The best-hidden boondoggle is dropped into the second half of a sentence in a general passage about women. “We will invest in women-owned small businesses and remove the capital gains tax on start-up small businesses.” (Attention all conservatives: Do not panic! This passage does not mean that Democrats favor government investments in businesses, even small businesses, even small businesses owned by women. That would be socialism. It is a convention of platform-writing that all government spending is referred to as “investment.” The Republicans do it, too. That doesn’t make it right.)

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¶ 8/10/2008 06:00:00 PM 0 Comments

When what is abnormal becomes normal, harm soon follows.

But what is normal? The standard is constantly changing, and these socialites and celebrities are on the leading edge of that change.
--Ann Althouse

Labels: definition

¶ 4/19/2008 02:07:00 PM 0 Comments

When he [Cone] talks about defeating whiteness, he does not mean white-skinned people, but rather a system of racially-based oppression. And when he talks about black people, he means people who live under conditions of poverty and oppression. This is what he means, I think, when he says that Jesus was black or that any God worth believing in must be part of the black community and against whiteness. Given how he defines his terms, I agree.

...as David Gilmour points out in The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, the word "white" [in The White Man's Burden] "plainly refers to civilization and character more than to the colour of men's skins. The 'white men' are those who conduct themselves within the Law for the good of others: Gunga Din may have a 'dirty' hide, but he is 'white, clear white, inside.'"
--Roger Kimball, "Rudyard Kipling unburdened", The New Criterion, April 2008

Labels: definition

¶ 3/31/2008 06:59:00 AM 1 Comments

On Meet the Press this [Sunday] morning, Senator Hillary Clinton accused her host, Tim Russert, of being 'Jesuitical' in his argumentation. The Jesuit-educated Russert (Canisius High School in Buffalo, N.Y. and John Carroll University in Cleveland) was pressing Senator Clinton on her 2002 vote to authorize war in Iraq. ...

Now according to the Oxford American Dictionary, "Jesuitical" has two meanings. The first is the more benign: "of or concerning the Jesuits." Okay, that's straightforward. But the word has a second meaning, which is almost always pejorative and was born of the old anti-Jesuit canard that we can be a little slick with our reasoning. Here the word means, "Dissembling or equivocating, in the manner associated with Jesuits."

Labels: definition

¶ 1/14/2008 05:18:00 PM 0 Comments

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

¶ 12/20/2007 05:01:00 PM 0 Comments

...the plan, as one skeptical pal of mine puts it, "to shove freedom down the throats of the entire world whether they want it or not"...
--Mark Steyn

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¶ 9/20/2007 06:59:00 AM 0 Comments

Even now, Benedict is reaching out to the Society of Pius X. And some would say that this Latin Mass thing is an olive branch in their direction. When will there be an olive branch for the Matthew Fox's and Rev. Alice Iaquinta's?

At our Techno Cosmic Masses people dance to techno music as well as live music; DJ's provide the musical ambience and VJ's or video jockeys provide images through slides and videos that tell the story of the theme celebrated.

IV. LITURGICAL COSTUMING: The Stole, the Alb, the Ambo, and the Vestment are all ancient costumes copied from the Romans. We don't see why we have to wear just these things and cannot wear costumes that speak to our particulary cultural norms in ways that are new and creative. We reserve the right to have a Star Trek Mass, a Clown Mass, or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Mass.

Labels: definition

¶ 9/18/2007 06:59:00 AM 1 Comments

Assuming the worst about Craig [Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)], the Senate has not held a vote on outlawing homosexual impulses. It voted on gay marriage. Craig not only opposes gay marriage, he's in a heterosexual marriage with kids. Talk about walking the walk!

Did Craig propose marriage to the undercover cop? If not, I'm not seeing the "hypocrisy."

--Ann Coulter

Labels: definition

¶ 9/07/2007 08:09:00 PM 0 Comments

...our problem, however, at least in my experience, is the wide diversity in current practice from one parish to another.

The recently created position of Liturgical Referee has been instituted to help to bring uniformity to the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Liturgical Referees will travel around the world randomly attending Masses. Liturgical Referees will stand, mostly quietly, to the side of the sanctuary during Mass and call out signals if he observes any liturgical penalties according to the GIRM and other liturgical documents. Only in the case of penalties that would make the Mass itself invalid will the Liturgical Referee blow his whistle and when necessary call for any replays to correct any mistake made. Penalty markers may be thrown during the Mass to alert the celebrant to any problems that might need immediate correction.

