Though a bit early for  election post-mortems, Frank Rich writes this morning of a food fight that guarantees to paralyze any bipartisanship in DC. “The GOP plot against the TP”
“Whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually affecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform….”

And this: “The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP….”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

UPDATE: 11/1/10; 10:36.  Wishful thinking? Perhaps, or maybe not.

Nate Silver: 5 Reasons Democrat Could Beat the Polls and Hold the House: “While our forecast and a good deal of polling data suggest that the Republicans may win the House of Representatives on Tuesday, perhaps all is not lost for the Democrats. Here’s one possible scenario for how things might not end up as expected.”

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/5-reasons-democrats-could-beat-the-polls-and-hold-the-house/

On October 31, 2000 John Eliot Gardiner’s “Bach Cantata Pilgrimage” was in Wittenberg to sing the cantatas Bach composed for “Reformation Sunday.” I have several times praised and recommended Gardiner’s monumental achievement in recording all the cantatas on their liturgically appropriate feast. All twenty-seven volumes of the pilgrimage are now complete with the release of the final two albums this month.

The splendid musical performances are further enhanced by the notes that Gardiner has prepared for each album. He provides insights into Bach’s musical genius, and makes astute comments on various aspects of the performance and the churches in which they took place.

Here are some comments he wrote about the first cantata on the Reformation Sunday disc, “Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild“:

The opening movement is fashioned as a kind of ceremonial Aufzug or procession — a moving tableau of Lutheran folk on the march. But their militancy is not in the least grim-faced: the 62-bar introduction establishes a mood of outgoing joy and bonhomie. Underpinning the fanfares of the high horns is an insistent drum beat which, interpreted a little fancifully, replicates the hammering of Luther’s theses to the oak door at the back of the church.

The voices enter singly and spaciously with majestic sweep and a glorious arc to their phrases, a lustre more evocative of cherubim and seraphim than of sturdy Lutheran Hausfrauen on the warpath.

Gardiner concludes his reminiscences:

At the end of the concert the rather severe-looking pastor came forward. First, he acknowledged that the music-making had given “der alte bøse Feind” a good beating. Then, having spotted in the programme that our next port of call was to be Rome … he fixed me with his gimlet eye: “Carry the good work on to Rome!” he said, and turned on his heel.

Some things just don’t need any commentary.

The much anticipated book by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale, has appeared. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is reviewed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books by Anne Applebaum (herself the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gulag: A History).

She writes apropos the book’s title:

The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia. This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.

And continues:

This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow,” writes Snyder, “but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”

And her conclusion is stark and unsettling:

If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that “lack of imagination” that so appalled Czesław Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany’s unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.

The whole review is here.

Jonathan Chait on our Alice in Wonderland world in which Obama and the Dems bailed out Big Business interests that are now backing Republicans, while the income gap between the uber-rich and the rest grows. His aptly-titled post is “What does it profit a man.”

Let’s sum up the economic situation. Unemployment is high, and average Americans are in a desperate, fearful situation. Meanwhile, corporate profits are at record levels:

Profits have surged 62 percent from the start of 2009 to mid-2010, according to the Commerce Department. That is faster than any other year and a half in the Fabulous ’50s, the Go-Go ’60s or the booms under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the most popular analysis of our economic troubles — not just among furious, self-interested business tycoons but more moderate elements of the political elite as well — holds that the primary problem is that the Obama administration is too hostile to business. It’s quite remarkable.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have the worst of both worlds. A top-heavy economy is causing them massive grief among suffering voters, and the only people who are actually doing well are lambasting them as socialists.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/78767/what-does-it-profit-man

I called attention the other day to a couple of startlingly – though by no means atypically – offensive posts by the conservative blogger Jim Hoft, whose blog “Gateway Pundit” has been hosted at First Things for quite some time now. Now comes this comment from Joe Carter, FT‘s Web editor, explaining that Hoft’s blog is about to leave FT’s Web site. One hopes this is a sign of good things to come.

My apologies to dotCommonweal readers for posting this publicly, but I need to communicate these journalistic guidelines to our blog contributors and am unable to send e-mail at the moment. Feel free to skip to the next post.

Attention dotCommonweal writers: those who plan to cover Saturday’s Stewart/Colbert rally must follow the helpful guidelines developed by the Washington City Paper. Failure to adhere to these rules may result in your stories being heavily edited, deleted, or mercilessly mocked behind your back.

