Year: 2010

How To Get Your Autographed Copy of The Fathers Know Best

Fathers Know Bes1-02 At last!

I’ve had a lot of people ask when the book would be available for pre-order, and now it is!

In fact, I’m pleased to tell you how to get your very own, autographed copy of the book–together with an exclusive audio interview that will not be available anywhere else.

Catholic Answers is doing a fundraising appeal based on the book because printing and properly promoting a book is expensive–particularly in the orthodox Catholic, non-profit world of niche publishing.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

As Karl Keating explains in a recent letter,

I want to launch this book with a bang, not a whimper

The book is ready for the printer. The text has been finished, proofed, and typeset. But this is a big book—about 400 pages—and to print it in a large enough quantity to get a good per-copy rate from the printer and to give it the initial public promotion it deserves . . . well, that takes cash that we just don’t have.

But—ahem!—you and our other friends do, and so I’m asking you to give us a hand in getting The Fathers Know Best printed and publicized. 

I’ve been involved in writing and publishing for a long time, so I know that bringing a book to fruition and getting it noticed (and sold!) is no easy thing. 

Each year more than 40,000 titles are published in the U.S., and it takes savvy and, alas, cash to get a worthwhile book “noticed” and reviewed and (as I think this one will be) praised, but that’s what needs to be done if The Fathers Know Best is to have the influence I think it ought to have.

In publishing, as in other areas, there’s a “window of opportunity.” 

If a publisher can make a big splash right from the start, then a book has a chance to carry itself, so to speak, and to go from success to success. 

But if a publisher isn’t in a position to print many copies or to give the book the marketing oomph it needs, even the best book will languish.

And The Fathers Know Best mustn’t languish, because it’s a book that can do an immense amount of good—both spiritual and intellectual—for countless thousands of people, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

That’s why I want to have a large first-run printing and an extensive right-out-of-the-gate marketing campaign. 

I want this book to “go viral”—because Christians of all stripes need it

To use a term common on the Internet, I want this book to “go viral,” which means to have publicity about it be self-sustaining so that more and more people can learn about—and learn from—this important book.

I hope you can help us pull this off. 

As I said, we need money to print a large number of copies of The Fathers Know Best—the more copies we order, the cheaper the unit cost and thus the lower we can set the retail price—and to undertake an extensive promotional campaign. 

I hope you might be one of those willing to help with a gift of $500 or $1,000 or even more. Or maybe you can afford to send us $100 or $200 toward this effort. Whatever you give, you have our thanks.

If you’re able to help us with a donation of at least $50, as a thank-you, we’ll send you in return two things: 

1. A copy of the book itself, of course, autographed by Jimmy Akin.

2. An exclusive audio interview with Jimmy about the book and its background. This interview will not be made available in the future and is available only as a thank-you to those who help with this project.

Perhaps you can tell from this letter that I’m excited about this project. I think Jimmy’s new book will do a lot of good for a lot of people. 

Over the years, I’ve learned of many people who, having stumbled across the Fathers, found themselves compelled to go where they didn’t want to go—into the Catholic Church.

They saw that the Catholic Church and Catholic beliefs go back beyond the Council of Trent, beyond the medieval councils, all the way to the earliest councils—and further back still, all the way to Christ. 

Won’t you help us help thousands come to see this truth?

You and I are witnesses to the truth of the Catholic faith—and I think we’ve had some success in that—but the most powerful witnesses I know, outside the Bible itself, are the Fathers of the Church. 

Please help us introduce them to today’s readers, both Catholic and non-Catholic. 

I’m excited about the book finally being available for pre-order, and I hope you will consider supporting it–and Catholic Answers as a whole–through a generous donation.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Of course, you could simply wait a little longer and purchase the book, but I hope that you will offer your support in this way because it helps the ministry continue its work and it helps us do a decent print run and proper promotion for the book–maximizing the apostolic good that is done and helping Catholic Answers undertake more publishing projects like this in the future.

To give those who support this appeal added value, I’m going to be sitting down and autographing all the copies that are sent to those who donate.

