Christmas in California

I may not be the most California of California boys, but this song touches on a lot of memories, from warm Santa Anna winds to wreathes of chilies and Christmas tamales.



From my uncle the rocker.

Bad Music Worth Listening To

I imagine everyone has some guilty pleasure music: music you know is not actually very good, but which you sometimes enjoy listening to more than good music.

Christmas ranks high in this area for me, and so I might as well go ahead and confess right off that I'm listening to Trans Siberian Orchestra while working today. Sure, there's the excuse that I haven't got around to loading the fairly heft Darwin collection of Christmas music onto my iPhone yet (not because I'm a stickler for not listening to Christmas music during Advent, but because I simply haven't got around to it.) But truth be told, I'd probably be listening to Trans Siberian Orchestra anyway. Sometimes one craves utter bombast over quality.

What are your musical guilty pleasures? The guiltier, the better.

Universal Destination of Goods

My mother-in-law was taking the bus up from Cincinnati to come help with the bed-resting MrsDarwin for the next week. With the Columbus area getting 4-6 inches of snow, both the bus and I had arrived late, but within minutes of each other. MegaBus doesn't stop at a terminal, however, they pull off at the side of the street in Downtown Columbus and discharge their passengers on the sidewalk. So for ten minutes my mother-in-law and I were wandering up and down the sidewalks in the wind driven snow trying to find each other in the vicinity of the Nationwide building.

We found each other and shivered out way back to the car. She'd had a long wait for the bus in the cold and wind on the Cincinnati side too. I turned up the heater as we drove home, and, finding out that she hadn't had any lunch, pulled off at the first Panera we could find to get her some hot soup.

It was an unfamiliar part of town and I turned into the wrong parking lot and had to circle the block. On the corner, as I waited for the light, a forlorn figure in a big old blue parka was standing on the corner and approached the window -- a woman who looked around fifty who asked if I had any change, claiming she needed seven dollars to get into a homeless shelter. I'm a cynic about these things: I didn't believe that the homeless shelter charged or her claim that she hadn't eaten in three days. But I'd been out in the driving snow a while before and I was willing to hand someone money to get them out of the cold for a bit. A ten dollar bill was what I had in my wallet, so I gave her that, thinking that if that were a lot for a panhandler maybe it made up for all the similar people I'd refused to make eye contact with in less inhospitable weather.

She hurried off down the street, and by the time we'd parked behind the Panera and gone in ourselves, she was seated inside with a big guy in a nice track suit who had a large duffle bag on the floor next to him. She smiled nervously and waved to us as we ordered. The guy was talking to her and gesturing towards the outside. We'd been scammed, I figured. A team effort with the more sympathetic one out in the snow, or some guy with a hold over this lady was making her collect money for them to split. Who knows. But I'd given her the money in good faith, and I figured at least she was in from the cold for a while, enjoying a coffee. After a while they left together.

We finished our soup and coffee and left as well. I let my mother-in-law into the car, went around to my side, and saw the smashed window, back driver side. Her bags gone and my work backpack too.

We looked at the tracks in the snow. There were very few. Probably someone pulled another car up next to it for shelter, threw the bags quickly in their car, and drove off. I talked to an owner of a nearby shop. "That homeless woman was out here again," he said. "This stuff always happens when she's here." Who knows. And in a sense it doesn't matter. Someone did it, and in the end whether it's someone I handed money to or someone completely unrelated doesn't matter much since either way it's someone I don't know and who sees me as a source of a few items of disappointing value.

I called the Columbus police department and was informed that unless someone had been injured or I knew the name and address of the person who had broken into the car, I need to use an automated system to file the report. So we drove home, with the wind and snow thrumbing through the back seat as we reached highway speeds.

It took a few hours of phone calls to deal with the various issues relating to being robbed. My mother-in-law got her cards stopped -- though not before whoever stole our bags had used her debit card to buy $25 of gas at a UDF. I reported my work laptop stollen via the IT helpdesk at work. The dispatcher took it stoically.

"Happens a lot," he said. "Though usually in airports. We'll get you a replacement by Monday, or at least a loaner. At least they didn't get your iphone or someone they could actually get money for. Those corporate laptops don't even sell for a hundred bucks at a pawn shop."

This morning I called around a found a place that can replace the window today.

The things that have me feeling low aren't the cost of the window or the few slightly valuable things (work laptop, my own portable hard drive) which were taken. Money got them and money will replace them. A few hours of my wages will go for paying for the loss, and the people who took them are surely a lot worse off than I am -- though what they took did them little enough good.

What has me feeling low is the different values assigned to things taken by us and by those who took them. My mother-in-law's prayer book, with little notes and pictures of many years tucked away in it. The two slim notebooks full of four months worth of research notes for the novel which were in my backpack. The rosary that a friend had given me years ago, which I kept in my backpack but used less often than I should.

These are things that meant a lot to us -- not in money but in thoughts and memories and history -- which have no value to those who took them. I doubt they got a second glance before being thrown away.

In the wake of the pope's recent exhortation, various fellow Catholic geeks have been arguing about topics like the universal destination of goods and the non-absolute nature of private property. It's one of these things that people like to argue about in the abstract: For the starving man taking the loaf of bread is not theft, because it's owed to him.

I'm not hear to say that's false, but I do think that when people get too caught up in thinking about the theoretical deserving poor and the injustices of society and the situations in which something we'd normally think of as wrong might be okay, it's easy to forget the real social disruption that's caused when one person decides to take what is another person's. Our loss was much greater than the thieves' gain. So much of what was taken had value to us but none to them, or even if it had value to them had much less than it did to us. That dead loss is the result of one person taking from another -- a deliberate rent in the social order that involves more than the transfer of value from one person to another. Value is lost. Trust is lost.

"We should pray for whoever did it," my mother-in-law said last night. It was surprisingly easy to do. They gained so little. They are so lost.

