Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 306

If you read only one article about New York State's democratic assault...

... on the institution of marriage, I suggest going with this lengthy, thorough, and very good NRO interview, conducted by Kathryn Lopez, with Robert P. George, professor at Princeton and one of the foremost defenders of marriage. Highly recommended.

700,000 copies of "YOUCAT" will be distributed in six languages at World Youth Day

From the Vatican Information Service:

VATICAN CITY, 28 JUN 2011 (VIS) - A press conference was held this morning in the Holy See Press Office to present the twenty-sixth World Youth Day (WYD), which will be held in the Spanish capital city of Madrid from 16 to 21 August. The conference was presented by Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity; Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, archbishop of Madrid; Yago de la Cierva, executive director of WYD 2011; Elsa Vazquez Maggio, an international volunteer, and Jose Antonio Martinez Fuentes, secretary general of WYD 2011.

  "Each World Youth Day is an extraordinary experience for a Church which is friend to young people, which shares their problems", said Cardinal Rylko. "A Church which places herself at the service of the new generations. It is an experience of Universal Church - unique of its kind - which embraces the entire planet, of a young Church full of enthusiasm and missionary vigour. It is an epiphany of the Christian faith which has truly planetary dimensions. And young people, especially in the old and profoundly secularised continent of Europe, have particular need of all this".

  The cardinal recalled how this is the second occasion that Spain has "generously welcomed" WYD, and he spoke of the last time the event was held in that country, at Santiago de Compostela in 1989. It was there, he said, "that World Youth Day came to be structured as we know it today: three days of catechesis, a prayer vigil on the Saturday night, then the closing Eucharistic celebration and the dispatch of young people as missionaries. Also at Santiago de Compostela, pilgrimage came to be an essential factor of young people's journey in the footsteps of Peter's Successor.

  "Over succeeding years", he added, "each WYD has brought something new to the programme: the Way of the Cross at Denver, U.S.A., in 1993; preparatory days spent in dioceses prior to the main event and the 'Festival of Youth' (a kind of cultural programme) at Paris, France, in 1997; the 'Feast of Forgiveness' (300 confessionals crowded with young people in the Circus Maximus) at Rome in 2000; the 'Vocations Fair' at Toronto, Canada, in 2002, and the adoration of the Eucharist at Cologne, Germany, in 2005. Thus the proposal made to young people on each occasion is in continual evolution, seeking to respond to the true spiritual needs of today's youth".

  The cardinal also provided some statistics, noting that "WYD in Madrid is going to be a very significant event". Four hundred thousand young people have already signed up; they will be accompanied by14,000 priests and by 744 bishops, of whom 263 will be responsible for catechesis. Two hundred and fifty sites have been assigned for catechesis, which will be delivered in thirty languages, and 700,000 copies of "YOUCAT" will be distributed in six languages. Twenty-four thousand volunteers from different countries will be involved in various services. Finally, before reaching Madrid, the young people will be welcomed in sixty-eight Spanish dioceses, "in confirmation of the fact that the entire Church in Spain is directly involved in the WYD experience", said the cardinal. For those unable to reach Madrid, "simultaneous gatherings of young people have been organised in countries such as Ukraine, Burundi and Madagascar. They will be linked to the main event in Madrid by television and internet.

  "The Pope's presence is the culminating moment of any WYD", said the president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, noting that the forthcoming event in Madrid "will take place in the light of the recent beatification of John Paul II, founder of World Youth Days. Thus John Paul II will return among the young people he loved so much, and who loved him. He returns as blessed, patron and protector. Indeed, the Eucharistic celebration welcoming the youth to Madrid, presided by Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, archbishop of the city, on 16 August, will be dedicated to the new blessed".

Learn more about the  Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church (YOUCAT) at www.YouCat.us.

The Call and Craft of the Catholic Novelist: An Interview with Fiorella De Maria

The Call and Craft of the Catholic Novelist: An Interview with Fiorella De Maria, author of Poor Banished Children: A Novel | Ignatius Insight | June 28, 2011

Novelist Fiorella De Maria, author of Poor Banished Children, was born in Italy of Maltese parents. She grew up in Wiltshire, England, and attended Cambridge, where she received a BA in English Literature and a Masters in Renaissance Literature, specializing in the English verse of Robert Southwell, S.J. She won the National Book Prize of Malta (foreign language fiction category) for her second novel The Cassandra Curse. Fiorella lives in Surrey with her husband and her three children and blogs at "The Singular Anomaly". She recently answered some questions from Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about her novel and the craft of writing fiction.

