Family time

It's swim team season in the South. Cicadas buzz in the bushes, fireflies twinkle erratically on the night shift, and the snack bar at some neighborhood pools sells Cheerwine for a dollar a can. Swim meet volunteers say things like "You have to stand over there, honeybunch," or "Ain't she just a little rocket in the pool?"

One neighbor training a puppy has discovered she can wait the dog out by making it sit and threatening to keep it in that position "until the Rapture."

Another neighbor sold his china cabinet to a man via Craigslist, and was gratified to see that the man showed up at his house with two strapping "young 'uns" in tow to help move the thing.

So summer beckons. I'm taking a blog break. Y'all come back now, ya hear? I'll post new material come mid-July. Stay safe out there. Thank you for reading!

Doctor's orders

Doc Zero's orders, anyhow (internal links are mine, but the words are Doc's):

"Federal and state governments are riddled with people like Barack Obama, producing a system completely focused on feeding itself, and too bloated to take effective action. It is almost completely insulated from consequence. Its wits are dulled by its perceived lack of budgetary or behavioral restrictions. Its deconstruction will require the conviction and charisma of Sarah Palin, the brilliance of Bobby Jindal, the courage of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and the enthusiasm of the primary winners from Tuesday night. The American people should no longer settle for representatives whose resumes contain nothing but political accomplishments – as if those are somehow worth a damn compared to private-sector experience. It took a lot of accomplished politicians to engineer a government with over a hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities."

Theology (still) matters

Edward Feser on the Judeo-Christian outlook as the foundation for our notions of human rights.

Wise words about the sacrament of confession

Some non-theological reasons why having another human being there to hear your sins makes a big difference, from Eve Tushnet.

Sailor man (Paul, not Popeye)

Charlie with the nautical metaphor and some back story on word choice in the Acts of the Apostles. His post also reverberates with the original words to "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" (Ebenezer makes a cameo appearance-- I hadn't heard that verse before).

Here's a similar verse from the "dance remix" of "Come Thou Font" that I have heard and do like, because it's lyrically much better than the metaphorically confused or repetitive stuff that bedevils our hymnody at the "young adult" Mass on most Sundays:

O, to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee!
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it;
Prone to leave the God I love:
Here's my heart, O take and seal it;
Seal it for thy courts above.

UPDATE: The Anchoress is also thinking in nautical terms, with help from saints John Fisher, Thomas More, and Paulinus of Nola, who share this feast day. Her post mentions a famous letter that More wrote from prison to his daughter Meg but does not link to that letter, so I'll do the linking honors here. It's a beautiful (and in its excerpted part, short) letter that any Christian could profit from reading.

Comeuppance

Algis Valiunas explains why not reading Norman Mailer was and is a good idea. From the conclusion to his comprehensive beat-down:

He [Mailer] fancied himself one of the big thinkers, and most of his ideas were not only bad but appalling; for he lived largely for the body’s pleasures, actual and vicarious, and adopted ideas that serviced those pleasures. T.S. Eliot remarked that a great writer creates the taste by which he is appreciated; Mailer helped create the moral confusion amid which he was glorified—not quite what Eliot had in mind.

Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom. One is torn between wishing that his memory would disappear immediately and wanting his remains to hang at the crossroads as a lasting reminder to others.

Kudos to the "character actors"

My friend Bookworm has a thoughtful essay up defending the "great men" view of history. She reminds us of the virtues of that once-traditional outlook by contrasting them with the Marxist view that seeks to flatten our collective patrimony by misreading it as little more than the clash of economic forces.

By way of building on Bookworm's thesis (we play well together), I want to add only that the lieutenants or the "character actors" who play second fiddle to history's headliners also matter. I think she would agree, not least because that addition dovetails with her assertion that "people don't have to be powerful to change history." To me that means that among great and small alike, there is an element (dare I say a providential element?) of "the right man at the right time" that cannot be discounted, so let me stipulate that as an appetizer and proceed to the main course.

