Reunion anecdotes

I mentioned in my previous post that I've been pulled into a portion of the planning activities for my high school class's 40th reunion.  Because it is a Catholic high school, they've decided to have a class mass, to take place at the banquet hall before the hors d'oeuvres appear and the bar opens.  A few of the committee members knew I was a deacon and asked me if I'd like to be a deacon for that mass.  I said I'd be happy to; but a few judicious inquiries on my part revealed that they probably needed help with music for the mass more than they needed a deacon.  So  I said I'd help with that.  I drove over to Rockford last night and we had a rehearsal, after which a group of us went to dinner.  A few reunion-related notes from that experience:

Reunions

This weekend is my 40th high school reunion.  A few reflections on reunions:

Continuing Brexit Drama

Vox News has a good summary of the Brexit crisis ahead of the October 31 deadline:

The Affordable Housing Crisis

The New Republic isn't a publication that I read very often, but recently this article, The New American Homeless, appeared on my Facebook feed. It was a sad and uncomfortable look at how families get caught on the downward spiral to homelessness.  The story of this family's journey took place in Atlanta, GA, but it could and does happen in many cities and smaller towns across the nation.

Incarnation instead of Atonement

Over the years, I often came to question what I had always been taught as a RC christian.  Usually this was the result of a lot of pondering on my own, followed by research. I became very uncomfortable with atonement theology about 20 years ago. So I began researching the subject, and discovered the different theories, including Duns Scotus - who made the most sense to me. Might also make some sense to the millions of young christians who are leaving traditional christianity behind.

Richard Rohr comments about this in one of his daily emails (slightly shortened)

Back to the Future

 This week the Business Roundtable, an exclusive club of the top people at the 181 biggest corporations, made news by announcing that there is more to business that making stockholders rich.
  Since 1978, the Roundtable has periodically issued a commentary on the role of corporations. Since 1997, the press release says, these statements have prioritized the stockholders.
 The new statement brings back the "stakeholders." The stakeholders include customers (who deserve value for their money),  employees (compensation, benefits, even help with education) suppliers (ethical deals) and the communities where the corporations do business.

1619 not 1776?

Yes, we all know that slavery was a large part of our country's history but how much?  By now, you all probably know that the NYT is launching a series of articles based on the premise that slavery was foundational to our country to the point that 1619,  the first importation of 20 slaves was the real beginning of what we call the USA, not 1776.  "Conservatives" such as Newt Gingrich are apoplectic about someone even presenting such a hypothesis. 
Several years ago, a hypothesis was presented regarding climate change.  It was proposed that perhaps variations in galactic cosmic rays caused variations in cloud nucleation and cloud cover which affected earth's temperature.  The reaction of the climate change "establishment" wasn't "how dare you propose such heresy?"  It was more like "Interesting, someone should pursue that".  It was subsequently found, after study, not to be significant but it wasn't dismissed outright from the beginning.
Similarly, I'm looking forward to reading the "1619" articles.  The biggie for me is how much slavery motivated the Revolution.  Was it because England was moving toward abolition that the colonies sought independence?  Were only the southern colonies so motivated?  The northern states made a lot of money from it in transportation of slaves and textiles from slave-picked cotton.  Anyway, even if I eventually don't completely agree, I'm sure to learn something.

Parsing the Eucharist

What people believe (or don't believe) about the Eucharist has been in the news lately. The trigger was a Pew survey indicating that only about a third of Americans who identify as Catholic believe in the Real Presence.  Which in turn has triggered much angst and wringing of hands over the state of catechesis.

A shooting. A killing. Justice?

A teen is dead.  Murder charges have been filed.  I'm not certain it's just.

Happy Feast Day

I always liked this song. It even follows the Gospel reading for today,

Voting for a practitioner of instrumentalized racism

May a Catholic vote for a racist?

Are they racists? Or difference-ists?

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf puts a new spin on the Left's insistence that racism infuses the Right.

Is that smell burning flesh?

 A clown tweeted an out-of-thin-air suggestion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were behind the death of  Jeffrey Epstein. The President of the Unites States retweeted it here and also here.
  In short, the President of he United States has accused leading members of the opposition party of murder. From The New York Times:
 

 Hours after Mr. Epstein was found to have hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell, Mr. Trump retweeted a post from the comedian Terrence Williams linking the Clintons to the death. Mr. Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead,” wrote Mr. Williams, a Trump supporter. In an accompanying two-minute video, Mr. Williams noted that “for some odd reason, people that have information on the Clintons end up dead.”

 There is no evidence to substantiate the claim, which derives from groundless speculation on the far right, dating to Mr. Clinton’s early days as president, that multiple deaths can be traced to the Clintons and explained by their supposed efforts to cover up wrongdoing.

 This is not funny. This is also beyond traditional Trump. I know: He told the Boy Scouts "man to man" to get rich so they could get laid, and hardly anyone got excited. So far, this retweet seems to be getting the" ho-hum, there he goes again" reaction all the rest of it does. But this is different.
 He is talking the way Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela was talking about his rival, Juan Guaido, when Vice President Pence, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and the whole State Department went stark, raving bananas and threatened war. Historically, talk like this leads to action, and action leads to loss of life and liberty. It isn't enough to say Kim Jung Trump is "like that." He has never been this much "like that," and others who are like that have caused pain and suffering to their own people and others.
 Trump just dodged a bullet himself, since if Epstein had gone to trial he would have been asked every day if a presidential pardon was on offer.  (My gosh! The neighbors we have down here!)  And he, unlike Clinton, used to give Epstein rave character reviews.
 The proverbial frog never noticed the heat being turned up under the pot, and that is why he became frog legs.