1. You may attend the rallies in a non-participatory fashion.

2. However, because the rallies are comic events, you may not laugh.

3. The act of not laughing, though, can be just as politically loaded as the act of laughing. Therefore, staffers are advised to politely chuckle, in a non-genuine manner, after each joke.

4. To avoid any perception of bias, please make sure to chuckle at all jokes, whether or not you find them funny. As journalists, we must make sure to not allow our personal views of “humorous” or “non-humorous” to affect our public demeanor.

5. Likewise, it could be devastating to our impartial reputation if our staffers were seen laughing at something that was not intended as a joke, thereby appearing to mock the entire event. If we are lucky, the comedians will have a drummer on hand whose rim-shots may be used as a cue for when to politely chuckle.

Please read and memorize the rest here. (H/T MOBS.)

Archbishop Raymond Burke, soon-to-be Cardinal Burke, apparently hadn’t read Cathy Kaveny et al — or even Joseph Ratzinger — when he gave an interview last week in Rome to Catholic Action for Faith and Family, a conservative advocacy group whom he advises.

In the interview, which Catholic Action is pushing out ahead of Tuesday’s elections, Burke was quite straightforward in saying that Catholics could not in good conscience vote for pro-choice pols (or those who vote in favor of same-sex marriage). From my write-up at PoliticsDaily:

[Catholic Action head Thomas J.] McKenna asks Burke, “Is it ever licit for a Catholic to vote for a pro-abortion candidate, a candidate who either in a platform or who has voted, has shown himself to support that. Is it ever valid?”

“No,” Burke answers. “You can never vote for someone who favors absolutely the right to choice of a woman to destroy a human life in her womb or the right to a procured abortion.”

He adds that voters “may in some circumstances, where you don’t have any candidate who is proposing to eliminate all abortion, choose the candidate who will most limit this grave evil in our country. But you could never justify voting for a candidate who not only does not want to limit abortion but believes that it should be available to everyone.”

The cardinal-designate’s latest comments on Catholic voters also seem to diverge somewhat from the current policy of the U.S. hierarchy, as developed in 2004, and based in part on advice from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer who a year later was elected pope on the death of John Paul II.

Burke also says:

“No matter what good I’m trying to achieve by voting for a candidate who favors that good, but at the same time favors the intrinsic evil, the grave evil of abortion, they can never justify that, voting for that candidate.”

That struck me as as even harder line than Cardinal Ratzinger took in his letter to the American bishops meeting in 2004 to formulate their policy of Catholics in public life, Ratzinger noted that a Catholic voter would be unfit to receive communion “if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia.”

Ratzinger added: “When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.”

Such a variance with other bishops is not new for Burke, but his growing influence, and the timing of the remarks, seem to signal his agreement with efforts on the Catholic right to be the dominant voice both within and without the Church, as discussed in a much-debated thread here earlier.

BTW, R.R. Reno has a post at First Things that seems very relevant here, in which he warns that “there is a danger when we theologize our political judgments.”

Even the politics of the pro-life cause isn’t always clear. The imperative to protect innocent life translates pretty directly into opposition to our current legal arrangements, which permit abortions. But what will move us forward? Here political judgment comes into play, which is a species of prudence. Should I vote for a pro-life Democrat on the theory that a lasting pro-life consensus will require bipartisan cooperation? Or is the next Supreme Court appointment so decisive that I ought to vote for the Republican candidate?

Reno adds that “Obviously, one cannot claim to be in accord with the magisterium of the Church will asserting the women have a right to abort the children in their wombs,” so he’d probably be more in accord with Burke than not. But the point about prudential judgments seems to complicate black-and-white judgments.

In the mid- to late-1940s, both during and after World War II, a young American poet burst on the Anglo-American literary scene. It seemed that a new star was born.

And then, a few short years later, he disappeared from view. And was forgotten.

Until now. The publication of Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master is a marvelous act of recovery and restoration. It contains essays, memoirs of Thompson, and 16 of his poems.

Why should Commonweal readers be interested? Because Thompson’s disappearance coincided with his return to the Catholic faith of his childhood. His conversion involved both a rejection of the gay lifestyle he was leading and a withdrawal from the world of literary ambition.

