The Beginning of the End

For opponents of gay marriage. The significance of today's ruling by the California Federal Appeals Court that Prop 8 was unconstitutional is not only that it is what supporters of gay marriage like me hoped for, but more importantly that it was decided by a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan and argued jointly on behalf of the plaintiffs by noted conservative and liberal attorneys. This puts a lie to Family Research Council president Tony Perkins who said after the ruling that "far Left" was "using liberal courts to obtain a political goal they cannot obtain at the ballot box." What liberal court would that be?

This case will likely make its way to the Supreme Court, and everybody knows the current Court leans far right, but it is difficult to imagine the swing votes on this court siding with social conservatives. Getting the constitutionality of gay marriage into the federal courts is the best thing that could have happened. It is very much reminiscent of past courts striking down discriminatory laws in the civil rights era.

Religious communities will continue to be able to choose to not marry gays and lesbians, which is their wrong choice but protected right. But eventually they will no longer be able to legislate their view of morality on the rest of us. I am very much looking forward to the day when I can officially officiate at gay weddings.

Ban the Burqa?

Claire Berlinski has a thoughtful post in the National Review online about the evolution of her thinking on the veiling of women. She lives in and reports from Turkey. This was her thinking when she moved:

One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women.

...The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.

This is her thinking now:

There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe... Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran.

...The debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.

...Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from the concept of namus — an ethical category that is often translated as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is not nearly so meandering as you might think.

It could be that I am stretching here, but I couldn't help but read this and think of the Church of the Brethren tradition of women having their heads covered. It is mostly gone but still practiced in some parts of the Brethren world. The argument for it, of course, is that it is scriptural. But the deeper question is how much is this scriptural argument in its context and in its present day practice is tied up with a patriarchal view of women that sees them as either inferior or dangerous?

I am sympathetic to the women who argue from whatever religious tradition that veiling is an act of liberation or personal religious choice. The problem is that there are often men who are a part of these traditions who see it as a woman's appropriate duty to God and religion. And they too often have the power in families and religious communities. Our free choices are rarely as free as we think they are.

Speaking of Moral Examples

I have intentionally been out of the 24 hour news and blogosphere cycle for awhile. As I dip my toes back in one of the first stories I read concerns Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official who was forced out of office after a Washington Times columnist and Fox News regular passed on a snippet of an old speech she gave that had her talking about not wanting to help a white farmer because of his race. Sherrod is black.

Apparently without even checking the facts of the story the Obama Administration dropped her like a hot potato. But if you actually watch the extended clip of her speech you see that she was telling the story of how she had to overcome her learned prejudices and learn to treat all people equally. She is telling a great story about her growth as a moral person.

Shirley Sherrod is exactly the kind of person we need working in government. It is embarrassing anyone in the Administration took seriously something from Fox News and disgraceful that she was let go. Hopefully Obama will quickly make amends.

On Being a Good Example

Yesterday I started reading Philip Gulley's If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus. In his opening chapter he tells the story of being a young person in church hearing a preacher say "Some people will tell you Jesus is only an example for how we should live. But anyone can be an example."

Thirty years later Gulley says he knows better than ever that this isn't true. Living the kind of virtuous life that makes one a worthy example for others to follow is very difficult. To say that it somehow diminishes the story of Jesus if he is 'only' a moral example is to ignore the simple fact that we rarely encounter individuals who so embody the qualities associated with Godly virtue. In our lifetimes we are fortunate if we come under the influence of a few who come close.

If Jesus was one of these rare individuals - and I suspect he was - it is not hard to understand why he would have attracted both followers and enemies. Authentic individuals who actually live by the highest values attract company. We want to be in their presence. We want to learn from them. We want to be like them.

They also attract enemies because they have authentic power, not supernatural power or power obtained through violence, wealth or stealth, but the kind of power that comes naturally from becoming during their life-times a brighter and clearer light, the kind of light that stands in sharp contrast to and exposes the corruption and dishonesty and violence that so often are the tools of those who are in power.

It has been my experience that taking Jesus off the Only Son of God pedestal and making him fully human actually makes it much for difficult to be a follower. What we are being called to do as followers is not to believe in him but to live as he lived. Imagine what the world would be like if Christians simply lived more simply, or forswore the use of violence of any kind. The world as we know it today would truly be turned upside down. We would say the kingdom of God has come on earth.

Am I asking too much? The world is fallen and we need the grace of God to save us? Then we are looking for the easy way out - or up. Making Jesus into our ticket to heaven is cheap grace. Letting him be an uncommonly virtuous son of God who challenges the rest of us sons and daughters of God by word and example to live as he lived calls us to a lifetime of growth and transformation.

