In 2004, South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk shocked the world by announcing he had successfully cloned human embryos in his lab. Key parts of Hwang’s research were later shown to be phony, however, and the scientist was indicted in 2006 on “embezzlement and bioethics law violations linked to faked stem-cell research.” Surprisingly, the fraud isn’t stopping Australia from considering a patent of the technology:

Australia’s intellectual property office (IP Australia) said it was considering the patent request by Seoul National University based on Hwang’s falsified research. Hwang is listed as one of 18 inventors in the patent application.

IP Australia said the decision to grant a patent was based on whether the technology was new or involved an inventive step, not whether an invention performed as claims.

“During examination, IP Australia considered that information relating to the falsification of research results involving Dr. Hwang were related to issues of utility (usefulness) and not matter that could be objected to in examination,” David Johnson, Acting Commissioner of Patents, said in a statement.

So, patents are granted in Australia “based on whether the technology . . . involved an inventive step.” Faking one’s results certainly is “inventive,” but I’m not sure that’s what IP Australia has in mind.

In his Weekly Standard article “Clinging to Her Religion: The Faith Journey of Sarah Palin,” Christian Terry Eastland rises above the hysteria and the noise in the best article yet on Sarah Palin’s religion. A sample:

Kroon [Palin’s pastor at Wasilla Bible Church] says that his church has had programs for children with special needs, that it supports the pro-life Heart Reach Pregnancy Center, which helps women in crisis pregnancies, and that it participates in house-building efforts undertaken by Habitat for Humanity. Rarely does Wasilla Bible have outside speakers, the most recent one a leader of Jews for Jesus. The church sometimes promotes events sponsored by outside groups, such as a recent Focus on the Family conference on overcoming unwanted same-sex attraction held in Anchorage.

Those who attend Wasilla Bible tend to be social conservatives. Kroon describes himself as “pro-life.” But the church, he says, doesn’t get involved in politics. “We’re extreme the other way. We put everything else down when we worship, whether it’s politics or anything else. The church is the church. Worship is worship.”

As Ramadan draws to an end, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue has sent its annual greetings to the Muslim faithful, urging Christians and Muslims to come together in safeguarding the dignity of the family, the “fundamental cell of society.”

I found this message of especial interest in light of Pope Benedict’s September mission intention: “That, faithful to the sacrament of matrimony, every Christian family may cultivate the values of love and communion in order to be a small evangelizing community, sensitive and open to the material and spiritual needs of its brothers.” Evangelization, the council letter reminds us, does not just extend outward in ministry to our non-Christian brethren, but it can also draw them in as friends and fellow evangelizers.

Some highlights from the letter:

One of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, which deals with the Church in the modern world, states: “The well-being of the individual person and of human and Christian society is intimately linked with the healthy condition of that community produced by marriage and family. Hence Christians and all men who hold this community in high esteem sincerely rejoice in the various ways by which men today find help in fostering this community of love and perfecting its life, and by which parents are assisted in their lofty calling. . . .”

These words give us an opportune reminder that the development of both the human person and of society depends largely on the healthiness of the family! How many people carry, sometimes for the whole of their life, the weight of the wounds of a difficult or dramatic family background? . . . Christians and Muslims can and must work together to safeguard the dignity of the family, today and in the future.
. . .

I need only remind you that the family is the first school in which one learns respect for others, mindful of the identity and the difference of each one. Inter-religious dialogue and the exercise of citizenship cannot but benefit from this.

And, from the Pontifical Council for the Family, under Cardinal Antonelli, comes this: The Christian family should strive to be characterized by “profound unity, respect of differences, generous openness to life” and “the care of the weakest.” “The beauty of the family,” writes the cardinal, “ must be witnessed in a concrete way . . . [by] building genuine Christian families that can be a burning fire, a point of reference for all.”

Who said saints were only forged in monasteries?

As hot as the culture war can burn, things rarely threaten to get physical. But this past Saturday, South Carolina experienced a brief but violent tremor along a national fault-line when cadets at the Citadel (a military academy in South Carolina) attacked the Princeton University Band before a football game.

Fanatics in each camp of the culture war are likely to interpret these events according to their preconceptions about the other side.

Some will look at the Citadel and see only an institution founded to quell slave revolts and that proudly flies the Confederate flag. On Saturday, this pack of humorless, violent bigots, all hopped-up on homophobia, territorialism, and envy, irrationally attacked innocent entertainers.

