Thanks, Amanda, for posting those links to the pieces in First Things on 9/11. I remember reading them at the time, and revisiting them again was instructive.

Today I came across a homily that was preached seven years ago and subsequently published in the Wall Street Journal. I hadn’t seen it at the time, but I wish I would have. It’s beautifully composed and rich in wisdom. Many of the themes should help anyone in a situation of powerlessness, coping to understand evil, trying to figure out how best to respond to wrongdoing, and/or grieving the loss of a loved one.

The homily was preached at Barbara Olson’s funeral (which fell on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows) by Father Franklyn McAfee. Olson was aboard United Flight 77 when hijackers crashed it into the Pentagon. From the plane, she called her husband Ted, and Fr. McAfee picks up the story there:

His wife was about to die, and there was absolutely nothing he could do. He was absolutely powerless. He was solicitor general of the United States, and he could do nothing for the woman he loved.

Ted, there is someone who understood your feelings, who knows your pain and sadness.

The feast of Our Lady of Sorrows honors the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, who stood next to the cross on which hung her own flesh and blood, nailed there by violent men.

She saw her own son dying, and she was unable to help. Only a parent or spouse can understand and know that pain. Mary stood there unable to do anything. She wanted to reach up and bandage his wounds, soothe his pain, wipe his brow, kiss away the hurts.

She was his mother. She would reach up and take him off that cross. But she could not. She was powerless.

…

I cannot explain the madness that took place on Tuesday. For what we saw with our own eyes is the face of evil. And evil cannot logically be explained because, as those of you who are steeped in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas know, evil–malum–is nihil. It is nothing.

Since God is existence itself–God told Moses, “I am who am”–evil would be nonbeing. Nothingness. And to confront nothingness is to come face-to-face with unspeakable horror.

We can, however, understand how people would be compelled to murder with enthusiasm so many people.

A terrorist is not born. Terrorists are made, with every conscious decision they make in life to hate, to choose death rather than life.

…

A handful of terrorists commandeered four planes, crashing three of them, including Flight 77, into symbolic buildings, killing in the process thousands of real flesh-and-blood people with families. These terrorists gave their lives, and took so the lives of so many others, with no hesitation at all. Have Satan and death won?

What did Americans do when they heard the shocking news and saw the devastation? Did they take to the streets with signs and placards, marching with fists upraised, saying, “Death to terrorists!” No, they did not.

What did they do? They took to the streets–in search of places to give blood. In fact, in some places so many of them that there was a seven-hour wait to give blood. They took to the streets to bring food to those who were rescuing people. They took to the streets to go to church, to hold candlelight vigils, to pray.

…

Barbara Olson, full of life, cheerful, laughing, smiling, loving, was the opposite of the dark powers that brought her death. But their evil deed was in vain.

We are people of life. And no terrorist, no matter how powerful, can take that away. As Pope John Paul II has said, “When God gives life, he gives it forever.” We believe in the resurrection of the body on the Last Day. We Catholics also believe that the soul is immortal; it cannot be destroyed. We believe that Barbara Olson is alive, not just in our hearts and in our memories, but actually alive, fully conscious and aware. Now.

We know this because Christ is risen from the dead. And if it isn’t true, if Barbara is really gone and gone forever, if you will never see her smile again, or hear her laughter, then this is all playacting. And I had better go and get another job.

Because there is an empty tomb in Jerusalem, our hearts, though mourning, are full today. We will see Barbara again.

Death cannot win against life.

Christians are those who, in the midst of December, believe in Spring.

I believe Paul saw all of this, and was so moved that he picked up his stylus and wrote those words which have become the Christian’s battle cry ever since; the words that should be on your hearts and lips as you leave this cathedral today:

“Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting?”

Read the entire homily here.

Rev. Hot Pants is only one sign that the Anglican communion is in a bit of trouble. Even casual readers will know that Anglicans have spent the past several years trying to avert an all-too-possible schism between the moral and theological “liberals” and the “conservatives.”

Of course tensions along similar lines also run high within the Catholic Church. Yet, somehow, very few people on either side foresee (either with longing or fear) anything like a schism. There have been a few splinter groups, but no moves towards separation by any large group of Catholics.

Why does Catholic unity persist? Michael Brendan Dougherty (writing for Culture 11) argues that those with liberal principles divergent from the Church–some of whom are powerful enough to be potential schismatic leaders–appear to ultimately value the security of “status, authority, and comfort” found within a united Church more than their principles.

Via Mark Shea, here’s John Cleese explaining genetic determinism. I was never that good at biology in college, but this seems to make sense to me.

Worth reading, today, are these two pieces from the archives. “Strange beyond understanding,” is how Fr. Neuhaus initially described September 11. Seven years later, that is no less true:

September 11. This is written the day after, just under the deadline for this issue. For years to come, I expect, we will speak of “before” and “after” September 11. I was on my way to say the nine o’clock Mass at Immaculate Conception, on 14th Street and First Avenue, when the hijacked airline hit the first tower. There was a small crowd at the corner of 14th and I remarked that there seemed to be a fire at the World Trade Center and we should pray for the people there. But I could not stay or I would be late for Mass. Only after Mass did I discover what had happened. How strange beyond understanding, I thought, that as we were at the altar offering up, as Catholics believe, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, only a little to the south of us was rising, in flames and mountains of smoke, a holocaust of suffering and death. That, too, was subsumed and offered on Calvary. It occurred to me that Friday, only three days away, is the feast called The Triumph of the Cross. Exactly.