For good or for ill, influential men and women have made their presence felt, and yet we remember them not simply for their virtues or depravities, but because these pivotal characters found positive or negative reinforcement in the lesser-known people around them. "No man is an island," as the poet once put it, and his axiom applies as much to the famous as to the obscure. I do not mean to write some breezy enconium to the so-called Law of Attraction, but as J.R.R. Tolkien well knew, there is no Don Quixote without Sancho Panza, and Frodo can't destroy the Ring of Power without Sam.

Bookworm's essay includes a succinct look at the roots of the English Reformation, where King Henry VIII, Queen Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn all loom as large as you would expect. What I would add is only that Henry's consolidation of religious and political power would not have had the historical resonance it did or does had it not been marked by his order to execute that able lieutenant, Sir (Saint) Thomas More, the man whose principled adherence to scruple shamed Henry for the hound he was and put paid to early notions of that particular monarch as a "Defender of the (Catholic) faith."

It is well-known that forceful, evenly-matched personalities spur each other to greatness, but history likewise brims with examples of "character actors" without whom great men and women would not have been quite so great. To pull one example from among a multitude, religious historian Rodney Stark lauds Leonardo Fibonacci as an under-appreciated hero of early capitalism, noting that when his "Book of the Abacus" appeared in 1202, "it made Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concept of zero available for the first time outside the circle of professional mathematicians," and was "siezed upon eagerly all across northern Italy as it provided new, efficient techniques for multiplication and division."

Many "second-tier" people shine in times of war. David McCollough's 1776 makes a case for John Glover as one such person. Glover and the "Marblehead Men" under his command, all expert sailors, were instrumental in helping George Washington and the ragtag Continental Army cross the Delaware River to attack Hessians encamped at Trenton, New Jersey over Christmas of 1776. Bookseller-turned-artillery-captain Henry Knox, and drillmaster Baron von Steuben are other supporting players without whom the indisputably great George Washington might well have lost the Revolutionary War.

Four generations later, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's unforeseen ability to hold the Union line with troops from Maine's 20th regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg also fits my addendum to Bookworm's defense. On any list of "great men" of the time, President Abraham Lincoln certainly has an entry, and General Ulysses S. Grant may have an entry (Confederate sympathizers smitten with Robert E. Lee tend to denigrate Grant unfairly). Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain can't often be found on "great man" lists, not because his character was deficient, but because his influence over time was. Yet you could make the argument that without Chamberlain, U.S. Grant would not later have had the chance to accept Lee's surrender at Appomatox Court House, and that's precisely the argument I'm making.

At least the name "Chamberlain" still burns brightly among Civil War buffs. The same cannot be said for William Dawes, who rode farther than Paul Revere with the same message on the same night, or for the trio of Polish cryptologists (Rejewski, Rozycki, and Zygalski) who made it possible for Britain to break Nazi Germany's top-secret "Enigma" code in World War Two.

May I end by switching gears in a flying attempt to buttress the original point? Those of us inclined to raise a glass to Eric Clapton ought also remember that Lee Dickson has been his guitar technician for more than 25 years.

Who gets to define feminism?

Amanda Marcotte says only "liberal" women are true feminists. Cassy Fiano says, in effect, "Apart from Sarah Palin, whom we already know you feel strangely threatened by, did you really mean to question the feminist bonafides of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton?"

Advantage: Fiano.

UPDATE: In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Ramesh Ponnuru mentioned a Gallup Poll that found 48 percent of American women identifying themselves as "pro-life." That number includes the current Republican Senate nominees from California (Carly Fiorina) and Nevada (Sharron Angle). Marcotte probably despises them, too.

The Katrina response model

In the Human Events list of "Top Ten" things that President Obama could have done in the aftermath of the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, items 2, 3, and 4 come with the dependent clause "as President Bush did after Katrina."