That fact alone now makes him a controversial, but also deeply mysterious, figure.

Full disclosure: I am currently editing a Selected Poems of Dunstan Thompson, which will contain work from the entire range of his life. Likely publication date: 2012.

In case you missed it, be sure to check out Cathleen Kaveny’s article “Catholics as Citizens: Today’s Ethical Challenges Call for New Moral Thinking” over at America, along with Lisa Fullam’s response (other responses here).

Does having sisters make you happier?

Interesting.  It’s the talking.  And the listening.

But is it just sisters?  Why wouldn’t wives, daughters, and female friends do too?  They’re all women too.  Don’t they talka and listen in the same way that sisters do? Why isn’t a man with a wife and two daughters in the same position as a man with a wife and two sisters?

The October 22, 2010, issue of the TLS, alas not available genreally, has a fine review of a book by Paul Williamson, Medieval Ivory Carvings: Early Christianity to Romanesque, which describes the collection held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Some paragraphs of the review that struck me:

A single plaque rarely measures more than 20 cm by 15 cm; which meant that, when there was a lot to fit in, an intricate scene might need to be carved in a square whose sides were no longer than a thumb. One twelfth-century English liturgical comb, 11 cm across, carries no fewer than twelve gospel scenes, all decipherable…. Among medieval artistic media it was the microchip.

The skill ivory required of its carver, added to the market value of his material, made a product expensive. So it was all the more important to get the imagery right. Even in this one collection we sense the constancy of artists’ efforts to ensure this. Christian imagery called for two kinds of imagination, corresponding to the two natures that theologians [sic!] attributed to Christ. Christ’s human nature demanded a purely visual imagination. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the Nativity, the traditional ingredients of which could be rearranged and augmented from direct or indirect real-life observation. An eleventh-century Cologne Nativity shows the Virgin’s shoes neatly placed on a stool beside her bed. A twelfth-century panel, possibly from Outremer, has the Christ child being washed in a tub. This kind of imaginative detail could also extend before and after the Nativity itself. An annunciation panel made in central Italy around 1200 adds a handmaid, peeping from behind a curtain at Mary’s meeting with the angel. One Carolingian plaque shows post-Nativity scenes with particularly arresting vividness: Herod’s soldiers dash babies to the ground like blacksmiths hammering at their anvils, while in the neighboring panel, a bare-breasted mother flings out her arms as if on Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” in anguish at her child’s death–all this in a frame less than 5 cm. across.

I have always thought that attention to Christian art and popular piety would go far toward disproving the common view that for most of Christian history such emphasis was placed on the divinity of Christ that his full humanity was overlooked.

Spirit has no dimensions, so its depiction is harder for artists the more dimensions they work in: harder, that is, in three dimensions than in two, from which plane ivory sculptures happily inherited a repertoire of recognized symbols. Even in solid ivory, the holy have haloes and angels have wings (often haloes too).  As to Christ himself, he wears a halo when immersed in human society, but in gospel episodes where his divinity appears at its purest, his supreme rank of spirituality is denoted by the lozenge-shaped super-halo, framing his whole figure, known as the mandorla…

Symbols easily become clichés. The more conscious an artist was of the reality behind the symbol, the more restlessly he would attempt to express in his own way, each attempt ncessarily a failure, but a different one. This originality is detectable in a French Ascension plaque made around 1160-70, a time when sculptors at Chartres were making similar attempts in stone. The Ascension plaque in question drops the mandorla, and also the traditional Ascension image of Christ as rising vertically, as in a lift or a rocket. Instead, Christ climbs through the air as if on a ladder, one leg high above the other, while his Father’s hand (usually just pointing down from a cloud to show he is there) reaches down to grasp his Son by the wrist, to pull him back home to heaven.

You and can see some of the Vand A’s collection here and here.

The Outlook Exchange e-mail program is out at Notre Dame.  While the students are okay, since they have another program, all faculty and staff are email-less, and have been since about midnight.  Some people are saying that it won’t be back up until tomorrow–who knows?

But I do know that being without email is deeply disconcerting.  I’m used to the pings that confirm my existence.  And to the constant newness within the familiarity.  The million-dollar-lottery email could be around the corner (oh, wait the spam filter took care of that).

