Summa Minutiae

Civics quiz

Here's a civics quiz from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, along with some background & quiz results for various groups from USA Today. I got 56/60 - the 4 I missed were:

• 19: In The Republic, Plato points to the desirability of:
• 33: Which of the following is NOT among the official powers of Congress?
• 58: What is a major effect of a purchase of bonds by the Federal Reserve?
• 60: The Federal government’s largest pay out over the past twenty years has been for:

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The permanence of parchment

Classical Bookworm: Parchment outlasts even marble - more meditations on the world to come in 2 or 3 thousand years.

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Common sense on cultural suicide

Two must-reads: Theodore Dalrymple via Jeff Goldstein.

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Some online Homer resources

Here's the germ of a collection of online resources devoted to Homer. If you have more, please drop me a line and I'll add them. These initial listings are mainly devoted to the study of Homeric Greek, but even if you're not into that you can still find some good commentary on his works here. I'm not interested in modern scholarship per se unless it's busy celebrating Homer's works as the foundation of the Western canon of liberal arts.

• Clyde Pharr, Homeric Greek, 1920.
• Richard C. Jebb, Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, 1905
• William B Owen, Edgar J Goodspeed, Homeric Vocabularies: Greek and English Wordlists for the Study of Homer, 1906
• Andrew Lang, Essays in Little, 1891; see the chapter "Homer and the Study of Greek"

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How to survive a disaster

Glenn Reynolds posts a roundup with some great links. And for all your Hurricane Dean needs, see Brendan Loy - hurricane liveblogger.

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Theodore Dalrymple's articles

I've been trying to find his recent articles collected in one place - here's the FindArticles collection.

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Idiot America (that's you) is dangerous

to the folks at Esquire magazine.

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To TSO from John Adams

Adams on taking up again in old age the pleasures of youth, courtesy of Mr. Gilleland.

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Old photos

Someone needs to tell Lileks about this.

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Lenten alms burning a hole in your pocket?

You can't go wrong by donating to the Crisis Nursery of Urbana-Champaign and Restoration Urban Ministries of Champaign IL. Both organizations accept donations online (hint hint).

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The grim reality of climate change (heh)

Behold "The Cooling World," Newsweek, April 28, 1975. Science fundamentalists were crapping their pants 3 years later when the great blizzard of 78 hit. I recall reading children's propaganda disguised as scifi in which the remnants of civilization clung to life along the equator squeezed between the southern and northern glaciers. And now it's more of the same BS - same Grim Reality To Come!, etc.

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That world is gone

Chris Walley of News from Farholme writes about the vanished intellectual world of Tolkien and Lewis and formulates Walley’s Rule of Contemporary Education: ‘There is no piece of knowledge that we can safely assume that the modern British schoolchild actually knows.’ Read the whole thing. The coming dark age will need a Jeremiah or two.

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Global warming as religion

Cripes, I wish I had written this.

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"It wouldn't be right, would it?"

Human nature never changes.

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Virgil and life

A moving essay by Ellen Handler Spitz of University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

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In praise of paper

Here's a good post on the ol' digital dark ages problem.

Future generations are going to have an easier time reading the text on the Domesday book or a copy of Us Magazine than they will playing the Flash game featuring the cows or reading this blog. Paper is solid state memory that is unmatched in its ability to preserve information that nobody is interested in at the time, but that someone might be interested in later. Beowulf sat unread for over six-hundred years, give or take a century. The Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte D'Arthur was found on a shelf in a school library in the 20th century. Paper's not perfect. Data loss is a persistent feature of the medium. Beowulf almost disappeared in a fire at Ashburnham House, after all. But until we have a digital medium that's got a comparable shelf life and loss rate, it's not time to toss out all those old books and newspapers in favor of jpeg scans.

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The state of Irish in Ireland

In which the author endeavors to travel through Ireland speaking only Irish.

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A good cause

Restoration Urban Ministries in Champaign, IL has been doing good work for years, but like most such groups they always need money. You can donate online here, even if you don't live in the area. If you do live around here, this page lists some other ways you can help. Please consider giving to them if you have a bit extra to give.

