North Western Winds

*** Note that this post has been rewritten and shortened after I realized that I didn't have the Tribunal's ruling down correctly. I came across a better story in the paper at work today and the link I used last night seems to have had new details added to it that made the changes necessary. Oh Canada... "Actually, my clients had no idea who the Knights of Columbus were. They had never heard of them and were completely shocked that this erstwhile bingo hall was turning them down," she said. The hall where the couple booked their reception had a "bingo" sign outside. Though findlay and her clients are "jubilant" that they won the ruling, the legal challenge may not be over. "For gay and lesbian people, we are going to need to study this judgment in detail. While my clients won their case, it currently appears that if the Knights of Columbus had found them another hall, the tribunal would have agreed that they could refuse the rental to my ...

The latest Catholic Carnival is being hosted at Crusader of Justice . He's done a nice job of it, so drop on in and have a look.

I've been finding a lot of new things to try on the computer of late. You might find some of these interesting too. Gollum . A Wikkipedia reader. It's supposed to make the site better organized and easier to read. You still use your brower, but accress the Wikki through the Gollum page. VLC Media Player . An interesting open source media player. It can even play Quicktime Video, something a lot of others can't do. Brushed . This is a very cool iTunes inspired skin for Firefox. A cut above, this one is. Open Office 2.0 . An open source Office software suite. Save a bundle!

Scott Adams, creator of the uber funny Dibert cartoon, has been posting about the subject of evolution and inteligent design. He doesn't like ID any more than I do, and he also thinks evolution supporters act really oddly when questioned. From the first post: I've been doing lots of reading on the subject, trying to gather comic fodder. I fully expected to validate my preconceived notion that the Darwinists had a mountain of credible evidence and the Intelligent Design folks were creationist kooks disguising themselves as scientists. That's the way the media paints it. I had no reason to believe otherwise. The truth is a lot more interesting. Here are links to his entries so far. Evolution and Intelligent Design, part One Evolution and Intelligent Design, part Two Evolution and Intelligent Design, part Three Also not to be missed: Why Scott Adams is Stupid and Who's Credible? I wish I was that funny.

As the release of the first Narnia nears, material on Lewis is sprouting up all over. This article on Lewis at the Evangelical site Christianity Today is pretty fair and has a lot of information about Lewis' biography and publishing history that makes for interesting reading. Ex.: By the late 1980s, Lewis seemed to be popping up everywhere, even in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities . Phyllis Tickle, an author and former religion editor for Publishers Weekly , recalls that in the early 1990s, Lewis's books began to appear on the religion bestseller lists of secular bookstores. This trend continued after the Hollywood version of Shadowlands , starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, was released in 1994. According to Gary Ink, librarian at Publishers Weekly, Mere Christianity has been on the religion bestseller list ever since. According to Harper Collins, Lewis's publisher, sales of his books have increased 125 percent since 2001. Part of Lewis' current ...

I decided earlier this week to join the 21 st century, music wise, and signed up with iTunes. I quickly grabbed a couple of singles - including Corb Lund's hilarious "The Truck got Stuck". Today I grabbed my first full album, Steve Earle, The Millenium Collection . I'm not a complete redneck music wise (although I confess to loving country - rockabilly my whole life) as I also have a single from Yo Yo Ma. It's from his Appalachian Journey , but it's absolutely beautiful. Nothing redneck about it at all... terrific example of the kind of fusion that lots of musicians are doing, often with less success than this. I'm sure my hyms and classical section will swell soon enough, with Advent and Christmas on the way. Are there any downsides to Apple's music service? Is there a better service out there and if so, why and how is it better? Speaking of Advent, which starts tomorrow , there are people around me who have had their Christmas lights and a fully ...

Over in the Asia Times , Spengler provides a fascinating look at the nature of religion in a review of The Star of Redemption , a book by a german writer named Franz Rosenzweig , now in available in an English translation. We live not merely in an age of faith, but in an age of religious wars. Today's intellectual elite feels something like the mad Englishman in a lunatic asylum whom Karl Marx sketched in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. He imagines that his warders are barbarian mercenaries who speak in a welter of unintelligible tongues, and mutters to himself, "And all this is happening to me - a freeborn Englishman!" There is no idea in The Star of Redemption that one cannot find close to hand in the mainstream of Christian and Jewish teaching. Rosenzweig's act of genius was to show that Christianity and Judaism are not ideas, not mere religions (his dismissive characterization of Islam), but rather lives . ... Faith cannot be proven or defended, but only...