I Remember MrsDarwin 9: Circle of Life Edition

It's the most wonderful time of the year, and not just because I'm hitting Advanced Maternal Age today. No, it's the ninth annual festival of lying liars: I Remember MrsDarwin!

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME. 

It can be anything you want--good or bad--BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. 

When you're finished, post this paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

This year, in honor of my being laid up for so long, let's contemplate mortality:

What did I confess to you on my deathbed?
or
What gift did you give me at my christening?

Bonus points for those who "remember" both, because I'm stuck here in bed with nothing to do but refresh the comments every three minutes.

Brush up on egregious falsehoods from the past eight years.

Can You Talk About "True Islam"?

There is a section of Evangelii Gaudium that I'm not clear I agree with, but it's not the economic sections. Near the end, Pope Francis has some pointed things to say both about toleration for immigrating from Muslim countries and about the necessity that Muslim countries protect the safety and religious freedom of their Christian residents. However, he wraps up by saying:

Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.

One hears this sort of thing every so often, but I'm not clear what it means to talk about "authentic Islam" or a "proper reading of the Koran".

It could mean, "To the extent that Islam is true, it rejects violence as a means of spreading its beliefs," and if so, I can certainly agree with that.

But what people seem to mean when talking about true Islam being a religion of peace is that somehow those Muslims who believe that their faith endorses the use of force at times to spread the faith of punish unbelievers are incorrectly interpreting Islam and that if they were better Muslims, they would reject violence.

However, it's problematic to say what is "true Islam" and what is "false Islam" -- especially given that I don't think Islam is actually true, except to the extent it happens to hold things which are also held by Catholicism (such as, say, the existence of God.)

There are some things one can say definitely are, at least, held by Muslims. For instance "there is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet" would seem to be something held by Muslims, and I think that even an outsider could be confident in saying that if someone believes in no God or many gods, or if he doesn't believe that Mohammad was God's prophet, then that person is not a "good Muslim" or a "true Muslim".

When it comes to a point which is disputed among Muslims themselves, however, I'm not clear how to distinguish right from wrong interpretations. There is no central authority in Islam similar to the pope in the Catholicism, and even with Catholicism, if you're an outsider and don't believe that the Church is Christ's true Church on Earth, who is to say that the magisterium is actually "true Catholicism" and not some distortion of it. At most, it seems like one could talk about "what Catholics believe" in some sociological sense.

This isn't a problem unique to Islam. For instance, do "true Protestants" believe in predestination? I'm not clear one can answer that claim. Some Protestants believe in predestination and others don't. Who is to say who the "true Protestants" are? Unless you are Protestant and you're committed to believing a specific set of beliefs within the range of what various Protestants believe, I'm not clear how you can rule on that question.

Certainly, I think that Muslims should not endorse religious violence, and I support those who believe their religion rejects it. However, I'm not clear how we can claim one way or the other what "true Islam" says on the matter.

Educational Programming

With MrsDarwin on bedrest much of the time, the small fry have been getting away with more than their usual quota of screen time. Some of this is spent doing schoolwork on the computer (Kahn academy for math, etc.) but some is also spent watching stuff on Netflix.

For the few weeks until the baby is born and MrsD is back on her feet, this is something we're okay with, but since school is getting somewhat shorter shrift as well, we'd like to mix in a bit more of the educational programming type stuff. Our oldest could watch animal special until the crack of doom, but we've gone through much of what's available at the library and a fair number of Netflix and the other kids (who are less interested in animals) are starting to revolt. So...

What educational programs would you recommend? Since we've gone so heavy on animal specials already, I'm leaning towards other topics: history, art, science not involving animals mating and killing each other

The age range is 11 through 3 and the youngest couple are willing to sit through almost anything the oldest three are willing to watch, so we're mostly shooting for the 11-7 demographic. I can't stand the super cute and bouncy, fast-cutting, low brow kind of kids programming, but aside from that we're pretty open. I never get the chance to see anything these days so I'm low on ideas.

We Shouldn't Turn to the Church for Economic Analysis

Last week saw the publication of an apostolic exhortation written by Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium. The wide ranging document (over 200 pages long) is self described as "on the proclamation of the gospel in today's world" and opens:

The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is consistently born anew. In this Exhortation I wish to encourage Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church's journey in years to come.

So, naturally, everyone decided it was about economics.

Yes, the document does touch on economics. Page forty-six has the section that generated headlines:

We have created a "throw away" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised -- they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers".

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and I the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

There's something a bit frustrating about this one section out of a wide-ranging document which addressed everything from the need for a personal discipleship to Christ, to the importance of marriage to how homilies should be written to abortion and the sacredness of unborn life becoming the one passage which people reading news coverage of the exhortation hear about. It seems typical of the urge, both inside and outside the religious community, to reduce any complicated message to its most political application. "Pope Condemns Capitalism" is a headline which allows one side of the political spectrum to cudgel the other, while "Pope Calls Everyone To More Personal Relationship With Christ" just doesn't have that conflict-driving ring. Though, of course, it's the latter message that we arguably need to hear more. Given the way this reaction has developed I can't help but be reminded of the intro to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio play:

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Francis, I think, gets this, and the focus of his exhortation is not primarily economic. Be that as it may, Pope Francis did certainly choose to include the controversial section, and so it's not unreasonable to address it, though I think people should be spending more time on the rest.

The Pope's comments have received attention even outside Catholic circles. For instance, Harvard economist and textbook author Greg Mankiw offered the pope's remarks a pretty skeptical reception. There have been a range of Catholic reactions as well, from politically left-leaning Catholics trumpeting "I told you so!" to politically right-leaning ones muttering that the pope does not know what he's talking about on economic matters.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has provided a more thoughtful approach in First Things with a piece entitled "Let’s Listen to Pope Francis on Economics". Arguing that Catholics should allow their preconceptions to be challenged by the pope, Gobry writes:

I’ve long believed in free market economics and believed that the Church would do a lot of good in the world if it embraced it. And I still believe those things. But what the financial crisis has laid bare is that the most conventional version of free market economics was actually dead wrong.