Oh, that Jesus would 'just' be an example that we spent our lifetimes emulating.

Fish Story

We have a children's story in worship every week and thankfully I have nothing to do with scheduling it and we have many people willing to take a turn on the schedule. But last week when the children came forward for a story no adult stood up so I took an impromptu turn.

What to talk about? Well I told a story from my fly-fishing experience the previous week. I asked the children if they ever fish or like to fish. Then I told them that I like to fish and I usually make it a practice to 'catch and release' the fish I catch, and I explained what that meant.

Then I related that during the past week I had caught a fish that did not survive as I brought it into my net. I talked about being sad about the fish dying. I then told them that I kept the fish, brought it home, and ate it for dinner.

I asked them if they liked to eat fish or burgers or chicken. I asked them if they knew that the meat they ate was once a living animal. I talked some about how important it is for us to know that we live in a web of life where some animals give their lives so that other animals can live. I finished up by talk about my feelings of reverence for life and explained what that word meant to me.

Did they get it? I had one parent relate to me that their child had not a clue what I was talking about apart from fishing. I had another parent tell me that they thought I was making a commercial for PETA. Ha. I had another parent tell me that just the previous week their child had said to them after watching a tv show that had chickens running around that the child had said "chicken, we eat chicken" which had prompted an interesting conversation and gratitude from the parent that I had picked up the subject while it was fresh on the child's mind.

I have vivid childhood memories of working on relatives farms and learning first hand that the animals I enjoyed (cows) or feared (pigs) would soon be on the dinner table. I have the same kind of childhood memories from fishing and hunting. I learned about the cycle of life; I learned about reverence as I watched animals die so that I could eat.

I also have vivid memories of taking my suburban raised daughter to a farm when she was a youngster and her breaking into tears as she protested that "my milk does not come from a cow it comes from the store." Living in an urban area there can be a certain disconnect between the food we eat and the real life and work that brings us that food.

I think we have a responsibility in our religious communities to somehow make that connection. Whether it is our food or our consumer lifestyle or our energy consumption: some animal or some plant or some person is giving their life so we can live. I think about that every time I go fishing.

The Tragic Nature of Human Life for the Earth

Andrew Sullivan links to gruesome video and sobering statistics on the number of birds killed by wind farms:

The American Bird Conservancy estimated in 2003 that between 10,000 and 40,000 birds were killed each year at wind farms across the country, about 80 percent of which were songbirds and 10 percent birds of prey. "With the increased capacity over the last seven years, we now estimate that 100,000 – 300,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year," said Conservancy spokesman Robert Johns. By our math, that comes to 274 to 822 birds a day killed by wind farms across the country.

For some reason this Henry James saying came to mind:

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths--the depths of an essential dearth in which its subjects roots are plunged...The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

I don't know how it is possible to ponder what it means to be human for the rest of life on the planet and not have a sense of tragedy. We are fouling the Gulf of Mexico with our oil and this is only the most immediate and visible cost of our addiction to oil. We are doing the same thing to our mountains and streams with coal mining.

We are told we need to move to more earth-friendly forms of energy: like wind. Wind farms are sprouting up all around the country. And killing staggering numbers of birds.

There is no escaping the conclusion that even when we are acting at our best, which isn't very often, we are exacting a terrible toll on the planet. And there really isn't much we can do about it except to strive to keep our environmental footprint to a minimum, protect and preserve as much of nature as we can, and grieve for the birds and fish who die so we can live.

How Diverse Can a Church Be?

James McGrath asks this question on his blog: how diverse can a church be? I think there are couple of ways of thinking about an answer. One is that it depends a lot on the emotional health an intelligence of the people in leadership at the church. Emotionally healthy people have clearly self-defined values and boundaries and are not threatened by people who have different beliefs. If the leadership is healthy they can model healthy dialogue and conflict and the congregation can tolerate, perhaps even welcome, a certain amount of diversity. On the other hand if the leadership isn't emotionally healthy then they will probably be threatened by diversity and seek to enforce adherence to a more narrow theology or doctrinal position. (And this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative theology; it is true across the spectrum. Emotionally healthy leadership seems to attract more diversity of thought and opinion around whatever the spiritual orientation is.)

