Not Noteworthy

What is a story?

2012-01-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

A story is a probing exploration into a corner of human existence. It stretches a character out uncomfortably in a certain direction, watching it squirm but never break, until new truths about humanity are unveiled. These truths may be exotic or they may be beautiful or they may be poignant.

A little bit about capital punishment

2012-01-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

The Catechism of the Catholic Church should ideally provide some reference in each of its teachings to Scripture and Tradition.

The section on the death penalty (2267) doesn't do this.

So, in lieu of Catechism footnotes, let me direct interested parties to the First Things article by Avery Cardinal Dulles, Catholicism and Capital Punishment

I've always had a quibble with capital punishment, since it has never seemed to jibe well with Catholicism's reverence for natural law. But in reading Dulles' article, I see that the justification for the death penalty is not that it is consonant with natural law, but rather that it is not, properly speaking, the act of men.

God alone is judge and God alone is Lord of life and death. But there is a bridge between God's lordship and human action, and that bridge is Biblical doctrine. Civil authorities (no matter their personal creed or model of government) are bequeathed God's authority for the sake of maintaining public order. This is not the "divine right of kings"--it is rather an acknowledgement that earthly power, whether acknowledged or not, comes from God.

Entering into Catholic faith is sometimes a process of letting go of deeply rooted assumptions. Modern sympathies, my own included, are to regard civil authorities with quasi-contempt: hardly divine, scarcely sometimes even human.

Yet deference to civil authority is so deeply ingrained in Catholic tradition that it cannot be disposed of without heterodoxy. I just never imagined before that it would reach such a height as to elevate the State above the proscription against killing. But the more I understand Catholic faith, the more I begin to see how all of creation (not only nature but society) is shot through with the divine.

My soft heart is happy that the Holy See views the death penalty as scarcely ever justified in developed nations. But my intellect does grasp that civil authorities are regarded as no more artificial or disposable than the human family, and that each of these entities has certain powers and duties that transcend the individual, making them more than the sum of their parts.

So, hey:

2011-12-30T06:21:00.000-08:00

I'm getting married today.

My thanks to those who offered their congratulations (thank you Fr. Thomas and Chris!)

I love you, Laura, my bride. I will serve you and protect you the rest of my days.

Response to a liberal Catholic

2011-12-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

In the comments of USCatholic.org

Tim MacGeorge writes,

With all due respect, I think that your posts, to varying degrees, represent what so many Catholics suffer from, and that is what one seminary professor of mine referred to as a "4th grade education" when it comes to things religious and theological. To take selected scripture passages out of context in order to "prove" a point is an illegitimate use of scripture. Practically every scripture scholar agrees that neither the Hebrew nor Christian scriptures address what we today call "same-sex attraction." Old testament passages often cited against homosexuality use the same word to describe such acts as they do to describe the eating of shellfish and the wearing of clothes of mixed fibers -- yet for some reason the bishops don't condemn wearing cotton-blend clothes with the same ferocity. I wonder why?As to the claim that no Catholic in good conscience can support gay marriage, well this is simply false. There are thousands and thousands of good Catholics - including many theologians and clergy -- with very well-formed consciences, who firmly believe that the "official" position of the current bishops is simply incorrect. Just as the "teaching" of the church as "developed" over time as it relates to other moral issues (e.g. slavery, usury to name but two), so too will this teaching. Best wishes to both of you and I pray that the Lord of Light whose birth we celebrate might continue to enlighten us all on our journey from darkness into the Light of His Love and Truth.

I have an education in things religious and theological that surpasses the 4th grade somewhat, so allow me to (helpfully) point to some rhetorical wrinkles in your post.First, your statement about Scripture appears to ignore the Letter to the Romans, which if it isn't about same sex attraction, must have been written metaphorically. Perhaps you can reveal the true meaning. Moreover, I'm curious about which scripture scholars are so persuaded that the Bible is a great friend of same sex attraction.

Second, I believe there is a intellectual dishonesty in likening Deuteronomy's proscription against sodomy to its dietary laws. You know as well as I do that the Catholic Church's own position on gay sex is founded less on minutiae of Hebrew religious law than it is on sober theological reflection on the human body as a beloved creation. Sexual matters have earned special attention in Catholic teaching through the centuries because they are, after all, at the heart of human origins, and thus also our identity and dignity.

Third, as to what "good Catholics" can or cannot believe, let's be precise in our language, please. Most American Catholics dissent from Catholic teaching in this or that issue. Dissent is materially wrong, sometimes seriously so, but normally it is borne out of misunderstanding rather than malice. I think it's unfortunate that Catholics are not trained better in desiring and seeking a deeper understanding of the truths behind Catholic teaching.

Only God can know hearts, and thus who the "good Catholics" really are. To be a Catholic in good standing with the Church (a more objective descriptor), one ought not publicly teach against Catholic doctrine in any matter of faith and morals, by word or example.Anybody can mark "Catholic" on the census forms, but at no time has the Church given a smile and wink to the idea that the contents of the Catechism are mostly fair-game for dissent. So there are likely many millions of Catholics who are not objectively in good standing with the Church. They may be good people. So might I. God only knows.

Also, no need to use scare quotes for the phrase "'official' position". It really is the official position. And it is not likely to change. This is because impossibility of gay marriage actually has the same ideological root as one of the other positions you mentioned: the prohibition of slavery. Both of these positions are founded on the inviolable dignity of the human individual in body, mind, and spirit. Gay sex and slavery both represent a misappropriation and distortion of the meaning of the human body.

Any development of doctrine (and I agree that doctrine does develop) is going to more powerfully honor that principle--not contradict it. So while liberals are expecting Catholic thought to move inevitably leftward (as you seem to be), those thinking with the Church see it moving, in fits and starts, ever Christward. Leftward and Christward are not opposites but they are emphatically not the same. Liberals are doomed to be disappointed with doctrinal development.

Political thoughts - inequality

2011-12-21T06:38:00.000-08:00

Running a country is hard.

Every day I am increasingly convinced that the Republican Party views the bottom 50% of earners in the US as "the problem" rather than as Americans with dreams, stories, and challenges.

The GOP probably feels that the US would be a much nicer place if that 50% simply went away. And they seem to be turning the US economy into a "hunger game", a sieve that dispatches the losers (many, many losers) into a trash heap of invisibility.

But the problem of economic inequality is not an easy one to solve. I wish it was as easy as the Democrats propose. End the Bush tax cuts, get that revenue, reignite essential government services, put more money into the hands of the middle class, and get the country back on track.

And that scenario might work, somewhat, for a little bit. But its benefits would be neither as long-lived nor as powerful as hoped.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is globalization. The second is government pillaging. Each of these represents the excesses of self-seeking both on the right and the left, which have crippled the sustainability of the state.

Money abhors a vacuum, and so a populace as fiscally top-heavy as the United States will never be able to keep its money here. The rationales for big money-makers to make their money in the US and keep it here (or transfer it here) is dwindling, while their opportunities and ease of access to foreign money is only increasing.

See, here's the basic economic/political dilemma of the age: when government is more powerful (the Democrat ideal), corporate abuse can be fought, human rights defended, and the middle and lower classes better served. But as a corollary, businesses flee and take their jobs and tax revenue with them, resulting in increased public debt and unemployment.

When the government is less powerful (the Republican ideal), businesses come back and there may well be more jobs. But they will be lower-paying jobs, with fewer if any benefits, and private debt will soar as people become indentured servants, making never-ending payments on medical and student loans.

So, I am not exactly describing a balanced picture here. But why should I? The Republicans are wrong, even if the Democrats need to work on a more global understanding of the problem.

A terrific video, and the questions it doesn't ask.

2011-11-23T09:13:00.001-08:00

There's plenty in this video I can get behind. The super-rich need less influence on the government and higher taxes, so that government services can be restored.

But he doesn't ask the question, here, of how the gap-growth between the rich and poor got started in the first place.Incidentally, I can't think of any reason why the incomes of the middle class should be proportionate to the growth of the economy at all.

If that were the case; i.e., if "a rising tide lifts all boats" (which it doesn't), average working Americans would be making much more money than they currently do--and notably, terrifically more money than average working-class people around the world.

That's the rub. The economy growth of a single country has no relationship at all to the world labor market. In fact, the more power that globalization wields against wages (which will only increase), the less will the middle class have any means, or even justification, for seeing any benefit from economic growth. As long as incomes keep pace with inflation (it's in corporations' interest to keep their prices within the purchasing means of most people), the market will never share the country's wealth with the middle class.

Oh Newt Gingrich

2011-11-23T09:10:00.001-08:00

How dare you advocate being "humane in the enforcement" of immigration law.

Haven't you learned that the Republican party platform is against being humane?

If you want to rise to the top of that party, be hateful, vindictive, provincial, misanthropic and harsh.

Goodbye, Gingrich. Kind words will win you no friends here.

The grades of my gradeschool

2011-11-18T06:52:00.001-08:00

Grade 1: Video games.

Grade 2: Science fiction novels and video games.

Grade 3: Writing about science fiction novels and video games.

Grade 4: Reading non-fiction philosophy books (and writing in the margins about science fiction and video games).

Grade 5: Reading philosophy (and writing in the margins about philosophy).

Grade 6: Reading anything I need to read, no matter how boring, and enjoying it.

Inserting a photo into a blog example.

2011-09-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

Stardate september 19th, 2011.

Photo by Richard Elzy

Samples and directions

2011-08-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

Stuff I need for the interview:

Directions to Our Lady of Tepeyac from Fry's

Sample 1: Drafting process for UbD

Sample 2: Using a cordless drill, UbD lesson plan template

Delivery guide

2011-08-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

Don't mind this post, it's just a means to get some documents to guys at work.

Zoning map

Zip codes by zone

Zip codes by code

Dear Laura,

2011-08-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

G.K. Chesterton was happier in love than Martin Heidegger.

Love,

Jeff

Actually, they're NOTHING alike.

2011-08-10T13:43:00.000-07:00

Laura and I had a fun conversation last night. We were on the subject of counseling and therapy. I was remarking that I've always enjoyed seeing a therapist/counselor/spiritual director, since I was a kid. What better experience for a self-doubting guy than to have the attention of another human being for a solid hour, whose entire purpose is to be understanding?

Laura asked, well, isn't that one of the perks of having a relationship or a marriage? Aren't we like one-another's counselor?

And for some reason, that I couldn't put my finger on at the time, I had to reject that comparison. "No. NO. Those two relationships are nothing alike."

That statement was impulsive, but the conviction with which I said it was real. I'm taking this chance to examine why I not only said it but stressed it. Something about the comparison between a counselor-client relationship, and a marriage, was repugnant to me. Why was that?

A clue actually came to me on the drive home, while I was listening to an interview on public radio with a psychiatrist. He gave up a comfortable practice in Manchester to serve the devastated victims of mental illness in Libya.

One of the things that he mentioned is that a powerful obstacle to practicing in Libya was maintaining emotional distance while listening to people's heartwrenching stories--the women whose shrapnel-wrecked husband died in her arms, the woman who, together with children, was used as a human shield by the Gaddafi forces.

I believe that a good counselor walks a thin line between, one the one hand, empathy and advocacy, and on the other, losing perspective. Counselors are mediators between a client's intimate experience and unveiling the blind-spots (whether that take the form of advice, treatment, consolation, etc). When a counselor loses perspective, he loses the capacity to be a mediator.

Professional distance is not only for the protection of the counselor but for securing the his ability to perform and succeed in enabling the client to reach psychological/emotional/mental/spiritual/social checkpoints. In fact, it is not so much a "distance" in the sense of being "far away," as much as a "vista"--an elevated view, that serves in the same capacity as a lighthouse in a storm.

That same professional or emotional distance, while not completely absent from a romance or a marriage, takes a radically different shape. In any case there is no expectation for lovers to maintain what anyone would call professional or emotional "distance".

Where the comparison is spot-on is that both a lover and a counselor provide an oasis of intimate understanding in a desert of empathy.

But where a romance is so much more profound is exactly where it is less useful.

When a couple become lovers, they enter the room of intimate mutual understanding; and when they become husband and wife, they close and lock the door behind them, and throw away the key.

They enter the labyrinth without string.

They walk one-another's forest without anything so much as breadcrumbs.

They dream each other's dreams, sans totems or kicks.

No ruby slippers.

The mutual self-gift of married lovers is total. That does not mean that said lovers lose their individuality--I've written on this point before. But they freely relinquish an eject button. They prioritize love over perspective--love, through faith, becomes the only perspective.

From this we might infer that married lovers do indeed serve one-another's need to be understood, but yet they do not substitute one-another's need for that mediator, that lighthouse, that is the occasional visit to a counselor.

I've written a lot.

2011-08-01T23:03:00.000-07:00

I have no idea how I am going to collect and organize all of this.

Disclaimer: The above links are absolutely indiscriminate in their content and subject matter. They span ten years of writing and maturing.

Saying goodbye to Phi? Goodbye to natural beauty?

2011-07-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have a history in this blog of waxing mystical about the golden ratio.

However, there is a fair amount of literature debunking the prevalence of the golden ratio. Very notable is an essay linked on Reddit, Fibonacci Flim-Flam by Donald Simanek. It's enough to make one abandon the idea altogether. (And, it reinforces my primary reason not to get tattoos: in a single lifetime, no concept or image is so enduring that it retains its meaningfulness forever--not even my best attempt).

This speaks to the danger of having too much mystical admiration for any one thing in nature, whether that be the mysterious origins of living tissue, the Big Bang, or the self-organizing properties of matter. Attach too much meaning to something, and then when it is swept out from underneath you, what do you have left to stand on?

This is part of the pathos of the debate between modern atheism and belief. The atheists correctly tear down the idols, and the believers, whose belief was founded so thoroughly on those idols (their allegedly bulletproof arguments), then lose their faith. Neither the believer nor the atheist had ever considered an appropriately transcendent understanding of God.

Now to be sure, my enthusiasm for nautilus shells was a careful enthusiasm. I was less rapt by the exact numbers than I was by the more abstract loveliness of nature--nature is not an equilibrium of halves, but an asymmetrical dynamo. Equality and balance are not synonyms; they are actually opposed. True balance involves complementarity and difference; equality causes inertia and stagnation. The nautilus expresses some of my earlier conviction in a symbolic form.

But Simanek's article nevertheless creates a vacuum of meaning. Maybe it is all just random after all.

But Simanek himself explains that this is not the case.

The reason f shows up in nature has to do with constraints of geometry upon the way organisms grow in size. Irrational numbers (those that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers) are often revealed in this process. The well-known irrationals are Ö2, f, e, p and any multiples or products of them. To make matters more interesting, these are related. For example, phi is f = (Ö5 - 1)/2. And the Euler relation, eip = -1 relates e, i and p where i = Ö(-1). The natural processes that display irrationals are not governed or caused by f in order to achieve some desired purpose or result, but rather they are constrained by the geometry of the universe and the limitations imposed by that geometry on growth processes.

His point is not that nature is chaotic; quite the contrary, his point is that nature is supremely simple. The processes that develop into beautiful spirals--which follow logarithmic patterns if not Fibonacci patterns--are based on the internally consistent properties of the bodies in question. Their matter is self-organizing, and this process undergoes countless influences with varying degrees of impact, producing different results. From this point of view, natural objects are not "reaching towards" an ideal; their apparent patterns and self-replicating structure can be explained by purely material, immediate causes.

The human mind likes parsimony. We are satisfied when diverse phenomena can be explained by the least number of possible rules. Fibonacci mysticism and mundane scientific observation both offer parsimony, but only the latter offers an explanation for it. True, if all logarithmic spirals had golden proportions, our hearts would be all aflutter. But the diversity of observed ratios is neither disheartening nor a point for atheists. Christianity must be comfortable with the messiness of nature.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. (GK Chesterton)

Thus, we should should not be discouraged because nautilus shells, vines, don't often reflect the golden ratio.

This issue then becomes a platform to begin the conversation about the validity of teleogical thought. Teleology is thinking about nature in terms of its proper "ends", e.g., "This egg is a chicken egg because, left to its own devices, it will become a chicken."

Teleology has been rejected as true knowledge ever since Descartes. For science, things are explained by what immediately precedes them--not what they will become. But this discussion is for another time.

Budget problem solving

2011-07-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: I'm a spender.

Looking at my spending for the last ten days--since the last time I've budgeted--I have overspent by 60%. That is, I hoped to spend $10/day on average, and I spent $16/day instead.

What is the primary culprit? Food. I eat out a lot, because I can't be arsed to prepare lunch before going to work. I think I'm eating cheaply, because I usually get a couple "chicken snack wraps" and a large iced tea from McD's for less than $5. But blowing half of my discretionary daily budget on lunch isn't actually economical. If I did that every day, I would be over budget because of other necessary expenses that come out of my discretionary pool--kitty litter, actual healthy groceries, and entertainment.

Now, my situation isn't dire--the $10/day allowance plan was meant to allow for extra spending when necessary. But I am determined to reign in that spending with some smart planning. By my reckoning, I have 22 days left in my July plan to recoup the $60 I've lost so far.

Simple division says that, to accomplish this, my daily allowance is now reduced to $7 and a quarter. My discretionary fund is now roughly $50/week. Keep in mind that this does not include gas--that's a separate pool. But it includes food, entertainment, and other expenses.

Here are the steps I'm going to take to stay within the budget:

Think in terms of weeks instead of days. Thinking in days gets me into trouble psychologically, because I get an inflated sense of spending power that makes fast food seem like a good deal, when it's not.
Plan meals. In the short term, I'm not going to change *when* I eat (that's a project I'll need your help with, Laura), but I'll change *what* I eat.
Carry cash, leave the cards at home.

Now, let's talk about food.

I don't eat crappy food because I enjoy it more than healthy food; I eat it because it's easy and it seems cheap at the time that I buy it.

The key to successful change is to make it as easy and as possible. I don't want this to be a major project. I want real progress, and if that means microscopic steps, then so be it.

I found a great place to start: a blog post, Eating Healthy for $3 a Day.

I have no intentions of slavishly obeying this post, but it gives me a place to start and allows me to make substitutions as I wish. If I wind up spending $5 day it will be a success.

Here is what he considers a list of daily staples:

3 cups cooked brown rice ($0.53)
2 cups cooked pinto beans ($0.23)
2 stalks cooked broccoli (360g) ($1.06)
1 baked sweet potato (180g) ($0.40)
1 tablespoon olive oil ($0.18)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds, shelled ($0.22)
2 cups nonfat milk ($0.37)

Let's forget number crunching and make some basic substitutions and additions:

I don't like rice. But I'll eat pasta.
I don't like sweet potatoes (sorry Laura) but I love regular baked potatoes.
The shelled sunflower seeds is a really interesting possibility that I hadn't considered. Nuts are expensive--they hover around $5 for 8oz, and I don't normally think of them as a cooking ingredient, but for the added protein (or as a snack) I could see sunflower seeds as being pretty amazing. Otherwise I may just go with some unsalted mix nuts or peanuts.
I'll take black beans over pinto beans any day.
I'm cooking chicken cacciatore tonight, so I will need ingredients for that.

So my plan today is to grab $50 in cash, and try to get a week's worth of groceries (including tonight's dinner) for $30. Wish me luck, I'll let you know how it goes.

Desperation and evil

2011-06-11T09:26:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, while listening to the news about various horrible events, I reflect on the traditional "seven deadly sins" (the wikipedia article here is fantastic). I am especially keen on the groupings of all of the sins into three: concupiscent (lust, gluttony, greed, envy), irascible (wrath), and "intellectual" (pride, vanity, despair, sloth).

Notice there are nine items here. The modern version combined pride and vanity into one, and despair and sloth into one. I think it's helpful to keep them distinguished. One can be vain without necessarily being narcissistic. Vanity or vainglory carries the connotation of futility, which I might loosely interpret as superficiality. A preoccupation with the meaningless.

Similarly, despair and sloth are related but not the same. Sloth or acedia (pronounced by one of my professors "aksedia") is more like what we would call clinical depression. And it is a mental illness. But calling something a mental illness does not completely empty it of moral significance. If one feels himself slipping into acedia, and he cannot overcome it by sheer force of will, then there is a moral obligation to find help and to persevere.

Despair, however, is less about activity (or the lack of it), but about ideas. Absolute despair is despair of God; but there can also be despair of friends, of love, of one's own prospects.

Anyway, as I listen to the news, I think about the collective sins that are sweeping the world, including my own, and I wonder how the traditional classifications apply.

In the first place, I think of poverty-stricken communities that coalesce into gangs, and here I believe desperation reigns. In terms of sheer numbers, I imagine that most crimes are desperate crimes. Desperation has the ability to turn any decent, good natured person into a criminal; even a murderer. On Paul Kennedy's "Ideas," I learned about Thucydides, who understood this well. Depravity is not a condition of some people, but a latent character of each of us when pushed to our physical and emotional limit. "War takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes."

How does desperation fit into the classical schema of sins? I am not sure that it does. Desperation is not born out of an over-reaching desire for what is not God. Rather, it is born out of an unreflecting impulse to the sudden loss of the entitlements due the human creation of God. It is the self-defensive reaction to violations of human rights and dignity. When food, water, shelter, and companionship are all robbed (whether by human agency or nature), the victim may enter into a mindset determined to reacquire these these things. The desperate mindset will place this re-acquisition at a higher priority than the lessons of civilization of which the comfortable human mind is more capable.

And there you have it: gangs. Collectives of fear within an atmosphere of hostility (cyclically reinforced), for whom the solitary rule increasingly becomes: whatever it takes, whatever works, to protect us and ours. Desperation is at once the greatest threat to civilization and the primordial foundation of it.

But desperation plays a much larger role in human behavior than this. Gangs are perhaps the most basic level of organized desperation. But feelings of desperation can obtain at every level of material wealth and comfort. Perhaps because of this, we can assign a spectrum of culpability to the phenomena of desperation.

The crimes of a truly desperate person might be forgiven on the grounds that, at the limits of human survival, few would act otherwise.

But the crimes of one who merely feels desperate, because of delusions or an exaggerated sense of entitlement, are less excusable. The wealthy who sacrifice thousands of jobs out of fear that their stock might be worth less the next morning. The husband who philanders out of fear that he will never have another chance to feel the thrill of fresh affection.

This exploration reveals that desperation is, in reality, a synonym for the irascible passions--the passions "against" something--in particular, the passions against loss. So desperation is really the opposite side of the coin of wrath, of extreme anger. But whereas wrath is directed at an "enemy", desperation is directed at a "need".

Desperation and anger are of course very close siblings. The whole phenomenon of scapegoating (thank you René Girard) is based on this partnership.

To that extent, aren't all sins, in some respect, desperate? No. The excesses of comfort and security invite a host of evils that have nothing to do with the fear of loss...

[sigh, the necessities of life].

The child in all of us

2011-05-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

One may have noticed that my interest of late has not only been romantic but youthful. As I come closer to age 30 I learn to appreciate how the child in us never really dies. Without undue cult of childhood, I think its safe to say that the truest part of each human being is their childhood self.

This is important. It gets to the heart of successful relationships, good business, and a right relationship with God. When we understand that we are children in adults' clothes, not only will it transform he way we relate to each other, but it could be the salve to relieve "my" pain at life's endless disappointments.

Why is such a simple, basic truth obscured? Well, it's misunderstood. A lot of "inner child" talk is caricatured as patronizing. But patronization assumes that "I" myself don't accept my own status as a tall child. Only someone who imagines himself an adult among children can be patronizing.

But the reality is so elemental. We're helpless when we're born. We're helpless when we die. And in-between, the only difference is ultimately a facade. An important facade, but a facade nevertheless. Culture runs on facade. But culture serves the individual, who is and remains a child.

"I love you so much."

2011-04-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading a book, "A Happy Marriage" by Rafael Yglesias. It's a bitter sweet story, a mostly autobiographical novel about a 30-year marriage, told alternately from the vantage points of its beginning, and its end in Margaret's death.

I'm not quite half way through the book yet, so whatever I say at this point will be modest. However, there is a line in one of the sad chapters that touched me: Margaret tells Enrique, "I love you so much. I love you so much."

What an amazing modification.

In my present early years with Laura, my "I love yous" come abundantly, and each one searches for some way to top the one that came before it, sometimes failing. It's a tough exercise in creativity, actually. I expect the torrent to continue indefinitely for the foreseeable future. At the very least, their scarcity would be conspicuous.

But with the neverending "I love yous" comes a worry that the words threaten to become habitual, and perhaps eventually even hollow. This possibility terrifies me. And so each one is spoken self-consciously. If the words ever escape my mouth unthinkingly, I scramble to find a way to rescue them from banality. If the words are ever a mere echo of the past, they must be filled with novel, present-moment sentiment. That sometimes takes effort, but it is a pleasure, especially when it brings Laura a smile.

Margaret's words, "I love you so much," affected me in three ways.

First, she is topping her husband's preceding "I love yous," not competitively, but appreciatively and complementarily. With her words she acknowledges and reveals her awareness that her husband's "I love yous" are sincere without embellishment, and that she is absorbing them.

Second, Margaret's words reveal to Enrique a fresh sincerity in her love. In the novel, he is insecure, and he has not been adequately attentive to, or trusting of the fact of Margaret's adoration. With the tiny modification, "so", Margaret in her dying dispels decades of insecurity. In its simplicity and innocence, "I love you so much" is a child's verbal squeeze of affection.

Third, the word "so" always indicates something new and fresh. Maybe the word "so" is excused from ever being over-used. It's a constant renewal. "The grass is so green". "The mountains are so beautiful." "The day is so nice." The tiny word does a lot of heavy lifting, carrying so much weight as a banner of immediate, present-moment character.

And so, if I sometimes neglect to adequately embellish my "I love yous", I have, for the time being, a fallback

I love you so much.

Fulfilling human desire.

2011-04-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

"My heart is restless until it rests in thee." Saith St. Augustine. And I do believe this is true. It belies some of the more austere and stoic expressions of Christian faith--the rigid systems that today's disaffected former Catholics say was their lot as children.

Contrary to all of that, there is a basic understanding that the Christian heart should not be restless. But what does it mean for the heart to rest in God?

For Augustine, it did not mean that the heart must disdain everything besides God. Rather, whatever the heart loves, it must love it in God. God becomes the cipher through which our love of everything in the world is purified and made good.

This doesn't mean that all of that Christian tradition of "contempt of the world" is invalid. To love something in God, it is necessary to be willing to give it away. This is the paradox of our existence. It is fine to love something so much that you would die for it. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13).

