Friday, January 25

Also check out National Review Online's new blog-like feature called The Corner. Various writers and editors from NRO post thoughts and links throughout the day. Here's Dreher's brief reflection on the mail he's getting in response to his work on the Boston case.
Telling like it is, but not in the Catholic press. Of course. Rod Dreher comes out swinging, again, about the Boston situation.
A look at what passes for scholarship these days from the Wall Street Journal. Old news, really, but still amusing. The writer takes us through a slew of meaningless academic abstracts, filled with nothing but jargon and specious "ideas." He blames the situation on academic fads, as well as the pressure to publish in academia. He's part of the way there. It starts in graduate school, where the pressure is on, even at the Master's level in the humanities, to do something "original." This results in innumerable theses, and then dissertations shooting in one of two "original" directions (or maybe both):

1) a focus on finer and finer points of minutiae related to matters like the use of conjunctions in Jane Austen and the role of the table leg in Normandy from 1514-1527. Or:

2)The application of obscure and nonsensical theoretical paradigms to the matter at hand...Seeing John Chrysostem through the prism of Derrida, examining the Second Crusade in a Marxian framework, or stringing together disparate characters like Cicero, Clara Barton and Ethel Rosenburg in one fabulous flight of fanciful pseudo-intellectualism.

But you know, you don't even need a real academic journal to get the point. Just go to the Postmodern Generator and watch a unique, totally meaningless, jargon-filled essay appear on your screen with just the click of a mouse!

Today's report from Boston: Diocese will report abusive ex-priests.

Cardinal Bernard F. Law yesterday announced that the Archdiocese of Boston will give state officials a list of names of every former priest who sexually abused a minor, reversing his previous opposition to retroactive reporting of clergy misconduct

He's also going to convene a big commission:

The cardinal also said yesterday that he has enlisted the deans of the medical schools of Boston University, Harvard, Tufts, and the University of Massachusetts, as well as the dean of Boston College's social work school and a prominent Harvard psychiatrist, to make up a panel to advise him on establishing what Law called ''an interdisciplinary center for the prevention of sexual abuse of children.''

Good news, but it still doesn't address the important problem of....how do you break the code of mutual protection that exists among those involved in ministry?

Funny, but true:

-- A POLL of 400 registered voters by Andres McKenna Research asked Americans what they thought would be the most significant obstacle to continuing the war on terror. The largest obstacle, cited by 27 percent of respondents, was the terrorists themselves. But right behind them, at 26 percent, was the news media.


From a column in the Jewish World Review.

Good piece on cloning from the National Review.
What's going on:

Baby's had some bad bedtimes this week. Three or four hours of pretty good sleeping followed by two or three hours of half-waking, just wants to nurse, followed by a couple of hours of dead-to-the-world unconsciousness, which unfortunately usually correlates with the time I have to get up. I think his top teeth might be bothering him. It's all bothering me, but only intermittantly. Why? Welll, I'm 41 years old, and I have the grace of hindsight. Lots of it. In other words, I have a 19-year old who lives a couple of states away whom I see just a few times a year now. I know how quickly life passes, and that before I know it, this little one will be off and running on his own. I'll treasure what I have now, thanks, no matter how much it wears me out!