Walking to Work

One of the senses in which I'm very fortunate with my line of work that I now live within walking distance of my office. It's a fifteen minute walk (bracingly up hill in the morning and gently down hill in the evening) and I really ought to do it more, but I'm always coming up with excuses not to.

It only takes a few minutes to drive, so when I'm running late (which is most mornings -- not being a morning person at all) I often fall to temptation and jump in the car instead. (This requires some coordination as we went down to just one car when we moved so close to work.)

I really ought to do it more often. Not only for the excercise, which I'm sure I need, but also because it provides a fifteen minute buffer on each side of the workday when one can be quiet and think things through.

Remembering a Faithful Priest

My brother the seminarian reflects on the one-year anniversary of the death of his spiritual director, Fr. Larry:

Every time I met with him, he would tell me the same thing before I left: "Remember, Will, that God loves you." And right then I knew it was true. Not because of his decades of academia and his doctorate, but because of his profound faith, which no teacher but the Spirit can teach. When I was around him, I knew that God was real.

I will miss the joyful "Hhheeeiiiii, Will!" with which he would greet me, and I will miss his candid, loving spirit.

Once he told me "A man must know how grieve, because if he doesn't, he holds onto what he should give to God. Every man should grieve, for that is how he finds joy. Hear me now, believe me later..." So I grieve for him, because I hope to know that joy that he knew.

I know he will be in heaven when I get there (by God's grace), and I pray that I can be as intimate with Jesus Christ as he was here on earth.

Would that all seminarians had such examples of holiness to guide them! God rest your soul, Fr. Larry.

The Sad History of my Chocolate Bar

Oh readers, I am going to recount to you a tale so full of woe that I know you will be weeping at your monitors as you ponder my great misfortune.

On Friday evening, I was given a Chocolate Bar as a belated birthday present. It was a Ghiradelli Mint Chocolate Bar, pristine, wrapped, beautiful. I delighted in this Chocolate Bar! I treasured it! I saved it for the time when I ran out of the Chocolate Squares I was also given that night. I placed it on a high shelf in the pantry, and waited.

Sunday night I considered having my Chocolate Bar, but Darwin was not ready to indulge at that late hour. So I decided to hold off until we could share it, because I love my husband just that much.

Monday afternoon I came down the stairs to find that my girls had pulled up a chair, unlatched the pantry (again) and pulled out the mexican hot chocolate to eat. Mexican hot chocolate, for those of you unfamiliar, comes in tablets made up of eight wedges. You heat the milk and pour it in the blender, then add two wedges for each cup of milk. It's good. Well, I found the mexican chocolate on a plate on the table, Babs washing her hands, and Noogs scaling a bookshelf to get a toy. I scolded them, set them up to play, and then, inspired by the mexican chocolate, decided to have a bite of my very own Chocolate Bar. And it was gone! Gone! Gone!

Noogs fervently denied moving it at all, and Babs was no help at all. There were no traces of mint chocolate about them, no wrapper anywhere, no smell of mint around. For a brief moment I wondered if Darwin had taken it to work, but I quickly dismissed that thought, because Darwin loves me and would never take my Chocolate Bar without asking permission.

I turned the kitchen upside down. I looked in all the girls' favorite hiding places. I searched under the couch -- no mean feat for someone who's eight months pregnant. I took up and replaced all the items on the pantry shelf. No Chocolate Bar. I even opened up the oven and checked inside, on the off chance that some enterprising young tooglet had stashed it in there. But it's unlike the girls to hide away food. They usually eat it right away and then look guilty if I catch them. Babs in particular, when she knows she's done something naughty, will hide her eyes and refuse to look up for the longest time. It's cute, kinda.

When Darwin came home he searched as well. Readers, we cannot find my Chocolate Bar anywhere in the house! How does a Chocolate Bar simply go missing, with no traces? I wanted that Chocolate! I could taste it! But alas, IT IS GONE. There will be No Chocolate for Mrs. Darwin, and I did so look forward to it.

Sob.

Matter, Form and Sanity

If you hang around certain sectors of the Catholic blogsphere much, you probably hear from time to time about this thing called "formal causality" that some people wish could get a little more respect. However, if you're not in the habit of reading Aristotelians or Thomists in your spare time, you may not be sure what is meant by it.

First of all, the word "causality" will lead you astray. In standard parlance "cause" is generally used in terms of "cause and effect". However, Aristotle's four causes (material, efficient, formal and final) cover a rather wider stretch of ground.

