Welcome Miners Bearing Gifts

And then, after a brief wait, the second miner emerges from the rescue capsule with great joy; he embraces his wife and then opens a bag to retrieve…gifts.

For others.

In the midst of all of this drama, all of the lights and excitement and concern, and at a moment when a man could reasonably be excused for thinking only of himself, Mario Sepulveda Espinace thought about others, and he brought them gifts.

Rocks? Rocks containing gold? It doesn’t matter. Mario Sepulveda Espinace crested the top of a hole from which he thought he might never escape, and his first instinct was to give. That’s a thing worth writing about, and thinking about and praying about. I wish I had a picture of that moment! How huge and resilient is the human spirit?

The Anchoress has a wonderful piece about the rescue of the Chilean miners.

I will now admit that one of the problems with never watching the news and only tangentially glancing at current news on the front page is ... ahem ... I didn't know those poor Chilean miners were finally being saved. I did know about their plight. At least I knew that ... but it took The Anchoress to alert me to their rescue. Thanks be to God and all those hard workin' folks who never gave up.

Now go read The Anchoress's post.

It's All Downhill from Here

A little midweek humor lifted from Kuriositas, (Image Credit Flickr User worldlflandsinfo).

Because Sometimes It Takes Planning

Reviewing "Roots of the Faith": Tracing Our Family Tree

This review was first published in Pittsburgh Catholic.

One thing Catholics seem to be able to count on these days is criticism that our faith is a watered-down version of that practiced by early Christians. Protestants question the need for confession, the priesthood, and praying to the saints. Religious and secular alike protest Church teachings on abortion, marriage, and celibacy. We ourselves get caught up in questions about the authenticity of the Mass or the liturgy, as well as any or all of the above issues.

In "Roots of the Faith," Mike Aquilina comes forward with answers to these questions and more. He shows concrete evidence that our faith has vital roots in the 1st century Church. The long-ago seeds of current teachings and Traditions are traced into their current place in the modern Church. What makes this book especially useful is that Aquilina addresses eleven issues that are commonly encountered today, among them hot-button topics like abortion, celibacy, and the priesthood.

Aquilina has long been known for his books about the early Church Fathers*. This is his most relevant book to everyday faith. It is an invaluable source for anyone who wants assurance that, "Nothing essential has been added, and nothing essential has been lost." Not content to merely answer questions that we may encounter daily, he ranges much further to make sure there is adequate context to fully understand each topic. The end result often is surprising new information, such as this tidbit about the Bible.

From the beginning Christians held certain documents as authoritative. Yet even these did not circulate as a book. Local churches possessed whatever document they had the cash and the opportunity to pull together. A bishop might own one or two of the Gospels and some of the letter of St. Paul. Only the most fortunate churches could possess most of the books we now know as the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Not only does a passage like this help to get the historic context of the development of the Bible, but it encourages us to travel in imagination to a time when the only Mass readings might be from Mark and 1st Corinthians, because those were the only books their church could afford. Thus the similarities and differences between that ancient time and our own are deftly revealed. More importantly, Aquilina makes sure the reader understands all the implications of the ancient pagan beliefs at the beginning of the Church and the impact they had on Christians. Quite often, this provides valuable background for any conversations readers may have on current issues, such as we see with the excerpt below about abortion.

Pagan philosophers would have been inclined to agree with today's abortion protesters: Abortion is baby-killing. The difference is that that pagan philosophers didn't see anything wrong with killing babies. Infanticide was a common and well-accepted practice in the pagan world. Romans didn't always kill their babies directly; more often they "exposed" them, meaning that they threw them out on the trash heap to die of starvation and exposure. Girl babies, of course, were especially disposable. Many a Christian woman grew from one of those exposed babies whom some passing Christian discovered and rescued.

Most impressive of all is when Aquilina clarifies points about the Church Fathers' writings which are typically used by detractors as proof against current Church teachings. For example, St. John Chrysostom's writings about marriage allow one to view him as either stereotypically prudish or surprisingly modern. Aquilina plainly takes us through Chrysostom's personal growth demonstrating how experience as a parish priest brought a more realistic view of marriage that was unique for the time. This can be difficult to do but Aquilina does it with ease.

The book is written in a conversational tone that makes for easy reading. Readers will particularly appreciate that Church Fathers' writings are in a modern translation and simple to understand. It is hard to imagine a better book to help understand and defend the teachings of the Catholic Church. Hopefully Mike Aquilina will be moved to write likewise on other contentious questions which are raised for modern Catholics. We could use the help.

