This is either the coolest gross job, or the grossest cool job that I know of. This Fin whale washed up on the beach in Florida and scientists performed a "necropsy" (even the term is gross) to determine how the whale died and it’s condition before. I think it would be fascinating work.
I will let the readers check out the details of the CNN.com. story for themselves.
It was determined that the whale was probably struck by a ship.
The whale’s last thoughts are believed to have been "I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
Our Lady Of The Underpass, Redux
Kewly enough, I noticed that my humble post on "Our Lady of the Underpass" has been picked up elsewhere. However, not all readers of this blog have yet picked up on the distinction that JimmyAkin.org is currently a group blog, so my post was mistakenly attributed to Jimmy. James White of Alpha & Omega Ministries writes:
"And finally, Dave Armstrong saw my note on Mary stains, and has fulfilled my wildest dreams by telling his fellow Catholics to get a grip (a little paraphrase there). Thank you Mr. Armstrong. Now, if you could be so kind as to go down to Chicago and try that out in front of all those folks lighting candles, I’d like to see their reaction. Or, how about cleaning the stain off the wall while explaining that? Yes, that would be interesting. But maybe Armstrong will comment on this amazing comment cited by Jimmy Akin about the same ‘stains.’"
[White here cites the original post. His editorial comment: "Um … yeah, wow. OK."]
Since the post has garnered a bit of controversy, even within the comments section of my post itself, I decided that a bit of clarification would be helpful:
The commenter I cited, a reader of Relapsed Catholic, implicitly agreed that the stains on the wall in question are just that, stains. As one reader of my post pointed out, when Mary actually appears, she simply appears. In all true apparitions, it’s really Mary, not an image in toast, oil, or any other material thing:
"These things ARE NOT MARY. They are nothing, just shadows, oil slicks, water stains. Our Lady NEVER appears IN something, IN some medium. She simply APPEARS. I am really sick of these stories, they really get my goat. Don’t these people know ANYTHING about verified Marian appearances? Rant over. For now" (emphasis is the reader’s).
(As a quick side note, even the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, miraculously impressed on St. Juan Diego’s tilma, is just that: An image. It was an image given as a sign to verify the reality of the apparitions given to St. Juan Diego himself.)
The distinction the person I quoted was trying to make, a distinction with which I agreed, is that it is in line with a genuinely Catholic piety to consider shapes vaguely similar to Mary to be images — icons, if you will — of Mary placed within creation. If such shapes are indeed placed within creation, then God does it; something Relapsed Catholic’s commenter states whimsically by attributing the deed to the Child Jesus scribbling pictures of Mommy.
The Catholic worldview is an inherently sacramental and incarnational worldview. Because Catholics experience God spiritually through the physical reality of the sacraments, it is natural for them to instinctively see God’s hand at work in the physical order of things. That sacramental experience of God enables Catholics to draw more deeply from the reality of the Incarnation than might non-sacramental Christians who only experience God cerebrally. Thus, Catholics can draw connections that might otherwise horrify non-sacramental Christians. "Our Lady of the Underpass" is one example.
As another example, I once read a book on St. Joseph which quoted a Catholic saying that he especially loved St. Joseph because St. Joseph taught God how to be a man. When I first read that, I loved the idea but realized that this was a deeply Catholic sentiment that might well repulse Protestant Fundamentalists. It’s not because they would disagree that Joseph was entrusted by God to raise and rear Jesus Christ; it’s because they have not deeply pondered, as Catholics have over many centuries, what it means for God to have chosen to become a man. What it means that he chose to enter humanity as a baby rather than as a man full-grown. The repulsion would be the first instinct, the pious Christian reaction that it is impossible for man to teach God anything, even, to a certain extent, how to be a man. It would take deeper reflection to realize that there is nothing wrong with saying that Christ’s earthly father taught him some of what it means to be a man, just as human fathers do for human sons.
Getting back to the original point: In short, yes, designs that appear to resemble Mary should not be mistaken for "apparitions" around which followings presumably develop. At best, such natural designs of sacred images are natural icons open to interpretation by others who may see other, non-sacred designs in them. Just like icons, such images should not be worshipped, but if they point the person onward to Mary and through her to Christ, neither should they be condemned. (And, in distinction to sacred icons, which should be treated with the reverence due such icons, there would be nothing wrong with eating a "Marian" grilled-cheese sandwich or scrubbing a "Marian" oil slick from a wall.)