I’m also–and I haven’t talked about this elsewhere–going to be personalizing the autographs by adding a citation to a relevant Bible verse to each one. That’s something I always do when I autograph things as a lagniappe–“a little bit extra.” Years ago when I was given a book by a Christian author, he wrote a Bible verse under his signature. I went home and looked it up, and I decided I liked the custom, so I always do that when I autograph.

And I don’t give the same verse to everybody. I’m going to be picking out a selection of Fathers-related Bible verses and using them for the autographs.

I wonder what your verse will be?

To add even more value for the donor, I recently sat down to record an exclusive interview with Patrick Coffin about the Church Fathers and the making of the book. We will be sending a copy of this on CD to those who generously respond to the appeal. It will not be aired on Catholic Answers live, will not be posted online, and will not be available in any other way in the future. It is exclusively a thank-you for those who are able to help the ministry through their generosity.

So I look forward to autographing a book for you, and I hope you can give to this appeal and help Catholic Answers maximize the apostolic good it can do though The Fathers Know Best.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Nobel Committee Issues Another Ignoble Prize

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer wins a Grammy Award, and the following dialog occurs:

Homer: Oh, why won’t anyone give me an award?

Lisa:       You won a Grammy!

Homer: I mean an award that’s worth winning.

Then a crawl line scrolls across the bottom of the screen, stating: “LEGAL DISCLAIMER:  Mr. Simpson’s opinions does not reflect those of the producers, who don’t consider the Grammy an award at all.”

That’s how I’m coming to feel about the once-noble Nobel Prize.

One of the most egregious awards they made was last year’s honoring of our president with a Nobel Peace Prize before he’d done anything. (It was awarded on his 11th day after inauguration.)

Even he said he did not feel worthy of the award—not that that stopped him from accepting it, mind you.

And the Nobel folks have a long history of lame decisions.

Now they have added to that legacy with the latest award, in which the culture of evil celebrates itself.

According to the Nobel web site,

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization”.

Edwards was one of two doctors who pioneered IVF, though his partner has since died.

Take it away, Christian Science Monitor! . . .

The Nobel medicine prize committee acknowledged the role of British biologist Robert Edwards in developing in vitro fertilization, handing him on Monday the prestigious award for bringing “joy to infertile people all over the world.”

Of course, the Nobel committee didn’t mention that it also brought death to millions of children conceived in a dish and then intentionally not used, some of them spending their entire existence in a freezer, only to be treated later as medical waste.

Between 2 and 3 percent of newborns in many developed countries are now IVF babies. And about 4 million individuals have born so far been through IVF, according to the Nobel committee. The birth of the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, was in 1978.

“What Louise Brown meant was, you held her up, all her parts were there, and she smiled, and that ended the ethics criticism,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Well, among culture-of-death, establishment bioethicists, maybe. Their job is to not to actually say no to anything but to rationalize whatever whatever comes down the pike and help society accept it by declaring it ethical.

So where do we go from here?

“The Nobel Prize is for the work Edwards did helping the infertile, but [he could also have] unleashed the most controversial technology I can think of, which is, should we use it to design our offspring?”

At the same time, the prospect of scientists helping to create human life in a lab has raised vexing ethical issues. The foremost question – very real for many IVF parents – is about what happens to fertilized, but unused, embryos.

One unintended consequence of IVF includes an explosion in multiple births – as a result of parents choosing to implant multiple embryos to raise the likelihood of success for an expensive procedure.

FILE UNDER: Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show

What are your thoughts?

Eco-Fundamentalists? Hate, Actually.

Let me say up front that I have nothing against treating the environment in a responsible manner. It’s implied by the commission God gave mankind in Genesis 1. I also try to avoid fights about words, so whether one would call a responsible environmental position “conservationion” or “environmentalism” is a thing that does not need to be fought about.

But there is a very prominent strand in the environmental movement that takes matters to extreme and anti-human limits. In a previous post, I have referred to this position as environmental fundamentalism, to distinguish it from healthy concern for the environment.

I mean, nobody wants to make Iron Eyes Cody‘s iron eyes cry. Do they?

