Still trying to digest this. Plenty of discussion and analysis at SLUGGER O'TOOLE
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Vatican newspaper says Jesuit was right to apply Gospel to injustice
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican newspaper said Jesuit Father Jon Sobrino, whose work was recently criticized by doctrinal authorities, was right in trying to apply the truth of the Gospel to concrete situations of global injustice.
Where Father Sobrino risks going astray, the newspaper said, is in proposing a new type of Christology that seems to prefer the "Jesus of history" to the "Christ of faith" and downplays his transcendent nature.
The article, published in L'Osservatore Romano March 24, came 10 days after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a note warning of "erroneous or dangerous propositions" in the work of Father Sobrino, a leading proponent of liberation theology.
...
The article said Father Sobrino begins with a "very just" application of theology to the concrete situations of extreme poverty and injustice in Latin America and other parts of the world.
It said Father Sobrino rightly believes that the Christian faith cannot act as a "sedative" in the face of such injustice, which affects millions of people.
'We were torturing people for no reason'
'We were torturing people for no reason'
Tara McKelvey
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tony Lagouranis is a 37-year-old bouncer at a bar in Chicago's Humboldt Park. He is also a former torturer.
That was how he was described in an e-mail promoting a panel discussion, "24: Torture Televised," hosted by the Center on Law and Security of the New York University School of Law on March 21. He doesn't shy away from the description.
As a specialist in a military intelligence battalion, Lagouranis interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Al Asad Airfield and other places in Iraq from January through December 2004.
Coercive techniques, including the use of dogs, waterboarding and prolonged stress positions were employed on the detainees, he says. Prisoners held at Al Asad Airfield, about 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, were shackled and hung from an upright bed frame welded to the wall in a room in an airplane hanger, he told me in a phone interview.
When he was having problems getting information from a detainee, he recalls, other interrogators said, "Chain him up on the bed frame and then he'll talk to you." Lagouranis says he didn't participate directly in hangings from the frames.
The results of the hangings, shacklings and prolonged stress positions - sometimes for hours - were devastating. "You take a healthy guy and you turn him into a cripple, at least for a period of time," Lagouranis told me. "I don't care what Alberto Gonzales says. That's torture."
Lagouranis was on the NYU panel to talk about torture and its role in the Emmy Award-winning television show "24."
FULL ARTICLE HERE
A CALL TO ARMS: A REVIEW OF LOOK HOMEWARD, AMERICA
[Review by Caleb Stegall, at http://www.godspy.com]A CALL TO ARMS: A REVIEW OF LOOK HOMEWARD, AMERICA
In "Look Homeward, America", Bill Kauffman offers an idiosyncratic look at the real split underlying American society and politics -- not the one between Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, but between materialists who recognize only a temporal order and those who admit to a higher, transcendent order.
...the result is, by design, impossible to categorize. Kauffman's collection of throwbacks and throwaways, retreads and retrofits, hillbillies and hell-raisers, poet politicians and insubordinate patriots is a stinging rebuke to political categorizers, taxonomers of the soul, and those who reduce humanity to the talking heads and soundbitten ghosts of American punditry. Kauffman describes himself as an 'outsider even among outsiders' and 'the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn.' ...FULL ARTICLE
Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists
by Bill Kauffman
(ISI Books, 2006).
Friday, March 30, 2007
Evolution of a Feminist Daughter
REBECCA WALKER — the daughter of Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple,” and Mel Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer — was a nascent feminist when she laid bare the details of her freewheeling, lonely adolescence in her 2001 book, “Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self.”
The memoir, like the 20-something Ms. Walker, was impassioned, poetic and occasionally messy. But it hit a nerve with many critics who considered it a poignant meditation on race and sex.
It also chronicled the author’s efforts to cope with being hot-potatoed from city to city in the wake of her parents’ divorce and what she perceived to be her mother’s ambivalence about her existence.
Left to her own devices by parents she thought were preoccupied with their careers, Rebecca Walker experimented with drugs, had sexual encounters with men and women, and had an abortion at 14.