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English

A couple of days ago Lisa lamented the NAB Psalms she's been reading each morning; they don't hold a candle to the King James versions she learned as a child. Amazon ahoy! and the UPS man delivered it this afternoon: the Oxford University Press edition of the KJV with "Apocrypha". 8-year-old Sarah read the first two chapters of Genesis aloud this afternoon while I kept interrupting her to point out the rhythms and rhymes. Interpolated words are in italics, so she had fun re-reading each sentence without those.

Lisa and I spent an hour with it this evening, finding favorite KJV passages from childhood and comparing them to the dreary depressing NAB's cardboard prose. And when the NAB isn't repellent, it's embarrassing - I cringe when Isaiah 9:6 collides with visiting Protestants at Mass:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

compared to the hokey:

For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.

Who's "they", Kemosabe? Really, this NAB we use is an embarrassment.

Try reading a short Psalm aloud from the KJV and any other translation, and pay attention to your tongue, lips and teeth. Note how the "archaic" language's extra syllables and softer, rounder sounds better prepare your mouth for the coming words - reading the KJV aloud is physically pleasurable. But in the NAB we stop and go throughout its sentences; we're made to produce dark half-pronounced filler words and clumsy combinations of sounds that get in the way of speech.

Yes, Augustine in his Confessions came around to admire the humility of the clumsy Old Latin Psalms that he first found repellent, but still...

A word of caution, though - the editors of the OUP KJV are a couple of post-modern twits whose introduction and notes might be summed up as "everything you thought you knew about the Bible is wrong, you slope-headed fundamentalist redneck."

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There they go again

Once again, those who influence and control the State, like the Sangerites and Nazis before them, are itching for slaughter. In the name of compassion, of course.

"In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber." (Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 227).

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Wikipedia as cultural history

A great article on Wikipedia and culture by Andy Updegrove:

But, you may ask next, is the Wikipedia accurate enough? After all, there is an ongoing controversy over whether its accuracy is the equal of a traditional encyclopedia.

That question, I think, entirely misses the point. Why? Because I believe that the real significance of the Wikipedia is not its status as a compendium of information, but rather its ability to provide a record of how we see ourselves, our heritage, our current events and our culture in real-time as those perceptions evolve. And that significance clearly transcends the utility of the static, shelf-bound reference works traditionally described as encyclopedias.

He cites the Wikipedia article on spoons - an amazing collection!

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Doctor of souls

Read Bill Luse's unerring diagnosis of a common human illness, via TSO. This sort of analysis is among the crown jewels of St Blogistan.

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"the evil rapidly and insensibly grew"

DarwinCatholic quotes a Commentary Magazine article on demographics, which quotes Polybius:

Ours, moreover, is hardly the only age or civilization to experience a demographic crisis. “In our own time,� wrote Polybius in roughly 150 B.C.E., “the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birthrate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit.� The reason for this decline, he believed, was decadence. “For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear children born to them, or at most as a rule one or two of them, . . . the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.�

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The perfect small-town newspaper

The Community Record, published in Sullivan IL and serving the towns around Lake Shelbyville in east central Illinois. Besides all the local news, it has some great features you won't find anywhere else. Highlights from this week's edition:

• Pauline Briney's essay about a homeless man from California who happened to pass through Findlay recently. Mrs Briney is a former mayor of Findlay and a longtime gadfly devoted to serving her hometown every way she can. And she wrote an epic poem to celebrate our wedding, which Mom read at the reception.
• a page and a half (and this on large noble newspaper pages) of Sharon White's archaeological adventures in Colorado.
• Kaskaskia Reflections, to which is devoted the entire last page in each issue. Janet Roney's weekly column explores the prehistory and early history of east central Illinois.
• Guy Little's weekly coverage of his Little Theatre on the Square. In his columns Mr Little regularly employs what must be the heftiest thesaurus in North America.

So not only do you get the news, you get to read the output of longtime essayists who love what they write about. We eagerly await every issue of this little weekly paper.

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Where do I apply?

I'm a big guy - I could probably hench with the best of 'em.

The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church has a stake in Reconquista. The pope and his henchmen are looking to turn America, founded and still a Protestant country, into a Roman Catholic country.

Surely someone out there can design a uniform for the Pope's Henchmen. There could be degrees! A bloody oath! Flashing swords! Just not those frilly Knights of Columbus hats, please.