But Jesus' teaching presupposes that the love is already rooted in God. That very same act, of dying for what one loves, can be twisted. Think of Gollum pitching headlong into the lava of Mount Doom, clutching his filthy bauble. The difference is that Gollum's love was not rooted in anything. It was a closed love--a closed system. Therefore it became subject to entropy, self-enervating without the ability to replenish itself from any source beyond.

That kind of twisted, closed love can be had for human beings just as much as inanimate objects. Just because we are God's most sublime creation doesn't excuse us from entropy; and latching ourselves to one-another will not save us from the passing away of the world. And so, yes, we love one-another, but we do so "in God", always opening up our personal interconnections to an infinite source.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But the above text is not the reason I sat down to write. I wanted to reflect on an emotion I felt one night, while I was driving down AZ79 with Laura, from Florence AZ to Tucson, during our vacation there last March.

The emotion was a flood of pleasant childhood feelings and memories. Listening to the gurgling of a humidifier when I was sick. Mom on Christmas Eve telling me that a red light in the sky was Rudolph. Sleeping in the recliner in my parents' room when I was afraid of a nightmare.

I can't help but think that the most intense longings we have--the longings that drive our thousands of adult efforts--are shaped by our first experiences of tenderness. It sounds like common sense. Pop psychology. But I wonder if it might not be deeply true. How far can we go with this idea? Is our quest for happiness always a reclaiming of happinesses lost? Is the Biblical hope for the New Creation not also in some respect the individual hope for a personal new Eden?

I confess that a part of my excitement and joy at the prospect of being a family man is that Laura and I will have an opportunity to create the same wonders and joys and heavenly comforts for our children that we ourselves experienced. We get to bring back the long-past mysteries of our first life discoveries, and we get to live them again, only this time, as the parents.

Is it wrong to hope to live vicariously through one's children? Only if that means that one's children are nothing more than a vehicle of one's own self-project. We can't ultimately control our children, who they become, or even what they think of us. We can't impose our immature dreams on our children, as if their purpose is to leave a mark on the world in the way I failed to do.

But I don't think it's wrong to take great pleasure in our children's childhoods--to permit them to stoke the old glowing embers of our own childhoods, to relive old moments of tenderness with the same serenity of my eight-year-old self sleeping by the humidifier.

When we become adults, we never cease to be the children our parents loved--and the children that God loves. Everything we once have been subsists inside of a skilled social professional. But the social professional, the solemn choice-maker, the adult, is after all the expression and the servant of a soul that yearns to be held. The mother holding her baby is, at one and the same time, holding and being held; creating a new experience of love and reliving it.

If the elderly sometimes seem more child-like to us, perhaps this is not so much of a regression as an unveiling of what was always there. With age, and with relief from the pressures of professional life, perhaps the adult is allowed to recede a bit and permit the deeper and more persistent self to show.

"...for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Matt 19:14). Jesus may not have been speaking loosely. I have heard priests explain that Jesus meant to emphasize a child's openness and faith. That may be true, but I think more can be said. To be child-like is to be vulnerable and passive in a way that we always are before God, but which we hide as adults to protect ourselves from a world broken by sin. Maturity is a defense mechanism--and a good and necessary one. But when the world has finally passed away in full, what need do we have for maturity in Heaven?

I need to make a distinction. The absence of maturity, i.e. adult defenses, professional social graces, etc. is not the same thing as immaturity as we conceive of it negatively. There is a difference between the one who is child-like and childish. To be child-like is to be innocent, naive, unafraid, open, awed, wondering. What we call childishness--brattiness, selfishness, etc.--is in fact the unrefined very beginnings of adult defenses.

An analogy. The child-like person might be like a figure skater. Figure skating is innocent of goals, pucks, and sticks. The childish, immature person is the beginner hockey-player. Consider the scene from "The Mighty Ducks" where the kids start by clumsily whacking the puck around. Michael J Fox illustrates their immaturity by replacing the puck with a raw egg, which predictably breaks. By learning how to play hockey with an egg, learning how to gently coax it instead of annihilating it, the Ducks learn maturity.

For Jesus, maturity is necessary and good. "Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves" (Matt 10:16). But it becomes obsolete in heaven. The saints in heaven are figure skaters. The saints on earth are professional hockey players. But while on earth, we taste heaven when we put the stick, the puck, and the padding away.

Diagnostic flow-charts.

2011-04-02T09:47:00.001-07:00

Recent lessons learned

2011-03-27T23:10:00.001-07:00

The dichotomy between feelings and reason is too simplistic. I've paid lip service to this before but I've found concrete evidence of it. That evidence is in love.

In Catholic culture much is made of the fact that true love is not so much an emotion but a choice. I believe this is true. Emotions, as I am fond of saying, are brain chemistry. My intention isn't to belittle emotions but only to point out that, like everything in nature, they are always changing, and are subject to forces beyond our control.

Now here comes the new lesson I've learned: Love is more than emotion, but it can't be less than emotion.

I do not say that occasional dryness bespeaks love's dissipation. Love is no reed blowing in a wind. Love is constant and trustworthy, in a way that feelings, good though they may be, are not.

But neither does true love exist in any kind of vacuum of feeling. In fact, contrary to my previous way of thinking, love doesn't thrive independently of feelings. Absent of emotion, love can subsist meagerly, for a time--perhaps even indefinitely, dormantly, like an animal in hibernation. But such a hibernation is not typical, nor should it be celebrated. In some pairs of lovers, the emotional aspect never flags.

Love without emotion (or very little of it) is a soul without a body. It is an incomplete being; a ghost seeking closure.

Catholic ambivalence about love is that emotional love is a passion. "Passions" is basically another word for emotions, but the formal term "passions" reveals something about them, namely, that they affect us. We are "passive" to them. By calling them passions, we illustrate that they are not so much something we do as they are something that happens to us.

Catholic theology has much to say about the passions. We regard them with a wary celebration--a little like the Red Ryder BB Gun of A Christmas Story: "You'll shoot your eyes out!" They are both wonderful and dangerous. Every passion can be directed toward good or evil. The "seven deadly sins" are corrupted passions; for each of them, we can point out a corresponding virtue. Anger becomes courage for justice; sloth becomes temperance; envy becomes a desire to match others' virtue.

The sanctioned approach is to ensure that our passions are rooted in God. Which, for the scholastics, meant rooting them in Truth, made most explicit in reason.

It sounds a little Vulcan (BTW, just saw the new Star Trek movie... best part of it is Leonard Nimoy).

But it's different than the Vulcans in two important ways. First, unlike the Vulcans, we don't say that our passions are in conflict with reason and truth--only that emotions are best when they are molded by reason and truth.

And second, our natural passions are meant to be understood as faint shadows of something which is supernatural--the ineffable, wordless, mystical aspect of God. Passions and emotions shame the logic's pretensions to know the whole universe. This simple animal function of our organism, this brain chemistry, breaks open our logical deductions into awe, wonder, and speechless gratitude.

Reason and the passions both image God in their own proper way.

Now here's another piece of the puzzle.

We say that God loves, and that God desires (i.e., he desires us). Now, technically, God can't desire because desire is a form of passion. God can't have passions, since God is not passive. This is just jargon for saying that God isn't affected by anything; he's always the one doing the affecting. Since God isn't affected (by nature, by forces, by sad movies), God doesn't have affections.

But if that's true, how can God love? Even more difficult, how can God desire? Desire is not just a passion, but a whole category of passions: the concupiscible passions. So it seems impossible to say that God desires.

A few points in response:

First, to say that God desires is a little bit of an equivocation. God's desire is not a passive desire; it is not a passion; i.e., it is not an appetite. God is not "hungry". Just as we can observe that human love is sometimes "hungry"--self-centered, consumptive, needy--God's love conspicuously lacks this dimension. God's desire is always a desire to give himself away. "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work" (John 4:34).*

Second, in spite of this, we can still say that God's love is attended by yearning. God is not passive (to emotions); and yet, in his very being, he is eager to give himself away.

What I'm finding here is a passion which is not a passion. In love, there is an experience which is "passionate," but unlike the other passions, it does not become corrupted by its extremes. True love is the only emotion that does not become destructive when it is experienced in its absolute form. Yet it is truly an emotion. Or at least, it is attended by an emotion. An eagerness; a yearning.

Perhaps, in psychology, we have here something like evidence of the uniqueness of a certain emotional phenomenon.

And in theology, we may have here evidence for the presence of grace.

As for me, I have learned: love's emotion is as holy as love's solemn choice.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* - To be sure, in natural love there is nothing inherently wrong with concupiscence, i.e., being needy. We believe that God himself experienced neediness in Jesus. "I thirst" (John 19:28). Appetites, needs, passions--these are all the curious byproduct of our creation as finite, limited beings. We are a "new" kind of existence, somewhere between the infinite and nothing. Passions are our unique expression.

On sales.

2011-03-09T10:43:00.001-08:00

The skills of the salesman are unabashedly manipulative. In a week's training with The Simple Group in door-to-door office supply sales, I learned that the four most powerful tools in the seller's pocket are greed, urgency, fear of loss, and indifference. Unlocking your customer's anxiety is the key to success.

I am a conscientious objector to the predator-prey model of sales. I stake my job and my good name on my ability to subvert and transform that model and also exceed sales expectations. This is possible because all things are possible, and I am a darn good seller.

Sales are the absolute bread and butter of the department. Our technicians' livings don't come from their talent in disassembling laptops but in customer purchases. While, in the long run, our skill and our reputation is important for sales, we must have short-term action on the sales front. We are a business. This is legitimate and good.

So, in this post, I will outline the fundamental principles that run through all of my interactions with customers and that make me an effective salesman.

1. Truth comes first. This is expressed in two parts: fairness, and the good of the customer. This is a priority that I can proudly hold and make explicit to the customer. The foundation of our business relationship is one of transparency and trust. The customer already knows that we are a business. The customer knows that I expect reciprocal fairness for the fairness I provide. The customer can also know that I owe my organization due compliance in exchange for their empowering me to serve the customer. But most importantly, the customer can know that what I want most is to solve their real problems and do it well.

Demolish pretenses, "techniques", and manipulations right off the bat. This is especially true when the customer brings emotions or unfulfillable demands to the table. But it applies to all cases.

1b. Tranquility. Don't underestimate the importance of emotions to our industry. When customers purchase our services they are not purchasing a repaired computer; they are not even purchasing our labor. They are purchasing assurance and relief from anxiety. Customers will pay more for a service they can get elsewhere when assurance and confidence is projected by a department. Comfort is the real product. Your ability to be a comforting presence at the point of sale and throughout the business relationship is paramount.

1c. Realism. Every transaction must be grounded in realistic expectations and fulfillable terms. Never lose sight of limitations on our time and resources when conversing with the customer. We need not advertise our limitations, but assure the customer that the promises we make are good. Do not write a bad check to the customer.

1d. Clarity. Mutual understanding between the technician and the customer must be double-confirmed. Every incorrect belief is a time bomb.

2. Know, love, and trust your product, your company, and yourself. It's easy to be a seller in Fry's Electronics. Our services are cheap and we're *&^% good at them. We do more for our customers than the competition. We will take care of the customer. And if there's any way this has not been true in the past, we will make it true now. I will make it true. For you.

Genuine, sincere pride is a double-virtue in the service industry. It projects a good image and it purifies the operation internally. So long as they are rooted in truth, realism, and clarity, bold statements reassure the customer and create a motivational investment on the part of the technician. But boldness must be rooted in sincerity.

(I am an advocate of units being assigned to the technician who checks them in, with exceptions made when necessary.)

2b. Everybody can afford and will benefit from our services. Failing to offer services is not a failure to sell; it's a failure to serve. Under no circumstances should we be giving customers back filthy, disgusting computers; slow, unoptimized computers with not enough RAM, computers with lost data, or laptops whose wireless function they're not using, or that they're using dangerously on unsecured, poorly configured networks. Why would we allow customers to spend $1000 on a prefab gaming desktop when we can build a better one for $700?

Offering services is not up-selling. It's not, "Would you like fries with that?"

It's consultation and problem solving.

Companies pay technicians a lot of money for expert consultation. We provide that service to individuals for free. Don't be embarrassed to offer services. Be proud of yourself and your team mates. That's team knowledge. There is no IT problem we can't solve together.

On women's clothing.

2011-02-28T10:24:00.000-08:00

This isn't something I've given much thought to. To the extent that it relates to feminism, I suppose it doesn't break the mold of this blog much. But here it is: I want to sort through the complexity of women's apparel.

I've never been very opinionated about whether women should dress modestly or not. Being a man, I've never having seen women arguing about how men out to dress, so I figured I'd return the favor. In seminary, of course, I heard talk about women's apparel routinely--how scandalously some women appear when they go to church, etc. I once received instruction (from a close friend) on how women's jeans are tailored to be deliberately seductive, with seam lines directing attention to the crotch.

I haven't missed the irony, that the men most concerned about how women ought to appear seem to spend an inordinate amount of time staring at, analyzing, memorizing the sundry ways they ought not. The objectification of women is a pathology to which both playboy and puritan are susceptible. Perhaps those two are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Perhaps they are, rather, two expressions of a single characteristic: being hot-blooded, and working out ways to deal with it.

Neither caricatures of the puritan or the playboy seem especially concerned with women's subjectivity. The playboy might pay superficial lip-service to the idea that "women can do what they want," but it's only for show. Throwing women's fashion to the lions of the free market can only have one result: a playboy-friendly skimp-fest. Both stances are male-centric; only the puritan is more transparent about it.

But I don't seek to argue that male perception is, or should be, irrelevant to the question. Neither, I think, would most female shoppers. Rather, male perception is one of many factors women think about. How does this make me feel? What aspect of me does this appearance express? What impression will I make on women? On my coworkers? On my family? How comfortable is it?

The issue of male perception remains a part of the whole, but perhaps it should be a lesser part than it presently is.

So given that, there is one word I want to explore and understand: modesty.

The initial impression I get (and I think I'm not alone) is that the word 'modesty' originates with the puritans and will never really shake a puritanical connotation in common speech.

Thou Shalt Chill Out: Gentleness and Catholic faith

2011-02-22T20:17:00.000-08:00

A Basic Distinction

"For modern American culture, everything is tolerated but nothing is forgiven, while for Christianity it’s exactly the reverse – many things aren’t tolerated, but everything can be forgiven." --Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago

This pithy teaching stuck in my mind from Francis George's homily given at the ordination of a new bishop in late 2005-early 2006. It's also a point from his book, The Difference God Makes. As a sound byte, it might be criticized for generalizing (especially in regards to his description of American culture).

However, as a description of Catholicism, it is spot on.

Here is a basic distinction that I wish had been taught to me when I was learning about my faith as a teenager. On the one hand, you have what the Church teaches. And on the other hand, you have how the Church loves (i.e., how the Church administers care).

We might call these moral theology and pastoral theology.

Or better: what the Church hopes you will do, and how the Church responds when you (of course) didn't do it.

Now, the distilled results of moral theology are available to anybody with a Catechism. That is not the focus of this post. It's the second half, how the Church loves, which feels a little bit neglected in popular discourse.

Here is the basic problem: it is too easy to associate a strict morality with harshness. This is understandable, but it is a mistake. A strict morality is no more necessarily harsh than a lax morality is gentle or kind. Harshness and gentleness are not products of a certain teaching or moral truth; they're products of one's attitude, one's fundamental worldview, one's anthropology.

If someone is harsh, the defect does not lie in the content of his moral opinions, but in his understanding of the human drama.

Let me illustrate, graphically, the difference between living Catholicism knowing What the Church Teaches without knowing How the Church Loves.

The first level represents a catechumen's first lesson in Catholic morality. It's terrifying.

The second level represents a slightly deeper understanding based on some of the complexities of moral theology. Its highs and lows may vary from person to person, as we all try to speculate about how serious our sins really are, erring on the side of mercy or condemnation, as our personalities are inclined.

This is still lacking any sense of pastoral theology. It is only accurate on the most superficial level--a little bit like the pictures of atoms we saw in our 5th grade science textbooks. If followed rigorously and exclusively, it can become misleading and spiritually dangerous. This is, ultimately, only the dark side of the moon. It is time to start looking at the other side.

Breaking Apart the Charts: Sin and Judgment

The Doctrine of Original Sin: (Of Ourselves) We Can't Not Sin.

One of my most inspirational professors was C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D. He is a specialist of medieval church history, and has written about the theology of St. Bonaventure and St. Gregory the Great. He is now a professor at Washington Theological Union.

Dr. Anderson made a point often in his lectures that some of the gloomier aspects of Catholic theology--Original Sin, the Fall, the corruption of the world and humanity--serve to generate an atmosphere of gentleness, not judgement.*

Anderson stressed that the doctrine of Original Sin yields not misanthropy, but humility. To be an understanding Catholic is to be wretched among the wretched. Per Augustine, it is to know that, of ourselves, we do not have the "power not to sin" (posse non peccare). The worldwide Church is groaning in pain. It is true that sanctifying grace gives us the posse non peccare. Nevertheless, the question of future sins for any newborn on this planet is not a possibility; it is a certainty (Romans 3:23).

The misery of the human condition is a fact that Catholicism will not allow attentive listeners to forget. In the high middle ages, it took shape as a celebrated genre of literature, contemptu mundi, "Contempt of the world," the most famous example being Pope Innocent III's "De Miseria Humanae Conditionis".** In it, the Pope describes the suffering and depravity of men with such detail and grit that human accomplishments appears only as so much scum. "Therefore, worm, why art thou proud?"

But the cumulative psychological effect of all of this negativity may be unexpectedly positive. If "there is no one just; not one" (Romans 3:10), then we are all co-conspirators in the world's crime. That fact ought to rob us of the passion to condemn. But how much more strikingly do we feel it, when again and again we run to the confessionals (or the lesser consolations we provide ourselves). There is a camaraderie of the wretched. It is as though a bride and groom, both dressed in white, stood in the middle of a demolition derby on a rainy day. And the drivers all have paint guns. Who will point the finger at who?

Judgment Belongs to God Alone

The Bible is unequivocal about judgement. There is no excuse to judge, not ever. However, some points bear mentioning.

First, we must make a distinction. Judging is not the same thing as discerning moral truths, nor is it the same thing as observing moral realities. If this were the case, the New Testament would invalidate itself, and life would be incoherent. If judgment includes defining moral laws, and there is a moral law against judgment, then the law is illegal (therefore, to judge against judging is also wrong, and we can judge with abandon!)

On the contrary, the sin of judgment involves chiefly two errors. The first is a self-deception: that I know your heart. The second is a blasphemy: that I know your sentence. We can observe actions, but not hearts. And we can provide solutions, but not eternal sentences.

Now, here is the second (and most critical) point: there is no reason why the commandment ought not apply to judging oneself any less than it applies to judging others. At first this might not be clear. After all, I know my own heart in a way nobody else does. I know my intentions, and I know how good/wretched I actually am.

But do I?

As Augustine wrote, addressing God, "You are closer to me than I am to myself."

One does not need to be religious to understand that the human capacity for self-deception is enormous. Ordinarily, we might imagine that self-deception most errs on the side of self- forgiveness and laxity. However, for perhaps just as many people, it errs on the side of self-loathing and spite.

When I sin, the last person I want to be in charge of deciding a just punishment for my crimes is myself. I know. I've imagined the things I thought I deserved. They haven't invented the machines required to carry them out.

And so, the commandment not to judge represents a doorway, not only out of condemning others, but self-loathing as well. Understanding and absorbing this great teaching of Jesus immediately changes the Catholic's understanding of the moral life. Let's chart it.

If we concluded at this point, It might feel a little like we are playing a game in which God is hiding the scoreboard. Our ignorance of the mind of God is little consolation to our guilty consciences. In the end, the temptation remains to operate by to a dangerously incomplete model, even if we acknowledge its being hypothetical.

That is because, up to now, we have operated only on the level of What the Church Teaches. Nothing of what we have said so far has integrated How the Church Loves, or pastoral theology.

Thus, in the immortal words of Leonardo DiCaprio, we have to go deeper.

Replacing the Charts: Pastoral theology, Jesus and the Church

Jesus: The Model of Pastoral Theology

When I was in the seminary, "pastoral theology" was largely synonymous with "breaking rules in order to be nice." It wasn't until after I left, sadly, that the nature and importance of pastoral theology made itself known to me.

Part of the problem was that some of my instructors had developed faulty models of pastoral theology. Either they had grossly sentimentalized Jesus into a milquetoast, feel-good, self-help author; or else they had no model at all save for a mushy, inoffensive, cynical filter for decision-making.

Part of the problem was that my perception was colored by my own, myopic, ahistorical, mechanical, "What the Church Teaches" approach, which was as harsh to me as it was against the people I judged.

Now, Christians are always using Jesus as the model for something. "Jesus this" and "Jesus that". But that is not only because we confess Him as "my Lord, and my God." There is real content here. While our Lord was on earth, he did not only teach--he lived. And so his bullet-points of Dos and Don'ts, while serious business, are not the whole content of the Gospel.

Some highlights from the Life and Times of the Almighty:

Jesus taught a hard law. His sexual morality was conservative, condemning divorce, and even advocating celibate chastity for those who could. He demanded severing ties to personal property, families, and even sacred duties such as burying the dead. He rewrote the thinking on fairness, setting the principle of sacrifice above the principle of proportionality. And he expected urgent, concrete results and had little respect for his disciples' wishes for personal safety or security.
Jesus spent time with sinners, doing things that sinners enjoy. He drank and ate. Sometimes he even supplied the booze. His enemies accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton (Luke 7:34). For Jesus, the presence of sin (even not-yet-repentant sin) was not an obstacle to delight, whether his own or that of his company.
Jesus was sparing in his use of harshness. The wrath of Jesus can be seen as having primarily three targets: first, the lazy, cowardly, or fruitless; second, the malicious exploiters of religious authority; and third, communities that definitively rejected his signs and teachings.

The first group includes Peter when he begged Jesus not to go to Jerusalem; the disciples who wanted to bury their dead before following Jesus; and disciples represented in parables (the fig tree; the man who buried his talent; the foolish virgins; the improperly dressed wedding guest, etc.) With regard to the first group, Jesus had a practical license to use harsh words, because their intended audience was already loyal to him. It makes no sense to rib someone for laziness unless they are already oriented in the right direction. In De Doctrina Cristiana, St. Augustine describes the "grand style" of preaching, which can be usefully employed only when one's audience is already loyal (and thus thick skinned).

Concerning the second group, the corrupt authorities, here Jesus reveals a divine intolerance for malice. Showing gentleness toward the malicious would ultimately cause more spiritual harm than confrontation. Malice--especially premeditated, calculating malice--does not call for gentleness.*** Forgiveness, yes, but not a cheap forgiveness.

The third group are the communities that rejected the Gospel. At no point in Jesus's earthly mission did he entertain hopes of universal acceptance. He was pragmatic in his approach. He encouraged his disciples to economize their efforts--do not waste time where it will do no good. Modeling this principle, Jesus did not lay attractive words at their feet. Where his message (and signs) were definitively rejected, he foretold wrath (Matthew 11:21-24) and implied that their obstinateness had fewer excuses than that of previous smitten cities. Yet it is worth noting that even here, Jesus is measured in his language. He does not call them names. He is not indulging in a personal vendetta.
At no time did Jesus employ harshness or shame as a response to people bound by sins of weakness. Even his reproaches against the lazy/fruitless can be interpreted as signalling a passionate and frightful urgency--something like this--rather than a "how dare you". This is where the great medical analogy comes into play: "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do" (Matthew 9:12). Sins are crimes, yes, but they are also wounds.

This connection was deeply understood by the populace of Jesus' day, who, after all, correlated congenital defects with inherited guilt. But in Jesus it represents a genius innovation. If sins are crimes, crimes call for punishment, and criminals will flee. If sins, however, are wounds; wounds call for treatment, and the wounded will gather. Christ the physician transforms the response of his followers to the phenomenon of sin.
For Jesus and his followers, the foundation of every interaction was peace and comfort--not anxiety. The words, "Do not be afraid," occur 15 times in the Gospels. The Resurrected Christ introduces himself with the words "Peace be with you." Jesus reasons, "Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?" Paul writes to the Philippians, "Have no anxiety at all." Throughout the New Testament, there is a veritable commandment to relax.

How do we reconcile Jesus' repeated calls to "chill out" with his equally repeated calls to drop everything, take risks, and get results?

A dancing analogy. Laura and I are teaching ourselves how to dance. We watched several instruction videos, and tried a few things, but it was all a jumbled (and hilarious) mess. Then, one video she brought home from the library changed things. It was The Wedding Dance with Paul Overton and Sharon Ashe. This video gave more instructions on standing still than any of the others we looked at. Don't lock knees. Loosen the shoulders. Lean slightly into each other. Feel, don't think. Listen to the movements of your partner.

Relax. Relax. Relax.

Now go.

There is no greater enemy in the spiritual life than anxiety and discouragement. Jesus and the apostles understood this. Peace is the foundation. Journey, effort, and even struggle must all have a bedrock of peace. Urgency is built on peace.

For Christians, peace is both the prerequisite for holiness and its final reward. And it must constantly be renewed.

These are the foundations of pastoral theology, which is ultimately the imitation of Christ the Good Shepherd. At no point does Jesus provide any excuse for doctrinal or moral laxity, nor for brutality.

In spite of his doctrinal rigor, Jesus' approach to ministry appears oblivious to the realities presented in my introduction to Catholic morality. Where are the emergency confessions? Where is the "Confession" iPhone app? I speak, a little bit, in jest (although I hear the iPad 2 has a time machine app).

But I gesture in earnest to the example of Christ the Physician, whose message was serious even while his ministry to his patients was joyful, celebratory, and anxiety free. Jesus does not want you to be anxious.

The Catholic Church: For the Saints, a Gymnasium; For the Sinners, a Hospital

The Catholic Church is the spiritual equivalent of Gesundheit! Institute and the U.S. Olympic Training Center combined and writ large. It is a hospital for sinners and a gymnasium for saints.**** It is critical to remember that the patients and the athletes are one and the same. They are also, always, the nurses and doctors, spotters and trainers. Every single one has a debilitating handicap; most have several. And the paraplegic's first toe wiggle is absolutely as momentous as the first nine-second hundred meter dash.

In this model of the Church, it makes no more sense to rally against a moral doctrine than it does to rally against the desire of the paralyzed to walk. It makes no more sense to berate a sinner than for a smoking lung cancer patient to mock their room-mate recovering from a triple bypass.

But pastoral theology is not just an extended analogy of a hospital. It is a realistic and faith-filled encounter of moral theology with life. Some points:

First: All sin, even venial sin, is serious. Nothing in this article is intended to persuade anybody otherwise. A single drop of ink blackens a whole cup of water. Our whole being comes from God, and a tiny peccadillo contradicts the whole God. Be this as it may, Jesus assured us, God's love and forgiveness extends far beyond our imagining. Our meager hearts can forgive great wrongs (with a little effort). Would we dare insinuate that God is stingier than ourselves? So the perspective of faith works both ways: God perceives sin's horror infinitely more than we; and he forgives infinitely more generously.

