Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

The Way The World Ain’t

Recently I was talking with a friend who mentioned to me that she’s seen only one of the Star Wars films. She saw the first one when it first came out back in 1977 and never watched another.

Why?

Because she had recently converted to Christianity from another religion and, as a zealous new Fundamentalist (she’s now a Catholic), she was horrified by the alien creatures in the film.

"I wanted to get up in front of the screen and shout ‘God didn’t make these!‘" she told me.

While she now recognizes that the mere depiction of alien beings isn’t inherently sinful, she still doesn’t particularly enjoy sci-fi, and part of the reason why is that God didn’t make creatures like what you see in the movies–at least so far as we’re aware at this point.

I’ve had other friends express similar reservations about sci-fi. They just can’t relate to the alien creatures or situations that one often finds in it, and sometimes they also point to the fact that God didn’t make the world the way that it’s depicted in sci-fi.

I’m sympathetic to this. I’m a sci-fi fan, but I’m still sympathetic.

From one perspective, I’m sympathetic to it on an emotional level. Humans have emotional comfort zones regarding what they want to experience. If our experiences are too strange, too alien, too outside-our-comfort-zones then we get . . . uncomfortable. For most people, just looking at the Star-Nosed Mole (something God did create!) is enough to give them the willies.

If science fiction gives some folks an outside-the-comfort-zone experience and makes them uncomfortable, I respect that. That’s not where my comfort zones are set, but I have such zones just like everyone else, and some forms of fiction I find distasteful and, therefore, I avoid them.

That’s a matter of taste, though, not of principle.

I’m also sympathetic to my friends’ theological concern, for I had the same concern back when I was an Evangelical. Much as I liked science-fiction, I wondered about a form of entertainment that depicts the world in a way that God didn’t make it.

After all, one could argue, if God chose to make the world this way and not that way, why should we spend time filling our imaginations with the way the world ain’t?

I realized, though, that this objection got at a principle that affected a lot more literature than just science fiction. It also affected fantasy, of course, and imaginative fiction generally. But it still affected yet more.

It affected fiction itself.

There are distinctions to be made between different kinds of fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, realistic, detective, romance, western, etc.). They all obey different rules and depart in different ways from the way the world actually is. But all forms of fiction depart in some way from the way that God made the world.

That’s why we call it fiction. . . . It’s the way the world ain’t . . stories that aren’t true.

Sci-fi and fantasy may (sometimes) break laws of nature that apply to the real world. Detective stories, romances, and westerns may all be written according to formulas that involve wildly improbably events that seldom happen–at least in conjunction with each other–in the real world. But even the most realistic story (or what in a typical English department would be considered a realistic story) involves envisioning the world a way that it isn’t.

So the objection can be posed even to realistic narratives: Why should we fill up our imaginations with material about the world the way God didn’t make it?

It’s a question worth considering.

There are good answers to it, and in upcoming posts I’ll share with you what I take to be some of those answers, but for now why not contemplate the problem?

About Writing

I’ve decided to add a category to the left hand column devoted to the subject of writing. I already have categories on fiction, books, etc., but these are mostly taken up with particular works or series.

The new one will be devoted to blog posts about the craft of writing itself–both how to do it and what moral and theological questions it raises.

A couple of things started me thinking along these lines. The first was a request I had to help someone learn how to do apologetic-style writing. I’ve been doing this for a baker’s dozen of years now, and in that time I’ve grown a lot as a writer. (Of course, like everyone, I also have more growing to do.) There are certain tricks of the trade–both of writing in general and apologetic writing in particular–that I’ve learned, and I wanted to start writing them down in a place where they could benefit others.

The second thing was the recent dustup over what Pre-16 may have written in a thank you note regarding Harry Potter. This surfaced a number of moral/theological issues connected with that, while I didn’t have time to go into them at the moment, I still thought were worth exploring.

I’ve got less experience writing fiction than non-fiction. Frankly, I don’t have that much time for it. But I do have some experience, and many of the rules are ones it shares with non-fiction writing.

