A lesson of patience and simplicity

Last updated on: July 19, 2007 at 2:27 am By voxnovablog

I have been in the Dominican Republic this week for the first time ever and the Dominicans have just given me a great lesson: one of patience and simplicity. Merengue, a fun Latin music to dance to, runs in the veins of the Dominicans. They have produced most of the best musicians out there in this genre: Wilfrido Vargas, Juan Luis Guerra, Los Ilegales, and more… You hear merengue everywhere: in the streets, cars, restaurants, you name it. When they... Read more

Diogenes calls for an impersonal economy

Last updated on: July 18, 2007 at 10:54 pm By voxnovablog

In what appears to be an attempt at wit, Diogenes writes in his blurb entitled “Adam Smith, call home“: To elimate [sic] poverty, the learned archbishop says, we need.. ..an integration between the mechanisms that produce wealth and the mechanisms for the distribution of its benefits… We have one. It’s called the marketplace. And you’d like to replace it with….? Good call, Diogenes! Obviously Adam Smith is our guide to diagnosing and eliminating global poverty! That’s right, Adam Smith who,... Read more

Disconcerting Trends at Catholic World News

Last updated on: July 18, 2007 at 8:45 pm By voxnovablog

Catholic World News is a popular and generally useful information source on Catholic matters. On its About CWN page, CWNews describes its mission as: Catholic World News is an independent Catholic news service staffed by lay Catholic journalists, dedicated to providing accurate world news, written from a distinctively Catholic perspective. There is no question that the reports from CWNews are written from a “distinctively Catholic perspective.” However, the claim that the service is “dedicated to providing accurate world news” can... Read more

Toward a Catholic “regional patriotism”

Last updated on: July 18, 2007 at 3:42 pm By voxnovablog

Katerina recently posted a good piece on Patriotism and Importance of Memory. As one of the Vox Nova contributors who has written on the subject of patriotism/nationalism regularly, I didn’t want her post to go by without highlighting it. The type of patriotism she describes — rooted in authentic community, solidarity, and memory — is one that I can indeed recognize in myself, only not so much as a citizen of the United States, but as having most of my... Read more

Latin America Leaning Left

Last updated on: July 18, 2007 at 12:50 am By voxnovablog

Courtesy of MSNBC, an interactive map that includes brief synopses of recent political trends in Latin America. Of particular note is the shift away from the market economies that failed to alleviate or even improve the poverty situation in Latin America. In a post-Soviet world, what will a limited market economy in this predominantly Catholic region look like? Time will tell. Read more

Feminism and Catholicism

Last updated on: July 17, 2007 at 9:44 pm By voxnovablog

The title is deliberately chosen to be provocative. For what does feminism even mean? At its most basic level, it is refers to equality between the sexes. Hence feminists fight discrimination based on gender and all kinds of inequality — cultural, political, and economic. In one sense, it is perfectly compatible with revelation, in the sense that God created man and woman as human beings to an equal degree. But in another sense, much of modern feminism is imbued with... Read more

TLM Shopping List

Last updated on: July 17, 2007 at 4:07 pm By voxnovablog

For those awaiting the arrival of the TLM, David Alexander of the renowned Man With Black Hat has some advice. If, under such circumstances, an additional Mass is agreed upon, there is not only the matter of the priest being trained to do so properly, but that of boys or men (not girls or women, as we are concerned with conditions under the older observance) who are trained to serve the Mass. The reformed Roman Missal does not require a... Read more

Get that Research Done!

Last updated on: July 17, 2007 at 3:29 pm By voxnovablog

A number of our contributors at Vox Nova are either professors or graduate students, so I am sure they understand the headaches this will cause for many researchers: BBC reports that the Vatican Library has closed for rebuilding, possibly until 2010. Anyone who may have been conducting a major project or writing or planning a dissertation that necessitates access to the rare and voluminous collections of the Vatican Library may have to either suspend or even terminate their work. The... Read more