Author

Jeffrey Miller

Page meme

by Jeffrey Miller January 25, 2008

Clayton tagged me with the Book
Meme Rules.

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people

Well the nearest book is The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd and
the sentences read.

Carthusians and a famous Hall of St.
Mary
which was filled with
tapestries emblazoned with the Virgin’s heavenly splendour.
At the time of More’s visit the city was seized by a
particularly severe fit of Mariolotry , with a Franciscan monk
preaching
the
good news that whoever recited “psalterium beatae virginis” (by which
he meant the rosary) each day could never be damned.

It is pretty interesting that out of the
whole book which I really liked that this meme zeroed in on one series
of sentences that I didn’t quite agree with. This would be
considered Mariolotry if someone strictly believed that this
devotional
practice on its own outside of Christ would lead someone to be saved.
This should be seen as a bit a hyperbole in that everyone who
is faithful to praying the Rosary as a devotional practice likely will
be saved when there is a conformity of their prayer life to their
actions.

Well at least that is a bit more
interesting than what was in the second closest book to me “Cocoa
programming for Mac OS X.”

If anybody want to joint in to this meme
in the comment box, fire away.

January 25, 2008 29 comments

Parody

PWTN’s new schedule

by Jeffrey Miller January 25, 2008June 24, 2016

written by Jeffrey Miller

Progressive Word Television Network (PWTN) which has brought you such hits as Earth Mother Joan Live and Journey from Rome now has a brand new line up of great shows.

Because of the writers strike we have decided to devote our new schedule to reality shows. We need writers for our regular shows since we write our theology as we go.

Regardless we are sure you will love our newtop of the line show Liturgical Dancing with the Stars!

Liturgical dancing with the stars

The new show pairs a number of celebrities with groups of professional liturgical dancers, who each week compete by performing the latest in liturgical dances with and without banners and other props, which are then given scores by our special panel of judges. Viewers are given a certain amount of time to place votes on their favorite liturgical dancers, either by telephone or Internet. The liturgical dancing group with the lowest combined score (judges plus viewers) is eliminated and does not go on to the next week. This process continues until there are only two or three liturgical dancing groups left, at which point one group is declared the champion.

We also have the greatest group of judges to judge liturgical dancers ever. Each week you will delight in the acerbic wit of Sister Joan D. Chittister, OSB, the Most Revd Dr Thomas Gumbleton, and the Most Reverend Donald W. Trautman, S.T.D., S.S.L. Bishop Trautman is a real down to earth guy that will never use any big words to confuse you and when it comes to judging liturgical dancers he will never quench the spirit.

We don’t want to spill the beans too much on what stars we will have this season but the following photo will give you some idea of the A-List talent we have.

Liturgical dancing with the stars

Interpreting Scripture through movement can be done by anyone who can pull on some leotards and wave their arms and body around during Mass, but you will love to see the professionals along with your favorite stars show you how it can be done. Liturgical Dancing with the Stars will kick off with a live show on Feb 28th filmed at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress which has been a great showcase for liturgical dance in the past.

Wait it gets even better. Besides your favorite stars from the state and the screen we also will have as guests some of your favorite liturgical dancers from within the Church.

Jesuit Liturgical Dancer

Such as the famous pirouetting Jesuit Father Saju George S.J.

Dominican-can

And who can forget Br. Angel Mendez, OP of the Southern Dominican Province Canadian Dominican-can dancer who will be appearing.

So make sure to set your TIVO or watch live the next best thing on PWTN with audience participation. Along with Liturgical Dancing with the Stars we have some other great reality shows that demonstrate the latest in prophetic scheduling.

You will just love our new audience participation show called “Sensus Fidelium (Sorry about the Latin)”. Each week a prophetic panel appears to discuss which direction the church should take on a hot button issue. After the panel makes their brave arguments for change on issues the audience can then vote on it via their phone or SMS text messaging. Each weeks results “Sensus Fidelium (Sorry about the Latin)” will be sent to the Papal Nuncio and the Vatican.

Or how about “Survivor: Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska” In this show progressive Catholics are isolated in Bishop Bruskewitz’s diocese and must go without internet connectivity and their subscription to National Catholic Reporter and other of their favorite magazines and newspapers. Each week tune in to see whether contestants can survive Masses celebrated totally in accordance to the GIRM and with exactly zero creative liturgical changes. In one grueling episode the contestants visit a seminary busting to the seams with seminarians who share the same knee-jerk “obedience” to the church as their Bishop does. A seminary full of young-fogeys is a difficult prospect to face. If you are a progressive Catholics who thinks they have what it takes for “Survivor: Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska” then please attend our tryouts. But it certainly is not for the faint of heart.

