Month: September 2005

It’s Unfortunate

Normally if someone on another web site writes a critique of something I’ve done, I let it pass. In keeping with Rule #1, not everyone has to agree with me. If someone wants to state their opinion and take exception with mine, fine.

Yesterday a couple of people pointed out to me THIS RESPONSE BY SCOTT RICHERT TO THE POST I DID ON PRICE-GOUGING, and I decided a response was in order.

Mr. Richert takes exception with what I said on the subject. That’s fine. I operate on the principle that not everyone has to agree with me.

In his post, Mr. Richert expresses the concern that many individuals feel when they see prices jump dramatically and therefore charge those who set the prices with "price-gouging." This is a natural, understandable, human reaction.

Mr. Richert regards raising prices out of a motive of greed to be a bad thing. On this, I am sure we can agree (provided that greed is understood as a disordered desire for profit rather than a properly ordered desire for profit).

It is difficult to tell from what he writes, but I suspect that Mr. Richert may think that I would disagree with him on this point.

Mr. Richert clearly has strongly held ideas about economics, and it would be very intersting to be able to interact with his position.

It’s unfortunate, therefore, that his articulation of his position is marred by things such as:

  • Ad hominem,
  • Guilt by association,
  • Distortion,
  • Exaggeration,
  • Uncharitable inaccuracy, and
  • Demonstrably false statements

Continue reading “It’s Unfortunate”

The Ex-City Of New Orleans

I was thinking about how to assess and explain the magnitude of losing New Orleans, which has gone from being a city of almost half a million to a ghost town of maybe 10,000, they think.

I thought about putting up a list of the Top 10 biggest U.S. cities and crossing a line through New Orleans as a way of visualizing the loss. Seeing that crossed out name next to other Top 10 names like "New York," "Los Angeles," or "Chicago" could powerfully communicate just what our nation has lost.

But it turned out that I couldn’t do that. On researching the matter, I discovered that–despite its fame and its history–New Orleans is not in the Top 10 biggest U.S. cities. It’s not in the top dozen, or the two two dozen. The list would simply be too long to make the point I wanted to make.

By population, New York is sixteen times as big as New Orleans. Los Angeles is eight. Houston is four. The city I live in–San Diego–is almost three.

Places like Columbus, Milwaukee, El Paso, Charlotte, OKC, and Tucson are all bigger than New Orleans was.

I guess we were lucky that–as unimaginably horrible as the damage of losing New Orleans has been–it was not as bad as if a Top 10 city was taken out. That would have been even more unimaginably horrible.

So where was New Orleans in the rankings?

IT WAS NUMBER TWENTY-EIGHT.

That distinction now belongs to Las Vegas.

Goodbye Gilligan

Gilligan By the time I was a kid watching Saturday-afternoon sitcom reruns, Gilligan’s Island was a staple of the syndication market. I loved the show’s inventiveness in constructing all of life’s necessities from a few coconut shells and banana peels, and, in retrospect, the show reminds me of a live-action Flintstones: The appeal was not in the plot but in the over-the-top island adaptations of modern gadgets and gizmos.

The anchor of the show was its earnest, wide-eyed innocent, Gilligan. The actor who played Gilligan, Bob Denver, has died. May he rest in peace.

"Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy first mate Gilligan on the 1960s television show Gilligan’s Island, made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died, his agent confirmed Tuesday. He was 70.

"Denver died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, told The Associated Press. Denver’s death was first reported by Entertainment Tonight.

[…]

"Denver’s signature role was Gilligan. But he was already known to TV audiences for another iconic character, that of Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman’s Dobie in the The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which aired from 1959 to 1963.

"Gilligan’s Island lasted on CBS from 1964 to 1967, and it was revived in later seasons with three high-rated TV movies. It was a Robinson Crusoe story about seven disparate travelers who are marooned on a deserted Pacific Island after their small boat was wrecked in a storm."

GET THE STORY.

UPDATE:

GET SEASON ONE OF GILLIGAN’S ISLAND ON DVD!

(Nod to the reader who corrected my ghastly error in omitting this information.)

Allowing One’s Rights To Be Violated

A reader writes:

Reading your blog post “Disaster Ethics 3: Taking Things” brought to mind the Church’s teaching “One may never do evil so that good may result from it” (CCC 1756).

You wrote, “if an armed man takes your daughter hostage at gunpoint and says, "You go into that BestBuy and get me a color TV or I kill your daughter!" In that case, the color TV is a vital necessity for you (since someone under your care will be killed without it)”.