It would have been a pastoral, doctrinal, and theological disaster if the Church had, over the past twenty years, blindly subscribed to what I’ll now refer to as the Washington Consensus. What in 2006 looked like the invisible hand of the market leading the financialization of the economy turned out to be a disastrous instance of crony-capitalist central planning. And when the Pope denounced it, I was among those condescendingly explaining to him that he didn't get it. What it turns out is that economists actually know very, very little, and that a lot of what we thought we knew turned out to be wrong. Given this hard-to-swallow fact, the prophetic voice of the Church that reminds us of what must be the ends of economic activity is very salutary.

I do think that free markets have allowed a great increase in economic growth throughout much of the world, and that this has been a great human good, but I don't think that the Church would "do a lot of good in the world" if it embraced capitalism. Indeed, I very explicitly think that the Church should not endorse capitalism.

Why not?

Because the Church is not on earth to conduct economic analysis any more than it is on earth to decide whether the sun is at the center of the solar system or the manner of the origin of species. Its job is not to figure out what sort of economic system will result in the highest growth or the greatest equality or any other such thing. Its job is to transmit God's graces to us through the sacraments, and to preserve and pass on to us His teachings. These teachings are not simply abstract, and throughout history (including the modern social encyclicals) the Church has sought to apply the teachings of Christ to the changing situations (the "new things" of Rerum Novarum) in which Catholics find themselves living out their lives.

However, while the application of moral principles to new situations most absolutely includes situations which we think of as "economic", and thus may have a certain appearance of being "economic teachings" they are not in fact economic analysis of the sort which we normally think of under the term. The Church's insight here is moral rather than economic. The Church teaches on how we ought to treat each other as people, not what actions will result in the greatest efficiency, the greatest growth, or the greatest profit. As such, the best response to Church teaching on economic interactions may not be "the state should require that everyone behave the way the Church says they should", since that may well not have the intended consequence. (For example, it may be far more beneficial for society to have need based programs which assist the working poor than to have a high one-size-fits-all minimum wage, in part because doing this would remove from employers the dilemma of either paying some workers more than the market value of their work because of their needs, or else being undercut by those employers who do.)

Reading Francis's exhortation with care (and in the light of some of the translation issues which have come up) I think it's fairly clear that Francis is not denying the efficacy of markets as functioning economic mechanisms, but rather condemning those who imagine that because markets allow for greater growth, and growth tends to help society as a whole, that by supporting markets we have now fulfilled the whole of our obligations to our fellow men. Far from it, the fact that on average people do better in a given situation does not mean that some people are not still doing very badly, and that we have a duty to help those people in every way we can.

Importantly, this critique applies no matter what one's economic preferences. Even after supporting what one imagines to be the right economic policies, one still must help those who find themselves in difficulties in whatever the prevailing situation may be. This applies to slacktivists on the left just as much to the misguided free enterprise fans who seem irresistibly drawn to writing defenses of Scrooge this time of year.

Let me pray for you

It's getting redundant to apologize for blogging being so light, but we are sorry -- we miss the interaction here. Darwin is swamped with taking up my slack, and as for me, it seems that even a mild few hours of being up can now raise my blood pressure to above the 140/90 limit, whereas if I stay pretty much horizontal I'm in completely normal territory. I have to trust everyone who takes my blood pressure on this; I literally cannot feel a difference between good and dangerous blood pressures unless I have the indicator of swelling, and now it seems that my hands can swell and pinch my carpal tunnel nerve (making typing a nip tricky) without my blood pressure necessarily being elevated. The good news is that I seem only to have gestational hypertension without indications of preecclampsia. The very good news is that it seems to be controllable with bed rest and tons of water and protein. The mildly inconvenient news is that I probably need to be mostly down until baby is born, I'm due in 18 days, and I have no history of going into labor early.

If all my posts lately have seemed fixated on pregnancy and blood pressure and whatnot, it's because this is now what consumes my days. I'm in good company: the Hail Mary starts off with pregnancy (I'm reading "full of grace" as a pregnancy reference these days; Jesus is grace, and if Mary felt anything like me, she was certainly full of him) and ends with death. It's a whole lifetime packed into one prayer. I feel like I've spent whole lifetimes in bed with this pregnancy, and I guess if my blood pressure gets too high there could be fatal consequences for me or baby, so the prayer is very apropos right now.

I have to emphasize what a minor cross this is to carry. It falls much harder on Darwin and the kids, who need to keep the house running, than it does on me. I have to stay in bed -- woe! When I consider the fate of those in North Korea, or mothers giving birth in the Philippines after the hurricane, or of those who don't have shelter from the cold, I can hardly complain. But time does weigh heavily on my (numbish) hands. I don't feel much like reading these days, even with hours to spare. I spend much of the day refreshing Facebook and clicking around blogs because I want some kind of connection with the outside world, and I say my Liturgy of the Hours because it helps pace the time.

But now I want to combine these two into something more productive. Let me spend this time in bed praying for you! If you have any prayer intentions, leave them in the comments, or send me a note at darwincatholic(at)gmail.com, and I'll remember them in my bed rest prayers.

A Darwin Thanksgiving

I apologize for the thin reading around here. MrsDarwin continues to be on and off bedrest due to blood pressure issues. Three more weeks till the due date, and at this point we're very much hoping that BabyDarwin makes his appearance early.

With MrsDarwin off her feet, I was the primary cook for Thanksgiving, with help from our guests: MrsDarwin's father and an old friend from Texas whose husband is off at sea with the Navy over the holiday.

