Telling the Christmas story

Recently, Jeff Miller (aka the Curt Jester) posted a somewhat-lengthy discussion of the Christmas movies he’s been watching. Along the way, he noted just how many of them hit the same themes over and over: 1) Family is important; 2) Materialism is bad; and 3) Santa Claus is real. On the other hand, the only other option seems to be watching some iteration or other of the Nativity story, the most recent of which Taylor Marshall blasted as “blasphemous and sacrilegious” for its depiction of the Blessed Virgin consulting a palm reader (Gottenyu! Not something a pious Jewish girl would do) and for depicting her as suffering labor pains.[1]  Couldn’t somebody, Miller wondered aloud, manage to write a story that would hit the Nativity themes without being a Nativity movie?

It sounds like an interesting idea. At least, until you ask yourself: How do you separate the Nativity from the birth of Jesus?

Of parachutes and prophylactics

In my last post, I observed that William Saletan seems almost willing to concede that abortion is wrong; however, his obsession with contraception forces him to maintain it as a fundamental right … albeit an unattractive and unpleasant right, one that he would rather see exercised as little as possible. This is almost a textbook example of cognitive dissonance, the moral and psychological tension caused by holding two conflicting principles simultaneously.

Babies are good, but unwanted pregnancy is bad. Killing babies is bad, but making women carry unwanted babies to term is bad too. So women shouldn’t get pregnant if they don’t want to have babies, especially if they don’t like the idea of killing unwanted babies.

Why Roe must go

Recently, William Saletan cobbled together a possible compromise solution to the endless struggle over abortion in America. The interesting thing about his solution is that, while he still doesn’t quite “get” the pro-life position, he makes several key concessions that show he, along with other key pro-choice advocates, is reluctantly learning.

Liar, lunatic, Lord ... or legend?

“In all my life,” C. S. Lewis wrote in the opening paragraph of Miracles, “I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves it after seeing it. She say that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.”

I remembered this paragraph after I first read of Emile Zola’s encounter with the miraculous. The defiantly atheistic journalist went to Lourdes, announcing that he wanted to see a miracle, even so small a healing as “a cut finger”. What he did see was a woman cured so thoroughly of lupus that patches of skin were still slightly red from healing. Zola was so horrified at the sight of a woman he had seen badly disfigured now whole and healthy that he turned away: “I cannot look at her; she is still too ugly.” He later stated that he would not believe in miracles even if confronted by all the miracles ever recorded.

These two incidents were brought back into my mind by a discussion on Father Z’s blog about the miraculous healing attributed to the intervention of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (“Talking Eagle”), the Aztec peasant to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared, and to whom the tilma which bears her icon belonged. Or at least to whom she is supposed to have appeared and the tilma is supposed to have belonged.

Thoughts on the inerrancy of Scripture



Saul Meets Samuel (artist unknown)



In “Another reason why sola scriptura is bad doctrine”, one could argue, I evaded a very sticky wicket. One could even accuse me of deliberate obfuscation.

Okay, grant that Christianity is not based on Scripture, that you can’t derive the authentic beliefs of the first Christians from Scripture alone, and that Scripture by itself is as likely to lead to errors as it is to truth. Still, if Scripture is the inerrant, indefectible Word of God—and postulating that God would not lie about Himself—then does that not require you, Mr. Layne, to believe that God commanded the total destruction of the Amalekites (1 Sam 15:2-3)? That He ordered homosexuals to be put to death (Lev 20:13)? Doesn’t that require you, Mr. Layne, to believe that rock badgers are ruminants because God said they chew the cud (Lev 11:5)? That the universe and everything in it was created in six days (Gen 1:1-2:1)? In sum, does this not require you, Mr. Layne, to believe everything the Bible says without reservation and qualification, no matter how silly or demonstrably counterfactual a statement might be, no matter how one text might contradict another?

Yes or no?

Another reason why sola scriptura is bad doctrine

Let's pretend that you're watching TV. (Not too hard, since you're already staring at a monitor.) On the screen are the usual between-acts interruptions of narrative flow known as "commercials". One of them is a trailer for Schmuckatelli's Rules,[1] a recent release from Blowhard Pictures, which trumpets the presumed endorsement from Roger Ebert: "A FINE MOVIE … I WOULD RECOMMEND THAT EVERYONE SEE IT".

Intrigued, you find your way to Ebert's review in the Chicago Sun-Times, where you read: "Schmuckatelli's Rules is a fine movie, except for the dialogue, the story, the acting, the cinematography and the editing. I would recommend that everyone see it, except that I can't think of a reason even to watch the trailers." Congratulations! You've just discovered a fallacy of quotation out of context!

