The Church and the Chosen People

Bill Saletan has a fascinating account of attending a bioethics conference at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome. Plenty of higlights there if your interested in efforts to develop ethical standards in the realm of stem cell research: check it out. There he chats with Austin Ruse about the remarkably successful efforts of Opus Dei Father John McCloskey to convert prominent figures:

Robert Bork, Larry Kudlow, Bernard Nathanson, Bob Novak, and Mark Belnick, the super-lawyer who got nailed in the Tyco scandal. Hadley Arkes has all but joined the club. I do the math: five Jews and an agnostic. What did they do it for? Maybe for what Judaism can't promise: answers.

Along with being my great read for the day (runner-up, NY Times article on Philippe Roger and the longtime anti-American sentiments of the French), this is an interesting point for me. My problem with the Church lately has been precisely what these men may have found: answers. In particular, the Church's answers lately have struck me as all too easy, and even more problematic, not accurate. Combining this with the rather mechanical descriptions of the sacramental dispensation of grace, and I find it something that I simply do not believe. In the case of biotechnology I side more with the Catholic point of view, but in general find myself increasingly "Jewish" spiritual sensibilities.

Chesterton

I rediscovered an old intellectual love today, a person who I find unparalleled in cultural commentary in the 20th century. G.K. Chesterton's predictions had an uncanny habit of being accurate, and much of his pointed observations of the world around him have seemingly only become more relevant with time. He observes:

At the top of his fury, Thomas Aquinas understands, what so many defenders of orthodoxy will not understand. It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours.

This resonates with some of my thoughts and hopes for this blog, more ways to avoid the quicksand of narcissism that la Morenita rightfully fears. I hope to use this blog to more clearly lay out and develop my own principles. Second I hope to garner evidence to support these principles. These first two our for my own edification, but also to have clear thoughts worked out when at a bar I happen to begin discussing politics or religion or all the rest. (Along this line I intend to explore the idea-not much developed by our president-of compassionate conservatism, drawing on Jason Deparle's American Dream.) Third, I hope to develop arguments and pieces that do exactly what Chesterton here proscribes, using other people principles as the starting point. (Along these lines I intend to do some research and write about the hypocritical silence of feminists on selective abortion procedures in China and India.)

Far from narcissistic, I hope this all is done in a public spirit, in the attempt to engage my neighbors in the public square in an open, honest, and effective manner. In turn, I hope they engage me in that fashion.

Hello World

Computer programmers, eat your heart out.