According to Aristotle's way of thinking, the universe is made of up matter and form. Matter in and of itself is just stuff. (If Star Trek had been written by Aristotelians, they would have constantly encountered beings with made up of matter and animate souls but no form -- the Aristotelian version of The Blob.)

Say you have a coffee mug sitting next to you (mine is already empty). That mug is made of matter. It also conforms to the 'form' of mugness. The form consists of those essential elements of mugness that make a mug be a mug, instead of a tumbler or a cocktail glass or what-have-you. So the material cause (the stuffness) of my mug is ceramic and glaze. The formal cause of my mug (the form) is 'mugness' -- whatever that is.

Now why, you may be wondering, do people feel this is such an important thing to consider? It sounds almost like a tautology. (This mug is a mug because it is like a mug.) Well, form may not seem much of a big deal when you're dealing with a mug. Indeed, I think one is right to question whether there really is an ideal form of "mug" or if mug is simply a human invented category which is useful in sorting the contents of your kitchen cupboard. However, form becomes very important when considering certain moral questions.

A couple years back, I was discussing gay marriage with an earnestly liberal Christian who was also a medical doctor. She asserted that the existence of hermaphrodites proved that gender was a loose set of descriptive categories, and therefore one should marry whomever one felt attracted to. I claimed that humans were meant to be males or females capable of reproduction, and that the fact that some people are born without clear or functioning gender characteristics no more meant that people were not supposed to mate male on female than the fact that some people are born blind means that people are not supposed to be able to see. The fact that there are deviations from the norm does not mean that a norm does not exist. After some consideration, she said that concepts lick sickness, disability and disfunction were all relative to arbitrary ideas of how a human "ought" to work, and that now she thought about it she could think of no objective definition of "health" vs. "sickness" for human beings. Awkward predicament for a doctor, eh?

The defect in this doctor's thinking was that she had discounted any idea of there being a "form" to which we as humans are meant to conform. And having dispensed with the idea of form, she no longer could say anything was actually a defect.

Now, when we start speaking of "defects" in regards to people, it's important to be clear on what we mean. From the point of view of Catholic morality, there is an inherent dignity to the human person by virtue of identity -- by the mere fact that it is a human person. The dignity of the person does not stem from the degree to which it conforms to the ideal. Someone who is born blind is not less of a human because he lacks a characteristic which humans are meant to have. Nor is a hermaphrodite less of a human because he lacks correctly formed gender features.

Further, there are some characteristics which pertain to the human form, and others which are merely accidents (surface features that do not pertain to the essence of what it is to be human). So while we might say that it is in the essence of a human to have eyes capable of sight, there is not particular value to a certain color of eyes.

Formal causality (like most of Aristotle) isn't taught much these days. Yet, as you can see, it's necessary to be able to make any kind of sane analysis of what a person, thing or animal is, and what it is supposed to be.

Many point to the predominance of science in the modern mind as the reason why few people understand formal causality anymore. And yet, in a sense, modern science should give us a good, realistic grounding in at least certain kinds of formal causality, though because of its limitations it clearly doesn't place a particular moral value on conforming to form.

Take, for instance, the question of hermaphrodism which my acquaintance brought up. From a biological point of view, it's clear that an individual who has unformed or malformed gender attributes, and thus is incapable of or uninterested in reproduction, is in some sense not the way an individual is supposed to be. After all, if all individuals were that way, there wouldn't be any more. It's an evolutionary dead end. However good one might feel about being a hermaphrodite, or how affection one might have for him/her, it's clear that from a biological point of view something isn't right in that picture. Although biology doesn't produce moral precepts, it's at least clear that hermaphrodism cannot be considered 'normal' and thus perhaps it's a bad idea to use it as the basis for your moral analysis.

Certainly, modern science doesn't concern itself with questions like "what is the essence of being human" but there is a certain rough realism about it which, if taken seriously, should help to reign in the wilder impulses of our modern, relativistic, moral feel-good-ism.

Why We Have Laws

As graphic photos of aborted babies have become less common over the years at the March For Life and large number of simple, black "I Regret My Abortion" signs have become one of the most common and moving features of pro-life demonstrations, members of the pro-abortion commentariat have been forced to find a new gloss to replace the old "pro-lifers are bitter old men who hate women and love fetuses" meme of years gone by. (Though that doesn't stop some people from continuing to parrot it.)

