President Obama has come out in support of gay marriage today in an interview with ABC news. Well, that’s not quite right. He actually was in support of it back in 1996 before his position then “evolved” toward opposition. Today the dissembling ended, which may be good for the president’s conscience, but what importance it should hold for the rest of us I fail to see.

President Obama, for all his accomplishments, is not a moral theologian, a religious leader, or even (whatever some have thought) a prophet. He is a politican responding, reasonably enough, to political pressures. The impatience of the well-connected and wealthy gay lobby in the Democratic party forced the president’s hand. To call his move “courageous”—or to call the gay citizens whose outsize purchasing power and political influence has propelled their cause “oppressed”—is a long stretch indeed.

The courageous stand would have been to buck the ossifying, self-complimenting elite consensus and come out strongly for marriage, but Obama, here as on most matters, very sincerely agrees with the establishment. The correct opinion is not always the courageous one, and when it comes to gay marriage the President’s view is neither.

Beneath this political circus, of course, a real moral and philosophical question lies. What is marriage? Is it merely a way of signaling our social approval of committed love between any ordering of two (or more) people? Or is it a definite institution ordered toward the rearing of children and defined by permanence, exclusivity, and sexual complementarity? I think the latter. President Obama, barring further evolutions, thinks the former.

via President Obama is Wrong on Gay Marriage » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

Read the rest.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church put its weight behind many of the key goals of the progressive movement. Fr. John A. Ryan played an important role, making the arguments that linked Catholic teaching to the then ascendant confidence that we could scientifically manage the problems of modern industrial societies.

Private charity is not enough, the earlier Ryan argued. Today’s world is complex, and the gospel rightly understood involves using the power of government when local communities and free markets fail to adequately provide for the needs of the poor and vulnerable. His arguments prevailed. In 1919 the program outlined by the bishops called for minimum wage laws, housing for workers, insurances for illness and disability, as well as support for the unemployed and elderly.

The Church was right to listen to Fr. Ryan. Modern industrialization caused vast social changes that made old modes of solidarity obsolete, or if not obsolete at least ineffective. As men migrated to the cities to work in factories, the old networks of families and small town life were not longer there to provide a social safety net. Put crudely, the weal and woe of many came to depend on wages rather than relationships. In that context the bureaucratic and legal solutions culminating in the New Deal made sense.

However, there are no lasting solutions to any fundamental political and social challenges. “The poor you shall always have with you,” Jesus teaches. And it has been so. The New Deal reached its high-water mark with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which turned out to be a domestic quagmire. As Charles Murray documented in his important book, Losing Ground, our welfare policies had the effect of subsidizing a culture of poverty.

via Paul Ryan and the Angry Catholic Left | First Things.

Not without consequence.

It’s not just the tests. No Child Left Behind has created a system of public-funded charter schools, a growing number of which are run by for-profit companies. Some of them are completely online, with kids getting their lessons at home via computer. The academic results can be abysmal, but on the plus side — definitely no classroom crowding issues.

Pearson is just one part of the picture, albeit a part about the size of Mount Rushmore. Its lobbyists include the guy who served as the top White House liaison with Congress on drafting the No Child law. It has its own nonprofit foundation that sends state education commissioners on free trips overseas to contemplate school reform.

An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show would be the taxpayer.

If all else fails, the kid could always drop out and try to get a diploma via the good old G.E.D. The General Educational Development test program used to be operated by the nonprofit American Council on Education, but last year the Council and Pearson announced that they were going into a partnership to redevelop the G.E.D. — a nationally used near-monopoly — as a profit-making enterprise.

“We’re a capitalist system, but this is worrisome,” said New York Education Commissioner King.

via A Very Pricey Pineapple – NYTimes.com.

I think of our daughter. While we value the classroom situation, we value her interaction with her siblings and parents more. In a classroom of disabled children, it is not surprising that she would make important and yet small strides. The social setting at home probably is as much a benefit to her language development as the classroom. Here’s a snippet of Pr. Petersen’s post:

Don’t get me wrong. This is evil. It breaks my heart to think of those kids enduring this. I believe that they did hurt Aiken and others even though Aiken and the others couldn’t express it. Words have power. They hurt. They should be fired, absolutely. But I can understand how they fell, how easy it would be. And in the

editted audio there were a few glimpses that indicated they were trying some. We heard some stuff about what day it is and an attempt to be excited and to communicate with difficult children.Similar incidents have been recorded in nursing homes and with coma patients.

The error, it seems to me, was to create a classroom of all autistics. I don’t know but I’d be surprised if the teacher and aide didn’t have a fair amount of training and experience. Once again, we see that education doesn’t overcome evil. But I don’t think this would have happened in a class room of Down Syndrome

children. Because Down Syndrome kids are sweet. They hug, they smile,etc. It was particularly foolish to put all autistics into one room.

