A Perfect Match
Many viewers were introduced to Somers and Reilly on "Match Game," as if they’d sprung straight from the Spiegel catalog, the Paris Hiltons of their day, famous for being famous.
Many viewers were introduced to Somers and Reilly on "Match Game," as if they’d sprung straight from the Spiegel catalog, the Paris Hiltons of their day, famous for being famous.
The "present crisis of western democracy," the 30-year-old Walter Lippmann announced in 1920, "is a crisis in journalism." ...
The "crisis" Lippmann detected in both democracy and journalism arises because the sheer volume of political affairs in an interconnected national and global world...surpasses the capacity of even the most conscientious citizens to monitor.
[10] The whole point of a Top 10 list, a friend recently scolded me, is to number them. (I was declining to do so.) [9] My friend was wrong, but only because Top 10 lists are artificial exercises, [8] assertions of critical ego, [7] capricious and necessarily imperfect. [6] (I have a suspicion that the sacred 10 is meant to suggest biblical certainty, as if critics are merely worldly vessels for some divine wisdom.) [5] More than anything they are a public ritual, [4] which is their most valuable function. [3] I tell you what I liked, [2] and you either agree with my list (which flatters us both) [1] or denounce it (which flatters you). It’s a perfect circle.
The loss of classical radio may seem insignificant to many people. In the big scheme of things, what's the loss of another art form? But all the losses in the arts simply add more casualties in the battle to keep the nation's cultural life from draining away. ...
It is a sad reality to face, especially when you realize that in a small way WFMR helped place our city above many others of its size because of the richness of its cultural life.
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
(hey that rhymed!)
posted by TS @ 22:22
Before Vatican II, when all Masses were said in Latin, each urban ethnic group had its own parish. A German Catholic parish would be around the block from an Italian Catholic one. Wasn’t the local diocese diverse but its parishes not so?
After Vatican II, when the Mass was generally said in the vernacular, each ethnic group attends a service at which its native language is said. ... Isn’t the local parish diverse but its services not so?
The hoped-for effect of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference’s earlier stance of neutrality on this bill was to protect women who are the victims of rape, while also protecting the possible pre-born human being, by affirming the necessary conscience exemption for institutions and individuals with regard to the appropriate testing, so as to avoid abortifacient emergency contraception. It is my judgment as Bishop of Madison that the earlier position of neutrality did not have its hoped for effect, and so it is now moot, and this neutrality position has now expired.
Contacted by The Catholic Times, WCC executive director John Huebscher said the Catholic Conference is retaining its current stance of neutrality. “We respect the concerns raised in (Bishop Morlino’s) letter,” he said. “They certainly underscore the passion of the bishops in affirming human life. At the same time, the Catholic Conference has not changed its position on the bill.”
Heubscher added that there are no plans to revisit the matter as a conference.
Heubscher said the WCC’s neutrality is based on the unanimous opinion of the state’s diocesan attorneys that a current conscience exemption contained in Wisconsin Statue [sic] 253.09 would allow Catholic hospitals and individual physicians to “opt out” of the possibly abortion-inducing treatment the legislation would require.
No hospital shall be required to admit any patient or to allow the use of the hospital facilities for the purpose of performing a sterilization procedure or removing a human embryo or fetus. A physician or any other person who is a member of or associated with the staff of a hospital, or any employee of a hospital in which such a procedure has been authorized, who shall state in writing his or her objection to the performance of or providing assistance to such a procedure on moral or religious grounds shall not be required to participate in such medical procedure...
While Bishop Listecki shares the lawyers’ opinion, he said he was breaking from the Catholic Conference’s stance of neutrality because “even legal opinions fall to (legislative) decisions that go contrary.”
According to Bishop Morlino, the fact that so many anti-life legislators refused to vote for an earlier version of the bill that included a conscience exemption amendment indicates that they consider the protection offered by Statute 253.09 to be inapplicable to the present situation. “If this were assured, there would be no reason why the Assembly would have rejected conscience clause exemption protection for the reasons they gave,” the bishop wrote.In addition to the two bishops,
Pro-Life Wisconsin legislative director Matt Sande agreed. He said in a Catholic Times interview that the current conscience clause contained in Statue 253.09 was “intended to keep physicians and hospital employees from being forced to participate in sterilizations and surgical abortions.” “It’s not going to be enough. That’s our opinion,” he said.His opinion is, at least, more consistent with what the statute literally says.