Second: Sin, even mortal sin, is not a reason to be anxious, for three reasons:

(1) Jesus does not want you to be anxious. We have covered this, but it bears repeating. It's a commandment from God himself. Thou Shalt Chill Out. This is not just a command; it's an invitation to trust. Do not be afraid. Peace be with you. Jesus even appeals to your sense of efficiency! What good does worrying do? What has your furrowed brow accomplished? If God tells you to relax, please, rest assured, it's ok.

(2) God does not desire your condemnation (Ezekiel 33:11). There, see? God is on your side. He is your judge, yes, but he is also your defense attorney. Yes, you sinned... nobody needs to present any evidence. And you really couldn't survive a genuinely proportional punishment. So let's work something out instead.

Consider this small fact: when you sin, even if you rape and murder, you don't vanish and go straight to Hell. Have you ever considered that God would be entirely in his rights and ability to do make it happen? However he does not. Even if you utterly sever your connection to I AM WHO AM, even if you reject the origin of being itself: nothing happens. You can curse God for hours, burn churches, do unspeakable things to the Consecrated Host, and still, air repeatedly fills your lungs, nourishing your silly hairless chimp body for another few minutes of life.

Even when we cut ourselves from the source of life, we live. Our bodies are that amazing. They are not just our interface with the world. They are not just a Temple of the Spirit. They double as the life-raft on the wrecked Titanic of our failed self-projects. As long as my heart beats there is hope. It carries me from Eucharist to Penance and back. As long as the sacraments are there, there is hope. That is how I know that God does not desire my condemnation.

(3) God knows your heart. To illustrate, here is a last bit of doctrine for you. Maybe you've lost the state of grace. And maybe you can't make it to Sacramental Penance. All right. If you're truly sorry, then say yourself an Act of Contrition and make a mental, concrete, sincere plan to go. Don't feel sorry enough? Just let God know, and ask him for the necessary sorrow. Got it? Good. You're covered. Stay sincere, and no Hell for you, even if you died right now. Even if you died halfway through saying the Act. Seriously. It's the truth. Ask any bishop.

This is not magic. It's just the built-in mercy of Catholic faith. Yes, repentance must happen in community because sin is a break with community. But just because Catholicism is not individualistic does not mean that our salvation hangs on an unpredictable thread.

The external observances keep us honest and sincere--they prevent us from paying half-hearted lip service and going our merry (corrupt) way. The externals are necessary and good. God became physical, so why shouldn't our salvation also be physical? But although we depend on the externals, God in himself does not. Therefore, at no point--not during a single minute--of a sincere Catholic's life does he need to expect Hellfire. Pray for salvation from it, yes. Expect it, no.

Last point. Sanctification is gradual. Pastoral theology, in a way, is the practical art of serving God's process of sanctification, both in oneself and in others. And that is the word of the day: process. Time, which is God's creation, is also his instrument of salvation. Sanctification is gradual. This may be frustrating to the moral theologian, for whom "error has no rights." And to be sure, one must never cite the gradual nature of sanctification as an excuse for past (or present) sins.

But I think we should frequently remind ourselves that genius should not be rushed--especially Divine Genius. God is the agent of sanctification, not us. No, we won't be lax in calling for goodness and justice; but also, no, we won't fret or worry. There's no use in it.

After all. God isn't worried. So why should we be?

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." --St. Julian of Norwich

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

End Notes!

* - Dr. Anderson recounted that his own spiritual journey was enhanced, not by coming to accept an easy doctrine, but a hard one: the existence of Hell. When he was a young universalist ("everybody goes to Heaven,") he was filled with intense anger at the injustices of the world. There was no equilibrium. He had absorbed a sense that it falls to us humans to exact the vengeance that the universalist God did not. By learning a new trust in God's justice, Anderson literally disabused himself of the burden.

** - Innocent always intended to write a corresponding, cheerful tract, but he never got around to it.

*** - A note on malice. In Catholic moral theology, I believe not enough emphasis is placed on the distinction between sins of malice and sins of weakness. The line dividing them is blurry, of course, but there is something tangibly present in the Gospel that is vital for Catholic understanding. It is not that sins of malice are necessarily more grave (although I presume they usually are). It is that their remedies are so different.

**** - I first heard this phrase from another professor, Fr. Robert Barron of Mundelein Seminary. Research shows that it seems adapted from a quote from Abigail Van Buren, “A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” David True uses similar verbiage in his article, Rethinking Church.

Revising the strategy.

2011-02-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

I have had something of a revelation, and it's thanks to an unassuming speaker by the name of Chris Steadman who talked (nervously) to a small gathering at Elmhurst College. He is an evangelical-turned-"new-atheist"-turned-"can't we all just get along" atheist or "faitheist."

Two points Chris brought up piqued my attention. Here they are, with my elaboration.

First, the most obvious line dividing culture, and the true line, are not the same. The most obvious line is between belief and non-belief. But the true line is the line dividing totalitarians from pluralists. Those words need some definition. By totalitarians I'm not talking about Hitlers and Stalins. I'm referring to anyone who sees elimination of one's ideological others as the most desired outcome. And by pluralism I'm not referring to relativists, nor am I referring to pluralist theologies of religion. I mean simply that pluralists engage their others with a view toward cooperation, dialogue, and yes, disputation. But not elimination.

Second, Chris Steadman stopped hating religion when he stopped concentrating narrowly on the texts of religion and started engaging religious people. The text is not the doorway to understanding the people--the people are the doorway to understanding the text.

Let me address the first point with a hypothesis: A traditional Christian can be a pluralist. A pluralist can be engaged in persuasion, even evangelization; but the pluralist partakes in mission while possessing a gentle regard for human epistemology. The pluralist honors God's creation of time by allowing God's grace to make use of time as He sees fit. Moreover, the pluralist does not regard himself a completed project, impervious to sanctification from any instrument God sees fit to use. Far from it--the pluralist evangelizer operates as a wounded medic--a medic in need of a medic. He has something to offer, and something to beg for.

Moreover, traditional Christians can be pluralists when they acknowledge that their engagement with their ideological others should not be constrained to, or hampered by, the activity of evangelization. Traditional Christian pluralists ought to recall that cooperation and dialogue are equally important and inseparable. Evangelization should not be indulged at the expense of cooperation and dialogue.

Chris Steadman's second point captivates me for two reasons. First, it strikes me as a deeply Catholic idea. Books don't Reveal God. People do. Catholic theology understands that the Holy Bible is a vessel of Revelation that God gives in the form of flesh and blood. This happens unsurpassed in the Incarnation. But it also happens sacramentally, as a continuous ripple, in the life of the People of God, the New Jerusalem, via the Holy Spirit. This ripple is what Catholic theology calls Tradition.

The Catholic understanding of revelation is sometimes shorthanded as "Scripture and Tradition;" however, it may be better stated: "Scripture through Tradition." The Church (the whole People of God), as it actually lived and lives, is the lens through which the Bible is read as a living Word and not a dead letter.

Now, this kernel of an idea should be treated with kid gloves. It could be abused. In matters of Christian doctrine I am not a populist (revealed Truth does not obey democracy) nor a modernist (revealed Truth does not change based on the evolution of human culture; however, its expression can unfold and deepen with time).

In this, I regret that Chris Steadman and I would continue to be at odds in our assessment of same-sex activity and lifestyles. However, I hope that he can see this is not a personal condemnation on my part. I respect his conscience and his personal story, even while I critique the foundations of the axioms of the sexual revolution--and I do so as a flawed man, myself.

But there's another reason Chris's idea--that the people are the doorway to understanding the text--interests me. Because this principle can be applied to atheists as well.

One of my fundamental critiques of modern irreligion is that its apologists misrepresent secularism as being innocent of ideology. "It's not a religion. It's not a belief. It is the absence of a belief. We do not believe in any gods." This line of reasoning upsets my training in logic. If q = "A god or gods exist", and p is ~q, p remains a proposition.

Every proposition, whether an affirmation or negation, mundane or fantastic, entails and implies a host of propositions upon which it depends. These may be ordered into a hierarchy of dependencies, terminating in axioms.

The ruptures in western discourse that cumulatively gave birth to modern secularism are well-documented. For each rupture, one can detect an ideological mitosis into the competing axioms, which today have coagulated into the organisms we observe today as species of belief and unbelief. That those axioms have often submerged into the collective subconscious does not negate their reality.

For every believer's Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Paschal and Von Balthasar, there is a non-believer's Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, Russel, and Sartre.

Thoughts on Inception

2011-01-05T20:22:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Inception's DVD release, I was able to grab it from the RedBox and watch it tonight. I'm so happy to see a thought provoking film again. Yes there are spoilers here, so go watch it before you read.

In terms of the plot, and what exactly happened at the ending, the movie is not that difficult to figure out. But I do find it interesting that a deep movie actually has a happy ending. More often, movie makers think that a movie just isn't intelligent enough unless it's a tragedy. Nice to see Nolan break the mold.

I think it's also worth explaining some of the whole "shared dreaming" business. It's a wonderful plot device--a bit like learning the rules of a game. But it does take some thought.

There are a minimum of three roles involved: The dreamer, the architect, and the subject. In our own dreams, we perform all three roles ourselves. In the film, those three roles can be performed by different people within the same dream. In a nutshell, the dreamer is the one whose dream others are sharing; the architect imagines a scene where the dream takes place; and the subject is the one whose subconscious populates and inhabits the dream in the form of dozens of anonymous people--"projections"--who basically exist to make things look normal.

Some analogies to help understand this:

If shared dreams were dinner parties, the dreamer is the host; the architect sets the plates and cooks the meal; and the subject is the guest and all of his imaginary friends come to dine.

If shared dreams were tennis matches, the dreamer is the sponsor of the match; the architect is the referee; and the subject is the tennis player and his imaginary opponent and/or teammate.

If shared dreams were paintings, the dreamer's dream is the canvas; the architect is a landscape painting; and the subject is the figures painted into the landscape to tell the story.

So in Inception, some guys try to perform corporate espionage by sharing a dream in which the mark is the subject--i.e., the mark's subconscious populates a scene invented by their own architect. It's as if the mark was acting in a play and not realizing it, and the play's director and other actors were trying to get him to reveal a secret.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think it's a little unfortunate that Cobb's wife, Mal, is portrayed as the interminable dupe. For a dead woman she gets really poor treatment.

Mal, we learn, was fooled into confusing Limbo for reality. Then we learned that Cobb tricked her in to knowing the truth (quite a paradox, telling a lie to persuade somebody of the truth), which freed her from Limbo, but then led her to believe delusions in the real world, leading her to kill herself. From then on, we are left with an exceedingly needy subconscious projection of Mal, who we then pity because she is too gullible to know that she is a projection.

I am a little bit surprised that a contemporary Hollywood film was able to slip by the good-taste censors a depiction of the female lead as easily bamboozled, clingy, and helpless. It's like a throwback to pre 1950's depictions of women as "silly" or "hysterical". In that respect, Mal and Ariadne are foils for each other, but in an unsubtle way.

And yet still I see the irresistible romance between the early Cobb and Mal. They had a tremendous paradise together. They grew old together. They lived as gods within a world of their own making. Perhaps there is a kernel of that romance inside of every budding marriage; the almost intimidating potential of the new; the taste of paradise; the delight of being with one's beloved.

In different ways, both Cobb and Mal's insatiable desire for the everlastingness of their dream sabotaged itself. Mal lost herself in beautiful but false Limbo. Cobb was careless in his effort to retrieve her and so effectively killed her. Both sought to continue the permanent romance, each on his and her own terms, and in so doing botched it. A true retelling of Adam and Eve.

Is there a moral to the story? With respect to the tragedy leading to Mal's suicide, the film is fatalistic--it could not have been otherwise. All the remains is for Cobb to have a moment of catharsis and liberate himself from guilt.

But is there any way the paradise of the early Cobb and Mal might have continued? What if Cobb had relented and not insisted that they leave Limbo? Perhaps Mal would have come around on her own, though it might have taken another 10, 20, or a hundred years (time passes more slowly in Limbo than in real life).

Perhaps the film is right to be fatalistic. The danger of Limbo is that it is a paradise of human imagining. Where it does not terminate in monotony and sloth, it ends in addiction and infatuation. Cobb's and Mal's different Limbo experiences represent the different ways that all finite paradises are slated to fail--how not even immortality can rescue such a dream from entropy. Cobb became impatient with it. Mal became infatuated with it. Cue the disintegration of love into demands for control, hoarding, possession, and desperation.

Testing

2010-11-19T15:37:00.000-08:00

Testing

Virus removal tools and updates, link list

2010-09-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

This is a simple list of links (as direct as possible) to the latest versions of the best virus removal tools. Note also that these are listed in the best order run.

Avira Rescure EXE (direct link, will burn a CD-R with bootable media)

Avira Rescue ISO (direct link if you prefer your own CD burner)

Combofix (link to page)

Malwarebytes (link to page) and definitions (direct link)

Spybot S&D (link to page) and definitions (direct link)

SuperAntiSpyware (link to page, downloads automatically) and definitions (direct link)

Microsoft Security Essentials (link to page) and definitions (direct link)

Avast (link to page) and definitions (direct link)

It's Your Turn

2010-09-10T21:42:00.001-07:00

Here's a basic struggle: doing that thing I am called to do, when I am called to do it. I'm not really talking about things like homework or chores or assignments. I'm talking about those points in life where somebody greets you at the yawning chasm of the unknown and says, "It's your turn."

I have not always returned that greeting enthusiastically. I distinctly recall being in line to jump off the three-meter diving board of a swimming pool in Tucson, AZ. I have never before so appreciated the magnitude of cubic space that separated me from the cold impact below. I couldn't do it. I cried. I asked to get down. The slow way. The safe way.

Through the turns in my life I have arrived at a familiar but uneasy relationship with irreversible moments. I learned that nothing is worse than stepping back down the ladder once you have climbed up it. That rule established, all forms of hesitation, worrying and tribulation feel like so much self-abuse. Confronted with life's one-way doors, the inner voice that says, "Get it over with!" wins the day. No matter how bad the possible consequences might be, none of them are worse than the ignominy of giving up, or the paralysis of indecision.

I am not advocating recklessness. Better divers than me do not hesitate to jump--that doesn't make them careless, just bold.

And so now life approaches, and it is not governed by my adolescent imagination. It marches inexorably toward me, relentless, obscure, vast, and not wholly reassuring. I arrive unprepared. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not ready for this! I have no guarantees that this will end as I would have wished.

Mistakes will be made. So be it! Off I go! And God help me.

I love my terrible job

2010-08-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

Every day, I go to work, and I am beset by several shelves full of computers whose owners have been waiting too long to get them back. I select four or five of the most urgent machines and get started (leaving the remaining 15 or so for another day) and I push hard to make progress on their repair. All the while, I frequently put my screwdriver down to answer phones and assist customers at the counter. In fact, in a given day, I may spend three quarters of my paid time at the counter, receiving new computers, talking with angry customers, and doing damage control for unexpected issues.

Every day, I expose myself to near constant negativity. And I love my job. I love it because it keeps me here in an existence that I love.

"If fertility is important, shouldn't infertile heterosexuals be disallowed to marry?"

2010-08-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

No. That would be silly.

When this question is raised, it is important first to address a pernicious intellectual obstacle.

The phenomenon of human fertility is not subsequent to marriage (like some kind of "add-on feature") but rather, prior to it. The fact that we have been rendering childbirth technologically optional does not change this. But our sense of control over childbirth is artificially inflated. We have lost touch with the socially organizing power that fertility naturally holds.

Fertility is prior to, and the basis of, all manner of human interactions. We should not be surprised at its central role in early and nature-based religions. In civilizations where women were accorded a solemn reverence, it was their fertility that was the source of their sanctity.

The existence of fertility in general is, anthropologically, the basis for the existence of marriage in general. I do not believe this is a controversial statement in itself.

However, reflecting on this reveals something new. Comparing a same-sex union to an infertile gender-complementary marriage involves a mental seppuku. Neither is bearing children, it is true--like two trees that had no apples for the harvest. One tree may be suffering a disease. The other is made of plastic. One couple fails in spite of participating in the socially organizing powers behind civilization. The other never participated.

Consider the justifiable outrage if NIA support groups around the country began being attended by same-sex partners.

One must also consider that infertility is not fully understood in the same way that same-sex infecundity is. Children born to couples who believed themselves to be infertile are not uncommon. Even so, an couple that is infertile because of a vasectomy is still infertile for accidental, not constitutive reasons.

The phenomenon of gender-complementary fertility in general is the basis for the existence of marriage.

Therefore same-sex infecundity, infertile-by-definition, means that there is no basis for same sex marriage.

EDIT: Clarification based on questions from friends:

Wyatt: Wait, I'm lost in syntax. How is a vasectomy accidental? And how is something constitutive necessarily not accidental?

I meant "accidental", not in the sense of "unintentional", but rather being the result of an external occurrence. If a dog has three legs, or is wearing a knit sweater, or has a notched ear, those are all "accidents"--none of them are the result of the dog being a dog. They just happen, whether by chance or invention. Accidental. It's philosophy jargon.

A gender-complementary marriage might be infertile, but that infertility is due to random incident--not to any constitutive feature of the couple, as is the case with a homosexual pair. There is a difference between being infertile in fact and infertile by definition. C.f. sick tree vs. plastic tree.

Typically when I make this distinction, the common reaction is, "Well, you're just splitting hairs, they have the same results, so they're the same thing." But that's reducing things to their function and result, and we don't do that in other areas, not even legal ones.

Wyatt: And how is homosexuality not both [constitutive and accidental]?

The jury's still out on whether homosexuality is a constitutive element of a person. Probably that answer is different from gay person to gay person and there are different varieties of homosexuality.

Regardless, homosexuality doesn't cause infertility. A homosexual union is infertile, not in the way a hetereosexual couple /can/ be infertile (external incident, disease/belief/surgery), but in the way a chair, a cloud, an antler are infertile--by definition.

Katlin: What about heterosexual couples who choose not to have children for religious reasons (believing the end times to be near) or personal morality (believing the world is already overpopulated?

On a personal (not legal) front, I might question the point of the people in your examples getting married in the first place. But even their decisions are "accidental," in the sense of being the result of something *external*--i.e., their heterosexuality didn't *make* them believe those things.

Katlin: There ARE people who do not believe in sex outside of marriage but who still refuse to have children. Should they also be forbidden the right to marry in a courthouse because they define marriage as being between two individuals WITHOUT the intention to procreate?

Recall my earlier statement: the only reason marriage exists at all, for anybody, is the generalized phenomenon of human fertility. Gender complementarity is not an optional component of that.

There is a difference between something being "forbidden" and being simply a contradiction in terms. Matrimony cannot be forbidden anyone for whom it is a possibility. But its origins define it. Matrimony without gender complementarity might as well be matrimony without two people. Either variance takes the union utterly outside any resemblance to its known origins, and outside any participation in its distinctive social character.

Infertility, voluntary or imposed by circumstance, does marriage no favors, but it does not create a contradiction.

An aside: In Catholic Canon Law, it is impossible for a couple to be married in the Catholic faith if they are not at least sincerely open to the possibility of children. This impediment does not prevent a (by chance) infertile couple from marrying, since they are still participating in the same formal structure, and anyway, children have been born to couples thought to be infertile.

Problems in the Conservative Strategy

2010-08-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

Alas, conservative activists for sexually complementary marriage are not, by and large, philosophers.

If they were, they would find in the annals of history some formidable allies, among them Plato and Aristotle.

But the the popular case against recognizing same-sex unions as marriages has run aground of bad presuppositions, bad language, and bad ideas. Conservatives lost the intellectual battle before they started. They entered the coliseum and promptly stabbed themselves.

Their first mistake was attempting to use sociological arguments in favor of sexually complimentary marriage.

Sociology is a child of the Enlightenment and it will always be loyal to she who bequeathed its operating maxims: that humans are discrete units, that the most important conclusions are reached by statistical observation, and that there is no such thing as an inherent, stable human nature.

I must constantly remind that I am not the Enlightenment's (or sociology's) enemy.

So, back to conservatives using sociological arguments. There are basic problems on the face of it.

It takes a lot of effort for a conservative to persuade progressives that his information comes from credible sources. Short of studies published by the competition's own favorite outlets, any other use of studies is largely wasted effort. Progressives understand that studies are easy to distort, whether by poor methods, obscuring of relevant data, loose interpretation, or simple human error. However, they are only likely to raise such matters when said studies arrive at conclusions that challenge the Enlightenment's (or the sexual revolution's) presuppositions about human nature. Ultimately, if any studies are cited that might favor such conservative shibboleths as valuing two-parent homes, delaying sexual experience in youths, marriage prior to cohabitation, or natural family planning, the result will almost always be a side-tracked debate about the reliability of sources.
Presumably, on matters of family and sex, conservatives would like to see some norms established for the long term. This renders questionable the strategy of basing their arguments in sociology, whose results are constantly changing. Please note that I do not thereby question sociology's usefulness in general--only its usefulness for establishing long-term norms. What sense does it make for conservatives to argue that sex-complimentary marriages are statistically better for children? Could anything be more difficult to prove in a legal setting? If ever there was a donkey jawbone wielded against the Philistine army, that's it (in which case, God help you).
Sociology alone makes no value judgments. Placing one's fate in the hands of sociologists (because, for the moment, they seem to be allies) is a bit like mistaking a wind-vein for a compass.

Sociological studies of marriage are as necessary as digital thermometers inside of a computer. One must know a computer's optimal temperature before a thermometer becomes useful. Sociology, like a thermometer, is a "dumb" measuring tool, not a basis for arriving at overarching conclusions. Taking the analogy even further, the technician might be monitoring the temperature of a dozen laptops and watching them reach 95°C and above, and proceed to shut off. If that technician were like some of today's sociologists, he might say, "Oh, I guess that this is the new standard of laptop behavior! We should issue cautions to consumers not to start any computer work they can't finish or save within 15 minutes."

In other words, too many sociologists measure trends in human behavior, but will not name the proverbial overheating when they see it. They understand correctly that sociology itself cannot make value judgments (any more than a thermometer can). But some of them write as though every new trend of human behavior is seen as a "new standard". But trends are trends. Surely there is a deeper basis for action and value-forming than the mob.

In short, conservatives should never uphold sociology as a standard for weighing fundamentals. Sociology does not deal in fundamentals. It deals with superficials. This is not to say that conservatives should never cite sociological studies. Yet if they do, they should be wary of the way that citation will be interpreted, understood, and reported.

Progressives in the "gay marriage" issue have been trumpeting the weakness of conservative sociology-based arguments for a long time. That weakness may be the single most important drive behind Judge Walker's striking down Proposition 8. Conservatives allowed themselves to be cornered into a position of relying on a harm-benefits analysis, and they predictably lost. They will continue to lose if they continue to play that game.

This is unfortunate. Progressives are guilty of no small amount of card-stacking when it comes to matrimonial and reproductive issues in the last fifty years. Elizabeth Anscombe understood in 1972 that widespread artificial contraception removed the keystone from sex's social benefit--the integrity of the triad of "sex-marriage-family". Pope Paul VI understood the ripple of social repercussions even earlier. In the present day, looking back, Jean Twenge's "Generation Me" sites studies documenting the slink of generations into divorce, learning disability, and mental illness.

So if sex-complementary marriage today does not shimmer in sociological terms, this should come as no surprise, least of all to those who have favored its continued dissolution in the individualistic waters of the Enlightenment. What is surprising is that marriage's struggles are now used by progressives as evidence against its deserving distinct public respect, relative to its novel counterpart. Well, say I, of course the dog doesn't walk anymore--you kicked it!

Unfortunately, this narrative--that the sexual revolution ruined marriage before it offered it to same-sex couples--will win no points on a legal front. Sociology cares not for whatever matrimony may have been; history and narrative are not its trade. If gender complementarity is in a shambles right now, there it lay. The case for gender complementary marriage will not be made via sociology or historical narrative, harm-benefit analysis or nostalgia.

It does not, however, need to be.

The United States government is not, and never has been, predicated on a mere harm-benefit analysis. That government would look very different. Conservatives can take heart in the fact that the Constitution lacks modernity's preoccupation with (and pseudo-sociology's belief in) a capriciously shifting human nature. That is to its credit. In fact, without a stable human nature, there is nothing inherent to individuals such that rights need always be respected.

Conservatives have a basic understanding, though they have not been very good at declaring it, that a fluid notion of human nature is coextensive with a fluid notion of human rights. This is bad. What the government can giveth, the government can taketh away. People with long memories and a historical sense (more, mind you, than an ability to proof-text old documents) are justifiably leery of the expanding sphere of State powers.

Judge Walker knows this, which is why he correctly phrases the terms of his decision as whether homosexual couples are seeking a "new right" or a right which has always existed but never manifested.

Developments in constitutional law have not aimed to reverse any tenet of the Constitution but to elucidate its implications for new scenarios. Judges understand that the trajectory of a Constitutional mandate may, if applied consistently, have surprising results.

Nevertheless, for Walker's decision to hold, it needs to be shown that same-sex marriage is not a new right; only an (inalienable human) right of which we are newly conscious. A careful and considered response to his statement is overdue, but it will not happen here, save for one note.

Recent history has, it is true, witnessed the rapid encroachment of Enlightenment and sexual revolutionary ideals--individualism, self-determination, identical public treatment--into marriage. However, that same history has revealed ever increasingly that sexual complementarity is a constitutive and vital component to human beings, including homosexuals. Elevating same sex unions to the level of marriage enshrines in public law a statement which is untrue: that sexual complementarity is of no consequence to human individuals or to society.

In order for a human right to be a human right, it needs to be bound in some respects by the human (in all of its biological irrationality)--and not an Sartrean narrative about what the human ought to be (a rational, disembodied, perfectly autonomous, self-creating en soi).

To an extent, the conservative inability to effectively vocalize the precise benefits of complementary marriage is to its credit rather than the reverse. It uncovers the preposterous nature of the challenge that is put to them: "What concrete advantages do heterosexual unions have over homosexual ones?" "Why should trees be made of wood and not something else?" "Why is a blue sky better than a green one?" Who could blame them for being a little inarticulate?

Forcibly submerging the sex-complementary quality of matrimony does not contradict a "tradition;" it contradicts us, collectively and individually. On the natural plane, heterosexual intercourse is the origin of individual life, and so (though it may raise eyebrows to say it), sex is the closest thing to God civilization encounters on this earth.