How many times a day do you check email?  Are you addicted?  Do you put up one of those “on vacation” disclaimers and check anyway?  If you’re sleepless in the middle of the night, do you check your email, “just in case”?

Maybe I need a web retreat.  What would be an Ignatian approach to email, anyway?

The big, bloggy news today concerns a supporter of Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for Kentucky’s Senate seat, who reacted badly when a female MoveOn.org volunteer went in for a harmless prank. (For the record, I too am a Paul supporter.) Writes the Louisville Courier-Journal (boldface emphasis mine):

At one point, violence broke out when Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org approached Paul and tried to give him an “employee of the month award” from Republicorp. Republicorp is a fake business MoveOn created to symbolize what it says is the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech.

Television video shows Valle, of Washington, D.C., being pushed to the ground and at least one foot stepping down on her head.

There is video of the incident at the first of the links above.

Now, one would have thought this an opportunity for conservative pundits, especially of the Christian persuasion, to disown such violence and remind their readers and listeners that politics should be conducted in a spirit of charity, no matter who your opponents happen to be. But when it comes to Jim Hoft, of the First Things-sponsored “Gateway Pundit”, such predictions tend to fall through:

Unhinged MoveOn.org Activist Tackled and Stepped On at Rand Paul Rally (Video)

Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 4:46 AM

Another day… Another unhinged leftist stalks and lunges at a Republican leader.

MoveOn.org contract employee Lauren Valle wasn’t counting on this reaction by Rand Paul supporters.

She was tackled and stepped on by Paul supporters. (TPM)

Look for the state-run media to make her into some kind of saint by the end of the day.

There is more in the same vein here. First things first, indeed.

Updates throughout: Apparently the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party recently sent this [PDF] to prospective voters. On the front it features a priest person in a Roman collar wearing a button that reads “Ignore the Poor” (and holding some kind of holy-looking book, or possibly a datebook, or possibly an instruction manual on how to overthrow Minnesota’s democratically elected government). On the reverse, it criticizes GOP candidate Dan Hall, asking, “Who in God’s name would deny health care to the poor?” Presumably the postcard is intended to push back on Archbishop Nienstedt’s anti-gay-marriage mailing.  Dan Hall has worked as a chaplain, and attends a nondenominational church that’s associated with the Assemblies of God.  Instead, the DFL has successfully impugned the charitable efforts and concerns of the Catholic Church in general, and its priests in particular, all while reinforcing the notion that Democrats not only don’t get religion, they harbor animosity toward it. I think that’s what the kids might call a messagefail. Not sure what’s on the other side of the postcard, or if it even matters, but I think it’s safe to say that whoever came up with this idea is in the wrong line of work. (H/T Stella Borealis.)

DFL spokesman Donald McFarland has issued the following statement:

The ad is part of a two-piece mailing that highlights and criticizes the policy views of Dan Hall, a preacher who is the Republican candidate for the Minnesota Senate. I enclose both sides of both pieces. I understand that some Republican bloggers have taken one image from the first piece, and claimed that the mail is somehow anti-Catholic. But the text explicitly criticizes Preacher Hall for distancing himself from policy views that have been taken by the Catholic Archdiocese, by the Lutheran Synod, and other leaders in Minnesota’s faith community. Dan Hall is willing to enlist God and religion in his campaign when it helps him — but in fact, his views hurt the poorest and sickest among us, and this mailing holds him accountable for those views.

You can see the second mailing here. It also refers to Hall as “Preacher Hall” (I can’t find any evidence that Hall refers to himself that way). Why the DFL would use the image of a man in a Roman collar to depict a lay chaplain who is a member of a nondenominational church remains mysterious. At least we can dispense with the claims that the mailing is anti-Catholic, although it may be anti-wise. My apologies for jumping to conclusions.

Another update: “I’ve never worn a Roman collar,” Dan Hall told me. “No one in my church does.” Asked why he thought the DFL would use such an image, he said, “I have no idea. You’re offending all kinds of church people, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish.” Hall explained that, probably as a result of this dustup, he’s received a great deal of media requests, concluding, “In the end, it’s probably going to help me.”

Still another update (the last, I hope): That isn’t the only Catholic-looking image the DFL is using in its campaign mailers. Check this one out. What is that, a side chapel? And St. Anthony? Might be a good time for the DFL to say a little prayer to him. Maybe he can help them find their common sense.

