Sister Anne Joan Flanagan, FSP, a Daughter of St. Paul stationed in Chicago, has recently been added to the panel of bloggers on the Chicago Tribune's religion blog, "The Seeker." Her first post is a reaction to a Tribune cover story on the predicament of couples who resort to IVF to resolve their infertility problems, and then face questions about the embryos that may never be born. Her most recent post is an interesting reflection on the messages sent by the various 'uniforms' people wear -- from her habit, to the military uniform and the "habit-like middle eastern clothing" worn by Major Hassan (the Fort Hood shooter). Nice to see Tribune including the perspective of the lived experience of a woman religious on their panel! (Sr. Anne also has her own Nunblog.)
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
An Interesting Addition to the Chicago Tribune's Religion Blog
Genentech's lessons for the Bishops
Perhaps the Bishops would have escaped criticism for raising concerns about the health care reform bill if they had taken greater pains to conceal their role?
A sad anniversary [Update]
dot Commonweal reminds us that "It was 20 years ago today that 6 Jesuits, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were killed [actually, murdered] at the University of Central America in San Salvador." More here.
Remembering the Jesuit Martyrs
Twenty years ago, on November 16, 1989, I was studying theology at the Jesuit community in Berkeley, Calif., when my friend Steve Kelly knocked on the door and asked if I had heard the news. I hadn’t. He broke down telling me of the brutal deaths early that morning of six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America, the Jesuit university in San Salvador. I had known those Jesuits from my time in El Salvador in 1985, when I lived and worked in a refugee camp. I was shocked and grief-stricken. Here.
This is change we can believe in, right?
No, wrong! This is just more of the depressing same:
Corruption Is No Barrier to U.S. Visa for Millionaire
"Teodoro Nguema Obiang enters the country easily, although his wealth comes from corruption tied to his father’s regime in Equatorial Guinea."
And the consequences of that corruption?
"Since oil was discovered there in 1996, Equatorial Guinea has become the third-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola, with estimated revenues of $4.8 billion in 2007. But although petroleum has made the ruling Obiang family and its associates vastly rich, the oil and gas wealth has not been spread beyond ruling elites.
In 2006, more than three-quarters of the population was living below the poverty line, according to a 2009 International Monetary Fund report.
By some measures, conditions in the country are getting worse. Though the nation’s gross domestic product grew more than tenfold from 1990 to 2007, infant mortality rose to 12 percent from 10 percent, according to a 2009 Unicef report."
Monday, November 16, 2009
"... argument amongst friends ..."
My Emory colleague Robert Ahdieh tells me that Hume--yes, that Hume--said that "[t]ruth springs from argument amongst friends."
Let's try, let's struggle, mightily, all of us--Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives--to be friends. If for nothing else, for the sake of truth!
In the Department of "So What Else is New" ...
... Marci Hamilton joins the bishop-bashers in a piece arguing that the Stupak Amendment violates, among other things, the Establishment Clause. No surprise there. The novelty is that she argues that the bishops' effort to assert taxpayers' conscientious objections to abortion funding violates the principle of Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." Hmmm ... that would be the Memorial and Remonstrance that was a petition from religious groups (Baptists and Presbyterians) opposing tax funding for something to which they conscientiously objected. There are colorable arguments that the Stupak Amendment goes too far in affecting private funding, but the Establishment Clause is not one of them. (Disclosure: I gave advice to the Democrats for Life of America in connection with the recent abortion-funding issue.)
Just how degraded is our politics these days?
Read this, for one example:
Poverty in America
Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
The number of Americans who lacked access to sufficient food shot up to
its highest point since the government began surveying, the Agriculture
Department reported.
Calling hunger "the most cruel and concrete sign of poverty," Pope Benedict XVI today told a special summit of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization that "opulence and waste are no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming ever greater proportions." Read More
Thanks to Robby
Many thanks to Robby for his thoughtful post, and for the heartening reminiscences on Governor Casey, about whom I'd be very happy to hear more. (Did I mention how happy I was when his son announced a run against Santorum earlier this decade?) I think of RC as a great unsung - or at any rate inadequately sung - pioneer in the cause of bringing a consistent ethic of life to the Democratic Party.
