Resolve Amy at Modern Commentaries posted New Years resolutions on diet, exercise and prayer. My preference is one resolution a year, and if it's turned into a good habit, that's a resolution kept. Perhaps one resolution can be leveraged into three if we pray while we exercise, and if exercise helps us eat less.  ¶ 1/08/2009 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Cliche watch: Words still matter A December 30, 2008 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The National Conference of Editorial Writers — a group of savants whose erudition is matched only by their comeliness — recently engaged in a bout of self-examination. The topic: words and phrases that have outlived their usefulness or that weren't all that useful in the first place.

How about the phrase "outlived their usefulness"?

(via M.Z. Hemingway at Get Religion)

Labels: The cliche has hit the fan

  ¶ 1/07/2009 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Clericalism

The subject of clericalism comes up with some regularity. Clericalism is the corruption that, overtly or subtly, subordinates priestly service and devotion to clerical privilege and power. --Richard John Neuhaus

Labels: definition

  ¶ 1/06/2009 06:00:00 AM 1 Comments

  Plowing Through the Door David Carr in The New York Times, December 26, 2008, reviews The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, by Michael Wolff. Not a book for "John and Mary Catholic".

Instead, we get Wolff’s own ineffable takes on how Murdoch became Murdoch...

  ¶ 1/05/2009 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Reading Rat Vol. 2 No. 1 On authors and works in my recommended reading (and other items of interest). New format starts as Volume 2.


God: Philosophers weigh in, by Alex Byrne, Boston Review, January/February 2009 (via Arts & Letters Daily)

the crucial step in Anselm’s argument is this: if (b) is true, and no perfect being exists, then (a) must be false—the Fool [of Psalm 14] is not thinking of a perfect being, because a perfect being has, among its other perfect-making properties or features, existence. Put the other way round: if (a) is true—if the Fool is genuinely thinking of a perfect being—then (b) must be false, and so God, the perfect being, exists.

The Good American: This life accepts Arthur Miller’s status as a liberal saint – and at enormous length, laments Philip Hensher, Telegraph. Review of Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography (2008) by Christopher Bigsby (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Still, there is something naive and faintly bizarre about Miller’s much-admired response to the McCarthy period, The Crucible, comparing the communist hunt to the 17th-century witch hunt. As [Elia] Kazan’s wife pointed out, the difference was that there really were communists. It was disgraceful to pursue people for their political views, but it was absurd to suggest that the political views were dreamt up in bouts of mass hysteria, like the accusation of witchcraft.

Under Flannery’s eye by Amy Welborn at Charlotte was Both, December 29, 2008. Review of The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews (1983) by Flannery O'Connor.

She was very concerned with the intellectual life of American Catholics and indeed saw what she was doing for the papers as in some way an act of charity in which readers might be encouraged to read beyond the pieties.

A Year for the Books: Mother Teresa's secret, and other revelations from 2008, by Peggy Noonan, Opinion Journal, December 26, 2008 (via Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor)

I suspect reading is about to make a big comeback in America, that in fact we're going to be reading more books in the future, not fewer. It is a relatively inexpensive (libraries, Kindle, Amazon), peaceful and enriching activity. And we're about to enter an age of greater quiet.

For them, it's wholly unholy, by Shahar Ilan, Haaretz (via Catholic and Enjoying It!)

According to kabbala (Jewish mysticism), on the night on which "that man" - a Jewish euphemism for Jesus - was born, not even a trace of holiness is present and the klipot exploit every act of holiness for their own purposes.

Pick of the pile, The Economist, December 4, 2008

The best books of 2008 covered the Iraq war, Chinese capitalism, Mississippi blues, fishing in Sweden, ayatollahs, human waste and the secret life of words

Plato Was a Backpacker, by Frank Bures, World Hum

This reckless questioning is not the same as wisdom. But I can easily imagine a young Plato coming home from Italy and wanting to scream from the rooftops: “You lemmings! Must we all eat olives and figs?”