Highly recommended.

*The Church Fathers were holy Christian theologians whose teachings and doctrine set precedents for the Church. They wrote during the first seven centuries.

Well Said

From my quote journal.

An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician, 1887-1920

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

A timeless tale of good and evil is the subject of my favorite Robert Louis Stevenson book. Naturally I was delighted to have a chance to discuss it with Jesse and Wayne for SFFaudio's latest readalong discussion. Full of Octobery goodness as well as musings about man's nature and literature. Don't miss it!

Reviewing "God Is Not One": Sloppy Writing and Muddled Logic

Should I Read It? 

 No.

Short Review

Sloppy writing and muddled logic are no match for a good fact-checker at your side, kid.

The Whole Story

I was so pleased to be offered a review copy of God is Not One from The Patheos Religion and Faith Book Club. (See more about them and the PBS show related to this book at the end of the review.) This is just the sort of book that intrigues me and, moreover, looks as if it helps us all understand each other better.

I completely agree with Stephen Prothero's premise that the world's major religions are not the same and that worshipers' different cultures provide a unique lens through which to seek God. In fact, this was one of the main concepts I took away from reading Huston Smith's The World's Religions some time ago. This is also the message that I got from the Catholic Catechism1 (839-848) that we cannot know how God is reaching others in their various circumstances (despite the Church's obvious insistence on the fact that Catholicism has the clearest view of God). Therefore, non-Catholics can find God in ways we cannot imagine.

I also share Prothero's opinion that there is a trend to claim that all religions are "one big happy family." So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I found Prothero's book did not, in fact, make it easy to reach those self-same conclusions, despite his stated purpose in the subhead: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter.

In the Beginning...
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. The subtitle itself began by talking about "rival religions" which to my mind didn't make sense at all, from the point of view of understanding different religions. My understanding of the word "rival" is largely borne out by the Merriam-Webster definition: a) of two or more striving to reach or obtain something that only one can possess (b) one striving for competitive advantage. One could have rival governments. Rival companies, even. But rival religions? Not really.

One could understand it if using a third definition of rival of "equal or peer" which is not what springs to mind. It also is not what Prothero promotes in the book.  Do these religions "run the world?" Again, this sounds as if we are talking about the Fortune 500, not ways to find and worship God.

Prothero's lack of focus, forced conclusions, and unscholarly generalizations continue the trend he sets in the subhead. Surprisingly, he does manage to have a relatively accurate overview of the different faiths while slanting and misstating many details. This in itself is an accomplishment of sorts which one does not see often. I suspect this is from taking a shallow look at each faith while picking and choosing sources out of context. At least, that is what I found in the areas that I knew the most about, as we shall see.

Facts Are Meaningless. You Could Use Facts to Prove Anything That's Even Remotely True!2
Prothero does not seem sure himself what he is trying to prove. Sometimes he mixes governments with religions, thus mixing apples and oranges. When he's tossing that fruit salad, he also doesn't worry too much about accuracy. Let us just examine this sample.

But today Christianity and Islam are the world's greatest religions. Together they account for roughly half of the world's population, and for more than half of the world's suicide bombers and drone attacks.

 I am really unaware of Christian suicide bombers or drone attacks, as were any of the sources I checked. I know of Muslim suicide bombers. I know of government run drone attacks. My copy of the book is marked with many examples of blatant inaccuracies and muddled comparisons simply in the few areas that I know well (Catholicism and overall Christianity). Prothero does not provide any documentation for this claim. He just makes it and sails on to point out that Muslims and Christians have lived in peace in the past, such as in medieval Spain. Why, oh why, does my mind insist on reminding me that such peace was only after Muslim conquest and under Muslim rule? Fact checking is a real problem for Prothero's beautiful examples much of the time.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do.
This leads us to Prothero's second besetting sin. Despite his stated desire to show us why religions are different and have the right to be so, he cannot help trying to make them equal, especially when it comes to comparing Christianity with any other religion's bad qualities. Setting aside the above example, which certainly illustrates that tendency, let us examine this statement.

Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christanity's own traditions of holy war and "texts of terror." ... It is not just the Old Testament that is flesh devouring and drunk on blood, however. "I came not to send peace but a sword," Jesus says (Matthew 10:34).

Christians are doing a disbelieving double-take right now as they know Jesus was not talking about a literal sword. He was giving a warning about how being a believer would cause dissension and separation from those they hold dear, as well as persecution for believers. To call  that statement "flesh devouring and drunk on blood" is to show how little regard the author has for accuracy and how desperately he grasps at straws to build his comparisons at times.

