On a Related Note to My Last Post

Posting has been pretty light because I've been really busy around here. Anyway, the folks at Lutheran Satire have made a video which was too good not to share--and it ties in to my last post.

Enjoy:

Monsignor Pope on the Spiritual Works of Mercy

Monsignor Charles Pope has a nice reflection on his blog about the spiritual works of mercy. Excerpt:

We tend to reduce charity to caring for people’s bodies, forgetting the needs of their souls. Indeed this oversight often proves self-defeating, since many of the corporal works of mercy become necessary because of defects of the soul. Some (not all) are imprisoned, poor, hungry, thirsty, naked, and so forth as a result of deep spiritual issues in their lives or in the wider culture. Yet so easily we overlook these spiritual issues....

Sadly, we often consider that our care for the poor has been accomplished by having provided clothing, shelter, or food. It is astonishing that we almost never even ask them to come to church or to listen to a sermon. In the old days at the old gospel mission downtown, or the Salvation Army soup kitchen, or the Catholic cafeteria and shelter, the poor who filed in were often expected to listen to a sermon, receive some Christian instruction, and surely to pray before the distribution of the meal or before bed at the shelter. This is rarely true today and most Catholic outreaches to the poor are almost indistinguishable from those of the government or nonbelievers. I pray you know of exceptions and will inform me of them, but the general pattern is very secular and corporal in its focus....

We think we are done when we have handed out the Christmas baskets. But where will most of the poor, whom we have blessed with this food and these toys, be going to church for the Christmas feast? Most of them, I can tell you from experience, are not going anywhere; they don’t belong to any church. And this is often part of the problem. Quite simply, many of them are disconnected from the wider community including the Church.

One thing which the old Baltimore (or Penny) Catechism did nicely was emphasize the fact that we are creature possessed of both body and soul. It follows that we must care for both body and soul--but the more important of the two is the soul. Thus, the spiritual works of mercy are the more important set of works. Feeding a hungry man and quenching his thirst may help him to live another day in this life; but offering him correction and counsel can help to sustain his soul into the next life.

Obviously, both are needed--but if we only offer food and drink and clothing and shelter, without offering community or fraternal correction or the consolations of faith, then we are showing kindness but not really love.

On the Importance of Evangelization

Rebecca Hamilton has a nice post about the importance of evangelizing:

The memorial service was a crowded event, the building filled to overflowing. I walked out, gripping my husband’s hand, hoping that in those last extremities my old friend had finally turned to God. Did he go to hell?

I said it aloud when we got back to the car. Was he dead, really, eternally dead and gone to hell? My passionate, crazy friend — had he doomed himself to eternal death?

My husband was silent for a moment. Then, he reached out and squeezed my hand.
Probably, he said.

I changed again after that. My friend’s death shook me out of my somnambulance. I realized that being quiet about Jesus was the cruelest thing I could do to the people around me.

There is much to like in the Hon. Mrs. Hamilton's post. She hits on a few points which I have made in the past, in particular concerning evangelizing as opposed to merely proselytizing, and of putting party loyalty over one's Faith. This latter becomes especially damning when neither major party (and few if any minor ones) party is particularly friendly to genuine Christianity, though one is more openly hostile towards it (and the other possibly more cynical about it).

On the other hand, there is more than one way in which we can evangelize. To literally tells people about Jesus (of better, to do our best to show them in our lives) is of course important, even necessary. It is not, however, sufficient. The simple outreach which attempts to introduce people to Jesus is important, but then again so can be catechesis.

The goal is not merely to get people to proclaim Jesus as Lord, but to go the step further of getting them into right relationships with God, man, and self. Just helping a person to become "Christian" is good, helping them to "find Jesus" is good. But helping them to understand and then embraces the fullness of His teachings is also important, and can help to avoid what I might call the "accidental scandal."

Scandal is that which causes another to stumble, be it stumbling into sin, or stumbling out of the Church. Accidental scandal, for lack of a better phrase, is that which we cause by our own ignorance which then causes another to fall into sin; and falling into sin, to perhaps then embrace the sin, then deny the Faith, and finally to deny Christ. I think we manage that well enough without neglecting catechesis, through probably well-meaning but almost certainly misguided attempts at "pastoral care."

The road seems innocuous enough. First a "lesser evil" is tolerated, then encouraged, and then even embraced as a means of avoiding what was as best as could be discerned the greater evil. But then this "lesser evil" takes seed, festers, and grows; it is not uprooted, and so it takes hold, and while we seem to master teh greater evil we fall to the lesser one, which then leads to some other evil. As Chesterton warned, that road leads down and down.

