The Ark and The Dove

Liturgical Dissonance

Today was Catechectical Sunday. According to the USCCB, Catechectical Sunday

will focus on the theme "Catechists and Teachers as Agents of the New Evangelization." Those whom the community has designated to serve as catechists will be called forth to be commissioned for their ministry. Catechetical Sunday is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the role that each person plays, by virtue of Baptism, in handing on the faith and being a witness to the Gospel. Catechetical Sunday is an opportunity for all to rededicate themselves to this mission as a community of faith.

One of the Hymns at Mass today was "As a Fire is Meant for Burning." It contains the following verses.

As a fire is meant for burning
with a bright and warming flame,
so the church is meant for mission,
giving glory to God's name.

Not to preach our creeds or customs,
but to build a bridge of care,
we join hands across the nations,
finding neighbors everywhere.

Hmmm.

So we celebrated Catechectical Sunday by singing that the Church's mission is NOT to spread the creed..."builda bridge of care." What is a bridge of care, anyway? Sounds like something that a Care Bear would shoot out of its stomach tattoo.

Speaking of Care Bears, check out this other verse

As a green bud in the springtime is a sign of life renewed,
so may we be signs of oneness mid earth's peoples many hued.
As a rainbow lights the heavens when a storm is past and gone,
may our lives reflect the radiance of God's new and glorious dawn.

This is a poetical puzzle for me. I have no idea what the image of a green bud has to do with the evolutionary diversity of human pigmentation. The use of "as" in the opening clause suggest some kind of logical analogy...but I'm having a hard time figuring out what the analogy is. It seems to hinge on what Augustine a bud being would classify as a "natural sign" -- an untaught, inherent signifier or indicator of something other than itself. In this case, buds are natural signifiers of seasonal change.

I'm not quite sure how that translates into the singers of the songs being signifiers of the solidarity of people who are differently pigmented. The one sign has a chronological relationship; it's not clear how the other sign works. Perhaps the singer is a microcosm of a larger social phenomenon--but is the song suggesting that we are shifting towards that solidarity, or that the solidarity already exists? The image of the bud would suggest that solidarity is not yet fully manifest. So are we NOT really one with people who have different pigmentation than us, but we will be eventually?

And what about that rainbow analogy. Do rainbows "light the heavens?" This is a strange expression to me, and I'm not quite familiar with it. i've never thought of a rainbow "lighting" anything. "Hanging" perhaps. "Being set in the Heavens" maybe. But "lighting?" I don't think of rainbows as being a source of light.

Now, I'm sure a physicist can correct me on this, but I also didn't think a rainbow "reflected" light so much as it "refracted" light. This is not my field, so I'll submit this one for more knowledgeable minds...but I was under the impression that rainbows occurred when a single, unified beam of white light struck a surface that separated that beam into its constituent wavelengths. I suppose a rainbow must, technically, be some form of reflection bouncing off of water, otherwise the refracted light would reach our eyes. But, even so, the rainbow, technically, should be an image of disunity and fragmentation if construed in terms of light.

It's also a bit weird that the analogy is between an event that occurs in the sky after an event (and therefore a chronological, cause-effect relationship) and a metaphor of an event that occurs in the sky at a given time (but not necessarily in a chronological relationship).

Rainbows "light" skies after storms.
We "reflect" radiance during God's new dawn.

We should be "reflecting" radiance the way rainbows light. I don't get it.

And the most noteworthy aspect of a rainbow's lighting is that it follows after a storm.

And what the heck is "God's new dawn?" It sounds like God is being reborn.

It would make much more sense to me if we reflected God's glory the way the moon reflects the sun. The moon's light is less than that of the sun, like the way we are limited in our capacity to be like God. We can only ever be dim reflections of God's full glory--at least in our current, fallen, earthly, states. more over, the moon functions as a surrogate of the Sun -- it's reflection reminds us that the sun is still there even when it can't be seen. It travels in the darkness to bring the Sun's light to those who can't readily see it. That sounds like a good metaphor for missionary work to me.

But the moon is only one color: white, so it doesn't serve the turn of multi-culturalism as well (even though white light is a better image of unity than a rainbow).

And, of course, the rainbow was not an image of diversity in the Bible. Rainbows as a symbol for humanity smacks of modern multi-cultural quackery to me. The rainbow, in its mythic, Jewish proportions, was supposed to be a sign of God's mercy--that he wasn't going to directly intervene and wipe out the entire human population through flooding directly because of its decadence and godlessness--that he tried it once and found it a very unpleasant business.

I won't even go into the problems of the cloying rhyme or fourteen syllable lines...

The real issue is still that this saccharine, multi-cultural, gutless missionary hymn seems to snub its nose at the fundamental nature of catechesis: teaching our creed.

It's Not a Necklace -- Stop Wearing it Like One...

Oh, and stop restricting religious expression while you are at it.

