They are, naturally, having a collective breakdown. Here’s a taste:
John Smeaton, co-founder of Voice of the Family, a coalition of 15 international pro-famiy groups, said it is “one of the worst official documents drafted in Church history.” “Thankfully the report is a preliminary report for discussion, rather than a definitive proposal,” he said in a press release. “It is essential that the voices of those lay faithful who sincerely live out Catholic teaching are also taken into account. Catholic families are clinging to Christ’s teaching on marriage and chastity by their finger-tips.” … At the Vatican press conference this morning, Michael Voris of ChurchMilitant.TV challenged the authors on this section. “Are the Synod fathers proposing that ‘gifts and qualities’ flow from the sexual orientation of homosexuality?” he asked. “Is the Synod proposing that there is something innate in the homosexual orientation that transcends and uplifts the Catholic Church, the Christian community, and if so, what would those particular gifts be?”
I hope to respond intellectually to the synod report. Tears right now are streaming from my face, and it is not about objections to welcoming gay people. There is something more profoundly at stake for me. Is this me? In the corner?
Cardinal Raymond Burke, demoted rather abruptly by Francis, is apoplectic:
He strongly criticized yesterday’s Relatio … which the Catholic lay group Voice of the Family had called a “betrayal,” saying it proposes views that “faithful shepherds … cannot accept,” and betrays an approach that is “not of the Church.” … The relatio, he said, proposes views that many Synod fathers “cannot accept,” and that they “as faithful shepherds of the flock cannot accept.” … “Clearly, the response to the document in the discussion which immediately followed its presentation manifested that a great number of the Synod Fathers found it objectionable,” Burke told Olsen.
“The document lacks a solid foundation in the Sacred Scriptures and the Magisterium. In a matter on which the Church has a very rich and clear teaching, it gives the impression of inventing a totally new, what one Synod Father called ‘revolutionary’, teaching on marriage and the family. It invokes repeatedly and in a confused manner principles which are not defined, for example, the law of graduality.”
To get a flavor of how Burke would respond to a family welcoming their son and his partner for Christmas, check this out:
We are to “value their sexual orientation”? Again, what exactly does that mean? Am I to value what my own catechism calls an intrinsic disorder? How do I do that? Do I value their orientation by saying, “I think it’s wonderful that you desire to have anal intercourse with another man?” Would that be honest or true to natural law and the divine revelation? Just how do I do this without “compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony”?
Celibate lesbian Catholic Eve Tushnet helps explain why valuing gay people cannot be reduced to anal sex (the priest above sees all gay people as sodomites and lesbians as non-existent):
For many of us our sexual orientation does flow out into expressions of love. For example, I agree with Wesley Hill that for some gay people it’s precisely our orientation which makes us unusually attuned to same-sex friendship. That may be especially true in our particular cultural moment, in which homosexuality is quite public and friendship relentlessly shunted into the private and even the trivial sphere. And I obviously don’t mean that gay people have “better” or deeper friendships than the rest of you people! Nonetheless I think the language of gay people having “gifts to offer” may help gay Catholics explore how our sexuality can be expressed, rather than repressed: how it can be channeled into friendship, artistic creation, teaching, etc.
Some reactionaries are simply in denial. George Weigel uses the occasion to attack the New York Times, which is as good a sign as any that he is still reeling. Then he makes the utilitarian point that rigidly orthodox churches survive and more open ones fail in the modern world:
Christian communities that maintain a clear sense of their doctrinal and moral boundaries survive and even flourish, while Christian communities whose doctrinal and moral boundaries become porous wither and eventually die. Why have the Catholic leaders who have gotten the most press at this synod, including Cardinal Walter Kasper of Germany, failed to grasp that? Why do they want to emulate the pattern charted by the dying communities of liberal Protestantism?
But this is not an argument against the mercy espoused by the first week of this Synod. It’s a very tired argument from the 1980s. One wonders why Weigel thinks the church in Ireland has all but collapsed in a generation? Too chill and welcoming to outsiders – or a clerical elite that believed it could get away with raping children because its boundaries were not porous at all? Last but by no means least, here’s Rod Dreher:
I suppose anything could happen, but it seems to me that the fix is in. This is a pastoral synod, not a doctrinal one. But the change in pastoral practices it mandates will be a de facto change in doctrine, because that’s exactly how it will be received by the Catholic public. Recall these 2013 remarks by Ross Douthat, commenting on Pope Francis’s “who am I to judge?” remarks:
“But still, such a tonal difference … on a fraught, high-profile topic is surely newsworthy, even if the news media inevitably offered misinterpretations of its significance as well.