It is a powerful experience to see that things don’t have to be the way they are, that our societies and our lives can be arranged otherwise. This is one of the great gifts of seeing the world.

It can be like coming out of our cave, blinking and looking.

100 Notable Books of 2008, The New York Times, November 26, 2008

The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list.

Top shelves, by Sean Dodson, Guardian Unlimited, January 11, 2008 (via Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor)

Every booklover has their favourite shop, and while it's true that many independents have been driven out of business by online sales and supermarket bestsellers, you still don't have to look too hard to find one that's thriving. To prove it, Sean Dodson chooses the 10 bookshops from around the world which he considers to be the fairest of them all.

(on Silent Spring by Rachel Carson)

For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. Carson's book, more than any other, publicized this message. --Michael Lind, The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century, National Review Online

A philosopher's ideas about Sleep, an interview with Bernard Shaw by Eimar O'Duffy (1929) (via The Truth About Cars)

His glorious evolutionary theory in Back to Methuselah of sleep as an infantile habit, still remains a dream.

Goethe; or, the Writer, Representative Men (1850), by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Chapter 7

What is strange, too, he [Goethe] lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Germany played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a French, or English, or once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse.

On Mr. Locke, Letters on the English (Lettres Philosophiques), by Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Mr. Locke, after having destroyed innate ideas; after having fully renounced the vanity of believing that we think always; after having laid down, from the most solid principles, that ideas enter the mind through the senses; having examined our simple and complex ideas; having traced the human mind through its several operations; having shown that all the languages in the world are imperfect, and the great abuse that is made of words every moment, he at last comes to consider the extent or rather the narrow limits of human knowledge.

  ¶ 1/04/2009 01:43:00 PM 0 Comments

  Stritch St. Francis plan faces crucial meetings Tom Kertscher reported in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The [City of St. Francis] Common Council will hold a public hearing Monday and could take a key vote Tuesday on the [Cardinal Stritch] university's proposal to build what could be a $150 million campus on the site of the Cousins Center and adjacent land.

See Cardinal Stritch envisions 800 students at Cousins site and Stitch's Cousins Center News

Our Archdiocese of Milwaukee needs to sell the property to help pay back money borrowed to finance the settlement of California lawsuits over sexual abuse of children by a couple of priests transfered there. See Firms show interest in buying Cousins Center property.  ¶ 1/03/2009 11:25:00 AM 0 Comments

  The Deadweight Loss of Brett Favre Stephen J. Dubner in the Freakonomics column of The New York Times on the jersey market.

it is also unlikely many Jets fans will have fond feelings for Favre any time soon. So it is hard to imagine too many of them buying a Favre jersey again, ever.

And what about wearing the jerseys they’ve already bought? Psychologists have noted a pair of phenomena related to this question: Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing) and Cutting Off Reflected Failure (CORFing). This boils down to the fact that people like to wear a team’s jersey after the team wins (that’s a BIRGer binge) and they like to bury a team’s jersey deep in the closet after the team loses.

There might have to be a separate category for a Jim McMahon Packer jersey.

(via Just One Minute)

Labels: definition

  ¶ 1/02/2009 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  A right to be atheist Jason Cameron in a letter to the editor published in the Boulder Daily Camera, December 23, 2008

Every time you say, "Merry Christmas" to a non-Christian, you might as well be suicide-bombing them or nailing them to a cross, placing a crown of thorns on their heads and sticking a spear in their sides.

And doesn't "Happy New Year" or even referring to "2008" and "2009" indirectly say the same thing?

(via David Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy)  ¶ 12/31/2008 06:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings', Culture Secretary says From Robert Winnett's interview of Britain's Minister of Culture Andy Burnham in the Telegraph

...“If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. ...

"...This isn’t about turning the clock back. ..."

Or ahead to when they're striking thirteen?

