Each semester that I teach Introduction To Theology, I begin with raising the question, "Is Theology Make-Believe?" (This is the English translation of the Irish form of the question as I have it in the title of this entry.) I do this for one simple reason: all of us have grown up in a culture defined philosophically by the movement called The Enlightenment, an 18th-century philosophical movement that is at the root of contemporary European and American thinking. Having graced itself with this name, "the Enlightenment," which more than implies the correctness of its own positions, this movement was radically anti-spiritual, effectively dismissing all of religious faith as a matter of personal, subjective, "belief" that has nothing to do with any actual facts about the universe. Since those kind of ideas are – whether accepted or resisted – saturating the brains of my students, I prefer to address them directly, and to examine whether there is in fact good reason to consider Theology as a discipline a science that produces knowledge, and not a kind of mental self-pleasuring for those who are interested in "that sort of thing."

To this end, I open up with an article that I know will be too difficult for most of my beginning students, but which I will help them through. This article is a symposium, a conversation by four scholars: a Political Science professor from Louisiana State University, a Methodist Ethics professor from Duke University, a Catholic Studies professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Orthodox theologian. Entitled " Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium", this conversation takes on the question of whether Theology as a discipline truly produces knowledge (just like, say, history, sociology, or chemistry) and whether it properly belongs in the university. Although all of these participants reject the Enlightenment's decree that Theology no longer counts as a real discipline, they represent a diversity of perspectives on Theology's relation to knowledge and its place in the contemporary university. As I said, I guide my students through this material and through the new vocabulary and concepts, but I want them to see what an informed person with a reasonable university education should be able to read regarding matters religious or theological. This is not USA Today, designed for sixth-grade readers. At the end of the semester, the students revisit this article for a final exam essay, and in that way I give them an experiential insight into how much their own capacity to read this subject intelligently has developed over the length of the course.

I was struck today by our opening-of-the-year Department of Theology convocation today, where, as it turned out, this very question was addressed in a public discussion by the faculty. This attitude toward Theology as a discipline is not just a problem among under-read and under-educated freshmen, but is also the general way of thinking among the bulk of the faculty in the other departments, even at a Catholic university. This has been recently highlighted for us by the feature article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, "The Ethics of Being A Theologian". The author, K.L. Noll, a Canadian professor of Religious Studies, took for granted that his discipline, secular Religious Studies, produced real knowledge, while Theology does not. This was an article published in the primary journal for the university community as a whole, and is so full of the sort of ill-considered stereotypes that the scholars in the "Theology as Knowledge" symposium attempt to address that it fills me with dismay to see the kind of obstinate avoidance of any thought that can challenge Enlightenment dogma – and this among university educators. Despite being a Religious Studies professor, he had no idea of what theologians actually do, and the variety of methodologies by which they conduct their research and produce their conclusions. In the face of contemporary atheist critiques, he says, all theologians are just dismissive. Maybe that's what I sound like I am being here, but I'm not here going to try to reproduce in print an exhaustive and book-length explanation of everything that theologians do. But I can make that case.

At the convocation, Kurz responded with a detailed examination of the variety of methods he employs as a biblical theologian, highlighting the vast intellectual requirements necessary to do his work, and the sorts of results they produce. Masson addressed a variety of points in response to Noll, one of which specifically addressed the engagement with reason and sense-data incumbent upon the theologian, specifically in his case coming from the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas: the same medieval affirmation of the truth of sense-data that helped give rise to the modern physical sciences. Long waded into Noll's basing his argument on the philosophy known as Logical Positivism, as almost all of today's "scientific fact versus religious faith" arguments are, despite the repeated discrediting of this philosophical approach in recent decades, as well noting how Noll's article persists in believing that one can separate "reason" from "faith" in human thinking, as though any system of thought does not depend on first principles, presuppositions, or dogmas. That insight is one of the most basic insights in post-Modern thinking, but is absent in this kind of recycled 18th century Enlightenment anti-religious folk wisdom. Barnes was the quietest and yet most damning. He took issue with Noll's characterization that

In sum, the religion researcher is related to the theologian as the biologist is related to the frog in her lab. Theologians try to invigorate their own religion, perpetuate it, expound it, defend it, or explain its relationship to other religions. Religion researchers select sample religions, slice them open, and poke around inside, which tends to "kill" the religion, or at least to kill the romantic or magical aspects of the religion and focus instead on how that religion actually works.

The idea, Barnes argued, that in this illustration, one can get at the truth of a thing by the examination of its corpse was as false for the frog as it is for as complex a human reality as religion. (I couldn't help but be reminded of the passage in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf says to Saruman that, "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.") More than that, though, Barnes was quietly outraged at the cheek of an atheist to even employ the metaphor of vivasection as a path to truth. (And despite his claim to be personally a theist and professionally an agnostic, Noll's methods assume and necessarily conclude the reality of atheism – another major problem with his approach.) If Christians today, Barnes argued, have to always answer for incidents of the past where Christianity as a whole is held responsible for any crimes of past individuals – excesses in the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Galileo trial – then atheists today cannot be excused from answering for the crimes of organized atheist regimes: the vast genocides of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the People's Republic of China. Programmatic atheism repeatedly ends in death; vast, organized, death. Barnes argued that an atheistic argument would here casually employ a metaphor of killing the subject in order to get at the truth of it, without the slightest shame by the author of that argument, had come to the limits of tolerance in educated conversation. Christians, Barnes believed, have too long been too generous in letting atheists be treated as individual and noble conversation-partners, without ever raising an issue of atheist complicity in atheist social atrocities. As I said, that made for a sobering end to the four panelists who responded to the article.

The last question, then, it seemed to me, was whether this response would be heard beyond those who came to the convocation. Would theologians push the matter, into a wider Marquette publication, or, even better yet, an attempt to print a version of the convocation as a response in the Chronicle of Higher Education itself? That seems to me the most important of goals, as it is there that the distortions and stereotypes were being most widely distributed among academics who didn't have the necessary education specialities to be able to locate the weaknesses in the article by themselves.

Op-Ed Columnist
Until Medical Bills Do Us Part
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 29, 2009 in The New York Times

Critics fret that health care reform would undermine American family values, not least by convening somber death panels to wheel away Grandma as if she were Old Yeller.

But peel away the emotions and fearmongering, and in fact it is the existing system that unnecessarily takes lives and breaks apart families.

My friend M. — you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name — had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.

The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”

“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.

Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.

A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.

The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.

“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

( Read more... )

Why they stay(ed)
Women religious and the apostolic visitation
Aug. 17, 2009
By Sr. Sandra M. Schneiders
Published in the National Catholic Reporter

Two sets of questions concerning U.S. women religious are roiling the waters in and outside the church today: 1) Why are religious disturbed about the apostolic visitation? 2) What is the real motivation for this investigation?

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I came from helping with today's training session for Theology doctoral students who are teaching for the first time to find a curious set of messages waiting for me on my answering machine. I'm off to Boston Thursday morning (my apologies to Boston LJ friends: as it looks like I'll not really have any time to come find you) to visit my dissertation director and dissertation subject, Jesuits Michael A. Fahey and Francis A. Sullivan, respectively, at Boston College. I'll be staying with my buddy Erik while I'm there, where he's been chomping at me for months to make this dissertation visit so that we could also visit some of the Revolutionary-era sites in the area, as some reading in Revolutionary-era history has become a bit of a mutual hobby over the last few years. So the weekend had basically been reserved by my host for such activities, with talk about the John Adams papers at the Boston Public Library, the USS Constitution Museum, Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord, and such.

So I arrived home to a set of messages from Erik, who had been trying to catch me and get my okay before making a financial commitment on my behalf. Apparently there were a pair of $50 tickets available for us for the Bruce Springsteen concert Sunday night, but the catch was that he needed to move now. Given that I wasn't answering his messages, he was having to make an executive decision (like John Adams, don't you know) and judge that I was willing to buy them. My initial instinct, to avoid all unnecessary expenses in this end-of-the [school]-year financial crunch then was amended by my instructions to myself in recent years to make a point of taking in more live music, and that I'd never seen Springsteen in concert. This would seem to override the initial reservation, despite my worries about expenses. I haven't heard from Erik yet, so, as far as I know, it's me, Erik and Bruce on for Sunday night. Eat your heart out, Mom.

Re-reading Karl Rahner's seminal essay "The Charismatic Element in the Church" in The Dynamic Element in the Church for part of the current dissertation chapter and I came across this gem:

For a Catholic every "clash" with the Church is always an occurrence recognized by the Church herself as an expression of her own life and only to the extent that it is such a thing. (p.49)

The gets right to the heart of something it took me years to realize: that the so-called "conservatives" and "liberals" within the Catholic Church, who spend so much time arguing against or in defense of what they conceive to be "the Church," are doing little more than amusing themselves, largely because they fail to recognize whoever they are arguing with as equally being part of the Church, which in most cases they are. It is this fact that results in their then being confused that the Church doesn't react (either for or against the group or idea in question) in the way that such people suppose the Church will or ought to.

This "clash" mentality is part of the disease of the dualistic thinking we Americans have imported from out political two-party system, along with labels like "liberal" and "conservative." There are few greater luxuries than thinking that one group can be right about everything and the other wrong about everything. In American politics, that way of thinking results in the Right conceiving of the Left as unpatriotic, or traitorous to the notion of America; it results in the Left as failing to recognize that the Right embodies in their "Rightness" the very diversity that the Left claims to cherish.

This perspective, imported into the Church, results in the same kinds of dismissal of the Other. This is where the Christian conception of Love, expressed politically, transcends any anemic notion of "tolerance" that is expressed today, because the person who recognizes the inherent diversity and clash within the Church, as Rahner describes it here – like the human body which lives by constantly constructing and deconstructing itself – embraces that and those from whom one differs as an individual. Thus we come to the Table of the Eucharist together, one Church as internally diverse as the whole of Protestantism, I think, but committed to this one communion together. I think that the particular danger of our time is that that commitment to internal unity despite diversity is under attack in a new way, especially by the overt attempts at recruitment by (and, essentially, incorporation into) American political parties.

My day at IrishFest was about as perfect as could be. I met Dee at the gates around four and heard her news from the previous night's IrishFestivities, with her jumping in on some of the late night rooftop sessions over at the Comfort Inn & Suites. We then proceeded to spend the day catching up while taking in a number of acts. It turned out to be a rather "nontraditional" IrishFest for me in that very few of the artists whose performances I attended were actually Irish. With Deirdre's knowledge of the traditional music scene, and recommendations from others in it, we ended up focusing on the Nova Scotia stage, which was a new feature of this year's IrishFest. So the evening's lineup (with the IrishFest write-ups here included) became:

Troy Macgillivray

From Lanark, Nova Scotia, MacGillivray is a master piano and fiddle player and will be part of the Nova Scotia Showcase. His musical prowess can be attributed to a combination of commitment and bloodline as his ancestors have been proprietors of the Gaelic tradition in North Eastern Nova Scotia for generations. Whether playing piano or fiddle, or showcasing his step dancing, MacGillivray displays an intense pride in the Celtic heritage he inherited from his forefathers. His most recent CD was named 2008's ECMA Instrumental Recording of the Year.

Vishten

Emmanuelle LeBlanc: bodhran, piano, vocals
Pascal Miousse: fiddle, mandolin, guitar, vocals
Pastelle LeBlanc: accordion, piano, vocals
Louis-Charles Vigneau: guitar, banjo, vocal

Vishten brings together young Acadians who are passionate about the music and dance of their homes of Prince Edward Island and Magdelen Island. Present with their Acadian music are touches of aboriginal, folk and rock which the band attribute to the richness of their culture and their own experiences. Vishten's show consists of fiery fiddling, mesmerizing step-dancing and sweet voices that will bring you to your feet.