While not a foreigner to the kitchen, I'd never done a whole Thanksgiving meal before, so it had its challenges, but everything came out well in the end, though dinner was an hour or two later than I'd planned.

Even the pies were praised.

And in the end, both the difficulties and those who were here to help us through them were reminders of the many things we should be thankful to God for.

I hope all our stateside readers had a similarly enjoyable Thanksgiving. And for those who aren't celebrating Thanksgiving as a holiday this weekend, I hope you come across some good pie soon anyway. Because pie is, after all, one of the many signs that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Day In, Day Out

The last few weeks have not been conducive to blogging. Between the normal exhaustion of the bed rest and blood pressure issues MrsDarwin has been going through in these last weeks of pregnancy, and the combined crunch at work of end-of-year work and trying to hire a new person for the team, I've found it really hard to find time for much of any reading or writing.

It's at times like this you realize how much we rely on having the two of us fully involved in order to make the house work. With the two of us, it seemed like there was plenty of time to talk over the wreckage of dinner after the kids bounced and shouted out of the room, talk some more while washing the dishes, then put the kids to bed and have some time for writing, reading or more talking. Now it seems to take the entire evening to do the dishes, make the kids clean up some of their day's mess, chase them up to bed, then finish cleaning up so that things are at about the same state they were the night before.

The oldest two kids have stepped up a bit. Our second oldest is a willing cook, though her experience mostly runs to baked treats, so I'll pre-prep dinners and leave her in charge of cooking them. (We have family coming in tonight, so I put together a massive lasagna last night and it's waiting in the fridge to be put in the oven this evening.) Each kid has an assigned chore too, and there's a tub of ice cream in the fridge from which those who have got their chores done before dinner can be awarded desert.

But with one parent mostly laid up, the trade-off of "it's more work to make them do work than to do the work myself" (not to mention more frustration) tends to kick in every so often. Obviously, what I'd most like is some idyllic existence in which I get home to a mostly clean house and have a peaceful dinner with my wife and offspring, then we all spend the evening in quiet activities and read-alouds. In practice, if the choice is between chasing around hectoring the kids into cleaning up the disaster they've made of the living room, and having them all go off to some other room while I clean up myself with the assistance of a beer and an audiobook, it's hard not to take peace over justice and good parenting.

And yet, all this shall pass. Eventually dumping buckets of toys on the floor will no longer be a favorite game. The baby will be born, go through the cute little bundle stage, the insane-bouncing-ball-of-little-boy-energy stage, and eventually move into the rational creature stage. MrsDarwin and I will be able to revert to being together and talking together as much as we'd like.

Meanwhile, today's lunch comes with a fortune cookie which tells me, "A charming friendship is in the making." Not a bad place for the bearing of a new child to end up.

Christ the King, Lord of the Dance

The Lord has blessed His people with peace; we did not hear this at Mass today.

And speaking of churchy music one can't sing with a straight face anymore, I now have a hard time with this one since Darwin composed some alternate lyrics:

"Thing a new thong unto the Lord,
Let your thong be slung from mountainous thighs."

Of course this sort of recomposing is nothing new, and can be done with more traditional hymns. No one has surpassed Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall, in which prisoners exchange information about a murder to the tune of O God, Our Help in Ages Past:

At last the hymn was announced. The organ struck up, played with great feeling by a prisoner who until his conviction had been assistant organist at a Welsh cathedral. All over the chapel the men filled their chests for a burst of conversation. 

'O God, our help in ages past,' sang Paul.
'Where's Prendergast to day?'
'What, ain't you 'eard? 'e's been done in.'
'And our eternal home.' 

'Old Prendy went to see a chap
What said he'd seen a ghost;
Well, he was dippy, and he'd got
A mallet and a saw.' 

'Who let the madman have the things?'
'The Governor; who d'you think?
He asked to be a carpenter,
He sawed off Prendy's head. 

'A pal of mine what lives next door,
'E 'eard it 'appening;
The warder must 'ave 'eard it too,
'E didn't interfere.' 

'Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away.'
'Poor Prendy 'ollered fit to kill
For nearly 'alf an hour. 

'Damned lucky it was Prendergast,
Might 'ave been you or me!
The warder says and I agree -
It serves the Governor right.' 

'Amen.'

Amen, indeed.

False Alarm

No matter how much I enjoy fictional drama, like, say, Downton Abbey, I hate it in real life, so let me say from the get-go that everything is fine. Still pregnant, and now I'm home and comfy and contemplating my slippers and my fleecy blanket.

I stayed in bed until 9:30 this morning because I had a doctor's appointment at 10:00 -- one of these health screening deals for the insurance to see if I could hit some pretty numbers that could net us money off per month, something worth shooting for in these days of skyrocketing premiums. The late rising time was an attempt to keep my blood pressure low enough to get a reading the insurance company would take. It was my main concern; fortunately, they don't take your weight or waist measurements when you're pregnant. My blood pressure at the midwife's on Tuesday was 130/90, which is pushing up into less-good territory.

So the nurse takes me back and makes chitchat while I settle on my side to nudge my reading down even further. And she puts the blood pressure cuff on and pumps it up, and then is silent.

"Hon, your blood pressure is 150/100."

The unfairness of this rankled. I had done all I could! I'd been drinking the water! I'd been eating the protein! I'd been laying down -- except yesterday, but I had to be up then for the kids' last class and performance, and anyway, I'd spent almost 11 hours in bed afterward, and what more could I do? Meanwhile the nurse was lowering the lights and cautioning me not to try to get up myself and tiptoeing away to get the doctor, leaving me to blot my welling eyes on my shirt sleeve since I wasn't supposed to go get a tissue.

