Vatican, Apr. 25, 2007 (CWNews.com) – Pope Benedict XVI (bio – news) called attention to the UN-designated "Road Safety Week" during his regular weekly audience on April 25.
At the conclusion of his audience the Pope said that a "decent sense of responsibility for one’s neighbors" should encourage careful driving and respect for the rules of the road. He said that it is particularly important for young people to absorb this message.
This was obviously in response to this incident.
First two liberals within the space of only two weeks get held accountable for what they say on air, and now Evel Knievel Baptized at Crystal Cathedral.
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With the news that Bishop John Nienstedt of New Ulm has been named coadjutor of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz gives a positive report of him and his rebuilding of his current diocese that was run amok by the previous Bishop.
I normally don’t do book reviews of fiction on my site. For one I don’t have the critical skills to write reviews of fiction. A book I just finished though deserves the exception. As a life long lover of science fiction, a genre that in some ways has shaped my life, I of course always love to find a great SF book.
Seldom though do the worlds of SF and Christianity meet and often when they do it is in a condescending manner. There are few books on the level of "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
that intersect religion and SF. Now I don’t require my SF reading to be overtly religious. I require it to be good SF, but it is always nice when you read a novel that is both great and also takes seriously the Catholicism of some of its characters.
One such novel is Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. When I first read a review of this book at the Claw of the Conciliator I was quite intrigued and so ordered it.
The novel has two storylines taking place in the present and in a small German village, Eifelheim, during the Avignon Papacy. Thrown into the mix is a group of aliens who have crashed in the Black Forest. Father Dietrich the village priest and his and the villages interaction with the aliens provides the major plot line of the book. What is so refreshing about this book is that Father Dietrich is not cast as the idiot fundamentalist that reacts negatively to the presence of the aliens. Instead he is quite positively portrayed and his interaction with the aliens is enhanced both by his faith and theology. At the same time he doesn’t make the mistake of making Father Dietrich too advanced for his time and you see the priest grapling with understanding the aliens and their technology and putting it into terms and concepts he can grasp.
The characters and the historical background are quite believable. I really got the feel of living in a village in medieval and the reaction of the village to these circumstances seems quite plausible. I only had a couple of minor quibbles with some of the theology in the book, but these are minor indeed and in no way distract from the plot. For the most part though it is obvious that the author made great pains to get things right. One part though that he got wrong was a discussion of the Holy Office. The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition was not established until 1542 in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation which is long after the year 1348 where most of the book occurs. Though in the parallel storyline in the present the characters do discuss the Inquisition and there is a discussion of the myths surrounding it. The mention of the Holy Office (which it was renamed in 1908) though is not really an important plot point in the book. At the end of the book he does discuss how some of the historical events mentioned were compressed to fit the plot of the book, so maybe he did the same with the inquisition.
Regardless though Eifelheim stands totally on both its plot, characterization, and the quality of the writing. Mark Shea called it the "best fiction read I’ve had in years." I wouldn’t go that far, but I would place it highly and place it into the category of a book that I will most likely reread. Eifelheim was originally a novella written in 1986 and had received a Hugo award and his current and his book length version of it has been nominated for Best Novel Hugo Award, 2007.
Sci Fi Weekly recently interviewed Michael Flynn about this novel and the interview is quite interesting in that his view of medieval times changed with his research.
Did your research for Eifelheim change your perspective about the Middle Ages?
Flynn: When I started writing Eifelheim, I had the real stereotyped version of what the Middle Ages was like. But the more I read about it, the more it became evident that it was not like that at all. I began to wonder if people who put gargoyles on their cathedrals would be all that frightened of aliens. They routinely imagined that there were humans who had no head but had a giant eye in their stomach, or humans who had one huge foot and hopped around, or creatures who were half human and half horse. So here’s some [aliens who look like] giant grasshoppers. Some [characters] panic and are frightened. But I wondered just how alien they would seem to people who routinely imagined alien creatures.
To this day, people take the term "medieval" to mean backward and ignorant, but it wasn’t that way. That came about because of snooty people, first in the Renaissance but mostly during the Enlightenment, actively and deliberately denigrating the era that came before them—because, having rediscovered ancient Greece and ancient Rome’s literature, they had to pretend that nothing had happened between ancient Rome and ancient Greece and themselves. And so the Middle Ages became a time of darkness.