We saw a few moments of Dee's enthusiastic buddies from D.C., Scythian, and then

Natalie MacMaster & Donnell Leahy: Masters of the Fiddle

Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy are two of the world's most celebrated fiddlers. Together Natalie and Donnell are a whirlwind of fiddle-driven music, dance, and song. The foot-tapping rave-ups, heart-wrenching ballads, and world-class step dancing of this collaboration leave onlookers breathless from the moment it hits the stage. Audiences now have the chance to hear the fruits of this renowned musical matrimony during an unforgettable evening of Celtic music. Long time Irish Fest favorites, this is the first time you will see them together at the festival.

Cara

Gundrun Walther: vocals, fiddle, button accordion
Jurgen Treyz: guitar
Rolf Wagels: bodhran
Tola Custy: fiddle
Patricia Clark: vocals, piano, fiddle
Claus Steinort: flute, iulleann pipes, concertina

Artists will tell you that sometimes you need to step back to get perspective. Cara has successfully done that as this band from Germany has remained true to Celtic and Irish music while incorporating different sounds of European music in their pieces. Cara is fronted by two women whose intertwined vocals tell spirited tales while the band plays rousing jigs and reels.

All of them were fabulous, with Vishten particularly delighting me with their traditional//pop synthesis in some pieces, and Cara for just being hands-down an incredible group with great songs. More than anyone else, Cara made the musical evening for me, being a recent arrival on the scene from Germany, of all places. I had to restrain myself from buying Vishten's and Cara's discs right on the spot, but I just couldn't afford it at the moment. I'll patronize them via the Internet later on.

Other than that, the main joy of the evening was in getting to talk at length with Dee. I observed with some small disbelief that we had now known one another for about sixteen years, which just doesn't seem possible to me. I got to hear of her continuing work with the U.S. Bishops' Conference, and was disappointed to hear of the lip service that the Obama administration seemed to be giving to its pledge to look for ways of reducing the numbers of abortions in the United States. But it was still interesting and engaging to hear about her work as the point figure for the Bishops in that work. Life details were fun to catch up on, too, whether hearing of her beau in New York or of the musical adventures of her roommate Stella, a songwriter I had heard of from P.J. McCurry back when we all lived in the Mar-Main Arms in South Bend.

It was also really useful for me to be able to sound out my dissertation to her as she's involved in such concrete human rights activism within the Church, is very well educated in Philosophy and Theology with Master's degrees in both disciplines from Notre Dame, but who also isn't a full-time member of the professional theological guild. So her questions and positive responses regarding my research were valuable to me because they were coming from someone in a different kind of position in life and faith. After leaving the IrishFest grounds as midnight approached, I walked her up to the Inn so that she could jump in on the late-night music sessions again, and we sat out in front of the place, still talking until 1am, giving us nine hours of straight conversation when not listening to music. When I grabbed a cab back to my place, the driver asked why I was all lit up and smiling, and I just had to say that there were few things so pleasurable as having a catch-up session like that with an old friend.

Yikes! Campus (and the Milwaukee downtown) is suddenly being buzzed by F-16s! I'm so relieved to be in a country where that isn't followed by explosions and panic, though I think we all just gave a bit of a jump. And... according to Google... ah. The Thunderbirds are in town for this weekend's air show.

Usually, I find that I'm a bit suspicious of pieces of writing that speak a little too easily or universally about cultural symbols of a generation. I tend to favour complexity over simplicity in any kind of analysis, just as a matter of course, and of trying to be realistic about anything in a given moment in history. If I'm being quick in that way, myself, I am usually painfully aware of it, although it is inevitable, especially in teaching, that one has to simplify, especially the more basic the student. One of my earliest lessons in the power of the press was a Chicago Sun-Times writer doing such an article about me and my friends my freshman year in college, which turned out to be a set-up and hatchet job, using us to fill-in-the-blanks of an essay he wanted to write about the Decline and Fall of things since his own college days.

That said, I still had to acknowledge that this writer was dead-on about the ubiquitous nature of these two symbols of my childhood. My family's copy of Thriller was one of the most-played LPs in our collection, and I can remember the central role that the poster of Farrah Fawcett took in my friend Teddy's game room, displayed like an icon for the liturgy of adolescent sexuality. These things were everywhere, and unparalleled among their kind: nothing was as big as either of them, or has been since, that I'm aware of. So as far as that goes, this article struck a nerve, although I'm not so sure that I'm ready to acknowledge some of his other sweeping statements about Generation X.

2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day
Jun 26, 4:30 AM (ET)

By TED ANTHONY

A record-shattering vinyl album and its moonwalking maestro. A paper poster of a golden-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit that was gossamer and clingy in all the right places.

It all seems so quaint now, the fragmented dream memories of a fleeting micro-era that began with words like "bicentennial" and "pet rock" and ended with MTV, Atari and absurdly thin cans of super-hold mousse.

The man-child named Michael Jackson and the luminous girl known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors jumped into our consciousness at a plastic moment in American culture - a time when the celebrity juggernaut we know today was still in diapers. When they departed Thursday, just a few hours and a few miles apart, they left an entire generation - a very strange generation indeed - without two of its defining figures.

"These people were on our lunchboxes," said Gary Giovannetti, 38, a manager at HBO who grew up on Long Island awash in Farrah and MJ iconography. "This," he said, "is the moment when Generation X realizes they're grown up."

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Now that, Ladies and Gentlemen, was a full-scale, classic, crack-and-boom Midwestern Thunderstorm! The heart of it crawled over the city and has now drifted south over Lake Michigan. At least four strikes within a block of my place! And maybe more still to come....

An interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about the restoration of an urban Jersey parish. I guess this really strikes me because it plugs into much of the vision of the Church that I'm working on in my dissertation. That work has got me quite curious and concerned about how local priest are (or are not?) being trained in their seminary education to cultivate the spiritual gifts of the laity, and not just being made to focus on cultivating their own spiritual gifts. In other words, are they being made simply into leaders, or are they being made into those who will cultivate and raise up the leadership potential in those they lead, leadership potential of other sorts that the ministerial priesthood?

Rebuilding a parish, pastor comes to love people more
Jersey City, N.J.

Our Lady of Czestochowa Church was packed for the 12:30 Mass on Mother's Day. Four families waited at the rear of the church with their infants who were to be baptized. In the congregation, there were dozens of young families with young children and scores of young singles.

Fr. Tom Iwanowski looked out familiarly on a congregation whose primary membership is made up of people between the ages of 25 and 50, a demographic that most religious leaders would covet. In little more than a month he would be moving on from this community where he had arrived 14 years ago, at the request of the previous archbishop of Newark, with the simple mandate to "go and change the direction of the parish."

Change it he did.

The story of the transformation of OLC, or Our Lady of the Waterfront, both tags now popularly used to refer to the Jersey City parish, is a tale simultaneously of how disruptive change can be, of the ease with which the Vatican's attention can be turned toward relatively unimportant local matters by a vocal minority, of the professional skills and enormous work it takes to be a successful pastor today and of the arbitrary nature of Catholic existence where the character and work of a community can be undone in an instant.

That latter point was perhaps the most compelling matter the day of my visit. It hung over everything. What will happen, was the prevailing question, when Fr. Tom leaves?

The question was probably much the same for the few Poles who still inhabited the parish 14 years ago: What will happen when we get the new guy?

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Huh. So they finally did it. I think this was originally scheduled for 2006, if I recall correctly, as it had just been announced when I was buying an old-style TV set in 1997, making me consider that I was investing in technology scheduled for obsolescence. But, given that I have cable, which I use almost exclusively for movies and perhaps three television shows I'll keep an eye on, I would have been Joe Clueless over this date, and not gotten around to getting a conversion box – I hadn't seen any advertisement indicating that this was about to happen. But I do find it simply kind of fascinating purely with regard to the history of technology to see a whole technology retired in such an organized way. Thus the jotting-down of this article here.

Friday marks final signoff for analog TV service
Jun 12, 10:59 AM (ET)

By PETER SVENSSON

NEW YORK (AP) - TV stations across the U.S. started cutting their analog signals Friday morning, ending a 60-year run for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.

The Federal Communications Commission put 4,000 operators on standby for calls from confused viewers, and set up demonstration centers in several cities. Volunteer groups and local government agencies were helping elderly viewers set up digital converter boxes that keep older TVs functioning. Any set hooked up to cable or a satellite dish is unaffected.

"When you're alone like me, that's my partner," Patricia Bruchalski, 82, said about her TV.

Bruchalski, a pianist and former opera singer who lives in Brooklyn Park, Md., got assistance Thursday from Anne Arundel County's Department of Aging and Disabilities and a community organization called Partners in Care. After her converter box was installed, Bruchalski marveled that digital broadcasts seemed clearer and gave her more channels - about 15 instead of the three she was used to.

"You're going to be up all night watching TV now," volunteer installer Rick Ebling told her.

Around 15 percent of U.S. households don't have satellite or cable, and they tend to be poorer. Nielsen Co. said minority households were less likely to be prepared for Friday's analog shutdown, as were households consisting of people under age 35.

A survey sponsored by broadcasters showed that Americans are well aware of the switch, thanks to two years of advertising about it. But many people simply procrastinated.

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Holy Moses! Miguel Díaz has been named Ambassador to the Vatican! I used to hang a bit with him and his wife Marian when they ran my graduate housing at Notre Dame when I was doing my Master's degree. Just the kind of talk-in-the-halls kinds of conversations and up to their apartment once or twice. Good people. And how cool is it that Obama actually named an American theologian to the post? I've not always gotten the impression that US ambassadors there were the most informed people in the world. (Which led to my applying for the position from the Bush Administration in 2000: I never heard back from them.)

US ambassador to Vatican named
by Michael Sean Winters on May. 27, 2009 NCR Today

A dark horse emerged in the race to become U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. (See press release below.) Miguel Diaz, a professor of theology at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University, was named today by President Obama to represent the United States at the Holy See.

The immediate takeaway is this. Diaz is a pro-life Democrat so his mere presence at the Vatican will disprove the contention of some conservatives that there is no such thing as a pro-life Catholic. If he can articulate the President’s commitment to reducing the abortion rate, those in the Vatican who appear disposed to like the President will have more ammunition when Deal Hudson, George Weigel and Co. attack L’Osservatore Romano for their pro-Obama line.

When tipped off to the appointment, I ran to the library and am just beginning his book "On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives." It is a serious scholarly work, that’s for sure. Very detailed, methodical analysis, zillions of footnotes, and a wide range of sources. It is certainly not my cup of tea; it is a little too generous in its citations of liberation theologians for my more conservative theological tastes but I have to say that he does not stray into some of the sillinesses of his forebears. I think he is not quite right on the relationship of nature and grace, but I am wrestling with it.

Appointing a theologian to the diplomatic spot is certainly rolling the dice. Any Pope but especially this Pope cares a lot about theology and it won’t take GOP operatives long to find any passages that might offend. (Sonia Sotomayor is not the only one whose writings will be gleaned with a fine tooth comb!) I will point out that Pope Benedict XVI has never described himself as a Rahnerian. 'Nuff said.

+++

Dr. Miguel Díaz is a Professor of Theology at St. John's University and the College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota. He is the co-editor of the book "From the Heart of Our People: Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology" and author of "On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives", named "Best Book of the Year" by the Hispanic Theological Initiative at Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Díaz taught Religious Studies and Theology at Barry University, the University of Dayton and the University of Notre Dame. From 2001 to 2003, he taught and served as Academic Dean at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is a Board Member of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) and Past President of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS). Dr. Díaz holds a B.A. from St. Thomas University and a M.A. and PhD in Theology from the University of Notre Dame.

EDIT: ( John Allen's analysis of the nomination )

One of my best friends sent me an email about the Obama speech at Notre Dame, characterizing those cheering for the President – especially in cheering him after the graduation ceremony was disrupted by a Pro-Life protester – as supporting the President's position on abortion. I think that that is far too simple and reductionistic a reading of the incident, and I rejected it. I too might happily cheer as a Domer in that situation, where I – as a Pro-Life Catholic of what I will call unimpeachable orthodoxy (in a bout of Pauline foolishness and boasting) – would reject the weeks of attempts of outsiders to impose a narrative of faithlessness upon my willingness to welcome a leader, a stranger, or even an enemy into our midst and to therefore be guilty of "dining with a sinner."