You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.3
The previous example points us to Prothero's third major problem. He continually takes information and quotations out of context, playing Twister to use them in making his points. In the introduction, I was jolted when he quoted Huston Smith and then went on to cast him as teaching that every religion was the same.

It is possible to climb life's mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge. At base, in the foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure, the religions are distinct. Differences in culture, history, geography and collective temperament all make for diverse starting points. ... But beyond these differences, the same goal beckons.

Even if one has not read Smith's book, the quote itself makes it obvious that what he is saying is that all believers seek Truth, however diverse their methods or beliefs. I only wish that I had a deeper knowledge of other major religious figures who Prothero dragged into his argument, such as Gandhi, Swami Sivananda, and the Dalai Lama. Once Prothero has been proven so unreliable with known sources, it is difficult to accept his word for similar snippets of text.

You're More Like a Game Show Host.4
Prothero's breezy style causes occasional faux pas which made me wince when reading such statements as:

Hinduism is an over-the-top religion of big ideas, bright colors, soulful mantras, spicy foods, complex rituals, and wild stories. One of the wildest of these stories concerns how Ganesha got his head.

It's always so amusing hearing wacky stories about people's divinities, isn't it? What zany characters they worship!

Yes, it did seem a bit disrespectful to say the least. I wish I could tell you that was the only example.

More than that though, it leads into a frustration of  mine with the text. The descriptions of the different religions vary widely as to what to base a comparison of "different" from. Prothero criticizes Huston Smith for showing the ideal of each faith. However, those ideals are quite helpful in knowing where adherents vary within denominations. Certainly those ideals are helpful in comparing the different religions to each other. Prothero much prefers to dwell on differences, often discussing one specific point in-depth, a cultural confusion, or argument flash-points before ever getting down to describing what people actually believe. I often would skip ahead to get the overall context or resort to Wikipedia for a concise description before diving back into the dizzying array of information poured out, for example, about Ganesha's head, Hindus around the world (past and present), and the many points of disagreement among Hindus about whether their religion is even a religion.

In the End
As I mentioned, Stephen Prothero does have the big overall picture generally correct. I really enjoyed learning about Yoruba, which I had never heard of before, and also his overview of atheism. It is too bad that his concept is conveyed via a flawed, superficial approach. It would be better for those  interested in how religions are different to read The World's Religions by Huston Smith or World Religions by John Bowker instead. Those books will do much more to lead to an informed view than God is Not One.


For More Resources, Reviews, and Conversation About This Book
The Patheos Book Club has more reviews about God is Not One and interviews with author Stephen Prothero. They declined sharing this review there because the publisher pays to have books included in the book club and Patheos felt this was too negative. I took the liberty of sharing it here anyway.

The American Experience on PBS is running God In America this week which is related to this book. It looks like a fascinating view of the role of religious belief in our country. Check out both sites.

1: (848) Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men.

2: The Simpsons

3. Princess Bride

4: Ghostbusters

Worth a Thousand Words

Ornamental latin alphabet from the 16th century, missing the letters J, O, W, X and Z.
From Wikimedia Commons where it was a Picture of the Day.

Letter illustrations:
* A: Head of a bird and two snakes
* B: King and devil
* C: Bird riding a wild boar
* D: Plant
* E: Dragon
* F: Bird and flower
* G: Dog
* H: Walking person
* I: Winged dog and lizard
* K: Grotesque masks
* L: Piper wearing a hat in the shape of a bird
* M: Lion and thistle
* N: Fish in king's garb
* P: Pelican
* Q: Bird or dragon
* R: Masks and faces
* S: Lizard in king's garb
* T: Two griffins
* V: Jester
* U: Sun
* Y: Small animal and plants

John Lennon's 70th Birthday Would Have Been Today

That alone is fairly mind-boggling.

For further boggling, of a good kind, check out Google's tribute on their main page.

(Techie note: that's not html5, it is Flash ...  sez Tom.)

Reviewing Schultze Gets the Blues

One of the pleasures of having joined the Good News Film Reviews group blog is that Scott is going through and occasionally posting one of my old reviews. It is interesting to see my reactions when these hit me unexpectedly. My review of Schultze Gets the Blues at Good News boasts a level of snarkiness that would make Scott proud ... and it made me laugh when reading it. A simple pleasure but then (I'll say it for you) I'm fairly simple.

The one line summary? "And to think that I thought The Station Agent was slow."


If you want more, click through and read the rest.