Others will look at the PUB and see privileged softies, living in a cocoon of excess and irony, who lack all understanding and respect for the commitments of the Citadel’s honorable cadets. On Saturday, these chronic mockers, who “sashay” and “hump” in public, these radicals and flag-burners, pushed too far and got what they had coming to them. The cadets should be given a medal.

Of course, either judgment would be very unfair. By this I do not at all mean to say that “nobody is guilty” for what happened. As a proud Princeton alumnus I can’t claim total neutrality, but I think most of us will agree that the cadets acted shamefully even by civilian (let alone military) standards; on their end there should only be an apology followed by silence. Furthermore, there is no evidence that PUB intended provocation or disrespect. They simply came to do what they usually do–in fact, they apparently censored their halftime show to suit their conservative audience.

Still, it doesn’t take much imaginative sympathy to see why serious and proud young men might misinterpret the sight of elite jokesters traipsing across virtually sacred ground. Most of the blame probably rests with the Citadel’s administrators. Anyone remotely familiar with PUB’s rollicking, irreverent style should have recognized that the interaction was unlikely to be pleasant.

Oh, and the Princeton Tigers lost, 37-24.

NASA has commissioned a twenty-eight-year-old science communication student from south Wales to write rap songs about space:

A postgraduate student who uses his love of hip-hop to make science easier to understand has been commissioned by space agency NASA to write a rap.

Jonathan Chase, who is studying at the University of Glamorgan in south Wales, was asked to come up with the Astrobiology Rap for a NASA magazine. . . .

The song features lyrics like: “We’ve been on Earth for many years and we are still producing answers; as time passes, collective knowledge advances.”

Of course it would be good to see increased enthusiasm for science in elementary students. What’s humorous is imagining NASA scientists enthusiastic about hip-hop.

With few exceptions, the above statement applies to me. It also applies to parfumier Christopher Brosius, who in fact has a store called CB I Hate Perfume. Arts & Letters Daily linked to a story by Jessica Gallucci about Christopher and his interesting collection of scents–Wet Pavement, Roast Beef, Burning Leaves, In the Library, and At the Beach 1966, to name a few. That last one Christopher describes as “Coppertone 1967 blended with a new accord I created especially for this perfume–North Atlantic. The base of the scent contains a bit of Wet Sand, Seashell, Driftwood and just a hint of Boardwalk.”

While I dislike many perfumes, I certainly do like the smell of the rich earth and clean air in a forest, or the sea breeze blowing over seashells and wet sand. Or the scent of old paper, wood paneling, leather furniture, and pipe smoke that I imagine something called In the Library would convey. The fact that someone has decided to capture these scents–and done so quite well, according to Gallucci–is interesting indeed.

More interesting would be the potential such smells might have to resurrect forgotten memories. Gallucci visited the store with her parents, and her father, like many a man dragged perfume shopping, sat in the corner brimming with disinterest. Yet when she brought him a vial of At the Beach 1966, she writes, “With an upward roll of the eyes, he inhaled. Then he took the sample from my hand, sniffed again and nearly leapt to his feet: the scent had triggered a memory of summers he spent lifeguarding on Long Island as a teenager.”

The store sounds like a Proustian bakery filled with a hundred petite madeleines, an olfactory photo album of sorts. In other words an interesting way to spend a Saturday afternoon in New York.

University of Massachusetts Chaplain Kenneth Higgins, who sought to give students school credit for campaigning for Obama, has been denied. Higgins told students last week:

If you’re scared about the prospects for this election, you’re not alone. The most important way to make a difference in the outcome is to activate yourself. It would be just fine with McCain if Obama supporters just think about helping, then sleep in and stay home between now and Election Day.

Of course, students can still campaign, it’s just that no academic credits will be granted for their service. But I think Higgins would agree that this lack of earthly reward shouldn’t stop followers from avoiding the sin of omission of not campaigning.

Last week, we read about the twenty-year-old college student who was able to access Gov. Sarah Palin’s email account using information he culled from Google.

In an interesting turn of events, federal investigators have now revealed that the culprit, David Kernell, son of Democratic state representative Mike Kernell, was found using the very same search engine. Live by the search, die by the search, I guess.

I love this sonnet by Robert Frost, capturing something of an autumnal wistfulness. He begins with a straightforward, almost flat statement, “There is a singer everyone had heard,” but his description of the oven bird’s plain chirrup soon wafts into evocative paradox: “On sunny days, a moment overcast.” His lyricism builds as he develops a steady meter, only to leave the reader lingering in question with his final line.