Ignatius Insight: How did you end up becoming a novelist? What sort of personal and educational paths brought you to that point?

Fiorella De Maria: I have wanted to be a writer since I was about seven. As a child I always had my nose in a book and spent blissful hours in my room reading absolutely any novel I could lay my hands on. Reading teaches you so much about the art of writing;  how to make a character come to life, how to create atmosphere with a few words. I was very fortunate in that I grew up in a rural area where it was safe for a child to go out alone and I could walk for miles through the Wiltshire countryside completely undisturbed, dreaming that I was in Narnia or Wonderland or whatever world I had just read about. It is a stunningly beautiful part of the world; I used to think that Tolkien had been thinking of Wiltshire when he created The Shire. I was very blessed to grow up in such a lovely and evocative place.

I had some very supportive English teachers when I was at secondary school who really encouraged me to write and to have a go at writing all sorts of things so that I could find out what came most naturally – articles, poetry, short stories, I even wrote a couple of plays – and they offered constructive criticism and feedback. Then at Cambridge, I had the chance to study the development of the novel in depth and did courses in modern literature so that I could learn as much as possible about what contemporary novelists were writing about.

Read the entire interview on Ignatius Insight....

Homosexuals and "The Boston Globe" are shocked and angry that....

... the Catholic Church continues to teach that homosexual acts are "acts of grave depravity" (CCC, par. 2357) and that homosexual desires are "objectively disordered" (CCC, par 2358):

There have been many last straws for Richard Iandoli.

He was stung when his church's hierarchy disparaged adoptions by gay couples, when his church emerged as a political leader against same-sex marriage, and by the way his church refers to homosexuality as "disordered.''

Earlier this month, the insult was more personal: The Boston Archdiocese stepped in and postponed an "All are Welcome'' Mass to commemorate Gay Pride Month at Iandoli's church, St. Cecilia on Belvidere Street in Boston.

"It hits you in the gut,'' Iandoli said. And he has wondered: What am I doing here?

Yet, like many gay and lesbian Roman Catholics, Iandoli refuses to walk away from his church, even when he feels that church leaders don't want him. ...

The church's position runs so counter to the growing acceptance of same-sex relationships that some gay Catholics say they are more bashful about their religious orientation than their sexuality.

"It was harder for me in my 20s to come out as a Catholic than as a gay person,'' said Constance Cervone, 54, of Jamaica Plain.

The article, "Worship in the face of rejection" (Boston Globe, June 27, 2011) goes on and on in the same vein, with angry references to "the far-right conservative hierarchy" and the declaration by one man, Domenic Stagno, that "Even though the hierarchy has gone astray from the times of Christ, I'm not going to let them take my church away from me.'' I've long held the silly belief that the Catholic Church was founded by and belongs to Jesus Christ, and now I learn it is actually the Church of Domenic Stagno. Why didn't someone mention it to me before?

Dave Pierre of TheMediaReport.com notes that this article is just the latest of a series of such pieces in the Globe; he writes:

From all of this coverage in the past few weeks, one would get the impression that the Globe thinks that the Catholic Church is alone in its opposition to gay marriage. Meanwhile, Orthodox Judaism, Islam, and many Protestant churches also hold the same disapproval. The paper has not profiled any of these organizations in the same negative manner, however.

The message from the Globe is clear: gay 'marriage' is good, faithful Catholicism is bad.

(Additional note: There is an interesting element to an accompanying online video to the Globe's front-page piece (Mon., 6/27/11). For the video, the paper interviews two gay men who attend Boston's aforementioned St. Cecilia. Both men not only rail against Church teaching but explicitly say that a main reason that they remain active parishioners is to "change the Church." There's a lot to swallow there. And for serious Catholics, this is somewhat sobering.)

Read his entire post.

