- Ecumenical chastity.
- Vatican steps in a steaming pile.
- Easy cases, good law.
- Timeo Danaos
I am pleased to see Rod Dreher The Washington Post reporting on a manifestation of something I’ve been intuiting for a very long time: Catholic female undergraduates are starting to room with their Muslim counterparts for the sake of living in moral sanity.
[T]his hook-up season, there is an increasing phenomenon of unlikely bedfellows opting out: Catholic and Muslim women. These women of faith are increasingly allied in searching for a different way to live out their college tenure than from dorm room to dorm room. And they are finding that despite theological differences that run deep, shared perspectives about modesty, chastity, and dignity run deeper.
At Georgetown, the Muslim Interest Living Community (MILC), originally “designed to create a strong support group for Muslims and non-Muslims who want to be steadfast in prayer and in their commitment to campus building and cooperation,” provides a haven for students seeking an escape from alcohol and hook-ups.
I would bet you a dinner at Lafayette’s finest (if we could agree on how to settle the bet) that more than a few Krustian girls have embraced Islam if only because it gave them an excuse to cover up and stop being used as punch cards for cads.
It’s a scandal that Christians actually practicing (or at least fervently trying to practice) chastity are kind of a well-kept secret without the critical mass to form their own “Living Communities.” Kudos to the Muslims who appear to have expressly opened their Living Community to like-minded non-Muslims.
There is such a thing as good news! You wouldn’t believe how this story cheers me!
The Vatican really stuck its foot in it yesterday.
It said something about financial reform – and that’s as far as I’m going, because the debate now rages in the Catholic blogosphere about who at the Vatican said it, what they said, what it meant, and just about every other aspect. Follow the 9 links, one per word in the preceding paragraph, for instance.
My schedule Monday didn’t allow me to seriously begin to process all this. I was going to make an observation, but Rod Dreher seems more or less to have beaten me to it:
Lord have mercy. What was once only in the febrile prophetic imagination of Jack Chick and Hal Lindsey is now a press release from the Vatican. A friend (who is not Evangelical) writes:
This is going to FREAK the evangelicals out. But it makes me wonder what the heck is going on in the minds of these Vaticanites! Don’t they have a clue how the world will preceive this? One world authority? ? Really?
Count me with the Evangelicals. It freaks me out too, and will freak out many Orthodox Christians. I bet it has the same effect on not a few Catholics as well. Maybe Malachi Martin wasn’t such a conspiracy freak after all…
Yes, there are many Evangelicals – perhaps a majority, at least judging from their TV exemplars – who reason backward from Antichrist being (in their view) a world religious leader to finding the spirit of Antichrist in any call for earthly authority that overarches modern nation-states (as if they were divinely ordained instead of unintelligently designed). I wouldn’t even be surprised if a few Evangelical converts to Catholicism are scandalized right out the door.
And that’s apart from prudential and political considerations.
We’re going to be hearing a lot about this for a fairly long time, I suspect.
Hard case, or the mythology thereof, made bad abortion law. Maybe some easy cases can return the law to sanity.
Can we all agree that abortion of girls because they’re girls is evil and should be forbidden?
If you can’t agree to that, read Michael Stokes Paulsen’s piece at Public Discourse and call me in the morning.
It’s probably very twisted of me, but I immediately thought of the aphorism (rooted in the Trojan Horse story) Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes when I saw this item:
A Florida lawyer has been named as a defendant in a personal injury lawsuit seeking damages over a shooting in another state by an elderly client.
Attorney David Gilmore should have anticipated that his client, Thomas Kyros, 81, posed a danger to Georgia Smith and her young adult daughter, Promethea Pythaitha, and warned local authorities after Kyros took up residence in a hotel in Bozeman, contends an amended complaint.It was filed Friday in federal court in Montana.
Kyros, a Greek immigrant who formerly lived in New Port Richey, Fla., became obsessed with Pythaitha, who was well-known in the Greek community as a child prodigy who graduated from Montana State University in 2005 at age 14 ….
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Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 