FoxNews is reporting another one of those cases where a student is forced to remove rosaries from around his neck because it can be construed as a gang symbol.

The most important issue here is, of course, the infringement on religious freedom.

The next most important issue here is that gangs are apparently so prevalent in our schools that schools are willing to violent the freedom of religion in an effort to undermine allegiance to violent pseudo-societies.

Then, I suppose is the concern that the rosaries has been hijacked by gangs as a banner -- it's like some kind of social-networking-santeria.

After that, I'm worried about the kid who is wearing the rosaries "for protection"--which sounds eerily more like superstition than devotion.

Then, down at the bottom of the heap, I guess we have the concern that the sacramental is being misused. We have crucifixes and scapulars for wearing. Rosaries are for counting.

Goodbye, Kotaku...We're Breaking Up

My Internet use seems largely determined by my basil ganglia. [That's the "reptile" part of the brain, which, as far as I understand it, leads people towards repetitive tasks.Thank you, NPR's Radio Lab.] I pretty much haunt the same five or six sites...over and over and over again during my daily breaks. So it's quite significant of me to declare Kotaku, the gamer's guide, off my check-in list.

Why am I leaving Kotaku behind? Well, Kotaku is part of the Gawker site network. Gawker, as most of you are aware, tends to lean very left of center. I'm used to getting "sucker punched" on media sites, so the occasional Kotaku post insulting my values, beliefs, and lifestyle could be shrugged off in the name of getting hot, new tech and gaming news.

But then Gawker had to give the green light to an article in defense of pedophiles.

It wasn't an ironic satire, mind you. It was offering pedophiles an encouraging pat on the back--"It's okay. You're just misunderstood."

Now, there were apparently some points in the article that I could concede. Apparently, pedophiles don't last very long in prisons, and the article was suggesting that maybe the state needs to rethink tossing pedophiles in with other kinds of criminals--criminals who recognize pedophiles as even worse than them and decide to mete out their own forms of punishment.

In the name of justice, if a pedophile is not sentenced to murder, then he no more deserves to be murdered in prison than anyone else.

From the Gawker writer's viewpoint, however, ensuring the safety of the pedophile is a manner of being "progressive"--of learning to "accept" pedophiles and their potentially inherently broken, malevolent, and diabolic appetites. The article does wallow at the muckish bottom of the slippery slope of gay advocacy that liberals said we'd never really hit.

I realize this was not an article posted on Kotaku proper; however, my assumption is that Gawker is getting the revenue from Kotaku advertising.

Mine will be one less unique hit count they get every day.

(h/t Stable Hand at The Jawa Report)

Cardinal Dolan at the DNC

His closing Benediction.

Democrats' response on twitter.

The conservative bloggers I've seen so far have been high-fiving Cardinal Dolan for proclaiming a benediction for the unborn...right...in front...of...the...entire...Democrat...delegation.

And that is why Jesus had dinner with whores and tax-collectors.

Do We Link Pres. Obama with Rising Suicide Rate?

I was stumbling through online government statistical data to see what kinds of numbers would be available to my students, when I came across the National Institute of Mental Health's government Web site. Sneaking around there, I found a page on indicating that suicide was the 10th leading cause of death...in 2007. That was five years ago. I wondered if maybe numbers had gone down or something, but the NIMH page is not the most navigable or user friendly.

So I tossed "suicide rate" into Google.

I know, hardly scholarly of me.

Anyway, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention makes numbers a little easier to read, providing a nice clear chart up to...2009. Still over two years old. I guess people have to tally these numbers, yet? Their graph is a little deceptive, however, since the difference between the highest bar and the lowest bar is about 15%...yet the highest bar looks like it is about 250% taller.

Anyway, according to their numbers, suicide rates have been more or less on the rise since 2000. Indeed, in the last 20 years, suicide rates seem to have been the lowest in 1999 and 2000. They jump up by what looks like about 5% from 2000 to 2001, and then hover around the same spot, going slightly up and down until 2007...then up again...then up again...

It's hard not to think of everything in terms of presidents nowadays, so I couldn't help but notice that suicide rates had a small jump under W. but then largely stabilized...until 2007, which I guess is when economical catastrophe became a thing we were all talking about. (Surely, it wasn't a new campaign cycle and the prospect of either McCain or a Democrat in the White House that sparked self-harm, ws it?)

Suicide rates rise again the year Pres. Obama was elected, and then rise again for the first year of his presidency.

I don't know what the last three years have been.

In 2010, the Washington Independent ran an article describing runaway suicide rates as a symptom of unemployment due to the economy.

The Website Business Insider (whoever they are) ran an article in 2011 listing the 15 American cities with the highest suicide rates. The site included unemployment statistics for almost every city.

So if we grant that increased unemployment leads to increased suicide, and if we grant that Pres. Obama's policies have increased unemployment, does this mean that Pres. Obama's policies increase suicides?