Is this the most ridiculous, arrogant Huff-and-Puff Post piece ever penned?

Granted, the competition is tough and the candidates are legion. But I think that Victor Stenger—"Physicist, PhD, bestselling author"!—has thrown down the Gray Gauntlet of Lumpish Twaddle, and has done so in the span of just six paragraphs! Best be sitting down and not eating or drinking before taking this in:

Many historians and sociologists have denied the there ever was a war between science and religion. Some have even claimed that Christianity was responsible for science! But they have ignored the most important historical facts. Greece and Rome were well on the way to modern science when Christianity interrupted its development for a thousand years.

Nevermind that the Romans didn't even figure out how to engineer a drafting chimney. Oh well; I'm sure they were only a few years from splitting the atom when the barbarians overwhelmed them. Which is not to make light of Roman and Greek achievements. By the way, didn't the Romans and Greeks believe in multiple gods? So how is that Romans and Greeks were scientifically brilliant while being religious but Christians were/are decidedly anti-scientific because they are religious? Huh?

But there are few historians who deny the evidence that medieval Christian philosophy and culture laid the foundation for modern science. As Rodney Stark summarizes in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005):

For the past two or three centuries, every educated person has known that from the fall of Rome until about the fifteenth century Europe was submerged in the "Dark Ages"--centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery--from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously rescued, first by the Renaissance and then by the Enlightenment. But it didn't happen that way. Instead, during the so-called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world! (p. 38)

See more in my essay, "Dark Ages and Secularist Rages: A Response to Professor A.C. Grayling" (Jan. 30, 2007). And now back to Stenger:

I don't deny that many scientists are also religious, but they have compartmentalized their brains into two sections that don't talk to each other.

Ah, so Dr. Stenger is not only a physicist, but a mind reader! Of course, that's easier done than actually dealing with the historical evidence. It's like Jack Chick, Tim LaHaye, or Jimmy Swaggert claiming the Catholic Church killed 60/80/100 million people during the "Dark Ages": they don't need to prove such claims, as Dr. LaHaye told me, "because everyone knows it's true". That, in essence, is also Stenger's line of "argument". Meanwhile:

Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies -- the assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside his or her body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations we make about the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments and the application the knowledge obtained to human activity.

Would Stenger also argue that science and, say, philosophy are also "unequivocally opposed epistemologies"? After all, one cannot scientifically prove the existence, nature, and meaning of "justice" or "love" or "democracy" or "virtue" or "first cause", even though everyone (with a brain) agree that such things exist, in some way or another, in the world. Also, can Stenger scientifically prove that his reason and logic are reasonable and logical? It's a moot point, actually, because he writes this:

The working hypothesis of science is that empirical data is our only reliable source of knowledge about the world. No doubt science has its limits. But it doesn't follow that religion or any other alternative system of thought automatically provides any insight into what lies beyond those limits.

No, that is not the "working hypothesis" of science; it is an ideological declaration of scientism. After all, saying that science "is our only reliable source of knowledge about the world" does not follow in the least from the recognition that science is the study of natural events and material data. Another physicist, Stephen Barr, in this September 2006 Ignatius Insight interview, put it this way in relation to the origins of creation:

One has to distinguish the question of the universe's beginning moments from the question of why there is a universe at all. In my view, science will never provide an answer to the latter question. As Stephen Hawking famously noted, all theoretical physics can do is give one a set of rules and equations that correctly describe the universe, but it cannot tell you why there is any universe for those equations to describe. He asked, "What breathes fire into the equations so that there is a universe for them describe?"

As far as the beginning moments of the universe go, science may eventually be able to describe what happened then. That is, when we know the fundamental laws of physics in their entirety -- as I hope someday we will -- it may well turn out that the opening events of the universe happened in accordance with those laws. In that sense, "the beginning" could have been "natural". However, that would not explain the "origin" of the universe in the deeper sense meant by "Creation".

Let me use an analogy. The first words of a play -- say Hamlet -- may obey the laws of English grammar. They may also fit into the rest of the plot in a natural way. In that sense, one might be able to give an "internal explanation" of those beginning words. However, that would not explain why there is a play. There is a play because there is a playwright. When we ask about the "origin" of the play, we are not asking about its first words, we are asking who wrote it and why. The origin of the universe is God Almighty.