I also have the same experience as others of reading (or viewing or listening to) fiction and wrestling with the moral and theological isues it raises.

So. . . . Hope this’ll be of interest to folks!

To be continued. . . .

"It Was A Dark And Stormy Night"

"It was a dark and stormy night" is the famous opening of the not-at-all-famous novel Paul Clifford, which was published in 1830 by the not-yet-famous novellist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose opening later inspired the sort-of-famous annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, starting in 1982.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s opening to Paul Clifford is famous for how bad it is–not the "It was a dark and stormy night" part, for that part isn’t bad, but the opening sentence as a whole, which was both much longer and much more bad and which reads as follows:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

This sentence, referred to by the shorthand "It was a dark and stormy night," has become the emblem of bad novel opening sentences.

These days there is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants send in the deliberately bad opening lines of imaginary novels that they (usually) have no intention of carrying through to completion.

And the 2005 results are in!

Now, the entry that won this year (like several of the other entries the judges gave notable mention to) is quite bad, but it is also risque, so Rules 7 and 8 all over that.

Nevertheless, many of the submissions are really hilariously bad.

Some of my favorites:

India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, presented itself to Tex as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because Tex finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before.

Ken Aclin
Shreveport, LA

Captain Burton stood at the bow of his massive sailing ship, his weathered face resembling improperly cured leather that wouldn’t even be used to make a coat or something.

Bryan Semrow
Oshkosh, WI

Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.

Randy Blanton
Murfreesboro, TN

Patricia wrote out the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room — not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she’d always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

Kari A. Stiller
College Station, TX

"Why does every task in the Realm of Zithanor have to be a quest?" Baldak of Erthorn, handyman to the Great Wizard Zarthon, asked rhetorically as he began his journey began to find the Holy Hammer of Taloria and the Sacred Nail of Ikthillia so Baldak could hang one of Zarthon’s mediocre watercolors, which was an art critique Baldak kept to himself unlike his predecessor, whom Zarthon turned into the Picture Frame of Torathank.

SSG Kevin Craver
Fort Polk, LA

"Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth–or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn’t, which is why it was heretical to say that it did–and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place."

Alf Seegert
Salt Lake City, UT

"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet."

Devery Doleman
Brooklyn, NY

Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother’s garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally, was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste like whipped cream) awakened with a start.

Alison Heft
Lititz, PA

Billy Bob gushed like a broken water main about his new love: "She’s got long, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and she moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, but what she sees in me, a simple plumber, I’ll never know."

Glenn Lawrie
Chung-buk, South Korea

Sandra had waited and wished for Gary to come sweep her off her feet, feeling just like Lois Lane waiting for her handsome, masculine Superman to come fly her away from the humdrum of everyday life, but Gary had never come, and so she’d ended up with Herman, a man as bald as Lex Luthor with worse eyesight than Clark Kent and the maturity level of Jimmy Olsen.

Mary P. Potts
Bradenton, FL

The double agent looked up from his lunch of Mahi-Mahi and couscous and realized that he must escape from Walla Walla to Bora Bora to come face-to-face with his arch enemy by taking out his 30-30 and shooting off his nemesis’ ear-to-ear grin so he could wave bye-bye to this duplicitous life, but the chances of him pulling this off were only so-so, much less than 50-50.

Charles Jaworski
North Pole, AK

As soon as Sherriff Russell heard Bradshaw say, "This town ain’t big enough for the both of us," he inadvertantly visualized a tiny chalk-line circle with a town sign that said ‘population 1,’ and the two of them both trying to stand inside of it rather ineffectively, leaning this way and that, trying to keep their balance without stepping outside of the line, and that was why he was smiling when Bradshaw shot him.

Keriann Noble
Murray, UT

Derwin Thoryndike vowed to place a 14-carat engagement ring on the finger of Glenda-Sue Ellington, so now all he had to do was save up enough money to buy the ring, get it inscribed, and then locate a person named Glenda-Sue Ellington and convince her to marry him.