(via Mark Steyn at The Corner)  ¶ 12/31/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Obama’s Choice of Pastor Creates Furor Jeff Zeleny and David D. Kirkpatrick reported in The New York Times, December 19, 2008, that the furor included this from Episcopal Bishop V. Eugene Robinson on Rev. Rick Warren.

the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.

See Purpose-Driven Spirituality  ¶ 12/31/2008 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  A talk with The Rev. Richard P. McBrien by Michael Paulson in the Boston Globe, December 28, 2008

Father McBrien gives his explanation of why many diocesan newspapers no longer carry his column.

As the Catholic hierarchy became more conservative under Pope John Paul II, bishops who were open to a diversity of viewpoints in the church either died or retired, and were replaced, in almost every case, by bishops who were more, let's say, attuned to the desires and intentions of the Holy See. I used to kid, I'd say bishops get points if they drop my column. They get noticed, and then they get promoted eventually, and so forth. I can give you so many examples. I mean, let's take Boston. Cushing was a patron of mine. He liked me, and I liked him. He had his foibles, but we all do. I liked Cardinal Cushing very much.

So when bishops let his column run it was not so much because they were "open to a diversity of viewpoints" but because they sympathized with McBrien's.

But [Archbishop] Medeiros was in, and Medeiros once said to me, 'Richard, what would my mother think if she read your column?' and I said, 'Your eminence, I don't write my column for your mother.' So then it got dropped.

There was no follow-up on for whom, if anyone, he does write his column.

To the concluding question, "Why don't you wear a collar?" McBrien replies

I only wear a collar when I go to my home parish in West Hartford to say Mass on a Sunday when I'm home. My Roman collar is my television uniform. You don't see the apostles with Roman collars on. It's a custom. And the custom in the academic world is that most priests who teach in Catholic colleges and universities wear a tie or just have an open sport shirt.

At his website, he's pictured in that academic uniform and calls the column Essays in Theology. When the column ran in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald, the accompanying picture was of him in a Roman collar and the paper called the column "Essays in Dialogue".

(via Cathleen Kaveny at dotCommonweal who refers to this as a Boston Globe Interview with Dick McBrien)  ¶ 12/30/2008 06:00:00 PM 1 Comments

  India, an Exporter of Priests, May Keep Them Laurie Goodstein in today's New York Times with the conclusion of a three-part series called "Divine Recruits" on foreign priests coming to serve in American parishes.

See In America for Job, an African Priest Finds a Home  ¶ 12/30/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Scientists doubt inventor's global cooling idea — but what if it works? This report by Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers ran in the December 28, 2008 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

It stretches the imagination — and perhaps credulity — to suggest that a solitary inventor with no government support could solve global warming, especially a man who never earned a degree despite studying physics for much of a decade at the University of Maryland.

  ¶ 12/30/2008 06:00:00 AM 6 Comments

  Crisis must force financial changes in U.S. Tom Saler in his "Historical Perspective" column in the Business section of today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

There are important lessons to be learned from the unmitigated disaster that was 2008.

Above all, investors should resolve that they never again will base their spending on rising asset values.

The old rules do still apply? Is there a futures market where I can bet against that lesson being learned?


Update: Boom, Bust, Repeat, by Daniel Gross, The New York Times, December 25, 2008, review of Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, edited by Michael Lewis

Yuppies’ Last Rites Readied, declared the headline on a New York Times article of Oct. 21, 1987, which documented how the stock market crash was causing materialist, money-soaked urban dwellers to reduce conspicuous consumption and focus more on human relationships.

  ¶ 12/29/2008 06:00:00 PM 1 Comments

  In America for Job, an African Priest Finds a Home Laurie Goodstein in today's New York Times with the second in a three-part series called "Divine Recruits" on foreign priests coming to serve in American parishes.