On the surface, this seems to be a case of doing evil (stealing a TV) so that good may result from it (saving your daughter’s life).  But I understand your logic that taking the TV would not be the sin of stealing because of its vital necessity.  (I also think the owner’s consent could be reasonably presumed under the given circumstances.)

But what if the armed man demanded that something intrinsically evil be done?  For example, what if he said to the girl’s mother, “fornicate with me or I kill your daughter”?  I think most mothers would reason that it is acceptable to commit the sin of fornication (or allow herself to be raped) to save her daughter’s life.  On the other hand, St. Maria Goretti chose to die rather than be raped.  Could she have morally complied with her attacker to save her own life?  Wouldn’t duress lessen or even remove her moral culpability?

Or could the principle of double effect be applied here?  For example, could we say that the choice one is making under such circumstances is the choice to save a life (one’s own or one’s daughter), not the choice to fornicate; the fornication is only tolerated for the greater good?  If so, then where do we draw the line?  Did all the martyrs have to die?  The story of those kids in a church (choosing to be shot rather than deny Jesus) a few years ago comes to mind.  Did they have to die?

It seems to me that a relevant distinction here is between the active commission of evil and the passive suffering of evil.

One cannot do something that is intrinsically evil, but one can allow oneself to suffer
an intrinsic evil at the hands of another. Thus one cannot kill another, but one can (in at least some circumstances) allow oneself to be killed even though one is innocent.

Something similar applies in the cases you mention. If someone points a gun at you and says that you’ll be
killed if you don’t allow yourself to be raped then it would be
morally licit to allow this rather than be killed. In this case, one is allowing one’s rights to be violated, but allowing one’s rights to be violated is not
intrinsically evil (though it can be evil depending on the circumstances).

On the other hand, if the gunman tells you to rape someone else then
that is intrinsically evil (you’re not allowing your rights to be
violated; you’d be violating someone else’s rights) and so you cannot
do that.

Denying Christ is intrinsically evil, so that cannot be done, even
under threat of death.

What Maria Goretti did was heroic but not morally obligatory (i.e.,
she could have allowed herself to be raped). She went beyond what
morality required and set a heroic example, for which she is honored
by the Church.

New Seminarian Document Expected Soon

Remember that document I was telling you about that is expected to affirm that those with a homosexual orientation are not to be ordained to the priesthood?

CNA is reporting:

The chairman of the U.S. bishops’ committee on priestly formation, Bishop John Nienstedt, said the Congregation told him that he could expect the guidelines soon.

This document  is about to be issued as Vatican officials are expected to begin their visit of the 229 seminaries, theology schools and institutes in the United States this month [SOURCE].

Purgatory: Two Views

Recently someone engaged in an apologetic discussion about purgatory e-mailed me with a question about some of the questions that had arisen in the discussion. These touched on some significant issues, including the nature of purgatory and the way it is theologically elaborated. I thought I’d share (a slightly edited version of) my response to him, as it covers some ground one doesn’t often see covered.

I wrote:

There are different ways in which a doctrine can be theologically
elaborated. The core of the doctrine of purgatory is that (a) there is
something that occurs after death in which, for the saved, the
consequences of sin are dealt with and (b) those experiencing this
event or process can be assisted by the prayers and suffrages of the
living. That’s the core, but it can be developed and explained in
different ways.

Historically, a common way of explaining this among many theologians
has involved the idea of temporal punishments, understood in a literal
sense.

This would not conflict with the fact that Christ paid the price for
our sins because Scripture uses language indicating that Christ’s
Atonement, which rescues us from hell and which is sufficient in value
to wipe out all punishment if God wants to apply it that way, usually
does not eliminate all punishment for sin from the Christian life.
Instead, Scripture makes clear, God applies the infinite value of
Christ’s Atonement in a way that rescues us from hell and that
eliminates *many* of the sufferings in this life that we would
experience for our sins, but not *all* of the latter.

The book of Hebrews speaks of God chastizing us for our own good and
scourging every son he receives. There is thus a residuum of
punishment due for our sins that God allows us to bear in order to
teach us a lesson and encourage our growth in holiness. This is not in
contradiction to Christ’s Atonement but an outworking of it. The only
reason we receive this discipline from God is that we are his sons and
he is disciplining us to help us grow. The book of Hebrews makes this
point explicitly.

Since the chastisements and scourging that God allows to come to the
saved are not everlasting, they are therefore referred to as temporal
punishments–punishments that last only for a time, as opposed to the
eternal punishment of hell.