Unlike Michelle Malkin, the Human Events people didn't even mention Lieutenant General Russel Honoré. They also left Sarah Palin out of their list, which is fine, because Palin already made the Washington Post look "stuck on stupid" (it was easy).

Going medieval on the myth

"The idea that Europe fell into the Dark Ages is a hoax originated by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals who were determined to assert the cultural superiority of their own time and who boosted their claim by denigrating previous centuries as -- in the words of Voltaire -- a time when 'barbarism, supersition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.' Views such as these were repeated so often and so unanimously that, until very recently, even dictionaries and encyclopedias accepted the Dark Ages as an historical fact."

-- Rodney Stark

Glenn Beck cannot be trusted with Christian history

Beck may have a little more going for him when he talks about America's Founding Fathers, but he hasn't done his homework on Christian history.

Wrong about the Council of Nicaea? Check.
Wrong about the Apostles' Creed? Check.
Wrong about the Nicene Creed? Check.
Wrong about the timeline behind the canon of the Bible? Check.
Wrong about Constantine? Check.
Wrong about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Check.

Mark Shea brings it home:

"Also, just to be clear: Constantine did not agree with the Council of Nicaea. As Caesar in charge of an Empire that was being rocked by controversy over the Arian heresy, he demanded the Council meet and settle the question for the sake of keeping peace in his dominions, but when the time came for him to be be baptized (people often delayed baptism till the end of their lives at this time), he chose to be baptized by an Arian priest. In fact, after the Council of Nicaea, the Catholics who had carried the day at the Council found themselves continually harrassed and persecuted by the Imperial Court, which tended to prefer Arianism and semi-Arianism as the sensible compromise position and to view Trinitarian Catholics as extremists. Athanasius, the champion of the Council’s teaching, was exiled five times and falsely accused of murder in an attempt to shut him down. (He dramatically produced the supposed victim of his murder, alive and well, in one of the great courtroom scenes of antiquity). The notion that the winners wrote the history after Nicaea is something only a person utterly ignorant of history—somebody like Glenn Beck, for instance—could believe."

Thanks to Peter Sean Bradley at "Lex Communis" for the find.

Meanwhile, Slublog has a gimlet eye on another kind of bias.

Over the wire from Uncle Jim

This is one of several pics in an unsourced email message about friendship, apparently based on the true story of an orphaned orangutan named "Rusty" and the dog he pals around with, somewhere in Northern California. No inferences about O'Hannigan family kin need be made, I hope...

Waffles for me, but not for thee?

British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward apparently said "I want my life back," and he's rightly been blasted for making that and other tone-deaf comments in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and its aftermath, but I find it interesting that the CEO who said "Hayward would not be working for me if he made those statements" is the same guy who ducked a reporter's questions about former President Jimmy Carter meeting with Hamas by asking "Why can't I just eat my waffle?"

Meanwhile, George Neumayr is still looking for that "new way of being on the planet" promised on the president's behalf by San Franscisco columnist Mark Morford. Morford wrote after the Cold Waffle Debacle but before the Beer Summit, the NCAA Basketball Tournament Picks, the bungled effort to save Arlen Specter, and the recent Party with the Beatle who Refused to Let it Be.

UPDATE: Things do not appear to be looking up for the president.

A slow recovery

A few notes as our family approaches the first anniversary of the car accident that changed our lives: You might remember that daughter Jane and I were directly involved.

My left elbow and tricep have suture scars, and while most of the auto glass was taken out of my arm by a wonderful trauma surgeon that day, bits of it were migrating to the skin surface as recently as March. Arm function is there, but my pullup totals aren't what they once were.

Jane (then age 10) was injured much more seriously. With the help of compassionate teachers and tutors, not to mention the school nurse and many hours with Cathleen doing math at the kitchen table, she made it through the ensuing academic year (just ended) in spite of being absent more than any of us would have liked. Jane still suffers from what neurologists have called "post-concussive headaches," though they are slowly diminishing in frequency. Both acupuncture and lidocaine injection into her scalp have been tried with inconclusive results. She had a followup MRI at Easter time.

