Excellence Round-Up

(1)Archbishop Chaput's very moving piece about liturgy: "Glorify God By Your Life":

Our worship is an icon of heavenly things, a window through which the reality and destiny of our lives is glimpsed. And the heavenly liturgy is the key to the universality of the Church’s mission. In the Catholic vision of history, God’s plan of salvation is destined to culminate in a cosmic liturgy in which all creation gives praise and glory to God, the Creator of all things. We have a foretaste of the liturgical consummation of history every time we celebrate the liturgy on earth.

This truth should transform the way we worship. It should move us with gratitude that our God would grant us the privilege of joining the angels and saints who worship before him. It should make us strive for liturgies that are reverent and beautiful, and that point our hearts and minds to things above.

This truth should also change the way we think about our public witness in this culture. We’re called to testify to Jesus Christ, to make his teachings known, to fight against all that violates God’s holiness and justice. And we need to understand our mission in the light of God’s larger plan, conceived before the foundation of the world.

The ultimate purpose of our witness is to prepare the way for the cosmic liturgy in which all humanity will adore the Creator. Our work takes part in this redemptive plan in which Christ continues to reconcile all things, until that day when every knee in heaven and on earth shall bend in worship, and God is “all in all,” as St. Paul put it.

(2) Crankycon on everything political.

(3) Two new lectures from Professors Patrick Deneen and Peter Augustine Lawler. If you want to know what I think about politics, listen to these guys! It's a privilege to listen to them.

Community as Mirror of Self

A cousin of mine wrote this and I thought it was particularly perceptive.

I think I wrote in one of my previous letters that living in community can be like living with a mirror that shows you your true self in all your beauty and ugliness. It can be really hard, but at the same time very helpful if you’re willing to accept yourself as you are and as you must change. I think I also wrote that it’s the members of this community that function as this “mirror of true-self”.

This is probably how human beings are supposed to live - together. You can really only see yourself if you're looking at another person. I think that's some deep truth.

The Television Ethic

It seems to me that the shows on TV have gotten worse, much worse than they have ever been. Shows like "Cougar Town," "Super Nanny," "One Tree Hill" and "The Bachelorette" - basically any show on any of the major networks. These shows are either a shameless "sitcom" with bad and awkward sexual humor, a boring reality show that smug Americans watch so they can make themselves feel like they're better than the narcissistic dweebs who end up on those shows, or an overwrought "drama" that lacks any sense of humanity instead substituting gratuitous sexual content.

I suppose what's most striking is the total absence of anything sacred. If you watch TV, it's clear there's nothing special about human affairs and human relationships. Television teaches us that we're all really only out for ourselves. Other people are a means to increase our "happiness" and to the extent they do that they are valuable. Traditional human virtues like love, gratitude, forebearance, patience, loyalty, faithfulness, and peace are mocked on television. No one on television takes any of these things seriously. In fact nothing on television takes anything seriously (maybe a few rare exceptions e.g. LOST). After all, persons who take things seriously are really just fooling themselves that who they are matters or what they do matters. It's not who you are, it's what you have, or who you have. Television teaches an ethic of exploitation for personal gain and I think it's terrible.

But maybe it's always been this way and I haven't paid close enough attention.

the philosophy of science

Here's a really interesting section in Edward Feser's book on Aquinas! He's talking about how science has putatively rejected the Aristotelian notion of final causation, but in practice acts otherwise. Final causation, or the end, goal, or purpose of a thing, has been rejected by scientists as irrelevant and possibly anti-scientific, as purpose is an immaterial thing. Part of the project of modern science is to prove the philosophy of materialism, (look at neuroscience, for example) so they avoid talk of anything that even resembles such antiquated ideas as "purpose". But it seems that scientists have been unable to avoid using the concept, as Feser explains on page 49 of his book

Moreover, physicists do not in fact embrace a regularity as a law of nature only after many trials, after the fashion of popular presentations of inductive reasoning. Rather, they draw their conclusions from a few highly specialized experiments conducted under artificial conditions. None of this is consistent with the idea that science is concerned with cataloguing observed regularities. But it is consistent with the Aristotelian picture of science as in the business of uncovering the hidden natures or powers of things. Actual experimental practice indicates that what physicists are really looking for are the inherent powers a thing will naturally manifest when interfering conditions are removed, and the fact that a few experiments, or even a single controlled experiment, are taken to establish the results in question indicates that these powers are taken to reflect a nature that is universal to things of that type.