Those non-sacramental Christians critiquing the Catholic reaction to such images should at least remember that the Catholic worldview is finely attuned to seeing the supernatural within the natural creation of God. Such Christians may not understand the conclusions Catholic draw from such a sensitivity to creation, but should at least be able to agree that it expresses a genuine Christian sentiment that all creation (which includes sandwiches and oil slicks), of which Christ is the firstborn, was created in Christ and for Christ, and thus gives glory to him (cf. Col. 1:15-16).
Noble Metals
I found it poetically comforting that today, on the very day that Benedict XVI was installed as Pope, our parish went back to the old custom of using precious (or "noble") metals to administer the Body and Blood of our Lord. I thought, "Of course! How fitting."
In our everyday lives we eat and drink out of glass and ceramic containers all the time. Nothing special about that. Receiving the Body and Precious Blood from vessels made of gold or silver reminds us that this is no ordinary meal, no run-of-the-mill family get-together. Aside from the Mass, when do we expect to eat or drink from silver or gold? It is one of those times when the art of the liturgy is so important. It practically shouts, "this is important!". It is also one of those small particulars in which the recent decades of liturgical experimentation have proved such a failure.
A few months ago kneeling was re-introduced at our Life Teen Mass. There are no more crowds of teens around the altar during the consecration. And now we are receiving the Eucharist from vessels of "noble metals".
Thanks be to God, indeed.
Are We Modern Yet?
From CNN.com comes another balanced piece about how the new Pope had better change to meet the expectations of a bunch of whining babies the more modernist members of his flock. Balanced, as is fairly typical for CNN, means drawing insights from a broad range of liberals. They lament-
Some experts are skeptical that Benedict will embrace modernity, believing he will instead focus more on internal church changes than on reaching out globally. That said, he remains — by definition — the leader of hundreds of millions of Catholics in most every corner of the world.
That’s nice at the end, there, where they grudgingly admit that he is the Pope.
I think (and hope) that those who expect this Pope to put his finger to the wind to test doctrine will be, not just disappointed, but dismayed. Of all the things for a Pope to embrace, mere "modernity" would be the most fatuous. Modern, by definition, means something that is already fading, already passing away, to make room for something even more modern. What is astonishing about modernity is how blindingly fast it becomes quaint and outmoded. Remember beanbag chairs? Polyester suits? Poodle skirts, for cryin’ out loud?
Mankind needs timeless truths, not the latest fads whipped up by doctrinal fashionistas. I can’t wait for the first encyclical.
In the words of G.K. Chesterton –
"My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."
Oxyrhynchus!
Oxyrhynchus! It’s not something you use to wash your clothes!
It’s a place in Egypt where, a century ago, a huge load of ancient manuscripts were found. (This tends to happen in Egypt, where the desert climate better preserves documents written on papyrus, which has a nasty tendency to rot in wetter climes.)
A BUNCH OF STUFF WAS DISCOVERED AT OXYRHYNCHUS,
including some fragments of what later turned out to be the Gospel of Thomas (we got the full text from the Nag Hammadi find later on) and the Gospel of the Hebrews–both being apocryphal gospels that are not inspired and do not belong in the New Testament.
This much is common knowledge among folks with a passing familiarity with biblical archaeology.
But what many have been less familiar with is the fact that many of the Oxyrhynchus texts remained unread because they were simply illegible. In fact, 800 boxes of the things remained unread at Oxford.
A new technique using infra-red has enabled scholars to finally read the documents, and the results thus far have been stunning.
EXCERPTS:
The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".
The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.
The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery
Now, as this story starts to break further into public consciousness, you’re going to hear a lot about the possibility of new gospels being discovered, and the secular media will do its part to try to suggest that any that are found are as early as possible, so as to make them rivals for the canonical gospels.
Take all this with a big spoonful of salt.
While it is theoretically possible that documents from the first century could be found, it is more likely that additional works from later than that would be found. These might be simply copies of Gnostic works we found at Nag Hammadi and be no big deal (despite media hype) or they might be new documents. In any event, it would take a good bit of time to figure out what their dates are, and the first dates proposed would likely turn out to be wrong.
It is possible that documents could be discovered that would contain accurate historical traditions of Jesus or the apostles, but the discovery of anything actually by them is unlikely (which is not to say that we mightn’t find things falsely attributed to them).
If we did discover, say, a new letter of Paul that looked authentic, it would set off a huge debate in the Christian community over what to do with it, but the odds of it being added to the New Testament (certainly in our lifetimes) would be remote.
What it might do, though, is prompt a lot of folks to realize how dependent on Tradition we are for the canon of Scripture–that it was Tradition that guided the early Church in identifying as authentic the manuscripts that we now have in the Bible. Any new document appearing to be authentic would lack a tradition of use in the churches and thus would not readily be added to the Scriptures of any group of Christians–except those already favorable to Gnostic texts out of an attraction to heterodoxy and novelty.
