Year: 2004

This Rock Is Up!

Catholic Answers has finally been able to achieve its long-standing goal of getting back issues of This Rock magazine online!

As of now, the mazagines from January 2001 (less the last few issues) are all online HERE.

The remainder of the print run of This Rock, going all the way back to the first issue in January 1990, are expected to be online in two months.

After that, we’ll continue to post new issues of the magazine, but lagged by about three months (unless you’re a subscriber, in which case the plan is that you’ll be able to log in and read the new issues immediately).

CHECK IT OUT.

JMS Warns Folkses of Hoaxes

This is not a hoax!

Amid controversies regarding forged memos and forged Batmans, Babylon 5 creator and Amazing Spiderman author Joe Michael Straczynski has felt the need to warn people against forged signatures of his name on various pieces of memorabilia. In a message recorded over at JMS News, he writes:

Folkses —

Several usenet folks — foremost among them Jan — have alerted me to a number
of forgeries on Ebay…comics, posters or photos that have the worst fake
signatures I’ve ever seen, supposedly from me.

If you’re out there buying anything that’s allegedly signed by me…compare it
with what’s been out there before. And be careful…a number of JMS-fake
signatures look exactly the same, which leads me to conclude that a bunch of
them are being pumped out by the same guy.

Sometimes it’s good to have a signature that looks like elvish script written
while drunk…harder to counterfeit.

jms

Beyond its posing on JMS News, no evidence that this post actually came from JMS was offered.

Is a phony JMS warning of phony autographs?

(It reminds me of when JMS first showed up on AOL and people questioned whether he was really him. His response was to the effect that: “I am not myself and resent the suggestion that I am.”)

Jesus vs. Slavery

A reader writes:

What is the best response to someone who asks, “Why didn’t Jesus condemn slavery?”

I would point out several things:

1. The Gospels do not offer us an exhaustive record of what Jesus said and did, therefore, it cannot be ruled out that he condemned slavery in a way not recorded in Scripture.

2. He did implant in his Church an implicit rejection of slavery that flowered in later years. Thus the New Testament speak of slavery in negative ways in a variety of contexts. St. Paul counsels slaves who can obtain their freedom to do so (1 Cor. 7:21). He warns masters to treat their slaves kindly lest Jesus treat them harshly (Eph. 6:9). He stresses the equality of slaves and free before God (Gal. 3:28). And he devotes an entire epistle (Philemon) to the subject of God’s compassion for the slave.

3. Slavery was deeply embedded in Mediterranean culture, and the early Church was a tiny, persecuted minority that had no chance of eliminating slavery in the short term. Therefore, since the New Testament is addressed to first century Christians, it is primarily focused on enabling new converts (both slave and free) to live together in harmony until such time as its implicit anti-slavery current could flower and slaves everywhere would be given the opportunity to gain their freedom.

4. Christianity’s compassion for the slave was well recognized at the time, and Christianity spread rapidly among slaves, who were specifically excluded from the rites of many contemporary religious groups. In the eyes of some, Christianity was perceived to a significant degree as “a slave religion.”

5. According to some early Church sources, the slave who is the subject of Philemon (Onesimus) later appears to have become a bishop. He may have played a crucial role in preserving and collecting St. Paul’s epistles (one of which directly concerned himself), and thus we may owe the formation of the New Testament as we have it to a former slave.

Blogosphere Exposes Batman Hoax

Batman2_1 DAILY PLANET (METROPOLIS) – A man dressed as the Batman today scaled the wall of Buckingham Palace and unfurled a banner advertising the protest groups Fathers 4 Justice, which advocates greater custody and visitation rights for divorced fathers.

The stunt was not characteristic of the Batman, who normally does not lend his name to political causes, and the obviously heart-felt and emotional nature of this particular cause led CBS News anchor Dan Rather to speculate that the Batman may himself be a divorced father being denied custody to his child.

