The Provincial Emails |
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< Following Year
SPEECH LOG Rev. Michael Witczak, Vice Rector and Professor of Liturgical Studies at Saint Francis Seminary, spoke on "Kingdom Coming! American Perspectives on Y2K, Armageddon, and Catholic Justice" at a breakfast presented by The Peter Favre Forum at The University Club.
November 25-30, 1999, Santa Fe, New Mexico Bumped from connecting flight; free tickets! Thanksgiving dinner in the food court: turkey sandwich, pumpkin ice cream. Casitas. Reading Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy. Good book stores. Fine restaurants. Riding the Santa Fe Southern "observation car," a flat car with a railing. Ancient Indian cliff dwellings. The Cathedral of Death Comes for the Archbishop.
SPEECH LOG Arthur Madigan, S.J., spoke on "The Future of Aristotelian Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum," the Francis C. Wade, S.J., Memorial Lecture, as part of the 1998-1999 Colloquium Series, Department of Philosophy, Marquette University.
At mid[sixteenth]century, Christendom was ostensibly divided between Catholics and Protestants. But an even deeper cleavage divided militants from pragmatists. The latter would let men alone with their consciences, provided these observances did not disturb peace and propriety; the former detested such public accommodations as courtesies to Satan.
SPEECH LOG Prof. James W. Ceasar of the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia spoke on "The Constitution and Public Policy" at a luncheon presented by the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society at the Milwaukee Athletic Club.
SPEECH LOG Daniel S. Hanson spoke at a breakfast presented by The Peter Favre Forum at The University Club.
R.I.P. Attorney Seher also made magic with a laugh I worked for Ralph Seher my first year out of law school. His offices were on the seventh floor of the Germania Building, then called the Brumder Building. My office window was the one to the left of the three arched windows.
SPEECH LOG Marty Stein spoke on "Planning Your Life For Doing Well And Doing Good" at a breakfast presented by The Peter Favre Forum at The University Club.
SPEECH LOG Prof. Steven G. Calabresi, the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University Law School, spoke on "Federalism and the Role of the Supreme Court" at a luncheon presented by the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society at the Milwaukee Athletic Club.
Ms. [Elizabeth] Semil [of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who with the author had participated in a panel discussion on NPR] belongs to the sanguine camp that believes people can be persuaded to conduct themselves in a virtuous manner by allowing their natural goodness to unfold, a process that can be set in motion by praising them when they do well and responding non-judgmentally when they do not. For those who share this view, shaming in not merely cruel but also unnecessary punishment; indeed, punishment in general is anti-social. Many of those who hold this view of human nature tend also to believe that people are innately virtuous--and that if they misbehave, either the demands imposed on them are unjust or their behavior reflects distorting forces that they neither caused nor can control (for example, a history of abuse by their own parents).
The law protects art from censorship on the ground that it contains ideas, and according to the legal scholar Daniel S. Moretti, "All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance--unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion--have the full protection of the guarantees." It is good that the law can save art from censorship, but unfortunate that this rescue undermines the conception of art that has permitted it to be studied within a discipline. From a formalist perspective, the treatment of art as idea renders it indistinguishable from non-artistic representation. Novels become interchangeable with political tracts, art photos with billboards. And as a natural corollary, the authority of the expert to construe artistic meaning is no greater than that of the historian, sociologist, politician, TV commentator, or, indeed, any construer of meaning.
[Isaiah] Berlin was insistent that the most monstrous crimes of the twentieth century have been committed on behalf of ideas that, in the abstract, sound most attractive. Marx and Freud, he argued, were both too eager to champion a version of what Rousseau had once said was "forcing" people to be "free." Berlin stood for calling a spade a spade; he distinguished liberty from other possible values, such as justice or equality. Intellectuals who recklessly play around with ideas could end up, like Heidegger, as proponents of Hitler.
SPEECH LOG Mark E. Kuczewski, Ph.D., and Cynthia A. Brincat, Ph.D., of the Center for the Study of Bioethics, Medical College of Wisconsin, spoke on "Strangers in a Strange Land: Philosophy and Applied Ethics," as part of the 1998-1999 Colloquium Series, Department of Philosophy, Marquette University.
READING NOTEBOOK
Curators, like historian, strive for objectivity, but they have to select and simplify far more drastically than in a book, and the resulting subjectivity is obscured by the authenticity of the objects and the lure of the design in which they have been placed. Because an exhibition's interpretation thus pronounced carries such power, it can provoke surprisingly violent protests from those who find it unfair that they cannot present a conflicting interpretation with similar authority. The thesis of a book can be answered with another book but how do you answer an exhibition? We have already witnessed the angry outcry against the original Enola Gay/Hiroshima exhibition at the Smithsonian. The Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress drew a storm of protests from anti-Freudians from the moment the plans for it were announced.
SPEECH LOG Hon. David B. Sentelle, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, spoke on "Lopez speaks -- Is Anyone Listening?" at a luncheon presented by the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society at the Milwaukee Athletic Club.
Our Archbishop has questions for all sides.
Weakland wants to see church minister more to central city Our Archbishop looks ahead three years to his retirement. "I feel very concerned right now that somehow the Catholic Church in Milwaukee is not doing enough in terms of social problems," said Weakland, who cited issues such as family stability, drug use and a lack of role models.Isn't he the one who closed almost all the central city parishes?
READING NOTEBOOK But it is a kind of coup to use constitutional formulae to subvert constitutional principles...
SPEECH LOG Gregory Pierce spoke on "Deciding What is Enough ... and Sticking To It" at a dinner presented by The Peter Favre Forum at Henni Hall, Saint Francis Seminary.
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