1. Jonathan Mitchican on the cassock:

The cassock was once the standard article of dress for Christian priests. Long after the Great Schism divided the east from the west, the cassock remained a symbol of priesthood that was acknowledged by Catholic and Orthodox alike. Cassocks have been worn by priests for so long that their origin is somewhat mysterious (despite the certainty that Wikipedia seems to have in the matter). They probably developed out of the common tunic that was worn by almost everyone in the Roman Empire. By as early as the seventh century, though, the cassock was a distinct enough garment that people identified it with clergy. The cassock was a symbol of the priesthood in the way that a white coat is a symbol of medicine or a tie is a symbol of formality and professionalism.

But all of that is over now, at least in the west. At age thirty, I’m the product of a post sixties, post sexual revolution, post Vatican II world. There’s no room for the cassock in the world in which I’ve grown up. I’ve never seen a Roman Catholic priest wear one, outside of the movies. In my own tradition, cassocks are reserved for liturgical functions, and even then they’re becoming rare, traded in for the more functional cassock-alb. To wear a cassock when not officiating at liturgy is to paint one’s self as a stuffy traditionalist who is pining after the nineteenth century, a clueless old fuddy duddy who is still trapped by the oppressive social norms of yesteryear.

2. Tea Party Jesus

3. 50 Fantastically Clever Logos

4. Do Ugly People Commit More Crime?

Ugly people are more likely to break the law. This is the statistically based conclusion in a paper published in The Review of Economics and Statistics entitled Ugly Criminals. The BBC describes the findings as being significant in “the new field of anthropometrics”, suggesting that this could be a handy profiling tool. In fact, anthropometry, in particular detecting criminal tendencies by the measurement of facial characteristics, is a very old discipline. It was previously condemned as pseudoscience – could it be making a comeback?

5. Study of the Week: Drinking Alcohol Regularly Cuts Risk of Arthritis

(more…)

There’s a bit of shooting fish in a barrel to this, but it’s delicious anyway: Deepak Chopra Gets Owned.

Thanks for the link to Steve Hayward of NoLeftTurns, who refers to Chopra as “one of those self-levitating frauds so common in our age.” In another Youtube offering, Richard Dawkins takes on Chopra with amusing results (the conversation starts about two minutes, thirty seconds in).

Speaking of Dawkins, Christian apologists love taking on the New Atheists, I assume because they make sense and can be  argued with. But if the apologists’ calling is to expose error and protect people from the seductions of their age, they ought to be addressing pseudo-mystical windbags like Chopra nearly as often.

For those of you who missed last week’s opportunity, now’s your last chance! We need a one-liner to go under the FT logo on a t-shirt, and we’d love to hear your ideas. Winner of the best caption gets a free t-shirt!

Send us your suggestions, along with your name and address, to contest@firstthings.com.

A Bosnian man, whose house has been hit six times by meterorites, explains that “I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don’t know what I have done to annoy them.”

The Washington Post offers a symposium on Should religions intermarry?

A Catholic pyschotherapist explains parapyschology as an apostolate to the holy souls.

Evangelicals offer their thoughts on the current meaning of “Be fruitful and multiply”.

Kevin Kelly lists the best magazine articles ever (and provides links for most of them), though he includes only three published before 1960.

While Flowing data reveals how to win every time at rock, paper, scissors.

A Scottish IVF facility could soon allow women to genetically screen their unborn children and discard those with defects. “Earlier this year the UK’s fertility regulator unveiled a list of 116 different conditions for which doctors can destroy embryos conceived through IVF. The controversial list includes a number of conditions which are considered minor, non life-threatening or medically treatable.”

And Catholic priests are now being trained to help those addicted to pornography. “This is the No. 1 sin they are hearing from men in the confessional,” says the therapist training them.

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, a professed atheist, recently stated she respects the Church, in response to an archbishop’s suggesting Christians might not vote for her on August 21. But does one’s religious background affect voters in Australia?