See Serving Short-Handed U.S. Parishes, Fathers Without Borders  ¶ 12/29/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Historic

Politicians are always calling things historic. Usually all that this means is “something that happened while I was in office”. --The Economist

Labels: definition

  ¶ 12/29/2008 06:00:00 AM 1 Comments

  Serving Short-Handed U.S. Parishes, Fathers Without Borders Laurie Goodstein in today's New York Times with the first in a three-part series called "Divine Recruits" on foreign priests coming to serve in American parishes.

See International priests, sisters are a blessing  ¶ 12/28/2008 02:00:00 PM 3 Comments

  Reading Rat December 2008 On authors and works in my recommended reading:

(on the death of Harold Pinter)
They [his plays] were credited for creating a new brand of theatrical silence and pause with which his work became synonymous. Later, this device would become known as "Pinteresque" and be adopted by devotees of his work. --Arifa Akbar
(via Drudge Report)

(on Ludwig Wittgenstein)
By the time that Ludwig (the youngest of eight children) was born, in 1889, the Wittgensteins were living in grand style in a Viennese 'Palais', enjoying the best of everything - especially music. Their musical soirées, attended sometimes by Brahms, Strauss or Mahler, were among the best in Vienna, and they also had a major collection of manuscripts by Mozart, Beethoven and others. --Telegraph

(on translations of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy)
In addition to Pevear-Volokhonsky [Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007] and Briggs [Anthony Briggs, 2005], the Constance Garnett translation from 1904 is available to today's readers, published by Modern Library Classics. ...
Louise and Aylmer Maude translated War and Peace in 1923. ...
Along with these several translations--Pevear-Volokhonsky, Maude, and Briggs--many are still devoted to a Penguin translation by Rosemary Edmonds, since superseded by Briggs. Another edition, translated by Andrew Bromfield, published in 2007 by Ecco, claims to be the original version of War and Peace, never before published. --Lesley Herrmann

(on Rumi)
whose followers, of the Turkey-based Mawlawi order, remember him in a whirling dance, the saga, which has become synonymous in the West with all Sufism. --The Economist

(on John Updike)
He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world — from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual — emerges, as if for the first time, in the complete­ness of its actual being. --Sam Tanenhaus

(on Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
It is a bit too easy for people in the West to deplore the failure of intellectuals living in unfree societies to follow the example of a Solzhenitsyn. Such stories are rare. His arose from an unusual confluence: a great crime, a great silence, a receptive audience and personal courage well above the ordinary. --The Economist

(on Soren Kierkegaard)
He chose celibacy for what he felt was a noble reason, a deeper solidarity with the loneliness of the world. He cultivated loneliness as a means of deeper entry into the soul. --Ron Rolheiser, OMI

(on Benjamin Franklin)
he was well-grounded in basic democratic principles (though he remained ambivalent about natural rights), had a keen sense of the needs of the ordinary people among whom he lived, and possessed a skill and cleverness of expression that make him one of the supreme political communicators of all time. --Ralph Ketcham

(on The Kabbalah)
By and large the special details of Kabbalism which distinguish it from the mainstreams of Jewish thought are what is “occult” in occultism everywhere, and most of the world’s religions can be reinterpreted in these terms. They give Kabbalism its fascination but they do not give it its substance. ... beneath the glittering and mysterious superstructure of the Kabbalah, which purports to be occult Judaism, lies — Judaism. --Kenneth Rexroth

(on Tom Stoppard)
The playwright-who even back then enjoyed a reputation as a bohemian conservative, with a heritage rooted in actual Bohemia-marveled at how little loved England was by its native sons and daughters. --Michael Weiss
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

(on Virginia Woolf)
Woolf and the other Bloomsbury group members regarded themselves as socialist and held what they considered to be “advanced” views on the mingling of different social groups—their servants were not expected to wear uniforms, for example, or address them as “sir” and “madam”. Yet they seem to have been quite clueless about what life was like below stairs. --The Economist

(on Abraham Lincoln)
Not until the president discovered Ulysses S. Grant, and not until Grant came to Washington as general in chief in early 1864, did Lincoln have a leader ready to end the rebellion by destroying the Confederacy’s ability to resist. --Jean Edward Smith

