[T]he captivity of some Catholics to the agenda of current congressional leaders and the White House proves that faith partisans are not a monopoly of the political right, and that some Catholics have an almost frantic unwillingness to see the abortion issue for what it is—a foundational matter of social justice and human rights. It can’t be avoided in developing our public policies without debasing the whole nature of Christian social teaching. No rights are safe when the right to life is not.
Confused about all of these newfangled legislative process terms like reconciliation and deem-and-pass? Here’s a video that explains it in less that two minutes.
The presentation isn’t exactly unbiased (what is when it comes to health care?) but it’s certainly informative.
[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host a discussion about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme is influential books. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com]
Earlier this week economist Tyler Cowen started a meme by asking bloggers to list the top ten books that have influenced their view of the world. (See the lists by Peter Suderman, E.D.Kain, Arnold Kling, Michael Martin, Niklas Blanchard, Bryan Caplan, and Will Wilkinson). Because it combines three things I love—lists, books, worldview analysis—I thought it would be interesting for our Friday pop culture discussion.
Like Cowen’s, mine is a “gut list” rather than the “I’ve thought about this for a long time list.” I also chose to leave out the Bible and other classic works that are a bit too obvious. For the same reason, classic works on political conservatism didn’t make the cut (we’ll save those for another day).
Because I couldn’t narrow it to ten, I cheated by listing ten pairs of books:
Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University will publish compelling new evidence next week that the play, a romantic tragi-comedy by Lewis Theobald is – as the author always maintained it was – substantially based on a real Shakespeare play called Cardenio.
Hammond has been backed in his assertion by the Shakespeare publisher Arden and there are unconfirmed rumours that the play will open at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford when the venue reopens after its three-year closure.
The claim represents 10 years of literary detective work by Hammond. “I don’t think you can ever be absolutely 100% but, yes, I am convinced that it is Shakespeare,” he said. “It’s fair to say it’s been something of an obsession. You need to ask my wife but a fair few of my waking hours have been devoted to this subject.”
Theobald’s Double Falsehood, or The Distrest Lovers was first performed in 1727 at the Drury Lane theatre in London, along with the remarkable claim that it was based on Shakespeare’s “lost play” Cardenio, which was first performed in 1613. Theobald claimed to have three original texts of Cardenio.
As the battle over the health-care reform bill intensified this week, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious sent a letter yesterday to every member of congress assuring them that “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions” and that they, the LCWR, “as Catholics,” are “all for it.” Never mind that, as Catholics, they are in direct opposition to the statement released by Cardinal Francis George on behalf of the USCCB.
The LCWR claims more than 1500 religious superiors as members and represents more than 45,000 nuns across the United States, but they do not speak with as much authority as they’d like to suggest. Today, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious—the second largest organization of superiors in the United States—released their own letter making that quite clear.
Over the past 15 years, the political conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs has been reframed as a religious war in which leaders from Yasser Arafat to Hassan Nasrallah to Osama bin Laden have appealed to the authority of the Quran to support their goal of eliminating the State of Israel. The authority of the Quran has also been cited in support of a revisionist history that seeks to deny the historical connection of the Jewish people to the city of Jerusalem and to its holiest sites, including the Temple Mount. Ignorant of what the Quran actually says about Jerusalem, Western reporters have recently tended to ignore archeological and historical evidence and give equal weight to the supposedly competing religious narratives of Jews and Muslims: Jews are said to believe that there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, while the Quran states that the historical and religious claims of the Jews are false.
The transformation of a political conflict over land into a religious war is one of the most dangerous and frightening goals of radical Islamist politicians—but it has nothing to do with the Quran.
Here the Italian Muslim communal leader and Quranic scholar Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi examines what the Quran says about the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Far from negating the historical claims of a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Quran actually confirms Jewish accounts of the building of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and supports the Biblical claim that the land of Israel was given to the Jews by God.
As someone who believes that bacon should be one of the four food groups, I am certainly sympathetic to your argument, David. However, I think the case you made has the unfortunate unintended effect of undercutting a key argument against abortion.
The abortion debate often hinges on the question of whether a fetus is a person. But what if the key issue that should be considered isn’t necessarily personhood, but the morality of killing? What if the immorality of abortion can be established irrespective of the question of personhood?