The New Testament scholar, Dale Allison, has just published a new book, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History. It begins:

This is my fourth and, I hope, final book on the historical Jesus. I never intended to produce more than a single slim volume. But one thing led to another, or rather one book to another.

More than five hundred pages later, Allison concludes:

Although I have no desire to contract the circle of my readers, it seems to me both vain and inane to imagine that a book such as this can contribute to our knowledge of God, or that it should draw much attention from the theologians. Even though the quest has served many of us as a wake-up call from our dogmatic slumbers, it is no substitute for constructive theology. It can be, at best, only prologue.

While it may be an “emotional necessity to exalt the problem to which one wants to devote a lifetime,” and while I am proudly a historian, I must confess that history is not what matters most. If my deathbed finds me alert and not overly racked with pain, I will then be preoccupied with how I have witnessed and embodied faith, hope, and charity. I will not be fretting over the historicity of this or that part of the Bible.

Tired of arguing about politics?  Me too.  Let’s argue about books!

The October 19^th issue of The Christian Century asks a panel of Protestant and Catholic theologians the following question: “Suppose someone who hasn’t been keeping up with theology for the past 25 years now wants to read the most important books written during that time.  What five titles would you suggest?”  The theologians queried were Stanley Hauerwas, Amos Young, Emilie Townes, Sarah Coakley, Lawrence Cunningham, Kevin Vanhoozer, George Hunsinger, and Willie James Jennings.

I found the answers fascinating on a number of levels.  First of all, there was relatively little overlap.  The only books that ended up on more than one list were John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (3 lists) and J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (2 lists). Depending on your point of view, this illustrates either the rich diversity or the fragmentation of the discipline, probably both.

Secondly, it wasn’t clear to me what the panelists’ criteria for “importance” were.  Carter’s book, for example, is only a few years old, so its importance may lie more in the future than the past.  At times, it seemed as if the panelists were including books that they simply liked rather than ones that were truly groundbreaking in some way.  I’ve been thinking about how I would answer the question and I am also interested in the views of other DotCommonweal contributors as well. 

My own criteria would be 1) a work published in the last 25 years or deeply influential in the last 25 years if published before that time; 2) a work that has been broadly influential in shaping a particular theological debate or serves as a reasonably definitive overview of that debate; 3) an expanded definition of “theology” that includes exegetical works as well. My judgments on this score are, of course, eminently debatable, which is what makes this sort of exercise fun. 

So without further ado, here are my picks:

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (4+ vols.), by John Meier

Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, by Jacques Dupuis, S.J.

The Nature of Doctrine, by George Lindbeck

A Community of Character, by Stanley Hauerwas

She Who Is, By Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J.

Justifications (warning: they are somewhat lengthy) after the jump.

 So what about you?  What five books would you choose?

  Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick PSA to remind you that if you’re not able to spend all day on our Web site (although I highly recommend it), one of the best ways to keep up with Commonweal is to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. You don’t have to call us. We’ll call you. Unless you want to donate or subscribe.

Here is the link to the “Message to the People of God” issued at the conclusion at the end of the special assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East.  It, and some of the comments made at the Synod are being criticized in Israel and elsewhere.

Breaking news on the chicken front! A coup d’état has taken place! (Dare I call it a coop d’état?) The smaller of the two roosters, a feisty Buff Orpingon, has dethroned the larger one, a Wyandotte. The battle must have been bloody; the victor has spattered blood on his neck, and there’s blood on the wall of the chicken coop. The result is that the victor has his harem of a dozen or so hens, while the loser is chased any time he comes near to them.

Over the summer we lost ten hens because we let them free-range. Candidates for the predator: fox, coyote, bobcat (seen by a neighbor), bear even; but since we’ve not seen much gore but only, every once in a while, a scattering of feathers, we’re wondering also about raptors, perhaps a hawk or a turkey vulture.

Much of the time, we at dotCommonweal focus on themes of interest to Catholics.  But it’s big, big religious world out there.

This weekend, the American Academy of Religion is meeting in Atlanta–it’s the big conference of scholars in religious studies in the US, and increasingly in the world.  Poke around the program.  What do you think?  Any sessions you’d like to go to?