My faith in the power of the gospel is such that I have no need to usurp God's prerogative for final and complete judgment of another human being, and to therefore help guarantee and confirm the intransigence of someone holding a position contrary to mine or the Church's. Such a position effectively says "no" to God's grace on behalf of someone else, which is not something for which I would want to answer to God, myself. That's not a dodge on my part. That's not me wanting to fit in with the Left culture of the American university. That's not me wanting to keep my thoughts on abortion as the ending of human life to myself. On the contrary, I feel every confidence both in the logic of that position as a far more consistent position on human rights than either the Republican or Democratic parties in America can conjure up. I just believe that, while it is my position and my duty to speak logic to my culture regarding the things of God – that is to say, to be a theologian of the Roman Catholic Church – it is not in my power to convince anyone of this crazy story (no matter that I think that the 20th century put the bulk of all the evidence in my favour). I can leave the power of convincing to God. I can think that I've figured out the truth about this question without thinking that I possess all truth. And so I can open my door to anyone, hear them out, and treat them as worthy human beings, created in the image of God. (And even argue with them, should the occasion be appropriate and should they be capable of honest argument.)

That's where I think that the sincere protestors, standing up for human rights in an authentic way, were nevertheless being short-sighted, or Christian in only a raw, beginner's way (where they weren't merely been played as part of partisan politics, which has also been a big factor here). For those at Notre Dame who welcomed the President, he had to answer to what he certainly recognized to be their Pro-Life differences from him on abortion, as the full transcript of his talk reveals. Those who would have eliminated his visit altogether would have therefore excused him from even considering his position or that of the Pro-Life community he was addressing. As I said above, they would have guaranteed and confirmed that position, forcing him into that stance. I see very little advantage in that, or for any possibility of grace or new perspectives. It is, however, a stand that can result in a satisfying amount of self-congratulation for having ably reaffirmed one's own position, to the cheers of the rest of the members of the choir. And what good is that? Even the Republicans and the Democrats can do that.

Obama calls for understanding in Notre Dame speech
Obama Receives Honorary Degree at Notre Dame, as Protests Build
Obama Confronts Abortion Debate, Urges Notre Dame Grads to Seek Common Ground
Transcript of Obama's Notre Dame Address

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Mom wrote and asked me about what I thought about all the controversy regarding President Obama's addressing the graduating seniors at the University of Notre Dame. I hadn't consciously articulated my thoughts until she asked, but now that I have, I thought that I would just copy it all down here. I would preface my comments by reassuring or informing anyone who found them objectionable from a Catholic perspective that I'm twice as orthodox as they are and am willing to prove it in public, internationally-televised debate, and that I can successfully do so with two glasses of wine on an empty stomach in my system, which proves both that I'm a notorious lightweight and that I am so orthodox that I'm willing to invoke Paul and foolishly boast about it because it's so true that I don't have anything to gain or to prove from it. That's my response to anyone whose most beloved rhetorical strategy is to deny the faith of anyone who disagrees with them, which has been more embarrassing in all this affair than anything having to do with the actual invitation to President Obama. So, as I wrote to Mom:

The Notre Dame thing is more irritating to me than anything else. It's a kind of short-sightedness that I find sometimes irritating or sometimes just disappointing. The same thing happened with Bush in 2001, but I don't know that that was made into such a big deal by the press, perhaps because the press felt any protest regarding Bush was part of the natural order of things. I call it short-sighted because I think it's an illusion at best that anyone would expect a President of the United States to perfectly line up with Catholic teaching. There are a number of things in the party platforms of both Democrats and Republicans that are utterly opposed to Catholic ethics, so this should be no surprise. Even someone perceived to be as politically "Right" as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, publisher of First Things, had warned those around him that they ought to always expect the Republican Party to betray them, despite the current seeming alignment of Republican interests with some of the concerns of his circle. In the same way, when you were younger, it was taken as a matter of simple fact that the Democratic Party, the party of the "little guy," was the party that Catholics and Evangelical were going to be naturally aligned with. But then came the shift of the "New Left" in the 1968-73 period when what it meant to be "Left" in the Democratic leadership underwent an astonishing ideological transformation, not least in its new hostility to religious belief and expression. The Republican Party in the late 1970s made a conscious and concerted effort to pick up the Evangelicals as a voting block, with great success. Since the 2004 Presidential election, the political Right has gone back to that playbook and has been making a major effort to do the same thing with Catholic Americans, though not with such visible success, except among some bishops who ought to be a bit more circumspect and clever about the extent to which they are being used for partisan politics.

The basic political issue, both in the Notre Dame snafu and in the past several years, is of course abortion. Because human life in particular is held to be sacred, with each human being possessing the dignity of being the image and likeness of God, a human rights ethic that has any consistency includes an opposition to abortion. This has been the case in Christian teaching since the late first century, when we see the topic first addressed explicitly, or in parallel secular ethics like in the unedited version of the Hippocratic Oath, where ancient physicians of that school swore to protect life even in its earliest stages. With respect to the sketch of the political context of this Notre Dame debate that I just gave, I have seen very little evidence that the leadership of the Republican Party is interest in pursuing the abortion issue as a priority beyond using it for the gathering of a voting block: a few rallying cries during elections, blocking the use of American funds to commit abortions overseas, sure, but nothing beyond that. There has been nothing like the forcing of the issue in the way the Abolitionists did in the lead-up to the Civil War.

The shape and nature of the argument involved in all of this has great significance. The logic used to justify the act of abortion itself, that the undeveloped fetus is not yet a "person," is a philosophical logic. That the fetus is human and is alive is a simple matter of genetics. People who debate using that language are just being sloppy. The question of "personhood," or of "humanity" as a philosophical concept, is more hazy. But Catholic ethics has increasingly become sensitive to the use of this argument through history, where invoking the debatable nature of someone else's humanity ("so-and-so isn't really human": no one has ever used this argument with regard to their own humanity) has been the justification for every other atrocity that people now repudiate. We pride ourselves on being the sort of people who would never have done that awful thing, whether against Jews, Africans, Native Americans, Cambodians, Rawandans, Sudanese, whoever. But it seems significant that the logic and the shape of the argument is the same. Catholics led the opposition to legalized abortion when it became an issue in the United States and when it culminated in the Roe v. Wade decision at the same time as that hard Secularist shift in the Left. So abortion has in many ways been popularly perceived as a particularly "Catholic" issue by those on both sides of the argument. Within Catholicism, this has become as much a "litmus test" issue as it has by those supporting the idea of a right to abortion, who throw their support behind anything even perceived to have anything to do with abortion, such as recent debates over the use of fetal stem cells in medical research. (The logic being that if any ethical qualms are shown here, it amount to becoming too close to admitting that unborn human beings have political and human rights, and so therefore no ethical concerns can be allowed to be raised on this issue. If you look at the lobbying groups supporting such research, it is abortion-rights groups that lead the way: "science" as such has very little to do with the politics.)

For those opposing President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame, the assumption is that any perceived acceptance or honouring of Obama as President is tantamount to an endorsement of his position as a supporter of abortion. This is, of course, foolish. That argument, extended logically, would imply that any recognition of the authority of the government of the United States implies an endorsement of its current policies. This is the exact opposite of what a democracy entails, of course, where everyone can cheerfully oppose the policies of their government without recourse to succession or civil war: one just has to convince their fellows to follow another course during the next general election, and thus we have revolution without bloodshed. So the basic argument against recognizing President Obama in this way falls apart. Notre Dame has recognized and received a number of Presidents over the years, every last one of which can be found to be in violation of Catholic ethical principles on one point or another. (Whether President Obama's choice of accepting the Notre Dame invitation over the hundreds of other commencement invitations he has received is driven by any particular political agenda is not a question I'll bother to consider here.)

But, say those who push this point, the abortion question is a special one: it is a fundamental crime against humanity to kill those least capable of defending themselves, depriving them of the chance to achieve any potential in their lives. They point out that John Paul II highlighted the particularly egregious nature of this act as perhaps the most fundamental violation of human rights that we have ever committed. All true. If so, that raises the question of complicity again. We are either complicit in aiding and abetting our society's support of abortion or we are not. Honouring a President who supports the idea of abortion rights, they argue, creates a tacit support that is incompatible with being Catholic. Myself, I cannot accept this argument, for the reasons described above. If their argument is true, these people are also aiding and abetting abortion by remaining citizens of the United States and by recognizing the legitimacy of this administration. To be truly consistent, their options could only be emigration, revolution, or utter non-recognition of the government in a state of permanent civil disobedience, probably no matter whose administration is currently running the show. Any position other than these seems to me to be opportunistic and disingenuous, if they have really followed their logic to its natural conclusions. That is, one that is opposed to President Obama on a more individual and personal level, and is using the abortion issue as a front for that opposition, but without being willing to follow their own logic to its natural ends. To insist that there should be this utter "line drawn in the sand" over the mere appearance of the President of the United States at the University of Notre Dame, or even the specific honouring of him for other goods shown in his life, and not to therefore question whether there is the same "line in the sand" between their Catholicism and their American citizenship is to "have their cake and eat it, too." There are a few Catholics who have been that consistent regarding issues of church and state. I do not see it happening here, which to me undermines the seriousness of the protests being raised.

The question becomes one of the greater good. Which is the greater good? To exist together in a democracy where freedom from the threat of civil war is seen as more important than even disagreement on fundamental issues of human rights such as that seen in the abortion debate, where the status of even a human being's development and acquiring of human rights is questioned? Or to exist in a country that guarantees that right to life (and all attending human rights, even those opposed by the Political Right but supported by the Catholic Church) even if guaranteeing those rights must come at the cost of the political union of the nation itself? Unless people follow their arguments all the way to the fundamental issues, which to my mind is the same thing as saying that they admit what they are really arguing about, then I think they are just wasting their time. Or worse, showing off for the cameras, whether to demonstrate to others how serious they are, or whether to reassure themselves.

So no, I don't find the people debating President Obama's presence at and honouring by Notre Dame to be persuasive. I am a Roman Catholic Christian, who has thoroughly investigated and has been convinced of the truth of the questions of that faith. I am also an American, excited by the prospect of a diverse democracy built upon a fundamental conception of Natural Law and Human Rights – the intellectual children of the Medieval Catholic universities which were then fostered by the Modern age. I am also a loyal son of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, excited by that school's distinctive gift and history of voicing Catholicism into the university, national, and international cultures of our time. The presence of the President is one more day at Notre Dame, one more person present who is in the midst of the ongoing conversation or story of their life. I was never in doubt about the Catholicity of Notre Dame, so protesting President Obama's presence does nothing to convince me any more of Notre Dame's Catholicity. I was never in doubt of President Obama's not being Catholic, so protesting his presence does not tell me or him anything that we didn't already know. The willingness of several of the prominent protesters to call Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins's Catholic faith into question over his issuing the invitation? That doesn't convince me any further of the depth of their Catholic faith. Instead, I find the moment, the conversation, the appeal to decency, logic, law, the Good – all things that are good – I find that the appeal to these sorts of things that the President and Notre Dame would be talking about, these are all aspects of God's creation, of the action of the Word and the Spirit in the world. That being the case, all that the President actually has to talk about are those things that the Catholic Church affirms, even if he has yet to make some of those connections, himself. I'm content to let that process happen, to even pray for the occasion, and to let God do any convincing necessary, having long since learned the lesson that my being loud or rude in no way assists God in this work.

President Jenkins put it entirely sensibly when he said, "We are not ignoring the critical issue of the protection of life. On the contrary, we invited him because we care so much about those issues, and we hope . . . for this to be the basis of an engagement with him," as well as adding that, "You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them . . . show respect for them and listen to them." Former President Fr. Ted Hesburgh also put it well when he said the other day, "No speaker who has ever come to Notre Dame has changed the University. We are who we are. But, quite often, the very fact of being here has changed the speaker."