Words fall short of expressing life’s mysteries–especially in a fallen world, especially about a fallen world–but Frost shows that the music of poetry, like birdsong, is composed of more than mere words.

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Some years back, the Washington Post editorial board apologized for an editorial calling evangelical Christians “poor, ignorant, and easily led.” Good thing, too.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reports:

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith–it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

It is not the case, however, that all new atheists are “poor, ignorant, and easily led.”

Many Baby Boomers have noted that, from an intellectual point of view, the American national response to Islamic radicalism has been shockingly sluggish and uninspired, especially as compared with the vast mobilization of the Cold War. After the Sputnik embarrassment, for instance, the entire math and science curriculum was radically reworked and improved. As far as I am aware, no remotely comparable initiative has been taken in the wake of September 11.

Because we’ve spent the past several years arguing about the justice and effectiveness of the invasion of Iraq, we tend to forget that the most crucial part of the struggle against terrorism does not involve conventional military operations at all.

To fight terrorism effectively you must not only know how to decisively interrupt complex international flows of money without stopping up the arteries of prosperity. You must not only familiarize yourself with languages, geography, national and ethnic histories and religious schools. You must also try to understand why and how ideas are spread—an engrossing psychological and sociological exercise.

The French, for instance, have belatedly recognized the need to carefully study the spread of Islamic radicalism in their Muslim-dominated prisons. Is it better to bind extremists together in clusters, allowing them to plot, or to disperse them throughout the prison population, allowing them to proselytize? And what effect would it have to introduce a greater number of moderate Muslim chaplains into the prison environment?

I think that, if given a push, many of us would find wrestling with such important questions fascinating and rewarding. Perhaps the next president will find a way to give them that push.

Reuters brings us the latest in the ongoing quest to conflate the news so readers don’t have to:

“Evolution fine but no apology to Darwin: Vatican”

The Vatican said on Tuesday the theory of evolution was compatible with the Bible but planned no posthumous apology to Charles Darwin for the cold reception it gave him 150 years ago.

Wait a second. Why is the Church expected to apologize to Darwin in the first place? According to the very same news article,

Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans in 1950 and Pope John Paul reiterated that in 1996. . . . Darwin’s theories were “never condemned by the Catholic Church nor was his book ever banned”. . . .

Creationism is the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible. The Catholic Church does not read the Genesis account of creation literally, saying it is an allegory for the way God created the world.

Christian churches were long hostile to Darwin because his theory conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation.

Earlier this week a leading Anglican churchman, Rev. Malcolm Brown, said the Church of England owed Darwin an apology for the way his ideas were received by Anglicans in Britain.

Let me get things straight: Other Christian churches understand the creation story literally. An Anglican in Britain hopes his church apologizes for not adopting evolution from the start. Sounds like the Vatican has some explaining to do.

A subscriber writes to ask if I know any good churches in Amsterdam. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Does anyone else have an idea? Beautiful old churches to visit—likely, I imagine, to be Dutch Reformed? And a good church at which to attend a Catholic Mass? Email here if you have a suggestion.

Our friend Thomas Farr—author of a major article on U.S. foreign policy and religious freedom in the next issue of First Things—writes to remind us of a conference at Georgetown University on October 10.

The last in a series of conferences commemorating the 10th anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act, it features such speakers as Rick Santorum, William Galston, Mark Plattner, William L. Saunders, and Hadley Arkes.

To see more information and to register for the conference, visit their webpage.

I’m reading A Brief History of the Normans by François Neveux. So far it’s quite informative and readable, but the author, apparently following current scholarly fashion, insists on referring to the medieval expeditions of the Northmen as “migrations.” For, you see, the word “invasion” (which he always puts in condescending scare-quotes) has a “very pejorative connotation” that reflects the “pessimistic vision of Frankish, Anglo-Saxon and Irish clerics, who . . . were describing the point of view of the victims.”

But later he notes that, when trade brought diverse Scandinavian peoples into sustained interaction with “Frankish and Russian worlds,” they “discovered rich but poorly defended countries, which soon encouraged them to move from trade to plunder.” So, we are told with a happy flourish, thus began “one of the most extraordinary human adventures of the Middle Ages . . . the Viking migration.”

Now, just yesterday I re-read G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse with great but critical appreciation. I can see why a careful modern historian would want to challenge Chesterton’s characterization of the “Danes” as vectors of “heathen nihilism,” who “only saw with heavy eyes/ And broke with heavy hands.” No doubt we are right to recognize great cultural and political creativity even among unlettered warriors–and for this reason we may well view the coming of the Vikings as something less than a total disaster.