(on James Madison)
The First Amendment was not, of course, "first" among the amendments put before the states in 1789 for ratification. It was the third of twelve, the first two of which went unratified. Tellingly, in James Madison's initial proposal, the amendments would have been inserted amid the various clauses of the body of the Constitution, reflecting and reinforcing its central logic but not altering its substance. For Madison, the First Amendment did not protect anything that was not already protected by the Constitution: the injunction for Congress to "make no law" was a reminder of the limits of governmental power. --George Thomas

(on Blaise Pascal)
Pascal’s famous wager goes like this, and I ask each of my readers to carefully reflect on it: God either exists or he does not exist, so I must of necessity lay odds for or against him, since I have free choice and in such an important matter I cannot remain neutral. If I wager for God, and God exists—then I have an infinite gain. However, if God does not exist, then there is no loss. If I wager against God, and God exists—then I will suffer an infinite loss. However, if God does not exist, then there is neither loss nor gain. --Kenneth Baker, S.J.

(on The Koran)
the clerics pointed to the Koranic verses that state “this is a book we have sent down to you (O Muhammad).” They ask, Don’t these verses imply that God is the revealer and Muhammad the receiver? They also point out that there were times when Muhammad waited impatiently for the revelation to come to him and that in more than 300 cases the prophet is commanded to tell his people to do one thing or another. This demonstrates, the argument goes, that the commands are coming from elsewhere rather than from the heart or the mind of the prophet himself. --Mohammad Ayatollaki Tabaar

(on Collected Essays by George Orwell)
Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies. --Florence King

(on Emanuel Swedenborg)
The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter: so that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics, that, "the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

(on Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton)
Why may not this power which causes heavy bodies to descend, and is the same without any sensible diminution at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth, or on the summits of the highest mountains, why, said Sir Isaac, may not this power extend as high as the moon? And in case its influence reaches so far, is it not very probable that this power retains it in its orbit, and determines its motion? But in case the moon obeys this principle (whatever it be) may we not conclude very naturally that the rest of the planets are equally subject to it? In case this power exists (which besides is proved) it must increase in an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. --Voltaire

(on Julius Caesar)
Caesar was careful with his own language. His war with his rival Pompey -- the attack he was masterminding during his sojourn by the Rhône -- is not called a "civil war" by him. That pejorative name came later. He never described the "crossing of the Rubicon" in his memoirs either. The phrase that later denoted an irrevocable step or a self-justified illegality was avoided by the man who actually crossed that stream near Rimini in 49 B.C., formally leaving the province of Gaul, where he had lawful power, for Italy, where he did not. --Peter Stothard
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

(on Google Books)
By now the company has digitized at least seven million titles. Many are old enough to be in the public domain — no issue there — and many are new enough to be available in bookstores, but the vast majority, four million to five million, are books that had fallen into a kind of limbo: protected by copyright but out of print. Their publishers had given up on them. They existed at libraries and used booksellers but otherwise had left the playing field. --James Gleick  ¶ 12/28/2008 08:12:00 AM 1 Comments

  "Life Without Bubbles."

It's a Paul Krugman column. I was worried Michael Jackson's chimpanzee had died. --Ann Althouse

Labels: Snark launch

  ¶ 12/27/2008 01:07:00 PM 0 Comments

  Pyric victory

"It's like putting out the fire in the kitchen of the Titanic while the ship is going down," said Felicia Herman, the executive director of Natan, a foundation financed by young Jewish philanthropists, speaking about the fallout from the Madoff-linked losses in the midst of a larger global financial crisis.

