Sunday Snippets ... and Your Humble Blogger Sells Out!

Yes it's time for Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival, hosted as usual by RAnn. As you probably know by now, it's a collection of Catholic writers that huddle together once a week to offer their collective works to discriminating readers like you. But before I offer you my work for the week ... you might have noticed something different at the bottom of this post.

Yeah, I sold out. I'm in this for the money now.

Blogging doesn't really cost me anything, since I use Blogger and a whole host of free tools. Because of that, I've been trying to keep my sites free of advertising, since I find ads annoying, and AdSense doesn't always "get" what's appropriate for you (why would I want to shop for plus-size dresses?).

However, a little over three years ago, a papilloma started growing in my right nostril. Since I was first out of work and then working but without health benefits, I let it go until it was practically hanging out of my nose.

So it's off to an ENT. Doctor Treebeard looks at me, and sends me off to a nearby clinic where I can have my nose CT scanned (and I'm beginning to wonder if my head shouldn't be examined). He also schedules me for a biopsy just in case. So I come back for the follow-up, and he tells me that 1) it needs surgery to be removed (really?) and 2) he's not the one to do it.

Requiem for a restaurant legacy

Jerry and Chuck Caniglia, and their restaurant. (Almost looks
like they were Photoshopped into the picture!)

Every now and again, I joke that as a kid my only experience with Italian restaurants was that you got spaghetti or mostaccioli with your steak. And every now and again, I wonder what kind of restaurant I would run if I had the money to invest.

Now I know my answer: I'd open a Caniglia's.

People who grew up or lived for any appreciable length of time in Omaha, Nebraska know about the Caniglia restaurants: Caniglia's, Mister C's, The Top of the World (on the 36th floor of what used to be Omaha's only skyscraper, the Woodmen Tower), Eli Caniglia's Venice Inn and a small handful of others. There were other Italian-owned steakhouses as well, some of which are still open, and their names still evoke plenty of memories: Piccolo Pete's, Cascio's, Angie's, Batiatto's and so on.

The Caniglias actually had more Italian selections, of course. While Caniglia's was originally a bakery, for the longest time it was a pizzeria — in fact, if I remember correctly, they still served pizza even after they transformed into a steakhouse. But for your appetizer, you could (and almost always did) order fried ravioli, served with plenty of marinara, and you had spaghetti, lasagna and veal parmigiana as entrée options (there may have been more, but those were my go-to choices).

Contraception: A Hill Worth Dying On!—CATHOLIC STAND

Is contraception “a hill worth dying on”? asks Austin Ruse, one of the Catholic Church in America’s most sage, most lucid commentators.

There is no question that the Catholic politician is duty bound to limit and then to stop legal abortion. After all, abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. Protecting the innocent from abortion is not a uniquely Catholic matter. Is contraception the same as abortion, or is it more like divorce, a fundamental Catholic teaching but one that we do not seek to impose on others[?]. We may seek to convince others but we do not seek to impose it on them through public policy.
There are good public health reasons to be against contraception. Hormonal birth control pills can cause cancer, for instance. And this is a very important point to make when we properly try to undermine public confidence in contraceptives. But this is not a Catholic reason to vote against them …. We do not see any great Catholic campaigns against smoking and smoking probably causes more cancer than the pill. [Bold font mine.—ASL]

Ruse warns us, “Abortion advocates everywhere are eager to use contraceptives as a cudgel to beat us with and they would love nothing more than for us to actually fight on that ground.” Indeed, the vast majority of Catholic Americans, both men and women, have registered dissent on this teaching, if on no other. Seemingly, to be against contraception is equivalent to being a Holocaust denier or a proponent of the flat-Earth theory. After all, according to Angela Bonavoglia anyway, “every major health organization maintains that [contraception] is crucial [to] the health of mothers and babies”; whether or not that statement is true, it’s certainly part of the mythos of the sexual revolution that women need access to birth control and abortion for their health.

(A myth, Michael F. Flynn reminds us, is “an organizing story by which a culture explains itself to itself”. In this sense, a myth is not necessarily false or fictional in its details; modern histories fulfill this function as well as did the tales of the Celtic bard or the Norse forteller. The major difference between, say, Herodotus or Suetonius — or even Homer — and the late Stephen Ambrose is footnotes: history is story at its very core … the tale we tell about us.)

Ruse’s comments come in the context of a couple of specific fights, in which open opposition to the sale of contraceptives is playing a role. However, to speak of “a hill worth dying on” is to speak of the contraception issue as if it were extractable from the rest of our fights.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Bake some cookies!