Moreover, it will continue to be so, regardless of public policy. Denying gender complementarity its unique role in the public is a bit like denying photosynthesis its unique role in agriculture. A State-sponsored fiction. Yet when the State begins to rule by fictions, where does this leave citizens who are in tune with reality?

Marriage vs. the Enlightenment: The Prop 8 Debate

2010-08-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

Not everybody will be able to read this in a mature spirit. It is not addressed to them.

I do not believe that the state should recognize the union of same sex partners as a marriage.

Unfortunately, that means that I will be known (outed, as it were) to the current activist public, including some friends and family, as a bigot.

That's a little bit painful, since as a child of the 80's and coming of age in the 90's, we learned about all of the institutional evils that were "ancient" history: the slaughter of Native Americans, oppression of blacks (slavery, Jim Crow, segregation), the Japanese internment camps, disenfranchised women, etc. And so people who had any ties such past evils, even if they disavowed them, were marked; and if they did not disavow them, they were more than marked.

So I'm already reconciled that in a decade or three, I may come to be known as a dangerously deluded relic, much like today's segregationists are. Oh well.

What opinions I hold strongly, I do not base in cheap sources, political mantras, or a lack of awareness of contrary arguments. I am not confident I could say the same for many people who support gay marriage. Or who oppose it. Politics, like sports, is all loyalties and passions and not a lot of discussion. Those on either side are simply too indignant that sincere opposition exists. The time for conversation has ended. History has made its decision. Now there is only one choice remaining: get on the right side or fade away.

Well. That is the way people are going to be. I don't need to play by their rules.

Why I am not hopeful for a strong defense of gender-complementary marriage in the US.

Opponents of gay marriage have never successfully made an accessible case for their side. That's not entirely their fault. The cards were stacked. To date the only "popular" manifestation of traditional marriage activism feels territorial and petty compared to the more attractive liberal image. Traditional marriage activists are not likely to shake the notion that they are simply mean.

They are not, by and large, mean or territorial. They are conscious that matrimony makes a contribution to public society, and legally blurring and loosening of marriage definitively obscures that contribution. But what that contribution is, conservative activists have failed to make clear and attractive.

I hope that they do. I might offer a suggestion. Instead of "traditional marriage," I believe conservatives should find a term that more accurately encapsulates what is really at stake, which is not, after all, a "tradition" but a facet of humanity. I propose an alternative: "gender complementary marriage."

The dynamics of ideas at the heart of the debate.

The liberal attitude is born out of Enlightenment individualism. The Enlightenment champions Equality--and not just any equality, but an equality that views differences between humans with suspicion. The Enlightenment attitude satisfies its impulses by publicly battling those differences.

This is not a criticism. I have no value judgment toward this tendency except when it is misapplied. Many times in recent history it has been correctly applied, and I applaud it.

Society remains in thrall to the Enlightenment, and no activism will succeed without believably honoring its cherished values--freedom, equality, democracy, self-determination. Yet marriage and the Enlightenment cannot coexist easily. Not without great concessions to one or the other.

Marriage demands sacrifice; the Enlightenment resists demands. Marriage is born out of compatibility, which is born of difference; the Enlightenment stresses equality, at times at the expense of difference. Marriage evokes permanence; yet the private, autonomous will chooses nothing permanently. Marriage embodies a communitarian view of the human person; the Enlightenment embodies an individualistic view.

Marriage is older than the Enlightenment and has roots in nature, making it therefore mysterious and integral to our human makeup. It is a part of us. It is both organic and institutional. The institutions of marriage are not so much a human construct as a human scaffolding around what is fundamentally not a construct. A tree is a tree before it becomes a treehouse.

The Enlightenment is novel and it is a construct, but again, this is not a criticism. The Enlightenment offers important correctives against common evils. Nature is cruel and brutal and unenlightened. Human inventiveness is necessary for survival, peace, and civilization. Thus we should not be too "romantic" about the naturalness or organicness of things. Nature is worthy of awe and reverence but not idolatry; it is not the only source of wisdom and it cannot alone provide us with peace.

Why the Enlightenment should not be taken too far.

Yet our innermost selves are natural. We are animals. Human inventiveness (like the kind expressed in the Enlightenment) forgets this at our peril.

When human inventiveness becomes drunk on its own accomplishments, it oversteps and begins to treat its natural, animal masters as if they themselves were its creations, and subject only to its machinations. Regimes based upon invented models of humanity have a habit of devouring people in the name of the models. The worst experiments in this manner of world-reinventing have come and gone, however. I will not name them. Godwin has no home here.

If such human inventiveness is likened to an unruly drunk, then perhaps it has gone through the 12-step program. Mr. Brooks has been clean for a long time. But William Hurt hasn't gone away yet.

An allegory.

In the recent history we have of making proverbial tree houses, we have discovered that houses can also functionally be built onto telephone poles. (They even get free cable).

Initially, tree-house dwelling society was taken aback, but reactions to this innovation eventually softened.

Only lately, those who once advocated for the acceptance of telephone-pole houses, now ask that telephone poles be called trees.

Those who objected, on the grounds that telephone poles are not trees, were called backwards thinkers.

Those who pushed for the recognition of the unique and distinctive character of trees were called bigots.

Wikipedia vs. Digg: The Internet at its Best, and at its Worst

2010-07-28T18:48:00.001-07:00

The dreams of doe-eyed idealists live on in the Internet. "Information wants to be free!" Universal, free access to limitless information; absolute powers of self-publishing; and virtual intellectual anarchy. The Internet is a parallel world to the real one, and the only rules it abides by are the ones people have chosen to follow. It is a self-governing paradise.

One of those dreams is the image of millions of anonymous surfers acting as the ultimate information sieve of which information and news is most relevant, important, and true. Throw enough people at a problem and the solution will rise to the surface.

That power is enticing, but it is tempered by one phenomenon: the more democratic information becomes, it seems, the less it becomes. Like magnetic iron shavings, Internet users bond together into clumps, and where there are clumps, there is control, there is preference, and there is domination.

Two of the Internet's most popular sources of information are Wikipedia and Digg. Both derive their importance from the analogy of the sieve. In Wikipedia, anonymous contributors edit articles ad-infinitum, and the more an article is edited by more people, the more true it becomes. Digg is somewhat different in that it does not apply the ocean of Internet users to the task of content creation, but rather merely content evaluation. Articles are voted up or down (there are no criteria for choosing one or the other; it is merely preference); and moreover, comments to those articles are themselves voted up or down.

These two models of user participation both make claims to the effect that the democratization of publishing will produce an end result that is more helpful and beneficial to public discourse than their mainstream media counterparts.

Wikipedia, I believe, succeeds brilliantly. The anarchic encyclopedia often comes out neck-and-neck in terms of accuracy with the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta, though it is often lacking in good structure. Whatever its failings, Wikipedia is far and away more useful and accurate than anybody could have predicted of a reference governed only by an honor system.

Even on matters concerning religion, which the dominant 20-30 something crowd of Internet users commonly loathe, Wikipedia offers solid information.

Digg, in spite of having similar principles driving it, is a wasteland of critical thought. Digg voters and commentators appear to be dominated by a vast sea of--not just non-believers--but angry, prejudiced, intolerant, and utterly dogmatic non-believers. It is not only the religion articles that unveil that striking character, but any article invoking popular emotion unleashes the mob mentality. That mob feeds on itself by "digging" comments it agrees with and "burying" comments it does not agree with.

What's the difference?

I believe there are a few:

What kind of user-contribution is invited?
What is understood to be of greatest value?
What happens to truth in these models?

Digg and Wikipedia ask for distinctly different contributions. Digg asks for a click. Wikipedia asks for expertise and explanation. An opinionated troglodyte can edit a Wikipedia article; however, such an edit will not likely stand the test of time. Even if the troglodytes outnumber the scholars, the scholars will win out in the end because the value of their contribution to the article will be more widely recognized.

Digg offers no serious means for scholars to win influence away from troglodytes. On the contrary, because contributing to Digg has no complexity or distinctive content (no "click" is more persuasive than any other "click"), the scholar's positions will only be "dugg" if their conclusions match those of the majority; otherwise they will be "buried." Majority opinion is self-reinforcing on Digg.

Digg and Wikipedia have distinctly different values. That is evidence in their very titles. Wikipedia is the "Free Encyclopedia". Users and contributers have a collective understanding that accuracy and truth are its sole reason for existing. Even those with idiosyncratic agendas understand this. Relatively few people edit Wikipedia articles with the same interests in mind that govern Digg. Whether I "like" something is irrelevant. Only the truth matters.

Digg, then, is all about preference--not about accuracy. A true comment will be "buried", not because "Diggers" found it to be untrue or inaccurate, but because they might have found it disagreeable or unimportant.

Another factor to consider is that the people who make earnest contributions to Wikipedia articles more often than not are specialists of some kind or another. They care about the topic at hand. Two scholars on Wikipedia can hold off a dozen article-defacing troglodytes, because they can continually remove the influence of superficiality, and their efforts will be reinforced by supporters.

On Digg, a comment can only receive one vote from each person. Thus, a scholar cannot continually "digg" their own comment; to defend ideological terroritory, the scholar would have to recruit substantial numbers in order to "digg" that comment up into relevancy. Without the numbers, comments get buried irrespective of their actual value.

So what happens to the truth in these models? In Wikipedia I believe truth actually does rise to the surface. In Digg, truth takes a backseat to the caprice of the mob, to enjoyment, to collective outrage, in a word, to groupthink.

My fascination with abandoned buildings

2010-07-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

Few things in the world fill me with more wonder and excitement than an abandoned building. I am not particular as to what kind of building it had been--though churches, schools, and hospitals seem more likely to bear a resemblance to their once living purposes.

I am not certain why these things capture my imagination. It's a sensation that actually leaves me at a loss for words. Most of my attempts at an explanation feel flat. So here is another go at it.

I believe my fascination is the result of the overlapping of several features that pull on my heartstrings.

First is the feeling of having found hidden treasure. Most abandoned facilities have been picked clean of anything of actual monetary value. Yet they often contain items whose financial worthlessness does no justice to their uniqueness, scarcity, and storied past. These might take the shape of a piano decayed beyond repair, or Victorian architecture, or works of art (like simple murals inside childrens' quarters). The only reason these objects haven't left their home is that individuals could hardly put them to use elsewhere--they would wind up being stored and forgotten (which is hardly better than being abandoned and forgotten). What they lack in utility, they make up for in curiosity. A piano may never be played again, yet by its very presence and accessibility it continues to be a source of enjoyment--"Hey, here's a piano! Somebody once must have considered this to be a valuable thing."

Even buildings without such trifles contain something of the same character. Indoor space is not something that is constructed, or abandoned, lightly. Somehow, present value becomes an echo of past value. Why are these buildings no longer used? Why do they occupy a no-man's land between use, demolition, or embalming? Very often in modern cases the reason is mundane: asbestos. Considerations of efficiency, safety, and risk-benefit dictate that allowing buildings to rot is the least bad path.

Unfortunately this means that some of that feeling--of having stumbled upon an (available) treasure--is illusory. Everything has an owner, even if it's rotting. The state protects garbage. There will be no fly-by-night restorations, no partial re-inhabitation of a long unloved shack, no "secret place" where one can spend leisure hours in privacy. Many, but not all abandoned sites are monitored by security.

But such reminders can't quench my suspension of disbelief. Abandoned buildings will always hold the allure of offering a "secret place".

A second reason such places captivate me is the ghosts. I am not referring to the remnant souls of the dead--I am a skeptic (though paradoxically I do take paranormal phenomena seriously). When I speak of ghosts, let me be clear that I do only refer to my own projections and imaginations. Yet time is relative rather than absolute. We are not so removed from the past as the length of years would have us believe. There is a sense--whether objective or subjective, I care not--of the lingering presence of the past in the present. An abandoned psychiatric ward will always feel more ominous than a disused auto repair garage. Buildings with innocuous histories will inherit a "spooky" character from my imagination. And buildings that harbored secret crimes will not tell those secrets now.

The allure of abandoned constructs is in their stories--real, or imagined, known or projected. In those stories is an invitation to feel connected to an "other," a desire that is the flip side of enjoying the privacy of perceived solitude. There is a community that is experienced when people occupy the same place at the same time. But there is also a community that is experienced by the historian, who acquaints him or herself with people in the same place at different times. The strength of that "community," I feel, is related to the presence of artifacts--which explains in part why I find recent wrecks to hold more allure than ancient ruins.

Though to be fair, the ancient ruins are less likely to cause asbestos poisoning.

The third and last reason I feel compelled to explore our discarded places is that it recaptures a lost sense of the frontier. Over the course of months I begin to feel as though I spend my days in an endless sitcom rerun. The nooks and crannies have been exposed to the white hot light of prosaic familiarity. Everything is properly regulated and controlled.

If this sounds nightmarish, then I am being unfair. I like routine. I would be happy to surrender six days a week to it. When "interesting" events meddle in my comfort zones, I feel intruded upon.

But, dear God, remind me please that this is not all there is! Show me secret gardens, impassable stretches, unattainable heights, and dark caverns! Abandoned buildings are a part of that mystery. The once-familiar is now unfamiliar and strange; a place where the nocturnal creatures of our childhood imaginations find sanctuary from the common, and thus from becoming exploited and common themselves. In abandoned buildings the domestic has returned to the wild, the controlled to the uncontrolled, and thus, the impossible to the possible. The small world of routine becomes large again, and that one day of the week stretches out to overtake the other six in its mysteries and unknowns.

In explaining myself here I think I begin to uncover something basic to human nature, which is its longing for the infinite. That is part of the reason I can't be other than religious, and why I regard worship as one of two most vital human activities (the other being caritas, mercy). The experience of the infinite and the mysterious inside natural phenomena--like abandoned buildings--reminds me with natural feelings of the what the supernatural infinite lays before me. But one need not be religious to be captivated by the haunted and uninhabited.

National sovereignty and immigration: a response

2010-06-26T11:22:00.001-07:00

My friend Katlin recently posted an argument in favor of Arizona's new-ish immigration law, as well as a link to Ray Steven's music video on the subject (he's still alive?).

I don't entirely disagree with her. Yet one can listen only to so much NPR (and associate with the highly activist Catholic Church in the southwest as much as I have) before one begins to pay serious attention to complicating factors in this issue.

Yes, a country has a right to enforce its borders. And yes, the United States has taken a gentler hand to border crossers than many countries, including, tellingly, Mexico. Sentimentality is a poor basis for legislation. Those who are in the United States illegally may have their advocates here--but how can they reasonably expect to demand anything for themselves? So far is it goes, error has no rights. Those who push for amnesty do not have solid ground to be shrill or self-righteous. To advocate for amnesty is to advocate for the capitulation of our legal system to serve interests to which nobody has a right.

But leftists are not necessarily the only sentimentalists to speak of, here. I dislike crooning, whether it's crooning over the plight of the poor [your favorite minority here], or crooning over the much threatened "American way of life" (a phrase which is abused when leveraged as a xenophobic bludgeon).

One consistent trend to be drawn, on many issues, is that the right tends to be principle-centered and the left tends to be more pragmatic. In the extremes, the left sometimes threatens to forget important principles (like national sovereignty), and the right threatens to forget the facts on the ground (like the material and historical causes of illegal immigration).

My problem with Ray Stevens is not that he's wrong in the principles his music celebrates, but that he is not tempering them with a healthy consideration of the problems at hand.

Illegal immigrants are in a desperate geopolitical/economic situation.
Legal immigration is too difficult/costly to achieve.
Birthright citizenship creates important human rights problems when dealing with the illegally immigrated parents of US citizens.

At the same time, amnesty is not a desirable option.

It sets a precedent that encourages further illegal immigration.
It does not address the actual causes of the problem.
As a matter of principle, it is an affront to justice for those who are legally inside the country.

So it seems that we need comprehensive immigration reform. The difficulty is that those words have been, fairly or unfairly, entangled with amnesty.

But we still have problems to solve. How will we deal with the American-born children of illegally immigrated parents, without forcibly separating families? How can we bring some sanity and accessibility to legal immigration?

And in the long term (when we are slightly less desperate ourselves), how will we discourage illegal immigration in the first place? It is important here not to pooh-pooh the economic situation in Latin America. The choice to cross illegally is not made lightly and it is not made with delusions of an easy life. In Altar, just south of the border, humanitarian organizations provide basic needs while strongly discouraging border crossing and expelling any myths about the availability of jobs. Problem is, many of the people in Altar aren't Mexicans--they're from South America. You're not going to dissuade someone who walked/hitched to Altar from El Salvador.

And the words "choosing to cross the border" need to be spoken slightly tongue-in-cheek. Certainly, everyone has a sob story. Like I said, I don't like sentimentalism. Yet the Ray Stevens video gives the inaccurate impression that people jump the border expecting to transition to a great life (full of freebies). This is not the case. In many cases, border crossers believe their choice is between assured expiration and uncertain hope. Considerations of whether it is right or wrong to break a law shrink in view of reality. Ultimately, the consequences of spending one's total resources to travel thousands of miles, get caught and prosecuted, become more tolerable than the consequences of staying home.

There is no legal classification for "economic refugees", but one could make a case. In the absence of such a legal classification, however, we should act in view of the facts on the ground.

Which brings me back to the immigration law. Is it wrong? Not really. But is it enough? Not even close.

Convergence is great when you spread it out right

2010-04-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Consider this "Technology Post 3: Return of Concupiscence"

Ever since high school I've been fascinated by the idea of converged devices. It always seemed to make more sense to me that a single device should take the place of three, four, or five other objects.

As early as 2004, long before the iPhone, I was already achieving a reasonable facsimile of an ultimate "do-all" device with an HP iPaq Pocket PC. I felt no shame for carrying around a gadget that functioned alternately as a walkman, breviary, newspaper, book reader, Web browser, and game device all in one.

But realistically, it didn't do any of those things well.

Technology has gotten better in the last six years, but I don't see that progress in terms of new technologies so much as the new affordability of existing technologies. Five years ago, the Fujitsu p1000 series MSRP'd for $1200, and now, netbooks run circles around it for a quarter of the cost.

The market is still, surprisingly, on a quixotic mission to give birth to an "ultimate converged device". It continually rediscovers that, where every human need is squeezed into a gadget of one design, the inadequacies of that design give birth immediately to another class of devices whose claim is to trump the first in usability.

We wind up with a handful of "classes" of devices that all serve a handful of tasks chosen from the infinite palette of human activity.

There are smartphones, MIDs ("mobile internet device", i.e. the iPod Touch), gaming handhelds, PMPs ("personal media player"), netbooks, tablets, smartbooks, and of course the venerable laptops (of all classes) and desktops (of all classes). A number of old classes have gone extinct. Yesterday's PDAs and UMPCs have today been absorbed into the nebulous category of MID. Arguably, gaming handhelds and PMPs are all also MIDs. Whatever.

Ultimately, you can get something that fits in your pocket, or something that fits in a purse (or a "murse" *snerk*), or something that you need to set on a table, or something that won't leave your home. Between those possibilities, you might want to send and receive calls and text, use the Internet, "consume media" (I hate that phrase), get directions, view and create documents and media, and so on.

All of the available gadgets offer to provide that functionality, but one thing continues to divide them: contracts.

So far as I am concerned, one has only successfully met their needs when one has minimized the number of contracts to which one is bound.

I considered this when my brother Alex and I discussed the GPS feature on his phone. It is incredibly useful. But it isn't available without a data plan on a major cellular carrier.

So who, in the end, wins the value game? Someone whose phone accomplishes the tasks of dozens of gadgets, but who pays $70-$80 a month for the privilege? (Alex gets some discounts, thank goodness). I have arrived at the conclusion that value trumps convergence where convergence involves slavery to contracts.

A nice computer with Skype + a pay-as-you-go phone + a dedicated, contract-free GPS would seem to do the trick.

The difference between storytelling and pornography.

2010-03-31T06:16:00.000-07:00

So far as I can tell, it's a clear line.

I do not come down very hard against violence or explicit content in the media, so long as adults are given the ability to control it (now if only they would).

Looking back on media that I consumed, even before high school, I'm amazed now at how much graphic content and adult themes I was exposed to. I will pick up a book that I read in the 6th grade and think, "I corrupted my young mind!"

In fact, I probably had zero understanding of the gravity of such things when I saw it.

But was what I read/heard/watched/played pornographic? I don't think so.

The line between the pornographic and the merely dramatic is partially a function of the author and partially a subjective quality in the consumer.

The same work can be either merely dramatic or pornographic for two individuals.

I believe the dividing line is drawn based upon the degree of subjective distance allowed between the consumer and the character.

In good storytelling, I fully expect conflicts to arise that are violent, problematic, etc. What I do not expect is an invitation by the author to take unreflective pleasure in evil acts.

As I said, the same artwork can be experienced in either way by different consumers. I do not doubt that some individuals play Grand Theft Auto perversely. But mostly, the thrills of the game do not feel substantially different than children playing "cops and robbers".

God of War 3, on the other hand, deliberately requires you, the player, to enjoy the very physical feeling of murder.

What about sex?

I believe it's a mistake to put sex on the same level as violence. It's worse. Perhaps that is counter-intuitive to people in my age group. "Make love, not war," etc. More Puritanical prudery from your local traditionalist Catholic. Yet there is a very simple reason why.

I can watch one man shoot another man without participating in the shooting. I can even pretend to shoot a man in the context of a game and not participate in it. Violence, whatever its inherent evil, does not by spectatorship or pretend compel complicity.

Sexually explicit content, however, does. That's partly cultural; but let's not fool ourselves: biology is a major player. It doesn't matter whether a novel, a film, or a game creates any level of distance between the actors and the consumer. Any recreation of the sounds, sights, and sensations of sex elicits immediate responses from the body. It is impossible to enjoy the "dramatic" element of a fully explicit rape scene without becoming emotionally complicit in it, at least partly.

Some scenes are carefully manufactured to communicate horror (think of the miserable sequence following the "key party" in the Elijah Wood film, "Ice Storm"). But even they eliminate nudity so that the horror is not compromised by natural reflexes.

The recent media spat over sexual video games is probably the best advertising they have ever witnessed. But their growing popularity likely has more to do with the lingering 60's cultural narrative that "pornography" no longer exists. So sayith the legend, the label of "porn" was only ever an instrument of patriarchy to control the free flow of information and maintain stultifying control over children and women.

So now we will have an epidemic of people who are controlled not by patriarchal institutions without, but by addiction, compulsion, and insecurity within. Hail freedom. Right?

What are the strongest threads of atheistic thought today?

2010-03-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

There's a common proverb that "For those who do not believe in God, no proof is possible; and for those who do, no proof is necessary."

I won't criticize this proverb too harshly--I know why it is so credible. But as a matter of history, the Catholic Church has come down on the side of saying, yes, God's existence is a fact knowable by reason.

In other words, the existence of God is not an object of faith (at least, not properly or exclusively).

It's the other things--the Resurrection, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth--that are objects of faith.

But God's existence is not. The existence of God is something that can be known. Such a statement is likely to draw criticism from believers and non-believers alike. But I would like to propose a fresh, all-encompassing approach to the God question. I would like to gather up the threads of atheistic discourse, analyze them into their components, and provide an alternative approach to uncovering the existence of God.

So here's my question. Where do I begin? How can I get the best bird's eye view of the current landscape of atheistic thought? I am already quite familiar with Richard Dawkins and www.infidels.org. But I still need to collect as many atheistic resources as possible. Perhaps some of my less pious friends will indulge me.

Setting the infatuation record.

2010-03-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

I'm in love with Laura Saad. And, reading her blog, is it really difficult for anyone to see why? But after six months of seeing each other, my degree of infatuation hasn't eased, it hasn't waned, it hasn't even plateaued. I remain still in the blissful state in which the very sight of Laura sends "happy juices" flowing all through my mind. And every day this feeling increases.

Love is not a feeling; it is a choice. Infatuation renders the choice easier to make... in some ways, infatuation makes the choice (to love) far less heroic than it otherwise would be.

Not that I complain. My last six months have not been easy, but the pains have been substantially offset by instinct and affection tugging on all of my paternal heartstrings. I am warned, both by friends and by knowledge, that the "easy days" do not last even for the healthiest of couples. And yet I feel that heeding these warnings too much would disallow me from savoring this slice of heaven. No!

In the private cocoon bordered by couch cushions and a blanket, there is a pervasive sense shared by Laura and me that our finding each other is both inexplicable and inevitable, and is by itself proof of God's existence and goodness. Each of us represents the fulfillment the other has sought since the lonely and cruel days of elementary school. And we fulfill it so well.

This all leaves me in a curious position vis-a-vis the "infatuation stage". I am both mentally preparing for its exit and each day overjoyed at its abiding presence. I know that my cautioning friends are not trying to be wet blankets... they only do not wish me to be dragged down too far by disappointment, or to confuse infatuation with "the real thing". I understand. And if they are right and automatic affection becomes someday rare, I will not be sad. But all the same, I cannot let go of the private joy in the possibility that my 6-month-and-counting infatuation trip may prove them wrong.

All I know is that many would die for what I now have, and I am among the luckiest people on the planet.

On feeling powerful

2010-03-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

All right, I have a confession to make.

I actually think I'm pretty smart.

That's a dangerous opinion to have, because if I can't back it up, that makes me one of the world's most detestable kind of people; and even if I can back it up, being smart is, ultimately, of only relative importance in life. And if I ever forgot that fact, I wouldn't actually be all that smart, would I? See the rule about not being able to back it up.

But one doesn't have to be smart to feel powerful. Something about the combination of forces--a cup of coffee, good health, free time, and a medium of expression--is enough to make a lot of people feel a rush of "can do". The world at one's fingertips. Thought with the clarity of a three-dimensional Venn diagram (with bullets). Delusions of intellectual grandeur. It's almost as if I could wield ideas like a pair of Paul Bunyan's axes, chopping down the forests of obscurity, darkness and fear in the name of God, like some horseman of the apocalypse of the world of unreason.

It's a good feeling. And once in a blue moon it actually does contribute to something really awesome. But more often than not I just like to stew in the feeling, and finally, time gets wasted. Ironic.

Religious belief and intelligence

2010-02-12T15:46:00.001-08:00

At the behest of a certain internet friend, I'm starting a thread on this topic to sort of tie together conversations surround religion and intelligence (HAHA, get it? Thread? Tie? Ok, I'm done).

Here's an irony. Intelligent people "get" the questionable nature of citing a correlation as if it were a cause. But that doesn't take away the seductive nature of correlations for anyone (intelligent or otherwise). This is certainly true of the alleged correlation between intelligence and unbelief.