What did the Pontiff really say?

It’s been a week now since L’Osservatore Romano released the extract from Pope Benedict XVI’s new book Light of the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald,[1] in which the Vicar of Christ said … well, something about condoms that caught everyone by surprise. (That is, everyone except for the emotionally stunted among the social liberals, the ones who stopped listening to the Church decades ago and now content themselves with whining variations of “Daddy doesn’t understand me”.)

What did the Pope really say? Even now the actual content of his remarks is a matter of debate, let alone its implications for sexual morality; this is despite the fact that the comments were printed, not simply overheard in passing. Whether the Pope’s comments have been overblown to the point of inviting dismissive clichés or truly a fundamental paradigm shift is a judgment call that needs some fifty or one hundred years’ distance to make dispassionately, without the injection of today’s sociopolitical obsessions.

I admit, like other conservative Catholic bloggers (see the link to Mark Shea’s blog in my last entry), I seized B16’s example of a male prostitute so I could pound the square peg down into the round hole of the pro-life movement’s aversion to contraceptives. We should all have been thinking more clearly. For if Benedict’s words meant what we thought they did, then the idea would obtain regardless of whether we spoke of homosexual prostitution or heterosexual fornication. The context was AIDS, not reproduction; to import contraception into the discussion was to do the Pope an injustice.

A blast from the past; or, recycling the (com)post

As many of you know, jaws dropped around the blogosphere when the MSM reported that Pope Benedict XVI had in some fashion come out for—yes folks, you read that right, for—condoms in the fight against AIDS. Turns out the MSM got it wrong again, this time with some help from L’Osservatore Romano, which for some reason is thought to be the official mouthpiece of the Vatican. If you want to read a good drilling into the subject, go to Jimmy Akin’s blog on the National Catholic Reporter website; I can’t do better. However, I felt the occasion called for some additional commentary. So I dug back up this gem from March ’09.

*          *          *

Sometimes, it seems like the only issues religious debates hang on now have to do with sex and reproduction. It’s like listening to Johnny One-Note playing the kazoo: it gets old very fast. Like much else, the same ground gets covered over and over, like a flock of crime-scene investigators looking for a toenail in a farm field.

Take the issue of contraceptives, for example. At least since 1968, the year Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, various people (both Catholic and non-Catholic) have been grumping about the Church’s decision to maintain its traditional opposition to artificial birth control, either damning it as an example of the Church’s refusal to join the twentieth (now twenty-first) century or bemoaning it as well-intentioned but ineffectual.

The meaning of tradition

We’re just one week from moving into Advent, the season of the liturgical calendar during which we prepare for the celebration of our Lord’s birth by reflection, repentance and renewal of our baptismal vows. That is, if we can spare ourselves the time from the madness surrounding The Holidays, which seem to start earlier every year (the phenomenon I’ve seen referred to, with grotesque aptness, as “Christmas creep”). Indeed, the profane traditions of “Thanksmas” have so multiplied under the beneficent gaze of Mammon that to actually observe Advent you almost have to dispose of all the Santa-Claus-Jack-Frost-and-snowmen crap, retaining—if you must—only a tree and a crèche.

Why do we do this to ourselves every year? The instant response is, “Well, we do it every year because … it’s … traditional,” with maybe a futile shrug and hand gesture that says, “What are you gonna do?” The season itself is so full of chairos, so pregnant with meaning, that we reiterate the accidents as if they were inextricably part of the essence. And perhaps that’s not far from the truth: perhaps it’s a physical manifestation of the spiritual richness of this time, albeit corrupted to a certain extent by Hollywood and Madison Avenue secular concerns.

So if you were looking for a “Bah, humbug!” from me, you’re going to be disappointed. But stay on a bit, because I’m about to go off on another tangent.

Wherein I take a possibly surprising position on a controversial issue

So I walked over to the [Group W] bench, there … Group W is where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the Army after committing your especial crime … there was all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly people on the bench there … mother-rapers … father-stabbers … FATHER-RAPERS!

—Arlo Guthrie, “Alice’s Restauraunt”

In California—where else?—US District Court judge Virginia Phillips issued a permanent, world-wide injunction against the Defense Department, ordering the military “immediately to suspend and discontinue any investigation, or discharge, separation, or other proceeding, that may have been commenced” under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

To me, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy made sense only as a means of conserving military criminal investigations resources for more critical violations of the UCMJ; as an attempt to compromise between the ideal of no gays in the military and the reality of gays filling useful, even critical roles, it was a loser: instead of being quietly intolerant, the DoD became openly hypocritical as well as intolerant.