Sorry for the rather extended post-birthday break. The day of my birthday I lost access to my computer at work and don't expect to have it back until this week sometime. Some of the time has also been spent on personal and medical issues; there's an operation I need, and all the years of not taking care of myself have finally caught up to make setting up the operation a major undertaking that makes herding cats look like a sane and simple way to earn a living. In fact, if I wanted to start my own business, I'd become an "operation coordinator", except that I'm not sure how to make it pay yet. Or design orthotic cowboy boots.

Anyway, I broke under the pressure and started baking cookies again.

Actually, I can't help but think of the poem attributed to St. Brigid of Kildare, which speaks of brewing a lake of ale for the King of Kings and the heavenly host. We're called to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger as corporal acts of mercy, because what we do for others is what we do for Christ (Matthew 25:35, 40); ale, besides being the great mark of hospitality throughout the Northern European world, was also a foodstuff, as it was brewed with a lower alcohol content and more carbs than our modern beers, especially the pilsners. Cookies are great treats; the smell of fresh-baked cookies is one of the most home-evocative scents.

Is liberal Catholicism irrelevant?

Recently there's been a spate of articles, by Patrick J. Deneen, Rod Dreher and Bonchamps of The American Catholic, all of whom argue from a single premiss: The struggle for the soul of American Catholics is no longer between "liberals" and "conservatives" as the MSM defines these camps (I prefer the terms "progressive" and "orthodox"), but rather between different strains of conservative Catholics. Claims Deneen:

The real action does not involve liberal "Catholics" at all. Liberal Catholicism, while well-represented in elite circles of the Democratic Party, qua Catholicism is finished. Liberal Catholicism has no future—like liberal Protestantism, it is fated to become liberalism simpliciter within a generation. The children of liberal Catholics will either want their liberalism unvarnished by incense and holy water, or they will rebel and ask if there’s something more challenging, disobeying their parents by “reverting” to Catholicism. While "liberal" Catholicism will appear to be a force because it will continue to have political representation, as a "project" and a theology, like liberal Protestantism it is doomed to oblivion.

Someone needs to tell liberal Catholics that. Angela Bonavoglia, feminist columnist and useful idiot for HuffPo, is also the author of Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church, and is still very much under the impression that the fight isn't doomed. Same with Kate Childs Graham, a gay feminist whose rationale for calling herself a "pro-choice Catholic" is as narcissistic and intellectually dishonest today as it was when first published by the National Catholic Fishwrap five years ago. Neither Bonavoglia nor Graham are "baby-boomers"; they're as much "Generation X" as I am (perhaps more, as I was born close to the cusp between the two cohorts). And lest you think I'm picking on feminists, let me refer you back to Young Catholics for Choice, who don't just support abortion upon request but rather a whole host of positions that run counter to Catholic moral dogma. YCFC is by no means populated by aging hippies, but rather is run by and for twenty- and thirty-somethings.

Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival (Vol. 14:4)

Welcome again to "Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival", hosted as per usual by RAnn at This, That and the Other Thing.

Here's how it works: A Catholic writer (such as Your Humble Blogger) writes a post in which s/he includes links to other posts written the previous week. The post includes a link to the "Snippets" page. Then, the link to the new post is submitted to RAnn's site. So when you follow the link above, you'll find a page that will link you to a bunch of fellow Catholic bloggers who offer you the best of their efforts, which will make tasty reading for a lazy afternoon.

This week I reached a major milestone in my life: I celebrated my fiftieth birthday on Thursday, Jan. 23. It just so happened that that day coincided with my monthly submission to Catholic Stand, which features plenty of good, solid Catholic writing, much by people with a higher profile in the Catholic blogosphere than mine. So my contribution for this month was "My First Fifty Years: What I've Learned", my little idiosyncratic take on important life lessons.

On Outside the Asylum, I posted what I hope will be the last economics post for some time, "The tragedy of the corporations", which argues that individual corporate efforts to hold down labor costs is the business world's collective decision to depress consumption and thus reduce their own income ... a kind of collective suicide pact. And on this blog, I posted "Calling George Orwell", a little reflection on a disturbing text message received by thousands of demonstrators in the Ukrainian city of Kiev.

That's all I have. Enjoy your Sunday, and I'll see you next week!

My First Fifty Years: What I've Learned

Yes, I still play. (Photo: Steve Thelen.)

Eight years ago, I was playing around with Microsoft^® Money and found an add-in for investment advice. As part of the program, it asked various questions about my general health background. Being interested, I followed through, answering the questions as honestly as possible then hit the “submit” button. The program digested my answers, thought for a couple of seconds then generated its answer. Among its conclusions, I found the rather disturbing prediction: “Life expectancy: 46 years.”

