A few things for today, which I'm posting partly because I'm sitting in the town library awaiting one of my children. (We're in the taxi driver stage of parenting, which with the range in our children's ages will last about 31 years. At least. Many of you will understand this nomadic existence.)
Here is something more curious than enlightening: Benedict's two great challenges by an Orthodox rabbi living in Israel, which appeared in the Asia Times. Referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he writes:
This archbishop, whose Church is the closest to the Roman Catholic Church, has female priests; it is in fact one of their key theological differences (transubstantiation — the meaning of the body of Christ in the Eucharist — being another). To affirm life and not recognize that the feminine is brought through the respect and equality of women is a non sequitur.
One begins to doubt the writer's competence when he claims that the Church of England is "the closest" to the Catholic Church, and not Orthodoxy. This is wrong in so many ways. And then one rejects it entirely when he claims that a Church must ordain women to affirm life, which is a non sequitur. What he is proposing, as it turns out, is a liberalized Catholicism supposedly more relevant and attractive, as in:
Pope John Paul II, while affirming life, did not recognize what most of his own people have, that life must be ordered to be lived well (personally, globally and in his own Church). There is such a concept as improving the quality of life.
. . . the Catholic hierarchy can still affirm life — even if salvation comes from the Cross of Golgotha — while improving the quality of those lives. An example is the controversial medical work on stem-cell research. Orthodox rabbis have defined the sacredness of life as beginning 40 days after conception, Islamic clerics as beginning after 120 days and Catholic theologians as beginning after conception; none is defined in the appropriate scriptural texts.
Which is a point in favor of Catholicism, and Christianity in general. Anyway, I would have thought that any reader of John Paul II would see that everything he wrote was directed to the right ordering of life. A writer may disagree with his idea of right order, as this rabbi does (he goes on to advocate ordaining women, married priests, liberation theology, and understanding "the feminine side of God"), but claiming that the pope did not know that life needed to be ordered is a bit dim.
In addition to the Asia Times' columnist Spengler's The crescent and the conclave, which I mentioned yesterday, you may enjoy his previous two columns, Africa, Islam and the next pope and Ratzinger's mustard seed and one of his answers to the "Ask Spengler" feature, Will African Christians Raze Mecca?. In fact, I'd recommend everything he writes. You can find his Asia Times columns here. The page includes the "Ask Spengler" feature in a sidebar.
Also of interest from the Asia Times: a series on Money, Power, and Modern Art by Henry C. K. Liu; Islamism, fascism and Terrorism by Marc Erikson; and The Philippines: The Disgraceful State by Pepe Escobar.
And as Spengler's consisting entertaining and stimulating writing reminds me of Mark Steyn's, here are a few links to his recent articles: In The inimitable Mark Steyn, the transcript of a radio interview, he analyses the major media's treatment of Benedict XVI. After noting that the major media "were rooting for Ellen Degeneres or Rupert Everett," he observes:
the difference between him and most western politicians, for example, is that he has given some thought as to how he wants what he believes in to survive, in a very difficult century which we face. For example, he's concluded in Europe, there's no point listening to the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan, because secularism is weak.
And that even though he is 78, you know, if he lives to 90-95, by the end of his life, it will be clear to all but the most obtuse, Belgian, Dutch, French, German and Italian politicians, that secularism as it's practiced in Europe, has been a disaster. It's left them with this birthrate that's made them almost extinct, and which will be presenting tremendous conflicts.
And he thinks the real challenge is to make Christianity resonate with the people who are going to be in the majority in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world, and not to listen to this sort of pathetic, feeble, parochial minority represented in the western media.
Referring the Cardinal Ratzinger's declaration against relativism in his sermon before the conclave, the interviewer asks, "You can say mandate, can't you, Mark Steyn?" Steyn replies:
Absolutely, and I think these Cardinals have actually accepted his view that the challenge to the Catholic Church is actually the opposite of what the western critics say.
It's not a question of how quickly it signs onto the New York Times' agenda. It's how fiercely it can hold the line, given that the disastrous consequences of the New York Times' agenda are going to be more and more plain in the next decade or two. And that's why it is, in that sense, not just an act of blind foolishness, but it's a conscious rejection of the New York Times' worldview.
Actually, I won't post the links. Just go to SteynOnline and pig out.
A few things from the English magazine The Spectator (the site requires registration, by the way):
Where Blair has gone wrong, an interview the Labour MP and Anglo-Catholic believer Frank Field,. He deals, I don't think all that well, with the collapse of civil society, though at least he recognizes that it has collapsed, which puts him ahead of most of his peers.
Leo McKinstry's The age of unreason. He attacks the ideological celebration of diversity and its effects upon immigration policy.
And Germaine Greer's The man who made England, her reflections on Shakespeare.
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