Jewish Charities Scramble to Cover Losses to Trader: Alleged Madoff Scheme Closes Doors, by Robin Shulman, Washington Post, December 24, 2008

Labels: The cliche has hit the fan

  ¶ 12/26/2008 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  In a one horse open sleigh
My Great Grandpa and Great Grandma Berres near their farm in Marathon County, Wisconsin, circa 1910.  ¶ 12/24/2008 04:35:00 PM 0 Comments

  Marty Haugen replies The Curt Jester, back on April 2, 2008, quoted Mr. Haugen from the now-deleted Commander Craig's Corner weblog.

My own hesitancy about joining the Church is not about its eucharistic theology, but rather around the unwillingness of the Church to commission, ordain and welcome all humans as Jesus did: male and female, married and unmarried, saints and sinners. I believe that the Church, God's people and all of creation have suffered from this omission.

If someone believed Catholic Eucharistic theology and that the Catholic Church is "the Church", then it would seem to follow one would join and stay despite anything. The reasons people do not join or stay in the Church might indicate the actual level of belief in Catholic Eucharistic theology, among other things. Among those other things, where might Haugen have gotten the idea that Church teaching on ordination involves an "omission", as if a To Do list has been misplaced for two millennia? From what I see and hear, probably from some of the Church's clergy and staff.


P.S. I can't claim he is utterly lacking in perspective.

I do not think of my own music as central or important to Roman Catholic worship, present or future.

Sounds like we'd hear less of his music at St. Al's if he was the Director of Liturgy and Music.


P.P.S. At Catholic Wintertime In Milwaukee, a call for more liturgical diversity in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, such as more Michael Joncas. I understand he once wrote something called "On Eagles Wings".  ¶ 12/23/2008 06:00:00 AM 8 Comments

  From sales to sacraments Today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Business section has "the latest in a monthly feature on people changing jobs in a dynamic economy." Joel Dresang interviews Father Dennis Wieland who had a career in retail management. He then attended Sacred Heart School of Theology (here in Franklin) and was ordained a priest at age 37. Now about 20 years later he's pastor of St. Anthony Church in Menomonee Falls.

What is your role in the parish?

"My primary responsibility is to shepherd this local community, to lead them in worship, to be like the chief teacher in the parish. Other things that go along with it are like chief financial officer. ..."

...

How does your retail experience play into what you do?

"I can use a lot of the skills that I learned in retail management in the parish - how to run a parish effectively. They don't teach you in seminary how to deal with finances. ..."

Last I heard, priests lack seminary training not just in parish finance but in parish administration generally. They might need at least enough training to avoid either micro-managing or failing in oversight of subordinates.

A sidebar gives Wisconsin's average clergy compensation at about $45,000 a year. Through 2016 the demand for clergy is projected to grow faster that the average for all occupations. These figures are not broken down by denomination.  ¶ 12/22/2008 06:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Mr. and Mrs. Right Bob Colacello in Vanity Fair, January 2009, on Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr.

Frederick Eberstadt, a New York friend who was a classmate at Millbrook, says, “It sounds funny, but Bill’s biggest interest was kidding around. He was very Catholic, though. He had a little shrine in his room, a Madonna inside this kind of stone box. [sic] He asked me what I thought of it, and I said it was kitsch. He said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I said, ‘What don’t I understand?’ He said, ‘It’s the mother of God.’ Even at that age, to his thinking, it could not be kitsch, because it was the mother of God.”

Mr. Buckley perhaps thought it was more important that it represented the Mother of God than that it might be regarded as kitsch.

(via Douglas LeBlanc at Get Religion)  ¶ 12/22/2008 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Punches only in punch lines Annysa Johnson reports in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Azhar Usman, co-founder of the Allah Made Me Funny comedy tour, and Rabbi Bob Alper, who bills himself as "the world's only practicing clergyman doing standup comedy - intentionally," will bring their "Laugh in Peace Tour" to Milwaukee on Wednesday.

That's December 24, 2008 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Shalom, 7630 North Santa Monica Boulevard in Fox Point. Here's some video from CBC News. Might be a bit of a didactic undertone; even so, if we didn't have family coming over, we might have tried to take in the show on the way to Midnight Mass.

