"Listen, people work here, it's up to you."

Jackie Mason on Political Correctness.

Hilarious and devastating.

John Allen: "Evangelical Catholicism triumphant"

Here's a good article by John Allen, I included the ending below.

In the United States, evangelical Catholics may be a minority, but an undeniably dynamic one. Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke published research in the mid-1990s suggesting that dioceses with a strong emphasis on traditional Catholic identity generate more priests. Comparing 10 dioceses identified by a cross section of experts as either “traditional” or “progressive,” they found that traditional dioceses outperformed progressive ones in terms of ordinations by a factor of about three to one.

Anecdotally, one could cite multiple eruptions of evangelical Catholic energy, from the Communion and Liberation meetings in Rimini, Italy, which annually draw more than 700,000 Catholics committed to challenging secularism, to World Youth Day, an international Catholic youth festival centered on the pope that routinely draws crowds in excess of a million and is one part liturgy and one part rock ’n’ roll. The expansion of evangelical-tinged Catholic media and an ever-growing host of Catholic blogs reflect this trend, as does the proliferation of Catholic schools and colleges marked by evangelical fervor. Former Domino’s pizza magnate Tom Monaghan is building an entire Florida town, Ave Maria, that might be described as the world’s first planned evangelical Catholic community.

In a 2004 Communio piece, Portier of the University of Dayton argued that a disproportionate share of undergraduate and graduate theology students and parish ministers are drawn from the evangelical camp.

Evangelicals may not drive other views out of the church anytime soon, but the impulse is clearly more than a top-down phenomenon radiating out from Rome.

With this one-two punch of grass-roots ferment and official support, the Vatican’s latest expressions of evangelical Catholicism feel less like the dying ripples of a wave that has already crested and more like harbingers of things to come.

As Catholics we're supposed to be evangelical as a result of being baptized. It seems that some Catholics let other Christian groups "steal" titles and attributes of the faith. I have a Catholic friend who lived in Utah for awhile. He said there were some Catholics he knew, especially among the younger folk, that had some looser morals than they should have had as a kind of reaction against pervasive Mormon strictness. Some of them literally didn't realize that the Church taught a lot of the same stuff.

That reminds me of a joke. Moses comes down the mountain with the Ten Commandments and said, "Well, I got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I talked Him down to ten. The bad news is that the prohibition on adultery still stands."

Hey, that reminds me, haven't heard from Jackie M in awhile....

Weigel on the "Ripken Ethic"

It's about baseball, not Church teaching, but that doesn't mean George Weigel's latest article doesn't qualify as some of the Best Catholic Writing 2007.

I've seen this more than twice

I have noticed that when people who are Christians cannot or do not want to engage the substance of an attack on the actions of a Christian friend that they often say things like "I don't think attacks should be made against [this person]. After all, he/she is a brother/sister Christian. We should show them respect and love."

Sure I'll buy the love part, but hold the mayo and the respect. It's always good to have respect and love for people as humans, but do I have to have respect for, say, Jesse Jackson as a Christian when he engages in extortion against other human beings? Or consider that many people have big problems with the actions of President Bush and they claim he should be tried for war crimes, etc. I myself would never say "Lay off the guy, he's a Christian, dammit!" I mean, if a Christian commits a crime he should do the time, right? And though most of the regular readers know that I'm being facetious here I use that example to accentuate the grounds on which I would not defend the President.

I have gone around and around with people on the whole issue of cutting Christians an extra break for screwing up, the practice of -- aside from any merits -- giving business people your patronage just because they go to your church, etc. I totally recoil from this type of ghetto behavior which really should be seen as alien to the Gospel.

"Simply Perverse"

Indisputable.

Excerpt:

But Rod Dreher isn't merely a non-Catholic writer. He is an anti-Catholic writer who for more than five years has gone out of his way to heap abuse on the Church and on those Catholics who did not join in his abuse.

As recently as yesterday, he took the opportunity offered by a scandal in his own Church, the Orthodox Church in America, to attack Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone by means of an attack on Bishop Gerald Frey, who retired seventeen years ago and died last week.

Just an inkstained journo doing his job and going where the story takes him? No; in the very same post, Rod writes that he "made a conscious prudential decision to keep [his] involvement with and concern in [OCA] church matters at arm's length." So scandal in the OCA is out of scope for his writing; scandal in the Catholic Church is, if no longer his bread and butter, at least good for leftovers.

Them be some mighty moldy leftovers, Tom.

He concludes this section of his post by stating "And to recognize him as, of all things, a Catholic writer, is simply perverse." I would argue that viewing Rod Dreher as still basically a "Catholic writer" is a temptation that many bloggers fall into. We'll use the comments below to track the responses to Tom's post, be they agreements or further disputations. But in my opinion, no Catholic blogger who links to Rod's blog can simply ignore the well-supported fact of his anti-Catholicism.