Your protagonist, the village priest, is extremely rational and logical. Aren’t medieval clergymen, as well as the rest of the Christian world at that time, supposed to be unscientific?
Flynn: The Middle Ages was an age of reason … and yet we’ve been taught to think of it as an age of superstition. It probably glorified reason far more than the Age of Reason. The medievals invented the university, with a standard curriculum, courses of study, degrees and, of course, funny hats.
The curriculum that was taught consisted almost entirely of reason, logic and natural philosophy—or, as we’d say, science. They didn’t teach humanities, they didn’t teach the arts, they taught essentially logical reasoning and natural philosophy. If you wanted to be a doctor of theology, a churchman, you had to first go through a course in science and thinking.
This was an era where the most celebrated theologian of all time was Thomas Aquinas, who dared to apply logic and reason to the study of theology. In fact, theology is the application of logic and reason to religious questions. They must have elevated reason to a pretty high pedestal if they were willing to subject their own religion to it.
In the Middle Ages, they first learned how to apply mathematics to scientific questions. After the time of the story, Nicholas Oresme, who was mentioned briefly in passing, was able to prove the mean speed theorem in physics using principles of Euclidean geometry, which marks the first time a theory had been proven by using mathematics, as opposed to us[ing] mathematics to describe the angle of refraction or to do surveying.
The interviewer obviously had the same stereotype that Mr. Flynn use to hold. In fact the interviewer said he had to look up words he didn’t understand like "Pre dieu."
Reading the interview I realized that I had previously read a book that Michael Flynn was a coauthor of – Fallen Angels. Fallen Angels was written by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn and while it isn’t in the class of Eifelheim I found it to be a good read and quite a fun book that had a funny aside about the effects of stopping global warming. Fallen Angels is one of the one available for free by Baen Books on their site.
I wonder if Cho shirts will start to replace Che shirts? After all they were both hate the rich mass murderers.
Or do you have to be a communist mass murderer to grace the front of liberals’ t-shirts.
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Here we are in the 21st century and if you look around your parish church you might never know that you are living in the modern age of comfort and technology. Sure some churches look like they are from a science fiction show, but when you look closer the basics have changed hardly at all. Just look at your basic pew. Many churches still have your basic wooden uncomfortable pew. Some have upholstered them with padding to make them slightly more comfortable or in some cases making them less comfortable. Most Catholics have come to learn the postures of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass so that they become second nature. But sometimes because of local changes people aren’t sure if they are suppose to stand or kneel at some point. If you travel often you have to try to play follow the leader to determine what you posture is expected of you. Now you might wonder what pews, postures, and living in the 21st century have to do with each other. Well the answer is both simple and amazing that no other company has solved the problem before.
This pew chair is the ultimate in charity! You will love it. The Holy Father’s Cathedra has nothing on the La-Z-Pew. This chair will not Peter out. But you think to yourself you can’t possibly get the parish finance board to come up with the money just so that the congregation can have the ultimate in comfort. But wait till you hear about all of the features of the La-Z-Pew.
But wait there is more! At the consecration of the Eucharistic species the La-Z-Pew softly vibrates to remind you to pray attention.
The La-Z-Pew is adjustable depending on the form of liturgy being offered: maximal upright kneeling for traditionalists, and a mild squat for the Saturday 4 pm suburban Mass. For charismatics, it can boost people to a full standing position for arm-waving, and when The La-Z-Pew is also great for children. Simply strap your child in and set the control panel to "Bouncing Knee" or "Rocking back and forth" mode. Plus each La-Z-Pew has built in sound baffles to help out when all else fails. Pastors will especially love the La-Z-Pew. During financial appeals the La-Z-Pew can be set to massage mode to provide maximum receptivity towards giving. After all invoking "God loves a cheerful giver" only works so many times. The new La-Z-Celebrant is great for those elderly priest who are still helping out long past the normal retirement age. Everybody needs a little help sometime and your pastor will love the smooth lift to standing position. So ditch the old pews – out with the old and in with the La-Z-Pew! |
* Idea suggested to me by RC at Catholic Light.
Rae Stabosz has written a post on one aspect of ESCR and the cloning required that gets very little mention.