And it’s especially newsworthy since a latitudinarian statement on this topic is of a piece with the tone of Francis’s pontificate as a whole. Popes do not change doctrine, but they do choose what to emphasize and what to downplay, which issues to elevate and which to set aside, where to pass judgment and where to talk about forgiveness, and so forth. And we’ve seen enough of this pontificate to sense where Francis’s focus lies: He wants to be seen primarily as a pope of social justice and spiritual renewal, and he doesn’t have much patience for issues that might get in the way of that approach to Christian witness.”
You can also teach falsehood by failing to teach the whole truth.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Winning Marriage, Marc Solomon recaps a private conversation Obama had during his Senate run:
In the course of this conversation, [Kevin Thompson] happened to mention Stonewall. “Well, what’s Stonewall?” Obama asked.
“You’ve never heard of it?” Thompson asked in surprise. This was a sophisticated Columbia- and Harvard-educated scholar and political organizer, running for national office. And yet he had never heard of the event that many consider the birth of the modern gay rights movement: the riots that took place at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969, when the LGBT community fought back against police intimidation and arrest and demanded legal equality. Thompson gave Obama a primer, glad that they could have an honest back-and-forth.
Soloman sees this as evidence that Obama “began his political journey sympathetic to gay rights, but not deeply informed about them”:
They were not one of his core political priorities. Today, just over a decade later, he has done more for gay rights than any other US president. In particular, the president has been a key part of landmark achievements on the freedom to marry, from the gutting of the Defense of Marriage Act to winning marriage in state houses and courtrooms. It is now easy to envision the completion of this civil rights battle before Obama leaves office. A confluence of good timing, a strategic and determined advocacy movement, and a president who saw with increasing clarity that the values inherent in our cause were fully in sync with his deepest values, enabled this journey. These historic successes, on his watch and with his help, meant that LGBT rights, and marriage equality specifically, would be at the center of the legacy he’d leave behind.
John Cassidy explains the significance of Tirole’s work:
Taking tools of game theory and information economics developed in the postwar decades, he and his colleagues helped to change the way governments and economists think about an old subject that is becoming ever more important to our networked economy: the regulation of companies with monopoly power.
From Amazon’s battle with book publishers to Cablevision’s attempted takeover of Time Warner Cable and the European Commission’s investigation of Google, the issue of how to deal with companies that operate in markets where competition is restricted or absent has become front-page news around the world. Tirole and his colleagues, particularly the late Jean-Jacques Laffont, didn’t establish a set of hard-and-fast rules for governments to follow in individual cases. But they did create a unifying intellectual framework that regulators, aggrieved parties, and the companies themselves can draw on in thinking through the relevant issues.
Tyler Cowen calls it “an excellent and well-deserved pick”:
Overall I think of Tirole as in the tradition of French theorists starting with Cournot in 1838 (!) and Jules Dupuit in the 1840s, economics coming from a perspective with lots of math and maybe even some engineering. I don’t know anything specific about his politics, but to my eye he reads very much like a French technocrat in terms of approach and orientation.
Justin Wolfers details how the “conclusions of Mr. Tirole’s style of analysis defy easy political characterization”:
In some cases they may call for a more vigorous regulatory response from government policy makers than is currently the norm, while in others, they call for greater restraint. In each case, the recommended policy depends on the details of the particular market, and in particular on what information is available; what contracts can be written; and how competitors, suppliers and customers are likely to respond.
In turn, this shows just how much Mr. Tirole’s work is a sophisticated mash-up of the three recent Nobel-winning themes that have revolutionized microeconomic theory. His research extends and applies the tools of game theory, which is used to analyze strategic interactions between firms and their competitors, suppliers, customers and regulators. It takes seriously the problem of imperfect information, analyzing how these interactions are shaped by what each of these players knows about the others. And he has been a pioneer within contract theory, assessing the consequences of the difficulty of writing contracts that fully specify the consequences of commercial transactions. This prize represents a vote of confidence in the direction of modern microeconomic theory.