However that may be, the deeply misanthropic views and “convert-or-die” rhetoric of environmental fundamentalism was very clearly on display this week, with the release of a shock video produced by 10:10, an international initiative to get people to cut their “carbon emissions” by 10%.

Here’s the video . . . WARNING: EXTREMELY GROSS AND OFFENSIVE!

Oh, and that is Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame at the end, now sporting long blond tresses.

According to the 10:10 initiative, the script for this video was written by “Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis,” who is the director of the 2003 romantic comedy, “Love Actually.” What the video displays, however, is hate, actually. Hatred of those who disagree with you such that you find it funny to ironically lie to them (“No pressure”) and then depict their bloody and explosive deaths in graphic detail (shlurppp!) . . . even if they are children.

The Telegraph’s James Delingpole, “a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything” puts it well when he says:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Meanwhile, over at 10:10’s “media partner” The Guardian, we read the following from 10:10 founder Franny Armstrong:

“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.

But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.

GAH!

Well, the blowback on this one was such that 10:10 swiftly pulled its own video and issued this completely inadequate and insincere half-apology:

Sorry.

Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website. We won’t be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.

We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.

At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

Onwards and upwards,

Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie and the whole 10:10 team

The casual, breezy tone adopted by Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie, and the whole 10:10 team makes it clear that they just don’t “get it.” Note also how “many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but . . . some didn’t.”

Yeah. Nice defense of your own filmmaking in the first clause. Nice dissing of the people you’re apologizing to in the second. You’re so sincere.

And this is by no means that eco-fundamentalism has revealed its misanthropic face in the media.

Delingpole helpfully provides a link to this threatening videogram delivered by Greenpeace, in which a wee bairn stonefacedly appears to make patricidal and matricidal insinuations:

Charming lad, that.

So . . . nice to see the mask coming off.

What are your thoughts?

Are You Smarter Than an Atheist?

QuizTitle

I am.

At least according to a quiz put out by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life.

The quiz has 32 questions, of which atheists in America who took the quiz got an average of 20.9 questions right. American Jews got 20.5 right, American Mormons 20.3 right, American Protestants 16 right, and American Catholics 14.7 right.

I got all of them, but that’s nothing special since this is the field I work in professionally. I’m expected to know my own field. Give me a comparable quiz on another topic and watch the number plummet. I can say with great confidence that if you gave me a 32-question quiz on sports—something very large numbers of people would do very well on—I would be lucky to get even a handful of questions right.

However that may be, what are we to make of the numbers regarding the different groups? Pretty dismal for Catholics, right?

Not necessarily, and it depends on what you mean.

This is not a case of “Catholics don’t know their own faith but other groups do know theirs.” The quiz is not religion-specific. It’s pan-religious. So the majority of questions on the quiz do not relate to the faith of the person taking the quiz, but to other people’s faiths. And therein lies a significant reason for why the numbers line up as they do.

What do the three high-scoring groups have in common? They are all religious minorities in America. That’s significant because a religious minority has special reason not only to understand its own religion (so as to reinforce its intra-group religious identity) but also to understand the religions of those around it (because of the need to understand how to interact with the majority religion that surrounds it). A person in a religious minority has special reason to understand both the basics of his own faith and the basics of the majority faith. A person in the majority faith has special reason only to understand the latter.

A Jew in Israel or an atheist in China would have less reason to know the basics of Christianity than a Jew or an atheist in America.

When you look at the two mainstream American religious groups—Protestants and Catholics—they score both less than the minorities and quite close to each other (only 1.3 questions separating them, which may well be within the poll’s margin of error).

Then there’s selection bias in who chose to take the poll. Perhaps atheists are more motivated to take a (rather long) 32-question quiz than Catholics. Who knows? This is a perennial problem of surveys.

The questions in the poll are also likely to distort results in other ways, too. I counted at least three questions that were Mormon-specific but only two that were Catholic-specific. Who is that going to advantage?

