Fuss over Notre Dame’s invitation (accepted) to Obama

Nothing here to fight about and they’re fighting about it.

Yes. [Thanks to Mark Silk.]

FBC Jax Watchdog as seen from Canada

FBC Jax Watchdog blogged the drive by First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Fla. to strip him of his anonymity and silence him. As Bene Diction Blogs On from Canada put it:

The blogger seems to have made some people who have more money than brains very nervous, because church leadership has not handled his questioning well at all from what we see in the public responses.

What has the church leadership wrought?

Some of the documents are online now; the church leadership claimed he was involved in criminal activity. Why? The overkill is stunning. Truth, humility, servant-hood took second place to power, as the mega celebrity bubble around the lead pastor tightened its grip on the minds and hearts of leadership. Most of us can’t comprehend the isolation mega-church celebrity ministers live in, nor can we comprehend the need of some to be so protective of perceived power they’ll harm in God’s name.

Avoidable harm. The entire piece is here.

Should we be bowling with Barack? Or let it go?

(c)Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

One from-the-beginning Obama supporter says the passing Tonight Show slight of Special Olympians requires a passing, personal apology.

Yes? Real repentance.

Or is he making too much about to little?

French Catholics want church abortion/contraception policy changed

More than 80% of French Catholics want church policy on abortion/contraception changed, according to a poll published Sunday by France’s Le Journal du Dimanche

Conducted by telephone on Thursday and Friday, after Pope Benedict XVI set off a firestorm of protest by denying the usefulness of condoms in preventing AIDS infection, the poll of a national sample of 620 Catholics also found almost half believe Benedict does a bad job defending Catholicism. A separate poll for Le Parisien found that 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Benedict.

An after-the-fact rewrite of the Pope’s condom comments for the official record did not add to his stature. Although the change did effectively concede that the weight of expert and general public opinion is not with him.

Your church, Nicholas Hughes and the mentally ill

Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, is gone by his own hand.

What might your church have done for him? Churches are often a poor refuge for the mentally ill. What is your church doing for the mentally ill, whether suicidal or not, now?

Saving African children from witchcraft

Pope Benedict XVI’s stand in Angola against witchcraft promises life to imperiled children on a content where belief that it is real and demonic frequently results in the torture of children.

The National Catholic Reporter said:

In Angola, children suffering from diseases such as malaria and AIDS, or street children, are sometimes accused of practicing witchcraft and subjected to abuse. In 2006, a three-year-old HIV-positive child was suspected of placing a curse on his parents, so neighbors abandoned the child in a coop, where chickens pecked out one of his eyes. Between 2001 and 2005, 423 children accused of witchcraft sought refuge at the Santa Child Centre run by the Catholic Church in M’banza Congo, the capital of Zaire Province, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The problem is pervasive, well-documented and horrific, as the New York Times reported:

In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, thousands of children are accused of witchcraft and are cast out of their homes, blinded or killed . . . The latest human rights report for Angola by the United States State Department says that children accused of witchcraft suffer abuses such as “the denial of food and water, or ritualistic cuttings and the placing of various caustic oils or peppers on their eyes or ears.”

Speaking to 1,500 Angolan clergy and laypeople at Luanda’s Sao Paulo church, Pope Benedict XVI placed the Catholic Church in peaceful but implacable opposition to the blight, urging all to “offer the message of Christ to the many who live in the fear of spirits, of evil powers.”

If somewhat besieged for other reasons, the Pope struck exactly the right note on this one.

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Austrian prisons (and ours)

The Quakers who first devised American penitentiaries tried (and failed) to create the conditions for criminal repentance, reform and restitution to society as good citizens.

Austria has similar goals and an entirely different approach, as the sentencing of Josef Fritzl revealed to us all this week.

The London Times reports:

“The Austrian penal system aims not only at enforcing punishment, but also attempts to bring the inmate back within the norms of society,” said a spokesman for Austrian prisons last week when asked whether it was right that Fritzl should enjoy such a lax regime.

The man who was jailed last week for murder, rape, enslavement, coercion and incest after locking his daughter in his cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children by her (six of whom survived):

. . . will be able to improve his English or study other foreign languages, as well as singing in the choir or training in a gym that is better-equipped than those of many hotels. As an inmate, he will be offered a wide variety of hobbies and entertainment, including tennis, darts and art classes.

Your thoughts?

Uncommon ground on abortion

Rereading ethicist David Gushee’s USA Today essay describing the arc of Obama administration abortion policy, I don’t find a call to anti-abortion arms. Just the prelude to one.

Gushee still hopes for “a serious abortion-reduction initiative that I could wholeheartedly support.” But he foresees a deeply conflicted future:

Christian conscience requires me to make this case even if it has no chance of prevailing in American society. And if we lose on abortion, as it appears we will lose for a long time to come, Christian conscience requires me to ask the government not to require citizens to pay for procuring services that violate their sacred beliefs.

And if we lose there, as it appears we will, Christian conscience requires me to insist that religious institutions and professionals not be required as a condition of accreditation, or employment, or contact with federal dollars, to actively facilitate or perform deeds that their conscience forbids them from doing.

And if we lose there, then the entire relationship between religious faith and American society will move into a period of profound crisis.

So give me my abortion-reduction initiative Mr. President, he in effect concludes.

His powerful sense of entitlement seems to be matched on the pro-life side, as Mark Silk suggests.

Unaltered, therein lies the possibility of trench warfare, not common ground.

Holy Re-Seeing

How did we miss the Vatican’s Wednesday condom backtrack? The London Times reported:

On Tuesday he told reporters accompanying him on his trip to Africa that AIDS was a “tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”. Taken aback by outrage worldwide, the Holy See altered the Pope’s remark yesterday to read that condoms merely “risked” aggravating the problem.

This is not the first time the Vatican has put words in Pope Benedict XVI’s mouth. Backtracking followed in 2007 when the pope suggested that Mexican officials who supported legalization of abortion had been excommunicated. Reinterpretations were offered and the final transcript was altered to make it appear that the Pope’s comments were general and did not refer to a specific incident.

“Clarification” or apology following some provocation of public anger has become something of a pattern for Pope Benedict XVI, no doubt contributing to the Pope’s decline in French public opinion poll numbers.

In this case, Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, found the Papal revisionism hopeful. He said:

The pope has admitted that he is unsure whether condoms can help alleviate the spread of HIV. Where there is doubt there is freedom and Catholics can make up their own minds whether they use condoms or not. . . . We call on the pope to revisit the teaching on condoms with a view to lifting the ban at the earliest possible moment. In his review, he should include experts who are unequivocal that condoms can help prevent the spread of HIV, like UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and HIV/AIDS advocacy organizations around the world.

O’Brien also observed that the Catholic Church required “359 years to stop continuing the line taken by their predecessors on Galileo.”

U.S. Blasphemy

Death or decades-long sentences attend violations of blasphemy law in Afghanistan and other Muslim-dominated countries — penalties considerably more severe than those of surviving state laws in the U.S.

One state law is already in court. George Kalman is challenging the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania state law forbidding the use of blasphemous words in corporate names in that state.

Howard M. Friedman says:

Kalman wanted to name his production company “I Choose Hell Productions,” to reflect the philosophical theme of his movies. In 2007, articles with that name were rejected because of the blasphemy and profanity prohibition, and he ultimately refiled under the name “ICH Productions LLC”.

Similar statutes are still “on the books in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming,” reports the New York Times.

Expect more heat over this one, even though the U.S. Suprement Court in 1952 ruled that “It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine.”