The question always comes up regarding the concentration camps. Howcould this happen? How could men do this to one another? I think the answer is this: it always happens when we think we can get away with

it. The guards so no consequences to their inhumanity. They were in power and there was no threat to the power anywhere. So they fell to their baser desires, they became what we all are in our fallen hearts.

This is why we need the first use of the Law and why the Law is good for us. We need the threat of punishment and shame to keep us from acting out our baser desires. God spare us from every being students in that classroom, in a nursing home without someone looking out after us, to be prisoners, or, worst of all, to be the guards/teachers/aides who do those things.

via Gottesdienst Online: The Auschwitz Syndrome or What is to be a Man.

If you haven’t seen the video, here it is. I’m not in favor of this man’s very public approach. I wouldn’t advice defaming anyone’s character in this manner:

Beware of Christians.

Demographic Winter – the decline of the human family (Full Movie) – YouTube.

On another forum a topic about vitalized congregations was posted.  I am not sure what vitalized was supposed to mean.  I took it to mean healthy, vigorous, active… anyway, this is what I posted — the dream I have had for the parishes I have and continue to serve and for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod…

• a Lutheranism that folks can be rightly proud of…
• one which is confident in the Scriptures and their message of Christ crucified…
• one which is sacramentally vibrant with the Divine Service as the regular Sunday gathering, with baptism regularly a part of that Divine Service, with private confession encouraged as gift and blessing, and with an appreciation for the Word that is efficacious — doing what it says…
• one which welcomes the stranger in a healthy atmosphere of dignified but not rigid formality…
• one which both expects and encourages full participation in the worship and study life of the parish so that the baptismal life of witness, mercy, prayer, and service may be fully lived outside the building…
• one which is interested and invested in mission beyond the shores and down the block (by mission I mean one that names Jesus and spreads the Gospel by word)…
• one which knows and addresses the poor and those in need or threatened (whether the name of Jesus is mentioned or not — food pantry, feeding the hungry meals, caring for children, etc.)…
• one that sees life as lifelong catechesis and which provides regular opportunity to grow in what it means to be a LUTHERAN Christian (read that catechisms and Confessions)… and
• one that lives in partnership with others congregations yoked through circuit and district and does not go it alone…

So mark me a dreamer… but this is what I hope and pray for… here in Clarksville, Tennessee, and throughout our nation where Lutheran Christians gather around the means of grace so they may gather others into the flock through the living voice of the Gospel witnessed in word and deed…  Dream big… or not at all.

via Pastoral Meanderings: A healthy, vital church…..

In his fine recent biography of Constantine, Paul Stephenson explains the growth of Christianity as a result of “sex, health, and arithmetic.”  The sex part has partly to do with abortion and infanticide, but more deeply with the basic family structure of ancient Rome: “If the population of the Roman Empire was sixty million at the time of Constantine’s birth, only around twenty-four million of these were women.  Given that boys are more problematic in the womb, more sickly and more inclined to die at a young age in military activity or by violence, this figure is quite remarkable and can be explained only by the fact that baby girls were frequently murdered.”

He goes on: “It was rare for all but the wealthiest families to raise more than one daughter, however many were born . . .

“and infanticide was the surest way to dispose of unwanted girls. It was legal, philosophically justified and widely practiced.  An infamous letter sent by a man to his pregnant wife in 1 BC instructs her: ‘if it’s a boy keep it, if it’s a girl throw it away.’ . . . far fewer girls than boys were allowed to grow to maturity, that is to child-bearing age, and consequently the general rate of reproduction in the late Roman world was kept artificially low.”

Abortion was widely practiced too, even though the procedure was dangerous and gruesome.  The reason, Stephenson says, “was men. “Roman husbands and fathers had complete control over their wives’ and daughters’ fates, and could order that abortion be carried out as surely as they could order the exposure of a healthy baby girl.”

via Peter J. Leithart » Blog Archive » The original feminism and the rise of Christianity.

There is nothing new under the sun.

All the Photos and Hi-Res too!

Marking and spot and measuring…

Digging!

Cheerleaders!

It’s working!

Ethan and I had some fun frying fish last week. For more photos, click through to the Flickr photo album. Sorry no close-ups of the fry action!

The Worlds First Inflatable Pub!

A bit of humor for the day. The seminary could use this for our weekly gemütlichkeit. No, there are better ways to support the seminary like food donations, clothing, appliances, furniture, or cash. Even so, a real, honest to goodness pub would be a good time!