Richard Dawkins goes to great lengths in "The God Delusion" to suggest powerfully that theistic belief is in fact a function of IQ. Specifically, a low one.

And yet Neil deGrasse Tyson, another atheist, points out that the really interesting thing is not the correlation, but the fact that intelligent theists exist at all (even at the highest echelons of academia).

Of course, the existence of intelligent believers isn't really a novelty to me. Please note that the "Academia <--> Unbelief" correlation typically cite hierarchies within scientific academia--never the professors of faculties in fields of philosophy or theology. Not that I have numerical evidence that those heirarchies are any different. But if powerful, believing brains are hard to find among the physicists, they don't appear to be nearly so much among the metaphysicians.

Nor are brilliant theists hard to find within history. History is a sticky issue to bring into this discussion, since the retort will arise: well of course 17th century geniuses still believed in God. Virtually everybody did. Our knowledge of the universe wasn't as advanced as it is now.

Yet this leads me to ask if atheism was really so intellectually inaccessible to academics of 100, 200, or 300 years ago. Perhaps it was easier (for the general populace) to believe in God in a world without Darwin. But among academics, Darwin's ideas were hardly new when they arrived on the scene. What was new was the compelling nature of the evidence he provided and the radicality of his conclusions. Yet it would have been as possible to be a 17th century atheist as it was to be a modern believer.

I still haven't gotten to my main point. Right now I'm just collecting sub-issues to deal with. And I have more.

For example, there's a basic fact that so many distinctions must be made before we can even discuss these issues accurately: Belief (propositional content) vs. religion (practice, ritual, song, storytelling, community). Philosophically informed belief vs. simple belief (vs. culpably stupid belief).

IQ vs. intelligence vs. academic accomplishment vs. field of expertise.

And let's not forget the factor of objective truth. Is it possible for the simpleton to be objectively correct in spite of himself?

But let me conclude on a simple opinion. Being a theist who, I'll flatter myself, isn't stupid, I not only believe in God but I believe that my belief in God is rational and that my premises can stand up to any of the apologetics of, for example, the authors of infidels.org.

So, being faced with the facts on the ground--the correlation between IQ and unbelief, or between scientific academic accomplishment and unbelief--it behooves me to offer my own explanation. I have one: Culture.

Unbelief in western acadamia is as self-perpetuating as superstition among backwater rubes--and its memes use much the same mechanisms of defense and self-propagation as the silliest of religion. I'm gravely pessimistic of anyone's claim, implied or otherwise, to be above the subtle machinations of cultural influence, which are a-rational (while not necessarily ir-rational), powerful, and invisible even to geniuses.

And I have a complementary explanation of why such correlations bother me even less: basically, I think I'm right... and I would be no less right if I were impossibly stupid.

Forgive my bias, but I imagine that good old Benedict XVI could go toe-to-toe with Richard Dawkins without breaking an intellectual sweat. And that's the point. This is one case where it only takes a single counter-example--a single smart believer (or even a single stupid believer who happens to be correct) to make the whole alleged correlation between unbelief and intelligence completely irrelevent. And not only irrelevant, but perilous to put too much stock in.

Redemption and Buddhism

2010-02-10T16:25:00.001-08:00

Father Cory Sticha posted a video of a mutual favorite professor of ours, Fr. Robert Barron, defending the remarks of Brit Hume regarding Christianity's superior tradition of redemption relative to Buddhism.

There are two issues involved, really. The first is the question: ought mainstream media figures to make such statements at all? (Here is where Fr. Barron's remarks are right on the dot). The second: does Brit Hume have a point as regards Christianity and Buddhism?

Some of the source of left-wing anger at Hume's comments might be that they interpreted his words to mean: "Christians are more forgiving than Buddhists." I seriously doubt it was his intention to say any such thing, but then, it is difficult to be accurately understood when one must shoehorn important words into brief moments.

One problem is that, if people do not know much about Buddhism, they might walk away from Brit Hume's words with a vision of the eastern philosophy in which people blame each other and are blamed for sins without any religious or metaphysical framework of overcoming it. I could think of no greater misery! But that is a gross distortion of the reality--and again, I contend, not what Brit Hume had in mind.

The difficulty is that neither forgiveness NOR blame are much on the radar of Buddhist philosophy. Seeking and granting redemption, while of course possible, are not ends in themselves.

The very concept of redemption entails a dialogue between the self and the other. In Buddhism, the ultimate goal is to eliminate that very distinction. When the "self", the "other" and the "all" are all One (and in some sense 'naught'), there is no redemption because there is no distinction between the redeemer and the redeemed.

Fellow Christians and I can interpret our entire faith-worldview as a dialogue of redemption. For Buddhists, that image would be far too "anthropomorphic" to serve as a model for their religious primary concern.

But that doesn't mean redemption is absent from Buddhist philosophy. Think of it this way. Christians might say, "forgive and forget"; I think Buddhists would focus mostly on the "forget" part. In other words, the only way for the sinner and the sinned-against to move closer to peace would be for each independently to "let go" of the drama that seizes their psyche. Neither person depends upon an action taken by the other to achieve this (no "Please forgive mes" or "I forgive yous" required).

Redemption can find itself in Buddhism in another way, via the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is a means to an end--not an end in itself. But its dictates do involve more of what we would consider traditional "Christian" morality. To grant forgiveness, or to seek forgiveness, would fall under the dictates of "Right Speech"--but again, the overriding aim here is not to effect any objective state of "being redeemed", but to ensure that our words pave over the rocks and potholes of relationships. Words should extinguish passions, not enflame them. The word "nirvana" means, literally, to extinguish, as in the passions and attachments that anchor us to an illusory prison. That is the overriding concern in Buddhist philosophy.

If my understanding here is correct (and I hope people will check my thinking), there might be some truth in Brit Hume's comments--without implying that Bhuddists are in any way stingier with their forgiveness than Christians.

Tiger Woods' redemptive dillema is, I think, two-fold.

First, by being a celebrity, he is caught up in a firestorm of secular modernity's exaggerated condemnations. The media has a penchant for shrill, judgmental, despair-laced soul poison that makes Jonathan Edwards' famous "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" look like a pep talk by comparison. The reputational death-sentence, to be held up by the modern media for public scorn, is one of the ironies of our allegedly 'permissive' contemporary culture.

Regardless of religion or philosophy, any of us walking in Tiger's shoes (Nikes, presumably) could probably imagine wanting a finger dipped in water to cool our tormented tongues.

And yet it feels difficult, in such a situation, to glean satisfactory counsel from a tradition that does not recognize the reality of sin ('Original' or otherwise), or the objective spiritual damage caused by sin. Isn't that like the coach who tells his broken-legged quarterback to "walk it off"?

If I misunderstand, I hope to be corrected and educated about this issue.

Designing the robot secretary, pt 3

2010-02-06T12:38:00.000-08:00

Thus, it's not enough to focus simply on one's ultimate goals and how they are fulfilled--one must also see that for every "ultimate" goal there is an "immediate" correlate. To write that book (someday) I need to educate myself (now). To love my grandchildren (someday) I need to eat healthy (now). To go to heaven (someday) I need to go to Mass (now)*.

*-No, one does not earn Heaven by going to Mass. Mass is not the price of Heaven. Going to Mass is merely the prescribed way of saying "yes" to God's free gift. Mass and Heaven are virtually one and the same.

And so the ultimate concerns need to be counter-balanced with immediate needs. And those immediate needs are governed by balance.

Balance is a tricky concept and it's one that needs to be broken down into concrete concepts if it's going to serve a function in a computer application.

I believe the definition of balance in this case exists somewhere between two concerns: (1) That I make sufficient immediate daily progress towards the milestones on the way to my ultimate goals so that they can be achieved without undue strain, and (2) that I serve the health and capability of my body and mind by enriching daily activity and avoiding excess.

One may add, as an appendix, (3) that I permit as much flexibility as necessary to live life in its unpredictability.

I believe that a computer program can reasonably factor all three of these in to a more or less satisfactory daily agenda. In the case of #1, it would be up to the user to outline "ultimate goals" and "milestones", as well as to estimate how much time certain milestones would take to achieve. For example, how many hours will it take me to become ready to take the Network + certification exam? When should I have taken that exam?

Designing the robot secretary, pt 2

2010-02-06T06:23:00.000-08:00

Although people's planning processes are more or less systematic (in my case, much less), everybody has a complex interworking of values that, after some mental wrangling, spell out how they spend their time.

I think a goal for all of us is for our schedules to represent what we truly value, rather than our values be changed by our schedules.

The system I am toying with now, drafting as a simple database, takes the answers to simple questions and attempts to turn them into a balanced schedule that adapts to new input similar to the way we do. Normally, we have to do the high-level thinking ourselves; Apps like Microsoft Outlook take care of the low-level minutiae of recording our plans. Glorified sticky notes. I want an app that intelligently structures time according to the common sense which is not so common.

In principle this shouldn't be hard to implement. The only appointments that one would hard-schedule would be ones that were already set--work schedules, doctors' appointments, etc. Though the app itself could remind you when it was time to sit down and put these in!

And even the work schedule would not be inviolable. Tell the program you're sick, and it'll give you the contact information for work and your doctor, query your sick days, and adjust the schedule appropriately.

Something this program should respect is that life is not divided into atomistic "appointments". Life is a self-gift. The unexamined life is not worth living--and so far as I understand, the quintessential examination is to ask: To what, or to whom are you giving yourself?

Put differently, as Stephen Covey advises: how do you want to be remembered at your funeral?

These questions, a computer program can't answer for you. But if these are the what and the why, then at least a program can help with the how. Which, I imagine, most of us struggle with at least sometimes.

Thus, the various top priorities of life--say, "Family," "Dreams," "Faith," "Work," etc., are not separate, disembodied "values" competing with each other for our attention. They are absolutely linked to each other. I work so that I can support my family and fulfill my dreams, all in the service of my faith.

But this, by itself, is not enough. Forgive my referencing an Adam Sandler movie, but "Click" is a perfect example. Michael Newman ostensibly works to support his family, but in reality, work has devoured his connection to the family.

Designing the robot secretary, pt 1

2010-02-05T20:43:00.000-08:00

I have an idea which is both grandiose and simple.

Why couldn't a computer program take a lot of the legwork out of managing my time?

There are countless applications for scheduling, but these are scarcely more than planners wrought pixelated. I'm thinking of something more useful.

Think about the process that goes into our decisions about how we spend our time (if we're not run completely by impulse). The more perspicuous of us are skilled at striking a balance--ensuring that some minimum amount of time each day is spent in activities most beneficially performed as routines, while allotting the remainder of the day to work and rest so that duties are done and the self is not too taxed.

On cliches and commonalities

2010-01-19T20:26:00.000-08:00

For six years of my life I supposed that I would join a celibate order of priests in an ancient faith, and thereby find a niche that was, like me, rare, deep, mystical, and heroic.

When that house of cards began to falter, I looked instead to the monastery, which lacked the priesthood's offer of sacramental powers and responsibilities, but for this was rarer still, and perhaps better suited to my refined (albeit still flawed) self-understanding. I could have what my heart longed for: the company of friends and brothers, a solid life purpose, and external structures to buttress up my weaknesses.

There is a certain irony here. In the very path of studying for priesthood and flirting for the monastery, I learned to appreciate the rarity, depth, mysticism, and heroism of the domestic church, of being a family man, more than ever before.

It was not simply a case of the grass being greener, because for me the grass seemed perfectly green everywhere (although the diocesan priest's lawn perhaps needs the most expert care). But that is exactly it. Up until recently in my life I had an unfair picture of the family's grass as being quite dry and uninteresting (or perhaps the false green of astroturf). Yet the last few years have seen a total reversal in me.

Here is an insight I learned in the seminary:

It's true, there is a certain rareness in finding one's vocation in the celibate orders of Catholic ecclesial life. Just look at the numbers. No one will accuse a young priest or a religious of being unoriginal.

However, the rarity of marriage has a twofold edge. First, while marriages are a "dime-a-dozen", Catholic marriages that involve prayer and that follow the teaching of the Church are an absolute anomaly.

But second (and perhaps more importantly), each marriage is a true one-of-a-kind vocation. Lots of people get married. No one else will marry *this* woman. No one else will be her knight. No one else will be for her what I may be called to be.

God-willing.

To an extent, I have learned that the constant evasion of cliches and commonalities is itself a giant cliche. While the masters of irony lampoon stupid pet names, I lavish them on my love without any irony at all. My little flower. My sweetheart. My dove.

And that is a large part of my critique against what calls itself "counter-culture". Not that they are overly rebellious (with all of the typical "shocking" accoutrements), but that they are not rebellious enough. Total individualism is not individualistic enough. The shared (nearly slavish) fear of convention takes the shape of an unwittingly lock-step group-think. The irony is that, self-amputated from tradition, the victims of this zeitgeist lack the reserves of human thought buried deep in history, by which they might have actually learned how to think for themselves.

In search again for the archimedian point.

2010-01-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

Life does not typically rest still long enough for me to make much progress in my search for truth. The search for a means to reliably pay the bills imposes itself with irritating urgency. I'm happy to report that my urge to write is slowly creeping back to me now, this time equipped with a new arsenal of experience, and yet with the same drive as ever.

When I mention the "search for truth," I am not referring to a personal existential quest or to a religious unknown. My guiding star will always, with the grace of God, be the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Yet having such a star does not excuse me from the exercise of walking long paths (with legs prone to stumble), nor of navigating for my peers when the skies are murky with pollution.

When I mention the "search for truth," I search rather for bridge between my skeptical generation and the faith which has brought me my deepest joys.

Yet for years my intellectual efforts have been like prying open a stubborn door. I can peek through the crack; I catch glimpses of what appears beyond; and I feel that at any moment the latches will snap and the door will burst wide open. Yet it always snaps shut, and I need to find another corner to pry.

What timeless dialectic shoots through every contemporary squabble with Christianity? What faults betray the fortress's strength? Where is the road by which belief's fiercest opponents may feel invited to walk, though it promises to confound them? What words can lead the Way without the dead weight of habitual cultural associations?

Where do I begin?

"Understanding Unbelief"- A sympathetic primer on the fundaments and structure of common contemporary irreligion.

"Everything Old is New Again" - The case for the revival of timeless human insights amid contemporary culture.

"Fault Lines on Sex" - A historical approach delineating the contrary, and overlapping foundations of contemporary schools of thought concerning sex.

"Social Conservatives' Shame" - Toward a reformed social conservativism.

"The Inner Life of Memes" - Toward a model for understanding competing belief structures.

So many stars to follow.

2010-01-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the feast of the Epiphany. In the Gospel, the magi tell the king that a star has heralded the birth of the Messiah.

The priest, in his homily, pointed out that we have so many stars and so many lights around us. How can we find the one that beckons us toward our royal inheritance?

As he said this, my attention was drawn to the scenery of the church. The tree was lit up with lights. There were, of course, the candle lights, the overhead lights, and so on. It all gave a grand illustration of Father's homily.

Faith must be the first light, of course, but does that relegate all other stars to charlatans and swindlers? I think that the answer to this question is going to be somewhat different between Catholic and Evangelical traditions.

The sacramentality of the Catholic faith is about being surrounded with stars, stars that, far from pointing away from the Star, are constantly pointing towards it. The little stars remain with us sometimes when the big Star becomes obscured, and they lead us back, because they serve that greater Star. The fact that they are not the One Star does not detract from their own beauty.

The magi probably did not discern the heraldic star simply by its brightness, as is often shown in art in which it dominates the heavens. They probably, rather, used the machinations of astrology, which, without other stars to guide them, would have been powerless.

So the question of "what lights in your life are you following?" is not simply an exhortation to saving faith--though faith discerns best which lights to follow. For there are tangible stars in our lives that point the way. We mustn't be distracted by the odd meteorite or airplane. We mustn't assume that the sky isn't worth attention unless it has fireworks or other man-made delights.

Our great loves can be lights to follow. Sure, they are God's creatures, and struggle, like I do, under the effects of sin. But even so, their created brilliance is God's handiwork.

On a recent Muse album, a phrase that pops up from time to time is "guiding lightning strike". Lightning originates from the ground and strikes the heavens. So perhaps a guiding lightning strike is exactly such a good light to follow on my way to the heraldic star. I think I've seen mine. The pattern is permanently written onto my retinas. I think I'll follow her.

Question

2009-08-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

According to what principle in Catholic medical ethics is genetic or surgical human enhancement an inherent moral evil?

Government, behavior control, and personal responsibility

2009-07-20T13:46:00.001-07:00

Politics factor into this discussion, but it's not primarily political. Better to call it political philosophy, or even more broadly, philosophy of authority.

I didn't study political philosophy directly, so I hope those who have will forgive a lack of citations and jargon.

Right now I'm listening to a local conservative talk radio show. The host is criticizing Obama for advocating "nanny state" policies that shield people from the negative financial consequences of bad choices, while at the same time preaching "personal responsibility" in his speech to the NAACP.

OK, never mind the silly false dichotomy. Fallacious host is fallacious.

But it got me thinking about some of the differences between the party platforms, their operative presuppositions about the human person and the role of government, and how consistent principles can be seen through apparently divergent policy.

The purpose of government.

If I were asked to describe the purpose of government in as broad terms as possible, I would propose that it's goal is

to provide a stable framework wherein human life can proceed indefinitely, with the minimum authoritarian impositions necessary to secure the most inviolable collective values.

From this description arises what are, I believe, the most fundamental questions that give rise to virtually any overarching political ideology (including anarchism), and within them, to parties.

How flexible should the framework be? How do we balance the criteria for circumscribing "human life" (individualistic vs collectivistic, biologistic fs psychologistic, etc.)? What do we mean by "proceed"? I.e., Should the government be concerned, or not, with progress in one or another spheres, and if so, by what means, and how is it measured? What are the most inviolable collective values (and what role should government have in regards to collective values that are lesser than these)? What sort, and what degree of impositions should government exercise within its material ability to do so?

Theoretically unlimited possibilities.

Whatever the answers to these questions, government cannot escape a basic fact: as the number of people in a community (X) tends towards infinity, the likelihood of (Y) action being taken by at least one person tends towards 100%. A corollary: As time (A) tends towards infinity, the likelihood of (B) occurrence happening at least once tends towards 100% (Can a maths expert put these ideas into correct notation pls?)

In other words, all governments deal with theoretically unlimited possibilities of human behavior and events, not bounded by what we believe is likely, what we believe possible, or even what we can imagine.

Kind of a Hobbesian nightmare. O LOOK A REFERENCE!

Intermediary networks of governance.

And yet between totalitarianism and total theoretical bedlam exist dozens of pre-existing networks. I hesitate to call them "structures" because not all of them are the result of deliberate construction. They all vary in types and degrees of organization, and in their relation to time and culture.

Among those networks present today are, of course, heritage, the family, religion, the market, the workplace, media culture, the public, and even the Internet.

How much faith do you put in them?

I think that, exclusively in regard to this question (there are dozens of other questions) a spectrum arises that partially characterizes the difference between the Democratic and Republican platforms. That spectrum lies in the degree to which one affirms the effectiveness of the intermediary networks to effectively fulfill the goal of government bolded above.

Absolutely Ineffective | Totalitarian <-> Communist <-> Socialist <-> European left <-> Democrat <-> Republican <-> Libertarian <-> Anarchist | Totally Sufficient

Please bear in mind that there is nothing scientific intended in the above spectrum. Some might object to my distinguishing between socialism and the "European left" (which I think most agree is more left than the American left, but which seems to me to be short of full socialism). I don't know enough to say.

The religion component (You knew it was coming).

But the spectrum does have some explanatory value. For example, you can see how Christian Republican Rob can be bff with atheist anarchist Tiervexx in the Laissez-faire thread. Both (correct me if I'm wrong) are heirs to an anti-authoritarian sentiment and a good amount of optimism in man's ability to self-regulate.

It might also serve to explain the ideological component of America's Catholics being largely Democrats (historical component notwithstanding, of course). True, the Vatican is socially conservative, which sadly lent a hateful passion to the nationalists in Spain's civil war and to a large movement of American Catholics to the Republican party after Roe v. Wade.

But Latin Christianity has never viewed human nature with much confidence, and that pessimism extends to intermediary networks--in particular, free market capitalism. Which was a Protestant invention, anyway. Rather, Catholicism tends to view most human institutions, including the market, as good but also incontinent and desperately in need of a colostomy bag.

Government authority is that colostomy bag. It might be full of shit, but damned if it ain't necessary.

And so Catholic social doctrine has the distinctive mark among American religion of favoring some "liberal" economic policy. Pope John Paul II is on record as teaching, in an encyclical no less (the highest level of ecclesiastical document second only to a council declaration), that governments are responsible to secure the medical needs of citizens and refugees where the free market fails to do so.

So what's your point?

I could take this three directions.

Discuss the authoritarian elements of contemporary left-wing economics (I am economically left-wing, but I am concerned about authoritarianism).
Discuss the means used by government to directly and indirectly influence human behavior, whether it should, and toward what ends.
Discuss my own theories about the balance between governance by intermediary networks/spheres vs. sovereign authority.

Writing activity from the past several weeks, Pt 5

2009-07-02T22:35:00.000-07:00

I also have a certain Pythagorean mysticism about the fundamental unity and intelligibility of being, and yet I reject the premise of Pythagoras and Descartes that mathematics is a first principle. Consider that Daniel Tammet "sees" numbers as shapes, colors, and movement; I'm persuaded that he and other savants have a privileged access to truth not as numerical but as phenomenological. Logic and math are secondary, they are declensions of what is ultimate.

I am also convinced that, while there is not exactly a way to "de-fine" the marks of truth (which implies that truth is fin-ite), the marks of error are easier to perceive. Systems that are closed and complete, yet which arrogate to explain the whole and lay it completely bare, almost certainly need adjustment if not scrapping. Theories which leave human agency and aspirations frustrated, or which terminate in absurdity, may have value in reminding us of real chaos, but it can only be a penultimate chaos. I have both intellectual and faith reasons for that conviction.

My avatar is something like a "theological seal"; it represents to me something like an archimedean point of reason and faith. Kenosis is the Greek word used in Philippians to describe the Incarnation: he "emptied himself". In this case, it doubles as a condition of truth--that truth must be open to infinity, and completely accessible.

Comment
let's just never get into a debate about feminism vs. Christianity.

Reply
Oh, I dunno. I don't think it would be as ugly as you think. I have a whole theology (actually borrowed from Hans Urs von Balthasar) of Christ as supra-feminine; if the Son is Logos, the Word, there may be here an identity with Holy Wisdom, spoken of in the feminine, or even the bride of the Song of Solomon. Even so, I know that this theory won't satisfy feminists, who still correctly point to the primacy of the Father, to whom Scripture and tradition refer to in the masculine.

I've read Mary Daily's "The Church and the Second Sex," and I know that any attempt to justify the status quo of the male priesthood will only viewed by some as a smokescreen concealing male will-to-power. But without losing my rabid orthodoxy, I can still say that if the feminine is "second" within a Trinity, that makes her the central sex; the pivot, the linchpin, the axis. IMO, a correct understanding of sex in Christianity does two things: (1) recognizes the inter-sexual dynamic of the Trinity, and (2) relativizes the importance of the clergy in the bigger picture of salvation.

Writing activity from the past several weeks, Pt 4

2009-07-02T22:30:00.000-07:00

As a high school teacher I taught world religions. I tried to stress that "there are always similarities and there are always differences." It is naive to suppose that religions hold their deepest truths in common. Two religions might teach the same thing but for vastly different reasons (Christianity and Buddhism have an extremely different take on why worldly attachments can be harmful).

Or they might teach the same doctrine but hold it in vastly different orders of priority relative to each religion's total framework; Hindus and Buddhist both hold something like moksha/nirvana as the ultimate spiritual destination, but Buddhists (afaik) have no analogue to Hinduism's legitimate life alternatives, like kama (sensuality) and artha (wealth and success). Hindus appear to be in no real hurry to escape from samsara.

But it's equally naive to suppose that they are totally irreconcilable. The religions are coextensive. There are real contradictions--I'm sorry, Ann Holmes Redding, either the Qu'ran or Jesus are the inerrant and ultimate revelation of God, not both; and no, that's not just a throwaway detail. To say you accept both is, in a way, saying that you reject the claims of both--claims that are held by more intellectually honest believers of either creed.

But there is a reason for the significant overlap between the distinctive teachings of Jesus and the wisdom of ancient Hindu sutras. Many Hindus believe that Jesus's youth was spent with the gurus in India (like early Christians thought that Plato's monotheism was plagiarized from Moses). More likely, it's the case that truth is a discovery to be encountered by divergent explorers, not an invention that can only spread through imitation by copycats.

Comment
Is it only your opinion that it's more likely, or do you have any evidence that supports that? I'm not saying that I don't also have that sense, but I'd like to hear reasoning in favor of, "more likely."

Reply
There's substantial overlap in certain teachings of different religions. The question is, can the overlap be interpret as a sign of enduring truth; or is it merely the cross-pollination of ideas?

Some points.

Inter-religious consensus on this or that doctrine is not a gaurantee of its truth; just as a popular vote is not a gaurantee of the goodness of the law voted for. Yet in both cases it seems the consensus and the truth are not completely irrelevant to each other. Still we can always point to certain doctrines that are more or less pan-religious and yet offensive to our consciences--like depriving women of dignity.
Inter-religious consensus on a morsel of wisdom might, given circumstances, be adequately explained either by independent parallel discovery or by cross-pollination. These two possibilities are also not mutually exclusive, as a culture's "good idea" might be a hybrid of something original and something borrowed.
In the case of independent parallel discovery, we have to admit the distinct possibility of mere coincidence, including the coincidence of disparate peoples arriving at the same error independently. Jimmy and Sally, neither one especially good at math, might both guess that 1/0 = 0.
In the case of cross-pollination, we also need to admit the distinct possibility that the morsel of wisdom may be really true; and the fact that one people discovered it independently while another discovered it through imitation is, by itself alone, not a dealbreaker for its being true.

In spite of all of this, I think that we are legitimately impressed when two very disparate peoples arrive at the same (or very similar) contingent possibility of development without having communicated with one-another. Take for example Mayan written language and advanced irrigation technology, remarkable for having no apparent roots in proto-Indo-European language or any influence by Eurasian ingenuity. One couldn't be blamed for inferring a certain common human ordering toward these developments, even if not all cultures have always (or yet) developed irrigation systems or written language and seem to get along fine without either.

Corroboration is not a deductive guarantee of objective truth, but it is a powerful inductive intimation of it. Science itself is the ever greater accumulation of corroborations and falsifications. If a certain idea has gained widespread currency, especially if it has done so through spontaneous independent parallel inspiration (some cite the maxim, "Treat others as you would want to be treated") that seems a valid argument that this morsel of wisdom has, as far as we know, universal validity.

