There was a movie on TV tonight: “Their Eyes were Watching God”. Halle Berry is in it and Oprah Winfrey produced it. The description of the movie in the newspaper was a young Florida woman’s quest for self-fulfillment in the 1920’s. The digital TV guide described it as the odyssey of a free spirit through stormy romances. After I noticed this show in the program guide, I search for information about the book and the writer online, and checked a couple reviews of the movie online. I watched the first half of the show before tuning out.
Category: Zombies
Clumsy Bishops
The Canadian Catholic Bishops have been trying to get Catholics involved in motivating Members of Parliament to oppose Bill C-38, which deals with same-sex marriage. Last Sunday at the 8:00 AM Sunday Mass St. Ignatius, instead of delivering a homily, Father Monty presented the Archbishop of Winnipeg’s Pastoral letter (available here in pdf format). Yesterday, I read in a newspaper that Fred Henry, the Bishop of Calgary, suggested on a Toronto Radio show that the Prime Minister of Canada, who is a Catholic, should be excommunicated for supporting Bill C-38.
Same-sex Marriage
The Canadian Parliament has been debating a Bill relating to same-sex marriage. Bill C-38 says: “Marriage, for civil purposes, is the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others.” This would replace or alter the legal definition of marriage, which had been established by judicial precedent in 1866 as “the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others.” People of the same sex will be considered to have the legal capacity to make a marriage contract, and if married, to divorce and divide their property in accordance with provincial marital property laws, and to claim other legal benefits and rights accruing to the married state.
Letters to a Young Catholic
I noticed “Letters to a Young Catholic” by George Weigel in the library, read it, liked it, and posted a review at Blogcritics back in December. I decided to rewrite the review and put it up on my own site too.
Addiction 105
Addictions therapists and theorists, like addicts, have their stories. It has become fashionable to identify drug use as a (reasonable?) psychological response to the unhappiness and ugliness of life, and addiction as a long term response to emotional pain.
On Bullshit
In Michael Lynch’s book about Truth, which I mentioned back here, he mentions Harry Frankfurt’s paper “On Bullshit”. It has just been printed as a very short book. The paper was available on line here and elsewhere, but Frankfurt’s publisher – the Princeton University Press – has been asserting copyright. [Updated March 16/05; it was available when I wrote this post but taken down]. Frankfurt is going to be on The Daily Show. Blog news about that at Crooked Timber.
It’s a short paper – it would come to about 25 pages of a larger font, generously spaced, and it’s a nice piece of writing. It discusses truth and bullshit in ordinary talk, advertising, and politics. Bullshit is what we hear from people who don’t care about the truth. Liars care about the truth – they say things they know aren’t true. Bullshitters don’t care about the truth. It’s not that they are careless about their story – their presentation may be elaborate, beautiful, and even true in some measure. But the bullshitter isn’t trying to tell the truth. The bullshitter is a story-teller. Bullshitters believe in themselves, sincerely. They want you to listen to them and like them, and they want you to believe them. The problem is that their stories aren’t reliable.
It’s a nice piece of work, which has inspired a lot of thought.
[Update/addendum. In 2022, after the Donald Trump presidency had acquainted people with the term “fake news” as a synonym for bullshit, I read the article The Varieties of Bullshit by Peter Ludlow (who has published online under the name E.J. Spode).
Addiction 104
Addicts and the people around them have different versions of the story of the addict’s life and role of drugs or compulsive behaviours in the addict’s life.
Parish Mission
Last week I went to a parish mission for the first time in my life. A mission is a short series of homilies or lectures offered over a few days to sharpen religious knowledge and spirituality. It is almost always presented by a guest preacher, and it is common to hold the mission during Lent. This year the mission at St. Ignatius was presented by Father Andrew Britz, a Benedictine who spent about 20 years as the editor of the Prairie Messenger weekly newspaper. He spoke over three nights, February 14-16.
Truth in Religion
I picked out Truth in Religion, The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth by Mortimer J. Adler (see previous post)- as I was browsing at the library. It was a quick and worthwhile piece of reading.
Addiction 103
My last entry in this series was about the idea of recovery, and I mentioned AA and 12 step programs. This time I want to talk about treatment. Addicts may take a long time to decide they need help, and when they do, reliable help may be hard to find.