A View from the Outside
Jordon has posted a quote from Andrew Sullivan. It is interesting to note what this mega-blogger/The National Review columnist has to say about the Pope and his choice of who he will sit down and talk to. [Update: oops. Sullivan is senior editor with the New Republic.] Here's what Jordon posted:
In an appeal to the growing fundamentalism of the developing world, this is a shrewd strategy. In the global context, gays are easily expendable. But it is also a strikingly inhumane one. The current pope is obviously a deep and holy man; but that makes his hostility even more painful. He will send emissaries to terrorists, he will meet with a man who tried to assassinate him. But he has not and will not meet with openly gay Catholics. They are, to him, beneath dialogue. His message is unmistakable. Gay people are the last of the untouchables. We can exist in the church only by silence, by bearing false witness to who we are. I was once more hopeful. I saw within the church's doctrines room for a humane view of homosexuality, a genuinely Catholic approach to including all nonprocreative people - the old, the infertile, the gay - in God's church. But I can see now that the dialogue is finally shutting down. Perhaps a new pope will change things. But the odds are that hostility will get even worse.
It is always, always, always easier to sit down with "enemies" or "antagonists" from outside than with brothers and sisters who disagree with you. To sit down with the gay catholics for discussion, they would have to admit that they were within the faith and might, even remotely, have a point. To sit down with those outside the faith would show tolerance, even while not admitting they might have anything important to say.Was it a Test?
James Lileks had a seemingly throw-away paragraph in today's Bleat.
As you may have read - not in newspapers, heaven forfend - a large portion of the blogworld has been crippled by attacks on the company that hosted a pro-Israel website, and the attacks are coming from servers that host Al Qaeda groups. This makes me uneasy; there’s something else going on here, I think. It’s like hearing reports from Alaska radar stations of peculiar blips on the screen. Someone’s testing something.
I don't know whether I would go that far, but it does make sense. To choose one hosting company for a denial of service attack- and succeed- is ominous. I would agree that there is something more here than meets the intitial awareness. I hope that the powers that be in Homeland Security are doing their thing in this new cyber-terrorism.Miracles
I have discovered The World According to Chuck. I think he may be in the same league as Real Live Preacher as a storyteller. Here's a quote from Tuesday's post:
We've diluted our mysteries and miracles until they seem common. The birth of a beautiful baby or a walk-off home run are both subtly attributed to the hand of an intervening God, working wonders in a mundane, ordinary world. And maybe so; I have no inside information.
But I suspect that for every Virgin Mary manifestation, for every episode of stigmata or angels in the outfield, there are a dozen ordinary lives that change when there is no earthly reason they should, and I know about one.
A dream. A vision, a hallucination. I have no idea, and in the 25-odd years since I last heard the story the details have dimmed, but Mac saw something in his cell that night, and he said it was Jesus.
