It's a Wonderful Life...Always

If I'd known then what I do now, I'd have wanted him to die in my arms'

This is a really good article…and deserves way more than a quick FB comment. I think it poses some questions that require way more dignity than just a reaction.

She asks if we are always right to save premature babies because sometimes it is only "post-poning the inevitable…" But does any one think that it does justice to a child for a parent to say “It would be better if you were not alive.” She comments that it is “a great taboo to wonder if she should have let her son go when he was born so fragile and weak.” It is a great taboo for a reason. Would anyone ever want to hear “you’d have been better off dead” from their parents? Death is always inevitable. No one wants to bury a child. Still, isn't it the case that whether we know, (however much we can really know anything about such things), that our child may die as a teenager or die as an adult... isn't it still a reality that death is always inevitable?

What this mom is contending with is suffering.
And the question comes down to this…Can suffering make life meaningless to the point that it is not worth living?

I Really DO Care...

Am I missing the point about empathy if I think this is funny?


I think this is hilarious.
My wife does not.
I see her point.
But I still think it's hilarious. Probably because I'm an ass.
I guess just because you've read "Men are from Mars, Women and from Venus" back in the '90's and you mentally ascent to it, doesn't mean that you are a good listener.
I suppose there is something utilitarian about just listening and trying to be empathetic, even if you really DO care about a person, that could drive them up a wall. Just because you think you're empathetic, doesn't mean you are. It's sort of taking a reductive approach to how women operate...or something...I guess. I don't know. All I know, is that damn nail...if we could just yank that thing out...OK. Sorry. Never mind. Go on. I'm listening.

Just because you know someone doesn't mean you know them.
It really is kind of funny though how absurd we are.

"Religion does Nothing but Cause War and Oppression" Seems Like a Claim of Almost Willfull Ignorance.

"But what about the Crusades and Inquisitions and the Reformation? Huh, huh, What about those?" Well, I won't deny that there are travesties in history in the name of religion, (although we really are bad at history here in America these days and all of these periods really require a deeper look and not just a mere caricature from the History Channel, especially if you're going to form strong opinions on them that weight your view about things like well, God and eternity), but I will challenge the assertion that religion, properly understood, was the source of the violence. Now, there is a great deal of qualifying that is needed here. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do this justice. However, I'll remind folks of the well documented stat that in the 20th Century we became incredibly effective at killing one another and did so on a previously unprecedented level. Between Mao, Stalin and Hitler, all of whom took up ideological banners that carried an explicitly atheist component, more people were killed in one century than all of the combined war-related murders in the preceding 19 centuries.

Meanwhile, we see people of faith coming together at an unprecedented level to together appeal to God for mercy and an end war.

Devotion to God Continues to Rise Despite the Assertion of His Death by Old and Now Dead White Guys.

I've been reading a little bit of Hegel and Nietzsche the past couple of semesters for school. It's worth spending the time and energy to review them, particularly if you wonder where we developed our bias of reading the world of people as a mass of individual self-deterministic consciousnesses. In any case the they helped develop and popularize the whole "God is dead" bit.

Interestingly enough, a century later, this supposed passing of God doesn't seem to have quite the impact that one might anticipate.

Anarchy and Oligarchs!

Yeah, your Mom's an Anarchist!

The fun of reading Chesterton is his reveling in the seemingly absurd only to have it realized on further discussion as the pinnacle of sanity. For example, anarchy is held up as an ideal and routine is cautioned against. However, Chesterton is not rejecting order, but is instead calling for a higher order. He draws a picture in which aristocratic decadence devolves into boredom and the card trick that seems to go unnoticed is that while the oligarchy talks about preserving tradition, it is in reality blazing a trail of superstitious progress for the sake of progress. So it is the case that most revolutions are not the peoples’ revolution but are instead foisted on society by the insanely rich and the pathetically bored and it is the home and the family that ultimately suffers as they are set upon with an imposed and alien control.  

For Chesterton “the [aristocratic] sort of reform as routine is a failed proposal.” Instead, he proposes that what is needed is the wildness of the domicile and a healthy dose of feminine anarchy. This feminine anarchy would propose that “people should not be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions.” Chesterton hints at his framework for a Distributist antidote to landlords and usury that would craft a society of “monomaniacal” specialists who must realize success in one particular function by giving “his all.” Contrast the tyrannical world of the specialists with the home, which serves as the cultivator of wildness. We gain as sense of how the tragedy of the suffragette seems to be in the loss of herself as woman rather than any shackles of the household.

A King, a Lady and a Dragon...or a Good Man is Hard to Find

Man, I am sure glad to be married. And lucky too. Seriously, if I was my father-in-law and the 22 year old version of me asked to marry my daughter, (uh, that sounds weird but you know what I mean), it would have been a short conversation starting with "no" and ending with "because you're an idiot." And I would have been right too.

"It ain't me, it's the People that say"

All Souls' Day

God is the God of the living. With confidence, we pray:
For all the dead whom we have loved in life: Raise them up, O Lord.
For all the dead of our parish: Raise them up, O Lord.
For all the dead among those who have harmed us: Raise them up, O Lord.
For all the dead whom no one remembers in prayer: Raise them up, O Lord.


Purgatory strips off from one person what is unbearable and from another the inability to bear certain things, so that in each of them a pure heart is revealed, and we can see that we all belong together in one enormous symphony of being.  - Pope Benedict XVI