The Provincial Emails |
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< Following Year
INBOX Received a thank you letter from the Very Rev. John H. Endejan for my contribution to the Cathedral Preservation Foundation. ... Your personal support of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist will certainly help to preserve our common treasure.
December 12-14, 1997 New York City Midwest Express Airlines. Milford Plaza Hotel.
SPEECH LOG The Honorable James Buckley, a Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, spoke on "Religion and Public Service," at a luncheon presented by the Federalist Society Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter.
1997-11-28 to 1997-12-04 Ireland Aer Lingus Chicago to Dublin. The Book of Kells. Driving to the west. Irish intercity buses have a setter for a logo instead of a greyhound. Shortcut one lane gravel road. Otherwise two lane asphalt roads look just like same in USA. Ancient coastal fort on mountaintop. Dingle peninsula. Road signs in English with Gaelic graffiti. Monks stone beehive huts. Waiting at sheep crossings. Found an injured sheep which had apparently fallen from the little roadside bluff; left a note at the farm house. Monks' chapel built of stone, without mortar, in the shape of an overturned boat's hull. No crowds in the off season. O'Connor mortuary/petrol station. Hotel in horse country. Walls decorated with photos from race finishes. Huge room, furnishings like antiques. Popped into the bar, had it to ourselves, Guinness does taste better over here. Morning jog between the dairy farms. Smells just like rural Wisconsin. Mild climate indicated by carport-like shelters for cows. Cold snap; clear blue skies, frost on the mountaintops. Ireland's geography is like a bowl, with coastal mountains forming the rim. Small island, radio traffic report for the whole country. Pub lunch and shopping in Limerick. Bought a gray wool hat. With sportcoat, sleeveless sweater, and scarf, salesman says I "look like an Irishman." Hotel in Waterford former mansion of the local bishop, of the Church of Ireland I assume. Huge room, again furnishings look like antiques. Waterford Crystal has a factory outlet store. Waterford Castle now a tourist attraction. Once was a square around a large courtyard, now three-sided. Cromwell cannoned the fourth side down. Furnishings Victorian, seems crowded now, but only a part of what was crammed into rooms in actual Victorian times. Tour guide confirms Chicago-area visitor's surmise that owned the castle has holdings around Chicago. Countryside is green, little farm fields irregular polygons, seperated by stone fences, just like in the storybooks. Here and there billboard-sized announcement that road project paid by European Economic Community funds. Past Dublin to golf resort just this side of Northern Ireland.
Rome endowments to honor Weakland: A $1.5 million chair of study in Catholic social teaching, and a $500,000 chair in liturgy and music, will be established in Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s name at universities in Rome by a foundation that is closely associated with him and the archdiocese.
SPEECH LOG David E. Collins, spoke on "General Johnson Says...," at a breakfast presented by the Peter Favre Forum.
HARK! THE HERALD
SPEECH LOG Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, spoke on "The Implementation of Vatican Council II: Where Are We?" at a breakfast presented by The Peter Favre Forum at The University Club. He asked who wouldn't favor abrogating doctrines like the Immaculate Conception or Assumption in the interest of Christian unity. It was a rhetorical question not a request for a show of hands. He received a standing ovation; I was at a table at the back so could stay seated without notice.
Pastor rips "Jonestown" type plan: The Archdiocesan planning commission has recommended, among parish mergers and closings, the merger of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Mary parishes in Kenosha. Fr. Thomas A. Lemieux of St. Thomas Aquinas gave a homily yesterday evening on the planning process. "I call this the Pied Piper approach, the Jonestown technique to accomplish organizational change," Lemieux told his congregation, referring to the 1977 death of more than 900 people who were directed by the Rev. Jim Jones to drink cyanide-laced punch.
SPEECH LOG Very Rev. Andrew L. Nelson, Rector of Saint Francis Seminary, spoke on "Business Ethics: Roman Catholic Approaches," at a breakfast presented by the Peter Favre Forum.
RECONSIDERATIONS It is one of the probably fundamental remaining differences between extremes of the Right and those of the Left. Hatred moves the former; fear the latter.
SPEECH LOG Gregory Pierce, Co-Publisher of ACTA Publications, and Paul Fullmer, President and C.E.O. of Selz, Seabold & Associates, spoke on "A Just Wage: Pipe Dream or Practical Program?" at a breakfast presented by the Peter Favre Forum.
SPEECH LOG M. Shawn Copeland, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Theology at Marquette University, spoke on "The Challenge of Living as a Black Catholic in America," at a breakfast sponsored by the Peter Favre Forum.
This brings me to the heart of the matter--to the particular relationship between the library and the humanities. In theory, there is no reason why Milton's Paradise Lost or Rousseau's Social Contract cannot be called up on the screen, assuming they are "on line." (What is more likely is that something like a Cliff's Notes version of them is on line.) But even if they are on line, there is every reason to hold them in book form--"hard copy," as we now say--rather than on the screen. With the physical volume in our hand, we are necessarily aware of the substantiality, the reality of the work, the text as it is, as Milton or Rousseau wrote it and meant us to read it.So should we read Plato on scrolls?
SPEECH LOG Rev. Kenneth Omernick, spoke on "A Catholic Looks at Time Management: An Assessment of the Spiritual Assumptions in the Systems of Stephen Covey, Hyrum Smith, and Jeffrey Mayer, at a breakfast presented by the Peter Favre Forum.
Vacation in Park City Utah. Skiing on powder.
SPEECH LOG Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, spoke on "Spirituality and Cultural Change," at a breakfast presented by the Peter Favre Forum.
[Leo] Strauss's critique of the end of history thesis--long before Francis Fukuyama brought the subject to public attention--was simultaneously a critique of the modern, cosmopolitan aspirations of the dominant progressivism that accepted a cosmopolitan outcome as the only rational object of political and moral striving. Strauss's objections were taken as prima facie evidence of his anti-progressive and therefore reactionary and anti-democratic tendencies. It was assumed by proponents of progressivist cosmopolitanism that the only alternative to their view was a narrow, parochial, ethnic nationalism, which was defined as, in principle, fascistic. But Strauss did not accept that a cosmopolitan/fascist dichotomy exhausted the available options. He was a proponent of neither. Strauss becomes a reactionary, anti-Enlightenment conservative only for those incapable of escaping the cosmopolitan/fascist dichotomy--a dichotomy that unfortunately remains all too prevalent.
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