There were also three questions on what public school teachers are and aren’t allowed to do in America regarding religion. That is a subject that atheists will be far more focused on (and thus likely to get right) than ordinary Christians. (It’s also worth noting that Catholics have their own parallel school system and many do not even use the public schools, giving them less reason to be familiar with the details of what is allowed.)

These last questions also aren’t actually about religion but about American politics regarding religion. Something similar applies to another set of three questions regarding what the majority religion is in particular countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan). Those aren’t questions about religion but about the demographics of other countries. (Hey, everybody! Quick! What’s the majority religion in Gambia? It sure tells you a lot about religion if you happen to know that the answer is Islam, doesn’t it? You’re much more informed about religion if you know that.)

So . . . it’s not the most informative quiz in terms of religious knowledge. Nor is the news for Catholics as bad as the raw numbers suggest. The quiz simply isn’t a test of how much Catholics know about their own faith.

That’s not to say that Catholic religious education hasn’t been a disaster in the last generation. It has been.

That’s not exclusively the fault of the clerical class. Parents in many families did not do their part to see to their children receiving a proper religious education. But when many elements of the clerical class have been actively and deliberately subverting the teaching of Catholic doctrine, it’s going to contribute to the poor state of religious knowledge among Catholics today.

One bit of sort-of-encouraging news from the Pew survey was that 55% of Catholics were able to correctly identify their Church’s teaching regarding the status of bread and wine in the Eucharist. That’s not nearly what it should be, but it’s at least better than the Gallup poll a number of years ago that started the false rumor that it was far less.

This quiz isn’t the greatest, but quizzes are fun, so have at it . . .

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN ATHEIST? (Be sure to write down your answers as you go; the answers are given at the end of the last question.)

MORE FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR.

Go Green? No Thanks. I Have A Religion.

Recently over on Facebook (where you can friend me if you like), I posted an item which stated:

Jimmy Akin would like the world to know that he has heard exhortations to “Go Green”/“Be Green”/“Save the Planet” so often that using any of these phrases drastically decreases the chance he will agree to the proposal in question—whatever it is.

I figured that this would generate a good bit of reaction, and it did. In less than a day there were over 100 responses. That was even more reaction than the item I posted about the spider in Madagascar that makes webs 82 feet across or the woman who fended off a bear by hitting it with a zucchini!

A big part of the reason the item got the reaction it did is that a lot of people feel the same way.

Here are some of the responses people posted:

Jimmy, it is so nice to know that I am not the only one.

Yeah. It’s like Chinese Water Torture. It has its merit, but do you have to beat us to death with it?

One trade association I belong to sends me a green e-mail every week like clockwork. It tells me that my clients want me to be green, and are more likely to do business with me if I’m green. I keep telling them that I’m not paying for that much body paint, but they keep sending me the e-mails anyway.

“Go green” and “reduce, reuse, recycle” is stuffed down kids’ throats every chance there is. It makes my kids groan and roll their eyes. How about “go chaste”??? A more-needed message for sure. Did you ever notice no one ever says, “oh kids will never recycle, so we might as well help them waste . . . “

Why did the “Go Green” message leave such a bitter taste on these people’s mouths?

Well, as one saying has it, there are “A Million Ways to Go Green!” And all of them are inconvenient.

Environmentalists have been so successful in pushing the “Go Green” sloganeering through our culture that we are now all continuously bombarded by environmental scolding that is vastly out of proportion what environmental problems exist, so far as the average person can tell.

As a result, environmental activists have acquired the reputation of annoying nattering nannies, of rigid killjoys out to spoil everybody else’s fun. Rather like the reputation Fundamentalists have. And in fact, many have noted that environmental activists treat environmentalism like a religion.

And it’s not the, “I’m comfortable with what I believe, and I’ll tell you why I believe it and also listen to you and we can have a mutually respectful dialog”-type of religion, like you get from the Vatican. Instead, it’s the “Convert or die!”-type of religion—in some cases literally, for certain environmentalist activists put spikes in trees with the deliberate intent of causing physical injury to loggers.