Another way to think about it is what I learned from evangelical church planters whose training I attended nearly 20 years ago. At the time there was no training available for liberal church planters, at least not that I was aware of. The one teaching that was driven home over and over was that the group of people planting the church must all agree on essential matters of theology and doctrine. Therefore, I was taught, it was very important to hammer out a set of core values that clearly define where you stand on how you read scripture, understand Jesus, think about culture-war issues like homosexuality, etc. The leadership needs to agree on these issues and then when the church gets underway new members also need to be in essential agreement. It is better to say to someone "You know there is another church down the road that might better meet your needs" rather than be so desperate for new people that you welcome those who have fundamental disagreements about core issues. I heard these trainers say that there would be more than enough diversity to deal with even among those who are in agreement on core values.

For the most part we followed this advise as we started Open Circle. I knew starting the church that there were certain issues that were important to me that I no longer wanted to have to be fighting about in a congregation: gays would be welcome, I would not be interpreting scripture in a literal way, and Christianity was not the only valid spiritual path. I was clear about these issues as I talked to potential members and those who stayed were in agreement on these issues. When we had enough of a core group we worked out a set of core values and then we clearly published these in all of our literature. We still do.

In some ways our congregation is not very diverse. We are mostly white, theologically and politically liberal. In other ways we are quite diverse. We have a lot diversity in religious background: Catholic, many flavors of Protestant, pagan, atheist, Jewish. We have a growing diversity in age. We started out with mostly boomer individuals and families; now we run the gamut from young families to seniors, singles, cohabitating and married couple with and without children, gay and straight. We have city dwellers, suburbanites and folks coming from small towns and the country, some driving 30 miles to get to church.

I have found it to be true that even with clearly defined core values there is plenty of diversity that presents continuing opportunities for dialogue and challenges for the congregation as we chart our way forward. We have constant conversations around the issues like these: what does it mean to be a Christian or a follower of Jesus today; how do we relate to our denomination, The Church of the Brethren; how do we best deploy our people resources to serve church and community? We have some strong differences of opinion in the congregation about these issues.

I wish we were more racially diverse than we are and interestingly enough, we were more racially diverse when we started than we are now 17 years later. I am not sure why that is but I would guess that part of it has to do with the fact that I do not have great cross-cultural skills and it is not one of the passions that drives me as a pastor, like say being welcoming to glbt folk does.

It is interesting to note that my answer to this question doesn't even touch on some of the issues found in this response.

Two Words for Harry Reid

Everything I read this morning seems to suggest that Nevada Senator Harry Reid was the big winner in last night's Republican party primary as the looniest candidate, Sharron Angle, won. I have two words of warning for Reid: Michelle Bachmann.

An Inadequate Response to Trouble and Disaster

I am with Bob Herbert on the joblessness crisis and the lack of adequate response from Obama and Congress:

Policy makers have acted as if they are unaware of the magnitude of this crisis. They have behaved as though somehow, through some economic magic perhaps, or the power of prayer, this ocean of joblessness will just disappear. That’s a pipe dream.

Even if we somehow experienced a sudden, extraordinary surge in job growth (which no one is expecting), it would take a very long time just to get back to the level of employment that we had when the recession started in late-2007.

...For all the money that has been spent so far, the Obama administration and Congress have not made the kinds of investments that would put large numbers of Americans back to work and lead to robust economic growth. What is needed are the same things that have been needed all along: a vast program of infrastructure repair and renewal; an enormous national investment in clean energy aimed at transforming the way we develop and use energy in this country; and a transformation of the public schools to guarantee every child a first-rate education in a first-rate facility.

This would be a staggeringly expensive and difficult undertaking and would entail a great deal of shared sacrifice. (It would also require an end to our insane waste of resources on mindless and endless warfare.) The benefits over the long term would be enormous.

Bold and effective leadership would have put us on this road to a sustainable future. Instead, we’re approaching a dead end.

The problem is that even though there is lots of anger on the street that anger is mostly misdirected, i.e. the Tea Party, or misinformed like those who are blaming Obama for not being angry enough about the gulf oil spill. But for all the throw the bums out anger on the street the politicians in Washington don't feel that anger every day; what they feel every day is touch of money that streams into their campaign coffers from the big players in finance and business who have everyday access to Washington politicians. These people are not personally hurting. What is a little unemployment to them? What they worry about and pay for access to talk about is regulations and tax breaks and the threat of inflation that is out there somewhere if we don't tame the deficit. So we get a tepid response to the real and festering unemployment crisis. And despite an epic disaster in the gulf it is still drill-baby-drill, put off only briefly until the cameras go away from the gulf.

There is only one person who has the bully pulpit and who could make the case for a real jobs bill and a real energy policy. I am still hopeful but also increasingly worried that another crisis (or two) is going to be wasted.