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¶ 9/05/2007 06:59:00 AM 0 Comments

Louis H. Bremer Jr., LRMC president and chief executive officer, said in a statement: "The interpretation many Christians are getting is that prayer is completely banned from the hospital, which couldn't be further from the truth."

"It would be very appropriate to say Jesus' name in the presence of a Christian family. That's no problem," Bremer said in the statement. "What must be understood is knowing the audience and what is appropriate for that particular situation."

The hospital was worried about "Secondhand Jesus" meaning that those who didn't intend to have Jesus had Jesus forced upon them by a third party.

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¶ 9/04/2007 05:59:00 PM 0 Comments

The human mind is admittedly fallible, and in most professions the possibility of occasional error is admitted and even guarded against. But the legal profession is the only one in which the chances of error are admitted to be so high that an elaborate machinery has been provided for the correction of error--and not a single error, but a succession of errors. In other trades to be wrong is regarded as a matter of regret; in the law alone is it regarded as a matter of course ... .
--A. P. Herbert, "Why is the House of Lords? sub nominee Inland Revenue v. Haddock", quoting the Master of the Rolls

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¶ 8/21/2007 06:10:00 PM 0 Comments

Much of the renewed interest in spheromaks is focused on a research effort at Lawrence Livermore called the Sustained Spheromak Physics Experiment (SSPX). The SSPX was dedicated on January 14, 1999, in a ceremony attended by representatives from DOE and collaborating scientists from the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. SSPX is a series of experiments designed to better determine the spheromak's potential to efficiently contain hot plasmas of fusion fuel, in this case, the hydrogen isotope deuterium. --David Hill

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¶ 8/15/2007 06:59:00 AM 0 Comments

"Strange New Respect" is Tom Bethell's term for the love showered by the MSM on conservatives who move to the left.
--Mickey Kaus, KausFiles, Wednesday, May 30, 2007, 11:57 P.M.

Labels: definition

¶ 6/02/2007 10:48:00 AM 0 Comments

The purpose of this ministry is to challenge the Church’s policies regarding women by engaging the hierarchy and organizing on a grassroots level to publicly witness for women’s ordination into a renewing priestly ministry.

To explain why we use the term "irritation," we use the analogy of

the grain of sand and the oyster. The grain of sand irritates the inside of the oyster to create a beautiful pearl, and the people active in this ministry are the grains of sand, irritating the Catholic hierarchy to create a pearl of wisdom for the Church that bring about repentance for the sins of the Kyriarchy and bring about a renewing priestly ministry!

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¶ 5/24/2007 12:32:00 PM 0 Comments

Pastoral care, to me, means trusting that each person has within himself or herself a spiritual capacity that helps him or her discover and make moral and ethical decisions.

I see my pastoral care as listening and supporting people in this often difficult process of discovery and decision-making.

Labels: definition

¶ 5/04/2007 01:09:00 PM 0 Comments

Some years ago, in conversation with a prominent Anglican bishop in Britain, I asked how he would define the mission of the Church of England. After a pause for thought, he said, "I suppose I would say that the mission, so to speak, is to maintain the religious option for those who might be interested."
--Richard John Neuhaus

Labels: definition

¶ 4/03/2007 07:59:00 AM 0 Comments

My Republican vote [Nixon 1972] produced little shock waves in the New York intellectual community. It didn't take long--a year or two--for the socialist writer Michael Harrington to come up with the term "neoconservative" to describe a renegade liberal like myself. The the chagrin of some of my friends, I decided to accept that term; there was no point in calling myself a liberal when no one else did. ...

I had no patience with the old conservatism that confronted the tides of history by shouting "Stop!"

--Irving Kristol, Forty Good Years", The Public Interest, Spring 2005, pp. 8, 9


Recall that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully embraced the reforms of the New Deal, and indeed the major programs of Johnson's Great Society. Skepticism was only evoked by the more speculative and theoretical extensions into "social engineering", as in the community participation effort in the War on Poverty, or the movement from civil rights to affirmative action in job and college and university admissions (which, of course, dates more to the Nixon than the Johnson administration). Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the "neo" before "conservatism".
--Nathan Glazer, "Neoconservative from the start", The Public Interest, Spring 2005, p. 15

Labels: definition

¶ 3/24/2007 04:30:00 PM 0 Comments

One difficulty the entire [Anglican] church is having to come to terms with, though, is that if the US is expelled, the whole edifice could crumble. It is cash from the Episcopal Church that keeps the show on the road.
--Ruth Gledhill

Labels: definition

¶ 3/23/2007 06:27:00 PM 0 Comments

He [Trotsky] maintains a double standard throughout his diary, using one set of values for his side and another for the enemy. ...

