Yes, here it is. The inevitable Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad post. You knew it was coming, it comes to every blog sooner or later. Some love it, some hate it and very few of those have even seen it. It's just the idea of the thing which gets people going.
Jenkins' article is full of wonderful mockery of the "Dwindling Organizations of Ladies in Lockstep" and "The National Organization of Women Who Only Think Like Us". Sarcastic titles aside, she points out simply and without fanfare that these women have shown themselves to be anything but pro-choice. As she notes they, "reveal something important about themselves: They aren't actually 'pro-choice' so much as they are pro-abortion."
Will the National Organization of Gals (NAGs) succeed in getting CBS to pull the ad? At this time, it looks like the ad will air as expected. But, never fear! If it does, Gloria Allred is one the case . . .
Jenkins' article is online at the Washington Post website to subscribers only.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Oh, so THAT'S how it works
When we have Canadia-style healthcare here, where will Canada's politicians go for their heart surgery?
What have we wrought?
The traditional number of parents is two, right? Turns out that *is* merely tradition. Heather McDonald, at NRO has an excellent piece on Reengineering the Family . I highly recommend you go over there and read the entire piece. Here are a few snippets:
"To the extent that a gay couple wants to retain the traditional number of parents in the home, it must exclude one biological parent from inclusion in the family unit."
"Infertile heterosexual couples unwilling to accept a biological limit in their lives spurred the ever-increasing array of gamete- and womb-swapping technologies that now includes sperm banks and complicated surrogacy arrangements."
And, the two money quotes:
"When a heterosexual couple or single woman (and occasional single man) makes use of someone else's sex organs, biology is severed from parental responsibility no less than when a homosexual couple engages in that process."
"The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children . . .The negative consequences of this family breakdown for children include higher rates of school failure and lack of socialization. Moreover, in a culture where men are not expected to raise their children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility and self-discipline."
Ms. MacDonald also refers to NYT writer, Adam Cohen's recent consideration of the possibility that these technologies will results in ever-multiplying genetic contributions resulting in what he terms, "fractional parents". It is important to note that Ms. McDonald does not appear to be a Christian.
What is astonishing is that the world is now noticing these connections while those in the church still try to deny them. In 1930 the Lambeth Conference became the first Christian ecclesial body to affirm the use of birth control as a good. Prior to this, we were all Catholics - no Christian denomination or body had affirmed the use of birth control as *anything* other than sinful.
In less than 100 years they have all caved and Rome stands alone on this, as a body. There are a few pastors who care enough for their flocks to preach and teach consistently on this, but not many. In fact, the last time I approached a pastor (who subsequently became president of an evangelical seminary) on this topic, his answer was to avoid an answer.
"To the extent that a gay couple wants to retain the traditional number of parents in the home, it must exclude one biological parent from inclusion in the family unit."
"Infertile heterosexual couples unwilling to accept a biological limit in their lives spurred the ever-increasing array of gamete- and womb-swapping technologies that now includes sperm banks and complicated surrogacy arrangements."
And, the two money quotes:
"When a heterosexual couple or single woman (and occasional single man) makes use of someone else's sex organs, biology is severed from parental responsibility no less than when a homosexual couple engages in that process."
"The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children . . .The negative consequences of this family breakdown for children include higher rates of school failure and lack of socialization. Moreover, in a culture where men are not expected to raise their children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility and self-discipline."
Ms. MacDonald also refers to NYT writer, Adam Cohen's recent consideration of the possibility that these technologies will results in ever-multiplying genetic contributions resulting in what he terms, "fractional parents". It is important to note that Ms. McDonald does not appear to be a Christian.
What is astonishing is that the world is now noticing these connections while those in the church still try to deny them. In 1930 the Lambeth Conference became the first Christian ecclesial body to affirm the use of birth control as a good. Prior to this, we were all Catholics - no Christian denomination or body had affirmed the use of birth control as *anything* other than sinful.
In less than 100 years they have all caved and Rome stands alone on this, as a body. There are a few pastors who care enough for their flocks to preach and teach consistently on this, but not many. In fact, the last time I approached a pastor (who subsequently became president of an evangelical seminary) on this topic, his answer was to avoid an answer.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Art of the ordinary
Over at What's Wrong With The World , there is a rousing discussion going on regarding the rule of women. Some of the usual suspects have appeared, including a feminist I have seen posting on MereComments in the past. After she pulls a tired old (dare I say it?) canard out of her back pocket, attempting to dismiss a woman who is rather more well educated and mannerly than she by telling this other woman to get herself back to the kitchen, my friend, Kevin J. Jones , had this to say:
Educated minds produce more than a series of cliches. Please stop bashing the kitchen. Cooking is perhaps the greatest art of the ordinary. Anti-kitchen feminism has impoverished our cuisine and our family table traditions. It is an adjunct of fast food colonialism, to borrow academic phraseology.
