Blogging Around: The "Quick Links for a Long Weekend" Edition

Some snippets to pique your interest. Go read it all at the links in the subheads.

From the Teeth of the Lion to the Dandelion
Love language? This one's for you.

Like many words in our language, many of the names of flowers hold clues about their history and relationship to us. The daisy, for example, known for its small yellow blossoms, is quite common throughout the world. Daisies are unique in that they close their golden petals during the night and keep them shut, as if in sleep, until the morning. This peculiar characteristic earned this little flower the name 'day's eye' from speakers of Old English. Eventually, that name was compounded into the word daisy.

The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic
How sharper than a serpent's tooth to have an ideological scientific dissenter among one's own ranks.

... In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."

Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.) ...

Cutaways
What "everyone knows" seems to be toppling like dominoes among these recent scientific studies. First, I heard about the one proving differences between boys and girls (duh) and now ...

... In what can only be called a shocking discovery, a 2003 study by the NICHD (a sub-branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) found that “religion reduces the likelihood of adolescents engaging in early sex by shaping their attitudes and beliefs about sexual activity.” ...

Hagiography and the Benefit of Doubt
I am sorry to say that until reading this, it never occurred to me to give the benefit of a doubt to those saints' stories which have elicited a raised eyebrow. I'm a child of my age and am now ashamed of it on this subject after reading this ...

I will always be a defender of the Golden Legend and the traditional hagiographies - and more than a defender of them, a believer in them. That is to say, I believe that they are holy, deserving of preservation, and usually true. For this, I have been called many things - stupid, romantic, reactionary. I have, in the past, justified myself by arguing that hagiography ought to be read in the same spirit that Holy Scripture is read - with literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical significance. I have mostly abandoned this argument - not because I think it false, but because I think it unnecessary.

Believing in the veracity of the Golden Legend does not require a suspension of disbelief, not a Sigerist double standard of truth (one truth for reason, one truth for faith), nor even a healthy hermeneutic. All that is required is the benefit of doubt. That is to say, most of the stories recounted by the traditional hagiographies give us no reason, in themselves, to disbelieve them.

God and Science
One more time, that tired argument that God and science don't mix, especially among those who are believers. The WSJ piece left me sorry that the Catholics the scientist turned to were so tongue-tied on behalf of their faith. Luckily Deeps of Time is here...

That’s not how the Catholic scientist sees the universe, however. A Catholic accepts, as Krauss does, a universe that is rational and orderly, but that does not exclude the extraordinary miracle. As G. K. Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, “We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception.” Left to itself, the universe does operate according to its own laws, and it is those laws the Catholic scientist seeks to uncover; but God can intervene from time to time if He so wills.