“I don’t do body counts,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told CBS News in March, 2002, in the early days of the war in Afghanistan.  “This country tried that in Vietnam, and it didn’t work. And you’ve not heard me speculate on that at all, and you won’t.” A few days later, General Tommy Franks, holding a news conference to announce an “unqualified and absolute success” in the latest ground battle in Afghanistan, more famously told reporters who wanted to know about enemy casualties, “You know we don’t do body counts.”

Except that we do.

The organization Iraq Body Count, which has tried to keep record of civilian casualties in Iraq, said the Pentagon documents released by WikiLeaks last week reveal an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths. This is a preliminary estimate based on a sample; Iraq Body Count said it will take months to do a specific count. Based on the new information, Iraq Body Count estimates 150,726 Iraqi civilian and enemy deaths through violence  since March 2003 – with more than 80 percent of the victims civilians.

“WikiLeaks has made it possible for Iraq Body Count to prove that the Pentagon has, indeed, secretly always known the names and details of how many died,” columnist Pratap Chatterjee writes in The Guardian, one of the papers that received the documents from WikiLeaks.

The Pentagon has been trying to claim the moral high ground in its battle with WikiLeaks by maintaining that the release of the records could lead to more bloodshed. But it needs to come clean on why it claimed not to keep records of civilian and enemy deaths when it in fact did.   And what more can be said about Donald Rumsfeld & Co.?

“Catholic Bloggers Aim to Purge.”
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/24/us/AP-US-REL-Catholic-Rage.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

No Byline. Wonder who wrote it?

“In 2008, Kathy Dahlkemper defeated longtime Republican incumbent Phil English in this district in Pennsylvania’s northwestern corner.

“But now a political newcomer, Mike Kelly — an auto dealer and former Notre Dame football player — stands a good chance of making the Democratic hold on this seat a mere blip. Ms. Dahlkemper began the summer with a nearly 10-to-one cash advantage and has had backup from the House Democrats’ campaign committee. However, her record, especially a vote in favor of health overhaul, has been skewered in ads from outside groups, and Mr. Kelly’s recruitment by the G.O.P.’s “Young Guns” program is a sign of confidence in his bid.” NYTimes http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/house/pennsylvania/3

This is one of the districts where the Republican-front Susan B. Anthony pro-life group has weighed in as discussed earlier: “Pro-Life Marches for Self-Destruction.” http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=10332

The locals weigh in; The Erie-Times News: Dahlkemper outperforms Kelly on specifics and initiatives http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010310249998

Whenever possible, my Friday evening includes the “News Hour” with Jim Lehrer and his marvelous team of professionals. And, of course, the duo of Shields and Brooks is always informative and often entertaining. Though they may not have attained post-partisan Nirvana, they have obvious respect and affection for each other.

So it was particularly interesting to me that, in the short time devoted to the Juan Williams Firing on last night’s program, they seem to have achieved common consensus: it was a mistake that was only compounded by being badly handled.

Today’s Washington Post picks up some of the pieces:

In a meeting with employees that had been scheduled before the Williams story broke, Schiller acknowledged that NPR didn’t manage the firing well, but offered no specifics. She said NPR would conduct a “post-mortem” next week to review how the firing was handled, according to employees who attended the meeting, which was closed to the news media. Schiller didn’t say who would handle the review or what the consequences of it might be.

An NPR spokeswoman, Dana Davis Rehm, said the review won’t second-guess the decision itself, but would focus on how it was carried out. Schiller declined to comment.

Staffers said that at the Friday meeting, Schiller apologized again for telling an audience in Atlanta on Thursday that Williams should have kept his comments about Muslims between “himself and his psychiatrist.”

“There wasn’t anger” among NPR employees at the meeting, “but I did get a sense of despair and disappointment,” said one NPR journalist, who asked not to be named because employees are not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “I got the impression that [management] felt they had acted rashly and without deliberation. When [Schiller] made the psychiatrist crack, it just made matters much, much worse.”

The rest of the Post’s story is here.

The New York Times Web site is carrying a photo of an art exhibit that includes a work with large red letters that say “KNOW YOUR SCUMBAGS.” The words are next to an image of the late Cardinal John O’Connor.