That is so right, it's simply brilliant. It also speaks to one of the abiding joys of my life in the last couple of years. Since I left the angry religious feminist-me behind, it's been an amazing and (mostly) joy-filled journey. A time of discovering simple pleasures and real delight in the every day. I am back to baking my own bread, I've finally discovered a successful red cabbage recipe, Baklava is back on the menu on occasion and I may even experiment with my once-legendary Beef Stroganoff recipe to see if I can substitute Greek Yogurt for the sour cream . . . but perhaps not. Why mess with a good thing?
I take Kevin to be using "art" in two senses. The first is the sense in which art refers to a field of human endeavour (painting, sculpting, pastry making, etc.). In this sense cooking is an art of the homemaker. The second sense encompasses the skills, techniques and methods required to ply the craft of cooking.
The homemaker, kitchen wife or everyday cook can be an artist of the ordinary if she learns the techniques and applies herself to the use of these techniques with loving care and a little flair of her own. Whether it be decorating, sewing or any of the other homely (meant in the old fashioned sense) arts, she is an artist with her own palette. A still life is a still life is a still life -- or it can be if it is painted by numbers from a kit. But if the painter is Picasso or the Dutch master of the still life, Willem Kalf . . . it isn't simply a still life, it is a work of art. A turkey is a turkey is a turkey if you simply cook by the book. However, if you discover your own secret to making the holiday turkey all your own, people will beg you for your recipe.
But Kevin is right to speak of "the art of the ordinary" in another way, specifically related to food and the family table. Instead of looking forward to mom's meatloaf (and when was the last time you had a sandwich made of meat loaf the next day for lunch?) or that special way she does potatoes for the Sunday roast, we are cruising through the fast food drive up window, wondering whether to try the "next new thing" or simply get our regular serving of salt, fat, and food-like chemicals. We eat in our cars, mostly alone, and we forget after the first bite what we are doing.
We lose, in this process, fleshly connections. And, it seems, these connections are important. The French, despite what food police tell us is a horribly unhealthy diet, don't seem to be suffering for their wine and cheese. Could this possibly be because the French meal consists of small portions, eaten slowly, around a table filled with family and friends? The "Slow Food" movement, which started in Italy, is spreading across America now because people are longing for those connections -- and the enjoyment of food that itself is something so much less (and, consequently, so very much more) than the industrially-produced, semi-edible substances which fill the shelves of the center of the grocery store. It reminds me of television chef, Lidia Bastianich, who frequently welcomes her mother, her daughter, or another family member to the set to assist in the day's cooking. It also reminds me of the line with which she closes every show, something we could profit from if we aim for this more often than we aim for a drive through:
Tuti a tavola a mangiare! (translation: Everyone to the table to eat!)
P.S. The Flavor Bible is my newest tool.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
When I get a little money . . .
"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” So said Desiderius Erasmus, Luther's disputation partner in the free will controversy. I wonder if Erasmus considered *not* buying so many books . . . was his will free in that regard?
For my own part, I think I will side with Luther. Especially when it comes to the buying of many books. Just when I thought we might read nothing more from the pen of Baroness James of Holland Park, here comes the one volume she could have written which I am simply compelled to purchase. Even in hardbound. Even at full retail price.
Talking About Detective Fiction
In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James—one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today—gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.
P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie (“arch-breaker of rules”), Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they’ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky’s sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction—and of the detective hero—in recent years.
There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.
For my own part, I think I will side with Luther. Especially when it comes to the buying of many books. Just when I thought we might read nothing more from the pen of Baroness James of Holland Park, here comes the one volume she could have written which I am simply compelled to purchase. Even in hardbound. Even at full retail price.
Talking About Detective Fiction
In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James—one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today—gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.
P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie (“arch-breaker of rules”), Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they’ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky’s sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction—and of the detective hero—in recent years.
There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.
Course correction
Well, he's not really a saint (officially canonized one, that is), and I do wonder what his reaction would be to a canonization movement. However, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was the most trenchant observer, the most faithfully insightful social commenter in the early 20th century. If Dietrich von Hildebrand is said to be a modern doctor of the church, Chesterton is his "common-man" counterpart. Never failing to get to the heart of the matter in a deceptively simple way, he surprises by always being right just when you begin to think he might be just a little bit off plumb.