But by the time she was an adult, she was writing about intergenerational feminism (her godmother is Gloria Steinem), and had helped found the Third Wave Foundation, a philanthropic group for women ages 15 to 30, becoming a symbol for young women who may not have considered themselves feminists.
Symbol though she was, Ms. Walker also cultivated a private life, and in her 20s was in a serious relationship with another woman.
Today, however, Ms. Walker, 37, has become what she called a new Rebecca, one who has a male partner, a child and some revised theories about the ties that bind, which she explores in a new book, “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence” (Riverhead), to be released on Thursday. A review appears in The Times Book Review today.
Pope recalls anniversary of 1980 slaying of popular archbishop in El Salvador
VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday recalled the 1980 slaying of El Salvador archbishop and human rights activist Oscar Romero, and praised those who lost their lives in carrying out their mission for the Roman Catholic Church.
Benedict reminded pilgrims in St. Peter's Square that Saturday [March 25th] had been the anniversary of Romero's killing, and that the church had dedicated the day to prayer and fasting for missionary martyrs.
He described they martyrs as "bishops, priests, other men and women clergy and lay people cut down in carrying out their mission of evangelization and human promotion."
Benedict said martyrs represent hope for the world "because they testify that the love of Christ is stronger than violence and hate."
With song and prayer on Saturday, hundreds of Salvadorans in the capital, San Salvador, mark the 27th anniversary of Romero's slaying.
The day before Romero was gunned down in a chapel, he had called on the military to halt its repressive tactics. During El Salvador's 12-year civil war, the [*U.S. backed and financed] military was blamed for death squads that killed thousands of suspected guerrillas and leftist opponents of the military-led government.
The Vatican is considering Romero for possible sainthood.
*my note
Why James Frey Doesn't Get It
by Heather King -- Publishers Weekly, 1/17/2006
Heather King, author of Parched, examines the deep differences between her memoir and A Million Little Pieces
I first read about James Frey's A Million Little Pieces in a New Yorker review. I was working on my own memoir, Parched (Chamberlain Bros.), at the time, so I scanned the piece with interest. Frey and I had a couple of things in common: we'd both had major substance abuse problems; we'd both been to Hazelden (him for six weeks, circa 1992; me for four weeks, six years earlier). But there the similarities seemed to end. It wasn't so much that we were of different genders, that I was a teensy bit older than him, that we'd chosen different approaches to staying sober. No, it was that Frey was angry. The whole tenor of the review was that Frey was angry. The testosterone-fueled rage! The studly ire! In light of my own 20 years as a falling-down blackout drunk, it struck me as an odd stance. The people who really had cause to be angry, it seemed to me, were the ones I'd trampled, cheated on, stolen from and lied to on my way to the nearest bar.
Now that the accusations of lying have surfaced and I've actually read the book, I see the differences go even deeper. Drama is the movement from narcissism to humility, but Frey is exactly the same at the end of his story—minus the drugs—as he is at the beginning: an insecure braggart without a spark of vitality, gratitude or fun. "A ballsy, bone-deep memoir," Salon.com called it, but for any alcoholic worth his or her salt, throwing up blood, puking on oneself, and committing petty-ass crimes in and of themselves couldn't be bigger yawns. What's gritty is the moment, knowing you're dying, when the world turns on its axis and you realize My way doesn't work. What's ballsy isn't just egomaniacally recounting your misdeeds; it's taking the trouble to find the people you've screwed over, looking them in the eye, and saying you're sorry. What's bone-deep—or might have been if Frey had done it—is figuring out that other people suffer, too, and developing some compassion for them. Oprah speaks of "the redemption of James Frey"—but redeemed from what, and by whom? Sobriety, in my experience, isn't the staged melodrama of sitting in a bar and staring down a drink to prove you've "won"—as Frey does upon leaving rehab. It's the ongoing attempt, knowing in advance you'll fall woefully short, to order your life around honesty, integrity, faith.