If, when we die, we have not dealt with all the remaining temporal
punishments that God has allowed us to experience for our sins then we
deal with them in purgatory.

This elaboration of purgatory has been popular for a number of
centuries, particularly in the West, where theologians have tended to
apply a juridical (courtroom) model to the situation, with God serving
as a judge who imposes penalties for transgressions of his law (albeit
in a fatherly manner).

Eastern Catholics have not always articulated purgatory in this way.
There are other ways in which the theological core of the doctrine can
be elaborated. One model that has been gaining ground in recent years,
including in the West, does not look to a courtroom/punishment model
but which instead speaks of purgatory as a purification or cleansing
that occurs to deal with attachment to sin. This kind of explanation
is found, for example, in the book Eschatology by Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger and also in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Exponents of this view tend to view the
punishment/chastisement/scourging language of Scripture less literally
than it has been historically taken, seeing punishment for sin not as
something God inflicts from without but as the natural outworking of
the consequences of our sins, which God allows us to experience.

(Hell is then understood similarly, not as a place to which one is
sentenced by an angry God but as the state of definitive alienation
from God, which one has freely chosen by rejecting God’s offer of
union. In other words, on this understanding, God doesn’t send us to
hell against our will; we insist on leaving his presence and he allows
us to do so.)

How the punishment model and the purification model are to be
reconciled–or even if they need to be reconciled–is not something on
which the Church has authoritatively pronounced.

It is possible to reconcile the two to a significant degree. For
example, relying on the biblical emphasis on the sufferings and the
divine "scourgings" of the saved as means of spiritual training, one
might use the punishment model but say that the *only* temporal
punishments God allows us to experience are those needed for our
sanctification (which on anybody’s account is a painful process for
most).

This would bring the two models significantly into harmony in that on
both there would be no "excess" punishments one received. The only
sufferings the believer would have on account of sin would be those
used for his sanctification.

The question would be how one is to look at these sufferings: Are they
things caused by God from without, on the manner of a father punishing
his children? Or are they the natural outworking of the consequences
of sin, which we might envision as the pain experienced by a patient
who has broken (or shot) his foot and is having it worked on by a
doctor.

There’s a difference between "It’s time to take your punishment" and
"I’ve got to set this bone and it’s going to hurt," but they both
involve sufferings meant for the good of the one who experiences them.
Which way one looks at purgatory is currently an open question in
Catholic theology.

Tastes Like Chicken

OrcaA wily whale at MarineLand in Ontario, Canada has developed a taste for seagull and has been teaching the other orcas in his tank how to nab the airborne snacks.

According to animal behaviorist Michael Noonan,

“The orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting
regurgitated fish into the water. He waits for a bird to grab the fish
and then lunges."

The other killer whales in the tank have begun to follow suit, offering
scientists an opportunity to see how animals learn from one another.

" They catch three or four gulls this way some days.", says Noonan.

Hey, I love seafood, but anyone would get tired of the same old thing every day. This also gives the whales a little leverage in negotiating with their trainers ("Now that we’ve got some freelance work, there are going to be a few changes around here. No more double back flips for a lousy herring…").

GET THE STORY.

It Takes A Catholic Village…

Arkansasstar_1For those of you interested in relocating, did you know that there is such a thing as a Catholic community in the United States? In Arkansas, one such community is called Star of the Sea Village:

"Catholic families, singles, and retired couples have chosen to relocate from all corners of the United States to a quiet, rural setting in northeastern Arkansas. This is in a sincere attempt to leave many of the secular trappings of the world behind while embracing and encouraging one another to live their vocation in life in a way pleasing to Almighty God. You will find an eclectic mix of Catholic neighbors, spread over 1,000 acres commonly known as and dedicated to our Lady under her title ‘Star of the Sea.’

"St. Michael’s Catholic Church, located less than five miles away, offers Mass in both the English and the Traditional Latin Rite (as an apostolate of the Fraternity of St. Peter.) Common to all residents is faithfulness to the Pope, the magisterium and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Perpetual Adoration of Our Lord draws many to St. Michael’s. The chapel has been a place of perpetual prayer for the past five years.

"Families at Star of the Sea privately hold property and individual families decide the degree to which each participates in community activities. Residents become part of a much larger family. Individuals and families can gain spiritual growth through local parish programs, attending daily mass and through the reception of the sacraments. Property owners have the option of belonging to the New Entity Corporation, the corporation that owns unsold land at Star of the Sea.

