Heavy Weather

Hailstone
Just a quick post to show this hailstone my son (the amateur meteorologist) found in our yard Sunday night. It was one of several that he grabbed and put into the freezer. They were the size of plums and made quite a racket when they began to hit the roof. I’ll be checking the whole exterior of the house for damage later today, as well as the cars. I’m hopeful that my old SUV is damaged enough for a new paint job (heh-heh. I’ve found that the key to never being fearful about having your car stolen is to never own one worth stealing. I never lock the thing.).

This particular hailstone happened to split when it impacted, revealing the layers that it built up while falling from 30,000+ feet.

We were lucky. The Doppler radar showed the storm (with several tornados) tracking directly toward our neighborhood. We went down into the basement, lit candles when the power failed, and sat there, listening. Nothing much except for the pummeling from the hail. It passed pretty quickly.

A little later (just before midnight) I headed into town for my weekly hour of adoration. Everything was normal until I nearly hit a tree that had fallen into the road. Then I saw where a number of people had gathered at a local church that had been struck by the twister. It was still standing, but obviously damaged (no one was injured).

A good deal of destruction in our area. I will try to send a few more pics later, if I can get them without being obnoxious or a road hazard.

All together, an interesting night. A little too interesting for our daughter. She was not amused at all, at all.

Today’s forecast; bright and sunny.

The Odd Politics Of The Free Market In America

Earlier I mentioned the Vatican position paper saying that developed nations should reconsider their farm subsidies and agricultural trade barriers so that those in the developing world won’t be hurt by them.

Unfortunately, protectionism is a perpetual risk for every nation, including those in the developed world.

After all: What politician doesn’t want to be able to please certain segments of his constitutency by offering it subsidies and protectionistic trade barriers to keep the prices it can charge for what it makes high?

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting analysis of how the U.S. has been able to ward off the kind of protectionism that has hurt Europe’s economies, as well as a warning about what may be on our horizon.

He writes:

The beauty of the American free-trade consensus over the last few decades is that it split two outlooks that tend to go together: nationalism and socialism. In terms of economic policy, nationalism is indistinguishable from socialism. When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. And what is the difference between socialized medicine and nationalized healthcare?

Liberals are naturally sympathetic to socialistic arguments, conservatives to nationalistic ones. But to everyone’s benefit these two outlooks have been quarantined in different parties. Conservatives have been culturally nationalistic but economically liberal (in the classical sense). Liberals have been economically nationalistic — on healthcare, regulation, taxes, unions — but culturally liberal. Although it’s been quite painful for them, this cultural liberalism has kept the Democratic Party in favor of free trade and immigration. Protectionism hurts foreigners and poor Americans, after all.

Indeed, to be fair, the Democratic Party has been heroic in bucking its base — the economically nationalistic labor movement — on free trade. FDR, Truman and Kennedy were all consummate economic nationalists. Free trade was tactically in their interests for a long time because it dovetailed with labor’s interest. When the United States stopped being the manufacturer to the world, the Democratic Party struggled — not always successfully — to stay pro-trade on principle, even at the cost of votes. Meanwhile, the GOP has had the opposite challenge: to stay pro-free trade even as its ranks swell with working-class voters enamored with their paychecks, not Adam Smith.

Now, a win-at-all-costs Democratic Party has realized that this is the perfect moment for it to re-brand all of its economic ideas in the language of patriotism. Many Republicans are determined to fight the Democrats for this turf. So they too are bending their economic policies to fit their cultural conservatism.

And if we let them follow this path, we’ll have the same problems as Europe in no time.

GET THE STORY.

The Vatican: Exponent Of Free Trade?

One doesn’t normally get the impression that many high churchmen are committed exponents of the free market.

Even when the free market is circumscribed by laws safeguarding fundamental moral values (like: You can’t buy and sell intrinsically immoral goods and services), and while John Paul II acknowledged that the market is able to do better for man than Communism, the impression is still given that many churchmen are somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of the free market.

But there seems to be an evolution of thought occurring on this subject. As the economies of the world have developed, it has become more and more clear what works and what doesn’t, and the reputation of the free market seems to be improving in at least some ecclesiastical circles.

One recent sign of at least part of this is a March 9th position paper issued by the Holy See for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s conference on agrarian reform and rural developement.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate a copy of the document, but from what can be gleaned of its contents from the news, it appears that at least some folks at the Vatican appreciate the fact that protectionistic farm subsidies and trade barriers in the developed world hurt farmers in the developing world.

Thus, according to the Catholic News Service (EXERPTS):

Justice requires that wealthy nations reconsider the level of subsidies they offer their own farmers and the barriers that countries place on the import of agricultural products from developing nations, the Vatican said.

