A "revolution in the self-understanding of the Catholic Church"

George Weigel on Pope Francis. Excerpt:

He is a man of broad culture, well-read theologically but more given to literary references and illustrations than to scholarly theological citations in his preaching and catechesis. Thus one of his recent daily Mass sermons praised Robert Hugh Benson’s early 20th-century apocalyptic novel, “Lord of the World,” for raising important cautions against dictatorial utopianism, or what the pope called “adolescent progressivism.”

Pope Francis also grasps the nature of the great cultural crisis of post-modernity: the rise of a new Gnosticism, in which everything in the human condition is plastic, malleable and subject to human willfulness, nothing is simply given, and human beings are reduced, by self-delusion, legal definition or judicial dictums to mere bundles of desires.

And the conclusion:

As he wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium,” Pope Francis is not a man of “political ideology.” He knows that “business is a vocation and a noble vocation,” if ordered to the common good and the empowerment of the poor. When he criticizes the social, economic or political status quo, he does so as a pastor who is “interested only in helping all those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking that is more humane, noble, and fruitful.”

Pope Francis is a revolutionary. The revolution he proposes, however, is not a matter of economic or political prescription, but a revolution in the self-understanding of the Catholic Church: a re-energizing return to the pentecostal fervor and evangelical passion from which the church was born two millennia ago, and a summons to mission that accelerates the great historical transition from institutional-maintenance Catholicism to the Church of the New Evangelization.

I agree with Weigel's summary.

The Children's Crusade

Just about anything I could write would subtract from the sheer joy and magic of this narrative, so, as we aspiring scholastigators like to say, just read the whole thing:

Hard Sell: Going door-to-door for Obamacare

If you're drinking something in front of your computer, swallow and put it down. If you have a cold, blow your nose first.

Premature Intellectual Ejaculation (PIE)

If you're a narcissistic charismatic writer prone to spontaneous blogging emissions requiring you to immediately follow up in comments with six (6) or more corrective NFR's to make your original point compelling or even intelligible, maybe because your reader isn't reading you closely enough, perhaps because they're low in openness, or maybe just because you yourself are guilty of disingenuously [e]liding so basic a fact about your own beliefs and work with an accusation against his reading comprehension, you may be suffering from a chronic case of Premature Intellectual Ejaculation, or PIE.

When your brain spontaneously starts that windup toward "uuunnnNNHHH!!!" and your hands get itchy on the keypad envisioning how Downton Abbey is really a metaphor for a French cassoulet which is really a metaphor for Dante's Divine Comedy which is really a metaphor for your own gluttonous eating like pigs in shit - STOP.

Just stop. Stop, run some cold water over your head, and see if it is possible to use it for some semblance of systematic rational processing for a change rather than just as a warehouse for your limbic, Komodo dragon-like carnal appetites.

Premature Intellectual Ejaculation is curable, but it requires a specific, disciplined regular exercise we commonly call thinking. However, if you do these thinking exercises faithfully, you will find yourself far less likely to impetuously and embarrassingly blurt out something like how The Apostles were the original Smurfs and your writing as a result will probably require far fewer panicked NFRs to correct someone else's alleged failure to read your professional writing closely enough.

Premature Intellectual Ejaculation (PIE). It is curable, but you must first put your reader's satisfaction ahead of your own spontaneous urges to emit.

"He was close; I could smell the cookies."

I know. It's so wrong. But so funny.



Awwww, the wittle baby penguin....

Now in FULL COLOR!

Amazing stuff.

Friday on the bus with Merle and Toby

No, not a euphemism for vomiting. 

But in honor of Will Wilkinson's "graf"  (whoever Will Wilkinson is), as breathlessly brought to us by Our Hero, I thought I'd add a little informal rendering of some low-openness music for today:

Couple of fine baritone voices there.  I don't know who the guitar player is, but he's pretty good, too.

Ruthie Leming: Low in openness

Our favorite backbiting coward Rod Dreher, fresh off the sting of having to take his kids to see the Duck Dynasty Robertsons instead of vice versa, turns to writing expert Will Wilkinson to once again drag his dead sister Ruthie's name through the mud now that she is safely beyond being able to talk back to him or otherwise stand up for herself

This Wilkinson graf, I think, explains why my sister had a permanent chip on her shoulder about something as trivial as my food preferences:

     My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel as merenostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?

Well, there you have it, expert writer Will Wilkinson's best guess - until the next random opportunity presents itself.

Only You

Mark Shea Uses JFK Assassination Anniversary to Judge Baby Boomers

Actually, it's the comments which are more illuminating.

Hat tip to Erin "Amen" Manning, namesake half of Rod Dreher's Evans-Manning award for civil commentary.

[caption contest]