It should be pointed out in all fairness that most environmental activists don’t go to that extreme, but the movement is rapidly acquiring a reputation for being as heavy handed and disrespectful of others’ views as anyone disdained as a “Fundamentalist.”

In fact, now that the term “Fundamentalism” has mutated way beyond its original meaning (a group of theologically conservative Protestants associated with a set of 19th century books known as “The Fundamentals”), now that we have not only “Christian fundamentalists” and “Muslim fundamentalists” and “Hindu fundamentalists,” it might as well be time that we start referring to “environmental fundamentalists” as well.

This actually could be a help for those with legitimate environmental concerns.

I mean, it’s not as if one should be unconcerned with the environment. God gave mankind the mandate to serve as stewards of the natural world, and that concern is legitimate.

That’s why—in my Facebook item—I didn’t say that urging me to “Go Green” would stop me from adopting whatever proposal is under discussion. I have no desire to adopt a rigid contradict-environmentalists-no-matter-what-they-say position. That would be irrational—just like adopting an adhere-to-everything-environmentalists-claim position.

What is needed in this area, as in every area of life, is the ability to think critically, to “Test everything and hold fast to what is good,” in the words of St. Paul (though, of course, he was speaking in a different context).

Unfortunately, experience has shown that many of the claims made by environmentalists are bunk, and many of the recommendations made by them are equally bunk. They will little or nothing to help supposed environmental problems—and they may even hurt.

The reflexive, unthinking exhortations to “Go Green” and “Save the Planet” and thus serve as a kind of marker for unreliable, unproved, and usually unhelpful proposals.

That is why hearing any of these things makes it less likely I’ll agree to the proposal. The appearance of these slogans is a good indicator of the presence of ideology rather than reason, and ideology is a poor guide compared to reason.

Having a way to refer, collectively, to those who have become environmental ideologues—“environmental fundamentalists,” for example—thus could play a useful role in distinguishing legitimate environmental concerns from unthinking ideology.

Naming the problem is part of solving it.

Oh, and as Columbo Would Say . . .

. . . "just one more thing."

Another thing I've been up to is setting up a blog on the Church Fathers in conjunction with my forthcoming book The Fathers Know Best.

CHECK IT OUT!

I've got a lot of cool stuff planned for it. In fact, just yesterday we taped a series of web videos with little-known facts and surprising stories about the Church Fathers. I'll let y'all know when they're out. Hope you enjoy them! (And the rest of the fascinating material I'm going to get into. :-D)

Here's a sneak peek of a near-final cover design for the book . . .

Frs 

Click to embiggen.
 

Blog Update

Just wanted to say that I'm sorry I haven't posted for a few days. It's been a busy time for me, and one of the things I've been busy with is a significant update for the blog (which may or may not be visible at the time you read this). I've been working with the folks at TypePad to increase the blog's functionality and to solve some issues that have been long-standing annoyances.

Once the new version of the blog rolls out there will still be some fine tuning I need to do, but I wanted to let y'all know what I've been up to and what the plan is.

Hope you find the new functionality useful!

Contact

I always welcome e-mail. Feel free to e-mail me at:

jimmyakinblog@gmail.com

I read all the personal e-mails I receive, and I respond to as many as I can. I can’t promise an answer, but I do what I am able with the time I have.

If you absolutely need an answer, call Catholic Answers Live when I am on the air (typically on Thursdays; check the calendar to find out precisely when). If you get on the air, I guarantee an answer! (Hopefully a correct one!) BTW, if you call right before I come on the air there are likely to be open lines.

Be assured that when people e-mail me with questions, I always anonymize them before answering them on the blog. I want people to feel safe in asking delicate or personal questions, and I treat their privacy with the same respect I want my own treated with. (It’s that whole Golden Rule thing.)

Permaposts

The following are some of the more important posts I’ve done over the years, so they warrant inclusion on this special page. If you’d like to nominate something for permapost status, e-mail me at jimmyakinblog@gmail.com. And thanks for your suggestions!

Please pay special note to the very first permapost!

The Most Important Permapost

Blog Operations

Interesting & Important Topics

Fun Stuff

  • Awaiting first nomination