Hmm. And that concludes my thoughts. Sorry about the length, Mom: you asked. (And you're the Irish parent.)

Mike

Amy is sitting across from me at the table, trying not to roll her eyes while everyone is LOUDLY debating Bob's argument that the saturation effect of current communications technology – cell phones, Facebook, Twitter – is undermining young people's abilities at establishing depth in friendship. Meanwhile, I'm just putting the final polish on this entry that I had been making earlier in the day, and had on standby on my journal, while everyone still thinks that I'm making a shopping list for Dan and Bob for Loome Theological Booksellers when they head up to St. Paul, Minnesota tomorrow for the Upper Midwest meeting of the American Academy of Religion.

America has printed (and made public on their website) a strong article on the philosophical trappings of the very simple fault of greed that has led to our current economic disaster. It makes for a good pairing with the Rolling Stone article I posted the other day. Worth taking the time to read.

Greenspan's Folly

The demise of the cult of self-interest

I was wrong, Alan Greenspan said in so many words. Seated before his congressional inquisitors in October 2008, with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression cascading down Wall Street, Mr. Greenspan confessed that the philosophical principle upon which he had based his highly influential professional judgment is—flawed.
For some two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan had counseled presidents and Congresses that government deregulation of financial markets and reliance upon self-regulation by self-interest was the way of both freedom and prosperity. The collapse of one insolvent bank after another was wrong, Alan Greenspan said in so many words. Seated before his congressional inquisitors in October 2008, with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression cascading down Wall Street, Mr. Greenspan confessed that the philosophical principle upon which he had based his highly influential professional judgment is—flawed.

For some two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan had counseled presidents and Congresses that government deregulation of financial markets and reliance upon self-regulation by self-interest was the way of both freedom and prosperity. The collapse of one insolvent bank after another has called such counsel into question.

Here are Greenspan’s own words: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.... The whole intellectual edifice [of risk-management in derivative markets]...collapsed last summer.” Asked whether his ideological bias led him to faulty judgments, he answered: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

One pillar in the “intellectual edifice” of Mr. Greenspan’s economic philosophy is the objectivist philosophy of the late Ayn Rand, whose inner circle Greenspan joined in the 1950s. As explained in her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Rand believed that the individual exists solely for her own happiness and thus that rational self-interest is the only objective basis for moral action. There are no moral constraints on the selfish pursuit of personal happiness, except force and fraud. And there is no moral duty to sacrifice individual advantage for any greater good, because there simply is no greater good than personal happiness (“egoism”).

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Thanks to magdalene1 for giving me the heads-up on this pretty fabulous article that goes a lot further than the news media has done in explaining to me the obscurities of what's been going on on Wall Street, and how our government is involved in it, or not involved enough. Horrifically enough, it reinforces that awful thing that Shirley Williams said to me over dinner at Notre Dame in 2001: that the most shocking thing she could see as an outside observer of American politics was that, over the last 20 years, America had actually gone from being a democracy to being a plutocracy – and no one had noticed.

The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

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As I've mentioned before, I have returned heavily to Merton since Chrysogonus's death. Outside of my dissertation reading and work, my reading has largely been Merton. I tore through the epic autobiography of The Seven Storey Mountain while traveling, moving too fast to get any good out of this journal as a reading journal. I was most stunned in my re-reading of it on two related points: the first being one of cultural history, we might say, and the second being more concerned with Merton himself.

I was struck by the reading of the Second World War as a result of a spiritual miasma in the generation leading up to it, of Merton's partial blame for the war on himself – and all others like him, caught up in the cult of Self. What struck me so heavily was that there was no sense in any response I've ever heard of to the book that this reading was condemned. For all those that would mis-read Merton as "going hippie" in the 1960s, there was no condemnation of him as an antiwar "peacenik" in the generation of the war itself: instead people responded very positively to the book. I finally saw all this in contrast to the narrative of the War that I had acquired when growing up from movies, television and especially from all the 1950s youth histories of the war that I read in grade school – my first serious investment in history, and the foundation for my becoming an historian. In all these, the Second World War seemed to be presented as a kind of inevitable triumph of American technology and can-do confidence in responding to evil abroad. There was, in the face especially of Nazi horror, no self-doubt and no questioning about the evil of war itself. I'm not noting this as a pacifist, or as one holding to classical Just War Theory. I'm just suddenly struck by noticing the stark difference between the narrative of the Second World War as I received it, and the narrative as Thomas Merton presented it in a wildly-popular (if clearly penitential) book among those who experienced the war. (Not to sound all Post-Modern with regard to "narratives.") No hint of a perspective on the war as Merton describes it – as of great moral ambiguity, even – has survived in any other account that has made it to me, except in cases where what I'm seeing is a clear projection of Vietnam-era politics back upon the past. That's common-enough in that 1960s-era narratives are still dominant in our entertainment and politics today.

The second thing I was struck by, that more concerned with Merton himself, is a related point. This is the fundamental consistency I'm seeing between two Thomas Mertons who are often set against one another: "the Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain" and "the Merton of the 1960s." This way of looking at Merton is often heard from those who have not read Merton, or at least have not read Merton very closely, it seems to me: even from some Catholic bishops. (It is similar in that respect to those who blame Augustine of Hippo for every imagined sexual dysfunction in Western culture, which is popularly taught among college professors of many fields who haven't read Augustine himself, but who listen closely to other professors who haven't read Augustine.) In that telling, the "spiritual Merton" of the early books gave way to the "social justice Merton" of the 1960s, who had more-or-less gone off and become a Buddhist, or was about to, by the time he was killed. The latter idea is just silly to anyone who knows his writing and his life: it was the depth of his Christianity that was empowering his explorations of Asian religions, and which made the leading figures of those faiths take him far more seriously as a conversation partner than the fundamentally areligious dabblers in Asian religions that became so ubiquitous from the 1960s onward. The youthful Dalai Lama was powerfully affected by their meeting, but has never reported supposing that Merton was a Buddhist or about to be one: it was the depth of Merton's Christianity that so struck Tenzin Gyatso, according to his account of their meeting. So the "spiritual Merton" was driving the "social justice/inter-religious dialogue Merton" of the 1960s, and in The Seven Storey Mountain I was strongly moved by the social justice themes – however much they were articulated in the language of a recent and traditionalist Catholic convert of the 1930s – that ran throughout that text. However much Merton developed as a scholar, as a writer, and as a human being – and there are dramatic differences in style and depth between 1948 when The Seven Storey Mountain was published and 1968, when Merton died at the monasticism conference in Bangkok – there is a fundamental consistency of vision throughout his corpus that I had never before so strongly perceived.

My Saint Patrick's Day was a mellow one, particularly by American standards. If anything, I would have enjoyed hitting the Saint Patrick's Day Mass at Notre Dame and soaking in that liturgy as an aid to a good time of prayer (as well as just great music from the Folk Choir). I was really amused when I learned that Saint Patrick's Day back in Ireland really was more of a religious holiday than anything else, although I'm embarrassed to hear that the ongoing vulgar Americanization of this, too, is making way there. There was a time when the Irish would have found it insulting to have our culture reduced to nothing more than going on a bender. I did have an interesting if random conversation on the bus today (a celebration of my Irish gift of the gab?), when a woman named Anita sitting next to me introduced herself when asking if I was a seminarian. (She had noted my reading material.) When I said I was a theologian, I discovered that she'd done Master's work in Theology at Garrett, with undergrad work in Economics and Mathematics, and had recently gone back to school for another undergraduate degree in something biological, as a prelude to doing M.D. work, with an eye toward combining it all in medical/economic ethics. It was a fascinating conversation, really, as she outlined some of her proposed work, which involved an amazing amount of intersecting expertises. Add to that some of the ethnic/cultural angles she wanted to address as an African-American woman, she seemed to be a potential powerhouse in getting all the credentials to be able to tackle the problematic ways we're doing medical care in our country, particularly as medicine becomes increasingly a corporate animal, and with its rush to implement any innovation, with profit far outstripping ethics as a deciding fact in whether to implement new technologies. Interesting stuff. Another point for public transportation!

Ambitious indeed. But the simple point of it not being a matter of resources as much as a matter of political will is a compelling one.

Charities head sees chance to 'remake' system
'Still possible to reduce U.S. poverty significantly in the next decade.'
Mar. 06, 2009
By Jerry Filteau, NCR Correspondent

Washington – Father Larry Snyder is an ambitious man -- not for himself, but for the poor and often voiceless Americans whom he serves as president of Catholic Charities USA.

Facing the worst challenge to the U.S. and world economy since the Great Depression, he said in an interview with NCR, “Maybe with this opportunity to remake our economic system we can correct some of its shortcomings (that existed) before.”

I mean the fact that we had 12 percent of the people (even before the recession began) living in poverty -- was that acceptable?” he asked. “Well, I don’t think so.”

He added that even with the still-deepening U.S. and global recession today, he thinks it is still possible to reduce U.S. poverty significantly in the next decade.

In January 2007 he announced the launch of a Catholic Charities-led Campaign to Reduce Poverty in America, with a goal of cutting the number of U.S. households living in poverty in half by the year 2020.

“Our main challenge in this campaign, our first challenge, is to create the political will,” he said. “Once the political will is there, we will see a reduction.”

He compared the challenge today to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which included Catholic-led legislation establishing the Social Security System and, for the first time in history, a minimum wage for U.S. workers.

As one of the first members of President Obama’s newly formed Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Snyder said he will use that position to try to promote policies and programs protecting and supporting human dignity across the life spectrum, from advocacy for immigrants, the unemployed, the poor and the elderly to reducing abortions.

The council’s first 15 members include two Catholics and several Evangelicals who are also strongly pro-life as well as other religious and secular members who are pro-choice, he said. Snyder said he expected that another Catholic would be added as the council is brought up to its full membership of 25.

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An essay by Prof. Stanley Fish on the future of classic university education. By "classic" I mean the university education as a humane formation. What is generally called a university education today has in fact become something much less: it's a job training program. I don't think that that's snobbishness saying so. I don't think it's a holdover of some old cultural ideal that amounts no more today than some conservative impulse on my part. I believe it to be a simple fact of intent. There is a point to educating toward an economic outcome. But there is also a point toward education toward a philosophical and humanist one, particularly one in the Christian humanist mode of what university education had been. To simply mandate the new form, for the powerful to simply create workers for their economy? That's a kind of conquest that violates the spirit and intent of America.

Still, I think there are a few avenues around the bleak diagnosis Fish offers here. Some of us simply do the true mode of education no matter the shape and intent of the university system in which we find ourselves. We seek out the right teachers, we ask the right questions, we do the work. There are also a few schools, most of them newly created, that try to explicitly address this trend, offering themselves as an alternative to the dominant university paradigm. Most of these schools are Catholic, drawing on historical components of Catholic education, and I've been interested to watch them. But a lot of them import quite a bit of conservative culture or what's called conservative or traditionalist Catholicism into their program, which I don't think are necessarily components of that classical form of education, nor, for that matter, necessarily traditional in their Catholicism. Still, it's interesting to see what kinds of ideological trends are frequently part of creating such schools. It is particularly astonishing in the face of how politically Left university educators tend to lean that education should have become so utilitarian. I wonder whether the New Left, 1960s-70s ideology of unqualified "freedom" with regard to everything – including "liberation" from the claims of any truths beyond individual desire or preference – have rendered the Left unable to resist, or even recognize, an all-consuming pragmatism or utilitarianism in university education.

