Author Archives: wjduquette

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About wjduquette

Author, software engineer, and Lay Dominican.

Questions and Answers, by Pope Benedict XVI

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This slim is a collection of questions asked of the Pope during various public meetings, along with the Pope’s off-the-cuff answers. The questioners range from small children just making their First Communion to youths preparing for World Youth Day to diocesan priests (by far the largest group). The answers are to the point, suited to the audience, and (as always with this Pope) loving, well-stated, gentle, and insightful. My favorite moment involves a priest who, as a seminarian, was gently chided by his spiritual director for loving football (soccer) more than Eucharistic Adoration. The Pope’s answer to the priest’s question includes the following:

I would therefore be against having to choose between either playing football or studying Sacred Scripture…. Let us do both these things!

He goes on to say,

…we cannot always live in exalted meditation; perhaps a saint on the last step of his earthly pilgrimage could reach this point, but we normally live with our feet on the ground and our eyes turned toward heaven. Both these things are given to us by the Lord and therefore loving human things, loving the beauties of this earth, is not only very human but also very Christian and truly Catholic.

Recommended.

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

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Now, I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan. I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett since his second Discworld book, back in the early 1980’s. I have bunches of his books in hardcover. I’ve read most of them aloud to Jane. I like Terry Pratchett’s stuff.

And yet, until just this week I had never read Good Omens…well, not really. I got a copy of it in hardcover when it first came out, and began reading it to Jane, and shortly got to a scene where Hastur and Ligur, two important demons, begin a conversation with another demon by praising Satan. And I said to Jane, “I can’t read this aloud!” So we stopped. And somehow I never picked the book up again, and eventually I got rid of it. (D’oh!)

But I keep hearing from other readers I trust (notably Julie at Happy Catholic) about how fun the book is, so the other day I got a copy. And I’m afraid I was underwhelmed.

This undoubtedly says more about me than it does about the book. At the lines of prose level it was funny, and there were lots of bits I had to read aloud to Jane. The problem is the subject matter: the authors are dealing with real supernatural material, stuff that matters, and getting it wrong. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files? Set in the real world, but clearly imaginary. The Discworld? Heck, the Discworld is so imaginary that it’s held together only by vast quantities of magic. But Good Omens, alas, it edges a little too close to home. I kept finding myself saying, “But it isn’t like that.”

Earth to Will: Pratchett and Gaiman were trying to be funny. The book isn’t meant to be taken completely seriously. Yeah, I know. The problem is, the book has a point. And the point is tied into a theology that’s completely screwy. And theologically-unsophisticated readers (which is nearly everyone) are all too liable to read it and agree with P&G’s point and walk away thinking they’ve learned something, when all they’ve really done is to reject an absurd strawman. This bugs me. (You might think I exaggerate, but I remember being 15, when Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy threw me into a atheistic tail spin. Granted, I was kind of looking for reasons not to believe at that point.)

But your mileage may vary; I’m just explaining why I’m having trouble giving the book an even break. Oh, well.

Ecto vs. MarsEdit

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I’m trying some new blogging software, a package called MarsEdit. For a long time now I’ve been moving back and forth between the built-in WordPress interface and a Mac app called Ecto. I like Ecto; it gives me a WYSIWYG view of the post, and lets me edit and save a local copy of the post. But it’s buggy. The WYSIWYG editor has some annoying quirks; and every once in a while the app simply shuts down, usually when I’ve asked it to post a draft to the weblog. If I had previously saved a local copy of the post, that’s only annoying; but usually I discover that I had neglected to do so.

Since the most important thing I want from using a standalone blog client is reliability (keeping all of my drafts on the server scares me), this means that Ecto is, for all its nice features, less useful than the WordPress web interface. So yesterday I went looking for other possibilities, and the only one that really looked like it might do is the aforementioned MarsEdit.

On the face of it, MarsEdit is very similar to Ecto, but lacks a few features. It doesn’t have WYSIWYG editing; you edit in HTML. On the other hand, that also means it doesn’t have Ecto’s weird editing quirks, and I’m pretty comfortable with HTML. Also, it doesn’t have Ecto’s “Amazon” tool, which makes it really easy to create nice links to book pages on Amazon’s web site, a feature I only started using a week or so ago. It does have a reasonably nice “Preview” feature, though; and it has nice HTML editing, with syntax-highlighting and customizable key commands; and so far it’s been rock solid.

I’ve already paid for Ecto; and the latest Beta (though still buggy and quirker) is much nicer than the previous version I’d been using. MarsEdit is more expensive (about $30). I’m going to continue to use it through the 30-day trial period, and then we’ll see.

The Life of Saint Dominic, by Augusta Theodosia Drane

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This life of St. Dominic was first published in 1857 in England; apparently it remains one of the best lives of St. Dominic in the English language, though it has its blind spots. In 1857, it was understood by everyone that the Rosary was given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, and promulgated widely by him; more recent research has shown that the first mention of the Rosary in any text follows Dominic’s death by quite a long time, and that the origin of the Rosary is correspondingly more recent. There are likely other similar errors. But I gather that there aren’t that many biographies of Dominic in English; and one of the reasons, which is hinted at in the book, is that Protestant England has generally looked on Dominic without fondness.