Australia, being a more secularized place than the United States, but not as much as the United Kingdom, generally is less inclined to consider a person’s religious background to be a significant or essential factor in elections. Whilst calling oneself an ‘atheist’ in the United States would be considered to be political suicide, in Australia, it may come as a surprise to some, but would be welcomed and even praised in some quarters.

As to whether the prime minister’s personal beliefs will have any effect her political decisions, I’m skeptical of the common and widespread assumption that one’s personal beliefs are merely ‘private’ and have no public consequences. Our beliefs are always personal, but never private.

Patrick Langrell, director of young-adult outreach for the Catholic archdiocese of New York, is originally from Australia.

Although he “grew up as a socialist republican in Belfast,” and believes “there is also much about the Catholic Church’s teachings to rage against,”  Kevin Rooney argues in The Backwardness of Catholic-Bashing that

the current animosity to all things Catholic manifests itself in ways that are far from healthy. So while many of the exponents of this popular new breed of anti-Catholicism would certainly consider themselves liberal, their treatment of the church is anything but.

Writing on the left-libertarian site Spiked, he condemns the censoriousness (here meaning to desire to censor), hypocrisy, and ignorance of his peers. For example,

Talk to any practising Catholic or ‘ethnic’ Catholic on this subject, and within minutes they will give you a shocking example of ignorance from their own friends and intellectual equals that would rarely be displayed in discussions of politics, the arts, etc. . . .

To display such ignorance about Islam these days would be described as racism — but when it comes to Catholicism it is perfectly okay. . . . [O]therwise intelligent people seem to have carte blanche to be ignorant and prejudiced when it comes to Catholicism.

It’s only going to get worse.  Even Catholic pessimists like me have been surprised at how quickly the hooting and howling has become an acceptable expression of public piety, with its overt bigotry unrebuked by those who otherwise consider themselves the keeper’s of national discourse. As Rooney mentions, no one would be allowed to speak of Islam like this without censure.

Wednesday, August 25th, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Be there—because, well, because I’ll be there, and Michael Novak will be there, and Chuck Colson, and Os Guinness.

Two Catholic speakers and two Protestants—a practical application of the idea of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and a significant marker of the attempt to join together on the local level,

The occasion is the first ever, state-wide Biblical World View Conference, cosponsored by Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe and the former congressman, Pastor Bill Redmond.

Here’s a video invitation to the conference from Archbishop Sheehan, and here’s a link for registration at the conference.

Anne Rice posted this now-notorious comment on her Facebook page Wednesday:

I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

According to what we’ve heard, Rice’s post was heavily edited by her public relations team. The original reportedly went like this:

I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-vampire. I refuse to be anti-werewolf. I refuse to be anti-zombie. I refuse to be anti-ghoul. I refuse to be anti-porphyria. I refuse to belong to a religion whose cruciform symbol is used to terrorize creatures of the night. I refuse to belong to a religion that drives stakes through the hearts of beings with whom I consanguinate. I refuse to be anti-undead. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

In today’s “On the Square” article, senior editor David Goldman shows how bad demographics lead to bad economies. In Fed Proposals to Counter “Deflation” Are Misguided, he writes that “Demographics drive deflation, and our demographics are not good.” For one thing,

an aging population saves, and savings are deflationary. As people near retirement, they must substitute future goods (savings instruments entitling them to consumer in the future) for present goods (consumption)—so the price of present goods falls.

The government may attempt to substitute its own spending for household spending but it never quite works, no matter how many public works projects the government sponsors. Japan poured more cement than anyone else—and the decade was still lost.

He’s referring to Japan’s famous “lost decade,” and argues that the United States is about to lose one too.

Doctors in India Worried Over Abuse of ‘Morning-After’ Pill

Health-care workers and government officials in India are concerned over the routine and indiscriminate use of emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), commonly called the “morning-after” pill. The pills, which have a heavy dose of the same hormones found in regular oral contraceptive pills, are freely available over the counter in India.