Senate Bill 5 allows for somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Most Delawareans by now are aware that SCNT creates a cloned human embryo that will be killed and stripped of its cells at the 5 th to 7th day of development (the blastocyst stage). Pro-cloning folks are content to sacrifice nascent human life in exchange for the possibility of cures for disease. But do even they understand the second reality of somatic cell nuclear transfer? Every instance of somatic cell nuclear transfer requires a human egg to be extracted from a young, fertile woman. To produce the thousands of cloned embryos needed for research, scientists will need thousands of young women to undergo the same complex, painful and risky procedure of egg extraction that IVF patients undergo.
She also goes on to explain how it is minority women that will most likely be exploited to get the multitude of eggs required. Though of course the media and liberals in general will care more about a stupid comment from a liberal talk show host then the risks of women undergoing ovarian hyperstimulation for the sake of a few bucks.
Taking advantage of women in ESCR is nothing new. Dr. Woo-Suk Hwang’s infamously fraudulent research involved pressured women working with him to donate eggs.
In a previous Crisis Magazine article they had a good article on the subject called How to Talk to Democrats About Embryonic Stem Cell Research.
In a 2005 editorial in the Boston Globe (“Risks to Women in Embryo Cloning”), Norsigian mentions the ESC controversy, noting, “Omitted from the polarized debate is any discussion of the thousands of women who will need to undergo egg extraction procedures for such embryo cloning. A primary concern is the substantial risks to women’s health posed by the extraction procedure and the inability to obtain true informed consent from egg donors given the current lack of adequate safety data.”
Getting more specific, she points out that 3 percent to 8 percent of women who take drugs to stimulate egg production—as women do when donating eggs—
develop Ovarian Hyper-Stimulation Syndrome, a condition that can be not only painful but occasionally fatal within “days after completion of egg collection.” A study published in the journal Animal Biology suggests the troubling possibility that ovarian hyper-stimulation treatments may lead to stillbirths and birth defects in future pregnancies. Additionally, the drug Lupron, which is “used to ‘shut down’ the ovaries before stimulation,” produces side effects including bone loss, liver problems, and acute pain. Finally, she discusses the philosophical issue of treating women’s eggs as commodities, a stance that objectifies women as mere producers of biological goods. “This is very much a women’s issue,” Norsigian says elsewhere; “there is a very strong pro-choice liberal contingent that believes there is something wrong with embryo cloning.”
Among that “contingent” was California’s Pro-Choice Alliance Against Proposition 71 (referring to the ESCR funding bill that eventually became law). The alliance points out that thousands of women will need to donate eggs to keep up with demand from researchers, a fact that “raises troubling questions about the exploitation of women, especially those who are young and poor.”
The feminist organization Hands Off Our Ovaries (www.handsoffourovaries.com) has as its slogan, “Because losing even one woman’s life is too high a price to pay.” They note that there have been “25 deaths and over 6,000 complaints of medical complications attributed to Ovarian Hyper-Stimulation Syndrome” and urge the FDA to investigate the possibilities of ovarian cancer, infertility, and birth defects that may also result from this procedure. Medical sociologist Diane Besson said in congressional testimony that in pursuing ever-increasing demands for human eggs, “We are being asked to make women the servants of biotechnology.” This idea should appall any Democrat concerned with women’s health issues, especially when he or she realizes that Dr. Hwang’s unsuccessful experiments into human cloning used 2,221 female egg cells (“Beyond Embryo Politics,” The Women’s Health Activist ).
Pope Benedict sports the new beard he grew overnight to go with his Camauro.
Introducing the La-Z-Pew! This amazing piece of comfort technology that solves so many problems all in one stroke.
The La-Z-Pew automatically adjusts to the correct postures throughout Mass. Shown here is the kneeling position. You will be amazed as the whole congregation as a whole all kneel at the same time. Time to stand, well you can stand our chair because it also helps you to move to a standing positing in a comfortable glide that will add no wear or tear to your joints.
Inside the arm of each La-Z-Pew is a handy pocket used to store the missal and any hymnals. Having difficulties hearing the liturgy? Simply use the embedded control panel to increase the volume in the built in speakers or use the handy mute button for an especially banal hymn.