But this does not make it reasonable to call a mass movement of armed and organized men, primarily motivated by the opportunity to take things without asking, anything but an “invasion.” This is not a characterization only morose monks could find intelligible.

This mealy-mouthed terminology may not indicate over-scrupulous scholarly neutrality so much as an internalized hostility to the story Western Christendom told about itself. Call me a cynic, but I doubt it will ever become fashionable to speak of Cortes’ “migration” to Mexico.

“I’m a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage. Do those positions sound contradictory? To me, they fit together.”

So writes David Blankenhorn, author of The Future of Marriage, in a recent LA Times editorial. The legalization of same-sex marriage, he writes, is not an easy case of good versus evil, but one of competing goods: the reduction of homophobia and the protection of every child’s birthright to a loving, stable family. Which wins out?

For Blankenhorn, the truly liberal response–aimed at societal flourishing and the protection of human rights–must be honest about our past to be honest about our future:

Many seem to believe that marriage is simply a private love relationship between two people. They accept this view, in part, because Americans have increasingly emphasized and come to value the intimate, emotional side of marriage, and in part because almost all opinion leaders today, from journalists to judges, strongly embrace this position. That’s certainly the idea that underpinned the California Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. But I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I’ve come to a different conclusion.

Read the rest of Blankenhorn’s case here.

I’d quote Mr. Pope in saying, “To err is human,” but this morning it was the error of the router in our office that stalled our blogging temporarily. To those who came by seeking a tidbit of insight or humor, you’ll be glad to hear the problem’s now fixed and the FT blog is back in business.

From over on starboard side, Nicholas Provenzo of the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism is “troubled” by the implications of Gov. Sarah Palin’s “decision to knowingly give birth to a child disabled with Down syndrome.” He thinks “it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome (or by extension, any unborn fetus)—a freedom that anti-abortion advocates seek to deny.” Here’s his line of thinking:  

A parent has a moral obligation to provide for his or her children until these children are equipped to provide for themselves. Because a person afflicted with Down syndrome is only capable of being marginally productive (if at all) and requires constant care and supervision, unless a parent enjoys the wealth to provide for the lifetime of assistance that their child will require, they are essentially stranding the cost of their child’s life upon others.

 
Meanwhile, on the port side, Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” treats us to this little thought:

I believe it is immoral and should be illegal for people to have very large numbers of children because they are then co-opting for themselves and their children resources that should be spread elsewhere in the world. You only get a chance to get your fair share. 

To the follow-up question, “How many is ‘very large’”? Ehrlich responds:

The issue is: What is the political position to take? In a country like the United States, we should stop at two. But if you had an ideal situation, you might have a lot of people who have no children at all, and some people who have as many as three or four because they happen to be particularly good parents, and are going to raise their children very well. 

Amanda posted yesterday an excerpt from a book entitled A Discourse of the Married and Single Life: Wherein by Discovering the Misery of One, is Plainly Declared the Felicity of the Other. This made me think back twenty-six years to my wedding reception.

My wife and I and our families and the groomsmen and maids-of-honor were waiting to enter the reception hall and be introduced to the guests. My older brother William was my best man and was to give the toast, and he hadn’t thought of anything witty to spice up his remarks. My father stepped in to help, and offered these words from Samuel Johnson: “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”

It got a big laugh, but afterwards a physics colleague of mine (now a professor at a prestigious university) came up to me with a confused look his face, and said, “I don’t understand the joke your brother told. What does celibacy have to do with it?” It suddenly dawned on me what his problem was: The idea that an unmarried person would be celibate was so foreign to his way of thinking, that Dr. Johnson’s statement seemed like a pure non sequitur to him.

FT readers interested in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will be interested in this upcoming conference:

Theology of the Body: Modern Challenges to Health Conscience, and Human Dignity

Baltimore, Maryland
October 9-11, 2008

This conference will reflect on the significance of Pope John Paul II’s teaching to the medical profession, “accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and their close inter-connection.” Physician experts, theologians, and expert speakers, in panel format, will provide medical and theological analysis of the discourses delivered by the late Pope John Paul II in 129 addresses that have been collected and published as the “Theology of the Body.”

Speaking at the event will be George Weigel and Robert P. George, both of whom are frequent contributors to First Things and members of our editorial board.

Those interested in the conference may register online or by mail, or contribute a donation to the conference.