- Equality and Inequality.
- Meet Old Jules.
- Texas’ less endearing side.
- Cardinal Bernardin’s ghost?
- Apophatic Ecclesiology.
* Temporarily renamed in honor of the Nativity Fast, about which Mystagogy has some more information.
The promise of the piece, as introduced at The Browser, was a principled distinction between tolerable inequality and democratically intolerable inequality.
The reality was a rather conclusory list, fleshed out minimally in about the length of a typical Op-Ed:
A great diversity of objections to inequality can be raised. Three of them concern opportunity, civic status, and fairness. The United States, and all liberal democracies, need to pay attention to these concerns.
Still, I can’t disagree, and the reminder that we in the U.S. are not by any means the most socially mobile of peoples is still timely, as there’s a myth to the contrary.
Ya gotta like a 68-year-old rural Texan with a playful attitude. I get the feeling Old Jules has got a life instead of a bucket list, as in his recent birthday musing.
There’s a lot to like about Texas besides Old Jules, the rural bon vivant (in the literal sense of the French). I’ve lived there. I have family living there now.
This (along with trifles like the 244 executions Rick Perry has presided, if not gloated, over) is not one of the things to like about Texas:
The sort of offenses that might land a student in the principal’s office in other states often send kids in Texas to court with misdemeanor charges. Some schools have started rethinking the way they punish students for bad behavior after watching many of them drop out or land in prison because of tough disciplinary policies.
Deborah Fowler, legal director for Texas Appleseed, a public interest law firm, says schools “criminalized kids’ misdeeds, no matter how small. “What we are seeing now are hundreds of thousands of Class C misdemeanor tickets being issued to juveniles in Texas [who are] being processed for those tickets through what is really an adult criminal justice court system,” she says.
Any Texans out there want to tell me why this is a swell idea?
Mark Shea touts some brochures on life issues produced by the USCCB. Then the other shoe drops:
Warning to Death Penalty Enthusiasts: The American bishops do, in fact, accept the Church’s whole teaching, not only about things displeasing to damn libruls, but even about things unacceptable to American conservatives. This is not, contrary to popular conservative conspiracy theory, due to a plot by the ghost of Cardinal Bernardin to destroy the prolife movement, but is in fact part of the Catholic tendency to be catholic. Hence the bishops address the whole of human existence and do not simply confine their teaching and commentary to the theory that opposition to abortion, contraception and euthanasia (and gay “marriage”) are the only aspects of Catholic moral teaching to which we need pay any attention.
Something I read about the Radical Reformation last night sparked a thought.
Frederica Matthewes-Green wrote earlier of inviting a friend to “come and see” what Orthodoxy was all about. Afterward, her friend said “I’m not sure what it was, but it was sooooo ‘not about me'” (an allusion to the opening of Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life).
Similarly, “conservative” Protestants, from the more austere versions of Calvinism or from the “Radical Reformation,” might say upon a visit “I’m not sure what it was, but it was soooo not ‘four bare walls and a sermon.'”
* * * * *
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 