When I was young, I could not appreciate Westerns. I found them dull. The pacing was slow, the acting wooden, and the sets looked to be little more than cardboard cutouts. The only exception was The Lone Ranger; why, I don’t know for sure, but maybe it is because he was a superhero who just happened to live in the Old West. Things changed. While I am not a fan of the entire genre, there are some Westerns which I... Read more
A good friend of mine is a soldier in Iraq. He has been there for over a year now and occasionally sends me updates. He has allowed me to post some sections of his emails, though he asked me to edit out some information that in any way identifies him. What I will say is that he has command over some men and that his unit is very active in both restoration and battle. I asked how things actually were... Read more
I am eagerly awaiting Paul Krugman’s new book (Krugman, by the way, will almost certainly win a Nobel prize in economics some day) on the politics and economics of inequality. This post is a follow up to yesterday’s on economics and the common good, and will argue that rising inequality is definitely something that should concern Catholics, as the unequal division of resources has been condemned consistently by Catholic social teaching. Here is a nice diagram, depicting the share of the richest 10 pecent... Read more
The theme for this year’s Fall conference at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture is “The Dialogue of Cultures.” All the info you need is here. The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, concerned by the deep cultural divides that characterize so much of our world, has found inspiration in Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address, and has decided to devote its eighth annual Fall conference to the theme: The Dialogue of Cultures. In interdisciplinary fashion, this conference will take... Read more
One of the funnier things that comes up in the healthcare debate is the dire warning about wanting your health care managed by the same people who run the Post Office, DOT, or IRS. Some folks will even throw Katrina in for good measure. In many respects this reminds me of the Simpsons’ episode where Homer goes back to college, and he has a preconceived notion of what the dean is going to be like. It turns out the dean is... Read more
Here is an examen to help us distinguish between necessities and superfluities according to Fr. Thomas Dubay in his book Happy are You Poor. Read more
What follows is merely my interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s pivotal 1946 lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism.” While this lecture was not Sartre’s first presentation of the themes that characterized and, dare I say, united the corpus of his writings, and while this lecture most certainly did not crystallize his thought on the significance and action of the subject, I want to spend some time with the text itself to courageously insert myself, so to speak, into its environment…notwithstanding, of course,... Read more
At Commonweal, my friend and colleague John McGreevy has a piece up, responding to Fr. Wilson Miscamble’s recent essay on Catholic-hiring at Notre Dame in America magazine. I agree with much of what John says. As I have already discussed privately with him, though, I was not sure about these few lines: Framing the problem simply as recruiting Catholic faculty is also ungenerous. Conspicuously absent from Miscamble’s essay are other faculty-Protestants, Muslims, Jews, unbelievers-enthusiastic about the university’s mission. The History department... Read more
Our friend and contributor Rick Garnett recently linked to a fascinating essay on the common good over at Mirror of Justice. The essay is called “In Search of the Common Good: the Catholic Roots of American Liberalism,” and was written by Lew Daly. Daly’s basic thesis is that Roosevelt’s New Deal was not only underpinned by Catholic social teaching, but that the whole constitutional mentality shifted from a pure laissez-faire liberalism to the common good, at least for a time... Read more
It is expected that Congress will approve SCHIP by the end of this week… regardless of an imminent presidential veto. Sister Carol Keehan, DC, president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA), issued the following statement: The Catholic Health Association is offended by President Bush’s statement today that he will veto bipartisan legislation to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). It is still not too late for the President to change... Read more
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