The Un-Empty Nest

Meagan moved back home last night from St. Peter as she ends a job in Mankato and begins a new job next week in Bloomington. Fiance Michael and monster dog Kato are residing at Michael's parents' home in Burnsville. Suddenly a bedroom is cluttered, we are buying milk again and there is already a whirlwind of activity in and out.

She voiced her unhappiness about this situation last night and it is hard not to share it. However, she is very fortunate in this economy to have found a decent paying job and her mother and I are hopeful that she will be able to save some money leading up to next summer's wedding. Then we can go back to being the empty-nesters we have grown accustomed to being.

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up

Was Jesus a cynic-like sage or an apocalyptic prophet? Crossan or Allison? Maybe he was both. Adam Gopnik offers this analogy in an article in The New Yorker What Did Jesus Do?:

And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)

The whole article is a good read.

Oxymoron Watch

Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary E. Landry on how cooperative BP has been in responding to the oil spill:

BP, from Day 1, has attempted to be very responsive and be a very responsible spiller.

It appears that this is could be an epic environmental disaster for the gulf coast. The only silver lining is that it should kill the Obama plan to open up new coastlines for drilling.

Atheist Delusions

I have been reading David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. Hart is taking on the so-called New Atheists who argue that Christian history is marked by its violence, ignorance, and opposition to science. I am only about half-way in but I find Hart making some good points.

One is that the Christian way of life was a marked upgrade from the pagan way of life that preceded it. He makes basically the same point here that Rodney Stark makes when Stark talks about how the Christians and pagans responded so differently when the Roman empire was visited by the plagues. The pagans fled for the hills, including the pagan doctors. The Christians stayed and took care of the sick. The result was that many of the pagans who survived converted to Christianity. It was a better way of living.

Why did the Christians stay and take care of the sick? Because at the heart of the Christian story there is a suffering God. On the surface it sounds like a terrible marketing strategy: my God gets hung on a cross, suffers and dies; how great can he be? It is a stumbling block. But in practice it leads to care for the suffering because this is where God is present. So widows are cared for, orphans are cared for, sick people are cared for. Christians are to stop supporting the games where humans suffer and die for sport. Christianity treats humans with more dignity; human consciousness evolves thanks to Christianity.

Christian culture brings us not only hospitals and better care for the suffering but a flourishing of the arts: literature, music, painting and sculpture. Creativity is encouraged; beauty is valued. And so the argument goes. The end of the pagan era was not the end of a golden era replaced by a thousand years of night until the enlightenment once again lit the mind on fire. The Christian era was in many ways a huge step up for humanity.

Another point, on Christian opposition to science, Hart essentially asks this question: in what culture did Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to name just a few history-making scientists, make their history? Christian culture. Where did they do their work? In universities created and funded by Christian institutions. Where they had remarkable freedom to study and write as they pleased. Hart talks at some length about Galileo's silencing at the hands of Pope Urban VIII over the issue Galileo's support of Copernicus' heliocentric theory. Hart repeats an argument I have read before that Galileo's problem was not in holding a view of the earth's place in the universe that the church found threatening. His problem was that he was a pompous ass who needlessly offended his erstwhile friend and patron the Pope. Even then his punishment was very mild. The pope and the church were not anti-science.

Hart acknowledges the reality of violence at the hands of Christians against Jews, witches, and Muslims, and he discusses the causes and consequences of the "dark ages" in western Christianity after the fall of the Roman empire. He notes, though, that Christian culture thrived in the East, and that this was gifted to the Muslims in their conquests and expansions. He traces the movement of ancient literature and learning back to the West during the Crusades. And that is as far as I have gotten.

One thing I will say for Hart and I am not sure this is a complement, he can match Dawkins and Hitchens snark for snark. The cultured despisers have no monopoly on the ability to hurl witty epithets at opponents.

Although I haven't finished the book my hunch is that Hart is worried about our future as we move into a post-Christian world that is losing its grounding in Christianity's great idea that charity and self-less love is the heart of God and the heart of a better way of living. I don't know the answer to that. Are we falling backward or are we evolving into a better future? I would say there is no way of knowing.

I wonder, though, if it is possible to be a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian and keep hope alive. The theology of Christianity doesn't work so well for me anymore, at least if that theology includes some kind of belief in a supernatural world, but the incarnational side that has God becoming human (in us all) and more particularly God being present in suffering and our calling to respond to that with love and service, that works for me. It is enough for me but is it enough for Christianity and for our culture?

I wonder to what hope there is when so many Christians identify their Christianity with militarism and capitalism. Christianity was once a better idea. It might still be but how would we know when you can't tell Christians apart from anyone else?