So, in fact, is writing. It's every writer's sacred honor to "get it right," but perhaps the burden falls heaviest on the memoirist. As a memoirist, it seems to me, something has to have happened to you that you're burning to tell. You've undergone some kind of transformation that matters not because it says something about you, but because it says something about the world; because it touches on the mysteries of suffering and meaning. There may be great leeway in being faithful to this emotional truth, but you have to have an emotional truth to begin with. The details you remember, your stance towards the people you meet, your interpretation of your experiences: all have to spring from this deeper level; this vision you carry around like a secret; the yearning to get it right that eventually drives everything you think, say, do. You have to have some kind of love for the world, with all its terrible suffering; you have to be willing to cut off your writing hand rather than betray by a word what it's taught you. The problem is that it doesn't seem to have taught James Frey much of anything, which is why A Million Little Pieces rings false, on both levels, from start to finish.... REST OF ARTICLE HERE
click here for Heather King podcast interview at NCR
Monday, March 26, 2007
Straddling Liberalism and Conservatism
Larchmont
...“I used to be a liberal, if liberal means concern for the other guy,” Father Groeschel said. “Now I consider myself a conservative-liberal-traditional-radical-confused person.”
His old friend Mrs. O’Keeffe doesn’t see any contradiction.
“If you knew the man all along, you just see a human being developing from one place to another,” she said. “His basic simplicity, intelligence and love of people has never changed. He’s still clothing the poor and feeding the hungry.”
Missing Fathers of the Church: The Feminization of the Church & the Need for Christian Fatherhood
by Leon J. Podles
You may have noticed that, in general, men are not as interested in religion as women are. There are usually more women than men at Sunday mass, and there are far more women than men at devotions, retreats, and prayer groups. The men who do come are often there because wives or girlfriends have put pressure on them to attend. In fact, if men speak honestly, they will tell you that men have a general feeling that the Church is for women. They may add that women are more emotional than men are, or that religion is a crutch that a man doesn’t need, as Jesse Ventura, the candidate of young white men, said in Playboy.
In my book, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, I examine the lack of men in the Western churches, which only the unobservant doubt, and I look at the possible causes and results of the lack of men. My thought has continued to develop, and I have slightly revised my thesis. In what follows I will first summarize my thesis that men stay away from the Church because they regard it as a threat to their hard-won masculinity. Second, I will explore how the Church has become identified with femininity. Third, I will consider how this feminization has undermined fatherhood, and how the Church can reach men and help them to be Christians and Christian fathers.
I think the lack of men is self-evident, but the reactions to my book have shown me that some people have not noticed and that others choose to deny the obvious because of a feminist, or, what has surprised me, a traditionalist agenda. Sociologists have gathered statistics about both practice and opinion, and the studies confirm the popular impression: religion, especially of the Christian variety, is largely a feminine affair in Western society. FULL ARTICLE
Are We Experiencing The Last Days Of Constitutional Rule?
March 15, 2007 By Paul Craig Roberts
The Bush administration’s greatest success is its ability to escape accountability for its numerous impeachable offenses.
The administration’s offenses against US law, the US Constitution, civil liberties, human rights, and the Geneva Conventions, its lies to Congress and the American people, its vote-rigging scandals, its sweetheart no-bid contracts to favored firms, its political firing of Republican US Attorneys, its practice of kidnapping and torturing people in foreign hellholes, and its persecution of whistle blowers are altogether so vast that it is a major undertaking just to list them all.
Bush admits that he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spied on US citizens without warrants, a felony under the Act. Bush has shown total disrespect for civil liberty and the Constitution and has suffered rebukes from the Supreme Count. The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush administration manufactured false "intelligence" to justify military aggression against Iraq. The Halliburton contract scandals are notorious, as is the use of electronic voting machines programmed to miscount the actual vote.
The chief-of-staff to Vice President Cheney has been convicted for obstructing justice in the outing of a covert CIA officer. Proof of torture is overwhelming, and the Bush administration has even had the temerity to have permissive legislation passed after the fact that permits it to continue to torture "detainees." The Sibel Edmonds and other whistle blower cases are well known. The Senate Judiciary Committee has just issued subpoenas to Justice (sic) Dept. officials involved in the scandalous removal of US Attorneys who refused to be politicized.