Philosopher Donald Marquis makes such an argument by circumventing the question of personhood and examining the question of what makes killing wrong. This, according to Marquis, is the question that needs to be addressed from the start:
After all, if we merely believe, but do not understand, why killing adult human beings such as ourselves is wrong, how could we conceivably show that abortion is either immoral or permissible.
Marquis concludes that what makes killing inherently wrong is that it deprives a victim of all the “experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted ones future.” It is not the change in the biological state that makes killing wrong, says Marquis, but the loss of all experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s future (hereafter we will refer to these as EAPE). We are killing not only the being but also its future self.
These EAPE are either intrinsically valuable or lead to something else that is valuable for its own sake. When a victim is killed, they are deprived not only of all that they value but all that they will value in the future. Therefore, what makes the prima facie killing of any adult human being wrong is this loss of future EAPE.
This has obvious implications for abortion. Marquis concludes that:
Having attended last Friday a forum on the ethics of food animal product hosted by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, I was particularly interested in the Times Literary Supplement’s review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It is an uncritical and even fawning review and beneath the TLS’’s usual standards (and rather different from the review conservative Christian works usually receive), but seems to summarize the book well.
The review and apparently the book both suffer — as did some of the comments at the forum — from a lack of clarity about what man is and animals are. In arguing against a comparison with “companion animals,” the reviewer writes:
Even if painlessly euthanized at that age, the brevity of its life precludes that life from having been a good one (at best, it was “promising”).
The reviewer seems to assume, but does not even try to argue, that food animals deserve a long and fulfilling life (whatever fulfilling means for them), and therefore to kill them for our use is wrong. But since they have no real consciousness or memory, how can they know, much less care, that their life is shorter than it might have been? (Might have been in human hands, not in the wild, but that’s another matter.)
Would a beef cow fall into despair if told he was being slaughtered on Monday? Would he start lamenting the books he had not read, the symphonies he had not written, the fact that he won’t be grazing in the field with his great-grandchildren? Animals don’t live in time as man does, and therefore being deprived of time is not an injustice.
In its blurring the fairly obvious difference between man and animal, that argument is typical of the kind of argument often offered against the current use of food animals. Whatever is the argument for treating food animals better than we do, that is not it.
On a different subject, at the dinner the night before the forum, the one vegan at the forum, Gene Bauer of Farmsanctuary, ordered a martini. I know there are no animal products in martinis and that therefore they are a vegan drink, but still . . . somehow I feel that vegans should not drink martinis. Beer and wine, yes, but not martinis.
Moral equivalency is a matter of dogma in the mainstream media: When five hundred Christians were massacred in their homes by machete-wielding Muslims in Nigeria’s Plateau Province on the night of March 7, news reports claimed it was simply retaliation for previous attacks on Muslims. That is an outright falsehood, according to The Barnabas Fund, an interdenominational Christian organization devoted to assisting Christians around the world who face persecution.
Nigeria: Media Distortions Of Anti-Christian Massacres In Jos:
The world has been horrified by the bloodshed in Jos, the capital of Nigeria’s Plateau State, as reported by the international media during the last six weeks. It appears, however, that deliberate manipulation and deception at a local level have meant that international reporting has been inaccurate, and has created the false impression that Christians were the aggressors and Muslims the victims when the reality is the opposite. So Christians have become double victims, suffering not only violence but also unjust blame.
Two incidents of large-scale violence have occurred, first in the city of Jos itself on Sunday 17 January 2010, and then in three mainly Christian villages to the south of Jos on Sunday 7 March.
In the latter incident men from the Muslim Fulani tribe, armed with swords and machetes, arrived at the villages in the early hours of the morning. The residents of Zot, Dogo Nahauwa and Rastat were woken by the sound of gunshots and ran terrified into the streets, where the attackers were waiting for them. A horrendous massacre followed. Local police say 109 people were killed, but other sources suggest this figure could be much higher, perhaps up to 500.