The doctor took my blood pressure again and gave me the Eye of Doom and made noises about life of the mother, life of the child, the dangers of preeclampsia, and possibility of emergency c-section as I wept into the crunchy paper liner on the exam bed. He made a call and told me to go to the hospital and check into Labor and Delivery, and asked if I was okay to drive. I thought I was, the hospital being literally across the street. I had to sit in the car for a moment and pray that I could calm down enough to call Darwin, who rushed home to pick up the kids (whom I'd left home alone watching a movie, under the eye of Eleanor! I was only supposed to be gone for twenty minutes!) and drop them off with a very kind and flexible friend.

I won't lie: during my sixty-second drive, my main thought was, "Does this constitute 'grave reason'?"

I'm sure it's not original to cry while walking the hospital corridors, but it's pretty ignominious when it happens to you. It's also hard to fill out paperwork when you can't see through tears, but the nurses were kind enough not to make a deal about it. I heard a newborn crying as I was led back to triage and  wondered if I'd hear my own baby crying soon enough. And I was tucked into bed and put on the baby monitor, and they took my blood pressure again.

128/84.

And again, I said, "Oh, that's not fair!" That's a better reading that I've had in weeks. And the pretty readings kept rolling in. 126/80. 113/75. Darwin came and we did a bit of data collection: the blood pressure went up slightly when I got up to go to the bathroom, and stayed down when I did. The final reading was 134/82 -- not the lowest thing in the world, but worlds removed from emergency c-section territory. And another doctor came in and said my labs were fine, and I was fine, and I should rest up but I didn't need to be on strict bed rest, and the nurse came in and read my discharge papers, including warnings that I should stop smoking if I was a smoker, and that I should call my midwife if I experienced any of the signs of labor, which I know by heart after going the rounds with five babies, and that was it. Thirty minutes of alarm and four hours of nothing-to-see-here.

Now I'm home and wondering: what do I take away from this? I am grateful, very grateful, that nothing is wrong and that it looks like baby can safely cook for four more weeks. I'm very happy to be home again (though I did contemplate taking a shower at the hospital because it's been so long since I've been in a bathroom which you don't have to prep five minutes beforehand by flipping on the ceramic wall heater and letting the water run in hopes that it will be hot by the time you step in). But is there some moral here except the unpredictability of life? Have all my high blood pressure readings been anomalies? Do I go back on bed rest? Will anything I do make a difference?

And how is it that I ended up with the one OB-GYN in the US who had not heard of the Downton Abbey episode (spoiler alert) which featured death by ecclamptic seizure?

Book Review: Living by Faith, Dwelling in Doubt

There's something a little disorienting about knowing someone both in person and in writing -- odder about knowing someone much better in writing than in person. I remember Kyle Cupp as the slightly awkward looking guy with a ponytail and long dark coat who was writing his thesis on Tolkien as literature and had a crush on one of my wife's co-workers at the college bookstore. Somehow, however, this slight Steubenville acquaintance was enough to allow me both to feel that I "know" him and also to experience a certain indignation when we disagree. Of course, this sort of subjective perception and simultaneously felt familiarity and otherness is exactly the sort of thing that would warm the cockles of Kyle's post-modern heart.

Thus, when I was given the chance to review Kyle's book, Living By Faith, Dwelling in Doubt: A Story of Belief, Uncertainty, and Boundless Love, I couldn't resist. (Plus, well, you know... Free books.)

Living by Faith is a slim volume which is in parts devastatingly effective writing. It is part memoir, part philosophical/religious testament.

To my mind, the former is the stronger part. Kyle tells, in nested narratives, both the story of his whole life, and interspersed within that the story of the short life and Kyle and Genece's daughter Vivian, who was prenatally diagnosed with anencephaly, and who they thus knew would live only a few hours after being born (if she survived to birth at all.)

Kyle's observations about his developing faith and understanding as a child, with parents of different faiths who later separated in divorce, are well drawn and interesting. (I hadn't realized till reading the book that Kyle also spent his youth in California. We even experienced some of the same earthquakes.) We tend to think of divorce and religiously divided relationships from an adult vantage point, but Kyle explains the way in which the experience of these divisions shaped his understanding of faith and truth for the rest of his life.

The sections on Kyle and Genece's difficult pregnancies, miscarriage, and particularly about Vivian's short life are particularly well written. As a parent, having experienced miscarriage and the early loss of close family, I had just enough in common with Kyle's experiences to feel fully how much deeper he had drunk of that bitter cup. Kyle is honest, unpretentious and frank about the sufferings of a parent going through loss. There were times when I had to set the book aside for a moment until my eyes cleared, but I'm very glad I read it. The human honesty of these segments is powerful, and his love for his wife and for his faith (which he clings to even as he questions it at times) is inspiring, but never mawkish.

The more philosophical and religious sections I in some ways found less involving. One of Kyle's primary points, which he returns to throughout the book, is that faith is an act which one may make definitively, but that faith is also always in the context of doubt, because we know neither the whole of the truth about what we believe nor can we fully know the extent to which our choices (including the choice to believe) are pure.

My own reaction is somewhat like the scene in the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radioplays where Arthur Dent responds to the news that the Earth was built by mice as a giant science experiment by saying, "This explains a lot of things. All my life I've felt that there's something terribly wrong with the world but that no one would tell me what it was." To which Slartibartfast replies, "No, that's just completely normal paranoia. Everyone has that."

Kyle is at great plains to express his doubt and uncertainties, but many of these uncertainties strike me as necessary ones and I can't escape the feeling after reading the book that Kyle is actually a somewhat more devout fellow than I am -- for all his protestations of doubt.