First, a disclaimer. In my spare time, I serve on the Board of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an organization that supports the cause of campaign finance reform. So I do have a bias on the issue.There's an opposing view.
Some of my friends in the pro-life movement suggest that reform may pose difficulties for the pro-life cause.
The traditional view tilts strongly towards the idea that salvation outside the visible Church is rare and difficult and that membership in the visible Church is often the determining factor between salvation and damnation. The modern--I might say Rahnerian--view tilts strongly in favor of the idea that salvation outside the visible Church is commonplace and membership inside the visible Church is only a small help at the margin.
Steve Braun, owner of Fair Grounds Coffeehouse, who was educated in Catholic schools, including Catholic Memorial High School and Marquette University...
“Coffee is like the second most traded commodity in the world. It’s made in Third World countries and First World countries drink it. I wanted to support the communities that make the coffee and make sure the farmer can support himself and his family.”I notice he leaves out the Second World; didn't it go out of business using a variation of this theory of non-market pricing? It happens that these questions come up in P. J. O'Rourke's review of Starbucked by Taylor Clark.
Is “Fair Trade” coffee rather than Starbucks coffee the answer to the third-world coffee growers’ plight? In the first place, Starbucks is the largest international purveyor of Fair Trade coffee, 18 million pounds of it in 2006. And in the second place, no. As of the book’s writing, Fair Trade contracts guaranteed a price of $1.26 per pound ($1.31 if organic) as opposed to free market prices that have fallen as low as 41 1/2 cents per pound in recent years. But applicants for those fair market contracts “must obey a structure of rules that often seems more like a socialist wish list than a structure designed to help growers,” Clark writes. “All aspiring farms must be small, family-run plots that are part of democratic, worker-owned cooperatives. Private ownership and capitalist practices are completely off limits — even hiring day laborers can take your farm out of the running.”
It turns out the villain behind low coffee prices is right in the third world itself. Vietnam has been dumping tons of pittance-price coffee beans on the market. And they are the stinky, bad-truck-stop robusta variety beans, not the yummy, hippie-living-room arabica type.
When Clark suggests what we should do for impoverished coffee growers, he does so with the same spark of insight about market freedoms that must have once flashed upon the young Adam Smith: “Demand the best-tasting coffee you can get.”
Desire/need for website to be better communication tool for parish. Council to get back to [committee chair(?)] next month with plan of action.The parish website includes a page for the Parish Council. It looks like they stopped distributing hard copies of their minutes with the idea they would post minutes in pdf, but then didn't.
archdiocese appeal--parishes required to participate within 2 years. St. Al's will be in the final wave.
Collections slowly dwindling but still above budget. Attendance statistics to be reviewed.
Living Our Faith--reaching out & increasing membership begins 12/1/07.
"...a program for African American Catholics who want to be ministers within their parishes, especially in central city parishes," said Franciscan Sister of Little Falls, Minn., Callista Robinson, the program's coordinator.
"It's important because it helps in the development and education and formation of lay leaders in the black community, coming from a perspective of black spirituality which is something that has not been duplicated through other venues in the diocese," Allen explained.
"It's not part of the John Paul II Center because the concentration is in black spirituality, which has not been addressed by any other programs in the diocese at this point," said Allen.
"I would like to get more involved in the church and do more ministry in the black Catholic church," he said.
...
"..."This course is to train people to do lay ministry work in the black Catholic Church, so even if someone doesn't belong to the black Catholic Church, they could certainly benefit from it. ..."
Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.--Bart Simpson
"It's time to stop being daft about Christmas. It's fine to celebrate and it's fine for Christ to be star of the show," said Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
...
"Hindus celebrate Christmas too. It's a great holiday for everyone living in Britain," said Anil Bhanot, general secretary of the UK Hindu Council.
Sikh spokesman Indarjit Singh said: "Every year I am asked 'Do I object to the celebration of Christmas?' It's an absurd question. As ever, my family and I will send out our Christmas cards to our Christian friends and others."
...
Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Shayk Ibrahim Mogra said "To suggest celebrating Christmas and having decorations offends Muslims is absurd. Why can't we have more nativity scenes in Britain?" ...
Labels: Ich bin ein Frankliner
He figures Christmas has long been in a struggle between the sacred and the temporal, between charity and marketing, tensions that are particularly out of whack now. But then that’s true in our society overall, where the notion of service to the poor that is the focus of the order he helped start seems as quaint as friars in cassocks.