While developing countries have to take responsibility for their own agrarian policies, the Vatican said, rich countries cannot ignore the impact their internal policies, particularly farm subsidies and trade barriers, have on the poor.

"Correcting this situation means appealing for a concrete concept of justice capable of being realized in policies, rules, norms and acts of solidarity," the Vatican said.

What you’ve just heard is the sound of one shoe dropping.

The other shoe–if it is to drop–is the recognition that what’s good for the third world in this respect is good for the first.

The fact developed countries are as economically developed as they are is no accident: It’s because they developed a legal and cultural environment in which economic development could take place, and that has been helped along by refusal to engage in economic protectionism and thus have free markets.

True, Europe is presently in the grip of a wave of protectionism that has hampered its economy, and even here in America there are protectionist elements (like all the farm subsidies the government gives out), but an important part of our economic development is that our markets are free-er than they could be.

It’ll be interesting to see how thought on these matters evolves in ecclesiastical circles in the future.

GET THE STORY.

Jesus Decoded

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ communications department has released a web site responding to the claims made in The Da Vinci Code.

The site–www.jesusdecoded.com–contains articles by various people on various aspects of the book, as well as the upcoming film. Amy Welborn is one of the folks contributing it.

The site doesn’t have an overabundance of info at this point, but it is a good effort that should help a lot of people. It also may grow substantially over time. There is a Q & A section where readers can submit questions and get answers.

There is also a "Jesus Decoded" TV special that will be available on DVD next month.

GET THE STORY.

VISIT THE SITE.

Literal Vs. Literal

Down yonder, a reader (quoting me) writes:

Maybe, though the literal sense of those texts is that God will send a great age of peace, during which it will be as if all strife–even between animals–will be eliminated.

Er. No. What you mean here is that the meaning of the passage is certainly metaphorical. Which, to be sure, it is. Lions, leopards, lambs, kids — even if the beasts will literally exist, they will be part of, and symbolically represent, that peace.

The literal meaning is what the passage actually says not what it actually means, even if that meaning is demonstrably false or makes no sense.

Er, yes, actually.

This may be a case of field-specific jargon.

In biblical studies the "literal" sense of the text–in the proper sense of the word–is what the author meant, not what his words say.

Thus when Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son, the literal sense of the text is not that there was this son who demanded his inheritance and went and spent it on loose living and came back to his father, who received him.

The literal sense is that God is always willing to take back a sinner, no matter what he has done.

I know it’s paradoxical to call this the literal sense, but this is the sense in which the term is used in classical exegesis (e.g., in the dictum that the literal sense of the text is always the foundation of the spiritual and you can’t play the spirital against the literal.

Thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. the profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."

Unfortunately, there is no word that has become firmly established for what you are calling "literal," and someitmes biblical scholars casually speak of it as literal, too–leading to confusion.

To avoid this problem, in what I originally wrote I contrasted literal with "even more literal." In other places, I’ve used the terms hyper-literal or literalistic.

In any event, the contrast remains between the surface meaning of the words of a text and what the author intended to communicate by them. In biblical studies–as paradoxical as it sounds–the latter is properly considered the literal sense of the text, not the former.

Mystery food! What is it?

I happened to see this while I was shopping today at the San Diego Mitsuwa Japanese market, where I had gone in pursuit of tofu & shirataki noodles. This isn’t either one of those, though.

Sorry for the poor picture quality. I only had my camera phone with me, and it looks like I got it a little too close to the camera.

Answer to what the mystery food is tomorrow.

Galactica Leaving?

Given what folks have said in the comboxes, I’m sure many are jazzed about tonight’s season finale for Battlestar Galactica.

It’s apparently got so much story in it that the show’s creators convinced the network to allow them to break out of the hour-long format and do a 90-minute finale (airing from 10-11:30 Eastern & Pacific).

I’m expecting a major clifffhanger at the end–if not a major rolling cliffhanger (that is, multiple cliffhangars involving different plot lines, piled on top of each other).

Last season we got a cliffhanger involving the sudden self-outing of Sharon as a Cylon in an out-of-the-blue act of extreme violence.

This year the cliffhanger may be even more intense. (The show’s creators like to top themselves.)

But it appears we’ll have to wait even longer to find out what happens on the other side of it.

And we may not find out on the Sci-Fi Channel at all.

Huh?

Here’s what’s going on: Normally Sci-Fi’s shows run 20 episode seasons, divided into two blocks of ten. The first 10 episodes air as a "summer season" and the second 10 episodes air as a winter season, starting in January. That’s the way SG-1 and Atlantis work, and it’s the way BGS has . . . until now.

Word is that Galactica will skip the "summer season" and will not start showing new episodes again UNTIL OCTOBER.

I am majorly unhappy about this.