[A]fter seeing the online ridicule of Down Syndrome children, I wonder whether the deepest sorrow that pierced Mary’s heart was not the physical suffering of her son, but the cruel taunts and mockery to which he was subjected. It must have been bewildering to her that his tormentors could not see that all the life and goodness, truth and beauty in her Son. Of course our children are not messiahs. But a Holy Cross Priest at Notre Dame reminded us last week that those of us who care for individuals with cognitive handicaps stand on holy ground. Knowing a child with Down Syndrome is like getting a small glimpse of the divine; original sin has been cleansed by baptism, and their souls are barely touched by actual sin. And that’s why we feel that when they are shown disrespect, something innocent and holy and sacred has been profaned.
A group of Muslim raiders with machetes attacked another Christian village in Nigeria on Wednesday morning. The attackers killed twelve villagers—seven women, four children, and one man—and cut their tongues out.
Attackers killed 12 people Wednesday morning in a small Christian village in central Nigeria, officials said, cutting out most of the victims’ tongues in the latest violence in a region where religious fighting already has killed hundreds this year.
The attack almost mirrored the tactics used by those who carried out similar massacres in Christian villages last week when more than 200 people were slaughtered.
Under the cover of darkness and a driving rain, raiders with machetes entered the village of Byie early Wednesday, setting fire to homes and firing gunshots into the air to drive frightened villagers into the night, witness Linus Vwi said.
“It was raining. They took that advantage,” Vwi said.
Vwi said he and about 20 neighbors rushed into the surrounding wilderness, cowering in bushes as they listened to screams.
He said the attackers spoke Fulani, a language used mostly by Muslim cattle herders in the region. Officials and witnesses blamed Fulani herders for the killings last week.
Earlier this week Joseph Bottum asked, “How many more rampages will it take? How many more murders of 500 people here, 500 people there—a land red with blood—before the Nigerian government understands its responsibilities?”
In order to bring attention to the murderous consequences of the failure of Nigeria to defend its own people, First Things is organizing a protest rally, to be held at 5:00 p.m. on April 7 at the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations, 828 Second Avenue in New York City.
In the wake of the endorsement of the current health-reform bill by Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, Archbishop Chaput of Denver has issued this statement:
In the past two days, congressional leaders and the White House have brought tremendous pressure on prolife Democratic members of Congress to support a fatally flawed Senate version of health care reform.
Regrettably, groups like Network and the Catholic Health Association have done a grave disservice to the American Catholic community by undermining the leadership of the nation’s Catholic bishops, sowing confusion among faithful Catholics, and misleading legislators through their support of the Senate bill.
Do not be fooled. Nothing has changed. The Senate bill remains gravely flawed on the issues of abortion funding, conscience protections, and the inclusion of immigrants. Unless seriously revised to address these issues, the Senate version of health care is unethical and should be firmly opposed.
Sorry, guys, it’s true: Women have science—evolutionary psychology!—on their side of the debate about which sex are better drivers. According to the Social Issues Research Centre, our Fred Flintstone-era brains cause us to drive erratically:
The differences between the sexes in terms of their risk-proneness while driving can be explained, at least in part, using an evolutionary psychology perspective. This proposes that much of neural circuitry of the human brain evolved to meet the requirements of societies and cultures very different from our own – that of the hunter gatherer – that existed for over 99% of our evolution as a species. Our 21st century skulls contain essentially ‘stone-age’ brains, and the brains of men are women are different in certain crucial respects.
Stone-age man did not drive. But the legacy of his hunting, aggressive and risk-taking past – qualities that enabled him to survive and mate, thereby passing on his genes to future generations – are still evident in the way in which he typically drives his car.
It is easy for Republicans to chide the Administration for taking an inappropriately hostile tone for an American ally popular with the public [Israel]. But the real scandal in American foreign policy, and the Administration’s point of greatest vulnerability, is continued appeasement of the Iranian regime despite Tehran’s open contempt for American overtures, and commitment to developing nuclear weapons.
On this issue the poll numbers are just as lopsided. Sixty percent of respondents in a March 2 Fox News poll said they believed force would be required to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, while only 25 percent believe that diplomacy and sanctions will work. Fifty-one percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans polled favored the use of force. Obama’s job approval for handling Iran was at only 41 percent, with 42 percent disapproving.
The president’s approval rating would be considerable lower if voters were well informed about the extent to which American policy has groveled before the Islamic Republic.
The news of a $30 million, 3D movie of the creation account based on the Book of Genesis is a reminder that throughout history people have been awed and thrilled by retellings of their culture’s creation story.
