Reading Rat - July 2010

Articles, Essays, Reviews

The Isaac E. Leibowitz Monastery Of Rare Books, by Stephen J. Gertz, BookTryst

Buy high, sell low

Brett Arends busts Ten Stock-Market Myths That Just Won't Die.

'Hypocrisy-hunting among the Victorians'

... A. S. Byatt syndrome: an operative assumption that Victorian decorum merely veiled Gothic perversion. --Jeffrey Collins

The less things change

Bishop Arthur Serratelli in an article originally published in America, March 1, 2010, and republished in Adoremus Bulletin,

It should be said at the outset that the new text of the Roman Missal represents a change in the language, but not in the ritual. There have been only a few minor adjustments to the rubrics of the Order of Mass, and most of them represent changes that were already in effect through other liturgical books (such as the Ceremonial of Bishops) that had not been incorporated into the printed text of the Missal.

That should ease the transition, since both priests following and priests ignoring current rubrics will have few adjustments to make.

Chesterton to Plato

On authors in my recommended reading:

Chesterton, almost everyone recalls, described his circumnavigation in search of something which, when finally he came upon it, he discovered to be—orthodoxy. The Pope as Theological Swinger is not what one wants. --William F. Buckley

Tolstoy preached chastity and poverty, though he had a gift for neither, as his wife pointed out. --Jay Parini

It was clear to all the delegates [at the Constitutional convention] that a definitive resolution of the slavery question—most especially any insistence that slavery be gradually phased out—would have doomed passage and ratification of the Constitution. The distasteful but nonnegotiable reality was that one could have a nation with slavery, or one could not have a nation. --Joseph J. Ellis

The Socratic method is not as ominpresent as it once was in law schools, but it is still widely used, more or less, in most law schools, by most professors, at least some of the time.
     And that's a scandal. For there is no evidence--as in "none"--that the Socratic method is an effective teaching tool. And there is much evidence that it's a recipe for total confusion. --Brian Leiter

Belief you can change in

The New York Times reported in Sunday's edition on health insurers offering plans limiting choice of providers in order to offer lower premiums.

more Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of choosing or keeping their own doctors if they are outside the new networks. That could come as a surprise to many who remember the repeated assurances from President Obama and other officials that consumers would retain a variety of health-care choices.

The Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a version of another Times story reporting

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

Saramago to Marcus

On authors in my recommended reading:

The dignity and persistence of landless peasants, like his [Jose Saramago's] own parents, were themes of several of his books, and though he called them ants, they were ants that raised their heads, that were not irreversibly downtrodden by landlord or estate owner or secret police or priests, but could still make the future if they wanted to. --The Economist

"This is what Israel is most afraid of," said Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, a prominent Palestinian who is calling for a nonviolent mass movement. He says Palestinians need to create their own version of Gandhi’s famous 1930 salt march. --Nicholas D. Kristof

he [Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence] did not say that among men's inalienable rights, which a just government should secure, the attainment of happiness. If he had said that, it would have been nonsense. ...
Now the pursuit ... he chose the word pursuit, which is a remarkable choice on his part, meaning a government should attempt to secure for every man the external conditions within its powers to control, to facilitate the pursuit by the individual of happiness. --Mortimer J. Adler

... [Amerigo] Vespucci concluded that the lands reached by Columbus in 1492 and explored by Columbus and others over the ensuing two decades were indeed a segment of the world, a new continent, unknown to Europe. Because of Vespucci's recognition of that startling revelation, he was honored with the use of his name for the newly discovered continent. --John R. Hebert (via Arts & Letters Daily)

... Augustus too was known to have written philosophical reflections, 'Exhortations to Philosophy', but that work has been lost. ... In other words, we cannot be sure that the evidence supports the view of Marcus Aurelius as a uniquely virtuous and philosophical emperor. --John Talbot

The Day the Mass Changed

Susan Benofy in Adoremus Bulletin

Critics of the new translation say that it represents a retreat from the reforms of Vatican II. But is it? A brief review of the history of the early reforms may provide some insight.

Part I and Part II

Bad language

The Economist editorializes Against fairness.

To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares.

Those two meanings are not just different: they are opposite. They represent a choice that has to be made between freedom and equality. Yet so slippery—and thus convenient to politicians—is the English language that a single word encompasses both, and in doing so loses any claim to meaning.

Nothing to see here

The Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B. website has been updated and now consists of a brief biography.

Between his 1977 appointment and 2002 retirement as Archbishop of Milwaukee, it notes only that he was

...Chairman of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' ad hoc Committee on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy which drafted the U.S. Bishops' Pastoral Letter on the Economy and ... Chairman of the NCCB Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

Blue Ridge bicycling

Snake Bit in Boone: Misadventures in Blood Sweat and Gears, by Ken Jost, Spokes, September 2008

Poles apart

Archbishop Listecki in a recent Thought for the Week post tells of his June 20th Mass at Polish Fest.

During the homily I shared with the Polish community my attempt at discovering my roots. In 1980, I journeyed to Poland. ...

A trip which included a visit to "the Shrine of the 'Black Madonna,' the queen of Poland."

I viewed men and women expressing their piety by approaching, on their knees, the icon of the Blessed Mother. I was deeply moved by this devotional practice which reflects the great fidelity that the Poles have for our Lady and their willingness to humble themselves before their queen.

Some are moved in the opposite direction by this devotional practice.

The transparency of stained glass

Near the end of Alma Guillermoprieto's review essay The Mission of Father Maciel [$] in the June 24, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, he observes,

Many priests and nuns, it would seem, opt to “obey” rules but not comply with them, as the Spanish formulation has it (obedezco, pero no cumplo). I offer this simply as anecdotal evidence, but in my casual, friendly, and often admiring acquaintance with members of the Catholic orders--all from the social activist branch of the Church, for whatever it’s worth--a remarkable number have been involved in some sort of couple relationship.

And yet, as far as I've seen, one would get the opposite impression from any order's fund-raising appeals. Mr. Guillermoprieto goes on.

I once attended a major church festivity in a small town at which several of the priests and nuns who arrived to celebrate Mass were openly, and even defiantly, there with their partners, either homosexual or heterosexual. In 1979, at the time of John Paul’s first visit to Mexico, I had a conversation with a progressive Spanish priest who lived with his partner, a middle-aged woman, about his split life. Why, I asked, didn’t he leave the Church if so many of its norms violated his own convictions and desire for honesty? I remember his saying, in effect, that the possibility of doing good within an institution as enormous and influential as the Church was greater than the chances for doing good outside it.

Completely unrelated to remaining on the payroll.

As seen on TV

For the past few weeks Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 classic 'The Road to Serfdom' has battled Swedish thrillers and vampire novellas atop Amazon’s charts. The Viennese apostle of the free market owes much of his success to Glenn Beck, a TV host on Fox News, who believes the book carries an urgent message for today’s Americans.

Essential reading: What would Hayek have made of his new cheerleader? The Economist