One theme I read several times from pro-choice authors this year was, "Where do these women who had abortions get off demanding that the law take that right away from other women? Sure, maybe they regret it, but shouldn't every other woman have the same choice that they had?"

This seems to me to exhibit a serious misunderstanding of why we have laws about these kind of things. On the one hand, a law may be put in place to prevent people from doing something which they genuinely desire to do. One example of this might be the drinking age. It is illegal for a 20-year-old to buy a drink. This is, at least in theory, to the advantage of the common good. But for the 20-year-old, it denies him the ability to do something which he might otherwise wish to do. However, other restrictive laws also have the purpose of freeing the restricted person from being forced into an undesirable action. An example of this might be laws that prevent twelve year old girls from marrying. It may be some some 12-year-olds genuinely wish to be married, however the premise of the law seems to be at least partly that few 12-year-old really want to be married, and thus the law fees them from being given in marriage before their time.

Groups like Feminists For Life employ similar logic in regards to abortion. By their way of thinking, an abortion is not something which most women (all other things being equal) genuinely desire. Rather, its availability allows others to force a woman into having an abortion that she does not truly desire. The fact that abortion is available allows a boyfriend to say, "I didn't want us to get pregnant. I'm willing to pay for the abortion, but I'm definitely not interested in helping you raise a child."

In this sense, the availability of abortion as a valid (or at least legal) option actually decreases the freedom of women in certain situations because it presents an undesired and yet possible alternative into which they can be pushed. If abortions were unavailable or less available, it would give a woman more legal and financial bargaining power, since the law currently acknowledges (at least in theory, though not always very well in practice) that a man has a level of financial responsibility for any child he fathers, whether in or out of wedlock.

One Small Simile For a Man

Al Kimel of Pontifications is probably the first person ever to make a valid theological point by comparing the Catholic Church to Riker. Should there be an award for that, or would it just encourage others?

What We Know (Part I)

As a number of clever people (a group among whom I flatter myself to number) have observed, one of the problems that causes a great deal of the heat in the Intelligent Design vs. Evolutionism vs. Creationism debate is that a great many people on all sides have a poorly formed understanding of the types of knowledge and their relative sources, weights and degrees of surety. I'm convinced that what we need far more than teaching ID (or materialism) in grade and high schools it to begin teaching (perhaps around the junior high level) some very basic philosophy of the "what do we know and how do we know it" variety.

Of course, I say this, but I have to admit that my own philosophical formation is not what it should be. I may have read more Plato and Aristotle than your average bear, but the more I flounder about in matters philosophical the more I realize that high school and college (during which period I did most of my reading on the topic) are periods at which one is very young to make the best possible use of philosophical primary source material. And nowadays, I spend much of my spare time chasing small bablets around the house and keeping up the side business and blogging and such. Naytheless, I've never been one to shrink from speaking about things that I don't know as much about as I should, so I'm going to take a stab at a series of posts on the topic, partly to clear my own thinking, and partly in the hopes of getting some good feedback from our readership -- which includes certain people who know lots about philosophy whom I shan't name except to say that they are called Scott and Bernard and David and others whom I'm sure I'm shamefully forgetting. If it seems like there's interest in continuing to tinker with such a work, I'll set up a wiki once I feel I've nailed down a couple questions that would determine the overall structure.

So without further ado...

There are many things which we may claim, with various degrees of accuracy to know.

I know that 2+2=4
I know that I exist.
I know that the sun will rise tomorrow.
I know that killing another person without good cause is wrong.
I know that, when dropped, objects tend to fall.
I know that my wife loves me.
I know that I love my wife.
I know that God, our creator, is eternal and unchanging.
I know that Christ was born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilot, was crucified, died, and was buried, but rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.
I know that Socrates died in 399 BC.
I know that there are seven continents.
I know that I am currently typing on a Dell Latitude.
I know that it is sunny outside.
I know how to drive a car.

All of these are true statements I could make about my knowledge, and yet they represent a number of different types of knowledge derived from a number of different sources.

The two most basic divisions of knowledge seem to be knowledge which one may know from within one's self, and knowledge which one may know from the outside world. Of these, the former category is smaller, but contains the knowledge which one may know with the greatest surety. For the purposes of brevity (and do feel free to suggest better terms for these categories as we move along) I'd like to call the first of these internal knowledge and the second external knowledge. I'll discuss internal knowledge in the remainder of this post, and start on external knowledge in Part II.