Aztecs would tell of the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes, Phoenicians about the Zophashamin, and Jews and Christians about the one true God—Jehovah. But there is one unfortunate group—the children of materialists—that has no creation myth to call its own. When an inquisitive tyke asks who created the sun, the animals, and mankind, their materialist parents can only tell them to read a book by Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins.
No child, though, should have to go without an answer, which is why I’ve decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into an accurate, though mythic, narrative. This is what our culture has been missing for far too long—a creation story for young materialists.
******
In the beginning was Nothing and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it explode. The explosion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.
For no particular Reason—for Reason is rarely particular—Time and Chance took a liking to this wet little blue rock and so decided to stick around and see what adventures they might have. The pair thought the Earth was intriguing and pretty, but also rather dull and static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and scampering through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere there was a Missing Ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings.
They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the Missing Ingredient. And indeed she did, hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put the Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the former planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth.
Now that they had Information, Time and Chance were finally able to create a self-replicating Something which they called Life. Once they created the Life they found that it not only became more Somethings it began to become Otherthings too! The Somethings and the Otherthings began to fill all the Earth— from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the sky. Their creation, which began as a single Something eventually became millions of Otherthings.
In a USA Today column, Rod Dreher makes the case that voodoo—and other minority religions—shouldn’t be off-limits from journalistic examination:
In a recent New York Times column, religion reporter Samuel G. Freedman rightly lamented the way the American news media have largely ignored voodoo in their Haiti earthquake reporting. But he also chided media commentators (including me) for speculating about voodoo as a harmful cultural force. Freedman quoted academics who praised the Haitian folk religion, and who complained about the ignorance and supposed racism of voodoo skeptics.
This, alas, is all too typical of American media’s religion coverage. We journalists ignore or downplay the role religion plays in the everyday life, or we take a naive viewpoint toward exotic religions practiced by people unlike us.
For years, I’ve watched this instinct show itself in the way most in the mainstream media cover Islam in America. Reporters are eager to find positive stories and often allergic to stories that might, in their minds, give aid and comfort to rednecks, right-wingers and other so-called undesirables. Once I attended a news meeting in which an editor angrily declined to look into substantive evidence that local Muslim institutions were teaching Islamic radicalism to youth by barking, “What about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?! We never write about their radicalism!”
He was an aristocratic Brit, kidnapped by pirates at the age of sixteen and sent to Ireland where he was sold into slavery. Six years later he escapes, becomes a priest, returns to Ireland, and faces off against hordes of Druids. Because of his work, thousands of Irish pagans came to know Christ and Ireland became one of the most Christian nations in Europe
So raise a glass of green ale today in memory of Patrick, the Indiana Jones of saints.
Roll Call has just reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked all female Democratic members of Congress “to attend a hastily called meeting Wednesday morning.”
She hasn’t said what the meeting is about, but presumably it concerns passage of the health-care bill. At a guess, it may be the meeting where she admits that she doesn’t have the votes for the bill without an abortion ban to lure in Bart Stupak’s coalition.
At least I hope that’s what the meeting is about. There’s something weird and off-putting about inviting only women, however—since I doubt Pelosi plans to reenact the scene where Lysistrata explains her political strategy to Cleonice.
Political junkies rejoice! C-Span now offers free online access to the more than 160,000 hours(!) of television footage.
Some policy nerds may be nostalgic for Dee Dee Myers-era White House briefings or Congressional budget reconciliation meetings. But for the rest of us, the archive offers an abundance of fascinating interviews and lectures from non-politicos.
Readers moved by the news reported in today’s Rally for Nigeria may want to read the Zenit interview with the Catholic archbishop of Jos, Ignatius Kaigama, Co-existence Turned Sour. At one point he explains that despite the persecution, many indigenous Christians are not leaving the north, and offers a cheering (and challenging) story about one group:
in Kano, you have the Maguzawa ethnic group. They are Hausas and normally everybody would expect a Hausa man to be a Muslim. They are not. They are adherents to the traditional religion and when they are not adherents of the traditional religion they are Catholics, Anglicans or whatever. So they are there. They don’t migrate.