Harvey McCluskey
Vancouver WA

A warning to the reader: Tom dies in the end of the story so don’t get too attached to him.

Sam Gerring
Lexington, KY

Anyone with a less refined air of unabashed insouciance would not have been able to so easily slip through the security cordon, charm their way past the armed guards, breeze through the marbled reception area and blithely enter the inner sanctum of the UN Security Council and there successfully negotiate an end to all conflict in the Middle East, but that was the sort of man Nigel Simpkins was.

David Lindley
Sheffield
England

The wheel of love had left its treadmarks in his chest once too often, like a knobby mud tire on a monster truck, or like a really big ponce wheel, the kind that tailors use to punch little holes in patterns and that would leave lots of nasty little welts if you were to run it up and down your arm.

Peter Loughlin
Santa Rosa CA

GET THE REST. . . .

. . . and use the combox to add your own bad opening sentences to imarginary novels! (Only keep it clean.)

“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

This sentence, referred to by the shorthand "It was a dark and stormy night," has become the emblem of bad novel opening sentences.

And the 2005 results are in!

Now, the entry that won this year (like several of the other entries the judges gave notable mention to) is quite bad, but it is also risque, so Rules 7 and 8 all over that.

Nevertheless, many of the submissions are really hilariously bad.

Some of my favorites:

India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, presented itself to Tex as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because Tex finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before.

Ken Aclin
Shreveport, LA

Captain Burton stood at the bow of his massive sailing ship, his weathered face resembling improperly cured leather that wouldn’t even be used to make a coat or something.

Bryan Semrow
Oshkosh, WI

Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.

Randy Blanton
Murfreesboro, TN

Patricia wrote out the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room — not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she’d always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

Kari A. Stiller
College Station, TX

"Why does every task in the Realm of Zithanor have to be a quest?" Baldak of Erthorn, handyman to the Great Wizard Zarthon, asked rhetorically as he began his journey began to find the Holy Hammer of Taloria and the Sacred Nail of Ikthillia so Baldak could hang one of Zarthon’s mediocre watercolors, which was an art critique Baldak kept to himself unlike his predecessor, whom Zarthon turned into the Picture Frame of Torathank.

SSG Kevin Craver
Fort Polk, LA

"Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth–or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn’t, which is why it was heretical to say that it did–and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place."

Alf Seegert
Salt Lake City, UT

"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet."

Devery Doleman
Brooklyn, NY

Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother’s garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally, was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste like whipped cream) awakened with a start.

Alison Heft
Lititz, PA

Billy Bob gushed like a broken water main about his new love: "She’s got long, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and she moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, but what she sees in me, a simple plumber, I’ll never know."

Glenn Lawrie
Chung-buk, South Korea

Sandra had waited and wished for Gary to come sweep her off her feet, feeling just like Lois Lane waiting for her handsome, masculine Superman to come fly her away from the humdrum of everyday life, but Gary had never come, and so she’d ended up with Herman, a man as bald as Lex Luthor with worse eyesight than Clark Kent and the maturity level of Jimmy Olsen.

Mary P. Potts
Bradenton, FL

The double agent looked up from his lunch of Mahi-Mahi and couscous and realized that he must escape from Walla Walla to Bora Bora to come face-to-face with his arch enemy by taking out his 30-30 and shooting off his nemesis’ ear-to-ear grin so he could wave bye-bye to this duplicitous life, but the chances of him pulling this off were only so-so, much less than 50-50.

Charles Jaworski
North Pole, AK

As soon as Sherriff Russell heard Bradshaw say, "This town ain’t big enough for the both of us," he inadvertantly visualized a tiny chalk-line circle with a town sign that said ‘population 1,’ and the two of them both trying to stand inside of it rather ineffectively, leaning this way and that, trying to keep their balance without stepping outside of the line, and that was why he was smiling when Bradshaw shot him.