The Amish Population Boom

The number of Amish in North America has doubled since 1991 and their distinctive communities can now be found in Canada as well as 28 U.S. states, including unlikely ones like Texas and Maine.

HHS bans coverage of elective abortion in high-risk pools

After reports recently surfaced that some of the new federally-funded high risk pool insurance programs in states across the U.S. were covering elective abortion, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a statement today, prohibiting the plans from covering the procedure.

Nuns With Music Deal Get Death Threats

Benedictine nuns from a secluded convent in southern France have received death threats after winning a deal aimed at creating a chart-topping album, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The nuns from the Abbaye de Notre-Dame de l’Annonciation near Avignon had their prayers answered last week after beating 70 other religious orders from North America and Africa to the deal with Universal Music.

Fewer Spaniards say they are Catholic

The proportion of Spaniards who say they are Roman Catholic has fallen to 73 percent from around 80 percent eight years ago, according to a survey released Thursday by the CIS research centre.

[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host a discussion about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme is "men do not do" lists. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com.]

During last week’s discussion of “50 Things a Man Should Be Able To Do,” a reader suggested we compile a list of things a man should never do. Although most people agreed that it was a worthy idea, one commenter warned that “The ‘should not’ list is inadvisable if it about cultural preferences and machismo.”

I disagree. I think the list should mainly consists of machismo and cultural preferences since those areas comprise the majority of things that men should not do. Besides, we’re creating a list, not drafting law. There’s no penalty for disagreeing. It’s doesn’t mean you’re evil. It just means that you’re wrong.

For this list I had some help from First Thoughts readers. You can hold me responsible for the first 37, while the remaining items are identified by the name of the contributor.

Here are 50 things a man should never do:

(more…)

Dr. Kenneth Howell, the professor from the University of Illinois who lost his job for his explanation to his Introduction to Catholicism class of the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality, will be allowed to continue teaching the course this fall, according to a letter, dated July 28, from the University to the Alliance Defense Fund:

The School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics will be contacting Dr. Howell to offer him the opportunity to teach Religion 127, Introduction to Catholicism, on a visiting instructional appointment at the University of Illinois, for the fall 2010 semester. Dr. Howell will be appointed and paid by the University for this adjunct teaching assignment. Read more

This is certainly good to hear, but it’s a far cry from the University admitting any wrongdoing for dismissing Dr. Howell in the first place, though the letter mentions that the University Senate Committee’s investigation into the decision to remove Howell’s teaching responsibilities is still ongoing. It’s also worth noting that this will be a new teaching arrangement, with Dr. Howell teaching as a visiting professor paid by the University rather than by the Saint John’s Catholic Newman Center—perhaps that’s all the religion department wanted to begin with.

The global financial crisis has made austerity a new reality for many people. At Biq Questions Online, Brian Kaller reflects on why the Irish will find it easier to endure the hard times ahead than will we Americans:

The Irish have a lot in common with Americans, and not just because our globalized culture has everybody listening to Beyoncé and talking about the series finale of Lost. To a Missouri boy like me, many things seem familiar: faces and last names, crops and churches, country music stations and county fairs. This is where much of rural America comes from, the original of the species. In other ways, of course, Ireland is a European nation, with nationalized health care, coalition governments, no death penalty, and no guns.

And when it comes to attitudes toward economic hard times, the Irish could not be less American, owing to the country’s unusual modern history. Ireland’s stark landscape of windswept plains and ancient monoliths draws legions of tourists, inspires New Age records, fantasy literature, and inspirational calendars. But we see those ruins out of context. When built, they were surrounded by towns, farms, and a cold rainforest like Oregon’s today. In medieval times, Ireland was a civilized and densely populated country compared to most of Europe. Even after the land was conquered and the forests felled, as many as 8 million people lived here — almost twice as many as today. Over the last 200 years, the populations of most countries increased dramatically­­ — Britain’s by seven-fold, America’s by a factor of 50. Ireland’s was cut by almost half.