The only problem is that they suffer a lot because of their Christian identity and Christian faith. They are denied education. They are denied government employment of the highest ladders; they are employed as night watchmen, cleaners or things like that but never higher than that. And this is what they suffer for being Christians. And the Church has come helping in a very decisive manner by empowering these people, by starting primary schools, again building bush chapels in order to bring them together to bring awareness, and enlighten them and get them going.
And it is working. Now, I can tell you that there are five or more people from those ethnic groups that have become priests and they are working very well. This is to tell you how far we have come and that even though the Catholic Church has been persecuted there are people who live there and still are ready to sacrifice everything in order to proclaim their Christian faith and identity.
Newsweek’s new issue is out, featuring more in the magazine’s ongoing love affair with the Obamas—this time a cover about Michelle Obama’s campaign against obesity.
But what’s that in the reflection in the apple?
A reader suggests its either Karl Marx or one of the cough-drop Smith brothers. Could be Old Adam, though. It is an apple, after all.
Among recently “planted” Protestant churches in Manhattan, Redeemer Presbyterian is by far the fastest growing and best known. It’s so new, in fact, that it doesn’t have its own worship space yet. While that is under construction (at West 83rd Street and Broadway), the congregation worships at three different locations. On Sunday, March 14, on a tip from a member, this reviewer attended the 6 p.m. “jazz” service at the Kaye Auditorium at Hunter College, at which the pastor, bestselling author Timothy Keller, usually preaches. The choice did not disappoint.
Dressed casually in black jeans and a shirt sans clerical collar, the Rev. Keller delivered a 30-minute meditation on the main Scripture reading of the day, Isaiah 56:1–8. He explained that this passage is about the twofold “justice”—mishpat and tzedakah, in transliterated Hebrew—to be brought about in the believing community by the “Suffering Servant.” Although developed with occasional levity to suit the causal atmosphere, Keller’s themes were as profound as the passage calls for. Mishpat, or “putting things right” for widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor (the “quarter of the vulnerable”), is the fruit of tzedakah—primary justice, or “living righteously.” Thus, “the just” are those who “disadvantage themselves to advantage the community,” whereas “the wicked” are those who “disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.” The eventual triumph of the Suffering Servant, whom, of course, Keller identified with Jesus Christ, is to widen the believing community to include all peoples who would relate to one another on equal terms and in justice so understood.
Brian and Craig Wansink teamed up to analyze the amount of food depicted in 52 of the best-known paintings of the Last Supper. After indexing the sizes of the foods by the sizes of the average disciple’s head, they found that portion size, plate size, and bread size increased dramatically over the last one thousand years. Overall, the main courses depicted in the paintings grew by 69%, plate size by 66%, and bread size by 23%.
The study’s findings will be published in the April 2010 issue of the International Journal of Obesity and released in the online version of the journal on Tuesday, March 23.
“I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or ‘portion distortion,’ is a recent phenomenon,” said Brian Wansink, professor and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.“ But this research indicates that it’s a general trend for at least the last millennium.”
A 1998 law mandates that the US government have an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom to advance religious liberty around the world as part of American foreign policy. But the Obama administration still has not appointed anyone to this post, even though in his landmark speech to the Muslim world from Cairo in June 2009 President Obama said religious freedom is an American priority.
Yes, but in fairness, the president didn’t say it was his priority.
Bart Stupak tells Fox News that, as a “guesstimate,” he thinks the Democrats are at least 16 votes short of passing the health-care bill: “I’d be surprised if they have 200 votes.”
One trouble for Pelosi seems to be that, this time around, she can’t accommodate Stupak and the pro-life Democrats, because she can’t believably assure them that the Senate will accept and adopt an abortion-funding ban. If Stupak is right, this is a curious turn: The fact that there is not a single serious pro-life Democrat in the Senate means that the House won’t trust the Senate on the issue, which means that the health-care bill could fail. If Harry Reid and Bob Casey had held their supposedly pro-life line on abortion, the Democrats would be much further along in health-care reform.
Is Stupak right about the aye votes in his whip count? My count runs higher, but, then, he does this for a living.
Of course, Nancy Pelosi does it for a living, too. And it’s hard to believe that she would put her party through these additional weeks of agony—keeping the issue on the front page day after day, ginning up more and more angry opposition—if she didn’t think she could eventually get the votes.
Among recently “planted” Protestant churches in Manhattan,