There is a bit more to Stenger's silliness, including his very laughable understanding of the nature of religion, but I've wasted enough time on it. If nothing else, I do hope that those sensitive readers who have fainting spells because I called The Huffington Post the "Huff-and-Puff Post" will see Stenger's, um, essay as evidence—scientific!—that I have fairly and correctly re-named it.

• Dark Ages and Secularist Rages: A Response to Professor A.C. Grayling | Carl E. Olson
• Excerpts from Chance or Purpose: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith | Christoph Cardinal Schšnborn
• The Mythological Conflict Between Christianity and Science | An interview with physicist Dr. Stephen Barr | Mark Brumley
• The Universe is Meaning-full | An interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker, co-author of A Meaningful World | Carl E. Olson
• The Mystery of Human Origins | Mark Brumley
• Designed Beauty and Evolutionary Theory | Thomas Dubay, S.M.

Abby Johnson, author of "Unplanned", is touring Australia

Abby Johnson, author of Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line, has just embarked on a national speaking tour sponsored by Right to Life Australia. She will be visiting several cities, including Sydney, Adelaide, Albury, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, and Perth.

For more information, visit the Right to Life Australia website and see Abby's website.

For more about Unplanned, visit the book's website and read the book's opening chapter:

"That Singular Anomaly" is the new blog...

... of British novelist Fiorella de Maria, whose third novel, Poor Banished Children, was recently published by Ignatius Press.

Here is the new blog, which is focused on book/literary-related subjects.

Tomorrow morning I'll be posting an interview with Fiorella in which I ask her about literary influences, the challenges of writing a historical novel, and her take on the current state of the Catholic literary world. In the meantime, here are the opening chapters of her new novel:

"Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine."

Princeton University Press recently published a collection of essays titled, The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, which is edited by George Levine. The book, according to its blurb, promises the moon and more:

 Bringing together distinguished historians, philosophers, scientists, and writers, this book shows that secularism is not a mere denial of religion. Rather, this positive and necessary condition presents a vision of a natural and difficult world--without miracles or supernatural interventions--that is far richer and more satisfying than the religious one beyond.

From various perspectives--philosophy, evolutionary biology, primate study, Darwinian thinking, poetry, and even bird-watching--the essays in this collection examine the wealth of possibilities that secularism offers for achieving a condition of fullness. Factoring in historical contexts, and ethical and emotional challenges, the contributors make an honest and heartfelt yet rigorous case for the secular view by focusing attention on aspects of ordinary life normally associated with religion, such as the desire for meaning, justice, spirituality, and wonder. Demonstrating that a world of secular enchantment is a place worth living in, The Joy of Secularism takes a new and liberating look at a valuable and complex subject.

Literary critic and Marx apologist (and former Catholic) Terry Eagleton reviews the book in The New Statesman and points out, among other things, that a completely secular world would have a very hard time establishing the sort of virtues—true responsibility, tolerance, peacefullness, hope, love—that are rooted in the West's Judeo-Christian heritage:

None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power. Instead, the volume chatters away about spirits and Darwinian earthworms, animal empathy and the sources of morality.

Kitcher asks himself why people should need to be united by a belief in some "transcendental entity" (his use of both terms is inaccurate) rather than by their mutual sympathies. "What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient. Anyone, even a mildly intelligent badger, can entertain "mutual sympathies". The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.

Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus. Secular thinking, too, had to be demythified. "God had in fact gone into hiding," Robbins observes, "and now had to be smoked out of various secular terms, from morals and nature and history to man and even grammar." Even Nietzsche's will to power has a suspiciously metaphysical ring to it.

Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place, and so mourning its disappearance would be like lamenting that a rabbit can't recite Paradise Lost.

Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.

Read the entire review.