Former FT employee Vincent Druding shared his own experience, as well, in “Ground Zero: A Journal”:

One night at 2 a.m. I was on my way through the rain to pick up supplies in the AMEX building, which, among other things, was being used as a transfer station for the bodies and parts of bodies we had recovered from the site. From there, they were packed onto trucks to be taken to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. As I entered the atrium of the building I saw scores of workers holding their hard hats over their chests. Fifty yards away a dozen firefighters proceeded slowly in my direction carrying a body bag. I removed my hard hat and stepped to the side. As they approached, I could read their red, swollen eyes. Their uniforms were dark with mud and soot. Raindrops dripped from everyone’s gear. A priest wearing a raincoat, a hard hat, goggles, a respirator, and a headlamp came forward with a book and oils. The men carrying their fallen friend cried quietly as the priest rolled back the bag and anointed the body, administering Last Rites. In the atrium, heads bowed and no one moved. I don’t remember how long we stood there, but time seemed to stop as profane space became as sacred as a shrine. Eventually, the priest stepped away, and the firemen walked slowly forward, out the doors and into the truck waiting outside. Without a word, we went back out into the dark rain to work.

Frightening setbacks in the battle against reducing abortions:

Canadian doctor warns Sarah Palin’s decision to have Down baby could reduce abortions

Last week I said that politics was a practical affair, for which people with ordinary practical experience were usually better qualified than theoreticians. The upshot was that Sarah Palin’s past as a mother and PTA member was nothing to sniff at. This Mail Online article on the PTA suggests that I was more right than I realized:

This lot wanted action, not thought. They wanted schemes to buy whiteboards, professional cricket coaching and a Spanish teacher for Year 6.

They wanted hard-nosed ideas for pushing their children ahead in life’s race, not debate about whether competitive sport is good or bad. They know the answer to that one. That’s why they’re running the show.

Yes, the world of the PTA is tough, money-minded and intensely personal.

Of course it may be that mothers in Wasilla are more relaxed than the urban professionals profiled in the article. But my experience suggests that mothers’ fierce and tough-minded pursuit of their children’s happiness is (along with men’s need to impress women) always and everywhere one of the main engines of human achievement. So, to reiterate, distinguishing yourself among a pack of motivated moms is nothing to sniff at.

Over at the law professors’ blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, they’re discussing the question of why political donations from lawyers are running so strongly in favor of Obama.

One commentator offers this explanation, “Could it be that most highly educated people agree with Obama, are aghast at Bush’s policies, and are afraid that McCain will continue on the same path as Bush?”

He is attacked by other commentators, and defended by yet others, but I was prompted to this question: Are lawyers, in fact, “highly educated”? Half of the smartest people I know are lawyers—I come from a long line of them, for that matter—but I realized I’ve also always thought of the law as something like an un- or even anti-intellectual pursuit: a highly specific application of the mind, rather than the heights of education.

To put the thought more starkly: Law school narrows the mind; education broadens it. Yes? No? Lawyers, of course, can be educated, in the same way unlikely, autodidactical way that truck drivers, engineers, and journalists like me can be educated. But are lawyers “highly educated” merely by the fact of their law-school degrees?

Depends, I guess, on what you mean by educated. Last night, I watched a video of an old roundtable discussion about Plato with Hans Georg Gadamer, Eric Voegelin, Alan Bloom, and Fred Lawrence. Now those guys, I thought, are educated. Maybe even highly educated.

Yesterday we read Yuval Levin fault Sen. Biden for conflating theology with biology when it comes to the morality of abortion and the beginning of human life. GetReligon’s Mollie, however, also criticizes Tom Brokaw for missing the opportunity to talk about Biden’s faith in a more meaningful way:

Brokaw is asking Biden what he would tell Obama about when life begins “as a Catholic.” Why would that be a religious question, exactly? And then his follow-up question has to rank as the most anemic murmur in the history of Meet the Press. Literally, “But if you, you believe that life begins at conception, and you’ve also voted for abortion rights. . .” How about, “If you believe that abortion takes an innocent human life, why do you think that it should be legal?” or “Your views are in conflict with the teaching of your church. Does that bother you?” or “Archbishop Chaput has said you should refrain from taking communion because of your support of abortion rights. Have you?” I mean, anything other than the non-question follow-up that Brokaw offers.

Good point. When you’re talking about science, talk about science, and the same goes for religion. Otherwise, you use one to avoid talking about the other, and nothing really gets said, which, I suspect, was Sen. Biden’s goal.

Sally Quinn—and what made the Washington Post imagine this gossip columnist was an expert on American religion?—points out the hypocrisy of conservative Protestants both promoting male headship and cheering for Sarah Palin.

To which Helen Rittelmeyer replies the answer is easy: Sarah Palin is Anne Hutchinson reborn. “If even the Puritans couldn’t unequivocally reject the possibility of female public leadership, I don’t know why Sally Quinn thinks that today’s Protestants should have to.”

Um, maybe. One remembers that the Puritan fathers did, in fact, find a way to get rid of Hutchinson (for heresy, as it happens, which also seems to be the charge brought against Palin, though this time from her fellow women rather than the men). Still, Rittelmeyer’s made an interesting volley back into Quinn’s court. Why must the press attempt to warp everything into the accusation of hypocrisy?

Please, pray for England.

Today, on the seventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, countless Americans across the country will sorrowfully remember those who lost their lives.

Today, the presidential candidates are taking a moment of silence, so to speak, from their campaigns to participate in a memorial event at Columbia University.

And today, as every day, the gospel commands us to love our enemies. As Fr. Neuhaus has said, this in no way means we must like our enemies or pretend they aren’t enemies. But it is in loving that we keep our enemies from winning us over to hatred and resentment, poisons for our soul.

“Responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation.” —The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”

New from Grassroots Films is a powerful short film, The Catholic Vote. “Vote your conscience” is the ultimate message–but inseparable from that is the imperative to form your conscience, and to form it wisely.