The Last Professor
Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009, 10:00 pm

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

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Yesterday afternoon and evening, part of my 3+ hour long conversation with my former boss, the 16th-century scholar Mickey Mattox,, lead us away from more predictable elements like Martin Luther and to the recent death of Richard John Neuhaus, the publisher of First Things, that journal of American public life in religion, culture and politics. While Neuhaus on more than one occasion drove me bananas with some glib remark, I had to always acknowledge the depth of what he regularly achieved in the pages of his journal. It is frequently referred to as a conservative or neo-conservative journal. There's some truth to that. But I'd also have to say that it's also a journal of 1960 liberalism. 1960 was so different than what "the Sixties" produced: its ecumenical union of "Protestant, Catholic, Jew" was a far cry from the anti-religious furor released by the New Left by the end of the sixties, and which continues unabated today as one of the strongest anti-intellectual bigotries characteristic of that portion of American society (the Right has its own, I know). Martin Luther King, Jr., while invoked as an icon today by the Left, would never be tolerated as he was: the Niebuhrian public Christian intellectual and preacher of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King, were he still alive, would either have had to change his tune entirely, betraying what he earlier stood for, or would have become anathema to today's Left by holding on to the core of his Christian commitments and therefore "become a conservative," even if he hadn't changed at all. More in that older mode, Neuhaus created a public space for serious discussion by writers of numerous perspectives, united in taking their subject seriously, and deeming it worth serious discussion. For all its hits and misses, that's something I have to credit to Neuhaus. And as Mickey pointed out, the personal loyalty and friendship so many people felt toward him – including people who loathed his conclusions – speaks strongly to a truly tolerant and generous human being, who didn't invoke "tolerance" simply as a tool to silence other perspectives. I had to bow to that loyalty, having never met the man himself, but recognizing what kind of person inspires such reactions.

George Weigel published a fine obituary on Neuhaus, and I thought I would jot that down in my journal for memory's sake. A great many more obituaries are linked on First Things's website.

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Wow: this is unexpected. First Things is one of the best journals of its kind, though I tended to find Neuhaus's own contributions the most maddening things in its pages. Nevertheless, you had to admire him for creating such an ecumenical forum.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus dead at age 72
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff
Published: Jan. 8, 2009

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading voice of Catholic conservatism in America, and one of those rare theologians and spiritual leaders whose influence vastly exceeded the boundaries of their religious community, has died at 72.

Neuhaus slipped away Jan. 8, shortly before 10 o’clock Eastern time. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering.

A priest of the New York archdiocese and a former Lutheran minister, Neuhaus was best known to society at large as an intellectual guru of what came to be known as the “religious right.”

From the early 1970s forward, Neuhaus was a key architect of two alliances with profound consequences for American politics, both of which overcame histories of mutual antagonism: one between conservative Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals, and the other between free market neo-conservatives and “faith and values” social conservatives.

In 2005, Time magazine took the unusual step of including the Catholic Neuhaus on a list of America’s 25 most influential Evangelicals, noting that in a 2004 session with journalists from religious publications, President George W. Bush cited Neuhaus more often than any other living authority.

“Father Richard,” the president said then, “helps me articulate these [religious] things.”

To Catholic insiders, however, it was Neuhaus’ writing rather than his political activism that made him a celebrity. From the pages of First Things, the unapologetically high-brow journal he founded in 1990, Neuhaus kept up a steady stream of commentary on matters both sacred and secular.

In broad strokes, Neuhaus was an unabashed supporter of the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and his commentary was prized in Rome. John Paul, for example, named Neuhaus as a delegate to the 1997 Synod for America. Yet he was no lapdog for ecclesiastical authority; he lamented the Vatican’s opposition to the Iraq war in 2003, and early in Benedict’s papacy Neuhaus voiced “palpable uneasiness” that the new pontiff was not clamping down on what Neuhaus saw as dissent from church teaching.

Over the years, even people who disagreed with Neuhaus’ politics or theology would devour his monthly essay in First Things, titled “The Public Square,” for sheer literary pleasure. His combination of epigrammatic formulae and occasionally biting satire often reminded fans of English-language Catholic luminaries of earlier eras, such as G.K. Chesterton or Cardinal John Henry Newman.

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The music of choice today – yes, I'm actually just making a recommendation/advertisement – is Over The Rhine's first Christmas album, a dark and moody effort now over ten years old entitled The Darkest Night of the Year. Right now, this early morning, marks the moment of the Winter solstice, making this last night or tonight that "Darkest Night of the Year," at least in terms of sheer length. This album pairs nicely with their 2006 second Christmas release, Snow Angels which is sultry and romantic, and more classically "Christmas," while both being more original in composition than most Christmas albums. (Don't let any traditional song titles fool you on that point.)

The Darkest Night of the Year is perhaps more of an "Advent album" in mood: darkly anticipatory, more Christmas Eve than Christmas Day, and that anticipation for the gift of redemption in Christ that we remember in Advent, well, that might hint at Christmas Eve being more elementally "the darkest night of the year." As with pretty much anything by Over The Rhine, it represents the very best in contemporary American songwriting, as far as I'm concerned. However, you take it, you owe yourself the deliciousness of this music.

And in striking contrast to this journal's recent idle hope for people of great moral worth to be in positions of political influence, we have the absurd escapades of Illinois Governor Blagojevich, now appearing in a news outlet near you. My favourite sentence highlighting a depth of moral idiocy that I can scarcely imagine to be non-fiction is:

The affidavit said Blagojevich expressed frustration at being "stuck" as governor and that he would have access to greater resources if he were indicted while in the U.S. Senate than while sitting as governor.

I stand amazed that there really are people like this, who would express such things out loud, and not be abandoned by everyone around them. I clearly hang out in the wrong crowds.

This was the piece that most caught my eye in today's Chicago Tribune as I came to my last day of taking care of the nieces. The fact that I was spending the weekend with the three girls whose education and character formation probably outweigh the combined total of the mental energy I spend on all my official students no doubt added to this article hitting me hard.

In some ways, what's written here isn't news. What strikes me as new, or newer, though, is the sheer multiplication of industries driving this trend. I might wonder which came first, chicken-or-the-egg-style, anxiety about appearance or someone trying to sell you something that might calm your anxiety about your appearance. The fact that sheer age itself is now no longer acceptable, except – possibly – for a brief window of 20 to 24 or thereabouts is alarming. Whatever came first, there are now arrayed several armies of specialists in product manufacture, image editing, manipulation, and agenda-setting, and advertising that are all arrayed against anyone being content with their age and appearance. After all, if you are content, you aren't going to consume the required consumer products, no?

As a specialist in spirituality among other things, reading this made me cringe at the thought of generations of people, especially women, never getting a chance to be let alone enough to find out what it is to be who and what you are in the present moment. It's not that men escape this – I remember a number of us talking here the other year about a First Things article "Against Eternal Youth" by Frederica Mathewes-Green about Hollywood no longer producing men, but instead only boy-men as the male ideal – but it seems far more epidemic a problem for women. Anyway, I needn't say more: the implications seem more obvious than I can add to. It just goes back to the biggest problem I've seen in an image/entertainment/movie culture: we don't know how to make joy, peace, contentment, simplicity, happiness, et al into a good story in itself. The best stories to be in, but the worst to hear, as I think Sam Gamgee put it. And all the worse when people want to make money off of creating, manipulating and magnifying your discontent. How do you become a woman or man able to rise above such a tide?

Desperately seeking the female ideal
Tweens and teens are trying to look older. Women are trying to look younger. All the self-modifying leaves little time for learning or doing.
By Anne K. Ream
November 16, 2008

Remember your 6th-grade class picture?

I'm sorry to take you back there. I know this is awkward for all of us but think about it for a moment. You might have been many things at 12: bucktoothed, regrettably sporting a bowl cut or, in my case, plagued by a gap-toothed smile.

What you probably weren't was professionally improved upon. But an unfortunate school photo is, according to trend watchers, fast becoming a remnant of another time.

A plethora of photo agencies and Web sites now offer retouching services that wipe out pesky adolescent imperfections, making for a more gorgeous (and grown-up) school picture. One such site offers a "Total Makeover Age Progression," a retouching package for young girls that includes new hair, skin, makeup, eyebrows, facial expressions and even arm reshaping.

Tween and teen girls are the new grown-ups, participating in our image-conscious culture in unprecedented ways.

Spas and salons report increased demands for facials, full makeovers and bikini waxes for girls who have yet to reach puberty.

Abercrombie & Fitch has marketed thong underwear with slogans such as "wink wink" and "eye candy" to girls age 7 to 14. Gary Rudman, author of gTrend Report, a nationwide study on tweens and teens, says "There isn't a real teen on television. Dramas such as 'Smallville,' 'The O.C.,' 'One Tree Hill' and 'Laguna Beach' feature teens whose vocabulary, complexion, fashion sense, wisecracking and comedy skills well-exceed their supposed years. This places a great deal of social pressure on ordinary teens to act with life experiences they don't possess.

"The combined efforts of magazines, television programs, MTV and models in teen stores have fabricated an image of what teens should be and look like," Rudman said. The only problem is, it's impossible for real teens to live up to the [media-hyped] expectation."

The sexualization and "adultification" of girls is a troubling enough trend. But it's bookended with an equally disturbing phenomenon: the extreme "youthification" of older women.

Thanks to Pilates, supplements, salmon-only diets, $500 face creams and a breathtaking array of surgical and dermatological fixes, 50 is the new 30. Or 20. Or something like that.

( Read more... )

Did many folks catch this? One of the refreshing pieces of babysitting the nieces is just the pleasure of sitting with a morning paper during part of breakfast (after the getting-the-girls-fed part). So this caught my eye in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, and its follow-up today.

As an undergraduate History major, I had quickly learned the lesson that the Left is correct about everything in our society, and it was only the long study of history that eventually pushed me over to hard-core political independence and the determination to try to think through issues on a case-by-case basis. As I wait in hope to see if an Obama administration fulfills any reasonable proportion of people's hopes for it, a big part of my hope rests in whether Obama will transcend the sillier side of hard-core American liberalism, which somehow never seems to realize that by "tolerance" it means "agreeing with us," and that to embrace diversity means to be Just Like Them. These very well-meaning people – perhaps illustrating the danger of "a little education," even if Ivy League – have long decried that white, male, European culture has been an all-conquering phenomenon in world affairs. The greatest ideological irony of all time is that these same people can then turn around and push onto the whole world the most all-conquering form of that culture ever, which is today's Western European/American secularist liberalism, and to then hail that as diversity.

I'm very bad for saying this, I know, and you might think I'm a conservative for not going after them with equal fervour here, but really, going after conservative inconsistencies seems beside the point since election day.

Which brings me to this article I caught in the Chicago Tribune. Had this girl been one of my high school students, she'd be riding a helluva college recommendation from me for her creativity and guts. And perhaps most of all for her class: for her willingness to not name names, and to turn what could be a sneering "aren't they all dumb?" moment instead into what teachers like to call a "teachable moment." It's no big credit to you if you simply point out someone else's failures, as I do in the generalization I make about some ideologues, above. It's great credit to you when you can actually look at yourself and get others to do so, and to admit that maybe we aren't as far along as we think we are....

Tolerance fails T-shirt test
John Kass
November 13, 2008

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

"In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain," Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

"Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said," Catherine said.

( Read more... )

John Cavadini, the early church scholar who was my mentor at Notre Dame, once told me that my talent as an historian was that I made creative connections, seeing how people or events influenced one another in ways that others didn't pick up on. Monday, my last day in Chicago, it wasn't so hard to make such a connection as I went walking in Grant Park during the afternoon after the last of my job interviews. The preparations were underway for the crowd expected to gather to cheer Barack Obama's projected victory in the next day's presidential election, and it was easy to imagine and foresee the sights we saw on the television last night of the victory celebration, as not just another political cycle coming to its natural conclusion, but as the hailing of a symbolic turn in the ongoing story of the American Experiment. It was astonishingly warm out, as I'd mentioned earlier, an extended weekend from Haloween to the election getting up around 70ºF, but not the October "Indian summer" we grew up with; I'll not be surprised if such record-setting early November bursts of comfortable weather will in Chicago be remembered as "Obama summers" instead, it seemed so timely for such a gathering.