The most important reason was the Famine, of course, and you can still hear the capital F in today’s Ireland. But that epochal crash was just the worst chapter of a history that emptied the land and made Ireland the world’s most famous exporter of sad songs and refugees. Perhaps no other people but the Jews have been so defined by tragedy and exodus.

Read more . . .

An English engineer solves the mystery of Pisa’s leaning tower’s lean, and finds a way to stabilize it.  Not all Italians are happy.

Jonathan Cohn thinks Obama’s a success and gets annoyed with liberals who don’t see that, because they undermine the cause. “Truth be told,” he says, “a Democratic member in a Republican district probably benefits more from higher Obama approval ratings than an ad buy from Moveon.org.”

Some people, almost certainly young men under forty, worry that in the future we won’t be able to play old video games.

And a reviewer ponders a book on video games that doesn’t dare look at the “the strange species of hopped-up man-boy whose compulsions find both their spur and their outlet in the hyperactive cartoon worlds rendered in meticulous detail on high-definition screens.”

An Oxford physicist says that radiation isn’t as dangerous as we thought, and that “Given the availability of carbon-free nuclear power, this makes a sea change in our view of radiation rather urgent.”

The alternative Anglican group in Canada voted overwhelmingly (the clergy unanimous, the laity almost so) to begin to establish an Catholic Ordinariate in Canada.

Ruth Franklin argues that Amazon isn’t responsible for the problems of the publishing industry, and that “The real trouble with Amazon, it seems, is that nobody truly believes we were better off without it.”

From 1924, Rose Macaulay (later a Christian) reviews H. G. Well’s novel/tract The Dream, which now looks very quaint.

Finally, more liturgical puppetry, this time at the opening service of the Presbyterians’ General Assembly.

“Genetically engineered crops could save many millions from starvation and malnutrition — if they can be freed from excessive regulation,” declares an article in Nature (not available online). Ingo Potrykus, chairman of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, explains:

Golden rice is a series of varieties modified with two genes (phytoene synthase and phytoene double-desaturase) to produce up to 35 micrograms of vitamin A precursor per gram of edible rice. Within the normal diet of rice-dependent poor populations, it could provide sufficient vitamin A to reduce substantially the 6,000 deaths a day due to vitamin A deficiency, and to save the sight of several hundred thousand people per year.

None of the existing varieties of rice has even low levels of the vitamin A precursor in the part that is eaten, so conventional breeding cannot increase it. Golden rice was possible only with genetic engineering.

Getting approval for a genetically-modified crop usually “takes about ten times more money and ten years longer,” he writes to bring to market than for a non-genetically modified one. (Golden Rice will be on the market in 2012, thirteen years after it was ready in the lab.) The effect is that a few companies control the field and they focus on the most money-making crops, and not on those that could change the “food security” of the poor.

Anne Rice, author of the a series of best-selling vampire novels and, most recently, fictional accounts of the life of Christ, has taken to Facebook to announce she is no longer a Christian:

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten …years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

Later she wrote:

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

The Catholic World Report has an important look at the complex situation in China in this exclusive interview with Cardinal Joseph Zen.

River Jordan Baptismal Site Closes Over Pollution Scare

Thousands of Christian pilgrims immerse themselves in the river’s sluggish water each year in faithful recreation of the biblical story of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist.

But officials closed the site this week to test the water’s quality. Local environmentalists have long complained of intolerably high levels of sewage and farming chemicals that, they say, pose a risk to human health.

Holy Communion to be offered on Twitter

Rev Tim Ross will tweet out the lines of the Eucharist next month to his hundreds of followers, who can tweet back “Amen” while taking bread and wine in front of their PCs.