For example, Kyle writes:

Nevertheless, in the domain of my religious faith, I prefer to cast certainty into the outer darkness. But first, maybe I should define what I am rejecting. I reject the unwillingness to allow that there may be truth beyond what I know or think I know. This kind of thinking is especially dangerous in the spiritual realm because the spiritual is unseen and ultimately ineffable -- otherness is its essential feature. (pages 89-90)

This doesn't strike me, however, as setting some unusually high standard in living with doubt. Indeed, it seems to me that anyone who does not "allow that there may be truth beyond what I know" is setting himself up as God, since only God can actually know all truth. Slightly later he expands:

We can speak of truth as one thing, as it is in itself apart from all thought about it. We can refer to truth in this way, but in practice, no such truth enters our experience. We perceive reality from where we stand and interpret reality by way of our dispositions, presuppositions, and ideas about it. We then take these limited perceptions and interpretations and formulate them into words based in part on our purpose and our audience. (page 105)

Again, this may be phrased in a somewhat post-modern way (and I know that Kyle is a big reader of post-modern philosophy) but what he's saying about the relation of our experience of truth to truth itself is something one could get from Plato as well. Kyle talks a great deal about having to accept his doubts and embrace uncertainty, but I mostly get this impression that this is only in relation to a sort of certainty which no one can have (or ought to think he has.) It's right and important to recognize the limits of our knowledge, as Kyle does, but I'm not sure that doing so needs to be such a source of concern. I'm not clear that it's a dangerous choice so much as our only choice.

Sumer Is Icumen to an End

Hello, friends! I've missed you! I'm emerging from my rest-tirement because today is the last day of our co-op, which means that the girls are frantically finishing up their projects on Egypt and Belgium (they have their mother's last-minute work ethic) and I'm curious to see whether my homeschool choir will actually be able to sing Sumer Is Icumen In in rounds and whether Santa Lucia will sound as operatic before an audience as it has in practice.

This is a bit fancier than we're planning to get, but the round sounds good.



(Digression: Ezra Pound wrote a parody of Sumer Is Icumen In, about his love for winter:

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.)

I am up and about today with the help of my friend, Mr. Protein. Apparently Mr. Protein is very handy for things like regulating albumin in the blood so that the fluid doesn't leak from the blood vessels into other parts of the body, and he comes in portable, highly compact, barely palatable forms as bars and shakes that the kids have no desire to steal even though they look like candy and chocolate milk. Mr. Protein gives me energy and keeps my ankles trim, and I hope he keeps the bottom number of my blood pressure from rising above 90.

Four more weeks to go...

Surely No Woman...

I'm never sure to what extent discussions on Facebook between major blog personalities (at least, major in that small pond which is Catholic blogging) are considered acceptable fodder for public discussion. Those who make their blogs semi-professional publicity venues seem also to maintain thousands of Facebook "friends", and the comment threads on their statuses can run to hundreds of comments, so I tend to assume that their acceptably public. However, in this case, the discussion that got me thinking yesterday seems to have vanished along with its 100+ comments, so I'll keep things general since it's primarily the general line of thinking on which I wanted to comment.

A well known Catholic male blogger posts on a Catholic female blogger's wall: What do you and your readers think about [pro-life tactic]. I've had a number of pro-lifers tell me that anyone who opposes this tactic is not pro-life, but I can't imagine that any woman would support an idea which so clearly is based on humiliating women.

Leave the merits of this aside: So far as I could tell, most of the fuss in this particular situation (including the position of the male blogger) stemmed from people who didn't actually know much about the real-life details. What I think is interesting here is an assumption one too often gets, that women are a monolithic group of people who we can expect to all share the same insights into some given topic.

For instance, recall back at the height of the clerical abuse scandals when you would hear people going around saying, "If women had more leadership power in the Church, they never would have allowed the covering up of child abuse."

These kind of statements are made by people who think of themselves as standing up for the dignity of women. But in the process, they assume that women do not in fact have the variety of independent thought that men do: Oh sure, men might be for or against abuse, for or against some political position that I'm against, but surely no woman would support this!

Why not?

Even if you think that a belief or practice is strongly anti-woman, it's almost certainly the case that at least some women support it, and indeed support it strongly. That's not because they're class traitor or hoodwinked by patriarchy -- it's because they're persons capable of forming their own beliefs and opinions -- even opinions you dislike. This doesn't mean that people can't argue that some belief or practice is "anti-woman" or "offensive to women" or some such, but don't expect that this means that no women will support the very thing you're opposing.

The Real Adjunct behind "Death of an Adjunct"

A month back, it seemed like everyone I knew in academia (and some general sympathizers) was posting links to an editorial called "Death of an Adjunct" which told the heartrending story of an 83-year-old Duquesne adjunct who died of a heart attack shortly after having not had her teaching contract renewed. This image summed up the fears and tribulations of many of those who are unwillingly trapped in the non-tenure-track world, and the editorial (written by a labor lawyer trying to unionize the Duquesne adjuncts) quickly became a rallying cry.

At the time, I couldn't help wondering if there was more to the story, simply because while being an adjunct can be a fairly bleak dead end for those who were counting on a tenure track position, it's unusual to see an adjunct who is in her eighties. Further, heartless creature that I am, I could imagine reasons why a university might not choose to renew the contract of a teacher in her eighties. While being no less persons for it, many people in their eighties are not all that efficient and effective on a daily basis.

Fortunately, a real reporter apparently had some of the same curiosities, and went and wrote an in-depth piece on Margaret Mary Vojtko, the adjunct in question, for Slate. It's highly worth reading.

The Vojtko who immerges from the article is a fully rounded person rather than simply a personification of an issue: The daughter of Slovak immigrants and depression-era steelworkers, a devout and traditionalist Catholic, a woman who get her undergraduate degree in her thirties and her masters at 40, but never managed to finish the dissertation for the PhD she took the classes for her in mid 40s. Nonetheless, as an adjunct with a Masters she taught several classes (including a graduate class "French for Research" and several classes on medieval history) for over twenty years. However, she found it difficult to contemplate retiring (and never saved for it) and developed a hoarding habit which eventually left her two houses uninhabitable.

