It’s Alive!

Jeremy Kessler describes why the Frankenstein story lives on:

Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein at a time when science, the modern representative of reason, was moving toward world-making and away from its traditional world-representing role. The more powerful applied reason became, the more creative became the rationalists’ work. Dr. Frankenstein marks the moment when the work of reason threatened itself with success. 

Branding The Children

It's best to start young:

[C]ompanies seeking an edge over their rivals should ensure that children are exposed to their brands as early in life as possible. That's according to Andrew Ellis and colleagues, whose new research shows that the classic "age-of-acquisition" effect in psychology applies to brand names as much as it does to everyday words.

How The Blind See

Mary Bates explains:

In essence, when blind people hear the actions of others, they use the same network of cortical brain areas that sighted people use when they observe such actions. This fits into what we already know about how some regions of the brain are recruited for different uses by blind people. For example, congenitally blind individuals rely on areas in the visual cortex to acquire information about an object’s shape and movement through other senses like touch and hearing. As Ricciardi, Pietrini and colleagues point out, the recruitment of visual brain areas for nonvisual recognition in congenitally blind individuals indicates that neither visual experience nor visual imagery is required to form an abstract representation of objects.

On Remaining Catholic, Ctd

Hand

Dreher follows up on his former post and wants to know why gay Catholics remain in the church:

I could be wrong, but I very much doubt Andrew Sullivan ever has to hear a word spoken against homosexuality at his parish in Washington, DC. If he did, it's not hard to find parishes that don't hassle him about it, and to live one's life as an openly gay Catholic without having any kind of in-your-face conflict. In most ways dealing with the church's hard teachings (hard for our culture to take, I mean), most American Catholic parishes are functionally AWOL. It's Moralistic Therapeutic Deism all the way down.

Rod is right that most priests do not want to use the Mass a means to directly hurt or abuse or berate gay parishioners. And he's right that rhetorical fulminations against gay people are very rare in my experience in the Catholic church. But he's wrong that many of us who stay try to make an issue of it in the services we attend or even harangue fellow Catholics. I sure don't. I wore an ACT-UP t-shirt to communion once, but that was the limit of my daring. I am not a gay Catholic at Mass. I am a Catholic. The issue of eros is trivial in the face of consecration, prayer and meditation.

I write about it because I feel a need to bear witness as a gay Christian in a painful time, but mainly because I want to argue for a civil change in civil society. But it is in no ways central to my faith. It is peripheral to the Gospels, is unmentioned in the mass, and I try to focus on the liturgy and prayer and to take in as much of the sermon as is safe for my intellectual composure. And this is not strange or, I suspect, rare for gay and non-gay Catholics alike.

We all have aspects of ourselves that the church considers inadequate or wrong. They come as a package. In my own accounting of my sins, sex does not feature much at all. Sometimes I seek a space in St Francis' chapel, a saint I have long loved. And I try to listen to God, and pray the Lord's prayer and meditate for a while to center myself before or after mass. I go much less frequently than I used to, which is the main expression of my alienation, I suppose. In the summers I barely go at all. For me the dunes are the sacraments and the water and air the incense, and the reeds the vestments, and the tides a remembrance of the change that persists.  I grew up in a rural woodland and always associated it with religion and the presence of God.

So my faith life is less formal than before, less regimented, as I try to find ways of bring it more fully alive. I write these things in case people might think that the life of a gay Catholic is somehow tortured and deeply conflicted. it is conflicted, but from those conflicts can come a deeper appreciation of the truth we seek and the charity we try (and fail) to live up to.

But it also true that absence from the sacrament of communion is for me an unbearable thing after too long. Perhaps this answers something unanswerable and helps explain how many of us actually do try to live faith rather than merely assert it.

Last Meals

Slate marks the death of the DC Sniper by studying final food requests of prisoners about to be executed:

The last meals of death row inmates are often quite memorable. Karla Faye Tucker requested a fruit plate but didn't eat it. John Wayne Gacy asked for shrimp, fried chicken, French fries, and a pound of strawberries. Timothy McVeigh ate two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Instead of a last meal, Tennessee convict Philip Workman requested that pizza be distributed to the homeless in Nashville. (Prison officials denied his request, but local groups passed out pizza in his honor.) Before his execution in 2000, convicted rapist and murderer Odell Barnes requested a last meal of "Justice, Equality, World Peace." In 1992, Arkansas convict Ricky Ray Rector, who had brain damage from shooting himself in the head after killing a police officer, ate a final meal of steak, fried chicken, and cherry Kool-Aid, but famously said he wanted to save his pecan pie for later.

On Remaining Catholic, Ctd

A reader writes:

This week I reread the Garry Wills book: Why I Am A Catholic.  Wills writes intelligently and candidly about his own disagreements with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.  As he explains, the church is not only the hierarchy. The Church – the mystical body of Christ – is all of the people and the priests and the hierarchy. To leave the church, he says, would be to abandon those who have been nothing but good to him simply because he objects to positions held by a few in the hierarchy. And of the hierarchy he says:

We do not leave a father whenever he proves wrong on something. That is when he needs us ….

The true lover of a country does not leave it in its time of peril. The patriot is not one who thinks a country must be perfect in order to deserve his allegiance. Patriots are often critics of their country, since they feel so deeply that it is worth protections.

It is for similar reasons that I remain in the

Catholic church.

If one truly believes that the church is all of the people, then to leave is rather like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.  To leave would be to abandon those who have nurtured and cherished me.  To leave would be abandoning them to the powerful and misguided few who are themselves in need of my willingness to challenge.

A Protestant friend recently confided that she was thinking about leaving her church.  She was raised as an Episcopalian, but decided that the Episcopal church was too liberal, so she joined an Evangelical congregation.  Now she says she misses the more liturgical aspects of worship, so she is thinking about becoming a Catholic.  But she thinks the preaching in the Catholic church is of a poor quality (it often is) and she said that she would not long tolerate a parish if it had bad preaching. 

What I realized as I was listening to her is that she is giving no thought to the idea of a church being the people.  For her, it seems to be about the smells and bells, or the preaching, but not about the embodiment of Christ in the people.  As I listened to her, I realized that she sounded more like a fickle lover than a faithful spouse or a loving family member. 

Returning to Wills's argument, marriages and family relationships sometimes hit rocky ground, but when we are committed in love, we don't abandon the beloved.  

We stay, we fight, we challenge, we live with compromises and we try to work things out.