Always slender, Jane's down an alarming seven pounds from her pre-accident weight. When the neighborhood pool opened for the season recently, she realized that diving and submerged swimming both hurt her head. On the plus side, the scarring on her forehead continues to fade, and the Zonisamide she now takes daily seems to be gentler on her stomach than medications she'd been taking before.

Last year at this time, we had two dogs, but the golden retriever we named "Al Pacino" now lives with friends a few blocks away (and answers to "Allie") because dogs that size require more time and care than we had to give in the first six months of recovery. Sophia the Cavalier Spaniel is still with us. She makes a fine "therapy dog" in her own right, when not playing with Walter the cat or Pikabu the other cat.

The car I drive now is older and heavier than the one totaled in collision with the speeder who crossed into our lane.

Son Thomas had the thankless task of trying to deal with the onset of puberty just when his sister needed more parental attention than she might otherwise have gotten.

Several items related to insurance remain unsettled.

I would not wish this circumstance on anyone. I will say, though, that the love shown to us by so many friends, neighbors, and colleagues, especially in the immediate aftermath of the accident, was astounding and humbling. Jane and I are walking miracles, and I'm grateful for having been given that second chance.

Some political perspective from J.R. Dunn

From an essay posted today on American Thinker:

"George W. Bush was condemned by everybody from the man in the street to Heaven's mighty seraphim due to the fact that federal aid did not arrive in New Orleans for three whole days after Hurricane Katrina struck. (This was -- and remains -- standard operating procedure for federal disaster assistance. It's hard to see how it could be otherwise -- but we'll skip that.) It has been six weeks since the Deepwater Horizon blowout. And what has the Obama administration accomplished in a time period fourteen times longer than that granted to Bush?

Well, we've seen Obama frowning. Obama sticking his fingers into the sand. Obama saying he's frustrated. Obama telling us a heartwarming story about his daughter. He even, according to spokesman Robert Gibbs, said "damn" at one point. (Though this has not yet been independently verified by a third party.)"

The always-worth-reading Dorothy Rabinowitz made related points a day later.

John Wooden, R.I.P.

He's gone to the Lord at age 99, as you probably heard. ESPN has a nice list of "things you need to know about John Wooden" up. One of them is that in 29 years of coaching basketball, he never had a losing season.

I won't excerpt from the rest of that list here. But I also liked Wooden's seven-point creed:

• Be true to yourself

• Make each day your masterpiece

• Help others

• Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible

• Make friendship a fine art

• Build a shelter against a rainy day

• Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day

Postscript: Sportswriter Bill Plaschke of the Los Angele Times adds a poignant column about Wooden's love for his wife Nell, and the folks at Get Religion have lots to say, also.

Making the point

Parody is not dead. And if you missed this over at Bookworm Room or Caroline Glick's web site, here's a chance to catch up:

Beach Glass (an argument)

The ragtop was down, the radio played “Drift Away,” and the sky was baby blue over the raked edge of my windshield, but a sand-in-my-shoe comment I’d seen a few hours before kept me from singing backup for Dobie Gray. “This world is too big for one god.” That’s what it said under “Religious Views” on the Facebook page in my head.

I know the man who said that, though not well. I wish he had said something I could agree with, like “God is too big for any one religion” (not a problem unless you think religion is for boxing God in rather than for listening to what He says).

Still, I find myself drawn to the “big world, small god” comment. Its author and I graduated within a year of each other from the same Catholic high school in Hawaii where Brother Stanich was a master of Socratic dialog, and Brother Maloney taught Latin while suffering excuses like “Bruddah! I cannot translate da kine! I got scoliosis!”