Related Links:

• "Can atheists be grateful?" (August 22, 2006)
• Relativism 101: A Brief, Objective Guide | by Carl E. Olson
• The Old Age and the New | Thomas Howard | From "The Old Myth and the New," Chapter One of Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism
• Dawkins' Delusions | An interview with Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P.
• Professor Dawkins and the Origins of Religion | Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P. | From God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins
• Atheism and the Purely "Human" Ethic | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson
• A Short Introduction to Atheism | Carl E. Olson
• C.S. Lewis's Case for Christianity | An Interview with Richard Purtill
• Paganism and the Conversion of C.S. Lewis | Clotilde Morhan
• Designed Beauty and Evolutionary Theory | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• The Universe is Meaning-full | An interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker
• The Mythological Conflict Between Christianity and Science | An interview with Dr. Stephen Barr
• The Source of Certitude | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.

"YouCat is a beautiful gift to Catholics..."

Over at Metro Catholic, George Vogt has posted a report on the "Rooted" conference hosted recently by Franciscan University of Steubenville:

STEUBENVILLE, OH (MetroCatholic) – "What am I worth? I'm worth that guy's life," said author Chris Stefanick, pointing to the image of Jesus Christ on the cross. "We're not the sum of our accomplishments. Our worth is not diminished by our failures. One Eucharist is your net worth. You are worth God the Son to God the Father."

Stefanick spoke to over 1700 teens, youth ministers, chaperones, priests, and religious, who packed Finnegan Fieldhouse June 17-19 for Franciscan University of Steubenville's first on-campus High School Youth Conference of the summer. Nearly 40,000 teens will attend Franciscan's conferences this summer in 11 states and Canada.

"I know that God wanted you here," said conference host Bob "Righteous B" Lesnefsky. "Somehow in God's mystical plan for your life, you were meant to be here."

This year's youth conference theme, "Rooted," taken from Colossians 2:6-7, guided the experience.

"Sometimes it all hits at once," said Father Rick Martignetti, OFM, in his Saturday morning homily. "People will hurt us. People who love us are going to die. Storms come. But when the wind comes, the tree that's well planted isn't uprooted—it dances in the wind. It rejoices.

"Mary wasn't spared the storms and troubles of life. But she was rooted. She can teach us the way of holding on to God at all times," said Father Martignetti, director of the Priestly Discernment Program at Franciscan University.

The weekend centered around Jesus Christ, present in the Eucharist at Mass and in adoration, and his Holy Spirit, speaking through God's Word in Scripture and the magisterial teaching of the Church to bring the life and love of the Father to every human heart.

A conference highlight was a quiz-show style contest to win free copies of the new international youth catechism, YouCat, made possible through a partnership with Ignatius Press.

"YouCat is a beautiful gift to Catholics," said John Beaulieu, Franciscan University's director of Youth and Young Adult Outreach. "We look forward to helping spread that gift through the conferences, and we are very grateful to Ignatius Press for working with us to make it happen."

Read the entire article. And for more information, including a complete list of conferences for adults and youth at Franciscan University of Steubenville, go to www.franciscanconferences.com. More information about YouCat can be found at YouCat.us.

An edition of "Hamlet" free of "deconstructionistic, biased bunk"

Faith, writing on her blog, Strewing, has praise for the Ignatius Critical Edition (ICE) of Hamlet:

If you are tired of postmodernist professors writing cockamamie literary analysis that makes you roll your eyeballs at their narrow, deconstructionistic, biased bunk, fret no more! I loved reading both Joseph Pearce's wonderfully in depth Introduction and the several essays at the end of the book. I especially enjoyed Crystal Downing of Messiah College's essay entitled: Reading Hamlet and Richard Harp's of the University of Nevada, essay entitled The Nobility of Hamlet. In fact I've decided that Professor Harp is brilliant because he clarified to me why I was always dissatisfied with seeing Hamlet's problem as one of indecision. I also enjoyed Andrew Moran's essay, Hamlet's Envenomed Foil which really illuminated the tension between Protestantism and Catholicism that Shakespeare so cleverly and brilliantly unfolds in this play.

Read her entire post.

The ICE edition of Hamlet is available in paperback or in e-book format; there is also a study guide. For more about the Ignatius Critical Editions, which now includes fifteen titles, visit www.IgnatiusCriticalEditions.com. Coming soon: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Metaphysical Poets (Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, etc.), and Romantic Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, etc.).