... Trotsky not only takes the trouble to record Lenin's complicity in Ekaterinburg but also goes on to justify it: "The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Czar's family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin." ... This entry is sandwiched in between entries revealing Trotsky's anxiety about the fate of his son Seryozha, a nonpolitical engineer who had been arrested by Stalin simply because Trotsky was his father. Trotsky thinks this is barbarous, which it was, and refers to Seryozha as "an innocent bystander," which he was, but it doesn't occur to him that the late Czar might have considered his fourteen-year-old son another innocent bystander, not to mention his four young daughters and the family servants.

--Dwight Macdonald, "Trotsky, Orwell, and Socialism", The New Yorker March 28, 1959

Labels: definition

¶ 3/18/2007 12:50:00 PM 0 Comments

The word "neoliberalism," at least in its domestic context, was coined by The Washington Monthly's Charles Peters in 1978. (It didn't start, as David Brooks declared, with a Kinsley tax editorial [4 pp. pdf] in 1981).
--Mickey Kaus (March 12, 2007 4:48 P.M.)

In March 1946, with a number of distinguished associates, Leonard E. Read established the Read Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. ...

The principal function which the Foundation for Economic Education served in those years, in short, was to facilitate the recovery of a tradition and the dissemination of ideas. ...

The Foundation for Economic Education in these years was extending its version of classical liberalism from the few to the many, one by one.

As FEE went about its work, another organization founded in 1947 thousands of miles away was also contributing substantially to the growing self-consciousness and interrelatedness of what some were calling the neo-liberal movement in the United States and Western Europe. The earliest stimulus for this aspect of the revival emanated from the United States in 1937, when Walter Lippmann published The Good Society. Among those quick to perceive its importance was Friedrich Hayek, who considered it a "brilliant restatement of the fundamental ideals of classic liberalism." [Hayek, Studies p. 199n]

--George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (1976) pp. 24-25

Labels: definition

¶ 3/17/2007 10:54:00 AM 1 Comments

is gnostic -- the believer searches for occult experience of his innermost self, standing in aweful solitude with God. It is not ecclesial. "God in you responds to God without," wrote Emerson, America’s sage. It is therapeutic, sold and bought for results, like tooth-whitener. American Protestants, Episcopalians, Catholics and even Jews are spiritually closer to each other than to their global co-religionists. This spiritual divide is cracking Anglicanism. It is even more worrying for Catholics, who have centralised authority. Rome is necessarily pained by deviancy. Back in 1899 Leo XIII, pope and prophet, condemned the American Religion in his encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, "A Witness to Our Good Will". Leo didn’t insist that anyone had yet fallen into those "views ... called by some 'Americanism' ", but he warned that the heresy was, as it were, out there on the prairie, waiting to gobble up American souls.

Leo deplored "that there are among you some who would have the Church in America different from what it is in the rest of the world". A century on, and the Church in America is different from what it is in the rest of the world.
--Richard Major

Labels: definition

¶ 3/16/2007 07:59:00 AM 1 Comments

one of the biggest problems that Democrats faced 1992-2005 was their inability to get outside of their media cocoon – CNN/NYT/PBS, etc. It was an echo chamber! Democrats would spend a cozy two years locked in a hazy liberal bliss, then get socked in midterms or the Presidential election.

Isn’t Fox News – and its surrounding Conservative Blogosphere -- the exact same thing? And isn’t it leading to the exact same problems? Republican activist types never have to read the hated New York Times, or watch CNN, or do anything that would expose them to the larger world. And in the last midterms, the talking heads they were used to seeing on Fox and friends confidently predicted a Republican victory. Consequentially, there were no Republican vote-catching initiatives, no sense of urgency, just the same complacent cocoon we’re used to seeing on the Dem side.

--Kevin, at Bajillion

Liberal students of public policy did not disappear from the pages of The Public Interest. ... But there can be no question where the main drift ran.

I see that as a failing on our part. ... It was our special issues that helped us to reach out and shape the debate. In their absence, one was too dependent on what came in over the transom, and these submissions reflected the increasing energy of conservative think tanks and foundations. Many of these conservative ideas were indeed powerful. But, as they began to dominate the debate over policy, we should have done more to examine them critically.

