Profiles encourage

Always been a fan of structural flow, strong angles, contrasts, even crags.

Heroes and hoagies

Disappointing. I was once a great fan of Jonathan Rauch. Now I cringe to find that he considers one of the few "great bloggers" to be Andrew Sullivan. Someone else I used to like before he fell over the edge into hysterical moralizing and Bush/Palin Derangement Syndrome.

Well, at least Victor Davis Hanson is still The Man. For now.

From east to west

After two weeks amongst the New Yorker gene pool and real summer weather --hot and muggy-- I am heading back to Bagdad by the Bay today, land of perpetual spring/fall.

I like my family. And they apparently like me. A blessing.

St Camelot's Post-Catholic Church

Reading the Pray Tell blog, which dishonestly promises "Worship, Wit and Wisdom",  I sometimes feel like King Herod, who had no intention of following what the Baptist said, but liked listening to him while he condemned him.

I long ago concluded that the RC Church was not going to have female priests, married priests, or say it was ok to be gay or be on the pill. I adjusted my life accordingly. Nothing in the intervening years –evanescent blips notwithstanding—has made me change my mind. These things seem as unlikely to me as corporate reunion with the more-than-ever-fragmented Anglican “Communion”. Which has become a kind of cautionary tale of what can happen when you do embrace the above items.

The populist egalitarian obsessions of the post-Marxist liberal West will not, IMHO, be welcomed into the bimillennial Catholic/Orthodox Churches. For that you have to go to cobwebbed and dotty Canterbury or the other restless and groovy progeny of the Reformation. So I am both fascinated and incredulous to observe people who keep hoping that the Camelot interpretation of Vatican II is waiting just around the corner. Or for the next pope. Etc.  Hence, my kinship with King Herod. 

The blog editor monk must agree with me, since my last two comments have been removed. 

Since I am visiting family in NY, the Sunday Times has arrived. I never read it unless I am here in its native turf. Its provincial world view remains startlingly unaltered. The Book Review front page features a history of the Papacy by "an agnostic Protestant non-scholar", reviewed by a self-described "collapsed Catholic." (Can you imagine them featuring a similar work on Islam with similar writers and reviewers? Of course you can't.) No surprises. The few great popes "were outnumbered by the corrupt, inept, venal, lecherous and mediocre." But a closing paragraph is apt:

It is now well over a half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age. With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day -- on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.

So when women there on PT dismiss the settled teaching of Rome on female ordination with a wave of the hand reference to Emily Litella, or the unserious fantasy that "Godde" is female, or some wholly unappealing remark that “someday the Pope(s) will have to answer to the pain these women must feel*, because a call is a call”…or when their male allies compare the Vatican with the Kremlin, I just shake my head. And am glad I made my choice all those years ago.

What I really want to say to them is, “Grow up.”

*Men having to "answer" for women's pain: feminism-as-revenge, in a nutshell.
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Separate but unequal

The Atlanta schools cheating scandal. Their award-winning superintendent...God, this is funny!

 Brenda Muhammad replaces Khaatim Sherer El.

Things will certainly improve now...

In risu veritas

Groups laughing at themselves tell truths that they deny to outsiders.

A mediocre gay movie, Role/Play, includes the line by a wiser older homo:

"Most gay men have the emotional maturity of a teenage girl."

Can you imagine the furor if that were asserted by Focus on the Family?

IMHO, gay culture teaches gay men how to be gay but not how to be men, too.


The two leads, Steve Callahan and Matthew Montgomery, a couple in real life it seems, are mediocre but appealing actors. Together they have nice chemistry.

Dreamscape

Two nights ago I dreamt I owed someone four thousand dollars for doing a job I did not ask them to do. Last night I was being evicted from my apartment because the gym owner and landlord was expanding his business and needed the space to anchor a big new sign.

Anxiety, anyone?

Ethics and eros

A thought while driving home from the gym.

About Catholic sexual morality. The fulcrum is the axiom that the only virtuous (aka ends-respecting and non-sinful) use of sexual intercourse is between a married man and woman, open to procreation. If you loosen that principle, eventually you will not have a basic principle.

Joseph Ascrizzi, The Dance of Eros-Logos,
sepia drawing on an incised, water gilded, gesso panel, 6x10 inches

My  thought: You probably cannot have a concrete coherent and stable Christian sexual principle and at the same time do justice to all the realities of people who find themselves at odds with it.

And if you try to construct a Christian sexual morality that makes room for every sort of conditions and situation, I wonder if it could be specific enough to be concrete coherent and stable.

Although I am a therapist myself, sometimes we designate as "therapy" what seems more like human kindness.

Unaccountably moving. A young girl beginning her life, with an old woman at the end of hers.

Happy Independence Day, America!