Protestant England, as everyone knows, was frequently at war with Catholic Spain. The Elizabethans were skilled propagandists, and one of their favorite topics was the Spanish Inquisition, which consequently everyone expected. I wouldn’t want to whitewash the Inquisition, but a lot of what we English speakers think we know about it goes back to British propaganda. Now, as everyone knows, St. Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy; and in fact the Inquisition was founded to combat the Albigensian heresy, and many of the early inquisitors were Dominicans. Dominic, in fact had nothing to do with the founding of the Inquistion (and it wasn’t the Spanish Inquisition in any event), and though there were excesses in the crusade against the Albigensians, so far as I can tell the inquisitors weren’t responsible for them. But be that as it may; Dominic was Catholic, and Spanish, and was around when the Inquisition was founded, and so, three centuries and more later, England used him as a symbol of everything she hated. Drane says remarkably little about all this, under the circumstances, but she takes some slight pains to clear the good names of St. Dominic and his early followers.

I found the book both interesting and frustrating. We are told quite a bit about the saintliness of Dominic’s life, and about his travels, and about various miracles that took place in his vicinity, all of which are interesting and about which I am glad to be informed. But Dominic founded the Order of Preachers, and I was really hoping to know just what he preached about, and how he preached it. Alas, his sermons generally weren’t preserved. Part of being a saint is the possession of the virtues in heroic measure, and that includes humility; where we know a lot about a saint’s life from the saint’s own hand, it’s generally because the saint was ordered to write about themselves by some superior. So Dominic wasn’t inclined to preserve his own words in writing, and apparently nobody else was either, alas, whether out of deference to him or out of a sort of corporate humility.

So. I enjoyed reading it; and I was left wanting much, much more.

This and That

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As I’ve got a few unexpected minutes to hand, I’m going to post some of the links I’ve been enjoying.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event. Michael Cleverly has (page 42 of) the story.

The Practicing Catholic has some good words on the virtue of obedience. My favorite, from St. Francis de Sales: “The Devil doesn’t fear austerity but holy obedience.”

Apparently we can’t we be having any of that “abstinence” stuff—even when it’s been shown to be effective.

It’s all a matter of perspective. My congratulations to both the artist and the photographer.

St. Paul found to be Catholic. Who knew?

If I watched more movies, I’d want one of these.

It’s the “No S” diet. Sounds like it might just work.

Book Tasting

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Fellow-Tcl’er and bookstore investigator Michael Cleverly has started a new blog, Wisdom from the 42nd Page. He plans to “taste-test” three books a day, giving a slight bit of info about each, and showing the entire 42nd page. He writes about his motivations at his old blog. The schedule sounds a little ambitious, but it’s a neat idea.

The Future of Anglican Orthodoxy

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Although I’m pretty much just a spectator at this point, this is still good to see. The participants in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), a meeting of orthodox Anglicans from around the world that was held in Jerusalem this past week, have released a statement that amounts to a declaration of independence from those elements of traditional Anglicanism that refuse to uphold the orthodox faith.

Of course, what do they mean by “the orthodox faith”? The statement answers that as well. Here’s the meat of it from my point of view:

2. We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.

3. We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

4. We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

It’s that part I bolded that concerns me. As an Anglican I was more-or-less an Anglo-catholic, while the Thirty-Nine Articles are an essentially Protestant and Calvinist statement of faith. Accompanying the Oxford Movement and the rise of Anglo-catholicism was a de-emphasizing of the Thirty-Nine Articles as normative. Consequently, this statement has the affect of putting the Anglo-catholic genie back in its bottle.

I have mixed emotions about all of this. On the one hand, the tolerance of doctrinal variance that allowed the members of the Oxford Movement to move in a strongly Catholic direction within the Anglican tradition also allowed the rise of the current leadership of the Episcopal Church. Consequently, I’m glad to see the GAFCON primates take a firm line on the content of the faith. On the other hand, if I were still Anglican I’d be having to look for the door, as I simply cannot accept a number of the Thirty-nine Articles—and if I were to remain Anglican despite that I’d be contributing to the very doctrinal wishy-washiness that I abhor.

I suspect that those remaining orthodox Anglo-catholics are going to be doing some hard thinking right about now.

What Would Thomas Blog?

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Phil at Brandywine Books suggests that St. Thomas might have blogged the Compendium Theologiae himself, had blogging been invented in his day. To which I respond:

It would seem that, if St. Thomas Aquinas were alive today he would be a blogger. On the contrary, St. Thomas could not possibly have written so many great works of philosophy and theology had he spent his time at the keyboard. I answer that St. Thomas would have had a collection of bloggers with laptops close to hand at all times, to whom he would have dictated blog posts in round-robin fashion, in between dictating paragraphs of the Summa Contra Gentiles and the like.

More Blogging Aquinas

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I’ve got posts up at the Blogging Aquinas blog on the first two chapters of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Shorter Summa. Surely there’s someone who can drop by and help me relieve my ignorance? I’m actually going to try to post something there every day, as I work through the book; we’ll see how it goes.