UPDATE: Rod states in the comments: "Before I left the Catholic Church, I was a hero to many in this same crowd, for standing up in public on matters regarding the abuse scandal, and saying what many of them said in private, over and over." Indirectly he's praising the folks at OCA News for being heroes since they are standing up in public on matters regarding the Orthodox Church abuse scandal and saying what Rod only says in private.

Funny Ebay Listing

Hat tip to my beautiful wife for sending me this this funny Ebay listing. A lady with six kids accidentally purchases a deck of Pokemon cards at the store that her kids put in the cart. So she posts it on Ebay, but not without a long piece of comedy writing in the Erma Bombeck tradition. Excerpt:

So, up for auction is an opened (they ripped open the box on the way home from the store) package of Pokemon cards. There are 44 cards total. They're in perfect condition, as I took them away from the kiddos as soon as we got home from the store. Many of them say "Energy". I tried carrying them around with me, but they didn't work. I definitely didn't have any more energy than usual. One of them is shiny. There are a few creature-like things on many of them. One is called Pupitar. Hee hee hee Pupitar! (Oh no! My kids' sense of humor is rubbing off on me!) Anyway, I don't there's anything special about any of these cards, but I'm very much not an authority on Pokemon cards. I just know that I'm not letting my kids keep these as a reward for their sneakiness.

Well, she definitely got her money back and then some. $142.51 is definitely overpriced for 44 Pokemon cards (I'm pretty sure). She had 865 watchers and around 180,000 hits on the auction page.

Allllllllright....

No more anonymous comments. Sorry, Diane.

"Wordsmith Intellectuals"

This page is part of a larger essay penned in 1998, and many of you have no doubt read/heard of it before. I can imagine Limbaugh quoting from it; it's the kind of thing that is tailor-made for conservative talkers to quote from. It rings very true, and I have met many people who fit the description of a "wordsmith intellectual" like a glove. I would estimate that over 85% of them oppose or at least greatly distrust our free market system. He first introduces the "wordsmith intellectual" and demonstrates his intrinsic value in society:

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism. This opposition to capitalism is mainly "from the left" but not solely so. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound opposed market society from the right.

The opposition of wordsmith intellectuals to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information.

He then goes on to explain the primary cause of the superiority complexes that intellectuals develop: educational institutions or as they are commonly known by ignorant capitalists, schools:

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling — the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge — spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

This leads to what Nozick calls a "plausible sociological generalization", which follows:

In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

My thoughts.

The author points out that this stated sociological generalization is "intuitively compelling". I agree that there is much truth in this generalization and it shouldn't be dismissed even though other factors are involved. For example, I'm not altogether opposed to the idea that some academics might be able to see some problems in the wider world of commerce which those immersed in it are too close to said problems to discover.

But several of the folks I know who fit this description are almost driven insane by "the system" with it's many faults and shortcomings and their knowledge of what is wrong with it. I always think to myself that assuming these friends of mine, who are really good folks, are correct they will never be able to translate their theories into practice. This is because they are used to communicating to other intellectuals in academia and cannot speak the language of those in the wider world or those involved in commercial enterprises. For all intents and purposes, they might as well be a bunch of barbershop conspiracy addicts, supposing in their small world that they are the sole guardians of the secrets of the universe.

I would also suggest that those in the world of business and commerce are much more open to the suggestions of academics and other wordsmiths, placing them on boards of all kinds and buying their publications, than the typical intellectual is open to respecting an accomplishment in the world of business made by an entrepreneur, say, for example, a college dropout like Bill Gates who in many of their minds merely "got lucky". For this suggestion I have a very small amount of anecdotal evidence, so feel free to light me on fire for suggesting it. But keep in mind that the words and actions of a businessman are very often suspected of being born of ulterior motives while it seems that those of an academic rarely are.

Readers of this blog can all probably think of many people to apply this rule to, even in the blogosphere where the wordsmith skills often of many academics is tested and tried by the dreaded free market. There are countless articles and even whole books like this one) being written which decry the sad state of blogging as dominated by amateur smithies "outside the guild", so to speak. It's all very humorous to me of course; if they fear for their full-time jobs on account of some scrub bloggers it says a lot more about them than us amateurs and answers the question regarding who are the content-providers in the employ of an industrial complex.

But to be fair, I doubt most of them are motivated by fear when they criticize; more than likely it's the horror that they could be one degree -- a hyperlink, perhaps -- away from something with terrible grammar written by an uneducated hack. The library shelf is safe. The flattened plains of the blogosphere surely comprise a horrific realm to these giants whose ankles are ripe for the teeth of a thousand chihuahuas.

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