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Essential reading

Jeffrey Hart on Mark Van Doren, and R. Emmett Tyrrell bestows the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year. And have you read Mr Tyrrell's appreciation of Tom Wolfe?

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"They want my body!"

TSO is surely the best writer on American bingo.

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Civic religion

TSO notes a couple of book reviews and quotes Bede Jarrett's The Relation of Church and State in the Middle Ages:

That the difficulty is wholly Christian can be seen if it be remembered (using the words in their present day sense) that to a pagan his State was his Church, and to the Jew his Church was his State. In either view there were not two powers but one. The Jew considered God to be the head of the State; the pagan made the head of the State into a god, i.e. he deified his ruler: Caesar, Alexander, Pharaoh, seeing in him divine guardian spirit of the State. For the Christian, however, the problem was much more delicate, since he was brought up to look on both the Church and State as divinely authorized powers and to believe that the authority of both was from God.

If you have the misfortune to listen to NPR or read the New York Times, you'll hear wide-eyed self-important catechesis in the liberal's religion: politics. They report on the things that matter to them most - the travels of the president, political wrangling in congress, long analyses of legislation, all directed these past years at removing this heretic who has usurped their papacy.

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The old hometown...

...just ain't what it used to be. I just did one of my periodic google searches for my tiny hometown and turned up some real losers on myspace.com, folks reminiscent of the empty creatures Theodore Dalrymple writes about. That was immediately followed by deep google-fu to obtain full names, addresses and phone numbers, which told me they don't live near my Mom.

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It's too late to come up with a snappy title

Robert Duncan writes from Spain that the socialists over there want to extend the legal definition of "person" to include monkeys, on the grounds that we share such-and-so percent of our genetic makeup with them. Gee, we share 100% of our genetic makeup with human fetuses...

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St Judas, patron of empty traitors

An engrossing take on National Geographic's "Gospel of Judas".

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How to make palm crosses

Here, from a now-defunct 1990s catholic email list, and here from my blog last year.

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Oof

Three cheers for Abdul Rahman! Meanwhile, this reads like the old chain email, "If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"

Rahman, who faced a possible death sentence for converting from Islam to Christianity, is to be freed after a court Sunday dismissed the case against him, citing a lack of evidence...

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Peggy Noonan on modern American immigration

Vide - a good read.

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Random immigration questions

In what ways are our problems with illegal immigration and Europe's problems with Muslim immigration similar to the barbarian migrations into Europe from roughly 400 A. D.? In what ways are they dissimilar? Can an understanding of the ancient situation contribute to an understanding of ours, and vice versa?

Focusing on our situation, what is the meaning and value of American citizenship? What is the natural law basis of the concept of citizenship? How has citizenship been understood in British and then American history? Is it somehow threatened or diluted when vast numbers of non-citizens populate our country? Does that have parallels with periods of restricted voting rights in our history, in which political participation was limited to those owning substantial property?

What questions aren't I asking?

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Personal identity as government property

A compelling argument against national ID cards in Britain.

It may be better to refer here to civic identity rather than personal identity, though in an era of expanding government power the former grows to encompass the latter, for all practical purposes.

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Madeleine P. Cosman, RIP

The author of Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony died recently. Her NYT obituary includes the following note:

Ms. Cosman also leaves behind a vast library of illuminated manuscripts and a large collection of handguns.

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The art of siegecraft and the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia

Two 10th-century Byzantine instruction manuals on seigecraft, and an overview of the 19th-century Fossati restoration of the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia. More Byzantine esoterica here.

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Worst press release ever?

Microsoft's semi-literate announcement of Flight Simulator X boldy breaks rules of grammar and composition known to most children.

Hmm... this post makes three rants in a row.

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Pffffft

My already-vague interest in the winter Olympics dissipated entirely with that fart-in-the-elevator moment: Peter Gabriel grunting the Athiest's Hymn, John Lennon's "Imagine".

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A letter to his children

If you've never read Whitaker Chambers' letter to his children which forms the preface to his book Witness, you should.