Ross sisters - Solid Potato Salad

A friend sent along a copy of this YouTube clip of the Ross sisters performing in 1944. at first I was surprised by the scanty costumes, although even the belly button is covered. Then I was amused at the subject of the music, although they more than do justice to potato salad. And then about one minute in I was pretty much blown away. You don't see this on American Idol.

Capitalism Works When...

It is heavily regulated. E.J. Dionne gets it right:

It is, indeed, naive to expect Wall Street to act as charitably as the Salvation Army, and you have to respect Fabulous Fab's brutal candor about this. Which brings us back to socialism.

Marx's predictions about the inevitable collapse of capitalism have been wrong so far because the system has worked reasonably well, thanks to the rules and redistributive programs established after the Great Depression.

The lesson is that the surest way to save capitalism is to regulate it in the public interest. The surest way to create socialists is for everyone to experience the economic consequences of counting only on the goodness in the hearts of Mr. Potter and Fabrice Tourre.

It was the unwinding of the post-Depression financial regulations, which allowed the free hand of the market to run loose, that brought us the worst recession since the Great Depression. There is a classic lesson here about human nature and it always amazes me that conservatives who supposedly believe in the lessons of human nature don't believe they apply in the economic arena. Or they don't care.

Capitalism only works well when it is heavily regulated by the government.

On the Nest

My Mallard is on the now on the nest pretty much 24/7. I saw her last evening under one of the bird feeders for a few minutes eating then she was back on the nest. She is well protected by the wood pile and the straw that she has piled up around her. I can't get a picture of her except like this one, using a mirror to view out the window - which is above my head - of the back garage door.

The Work of the Devil

Two Washington Post articles on the Catholic Church and the clergy abuse scandal include details of the devil's work. The first is about a planned Latin Mass in DC at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The event organizers, the Paulus Institute, invited a former Vatican official to lead the mass. However the selection of Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos of Colombia has outraged victims' rights group because the Cardinal once praised a French bishop for not telling police about a priest who had sexually assaulted children. Paul King, president of the Paulus Institute knows what is going on here:

At first, King said, divine providence seemed to shine on their efforts. Scheduling conflicts at the Basilica -- the largest Catholic church in North America -- had made it impossible to hold the event in 2008 and 2009. So it was with care that organizers picked April 24, 2010, for their Mass. Weeks later, they realized it coincided with the fifth anniversary of Benedict's papal inauguration.

"It seemed like even the date was selected by God. It was like God himself was blessing our Mass," King said.

Now, he says, a more sinister force seems to be at work. "We've perceived things that are obviously the work of the devil," he noted darkly. "The disruption of this Mass by protesters, for example, is not something we invited."

The second article notes that Thomas Paprocki, an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Chicago, who was announced Tuesday as the church's ninth bishop of Springfield, IL, said three years ago that the principal force behind the waves of abuse lawsuits was "none other than the devil."

What century are we living in?

Who to Support for MN Governor

For those living in MN Dave Mindeman has a great post today on the merits and problems with the DFL candidates. Dave is doing some of the best political blogging in the state.

Spring Clean Up

Spring has come early to Minnesota; warm weather in March has us running about two weeks ahead of schedule. I have been slowly making my way around our gardens cleaning up last year's perennials, removing straw from around the more than 50 shrub roses we have planted and trimming back the dead branches.

There is one area just off the brick patio out back that I haven't touched yet.

What you are looking at here is my winter wood pile that I keep on the patio for outdoor fires. Immediately to the right of it is a small bed that has our only two hybrid roses as well as an herb garden of perennial lavender, thyme, and lemon balm. In Minnesota hybrid tea roses need to be buried completely underground using the Minnesota Tip Method. I usually bury these two but we were back and forth to PA in the late fall as Mary Ann's father declined and I didn't get it done. I piled some straw around them and then we were blessed with heavy snow. I piled it high on the roses and was pleasantly surprised to find them alive this spring.

In any case I usually clean up this area first since it is right off the deck and patio, but not this year. Here is why:



One of our resident Mallards has chosen this spot to lay her eggs. It's kind of amazing to me that she doesn't seem to spend time on them during the day but she comes in every evening and spends the night. Every year Mallards lay eggs somewhere on our property or on a neighbors. They never make it; crows or foxes or skunks get the eggs. We will see if these fare any better this year.

Rowling on Going From Poor To Rich and Paying Taxes

J.K. Rowling has a great piece in the TimesOnline about her indebtedness to the British welfare state and why now that she is rich she doesn't support the party of the rich or simply move out of country to avoid paying taxes:

But wait, some will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?

No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.

Now, I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

That's a great quote for tax day.