But what about cross-pollination? Here we can perhaps more easily imagine scenarios where a bad idea spreads.

I tuckered myself out again. Some questions I want to return to:
-What makes an idea "bad"?
-What is the method of its cross-pollination? (Voluntary or involuntary?)
-If voluntary, what can we legitimately infer from the popularity of an idea?
-Under what circumstances might a popular idea also be a bad one?
-Is the popularity of an idea an argument for its truth, or at least that some part or aspect of it is true?

Comment
irrigation developed because of a need, just the way eyes developed because of a need -- not necessarily because of a truth. Evolutionary psychologists would probably say that the most successful religions satisfy basic human needs. As those needs are universal, it isn't too hard to believe that the constructs created to fulfill them would be similar.

Reply
The categories of needs and truths are also not mutually exclusive. William James was a fan of the notion that evolutionary psychology itself was a clue--mind you, a clue, not a smoking gun--not only about human beings, and not only about the physical, but the metaphysical and the moral spheres as well.

The evolution of eyes would seem in indicate the presence of that which is seeable, and the advantageous nature of the ability to detect and utilize that data. But the seeable was present before any such organ existed that could detect it. The truth preceded the need.

I believe in evolution and in the principle of natural selection, but I keep an open mind about the possibility that there may be other natural causes linking truths to needs and needs to mutations. I'm not a Lamarckist, and I know that "genes have no windows," i.e., that so far as we know there is no direct correlation between environment and genetic mutation. (Edit: Woo!)

Needs must be satisfied, and they must be satisfied by a something. We will not survive on a diet of air. The moral and the metaphysical are no less important to civilizations. If independent parallel technology development points so a truth about human needs and the means to satisfy them, why should not a a similar principle be one (among many) means of moral and metaphysical investigation?

I hardly claim that an entire religion can be patched together with this type of thinking; though such claims are made by "inductive theologians" (like Peter Berger in A Rumor of Angels). I also I sneer at attempts to "combine all religions"; unless the author is honest about the fact that the frankenstein result would not be an orthodox contributor to any one of them.

I only suggest that more than a few wisdoms cross the boundaries of creeds, and that this may speak strongly of potential universal validity.

If all of the teachings of religions, including the really popular ones, are nothing more than culturally relativistic memes that are chance subjects of viral popularization, then the only reason to study them is for ethnographic reasons. Like pinning butterflies to Styrofoam. There's nothing deep about that.

But if the massive upswing of the moral and metaphysical thought of civilizations; the trajectory of wide swaths of critical thought have moved here or there in a direction that was powerful and positive, it seems to me we can scarcely ignore them, and even that those movements deserve a certain respect (if not automatic assent).

Comment
I essentially agree with you, or I at least want to... of course, science waters down the miracle of all this and points to such overlaps as simple means to adaptive human behavior, like love, cohesiveness, cooperation... destroying or shunning outsiders...

But how universal are the deepest wisdoms that religion has to offer? How would we know, as human beings? We magnify the importance of things that pertain to us. Even if they are of the utmost importance to us, what do they tell us about the universe? What do they have to do with God? Where are we, in God's grand scheme? Why is there all that alien space beyond us?

Let's not be too daunted by the possibility that Jesus was influenced by Indian mystics. He would be no more of a copycat than the pope or any of us. I suppose, though, that the problem is that Jesus is not "supposed" to be ordinary, because Christianity says he isn't, which gives way to circular reasoning. We just aren't. supposed. to believe that. 'cause it's bad. Even though it wouldn't contradict claims of his divinity, it would be... discouraging for us. So we don't like to consider it, although it may be true. We tend to embrace comforting possibilities as more likely.

Sometimes, I don't like the things I watch myself think and say. I'm going to cut out the devil's advocacy, say my prayers, and go to sleep.

Writing activity from the past several weeks, Pt 3

2009-07-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

Post subject: Re: Carrying thought patterns across disciplines

One pattern that has deeply ingrained itself into me, via philosophy, is consciousness of the hierarchic order of being. I have a personal theology integrated with my religious orthodoxy, that it is inequality, not balance, which is prime.

A symbolic illustration would be the nautilus shell versus the Yin-Yang as an all-encompassing microcosm of nature. With all due respect to Taoism, I feel that the nautilus more completely represents how complimentary and quantitative difference and tension create beauty--such as the difference between the accelerating rate of growth combined with a merely constant rate of change, the cause of logarithmic spirals.

It's a pattern that I am more or less convinced is determinative not only for physical phenomena and aesthetics but also for truth in philosophy, politics, and religion. I know that sounds vague and like I haven't really thought this through--and boy does it need better elucidation. But it's the way philosophy fundamentally shaped my perception of everything.

Comment
I would imagine this would also apply to social hierarchies? Hierarchies of wisdom? I have to go to work at the moment, but I like this line of thought. I'd like to know where you see certain things and phenomena in such a schematic

Reply
Part of my difficulty here is that I'm not really pushing for "hierarchy" necessarily, or most deeply, in the sense of the Catholic clerical hierarchy or the Hindu caste system or the corporate ladder or academic hierarchy--such instruments of governance are as good or evil as their members. I am oddly enthusiastic about social hierarchy, but only when it takes natural analogies of interdependence as a model.

Re: hierarchies of wisdom, I believe truth is hierarchic in terms of depth, scope, urgency, precision, etc; but I also believe that there is a real analogical relationship between higher and lower orders of truth. I am an analogic realist--I believe that true analogies point beyond themselves toward a fundamental intelligibility of being; they are not merely constructs. I also think that analogy is entirely different, deeper than, and prior to both science and deductive logic, whose methods depend on it.

I am a spatial thinker, and whenever I read an opinion, a critique, or an essay, I can almost see its lines of connections with similar ideas on higher or lower orders of truth. Often I need to ask the author questions to avoid misunderstanding. But when I learn a new idea, it's not like one more coin to add to my coin collection; it's more like a fossil that more or less resembles this part of that dinosaur's skeleton; correcting past excesses and adding completeness to an inexhaustible and difficult corpus of knowledge.

Comment
I defintely disagree with the aesthetics. Symmetry and balance seem to be the most commonly recognized forms of beauty, across humanity.

Reply
Good point. And yet the bilateral symmetry of animals is always partial. A minority of humans are ambidextrous. The brain hemispheres have slightly different functions (not as radical as often supposed, but still). The way hair parts on a person's head usually favors one or the other side. The heart is appropriately asymmetrical.

I wouldn't dare say that these modest, often vital imbalances always and everywhere follow the golden ratio; but more significantly, I am captivated by the way these imbalances create a relationship of mutual interdependence. And moreover, the term "equality" starts to lose its cash value when you're talking about such a relationship. Which side of the heart is more important? Well, the left ventricle is stronger. But who's going to argue that the right atrium is expendable? It seems silly to speak of a competition between heart chambers.

This also gets me into trouble with feminists. I think that the whole concept of being the equals of men is broken on the most fundamental level--not because males are superior, but because it's like demanding that the right atrium be the equal of the left ventricle. When a practice or an idea violates the absolute human worth of women, then I'll get pissed.

Comment
Am I right in assuming you believe political and societal stability is only obtainable through imbalance of power?

Reply
Yes and no. You're right in that I've come to view the value of "equality" as something of quaint artifice, and you'll rarely hear me use the word in earnest (I'll instead speak of absolute human worth). I believe political and social stability is only obtainable through difference and mutual interdependence, equality be damned. Absolute human worth is prior to this belief, of course (injustice isn't about violating equality or discriminating, but rather violating absolute human worth, which sometimes takes the shape of one of the former). But still, I believe that it's erroneous to aim for equality as a value sui generis.

Comment
Does the yin yang symbol illustrate "quantitative difference?"

Reply
No, quite the opposite, if I understand correctly; everything I've read has emphasized that Yin Yang is a balance of opposite equals. That's exactly where I differ with it. Natural homeostasis rarely if ever involves an encounter of any two things that can sensibly be described as "equal" in any way. They are both vital, and if you want to play word games you can call them equally vital, but being "vital" is not something that differs in degrees--you either need it, or you don't.

Comment
But the philosophy, itself, asking for trouble, socially (er, well, it always has), the same way that eugenics did.

Reply
I've exhausted myself. But I'll just say that it's the difference between "Power Over" and "Power With". C.f. Foucalt.

Continued
Attached is a graphic I just did. I've been thinking of designing this for a while. It's not perfect (stupid pixels always want to round my divine proportions!) but it's sort of a synthesis.

First, a version that I did not create:

And my version.

Both illustrate nicely the concept of mutual interdependence and a certain "happy subordination" which is not "power over" but "power with".

The reason I would still give preference to my own version is that I am attracted to the symbolism of the open spiral vs. the closed circle. Closed systems (in any sphere of being, including relationships) are subject to the law of entropy. Ideologies are closed systems. Wisdom always points infinitely outward and inward, never exhausting truth, yet still hinting at it.

I also position myself against a merely circular view of time. But it's a little bit of a caricature to state that western religions have a linear view of time; it's more accurate to describe it as a progressive spiral. The snake never swallows its tail.

Writing activity from the past several weeks, Pt 2

2009-07-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

Why? How? When?

Originally posted to Facebook notes,

Monday, June 22, 2009 at 7:47pm

Why has the word "organized" become a term of abuse (as in "organized religion") when nature itself is incredibly organized (i.e. organic)?

How, in the face of everything we know about human nature, did individualism and private autonomy become absolute values?

Why do we still celebrate the age of sexual libertinism when we find ourselves less happy, less loved, and more damaged than ever before?

When did a thing's ancient pedigree go from being a sign of abiding truth to a scarlet letter of obsolescence?

Why is the first response to hypocrisy always to spurn the virtue that the hypocrite failed to practice?

Why do people reject faith and obedience in the name of individualism, only to live and speak in lockstep conformity with a zeitgeist which long ago ceased to offer anything new?

Catholics won't be proud of their faith until they're released from the technicolor fantasy that the highest freedom is the consumeristic accumulation of options.

Comment at 10:07am June 23

preach it!

Comment at 6:08pm June 23

"Why has the word "organized" become a term of abuse (as in "organized religion")..."

I think you answered your own question there...

"How, in the face of everything we know about human nature, did individualism and private autonomy become absolute values?"... Read More

Ummm, so, what is wrong with individualism? I don't see how that's a bad thing, for your argument or mine. And PRIVATE AUTONOMY? Free will is pretty much a human right, last time I checked - oh, wait you're arguing for religion. That's why those values are bad. Of course. How could I be so silly? (And free will has always been present in human nature, ya know.)

"Why do we still celebrate the age of sexual libertinism when we find ourselves less happy, less loved, and more damaged than ever before?"

I may not be a happy person, but I know for certain that sexual libertinism is not the cause of my unhappiness. If it were not for that, there would be even MORE sexism in the world than there already is, and I would be

Comment at 6:09pm June 23

(cont. from above)
...even less happy.

“When did a thing's ancient pedigree go from being a sign of abiding truth to a scarlet letter of obsolescence?”

An ancient “pedigree” is not proof of something’s legitimacy or worth. Unless, of course, you think that noble and royal titles mean that those people are better than the rest of us, simply because they have “pedigrees.”

“Why do people reject faith and obedience in the name of individualism, only to live and speak in lockstep conformity with a zeitgeist which long ago ceased to offer anything new?

Conformity is one thing. Obediance is COMPLETELY different. Conforming is something almost no one can avoid, because almost no one is original in what they do, say, etc. But conformity is not obediance. Obediance is following without question. One can conform and question, because one CHOOSES to conform.

Comment at 8:44pm June 23

Re: individualism - has a lot to do with geography/technology. Historically, the more isolated/mutually dependent a society is, the less individualist. The more mobile and global, the more individualist. (Sweeping generalizations, but still.) You're going to take on globalization? Technology? Wouldn't you rather - I don't know - sleep in?

Writing activity from the past several weeks, Pt 1

2009-07-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

Originally written to Facebook notes,
Friday, June 5, 2009 at 12:21pm

Recently, the gay marriage poll has been making the rounds, and the results are unsurprising. Rather than vote, I posted a status that said, "THE INTERNET IS LIBERAL!" I might as well have posted, "PUPPIES ARE CUTE" or "MICHAEL JACKSON IS WEIRD [Postscript, this was written before his death. Rest in peace, Michael.]." My point was that polling the general Facebook populace is an exercise in restating the obvious.

My sister, who I love, wrote, "What's up with your fascination with this topic (the gay marriage thing). Given that it doesn't impact you or (presumably) anyone you know and love personally, I don't see any reason for you to be feeling ALL CAPS - level emotion here."

The spirit of my all-caps post was a little subtle. It's hard to communicate certain sentiments over the Web. Certainly it begged for misinterpretation. Yet at the same time, my sis is correct: I am fascinated with the gay marriage issue... sort of. More accurately, I am fascinated with the wider issue of modern sexual libertinism and the collapse of an intelligent and persuasive response to it, of which the "gay marriage" issue is just a subset.

As a social conservative (a standpoint informed by, but ultimately independent of, my Catholic faith), I critique the exaggerated privatization and individualization of questions of sexual behavior brought upon by a zeitgeist completely beholden to the teachings of mid-20th century figures like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Hugh Hefner, and others. Overall, I fear that modern western society has grossly underestimated the universal importance and impact of sex (and its natural correlates).

I am skeptical that a society that puts on giant blinders to the basics of the birds and the bees (in favor of a utilitarian and commoditized model of sexual pleasure) can operate for long without severe collective, and thus individual consequences. And I do not predict that those consequences will happen in some undetermined future--I observe that they have already happened; the bottom has fallen out; and we celebrate it even though as a society we are less happy, less healthy, less loved, and more alone than ever before.

Even though I do not consider my position to be irrational or not well-founded in verifiable evidence, I face incredible obstacles to my own credibility--from my allies as much as my opponents. My position will always be caricatured as a blind, sentimental 1950s romanticism; or as Biblical fundamentalism; or (as in the case of the gay marriage issue) simple hateful prejudice. And I receive no help from the fact that no small number of my allies are blind romantics, fundamentalists, and prejudiced people.

I stand by my convictions about morality and about public policy (which, believe or not, are distinct in my mind), not in the name of "tradition" or "God's law", but in the name of the public good; and because my reasons do not easily express themselves in sound bytes and catchy slogans, I see little hope that my views will obtain in the wider society. Short of a miracle. Fortunately, I believe in miracles.

How the Pill Ruined Civilization

2009-05-17T22:54:00.001-07:00

Bing Bang Boom. (Rumble).

Book stuff 5

2009-05-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

In the previous four posts I have been sifting through possibilities and uncovering how my central goals will affect the tone and content of my first book. Now I need to ask what to write about.

And I am certain that my first book needs to be a diagnosis of modernity.

Let's break the impossibly broad into the ludicrously difficult.

Modernity within the history of ideas; consistent patterns
Fundamental presuppositions; convergences and departures with its others; the precise contours and composition
Consequences for action and civilization; where modernity operates and how; predictable elements.
Assessment and "big picture"
Call to action

The initial direction that I wish to investigate is something along these lines: that human thought is both complex but also binary; that memes, like organisms, have a common ancestor; and that features of these ancestors can be objectively recognized and traced through history. I wish to deconstruct the notion that human thought is progressive along the lines of discovery and science; and reconstruct a model of the history of ideas that is alternately progressive and regressive. Human thought is not a Comtean climb out of the valley of superstition over the mountain of positive fact; human thought, like being itself, is the constant interplay and tension of being and non-being, producing innumerable variations, some large or small, beautiful or ugly. The history of thought is like the Hindu metaphor of a river of many tributaries, but there is oil in the water; each tributary has a different mixture of each, and at every convergence and division the proportions and patterns change. Some tributaries are safe to drink from in proportion to their purity; others are deadly.

Book stuff 4,

2009-05-04T04:51:00.000-07:00

In my last "book stuff" post, I reflected that the first step of "reasoned evangelization" must be a kind of listening. It is not merely that it needs to be well-researched (foregone conclusion!) but that I must be for the reader, early and often, both a companion and a gatekeeper--both unpretentious and knowing. That is a difficult balance to achieve.

The voice of the author ought to be sympathetic without patronizing the reader. It should carry a sincere gentleness which, though formal, is soft-spoken and universally welcoming. It is not (unless absolutely necessary) the mechanical rigidity of logical parsing; nor a syrupy sycophancy. It is above all, human. One thinks of Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings. How does one unselfconsciously, and without the slightest self-aggrandizing, be as familiar and comfortable to the reader as a closest friend?

Once that voice is present, the same voice must also be--unselfconsciously--supremely assured about the End, about the ultimate Triumph of good. As per St. Julian of Norwich, "all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well." This has nothing to do with being omniscient. The author should be a "gatekeeper", like Virgil to Dante. If he is not omniscient, he is at, least, trustworthy; the reader has no hard "proof" of this, and rightly so, else it would not be trust.

Like the measured morsels of truth the author slowly uncovers, the gatekeeper himself is never fully disclosed nor totally hidden. This is not a contrived "peek-a-boo" meant to manufacture a false mystique. In fiction, the "gatekeeper" archetype has a goal which stretches beyond merely transmitting information--a goal that is vulnerable to carelessness in letting too many know too much before the right time. The point is not to be frivolously coy. It is to be the midwife of a delicate labor of truth.

Another "Lord of the Rings" figure I believe exemplifies this is Gandalf. Gandalf is both personable and mysterious; both warm and elusive. He does hold his cards close to his chest, to be sure, but at the same time he communicates the unspoken assurance that his mystery, like his warmth, is ordered toward joy.

Pippin glanced in some wonder at the face now close beside his own, for the sound of that laugh had been gay and merry. Yet in the wizard's face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a foundation of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.

You can't count on people.

2009-04-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

This is both a religious truth and a popular truism. We like to delude ourselves that it isn't true while we become joyful friends with someone. The happiness of true blue friendship seems to carry the inherent promise of endurance. Even moreso than romance, which is fraught with insecurities and pressures, deep friendships combine light-hearted casual love with weighty, time-worn loyalty.

Would that this was a guarantee.

But even friendships, which are some of the holiest things in nature, are natural and are part of the "world which is passing away". Fr. Denis Robinson of St. Meinrad Archabbey coached me in this one lonely evening at the American College of Louvain. I was melancholy because all of my friends were gone. I felt empty without them. Father reminded me that as long as we trust our happiness to something of the Earth--even a dear friend--that happiness is doomed to drown with the sinking ship.

Only Christ can be trusted. Only Christ will not pass away.

It would be a mistake to disregard this as mere religious misanthropy. The intention is not to withdraw from friendships into the cold darkness of a candle-lit chapel; nor is it to turn one's nose up to lost friends like so many sour grapes. "Bah! Forget friends!" No, it's actually more innocent than that. By remembering the human condition, we learn to regard friends as beautiful clouds. They dot the sky; they remain for a time; and then they leave. There is nothing I can do about it--why mourn the passing of a cloud? Christ is the beautiful blue behind the clouds, and he contributes to their beauty. When they all pass away, he remains, and he is still beautiful.

Book stuff 3, Categories in evangelization and reason

2009-03-28T21:42:00.000-07:00

Continuing on my search for the subject of my first book, it seems necessary to take the category of "reasoned evangelization" and analyze it into subcategories. Since I am not entirely sure where to begin, I'll just start somewhere and see where that takes me. Say, for example, "apologetics", which is a time-honored and classical category.

Apologetics can be taken in the broad sense to be any reasonsed defense (or pejoratively, an attack). It evokes a polemical mood, and though this is not necessarily the case, such is suggested by the very title of any classical polemical work beginning with the word "Contra".

Unfortunately, in my experience of popular (and Internet) apologetics, much of what passes for apologetics is in fact sophistry. It is often content to misrepresent contrary positions, and somtimes employs language impotent to satisfy anybody but its own champion. The temptation is for insular communities of the faithful to employ apologists who--so long out of touch with real flesh-and-blood opponents--construct fictitious enemies out of a list of supposed errors.

This points towards an important category of reason prior to apologetics: listening. Reason demands a full account of all positions, and the free mutual encounter of fully developed, mature accounts based on firm foundations. Hence it also requires a representative skilled enough to give it. There is a reason Frederick Copleston chose AJ Ayer as a dialogue partner on the subject of the existence of God; the same reason it would be better to debate Richard Dawkins than Marilyn Manson!

But listening is more than just having, understanding, and being fair to articulate opponents. Listening also requires a perspicuous perception of humanity, the heart, the world; perhaps dasein is the appropriate word. This indicates that the listener must be, if not a phenomenologist or a philosopher, at least a good student, and never an idealogue (one who latches onto, and is blinded by an idolatry to intellectual constructs). Something in the vein of C.S. Lewis.

The defect of Internet polemics is the absence of this prerequisite sympathy and innocence. It is the innocence of Socrates, which relinquishes control of the opponent's thoughts, and, trusting in the unity of truth, merely reminds her of what she already knows. He is the midwife of truth, coaching one to breathe as she gives birth to truth.

Book stuff, continued

2009-03-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

But an evangelical mission does not alone determine the content of a Christian author's book. It is too broad a category. Specialization is necessary. Let us analyze "evangelization" into its various parts:

Grace (this is out of my hands)
Reason
Delight
Promise

The above list is not wholly original--I am keeping in mind St. Augustine's styles of preaching: Calm, Moderate, and Grand, which correspond to the need to educate a hostile audience; delight a friendly one; and exhort a comitted audience to action; these, in turn, correspond to the above categories of Reason, Delight, and Promise. Special thanks to Colt Anderson's book Christian Eloquence.

Within this bunch, I sense that my missionary calling lies with the hostile audience, and thus, toward an educational, calm, rational corpus. That is not to say that my works should not be delightful or offer an eschatological promise. But my mode of writing is to always anticipate the most hostile possible reader. Such an audience will not be benefitted when too much energy is devoted to delight--they will (sometimes rightly) suspect that the author is trying to swindle them with pleasant, rather than true, words. And the hostile audience is far from able to grasp the meaning or importance of a Revealed Promise.

So, let's take Reason, then, and break that down as well.

Book stuff

2009-03-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

I know I will write a book. It is only a question of when, and whether I will wait until I have more education under my belt before beginning. I am leaning towards "no".

My knowledge of philosophy and theology is broad but not deep. The important thing is that I know enough to know what I don't know, and where to find it. The research skills are there; the resources are there. I would have liked to develop more linguistic skills, without which I know my thoughts will not be taken seriously by major universities. However, with help, I may be able to manage.

I feel as though I have already written several books in my mind. The content of this blog is basically my "Pensees" (Blaise Pascal was the original blogger). Given that, the question is: where do I begin? I have dozens of ideas, arguments, missions, theories, metaphors, concepts, and hobby-horses. Not all of them are of equal value. Not all of them have broad applicability. Not all of them are fully developed. I don't want to start something I cannot finish. But I don't want to write ten books and feel that I haven't even started.

If I follow Understanding by Design, the first question to ask is: what do I want to accomplish? What is the effect I want to have on the reader? To which the ultimate answer is: "repent of your sins, believe in the Gospel, and be baptized." This will always be the underlying goal of anything I write.

On Facebooking...

2009-03-13T12:19:00.001-07:00

I've had a Facebook account for years, but hardly ever looked at it. My current profile picture--the one where I look barely awake--is more than two years old, but I'm not inclined to change it. Recently (with the news about Facebook's website changes), I decided to revisit the old page, confirm all of my friend invitations, and just get invovled more often.

By the way, for those of you reading this ON Facebook, note that I can't access Facebook directly from my work computer. What you're reading is the RSS feed of my Blogspot post.

It's gratifying to see so many old friends, some of whom are now married. Some of them have changed in appearance. Some have children. It almost makes the idea of a high school reunion rather redundant--if also easier to organize (Yah, CFHS, Class of 2000!)

I also love the new connections with old acquaintances who I believed were "done with me", who perhaps I had angered in the past or allowed to drift away. Being accepted or invited to be on their friend-list is a deeply felt gesture of reconciliation (for those of you for whom this is the case, and you know who you are, thank you).

It also brings a few worries. I wonder how many of my high school buddies would take offense at my being a devout Roman Catholic, with everything that entails--including being in the anti-gay-marriage camp. That issue is a lot hotter now than it was ten years ago. We social conservatives are the nazis, slave-owners, and segregationists of the 21st century, judging by the way we're typically portrayed. Oh well.

My seminary buddies--now priests and deacons--have been especially active on here, which is nice to see. I wonder how I'm perceived, this ex-seminarian high school teacher. All of you should know that I'm jealous of your education, even while I support Mundelein's commitment to educating only prospective clergy.

So, here I am. It's nice to feel so connected, to know that I'm remembered and acknowledged, and that I'm not alone. I'm sorry I drifted away from you all, and I'm glad to have such an easy way to keep in touch.

Sound Science vs. Rigid Ideology, parte due

2009-03-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

"Promoting science isn't just about providing resources -- it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient -- especially when it's inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda -- and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."

I called it.

What is frusting about this Obama soundbyte is that it is a complete non-sequitur. Someone who didn't know any better would think that the conservative stance against embryonic stem cell research is based on the desire to "distort or conceal... scientific data" that is "inconvenient" to a "political agenda". It's as if there's some secret that ESCR would expose that conservatives want to keep secret. What? Mr. President, who is the one distorting and concealing here?

But here again we see the opposition between "sound science" vs. "rigid ideology"; in this case, "...facts, not ideology". I suspect this will be central theme of Obama's social agenda for the US. My question for him is:

Mr. President, what "facts" are the conclusive evidence that ESCR is not the inhumane exploitation of the already absurd state of these conceived human beings?

Oh, right.

“Well, uh, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or, uh, a scientific perspective, uh, answering that question with specificity, uh, you know, is, is, uh, above my pay grade.”

Well, while you're doing things appropriate to your "pay grade," why not leave such legislative decisions to the experts?

Basic Concepts for High School Media Projects

2009-02-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

Having just given a media project, as well as a workshop to teachers on assigning said media projects, it became evident to me that both teachers and students need an introduction to certain "big ideas". Let me see if I can't carve out a basic "table of contents" for what such an introduction would contain:

Windows Concepts

Files and file extensions
Directories
Networking
Storage

Hardware Concepts

Cameras and camcorders
Storage media
Card readers
Transfer cables
Capturing

Software Concepts

Project files
Media file types
Codecs
Conversion

Media Concepts

Clips
Resolution
Frames per second
Audio
Compression and quality

Copyright law
Derivative works
Fair use
Public domain
Waived Copyrights (Copyleft; Creative Commons)
Giving credit

Revising my "About Me"

2009-02-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

"The Greeks discovered that Being is True, Good, and Beautiful. To the Jews and Christians it was revealed that, underneath and beyond all this this lay three yet greater things: Freedom, Love, and Mercy. Thus is nature perfected by Grace."

