Albertus Minimus

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...

My apologies for my recent (relative) silence. I can only proffer the normal excuses of work and family commitments eating into all my waking hours, leaving none spare for blogging. I hope to get back to something like normal in a day or two.

Don't visit the Natural History Museum...

...on a wet Sunday afternoon at the end of half term unless you want first-hand experience of the sorts of geological pressures that turned the carbon in plants from dead matter to coal to diamond. It's a surprise that we weren't all fossilised and added to the exhibits: touristicus idiotisaurus.

The Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut

Did you know the word 'mugger' derives from the Hindi term 'magar', which comes from the Sanskrit 'makara', meaning 'water monster' or crocodile? The reason I now know this rather arcane piece of etymology is that I am reading Rudyard Kipling's 'The Second Jungle Book' and one of the stories takes the form of a conversation between an Adjutant bird, a Jackal and the feared and fearsome Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut – a crocodile. So a mugger was originally the name for the freshwater crocodile of India. Remember to point that out the next time a hooded youth requests money with menaces; no doubt he will be so fascinated that he will desist in his demands.

By the way, if you haven't read any Kipling, can I recommend him to you: he is probably the most purely enjoyable writer I have ever come across, and even a century on his stories about India convey the country more clearly than any other writer I have come across.

And a final note: the word 'hugger-mugger' is of unknown derivation, but I suspect it may be something to do with that remarkable Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut.

A leg, an arm or some breast?

The arguments of abortions advocates often involve the idea of degrees of personhood: that is, a newly fertilised egg does not qualify as a human being, whereas an adult obviously does. Between the two there is a continuum, so that as the foetus develops it gradually becomes a human being. If we accept this, then obviously we have to decide when the developing creature becomes a human being. Some, like Peter Singer, would say that infants do not qualify as human beings and therefore infanticide should be permissible. That is too blatant an instance of murder for most people to accept, but then the question retreats to at what point during pregnancy does the foetus become a human being. As I noted in a previous post, in different countries there are differing cut off points, with the USA allowing abortion up to birth at one end of the scale, whereas France and Germany regard 12 weeks as the beginning of human life.

But if personhood is really a continuum, then the truth is that there is unlikely to be a single cut off point at which the foetus ceases to be a bundle of cells and becomes a human being. The dividing line, far from being a line, is much more likely to be a blur, like the twilight between day and night, neither one nor the other.

I’m also quite prepared to hold that there may be no fact of the matter about when an abortion becomes impermissible; if personhood admits of degrees, then the wrongness (and hence permissibility or otherwise) of abortion may also admit of degrees.

Source.

This being the case, I propose that we should allow partial abortions. That is, while the foetus is not yet a human being, it is no longer a bundle of cells. Thus, in keeping with its middling status, we can allow for its legs to be aborted, or its arms. Indeed, as it enters this grey zone straddling humanity and inhumanity, it's unlikely that an abortion will leave the foetus with any of its limbs. As it progresses, of course, we would have to regard the limbs as, one after another, fully human, so some time further in its development all that would be permissible to abort would be its fingers and toes. Finally, its digits now safely turned into personal appendages, the developing foetus, on the verge of humanity, might have to sacrifice an ear lobe or two. In the end, having travelled into the safe waters of personhood, the newly renamed foetus (we can now reliably call it an unborn baby) can be born safe in the knowledge that it is accepted by one and all as a fully fledged human person.

There, that seems all quite clear to me.

Flew the (atheist) nest

Professor Antony Flew is a philosopher, and was until very recently one of the main warriors in the army of philosophical atheism. But the evidence that has accrued over recent years, particularly that of design and fine tuning in the structure of the universe, has led him to reconsider. Here is a link to a long but fascinating interview, describing how his views came to change from atheism, to deism, to now, it seems, a weak version of theism.

With thanks to Anselmus at Catholic Blogic for the link.

How hard it is, sometimes, to choose life

I have a number of times asked for your prayers on this blog, and I am most grateful for them. Now I would like to direct you to a man I don't know, but whose name is Phil, a man who is dying. Let Theocoid tell you more about him:

I have been watching a man die slowly, over a period of 14 years. His name is Phil, and he's homeless. I think he's had places to live and employment off and on over the years, but he always winds up at the exit of the same Albertsons with his bike, a bike trailer, and his sign.

He first caught everyone's attention about when he was much younger. It was about the time that homeless folks really became noticeable in Boise. Whereas others help up signs that said, "Will work for food," or "Need gas to get to new job," his sign said, "Why lie? I need a beer."

To read the rest of Phil's story, please go here.

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life, that you may live. Deuteronomy 30:19.

How hard this choosing is sometimes.

Parochial matters

So, we are continuing with our ideas to improve the parish, and make it a more prayerful community orientated towards God. Things are proceeding slowly, but they are moving on, and we have just begun a mother's prayers group. This involves groups of mothers, and sometimes grandmothers, gathering in small groups to place their children in to the hands of Our Lord, in the knowledge that He can bring healing and forgiveness in manners far beyond our own capabilities. If you're interested in forming such a group in your parish, here's the link to the mother's prayers web site.

Of course, this has the problem, in common with almost all such parish initiatives, of drawing mainly those who are already committed to the Faith. Again in common with many other parishes, we are scratching our heads trying to figure out what to do with those occasional Catholics, who infrequently attend church, and that other group who suddenly start coming to Mass when their children are approaching school age, and then tend to slide away once the little ones are safely ensconced in the local Catholic school.