The Maverick Philosopher is beginning a series of posts asking " what is religion? " He begins by suggesting that an important preccursor to religious sentiment is the feeling that something is not right in the world. By radically defective and fundamentally unsatisfactory, I mean that the dis-ease of our condition goes right to the root of it, and so cannot be dealt with by any half-way measures. In particular, no one who is religious could possibly believe that the fundamental malaise of our condition could be alleviated by any sort of human social action no matter how concerted or revolutionary. We need help, and if any truly ameliorative help is to come it must come from elsewhere, from beyond the human-all-too-human. A religious person can and must take action now and again to right wrongs and make piecemeal improvements in the conditions of his own life and those of others; but no religious person could be an activist if an activist is one who believes that humanity ha...

There is a confession meme going around some of the blogs I read. This is not part of it, but I do confess to liking this video clip more than I ought.

The rebel myth: The myth asks us to admire the "authentic life". Notice what authentic life is not: it isn't moral life, it isn't a life of self-denial out of love, it isn't even an examined life. Far from ever having to examine his life, the rebel always seems to have everything worked out from the the beginning, as though he were Christ questioning the teachers in the Temple. The rebel never has to experience the essentially moral drama of figuring out that "the greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves", for the rebel -as the story goes- only experiences grief at the hands of others, extrinsically, because he is oppressed and misunderstood. Because the rebel never experiences anything in his soul that he sees the need to correct or master (except perhaps, his own self- repression), the rebel is unable to have any moral development. In truth, the moral life begins when we accept that there are things in us that need to be perfected with outside help...

Amy Wellborn responds to the leaked Vatican document on how the Catholic Church should deal with candidates for the priesthood dealing with same sex attractions: Here's the bottom line for me, and why I wrote, weeks ago, that the "who you are" question in regard to vocation discernment and this issue is secondary to "what you believe and what you will vigorously and enthusiastically teach." ... when it comes to guidelines, as reasonable as it might seem to do the "no homosexuals in the seminary thing," it doesn't get at the problem. The problem is not, in simple terms, the homosexual priest. The problem is priests who don't believe what the Catholic Church teaches on sexuality, who don't preach it, who don't witness to it in the confessional, and who don't live it in their private lives. Do you see the difference? I certainly do. By dealing with it in the manner Amy espouses, the Vatican will gain the ability to deal with those ...

This article argues that universities are obsolete . Herman Melville said that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Melville didn't need college to write "Moby Dick." He needed to read and spend time in the world. Before sailing out on a whaler in 1841, he had already worked on his uncle's farm and as a cabin boy on a ship to England. Peter Drucker urged high-school graduates to do likewise: Work for at least five years. If they went on to college, it would be as grown-ups. You wonder whether colleges, stripped of their education function, wouldn't find other lives as spas, professional-sports franchises or perhaps lightly supervised halfway houses for post-adolescents. The infrastructure is already in place. Putting aside the intellectual class' obsession with things passing and thus bringing the great moment of cosmic progression to a thundering conclusion (yawn), I do think there's something to this. The potential of the podcas...

I just received a pleasant little e-mail advising me that NWW has been deemed Master Blogs worthy. I applied for this a while back and truth be told when there was no response I assumed I'd been passed over. I'm the new entry under " Society / Religion ." I'm familiar with some of the other bloggers in this category and am pleased to be in their company. Jay at Living Catholicism is one of the Catholic Carnival organizers, for example. Amy Wellborn of Open Book fame is well known among Catholic bloggers, and I've also bumped into the Summa Mamas once or twice. What a nice surprise!

It's been a busy week (work is nuts right now) and the weekend was enjoyable but no less tiring. I think, dear reader, that I am going to be taking one of my blogging breaks this week. I have some holidays from work just before Christmas and if I'm not around by next week I'll be around then for sure. (I'll be back next week, if I know myself.) So just for this week, it's okay to turn that dial.