I'm not satisfied with this.

Greeks: Being = True, Good, Beautiful
Christians: God = Freedom, Love, ________?

The problem with calling God "Mercy" in this case is that it really is not distinct from "Love" in the Christian sense. All Christian love is kenotic love--self-emptying love--which is mercy.

Freedom and Love are two names of God; what is the third? The scientist asks, "Why do you need a third name?" Because of my intellectual love for patterns, and because of my suspicion that God also loves patterns.

Ah. Got it. Mystery. Mystery is the third name of God--it is the name that denies the act of naming God. It is the name which reminds us that God cannot be systematized. Thus, within this little system, there is a word that explodes the system outward.

"The Greeks discovered that Being is True, Good, and Beautiful. Jewish and Christian revelation unveils three yet greater things: Freedom, Love, and Mystery. The natural wisdom of the mind is both perfected and shamed by the Grace of God."

Resources for legal moviemaking in the educational setting

2009-02-11T04:49:00.001-08:00

I split this blog entry into two. Here you will find links to resources and documents pertaining to the rights of teachers and students vis-a-vis creating multimedia projects.

The most directly useful documents are asterisked (**).

Web sites containing royalty-free and public-domain music and sounds:

Jamendo - Free and royalty-free music under the Creative Commons License (except for anything labelled "NoDerivs"). Credit original sources.
The Freesound Project - Free and royalty-free sound effects and music loops under the Creative Commons License. Credit original sources.
Public Domain Information Project - Royalty free and public domain music for purchase.
Public Domain Music - MIDIs of public domain music, usable with the permission of the site owner (see his FAQ).
MusOpen - Unrestricted recordings of public-domain classical music.
Public Domain 4U - Unrestricted recordings of public-domain jazz music.

Copyright documents and guides:

Copyright Act of 1976 on Fair Use - Primary Source (sections 107-118)
Copyright Act of 1976 on Fair Use - Introduction
** Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia (by the Consortium of College and University Media Centers) - This is the most important in this case.
TEACH Act of 2002 - Amended Sections 110(2) and 112
** TEACH Act of 2002 - Guide by the University of Texas System
** Reproduction of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians - Circular 21 by US Copyright Office (contains the "Agreement on Guidelines for Classroom Copying in Not-for-Profit Educational Institutions" by the Ad Hoc Committee of Educational Institutions and Organizations on Copyright Law Revision, the Authors League of America, Inc., and the Association of American Publishers, Inc.)

Online misinformation:

Too strict: The first link in a Google search for "copyright" and "teachers" points to A Teacher's Guide to Fair Use and Copyright. While decent, this document incorrectly applies the so-called "Spontaneity Test" to all materials whatsoever, including use of audio and video in projects. For reference, here is the text from the "Agreement on Guideliness for Classroom Copying" cited above:

Spontaneity
(i) The copying is at the instance and inspiration of the individual teacher, and
(ii) The inspiration and decision to use the work and the moment of its use for maximum teaching effectiveness are so close in time that it would be unreasonable to expect a timely reply to a request for permission.
However, this rule does not apply to audio and multimedia material. It explicitly states in the same document:

As stated above, the agreement refers only to copying from books and periodicals, and it is not intended to apply to musical or audiovisual works.
Too lenient: Several guides (Google "fair use" and "favor" and "against") take a creative approach to establishing the legitimacy of copying practices. They use scales--not unlike a certain Knight of the Round Table. According to Cornell's copyright policy document, "Where the factors favoring 'fair use' outnumber the factors weighing against a finding of "fair use," reliance on the fair use exception is justified." Technically I would be in line with Cornell's policy if I sold Xeroxed copies of a textbook at profit, so long as I had enough "checkmarks" on the "fair use" side of the worksheet. Now there's a felicific calculus for you.

Remaining question(s):

I can't seem to find an unambiguous and authoritative answer on whether teachers and/or students have the right to circumvent copy protection technology on DVDs for instructional purposes.

Resources for moviemaking

2009-02-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

In a few weeks I will be giving an in-service to my colleagues on the use of Windows MovieMaker. I've downloaded a handful of really great tools, and the more I learn, the more I feel like making videos again. But half of my new discoveries have been legal in nature. The Web is an elusive treasure hunt of information about the doctrine of Fair Use. Most of it is strewn about in localized summaries--getting to the primary sources literally took me hours.

So in this post I would like to list both the tools I'm using to produce my tutorial (and certain excellent guides), as well as a list of important primary-source documents related to copyrights and responsibilities in the non-profit sphere.

Movie tools:

Windows Movie Maker 2.6 - the basic Windows home movie editor
CamStudio 2.5 beta 1 - records on-screen activity
Magnifying Glass Pro - zooms in on area around mouse cursor, because CamStudio does not have built-in zooming functionality yet
OpenOffice.org Impress - free "PowerPoint"--can do fantastic basic animations, excellent for using with compositing/chroma key/blue screen)
Synfig - free 2D animator, allegedly as powerful as Adobe Flash, but not for the faint of heart. I haven't tried it yet, but I would like to.
Fraps - records 3D video games

Tutorials and guides:

Compositing and Chroma Key in Windows Movie Maker:

I'm going to explain the first part of this myself, because too many of the guides out there assume you already know how to do this.

Windows Movie Maker does not natively do compositing/chroma key/blue screen effects--where you "erase" the colored background of one video clip so that another one ("behind" it) shows through. You can trick Movie Maker into doing exactly this, though.

First, you need to create a folder. Open up File Explorer, and browse to (minus the brackets). Right-click and select "New" and "Folder". Name the new folder "AddOnTFX".

Now that you have that folder, you are going to create two files in Notepad: one named "composit.xml" and the other named "chroma.xml".

Visit this tutorial by "PapaJohn." Copy the contents of the first example into your "composit.xml". Copy the contents of the second example into your "chroma.xml". Follow the rest of his directions, and enjoy!

Configuring CamStudio (his settings result in perfectly smooth output, 30+ frames per second)
Record audio from speakers
Animations in OpenOffice.org Impress and in PowerPoint.

One thing I don't get.

2009-01-30T23:27:00.000-08:00

So I'm reading all about Pope Benedict lifting the excommunication from the four bishops at the top of the SSPX schism. It really doesn't matter to me, one way or the other. However, I am confused by one point:

If these bishops are no longer excommunicated, but are still stripped of all ecclesiastical faculties, and yet they continue to celebrate the sacraments in defiance of the Holy See, aren't they basically already self-excommunicated?

I don't get it.

"Sound science" vs. "rigid ideology"

2009-01-26T14:20:00.000-08:00

President Obama has done a good thing. The complaints against him sound like my students complaining about not being allowed to turn in late work--both desperate and unconvincing. Why would environmental requirements be costly to auto companies when Toyota has proven that automotive cleanliness is a huge marketing boon? Why would car companies have to manufacture a different car to meet each state's requirements rather than a single model that conforms to all of them?

But this is not really a blog post about cars, the environment, or the laws governing them. This is a post about political language. I was delighted to see that the link I clicked, titled "Obama: 'Rigid Ideology Has Overruled Sound Science'", was about cars, and not about what I feared: embryonic stem cell research. Most of us that follow such things understand by now that "sound science" in the political realm is code for embryonic stem cell research.

Everyone, at arguably the most important time of their life, has been an embryo. We do not come from embryos, any more than we "come from" our infant, toddler, or teenage selves. We all were them. There is no discontinuity, biologically or ontologically, between that tiny bundle of cells and the first African American president it would become.

But, common sense aside, witness the power of words--such as the words of President Obama when he declared in his inagural speech that he would "put science in its rightful place." What is the rightful place of science? The revelation I received in Leuven was, years ago, that science itself does not answer that question. And if science, the only legitimate source of enforceable legislative truth, is silent on the question of its own "rightful place", then there is only one answer remaining to fill the void:

The rightful place of science is whatever we want it to be.

It is a fair wager that the next time President Obama invokes the dramatic language of "sound science" versus "rigid ideology", it will not be for such a benign purpose as environmental responsibility. Both terms are wildcards of immense political cash value. Does the technological data surrounding embryonic research teach a doctrine on whether it is right to do so? No? Then whence our answer? It seems we will be given two options: the gilded prose of a polished man who promises it is good, and "rigid ideology"; i.e., any belief structure that disagrees with him.

Dreaming of Leuven

2009-01-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

The summer of 2001, Fr. Kevin Codd, the president rector of the American College in Louvain, personally visited me in my home town. My bishop had alerted Father that he had a seminarian who was eligible, via the DeRance scholarship, to complete his philosophy training in the small medieval town of Leuven, BE.

I was initially leery. At that time, I was locked into a combative, politicized, teeth-grinding Catholic conservativism. I even told this devoted man of God that I feared his seminary was "very liberal". I even used those words. I was not set at ease when Fr. Codd was joined by an alumnus, a local priest, dressed in Bermuda shorts and telling me, "The worst explanation you can give someone for a Catholic doctrine is 'Because the Pope said so'." I fawningly adored the Pope, which did not bode well for my reception of said advice.

In spite of my fears, Fr. Codd persuaded me that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was not, however, impressed with his dewey eyed, sing-song sentimentalism about the town of Leuven. At that time, I would have studied philosophy in a Wal-Mart broom closet if I was assured that it would be faithful to the Magisterium. I could not fathom that a town's history or beauty was relevant to the quality of my education. Yes, yes, it's very pretty, but what will I be taught?

It took a couple of years, but Leuven broke the hardness of my heart. I never lost my loyalty to Rome--and still haven't--but my loyalty became wiser (a process that remains ongoing). Before, I scoffed at Fr. Codd's cooing about Leuven, and at the lavish praise by Bishop Fulton Sheen of the same. Now, as I think back, I cannot help but to sing the same song.

Lately I've had a recurring dream. In the dream, I am back in Leuven, not a seminarian anymore, but living there as a student of the University. On a whim, in the early evening, I go to the American College. Through the large chapel doors (that are rarely opened), I hear the voice of Fr. Wallace Platt giving an impassioned moral exhortation. I do not enter the chapel, but wait. When the Mass is over and I know that the community is having dinner, I open the front door and peek in. There are the tables, and sitting at them are all of my old formators--Fr. Kevin, Fr. Wally, Fr. Denis Robinson, Fr. Aurelius Boberek, and everyone. The students faces were all new (my dreams mix fantasy and reality), but the priests were happy to see me and welcomed me to a table. I did not eat--I did not presume the right. But I talked and laughed and joked and philosophized.

Sometimes when I have the dream, the students are my old confreres. Sometimes I stay the night--in a bare, unfurnished, musty-smelling room. I am always a guest, never a resident. Sometimes the dream takes me to the cobblestoned streets of Leuven, to cafes and pubs, familiar and unfamiliar. Sometimes my family is there and I am joyfully showing them everything there is to see. It is always early evening, after a rainstorm, with the sun poking out from behind still-present rainclouds, and the smell of rain still in the air. I always walk up or down Naamsestraat, my home street.

"Same-Sex Marriage and the Failure of Justificatory Liberalism"

2008-12-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1239

What, liberals claim a mandate of self-evidence for their doctrines? Noooo.

"Pious scholars are rare."

2008-11-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

--Blaise Paschal

A reader commented on my blog,

I've discovered your blog only recently and to be honest, am not really sure how I got here. I don't know if you take questions but I was wondering about what you've been saying about your prayer life. I'm studying theology at the moment and in the classroom can be fired up by God, learning, drawing closer to Him, and then I get home and struggle to kneel beside my bed, let alone to pray. Do you think that it's somehow of God...? Is it just a discipline, a habit we need to force our body into...? How to change...?

If I knew the solution, or even where to begin, then instead of blogging I would have published three books about that subject by now. Prayer is a huge benefit when it comes. But the same "not-garden-variety-bad-work-habits" that interfere with my official duties also cripple my efforts in things like daily prayer and exercise.

But, wouldn't you know, thanks to your question I came across something deeply insightful. I Googled "Pious scholars are rare" to make sure I remembered the quote correctly, and found a link a page in this book. It is Making Sense of it All by Thomas V. Morris, published in 1992.

Dave [who asked the question], there's stuff in this book that might be good for both of us to read and to reflect on.

On "Grand Narratives"

2008-11-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

Postmodernism is a standpoint of universal skepticism against "metanarratives" or "grand narratives"--universalizing stories that purport to encompass and illuminate every non-universal story throughout time and geography. Of course, it takes very little cleverness to see the "metanarrative" inside of postmodernism itself. Yet there is still value in the postmodernist point. If nothing else, we now have a language about "metanarratives", so that even if we cannot help but to create and live by one or another metanarrative, we can now, at least, more clearly see them for what they are, ask questions that were not asked before, and ascertain the relative value, the ultimacy, the adequacy, and the truth of metanarratives.

Of course, it is impossible to step "outside of" all metanarratives and so look at them like so many billiard balls on a table. The ones to proclaim that they have done so are still captive of a naivette that needs a healthy dose of postmodernism before they can become helpful dialogue partners. No claim, no matter how loudly, to "reason", to "common sense", to "logic" can yet presume to hold all of the cards, to know all the outcomes, to determine all points of view with a cold, exposing light. Yes, a person may be a general of his own metanarrative, and so will easily win followers who were already captivated by the same. But general and soldiers alike may, without a certain openness and a certain prodding, be imprisoned by a small metanarrative and never see the light of a narrative which is more meta than their own.

And that's the key. We might regard "metanarratives" as being like billiard balls on a table, equally insufficient, equally worthy of skepticism. But through some mystery of understanding, we can see the table as meta to the balls; the pub as meta to the table(s); the district as meta to the pub(s). And perhaps we are unable to arrive at a metanarrative which is actually ultimate--for we always arrive at the same point, namely, that there is something meta to our meta-izing; and there may be something meta even to that.

From this juncture we can go in (at least) two directions. First we may ask what is common to minds such that they, in common with one-another, can recognize common relationships of "meta"--like, for example, the popular postmodernist project itself, by which many people have come to see skepticism as meta to the various available metanarratives. That is the speculative road. Second, we may ask: by what process does the mind change, perhaps not to a belief contradicting a previous belief, but toward a narrative which is more meta than a previous narrative? Or how can a mind be deceived, and so be confused into believing a less meta narrative to be the more? As if a billiards player were to become more consumed by the glimmer of a single ball than the game, or by the game than by the pub and the relationships that constitute the possibility of the game? A question we will discover on the way is: what is the relationship between a metanarrative and its subordinate narratives? This is the practical road.

Both roads are ultimately necessary. The first road needs to be followed if we are to fortify the project against radical skepticism and relativism. Radical relativism is a popular cognitive option in the face of superficially irreconcilable differences of opinion; yet it appears to be falsified by the phenomenon of shared understandings--even if these understandings are never 100%universal. One might argue that shared understandings can be explained away by a theory of memes that treats beliefs as independent, self-reproducing organisms with no link to a yet-elusive "objectivity". Yet this theory presupposes (rather than observes) the origin of shared understandings. It seems to be falsified by the immanent phenomenon of non-constructed otherness. The postmodernist may argue that there is no such thing as non-constructed otherness--for all otherness, even if it is "natural", is reconstructed in our minds by language. But this is a mistake. There is no non-constructed understanding. But even if we accept that language structures all understanding, this presupposes that there is an other to be structured.

The second road--the concrete road--is perhaps the more interesting of the two, because here we can begin to survey the history of ideas, not as an infinite series of discrete units of belief, but as vast collectives, associations, and above all, as hierarchies of metanarratives and subnarratives.

I will not lie--I labor under a metanarrative myself. It is subnarrative to my Catholic faith, and it goes something like this: Very early in human history, the seeds of two primordial metanarratives and grown and sprouted "children", and philosophy has ever since been a dialogue, or a battle, between subnarratives variously pledging their alleigance to one or the other unspoken, implicit, metanarrative. It sounds almost Manichean, I admit, but this is the thread I would like to follow to its conclusion.

More discernment! (Updated)

2008-10-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

I had another monastery-related thought today and it exploded into a massive entangled web in my mind. Let's see if we can't sort this out.

One dimension of monastic life that has always been attractive to me is the element of "smallness" that is included with it. I recall seeing in the St. Meinrad bookstore a volume by the title, "A Boring Life," which I cannot seem to find on Amazon or on the Web for some reason (we joked at the time that Br. Thomas must have authored it). But the key is that, while I always wanted to share that divine encounter of my young experiences with more people, that did not translate vocationally into me becoming a public figure.

Even as a teacher, I falter at governing a classroom of 26 students; and I am the Incarnation of Awkward at the much vaunted "Teacher's Talent Show" (at which I have signed on to attempt to sing Sinatra). I never cared to see my name, face, or person reach the consciousness of more than my circle of friends. Whatever I have to share with the world, it isn't my persona; like Paul, I guess, I am a little man behind big words. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I would hate to be a church's "pastor". What a horrendously "famous" person!

I do enjoy two things. I enjoy working with people on a small-scale level. And I enjoy sharing thoughts in writing with large anonymous audiences. I enjoy feedback, but not accolades; I love seeing the fruits of my work; not necessarily awards or recognition. I like compliments and validation; I hate public praise.

There was a time not so long ago when I was told that all of this was a symptom of a low self-esteem. Now I can stand as an adult and say: that's ridiculous. It is true that I needed to learn to be liked. Over the last couple of years I have been proven wrong in my hypothesis that no person would would actively seek my company. No, people do. But it is also not the case that, therefore, I am cut out to be a public figure.

This is an area in which I have fooled myself since high school. Since the 11th grade I built up a persona of being a very public, charismatic person--someone made for speaking before large crowds, persuading audiences, giving impassioned speeches and so forth. I staked no small part of my identity on this notion, that I had a preacher in me, and that God was calling me to be a "light to the nations," just so.

The problem is twofold. First, while yes, I do feel energized by an audience and it gives me a new excitement about the material, it is still a draining experience. To be a teacher--to guide students through an experience that they will ponder and integrate--requires not short bursts of excitement, but a meticulous program of activities and assessments. This is not the place to profess a string of insights that excite me. This is a demanding, one-man educational machine; a self-contained, self-sufficient society; incorporating discipline, management, governance, recording, facilities maintenance; and after all is said and done, a meticulous program of activities and assessments. I am not as responsible as this. I am no king, governor, or lord. I disclaim all pretenses to being a pastor, to having this kind of authority. Take it away, I beg you! I hope never to be in this situation again, even while I understand how it is sometimes unavoidable. I would much rather be the beneficiary, or low-level servant of this network than its master.

Let me say: When I left the seminary, I was relieved to be back in the pews and no longer in the sanctuary. Now as a teacher I find myself in a "sanctuary" of another sort--and all I want now is to get out from this position of height and authority. I am no pastor of souls! I am no magister!

The second problem is that I do not have your "garden variety" bad work habits. For as long as I can remember I have had a murderous perfectionism that, far from enabling me to live perfectly, instead fills me with dread at the thought of doing the simplest, easiest things. "Now, it can't be as bad as all that. Everybody procrastinates; it's normal. All you need is a day off." You Do Not Understand. I am not able to function normally without help. I am an escapist. There is no such thing as "just one drink" for an alcoholic, and there is no such thing as a "little escape" for me. The more momentous the task, or the more inner voices saying "you should, you should, you should," the more sensitive the trigger.

I realize that this is an issue that I cannot ignore. In the short term--as long as I cannot take the heat--the solution is to get out of the kitchen. I function best when I am put to work at low-level and routine responsibilities. I take pride in doing quality work in areas that are necessary but not high-profile. I long to disappear behind the scenes and work for the good of many, without the pressure to fundamentally change any person's life (at least in a direct way).

Wherever I am called, I believed I am called to smallness. I do not believe that would change, even if I were pressed to take on leadership--such as in a family, or in a classroom. It would not change even if I conquered the anxieties that burden my efforts. I hope it would not change, even if I had a name on a published book--though I can understand one reason authors choose pen names.

I do not want to be told that my desire to disappear into anonymity is disordered; I do not want to be told that, no, I am wrong, I am destined for "great things".

A couple of commenters have told me that they are reminded of St. Therese of Lisieux. I am not sure that I can be fairly compared to her. For one thing, St. Therese's smallness was based on a life of prayer that was fervent even before she entered the community. My prayer flags like an old flashlight. I don't know that humility is the root of my desire for smallness, so much as a desire for relief from the pains of public life, or a kind of fatalistic despair at the efforts of the average work day. World-weariness is not humility.

But perhaps I am weary because I am truly not where I belong. I do not "jibe" here; there is friction; there are blisters that have developed from jamming someone of my disposition into a niche he was not built for. There might come a time when I am ready for heavy and difficult responsibility, but perhaps my preparation for such a time is now being stunted by noise and confusion. Perhaps I need to incubate--to rest, but not to be lazy; to find peace, but not sedation; to find quiet, but not sleep.

Where is God in all of this? Unmoving, unchanging, forever calling, knowing me more than I know myself, patiently waiting my arrival to the life he has prepared. That I have only mentioned him now is both a testament to the dearth of prayer in my life, and also to my confidence that he is always there and always works regardless of whether he is explicitly invoked. But if Jesus Christ called me by name, and led me to a path whose sufferings and consolations were the instruments to save my soul, what would that path look like?

The path is not a separate thing than the search for it; it does not begin for me at the age of 27 or 29, but I have been on it already for some time. Perhaps the trajectory of my path so far is a part of the message--just as Christ took fishermen and made them fishers of men. So what am I now, that will be continuous with Christ's call?

Continuing discernment

2008-10-27T04:06:00.000-07:00

My thanks to Brother Thomas for his prayerful and insightful comment on my last discernment entry. At the end, he wrote,

Don't we all know what we really want, and that this deep desire is God's Spirit groaning within us?

I believe that I do. However, caution ever remains at my side. Ten years ago, in tears, I wrote that I wanted to be a priest. On retreats to the seminary, before I signed up for the program, I experienced intense emotion as I wrote spiritual journals. Yes, my Lord and my God--I wrote--I will be your servant. I place myself entirely in your hands. Do with me whatever you wish. This is where I belong--I wrote, referring to the seminary--this is a path to happiness that you have laid out for me.

Was I naive? There was some immaturity there perhaps. Emotions are a powerful thing to a sheltered teenager. But I do believe that there was something authentic in that wide-eyed surrender that I felt. I was not aware of the realities of the Catholic parish as I wrote those words. That is the missing piece. My vocation was not born out of a connection to any parish church as a community. I disliked youth groups. I was not part of any volunteer programs apart from teaching Catechism. I was attending daily Mass for a time, but I never felt the slightest urge to serve at the altar.

I have sometimes said that my main attraction to the priesthood was intellectual--I believed that I could study the mysteries of God to my heart's content. Yet this, too, is inaccurate. What I loved about "church" and "Catholicism"--what drove me to tears--was not just the depth of the tradition. The studies gave me assurance that my feelings were grounded in a firm bedrock. But it was something else, it was the sense of the church as a refuge. I loved the church--and here I speak of the building--as I loved my mother. I loved the empty church as a place where I could be alone with my God who intimately knew me and who I could trust with my life.

[I should have seen the signs when more than one priest in the diocese poured scorn on this sort of religious experience, calling it "protestant".]

I loved the warmth of the morning daily Mass in the small chapel with its perfunctory homilies and room full of people two generations my senior. I loved going to Confession and hearing a deep, old, tender voice in a small, dark room, assuring me that God is the author of history and that untold beauty awaits us all whether we can see it now or not.

In these experiences, threaded together, I discovered a God that wanted nothing more than to embrace his beloved children, each individually and all together, and relieve them from spiritual suffering even while they endured the pain of living in a broken world.

I found a sort of personal salvation, and so I believed that the priesthood was the logical conclusion. What better position was there to share this intimate joy in God with as many people as possible?

The greatest mistake the Diocese made in taking me on--a mistake that I encouraged--was in not recognizing how out of touch I was with the true meaning and function of the parish, at least as it is today. I have zero interest in the parish as a public, ordered society. Parish councils, education programs, plant management, social functions, clubs, fundraisers--public, public, public. I have an allergy to the public.

And so I am, prima facie, disqualified to be a parish priest. The parish priest is not only, or primarily, the custodian of the God's intimate embrace of the discouraged soul. The priest is a community organizer. The priest must drift from function to function, through all sacharine falsehoods of public decorum, without any relief and without any human being with whom he can be himself.

The liturgy is a different thing altogether. The sacramental presence of Jesus Christ makes all the difference. The liturgy is both public and private, both intimate and ultimate. My vision of liturgy is determined by my vision of a God that reaches out to embrace each of us individually and together at once; a God that meets us in the inner room of the soul even while he calls us together to love one-another.

The Church does not exist prior to the initiative of God; and when it does exist it does not thereby obliterate the individual in favor of a "parish" with a "culture"; but rather it fulfills and brightens the individuality of the members, makes them glow with a pre-ordained, but delightfully different beauty given by God. Thus the liturgy is precisely the only public function which is neither sentimentally individualistic nor politely, superficially public.

But I am as unfit for diocesan priesthood as an amputee for tennis. It does not matter if he can run fast, he has no arms (maybe he is better suited to another sport). My experience of faith has always been lopsidedly personal and intimate, having no respect for the gatherings of near-strangers for purposes of mutual distraction or collective esteem-building. I am not, like Barack Obama, a community organizer. Community be damned. Who are you, what is your story, where do you hurt?

It feels funny writing that my experience of faith is "personal". I am usually the one saying I lack a personal relationship with God. But what I mean by a "personal" experience of faith is not that I feel like God is my invisible buddy, with whom I often chat about the frustrations of Tetris. Rather, my faith is personal because it thrives on persons, flesh and blood, each one a sacrament of God. Profound encounters with the human soul--something that never happens during "social functions"--are my impetus to pray. Some people need chant. Some people need statues. Some people need colorful windows. I need talk. Hold the weather and sports, please.

Thus, it is no surprise that I was happy in the seminary. There were problems, problems that I struggle with even now as a lay Catholic, and which will follow me wherever I am called. But living and studying within a community of men, men with a singular purpose, men who were each individually themselves as well as soldiers of Christ, I found the fulfillment of what I hoped for as a teenager. The seminary is, in a certain way, deceptive. It is a community of intimate friendships that prepares men for a life without any. This is hyperbole, yes, but there is truth in it.

To return again to the question,

Don't we all know what we really want, and that this deep desire is God's Spirit groaning within us?

Perhaps I do know.