Within the category of internal knowledge, some things we know irrespective of any experience of the outside world at all. (I'm not sure what the name for this category should be, so if anyone has any ideas, let me know.) Within this sub-category fall mathematical knowledge and self knowledge, represented in the above list by:

I know that 2+2=4
I know that I exist.

Self knowledge is both the most certain and at the same time the least useful area of knowledge. As Descartes observed, it may be known with certainty that "I think, therefore, I am" and yet in a sense this mere knowledge of existence gets us no where.

Some people might question whether mathematical knowledge properly belongs in the category of things which may be known withour reference to the outside world. Certainly, as children we learn to think about mathematics by dealing with concrete examples. (You have three pennies and I give you four more, how many do you have now?) However, I think that the mathematical concepts are knowable separately from any material example of them. That is because mathematical entities exist by definition, rather than being discovered by observation. We know what "two" is by concept. We do not need to examine numerous examples of two to see what two really is, and add two objects together repeatedly to see if they always equal four. Rather, two is two by definition, and one finds "two" in nature to the extent that material things conform themselves to the concept. Indeed, some mathematical concepts (a point, a line, a circle, two parallel lines, etc) exist only as mental constructs and are never found in perfect form in the physical world.

The other sub-category within internal knowledge consists of that which we may know internally, but do so only with reference to the experience of the outside world. Within this category fall the following statements:

I know that I love my wife.
I know that killing another person without good cause is wrong.

The first of these constitutes knowledge of an action which I which I myself perform, and thus I am able to observe it first hand and know it internally. I suppose one might call this knowledge of action. One performs an action in relation to the outside world, and so this knowledge requires interaction with the world, but the knowledge itself is internal.

The latter statement is an example of moral knowledge. Again, I think this would inspire a certain degree of controversy. Many people assert that morality is a learned system of culturally determined regulations. Certainly, one finds different moral standards in different cultures. Nor, as any parent can attest, are children naturally moral. Far from it, they often seem naturally selfish and willful. And yet there are certain basic moral norms which do seem to be inborn (in some sense) in human nature. Among these is that innocent life should not be taken without cause. Also that property, rightfully owned, should not be taken by another. That parents should care for children, and that the young should in turn care for the elderly. Plato held that such moral laws (which are known, though perhaps incompletely, but all human beings) are imperfect memories of the perfect forms of Good, Justice, etc. with which we were acquainted before birth. Christian tradition has normally assigned this knowledge to an innate understanding of certain elements of God's will through natural means -- natural law. Either way, it seems to me that the idea that such basic laws are inborn in us comes so naturally that it should not lightly be discounted.

I have put moral knowledge in the category of internal knowledge which we know in reference to the outside world because all of these moral norms deal with our interactions with other persons and things. If one has no knowledge of other people, one cannot know that killing them or stealing from them would be wrong. Still, I'm not fully satisfied with the classification. If anyone has suggestions, I'm open to them.

Next time, the major sub-categories of external knowledge...

Children's Mass

Babs started the morning off by throwing up twice, so we decided to do the mass in shifts thing today. I trotted off to the 9:30 with the "family" choir while MrsDarwin and Noogs are currently at our usual 11:30 mass. (Babs has proceeded to eat a huge breakfast and is -- so far -- keeping it down, so perhaps she was just messing with us.)

There seems to be no excuse like "family" for bad liturgy... Not that the 11:30 at our parish is high mass or anything, but there is at least a certain seriousness to it. The 9:30 features an Alleluia with hand motions (What is it with hand motions? I hated them at least as much at age six as I do now -- perhaps more so then since my teachers back in parochial school were always of the opinion it would be 'cute' for us to learn songs with hand motions.) and a setting of the Our Father which lasts into eternity with all the tinkley shallowness of new age elevator music.

I've never understood that theory of liturgy that in order to involve children in it one must assume all the least likeable stylistic elements of childrens TV programming.

This was hardly the worst case of liturgical foolishness I've seen, but one could tell from the signs of boredom and derision among a number of the teens and older children that it was nonetheless doing damage.

Blogger Bleg

Has anyone else been having blogger eat comments the last couple days? The long post below on construction vs. design had a comment from Scott Carson vanish after being up for a while, and then two comments that I added afterwards won't show up in the pop-up window, but do if you click through to the page that has only that post. Very strange...

