I heard this morning on the news that retailers are worried, because they don’t expect a significant turnout this upcoming holiday season. They are reducing prices significantly to attract buyers, but they are not very optimistic. And then I thought: that is exactly what Christmas has turned out to be–all about shopping. I always remember being stressed out the few weeks before Christmas, because “I had” to get all my shopping done. These past couple of years I haven’t done... Read more
The Catholic Diocese of Green Bay has given St. John the Evangelist and the Rev. Guy Blair permission take in the homeless in defiance of city zoning requirements.Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the Milwaukee archbishop temporarily serving as administrative head of the Green Bay diocese, has given the church at 413 St. John St. permission to do what it needs in the upcoming cold months to help the city’s most vulnerable homeless, Green Bay diocese spokeswoman Renae Bauer said Friday.Mayor Jim Schmitt... Read more
It used to be that the method televangelists used to encourage their flock to send them money was rejected by most Christians. It was always a hard sell: the televangelist has a special message which the world needs, and if they are not financed by their flock, that message would be lost, people will not be saved, and Christianity would be losing its influence over the face of the earth. While most Christians repudiated such an approach, the televangelists found out... Read more
The National Review, on the most transparently consequentialist grounds, endorses torture, while pretending not to. This is what they have to say about waterboarding: “Waterboarding is an extremely rough interrogation tactic in which a detainee is tied down and made to fear imminent drowning. It treads close to the legal line of torture. It does not, however, appear to cross that line — at least not clearly. “Torture” is a special legal designation, reserved for especially sadistic forms of abuse,... Read more
[Stephen Colbert’s] announcement came after the South Carolina Democratic Executive Council voted last week to keep the host of “The Colbert Report” off the state’s primary ballot. The vote was 13-3. Colbert poses as a conservative talk-show host on the Comedy Central show. “Although I lost by the slimmest margin in presidential election history—only 10 votes—I have chosen not to put the country through another agonizing Supreme Court battle,” Colbert said Monday in a statement. “It is time for this nation... Read more
Today, President Bush will award the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to two extremely worthy individuals: Henry Hyde and Dr. Oscar Biscet. Aside from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quite possibly our greatest living writer, it would close to impossible to find two better champions of human rights. Biscet, a deeply Christian man and longtime democracy advocate, languishes in a Cuban prison. Recently, the president forcefully spoke on his behalf: (more…) Read more
Courtesy of Mirror Of Justice’s Rob Vischer, (from philosopher Gerald Dworkin, via Brian Leiter), here is a series of hypothetical statements from certain people associated with the Bush administration on the medieval torture technique known as “the Rack”: “Mukasey: I haven’t been read into the details of the Rack, and I understand that these details are classified. I am firmly opposed to torture, torture is illegal, but I do not know whether the Rack is torture. To comment further would... Read more
This small selection of a letter written by C.S. Lewis provides for us this week’s quote: Puto fere omnia facinora quae invicem perpetraverunt Christiani ex illo evenerunt quod religio miscetur cum re politica. Diabolus enim supra omnes ceteras humanas vitae partes rem politicam sibi quasi propriam – quasi arcem suae potestatis – vindicat. Nos tamen pro viribus (sc. quisque) suis mutuis orationibus incessanter laboremus pro caritate quae “multitudinem peccatorum tegit.” Vale, sodes et pater. C.S. Lewis (more…) Read more
I know I’ve been over this point many times before, but it’s an important one. According to reports, the USCCB draft voting guide (which I discussed last week) will list a specific number of intrinsically evil acts, that cannot be justified by appeal to intent or consequence. These are: abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, racism, torture, genocide, and the targeting of noncombatants in acts of terror or war. Now, the standard Catholic argument for voting Republican centers on... Read more
St. Francis of Assisi tells us that only those who love God with all their heart and mind, love their neighbor as themselves, confess all their sins, receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, produce worthy fruits of penance, abstain from vices and sins, avoid excess in food and drink, venerate and revere the clergy–even the sinful clerics, and give their excess of wealth as alms shall hope to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Here is a little fable... Read more
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