Conservatives may sympathize with the university for wanting to cease hiring a teacher who reportedly refused to use technology to interact with her students (even as this became the norm) and became unable to tell when they were cheating right in front of her, but liberals will be less than thrilled with her beefs with the university and the students:

As a traditional Catholic, Vojtko felt that the university wasn’t as religious as it should be. Staunchly pro-life, she was indignant when Duquesne held bioethics panels that suggested that contraception and abortion might be morally defensible. She also thought that Duquesne’s mission statement —which includes “Duquesne serves God by serving students”—was sacrilegious. Sébastien Renault, a close friend of Vojtko’s, remembers her saying, “It’s bad theology, because it doesn’t work this way. You don’t instrumentalize God. You serve God first. And the more you know him and love him and serve him, then you will serve the students.”

Renault says that although Vojtko was a devoted teacher, she becamse increasingly frustrated by her students, whom she came to see as self-absorbed and disrespectful. Duquesne students aren’t required to take classes on Catholic theology, and Vojtko thought religion should play a bigger role in their education. She didn’t hesitate to share her opposition to abortion, premarital sex, provocative clothing, and gay marriage with her students. She suspected some of her colleagues resented her moral principles and her “cleanness of life,” according to Renault.

Read in full, Vojtko's story lacks easy answers. You can sympathize with the university's desire to get her out of teaching, and it turns out that the university both provided her with alternate housing and attempted to provide money to fix problems at her house (including the furnace going out during the winter -- which she refused to let any of various parties that offered to help fix.) At the same time, you find yourself admiring and sympathizing with this indomitable lady who didn't want to give up her job or allow other people to run her house.

I'm Going To Be One Of Those Old People

As a kid, I used to live in awe and fear of the kind of older couples who had their houses set up perfectly and would give kids entering the house that look said, "You wouldn't dare make a mess in here, would you?"

I used to wonder, "What was it like having these people are parents? You must never have been able to do anything!"

The other day, as I was trying to catch up on chores after the kids were in bed, I realized I want to be one of those old people. Not because my house is always neat, but because it never is. When I no longer have people in the house who pull books off the shelf for fun and leave apple cores under the radiator, I'm going to organize everything and relish the fact that it stays organized -- for whole days at a time. I'm going to put nice things out on shelves and tables and glory in the fact that no one will knock them over and break them. I'm going to organize my library by subject and the shelves by author, in the confidence that no one will throw them all on the floor looking for pictures or pile them helter skelter on the couch while looking at the first sentence of page forty-five in each to determine the nature of her future love life.

The kids can be in fear and awe of me and wonder what it was like to have me as a father.

The revamped Sense & Sensibility, reviewed

Passionate discussion was had here over the idea of re-writing Austen to fit into a modern framework, touched off by news of Joanna Trollope's forthcoming modern-day Sense and Sensibility. How'd that work out for her? The WSJ reports: 

No book series could be both so unnecessary and yet so inevitable as the "Austen Project," which, beginning with Joanna Trollope's "Sense & Sensibility" (Harper, 362 pages, $25.99), will bring out "reimaginings" of Jane Austen's six canonical novels. Why does Ms. Trollope need such a fancy imprimatur? Writers have been exhaustively reimagining Austen's fictional worlds for years in an unstoppered gush of adaptations, prequels, sequels, modernizations and alternate narratives. Her characters have starred in board books for babies and fan-fiction erotica. Her settings have been the site of zombie invasions and murder mysteries (including by eminences like P.D. James). And this doesn't even take into account the cottage industry of Austen-themed self-help books, dating manuals, travelogues, recipe collections and social-science monographs—or the critical studies that try vainly to explicate the international infatuation. 

Amid such a flourishing garden, Ms. Trollope's "contemporary retelling" is a rather drab shoot. Just as the title is unchanged (save for the ampersand—some kind of nod to modern times?), the characters keep the original names and play out an identical drama: Thoughtful and guarded Elinor Dashwood and her impulsive sister, Marianne, fall in love with compromised men, console each other when their hearts are broken and are finally rewarded with happy endings. 

Ms. Trollope's present-day updating offers novelties like text-messaging and YouTube scandals, as well as the frisson of seeing Elinor utter mild profanities. But the writing isn't so much modernized as simplified, like those Shakespeare editions for grade-schoolers that provide colloquial "translations" on facing pages. Egged on by her rakish suitor, John Willoughby, Marianne in Austen's original cruelly gibes at her principled but unglamorous admirer, Col. Brandon, saying: "Add to which, that he has neither genius, taste, nor spirit. That his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression." In Ms. Trollope's version this becomes: "He's not a fruitcake. He's just very, very dull." 

The book's halfhearted rendering seems ominous for the series as a whole. However absurd the profusion of Austen homages may have become, most of the adapters have been genuine Janeites, whose zeal infused even the silliest spinoffs with charm and personality. With the Austen Project, a spontaneous movement looks to have become officially franchised. This puts it in league with recent cynical estate-commissioned sequels such as William Boyd's 007 novel, "Solo," or Sebastian Faulks's Wodehouse pastiche, "Jeeves and the Wedding Bells," about which the best you can usually say is that they don't manage to spoil your enjoyment of the original.

Doubtless this comes as no surprise to anyone wincing at the thought that text message alone is enough to modernize Austen, or to rejuvenate any canonical text. It seems to me that a far more successful (or at least righteous) approach would be for an author to ask: what is it about Austen's novels that are universal? What is the underlying appeal of the story, and are there elements of modern life that reproduce the tensions and the constraints that the characters confront? Are there any parallel structures nowadays to the social conventions, legal restrictions, and etiquette that kept the course of true love from running smoothly for Elinor Dashwood et al.? And if so, can the author explore those with enough zest to make the plot hum?

It sounds like Joanna Trollope doesn't have quite the deft touch with human nature of her more famous literary ancestor.

The same column also reviews a retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants.