After such a grueling show you will be able to sit back and relax to American Catholic Idol where each week amateur contestants belt our classic songs such as “Here I Am Lord”, “Ashes”, “Shine, Jesus, Shine” and multiple other songs you have come to know and love at your local Catholic Church. A panel of songwriters from OCP and GIA will judge these performers as to capability and to how well they perform with acoustic guitars, tambourines, and any other hand-held percussion instruments. You will laugh as less than talented singers try their hand at a Marty Haugen song or thrill when a singer nails “On Eagle’s Wing.” Join is for the wild ride of emotionalism in all of your favorite modern Catholic hymns.

There is lots to love this year at Progressive Word Television Network (PWTN) so come an join us!

January 25, 2008June 24, 2016 23 comments

Pro-life

Conflict of interest

by Jeffrey Miller January 25, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

Jill Stanek reports on the
Guttmacher Institute’s most recent report indicating that by 2005
abortion had dropped 25% from its all time high of 1.6 million in 1990
to 1.2 million in 2005. Guttmacher is Planned Parenthoods
research arm and I am highly skeptical of anything that comes out of
them. I was a little surprised to see so many Catholic
bloggers use the reported decline without the hefty barrels of salt
that should be seen when coming out of them. It is in Planned
Parenthood’s best interest for there to be a reported decline in
abortion. For one it helps to try to reduce it as a hot topic
and to make it a seem that the number of abortions will decline by
itself. Another point is that they can claim that there
blanketing of contraception is working. In an election year
they certainly want to make abortion less contentious among voters so
that pro-abortion politicians can get elected and to secure Planned
Parenthoods source of income as the largest abortion provider.

I surely want a decline in the number of
abortions at a substantial rate to be true but it looks like in the
case that Jill Stanek reports on that the statistics are quite
questionable and while there has been some decrease it is not as much
as they reported. Jill had also made an astute observation
about the previously reported baby bump and the decline of some levels
of abortion. Guttmacher claims that it is
contraceptives and the lack of access to abortion clinics that is the
cause of this reduction. No surprise that they don’t see
there is more of a move to embrace life than to kill it.

What really drives me crazy about
mainstream reporting on the Guttmacher Institute is that they almost
never mention there connection to Planned Parenthood. If an
institute funded by a tobacco company released research that cigarettes
were killing less people the media would laugh at such stories because
of the massive conflict of interest. But they don’t see this
conflict of interest because of their own conflict of interest.

January 25, 2008 9 comments

Pro-life

"Denying the possibility of conversion is to deny the possibility of grace"

by Jeffrey Miller January 24, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

href=”http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/01/a_jesuits_perspective_on_abort.html”
target=”_blank”>Here is a wonderful guest opinion
on the Washington Post/Newsweek site by Dr. William Blazek, a Jesuit
scholastic and physician.

…A further note on killing the other
person: As a practicing physician licensed to care for pregnant women,
I believe that abortions kill a living human being in the earliest
stages of development. The moral question at hand is not if we are
killing; it is whether the victims have any claims as persons or not.
While the U.S. legal balance is at present skewed towards the denial of
rights for the unborn, Catholics and many Evangelical Christians argue
that both the mother and the unborn have rights. On a spiritual level,
a woman seeking an abortion should recognize that exercising her
choice will kill a vulnerable and defenseless human being. There is
no doubt about this. There is also no doubt that an action can be legal
and at the same time be wrong.

Final point, we kill the Church when, in ignorance, we hold it up to
ridicule. Last Spring, I asked several medical students in a seminar
whether they rejected Catholic teachings regarding reproduction and
artificial contraception. Several raised their hands. I prompted them
to articulate the position and to give their critique of it.
Conversation languished for some while. None in that group of
graduating physicians had an answer, yet these well-educated role
models were willing to publicly disagree with an argument they could
not explain. At a recent Christmas party, a gentlemen identifying
himself as a Catholic biologist was railing for research that would
result in the death of frozen human embryos. He justified the
exploitation, because they are just sitting there. I advised him that
the Churchs reverence for the protected status of a human person is
not based on level of activity but on an intrinsic dignity. He agreed
to consider that.

Hat tip
href=”http://somehavehats.typepad.com/some_wear_clerics/2008/01/a-jesuit-speaks.html”
target=”_blank”>Karen Hall.