Keriann Noble
Murray, UT

Derwin Thoryndike vowed to place a 14-carat engagement ring on the finger of Glenda-Sue Ellington, so now all he had to do was save up enough money to buy the ring, get it inscribed, and then locate a person named Glenda-Sue Ellington and convince her to marry him.

Harvey McCluskey
Vancouver WA

A warning to the reader: Tom dies in the end of the story so don’t get too attached to him.

Sam Gerring
Lexington, KY

Anyone with a less refined air of unabashed insouciance would not have been able to so easily slip through the security cordon, charm their way past the armed guards, breeze through the marbled reception area and blithely enter the inner sanctum of the UN Security Council and there successfully negotiate an end to all conflict in the Middle East, but that was the sort of man Nigel Simpkins was.

David Lindley
Sheffield
England

The wheel of love had left its treadmarks in his chest once too often, like a knobby mud tire on a monster truck, or like a really big ponce wheel, the kind that tailors use to punch little holes in patterns and that would leave lots of nasty little welts if you were to run it up and down your arm.

Peter Loughlin
Santa Rosa CA

GET THE REST. . . .

. . . and use the combox to add your own bad opening sentences to imarginary novels! (Only keep it clean.)

Do Not Feed The Erik

Okay, folks. A little lunchblogging.

I just want to thank everybody again for the sanity and good humor they have displayed in the two "Huh?" posts.

It has become clear that the original commenter, Erik Johnson, is deliberately attempting to cause trouble. His lurching to new topics, raising new accusations for which he has no proof, and sending out of e-mails to other bloggers can only be interpreted as deliberate harrassment.

Y’all did notice, didn’t you, that after he introduced his latest theme that he indicated that he e-mailed it to ten other people (again, all of them being bloggers from what I can tell), right?

One of them, Steve Dillard, responded by saying:

Look, I don’t know who you are or how in the world I got on your email
list, but go sell crazy somewhere else.

Classic!

I am also told that Erik has been causing problems on other folks’ blogs, where the most successful strategy has been to simply ignore him.

I request the same here. If Erik logs on and comments again, I request that people simply ignore him.

Now a word to Erik: I have been patient with you beyond any reasonable expectation. It appears that you are a troubled individual who may be in need of counselling, as is the case with many people making the transition to adulthood. I suggest that you talk to a counsellor.

However that may be, you are no longer welcome on this blog. Do not post further comments here.

Our Evangelical Brethren . . .

. . . and we are getting into fewer battles than in the old days. There’s less animosity on both sides.

Not to say that there’s none. . . . But less.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE ON THAT BY RICHARD OSTLING.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

One of the Catholic individuals interviewed for the article points out:

"The admiration for John Paul II is simply astounding given (evangelicals’) historic real hatred for the papacy," says William Shea of the College of the Holy Cross.

If anything, he thinks, Pope Benedict XVI is closer to the evangelicals’ outlook than John Paul II.

I think that’s right. In many important ways, B16 is even more where Evangelicals are at that JP2 was.

Unfortunately, that convergence of attitudes in some areas may make differences in others all the more sharply felt.

Roe vs. Wade vs. (Nano) Technology

A reader writes:

Often, when you’re arguing about abortion, you’re told that many embryos fail to implant, with the implication that if God lets this happen, he can’t place much value on early human life.

Yeah, bad implication. One can chalk it up to the Fall just as well. Also, it isn’t certain that all of these miscarriages were human beings. While under ordinary circumstances the union of sperm and ovum result in a new human being from the moment of conception, there might be situations of gross genetic defects in which we might not be dealing with a human being. Unfortunately, we simply don’t know enough–either about genetics or about what goes on in early pregnancy–to draw any conclusions with confidence at this point.

If we develop nanotechnology capable of surgery on a cellular level, would we:

a) be obliged to save these embryos if possible

b) allow the embryos to die (there may be good reasons why they fail to implant) – it is a natural lifespan, no matter how brief, or

c) make this a choice of the parents – many couples who have difficulty conceiving would benefit

The answer to this one is not yet clear. Almost certainly the situation would start out with (c) as the deault option, if for no other reason that initially such nanosurgery would be extraordinarily expensive and beyond the means of many couples. It would likely require heroic sacrifices for many couples to even gain access to the technology in its early days.