I eyed the preparation of the grounds and staging itself after coming out of the Chicago Hilton and then wandered north through the park, musing on the last Presidents from my home state of Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant, for whom the park as a whole was named, and Abraham Lincoln, who sat immortalized on the north end of the park, in an elevated statue that had him gazing south toward where Tuesday night's gathering would take place. Lincoln and Grant, of course, were figures of the American Civil War, that early first climax of our national disaster of racial slavery. Inevitably, Obama will be seen, like the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as another point on that journey toward a truly multicultural society. I liked what one commentator said last night – I think on CNN, but I'm not sure: I was flipping up and down the dial of the 24-hour news stations and listening to the commentary – about in the story of civil rights in America, there was in this election a kind of turning point. He pointed to the outpouring of rage by some when Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House on 16 October 1901, or the resistance by some to Jackie Robinson's joining baseball's Major Leagues in 1947, that these events provoked the racial anxiety of some because they were "ahead of the curve." The commentator went on to say, "... but this – this IS the curve." I grew up in an extended family that was multi-racial, and had the great blessing of seeing that as normal from earliest memory, though for me that was from a step removed, while my mixed-race cousins had to deal with a certain amount of crap in their early school years. Now my family is more beautifully diverse than ever before, and I could only hope that the commentator's words were true: that the arrival of a mixed-race American to the White House is the turning of that curve that so normalizes this reality that it puts the vast bulk of race-based fears behind us in history. Standing before the Lincoln statue and looking south across Grant Park, it was easy to imagine that someday a matching figure of Obama might gaze north back at Lincoln, a reversal of Dickens' line, capturing between them the worst of times and the best of times.

Obama riffed on Dickens' "the best of times" in his speech last night in Grant Park, along with moments of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and King's "I have been to the mountaintop" sermon, fully aware, I hope, that this is his moment to succeed or fail. The symbolism mentioned above is, in many ways, the easiest part of his election to the presidency. He has a Democratic Congress, and cannot blame partisan opposition so easily for problems in at least the next two years: it just remains to be seen whether his election becomes the shift to a new national unity that he kept invoking throughout his campaign, or whether it settles into a familiar Democratic pattern of the 1968-1973 American New Left that has so dominated Democratic party ideology in the last generation, with the deep irony of having birthed and driven the subsequent neo-Conservative reaction that the New Left so loathed. The Politics of Left-Right Division are easy to maintain, especially in a two-party system, and it is far more ingrained than anything else in our social or political habits. It's easy for people to say, like me, that they want to move past the paradigm; it's hard to see exactly how to do that, and if there's a better paradigm to offer that isn't just the effective conquest of either the "right-thinking" Left or Right perspectives.

I left the Lincoln statue and headed further north, feeling my way around the Art Institute and stopping to look at my hometown giant Lorado Taft's Fountain of the Great Lakes, now sort of hidden behind trees and neglected. I kinda love the thing, but it made me think about American visions left behind: that like the move to new multi-ethnic and multi-racial consciousnesses in the United States, the regional visions of America have been increasingly left behind in American self-identity. Whether this is from the experience of national news, national advertising, and national entertainment because of our telecommunications, I realized I never really thought about myself as part of "Great Lakes States" group. More as a "Midwesterner" in geography and habits of friendliness, but hardly in such a way that separated me in any fundamental way from making friends from either coast. And this seemed to be part of the same movement as the ethnically-oriented ones: a constant widening of perspectives, driven perhaps more by technology and transportation than by philosophy to begin with, and then a resulting shift in conceptions of identity. I looked at The Great Lakes as I'd been looking at the Magnificent Mile's skyline from the park, taking in the architecture and pulse of the city. I'd never been downtown over a period of several days like this, I realized: all of my experience of Chicago had been high school and college day trips and later overnights, but never any chance to just get used to a stetch of the city, like I had just started to get used to the stretch between the Hilton and the Palmer House. It was hardly a full vision of the city, but it was a timely one, in seeing the city and the park get to take its deep breath before stepping onto history's stage for one night.

The rolling thunder of the 105th Anniversary parade is proceeding outside my window. The bikes are moving down Wisconsin Avenue from their starting point at Miller Park toward their destination at the Summerfest grounds down by the Lake. There's a crowd of a few hundreds at the intersection of 16th and Wisconsin, mostly in the shade of the south side of the street, cheering the riders on, and with a colour guard of what I presume to be ROTC students standing at the NE corner by the bus stop. It's considerably less than the crowd of thousands I seem to remember from the 100th anniversary, in my early days at Marquette, but just as zesty for this distinctly Milwaukee piece of Americana.

I see that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing tonight, which I hadn't heard at all, since I've been more staying out of the way of the festivities than diving into them. I'd have sought out tickets to that, though, had I been more aware of what was planned, instead of being content to continue my dissertation work and more interesting in gathering with friends away from the crowds of visitors to the city. Springsteen is the hands-down perfect choice to climax the weekend's musical line-up: a far cry from the disaster at the 100th anniversary's epic crowds of bikers who discovered that the closely-guarded secret of the "mystery headliner" turned out to be... Elton John. I don't think you could have asked for more cognitive dissonance than for all the Harley riders in 2003, even be they doctors and lawyers in "real life," than to give them Elton John, who was probably the greatest rock musician in the world who nevertheless managed to seem to be diametrically opposed with the self-created imagery and mythology of the bikers. The rumours then had been that the "mystery band" would turn out to be The Rolling Stones or perhaps U2, whose drummer, Larry Mullen, is an avid Harley rider himself. People just started walking away as soon as John was introduced and started playing, or within the first few songs, and Elton (a friend of a friend of a friend of mine here in town) was apparently rather devastated by his reception. Myself, I cannot imagine what the fool who arranged that concert was thinking. I thought the people who afterward cried "homophobia!" were wrong and overstating (and that term itself, so easily ascribing mental disorder to anyone who even disagrees on a thought, has always been too Soviet for my comfort), and that it couldn't have been that hard to figure out that what was called for was a particular image: a band or musician of the classic, hard-rocking, leather-wearing, "rebel" imagery of the biker mythos. So summoning Springsteen is perfect for today, but certainly ought to have been more obvious five years ago as well. (Even the side-stage bands are classic: today's line-up includes Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Blue Oyster Cult, and Peter Frampton! Heh.) Presuming the tickets are all gone, and even though I kind of hate going to a concert by myself, I'm tempted to drift down near the Summerfest grounds around 8pm when The Boss takes the stage and see if I can just find some spot to hear the music decently enough. Actually, had I known, this would have been a great show to invite me dear Mum to: she's a huge Springsteen fan, and would enjoy going to see him even more than she would have enjoyed The Saw Doctors the other week at IrishFest.

So now, forty minutes after I started writing this, which was ten minutes, maybe, since the first wave rolled through behind police sirens, the bikes still file past: less whooping and cheering from the folks on the street now, as more of them are sitting on the curbs, but they are still coming, with occasional explosions of drilled-muffler roars. The colour guard has retired, but Old Glory is still represented on bikes whose riders wield full-sized flags like lances. When the engines rev, the crowds still manage more cries. I was first hit over the head with the way bikers had evolved from "social menace" to pure American when Kevin and I ended up in the 60th anniversary Sturgis Rally on the famed Road Trip. This still has that same spirit, and it's a fun one: the same spirit which inspired me during the noise at 3am five years ago to write my only pure "classic rock" song, "Made In The U.S.A.," which is something of an uncharacteristic (for me) anthem for biker chicks, or the wannabe biker chick then on display in the Marquette undergraduate women. This year's gathering may be smaller than the unfathomably huge crowds of bikers that made up the 100th anniversary – or maybe not that much smaller at all, for all I know – but it's distinctly Milwaukee, and one of the many things I've come to love about this town.

A few news stories that caught my eye over the last few days that are related, for better or worse, to religion in America....:

Optimism in Evolution
Obama’s View on Abortion May Divide Catholics
McCain and Obama face questions about their faith

( Read more... )

Continued From Below

On Saturday, Chad and I ended up talking books a great deal over breakfast, particularly about a Western culture text assessing shifts over the last half-millennium by Jacques Barzun entitled From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. He took me through some of the thesis of that while I dutifully added it to my mental "must buy and someday read" list. A little while later I was floored when I looked through one of Chad's architectural books, this one called Lost Chicago by David Garrard Lowe, which showed me the gems of Chicago that both had been lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and also that had been built and senselessly destroyed within a few decades to make room for a newer idea. In particular, I got my first glimpse at photographs of what had been standing in Chicago during the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, which I couldn't believe had been torn down. I had mentioned this in my conversation with him the night before: about having been told of the great classical architecture put up along the lakefront, of which (I had been told) the only remnants were the Field Museum and the Science and Industry Museum, and that all the land in-between and been filled with such classical treasures. This wasn't entirely accurate, I now discovered (the survivors are now in fact the Science and Industry Museum and the Art Institute), but I could see why the friend who had told me the story had also mentioned that a friend of his, a scuba diver, said that if you went diving off the coast of the city, where the rubble from the demolished pavilions had been dumped, it looked the ruins of Atlantis. How accurate that is, I'm no longer sure, having had Chad tell me and the book confirm that most of the buildings were not intended to be permanent and were not build of the marble they appear to be, but rather of a stucco of some sort. Plans to finish them in marble later were abandoned when much of the pavilions burned in a fire in 1894. So, anyway, I had to grab Chad and gabble about the photographs and the book with him for a few minutes. And then add that one, too, to the must-buy list. This also proved the occasion for Chad to enthuse about a book called The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson, which I had not heard of, but which sounded great fun. I sat down and strained my brain for a bit to come up with a list of books Chad might like as gifts, which made me remember us talking about books the same way years ago, with me pushing Julian of Norwich upon them with great gusto, and their questions about the types of things I was reading inspiring me (on top of a run of similar requests) to start keeping an ongoing Reading List on my old website. I suppose you'd have to go back through the journal here, and add up all the books tags to get the same thing, though that sounds like an awful lot of work.

Saturday afternoon the whole family headed over to the Lakeview Museum of Arts & Science, to take the kids to an appropriately kid-titled exhibition called "Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body" which was a wonderland of cartoonish displays of digestion, burping, mucus and zits. This was in addition to the hands-on and fun science of their Discovery Center. I was a bit more interested, along with Chad, in a display called "Within the Emperor's Garden: The Ten Thousand Springs Pavilion," which I tried and failed to photograph surreptitiously from my hip, under the suspicious stare of the little old lady who had told me that photographs were not allowed. The model of the Pavilion from the Forbidden City was interesting in its own right, but what especially captured my interest was the diagram and side display of how the fitted wood beams of their architecture allowed for such ornate and grand construction without the use of any sort of nails. I suggested to Chad that, in lieu of turning his yard into an English-style garden, he might at least construct a gazebo in their backyard on these principles. But when I mentioned that alone putting their home on the local tourist route, I could suddenly see why that might be unattractive.

On the way over to the Museum, Chad had taken me on a roundabout route through Peoria, past a contract his company was working on for a new ministry center for the Diocese (now headed by Bishop Dan Jenkins, who had been the Rector at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart during most of my time at Notre Dame and with the Folk Choir), through the West Bluff Historic District down West Moss Avenue, an older neighbourhood of wonderfully-restored or -maintained homes of interest, including a pair of Wright or student-of-Wright designs that were as tasteful as ever. Older homes under the shade of older trees. Just the way everyone should be able to live. From the Museum, Chad took me on a route that let me eyeball the magnificent homes on Grandview Drive, which I'd seen one night when Darcie Short drove some of us from LOMC around the sites of Peoria. Here on the high bluff above the Illinois River, I was particularly taken with some of the 1930s-style manors which you could easily imagine Cary Grant stepping out from in old Beverly Hills grandeur. Chad told the kids and me stories of taking drives along here with with mother on Sundays after church as a kid, zooming down the hairpin turns. We ended up near the equally-interesting look of the old Peoria Water Works Company down by the river before Eva hit her maximum tolerance of Dad's architectural enthusiasm and lecture, and I thanked Chad contentedly as we raced home before the looming four year-old meltdown.