January 24, 2008 6 comments

Parody

4Give Count Redux

by Jeffrey Miller January 23, 2008September 11, 2011

written by Jeffrey Miller

Brad Sutton a Point Church Pastor saw one of my previous parodies over at SperoNews and referred to in in a sermon and even created a new graphic for it that was much better than my original graphic.

You are a committed Christian and you really want to do what Jesus tells you to do, but sometimes scriptural passages are difficult to interpret.

For example Matthew 18:21-22 says:

“Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. “

Peter’s measure definitely seems off and if you take the Bible literally it is pretty difficult to determine when you reach the limit of 70×7 (490). Just how do you know if you have accidentally forgiven somebody 491 times or more? This can be embarrassing in difficult relationship and what if you mistakenly undercount and stop offering forgiveness at a number below 490?

That was a messy and difficult problem. That was until we at Roncoe products made the 4GiveCount counter available at your local Christian bookstore.

With the 4GiveCount counter you will always know where you are at when it comes to forgiveness. No more messy mistakes and uncertainty when it comes to mercy.

Simply enter the names of those people you come into contact with into your computer or PDA’s address book and download it via a USB cable into the 4GiveCount counter and your ready to start. Every time somebody does something and you forgive them all you have to do is select their name in the Forgive Person display and then click the forgiveness button located on the upper left side of our special counter. This will increment the forgiveness counter by one for the currently selected person.

Our counter can be set to one of three forgiveness modes.

* Peter – If you are like St. Peter and believe that seven is a generous limit for forgiveness then select the Peter mode.

* Literal – To follow just what Jesus said in the Bible select the literal 70×7 mode.

* Jesus – Some biblical interpreters hold that Jesus’ statement was meant to be symbolic by giving us a relatively high number. If you follow this interrelation select the Jesus Infinity mode. *

When you increment the forgiveness counter and it detects that you have forgiven them past the upper limit as determined by the selected forgiveness mode- the Mercy Overload lamp will start to flash to warn you that you need not offer forgiveness. That’s all there is to it and you will always be sure you have done your part.

But wait there is more!!! If you order your own 4GiveCount counter by midnight tonight we will throw in a blessing counter. You are always being told to count your blessings and it is just so easy in the rush of everyday life to loose track. With our reliable and durable blessing counter you will always know just how blessed you are!

* If you select the Jesus Infinity mode and you notice that no matter how many times you increment a persons forgiveness index that the Mercy Overload lamp never comes on – don’t worry this is normal operation. This accurately simulates Jesus in that no matter how high your current forgiveness index is, his Mercy Overload lamp also never lights.

4Give Counter

January 23, 2008September 11, 2011 5 comments

News

You stole my heart

by Jeffrey Miller January 23, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – The heart of
a revered 19th century Argentine friar and patriot was stolen from an
urn in the Franciscan monastery where it was kept for years as a
religious relic, a church official said.

Whoever scooped up friar Mamerto Esquiu’s heart on Tuesday left the urn
it was stored in behind, said Jorge Martinez, head of the San Francisco
monastery in the northwestern province of Catamarca.

“The theft was carried out because of the heart — nothing else was
stolen,” he told local reporters. “It’s very sad.”

Witnesses reported seeing a bearded man run from the monastery around
the time the heart went missing, but no one had been arrested, the
Catamarca daily El Ancasti said.

Tuesday’s theft marks the second time since 1990 that the friar’s heart
was mysteriously spirited away, the newspaper said.

Born in Catamarca in 1826, Esquiu entered the monastery at a young age
and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1848. He gave stirring speeches
supporting Argentine unity and its 1853 constitution, becoming a famed
religious leader and patriot.

Esquiu died in 1883. When his body was exhumed for an autopsy shortly
thereafter, church authorities said his heart showed no signs of
decomposition. It was removed and given to the monastery where he had
begun his religious studies.

Esquiu’s body is entombed at a cathedral in the neighboring province of
Cordoba.

Vatican authorities in recent years began to consider Esquiu for
possible beatification, a step toward sainthood in the Roman Catholic
Church.

January 23, 2008 1 comment

Politics

Welcome to the Monkey House

by Jeffrey Miller January 22, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

has a good article in The American Spectator
on the divide between religious coverage of reporters on candidates for
the two parties. There is an intense curiosity by reporters
regarding faith when it comes to Republicans that is totally missing in
coverage of the Democrats that will never get cries of theocracy no
matter how many church pulpits they speak from.