You scored as Indiana Jones . Indiana Jones is an archaeologist/adventurer with an unquenchable love for danger and excitement. He travels the globe in search of historical relics. He loves travel, excitement, and a good archaeological discovery. He hates Nazis and snakes, perhaps to the same degree. He always brings along his trusty whip and fedora. He's tough, cool, and dedicated. He relies on both brains and brawn to get him out of trouble and into it. Indiana Jones 67% Neo, the "One" 54% Maximus 54% Captain Jack Sparrow 50% El Zorro 50% Lara Croft 46% William Wallace 46% The Amazing Spider-Man 46% James Bond, Agent 007 46% The Terminator 42% Batman, the Dark Knight 33% Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

The question of art - and of film especially - keeps popping up in my Internet wanderings. I found this article about the question of pagan vs. Christian filmmaking at Libertas . This surprised me, probably because I hadn't considered it before: There is one exception to my argument that non-Christians make the best Christian films. A particular group of Christians has excelled in its craft during the past century of cinema. This fraternity includes Frank Capra, Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars Von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. All operate (or operated) in the mainstream rather than sequestering themselves in a subculture, and all came from a Roman Catholic background. Three tenets of Catholicism informed their craft and equipped them to succeed. First, an intuitive understanding of iconography gave them a strong foundation for crafting visual images. Next, they seemed to grasp the incarnational function of art, which...

It is inevitable that with CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe coming to theatres very shortly that we will see an accompanying barrage of commentary on it. Some of this will come from the Christian community, as it prepares to use the film as a teaching resource. There is nothing wrong with this so long as there is no lying or distortion involved. What will be less noticed but no less evident is that there are others who will try to milk the movie's publicity and share in the spotlight as well. By this I mean certain academics and talking heads who will find the movie threatening; who will see in it more meat being thrown to the red state barbarians. There is nothing wrong with them speaking to the film, of course. But they too must be held to standards of scholarship and honesty. The problem is that fewer people will even look for bias in this sort of coverage. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik on C.S. Lewis' position ...

Faith should be sublime The more I hear frm Barb Nicolosi , the more I like . This is from a recent interview the film maven gave to Godspy : Why DO "heathens" or "pagans" seem to make the best Christian films? First of all, by pagan, I mean people who worship other gods, many gods, and that's what most people in Hollywood are. That is, they worship money, prestige, power, botox, Spielberg, you name it. Why is it that non-believers have actually made the best Christian films in the last few years? Because they value beauty and excellence. That's why even when they pick up a story accidentally that has some good value at its heart, they end up making a better project than we do when we start with Christian message stuff, because we don't value the craft as the gateway to beauty. We are all about using a movie to deliver a message. The best movies in the last few decades have been made by pagans who are serving the project as a beautiful thing in it...

There are two good essays by J. Budziszewski at Orthodoxy Today . The subject of the first is criticism of Liberalism, and the subject of the second is... Conservatism. With the news full of rumours that Canada's minority government could fall sometime soon, it might be a good time to give these a look. From the Critique of Liberalism : The first moral error of political liberalism is propitiationism . According to this notion I should do unto others as they want; according to Christianity I should do unto others as they need. Numerous mental habits contribute to the propitiationist frame of mind. Most of my college students, for instance, think "need" and "want" are just synonyms... Christians can slip into propitiationism by misunderstanding the Golden Rule. This happens when we read Do unto others as you would have them do unto you as though it implied Do unto others as they would have you do unto them-"I'd want others to honor my demands, so I ...

What does ID have to do with Roe v. Wade? Here . Related issues can be found in this look at sociobiologist EO Wilson : [Wilson] offers scientific humanism as the alternative to the two great fallacies: God-centered religion and atheistic communism. The interest, of course, is in the latter, because one might have thought that Marxism-Leninism's scientific materialism and Wilson's scientific materialism would be regarded as more alike than different. But Wilson chooses to distinguish them solely by the fact of Marxism-Leninism's acceptance of a tabula rasa view of human nature, unlike the sociobiological view that we have a fully wired human nature, though one "self-assembled" through millions of years of natural selection. But this differentiation, while it serves to separate Wilson from some admittedly nasty company, does not really go to the heart of what is most lacking in any materialist view of nature. The thing that the materialist cannot explain is wh...

Numenorean To which race of Middle Earth do you belong? brought to you by Quizilla

Talk about bringing a knife to gunfight! Get a load of this article that Althouse has linked to : Darwin's evolution still stands out as the thorniest point of contention between science and religion, but other more recent scientific advances also raise new questions for believers. How, for example, does the 20 th century biological revolution influence the Christian concept of virgin birth? Where did Jesus get his DNA? His Y chromosome? A number of scientifically minded Christians have come forward during the Dover "intelligent design" trial to say they accept that ordinary humans arose through purely natural processes, no intelligent design needed. But it's another thing to accept that the Lord and Savior was conceived through an act of sex. This lede says more about modern unreflective positivism than it does about the fullness of the Christian faith. Here we have supposedly smart, educated people asking aloud where Jesus got his Y chromosome from. The mind ...

Superadditum Naturae I've been distracted from Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity this week, but I'm still intending to do a number of selections on the blog. I'm working them in slowly so as not to be monotonous. Anyway, here is a short bit that I like very much. It's from the part of the Nicene Creed that says "He ascended into Heaven": Hell consists in man's being unwilling to receive anything. It is the expression of enclosure in one's on being alone... that man will not take anything, but wants to stand entirely on his own feet, to be sufficient to himself. If this becomes utterly radical, then man has become the untouchable, the solitary, the reject... it is the nature of the upper end of the scale which we have called Heaven that it can only be received, just as one can only give Hell to oneself. "Heaven" is by nature what one has not made oneself and cannot make oneself; in Scholastic language it was said to be, as grace,...

Glen 'Instapundit' Reynolds says much more bluntly what I was coyly suggesting yesterday: WELL, THE HATEMAIL HAS POURED IN after my earlier post on Bush's speech. For the record, though, I didn't say (and don't think) that anyone who opposes the war is unpatriotic . (In fact, only antiwar people seem to keep raising this strawman). But the Democratic politicans who are pushing the "Bush Lied" meme are, I think, playing politics with the war in a way that is, in fact, unpatriotic. Having voted for the war, they now want to cozy up to the increasingly powerful MoveOn crowd, which is immensely antiwar. The "Bush Lied" meme is their way of getting cover... it's not "dissent" that's unpatriotic, something I've been at pains to note in the past. It's putting one's own political positions first, even if doing so encourages our enemies , as this sort of talk is sure to do. Also here : UPDATE: Reader Kathleen Boerger emails...

Connexions reviews Allistar Mcgrath's book The Twilight of Atheism and finds plenty of things to say: “There has always been a sense in which the natural sciences are opposed to authoritarianism of any kind ,” nevertheless “Most historians regard religion as having a generally benign and constructive relationship with the natural sciences . . . As leading historians of science regularly point out, the interaction of science and religion is determined primarily by historical circumstances and only secondarily by their respective subject matters” (p. 84). The theory of evolution is the case in point. On the one hand, plenty of church leaders in the 19th century actually welcomed Darwinism both for its explanatory power and theological possibilities. Charles Kingsley, for example, criticised Paley’s argument from design for its mechanical and static notion of providence, finding the idea of a God who directs but does not determine an evolutionary process a...

Old media ? When you hear [Pat Robertson's] words do you experience (a) an acidic surge of joy because you are 99.9 percent sure that you know what Robertson is going to say, or (b) a sense of sorrow for precisely the same reason? If you answered (a), then I would bet the moon and the stars that you are someone who doesn't think highly of Christian conservatives and their beliefs. If you answered (b), you are probably one of those Christians... Some journalists are happy to see Robertson's face on television screens, because every time he opens his mouth he reinforces their stereotype of a conservative Christian. New Media ? Though their parents may have taught them to take refuge in a parallel Christian subculture, the movies these people found in Christian bookstores bored and embarrassed them. To be accepted at Act One you have to believe that Jesus is a real presence in your life. But the worst insult you can deliver there is to say that a movie reminds you of such n...

November 11 th is a day for remembering the sacrifices and sufferings of veterans and part and parcel of that is not squadering what they've achieved. With that in mind, here is Robert Fulford on Margaret Olwen MacMillan's book 1919: Six Month that Changed the World . MacMillan, an Oxford D.Phil. in history, provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto, has a thesis that is perennially relevant: In 1919, after serving as a Treasury official with the British delegation at the six-months-long Paris peace conference, Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, arguing that the peace treaty imposed impossible conditions on Germany. His book was a best seller, particularly in Germany, where his views became Holy Writ. In 1936, on another subject entirely, Keynes would explain how politicians and dictators unthinkingly repeat the wrong-headed ideas of faded academics: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling ...

As a bibliophile who loves old and odd books I think GooglePrint sounds marvelous. Students of all kinds of information should be welcoming such a development. The Association of American Publishers (AAP), on the other hand, is feeling threatened. Google has offered to remove any book at a publisher's request but that hasn't gone over well : The AAP was insulted; its CEO, Pat Schroeder, announced, "Google's procedure shifts the responsibility for preventing infringement to the copyright owner rather than the user, turning every principle of copyright law on its ear." Schroeder is right, but the Authors Guild and the AAP are wrong. Copyright law has been turned on its ear, but it's not Google that did the turning; it's the Internet. Nor is it Google that is exploiting this turn; that title goes to the Authors Guild and the AAP. Indeed, their claims about Google represent the biggest landgrab in the history of the Internet, and if taken seriously, will ...

It looks like Jim Ryan might be resurrecting Philosoblog . Great news if it's true.

I didn't post last night because I was working on the new computer, which arrived on Monday. OK, I was playing with it too. And I was really surprised at how quickly it arrived. It came via regular mail (Canada Post) from Mississagua, Ontario on Friday and it was here on the west coast Monday. That's service! When I ordered it I was mostly interested in getting the best combination of processor, RAM and HD space. I knew this thing was going to have a DVD player; I was surprised to find not only a DVD player but also a DVD burner and a wireless mouse and keyboard. I've got the mouse and keyboard figured out. They're simple enough even if moving from a trackball to a mouse is a bit disorienting. I've never burned a DVD (CDs, yes) so that's something I'll get to... eventually. I'm really happy with this machine so far. Everything just pops open, and the multimedia stuff is awesome. Great framerates on the movies I view at Apple.com and visualizations from ...

Althouse tips me off to a most interesting WAPO story on the pending changes to the US Supreme Court : In the view of Howard Gillman, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, the possibility that five Catholics may soon sit on the court is less striking than the fact that all five are Republicans. "It certainly is a dramatic reflection of the changing demographics of our parties," he said. Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has made substantial inroads among Catholics, who are a quarter of the U.S. population and have roughly split their votes in recent presidential elections, tipping narrowly toward Al Gore in 2000 and then toward George W. Bush in 2004. Why have recent Republican presidents turned again and again to Catholic jurists when making appointments to the Supreme Court? It may be partly an effort to woo Catholic voters, but mostly it's because so many of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament are Catho...

Thanks to Fidei Defensor for the lead to this article on church sex ratios . [David] Murrow notes that, among the major Christian denominations, it is the mainline churches that suffer the largest gender gaps in church attendance. These churches, still pilloried by feminists for their patriarchal pretensions, have in fact become spiritual sorority houses. It is the more conservative denominations, such as the Southern Baptists, that have the most even ratios. In these more traditional churches, many of which do not have female clergy, parishioners hear less about cooperation and feel-good spirituality and more about spiritual rigor and the competition to win souls. Churches that embrace male leadership, including the Roman Catholic Church, remain the largest in the country, and the Mormon Church, which also does not have female clergy, is the fastest-growing. Murrow is the author of Why Men hate Going to Church . Charlotte Allen, another author quoted in the article, says that: The pr...

"I'm okay, you're okay - in small doses." Via Althouse comes this gem from The Atlantic : Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring . Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thought...

This is a remarkable post by a non Catholic blogger (a Baptist, I believe): What I find highly ironic is the way that Protestants like to portray the Roman Catholic Church as biblically illiterate, when the fact is that they are doing a much better job of synthesizing biblical scholarship and pastoral instruction than any Protestant denomination. I really question whether any Evangelical denomination would have the ecclesial resources to put together a work [Pontifical Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church ] of this kind of sophistication. If they did, no doubt the eyes of many pastors would simply glaze over in the attempt to read it. In the Evangelical world, the church and the academy operate in separate realms (which is why Christian apologetics is in such a sorry state), whereas in the Roman Catholic Church, the academy is able to serve as a help to the Church. Though this does not always work that way, the structures are at least in place to e...

From The Daily Standard : In the marriage market, too, despite what Dowd claims , women are facing less of a choice between love and self-improvement than ever before. She cites, for instance, a much-quoted study showing that women's marriage chances drop as their IQs rise. But she fails to mention--understandably, since it tended to be ignored by the breathless press reports--that the study was conducted on a population of women born in 1930s Great Britain. More up-to-date analyses suggest that the trend is moving in the opposite direction, and highly-educated women are considerably more likely to get married than in the past. A recent study noted that in 1980, a woman in her early forties with 19 years of education under her belt (i.e., a college degree and some graduate work) had just a 66 percent chance of being married, whereas a fortysomething female who left school after high school had an 83 percent chance of wedlock. But today the gap has disappeared: highly-educated women...