Labels: definition

¶ 3/14/2007 07:41:00 AM 1 Comments

the restrictions necessitated by social domination. This is distinguished from (basic) repression: the "modifications" of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization.
--Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1966) p. 35

Labels: definition

¶ 3/12/2007 12:01:00 PM 0 Comments

the numbers of people willing to get out of bed on a Sunday morning to attend a Church that defines its charism as "facilitating the conversation" are probably rather small.
--Jim Naughton

Labels: definition

¶ 3/08/2007 07:39:00 AM 0 Comments

for some Catholics, lapsed Catholics and even non-Catholics, the term is used to express a sense of "liberation" from what they see as a misguided, outdated, or misinterpreted moralism; for others, it connotes a dismissive or belittling attitude toward traditional Catholic moral teachings, or an attempt to "psychologize" or "secularize" what they see as authentic spirituality.
--Wikipedia

Labels: definition

¶ 3/06/2007 06:09:00 PM 0 Comments

In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in Natural History that called for a truce between religion and science. "The net of science covers the empirical universe," he wrote. "The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value." Gould was emphatic about keeping the domains separate, urging "respectful discourse" and "mutual humility." He called the demarcation "nonoverlapping magisteria" from the Latin magister, meaning "canon."

The "canon" of the scriptures comes from the Greek word kanon meaning "measuring rod" or "norm". (p. 76)

Magisterium - The teaching office of the Church. ... (p.230)

Labels: definition

¶ 3/05/2007 07:43:00 PM 1 Comments

What made fascism different from earlier dictatorships was the presence of a mass party that monopolized power through its security services and the army and that eliminated all other parties, using considerable violence in the process. The new style of party was headed by a leader who had virtually unlimited power, was adulated by his followers, and was the focus of a quasi-religious cult. The party's doctrine became an obligatory article of faith for not only its members but for all other citizens and was constantly projected by means of a powerful propaganda machinery.
--Walter Laquer, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996) p. 14

By the way, here is Goldberg’s definition [Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism]: “Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy.”

Labels: definition

¶ 3/05/2007 06:58:00 AM 0 Comments

I personally find the word 'alien' offensive when applied to individuals, especially to children. An alien to me is someone from out of [sic] space.
--Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami

Labels: definition

¶ 3/04/2007 07:25:00 AM 0 Comments

Hathos is the attraction to something you really can't stand; it's the compulsion of revulsion. I feel that way about Bill O'Reilly.
--Andrew Sullivan

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¶ 3/03/2007 09:16:00 AM 0 Comments

saga of (improbably) well-off, catty and over-the-hill sluts in the big city.
--Russell Wardlow

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¶ 3/02/2007 03:55:00 PM 0 Comments

The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. ...

...mutation--if I may use that biological term--that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
--Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (3rd ed. 1950) Ch. VII

Labels: definition

¶ 3/01/2007 08:58:00 AM 0 Comments

the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day.
--R. R. Reno summarizing Allan Bloom

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¶ 2/27/2007 12:31:00 PM 0 Comments

It's the television equivalent of NPR.
--Martha K. Levin, the publisher of Free Press

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¶ 2/26/2007 06:04:00 PM 0 Comments

urging the Church toward a Vichy-style capitulation that acknowledges the de facto coercive power of sexual Leftism.
--Diogenes at Off the Record

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¶ 2/23/2007 12:11:00 PM 0 Comments

Yet during a meeting with the Editorial Board Tuesday, [Milwaukee County Exectutive Scott] Walker said he would like to grow the local economy enough so lower-income people don't have to rely on transit and could instead afford to buy cars if they chose.

While we understand what Walker was getting at, those kinds of comments unfortunately sound like someone who thinks of rapid transit more as an urban albatross than a tool for regional economic growth.

Labels: definition

¶ 2/21/2007 07:17:00 AM 0 Comments

a private club for educated white people.
--Tavis Smiley

Labels: definition

¶ 2/21/2007 07:01:00 AM 2 Comments

Long ago, witty commentators called the Episcopal Church the "Republican Party at prayer." Today, "NPR at prayer" would be more like it.
--Terry Mattingly (February 19, 2003)

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¶ 2/20/2007 07:00:00 AM 0 Comments

verbal irony.^Fe
dramatic irony!^Fe
and
situational irony?^Fe

Labels: definition

¶ 11/11/2006 02:55:00 PM 0 Comments

Liturgical innovation comparable to the innovation of Gregorian chant; relevant: “A clown liturgy may sound sacrilegious but those who attended a special Mass at St. Agnes Church described it as moving, uplifting, spirited and colorful” (Catholic Herald, Milwaukee, February 16, 1984).

Didn't want to let the 22nd anniversary of that article go unmarked.

Labels: definition

¶ 2/16/2006 12:09:00 PM 0 Comments