See Ever genuflect in a movie theater?

P.S. You can book the pair as motivational speakers for $12,000 plus coach air fare.  ¶ 12/20/2008 09:12:00 AM 0 Comments

  'Pearls Before Swine'

(recommended reading by Martin Luther)

  ¶ 12/19/2008 01:50:00 PM 1 Comments

  Bush Approves $17.4 Billion Auto Bailout David M. Herszenhorn and David E. Sanger reported in The New York Times

Via Robert Farago at The Truth About Cars, Bailout Watch 295

And here’s something odd. “Government officials will examine all financial statements and records of the car companies.” You mean they haven’t already? The Prez wants to fork-out $17.4b without knowing the exact size of the hole into which he’s throwing U.S. taxpayer money?

On Chrysler's reaction, Mr. Farago comments,

Business as usual, then? Yup.

And to GM's,

Once again, GM CEO Rick Wagoner has slipped the hangman’s noose without promising any quantifiable goals or metrics for future success.

  ¶ 12/19/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Magic costs more than mere rides Patrick McIlheran's column in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the cost of the proposed Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee commuter train got me to look back at some figures. These might be a bit out of date, but KRM Edition 3, January 2007, projected the "Annually, commuter rail will generate 25.2 million passenger-miles" (p. 4). Transit Now Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee Commuter Rail: Quick Points & Facts (2003) said "Annual operating costs are expected to be $10.9 million." That works out to a cost of over 43 cents per passenger-mile, about $28 for a Kenosha-Milwaukee round trip. The actual cost of a Kenosha to Milwaukee daily commute would be about $7,000 per year. That's the cost, not the fare proposed to be charged to riders.

The occasion for Mr. McIlheran's column was a Reason Foundation study that concluded KRM Commuter Rail Plan's Supposed Economic Benefits Aren't Credible; System Would Require Massive Subsidies. The study arrived at similar operating cost amounts.

P.S. McIlherean quotes Tom Rubin in the study.

"Commuter rail is, to a very high degree, an all-or-nothing option," he writes. It's impossible to erase a mistake, so we'd just keep throwing money in.

That's a virtue, say rail's backers: Such permanence means riders won't worry that the route will change.

If that's what they say, they're ignoring history. Here on the left we see what would be the track used by the KRM. While it's single track now, it had been double not that long ago. To the right, parallel to the high tension lines, is the right of way of the long-ago abandoned MRK electric passenger rail line from Milwaukee to Kenosha.  ¶ 12/17/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  2009 Lenten Pilgrimage to Sagrada Familia Not the Sagrada Familia chapel in Guatemala that our parish mission group has helped with. (See a lofty mission) This is the Archdiocesan sister parish Sagrada Familia in the Dominican Republic.

The all-inclusive fee (between $1,800 and $2,000, depending on airfare) covers air and ground transportation, programs, guides, translation service, communal reflection and retreat, and simple meals and accommodations. A unique part of this experience is the opportunity to be hosted for four nights by La Sagrada Familia families who graciously welcome us into their homes.

This is different from the parish mission trips. It does not involve additional fundraising for things like medical supplies or for a project like the Guatemala chapel. Nor does include things like working in a medical clinic or school ... or laying concrete block for a retaining wall behind the swine shed. (See Casa de cerdos) Perhaps as a result, the pilgrimage requires only two orientarion sessions. It might be more what some people are looking for. I've heard some local judges and lawyers who were on prior pilgrimages speak about them very positively.  ¶ 12/16/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  Evangelizing the Religious Imagination This column by Father Ronald Rolhieser, OMI, ran in "our" Milwaukee Catholic Herald, November 6, 2008. In it, he reviews The Shack, by William Young.

The real task of evangelization today is very much that of trying to evangelize the imagination, of trying to put healthy, life-giving images of God into the popular imagination. We have libraries full of scriptural and theological books that are solid and orthodox. These are important because without a solid grounding we soon go astray, but they need to be supplemented.