More on the monastery

2008-10-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

As we slide quickly past October into November, I see ahead of me another visit to St. Meinrad Archabbey--another year, another week with the monks and with other discerners, and another look at where I have been, and where I am going.

In December of 2006, I made my first "Monastic Observance" retreat at St. Meinrad. I was a clinically depressed diocesan seminarian in the middle of a dreary internship, engulfed by the triple-isolation of "Made in China" sentimentality of the American Catholic parish, of being a conservative celibate Christian freak in a secular individualized society, and of layers upon layers of insecurity, inversion, bitterness and escapism--not to mention intellectual pride and emotional immaturity.

St. Meinrad glowed like heaven itself. I can scarcely say more, except that I was at least mature enough to know that it would be foolish to make that reckless switch.

In December of 2007, I returned to St. Meinrad surrounded by a different world. In the span of a year, I had quit the seminary; had a three-month relationship with a single mother; been hired as a high school theology teacher; moved to the city; acquired my first ever apartment, credit card, and cat; and even though I was working unhealthy hours and felt more alone than ever, I had an indomitable optimism.

St. Meinrad then seemed more distant. Though still, as always, a place of welcome and peace, the sacrifices demanded by the monastic call seemed steeper than before. I had only just begun to live life. Even on a teacher's wage, the basic secular comforts loomed large in my mind, not least of which because they were the only comforts I had.

Now I stand in a new position. I am teaching again this year and I have pushed hard to make myself a valuable member of this community. The process that began last year continues to unfold, and I am mostly accomodated to the identity of a college-educated lay Catholic professional rather than a liminal clergyman. As my footholds become steadier, I am slowly reaching out and building an identity around my faith--which, incidentally, is not easy in a large, secularized city. I owe the lion's share of my maturing to Katlin, who I met in April and who has been my strongest link to reality ever since. As I once again learn to be comfortable in my own skin in a new world (as happened in Illinois, and as happened in Belgium, and as happened in California, and as happened in high school), I am able to start looking at where I am relative to where I ultimately want to be, without as much fear that I am being strung along by fears.

I never ultimately wanted to be a high school teacher, and frankly I still do not. In this work I get wrapped up in caring about my students--all of them. I love them. I want them to be successful and happy. But I've known the happiness that only faith can offer, and so I struggle to drag these students beyond the "spirit of the age", which is powerfully dragging them into a cynical, amoral adulthood where everything is gray. There is a stark difference between the peers I knew as a high schooler and the students in my care. The passion for renewing society and creating a just social order--what I was formed in--is now so cold and damp, replaced by a tepid individualism. The rebellion itself is so passive that it doesn't even provide the fuel for sustained striving that often leads to a profound conversion. The Holy Spirit shows through the glowing embers, but the landscape seems already burnt out at the age of 17. The spectre of discouragement hovers.

But I am not discouraged, and the long view tells me that there are good things happening here, and that good things are happening in my own life. I will be 27 in two months, no longer at the very beginning of life, and perhaps on the cusp of finally answering God's call, once I can discover what it is.

The problem is that I remain deadlocked between marriage and monastery. I have already eliminated two possible vocations definitively--the diocesan priesthood and lay single life. It is not good for me to be alone. This means that I choose to relinquish the vast license I now have to spend my time as I wish. So be it--I am not a good steward of time. But who do I give my time to?

Whenever I mention the monastery to Katlin, she tells me to be careful--yes, I know that I would probably be happy in the monastery, but it is a known happiness. I do not yet know the happiness that married love may bring. It is unknown. And I should not choose one happiness over the other, simply because it is familiar. That would be to shrink from the challenge of maturing that I have pursued since leaving seminary. I have been a serial dater since then as well, the fruit of which has been disappointment. Even if I fell in love, how well-suited am I to be a leader, a caretaker of a family?

The answer is prayer, that bugbear of mine. I have always trusted that God will not lead me astray, and so far he has not. But though I feel a divine hand protecting me in a long period of discernment, that hand does not beckon with clarity. The things I love and need most, and the gifts that I offer, seem equally present down either path--loving companionship, permanence and stability, growth in God, a chance to transform the world (beginning at home).

Two brief notes:

2008-10-19T21:05:00.001-07:00

1.Could there be growth in heaven?

I believe so.

Growth does not necessarily imply that anything is (grievously) lacking in the saved soul. That is to say, if a soul enjoys the beatific vision, it lacks nothing of what it ought to have; but this does not mean that it cannot grow even holier, even closer to God. Some might say that this logically implies that some souls are "worse off" than others, and this would imply that there is evil in heaven. But in the equation of the Union between the Infinite and the finite, the finite are by definition infinitely "lacking"--yet it is a "lacking" which is itself glorified, for Christ himself glorifies finitude. The difference between the infinite God and the finite saints glorifies God, so also does the continual--infinite!--progress of the Heavenly Liturgy toward God glorify God. Thus I believe that Heaven is not a static, but is rather a "progressive" place.

2. On drawing lines.

The intellect cannot but help to draw lines, to distinguish, and this is no less true in the domain of human action. The moral line is neither wholly straight nor is it fuzzy or indeterminate. Beginning with the law of God and progressing through considerations of virtues, circumstances, and codifications, we find that the justice or injustice of "lines" has nothing to do with whether a line is "man-made" (for such "lines," as are found in canon and civil law, are prudentially necessary, even if they are sometimes artificially strict) or whether a line withholds reaction to an imperfect behavior (for human beings are often unready for, and would be harmed by, immediately imposed perfection). The justice of a "rule" lies solely and simply in whether it can be demonstrated, within its prudential context, to serve human dignity in its immediate state and ultimate goal.

On gay marriage

2008-10-14T04:06:00.000-07:00

The conservative position on gay marriage is difficult is because it would deny to homosexual couples a public recognition of the equal stature of their union to an analogous union between mixed sexes, thus making them unhappy. Specifically, they would understandably feel marginalized, segregated, invisible, and rejected. Also, there is the implied denial of intangible (and sometimes tangible) goods connected with the status of marriage: legitimation, a sense of permanence and officiality, stability, community support, and a foundation upon which to build a legacy via [in this case adopted] children.

These are genuine goods, and the public order I would vote for would deny them to gay couples. I do not want that. I do not want gay couples to be unhappy and marginalized. To me it is a biproduct of the situation we find ourselves in--a situation in which losses will be suffered no matter what the outcome.

Conservatives suffer a disadvantage having to articulate what is, admittedly, an abstract grievance in a culture dominated by the demand for self-determination.

I will try to do so, and I may fail to persuade, but I hope this is illuminating nevertheless.

The social contract owes its existence not exclusively or even primarily to the combined wills of atomistic individuals. The social contract's allegiance is, above all, to inalienable human dignity (the source of human rights)--a dignity not given, defined, or created by the government. This dignity is recognized as already present and inherent in humans as humans, as long as humans have existed, and so it is revered--yet it is also vulnerable, and thus needs guarding. It is key to our historic understanding of government that neither kings nor majority rule are the last word; all government is subservient to human dignity, rooted in human nature, and denying nothing to anyone what belongs to each in accord with his or her humanness. They key is, what is "humanness"?

Today we conceive of "human dignity" and "human rights" in strictly individualistic terms; but if our notion of humanity is so atomistic, it is simply flat wrong. There is no humanness--there are no humans--apart from the defining structures out of which our childhoods arose. And it is not a stretch to say that the only such structure that enjoys a perennial default status (for no reason of our own machination) is the biological family. It is one thing to say that someone's dignity maintains even when, in particular cases, one arises from alternative situations ('families' in an analogous sense). It is another to deny the brute ever-presence, across time and the globe, of a reality which is so powerfully constitutive of collective human existence. To delete from public recognition, not only the brute "biology" of our individual origins, but also the consequent bonds which ideally become a child's welcome committee to the world, is to publicly, officially declare a new, different conception of human nature.

"Family" is now a household of voluntarily cohabiting individuals. Blood has no role, privilege, or status. The complete severing of the law from reality in this case represents, to me, a troubling precedent.

The pre-existing reality of families (biologically begotten) is prior to the state both in chronology and in inviolability. The state exists because of that entity, not the other way around; the state did not "invent" or "define" the fact that human beings cluster into mutually fostering bonds of spouse and spawn. It was created by them for their sake. The state does not serve citizens as atomistic individuals in every aspect of life; it serves families--both the biological and the analogous kind. But the point is that even those "analogous families" are analogous to something, which is not itself an analogy, but the real thing: blood family. It is the mold and the model for all such households. Watch me repeat myself here: it was not given, defined, or created by the government. It is recognized as already present and inherent in humans as humans, as long as humans have existed, and so it is revered--yet it is also vulnerable, and thus guarded. But in this case, it has only become vulnerable in the last thirty years.

For social conservatives there is a close connection between the public privilege granted to heterosexual marriage (the biological linchpin of family) and to the same human dignity that is the source of inalienable rights. Both are rooted in the official, state-enshrined understanding of what "humanness" is. If you can change what that word means, you can make radical alterations to the way government understand, and treats, people. It's like changing the multiplier on a computer's processor: tiny little modification, big consequences (and like an overclocked computer, the negative consequences may not be evident for some time).

The conservative position, when not blatantly bigoted or blindly religious, ultimately demands that government remember its subordination to realities that pre-existed it and have not, in their essence, changed--nor will they. This is not a debate about whether Bob and Fred can live happily ever after (they can). This is a debate about the foundation and rights of government. Democrats wish to place government over family as its creator and author (so that it can "re-author" this reality). Republicans demand that government know its place--that it not attempt to use its powers to alter that which it was built to serve.

One final, final point. There is something lost in the translation when conservatives wield signs saying "Protect marriage." People imagine that they are saying, "Protect marriage from gay people" (Hence Ron Zimmerman's great song about those who are trying to "protect marriage from people who want to get married." No. The "Protect marriage" slogan isn't about protecting marriage from gay people. It's about protecting marriage from the government--and as is most often the case, the judiciary branch.

Debating with atheists.

2008-10-08T18:00:00.000-07:00

It's so much fun!

EDIT: Darnit. Login required. Will fix somehow.

Adaption of "Batter my Heart"

2008-10-06T17:13:00.000-07:00

The director of my parish's RCIA program asked me to provide us with today's opening prayer. I wanted to share the "Holy Sonnet XVI" of John Donne, aka "Batter my Heart". However, I discovered that the language of the poem is a little difficult, so I took some creative liberties and adapted it. First, the original:

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit You, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue,

Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to You, imprison me, for I

Except You enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

Now, my version:

Do break me down, my triune God; for You
are too polite; too gently offer help;
So I may stand and walk, destroy my self,
With force do crack, blow, burn, and make me new.

My soul is occupied long past her due,
She longs for you, her guest, but to no end,
Your soldier, reason, her protection lends,
But reason, weak and captive, proves untrue.

Yet dearly do I love you, not in vain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to You, imprison me, for I

Unless enslaved by You, shall ne’er be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

On Surrender

2008-10-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

The focal point my lesson on Baptism is that it is the new Christian's total surrender; and thus that Christianity is fundamentally a faith of surrender. In RCIA Monday evening, I encountered some examples of just that. But some of the things people said modified my understanding.

It's a cheap aphorism to tell someone to "Let go, and let God," as if it was acceptable to let one's obligations slide. The surrender demanded by Jesus was never a "giving up" with respect to our daily responsibilities. The "rest" offered by Jesus was never an invitation to sloth. I confess to feeling a little disappointed by this realization. Is Jesus' promise of rest not then empty? We are exhausted. To offer us rest and then to comission us to take up the cross seems a terrible bait-and-switch.

Faith informs me that Jesus' promise of rest is not empty; in fact, it is a promise that satisfies more completely and permanently than a summer vacation of sleep and leisure. All we have to do is look again at the Gospels. What Jesus demanded, and the only thing he ever asked, was for people to trust in him. It was that trust, that opening up to the Incarnate Word, that sparked incredible works among the people. Thus the Lord gives food to those he loves while they sleep.

To trust in Jesus Christ--a free response equally available to saint and sinner--means that one acknowledges God's power as real. Thus the rest he offers is real; it is more real than the rest of leisure. To understand this, we need to distinguish between two kinds of human effort: the effort of exertion, and the effort of will. Without grace, overexertion attacks the will. If we permit the will to become subject to nature, and entropy drags us down. With grace, the will is lifted up on supernatural columns, and it is held high without any effort on our part. No amount of exertion, nor suffering, nor "death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

And so, the "rest" that Jesus offers, the "easy yoke", is not a worldly kind of leisure or relaxation. In fact it is the opposite. By lifting the will up above the exhaust of nature, the grace of God leaves one feeling rested and new even through the extremes of human action and suffering.

On life's great loves

2008-09-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

Two points of reference here, both of them odd. The first is a line from the Whoopi Goldberg character "Guinan" from Star Trek: love doesn't feel the same twice. To have loved and lost, and then to love again, sometimes is difficult to recognize because it feels different. Second is my friend Katlin's experience of life's "great loves", which rise to the surface of her memory of relationships as the ones that most deeply changed her.

In my life I can probably point to three great loves, if by that we're referring to specific women. But a relationship to a life, a community, or a place can sometimes be just as significant, and this would boost my number to five. The imprint of these relationships have left me intensely changed.

But none of them have yet lasted very long or have led to that comfortable feeling of familiar intimacy--the feeling described by Katlin as the "half-bored kiss". Certainly, the excitement of new attachments and new relationships is a thrill; but some of us have been searching for so long that the "thrills" have only become stressful--and exhausting. It is at this moment that one's attention turns away from excitement, towards a sober, abiding peace in the company of another.

There is no such thing as a relationship without drama; how can we expect there to be no turmoil between two souls when we cannot even calm the storms inside of us alone? But an intimacy between souls can be a source of peace. Katlin tells me that it became tradition at one point for the new groom to build an extension to his father's home. A spiritually intimate relationship is like building an extension inside of oneself for the soul to roam. It is allowing one's own interiority to be the host for another soul; to receive a guest. When a relationship has grown so deep that two people feel as two souls in the same interior home (irrespective of literal living conditions), there is a wonderful new experience of freedom.

But the vast majority of people we encounter at random do not inspire us to run and get the tools to start building that extension. They are scared; we are scared; and the insecurities and neuroses create any number of frictions; or else an intangible quality warns me (or her) away; or else the interpersonal exchange is as dry as sand, but with even less salt.

Sometimes, sometimes, however, someone comes along and changes everything. Someone with the warmth and welcome of a monastery; the openness and transparency of a child; the maturity and grace of a professor; and through it all the quiet feeling that she is happy to see you.

There is human love, and there is the divine grace of caritas. The two are utterly different, pouring from two vastly different fonts. Recent experience makes me ask whether there is a third. It is a fusion of a the two. It is a human love, and therefore a feeling, but it lacks the excitement of corrupt concupiscence. It points beyond simple friendship; it is open to exclusivity and romantic transcendence; but it is attended by the subtle, gentle promptings of a divine approval. Those promptings that do not rush, shame, or manipulate; they fill the heart with a new energy for goodness and self-improvement. This love hints at what the next stage of life may hold; it has "calling" as its sober and serenely smiling attendant.

I am intimidated and frightened, doubtful and skeptical. The life of a serial dater is a life filled with hope-disappointment-hope-disappointment-hope-disappointment. Each time, a woman possesses a quality which makes her stand out: here, a charmingly brash honesty; there, a kind heart; over there, a similar personality; next, a steady and successful carreer; then, a shared suffering; now, a shared religious faith--each one to fall aside as my disqualifiers grow more keen. Every hope now is a cautious hope, even if a new hope is filled with promise and novelty.

But can I say it? This hope seems different. So different that its difference is different. There is something here that tugs at me, as though a future happy self reached out to me saying, "Don't let this one get away!"

Future encounters will tell.

The ideal gadget

2008-09-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since the "netbook craze" (beginning with the Eee last year), affordable ultraportable laptops have descended to a price level much lower, in fact, than were the Pocket PCs I was obsessed with (the tombstone of my Windows CE obsession reads: "2000-2005. What was I thinking?").

I've written technology blog entries before, discussing the fallacy of the "do it all" gadget, but as I continue to look for a possible Christmas technology purchase, I reflect again on how technology could make certain tasks easier, more enjoyable, and more efficient. In a more recent post I had my sights on the Gigabyte m912. However, early reviews have dissuaded me: its 1GB of RAM isn't enough to drive Vista comfortably; the version of Vista it comes with lacks tablet functionality; and Intel has just shipped a dual-core version of the same processor it carries, which itself is pretty weak.

When Gigabyte or another company releases a similar machine with the dual-core Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, Vista Home Premium, and perhaps a bigger battery, I'll take it.

But let's get a little speculative now.

My philosophy of computing is that where human activities have different priorities, they need to be embodied in different devices. Thus, for example, it is incorrect to try and integrate a cell phone with a full computer. Mobile phones need to be light, convenient, simple, inexpensive, and unobtrusive. Computers need to be powerful, capacious, and have excellent human interfaces. A no-compromise solution is a multiple-device solution, and there is no way around that.

However, a multi-device solution does not necessarily mean having multiple centers of data storage. No matter how good of software you use, it will be a struggle to keep all of the software synchronized on all of them, all of the time.

People already get around this by having large USB keys that they carry around with them. The more responsible among those regularly copy the contents of said keys onto the computers.
My thought is that two bodies of technology should be separated: on the one hand, the inputs and outputs of a computer, and on the other, the data storage, processor, GPU, etc. that make up the computer itself (including the batter for portable devices). The former can be any size or shape; the latter should be as portable as possible.

The UMPC device category is ostensibly an attempt at this sort of arrangement. However, it has a terrible flaw: such devices are encumbered by UI hardware that is woefully inadequate. By trying to turn card-deck sized computers into self-sufficient PCs, companies have been forced to compromise on absolutely essential features. I am sorry: serious work cannot be accomplished on an OQO. The combination of a touchscreen, battery, thumb-keyboard, speaker, and every IO port possible ramps the price up on such machines so as to make a cost-benefit analysis very dreary.

In my opinion, a portable computer should be a combination of CPU, GPU, storage, wireless technology, and other integrated devices, but have only a single, high-bandwith port. It would have no display, no UI, and no battery. A brick, in other words. That brick would also hold the OS of the user's choice, loaded with plug-and-play drivers for various inputs and displaytechnologies. Such a device could be terrifically portable and inexpensive, relative to today's UMPCs and ultraportable laptops. This would also improve options for more capable processors and discrete graphics.

A battery could be integrated, perhaps, so that the brick could maintain periodic 3G connections to a online backup server. But otherwise, the brick would be a card-deck size machine with a single port.

Then you could have every kind of computer under the sun, each an empty shell with a single port. Desktops, laptops, ultraportables, and tablet PCs. Note that I do not include "UMPC"--I believe that this category of computer needs to die. The smallest computer usable for real mobile productivity is "netbook" sized, with at least a 9" screen.

Not every brick would be powerful enough to drive every kind of display satisfactorily; but every "shell" workstation would accept every brick. You could buy a "gaming PC" brick or an affordable "workstation" brick. Eiter brick would work in a desktop or a laptop "shell", but the "gaming PC" brick might kill the batteries in the laptop shell very quickly relative to the cheap brick.

I know this isn't an original idea.

Edit: Ha!

Creating Ourselves

2008-09-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

As a philosophy student at the University of Louvain, I learned a great deal about secular existentialism and what it represented in terms of the history of ideas: as Sarte put it, the logical consequence of atheism--the final taking of our individual destinies into our individual hands; the ultimate removal of all traces of the en soi, of all "givens" in life, so that all that is left is the Will. The Will then becomes like a mathematical point, a singularity of self-identity, empty of content, around which the isolated, atomistic individual creates himself, as if every soul were a hacked game of "Sim City" where every player had infinite money.

It is this existentialism which, I believe, is at the heart of movements pushing for human cloning, genetic engineering, and yes, gay marriage. It is also at the heart of the transgendered movement. To treat something that is older and larger than ourselves, something that belongs to the order of nature itself, as if it were always a human invention that, anyway, we can do better, is exactly the self-divinization that I denounced when I created the Internet moniker, "NotSelfCreated."

And that is what irritates me most about the increasing number of developments like this one. The hailed interpreters of the law--the law, which ought to be a source of stability in any nation, not the source of change--are wittlessly rewriting creation itself. That a manufactured gender should be legally, officially interpreted as being on an identical level as the gender arising from the unaided processes of creation is both the ultimate hubris and a deception that will not be without consequences (as Jeff Goldblum's character said in "Jurassic Park", "Nature always finds a way"). If judges had the least bit of philosophical awareness, they would understand that a surgically altered man-into-woman is far more analagous to someone covered in tattoos, or with an amputation addiction, than a bona fide woman. And while the first two would certainly be grounds for legally sanctioned discrimination, the judges have chosen to drink the Cool-Aid of modern existentialism, and effectively legislate from the bench that gender is a human technology.

To end with another quote from the same character from the same film: "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me. "

On meekness

2008-09-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

Once in the seminary I debated with another seminarian about whether the imitation of Christ legimitated a "tough love" approach to being a pastor. He said that he preferred to imitate the meekness of Christ.

At the time, I was caught up in a conservativism that reveled in the angry moments of Jesus Christ--which, to be fair, are not few. Thus, hearing my friend say that he preferred the meekness of Christ left a bad taste in my mouth. Internally, I criticized him for "sentimentalizing" the Gospel, for "cherry-picking" a "nicety-nice" Jesus out of the Gospel, which I believed was a predominantly rough-and-tumble endurance test of pained and bloody charity.

EDIT: You know what? This article says it all better than I ever could.

"Jesus is Magic"? Not quite.

2008-09-15T17:22:00.001-07:00

Reference is to Sarah Silverman.

Little known fact:

By Christian reckoning, none of Jesus' miracles--not even the raising of Lazarus or his own Resurrection--are privy to him alone as the only-begotton Son of God, the Incarnate Word, or the Messiah. Even in his working of signs, Jesus' humanity is uncompromised. It is simply a humanity which is already immersed in the Beatific Vision. Every action, miracle, and wisdom of Jesus Christ is available to us, the adopted sons and daughters and God, through the grace of faith.

There is one exception and one alone: only Christ can say "I AM"--only he can speak "with authority" in interpreting and teaching the Law, because he is literally its Author.

Jesus is Magic? In the sense that Sarah Silverman is speaking, not quite. By my understanding, it is technically incorrect to speak of the signs Christ performed as if they were his alone to perform.

Essential Questions and Understandings: The Incarnation

2008-09-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

Why study the Incarnation? So what?

The Incarnation is among the doctrines that makes Christianity unique among the religions of the world. While many religions have gods that manifest themselves among human beings, only in Christianity does God himself, without reservation, lives a life that is utterly and completely human, without reservation. Jesus Christ is not a “Hercules” figure.
For Christians, the Incarnation is the condition of possibility of the fulfillment of all human desire. By placing himself in our hands, God allows us to return to his own hands. In the doctrine of the Incarnation is buried the one hope to a happiness that will not fade away.

What makes the study of the Incarnation universal?

Even though the Incarnation makes Christianity unique, the longings and hopes embodied in this teaching can be found in every community and in every individual. This is the longing for community with the absolute, for the final intimate embrace with the eternal, for a release from suffering, death, and evil (others’ and our own).
God becomes a single man in a particular year in a particular culture with a particular story, personality, name, family, and face. It is exactly for this reason that the promises he made are extended to the whole human race, which is as much a collective of particular individuals. It is exactly in our differences and uniqueness that we share a common human destiny.

What is the moral of the story (of the Incarnation)?

There is a struggle. It is the struggle between our hopelessness and God’s ever-advancing, consoling outreach. God tramples down millennia of despair to crack the concrete prison we have built for ourselves, and he grabs his beloved Humanity by its bloody roots, proving again and again that our meager resistance is no match for his love. The real moral of the story is a call to surrender, to lay down the burden of fighting a battle we cannot win, a battle against our one and only ally.
The Incarnation is a tale of the dramatic lengths God will go to return a lost and cold, tattered and broken creature to himself. It is not a story about God’s distant “compassion”, a mere “being with” so that our misery can have some company on its way to the grave; nor is it a “superhero” story in which we are passive damsels limply carried aloft by a masked being foreign and strange to us. Fundamentally it is a struggle that spans the cosmos and rages on in the human soul—the battle between meager self-servitude and meek surrender to divine life and power.

What larger concept, issue, or problem underlies the Incarnation?

At bottom, it is a dialogue between the Infinite God and his finite creation. The problem is believing the impossible: that somehow a single part of God’s creation can contain not only the whole creation, but God’s infinite self. It is as if, breaking against the shore, a single wave contained—was—the entire ocean.

What couldn’t we do if we didn’t understand the Incarnation?

If we misunderstand the Incarnation—if we indulge in any of the Christological heresies—we ultimately cut ourselves off from God. Or rather, we cut ourselves off from anything more than a partial, temporary, finite and thus unsatisfactory encounter with the divine.
Apart from the Incarnation (orthodoxly understood) our sufferings and trials are bereft of any lasting redemption. For example, if we are Apollinarians, then Jesus lacked a human soul and therefore did not truly live a human life. His example then becomes hollow, his sacrifice mere pageantry, and his death not a true death. The story of Jesus becomes a story of God showing us a greatness that is, in the end, beyond us; even though he points the way, it lies beyond a chasm and merely taunts us. If we are Arians, on the other hand, Jesus perhaps truly died, but he is himself a creature of God—a supreme angel perhaps, the first creature, but a creature nevertheless and therefore finite. If the Son is a finite creature than his death is doubly futile. First, like in Apollinarianism, he is not truly human; but second and more importantly, he is not truly God, and therefore has no more access or community with the Infinite than we ourselves do. The Incarnation is the only source for unlimited mediation between the finite Creation and the infinite God.

How is the Incarnation used and applied in the larger world?

It is first of all applied sacramentally in those Christian faiths with a sacramental dimension. It is in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist, that “God partakes of our humanity so that we might partake of his divinity”.
It is fulfilled in the unfolding of the Kingdom of Heaven into ordinary life, where the grace of charity from the sacraments manifests in choices emulating God’s self-emptying love.

What is a real-world insight about the Incarnation?

Love is a choice and love is a skill. Love that emulates the Incarnation does not require amorous feelings to fuel its action; it requires only God’s grace and our responding charity.
Real-world Christian love is always a “pay it forward” movement. One cannot give unless one has received; but once one receives, the gift burns forever.

What is the value of studying the Incarnation?

Knowing about and understanding the Incarnation gives one the understanding necessary to appreciate and respond to the gift of the Christian mysteries.It also gives one a supreme model of “kinetic” love to follow and to guide one’s life.