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Benedict XVI on Islam, Fessio on homeschooling

Hugh Hewitt has highlighted part of his recent interview with Fr Joseph Fessio, SJ, in which the good Father describes homeschools as "the monasteries of the new dark ages". This ties in directly with my previous post on Christian demographics. Does anyone have a link to the Pope's speech mentioned in the interview? UPDATE: Here's a bit on the meeting from an article in the Saint Austin Review.

HH: Right. Well, let me ask you then. If, in fact, that reformation within Islam is not possible in the eyes of the Pope, and the demographics do not change, as they are unlikely to change in Europe, the last time Christendom went under the waves, so to speak, in Europe, there were the monasteries, beseiged as they were by the barbarians, sacked as they were by the Vikings, they endured.

JF: Yeah.

HH: That doesn't happen in modernity, because of the technology of oppression. And you've just noted the reluctance of Islam to accept religious pluralism, or to embrace it and celebrate it.

JF: Yes.

HH: And so what happens in Europe?

JF: Well, Hugh, I've got one of the very few things that I've said, which I'm proud of, because it's become kind of almost a slogan to some, is that home schools are the monasteries of the new dark ages. That is...and you non-Catholic Christians have a lot more of them than we Catholics do, but we've got a lot. And I think that is where families are having children. They're passing on the faith to their children. They're giving them wisdom and the knowledge of our culture. And we have an advantage here, because the homosexuals, and the pro-abortionists, and the pro-contraception people, are not having children by definition.

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Dan Dimancescu

This afternoon I found a very well-written article by one Dan Dimancescu in the July 1969 issue of National Geographic. The author was in his mid-20s when he organized his second or third NG expedition to Romania. His writing was so engaging I had to google him. He turned up at Harvard, where he now runs the Honorary Consulate of Romania.

And check out that link to ABONG (A Bookcase of National Geographics). It makes a handy index.

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On memory and what to remember

Plato's Stepchild has a bit from James Schall on the use of memory. This is one of those things that'll stick in my head but I'll forget where I found it if I don't blog it.

We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live. Engrave on your mind whatever can help you to conceive or carry out a project, whatever your soul can assimilate, whatever can serve your purpose, vivify your inspiration, and sustain your work. As for the rest, consign it to oblivion. And if it is possible that on occasion many things may be useful which did not seem likely to be so, and in fact are not usually so, that is not a reason for saying: let us remember them on the off chance. If need be you will look them up again; they will easily be preserved on paper. On the pretext that you may have to catch a train, you do not learn Bradshaw by heart.

Pascal said that he did not think he had ever forgotten a thing that he wanted to remember; that is the right sort of memory, on condition that one wants to remember only what is useful. When St. Augustine defines happiness as "desiring nothing but the good and having all that one desires," he is equally defining the best kind of memory. Entrust to yours all that is good, ask God to give you if He will the grace of Pascal, that of St. Thomas "in whom nothing went to waste," or that of Mozart who after one hearing reproduced a whole solemn Mass. But I repeat that such a grace is not necessary; one can supply its place without suffering any real harm. And what is the good of trying to estimate its value seeing that we have to make use of what has been given us, not of what we lack!

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Anthem of the Enlightenment

Wisdom 1:16-2:20, which I can't link to at Bible Gateway since they use Bibles that have been edited for length.

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Newman on Milan, St Ambrose and Catholic worship

Vide.

At Milan Newman and St. John tarried between four and five weeks. To Newman that town more than any suggested the whole picture of the Church of the Fathers. His letters from thence speak more simply of peace and happiness than any others. Three days after his arrival he writes thus to Henry Wilberforce:

'Milan: Sept. 24, 1846.