It is a bit surprising to see obscene language in The Times, which goes to sometimes comical lengths to avoid re-stating it even when central to a news story. But here, it appears in a photo atop a review of a Manhattan art exhibit, developed at Harvard, called “Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993.” I don’t understand why The Times would run a review without at least some commentary or perspective on the inflammatory image it chose to present  from the exhibit. Instead, the review goes on about how “this exhibition of material from the fairly recent past has plenty to teach us in the present: about how an effective public art can be made in response to very specific political circumstances,” blah blah blah. “Know Your Scumbags” is effective art?

I picked up on this through  an interview Archbishop Timothy Dolan did with the local CBS TV station. I’m not a fan of the line of argument the archbishop used – that the news media would react differently if this were an attack on Muslims or Jews or African-Americans, which are all groups that have  their own grievances with the news media.  But when I looked at the “art” in question and the review, I understood why the archbishop was so bothered.   (In the CBS interview, Dolan also assailed a  review of a new play, “The Divine Sister,” which The Times called a “gleefully twisted tale of the secret lives of nuns.”)

The Times issued a statement to CBS saying that its job is to cover cultural events “even if some may disagree with the content of the artwork.” True enough. But what kind of art criticism is it to re-print  an obscene attack such as the one on Cardinal O’Connor without, uh, critiquing it?

F. Murray Abraham is to play John Henry Newman in a new biopic, reports the Catholic Herald:

Italian director and screenwriter Liana Marabini, who specialises in directing films about the Church, will begin to shoot The Unseen World, a biopic about Newman, in the coming weeks, Italian television Rai reported today.

Filming will take place in Rome, Littlemore, Oscott, near Birmingham, and Oxford.

F Murray Abraham, the actor best known for his role as Salieri in Milos Foreman’s Amadeus, is to play the English cardinal beatified by Pope Benedict during his visit to Britain in September. Mr Abraham, who was raised in Texas by an Assyrian Christian father and an Italian-American mother, won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Amadeus in 1985.

Nastassja Kinski, the daughter of actor Klaus Kinski and star of films by Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Francis Ford Coppola, also features in the film.

According to the report, Marabini hopes the title The Unseen World reflects the metaphysical relationship between God and man referred to in Newman’s writing.

The film will deal with Newman’s conversion and spiritual growth against the backdrop of Victorian England. It will also deal with the intense friendship between Newman and fellow Oratorian Ambrose St John.

H/T: First Thoughts at First Things

No, not the latest pronouncement from that revanchist pope of ours (that’s meant as a joke, and is not to be taken literally)…

Rather, it’s the latest marketing slogan from Starbucks. I live in perhaps the last Brooklyn neighborhood without a Starbucks (yes, I’m bragging), so just spotted this at the Christian Century blog, Theolog.

Adam Copeland wonders:

There are plenty of rituals in our congregations too, but many of them fail to welcome as well as some coffee shops. Do our churches judge visitors before they walk in the door? Do our congregations offer rituals that feed and connect to the present day or ones that merely echo past significance?

Are we seeking to make new rituals in our sacred places of worship, welcoming folks by name, hosting groups, sharing free meals? Or are we selling God short?

I dunno. But I doubt God would charge $5 for a cup of danged coffee.

NCR reports on an unexpectedly large group of Irish priests meeting to discuss common interests. Among them:

The association hopes to speak to the members of the Vatican’s apostolic visitation to Ireland to voice our opposition to the new English-language translation of the Mass,” Father Hoban told Catholic News Service. …
The association said it also would work for “full implementation of the vision and teaching of the Second Vatican Council, with special emphasis on: the primacy of the individual conscience, the status and active participation of all the baptized and the task of establishing a church where all believers will be treated as equal; a restructuring of the governing system of the church … encouraging a culture of consultation and transparency, particularly in the appointment of church leaders; a re-evaluation of Catholic sexual teaching and practice that recognizes the profound mystery of human sexuality.”

A friend of mine brought this to my attention. I said “And? Another group of clerics working apart from the people they serve? Why is progressive clericalism better than the usual kind?” His take was different–”It’s a union.” I like his take better.

Priests now are in short enough supply that, if they could speak together on topics of common interest, I believe they could make a difference. In some cases they do. I heard an apocryphal story about an African bishop who tried to rein in a priest who was practicing concubinage too egregiously for the bishop to ignore. (Priests in relationships, sometimes quasi-familial, long-term relationships, with women is a widespread practice in many parts of the Church. What’s missing, of course, is the priest’s responsibility in the relationship and for the kids that often result.) The other priests in the diocese, many of them living in similar circumstances, rose to his defense. “If you get rid of him, we’ll quit too.” The bishop backed down.