If anyone has run into this and knows a cure, I'm all ears.

It Stinks to Heaven

Adult Swim has once again scrambled the schedule, and now our line-up of shows we watched before and after Fullmetal Alchemist have once again been re-arranged. Once upon a time the show before was the charmingly foolish Inuyasha. Now, there is the appauling in every way Stroker & Hoop. We know that nature abhores a vacuum, and so we may conclude that Stroker & Hoop sucks to an unnatural degree...

Creation: Design or Construction?

David over as Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has a fairly decent piece up this evening dealing with some important distinctions in the ID debate.

One that I had been meaning to dive more deeply into is addressed (and, indeed, the problem demonstrated) by his point #3:

Someone limiting himself to modern science is very limited in what he can say about the existence or non-existence of a design in nature because of what he means by design. He limits himself, by method, to speaking about the identification (by proof or hypothesis) of a secondary efficient (natural) cause.

A further distinction which may help in defining what science addresses under the title of "design" as opposed to what philosophers and theologians (or in the ID debate, more often apologists) occurred to me, so here it goes...

The word "design" can, of course, mean very different things to different people in different circumstances.

Design may indicate a purpose or intent, "It was his design to seize the throne, and the queen's gaffe in picking her nose in public gave him just the chance he needed."

Design may also refer to a pattern, "He stood, staring at the intricate design of squirrel skulls laid out upon the driveway."

Or "design" might be used in the sense of schematic or blue print, "When building the out-house, he carefully followed the designs given to him by his feng shui consultant."

I think one of the difficulties in the "Intelligent Design" debate is that different parties are often using different definitions of "design".

In the physical world, we are used to finding design in the sense that I would like to term "construction" and then working backward to find design in the senses of "plan", "purpose", "intent" and "orderliness". Say you come upon a table. You discern it to have been constructed by a carpenter, in that it is made out of a material which you know to be a good construction material (wood) and shows signs of having been put together using tools with which you are familiar (saw, plane, sander, screwdriver, wood glue). You know that people are known to use these tools to construct items similar to the table. And so you take it as a given that the table was constructed, and may go on to think about why it was constructed, how well it was constructed and suchforth.

Now, let us say that you come across a sphere, exactly roughly one inch in diameter. It is a mathematically perfect sphere, so far as any instruments can detect. It is made of a pinkish substance of harness similar to diamond that conducts electricity as well as a super conductor. It behaves as if it has mass but no inertia and is repelled by both poles of a magnet. Is it, you are asked, a constructed artifact or a natural occurrence? Well, it's rather hard to say, isn't it. Certainly, no natural process you know of could have constructed it -- indeed, it seems to defy the laws of nature. And yet, you have no idea how anyone could have constructed it -- that too is to the best of your knowledge impossible. Certainly, God could have created it ex nihilo, but that's merely because according to the very definition of God He could create anything. With any degree of seriousness, all that a scientist could say about it is that he has no idea how it could have come to be, and all that a theologian could say about it is that clearly God must will its existence, since God wills the existence of all things that exist. Science fiction fans everywhere would declare that aliens must have made it.

The difficulty in addressing the question of "design" in living things is that although living things demonstrate several characteristics we often associate with constructed things, we have no idea how one might go about constructing a living organism, or a part of one. The only way that we know of for getting a living creature is: from another living creature.

I think this is why people thinking in a scientific mode tend to react so negatively to discussions of animals or cell structures being "designed". Thinking in terms of construction, the scientist thinks "we have no idea how to construct a bacterial flagellum, so where do these people get off suggesting it was designed?" The scientist may not have a very good idea of how the flagellum developed via evolution, but he does at least know how one bacteria can split into two bacteria, with occasional mutations in the line of descent. So he's willing to take a flyer on it since he has no idea what another form of "design" would look like.

The design theorist is in some senses no better off. He feels that a feature such as the flagellum could not have evolved via "random chance" and yet aside from positing that a designer was involved, he has no idea what the answer to the scientist's construction question is. Perhaps God created the first flagellum equipped bacteria ex nihilo. But then, perhaps the flagellum did indeed result from a series of gradual modifications over time -- and the "design" part is found in the proper working out of an unlikely series of events. What the design proponent is most set on (in most cases, at any rate) is that the development of the flagellum was intended. However, in this conviction he is not necessarily disagreeing with the scientist strictly speaking, since science doesn't have to tool to answer questions about intent anyway.

