October 2005 – Page 5

The moblog link has landed

Just a quick post to let y’all know the link to my moblog has joined my other site links in the left margin. Enjoy!

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Mohave desert

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Saint-In-Waiting

His case for beatification has been ready for years, but he’s needed a miracle. Perhaps not enough of his fans have thought to ask him for a cure? In any event, the wait for a miracle may soon be over for John Henry Cardinal Newman, always a Venerable, not yet a Blessed.

"England could soon have its first saint since the Reformation after a miracle cure was reported in the US.

"Cardinal John Henry Newman, who founded Birmingham Oratory in 1848, is being championed as a future saint by its current provost, Father Paul Chavasse.

"A case for his beatification, the stage before sainthood, is ready but it is lacking a miracle by the cardinal.

"Claims by a Boston deacon he prayed to the cardinal and his spinal problems were cured are now being investigated.

"The claim follows 50 years of work to introduce Cardinal Newman’s cause for canonisation — a process which includes collating more than 20,000 of his letters and evidence from personal witnesses to his suitability as a saint."

GET THE STORY.

I wonder if it is a commentary on the state of the Christian faith in England that the process has taken so long, and that when a miracle came it was reported in the United States, not Great Britain. After all, a certain Nazarene of the ancient world noted that "a prophet is not without honor except in his own country" and was himself unable to perform many miracles in his own hometown because the people did not have faith (Matt. 13:57-58).

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Blog Trip

Howdy, folks!

Blogging will be a bit . . . unusual . . . the next two days (Thursday & Friday).

I’m taking a roadtrip through SoCal, Arizona, and as far as western New Mexico.

At least that’s the plan.

As a result, I may not have access to the Net–at least not the ordinary way.

I have, however, been preparing for this by getting myself set up with moblog (mobile blogging) capabilities–at least as far as the tech I have available will allow.

So, here’s what to expect: I’ll probably send a few camera phone shots. Probably won’t be able to do much explaining on what they are in the posts themselves, but I have a backup for that.

The backup is this: I now have an audioblog. You can access it by going to jimmyakin.blogspot.com. There I’ll try to post entries by mobile phone which you can listen to in .mp3 format. In these I’ll try to explain what’s in the camera phone pictures I’m sending, as well as other thoughts that occur to me along the road.

I may even find a wi-fi zone where I can do a more traditional post or two.

In my absence, I’d invite my co-bloggers to let fly with anything they may have that they want to say. (Thanks, guys! And don’t worry about scheduling. Just publish as soon as you write them.)

Folks can also use the combox to this post as a free-form discussion on . . . . well . . . anything y’all wanna talk about (but keep it within the rules).

Have fun, y’all!

Seven Days Of Posts

Okay, folks. As an experiment, I’ve upped the number of days of posts that the top page has from four to seven.

I’ll let it stay this way for a few days and then decide whether to leave it this way.

Lemme know what you think of this and if it causes problems.

RIP: WWI Veteran

One of the last remaining Australian veterans of World War I died on Monday, October 17. He was just 14 when he left to defend his country; he was 106 when he died.

"William Evan Allan enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy at the outbreak of the war when he was just 14. He served as a seaman on the HMAS Encounter from 1915 to 1918.

"’With his passing, we have lost an entire generation who left Australia to defend our nation, the British Empire and other nations in the cause of freedom and democracy,’ Veteran Affairs Minister De-Anne Kelly said in a statement.

"’Mr. Allan was just a boy when he went to war, much younger than most. His sacrifice is remembered and we honor him for his service,’ she said.

"Allan, born in the southeastern town of Bega in July 1899 and a resident of Melbourne, also was Australia’s sole surviving veteran of both world wars. In World War II, Allan served on an armed merchant cruiser and as pier master of a naval base."

GET THE STORY.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it amazingly uplifting and hopeful that in a day and age where parents kick out freeloading adult children on a "reality-TV" series that we are still within living memory of an era when young people, now considered minors, were mature enough to take on the adult responsibility of serving their country with honor. Perhaps we can still reclaim that heritage of raising self-sufficient and heroically-inclined children (although, of course, we should wait until they are eighteen before calling them up for war).

May William Evan Allan and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace through the mercy of God.

The Salton Sea

Whenever I go somewhere, I like to do laps around famous things.

For example, when I went to New Orleans for a visit, I went down to Bourbon Street and walked down the entire length of it and back up again. (And it is, let me tell you, one seedy place. Going to it once because it is the most famous thing in the city is justified. Going more than one is not necessary, thankyew.)

When I went to the Salton Sea, therefore, I did a lap around it.

I drove up the east-hand side of it first, stopping at Bombay Beach and the state park visitors’ center, then turned around and came back down the west-hand side.

Oh yeah. . . . and I promised to tell you why I went there in the first place. . . .

Continue reading “The Salton Sea”

The Wordplay Of Abortion

One of the great frustrations of pro-life advocates is that the mainstream media consistently shades the abortion debate in favor of those who advocate a "right" to abortion. As but one example of many, pro-lifers are "anti-abortion," even if opposition to abortion is only one of the fronts in the Right to Life battle; abortion advocates are, on the other hand, "pro-choice," even though the term gives no indication that the "choice" for which they lobby is for the choice to kill children.

One pro-life site has put together a helpful guide to the language issues, titled Coming to Terms: A Pro-Life Semantics Guide:

Those who govern the culture’s language govern the culture. Why so? Because words shape ideas and form the way people think. Put simply, words teach. Unfortunately, those who govern the language today are the mass media in America who are enemy #1 of vulnerable human life. Their semantics are why so many have come to think that killing itself is a human ‘right.’

"At least five different terms exist in the media’s lexicon for killing, such as abortion ‘rights,’ ‘right’ to the body, ‘right’ to choose, women’s ‘rights,’ privacy ‘rights,’ and reproductive ‘rights.’ At the same time, the most fundamental right of all, to life itself is censored by them, erasing it from public thought. Pope John Paul, spoke on this grave moral evil in his encyclical The Gospel of Life [Evangelium Vitae].

"’The moral conscience, both individual and social, is today subjected, also as a result of the penetrating influence of the media, to an extremely serious and mortal danger: that of confusion between good and evil precisely in relation to the fundamental right to life…’ #24."

"Friend, the culture war is largely a war of words and no one fights it better than the media elite. Better than anyone they know that if you want to change the way people think, just change the words. Yet verbal engineering applies to us as well. Using honest vocabulary is vital to restore protection for life. Terminology that devalues it is explained in this guide. Honest phrasing is given to restore its dignity."

The guide goes on to compile a list of words commonly used in the abortion debate and then offers alternative word choices to clarify what the euphemisms hide (e.g., abortion "clinic" v. abortion "site"). We could quibble with some of the suggestions (e.g., using "abortionist" as a replacement for "doctor"; like it or not, many doctors are abortionists and abortion is only a subset of their medical practice), and with the advisability of using some of the suggestions in all circumstances (such as when attempting to engage abortion advocates in discussion of the issues).

Despite certain deficiencies, though, the guide is useful in demonstrating the scope of the problem of how language whitewashes the abomination that is abortion.