...no longer an MP [Member of Parliament] and having said during his reception: "I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God" ...
New light fixtures were fabricated to replicate the originals, thanks to the sneaky hand of Bishop Callahan, who, as an associate pastor of the basilica in 1977, hid an original light fixture in the basilica attic for fear of it being thrown away, only to unearth it at a timely meeting.
The ordination of Bishop Callahan also makes it possible for the bishops to do pastoral visits of parishes--what Archbishop Dolan termed "systematic, canonical visitations" in which the bishops go the parishes, celebrate Masses, and meet with parishioners, staff, parish council, school personnel and others. They also review the parish records.
"Within seven years I would like to do a systematic visit of every parish in the archdiocese," the archbishop said.
From his chancery experience, Bishop Brust knew every priest and property in the archdiocese. He had been one of the quiet planners of archdiocesan growth. Pouring over telephone company utility data, Bishop Brust carefully plotted the areas where parishes and schools would be built, personally surveyed the land, often after Masses on Sunday, and then arranged for its purchase. In that capacity, Bishop Brust helped direct the suburban growth of the archdiocese.
been appointed board chairman of Catholic Relief Services, an agency with an international staff of about 4,000 and an annual budget of more than $500 million. It is the conference's official overseas relief and development agency.
Labels: Ich bin ein Frankliner
I think it’s time we identified and warned against what I’ll call the Grimes Defense: If an argument has been exaggerated a little bit for effect, we can throw it out--baby, bathwater, and even the soap scum of lingering doubt.--Stefan Beck
Labels: definition
A majority of all but one of the sixty population subgroups studied in the research took the virgin birth at face value. The exception was atheists and agnostics (among whom just 15% said this really happened).
Q:Is there anything significant about GodTube that is being overlooked?
A: A lot of attention gets paid to the growth of the Web site. A quarter of a million people, approximately, have signed up to our social network, and we launched it (about two months) ago.
That's pretty significant. Who it is, I think, is even more significant. We have about 25,000 churches that are signed up. It's individuals and pastors.
So, really, we are acting as the infrastructure for a lot of churches right now in terms of their online video and delivering their online content.
I think that's really important. People aren't picking up on the fact that a good portion of the 800,000 hours of video that we have is being uploaded by churches and embedded into their church Web site or their church blog.
...Since [Director Rob] Van Alkemade has no apparent interest in exploring the irony of a fictional character sermonizing about Americans "inability to distinguish between real life and simulated life", all we can do is take it at face value when Reverend Billy preaches to a movie audience of... Well, not the converted, exactly. Call them the smugly complacent.
Just recently I had three: Last Sunday at Holy Family in Fond du Lac; the Sunday before at Blessed Savior in the northwestern section of our city; a month or so ago out at St. Paul in Genesee Depot.
The new building includes signs and symbols from the six churches that have become Holy Family - Sacred Heart, St. Joseph, St. Mary, St. Peter, St. Patrick, and St. Louis, which was destroyed by fire in March.
Each Knol article will be written by a single author, and other users can edit it only with permission from the author.[citations omitted] Readers may rate or comment on the articles. There can also be multiple articles for the same topic, each written by a different author.
Just about all of the segments in each episode are filmed in one take. It is very rare to have to re-shoot something. In a full day of filming, the word "cut" was never uttered.
Put simply, the development is a return to tradition and orthodoxy, to past practices, observances, and customary ways of worshiping. But it is not simply a return to the past—at least not in all cases. Even while drawing on deep traditional resources, many participants are creating something new within the old forms. They are engaging in what Penn State sociologist of religion Roger Finke calls "innovative returns to tradition."
An independent, nondenominational church of some 600 members, Trinity Fellowship is not the only evangelical congregation that is offering a weekly Eucharist, saying the Nicene or Apostles' creeds, reading the early Church Fathers, or doing other things that seem downright Roman Catholic or at least high Episcopalian.
This coming year, I want to trumpet three exciting, promising, and important pastoral initiatives in the life of our archdiocese: Living Our Faith, strategic planning for the years ahead, and the Faith in Our Future Capital Campaign.
The Living Our Faith project demands nothing dramatically new, no added committees or forms to fill out. It is a concentration on what we do best as the church: to meet, know, and live Jesus Christ!