A Few Good Links (vol. 17)

For some reason it's more difficult for me to post on Mondays on my current schedule. I don't know why, but it is.

1. Professor Robert P. George is leading a group of seven people who have offered to take 100 lashes each in solidarity with Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger who was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in jail for violating sharia. The offered to take these lashes so that he wouldn't have to.
2. My co-blogger will probably be disappointed to learn that the video of the Danish archer is apparently more about audience gullibility than actual archery skill.
3. An interesting topic which I have discussed before is back on the blogosphere (kind of): Edward Feser and the Nicene Guys both discuss Monogenism and Polygenism and the question of human origins.
4. One problem with the modern view of the world is that it conflates vocation with career. The two are not identical.
5. President Obama continues his war against the middle class. Really, a war against anyone who didn't vote for him, which is in some ways actually worse than simply a war against the middle class, since that one is at least not in principle personal.
6. Vintage Christianity, summarized. I disagree with his assessment of how the Reformers went back to how the Church was in its earliest days (some may have thought that's what they were doing), but the rest is a good read.
7. There's nothing wrong with the "seamless garment" metaphor as applied to Catholic social teaching, but it is unfortunately used with some frequency as a cover for hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty.

As always, I would lie to revisit some of these links--but I probably won't!

Marriage and the Clash of Worldviews

Another day, another story for the "clash of orthodoxies" file, if that is a fair label (some so-called "orthodoxies" hardly involve right thinking or right belief). This time the item in question comes from Slate via Business Insider, and yes it's a little bit old, but it's been making rounds recently for some reason. It is yet another of those articles in which much of the analysis is correct (albeit slightly distorted), and is basically a good case for not doing what the article urges us to do: in this case, adopt similar attitudes towards marriage (and let's be honest, sex) as the Dutch.

I mean to give some credit where credit is due: the author does identify some real cultural problems in America. One of these really is the fixation on marriage as the be-all end-all. Not everybody is meant to be married: this is a true statement, as the writer of this article notes: "I am not here arguing against marriage, but against marriage as a rite of passage, against the assumption of all little girls that they will one day be married in a white dress on a green lawn." Indeed, marriage is a vocation, and a highly important one. From the standpoint of human society, marriage and parenting are the two most important of all vocations--but yet there are some single vocations which are more important and necessary still (many of which are also in decline in America and more broadly in the West).

The writer, Katie Roiphe, argues that if we adopt a dutch attitude towards marriage, fewer people will care about marriage. She cites this as a good thing, I consider it a very bad thing. To quote from Miss Roiphe:

"What would it mean to end the centuries-long American fixation on traditional family structures? Would we be able to look at families living outside of convention without as much judgment, as much toxic condescension?... 

If we woke up one morning and discovered that in America marriage was suddenly regarded as a choice, a way, a possibility, but not a definite and essential phase of life, think how many people would suddenly be living above board, think of the stress removed, the pressures lifted, the stigmas dissolving... 

Whatever one thinks about the institution, the truth is that marriage is increasingly not the way Americans are living. If one goes strictly by the facts—that the majority of babies born to women under 30 are born to single mothers, or that about 51 percent of American adults are married—one has to admit that marriage can’t be taken for granted, assumed as a rite of passage, a towering symbol of our way of life. But somehow this hasn’t dimmed our solid sense of marriage as the American normal. 

If we suddenly stopped being in thrall to the rigid, old-fashioned ideal of marriage, we could stop worrying about low marriage rates and high divorce rates. We could stop worrying about single mothers and the decline of marriage as an institution, especially in the lower middle class, and the wasteful industry of wedding planning." 

Yes, much of this would probably result from Americans' no longer caring about marriages. The problem is, much of this stuff is actually healthy for a society. The decline of the Traditional family--nucleus one man and one woman wed for life, but also including the earlier decline of the larger extended family--spells much mischief for society. The social stigmas have at times been taken too far--but that they can be taken so far implies that they have a rightful place.

We should as a society discourage adultery, fornication, polyamory, polygamy, and worse forms of sexual degeneracy. We should not encourage women to go become single mothers--or rather, we should acknowledge that this is often the gritty reality (inasmuch as the alternative, abortion, is far worse), but we should not encourage women to actively seek out this "lifestyle." And the high divorce rate should be a cause of concern, even as it is declining (largely as a result of fewer people getting married to begin with).

The creator of XKCD, Randall Munroe, is probably not a conservative, but occasionally he articulates the conservative argument for such customs as "stigmas" and "taboos."

