Tasty Tidbits 8/20/11

Education, Humor, Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism 2 Minutes
  1. Banned Book hypothetical
  2. Roll over, Beethoven Winston
  3. Bullies and their victims in Spain.
  4. A rare disagreement with Fr. Pat.
  5. Police blotter.

(Limited blogging, launched by autopilot Friday evening, due to Saturday commitments.)

1

It’s Fall, so the American Library Association is having its annual handwringing about banned books. (Link surely unnecessary.) As the USA today version of the story acknowledges, books get banned because School Boards don’t want to lose public support.

And they don’t want to get sued for allowing religion in. And they don’t want to get sued for keeping religion out.

Makes me glad I’m not on a School Board.

But let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose a librarian in the Bible Belt bought the Creationist Children’s Classic We All Have the Same Grandparents n (although I just made it up) and put it next to Heather Has Two Mommies. Do you suppose ALA would be loudly lamenting its loss when the School Board said “get rid of it”?

2

If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain. If you aren’t both thoroughly disgusted yet quietly bemused by politics at 60, then you haven’t been paying attention.

3

For the record, hate is not right-handed.

The characterization as World Youth Day attenders as “Martyrs” is over the top from an Orthodox perspective (they’re barely Confessors), but let me say that it doesn’t take muy cojones, señorito, to get in the face of a nun or kids praying on their knees and spout blasphemies at them (nor to sit in Indiana and taunt Spanish bullies over the internet).

4

Father Patrick Henry Reardon finds some fault with the beloved Orthodox term Theotokos (roughly, birth-giver of God), a coinage of the 3rd Ecumenical Council, because it leave out the Mothering Mary provided God the Son after He became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and her.

For once, I disagree with Fr. Pat — I think. Theotokos was exactly the right term to refute the Nestorian heresy of dividing the natures of Christ. Fr. Pat wasn’t necessarily denying that it was the best term for that purpose, but lamenting its limited reflection of what Mary’s motherhood means.

But unless we’re in continuing danger of Nestorianism, perhaps it would behoove us to remember that the mothering didn’t end with parturition and join the Latins in “Mother of God.”

5

 

Bon appetit!

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