Dimly Lit

I’ve begun reading “Son of Laughter” by Frederick Buechner again. It’s been several years since I read it the first time, but the power of Buechner’s writing has not lessened over the years. His ability to bring characters to life that were previously just Sunday School flannel board caricatures will continue to bring me back to his works again and again.

Just a quick list of suggested Buechner reads for anyone interested:

Son of Laughter

Godric

The Book of Bebb (Leo Bebb continues to be one of my all time favorite characters)

Brendan

There are, of course, more. I think I’ll try to make lit-blogging a regular feature.

This is one of those truly amazing stories that you don’t hear. The new mayor of Baghdad uttered those words after having received death threats. His predecessor was assassinated for his pro-Americanism.

By the way, Fadel also wants to erect a statue of George Bush in the center of Baghdad. Why? “He is the symbol of freedom.”

There are so many potential articles and storied to be linked to regarding the electon in Iraq. What an amazing display of courage and the thirst for freedom when over 70% of eligible voters showed up to vote under threat of death and violence. Yes, there were moments of tragedy. Yes, some lost their lives in pursuit of the dream of self-government. No, the problems are not all solved because of the vote. But it was a huge leap forward toward the goal of real democracy.

I was talking to someone yesterday about the amazing turnout in Iraq amidst the danger and turmoil and listened as he bemoaned the fact that here in America we have a hard time getting a 40% turnout. The only thing I could think of was to say that my hope is that 200 years from now a peaceful, democratic Iraq will have the opportunity to complain about low voter turnout.

By the way, l loved this paragraph(following citation labeling ID as unscientific):

It may or may not be, but surely the matter can be debated on scientific grounds, responded to with argument instead of invective and stigma. Note the circularity: Critics of ID have long argued that the theory was unscientific because it had not been put forward in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Now that it has, they argue that it shouldn’t have been because it’s unscientific. They banish certain ideas from certain venues as if by holy writ, and brand heretics too. In any case, the heretic here is Mr. Meyer, a fellow at Seattle’s Discovery Institute, not Mr. Sternberg, who isn’t himself an advocate of Intelligent Design.

Richard Sternberg is a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He was the managing editor of a journal published at the musem. He has 2 Ph.D.s in biology and made the cardinal mistake of allowing a peer reviewed article laying out the case for Intelligent Design to be published in the journal for which he was editor.

Lately there’s been quite a bit of discussion in the MSM and school systems around the country about whether or not Intelligent Design should be allowed to be taught alongside and as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. I’ve paid only passing attention to the debate, partially because I haven’t had time to look at it closely and partially because, as a homeschooling family we don’t need to worry about what the public school systems demand.

This idiocy about Dr. Sternberg, however, is the kind of thing that really raises my ire. It is truly amazing to hear the condemnation and anti-religous bigotry with which the Smithsonian is apparently rife. There is no toleration with any views, no matter how well researched, that call into question the holy grail of Darwinism. Remember, the article in question was peer reviewed, and apparently contained many citations to mainstream scientists at fairly renowned institutions - University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford.

I don’t pretend to know the science well enough to comment on the merits of ID at that level, but it certainly seems plain that the scientists at the Smithsonian are simply unwilling, or afraid, to truly examine the facts presented in this case. A very unscientific methodology. In fact, it seems to me that what the museum wants, indeed demands, is a quasi-religous devotion to the currently dominant faith of Darwinism.

You’d think these guys had never heard of Galileo.

Update (02/08/05)

Well, this little mess should get interesting. It seems that a couple of the folks at the Smithsonian have replied to Sternberg’s accusations stating that, well, Sternberg’s lying. The only places that I’ve seen these comments are in the comments on a blog called The Panda’s Thumb and in a letter to the editor in the WSJ (I don’t have a link).

We’ll have to wait and see what happens…

This is a section over on Touchstone Magazines site that I just discovered. The reading for Thursday, January 27 (scroll down) is very powerful and thought provoking in suggesting that in several ways Esau was the first modern man, or perhaps the prototype of modern man.

Fr. Reardon lists 4 ways in which Esau is a foreshadowing of ourselves, instant gratification, belief that man does live by bread alone, no tie to the past, and individualism resulting in a loss of personhood.

Reardon’s description of personhood here I found to be excellent and the last paragraph where he invokes Christopher Clausen’s term of “post-cultural man” is pretty profound.

The character of Esau goes far to illustrate the phenomenon of “post-cultural man,” a term coined by Christopher Clausen to describe the deeply isolated individual deprived of the wealth and wisdom of a living heritage. Emancipated from answering to the authority of the past, this post-cultural man is necessarily deprived of a fully human community in the present. He belongs only to the “now,” reduced to a spiritually meager, less-than-human cohabitation in what Robert Bellah calls a “life-style enclave.” Poor Esau, coming from nowhere, now lives nowhere and has nowhere to go.

George Will has a terrific take on the whole flap over Larry Summers. The best paragraph has to be:

Is this the fruit of feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute’s contrition?

Sure, Dr. Summers should have realized that his audience consisted of a bunch of academic liberals to whom any mention of gender differences is anathema, but Hopkin’s response is pretty overwrought.

This is a great argument for homeschooling. While it is important to learn some facts, homeschooling allows the freedom to tailor education to the student. Ideally, this will help to produce a lifetime love of learning - not just the tedium of memorizing a few facts for a test.

Grrrr…It’s painful to look eagerly for scores the day after a game and consistently see headlines like this: Late 3-pointer defeats MU. The first paragraph sums it up nicely:

The Missouri men’s basketball team slowly has descended into a sad routine - follow up a great performance with a really bad one.

Sigh…

Not much to be said about this: Examiner Finds Man Breathing in Morgue