The problem, at the end of the day, is that there are ultimately only two "right" ways to live: faithfully in a marriage, or singly celibate. Any alternative is what was once called "sin," and now has been--as any evil act often is--euphemized as "alternative lifestyles" or "lifestyle choices." A rose by any other name--but these alternative choices are not so much comparable to roses as to the thorns. Ultimately, those who engage in them are hurting themselves, their "partners," and all-too-often, society at large (if only on a small scale).

----
As an ironic aside, she also writes this line: "We could instead focus on actual relationships, on intimacies, on substance over form." Um, substance = form + matter--perhaps this is the source of so much of her confusion?

Chesterton on Suicide

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes -- for it makes even crimes impossible.

GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy

I know that there are a number of people who are grieving over Robin Williams suicide--it seems that every major celebrity who dies, and especially who dies early, invokes a bit of national mourning. It is a tragedy, and depression is an unfortunate thing to struggle against.

With that said, there is something far, far worse than depression even, something for which depression is at most a symptom, though something which may exist without depression. That is despair. There is the suicidal depression which preys upon the mind and the emotions, but it pales next to that deep and dark despair which preys upon the very soul. The man who is depressed may yet find hope: but he who finally despairs has rejected hope and so is lost.

Contemplating Switching Blog Platforms

We only launched this blog a little under a year ago, and now we are considering moving it again. We both like the blogger interface, but it would be nice to divest ourselves of Google to the largest extent possible. Part of this is because of the while tracking thing: there are a number of "service" providers (meaning, provides browser, email, blogs, etc) which do not track and collect information to the extent that Google does. Furthermore, Google likes to see itself as being on the forefront of the progressive movement--both with its calls to "expand gay rights. This means on the one hand legalizing "gay marriage" and thus further throwing the institution of marriage into disarray, and on the other ultimately causing any actual rights which come into conflict with this to contract.

Second, we have suspicions that Google may have played some part in the dismissal of Eich as CEO of the company which he helped to found over his one-time support of traditional marriage. They obviously did not publicize this, but size the lion's share of Mozilla's profits come via Google, and given that Google has been very outspoken in its support of "gay marriage" and other supposed "gay rights," that they played a part (and a significant one at that) in Eich's ouster would come as no surprise.

We'll keep blogging here for now, especially while we look for some other provider to blog with. We are leaning towards WordPress though we haven't made any final decisions yet. Whatever are their opinions of "gay marriage" and "gay rights" and for that matter abortion as opposed to religious freedom, the rights of conscience, and the right to life, they have largely kept those opinions to themselves.

Speaking just for myself, I will probably have to keep a gmail account to continue using Google drive, which is unfortunate but borderline necessary, in particular with my career. I prefer Dropbox because of the fact that they are not Google, but it seems like its increasingly difficult to get by with just Dropbox. I don't know of their corporate values, but in some ways this is better than with Google. To not know means that they are keeping politics out of their supposedly non-political organization, unlike Google. However, I currently have multiple gmail accounts, in large art because I have to have one to write this blog, which is itself a "semi-anonymous" blog, meaning that I have a second one for "work" purposes; I suspect my co-blogger can say the same.  Suffice it to say that I am also looking into alternative (though reliable) and free email providers--gmx looks promising, as do these folks, though I want to try out their services before actually recommending them.

Leave us a line with your thoughts and suggestions.

Quick Link: What Am I Not Supposed to Judge

"Judge not, lest you be judged; condemn not, lest you be condemned." Yes, but what am I not supposed to judge, since elsewhere I read: "By their fruits you shall know them"? The answers might be: a person's "heart"/intentions; the state of his soul; his circumstances and struggles; or his knowledge of the sinfulness of his actions. On the other hand, the action itself must absolutely by "judged," as in evaluated: this is a good action, this is a bad action, this was a good deed, this was a vile sin. A man's "works" are his visible fruits, and we are instructed to pay at least some attention to these.

Quick Link: Jennifer Fulwiler on Building a Community

Lots of good stuff in this post. I especially appreciate how she's noted that you have to make sacrifices to make a community work, and that this is the kind of thing which is not instant, but instead takes many years (nine in her case):

Five years into our marriage, I felt like this whole community-building endeavor was a failure. Only my mom lived near us, and while she was a tremendous help, she was also busy with her full-time job. We’d been members of our parish for a couple of years, but I hadn’t really met many people. Any kind of socializing was difficult with two toddlers and a baby, and I didn’t even know my neighbors. What I didn’t understand then is that true communities don’t pop up overnight — or even over the span of a couple of years. It takes a lot of time, but the wait is well worth it.