Nifty: A Clock That Knits

No wonder this designer won an award. See the finished scarf and more about the clock at core77.

Thanks to Bridget for sending this!

It's All Downhill from Here

A little midweek humor. This is actually a brilliant combination of humor and observation (as most of the best humor is, I suppose). I love maps like this. Click through and see it large at xkcd, the creator of this geographic inventiveness.

Yes, I know it is running into the sidebar ... I wanted it as large as possible.

Deceptive Nature Documentaries

Chris Palmer is stirring things up in the wildlife documentary business. I was relieved to see that he says Planet Earth is legit and gets real footage without cheating.

"If you look back to the history of wildlife films, going all the way to the beginning of the last century, when people started to make them, there's always been manipulation," says Palmer. "The question is just the degree of it." In fact, according to Palmer, things have actually gotten better in some ways. "In those days, there was tremendous cruelty. Animals would be goaded to attack, and then [filmed]. They would put a python and a cougar in a small enclosure to fight.

"We wouldn't do that these days," he continues. "But we do other things now. We use animals that we pretend are free-roaming, but that are actually rented from game farms. Or we have Shark Week -- a program that demonizes sharks and makes them out to be dangerous and menacing man-eaters, at a time when we're trying to preserve them."

Read the whole story here. Thanks to Hannah for passing it along.

What Unitarians Know and Sam Harris Doesn't

I meant to post this earlier as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Gilead was one of my favorite books last year, thoughtfully and gently punctures Sam Harris's pretensions in her review of his new book, The Moral Landscape. Here is a bit to entice you and then do go read it all.

Sam Harris begins his new book with a celebration of the ideal of cooperation, a value that has been in eclipse among us, and whose absence we feel in every failed attempt to dislodge the country from all the tight places in which we find ourselves these days. The cult of competition has elbowed its way into the place in our national life once reserved for promoting the general welfare, and the general welfare has suffered in consequence. Mr. Harris's assertion of this value without so much as a nod to the claims of our brutish Pleistocene ancestry is tonic. He says: "As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution."

What specific forms is cooperation to take? Mr. Harris is a little vague on this point. He strongly favors "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures." He imagines potential human circumstances as landscapes of peaks and valleys, with different models of moral success on each of the peaks and of moral failure in each of the valleys. Probably because he deplores moral relativism, he offers no particulars about what these variants might look like. Many of his aspirations are highly respectable but they are neither bold nor new, at least from the point of view of certain religious traditions. If he were to articulate a positive morality of his own, he might well arrive at its heights to find them occupied by the whole tribe of Unitarians, busily cooperating on schemes to enhance the world's well being, as they have been doing for generations.

If You Liked the Archangel Images, You Don't Want to Miss This Art Sale

The gorgeous archangel art at Gryphon Rampant was much commented upon when I used it for the Feast of the Archangels. But there is much more to see in the gallery. Here's one sample of this gorgeous art.

Now I see that they're having a 25% off art print sale .... early Christmas shopping anyone? Go look around. There are some real treasures there.

All the E-Mail That's Fit to Blog: The "Interesting Sites" Edition

Planet Catholic

Caitlin tells us:

I'm creating an aggregator site, Planet Catholic, for all of the Catholic blogs out there.  Planet Catholic pulls text from the RSS of Catholic blogs and publishes an excerpt from each blog post (the first 250 characters) and then provides a link to the rest of the post. 

The Catholic Guide

Planet Catholic is not Caitlin's only interesting Catholic site:

Also, I've been running a wiki called The Catholic Guide.  The intent is to create an online information database all about the Roman Catholic faith that is built by volunteers.  It has been seeded by articles from the 1913 public domain Catholic Encyclopedia.  We have a few volunteers but the site really needs more exposure to attract volunteers.

Patheos Book Club
This had vaguely caught my eye at one time but The Anchoress sharpens my focus:

Patheos is starting a book club, where we feature Harper One books (and others) and this one, although it's not new, is going to be looked at b/c apparently there will be a PBS series tied in with it, starting October 11.

Evidently next they will be reading God is Not One, which I'll be reading and reviewing ... as soon as my copy gets here. Looking through the various reviews around the interwebs it struck me as a similar take to Huston Smith's Illustrated Religions of the World, which was eye opening when I read it many years ago. I'm curious to see how this compares.

Aliens in This World Reviews Secretariat: "Ahead of the Pack"

You don't have to just take my word for it that Secretariat is a really good movie. Aliens in This World, where you can count on a thoroughly realistic point of view has a review with which I agree completely. Yes. You don't see that every day, do you? I'll say it again. Completely.