With that in common, I’m in no position to tell Facebook Guy that my karma ran over his dogma. But it’s hard to keep from asking whether he lingered too long in the cul-de-sac shared by professional throat-clearers who make a living from the premise that all religions are more or less equal. However he came by that “big planet, small god” point of view, it must be challenged, and there’s no better place to start than with astronomy: Earth is not big when compared to other worlds. Many things about Earth are special, but by galactic standards, our planet checks in with average mass at best. On a beach patrolled by giants like Jupiter and Saturn, Earth would get sand kicked in its face. If this world really were bigger than any one god, then Mr. Facebook Philosopher would only have transposed the question about whether God could make a rock heavier than He could lift into a new key, and there’s no harmonic convergence or sense there, either.

Beyond the problem of asserting nonsense on stilts, “small gods” are pretenders to the throne, because what is small could conceivably be bigger, and capital-g God (the Father) has no growing to do.

Yet logic only goes so far. While Elijah recognized the voice of God in a tiny whispering sound (1 Kings 19:12), the same God spoke in a basso profundo from a cloud at the Transfiguration (Mk 9:7). As David and Goliath could attest, questions of degree are often more important than questions of size.

In contexts like this, philosophy and theology dance with each other, and not in the forced or cringe-making way that attracts condescending observers like crows to shiny objects. Think of the tango in “Scent of a Woman,” or the ballet that shorebirds do with waves. With no unrealized potential to grow into – even in Mary’s womb before He was born, Jesus was fully rather than “potentially” human -- God cannot be inert. On the contrary, wrote John the Evangelist, God is love, and the essence of love is the act of self-giving. Love would have to be that way, wouldn’t it, springing as it does from the template laid down by a triune God? Some beach glass, then: who God is and what God does are inseparable, and neither part of that leaves any room for improvement.

Disciples of John the Baptist glimpsed God’s perfect unity when they came (in Mt 11:2-5) to ask Jesus if He was the “expected one.” Jesus did not answer their question with another question, or touch a finger to his nose as though affirming their guess in a game of charades. Instead, He said, “Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them.”

What John’s disciples got from Jesus, in other words, was the unabridged version of “By their fruits, you shall know them.” Jesus had already taught His own disciples to pray that the Father’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” He had worked miracles, explained forgiveness, turned fishermen into “fishers of men,” and encouraged them to learn trust from the lilies of the field.

All of that backs my claim that small gods end up in fantasy novels. Large gods inspire multi-volume love stories. And when the glee club at the U.S. Naval Academy breaks into a stirring rendition of “Eternal father, strong to save,” it’s not Poseidon or Neptune who receives the prayer offered by their harmonizing voices.

Where would the assertion about “small gods” that got to me have come from? It bobs like a marker buoy over the crab trap of confusion, and my guess is that the man who dropped it into the wide water suffers from misplaced tolerance. David Mills recently described a related pitfall while explaining how “spiritual” sounds better to some audiences than “religious” does, and why that is a mistake:

“The man wasting away from pancreatic cancer will get no help nor comfort from the ‘spiritual,’ which will seem a lot less friendly and comforting when he feels pain morphine won’t suppress,” wrote Mills. “He has no one to beg for help, no one to ask for comfort, no one to be with him, no one to meet when he crosses from this world to the next. He wants what religion promises. And he is right to do so.”

There is more going on in that paragraph than I can unpack while gliding over the wave tops of Christian thought, so let me close by noting that musicians often write about the same search for security (see, for example, King David’s work in Psalm 23). Nowadays, the search colors everything from “Stand by Me” to “Landslide,” but it’s strongest in gospel music. Here, for example, is part of the lyric from a Patty Griffin song: “Calling the sheep in for the evening / There's a voice, calls above the howling wind / It says “Come rest beside my little fire; we’ll ride out the storm that's coming in.”

That invitation is something an old priest might also have sung, though he wouldn’t sound so much like an angel playing guitar. But as the Capuchin friar I’m thinking of told an anguished writer, “True belief is a decision. It’s also a gift. Accept the gift, and you will make the decision.”

(cross-posted June 9 to Catholic Exchange)