The Provincial Emails 

2000-07-20

HARK! THE HERALD

Vatican II and the Liturgy

2000-07-20

2000-07-01

READING NOTEBOOK

The primacy of the book follows naturally from its form. It has a protective shell that keeps dust and sunlight off the fragile printed pages, allowing the words within to be legible for centuries. This primacy will disappear when the book becomes as evanescent as an image on a TV screen. Without its physical advantages, how long will the book's authority persist, and what, in turn--if anything--will take its place? Probably nothing, because nothing will ever again have the physical properties to do so. This absence will in turn change our mental lives. The codex was proof (some would say misleading evidence) that there were ideas that lasted, that deserved special respect. The invention of the e-book will push us to the reverse conclusion--that knowledge is in perpetual flux. It will make relativists of us all. Looked at in this way, the e-book may represent an unprecedented and even dangerous innovation. It is not merely the latest gizmo thrown off by the forces that, over the last twenty-five years, have been separating words from paper; word processors, electronic dictionaries, CD-ROMs, the Web. Unlike these, the e-book will knock a key strut out from under us all.
--D. T. Max, "The Electronic Book," The American Scholar, Summer 2000, p. 18

2000-07-01

2000-06-08

HARK! THE HERALD

Kenosha parish shares riches
Parish council decides to give $100,000 to fledgling St. Anne,
by Penney Haney, Catholic Herald, Milwaukee, June 8, 2000

St. Mary parish had invested about $200,000 which grew to over $1 million. Its parish council, after 18 months of "discussions and discernment," voted unanimously to give $100,000 to the new St. Anne parish in Pleasant Prairie. Some St. Mary parishioners objected to giving the money when parish budgets were being cut even though it had over $1 million in reserves.

But he [Fr. Howard Haase, St. Mary's pastor] maintains that "there's a difference between our reserve and our operating budget."

2000-06-08

2000-04-01

READING NOTEBOOK

There is a generalization to be ventured here--that no nation in history has been so systematically and consistently abused by its own intelligentsia as the United States in the twentieth century. An American intellectual defines himself by such abuse, and the record is by now endless and, stylistically speaking, distinguished.

--George Watson, "Americanophilia," The American Scholar, Spring 2000, p. 125

2000-04-01

2000-03-06

OUCH DIOCESE

Confidential letter to priests, January 7, 2000

2000-03-06

February 26-27, 2000, Rochester, New York

Landed in summer weather, rented car, and arrived at church just in time for the wedding of my wife's nephew, Kenneth. A thousand miles from home, might as well stay over for the reception.

2000-02-26

2000-01-01

READING NOTEBOOK

Nevertheless, if computer science does not begin and end with programming, neither will it give up its secrets to those who cannot program. I greet the news that high school students do not program our millions of microcomputers as an English professor might greet the news that the school library is terrific but the kids don't read. Here is a puzzle worth much more than a moment's thought. There is an inverse relationship between the availability of microcomputers to primary and secondary school students and the chance that those students will do something substantial with them. I am not saying that the relationship is causal, but the association is there.

--Paul de Palma, "http://www.when_is_enough_enough?.com: Putting Microcomputers in Their Place," The American Scholar, Winter 1999, p. 67

... For decades, after all, we Americans have carried on all our intellectual controversies pretty much the same way. A book comes out, offering a radical new take on a painful and delicate topic--the genetic component in intelligence, or the reasons for the Holocaust, or the fall of the American intellectual. Initial reviews and articles make clear that the author has something new and controversial to say. Prominent writers and thinkers take positions. Quarrels break out at public forums.

All of a sudden, a story emerges: not the story of the original book, which becomes at most a sidebar, and usually nothing more than a first paragraph. Rather, the conflict becomes the story. Individual positions and posturings, particular reviews and debates, generate still more publicity. The actual theses and substance of the original book lie buried and forgetten, unread and distorted, under the tons of invective hurled at the author and his or her detractors. In many cases, no one actually seems to have read the original, though everyone has read the cover article about in in the New York Review of Books.

Journalists need to find a dramatic hook for every article and to summarize complex, colorful theories in stark black and white, two good ways to heap more fuel on the fires they cover. Radio and television shows--and the World Wide Web--do more to confuse than inform. Often they give currency to falsehoods. Nuances drop away, distinctions disappear, group divisions harden. In the end, the debate often pulls entirely free of its original moorings. Once the wheels begin to turn, the School of Athens turns into the Garden of Earthly Delights: off go the philosophical masks, out come the grimacing demons that had been hiding behind them. ...

--Anthony Grafton, "Arndt and Eichmann at the Dinner Table," The American Scholar, Winter 1999, p. 108

Those books that do not already exist in electronic back files, or are not digitized, will disappear. Virtually all of the ancient works we possess were copied into codex form during late antiquity or the Middle Ages; works that remained on papyrus vanished. Anyone who has searched in vain for a record album, only to find that it hasn't been converted to a CD, has seen this process at work today.

--Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, "The Book Is Here to Stay," reviewing The Evolution of the Book by Frederick Kilgour, and Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cervantes by James O'Donnell, in The American Scholar, Winter 1999, p. 139

2000-01-01

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