A Novel Idea

Earthjim Over at Catholic Exchange, Terry Mattingly tells us about a new graphic novel / movie project from the creator of Earthworm Jim (left), Doug TenNapel.

Along with exploring the creative process that TenNapel employs, Mattingly describes how Creature Tech moved from a picture story on paper to a real , fer-sure Hollywood movie;

"The key moment came when the blogger called "Moriarty" posted the following at the Ain’t It Cool (aintitcool.com) site for film insiders:  "There’s no doubt. It’s weird . . . It’s also very funny, profoundly sweet and heartfelt, touching in a strange way, and serious about concepts like faith and family without being in any way preachy or corny.

"Simply put, Creature Tech is the best American animated film since The Iron Giant . . . Better than anything from any studio . . . It’s a movie that just happens to be in print."

Within minutes, studios started calling his agent. Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox won the bidding war and early work began on a live-action movie"

I want to see it already, just based on the sketchy (heh) description in Mattingly’s article. TenNapel deals with the creative problems that face Christian artists in an apparently organic, sensible and honest way. Of the current state of the entertainment biz from a Christian perspective, he states;

"People want a quick fix. Christians are going to have to learn that art isn’t automatically good if it’s made by Christians. And Hollywood will have to learn that art isn’t automatically bad if it’s made by Christians."

I did not grow up reading comics much, and am not that familiar with the graphic novel genre, but I hope to read Creature Tech before the movie comes out. Any graphic novel fans out there who might be able to give me some confirmation on the worthiness of this one? It sounds tasty.

GET THE STORY.

Blog Week Lite?

Just a note to let folks know that I’m currently having to devote a significant amount of time to a writing project (the Mormonism booklet for the publisher outside the U.S.), and blogging may be light this week.

I’ll do my best to at least throw up some interesting links, though.

Abortion/Excommunication Mess

There are press reports about an Austrian bishop saying that a business owner who rented shopping mall space to an abortion clinic has excommunicated himself.

HERE’S JOHN ALLEN’S VERSION OF THE STORY.

Allen goes a bit too far when he says:

It’s long been a subject of debate whether more remote forms of cooperation, such as the contractor who builds a clinic, also trigger automatic excommunication.

Not that I’m aware of. Not in serious canonical circles.

The canon that provides automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication for abortion is this:

Can. 1398 A
person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae
excommunication.

As phrased, that would strike only the person who has actually procured the abortion. However, canon 1329 also provides that:

§2. Accomplices who are not named in a law or
precept incur a latae sententiae penalty attached to a delict if without their
assistance the delict would not have been committed, and the penalty is of such
a nature that it can affect them; otherwise, they can be punished by ferendae
sententiae penalties.

The clause in blue allows not only the procurer of the abortion to be struck with automatic excommunication but also those directly involved in the abortion itself, such as the abortionist, the person who paid the money for the abortion, and possibly a few others (nurses, the person who drove the patient to the clinic). It does not apply to people whose cooperation is more remote and thus whose role might have been substituted for by someone else. At least, in the absence of an authentic interpretation to the contrary, it is doubtful whether the law applies to remote cooperators, which means that the following canon kicks in:

Can. 18 Laws which
establish a penalty, restrict the free exercise of rights, or contain an
exception from the law are subject to strict interpretation.

That means that in cases of doubt you have to give the benefit of the doubt to the person who would be struck by a penalty.

Since the cooperation of a person who rents space to a "sexual health clinic" that performs abortions is only remotely involved (like the people who supply electric power and gas and who stamp the legal forms at city hall and to handle the clinic’s money at the bank, and who provide cleaners, and who provide medical supplies), you can’t–as the law presently stands–say that these people are automatically excommunicated.

The green CLSA commentary on the Code concurs:

A properly strict interpretation means that the canon applies primarily to those directly participating in the abortion, not those removed from such participation [p. 1603, n. 308].

If a bishop with the proper jurisdiction over the shopping mall owner concludes that the owner is gravely at fault for renting space to the clinic (an extremely resonable conclusion) then he could declare an excommunication (ferendae sententiae), but it would not be an automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication.