A picture is worth 100 Easy-to-Read Words

High fashion meets the latest reading at the Darwin household:

Manolo says, And now do you like my hat?

(Thanks to Happy Catholic for sending me to Manolo's Shoe Blog in the first place.)

Why I was not carefree this afternoon

As I was about to send Babs off to dance lessons, I had to pull her out of my friend's van to change a rather runny diaper. Then I kicked back with my book, and very soon was contemplating an afternoon nap. Then I got a call from my friend.

"I'm on my way to bring Babs home. She had another hugely runny diaper, and the only explanation we could think of was that she must be sick!"

No, dear readers, there is another explanation. You see, Babs is clever enough to pull up her chair to the pantry door so she can unlatch the chain. She did it this morning, when I came down to find that she'd scarfed a quantity of prunes. Yes, prunes.

So the prunes will have to be hidden somewhere else, I see. In the meantime, Babs maintains that kind of cheer that's only witnessed in the two-year-old who is pleased as punch by her ability to produce fantastic and grotesque diapers.

I only wish this counted as "toilet humor"...

The Home Visit

My midwife and her assistant came over today for the 36-week home visit. I don't know if you can call it the nesting urge, but I did a fair amount of cleaning and rearranging yesterday in preparation. Heck, I even had Darwin hang some pictures that have been sitting around for months! But my bathroom counter is clean, and the floor is swept, and I hope I won't have to do that again before the baby is born.

The midwife checked out the layout of the house and made sure we'd laid in our supplies. For them as is interested, here's a partial list of stuff you need to have handy for a home birth:

• A bag for baby containing some cloth diapers, an undershirt, some socks, a first outfit, and several receiving blankets.
• A bag with eight towels and twelve washcloths
  
• A sterilized pan for the placenta (bake in a paper bag at 250 degrees for an hour, place the paper bag in a plastic bag, store in a safe dry place)
• A postpartum bag containing the antibiotic eye ointment, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, Q-tips, small unopened bottle of olive oil
  
• two fitted bed sheets, a plastic sheet, and two sets of pillow cases. (In early labor you make the bed with one sheet, put the plastic sheet over it, and put the other bed sheet over that. Then after the baby is born you pull off the soiled top sheet and plastic sheet, and voila! The bed's already made.)

Baby's heartbeat is strong, she's wiggly and of a good size (but not too big!) and I'm as healthy as a horse. And I'm about 70% effaced and almost 2 cm dilated, and baby's head is low. This could all go down quickly once it starts -- heh, heh, heh...

But in the meantime, I feel just fine. My mom is scheduled to come out in three weeks to help with the girls and the baby stuff, and as long as my ankles don't swell up, I ought to be able to hold down the fort until then. And I haven't developed any new stretch marks (yet)! And a friend took the girls to dance lessons, so I'm carefree all afternoon! You think I'm going to write a long and witty post for your edification, but what I'm really going to do is make some cocoa and lay down with a book and relax.

TTFN!

Reading Around

Scott Carson, fed up with low-achieving students bitching about him on ratemyprofessor.com, bolsters his self-esteem by testing himself in the areas that really matter.

Pauca Lux ex Oriente explains how the Orthodox observe the Lenten season, and challenges his Western brethren to become more inventive in finding new ways to do good.

MrsDrP agrees with me about the need for improved marriage preparation, and recounts her own horrific Engaged Encounter retreat.

Star Trek Materialism

Mark Shea has an article on Catholic Exchange about materialism and the Star Trek mentality. In the process, he recalls what if memory serves was definately one of the top ten all time bad episodes of STNG.

Needless to say (he says, resuming his fandom personality from ten years back) this is just another example of how Babylon 5 was infinitely superior to any of the incarnations of Star Trek.

And I Nominate...

I'm kind of charmed by the Catholic Blog Awards, so I was itching to nominate someone. Hopefully I'll come up with more later to but to start the day off right I've nominated Scott Carson of An Examined Life for "most insightful blog" (how else could one describe a blog that finds fascinating things to say about McDonalds, the Mitford novels and Frank McCourt all in the same week) and Fr. Martin Fox of Bonfire of the Vanities for "best blog by a priest or religious" (need one say more?).