Angie and Chad wanted to have an adults-only dinner with me (or at least used my presence as an excuse for an adults-only dinner, themselves) and they took me out to a very cool Italian restaurant down near the waterfront district of Peoria called Rizzi's on State that I liked a lot, and hope to return to someday. There I tackled their Pork Chops Siciliana (Thick cut pork chops sautéed with mushrooms, cherry peppers and onions with a touch of marinara.) with a glass of a Chianti whose name escapes me now, and which Chad tried as well. This is where I discovered, as we talked a bit of wine, that Angie – who, when I first had gotten to be friends with her, had been a teetotaler like me, out of caution – had since discovered that alcohol tended to make her quiet, if not sullen, of all things, whereas for me it makes me more lighthearted, talkative and giggly. ("As if you need that," said Dan to me when I told him this story.)

A block behind us, a photographer was shooting a bride and her party against the background of one of the old brick factories of the Peoria waterfront, and we talked about how that sort of visual juxtaposition had become fashionable lately, while I mentioned beyondthewell and wondered if it was her and her husband taking the shots. I suppressed the urge to go over and find out, though I thought it would be funny to just trip by and surprise her, if so. Their studio is just over in Bloomington, and after describing their business, we then got to talking about paying for serious portraiture and for art in general, and what that was worth to us. Karen herself had written to me about her and Nate taking up Over The Rhine favourite Michael Wilson's availability to do his "Daylight Portrait", and that had gotten me thinking about the value of such things, particularly given that I have an irrational impulse in my head that denies that there could possibly be anything in this world – houses, cars, books – that one ought to pay more than, say, twenty dollars for. [And instantly, Angie's recent citation jumps into my head: From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Sir Winston Churchill]

I asked them a theoretical question about their sense of contemporary attitudes in Evangelicalism on the question of "certainty" in faith that they completely shot down, though I suppose that it might have more to do with my specific observations of Evangelicals who convert to Catholicism than with Evangelicalism in general. But I abandoned that tack of making them speak for all of Evangelicalism in America before I became utterly annoying.


We went walking then, after dinner, along the restored and lively waterfront, which seemed shockingly different from the Rust Belt ruin I remember from college days. It was a delight to see something have come to life again like that. I looked at this piece of now-fading painting along one of an old series of railway supports, from a line that once crossed the river here to descend into the city. We people-watched the other strollers, talked about weird Asian fish that had been disastrously transplanted into the Illinois River, wondered about a WWII submarine memorial that apparently stood there for no reason other than these subs having passed through Peoria, eyed the Segway rentals, listened to a bit of what sounded like a Dead cover-band, and talked.


I tried taking a decent portrait shot of them, which Chad was too amused to take seriously, flashing me a maniacal Joker smile when I tried. Angie had told me that they had shown the girls the shots I had taken when I'd last visited, before the girls had come along, which the girls found quite funny, perhaps because of Angie's unusually short haircut from the time. Myself, I was still having trouble getting used to Chad's short and business-like hair today, as he had then expressed his own preference for wearing his longer, and had wondered, if I recall correctly, whether he could get away with letting it grow even longer than it was then.


As we left the waterfront, I had Chad take me a bit further down the district so that we could go up the climb on Persimmon Street where I then told (or for Angie, re-told) the story of my grand misadventure the night of Darcie's wedding, with her Maid of Honour December Saucedo, Rich Alms, and Todd Peterson. The run back up to the downtown area is no longer the gauntlet of crackhouses, shooting ranges, brothels and clubs disguised as the above (and a police precinct squatting innocently in their midst) that it used to be. Chad regaled us with similar memories of sitting with his Dad in the window of the old brick place where he worked, eating sandwiches and watching police raids like they were quality entertainment.

Back at the house, with the babysitter returned to her family (and after a talk on the virtues of jr. high school girls versus high school girls for babysitting), we three just kicked back and talked the rest of the night. Angie was now having a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which managed not to cause the withdrawn effect we had discussed earlier, and perhaps aided in the talk. A bit more architecture. A long conversation on dreams, particularly dreams of flying, with the discovery that Chad and I experienced dreams of flying in exactly the same way, giving rise to my curiosity as to whether this would be a more common male trait, if we could survey the question broadly. For us, flight in our dreams takes an absolutely stillness of mind, a state of perfect confidence or faith in one's ability to fly, any wavering of which becomes a wavering of flight itself, with the threat of disaster. Furthermore, we discovered that we never remember launching into flight in our dreams: we always enter a flight dream in the midst of flying. Angie, on the other hand, described an actual "take off" process in her flight dreams of running down the street with arms stretched out, airplane-style, which had Chad and I howling at the image, to Angie's mild annoyance.

The next day, I simply got ready after waking and headed out to the Bloomington Amtrak station with Angie. We were listening to the soundtrack from Elizabethtown in the car as we began talking, and memories of the movie struck a certain chord with me at that moment. The film had come up during a long train of our Friday night conversation about movies. Waiting for Chad, I was tempted to foist a digital download of Before Sunrise on her when I found out that she had never seen the film, and I talked about why Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset duology had had such an impact on me over the last few years, acknowledging that I might have to push my other top favourites (Never Cry Wolf, A Man For All Seasons, The Man Without A Face) aside for them. She had given me a long list of favourite films, most of which I had never even heard of, which was kind of interesting in itself, to find that her taste had gotten so broad and independent-oriented. But Elizabethtown had popped up in the talk, one of the few mainstream movies to do so on her part, which I had just seen for the first time maybe a month or two earlier, and that got me thinking. I thought it was a flawed film (we both pointed to things like Susan Sarandon's dance sequence), but it somehow felt stronger to me for the flaws, if that makes any sense. While certainly the small town feel appealed to me given my roots, I think it was the theme of remaining open to the unexpected turns ahead of us in life that had struck me most strongly, and certainly that kind of openness was something for which Angie was ready to take me to task, as I had described the last few years to her. And so the parallels between themes in the film and themes in the weekend's conversations suddenly appeared in my mind as we set out on the highway to the road-trip music of the soundtrack. Go figure. She had time to get me to the train station and return easily before meeting Chad and the girls at church, and now the talk was pretty light, of odds and ends, and the occasional thought about this chance to catch up as a whole.

We sat there on the cement slab that serves as the "platform" of Bloomington's train station. We talked occasionally about this and that, but mostly I just found myself looking at her, mostly in a kind of quiet amusement and wonder that she was there. Or that I was there. I remembered the day I met her, noticing her red car pulling onto the gravel road leading back to LOMC after mine, a few days before training started, just after the end of the school year, and being introduced to her as one of the Coordinators for that summer. Along with discovering that she was one of my bosses, there was a bit of recognition that there was something about her that I already liked. Now, sitting on the ground this summer morning, I knew that maybe I was being a bit sentimental: it's a job hazard for me as an historian, paying as much attention as I try to to the past. "Did you ever think that we would still be friends after all this time?" I asked her, shortly before we realized it was already ten and that my train had not yet showed up. I continued thinking along these lines after we said goodbye, and while I sat the extra 40-odd minutes for the train to arrive. So many of these other rich, rich friendships from that amazing summer had blurred and faded with distance, but here we were, still talking as intensely and as curiously after all this time, as much as we ever had, late after the campers had gone to bed, sitting out on the Meadows' Deck, underneath the stars. Like everyone else who has ever lived before us, we had laughed about how it really does seem like just a year or two ago. That we would still be friends might be beyond expectations, but that certainly didn't matter: just the fact that it still seemed perfectly natural to be friends was the only thing that counted. Even though it was my own, there was a sense of realizing that I didn't know that the story would be this good.

With the train about 45 minutes late, I still ended up only missing my connection to Milwaukee at Union Station by two minutes. Declining to take part in the mild riot brewing by those who wanted those last two minutes to run down the track to the nigh-departing train, I took the opportunity to withdraw, grab some food, and go sit on a bench looking out across the water at the city, just a bit south of the Adams Street Bridge. I wished I had Chad handy as my personal architecture enthusiast as I looked at the different buildings, and I mused on the last week, at seeing and catching up with Jenny and Angie within a few days, thinking that I only lacked Sunshine strolling down the riverwalk with her husband to round out the sequence nicely. If anything, the last few weeks had both indicated that there was something in my life that was so much bigger than me, if that makes any sense: a sense of symmetry or narrative structure that didn't seem a conscious creation of my own, but also not quite something I'd want to give the grade school theology tag of God "writing my story:" I do believe that God gives us and our universe too much freedom for such a deterministic understanding of events, and yet... there was a kind of grace going on. Perhaps it really means that I've frequently done things right. I hoped so. I hoped that I've really been given a gift for friendship and for love that I've succeeded in using, and in healing where I've putzed it up. Whatever exactly it all is or was, as I sat there with just the two of us – me and Chicago – it seemed to give my presence in space and time a bit of meaning that defied the obvious fact that I was barely in this city long enough to cast an afternoon shadow. And though there were so many things that told me not to be – right then, I was content with that.

Something led me to looking up something about Pittsburgh favourite Mr. Rogers yesterday before getting together with Andrea and Patrick, and I found myself really struck by this story where, according to Wikipedia,

In 1969, Rogers appeared before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications. His goal was to support funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in response to significant proposed cuts. In about six minutes of testimony, Rogers spoke of the need for social and emotional education that public television provided. He passionately argued that alternative television programming like his Neighborhood helped encourage children to become happy and productive citizens, sometimes opposing less positive messages in media and in popular culture. He even recited the lyrics to one of his songs.

The chairman of the subcommittee, John O. Pastore, was not previously familiar with Rogers' work, and was sometimes described as gruff and impatient. However, he reported that the testimony had given him goosebumps, and declared, "Looks like you just earned the $20 million." The subsequent congressional appropriation, for 1971, increased PBS funding from $9 million to $22 million.

Then, thanks to that occasional Wonder of Information Access that is YouTube and its cousins, I was able to watch his actual congressional testimony, which was oddly compelling. I'm wondering now about showering the nieces with Mr. Rogers DVDs....

I saw this article Tuesday night and grabbed the book from Raynor Library's browsing collection on Wednesday. So far it's compelling reading, but also kind of heartbreaking as an attempt to look at the currents of campus culture for my students: this is neither the respect for or empowering of women that I seem to remember being the goal of the feminisms of my student years nor the inheritance from any forms of chivalry. Eek: I'm starting to talk as a member of a different generation! Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses isn't bleak or hand-wringing, though, just honest. I can immediately think of half a dozen friends I'd like to read it with, though, who would have some professional interest in the topic, whether pedagogical, psychological or cultural.

Myself, seeing how the book itself arose out of a Spring 2005 course by the author at Saint Michael's College, this book has really got me thinking in terms of designing either a similar course on "Sex, Dating, and Spirituality," or perhaps having it as one major component of a "Faith and Contemporary Culture" course. I couldn't help but notice how my students last semester, while enjoying all or parts of my "Theology Through the Centuries" course, and reading the classic texts that made the bulk of that syllabus, were particularly involved in, or just plain excited by the reading of Joseph Ratzinger's/Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. The reason for this seemed to be because of the immediate, even practical, nature of the theological questions being discussed: suddenly they saw all the stuff we had been reading suddenly becoming important and useful in the shaping of contemporary culture, politics, worldviews, economics, and the like. So maybe a whole course that addressed contemporary issues of different sorts, or from different angles, but all rooted in theological discourse. It would have to be a course where the students had already been exposed to some of the Tradition and its sources, and had begun to learn to reason in such ways. But anyway, I'm thinkin'....

Author sees wide gap between college students' faith, campus culture

By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Author Donna Freitas held her breath when her book, "Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses," was published this spring.

She was nervous that the book's frank discussion of the pervasiveness of casual sex on today's school campuses, Catholic colleges included, would not be warmly received by college leaders.

But while she was bracing herself "for the worst," as she put it, Freitas said she received an unexpected "outpouring of positive response" from people "who care deeply" about today's college students and who want to help them, including professors at Catholic colleges.