"Ave Maria Hall, with adjacent tennis/basketball court and soccer field, is the common area. Community activities have included the annual May crowning of our Blessed Mother, Fourth of July parties, the August rededication ceremony to St. Philomena, and the traditional All Hallow’s Eve celebration (door-to-door ‘saintly visits’ followed by hayrides and a bonfire). Prayer, including the Holy Rosary, is a common devotion at most gatherings. Presently, community prayer is held at the Hall once a week."

Sounds like a project of which both our current Holy Father and St. Benedict of Nursia, the saint from whom Pope Benedict took his name, would approve, given that it is very much reminiscent of the Benedictine spirituality of creating Catholic communities in which the faith and the faithful can grow and flourish.

The Future Of Apologetics

A reader writes:

I listened recently to Cardinal Dulles’ comments on the History of
Apologetics and was wondering if you could draw lessons from that history
and give the outlook for future apologetics efforts. 

Me personally? Well, I’m no Cardinal Dulles, but I’ll do what I can.

Christian apologetics always takes its cue from the envrionment that it is in. In the early days of the Church, it had to defend Christianity against challenges that are very different than those it faces today.

We have now entered the fourth age of human communications, which means that we are now in an unrestricted marketplace of ideas. It isn’t a question of Christianity vs. paganism or Catholicism vs. Protestantism, anymore. It’s Christianity (or, within Christianity, Catholicism) vs. Everybody. The challenges to the Christian faith are no longer confined to a single or a few ideological sources. The world is now so interconnected that the challenges come from every source there is.

This means that apologetics will have to be much more comprehensive in its scope and flexible in its approach. The demands placed upon it are now far, far greater than at any time in history.

Which leads to the next point . . .

In particular, I
was wondering if the predominantly lay involvement in current apologetics
will have an effect on the development of this work. 

Yes. It’s essential to the future of apologetics. Because of the fourth-age effect of connecting every viewpoint with every other viewpoint, there will now be a much greater demand for apologetics and thus a greater demand for apologists.

Think of it this way: How many apologists do you need when everyone in the village is Catholic and you have little contact with those outside the village? Now compare that to how many apologists you need when a minority of those in the village are Catholic and everyone in the village is talking to people all over the world on the Internet? The challenge to ideas is going to be far, far greater in the latter circumstance, meaning that there need to be more apologists out there. (Though they don’t necessarily need to live in the same village, since they can create online repositories the villagers can access via the Internet.)

Given the need for the number of apologists to grow, these will come overwhelmingly from the laity. The clergy is simply not prepared at the present moment to shoulder this task. Not only is there the broad-based vocations problem in the developed world, the seminary system has no present ability to teach apologetics to prospective clergymen, and in fact many currents of thought among the clergy are actively hostile to apologetics, wishing to see it go away in favor of ecumenism. Many churchmen today simply have no perception of the need for apologetics (Cardinal Dulles is one of the few who does), as most received their definitive intellectual stamp in an age when apologetics was at its nadir.

Thus apologetics is no exception to the trend of many tasks formerly reserved to the clergy (back in the age when everyone was a farmer) have now devolved to the laity under the pressures of the contemporary environment. For the first time in Christian history, the majority of major apologists are and will continue to be laymen.

Finally, given the
existence of some famously, unreliable "Catholic" apologists, do you
foresee some sort official certification process for public apologists?

Not any time soon. The Church is not at present set up to train or evaluate apologists. There are laws, both universal and particular, that could be brought to bear on particular apologists, but it simply is not practicable to try to certify everyone who wants to do an apologetics web page or write apologetic articles or books.

With the growth of human communications that occurred toward the end of the third age, it became impracticable to grant an imprimatur for every book of a religious nature that was published, and so the Church switched to a model whereby imprimaturs were needed only for certain books. The problematic ones that then got published were handled by another mechanism, with the bishops’ conferences and the CDF issuing warnings against the most egregious books–a process that has not been wholly effective, but which is unavoidable given the volume of publishing that takes place and that needs to take place if the Church is to maintain an active presence in the present media environment.

The same consideratins (among others) make it difficult to enact a broad-based mandatory certification program for apologists. Any attempt to institute one would cause far more harm than good. That’s not to say that it might not be tried in the future, but it would be ill-advised, as well as ineffective. The problematic apologists are the very ones who would ignore the requirements; all it would do is hamper the good ones by making them jump through more hoops, which would deter further good apologists from entering the field, knowing the hoops they’d have to jump through.

I therefore suspect that the future when it comes to cerifying apologists will look more like the present model of imprimaturs on books: Except for very specific exceptions, it’s largely a message of "Go forth and do good, and we’ll warn people about the really major problems that show up"