Here's a bit and then go read it all at Aliens in This World.

I really enjoyed this movie, and it was exactly what I needed. It had heart, humor, drama, factual interest, and it even let me travel back in time to the Seventies for a bit (without too much of the bad stuff). Family was very important, and they played with that theme in various interesting ways. There was a surprisingly topical theme of maintaining American unity despite deep political disagreements (though it wasn’t shoved down anybody’s throat either way). It was maybe not a great movie for all time, but it was solidly enjoyable and interesting. It also came out and said some good things about horse thinking, which a lot of horse movies are too sappy to remember.

Love is Spelled: T I M E

What good is home-schooling our children in the Catholic faith, if we can't miss one day of pre-planned lessons to help babysit some older siblings of an extremely sick child?

What good is attending a Pro-Life Committee meeting if on the exact same night a family in our parish whose child struggles with a life-threatening disability has no one to say a rosary over their sick baby's crib in the NICU?

There's a sickness of "busyness" among Catholics that is extremely dangerous because we crowd out God with our previously scheduled God appointments.

I have been following with great interest the story of newborn Tess and her parents, as told by her mother at Abigail's Alcove. Tess endured one ailment after another, culminating in an 18" length of IV line having to be removed from her heart. (Yes, it is an "and then what next" sort of story that these poor people have gone through.)

It all ended well. But in enduring the trials, something became very clear. I do not think this is reserved to Catholics. I think that "extreme busy-ness" is an American disease. We'd like to think that we're better than that. But obviously this is not the case.

Do go read the whole story at Abigail's Alcove. It takes a special sort of love to set aside plans and step up to help. We must pray that we have that love and, even when we don't feel it, we must do it anyway.

Jesus didn't give lip service. He gave his whole self. We must go forth and do likewise. It is the only way to be whole Catholics.

UPDATE
I meant to mention also that today is St. Therese of Lisieux's feast day. (Read more at this very good post at The Anchoress's.) This saint of little things would appreciate the problems we must overcome in ordering our time properly so that we put others first. St. Therese pray for us.

Aquinas and More's Clearance Sale Ends at Midnight

Great prices on Catholic books and gifts. Be there or be square.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Expected Versus Surprise

"Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist, 'Give me the chance to do my very best.'"

Babette quotes Achille Papin, Babette's Feast

Sometimes the artist does their very best and the marketers manage to mess it up or never give it a chance. We know what this results in:

• Hollywood sequel after sequel.
• Prepackaged standard radio playlists.
• Derivative tv shows.
• Boring ads that never get a first glance, much less a second one. 

Of course, none of this lack of creativity is exactly new. That's why "you can't judge a book by its cover" is an old, old saying. It's still as true today as it was back in the day some frustrated author or reader came up with it.

Why?

Here's a key reason. More importantly, here's a solution.

Surprise! (or why unexpected creative works)

“Expected.” Attach the word to a creative campaign and you might as well roll up the sidewalk and go home. You’ll never get the results you’d like. When you tell your story the same way it’s been told a thousand times before, why would your audience take the time to listen? You haven’t given them any reason to.

But surprise them and they can’t help but pay attention. The Old Spice “Look at your Man” campaign is a recent example. Not only is the style and stream-of-consciousness of the script original, but it engages by stepping out of the stream here and there.

When creative concepts venture into the realm of the unexpected it can have a surprising effect on the marketer as well — fear. This is the moment when deep breaths are required. It’s important to combat marketing stage fright with logical reasoning. One has to wonder about the initial client reaction when the agency presented the Old Spice campaign.

After all, stepping out on a limb allows for the possibility that branch will break off and plummet into the void. But unexpectedness attracts eyeballs to your brand. Yes, this may be as terrifying as it is mesmerizing, but keep in mind that if your message is spot on – as it is in the Old Spice ads — those eyeballs will stop looking and start buying.

OnMessage blog

Expected.

Or, as Rose said to me yesterday upon hearing the resolution to a recent creative disagreement with this very subject at its center, "Lame."

Yep. Safe. But "lame."

Surprise doesn't have to be wacky or outrageous. It just has to show us something in a way we hadn't considered before. That's called ... right ... creativity.

OnMessage is a client of ours and when Tom saw this blog post he sent it my way. Spot on.

It's All Downhill from Here

Having just missed the middle of the week, beginning that slide to the weekend (yay!), here's a little Catholic (very Catholic) humor from The Crescat.