  ¶ 12/15/2008 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., RIP James Martin, S.J., at In All Things, Friday morning.

I heard him speak on "John Paul II and Evangelization" at an October 21, 2008 conference in Mundelein, Illinois. (That topic is his contribution to the book John Paul II And the New Evangelization: How You Can Bring the Good News to Others.) We talked briefly afterwards.

Among his last writings was The Eve of St. Agnes—Green Bay, 2008: John Keats for Today’s Reader, posted January 28, 2008 at First Things.  ¶ 12/14/2008 09:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Ensemble takes wide-ranging Baroque journey Tom Strini in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews Celebremos al Nino: A Mexican Baroque Christmas performed last night by The Rose Ensemble at the St. Joseph Center Chapel, part of this year's Early Music Now series.

The program notes said the careers of the three featured composers, Juan Gutierrez de Padilla, Juan Garcia de Zespedes, and Antonio de Salazar, and Antonio Salazar, had included serving as maestro at the Cathedral in Puebla, Mexico. Their compositions showed the influence of seventeenth century Mexican dance music. While Church authorities had censured the dances, as such, they did not object to the adaptation of dance music. The notes quote Pedro Cerone, who apparently wrote on music at the time, as saying a Mass with music based on that of the villancicos would fill the churches with people usually seen once a year.  ¶ 12/14/2008 06:56:00 AM 0 Comments

  George Bailout Not So Wonderful Now says Ross Douthat in the Washington Post, October 12, 2008

In a mid-movie peroration, the hero lectures Potter and a gaggle of local entrepreneurs on the virtues of democratizing homeownership: "You're all businessmen here," he presses them, sounding for all the world like a politician defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac against their critics in 2004 or so. "Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? ... What'd you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? ... Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?"

Yet 'Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter!' said Gary North at LewRockwell, December 11, 2002

It was not honeymoon cash that solved bank runs in America. It was the government’s extension of an insurance subsidy and its implied promise of a fiat-money bailout by the Federal Reserve System. This solution has guaranteed inflation ever since, in order to keep home owners happy and depositors asleep.

Here George Bailey explains fractional reserve banking.


Mr. North continues.

But the movie isn’t about fractional reserve banking, any more than it’s about angels getting their wings. It’s about the positive, cumulative, but unseen benefits to many people of individual acts of charity and honesty. It’s also about capitalism: home ownership, small businesses, and sacrificial hard work.

  ¶ 12/12/2008 06:00:00 AM 0 Comments

  Ever genuflect in a movie theater? In his December 8, 2008 "On Religion" column in in USA Today, Mark I. Pinsky's discusses Putting the 'fun' in fundamentalism.

The popular image of fundamentalist faith — whether Jewish, Muslim or evangelical Christian — is humorless, intolerant and angry, unhesitant to cast the first stone, sometimes literally. The words "whimsy" and "orthodoxy" do not often appear in the same sentence.

Yet humor is a way of explaining religion — to its adherents and to others. Increasingly, believing members of orthodox faith traditions are able to joke about their foibles and shortcomings before an audience of their community — if only in the safe, sheltered environs of a mosque social hall, an Israeli comedy club or a sold-out Apostles of Comedy concert at a central Florida megachurch.

(via Terry Mattingly at Get Religion)  ¶ 12/11/2008 06:00:00 PM 0 Comments

  11. Bob Dylan advised us never to trust anyone...

A. Over 40
B. Wearing a uniform
C. Carrying a briefcase
D. Over 30
E. You don't know
F. Who says, 'Trust me'
G. Who eats tofu

The correct answer is "Yes", that is, Trust Yourself.

Jack Weinberger most likely coined the phrase Never trust anyone over 30.

(Question and proposed answers from a "Memory Test" making the email rounds)  ¶ 12/11/2008 12:00:00 PM 0 Comments