'My dearest H. W.,--We are most happy here. We arrived here on Sunday morning in time for Mass--and after all the troubles of our journey, the heat, the tight confinement in diligences, the dust, the smoking, the strange faces and the uncatholic bearing of fellow-travellers, and the long spells of journeying, night as well as day, and again the discomforts of an hotel, we are quite in harbour. An Abbate, to whom Hope gave me an introduction, has got us most excellent rooms, lofty, cool and quiet in the heart of Milan. They form a part of the Priest's house of S. Fidelis, and are reserved for the missioners who come to give retreats in Lent. We can get into the Church without going into the street, so it is like a private Chapel. It belonged to the Jesuits before their suppression, having been given to them by the great St. Charles. It is like a Jesuit Church, Grecian and Palladian--and I cannot deny that, however my reason may go with Gothic, my heart has ever gone with Grecian. I loved Trinity Chapel at Oxford more than any other building. There is in the Italian style such a simplicity, purity, elegance, beauty, brightness, which I suppose the word "classical" implies, that it seems to befit the notion of an Angel or Saint. The Gothic style does not seem to me to typify the sanctity or innocence of the Blessed Virgin, or St. Gabriel, or the lightness, grace, and sweet cheerfulness of the elect as the Grecian does. I could go into this beautiful Church, with its polished tall pillars, and its smiling winning altar, all day long without tiring. And it is so calm ... that it is always a rest to the mind to enter it. Nothing moves there but the distant glittering lamp which betokens the Presence of Our Undying life, hidden but ever working, though entered into His rest.

'It is really most wonderful to see the Divine Presence looking out almost into the open streets from the various Churches so that at St. Lawrence's we saw the people take off their hats from the other side of the street as they passed along; no one to guard it, but perhaps an old woman who sits at work before the Church door, or has some wares to sell. And then to go into St. Ambrose's Church--where the body of the Saint lies--and to kneel at those relics, which have been so powerful, and whose possessor I have heard and read of more than other saints from a boy. It is 30 years this very month, as I may say, since God made me religious, and St. Ambrose in Milner's history was one of the first objects of my veneration. And St. Augustine too--and he was converted! and here came St. Monica--seeking him. Here too came the great Athanasius to meet the Emperor in his exile. I never had been in a city which moved me more--not even Rome. I do not know whether it will--but I have not the history of Rome enough at my fingers' ends to be so intimately affected by it. We shall be here, I suppose, three weeks, or a month--how sorry I shall be to go!

'I have said not a word about that overpowering place, the Duomo. It has moved me more than St. Peter's did--but then I studiously abstained from all services &c. when I was at Rome, and now of course I have gone wherever they were going on and have entered into them. And, as I have said for months past that I never knew what worship was, as an objective fact, till I entered the Catholic Church, and was partaker in its offices of devotion, so now I say the same on the view of its cathedral assemblages. I have expressed myself so badly that I doubt if you will understand me, but a Catholic Cathedral is a sort of world, every one going about his own business, but that business a religious one; groups of worshippers, and solitary ones--kneeling, standing--some at shrines, some at altars--hearing Mass and communicating, currents of worshippers intercepting and passing by each other--altar after altar lit up for worship, like stars in the firmament--or the bell giving notice of what is going on in parts you do not see, and all the while the canons in the choir going through matins and lauds, and at the end of it the incense rolling up from the high altar, and all this in one of the most wonderful buildings in the world and every day--lastly, all of this without any show or effort--but what everyone is used to--everyone at his own work, and leaving everyone else to his.

'My best love attend you, your wife and children--in which St. John joins.

'Ever yours, Carissime, most affectionately, J. H. N.'

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On teaching the Bible as literature

David Gelernter has an article in the latest Weekly Standard on "Bible Illiteracy in America", which coincides with the release of a report by the Bible Literacy Project. Amid a flood of verbiage that reduced me to high-speed skimming, Mr. Gelernter's article seems to be a call to teach "Bible as Literature" courses in public schools as a means to help the American high-school yoots of today better understand the history of their country and their civilization.

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Transfiguration College

Athanasius is helping to found Transfiguration College a "Byzantine Catholic great books college" in Illinois. Of course they have a blog!

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Melted in the pot

As a child I found it remarkable that the national TV news anchors in New York sounded just like us in little ol' Findlay, Illinois.

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Perhaps the first German beer question of the new papacy

What Catholic German beer should a Guinness-drinking Irish Catholic drink in celebration of the glorious reign of Benedict XVI? Papa Lu recommends "Erdnger" and "Paulaner." Did they lose a vowel in that first one? What's with those Germans?

I eagerly await more recommendations.

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"The patient cannot decide"

The Old Oligarch links to an article on a wave of brutal serial murders in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, in 1999 and 2000. An odd twist: the murderers are doctors.