More later on what would happen if we found such a document. In the meantime,
Me Want Broccoli!
First Scary Monster disappeared because he was too, well, scary – then Elmo came along, and now the writers of the Sesame Street have apparently staged an intervention with Cookie Monster and have helped him to confront his addiction to sweets. He has now learned that cookies are a "sometimes" food. How did they accomplish this, I wonder? Did they force his eyelids open and make him watch movies of obese children? Wait, no! Cookie has no eyelids on his googly eyes. Did they quietly send him off to rehab, like an aging rocker?
I readily confess that I watched Sesame Street well into my teen years because there was a fair amount of semi-brilliant comedy on the show. Attention: Jim Henson has left the building.
The brilliance of the early Sesame Street was that it did not take itself too seriously. Sure, help the kids learn to count and spell and all, but throw in a lot of broad, goofy, stupid humor, too, along with some pratt falls and pie fights. Well, I never actually saw a pie fight (those muppets would be hard to clean) but you get the idea. In those days Bert and Ernie were like Laurel and Hardy, or Abbot and Costello. A great number of their skits had no point at all, except a few minutes of idiotic fun. Ernie was a consumate pest, and Bert the ultimate straight man… er, straight muppet. Think Sponge Bob and Squidward.
PBS, though, has had to deal with the same changes as the Big 3 networks: Increasing competition leading to growing irrelevance. Hardly anyone is watching anymore, and the median age of the average Sesame Street viewer has been dropping over the years. It is now almost exclusively a pre-kindergarten show.
So, goodbye, Cookie. We’ll always have the "rectangle" sketch.
GET THE "HEALTHFUL!" STORY.
A Libertarian Case For Marriage
In order to win the battle on marriage in this country, pro-family individuals need to be able to make their case in a way that is not dependent on religious arguments because so many (even persons of faith) will allow these to be partitioned in public debate and ignored at voting time.
Fortunately, the natural law basis for marriage is clear enough that this is fairly easy to do.
Some even have hopes of putting the argument in a way that may appeal to libertarians.
Beauty, eh?
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the way things are made, the way they look. As a kid I was extremely nearsighted for a while before anyone discovered the fact. The result was that: (A) I had no interest in school, and (B) I developed the habit of examining things really closely, because that was the only way I could see anything. I appreciate artists who can paint in a very impressionistic style, but for me the details are the fun part. Hopefully, the other aspects of the composition are strong as well, so the details are part of a well-balanced whole. Detail is a big part of the beauty of any object. I don’t feel that my job as a Catholic artist is to bring beauty into the world, but to bring attention to what is beautiful in the world.
Now, I said all that to say this: If you have not yet discovered the music of Alison Krauss and Union Station, you owe it to yourself. She and her bandmates, particularly Jerry Douglas, display a rare depth and genius, as well as just pure musicianship; the details of a musical expression that is as meticulously crafted as it is heartfelt. Alison Krauss’s vocal cords should be declared a national treasure, and Jerry Douglas – well, he should be bronzed, or something.
Don’t settle for "interesting". Life is short. Go straight for beauty.
Animal Yucks
No! This post ain’t about yucky animals! It’s about animal laughter.
Back in grad school, my Medieval philosophy professor was convinced that her dogs laughed–or rather, had a canine equivalent to laughter–but didn’t have a scientific study or report of one to back it up.
But LiveScience.Com has one.
EXCERPT:
"Indeed, neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of the brain, and ancestral forms of play and laughter existed in other animals eons before we humans came along with our ‘ha-ha-has’ and verbal repartee,"
says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University. When chimps play and chase each other, they pant in a manner that is strikingly like human laughter, Panksepp writes in the April 1 issue of the journal Science. Dogs have a similar response.
Rats chirp while they play, again in a way that resembles our giggles. Panksepp found in a previous study that when rats are playfully tickled, they chirp and bond socially with their human tickler. And they seem to like it, seeking to be tickled more. Apparently joyful rats also preferred to hang out with other chirpers.
Stealth Deer
Thought some of you might enjoy this picture I snapped looking out the window into our back yard. The bush on the right in the photo is apparently a favorite deer snack, especially during the winter. I was interested to find that there are two distinct types of White-tail deer in this area. The indigenous herd is almost a grey color. This happens to blend in extremely well with oak trees, and can make them hard to spot. The others (and I have this on very reliable heresay) were introduced from the Great Plains, and are more of a tawny color that might blend well with tall grasses and such.
So, Arkansas deer are, like – STEALTH deer.