Wonderful Matters

Today is Good Friday. A lot of Catholicists were out in force engaged in a lot of religious show biz, but all I could think about was the number of people who were out there actually doing the thing Jesus did. Self-sacrifice . My meditations today were overwhelmed by that. I thought about the ways I could do it, but my showing was sadly quite piddly. This week is my spring break, and I mostly just spent the afternoon riding my bike on the local bike trail. Along the way I passed a lumber yard, and in it were a dozen guys sawing and hammering. A bit further down I passed a construction site. There were another dozen guys there putting in the foundation for some large edifice. All of them... Offering themselves this day to make sure people have buildings for something important. There were about a dozen other people I saw or engaged who labored at something today. Sure they get paid. When Jesus sacrificed Himself, when He died on that cr...

Last night I caught the tail end of a PBS Newshour conversation between a gal representing the same-sex marriage proponents and a guy representing the traditional marriage proponents. What I caught was a verbal boxing match over the constitutionality and legality of the issue, and what struck me was how much the guy appealed to Obama as one who supported this claim or that claim they'd made, while the gal merely trumpeted all the same pap about certain lawful protections of one's supposed rights claims. Here were two eloquent ambassadors duking it out in the culture war, showcased on national television as if it was Friday Night Fights. Thing is, they both belong to the same team. They're both megaphone holders for the World System. In one corner was the guy, representing the Devout Romanists, eager to denounce same-sex marriage, but doing so from the ministry of condemnation. In the other corner was the gal, representing the Radical Selfists, talking up the idea that...

Today the U.S. Supreme Court starts to hear arguments about same-sex marriage. The media are going to shine their cameras and shove their microphones in the faces of everyone involved, and their pundits and pontificators will beam about how splendid homosexualism is as well as sneer about how nasty the detractors are. All of this portends a government sanction of sexual immorality never seen before. In looking at every argument made in favor of homosexualism or same-sex marriage, I discover a grave paucity of critical thinking about what sexuality and more importantly love and family really are. I've considered putting together a page on my webzine devoted exclusively to the details about this discourse, and that'll have to appear next month. For now I thought I'd get a bit into just some of those items with some attention to brevity. The challenge is to get right at what is what about these critically important things. When they say "You should be allowed to love ...

The splendid film Despicable Me has a scene featuring little girls at an amusement park who play a shooting gallery game in order to win a big stuffed animal. The object is to knock over a spaceship zipping side to side. One of the girls makes a direct hit on the target, theoretically with enough force to score the prize. Alas, the ship does not fall back to indicate a full "knocked over" achievement. After asking for the eagerly expected animal, the barker explains very smugly that the target had to be knocked over for the prize to be awarded. The adoptive father of the girl, the "Despicable Me" character named Gru who is an expert with nefariously utilized weaponry, steps back, pulls out some elaborate multi-barreled rocket launcher, and then utterly obliterates the entire shooting gallery. The spaceship target disintegrates amongst the rubble. He then proudly proclaims, "Knocked over!" I've had a series of observations about things that remi...

Since I spend some time watching the goings-on of the Roman Catholic Church, simply to know what's happening so I can meaningfully introduce devout Catholicists to the way out of that body of death, I imagine I ought to put in a few words about the latest papal selection. The thing is that the things people say about it are never much different from the things people say about any such event. One of the more notable ones this time relates to the new pope's silence, or inactivity, or uncomfortable dismissal of the ugliness that occured when he was a Catholic leader of some stripe during Argentina's "Dirty War," which loosely refers to the purging of government undesirables in 1979. I guess my response is, yeah? So? For one, the Catholic church has these kinds of accusations against all kinds of priests and prelates and it's all just blapping. For another, whenever the media blap a lot of this stuff as if it is really anything, then it means there are a lo...

My latest home page piece uses William Hogeland's  Founding Finance as its text, and you'll see who the major players are when you visit my webzine. One of Hogeland's most prominent players who I didn't address was Herman Husband, a fascinating character who could be considered one of the United States' genuine founding fathers if he wasn't so eccentric. A rabblerousing Christian man bent on getting things done in the world the way they should be, he was as much devoted to gospel things as he was to getting civil government to behave. He had extraordinarily prescient ideas about how society should arrange itself for the best interests of all, and his passion for biblical principles motivated him to persist in his industrious causes. His adventures through pre-revolutionary America and its founding are engaging reading -- I can't see how his story would not make a fine major motion picture feature. For the most part his attempts to reform everyt...