Coming soon to a hospital near you: if you cannot communicate effectively with the doctor who is treating you, you may be murdered. The inability to communicate may be because of your injuries or condition, or it may be because your doctor no longer considers you worth communicating with.

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On going no-news

In a comment on the previous post, TSO linked to a little essay by Thomas Howard about his news-consumption habits. Good stuff.

Of course, I'm not jumping into a Puritanical campaign against it. I just need to use it reasonably (which, for me, amounts to using it very little) and ask myself whether there's something I might more profitably attend to. This can be done, as in "John da Fiesole's" blog Praying the Post.

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Rights

"You have the right to clean air," the officer said as he arrested the smoker, "whether you like it or not." I wonder what Terri Schiavo thinks of her right to death with dignity? Joe Ford narrowly escaped enjoying the right to a reasonable quality of life.

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"Bigotry and the Murder of Terri Schiavo"

Here's a compelling article in the Harvard Crimson written by Joe Ford, a Harvard student with cerebral palsy whose doctor tried to murder him hours after birth. An excerpt:

As Schiavo starves to death, we are entering a world last encountered in Nazi Europe. Prior to the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the Nazis engaged in the mass murder of disabled children and adults, many of whom were taken from their families under the guise of receiving treatment for their disabling conditions. The Nazis believed that killing was the highest form of treatment for disability.

As the opening quote suggests, Nazi doctors believed, or claimed to believe, they were performing humanitarian acts. Doctors were trained to believe that curing society required the elimination of individual patients. This sick twisting of medical ethics led to a sense of fulfillment of duty experienced by Nazi doctors, leading them to a conviction that they were relieving suffering.

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An unjust law is no law at all...

... as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously quoted St Augustine in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Or as Aquinas put it (and as The Social Agenda quotes it),

A human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence (Aquinas, STh, I II, 93, 3, ad 2).

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A mind cast loose from its mooring

Bill Luse ponders the condition of Terry Schiavo and America:

Back in September, the Florida Supreme Court ruled Terri's Law unconstitutional on the basis of separation of powers, protesting that we could not have judicial decisions overturned by popular clamor, and I wondered at the time:

Even if the judicial decision is manifestly unjust? Say, when a judge decides that a black man is better suited to slavery than to freedom? Justice Barbara Pariente expressed sympathy for the emotional plight of Terri's parents over these long years, but decreed that "our hearts are not the law. We must govern our decisions by the rule of law and not by our emotions." Unless the emotions involved happen to be judicial sympathy for a woman seeking abortion, or a democrat seeking the presidency.

In Justice Pariente we see the result of a legal positivism operating independent of reality. When a person is no longer guided by natural moral law, he will not venture out to seek Truth on his own following the lead of reason and faith - instead, he will cast around for any gimcrack nonsense written objectively on solid paper.

A debased mind that has lost touch with reality is in no condition to judge between right and wrong; apparently, all it can do is judge between "it is written" and "it is not written"; a condition Dr. Sobrino in the link above diagnoses as irrational primitive fetishism.

(And you really must read the whole of Sobrino's essay.)

Posted by Bill White at 8:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

About America

Dr. Athanasius of Summa Contra Mundum issues a stirring call. What to do? Is it time to start researching what the American founders thought about Tyrants and What to Do About Them?

It would seem that the American system is workable as long as its principles and practices are founded in natural law. Once the fundamental laws of reality are discarded, perhaps our system is no longer workable at all; recourse to our founders may mislead a brutal society. Perhaps we should go farther back and find out what the Church, the ancient custodian of the truths of man, teaches about the governance of people and the preservation of civilization.

Posted by Bill White at 5:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Anonymous Bob

I'd never heard of this guy before, which is odd considering Terri Schiavo is Catholic. Perhaps the problem is that Mrs. Schiavo currently has very few talents and abilities?

From the beginning of his episcopacy, Bishop Lynch expressed the belief that a bishop's responsibilities are primarily to the diocese where he serves. This belief was soon made visible in the way he made himself present to the priests, deacons, religious, and faithful of the Diocese of St. Petersburg. He recognized the talents and abilities of priests, religious, and laity alike. That recognition crossed the boundaries of gender, age, and ethnicity. It was apparent in the appointments he made to positions within the diocesan structure.

Yadda yadda yadda. T