moral short cuts and legislation
Chesterton once accused the Puritans "Not of having too much morality, but too little." It seems to me that the neoPuritans, those secular busybodies that try to legislate their version of good and clean living, are stricken with the same malody.
It is not that they have a robust morality that provides vision, energy, and purpose to human life, but that they have a weak and feable structure, hardly capable of being principled, ordered, or systematic. In order to buttress up their little morality they attempt moral short cuts, the biggest of which is federal legislation.
Lobbying for laws against all things that they deem bad, unfit, or unhealthy, they seek to impose a grand appearance of their morality, but it becomes, like Bilbo Baggins so artfully said, "thin. Sort of stretched, like butter scrapped over too much bread." It is thin, and thus prone to distortions, corruptions, and ripple-effects that were unintended, but necessarily follow.
NeoPuritans try to take moral short cuts. They want the nation to be better, so instead of convincing every man, woman, and child to be better, they simply legislate away those things they believe are making our country worse. They think that national policy and law make people better versions of themselves because it saves them from themselves.
marriage, society, and my friend Chris
My friend Chris, a conservative law school student, was at a conference for the political and legal protection of traditional marriages. It is a pretty famous group that supports the Christian conception of marriage. At this particular conference the main issue was gay marriage and how to legally defeat it in the several states.
At one point there was a Q and A session where attendees could ask questions and make comments to the presenters. My friend Chris is a lot of things, one of them is not shy. He is what you call "confrontational" and also "fearless" and "thoroughly Catholic."
So at this conference filled with mostly Christians and other social conservatives of every stripe, he takes to the microphone and addresses one of the speakers who criticized gay marriage as the "undoing of the meaning of marriage in society".
He said: "Marriage is not just about a union between a man and a woman. It is that, but it is also about the procreation and education of children. That's the 'meaning' of marriage: babies and bonding with your spouse. I think, if we are going to be honest, we have to see that use of contraception within marriage was really the 'undoing' of marriages, because it separated babies from the sexual act altogether. No-fault divorce, remarriage, and all the rest are results from the widespread acceptance of contraception in marriage."
The place was silent.
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
Benedictine Monk practicing the Lectio DivinaThough I am no longer a full time employee at a parish, I still consider myself a youth minister. I do a lot of ministering to teens around the country in many parishes, not just one. That being the case, I still found the need to be grounded in a specific community and in a specific ministry. Through a lot of praying my family and I decided that I would volunteer in the middle school ministry at our home parish.
Brian Kelsch, the EDGE middle school youth minister, is a great guy. He follows the Life Teen, Inc. format - Gather, Proclaim, Break, Send - pretty devoutly and so it is easy for Core Members to identify with the flow of the nights. For this ministry I run a small group of 8th grade boys and girls, from 15-25 kids each week.
This small group has been very rewarding, and sometimes frustrating along the way. I think having some of the funniest kids in the room is a double-edged sword. They bring a lot of joy with them, but also a lack of, how do I put this delicately? An inability to shut up. That's it!
For the last two weeks in small group when we meet up, instead of asking vaguely connected-to-the-talk questions that are also supposed to be engaging and fun, we have been praying Lectio Divina as a small group. If you haven't listened to the podcast yet, you should stop reading and go have a listen. It's episode number 2.
Calling Catholic Bloggers
This was the Social Communication's own logo. Ugly, huh?This was the image that the Pontifical Council on Social Communication used for their article. Kind of ugly, huh?The day after Pope John Paul II's beatification the Vatican is sponsoring a day conference on/for Catholic bloggers. On May 2 150 bloggers are invited to the Palazzo San Pio X for this all-day conference.
The Pontifical Council for Social Communications and the Pontifical Council for Culture are hosting the event.
In order to get invited all one has to do is email the event host - blogmeet@pccs.it - and pray you get picked. Oh, and you need to figure out a way to fly to Rome and be put up somewhere. All costs are covered by you.
So I just sent in my own request for the conference. Maybe I can fundraise for the flight out there- if they pick me, that is.