Chesterton on Iron Man (not really)

More exciting than stock market swings or pictures of Sarah Palin field dressing a moose is the fact that Iron Man is released on DVD today, and I've got my rental copy reserved through RedBox for a buck.

from GKC's Ballad of the White Horse:

The fires of the Great Army
That was made of iron men,
Whose lights of sacrilege and scorn
Ran around England red as morn,
Fires over Glastonbury Thorn --
Fires out on Ely Fen.

Belloc's Benevolent Monster, and Word of the Day: "farradiddles"

It so happened that one day I was riding my horse Monster in the Berkshire Hills right up above that White Horse which was dug they say by this man and by that man, but no one knows by whom; for I was seeing England, a delightful pastime, but a somewhat anxious one if one is riding a horse. For if one is alone one can sleep where one chooses and walk at one's ease, and eat what God sends one and spend what one has; but when one is responsible for any other being (especially a horse) there come in a thousand farradiddles, for of everything that walks on earth, man (not woman--I use the word in the restricted sense) is the freest and the most unhappy.

- Hilaire Belloc from "On a Winged Horse and the Exile Who Rode Him" published in On Nothing & Kindred Subjects

In Defense of Monsters

A monster was a harbinger of evil...  Today, monsters are the exact opposite. From Frankenstein to Sesame Street, we've become conditioned to believe that monsters are good things. The Cookie Monster is so proud to be a monster it's his last name for goodness sake.

- Jonah Goldberg In Defense of Monsters in NR 30 Oct 2000

Dante for Reason

Among the humiliations Wilde suffered after being sent to prison were not only compulsory silence - prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another - but deprivation of books. All he had in his cell at Pentonville, apart from his bed (a plank laid across two trestles), were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. When at last his sympathetic MP won him permission to have more books, Wilde nominated Pater's The Renaissance along with the works of Flaubert and some by Cardinal Newman. These were allowed, but only at the rate of one a week. Moved to Reading Gaol, he found himself under a more sympathetic prison governor. His book request lists after July 1896 show him developing an interest in more recently published titles, including novels by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Wilde later said that he also read Dante every day in prison and that Dante had saved his reason.

from Brenda Maddox's review of Thomas Wright's Oscar's Books

money to buy a house? you've got to be kidding.

"It's just the buyer pool is so low," [Prudential real estate agent Valerie Morrill] lamented. "Eighteen months ago, you needed $500 to buy a house." Now, all the special rates and government programs are gone, leaving buyers facing a 10 percent down payment. "You have to have money and nobody has money." (link)

I think, honey, that "buying" houses without money, through lenders afflicted with optimism and greed, is what forced many billions of dollars (provided from federal income taxes) to be used on a bailout of AIG, Fannie, and Freddie. Real estate agents fit into this moral mess somewhere, too.

families: a burning fire

The "beauty of the family must be witnessed in a concrete way," explained Cardinal Antonelli [president of the Pontifical Council for the Family], who called for "building genuine Christian families that can be a burning fire, a point of reference for all." He encouraged families characterized by "profound unity, respect of differences, generous openness to life" and "the care of the weakest."

from Zenit article

It Is Wrong to Interrupt the Generation of Human Life

My letter to the editor of the Bryan/College Station Eagle was published today as Clarifying Catholics' belief in life's beginning. The title the editor used shows that he didn't understand what I was clarifying; I was clarifying not a Catholic belief in when life begins, but in the morality of interfering with conception and gestation. Also, the references I provided were dropped. The letter as I submitted it is reproduced below, but with hyperlinks added.

Carol Biggs (Eagle, Sept. 11) stated that St Augustine did not say anything supporting delayed vivification, and accused Marcel LeJeune (Eagle, Sept. 7) of mixing up saints and being a casual reader of history. Augustine wrote in his "Enchiridion" (XXIII.86) that he did not know when a human being begins to live in the womb. But in his "On Marriage and Concupiscence" (I.17) he wrote following Aristotle's idea of life beginning sometime after conception. Augustine was not a scientist, and he did not have the understanding of genetics that we do today. Today we know that a genetically distinct human is formed at conception.

The Church has always taught, and the paragraphs of St Augustine cited above readily agree, that it is wrong to interrupt the generation of human life, from the sexual act until birth, whether by sterilization, contraception, or abortion.

It is easy to be confused about what the Catholic Church teaches when notable Catholics such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden publicly misrepresent these teachings. Thankfully the U.S. Bishops have recently issued a statement of the Church's constant teaching of respect for unborn human life. It can be found online at http://www.usccb.org/prolife/constantchurchteaching.shtml. This fact sheet succinctly clarifies the ideas many have stumbled over.