On Robby's thoughts concerning the relative faults of the two major parties, I'd like to second the suggestion that a string of tit-for-tat comparisons or finger-pointings would not seem well calculated to bear helpful fruit. I would also say, however, that I'd actually welcome being apprised of unfamiliar problematic positions taken by today's Democratic Party, which I have no partisan interest in defending. I truly think it would be helpful to all of us as responsible Catholic citizens to be apprised of important errors from any political quarter whence they emanate. I no more want to support wrongful Democratic positions than Republican ones. I simply happen to think - and this is an empirical proposition that might well be false, and I tend to believe these days more by dint of my milieu than by dint of actual fact - that the Republicans have recently taken the mantle of most irresponsible party away from the Dems.
One last pair of points here, harkening back to Rick's welcome expression of concern with my 'Pakistan' post late week before last:
The first is that I wish to emphasize again that I do not think any Republicans are anywhere near properly comparable to 'acid-throwers' in their degree of apparent contempt for our pluralistic republican democracy. Rather, I think that the Republican Party has recently failed sufficiently clearly to repudiate 'birther,' 'deather,' 'tea-bagger' and related fringe elements that have even drawn encouragement from some Party members, and that the recent NY 23d district race as well as the new 'RINO-purge' movement now appear to indicate that a 'blowback' could be underway. In other words, the great Party of Lincoln, T Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and folk like Howard Baker might now be coming to suffer at the hands of the fringe a fate not unlike that which the great non-theocratic traditions of Pakistan are now suffering at the hands of a fringe that Pakistan's intelligence services themselves seem once to have enouraged.
The second is that I believe the Democratic Party itself once faced a similar internal dysfunction (and might be poised, post-Stupak, to face it in somewhat attenuated form once again). Were this 1968 in Chicago, or the early 1970s in California (think SLA and the like), for example, I think that much of what I've recently expressed concern about in connection with the RNC could quite aptly have been deplored in connection with the DNC.
Finally in this latter connection, here is another instance of this 'fringe' problem I raise: http://www.wpcva.com/articles/2009/11/13/chatham/news/news35.txt. If you read this, I am tempted to think that, like me, in place of 'Altavista Journal' at the top of the page, you will find yourself reading 'Atavistic Journal.'
Thanks again!,
Bob
Which Party is Worse? (plus remembering Gov. Robert P. Casey)
I am grateful to Bob Hockett for his comments. I found much in them to agree with, but much to disagree with, too. Bob and I think very differently about which political party poses the greater overall threat today to justice and the common good. We also disagree about who is telling more and bigger lies and who is behaving more thuggishly--conservatives and Republicans or liberals and Democrats. I suppose, though, that if we began listing the offenders and offenses on each side, both lists would be impressive and depressing. A game of tit-for-tat would likely go on a very long time. If the game starts, I'll play; but with doubts about its value.
I was pleased to learn that Bob wrote in the name of Governor Robert P. Casey for President in 1996. Casey was a truly great man. Politicians of his character and ability do not come along very often. I had the honor of working for him as an informal advisor and writer. I helped with the speech he was denied the platform to deliver at the Democratic National Convention and ended up giving at a pro-life rally outside the hall. My dear friend John DiIulio and I co-chaired the issues committtee of his exploratory presidential campaign, before the effort had to be dissolved due to the Governor's poor health. (He had undergone a heart and liver transplant only a couple of years earlier, and had been unable to conquer the infection that eventually took his life.) Casey was an economic liberal of the old-fashioned FDR school, and a full-bore social conservative. He was pro-marriage and pro-sexual moraity as well as pro-life, and he had something bordering on contempt for the "life-style liberalism" that had by the 1990s become orthodoxy in his party. He called it "the cult of the imperial self." He asked me to introduce him to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, which I did, and to Irving Kristol, which, alas, I failed to find the opportunity to do. He had read a piece by Kristol on the social harms of pornography which he found deeply insightful. He was also more of a hawk on foreign policy than most people knew. As a governor, he rarely had opportunities to speak publicly about such matters, but privately he expressed admiration for Ronald Reagan (especially for his willingness to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire") and for his fellow Democrat Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
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