brian's blog

I'm not a Catholic, but when specific teachings of the Roman Catholic church are truly "catholic" (that is, universal to all Christians), I'm more than happy to agree with them.  Here's a great account of the journey of a woman from being pro-choice to being pro-life.  Her account of her thinking, and the way it changed, is especially enlightening.

(via First Things blog)

Interesting-sounding lady, and in Tennessee, no less!
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1100

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1098

Okay... I like these two articles, or at least most of each of them. Let's link to them and sum up their messages:

1. "We should work less and consume less."
2. "We should make more money."

Of course, that over-simplifies both of them. The most striking claim in the second one is about the tenth commandment ("don't covet your neighbor's stuff").

Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, include jealousy about livestock? Well, think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own.

We were born to write and carve
We were made to paint and sing
Forgiven, now we build and breathe
And story-tell 'bout everything

Imagine, for a moment, that al Qaeda was large enough, and well-funded enough, that they had assigned at least one terrorist to each and every American.  Imagine that their surveillance and technology were sophisticated enough that the terrorist assigned to you knew every move you made, and could, for all practical purposes, read your mind.

And imagine that that terrorist's primary goal was not to kill you, but instead to destroy you--to so soak your mind and heart in fear and anxiety as to make you doubt everything you had ever believed to be true.  His or her delight would not be in seeing your cold, dead corpse, but instead to see you corpse-walk through your life, having given up on the existence of meaning, or the possibility of hope.

I'm sure this has been better said elsewhere, and it probably repeats things I've written here before. But when a friend of mine emailed me (when I drew her attention to this article), and she said essentially that it is presumptuous of us to claim that abortion is murder, that the unborn child is really a human being, I replied to her and tried to say more clearly what I believe. I liked my response well enough to copy it here...

I believe that abortion is, without exception, the number one human rights issue of our time, period.

I want to focus. I want to narrow down the things I think about, the things I am paying (notice the verb) attention to. Such things are receiving my attention like money that I am paying to them. The question is, what am I getting in return for my "investment"? It seems as though the broader the base, the larger the group of diverse items, that I pay my attention to, the less any of them can give me back. Another way of putting it is that I can only pay a little to each one at a time; therefore they can't give me much at a time.

So last night, in the dark, I pulled out my little notebook, the one I consider "disposable," for short-term to-do lists, grocery lists, and the like, and wrote something a little more important in it. I will copy it below, for posterity's sake.

She is a person.  He is a person.  From conception.  Period.  That's where I start, and where I keep coming back to, when I try to think about abortion.  The fact that the conceived person really is a person doesn't necessarily change at all the pain that a woman may experience when she discovers that she is pregnant.  She may still face utter and unthinkable rejection from her friends and family because she has shattered their vision of her purity, or how her actions supposedly reflect on them.  Her pregnancy may create an apparent (or even real) life-and-death situation for herself, in which carrying her son or daughter to term will result in her own death.

This is a fascinating description of the movement to encourage children to spend more time outside.

Leave No Child Inside | by Richard Louv | Orion Magazine March-April 2007

Similarly, the back page of an October issue of San Francisco magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him—but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work.

The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams.