Catholicism and Homosexuality

Eric Brown, one of my fellow writers at The American Catholic, has a well thought-out and deeply moving article up about the experience of being a faithful Catholic of homosexual orientation.

Pop Culture Watch: Roadkill Edition

The holidays -- that neutrally named period leading up to the solemnity of the birth of Our Lord during which it is a requirement of consumer culture that we all rush about terribly fast seeking the best deals on the planet on items destined for others and ourselves -- are approaching, and as my duties this year involve running the "holiday core team" tasked with making sure that all the consumer electronics sales for Nameless Large Corporate Employer go off well from Nov. 26th through Jan 2nd, things have been rather franetic at work of late.

In all this I am reminded of a scene in a movie -- some sort of slacker comedy I saw years ago whose title escapes me -- in which a character brings himself to tears going on a rant about the poor, innocent, starving coyote who is endlessly tortured by a cruel, sadistic road runner.

Perhaps one of our readers who has retained more pop culture cred than I will recall what movie I'm thinking of. Regardless, I think I have been won over. The young ones have been watching the Looney Toons Golden Collection Vol. 3 via netflix, and having watched the Road Runner repeatedly break laws of reality which only adhere in the world of the cartoon when they serve to injure the coyote, and listening to his insufferable "Beep, beep", I think I'm ready to say: The Road Runner is a punk.

More to the point, he is a force of chaos. I'm in Wile E's camp. The bird needs to be lunch. He's exactly the sort of creature who would suddenly decide to revise all his pricing after it's already been sent to the site team for execution.

High Comedy: Changing Table Edition

Dorian knows why babies crack themselves up on the changing table. Here's her three-month-old's running monologue, a level of hilarity that our slightly less cognizant two-month-old is working up to:

You guys!

Hi! Hi there! Hello! Hi!

So...

The changing table!

The ceiling fan!

The ceiling fan, right? Am I right? Too funny! It's a ceiling fan!

My sister! With the song! About me!

Midnight! No - really! Midnight!

Are those my feet? Are those my FEET? Those are my feet!

Daddy!

Is that the kitty? Is that the KITTY? It's the kitty!

My brother! With the dancing! In my face! Pushing my swing!

But, seriously.

No, I'm playing. The changing table! The CHANGING TABLE!

Thanks - thank you. You've been a wonderful audience.

Presenting: The Church

As I mentioned, I'm giving a lecture in our Adult Catechesis series on "The Church". Well, for them that's interested, here's my PowerPoint presentation, though I don't know how much sense it will make given that it's mostly a visual for me to talk over.

Still I've tried to make the visuals good.



The presentation itself is here:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgjj8n7q_13g8tsnf6m

[It looks like on some slides the text goes off the bottom in the GoogleDocs version -- and my Greek text on one slide got lost. But hey, what can a fellow do?]

The outline that I'll be speaking from is here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgjj8n7q_78fwh8f8d4

Four Brothers, Two Sides

If you didn't already see this yesterday, this CNN piece about four brothers and their experiences in World War II is highly worth reading. All of them grew up in the US as part of a large Japanese-American family, but several years before the war the father and younger children moved back to Japan. The oldest two brothers fought for the US in the Pacific theater, and the youngest two were drafted into the Japanese military. They re-united after the way, and one of the younger brothers later went on to fight for the US in Korea.

We'll See How This Works Out

After spending an hour window shopping (well, browser window) bridesmaids dresses, MrsDarwin has resolved to get in shape for her sister's wedding. She is now off do so some aerobic cookie making. At 10pm.

Floating in from the kitchen, "Oatmeal chocolate chip. Oatmeal is healthier."

UPDATE from MrsDarwin:
Here's what I have to compete with: my 18-year-old sister. I might as well just eat the whole batch of cookies now.

Speaking Hot and Cold on Climate Change

The weekend WSJ included a pair of articles discussing what president-elect Barack Obama should do about global warming. I sensed, and enjoyed, a little bit of editorial commentary in the authors selected:

British novelist Ian McEwan spins an airy confection of emotion and earnestness in his plea that Obama immediately work to shut down the carbon economy -- while making the seemingly contradictory claim that this would actually make people lots of money pioneering new technology if they would only forget their attachment to past energy sources. (As with so many climate change activists, he turns a blind eye to the nuclear power which is the real source of Europe's lesser reliance on coal and oil and instead touts the advantages of solar power.)

Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School pens a much more prosaic piece, looking at the costs behind proposed solutions, the humanitarian dangers of ignoring pressing problems like global hunger to pursue potential future ones such as global warming, and the ineffectiveness of Kyoto-style approaches to "solving" global warming.

One hopes that Lomborg's pragmatic approach will win out over the sentimental prose of McEwan, but in a world where presidents heal planets, one never knows.