Yet the Democrats have taken impeachment "off the table." Many Democrats and Republicans and a great many Christians can contemplate illegal military aggression against Iran, but not the impeachment of the greatest criminal administration in US history. Far from being scandalized by what the entire world views as an unjust invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US, leading Democratic and Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination rushed to inform the Israel Lobby, AIPAC, that they, if elected, will keep US troops in Iraq.
The previous occupant of the White House could not escape being impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about a consensual Oval Office sexual affair. President Nixon and his vice president, a saintly pair compared to Bush-Cheney, were both driven from office for offenses that are inconsequential by comparison. Liberals branded Ronald Reagan the "Teflon President," but the neoconservatives’ Iran-Contra scandal was a mere dress rehearsal for their machinations in the Bush regime.
What explains Bush-Cheney invulnerability to accountability?
Perhaps the answer is that Bush has desensitized us. Like kids desensitized to violence by violent video games and movies and pornography addicts desensitized to sex, we have become desensitized by the avalanche of Bush-Cheney crimes, lies, and disdain for Congress, courts, and public opinion.
Our elected representatives, if not the American people, now regard as normal such heinous actions as war crimes, the rape of the Constitution, self-serving use of government office, and the constant stream of lies and propaganda from the highest offices of the executive branch.
Perhaps that is what disillusioned foreigners, who once looked with hope to America, mean when they say that America does not exist anymore.
If the notion has departed that the highest political offices in the land are supposed to be occupied by people who are honest and faithful to their oath to the Constitution, then we are far advanced on the road to tyranny.
In future history books, will Bush-Cheney mark the transition of the United States from constitutional rule to the unaccountable rule of the unitary executive who cancels out Congress with signing statements and silences critics with the police state means that are now part of the US legal code?
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The Israel lobby debate
In March the London Review of Books published John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay 'The Israel Lobby'. The response to the article prompted the LRB to hold a debate under the heading 'The Israel lobby: does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?'. The debate took place in New York on 28 September in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. The panellists were Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer and Dennis Ross, and the moderator was Anne-Marie Slaughter.A video of the event, produced by ScribeMedia, is now available to view online. Click here to view the debate.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Subpoena Power II
Darn, that patriot feller can write - check out his latest...
The Patriot, " Subpoena Power II"
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Well, as I predicted the other day the administration is planning a full on war against the House Judiciary committee’s use of subpoenas to extract testimony from the White House and the DOJ over the US Attorney fiasco. I would have hoped that a Constitutional showdown with the White House would have occurred over something more germane to the flagrant abuse of power exhibited by the Rove cabal, but you take your victories where you find them. As with all scandals, the cover-up is probably worse than the underlying event. Practically speaking the President can fire some, or all, of the US Attorneys for any reason, including replacing them with patronage appointments. What the administration cannot do, what is actually illegal, is to attempt to direct the course of criminal investigations by applying political pressure. Replacing a US Attorney with Karl Rove’s friend? Ok. Replacing the same US Attorney because he wasn’t investigating more Democrats? Not Ok.
Bush’s churlish press conference yesterday was clear evidence that the administration hasn’t really changed its position on the issue of executive power since the election. Perhaps they think that the traditional presidential prerogative on attorney appointments will be given deference by their conservative packed Courts. Here they may have miscalculated. True conservatives are nervous about the concept of unbridled power no matter where such power is concentrated within the body politic. The right-wing Bush coalition is not as uniform as it appears and all that executive power makes libertarians nervous.
The administration is still trying to hoodwink Congress with its lies. The White House’s official position is that "The president expects everybody who talks to Congress to tell the truth, and so does the law. And they know that it would be illegal not to tell them the truth," he said. Which would be ok….if the administration had a shred of credibility left after lying about every significant issue in the last seven years. The administration’s lack of credibility isn’t lost on John Conyer’s, the head of the judiciary committee who commented that just having Rove and Meir come in for a friendly chat would be a pointless exercise. "We could meet at the local pub to have that kind of conversation," he said. "But in my judgment it would not advance us toward uncovering the simple truth in this matter."