More Orphans with Living Parents UPDATE

"Based on these procedures, it is believed that all children were with at least one of their parents as of last night."
 "These procedures" are letting 300 (out of 680) people SUSPECTED  of being in the country illegally go home from detention to look for their children.  Our Homeland Security play-soldiers, in the passive voice, "believe" maybe children (many of whom would be American citizens) were reunited with their parents in less than 24 hours. But many were not.
 We are talking about the big roundup in Mississippi. Much is still not known. Like whether the employers will pay a cost-of-doing-business fine for running with an illegal workforce. They hardly ever have suffered more than that in the past.
 "It is believed." Yes, like the thousand or so children detained at the border whose parents the Border Patrol lost. (Maybe a different agency lost them; accountability is a slippery thing in Homeland Security) .
 Mississippi social service agencies weren't warned of the round-up in advance. When you are playing soldiers, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement does, you don't tip your hand to the enemy. After the fact, schools (which seem to be in session) were contacted. Again, tell nobody nothing; to tell would reduce the swagger content of your human round-up. Yee-haw!
 How's that flag pin in your lapel doing these days?

 UPDATE:   "We are a law enforcement agency, not a social services agency," an ICE official told NBS News. 
 That is supposed to "explain" why social service agencies and schools didn't get a heads-up and why ICE doesn't really know for sure that every kid wound up with a parent eventually.  Are Catholics allowed to work for outfits like that?

When Scripture is the Opposite of Consoling

I am used to finding inspiration and consolation from Scripture, particularly the Mass readings.  Except when they come up with readings such as we had for this morning.  Here  is the link from the USCCB site. To say that all three readings hit a sour note is an understatement. They aren't an example of the Scriptures "afflicting the comfortable" but of God seeming not to be God.

Pronunciation

We upper Midwesterners - or at least I - consider the words "bury", "berry", and "Barry" to be homonyms.  In an online discussion group a few years ago, a New Yorker, or it may have been the resident of a Mid-Atlantic state, or perhaps a New Englander (sorry, I don't remember exactly where she was from, except that it was east of the Appalachians and north of Chesapeake Bay) expressed amazement; she pronounces each one differently.

I was on a business call this morning in which a participant, reaching for a metaphor, referred to the price of Gala apples (and, as at least one person on the call had never heard of Gala apples I should clarify that Gala apples are a variety or cultivar of apples, just like Delicious or Macintosh).   She pronounced "gala" in such a way that the first syllable sounded like the first syllable in "golly".  I replied, pronouncing it the way that I think it's pronounced, with the first syllable sounding like "gay".  A third person chipped in, pronouncing "Gala" in such a way that the first syllable rhymed with "pal".  I guess regional variations are legit, and there is no one way to pronounce anything (although I concede the possibility that I'm just flat-out wrong, and no other literate being says "gay-la").

I also speak with many people from outside the US in my work.  This morning, a colleague in India, in referring to a person whose name is Merrill, pronounced it in such a way that it sounded to me as though he was referring to "Metal" or perhaps "Medil".  As I didn't know a Mr. Metal or Mr. Medil, I asked him to spell it, and another American had to interject an explanation.  I felt awkward, and feared that my Indian colleague had lost face.  My Indian colleagues are astonishingly multilingual, as there are something like 200 languages spoken in India, and they are justly proud of their ability to communicate with many people in many languages.

No profound point to this, except that speaking and hearing are more complicated than we think, and as the world shrinks, we need to be willing to stretch ourselves.

Tax dollars at work

I've written in the past about the annoyances of owning landlines and their tendency to be called by telemarketers who interrupt my work day.  Mostly because of inertia, and despite what I threatened last year, we still haven't canceled our landline.  Telemarketers still call from time to time, almost always spoofing another number.  Recently they've been spoofing local numbers in the community.

The bishops on the shootings

The horror felt by the American bishops grew palpably with each successive mass shooting over the last few days.

Shootings

I have a lot to share regarding the mass shootings from the past week.  It's going to take me some time to pull it together.  So until then, here is a Catholic thought for the day: the right to life takes priority over 2nd Amendment rights.

We conservatives are known to enunciate the principle, "The right to life is the foundational human right, upon which all other human and civil rights depend."  Usually, we articulate that tenet, which I accept as true, in discussions about abortion.  But it applies to all other life issues as well - including the right not to be shot by a mass shooter.

Lindsey at Napa

Conservative faith and politics amid the Zin and cigar fumes.

Cat Fights and Pit Bull Drama

I got up this morning to a cat fight. Perpetrated by real cats, not politicians. (I'll get to the debate in a minute).
I didn't actually watch the debate last night.  We watched an episode of the French tv series, Origines, which I recommend.  It has English subtitles.
So this morning I caught up on what the pundits said about the debate.