The first story to give me a healthy Augustinian appreciation of human depravity when I was a boy was the infamous murder of Bobby Franks committed by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. When I finally got around to reading Nietzsche, the crime came to symbolize the natural outcome of proud striving to seek an excellence “beyond good and evil.” But it seems it also makes a helluva story.

Joseph Epstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has only good things to say about For the Thrill of It, Simon Baatz’ new history of the case. Having not yet read it myself, I can’t responsibly give a full-throated recommendation, but if you can stand a little gruesomeness and have thirty bucks lying around, it could be worth your time.

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Ian Johnson has written an interesting article on the ranking of countries competing in the Olympics. Not surprisingly, figuring out who is actually winning is no easy task:

Despite all the high-tech clocks, cameras and sensors, the Olympics still can’t give a definitive answer to one basic question: Who is winning the medals race?

The reason is due to a divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The U.S.–actually its media, including the Wall Street Journal–ranks countries by all the medals a team wins. At the end of Tuesday’s competition in Beijing, the U.S. tops that table with 22, versus 20 for China. The rest of the world ranks countries by golds. Silver and bronze are used only as tie-breakers. By that tally, China sat atop the rankings, with 13 gold medals, compared with seven for the U.S. (Wednesday’s medal events will have added to all these numbers.)

The split has its roots in the early days of the Olympics and reflects the movement’s evolution, from an organization that sought to eliminate nations’ victories over one another to one that celebrates them. And while it’s primarily a quirky point for most people, the difference in the medal tables arguably has its serious side too. Some see in the gold-first ranking–which is unofficially endorsed by the International Olympic Committee–one reason why countries have become increasingly ruthless in cutting funding for sports where they don’t have a clear shot at a gold.

All of this confusion about who is winning at the Olympics reminds me of another one of life’s truly great sports questions: Who’s on First?

Abbot and Costello perform their “Who’s on First?” sketch in the 1945 movie The Naughty Nineties.

If The Economist is to be trusted, Bavaria gives the lie to the secularist story of modernity, according to which man has only achieved health, wealth, and education in proportion as he has cast off the fetters of religion and tradition. This deeply traditional and still strongly Catholic Freistaat has “Germany’s lowest unemployment rate, the lowest debt per head and a budget surplus.” Furthermore, “[s]ince 1970, GDP per person in Bavaria has grown faster than in other western German states. . . . Crime rates are well below the German average. In international tests of maths and reading, its schoolchildren outscore their peers from the rest of Germany.”

Now, however, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) that has governed Bavaria for the past forty years is in danger of losing power. The reason? Among other things, the sucess of Bavaria has encouraged immigration, which has diluted the political power of Bavaria’s conservative, rural Catholics. The new breed of young, cosmopolitan Bavarians tend not to be enthusiastic about preserving Bavarian culture, and feel no duty to support the party that symbolizes it. The Economist notes the irony: “The CSU helped modernise Bavaria; now it is stalked by modernity.”

Assuming that this erosive trend continues, can Bavaria lose its religious and traditional character but keep its enviable advantages? It will be very interesting to look into this petri dish thirty years from now.

Ryan has a point. Ever since online companies have attempted to improve upon reference books by making them up-to-the-minute online resources, they risk the quality of the information it’s their job to supply, while trying to keep their info-hungry readers satisfied.

This is particularly a problem for Wikipedia. And for Google Maps, one can imagine the difficulty of providing users with clear border information for areas where there may still be border disputes. That’s a problem atlas publishers have generally avoided, since there’s room for dust to settle between their publication dates.

Google, the everything-and-anything internet company that makes earning money look like a cakewalk, was accused this week of removing Georgia and Armenia from its searchable “Google Maps” site after an armed conflict broke out in the region.

Google has issued a statement saying that it never posted map information on Georgia and Armenia in the first place, because they “weren’t satisfied with the map data [they] had available.” Apparently, no one had noticed Google’s lack of information on Georgia and Armenia before the conflict because, well, not very many people look up those countries to begin with.

In any case, it seems it’s nearly impossible for even information-messengers like Google to avoid politicization these days.

Your favorite author on “The Living Church: Revisiting Vatican II.” Here’s a taste:

“Before and after”—that gets to the heart of most of the disputes about the council. Up through the 1980s, self-identified liberals routinely spoke of the “pre-Vatican II Church” and the “post-Vatican II Church,” almost as though they were two churches, with the clear implication that a very large part of the preceding centuries had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Many liberals made no secret of their belief that aggiornamento was a mandate for radical change, even revolution. In the two decades following the council, they hailed as renewal what others saw as destabilization and confusion. Some traditionalists, farther to the right of center and as disappointed by the impact of the council as liberals were heartened, blamed the council itself, employing the logic of post hoc ergo propter hoc—”after which therefore because of which.” Liberals, on the other hand, demanded an early convening of Vatican Council III in order to, as they put it, “complete the revolution.”

Pope Benedict XVI, we are reminded, casts the dispute in a different–and far more luminous–light:

The question is one of hermeneutics, says the pope. There are, he suggests, two quite different ways of interpreting the council.

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the “hermeneutic of reform,” of renewal in the continuity of the one subject, the Church that the Lord has given us. She is a subject that increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.

It is tempting but inadequate to depict the difference between a hermeneutic of reform and a hermeneutic of rupture as a conflict between conservatives and liberals. The teaching of the council as advanced by John Paul II and Benedict XVI is in many ways emphatically liberal—as, for instance, in its embrace of democracy and its call for a new way of engagement between faith and reason.

. . . More than 40 years later the hermeneutic of continuity and reform is prevailing, as a result of the leadership of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and in critical response to the excesses of those who viewed Vatican II as a call to revolution. Today there are more younger priests, along with growing communities of religious women and men, and they tend to be deeply committed to renewal within tradition, with the emphasis on both renewal and tradition. The generation of Rynne is past or rapidly passing. Kumbaya still lingers in the air but is slowly giving way to music and liturgy drawing more deeply on centuries of Catholic worship. A relentless diet of novelty proved unsatisfying. Whether in liturgy, doctrine, or morality, novelty has never been Catholicism’s strong suit.

Michael Potemra tells us that in Bernard-Henri Levy’s forthcoming book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, there is an interesting line from the journals of Paul Claudel. On May 21, 1935, Claudel wrote, “Hitler’s speech: a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe . . .”

The Catholic poet and diplomat Claudel wasn’t alone in linking National Socialism to Islam. Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian who was the principal author (with Bonhoffer) of the Barmen Declaration against the Nazis, had this to say:

Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet.

(Church and the Political Problem of Our Day, 1939, p. 43)

Salve Iosephe,

Litterae de lingua latina scripta in Res Primae accipio tuus qui post-electronica fero. Ut praeclarissimus magister Mantuae dixit, ut mihi iam verum videatur illud esse quod non nulli litteris ac studiis doctrinae dediti quasi quiddam incredibile dicere putabantur. Promoveo linguam Romae universalem adolescens, non desero senex! Pro salute Benedicti XVI regnante glorianter deprecemur—in victoria nova rerum antiquarum exspectatio desiderium noster.

—Georgius Gulielmus Rutler, Presbyter