Also on a personal note, I see that Tropical Storm Erin formed in the Gulf of Mexico today. There are myriad jokes I could place here about my wife, as she’s named Erin…but my instincts are telling me I better not. Gerald over at the Closed Cafeteria also has a wife named Erin (and he’s been quick to note that when my Erin comments on his blog that it’s not his wife commenting) and may be considering doing the same thing.
In any event, no matter what happens, it’s Bush’s fault.
Since I’ve been reading my daughter her bedtime stories, starting when she was about 6 months old, I’ve followed story time with prayer time, praying the Our Father and Hail Mary. The first really cool milestone was when Caroline learned “prayer hands.” Next, she started touching her head and shoulders – an early sign of the cross. Now she’s much more verbal, and one afternoon a few months back I heard her just randomly blurt out a line of the Hail Mary. So, that evening, I started our prayers, but I would pause every few words and she’d fill in the blank (that’s called a Cloze procedure when it’s done in reading instruction.) From there, I started pausing and letting her add in multiple words. I shot this video about a month ago and just now got around to putting it online. Appropriately for the Assumption of Mary, here’s little Caroline exhibiting her memorization abilities as she says the Our Father and Hail Mary – with my apologies for the poor audio quality.
It may be blatantly obvious that one of my key news sources is the Drudge Report…there’s a reason for that, he’s on the cutting edge. But, in this case, Gerald over at the Closed Cafeteria caught it before Drudge did. Today, Drudge features a story on the Dutch Bishop who says we should call God “Allah” as a gesture of peace.
Speaking on the Dutch TV programme Network on Monday evening, Bishop Muskens says it could take another 100 years but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches. And that will promote rapprochement between the two religions.
Muskens doesn’t expect his idea to be greeted with much enthusiasm. The 71-year-old bishop, who will soon be retiring due to ill health, says God doesn’t mind what he is called. God is above such “discussion and bickering”. Human beings invented this discussion themselves, he believes, in order to argue about it.
More than 30 years ago Bishop Muskens worked in Indonesia and, there, God was called Allah, even in Catholic churches. The Dutch should learn to get on spontaneously with different cultures, religions and behaviour patterns:
“Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years. In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can’t we start doing that together?”
Of course, the reason not to start doing that together is that in Holland they don’t speak Arabic (not yet…). Why use the Arabic name for God in a place where they don’t speak Arabic? To speed the process of knuckling under to Islam as it takes over Europe?
Four stately lime trees ceremoniously planted near a popular Roman Catholic shrine in 1983 for a visit to Austria by the late Pope John Paul II are being uprooted to make way for a large grandstand for next month’s pilgrimage by Pope Benedict XVI.
Environmentalists have criticized the action, but church and municipal officials are playing down the trees’ significance.
“This shows the hypocrisy of the church,” said Lambert Schoenleitner, a regional spokesman for the environmentalist Green Party in the southern province of Styria.
Schoenleitner believes nature should be revered as much as faith and doesn’t think trees should be sacrificed for an event that will last just a few hours.
Organizers say the trees must go to make room for a 52 1/2-foot-high steel grandstand to accommodate some of the thousands of pilgrims who will flock to the shrine town of Mariazell, 60 miles southwest of Vienna.
Okay, I agree that it may be a bit silly to remove the trees. But, seems new ones could easily be planted after the grandstand comes down.
Courtesy of the Financial Times is a story that quotes the Comptroller General of the US, David Walker. (Mr. Walker is remotely related to my wife.) He explains that the USA is in a fiscally unsustainable state. Goes as far as to compare the looming problems to the fall of Rome (the Rome in Italy.)
Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.
“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”
The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.
“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.
Solutions Mr. Walker has suggested include drastically cutting government entitlement programs and raising taxes. Maybe he’d also consider recommending that we lower taxes further, to spur economics growth – after all, history says that lower taxes result in higher revenues (the left has a tough time with this, though.)
So now, in his ongoing heartburn about Beckwith swimming the Tiber, James White has become so incensed that people could disagree with him that he has compared those who disagree to Islamo-fascists.
He posted these photos:
I’m sure that soon we’ll get a Kerry-esque “botched joke” disclaimer. Original context here
Erstwhile visitor to this site James White, known for attacking Catholics using the steamroller technique, still can’t deal with the fact that Francis Beckwith has reverted to Catholicism. So, when Beckwith appeared on “Stand to Reason,” a reform-protestant radio show (hosted by the steamrolling Greg Koukl,) White was there to post patronizing and insulting questions to Beckwith. Uncharacteristically, White started out with rational discussion, and after several rounds of debate, descended to an abysmal level of condescension. The point he reached was questioning whether Beckwith had ever read the Council of Trent prior to his recent reversion, because in White’s mind, Beckwith appeared to contradict himself on the STR program.
Now, let’s begin the countdown until White leaves some sort of smug comment on this blog post, since he uses Google to find any and all references to himself (even when it’s a little irrelevant blog like mine.) He’s done it before.
“re-examine how they might maximise enrolment of Catholic students”.
Also, they should:
increase the proportion of school staff who are “practising and knowledgeable Catholics”.
The general trend here in the southeastern USA, of course, is that Catholic schools are becoming more and more elitist as the tuition keeps going up. Whereas it used to be a community that was mostly Catholic, living in neighborhoods together, going to Church together, and going to school together, now it’s much more scattered – people come together at the school from all over the place, and there are Catholic and non-Catholic students (nothing wrong with this, but it’s ironic that my local parish school is 55% Catholic.
Meanwhile, Catholics who are committed to Church teachings on the family can’t afford to send their kids for $3000 or more per year (per student.) There are places in the plains states where it’s much more affordable, but not where I live. Homeschooling, here we come!
In a July 24 decision in Tampa, a jury gave Daniel and Amara Estrada $23.5 million for lifetime care of their 2-year-old son, Caleb, and for their own pain and suffering. Like the Estradas’ first son, Aiden, Caleb was born with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, a metabolic disorder that affects many parts of the body.
The couple said Dr. Boris Kousseff, a geneticist with the University of South Florida, failed to properly diagnose Aiden’s illness and assured the Estradas that their chance of conceiving a child with similar afflictions was the same as any other couple’s.
In other words, they would have killed the baby if they had known. Another move toward “designer children.”
“To call it a wrongful birth seems very odd,” said Sheila S. Hopkins, associate director for social concerns and Respect Life at the conference, in a telephone interview from Tallahassee, Fla. “Anyone can have children who have challenges. … Who are we to decide what’s a ‘wrong’ birth and what’s a ‘right’ birth?”
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