Freitas, a Catholic theologian and assistant professor of religion at Boston University, said she was encouraged not only by how "open and supportive people have been" but also by their willingness to "engage in positive conversation rather than run away" from an issue many might not want to discuss.

While Freitas was attending the Catholic Theological Society of America meeting June 5-8 in Miami, she said, several theology professors told her they plan to discuss her book in courses they are teaching this fall.

The author also has been contacted by countless parents asking her to recommend a college campus where the frequency of casual sex, or as she terms it, "hookup culture," is less prevalent.

In a recent telephone interview with Catholic News Service from her home in New York, Freitas said it's important for parents to talk to their children "way before college" about the type of school environment they might encounter.

Freitas started talking with college students about their views of sexual behavior and how these ideas or practices connected, or not, with their faith during a course she taught on dating several years ago at St. Michael's College, a Catholic college in Colchester, Vt.

In discussions with students she realized that many of them did not see how their faith had much to say about the issues they faced.

Freitas was determined to find out if this small group of students reflected a larger trend and that became the impetus for "Sex & the Soul," published by Oxford University Press.

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Three Four [thanks to weaklingrecords for the last recommendation] articles that caught my eye, the first thanks to friede, who's quite right in finding Dowd dodgy in general (I tend to find the made-up writing of Lois Lane more useful), but who does well in simply, well, reporting in this column.

An Ideal Husband By MAUREEN DOWD
36 Hours in Pittsburgh By JEFF SCHLEGEL
On sale now in Jerusalem: Priestly garments By MATTI FRIEDMAN
Wall-E for President By FRANK RICH

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Another waking in the middle of the night. (Heh. Just found your note. Thanks, Em.) Took a few hours out to finally catch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this past evening with Mike and Donna, over at the glamourous Oriental Theatre, though not, unfortunately, in the main theatre, as it would have been if I'd seen it in the first week or so. That was just pure popcorn fun, as expected, with Spielberg enjoying himself playing with all sorts of 1950s cultural motifs.

Pulled down my copy of Jordan's A Crown of Swords for fun reading during meals, sleepless interludes, and such. My copy of Lord of Chaos is now fallen into three large chunks still hanging together in its hardcover: the rush to printing always made me feel that these were not the best-bound books in the world. But this read-through has had a bit of a nostalgic feel to me. I always remember reading the first blazing sentence of Lord of Chaos from my brother Joe's new copy, sitting cross-legged on a table in a hallway waiting on him while he was in his Portuguese class at the U of I, coincidentally as a classmate of one of my favourite L.O.M.C. campers, Dana Ingman. A Crown of Swords was the first volume of The Wheel of Time that I'd made a point of buying on the day of release, and the first one to make promotional use of that newfangled "internet," posting the Prologue for free on Tor Book's webpage, before they figured out how to charge for that, too. Reading the prologue always makes me remember walking up to Holy Cross House on a sunny day, reading a copy of the Prologue I'd printed out at the library, and of handing it around to Brett Boessen and Kate Keating, sharing the excitement of the coming story with them. I can't think of many books that have so many memories attached to the reading of it in this way, but it certainly reinforces the fact that it's fun to find friends who share our fandoms.

Miscellanea from the web that I wanted to jot down in my journal: Two news stories about Tim Russert's funeral,

Political leaders pay tribute to TV's Russert
Obama, McCain among mourners at Washington funeral Mass for Russert

and an interesting cultural essay that caught my eye reposted in crookedfingers' journal:

1958: The War of the Intellectuals
By RACHEL DONADIO

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What a strange weekend.

Our regular gathering over at the Lloyds on Friday gave me a weird moment when Dan told me that Tim Russert had died that afternoon. I discovered Russert's Meet The Press as I began to teach at Saint Joe's, and it remains to this day on my VCR's automatic taping schedule. He stood out not just for his service in trying to be a more substantive news encounter with the political world, but he was of particular interest to my field, as well. I thought him the most important figure for American Catholic politics, and a huge figure nationally for taking the theological and spiritual seriously in national affairs. His Meet The Press sessions with major religious leaders across the spectrum were serious cultural roundtables, while the bulk of the rest of the news media would have simply panted in their anti-religious hysteria at such scenes. The panel discussion he helped lead on Catholic Politicians in the U.S.: Their Faith and Public Policy at Boston College's The Church in the 21st Century Center (which Erik surprised me with a DVD of, since I couldn't attend) was as illuminating as anything I've ever seen in speaking about religion and public affairs. He was giving the Catholic Common Ground Initiative Lecture at the end of the month, as I saw from the ads in America, and I was wishing I could attend. Just the fact that he was 58: it all added up to just more of a sense of shock than some of the more recent deaths of major figures. You just didn't assume he was going to be next; you assumed you would get years and years more benefit of his experience, enthusiasm and insight.

The rest of the night had its fun, the silliest moment being when Renée, like all the kids, having been put to bed before we started watching the half-season finale of BSG, suddenly began speaking to us over the baby monitor, which she had long since begun using as an intercom. "Momma, I'll be sad when you're gone tomorrow," which left us laughing as the show began, since Donna would be gone from all of 5am to 10am for her shift at Starbucks. But it was another thing when the same thing happened during a critical moment of the show, with Renée leaning into the microphone and us suddenly hearing, "MOMMA, I WISH YOU WERE HERE WITH ME: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE BUT I WOULD LIKE YOU TO BE; YOU DON'T NEED TO BE BUT I WANT YOU TO BE, NOT NEED YOU TO BE...." Or some seemingly-endless stream like that. Suddenly the whole living room was boiling with the tension of interrupted drama, and people were hissing, "Turn it off!" "Turn it down!" "I'm turning it down! I'm turning it down!" "What did they say?! What did they say?!" and just laughing about the whole thing. My friends certainly enjoy how cute their kids are, but even they don't always find even the cuteness to be the most convenient thing in the world....

I spent a larger part of the weekend writing an essay for a contest for America, actually, than doing dissertation work. In what seemed to me to be a response to the writings of "the New Atheists" (Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and their like, as I've noted here and there before), they were soliciting essays on the theme of "the case for God." I've always had a strong interest in apologetics, since I've been leaned on so much over the years for why I believe this whole silly thing to be true, and so I finally thought I'd throw my hat in the ring on the matter. I idly debated which of two approaches to take, and finally decided on the one that I thought had more substance, though was harder to articulate in the 2500 word limit, than the one that had more literary flair and fun (a proof for the existence of God based upon the existence of humour that I dreamt up at Notre Dame). But that seemed more potentially "fluff" to me, and as the New Atheists are more fluff writers, I thought that the serious response was the one more necessary for our times. We'll see. I'm not sure that it's the best thing I could have tried to pull off for a popular audience.

Recovering from that effort today (I had a 10+ hour writing and editing spree last night that took me into this morning), I spent some time in different parts around campus, but especially enjoying the time toward sunset while sitting by all the new roses in the Courtyard of the Fountain before the Chapel of Joan of Arc. There were various tour groups being conducted around, right up until sunset, and suddenly I heard one guide's voice behind me, saying something like, "... this is a great place to read theology. In fact, over to our right you can see my freshman Theology professor, a Notre Dame graduate and now Marquette doctoral student, hard at work and enjoying the surroundings...." I looked up to find David Kruse, one of my greats from last year, leading the group and grinning as he spoke. I saw the group laughing quietly at his "observe the beast in its natural habitat" delivery, and I complained, "I feel like I'm in a cage!," as I casually tried to hide the novel I had switched to. But they seemed a fun group, actually asking me about the two campuses in comparison, and while Notre Dame over-all beats Marquette for its beauty, which is not hard given their different locations, I have to give that spot at Marquette as being the best single "spot" between the two campuses: having an actual piece of medieval architecture like the Chapel, and the landscaping around it, beats the much vaster Basilica of the Sacred Heart, to my mind, despite everything I've enjoyed about that space. I had to pass on my thoughts about Notre Dame's team for the fall, having not given it the slightest thought until asked.

Getting to the end of the grading. People did impressively well on the final, which I probably made too hard. I threw out a few questions or gave credit for more than one answer when I saw that the wording was being taken a different way by people, but I'm still impressed. I find that, especially as I graded the last essays, that I've learned more – theologically speaking – from this group of students than from any other that I've taught. Perhaps it was because this was a higher-level course, and so the discourse naturally elevated with these students. But as I said, it was the last set of essays, particularly the ones where I asked them to creatively synthesize the theologies of the Trinity that they read in Julian of Norwich's Showings or Reveleations of Divine Love and Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, Questions 27 and 43, that made me conscious of this. Julian I've taught for years, but I was seeing more new material – both in my reading her with these students and in the students' essays – than I ever expected, so that was a great pleasure.

Today is the day that I hate. While I am super-excited to wrap up this teaching gig and to turn to my dissertation full-time until I complete it, I am always depressed the day the students are all gone. It's just the sheer deadness of the campus: this place is always bustling with life, even occasionally the life of the mind, and when it all suddenly just stops in the space of 24 hours, I can never adjust to it right away. Even if the people central to my social life are still all around, there is also a kind of "incidental socialness," I guess, much less the social pleasure of just working with my own students, that still seems lost. I've come to expect this shift now, and to simply recognize it for the passing thing that it is, but I still feel it as strongly as ever.

Lastly, I include here three New York Times pieces that stood out to me over the last week. One is a spot-on piece by Thomas L. Friedman on one of the aspects in which our current leadership is failing America by focusing on short-term gains or merely the appearance of gain or leadership. The next is a more specific horror story about the unjust – and unconstitutional – detentions being currently conducted by our federal government. The last one I read in Starbucks the other day, an instructive random moment while waiting to hang with Jessica, about corporate spying on American citizens.

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This bites. But was inevitable, partially probably due to wider economic reasons, as the article mentions, and I would think to some wider social ones, too, that would de-emphasize the worth of Catholic education as such. But it was also obvious that the huge payouts in the sexual abuse cases granted by holding the whole of a diocese as accountable instead of the guilty themselves were going to be more paid by the students, the homeless, the humgry and the sick than by anyone else.

More Catholic Schools Closing Across US
Apr 12, 6:11 AM (ET)

By MATT SEDENSKY

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) - For 46 years, crime, recessions and hurricanes proved no threat to the daily ritual of St. Monica School, where the entire blue-and-white uniformed student body gathered outside each morning to join in prayer.

Come June, though, the tradition will fade away, and "amen" will close St. Monica's morning recitations for the last time. The school, a home-away-from-home for mostly minority students, will close.

As Pope Benedict XVI next week makes his first trip to the U.S. as pontiff, Catholic schools across the country, long a force in educating the underprivileged regardless of their faith, face the same fate as St. Monica.

About 1,267 Catholic schools have closed since 2000 and enrollment nationwide has dropped by 382,125 students, or 14 percent, according to the National Catholic Education Association. The problem is most apparent in inner cities, in schools like St. Monica with large concentrations of minorities whose parents often struggle to pay tuition rather than send them to failing public schools.

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The new year will start with a bang this year – I think of the new year beginning halfway through August on August 16th, if you don't know that one – as the good news has come that The Saw Doctors (The Saw Doctors) will be over from Tuam and playing Irish Fest for two nights this year! I'm already wired in excitement. Y'all should do yourselves a favour and show up for one of these shows. I've seen them at Summerfest, and over at the casino, but I've been aghast that they haven't played the festival the whole time I've been here. Short of U2 showing up for it, this is the best news possible. Now we just need Janet Harbison, Fionnuala Rooney or her brother Michael Rooney to be in the Harp Tent and all will be as good as it can be. (Although I'm sure that there are many more great harpists beyond these few I've heard.)

Slate articles I read in the last few days, brought to my attention by friede and kesil.

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Waking now in the middle of the night to the sound of rain on my windowpanes and the rumble of thunder in the distance: springtime music to this Midwestern boy's ears.

Ill. Univ. Top Cop: 'I Lost 5 People'
Muslims More Numerous Than Catholics
‘With a Few More Brains ...’ By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Students of Virginity

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