The Highest Virtue

Human life is best lived self-forgetfully. Looking for happiness in yourself is and will ultimately be a path of disappointment. Rather, happiness comes as a result of forgetting about yourself and living for other people. Human persons live and were created for relationships, and relationships only happen with other persons - no relationship happens alone. Realizing this fact and then putting it into practice is the task of the Christian.

Also new for New Hampshire

A New Bishop!

What's this guy's deal?

Time will tell

Great News for New Hampshire

No more John Lynch!

Hope

I hope to avoid a homily about the attacks on the United States at Mass tomorrow.
Yep.

Pray for peace

The President's Speech

A speech about a plan to save the plan that was a plan to save the plan to save the planet.

Blah, blah, blah, spend more money, blah, blah, blah, tax cuts, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, small business, blah blah blah, health care, blah, getting back on our feet, blah blah, blah.

Republicans

The debate was, perhaps unsurprisingly, disappointing.

The worst part, and the part that most clearly depicted the insanity of the party, was when the entire room applauded the number of people executed in Texas.

Rick Santorum lost my vote for sure by calling other debaters "isolationist". Rick Perry is a blowhard and seems to confuse himself in the midst of responding to questions. Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman are charismatic folks and seem to be more intelligent than the media favorites, but there's something missing from their presentation - I can't see either one of them being President. Maybe it's because MSNBC put them on the far side of the screen. Michelle Bachmann does not seem to have any substance. She hasn't responded to the majority of the questions she has been asked. Ron Paul is occasionally on target but seems to be trying to say too much in each of his 30 second allotments. Also, he's getting really old, and seems much too much like a cantankerous grandfather.

The best part of the debate was Newt Gingrich scolding the hosts for trying to incite disagreement amongst the participants. He was completely on target, and the media should be ashamed of themselves for being so obviously in the tank for the Democrats. Newt seemed to be in good form all night, having the most coherent and intelligent responses to the questions posed by the hosts, and also demonstrating a good deal of civility in addressing the other candidates. But of course, he has absolutely no chance.

I think I'm going to vote for Herman Cain or John Huntsman in the primaries unless someone else shows up with more gravitas.

A Difference in Emphasis

An interesting note about wikipedia.

If you search Rick Santorum's wikipedia page, and scroll through his biography, you will see a section on his "political ideology" - the implication being that he is an ideologue, one who tries to impose his vision of reality on the world.

IF you search Nancy Pelosi's wikipedia page, you will find the corresponding section titled "Political positions". See, Nancy Pelosi isn't an ideologue. She simply takes positions on issues.

There's a host of other absurdities but this is a great example of why the internet can insidiously affect our judgment. If you look at these pages in isolation, you probably wouldn't notice the difference in emphasis, but it is significant and it will affect the way we understand these characters.

Around and Around

"The second point on which I touched earlier consists in noting that in philosophy a straight line is not usually the shortest road. The great philosophic problems yield to conquest only when they are treated as the Hebrews treated Jericho- by approaching them on a curved path, marching around and around them in concentric circles which become ever tighter and more suggestive."

- Jose Ortega y Gasset, "What is Philosophy?"

One Effect of Holiness

Courtesy of Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil":

But to all that moving experience there had been a shadow (a dark lining to the silver cloud), insistent and plain, which disconcerted her. In the sober gaiety of Sister St. Joseph, and much more in the beautiful courtesy of the Mother Superior, she had felt an aloofness which oppressed her. They were friendly and even cordial, but at the same time they held something back, she knew not what, so that she was conscious that she was nothing but a casual stranger. There was a barrier between her and them. They spoke a different language not only of the tongue but of the heart. And when the door was closed upon her she felt that they had put her out of their minds so completely, going about their neglected work again without delay, that for them she might never have existed. She felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit after which with all her soul she hankered. She felt on a sudden alone as she had never felt alone before. That was why she had wept.

No thanks

I don't have a Facebook page, for various reasons. I did in the past. But I signed in today to see what I was missing. Eerily, the site remembers everything about you. Somewhere on Facebook's servers is information about myself that I cannot delete, cannot remove. In any event, signing in today I was immediately overwhelmed. Facebook seems like a sure-fire recipe for social anxiety disorder.

The Avett Brothers...

Are my new favorite band. Check out the lyrics to their excellent song "Ill with Want"

I am sick with wanting and it's evil and it's daunting
How I let everything I cherish lay to waste
I am lost in greed, this time it's definitely me
I point fingers but there's no one there to blame

A need for something, now let me break it down again
A need for something but not more medicine

I am sick of wanting and it's evil how it's got me
And every day is worse than the one before
The more I have the more I think I'm almost where I need to be
If only I could get a little more

A need for something, now let me break it down again
A need for something but not more medicine

Something has me, oh something has me
Acting like someone I don't wanna be
Something has me, oh something has me
Acting like someone I know isn't me
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed

Temporary is my time, ain't nothing on this world that's mine
Except the will I found to carry on
Free is not your right to chose
It's answering what's asked of you
To give the love you find until it's gone

A need for something, now let me break it down again
A need for something but not more medicine

Something has me, oh something has me
Acting like someone I don't wanna be
Something has me, oh something has me
Acting like someone I know isn't me
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed

Awesome

hahah

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/273444/hell-you-people-jonah-goldberg

hilarious stuff:

Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists.

