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.’ ”

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.”