He hoped it would unite the faithful across the world: “Where could it lead, who knows? Maybe one day to a baptism by Facebook,” he said.

‘In God We Trust’ Again Upheld by Federal Appeals Court

In a 3-0 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, DC, ruled that the National Motto, “In God We Trust,” is constitutional and does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Quoting the 1970 decision in Aronow v. United States, the Court wrote: “It is quite obvious that the national motto and slogan on coinage and currency ‘In God We Trust’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion.”

Our friend and frequent contributor Archbishop Charles Chaput will be speaking at this year’s meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. The group, whose membership includes several members of First Things‘ board, is meeting in Baltimore from September 24th to 26th. The theme is “Catholicism in America.”

The group was founded about thirty years ago as a faithful alternative to all the dissenting groups, to gather scholars who saw traditional Catholicism as an aid to thinking well and not an impediment. Here’s their history.

Update: Since I mention him, here are the four most recent “On the Square” articles by the archbishop: Fire on the Earth, Glorify God by Your Life, Suing the Church, and The Captivity of “Catholic” Witness.

Shi’ite Muslims believe that “sigheh,” a fixed-term marriage that is automatically dissolved upon completion of its term, is an institution established by Allah through Muhammad in the Qur’an. So to aid pious pilgrims who are looking for a little short-term matrimony, the Iran has sanctioned brothels marriage chapels at Imam Reza’s shrine in Mash’had. Here are the details outlined in a document obtained by Planet-Iran.com:

In order to elevate the spiritual atmosphere, create proper psychological conditions and tranquility of mind, the Province of the Quds’eh-Razavi of Khorassan has created centers for temporary marriage (just next door to the shrine) for those brothers who are on pilgrimage to the shrine of our eighth Imam, Imam Reza, and who are far away from their spouses.

To that end, we call on all our sisters who are virgins, who are between the ages of 12 and 35 to cooperate with us. Each of our sisters who signs up will be bound by a two-year contract with the province of the Quds’eh-Razavi of Khorassan and will be required to spend at least 25 days of each month temporarily married to those brothers who are on pilgrimage. The period of the contract will be considered as a part of the employment experience of the applicant. The period of each temporary marriage can be anywhere between 5 hours to 10 days. The prices are as follows:

(more…)

We must be Experts in Stupidity, Joe Carter declares in today’s “On the Square” article.  After describing some attempts to ignore the obvious, he writes:

Unlike these Rousseauian utopians, we can’t even pretend to know how to build a healthy political and social structure. What we do know, however, is how to recognize a sick one.

Just as physicians define bodily health as the absence of sickness, conservatives view the absence of sickness as the best gauge of the health of the body politic. Our primary socio-political objective, therefore, is similar to that of medical doctors: preventing and eliminating moral sickness.

He goes on to suggest what this means in practice.

As a member of the Chesterton Review‘s board, I should mention to you the publication of the latest issue, the Spring-Summer 2010 double issue. It includes Allan Carlson on a family-based economy, and articles on the philospher Slavoj Zizek’s view of Chesterton and paradox, Hilaire Belloc’s idea of the “servile state,” and reflections on Chesterton’s social philosophy of “distributism,” as well as book reviews and the like.

Our editor Robert P. George describes the Review this way: “Serious and lively, scholarly and popular, ecumenical and artisan, it is a rebuke of those who suppose that serious writing cannot be fun to read, or that an orthodox viewpoint must be a narrow one.”

Update: The Chesterton Institute asked me to post its e-mail address, which is chestertoninstitute@shu.edu.

Writing in the University of Chicago’s magazine, the political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain explained her defense of the Iraq war against two critical letters (scroll down the page about three-quarters of the way). One of them is particularly ad hominem, of the “find it sad that a professor of ethics would” sort. (The other suggested that Israel was a better target for a preemptive war than Iraq.)  Prof. Elshtain is a member of the First Things board.