However, I must say there are some catagories that I think they could add:

Best Eastern Rite Blog: Pauca Lux Ex Oriente (keeper of the Holy Hand Grenade awards)
Best Use of Astronomical Imagery: CatholicSensibility
Best Retired (Aging?) Blog: City of God
Best Conservative Catholic Science Writer: Farrell Media
Most Subversive Fake Blog: Blogging Ex Cathedra
Most Papal Blog: Musum Pontificalis

Special thanks to CollegeCatholic (best by someone who was in kindergarden when I was in junior high?) who nominated us for Most Intellectual Blog -- though I think I'd have a better chance in "most long-winded blog".

2006 Catholic Blog Awards

Hey, look everybody! It's time to place your nominations for the Catholic Blog Awards! Who wants to show some love to the Darwins? (hint, hint)

Personally, I had to nominate Happy Catholic because Julie D. is my favorite morning read. You all feel free to follow suit.

A sobering reminder

Via Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex, a link to a page about genocide under the Nazis. No explicit images, but absolutely horrifying nonetheless.

Wisdom from the Tribunal

Through a series of links, I came across this post by canon lawyer Ed Peters (a few years old, it seems) answering those who object to the high rate of annulments in America. He makes many good points, the chiefest being that if Catholics are serious about the serious spiritual and psychological damage of contraception and pre-marital sex, then we should not be suprised that those who already are cohabitating and contracepting before marriage do not have a strong grasp of the solemnity of the sacrament.

Amy Welborn makes this same point in a recent post and quotes canonist Pete Vere:

It was with some reluctance that I first got involved with Tribunal ministry, since as a Traditional Catholic I bemoan the annulment crisis in North America. The fact I was extremely also suspicious of canon 1095, the canon with lists the psychological grounds vitiating marital consent, and the canon under which most marriages before a tribunal are declared null, didn't help either.

However, my Tribunal experience has been a real eye-opener, especially in light of the contraceptive and divorce mentality I encounter in most people, including Catholics. In fact, these mentalities are so pervasive within North American society that after four days on the Tribunal I found myself declaring as many marriages invalid as the next judge, often on a canon 1095 basis, and wondering to myself whether any marriage attempted today in North America is valid. In short, as a Traditional Catholic canonist, I can safely say that since the sexual devolution of the sixties, the rise in marriage annulments has not been because of the Second Vatican Council and a more liberal application of canon law, but because of a selfish and unrealistic understanding of what marriage entails by your average person entering into it.

But then again, we're often looking at people who have grown up watching pornographic sitcoms, who have been subjected to sex-ed programs more graphic than a gynecologist textbook fifty years ago, engaged in pre-marital sex since their early teens, most often shacked up two or three times by the time they marry, see children as an inconvenience, and suddenly we expect them to enter into a sacramental Christian marriage?

Amy says, and I agree with her, that what is needed is not more criticism of the tribunal or the annullment process, but stronger marriage preparation.

...Stop witnessing the marriage of every baptized Catholic who walks into the rectory and asks for one. There is much discussion of the high number of annulment cases processed in the US, in particular, but I have just a couple of things to say. First, the majority of couples coming to the Catholic Church to be married are a)living together and b)contracepting and are c)rarely challenged on this by those preparing them for marriage. Many of them are barely catechized on anything, are not regular Mass-goers until Mama gets it into her head that they must be married in the Church and the pastor sternly berates them for not being registered and not having envelopes - a far greater sin that cohabitating, you know - and you're telling me that these marriages are not rife with potential problems with validity?

I can't say that I remember my own marriage prep classes that well. We did have to fill out one of those compatibility surveys: have you talked about this, what are your views on that, is anyone pressuring you into this marriage, do you feel impulses to irrational anger, have you discussed finances, etc. When it came time for the priest to go over our results with us, he glanced down at the scores and said, "I don't say that you cheated, but I've rarely seen such a high compatibility rate." Well, of course! We took marriage seriously! Why should we get engaged without knowing exactly where the other stood on the issues that make or break many marriages? (And we dated for a long time before getting engaged, seeing as we were in college, so we had plenty of time to talk things over.)

Full disclosure here: my own parents were divorced and annulled after more than twenty years of marriage, at about the same time that Darwin and I were getting engaged and taking marriage prep classes. Some of my friends asked me, "Doesn't that make you worry about getting married? Can any marriage last?" No, I replied, it only makes me value the graces of the sacrament more, because I've seen what happens when those graces aren't present.