What to do? Well, let's break this down a bit first. Let's take the occasional Catholics first. The positive aspect is that they come to church in the first place. This indicates that there is, somewhere in their hearts, an inchoate sense of God's presence in the Mass and the Eucharist. However, all sorts of factors militate against those occasional visits becoming regular, some of which are beyond our control (the change in working hours being one, so that in many households people are working at the weekend). There's not much we can do about that in the short term, so let's look at what we can do. The first, most repeated, and most obvious reason for this pattern is simply poor catechesis. It's become a cliché that catechesis has been terrible for the last thirty years for the simple reason that it's true. People from my generation (I was born in 1963) were simply not taught the Faith, or if we were it was done so badly as to be positively off putting. So how can we teach these people more about the Faith?

What is the great under utilised area of Catholic catechesis? I would argue it is the sermon. Another truism is that Protestants are generally appalled by the poverty of Catholic sermons. This does not seem to have been helped by the general instruction that the homily should expand and explain the readings of the day. So one idea, which we hope to put into practice sometime, probably this coming Advent or Lent of 2007, is to devote all the sermons over such a period to a systematic exposition of the Faith, coupled with texts of the sermons attached to the newsletter complete with web links and suggestions for further reading. This has the advantage of reaching everyone who is at Mass, many of whom do not involve themselves any further in the life of the parish. I had hoped to have this running for this coming season of Lent, but it requires more preparation than I have been able to give it as yet.

The next avenue which we are pursuing is the fairly obvious one of setting up a parish web site. I'm talking to a web designer on Wednesday, and I should like to canvass suggestions for particularly good parish web sites that you might have come across. I'm looking for ideas both on the practical side – how we can make the site look good and convey the necessary parochial information clearly and quickly – and on the catechetical front – sites that educate and inform the members of the local parish about the Faith. Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

How many cultures does it take to change a lightbulb?

Only one, the rest are on benefits.

Sorry, that's probably unnecessarily savage, but as a child of immigrants to this country, parents who worked and worked to support themselves and their children and never expected anything from the United Kingdom but a fair chance at employment (received) and education (nope), it irritates me immensely to see people coming here and expecting the state to house, clothe, feed and keep them. Still, what can you expect when the official position appears to be that there is no good in being British in the first place? And besides, all those swarthy skinned people with their strange languages bring a nice cosmopolitan frisson, and you can't deny our food has actually become palatable. So, it would appear, runs the unconscious thought around many a comfortable dining table, safely insulated from what is going on outside.

But despite increasing worries on both the left and right about the effects of mass immigration and multiculturalism, the golden elite who run the country still don’t hold much with the idea that there might be millions throughout the country who are tolerant in their approach to these issues and detest extremism, but who are deeply concerned about the way in which their neighbourhoods might be affected by such far-reaching social and cultural changes, over which they have next to no control.

Multiculturalism may seem like a great idea in Islington, but such peaceful coexistence is far from the norm in our northern cities, and in poorer parts of London the cracks in the multicultural varnish are becoming more noticeable.

Appalling murders such as that of the young solicitor Thomas ap Rhys Pryce make middle-class whites flinch inwardly from an unsayable fear, that the fracturing of social life in our cities doesn’t accord with the relentlessly upbeat official version.

The full article, from the 'Sunday Times', is here.

Sniff the air, the wind is changing direction

In a previous post I said that I had the impression that the reaction among some Muslims to the cartoons of Muhammad had produced a greater repugnance than even the 7/7 London bombings. This poll in the 'Sunday Times' would seem to indicate that that surmise was correct.

(A) Sunday Times-YouGov poll of more than 1,600 people shows widespread public anger about protests earlier this month in Britain and the worldwide uprising in response to Danish cartoons picturing the prophet Muhammad.

The poll shows that 86% of people think the protests were “a gross overreaction”. By 56% to 29% respondents said it was right to publish the cartoons in Denmark and republish them elsewhere...

The police and politicians are criticised more generally for not confronting Islamic extremism, with 80% of respondents saying the authorities show too much tolerance of Muslims who urge extreme acts. Two-thirds, 67%, think this is because senior policemen such as Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, are too “politically correct”.

I guess I'll have to wait for the DVD

Screenwriter Andrew Klavan, at the Libertas film blog, is on the Oscar voting viewing mill. But he has some suggestions for worthwhile films that the Academy unaccountably passed over, and which you might have missed too.

All the same, I can’t help feeling a little disgruntled about the movies the Academy decided to pass over. For instance, how could they ignore Heroes In The Sand, that incredibly stirring tribute to the fighting Americans who blasted the Taliban out of Afghanistan? And what were they thinking when they slighted Reason To Live, the biting drama about a once left-wing university professor who comes under fire when he accepts Jesus Christ as his savior? And what about Goodbye, You’re Out of Luck, the classy suspenser about a heroic 1950’s federal investigator who breaks up a ring of homegrown Communist spies?

Not only were these films ignored by the Academy, but their chances for critical recognition and box office success were severely hampered by the fact they were never made. Which is exactly why I didn’t see any of the Academy nominees when they first came out.

See, my problem with Hollywood is not about the movies it makes, it’s about the movies it never makes.

For why you're not likely to see such movies in the near future, I suggest reading the rest of his column.