Big T, little t

I’ve mentioned my first blog before, which was called, with stunning originality, “In My Humble Opinion”. I was able to update it twice a week for awhile; but then as my financial situation started demanding more overtime work just to stay reasonably poor, updates came with less frequency, until it died out about the end of 2004. (Unfortunately, since it was part of the now-defunct “AOL Hometown”—and since a virus wiped out my main hard drive—I no longer have any copies of the opinions I wrote back then.)

Between then and the first post of this blog, when my friends and I were discussing my starting again, I admitted that IMHO was too common a name or expression to stand out. (I was already considering “Outside the Asylum”, as an ironic reference to the late comedy-fantasy writer Douglas Adams’ wonderful book So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish … the irony enhanced by the fact that Adams himself was an atheist.) One of my friends, Larry, suggested I call the as-yet-unborn blog “Big T little t”. This was a very obscure reference to a long night of coffee and Deep Thinking many years ago, when to distinguish between certain kinds of reality we chose to separate the objective from the subjective by the clumsy verbal distinctions “big-T Truth” and “little-t truth”.

On repentance

 Strangely enough, Ash Wednesday is not a holy day of obligation for Catholics. Even fifty years ago (as far as I can tell), when observation by Mass attendance was near-universal, it wasn’t required although it was strongly urged. Nowadays it seems bearing the Sign as a dark smudge on your forehead sets you apart not just as a Catholic but as that most exotic of birds, a traditionalist (or “trad”) Catholic.

Well, not really, since even Vice-President Joe Biden, held to be a “cafeteria Catholic” because of his pro-choice voting record, sported a thumbprint-like mark on TV this week. And observance isn’t strictly limited to Catholics, though it isn’t common at all among free-church Protestants. But it’s safe to say that Ash Wednesday observance is notably absent to those who have any memory predating the death of Paul VI.

Evangelizing the workplace?

I recently got a text message from a high-school acquaintance I reconnected with on Facebook. I'm not much of a texter myself, as it's often simpler (and cheaper) just to call the person and talk rather than spend the time and money on text messages. But occasionally it serves a purpose, so I prefer to have the function; my new phone has a full QWERTY keyboard, since I don't have the hang of abbreviations.

Kurt is a born-again Evangelical who likes to "thrash Scripture". His message read: how r u coming w/ ur witness @ work?

I didn't have an answer for him.

The closing of the cafeteria

I’ve said before—in fact, I said it last March—that it seems nowadays the only debates religious issues hang on have to do with sex and reproduction. Yes, it gets tiresome. I for one am not so obsessed with abortion, gay marriage and celibacy that I can’t talk about anything else. For instance, I was going to embark on a series of counterarguments to common atheist attacks … until life intervened.

But because the Catholic Church takes such a prominent position against gay marriage, and because that particular issue is cropping up in the news more often, it creates interesting ripples and reflections that bear comment. More to the point, the fact that gay marriage does take up more talking-heads time in the culture factories means that it can springboard sidebar discussions of other topics.

March for Life 2010: How the MSM missed the bus

There’s an interesting YouTube clip on Tom Peter’s American Papist site. The video shows the March for Life 2010 in Washington, DC.

For the most part, you didn’t hear about the March for Life from the mainstream media. So far as any were looking, they were focused on the handful of pro-choice people standing forlornly on the steps of the Supreme Court, holding the blue “Keep Abortion Legal” signs they have been holding for the last 37 years.

Did God command genocide?

When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. (Dt 7:1-3).

In his blog on the Archdiocese of Washington web site on January 20^th, Monsignor Charles Pope asked the difficult question, “Did God command genocide?” And if you read the book like a certain Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps kind of Christian—or as a completely hostile, hysterical atheist like Richard Dawkins (see his most recent rant in the Washington Post)—your answer will be a definite “yes”. If you’re any other kind of Christian, you’re going to wince, hem and haw, and possibly find some justification for declaring the text inauthentic.

Is God a homophobe?

It’s perfectly understandable why people want a loving God who forgives faults and imperfections. After all, that’s the God Jesus describes in his parables, especially that of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32), in the same chapter where he describes God as pursuing the lost soul like a shepherd pursuing a lost sheep (vv. 3-7) and a woman who pursues a lost coin (vv. 8-10), even though they have others which will not leave them wanting.

But God’s forgiveness of sins makes no sense if we don’t concede that there is such a thing as sin in the first place. It also makes no sense if we don’t concede that, as Creator of the Universe, and having nothing and no one superior to Him, He is the One who can ultimately determine what is right and wrong, good and evil (leaving aside the “Euthyphro dilemma” for the sake of argument). If there is no sin, then He has nothing to forgive. But if we assert His forgiveness, then we concede by implication that there’s something to forgive, and that He has the authority to decide what it is that needs forgiveness.

Victim discount card not accepted at this store

Sometimes it's worth reading the comments an article in a blog has garnered. More and more often, it's not. Reading the responses to articles on news sites like CNN.com or Telegraph.co.uk will at least have some give and take, though the former tends to attract the secularist liberals the reporters mostly write for. Web periodicals like Inside Catholic and First Things tend to draw a less diverse crowd, though there will often be two or three people who go to such sites to a) play devil's advocate or b) find out how the enemy thinks. Every once in a while, though, someone will post a comment that either effectively challenges the original post or riffs off that post in another equally insightful direction.

And then you have what I call "drive-by shooters". Drive-by shooters aren't interested in debate or insight. They just want to make you aware of their contempt for the author and the tribe s/he camps with: "Hi, just thought I'd drop by to shoot off a couple of zingers to make fun of you straight Christian conservatives, though I might just content myself with a sneer or two at your loathsome, hateful ideology."

Real men wear the pants ... and keep them zipped!

 “Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that’s what they did. But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men. Disco by disco, latte by foamy non-fat latte, men were stripped of their khakis and left stranded on the road between boyhood and androgyny. But today, there are questions our genderless society has no answers for. The world sits idly by as cities crumble, children misbehave and those little old ladies remain on one side of the street. For the first time since bad guys, we need heroes. We need grownups. We need men to put down the plastic fork, step away from the salad bar and untie the world from the tracks of complacency. It’s time to get your hands dirty. It’s time to answer the call of manhood. It’s time to wear the pants.”

 

So runs the copy of Dockers’ new “Man-ifesto” ad campaign that’s caused a bit of an uproar among the talking heads. Some praise it as refurbishing the image of “noble masculinity”, bringing it forward not as a threat to women’s rights but as a “valuable and enriching quality”. Others damn Levi Strauss for “waxing romantic for the days of submissive ladies and alpha males” … although there’s nothing in the ad about women being submissive (unless having a door opened for you makes you a servant, which it does in the looking-glass world of second-wave feminist theory).

Of fake Catholic organizations

 Back in March, I asked if it was possible for someone to be both pro-choice and Catholic, and answered “yes and no”. Technically, a person doesn’t stop being a Catholic unless and until s/he formally apostatizes, either by joining another church or by abandoning worship altogether. (Even then, a person may remain very much a Catholic in the way his/her imagination interprets symbol and story.) In such a functionally crippled sense, a person can be a “pro-choice Catholic”, although the two concepts linked together create an oxymoron.