In my experience, as something of a scientist myself, this is absolutely true. No one would ever want to admit that what scientists are really doing is uncovering universal truths about a things nature and end, but it is probably the case.

John Rawls Made a Mistake at the Beginning

And so he got everything basically wrong.

Because “comprehensive doctrines” and the robust moral convictions that stem from them tend to collide and compete, Rawls thought that a pluralistic society needs to take a very modest approach to political debate, restricting arguments to “public reason,” which in his terminology means giving arguments based on principles that most people will accept.

Here’s how it works. For the most part those who support voluntary euthanasia do so because of their beliefs about the meaning and purpose of human life. “It’s futile to prolong a life that has no hope of fulfillment,” someone might say. Meanwhile, those who are opposed to doctor-assisted suicide often say: “It’s not our place to decide who dies and when they die.”

Very different views of what it means to be human lie behind these statements, with one side elevating autonomy and the quality of personal experience, and the other side emphasizing a submission to reality, even it its painful and challenging forms. Yet, according to Rawls, because they—man-as-maker-of-meaning vs. man-as-grateful-recipient—are “comprehensive doctrines,” they should not be invoked as public reasons.

Thanks Prof. Reno!

Anscombe

G. E. M. Anscombe famously held that there are some positions in ethics that are so odious that in many cases the proper way to respond to someone who holds them is, not to discuss his error with him, but rather to refuse to discuss it. Her example was someone who proposes, in all seriousness, to kill an innocent person for the sake of some allegedly greater good. In Anscombe’s view, the person who makes such a proposal manifests a “corrupt mind,” even if he is sincerely open to debating its merits; we might even say that his corruption is all the greater precisely because he sincerely wants to debate it. One way to understand the reasoning behind her view is in terms of the Aristotelian idea that moral understanding is more a matter of having the right sensibilities and dispositions than it is the having of a correct theoretical understanding. Indeed, it is on this view difficult for someone even to have a correct theoretical understanding in the first place if he does not to some extent already have the right traits of character. This seems to me an eminently conservative view to take, insofar as it reflects the insight that much of our knowledge is tacit rather than articulate, embodied in habit and tradition rather than in the explicitly formulated propositions of a philosophical theory. It is a paradigmatically anti-rationalistic conception of ethics (which, of course, does not mean that it is anti-reason).

Feser on Anscombe.

Some propositions are so odious the correct response is to refuse to discuss them! A great truth.

busy busy!

buying a house, taking care of a newborn, working all the time. things might settle down in a few months!

Nancy Pelosi says: Give poor people contraception so they stop reproducing

Remember this gem from the wretched Speaker of the House?:

“Family planning services reduce costs.”

That’s what Speaker Nancy Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. She was defending a provision in the original stimulus bill that would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for birth control. Republicans had criticized this provision, and so the Speaker responded that promoting contraception among poor people would both stimulate the economy and save the government money on welfare payments.

As the video clip shot around the web, public reaction was intense, and overwhelmingly negative—how could anybody think that preventing poor people from being born was the moral way to help poor people out of poverty? It had the air of eugenics about it, as if she were saying that one generation of poor people is enough. Even the liberal partisan Chris Matthews thought Pelosi’s position resembled China’s one-child policy. In response to the backlash, the President told Pelosi to remove the contraception funding from the stimulus bill.

And she's a Catholic. Now that's concern for the common good!

What the Church is Not

The Church is not perfect; The Church is not the Bishops; the Church is not the congregations; the Church is not the Pope; the Church is not the pedophile priests; the Church is not folk masses; the Church is not rule-based; the Church is not judgmental; the Church is not her sins; the Church is not omnipotent; the Church is not omniscient; the Church is not hypocritical; the Church is not your parents; the Church is not your CCD instructors; the Church is not in your mind; the Church is not empty; the Church is not full;the Church is not something you invent; the Church is not what Time Magazine says it is; the Church is not human; the Church is not something to be ignored.