“Perhaps the various Robins who have fought crime alongside the Batman have, in reality, been his children,” Rather speculated. “Perhaps he is now being denied access to them due to a contentious divorce situation in which their mother feels it is unsuitable for children to be fighting crime.”

The Caped Crusader’s success in protecting his secret identity seemed to run out this time, when British police arrested and unmasked him, revealing him to be Jason Hatch, 33, of Glouster and a member of Fathers 4 Justice.

The Boston Globe immediately announced the discovery of the Batman’s secret identity, but within hours superhero experts within the blogosphere debunked this idea.

Batman1“Just look at the pictures,” said Chirp Birdly of Little Red Power Cables Instablog. “This clearly is not the Batman. He has way too much body fat and not nearly enough body muscle. The details of his ‘costume’ are all wrong. He’s wearing jackboots that come up to his knees. He’s got a poorly-fitting cowl that doesn’t even have the white, blunked-out eyes that keep criminals from telling where he’s directing his gaze. He’s got a simple cloth bat symbol on his chest, whereas the real the Batman wears a metal plate under this symbol to protect him from bullets. Finally, he’s not wearing gloves but cuffs with little bat fins on them–that means he would leave fingerprints everywhere he goes and severely compromise his secret identity.”

To underscore his points, Birdly posted to the Internet an animated gif superimposing pictures of “the Buckingham Batman,” as the blogosphere dubbed him, with a file picture of the established the Batman.

“The differences between the two are striking. Even if the Batman had totally let himself go, he wouldn’t lose height!” Birdly claimed.

The Daily Planet could not verify Birdly’s claims because the server to which the animated gif was posted immediately polularity crashed after being linked on The Drudge Report.

CBS and The Boston Globe continue to maintain that the Batman’s secret identity has been exposed, but Birdly disagrees. “Believe the evidence of your own eyes,” he pleaded. “Further, this guy lives in Glouster, which is five hours ahead of Gotham City. He would often be at work at the very late-night times the Batman has been busting criminals. There is no way, even with the high-speed Batplane, that he could be in two places at once. And besides, his British accent would be a dead giveaway in Gotham.”

SOME Dare Call It Genocide

A reader points to this story on what the U.S. has been doing to help fight the genocide in Sudan. Excerpts:

The significance of the administration’s action cannot be overstated. This marks the first instance that a party to the 1948 Genocide Convention, the most fundamental of all human-rights treaties, has formally charged another party with “genocide” and invoked the convention’s provisions while genocide has been in progress. In the past, the convention and the term “genocide” have been applied only retroactively by state parties, long after the violence ended. Former President Bill Clinton underscored this recently when he apologized for his administration’s inaction to stop the 1994 genocidal massacres of the Tutsis in Rwanda.

[T]he United States is taking the lead in trying to rally the international community to exert pressure on Khartoum, all the while continuing America’s unilateral economic sanctions.

The United States is also providing some 80 percent of the humanitarian aid and other support to keep Darfur’s 1.5 million refugees alive. While many other nations have so far failed to make good on their pledges, the U.S. is exceeding its aid commitment.

The European Union has hedged from using the G-word about Darfur. In the late 90s when it dropped the word “slavery” from the U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution censuring Sudan’s atrocities in the south, the EU representatives argued that such harsh terms have no place in diplomacy. But it was with just such bluntness that President Bush laid blame squarely on the regime back in 2001 for crimes against the southerners (he called the crimes “monstrous” and compared them to the Holocaust).

It is now up to the other members of the Security Council to seize this historic moment. On its response to the U.S. resolution rests the fate of the three African tribes of Darfur — and the world’s solemn promise to act to stop genocide.

Some Innovative Teaching Techniques Are Not Good Ideas

As one teacher learned when she tore up a Bible to get students to think about how they would feel if someone desecrated what they considered sacred.

Thinking about what you would feel if someone desecrated what you hold sacred as a teaching technique: GOOD.

Witnessing someone desecrating what you hold sacred as a teaching technique: BAD.