It would be a pity if the taint of commercialization stopped readers from picking up Jo Baker's intelligent and elegantly written "Pride and Prejudice" adaptation, "Longbourn" (Knopf, 331 pages, $25.95). Ms. Baker's novel is about the Bennet family's household staff—Longbourn is the family home—particularly a housemaid named Sarah, whose love affair with a newly arrived servant takes place simultaneously against Elizabeth's courtship and marriage. 

Through the brief quotations from "Pride and Prejudice" that open each chapter, Ms. Baker makes it clear that maids, cooks and footmen are omnipresent in the classic and yet are taken for granted not only by the Bennets but by Austen herself. From the point of view of their overworked help, even Austen's most lovable heroines cannot escape appearing cosseted and self-regarding (more heretically, "Mr. B." is implicated in a paternity scandal). Ms. Baker at times belabors the quotidian unpleasantness whitewashed in Regency romances—we regularly find Sarah rinsing soiled linens or emptying chamber pots. But the emotional imbalance between upstairs and downstairs is affecting. Darcy, in his famous declaration to Elizabeth, called love a force that left him "properly humbled." But to Sarah, who has had humbling enough for a lifetime, it's the distant promise of fulfillment and self-worth. 

Her elusive interest, an enigmatic ex-soldier named James Smith, widens the perspective of the story even further. Although the visiting militia in "Pride and Prejudice" exists purely to tantalize the foolish younger Bennet daughters, Ms. Baker reminds us that they were veterans of ugly battles in the era of Napoleon. To James, the cozy world of the Bennet family is marked by an "innocence as deep and dangerous as a quarry-pit." "Longbourn" reveals these messy backdrops while still, in fitting tribute, inventing a touching love story of its own.

A "paternity scandal" implicating "Mr. B"?  This novel may share names and settings, but we're working anymore with the characters Austen actually wrote. Let's remember that there's a paternity scandal in Sense and Sensibility too, so it's not as if she's too squeamish to touch sexual immorality. I'm curious as to whether the mysterious Mr. B is Bennet or Bingley -- guessing the former from the context, but I confess myself insufficiently intrigued to search out the book and find out.

Man is not the Measure of Marriage

You see these articles going around ever so often which seek to advise people on how to achieve a happy marriage by explaining who marriage is "for". It's not for you. It's for your spouse. Seek to make your spouse happy, and all will be well. Or perhaps it's not for either of you but for children. If you both seek to form a good family for their sake, it will all work out. I suppose it's only a matter of time until someone writes that it's actually for society -- though perhaps not as that is not exactly the spirit of the day.

Aside from often coming off rather saccharine, the problem with these attempts is that they seek to find the measure of good (in this case, good in the context of marriage) in another person.

Obviously, in a marriage, your spouse is a key element. You two will be responsible for making each other happy or unhappy, united or divided. And the particular feelings and preferences of your individual spouse are important as far as the details of how a loving marriage is expressed. One woman may be made to feel most happy by surprise gifts of flowers and offers to watch the kids while she goes off to have some time away with "the girls", while another cares little about gifts and flowers and girl time, but very much cares about her husband being home to spend time with her as much as possible. One woman very much wants her husband to take her out somewhere she can wear a nice dress and heels and that lipstick that she bought last week, and another really hates it when she feels that she's being forced to dress up. One could identify the same variety of desires among men. In these little details, there is necessarily a great deal of variation because there are many sorts of people and one clearly ought to make the effort to learn what one's spouse wants and meet those desires and not some other arbitrarily chosen set.

However, while the way one may work out one's love toward one's spouse will vary a great deal from marriage to marriage based on the desires and circumstances of each couple, what makes a good marriage is not simply "making it about the other person" or "doing what your spouse wants". If doing good within a marriage simply meant doing what your spouse wanted, then that would lead us to the contradictory idea that if you spouse wanted something that was bad, it would be good to do bad. For instance, in the formulation that marriage is "for" making your spouse happy, if your spouse was in fact deeply selfish and could only be made happy by you acting in a way that was destructive to you, the "marriage is about making your spouse happy" dictum would suggest you should go ahead and behave self destructively in hopes of making your spouse happy. In fact, if we take moral law at all seriously, such a course of action would not only damage you, it would damage your spouse as well, since being the cause of wrong action is itself damaging.

Marriage is for virtue, not for your spouse or for the kids or for society. Virtue entails, among other things, working for the happiness of your spouse, to the extent that that happiness is ordered towards good things. But it is virtue which is the defining element, not simply the desires of your spouse. There can only be one source of Good, and that can never be another of us imperfect human beings.

They're Not Writing Songs Like That Anymore

Last night the bedresting MrsDarwin was watching the 2007 adaptation of Northanger Abbey.  I wandered through during one of those Austen movie, posh-dancing scenes, and suddenly doubled over laughing.  MrsDarwin raised an eyebrow in my direction, and once I recovered my composer I was able to explain.

The music being used for the elegant dance was a tune that I knew from one of the odd pleasures of my youth, a somewhat unusual CD entitled How the World Wags which featured low brow music from the 1600s. The particular song being used in Northanger Abbey was entitled "Seldome Cleanely".

The song opens:

DRaw neere you Countrey Girles,
and lissen unto me,
Ile tell you here a new conceit
concerning Huswifery,
concerning Huswifery,

Three Aunts I had of late,
good Huswifes all were they:
But cruel death hath taken
the best of them away,
O the best of them away.

O this was one of my Aunts,
the best of all the three:
And surely though I say it myselfe
A cleanly woman was she,
A cleanly woman she she.

And the tone is pretty well set by the verse that I remembered and which allowed me to find the full lyrics via Google:

The smallest candles end,
my Aunt would never loose:
It would helpe to make her puddings fat,
With the droppings of her nose,

Really, Seldome Cleanely is just a bit rambunctious. The real star of the album was the rather more famous Pox On You For A Fop by none other than Henry Purcell. Enjoy!