My sense on this is that the Austrian bishop (apparently an auxiliary of Cardinal Shonborn) simply misspoke, which is why Cardinal Schonborn hasn’t backed him up.

In any event, the press reports on this are a mess.

MORE FROM ED PETERS.

The Our Father In Aramaic

Yesterday there was a caller on the show who wanted to know about finding the Our Father in Aramaic. I mentioned that it’s found in the Pshitta, an Aramaic translation of Scripture, and it’s also available online. Unfortunately, the address of the site I had was too long, so I promised to put it up on the blog this morning.

Unfortunately, after the show, a closer inspection of the site showed it to be kooky to the extreme. The translation they gave of the Aramaic into English was completely wrong, so I decided just to print the text of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

First, though, here’s an audio file of it (.wav format):

LISTEN.

After doing a little digging around, I found the following nice image, which contains the prayer in English and the Aramaic alphabet, with an Aramaic pronounciation also. Bear in mind that the English and the Aramaic pronunciation runs left-to-right, while the Aramaic script itself runs right-to-left.

Also bear in mind that the pronunciation the prayer is given in Aramaic will vary from one group of speakers to another, based on accent. For example, the first word of the Lord’s prayer in Aramaic is Abun, which will be pronounced by some groups as "Ah-boon," others as "Ah-woon," and still others (as in the transliteration below) as "Ah-voon."

Click to enlarge.
Abundbashmaya2

One word of warning about the above: What’s on the Aramaic transliteration line doesn’t always match up to exactly what’s on the English line. Because of word division and length, the lines don’t match up exactly. For example, on the third line from the bottom in the Aramaic column, you’ll see the word Malkutha ("Mal-koo-tha"), which means "Kingdom," but Kingdom is on the fourth line from the bottom in the English column.

I can’t go through the whole prayer line by line right now, but some folks might find it interesting to understand a little of how the language works.

The prayer is often called the Abun Dbashmaya in Aramaic, which are its first two words. This is similar to the way we call it the Our Father after it’s first two words. But in Aramaic "Abun Dbashmaya" means more than just "Our Father."

The "Our Father" part of it is just the first word: Abun. As you know, one of the Aramaic words for "father" (there are actually several variants) is Abba, which is just spelled ABA in Aramaic (it being understood that the B reduplicates in pronunciation).

In Aramaic, pronouns often take the form of suffixes on the ends of words, and the suffix -un is a pronoun suffix that means "our." When you stick -un on Abba, you get "Abun," meaning "Our Father."

The Aramaic word for "heaven" is shmaya, and you can see that in the second word of the prayer. The prefix b- (sometimes followed by a vowel, sometimes not) is the Aramaic equivalent of "in" (remember the in/on discussion we had recently?), so bashmaya means "in heaven." And the prefix d- is the Aramaic equivalent of "who," "which," or "that." Dbashmaya thus means "who (is) in heaven." (Aramaic sometimes omits the verb "to be," as it does here.)

Thus you can see how "Abun dbashmaya" translates as "Our Father, who art in heaven."

Cool, huh?

PlayPlay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Undying Love

Skeleton_loversYou’ve gotta admire ’em!

The picture to the left depicts the skeletons of a pair of lovers who died 5,000 years ago (3,000 B.C.) in Mantua, Italy.

Their tenderness is obvious.

This couple wasn’t buried in a volcanic explosion like that of Pompeii (which happend in the 1st century A.D.). It seems that the man (left) was killed or mortally wounded first and the woman (right) lay down beside him, knowing that she would be killed as well.

Sad!

But a tribute to human love.

I find archaeologists saying how "excited" they are by this find a little morbid.

I’d suggest, instead, praying for their souls.

Lovers like that deserve that much.

GET THE STORY.

Apple Vs. DRM?

If true, then

GOOD.

HERE’S STEVE JOBS’ ORIGINAL ESSAY.

EXCERPT:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.