I also wonder what it’ll do to the ratings of Sci-Fi’s Friday night lineup. Despite being last in the lineup of shows for that night, Galactica pulls higher ratings than SG-1 and Atlantis. That’s the OPPOSITE of what normally happens on a network: The lead-in shows get higher ratings, which then fall off as the evening wears on.

Galactica has been so good that it’s done the reverse. I’m sure that SG-1 and Atlantis have benefitted from this, with viewers deciding to tune in early since they’re committed to be there to see Galactica. But without Galactica in that 10 p.m. slot, the ratings for SG-1 and Atlantis may suffer, with viewers having less motivation to tune in.

(I know I’ll be less motivated to rush home after Friday night square dancing and tune in, meaning that I may not stay up for the replays of the Stargates and may instead just wait to see them on DVD.)

Why would Sci-Fi do this?

I don’t know. They may be trying to bring Galactica in line with the way TV series normally air their new shows, which have a fall premier and then play through spring, with a summer hiatus.

But there may be more to it than that.

SY-FY PORTAL IS REPORTING THAT NBC UNIVERSAL, WHICH OWNS SCI-FI, MAY BE MULLING WHETHER IT WANTS TO YANK GALACTICA OFF SCI-FI AND PUT IT ON NBC.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

That’s a prospect that makes me distinctly . . . nervous.

Many have called BSG the best show on television, and I certainly think it stands up against the junk normally airing on the Big 3 networks (none of which I tune in to watch).

It’d be nice to see Galactica get the mainstream success that its quality merits.

But.

You need much bigger ratings to stay on the air on a major network than on a cable channel, and if Galactica’s ratings don’t take off fast, NBC could decide to pull the plug on the show . . . whereas it could have stayed on Sci-Fi for years and years and years. (Like SG-1.)

Also: NBC network executives could "take more of an interest" in BSG if it were promoted to the bigtime, meaning more interference with the way Ron Moore and his team have been running the show.

And since the suits at NBC don’t understand science fiction the way the suits at Sci-Fi presumably do, that could mean a lot of idiotic, ham-fisted interferences in the show . . . like the ones that killed Crusade.

So I’m nervous, and we’ll have to wait to see what happens.

Looks like there’s more than one Galactica-related cliffhanger afoot.

A Small Rebel Force…

Just as pro-lifers begin to find themselves tempted to despair over the Empire of Death that is ever more quickly strangling our society comes a message of hope from the Rebel Alliance for Life:

"A seven-month pregnant woman — her belly vast — was at a supper with a friend. He, being of the family type, told her she was very lucky to be expecting a baby. He was the first person who had said such a thing, she told him.

"It’s a jarring anecdote because it so sharply puts into focus how pregnancy has become the occasion not for congratulations, but for anxious questions about childcare, leave and work. Watch how the announcement of a pregnancy among women is followed within minutes by the ‘What are you going to do?’ question. We’ve replaced the age-old anxiety around life-threatening childbirth with a new — and sometimes it appears just as vast — cargo of anxiety around who is going to care.

[…]

"The painful paradox is that while women have liberated themselves from being defined by their biology — the fate of the girl in many African and Asian societies who is not truly a woman until she has given birth — mothers have ended up relegated to the status of constant abject failure in a culture driven by consumerism and workaholism. There is no kudos in being a mum, only in being other things — such as thin, or the boss — despite being a mum. Motherhood is a form of handicap.

"The fact that we still have as many births in the UK as we do is extraordinary. Some cynics would say it’s the triumph of biology over culture — we are programmed to reproduce regardless. I prefer a more romantic notion: that it’s a form of popular rebellion by which the prevailing anti-natalist mores of a manipulative consumer capitalism are trumped by the innate understanding of millions of women (and men) of what really constitutes love and fulfilment — dependence, commitment, the pleasure of guiding enthusiasm and, above all, the privilege of nurturing innocence."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to the reader who sent the link.)

"It’s a … popular rebellion by which the prevailing anti-natalist mores … are trumped by the innate understanding of millions of women (and men) of what really constitutes love and fulfilment."

I like that. Now I just have to find the rebel base so I can join the alliance being formed to restore the culture of life…. Oh, wait! I’ve already found it.

Ectopic Abortion

A reader writes:

I recently had a relative who had an ectopic pregnancy that was terminated by using the drug Methotrexate.  Everything that I have read says that ectopic pregnancy cannot deliver the baby alive.

I believe that from reading the Catechism that this was an abortion and that this person has excommunicated herself by submitting to the abortion?  I have not spoken to her and do not know how or if I should bring up the subject of what happened and what it means to her relationship with God.  I have prayed much for her and her aborted baby, but any advise you could offer would be greatly helpful.  This is a horrible situation for any mother to be in.

It is indeed. Discovering that you are experiencing an ectopic pregnancy is horiffic.