She begins by rejecting the writers’ description of the Hussein regime and the war, and then writes:

On the humanitarian justification for the war, I was describing my own position, not issuing a universal truism. But my position was shared by some of the great democratic heroes of our time, folks like President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, whose health was broken during the years he spent in communist prisons, and other leaders of the new democracies erected on the ashes of the Soviet system. I suspect that because these democratic heroes had such a recent experience of tyranny, they were far more sensitive to the fact that the Kurds had been gassed by Saddam; that the Shi’a had been slaughtered with impunity in numbers over 100,000; and other pertinent facts-not opinions, but facts.

And given her astonishing claim that what the U.S. has done has “caused greater suffering,” I suggest Athey take a look at Samantha Power’s award-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, and its discussion of Saddam’s regime and the poison gas used on the Kurds.

She closes with a reflection on the kind of letters to which she was responding — one had declared she must have “twisted the evidence” to say what she’d said. In this kind of disagreement,

Rather than registering a disagreement, one attributes the worst possible motives to the person with whom one disagrees. This has a corrosive effect on our political discourse. One thing I have come to understand as a lifelong student of politics, is that Clauswitz’s famous “fog of war” pertains to politics more generally, a realm in which decisions are made in the absence of perfect and transparent evidence.

Politics is a realm of approximation and imperfection where, hopefully, things turn out right at least part of the time. Apparently, Mr. Glynn cannot abide ambiguity and uncertainty, so he must resort to charges of venal sins.

We’re offering a Second Links today without a First Links, but the numbering refers to the time of day the items appear, not the order.

After running a stop sign, an teenager led police in a one-mile chase, in a horse and buggy. The Amish seventeen-year-old rolled the buggy while turning into a drive way and then fled on foot.

Perhaps moving even more slowly, a British woman has set the record for the longest time — almost 29 hours — swimming across the English channel, which is an impressive physical feat.

We can now see the the biggest and best picture of the night sky ever made, called a “terapixel” sky map.

From Harper’s archive: Dorothy Thompson’s Who Goes Nazi?, a character analysis with some continuing relevance of “the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers.”

A Grove City College professor writes on the lefty website Salon.com about a megachurch that invited pro-gay protesters in to talk.

The Anglican minister who gave communion to a dog (a “dog wafer gaffe” as the newspaper put it) has apologized, but insisted that “Jesus is a positive person,” which seems to mean she thinks He would have done so too.

Russia institutes a new holiday marking the country’s conversion to Christianity., though it is the kind of holiday on which you have to work.

Thanks to Patrick Kosarski and The Anchoress for links.

According to a report in Britain’s Telegraph, Bishop Giuseppe Fiorini Morosini of the Calabrian Diocese of Locri-Gerace has written an open letter to the bosses of the ’Ndrangheta—the Calabrian Mafia—“imploring them to stop using holy shrines for their initiation ceremonies.” The bishop, says the Telegraph, decided to speak out “after more than 300 alleged mobsters—including the 80-year-old ‘Godfather’ Domenico Oppedisano—were arrested in a police blitz earlier this month.” The Telegraph article is accompanied by a screen capture from an Italian police surveillance film showing Oppedisano “being ‘sworn in’ under a statue of the Virgin Mary at Polsi near Reggio Calabria.”

In his letter the bishop states, “We have seen images of your illegal gatherings and divisions of power at the shrine to the Madonna at Polsi” and goes on to note that “We had always thought that these meetings at holy shrines were folklore but now we have had to re-think.” Interestingly, entries about the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi in both the English and Italian versions of Wikipedia speak of the shrine’s longtime ’Ndrangheta associations; the English-language page even observes that as early as 1903 there were Carabinieri reports of “meetings between several criminal societies at the shrine.”

In any case, the bishop ends his letter to the Mafia bosses by reminding them that the Church is “always willing to welcome you with open arms because it is the only institution that believes in the possibility of your conversion.”