News Flash!

The President is not responsible for the oil spill disaster on the Gulf Coast. And he's not even responsible for cleaning it up! Rest easy, liberals.

What's Wrong With the World

As far as I know this isn't a prank:

High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is "just like asking grandma or auntie."

So D.C. officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company's super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called "WrapMC" -- for Master of Condoms.

Now that's tax money well spent!

Friday Night Whiskey Thoughts

I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm 25. I'm amazed that, if I turn out average, I'm expected to live for roughly another 50 years! It's certainly not a guarantee, but I've been taught to believe, and have otherwise good reason to believe it is possible and maybe even likely.

This is hard for me to fathom! I've already seen so much and lived so much. Imagine what 50 years could bring! Although I will be happy with whatever God decides to do with me, I hope that I get to see the love in my life grow.

I love my wife so much, and my new baby is a beautiful and amazing gift. I hope I'm able to appreciate both of them in 50 years as much as I appreciate them now. God grant me the strength to do this no matter the circumstances I face.

Jonah Goldberg at Commentary on the Term "Socialism" as applied to President Obama

Now, when conservatives dare to suggest, tentatively or otherwise, that Obama or his party might be in the thrall of some variant of socialism, they are derided for it. In the wake of health care’s passage, for example, a Salon article mocked conservatives for thinking that Americans now live under “the Bolshevik heel.” When the RNC was debating its resolution in 2008, Robert Schlesinger, the opinion editor of U.S. News & World Report, responded: “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”

Similarly, in a May 2009 interview, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocked the president’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” By these lights, socialism is a very sophisticated, highly technical, and historically precise phenomenon that has nothing to do with the politics or ideas of the present moment, and conservatives who invoke the term to describe Obama’s policies and ideas are at best wildly imprecise and at worst purposefully rabble-rousing. And yet when liberals themselves discuss socialism and its relation to Obama, the definition of the term “socialist” seems to loosen up considerably. Only four months before Meacham’s mockery of conservatives, he co-authored a cover story for his magazine titled “We’re All Socialists Now,” in which he and Newsweek’s Evan Thomas (grandson of the six-time Socialist-party presidential candidate Norman Thomas) argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country. At the same time, a host of Left-liberal writers, most prominently E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post, were floating the idea that the new president was ushering in a new age of “social democracy.” The left-wing activist-blogger Matthew Yglesias, echoing the Obama White House view that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, said the Wall Street meltdown offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.”

...more

But is it correct, as an objective matter, to call Obama’s agenda “socialist”? That depends on what one means by socialism. The term has so many associations and has been used to describe so many divergent political and economic approaches that the only meaning sure to garner consensus is an assertive statism applied in the larger cause of “equality,” usually through redistributive economic policies that involve a bias toward taking an intrusive and domineering role in the workings of the private sector. One might also apply another yardstick: an ambivalence, even antipathy, for democracy when democracy proves inconvenient.1 With this understanding as a vague guideline, the answer is certainly, Yes, Obama’s agenda is socialist in a broad sense. The Obama administration may not have planned on seizing the means of automobile production or asserting managerial control over Wall Street. But when faced with the choice, it did both. Obama did explicitly plan on imposing a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the U.S. economy through the use of state fiat—and he is beginning to do precisely that.

Seems to be a great essay. Goldberg is one of the few writers left at National Review who is still cranking out great stuff.

hah

“He’s a conservative by temperament, one of the people who would have complained on the second day of Creation.”

- Father Neuhaus

A Confession

Sometimes, (big surprise) I am a terrible Christian. I missed Mass today - a Holy Day of Obligation - simply because I totally forgot until 7:45pm, 45 minutes after the last Mass of the day started. I got home at 6:30pm, and easily could have made it to the Church. But I am so preoccupied with other things in my life - family, work, and relaxing in front of the television or the internet - that I do not make enough time for God even just to think about Him, to think enough that I would remember that He calls me to worship on some days set aside for Him. For this I am sorry, and I am embarassed. I do vow to change this bad habit I have developed, the habit of forgetting the most important Person in my life, and to pray daily to change my ways.

Happy Feast of the Ascension of Jesus Christ!