First, some (partial) good news: Your relative may well not be excommunicated.

Although canon law provides an automatic excommunication for procured abortion, it also includes a number of exceptions which keep this excommunication from being triggered.

Among those exceptions is not knowing that a particular action would incur a canonical penalty. If your relative did not know that procured abortion carries a penalty under canon law then she is not excommunicated.

There are also several other exceptions that might pertain to her state and keep the excommunication from being triggered.

In view of this, I would not raise the possibility of excommunication to her, especially at this time, when she is still recovering emotionally from the ectopic pregnancy.

Now: What about the use of the Methotrexate?

I assume from the way that you present the matter that this drug was used while the child was still alive.

That may not be the case, however. If the child was already dead then its use would not have been immoral. If they knew that the child was dead then it would have been morally legitimate to use this drug to remove the child’s body from the mother.

If you address this situation with your relative then you should first verify that the child was still alive before telling your relative that what she did was wrong. (I’d also verify that Methotrexate was used. Always verify your facts rigorously before accusing someone of a grave sin.)

Now: What if the child was alive?

In that case, what she did was a procured abortion and it was gravely immoral.

Although there are ways of dealing with ectopic pregnancies that many orthodox Catholic moral theologians regard as morally licit, use of an abortifacient drug like Methotrexate is not one of them. The reason is that Methotrexate directly kills the child, and it is never morally permissible to directly take the life of an innocent.

If the child was alive then this was an abortion. It’s too bad your relative did not know about or did not pursue methods of dealing with her situation that are potentially morally licit.

Given what happened, it would in principle be a spiritual work of mercy to alert your relative to the moral character of the act she performed so that she knows that she can take the appropriate steps to deal with it (going to confession).

Your job in delivering such a message to her would be to do it in the way that has the best chance of actually prompting repentance, meaning not only using the best words but also doing it at the best time possible.

When and whether such a time might be, I can’t say. I don’t know how long ago this occurred, what your relative’s state of mind is at present regarding the abortion, or what your relationship with her is.

Ultimately, the decision of when and how to broach the subject is a judgment call, and you just have to make the best decision that you can and trust God with the results.

(You also do not have to assume that you are the only instrument God has to work with your relative. He’s got lots. So don’t think this all hinges on you. In fact, depending on what your relationship with your relative is, you may simply be the wrong person to deliver this message. That’s something that has to be considered.)

If you do decide that it is opportune to discuss this with your relative, what words should you use?

Myself, I tend to be direct about the evil involved, while trying to frame the subject in as compassionate way as possible.

If I were in your position and decided that the moment to talk about it had come, I would probably say something like:

<massively compassionate tone of voice>I just wanted to let you know that I feel really horrible about what happend. Having an ectopic pregnancy is a nightmare that no woman should have to go through. It must have hurt you tremendously to have to go through that, and I want you to know that you and your baby are in my prayers.

That being said, I understand that you used Methotrexate to deal with the situation. While it’s understandable that you felt the need to do something, and while there are potentially moral ways to handle an ectopic pregnancy, this was not one of them. Methotrexate directly brings about the death of the child, and it is never morally licit to directly bring about the death of an innocent.

I don’t know how much you understood about all this at the time. I’m not judging you AT ALL. I know this was a horribly shattering experience for you, and I don’t want to do anything but offer my support for you.

I also don’t want to pry into this matter. I respect your privacy. But I hope that you’ll consider going to the sacrament of reconciliation to make sure that you’re square with God about this. He loves you even more than I do, and I know that you will find healing and relief in the sacrament.</massively compassionate tone of voice>.

That’s what I’d be inclined to say, but others may be able to propose better words.

(NOTE: Exhortations to approach the relative before she had a chance to recover from the event emotionally and exhortations to read the relative the riot act will be deleted.)

I’d also be prepared to answer questions about what alternatives to the use of Methotrexate that she could have used.

READ ABOUT THAT HERE.

You could also e-mail her that link if she wants rather than try to explain these things in the discussion.

Spend No $10K Bills

Tenthousand

A U.S. bill with a face-value of $10,000 has been moved to a more secure location for safekeeping and historical archiving:

"The $10,000 bill bears the likeness of Salmon P. Chase, for whom the bank was named. Chase was a U.S. senator who served as treasury secretary under President Lincoln.

"The large bill was discovered in a bank customer’s safety deposit box after the owner died 20 years ago. The woman’s family exchanged the currency at face value, and the bank stored the bill in a plastic sleeve for protection.

"But bank officials decided the bills would be safer at the JP Morgan Chase & Co. corporate office in New York. The bank sent the bills there last month by armored truck.

"The government stopped printing bills larger than $100 in 1945 and hasn’t issued any since 1969. The Green Bay bills were printed in 1934."

GET THE STORY.