And it isn’t as if the DOJ has been any more forthcoming than the White House on the motivations behind the firings. Pat Leahy complained about 3,000 documents the Justice Department handed over to the committees late Monday, saying redactions in the documents make them unworkable. "Instead of freely and fully providing relevant documents to the investigating committees, they have only selectively sent documents, after erasing large portions that they do not want to see the light of day."
Of course the administration’s promise to fight the subpoenas in Court has the potential to drag the whole matter into the presidential election, as it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would get the case within the 21 months left in the Bush administration. How typical of this president, who never finished anything he started in life, to dump this issue squarely in the lap of the Republican party as they try to figure out how to undo 8 years of damage in time for the next Presidential election. Good luck boys!
VIdeoOfMark and LouiseZwick, " The Catholic Worker: A Model for Church and World "
http://ethicscenter.nd.edu/archives/videos.shtml
Mark and LouiseZwick, "
The Catholic Worker: A Model for Church and World "Length: 1:15
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Listen to this when you're doing the dishes...
What Role Does Spiritual Thinking Have in the 21st Century? Interview with Dr. Charles Taylor
Interview with Dr. Charles Taylor
2007 Templeton Prize winner Charles Taylor is a genial man with a predisposition to laughter, often at himself. Perhaps more importantly, for a thinker who coined the term "malaise of modernity" he is also an optimist. That he, is considered a philosopher's philosopher by his peers, exhibiting a rare mastery across an impressive spectrum of ideas only increases admiration. The author of more than a dozen books, including the widely praised "Sources of the Self" and the forthcoming "A Secular Age," Taylor's work explores a dizzying array of disciplines–philosophy, religion, political theory, moral theory, and ethics, among others. Lindsay Waters, executive editor at Harvard University Press, says, "Charles Taylor's passionate philosophy allows him to zero in on the most distinctively human issues of our time, and not be afraid." In the following Q&A, Professor Taylor explains the importance of the concept of mystery to our understanding of the universe, why "God is not Dead," and whether he is a fox or a hedgehog.
Prominent Conservatives Launch Effort To Restore "Civil Liberties Under Assault By Executive Branch"
Four prominent conservative thinkers are set to launch a campaign "to restore checks and balances and civil liberties protections under assault by the Executive Branch," arguing that, "since 9/11, the President has acquired too much power."
Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, who led the effort to impeach President Clinton, is one of the organizers of the effort, called the American Freedom Agenda. Others are David Keene of the American Conservative Union, writer and conservative direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, and constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served in the Reagan administration as associate deputy attorney general.
At a 1 p.m. news conference today at the National Press Club, they will pitch a legislative package "to restore congressional oversight and habeas corpus, end torture and extraordinary rendition, narrow the President's authority to designate 'enemy combatants,' prevent unconstitutional wiretaps, email and mail openings, protect journalists from prosecution under the Espionage Act, and more."
In a statement, the four said the president "has encroached on the power of Congress to make laws, and on the power of the courts to interpret the law - a scenario that the Founding Fathers foresaw and warned against." As a result, they said, "We are issuing this call to Americans of all political and philosophical persuasions to join us in urging Congress to enact The American Freedom Agenda."
"The AFA would roll back the alarming recent concentration of power in the White House and its end runs around due process... The AFA seeks to restore America's tradition of respect for the rule of law and the benefits of dispersed as opposed to concentrated power, to redeem the principle that no man is above the law, and to prevent injustices that undermine national security."
"We are conservative scholars, activists and writers. We do not favor a crippled executive or enfeebled government. In a time of danger, checks and balances make for stronger government because the people will more readily accept a muscular authority if barriers against abuses are strong. If at some future time Congress, in turn, aggrandizes power and invades the executive or judicial domains, we will be equally alert to sound the alarm. But today, the clear and present danger to conservative philosophy is the White House."
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
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