Here, courtesy of the American Catholic, is a bit of Chestertonian food for thought in regard to our culture:
The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr: he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age . . . It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it.
That's the problem with conversion, it looks so different. To correct our course, what is sometimes required is an over-correction. I am sure I am not the first one to wonder if we aren't a little too careful about some things, a little too (gasp) legalistic. That may well be, at times, precisely what is required.
One of the things that makes me grin is thinking about who may be sharing a mug of beer with whom up in Heaven right now. Have you ever wondered what an evening with Chesterton and St. Paul would be like? Here's Paul's answer to the problem of course corrections, antidotes and poisons:
Causing a brother (or a sister) to stumble is no small matter. Whether it be wearing a two-piece swimming suit in mixed company at the beach or having a glass of wine with dinner, we must consider whether we are causing a weak brother among us to stumble - or giving a legalist cause to tsk, tsk to his heart's content.
On the other hand, what about the repentant sinner, formerly used to such theological diversions as preacherettes and equal-partnership marriage? Well now, there is where we might see what looks like an over-correction. When the repentant sinner comes home to Christ's church, everything is up for grabs. Jeans in church? May it never be! Skirts and dresses, if you please. Long hair and headcoverings in worship, constant self-reminders about a wife's submission and delighting in things formerly despised are on the daily menu.
It is the repentant among us who are often the most sensitive to appearances, the ones who may be offended by seeing a brother dine in an idol's temple. Not because all the old is cast off and the logs are removed from eyes, but because the old sins leave their marks, their sore spots and sensitivities. The pull of the old, familiar wretchedness can catch at one's heart at the most unexpected moments. Especially when one's gait is unsteady in these new, orthodox shoes.
Perhaps also, because of this, it is the repentant who appear to be the most dangerous poison of all.
Here, courtesy of the American Catholic, is a bit of Chestertonian food for thought in regard to our culture:
The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr: he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age . . . It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it.
That's the problem with conversion, it looks so different. To correct our course, what is sometimes required is an over-correction. I am sure I am not the first one to wonder if we aren't a little too careful about some things, a little too (gasp) legalistic. That may well be, at times, precisely what is required.
One of the things that makes me grin is thinking about who may be sharing a mug of beer with whom up in Heaven right now. Have you ever wondered what an evening with Chesterton and St. Paul would be like? Here's Paul's answer to the problem of course corrections, antidotes and poisons:
4Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one.
5For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords,
6yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.
7However not all men have this knowledge; but some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled.
8But food will not commend us to God; we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat.
9But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.
10For if someone sees you, who have knowledge, dining in an idol's temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols?
11For through your knowledge he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake Christ died.
12And so, by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.
13Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.
-- I Corinthians 8:4-13
Causing a brother (or a sister) to stumble is no small matter. Whether it be wearing a two-piece swimming suit in mixed company at the beach or having a glass of wine with dinner, we must consider whether we are causing a weak brother among us to stumble - or giving a legalist cause to tsk, tsk to his heart's content.
On the other hand, what about the repentant sinner, formerly used to such theological diversions as preacherettes and equal-partnership marriage? Well now, there is where we might see what looks like an over-correction. When the repentant sinner comes home to Christ's church, everything is up for grabs. Jeans in church? May it never be! Skirts and dresses, if you please. Long hair and headcoverings in worship, constant self-reminders about a wife's submission and delighting in things formerly despised are on the daily menu.
It is the repentant among us who are often the most sensitive to appearances, the ones who may be offended by seeing a brother dine in an idol's temple. Not because all the old is cast off and the logs are removed from eyes, but because the old sins leave their marks, their sore spots and sensitivities. The pull of the old, familiar wretchedness can catch at one's heart at the most unexpected moments. Especially when one's gait is unsteady in these new, orthodox shoes.
Perhaps also, because of this, it is the repentant who appear to be the most dangerous poison of all.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Today's menu
Tzatziki sauce - to be used as a raw veggie dip
Asparagus - sauteed in butter served in a sauce of Dijon Mustard and lemon juice
Sauteed Kale with capers
Oven Roasted Root Vegetables - Turnips, Parsnips, Rutabagas and Onions
And, tomorrow:
Polenta with Basil
Yummm!
Asparagus - sauteed in butter served in a sauce of Dijon Mustard and lemon juice
Sauteed Kale with capers
Oven Roasted Root Vegetables - Turnips, Parsnips, Rutabagas and Onions
And, tomorrow:
Polenta with Basil
Yummm!
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