January 22, 2008 2 comments

Punditry

Kill humans and ration heating

by Jeffrey Miller January 21, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

In a new book of interviews with
celebrities called “Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?” there is one
by Phillip Pullman that includes:

…”This is a crisis as big as war and
you
couldn’t trade your ration book in the wartime. You were allowed three
ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what
it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should
have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you
shiver for the rest of the year.”

…”If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality
and
saw what was happening,” reckons Pullman, “they’d eat us. Eat as many
of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.”

Well it looks like Mr. Pulman has found
religion – global climate change.

January 21, 2008 4 comments

Punditry

Reform

by Jeffrey Miller January 21, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

Karen Hall at Some
Have Hats has started a
cleverly titled new blog covering Jesuits called Some
Wear Clerics. As fans of Karen know she often posts
on Jesuit subjects and has many friends and acquaintances within the
Society of Jesus. Her co-blogger Joe Garcia The purpose of
the new blog is in part.

This blog, or at least my posts
thereto,
will require something of the reader if he is to remain sane: two-fold
courage. Courage to admit there are things deeply wrong with the
current Society of Jesus and many of its members, and courage to
believe these problems, with God’s grace, will one day find relief. …

The election of the new Jesuit Father
General seems like business as usual, but as I commented over at
Karen’s blog I doubt if the reform of the Jesuits was going to be a
top-down affair anyway. More than likely it could
be bottom-up with the the infusion of younger Jesuits who are much more
inclined to be faithful to the Magisterium of the Church who will in
part help to reform it.

I do wonder if historically if there have
ever been a major reform of a large order that had become worldly
without a split. Off hand I can think of the Discalced
Carmelites and the Capuchins of examples of splits from the parent
order that resulted when the parent order was losing their charism.
Historically often these splits helped to also reform the
parent order as a result. There is often a great animosity
towards those working to reform an order as in the case of St. John of
the Cross that ended up getting locked up for almost a year until he
escaped. Fr. Groeschel who was once a
Capuchin labored for years for reform within his order before
making what he calls a very difficult decision to leave and co-found
the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.

So it will be interesting to see if reform
does occur what model it follows and I do hope that it can be one
without a split. As easy as Jesuit bashing is I would love to
see the order as a whole make the contribution to the Church they once
did instead of keeping the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
busy.

January 21, 2008 4 comments

Pro-life

March for Life coverage

by Jeffrey Miller January 21, 2008

written by Jeffrey Miller

This year their is an interesting
juxtaposition of MLK’s birthday and
tomorrows walk for life which is the great civil rights movement of
today. Though as bad as segregation was the intentional
murder of innocents is so much worse.

Margaret Cabaniss at Inside Catholic
was
shocked to see an actual sympathetic column from the Washington Post on people
involved in the
March for Life. Here is a great quote from it.

Valentine,
who is majoring in human life studies at a Catholic college in Ohio,
said that every time he and his friends persuade a young woman not to
have an abortion, they throw her a baby shower to make sure she and the
newborn start out with the necessities.

He noted that the antiabortion movement
is becoming predominantly youthful while the abortion rights movement
is aging. “This conference shows that the youth are not the future of
the pro-life movement,” he said. “We are the movement.”

Dawn Eden has a wonderful story an a Supreme Irony on someone involved
in the March for Life.

Gerald at the Cafeteria is Closed has some
good pictures of the San Francisco Walk for Life here and here.

American Papist who will be at the march
will be maintaining constant coverage of
the even.

In other news a speech by abortionist
Alberto Hodari, captured on video and posted on YouTube and the Students
for Life of America Web site includes this:

“I’m not joking. I believed because it
was new, we used to let the boyfriend or husbands come into the room
when we were doing the abortion. It was that they heard that Caesarian
section or doctors allowed husbands in the delivery room. When I came
to America, nowhere. They wouldn’t even let me go see my wife deliver a
baby and I was a doctor. ‘Now you, stay outside.’ So gradually it
became we were very modern we let the boyfriends come in and they all
passed out. And more, one sued me because he fall, he broke his tooth,
he sued me. And so what do I do now if somebody comes? The state says
‘no.’ The state doesn’t say ‘no’, but I blame the state. They don’t
bother to check with the state. My wife says we doctors have a license
to lie, and it’s true. It’s absolutely true. Sometimes you need to lie
to a patient about things they want to do or no.”

Dawn Eden reports on a Planned Parenthood’s
worker who in a blog entry mentions covering up the reporting
of child rape. Planned Parenthood is very consistent in this.

January 21, 2008 1 comment

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