It would also take time for moral theologians and then the Church to come to conclusions about what is morally obligatory in this situation. Until that starts to get sorted out, it would still be up to couples to decide what to do.

I suspect that we would not arrive at a point where the Magisterium was saying that nanotechnology must be used in these situations. For one thing, as noted above, some of the conceptions may be so grossly genetically defective that they simply are not humans.

Imagine, if you will, a conception that has five chromosomes instead of the usual forty-six. I don’t know if that ever happens, but use it for purposes of a thought experiment. Such a conception likely would not be a human, could only live a very brief time, and could not be repaired by nanosurgery as adding in the needed genetic material would result in it simply not being the same entity any more.

If some conceptions are not human beings–even though, as we said, in the normal course of affairs the union of sperm and egg result in the creation of a new human being from the moment of conception–then, for those bizarre situations where conception fails to produce a human there would be no moral obligation to use the nanotech.

Further, the same kind of end-of-life calculations that we’re currently starting to go through with folks whose bodies are dying would begin to apply to those who are still in utero.

There might well be situations in which the use of the nanotech would be disproportionate to the goal to be achieved and thus not morally required. For example, using nanotech to force an embryo to implant when the embryo has a genetic defect that will cause the embryo to die in a few weeks anyway. In that case the use of the tech is likely not to be proportionate to the good to be gained and thus it will not be morally obligatory.

In cases where the nanotech is not capable of producing a proportionate good then the thing to do for many couples would be to entrust the child to God’s care and accept its death as a tragedy that will one day be undone by the power of Jesus to redeem individuals from death.

I thus find it hard to imagine a day in which it is morally obligatory to use nanotech in all circumstances. There may be some in which it is morally obligatory, but not all. Just as medical procedures to extend life for born people are obligatory in some but not all circumstances, medical procedures to extend life for the unborn may be obligatory in some but not all circumstances.

Another possible abortion-limiting benefit of nanotechnology might be to correct ectopic pregnancies, where the fetus develops outside the womb in the fallopian tubes.

I can see some circumstances in which this may help, though in other cases nanotech may not be necessary for a falopian-uterine embryo transplant. In other cases, it may not help.

And finally another benefit of nanotech would be the possibility of genetic surgery to correct defects.

Again, in some cases yes. In other cases, I don’t know that it would help. As noted, some genetic defects may be so extreme that nanosurgery might not help. Also, there may be stages of development in which there is not much for nanites to do–for example, if the baby is too small and growing too fast for the nanites to do the surgery without harming it in the process.

If nanotechnology is developed to the extent that the visionaries of the Foresight Institute hope, there could literally be no medical reason for having an abortion.

I’d want to put quotes around "medical reason" since, properly speaking, there are no medical reasons to have a direct abortion, however medical technology certainly has the potential to eliminate a large number of the instances in which individuals think that a therapeutic abortion is warranted, just as it has already eliminated many.

I would caution against thinking that we’re ever likely to get a technological fix for all the potentialities there are. There are intrinsic technological limits, and technological progress comes in stages. Sometimes those stages get sidetracked by economic factors, lack of interest on the part of researchers, political correctness, etc. We rarely get a brilliant, comprehensive fix right out of the box.

As was once pointed out to the eminent physician Dr. Stephen Franklin, "Maybe somebody should have labeled the future: ‘Some Assembly Required.’"

This Week's Show (July 28, 2005)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW.