If you’ve done the math, you’ll have figured out that I was 42 at the time. Yikes.

Considering that I’m celebrating my fiftieth year of life today, rather than decomposing in a pine box somewhere, is merely a reminder that actuarial tables have the force of neither physical nor human law.  The longer you live, the longer they expect you to live. (That is, no combination of answers will ever cough up the result “This guy should have died four years ago,” or “Check your watch; you could go any second”). In fact, since 1996, when I survived being robbed at gunpoint for the second time, every breath I’ve taken has been in the knowledge that life is an unmeritable gift.

 Read more at Catholic Stand!

Calling George Orwell

Earlier this afternoon, a woman who used to be my supervisor and I were talking about advances in technology. Like many of my generation, I'm about 1/3rd computer geek, but I'm also a bit of a "tech skeptic" — I don't believe that technological progress is equal to or the same as social progress, or that it will necessarily lead us to Utopia. That doesn't stop me from wanting the latest cool toys, though.

Anyway, I mentioned to Maranda a blurb I'd read where someone claimed that all cars in America would be hooked up to the Internet within the next 5 – 10 years. Consternation dropped on Maranda's face: "Why the hell would anyone want their car hooked up to the Internet? We've already got a big enough problem with people texting while driving! Who needs to be surfing the Web at sixty miles an hour on the open road?" We agreed the idea was pretty ridiculous, and went on talking about MP3 players, Google glasses, iPhones, shoes and ships and sealing wax.

Meanwhile, over in the protest-torn city of Kiev, thousands of men and women protesting the increasingly authoritarian régime received this chilling text message yesterday: "Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance." You see, Ukraine passed a law prohibiting public demonstrations; using new technology, the government can locate any cell-phone subscriber in or near a place where prohibited activities are taking place.

Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival (Vol. 14:3)

Welcome back to Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival! 

Sunday Snippets is a weekly link-fest hosted by RAnn at This, That and the Other Thing. This post contains links back to my writing for the week, while also linking you back to RAnn's blog, where you can find links to other Catholic writers looking to entertain, instruct and amuse you. If you've already read what I've written earlier this week, then by all means go over to RAnn's place and delve into some other writers!

My main effort this last week was in Outside the Asylum: "Dumb idea #6,258: Create jobs by paying poor people less". There's been no small effort by conservatives to pooh-pooh a minimum wage raise, and as a measure to reduce the "wealth gap" I certainly agree that it can have no more than a temporary effect. But Richard J. Epstein wants us to go further: get rid of the minimum wage entirely, because by his reckoning (based on no identifiable facts) labor costs are too high. While I can certainly appreciate his major point — government-mandated redistribution of wealth is generally a bad idea — cutting the minimum wage is not just inappropriate, it's what-color-is-the-sky-in-your-world insane.

In The Impractical Catholic (this here blog) I managed to post three times on non-economic topics (woo-hoo!). First, there's "Being a jerk about gender pronouns", in which I explain why an intelligent, honest person should not use masculine pronouns in reference to a cross-dressing woman or feminine pronouns vis-à-vis a man pretending to be a woman. Then there's "Breaking up with the Pope is hard to do", in which I tweak Philip Pullela of Reuters for insisting that Papa Bergoglio's recent comments on abortion were meant only to placate Catholic conservatives. Last is "An end to arrogant atheism?", in which I reflect on a recent article in Slate by Richard Speckhardt of the American Humanist Association calling for atheists to be more charitable in their dealings with believers.

Go get your Catholic reading on! Have a great week!

An end to arrogant atheism?

It might be worth your while to read the post in HuffPo by Richard Speckhardt, the executive director of the American Humanist Association, before you go on with this.

I truly respect the points that Speckhardt is trying to make in this post. It's not that, in making them, he occasionally makes patronizing comments ("While Dawkins certainly has a valid point regarding mainstream religion's frequent opposition to critical thinking and empiricism ...." No, he doesn't!). It's not that, in making them, he falls prey to the same smug, unsubstantiated assumptions that clog the brains of many New Atheists and set religious apologists' teeth on edge ("Yet again, Dawkins has a valid point — that the anti-science mentality of many religions has limited its adherents from learning about science and working in the scientific field ..." GA-AAA-AH!). In the main, his point is as valid for the religious as it is for the non-religious: as the old saying goes, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." I just wish he'd use less vinegar while asking for more honey.

No, my only objection is that arrogant atheism will only end the same day arrogant theism ends — when Christ comes again and all things are made new. Or, if you prefer, when the last human being quotes the Iliad and dies.