Just for completeness, here are the pertinent sections of St Augustine's writing:

from Enchiridion (XXIII.86): "... a corollary question may be most carefully discussed by the most learned men, and still I do not know that any man can answer it, namely: When does a human being begin to live in the womb?"

from On Marriage and Concupiscence (I.17): "Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or, if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born."

is it just me or does anyone else think bagpipes at a wedding is ridiculous?

from Tuesday 9/16/08 news: George Takei, Star Trek's Mr Sulu, "weds" Brad Altman at a museum in a Buddist/Native American ceremony with Koto harp music and a bagpipe procession, to the tune of music from A Chorus Line. George and Brad wrote their own vows. (full AP article by Sandy Cohen)

saving a classroom from the internet

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, has another good article at The Chronicle Review: Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind. Even at the primary education levels I see the hysterical enthusiasm most teachers have for integrating technology, including internet based textbooks, reading, and research, into the classroom. Bauerlein writes:

So let's restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students' minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can't do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.

What Does Augustine Really Say?

I've been trying to research Augustine's understanding and teaching on delayed vivification, and I've noticed that "nupt. et con. 1.15.17" is referenced all over the internet without actually quoting it. Just one monkey after another copying and pasting unquoted references. The link trail seems to lead back to a reasonably good blog, Fr Z's "What Does the Prayer Really Say?", with the article Pelosi's spokesman responds with more gobbledygook, quotes Augustine again. "nupt. et con." is St Augustine's anti-Pelagian writing On Marriage and Concupiscence and the paragraph is as follows, the highlighted portion as explicit to acceptance of Aristotle's 40/80 day vivification as I can find. If somebody has a better reference, then please leave a note in the comments.

It is, however, one thing for married persons to have intercourse only for the wish to beget children, which is not sinful: it is another thing for them to desire carnal pleasure in cohabitation, but with the spouse only, which involves venial sin. For although propagation of offspring is not the motive of the intercourse, there is still no attempt to prevent such propagation, either by wrong desire or evil appliance. They who resort to these, although called by the name of spouses, are really not such; they retain no vestige of true matrimony, but pretend the honourable designation as a cloak for criminal conduct. Having also proceeded so far, they are betrayed into exposing their children, which are born against their will. They hate to nourish and retain those whom they were afraid they would beget. This infliction of cruelty on their offspring so reluctantly begotten, unmasks the sin which they had practised in darkness, and drags it clearly into the light of day. The open cruelty reproves the concealed sin. Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or, if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born. Well, if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together by wedlock but by debauchery. But if the two are not alike in such sin, I boldly declare either that the woman is, so to say, the husband's harlot; or the man the wife's adulterer.

But in his Enchiridion XXIII.86, he basically says "I don't know":

On this score, a corollary question may be most carefully discussed by the most learned men, and still I do not know that any man can answer it, namely: When does a human being begin to live in the womb? Is there some form of hidden life, not yet apparent in the motions of a living thing? To deny, for example, that those fetuses ever lived at all which are cut away limb by limb and cast out of the wombs of pregnant women, lest the mothers die also if the fetuses were left there dead, would seem much too rash. But, in any case, once a man begins to live, it is thereafter possible for him to die. And, once dead, wheresoever death overtook him, I cannot find the basis on which he would not have a share in the resurrection of the dead.

Regardless of vivification, he viewed interrupting the process of generation of human life from the sexual act until birth as wrong (contraception or abortion).

parable of the talents?

I wonder if Nancy Pelosi (aka Theologian Barbie) could elaborate on this quote from St Augustine's City of God (XIV.24): "Some have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing."

Pet Tigers

You might think it's illegal to buy or sell an endangered tiger cub in Texas, but it isn't. For $500, you can buy an orange Bengal tiger and tie it up in your yard, no questions asked (a white tiger will cost you $5,000). It's all perfectly legal in Texas.

- A Tiger's Tale in Texas Observer

Very cool.  More people ought to consider having a pet tiger.  Texas could become like a giant Zoo Tycoon game.  I'd keep my tiger in the front yard and open up a hot dog stand.  And when one got loose it would help solve problems of obesity in Darwinian style; unless, of course, the prey was carrying a big enough gun, which would be quite likely.

On Destroying Laundry and Marriage

One consequence [of not making kids do household chores] is never more obvious than at this time of year, when hundreds of thousands of college freshmen move into their dorms and promptly begin destroying their laundry. Other studies suggest the shift may have longer-term implications for marriage and community life.

from On the Virtues of Making Your Children Do the Dishes by Sue Shellenbarger at the WSJ

civics: negative learning in higher education

When the Intercollegiate Studies Institute assessed the civic literacy of 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities in 2006 -- asking about American history and constitutionalism, mainly -- the average senior received a failing grade of 54%. Many schools even demonstrated "negative learning," with seniors performing worse than freshmen.

from Don't Know Much About History by David Feith in the WSJ

city vs country

From the Founders to Thoreau to modern Farm Aid concerts, Americans have been of two minds about the city and the country. For some, the city means progress, prosperity, and the development of mind and culture, and the country means the opposite. For others, the country means virtue, tradition, and freedom, and the city means the opposite.

Benjamin Franklin: City Slicker by Jerry Weinberger @ City Journal

not a new problem

For Bauerlein [author of The Dumbest Generation], the future of American democracy "looks dim" unless we can counter the youth culture with respect for the knowledge of those over 30.

from "On Stupidity" at chronicle.com