Priests of the world, unite! You have more influence to change the practices of the Church than you imagine. Don’t expect the leadership to encourage you, and don’t wait for permission. It won’t come. As a papal nuncio said to one leader of an Irish priests’ group: “You are a nobody leading nobodies.” Oh yeah?

Recently on his NCR blog, Richard McBrien posted a response to the “Fordham Conversation Project,” a meeting of young Catholic theologians that was hosted at Fordham in August and was reported on this blog by Robert Imbelli. McBrien quotes the group’s self-description as follows:

“We are young Catholic theologians at colleges, universities or seminaries, who desire to shape our careers in ways that reduce polarization in the American Catholic church. Each of us came of age at some distance from the ideological debates of Vatican II and the immediate postconciliar era, and we believe that our Catholic generation has new opportunities to heal divisions in the body of Christ. We proceed with profound humility toward the previous generation’s tilling of common ground, even as we hope to plant new seeds of faith and charity in our church. As Christians committed to the unity of the Holy Spirit, we approach our task with intellectual solidarity toward one another.”

He then goes on to question whether describing the debates of Vatican II as “ideological” is either accurate or helpful:

What does the Fordham group mean by the “ideological” character of the debates at Vatican II? Did those debates represent differences in theological and pastoral emphases, or were they reflective of radically different understandings of the nature, mission, and structural operations of the Church?

McBrien goes on to argue that the real theological work of Vatican II was covered over and compromised by changes in ecclesiastical leadership, which sought to undermine and even reverse some of the progressive strides made by the council. I’m in no position to argue for or against McBrien’s account of the postconciliar era, though it does seem to be a position agreed upon by many Catholic commentators whether conservative or progressive. More interesting, I think, is the Liberal pathos shared by conservatives and progressives to try to characterize proper debate over foundational principles as “ideological” in the name of seeking the Golden Calf of compromise.

Progressives tend to like compromise because it gives the impression that we’re having a properly civilized, rational discussion, and conservatives like it (at least the smart ones do) because they know that it almost always leads to a tacit support for, or at least a leaving in place of, the status quo. It seems to me that McBrien is completely right to press the issue with the Fordham group over whether they think the postconciliar debates were really simply ”ideological,” which is to say that they were driven by interests other than theological, or whether they may indeed have been about important theological issues, such as the relative roles of  laity and clergy in Church governance, the importance of ecumenical dialogue, the performance of the liturgy and sacraments, the relation between the Church and the modern world, etc. To say that such issues are simply ideological and to consign them to that most despicable battlefield known as the ”culture wars” seems to simply avoid the fact that there was and still is actually real theological work to be done and rational debate to be had. The very phrase “culture war” implies that the positions that have been and are being staked out are neither informed by rational thought (they’re just cultural worldviews pulled from the air) nor conducive to conversational engagement (which is why they can only be aggressive assertions). 

This ideology of compromise, which pretends to have overcome the debates of the past by demoting them to a status that is less then rational, also informs political “common ground” initiatives. Talking about “open hearts, open minds and fair minded words,” is a good piece of platitudinous,  political rhetoric that is useful when speaking to a crowd who you hope will have a heart and mind open enough to vote for you again, but it’s hardly a rallying cry for a serious debate over the truly incommensurable positions that divide some pro-lifers, who think that a fetus should be granted full, equal (and in some cases supervenient), legal recognition as a person, and those who don’t. It seems silly to pretend like there is not a proper, rationally supportable choice between these two positions, which is why I sympathize with those pro-choice individuals who would say, “Why are we even talking? We’re right and we’re winning.” 

Similarly, the question of whether or not the Constitution provides for the clear separation of church and state seems to be a debatable interpretive proposition. Like the documents of Vatican II, the Constitution doesn’t interpret itself. So, when someone offers an interpretation, the proper response is not to laugh at the obvious ideology and ignorance behind their proposal, but to argue for a counter-interpretation. If the original proposition was indeed ideological, it might fold when faced with actual arguments, and if it is not, then maybe we’ll have an actual debate. But, of course, we’ll never get there as long as we’re more concerned with fine tuning the rules of the game than we are with actually playing it.