She notes that not everybody can do this--it may be that we're included in "not everybody." But with a little bit of luck, at least a part of the family and a few good friends will live closeby. Community-building requires sacrifice, but it's well worth the effort.

Five years into our marriage, I felt like this whole community-building endeavor was a failure. Only my mom lived near us, and while she was a tremendous help, she was also busy with her full-time job. We’d been members of our parish for a couple of years, but I hadn’t really met many people. Any kind of socializing was difficult with two toddlers and a baby, and I didn’t even know my neighbors. What I didn’t understand then is that true communities don’t pop up overnight — or even over the span of a couple of years. It takes a lot of time, but the wait is well worth it. - See more at: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2013/07/how-we-built-our-village.html#comment-176861

Five years into our marriage, I felt like this whole community-building endeavor was a failure. Only my mom lived near us, and while she was a tremendous help, she was also busy with her full-time job. We’d been members of our parish for a couple of years, but I hadn’t really met many people. Any kind of socializing was difficult with two toddlers and a baby, and I didn’t even know my neighbors. What I didn’t understand then is that true communities don’t pop up overnight — or even over the span of a couple of years. It takes a lot of time, but the wait is well worth it. - See more at: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2013/07/how-we-built-our-village.html#comment-176861

Five years into our marriage, I felt like this whole community-building endeavor was a failure. Only my mom lived near us, and while she was a tremendous help, she was also busy with her full-time job. We’d been members of our parish for a couple of years, but I hadn’t really met many people. Any kind of socializing was difficult with two toddlers and a baby, and I didn’t even know my neighbors. What I didn’t understand then is that true communities don’t pop up overnight — or even over the span of a couple of years. It takes a lot of time, but the wait is well worth it. - See more at: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2013/07/how-we-built-our-village.html#comment-176861

Five years into our marriage, I felt like this whole community-building endeavor was a failure. Only my mom lived near us, and while she was a tremendous help, she was also busy with her full-time job. We’d been members of our parish for a couple of years, but I hadn’t really met many people. Any kind of socializing was difficult with two toddlers and a baby, and I didn’t even know my neighbors. What I didn’t understand then is that true communities don’t pop up overnight — or even over the span of a couple of years. It takes a lot of time, but the wait is well worth it. - See more at: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2013/07/how-we-built-our-village.html#comment-176861

Five years into our marriage, I felt like this whole community-building endeavor was a failure. Only my mom lived near us, and while she was a tremendous help, she was also busy with her full-time job. We’d been members of our parish for a couple of years, but I hadn’t really met many people. Any kind of socializing was difficult with two toddlers and a baby, and I didn’t even know my neighbors. What I didn’t understand then is that true communities don’t pop up overnight — or even over the span of a couple of years. It takes a lot of time, but the wait is well worth it. - See more at: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2013/07/how-we-built-our-village.html#comment-176861

Epic RCIA Curriculem

A friend tipped me off to this epic RCIA program. I wish I had more free time so that I could a) do something like this myself and then b) look into implementing it at my own parish. It's missing a few things, unless the section titled "That Catholic Thing" covers all the practical matters of the liturgical year etc (to be fair, that is probably me lest favorite topic for all of RCIA), and maybe whole sections for things like the seven deadly sins and the sins which cry out to heaven for vengeance; or the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit (which I suppose can be covered briefly with the section on the Holy Spirit).  I would personally probably try to end with the Beatitudes revisited, but this would require another week.

My thought about RCIA in general is that it's too short, that there needs to be more weeks to cover everything. Once upon a time, it was a three year process; now it goes barely 2/3 of a year.

Still, this is a very impressive looking curriculem, though it would be difficult to implement is run by volunteers. Difficult, incidentally, does not mean "impossible" or "not worth the effort." I also think that not everybody would be able to keep up with such a program, but it would be a nice "advanced RCIA/adult catechesis" course. Such is sorely lacking in most parishes, though I'm at one of the better ones in the diocese.

Where to Go Into Exile

Catholic Vote has put together a "top 5" list of locations which mostly consists of micronations for Catholics to go into exile. We're not there yet, and I'm thinking that it's a little more complicated to do than this anyway, but it's still entertaining. I hope that it won't come to that in my lifetime, but I am skeptical of the "progress" which runs rampant in the world, not merely the technical "progress" which ruins the beauty of the citysckapes and countrysides, but the moral/social "progress" which has destroyed families and subverted actual rights in favor of a variety of privileges, conveniences, and "lifestyles."