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Has Jimmy heard of this unapproved apparition?
Who are the Fathers and Doctors of the Church?
Can women be ordained priests or bishops validly?
What does the language of divinization mean?
What are the seven hills of Rome? Is Vatican Hill one of them?
Must Catholics believe in purgatory (caller has trouble with this, with the "sale" of indulgences, with salvation, etc.)
Did purgatory exist and was there anyone in it prior to the time of Christ?
How to refer to a monsignor or a bishop in conversation?
Should the caller attend a wedding where the parties are living in sin prior to the wedding?
Why does God let the devil run amok after he refused to serve? Why do evil spirits obey Jesus?
What to do about priests supporting homosexuality?
What does the Church teach about trans-gendered people?
What’s the difference between being published "with ecclesiastical approval" and the nihil obstat and imprimatur?
How to tell if a prayer or pious work currently carries an indulgence?
How would one report a miracle that one felt one had experienced in connection with the intercession of John Paul II?
Can consecrated chalices, etc., be sold?

This Week’s Show (July 28, 2005)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW.

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Has Jimmy heard of this unapproved apparition?
Who are the Fathers and Doctors of the Church?
Can women be ordained priests or bishops validly?
What does the language of divinization mean?
What are the seven hills of Rome? Is Vatican Hill one of them?
Must Catholics believe in purgatory (caller has trouble with this, with the "sale" of indulgences, with salvation, etc.)
Did purgatory exist and was there anyone in it prior to the time of Christ?
How to refer to a monsignor or a bishop in conversation?
Should the caller attend a wedding where the parties are living in sin prior to the wedding?
Why does God let the devil run amok after he refused to serve? Why do evil spirits obey Jesus?
What to do about priests supporting homosexuality?
What does the Church teach about trans-gendered people?
What’s the difference between being published "with ecclesiastical approval" and the nihil obstat and imprimatur?
How to tell if a prayer or pious work currently carries an indulgence?
How would one report a miracle that one felt one had experienced in connection with the intercession of John Paul II?
Can consecrated chalices, etc., be sold?

Huh?–Parte Dieux

I was impressed by the comments folks posted on my original Huh? post. A lot of very perceptive comments and well-delivered humor. My compliments, folks! I was touched!

I’m not going to drag this subject out, but wanted to put a few items on the record.

First, as many pointed out, I did not endorse the Iraq War in the posts that the original commenter cited. Neither did I dis-endorse it.

Second, I have no intention of commenting specifically on the war at this point. There is no official Catholic stance on the war, and I generally confine myself to matters of theory rather than matters of application when it comes to subjects like this.

Further, if I were to stake out a position in the way that the commenter wants, it would only "feed the troll" as the saying goes. I have no interest in being provoked into a debate with the commenter on this or any other subject. I’ve tried to be patient and charitable, but I’m not going to feed a fixation.

Lest there be any doubt as to the unreasonableness of what was being asked of me in this case (and others have already very ably pointed out the problems here), I would like to put on record an e-mail that was sent to me at 11:05 p.m. Pacific Time, just over an hour before my "Huh?" post even went up–at which point I had publicly said nothing in response to the commenter. In this e-mail, the commenter wrote:

Mr. Akin,
So, you have been a little bit too much influenced by Richard John
Neuhaus, so that you’re a neoconservative like he is now, right?

This is simply wild speculation on the part of the commenter.

In point of fact, I can’t recall ever reading anything Fr. Neuhaus has written on the Iraq War. I don’t know what Fr. Neuhaus’ opinion of it is. I don’t know if he’s a "neoconservative," and I certainly am not one myself.

The commenter is simply leaping wildly to conclusions for which he has no rational grounds.

Further, the commenter carboned his e-mail to eight different people besides myself, all of whom are notable Catholic bloggers. In deference to them, I will not re-post their e-mail addresses.

I will, however, compliment them on the fact that at this time of this writing not one of them has chosen to respond to the commenter’s e-mail–at least not with me included in the reply. It appears that they all have the blogger ethics and professionalism to recognize and resist such attempts to gin up a baseless controversy and start a blogpile on someone else.

For all I know, they themselves may have had encounters with individuals attempting to entrap them in this fashion.

In any event, my compliments to them and to the voices of reason that have weighed in on this subject.

We now return to the blog . . . already in progress.