No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called) a “bunch of terrorists” on the day Giffords returned to the Congress. Would the mainstream media notice or care? Would Meet the Press debate whether this raises “troubling questions” about the White House’s sensitivity? Would Andrea Mitchell find some way to blame Sarah Palin for Dick Cheney’s viciousness? Would Keith Olbermann explode like a mouse subjected to the Ramone’s music in Rock and Roll High School? Something inside me hidden away shouts, “Hell yes they would!”

Check the whole article out.

Can anyone tell me...

what's the deal with Sarah Palin?

Is she running for President or is she simply FNC media darling, forever?

Because the Technocrats Demand It

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced new guidelines in Washington Monday requiring health insurance plans beginning on or after August 1, 2012 to cover several women’s preventive services, including birth control and voluntary sterilization.

According to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the decision is a part of the Affordable Care Act’s move to stop problems before they start. “These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need,” she said in a news release.

Find birth control morally objectionable? Subscribe to a health care plan that used to charge individuals for it's use? No more! You will now pay for everyone's birth control. Freedom of conscience in America is on its way out.

For a laugh

Leo Strauss once called "the pursuit of happiness" the "joyless quest for joy."

A Temptation for Political Man

I'm reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters for the first time. The Screwtape Letters is the story of an "under-secretary of a department" of Hell (Screwtape) giving advice to a "junior tempter," who is working on the corruption of a young man. Lewis's intention, of course, is that in learning of the tactics of Hell, we will also learn how to defend against them.

As a politically-minded fellow, I am struck early on by a passage where Screwtape is talking about introducing a temptation to instrumentalize faith:

Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the 'cause', in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

This is a temptation of which the political man, the man concerned with worldly life, should be particularly aware. The devil can corrupt our concern for justice by encouraging us to confuse it with our final end or our summum bonum. We mistake the trees for the forest, or choose the part over the whole. This is a temptation in all things, but political life, with its focus on justice in this world, is particularly prone to encouraging this mistake. The point is we need to put first things first, and the first thing is not politics but our relationship with God Himself. If we are not in right-relation with God, we cannot be in right-relation with our fellows. In being in right-relation with God, we are necessarily in right-relation with our fellows.

The triumph of justice, a social virtue, is ultimately dependent on each one of us personally having our priorities straight. This is not to say that this is something we do alone; nothing human can be done "alone" - this is a Liberal (enlightenment) myth. What it does say is that the line of good and evil and ultimately justice runs through each and every human heart. We cannot forget this in participating in our worldly affairs. The problem is not "out there" in some abstraction or social construct - it is in our hearts.

The New Atheists

"...what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ."

- Peter Augustine Lawler

Over-quote week

Peter Lawler is my Hero

And he thinks exactly like I do with respect to beer, wine, hard alcohol, and coffee! On beer:

We drink beer to loosen up, to clamp down on our inhibitions. Then we anxious autonomy freaks can open up to others, be conversational, tell the truth with uncalculated abandon. Bars, of course, are among the most conversational places in America. And beer, we all know, is the mean between the extremes of hard liquor (that will get you too drunk to talk and cause you to lose any control over your moods and so might make you more solitary and melancholic than ever) and not drinking at all (which is a sure sign of a lack of convivality and openness to the joys of life).

and on wine:

Wine, in my opinion, does facilitate the social virtues about as well as beer. It was an excellent replacement for the martini (which tastes ridiculous and gets you drunk fast) among sophisticates such as us BIG THINKERS. So I endorse wine as long as it's fairly cheap. The movie's passionate argument against Merlot, to me, is an argument for it: It's impossible to screw Merlot up, and that can't be said of even Cabernet.

And finally coffee:

What about coffee? Well, I really like it and drink a lot of it. Some say I don't believe in progress. But who can deny that there's been remarkable progress in the coffee readily available to Americans over the last generation? STARBUCKS coffee is swill. But there are many better kinds of designer, grind-your-own bean coffee everywhere now. And coffee shops that serve all kinds of special roasts even in the sticks of our country. ...

Coffee is certainly the beverage for philosophers. Wine might lead some to speak the truth, but often in a stupid, blowhard way. Coffee, take it from me, is the more EROTIC beverage.

July 4, 2011

The report ['The Seventh Quarterly Report'] was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

But what of the psychological effect!?!

What's Most True in Marx

"Capitalism makes human beings miserably anxious by turning every human purpose, except those that serve productivity, into a meaningless whim."

Peter Augustine Lawler writes this in the essay "Human Dignity and Higher Education Today" which can be found in his new book. It's an interesting thought. As a culture, we have no room, or at least make no room, for leisure. Heck, maybe we're not even sure what leisure is - it's probably a waste of time. The point of life is to work and to acquire. Continual acquisition, and the resultant change it brings, is probably the end we seek. Whatever we have, it's not good enough. This holds true for material things, but also social things like prestige or notoriety. How do we rediscover, as a culture, the value of leisure time? What is the right balance?