Open Comment Thread (2015-10)
A little late on posting this. Have at it.
Wow, I said "have at it" last time. What an old, predictable coot I'm becoming.
("Becoming!?" said his kids....)
A little late on posting this. Have at it.
Wow, I said "have at it" last time. What an old, predictable coot I'm becoming.
("Becoming!?" said his kids....)
Posted by Pauli at 10/07/2015 09:01:00 AM 109 comments
Labels: Benedict Option, blogging, first amendment, music, Open Comment Thread, preach it bro, sexdugsrockandroll, whatever
The real "sexual revolution" took place in the early Church, and the one people talk about in the sixties was just an attempt to undo it. Many people who have rediscovered the restoration of the beauty and integrity of the human person are converts to the Catholic Faith, and a number of them (130 to be precise) have delivered what I think is by far the most gracious, balanced and respectful letter voicing the concerns of the Catholic faithful with regard to the Synod on the Family. Excerpt:
With respect to the bewildering diversity of contemporary opinions about the human good, especially where questions about the human body are concerned, we understood that the radical nature of the Christian claim − that God, the Son, had taken up all flesh into Himself − was at stake. Christ “revealed man to himself” (Gaudium et Spes 22). He thereby “made clear” the meaning of our humanity – and with it the meaning of the body, of sexual difference, of sexuality, marriage and the family. He did this, for example, when the Pharisees asked him about divorce, and he turned them (and his own disciples) back to “the beginning,” to human nature as it was created. What is more, he brought something new to that same humanity, bestowing on it, mercifully, a share in His own fidelity to the Church. It was not by accident, then, that early Christians were drawn to the Church through the radiant humanity of His followers, manifest, for example, in their unique attitudes toward women, children, human sexuality, and marriage. And it was not by accident that, for the same reasons, we too were drawn to the Church many centuries later.
We are keenly aware of the difficult pastoral situations that you will be confronting at the Synod, especially those concerning divorced Catholics. We also share something of the burden you carry in confronting them. Some of us have experienced the pain of divorce in our own lives; and virtually all of us have friends or close relatives who have been so afflicted. We are therefore grateful that attention is being paid to a problem that causes such grievous harm to husbands and wives, their children, and indeed the culture at large.
We are writing you, however, because of our concerns about certain proposals to change the church’s discipline regarding communion for Catholics who are divorced and civilly re-married. We are frankly surprised by the opinion of some who are proposing a “way of penance” that would tolerate what the Church has never allowed. In our judgment such proposals fail to do justice to the irrevocability of the marriage bond, either by writing off the “first” marriage as if it were somehow “dead,” or, worse, by recognizing its continued existence but then doing violence to it. We do not see how these proposals can do anything other than contradict the Christian doctrine of marriage itself. But we also fail to see how such innovations can be, as they claim, either pastoral or merciful. However well meaning, pastoral responses that do not respect the truth of things can only aggravate the very suffering that they seek to alleviate. We cannot help but think of the abandoned spouses and their children. Thinking of the next generation, how can such changes possibly foster in young people an appreciation of the beauty of the insolubility of marriage?
"Today, there are those who say that marriage is out of fashion….They say that it is not worth making a life-long commitment, making a definitive decision, ‘forever,’ because we do not know what tomorrow will bring. I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, I ask you to swim against the time; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes you are incapable of responsibility, that believes you are incapable of true love." - World Youth Day, 2013
Posted by Pauli at 10/07/2015 08:44:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: catholic, conversions, marriage, Pope Francis, Synod on the Family
I liked this article on the Synod on the Family from CNN. It's short and to the point. Here's a cliff notes summary:
1. Will the church change its position on same-sex marriage?
No.
2. Will the church change its teaching on birth control or abortion?
No.
3. What about euthanasia?
No.
4. So will this meeting change anything at all?
Possibly.
5. If the synod does recommend any changes, when will they take effect?
It's hard to say.
Posted by Pauli at 10/06/2015 10:19:00 AM 4 comments
Labels: catholic, Pope Francis, Synod on the Family
Hopefully Pauli will indulge me in this little exploration of one of the weirder things I've run across recently and not, believe it or not, said or instigated by Rod Dreher.
No, I'm talking about Disqus' increasingly dreaded Terminator "Detected As Spam" filter.
I actually tried Disqus myself some months ago before just throwing in the towel, thinking, well, maybe it's just my pugnacious writing style (I know, I'm probably being way too hard on myself). But when I started asking around, I was surprised to find, at least in my circle of friends and acquaintances, that I was in the majority, not the minority, including a few who ran their own Web sites and had previously tried to use Disqus as a comment manager.
The main thing that infuriated both ordinary commenters and Webmasters who utilized Disqus alike was its crazy positive feedback learning algorithm (don't ask me what that means). In other words, it uses its own automatically marking someone's comment as spam as a rule that reinforces its automatically marking someone's next comment as spam as a rule that reinforces its automatically marking someone's next comment as spam as a rule that reinforces... You get the idea. Those acquaintances who ran their own little sites finally had to kill the Disqus beast because it was costing them viewers irritated at their treatment, not to mention the time wasted digging into their logs to un-spam Disqus victims.
Disqus actually has a page where its victims can petition for relief, but, as one might expect, it reads like an early draft of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Joseph Heller's Catch-22, mainly because Disqus uses its filter on that page, too, which means, yes, you guessed it, penitents wishing to be absolved of their spamnation so as to avoid further spamnation only find their petitions marked as spam, thus - yes, furthering their spamnation.
Overall, this process is not unlike dealing with too large a population of medical patients by giving everyone something marginally lethal in order to reduce the problem to manageable proportions.
Am I just running with the wrong crowd? Or have you or your friends had a run-in with Disqus, too?
Thank God for Pauli using Google, who in its severest moments only asks if one is a robot.
An unfortunate "BenOp" community member? |
I don’t want to get dragged into an extremely bitter fight that has way, way more layers than I am capable of understanding from this far away.
Posted by Keith at 10/04/2015 05:56:00 PM 10 comments
Labels: Benedict Option, BenOp, child sexual abuse, Doug Wilson, Rod Dreher, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (TM)