Learning

New babies seem to have inverted sleeping schedules, or at least ours does!

Your thoughts appreciated

Should I move into the woods, 40 minutes away from family, friends, and civilization ? (I found a cheap, beautiful new house there)

the Boston Globe has a great article about religion?

It's true! They let someone onto the pages of the Boston Globe who knows a little bit about religion. Professor Stephen Prothero of Boston University (?) writes about how all religions are actually different, and that these differences matter. We cannot and should not pretend that all religions lead to the same God, because believers do not believe so. To think otherwise is to disrespect believers of all kinds, and it is the opposite of "celebrating diversity" - it ignores diversity and replaces it with a lie. The Professor clearly sees the motivation of advocates of this "all roads lead to the same God" idea in a particularly perceptive passage in the middle of the article:

I understand what these people are doing. They are not describing the world but reimagining it. They are hoping that their hope will call up in us feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood. In the face of religious bigotry and bloodshed, past and present, we cannot help but be drawn to such hope, and such vision. Yet we must not mistake either for clear-eyed analysis.

Those who preach one world religion and who ignore genuine religious differences are reimagining the world, as Professor Prothero aptly puts it. I believe this tendency - the tendency to reimagine the world - is omnipresent in our world today. I get this idea from a philosophy professor of mine from way back when who was fond of saying that the single unifying characteristic of modern philosophy is that tries to project itself onto the world. Modern minds want to project their vision of reality onto the world. This stands in stark contrast to the ancient thinkers, who understood the purpose of philosophy and indeed of reason itself to know the world as it is, and to conform one's actions to this reality. In ignoring religious differences, modern thinkers indulge in a fantasy that renders them ineffective and unpersuasive. Pretending differences do not exist does not eliminate the differences. In fact, it may aggravate things by obscuring what is truly held in common, these commonalities being the prerequisite of a true conversation. Not to mention, pretending all religions are the same is simply rude. Professor Prothero's article is a great antidote to the modern way of thinking and I hope read more from him in the future.

Father James Schall Quotation #34,331

Father James Schall writing about justice:

More injustice is caused in the world by philosophers and politicians who rashly pursue its perfection than by those who simply do unjust things. Almost every disordered political movement is postulated as a form of justice. The movement explains itself in justice’s noble name. Democracies, including our own these days, are susceptible to such aberrations. The danger is acute when leaders, who concoct such “justice” ideas, are little aware of the final or immediate ends of man. The new “justice” is designed to replace something basic to natural law or revelation.

Tradition defines justice: “To return to each what is due.” Aristotle distinguishes its different kinds. He lived before “Earth Days.” Their advocates consider the planet itself to be an object of “justice.” Therefore, the state is empowered to “save” us by imposing “environmental justice” on us all. To many, if the planet is used for that which the planet is intended, namely, for man, this use is an injustice against some unknown generation down the ages.

Read the whole article! More:

Earlier, in the Republic, Socrates formulated five definitions of justice: Justice is 1) to return what is due and tell the truth; 2) to do good to your friends and evil to your enemies; 3) the interest of the stronger (Machiavelli); 4) a pact whereby we stand midway between doing the worst evil and suffering the worst evil, and, finally, the proper one, 5) when every specialized part of a whole functions as it should for a common good.

He's still writing with great wisdom and lucidity in his mid-eighties. Awesome.

Philosophy and Alcohol Go Together

Prof. Edward Feser on "the Metaphysics of the Martini"

But is there a norm here? I addressed the question once before in a gag post, but since we’ve been discussing the metaphysics of artifacts, let’s address it semi-seriously. To certain super-sophisticates, vermouth, never mind scotch, shouldn’t appear in a Martini at all. (There’s the famous crack about Churchill to the effect that when mixing his Martinis he’d look in the direction of France, which would suffice for the vermouth. Perhaps Churchill’s Burnt Martini recipe would have called for a mere glance northward toward Scotland or a toot on the bagpipes.) This seems to me more than a little precious. And just false. Here’s the basic reasoning: A Martini is a kind of cocktail; cocktails are mixed drinks; gin by itself is not a mixed drink; ergo, gin by itself is not a cocktail, and thus not a Martini.