Then there's our planning endeavor, led by Fr. Jim Connell. Do, in fact, all of our parishes, schools, services, and diocesan structures clearly and effectively assist us to meet, know, and live Christ?
...we ask if we as the church in southeastern Wisconsin are as organized, effective, sharp, and responsive as we should be?
These are all pointed questions on which Fr. Connell is concentrating. He's meeting with everybody from janitors to deans. And he's a dog with a bone.
After more than 15 years and three cycles of archdiocesan planning initiatives, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new millennium in need of a comprehensive plan for Mission and Ministry.
Finally, like it or not, to engage people in the adventure of a lifetime - meeting, knowing, and living Christ in and with his church - costs a lot of money!
Catholic education and faith formation, carried out with excellence and precision, forming and changing lives, is expensive.
Thus, our Faith in the Future Capital Campaign, forming us in stewardship, bringing us together as Catholics, raising much needed resources for our parishes and the wider church, is essential.
Tomorrow, our children and grandchildren may have lost the "pearl of great price," their Catholic faith.
The Wisconin Catholic Conference strongly supports Senate Bill 195, which allows employees to take leave from work to attend a child's day care or school functions.
The seven San Antonians, building on the scholarship of Sheila Raney Baird and Robert Stevenson, sang and played a program of 16th and 17th century Spanish-Indian and Spanish-African crossover Christmas music.
Soprano Kathy Mayer, alto Tanya Moczygemba, baritone Christopher Moroney, alto Covita Moroney, tenor Jody Noblett, tenor Lee P'Pool and soprano Sonya Yamin brought a large battery of African and South American ocarinas, flutes, drums, shakers, pitched stones and scrapers to bear upon this music.
I’m guessing that a fair number of Commonwealers have enjoyed the NPR series...
Author: Helen Prejean, CSJ
This essay aired as a commentary on NPR...
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
One of the Vatican's most senior cardinals has dismissed the idea that a breakaway group of Anglicans might be received into the Catholic Church en masse - despite Benedict XVI's personal support for such a move. Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, told The Catholic Herald: "It's not our policy to bring that many Anglicans to Rome."
Labels: Ich bin ein Frankliner
Where I live in upstate New York, I've recently seen robins and bluebirds show up in the middle of winter. And this past January, a friend of mine ate asparagus he harvested in the Catskills, which are normally frozen this time of year.
Global warming is no longer a distant threat. ...
Dear Dogbert,
My parents told me that every time I ask Santa for a gift, an angel will lose its wings. That seems like a fair arrangement to me, but is there any risk the wingless angel would fall on my head and kill me?
Brent
Dear Bent,
Wingless angels generally burn up on reentry. It’s nothing that a little shampoo can’t cure.
Sincerely,
Dogbert
Rosmini fast tracked ahead of the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman?
Labels: Headline
author of In Solitary Witness, the story of Franz Jaegerstaetter, an Austrian peasant beheaded in 1943 in a Brandenburg prison for refusing to serve in the German army during World War II.
"His was, at least to me, the real story," Zahn wrote in Commonweal [$], a Catholic magazine, in 1997. "A priest - given his calling, his education, his training - might be expected to take such a stand; but the witness of a simple peasant who had a wife and three young daughters at home deserved more intensive study."
But critics say the move is unnecessary and the president simply wants to be in a different time zone from his arch-rival, the United States.
The diocese serves about 8,500 parishioners in 47 congregations in central California.
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
Due to the 10-minute long Sign of Peace that allows for chatting and introductions, we've gotten to know about a dozen parishioners.
In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.' [their emphasis]
Practically speaking, it makes little sense. Iran has poured an estimated $10 billion into building a complete, home-grown nuclear industry, yet it has just one nuclear power plant, the Russian-built Bushehr reactor, due to come on stream next year. The same money could have built ten conventional plants of the same capacity, fired solely by the natural gas that Iran currently flares off into the sky, because it has not invested in the technology to recover it.
Roughly 5 percent of rest-of-world natural gas flared off versus
1 percent of US natural gas production in 1999 ...
Amount natural gas flared off in 1999 outside of US was roughly equal to California’s annual demand for natural gas
We are built to stand in the spotlight. Our own reality is massively (sometimes oppressively) real to us and scientists today tell us that the universe has no single center but that everywhere and every person is its center.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda. (p. 39)
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto