The point of teaching is to clarify, to bring the truth to light so that the student might understand it. Unless the truth is not that something is, only something that might be. In this case, the teacher might seek to “complicate,” “contextualize,” “relativize,” or otherwise obfuscate the subject at hand. Russell Jacoby has a nice piece on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he addresses this current academic mode, and the way it fails in the practical world:

To defend binary thinking is to invite opprobrium. It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic. Binary logic structures the very computers on which most attacks on binary logic are composed. Some binary distinctions are worth recognizing, if not celebrating: the distinction, let us say, between pregnant and not pregnant, or between life and death. Others are at least worth noticing — for example, that between a red and a green light. You either have $3.75 for a latte or you do not. Can that be “complicated”?

Of course, to defend simplifications always and everywhere is not only anti-intellectual, but dangerous. Already in the 19th century, the historian Jacob Burckhardt feared that “terribles simplificateurs” would descend upon “poor old Europe.” They did descend — upon the rest of the world as well — with facile ideas about nation and religion. We should indeed distrust them, but not by rote. Complexity for its own sake is no virtue. More turrets are not necessarily better than fewer. Perhaps it is time to return to Ockham’s principle of parsimony, his so-called razor: “Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.” Instead we have gone in the opposite direction. The cult of complication has led — to alter a phrase of Hegel’s — to a fog in which all cows are gray.

Jacoby’s final point is a valid one. Many times we examine a subject or a question more closely only to find that it is more complicated than we thought it to be. But complication is not the final truth. When we find a topic more puzzling than we had envisioned, we acknowledge the puzzle and continue on to solve it. There may be fog surrounding it, but in the end, the cow is not relative.

Via Arts and Letters Daily

Richard Cizik, who is Vice-President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, has created quite a stir among his constituency by breaking ranks with the NAE’s neutrality on issues of climate change (a.k.a. “global warming”). Using the language of evangelicalism, he has described his new-found adherence to the warming worriers as a religious conversion, a moment of sudden enlightenment which overcame him at an alarming presentation by Sir John Houghton, first chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in England in 2002. Since that time he has been traveling to college campuses and churches preaching the gospel of climate emergency (and lamenting that there’s nary a word about it in the churches, though were he to go to the liberal churches he would hear plenty about it). Though he is a professed supporter of George Bush in other matters, and would normally be reluctant to align himself with Al Gore, it is Gore’s position on global warming which he embraces. He calls his position “creation care,” and cites Bible verses in support of it, which may be intended to separate himself from Gore & Co. But Gore has lately been citing the Bible himself, and in any case Cizik’s views on global warming are like Gore’s.

Given my rather public skepticism of the thesis that humans are causing any significant climate change, my friend Bob Benne, who is the director of the ethics center at Roanoke College, invited me down to Roanoke to debate Mr. Cizik on these matters. Bob has an eye for irony, noting that I come from a “liberal” church which tends to support Gore’s views rather enthusiastically, while Mr. Cizik’s religious constituency has been cool to the warmers. So we each crossed the tracks, and the cross currents intrigued Bob.

Mr. Cizik, having studied his opponent’s published remarks, opened the debate with a direct attack on my position. I’m a coward when it comes to public confrontation, and I squirmed. But then he shifted gears and delivered a passionate sermon, urging us to mend our ecologically harmful ways lest we sell out our children’s future.

When my turn came I began by saying that I had studied up on him, too, and noted that he had previously threatened us with the wrath of God if we didn’t shape up; and he interjected that he still stood by that warning. I then ran through my litany of objections to the reigning paradigm that human activity is causing dangerous global warming: the earth’s long history of natural climate swings; the probability that solar cycles are the principle driver of warming and cooling periods; the fact that climate swings do not correspond to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere; the fact that glaciers grow and recede all the time and their melting will not cause serious sea level rise; that rising temperatures will not cause more severe storms; the fact that warming will save more lives than a cooling planet and be otherwise beneficial.

Mr. Cizik did not rise to this challenge, choosing not to argue about my facts. He did challenge me directly on a couple of points. I attacked the insistent claim of the alarmists that there is a scientific consensus on the thesis that human activity is the root of the trouble, saying that anyone with an internet connection can show that is false, that there are thousands of scientists who dissent (and next week’s conference of the skeptics in New York will make this perfectly clear). Consensus is not how science proceeds, I said, and we have only to remember the “consensus” of the 1970’s that earth was cooling dangerously. To this Mr. Cizik replied that he had asked a couple of scientists he knows about that false cooling consensus, and they denied that they ever believed that. I hope I may be pardoned for thinking that two people do not constitute a refutation of that well-documented embarrassingly false “consensus” of 35 years ago.

His other challenge came out of my major moral claim, that any serious effort to reduce emissions by any significant amount, let alone the 60-80% called for by the European Union and some of our presidential candidates, would destroy economies all over the world and condemn the poor to perpetual poverty – which is why China and India will have nothing to do with emissions caps. Mr. Cizik in reply noted that the city of Portland, Oregon, has extensive “green” regulations but was still prospering. Again, I could not find this local example convincing refutation of what every sane economist knows: Economic growth, which requires energy, and is not possible if greenhouse emissions are severely curtailed, is what will permit us to adapt to the climate changes which nature has always produced naturally and which we cannot stop.

If there was a place where the discussion went awry, at least from my point of view, it was in his conflating combating global warming with other kinds of environmentalism, like being sparing in our use of resources and restraining pollution. When I protested this conflation, he replied that these points were “a seamless whole.” “No they aren’t,” I said bluntly, as the audience stirred. Indeed they are not. They are different issues and there are very different policies attached to them. Conservation and environmental cleanliness are worthy goals which I fully support; and they can be, and are, addressed by mostly sensible public policies. But cutting “greenhouse gas” emissions drastically would be an epic disaster. Fortunately it can’t and won’t be done.

Frankly, if I wanted to worry about climate change, I would worry about global cooling again, since the sun is behaving very weakly just now, and sun-watching scientists have even dared to suggest that a reprise of the Little Ice Age is in the offing. Maybe earth is already cooling. We’ve had ten years without a temperature rise, and this past winter, in both hemispheres, has marked a substantial downturn. And the sea ice is back, both in the Arctic and Antarctic. It’s too soon to tell if this is the begining of a long trend, and we’d better hope it isn’t. But we have no more control over that than we do over warming.

The debate was a pleasant and spirited exchange, marked by good humor and good will; and after the first few minutes I rather enjoyed it. Clearly I failed to persuade Mr. Cizik that’s he’s been the victim of scaremongering, and he, of course, found me as obdurate as ever. My final word, then as now, is this: Global warming is slight, is natural, cannot be stopped, and is on the whole beneficial. Trying seriously to stop it would waste billions of dollars that ought to be spent addressing real human needs.

. . . at least now that John Hagee is in his corner.

For those of you who have not been counting down to Armageddon since that concatenation of false prophecy The Late Great Planet Earth hit bookstores back in 1970, John Hagee’s ministry consists of oversize illustrations of who-is-going-to-invade-Israel before the always imminent Rapture sweeps all true Christians into the clouds with Jesus until the tribulation period, in which the Antichrist pursues some unfortunate economic policies until Christ returns again and establishes his 1,000-year reign on earth until Satan is loosed again to wreak havoc until Christ returns again again and Satan is finally thrown into the lake of fire with his minions and this guy Earl.

Everybody got that? Lots of killing, Rapture, clouds with Jesus (return 1A), Antichrist, Jesus returns (1B), lions and lambs, Satan loosed, Jesus returns (2), The End. (For a more interminably drawn-out version of this scenario, see the Left Behind books, movies, and videogames, which turn the bloodfest that is the end of history into madcap fun for the whole family—and a great Sunday school tool, too!)

The only thing wrong with this parsing of the End Times is that its biblical foundation is based on one or two badly misinterpreted verses of Scripture and a desperate need to hurry divine judgment before an awful reality sets in—sometimes life does not get any better. It reflects a now two-centuries-old desperation on the part of some folk who are having a hard time of it and just want out—or at the very least want to be vindicated for their beliefs in the face of so much unbelief. I do not doubt the genuineness of their faith in Christ, only the validity of the dispensationalist super-preachers’ dividing of the Word and the motives behind constantly playing on people’s fears and frustrations.

As N.T. Wright ably demonstrates in his new book, Surprised by Hope, there is work to be done here on the Third Rock from the Sun that is intrinsically linked to the coming Kingdom of God—and not just in terms of evangelism. Oh, and there is only one return of Christ, not two.

(One caveat: Bishop Tom is a wonderful Bible scholar, but his adventures in political left-wingery, in which the United States is typically the bad guy, may cause you to dismiss the theological stuff without due consideration. So please be discriminating. You know, in a good way, not in the “Hey, you! Get off my lawn! When did these people move into the neighborhood?!” way.)

While Hagee’s endorsement of McCain may help the senator with some evangelicals, I can’t help but think that McCain is having a hard time keeping a straight face through it all. He’s not known to suffer the hard-edged right-wingery of some fundamentalists gladly, and I would imagine his own religious predilections tend more toward the amillennialist view—even if he doesn’t know it.

For those of you who have been dying to find out what Hal Lindsey’s been doing since his aforementioned foray into prognostication, click here. He’s “prophetically correct,” don’t you know, despite being wrong for the past forty years. Nice work if you can get it . . . like forecasting the weather—no matter how many times you scream “Nor’easter!” and the sun just shines, you still have a job come Monday.

Carl Olson over at Ignatius Press’ Insight Scoop blog relates how one Catholic bishop had the audacity to prevent a Catholic biblical scholar from speaking at the Newman Center on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

That scholar is Luke Timothy Johnson. The bishop, Edward K. Braxton, has defended his decision thusly:

“I do not wish Catholic institutions or organizations to invite speakers into the diocese who have written articles or given lectures that oppose, deny, reject, undermine or call into question the authentic teachings of the magisterium of the Catholic Church.”

Imagine that: demanding that a Catholic scholar actually teach in conformity with the Catholic faith. Imagine a voluntary religious organization demanding that people of some academic authority not contradict the doctrines of the institution of which he is a part. Amazing in its coherence, exhilarating in its discipline, a bishop actually acting like a shepherd!

Olson is right to point out some of the good work Johnson has done in the past, especially countering the Jesus Seminar mishegaas (wonderful word). And I knew he was just left of John Waters on the sex and marriage issues. But I didn’t realize he was so blithely indifferent to such key doctrines as the Virgin Birth. How on earth could it be “not important”? Whether Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate is not important??? Does it have no relevance to the meaning of his death on the cross, the atonement, and his identity as savior of a sinful people?

I love the complaint uttered by one of the parents: that the kids should be able to “hear all sides.” What sides? There are no sides when it comes to magisterial teaching. If Johnson wanted to make the case for a liberal, mainline view of marriage, sexual morality, and doctrine, then he should be doing so either in debate with an orthodox Catholic or in a different venue altogether. Does he really not understand the millennium-old theological underpinnings of these matters, as understood by his own church? Again, if he wanted to make the case as an advocate for another church, fine—fight it out in an open forum. But he is doing to the Catholic Church’s defined teaching of the sacramental nature of marriage, ordination, etc. what the Jesus Seminarians did to the historical Jesus: refashioning it to fit the comfort zone of neo-gnostic academics.

I have never understood why the dissenters within the Catholic Church—think Garry Wills, James Carroll, and members of Catholics for a Free Pass on Killing the Little Babies—remain within the church. It’s a free country. Pick yourself up and walk over to a TEC or ELCA congregation: I promise, they would love to have you.

My guess is, and it’s just a guess, is that it would be no fun knowing that the old Catholic Church was still there, teaching all that hoary stuff they simply can’t abide. In effect, Rome would have won by simply remaining unmoved. As as mainline Prots, these guys and gals would lose their cachet as dissenters. An Episcopalian questioning the Virgin Birth, a male-only priesthood? Yawn . . .

By way of Michael Spencer at The Boar’s Head Tavern.

In the most recent issue of First Things (subscription required), Gilbert Meilaender argued against a proposal by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to create a system, “in which organs of the deceased would be taken for transplant, with their consent presumed, unless before death they had opted out or, after death, their family members objected to such use of their organs.” This followed Meilaender’s earlier article “Second Thoughts About Body Parts,” and he has not been the only author noting the dangers of the organ transplant industry.

One of the fears that authors like Meilaender have voiced is that those near death–especially the disabled and those who could not afford long-term medical care–would be eased toward a quicker death so that transplant surgeons could harvest their organs. This hypothesized fear has now made become a court case. The New York Times reports that for the first time a transplant surgeon has been charged with administering drugs to speed up the death of a patient–who was both poor and disabled–so that his organs could be harvested (full story here). It is premature to condemn the accused transplant surgeon before he receives a fair trial, but the fact that there will be a trial in the first place shows that misgivings about the culture surrounding organ transplants are not unfounded.

Some articles of note from today include the following.

A piece in the New York Times reminds us that not all black Americans are, in fact, African-Americans, and argues that the former term is therefore preferable to the latter.

An article from Christianity Today reminds us that the Pew Forum’s new report on religious affiliations (mentioned on this blog here and here) may be accurate, but that the boundaries between various forms of protestantism remain difficult to pin down.

And on a more humorous note, another piece in the Times describes a new extracurricular activity for Navadan youth: elk calling. A sample:

For Maddie, Juna Priest, Tatum Higginbotham, Carmen Hutchens, Jeremy Novak and 17 more of their fourth-grade classmates at the Jessie Beck Elementary School here in Reno — the elk-calling business offers the chance to mew, squeal, grunt, and plain old scream and consider it part of a good, if unusual, environmental education.

Mmm—eeee—eeew. The sound people make when they are audibly feeling your pain is the same plaintive sound a cow elk makes when her calf is lost. It’s a good chance to talk about a cow elk’s protection of its young. That is roughly the way Ryan Brock planned it when he was a science teacher at Jessie Beck Elementary and created an Elk Club as an after-school project.

Eee-yow. This sound, which in humans expresses surprise or pain, is part of the chatter of cow elks. Time to talk to the fourth graders about herd communication, and movement, and elk ranges and habitats.

Mmwheee wheee mmwhee. The urgent sound of a cow elk in estrus, at the height of the rutting season. Time to talk about something else.

“It depends on the year and the group how I explain that,” said Mr. Brock, who is 32 and continues to run the Elk Club although he left teaching this fall to pursue a graduate degree. “With the bull sounds, I say, ‘This is like a man flexing his muscles and saying ‘Look at me.’ ” The estrus call? He says, “She’s saying, ‘Look at me, boys.’ ”

So some Greenpeacenik types are hanging out atop the Parliament building in London to protest an expansion of Heathrow Airport.

An expansion of Heathrow Airport? The thing already qualifies for a seat at the U.N. The last time my wife and I were there, we asked if we could book a room somewhere in Terminal 3 because we weren’t going to make it out in time to catch a train to our hotel. If that monster gets any bigger, it’ll be called Wales.

N.Y. Times homepage has just announced.

He was 82.

Update: Here’s the Times’ obit, which obviously had been in the can for a while. (Check out the fourth graf. And thanks to Ryan Anderson for pointing it out.)

The feminists are killing the English language, says David Gelernter in the new edition of The Weekly Standard. The vitriol and bombast in his writing does not help his argument, but the main point behind it is sound: The intelligentsia has decreed that standard English requires gender-sentitive revisions, and these revisions are not improvements. Chairman sounds good; chairperson is a linguistic atrocity. The third person has become the default genderless voice to such an extent that “The driver should not drive without their wipers running” sounds grammatical to many. And we see people trying to alternate between he and she, or using the feminine pronoun as the genderless default, which of course places more emphasis on gender than is necessary. Gelernter writes:

Here is the problem with the dreaded she-sentence. Ideologues can lie themselves blue in the face without changing the fact that, to those who know modern English as it existed until the cultural revolution and still does exist in many quarters, the neutral he “has lost all suggestion of maleness.” But there is no such thing as a neutral “she”; even feminists don’t claim there is.

“The driver turns on his headlights” is not about a male or female person; it is about a driving person. But “the driver turns on her headlights” is a sentence about a female driver. Just as any competent reader listens to what he is reading, he pictures it too (if it can be pictured); hearing and imagining the written word are ingrained habits. A reader who had thought the topic was drivers is now faced by a specifically female driver, and naturally wonders why. What is the writer getting at? To distract your reader for political purposes, to trip him up merely to demonstrate your praiseworthy right-thinkingness, is a low trick.

[E.B.] White’s comment: “If you think she is a handy substitute for he, try it and see what happens.”

Gelernter is right that the fuss about he and she is more than just a matter of linguistics. Indeed, it has roots in the movement to pave over differences between the sexes, to wipe out masculinity and femininity in language and in life. But even though the movement toward linguistic androgyny is not going away, we can take comfort that in some corners of America, English does not need any help in identifying female chairmen, firemen, or fishermen. Near the beginning of her book, The Hungry Ocean, the fisherman Linda Greenlaw provides what one hopes will be the obvious solution to the problem. :

The two men shook hands, and as the fishy smell backed away from the table he added, “I just wanted to say hello. I’ve never met a fisherwoman before. Good luck.”

“Thanks. You too,” I said, and shook my head at his use of the word fisherwoman. I hate the term, and can never understand why people think I would be offended to be called a fisherman. I have often been confused by terms such as “male nurse,” wondering if that would be someone who cares for only male patients. Fisherwoman isn’t even a word. It’s not in the dictionary. A fisherman is defined as “one whose employment is to catch fish.” That describes me to a tee. Generally, when the conversation reaches the point at which the person with whom I am speaking asks what I do for a living, I assume he or she has already determined that I am female, leaving fisherman appropriately descriptive of my occupation. Fisherwoman would at best be redundant.

Anthony, you’re clearly on to something in noting that one of the key aspects of success, historically, with Best Picture winners is some modicum of box-office success. The great William Goldman summed it up best when he likened the Academy Awards to the American automotive industry. Imagine, Goldman posited, that Ford, Chrysler, and GM gathered at the end of each year to hand out prizes to celebrate the best cars in production. How often would they shower praise on a Toyota model? Or on some small, niche model of their own?

If you want to really, really dive into the weeds, the excellent website BoxOfficeMojo.com has all sorts of wonderful indexes, including the numbers for past BP winners and this wonderful all-time index, which even allows you to look at grosses in constant dollars.

And they’re not embryonic. The latest study showing the uses of adult stem cells: http://pubs.ama-assn.org/media/2008j/0226.dtl#2

A review of previously published research suggests that stem cells harvested from an adult’s blood or marrow may provide treatment benefit to select patients for some autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular disorders, according to an article in the February 27 issue of JAMA.

The paper is here.

It’s not George Weigel’s Witness to Hope, but, at one-fourth the length, this book is a brief and inspiring reflection on the life of John Paul the Great. Written by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, A Life with Karol: My Forty-Year Journey with the Man Who Became Pope (Doubleday, 2008) gives an insider’s look into the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest men.

Dziwisz served by the side of Karol Wojtyla from 1966 until Wojtyla’s death in 2005. As personal secretary, first in Krakow, then in the Vatican, Dziwisz does not attempt a comprehensive scholarly biography. Instead, he recounts some key and poignant moments from John Paul’s story—memories of a friend, a conversation with the reader.

So for example, we hear about the awe-filled days surrounding the papal conclave—how, the afternoon of his election, Wojtyla’s longtime friend Maximilian Cardinal de Furstenberg strengthened him with words from the rite of priestly ordination: “Deus adest et vocat te, God is here and he is calling you.” Then, Dziwisz relates how John Paul painstakingly rehearsed his first papal homily to none other than Angelo Gugel, Vatican butcher, determined to address Rome in her own language. That homily was unforgettable:

I think that those words—“Be not afraid! Open the doors to Christ . . .”—were the motto of his life and the master key to his pontificate. Those words were meant to inspire strength and courage, especially in the nations groaning under the yoke of bondage. To them, his words were a proclamation of freedom.

But . . . the words “Be not afraid!” didn’t come to John Paul II from an ideology, or a political strategy, but from the practice of the Gospel and the imitation of Christ. That was his strength! Armed with those words, he set out to travel the ways of the world and, I think, to transform it.

The subsequent chapters sketch his travels (around the world about thirty times) and his teachings (fourteen encyclicals alone), and they highlight the transformation that resulted. Constantly emphasizing the need for true humanism—recognition of and respect for the dignity of man as the image of God—John Paul was a spiritual inspiration for the Polish solidarity movement and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The Pope of the People, he spoke out globally for the poor, infirm, and oppressed, and he invigorated the youth with love for the Church. He promoted evangelization—“new evangelization,” he called it—challenging people to spread the light of the Gospel in all states of life. And, once again, he led the way, constantly working for peace and reconciliation between nations and creeds.

There are many touching moments in Dziwisz’ account, and there are charming, even funny, ones too. This is one of my favorites:

If memory serves, it was January 2, 1981. We left around 9 AM in Father Jozef’s car, so as not to attract the attention of the Swiss Guards stationed at the exit of the residence at Castel Gandolfo. Father Jozef was the driver and Father Tadeusz sat in the passenger’s seat, pretending to read the newspaper, which he held completely open so as to shield from view the Holy Father, who was sitting next to me.
…

We drove through a lot of villages so that the pope could enjoy himself looking out the windows and seeing a bit of ordinary life. When we arrived, we parked near one of the ski runs outside of Ovindoli, but there was hardly anyone there. That was the beginning of a wonderful, unforgettable day. Mountains on every side. The landscape completely covered in white. A huge silence in which you could focus your mind and pray. The Holy Father even managed to ski. He was delighted by the “present” we had given him. On the way home, he smiled and said to us, “Well, we did it after all!”

John Paul made more than a hundred of these expeditions, many unknown at the time to either the Vatican or the press. As Dziwisz observes, “In the mountains, he contemplated the works of God and abandoned himself into the hands of their Creator.”

No one can read about the life of John Paul the Great without coming away with the conviction that he was a real man, with whom God was really present. And his life is a testimony that, with God, all things are indeed possible. In essence, the story of his life is simple: “He was in love with God. He lived on God. And every day, he would start over again. He always found new words to pray, to speak with the Lord. . . . It was as if he never stopped praying.”

Jonathan, it would seem that only some movies build an audience over time. Check out the Annie Hall entry at imdb.com: $38 million is pathetic.

(Granted, Allen may be an exception to all rules: To date, Hannah and Her Sisters, one of the most overrated films, never mind Woody Allen films, of all time—who talks like that?—is his biggest grosser, at a paltry $40 million.)

If you look at a list of Best Picture winners, though, most have been money makers. The art-house film seen by only New York and L.A. types has been the exception. The reason No Country for All Men has done as poorly as it has, given all the hype, is that it, too, is vastly overrated. It has all the dramatic power of a broken hip. Barden’s Boris Karloff impression was as amusing as it was threatening, and the distancing effect the Coens’ have been praised for, as if it were intended to express the the quotidian nature of crime in the 1980s, was merely dull. I don’t think audiences were put off by the violence and the matter of fact, almost philosophically detached way in which it was expressed, but because everyone in the film seemed bored by it.

So I think this year’s selection of less-than-blockbuster selections for Best Picture (Juno’s being the exception) is an aberration.

I don’t know when they launched it, but the New York Times has put a very nifty graphical representation of box office returns up on its website. If you’re looking to waste an hour–and get a sense of how longevity and opening weekend have changed in importance in the industry—you could do worse than playing around with this.

That’s the title of an article by Heather Mac Donald in the current issue of City Journal, just made available on their website. It’s a painfully honest look at sex on the modern american university campus, with all the internal contradictions that it brings with it. Along the way, you’ll read about college administrators who try to hide the statistics about rape on their campus…because they’re too low. (You’d think they’d want to publicize these numbers, demonstrating how safe their campus is. But no, it indicates a repressive environment where rape victims don’t feel safe to come forward.) You’ll also read about NYU’s efforts to educate on “abstinence”:

In a heroic effort at inclusiveness, she also provided a pamphlet called “Exploring Your Options: Abstinence,” but a reader could be forgiven for thinking that he had mistakenly grabbed the menu of activities at a West Village bathhouse. NYU’s officially approved “abstinence options” include “outercourse, mutual masturbation, pornography, and sex toys such as vibrators, dildos, and a paddle.” Ever the responsible parent-surrogate, NYU recommends that “abstinence” practitioners cover their sex toys “with a condom if they are to be inserted in the mouth, anus, or vagina.”

Here’s how the article opens; it’s well worth reading.

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

Speaking of motherhood…

Have you seen the over-the-top article in the Nation about Conservative Christian fears about demographic collapses and efforts to win the various culture wars by out-populating the enemies? Ross Douthat described the article with this: “the piece basically reads: Patriarchy patriarchy patriarchy, Catholic evangelical fascist, Mussolini Hitler, racist racist racist. I guess The Nation knows its audience, but still …”

For one alternative view on being a serious Christian and a mother, you might want to check out this blog, “Building Cathedrals: Building When No One Can See.” It’s put together by some friends of mine, all of whom did their undergraduate work at Princeton, and now, apparently, have bought into patriarchy and fascism. Here’s how they describe their project:

Seven young, Catholic mothers who graduated from Princeton University, seeking to build our families just as the architects of the great cathedrals built their detailed masterpieces: day by day, stone by stone, with attention to details that only He will see.

Seven bachelors degrees, four advanced degrees, and nearly 200 combined months of pregnancy have only convinced us of how much we have left to learn in matters of faith, family and vocation. We adhere wholeheartedly to every doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church, but the details beyond that, from co-sleepers and breast pumps to schooling options and professional life, are grounds for robust discussion with like-minded friends. Nothing written on this blog is intended to incite maternal guilt, anger or to advise on medical or legal matters. Virgin most prudent, pray for us!

Yep, Steve, that Feuerherd column is idiotic. Ramesh Ponnuru had a nice reply here.

As Ryan notes, the Catholic Church, according the Pew report, has lost the greatest number of believers in recent years. But the “unaffiliated” . . . faith? denomination? ecclesial community? . . . has burgeoned to 16 percent of the U.S. population, making it “the country’s fourth-largest ‘religious group.’” As the ever-estimable New York Times hastens to assure us, “The rise of the unaffiliated does not, however, mean that Americans are becoming less religious.” It just means that more people are getting up (or not) on Sunday mornings and professing faith in “nothing in particular.”

Here is the breakdown: About 39 percent of “unaffliliated” consider themselves secular unaffliliated, 36 percent are religious unaffiliated, 15 percent are agnostic, and 10 percent are atheist. Encouraging to note is that, looking at the population as a whole, this means just 1.6 percent, or one in sixty Americans, are professed atheists. Moreover, as Pew observes, the “unaffiliated population has . . . one of the lowest retention rates of all ‘religious’ groups” and is primarily comprised of adults between eighteen and fifty. Only time will tell whether this now-young, growing sector will change their tune . . .

“Credo in nihil particularum…”

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (of which I am a proud member) issued a press release yesterday attacking an idiotic column by one Joe Feuerherd that appeared in the Washington Post. In that column, Feuerherd blasted the Catholic bishops of this country for supposedly telling him who to vote for under pain of eternal damnation. Donohue’s press release is, on the whole, excellent, but it makes a lamentable slip in the following passage:

Feuerherd would have us believe that the document [of the bishops] lists as “intrinsically evil” such things as “abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage.” He is twice wrong. The document does not call either stem cell research or same-sex marriage “intrinsically evil.” There are eight acts which merit that label: abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, the destruction of embryos, genocide, torture, racism and targeting noncombatants in war.

The sloppy wording of the last sentence makes it sound as though only eight things are “intrinsically evil” according to the teaching of the Church and her bishops, and that same-sex marriage is not one of them. But that is obviously untrue; there are many things besides those eight, such as murder, adultery, blasphemy, and incest. The list is much longer than eight. And since the list would clearly include homosexual activity, it would logically also include so-called “same-sex marriage.”

What Donohue presumably meant to say was not that “There are eight acts which merit that label,” but that “There are eight things that are so labeled in the bishop’s document.” But even if he had been more careful in his wording, and written just that, what would have been the point? The particular document of the bishops may not explicitly list “same-sex marriage” as intrinsically evil, but the Church’s clear teaching is that such arrangements are indeed evil and intrinsically so.

One has the uncomfortable sense that Donohue sees the adjective intrinsically here as merely an intensifier, like unspeakably, and wants to take pains to make clear that the Church does not put “same-sex marriage” in the same list of horribles as torture and genocide. But intrinsically means simply intrinsically. An intrinsically evil act is one that is objectively wrong in and of itself, and which therefore can never be justified by circumstances or consequences.

That being said, it is wonderful that Donohue took on Feuerherd, who is obviously a dolt.

The Telegraph reports:

An artist killed herself after aborting her twins when she was eight weeks pregnant, leaving a note saying: “I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum.”

Emma Beck was found hanging at her home in Helston, Cornwall, on Feb 1 2007. She was declared dead early the following day - her 31st birthday.

Her suicide note read: “I told everyone I didn’t want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does.”