Matt Yglesias highlights Tirole’s work on competition:
… I think many people will be most interested in his 2002 paper “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” co-authored with Jean-Charles Rochet. Among other things, the paper offers a powerful explanation of why so many leading internet companies — most prominently Google and Facebook — don’t charge for their products. In the most simplified thinking about business, a company has suppliers and then it has customers. But a platform market is two-sided. Apple sells iPhones to customers, but it also collects 30 percent of the gross sale price of apps in the app store. …
[W]hile it costs a lot of money to run Facebook it costs very little money to serve one more Facebook customer. The same is true for Google. Indexing the web is expensive. Paying engineers to work on the search algorithm is expensive. But serving one additional customer costs basically nothing.
Jordan Weissmann praises Tirole for his prescience:
Even in papers published decades ago, the subjects of his work feel ripped from today’s headlines—he was writing about the threat of too-big-to-fail banks and the hazards of bailouts all the way back in 1996. Want to talk about how to prevent another financial crisis, deal with Comcast, or think about the meaning of a monopoly in the era of free Internet services such as Google and Facebook? Triole’s your man, and has been for a long time. Yet he’s not a name you’re likely to see all the time in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
“Many of his papers show ‘it’s complicated,’ rather than presenting easily summarizable, intuitive solutions which make for good blog posts,” economist Tyler Cowen wrote in a summary of Tirole’s work. “That is one reason why his ideas do not show up so often in blogs and the popular press, but they nonetheless have been extremely influential in the economics profession.”
And David Spencer, who notes that he “do[es] not intend to criticise directly the award of this year’s prize to Jean Tirole,” uses the award as a starting point for a broader argument:
Academic economics is still stuck in an intellectual and ideological rut. Despite the global financial crisis – the worst in a lifetime – academic economists are more likely to win awards and the respect of their peers by producing abstruse models than by tackling and resolving real-world problems. The economics Nobel awards advances in economic analysis – meaning the development of formal models and the application of particular mathematical and statistical techniques. In essence, solving puzzles within economics matters more than dealing with grand societal challenges.
Thomas Piketty, who has done more than anyone else in the last year to bring academic economics to the public attention, had no real prospect of winning the prize, given his concern with the real-world issue of inequality. The non-award of the prize to Tony Atkinson – pioneer of inequality and poverty studies – can also be explained in the same way. But it should be a cause of concern, not least for members of the public tuning in to learn who has won the economics Nobel, that acute economic and social issues are not high on the agenda of academic economics.
The trash can says “Please Don’t Litter”, so we are in the Anglophone world. The cars drive on the right, so we are most likely in North America. There is gleaming new construction in a super-clean neighborhood, with ample surface parking attached, adjacent to a more established neighborhood that is urban, but not super-dense. Also, slightly hilly. Assuming the photo was taken recently, we are reasonably far south, because everything is very, very green. So … probably the US, in a well-established mid-sized city that has seen some significant growth lately.
That type of new architecture (blocky with lots of glass and slick materials) is, unfortunately, really ubiquitous these days. I’ve seen buildings like that in Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Charlotte, Atlanta, Boston … a couple of weeks ago I passed through Tyson’s Corner, VA, for the first time in a long time, and seems like that is the entire town now. And seriously, that (apparently purely decorative) canal with the fountains in it should make this easy to find, right? Indianapolis (where we were for a gimme window a few weeks back) has one like it, but that’s not it.
I hate giving up on this, but I honestly have no idea. Just so I have something to put in the subject line, I’m going to say Atlanta, since it always seems like they’ve erected some new glass and steel monstrosity every time I go back there.
Another aims for a blue-glass city of the North:
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Or waaay south?
My first reaction to the picture was Auckland, New Zealand. Just a wild guess, but saw a House Hunters International recently of a couple trying to buy a condo in Auckland and this looks similar to one of their views.
Another reader e-mails it in:
I’m resolving to enter this contest every week, even when I don’t think I have a good idea of where the photo was taken. Too often I’ve said, “hey that looks like xxxx, but it’s probably not, so I won’t enter.” Then it turns out to be xxxx. That said, my entry this week is probably wrong. But something about this photo looks like eastern Canada to me, and the English on the trash can rules out Montreal. So I’m guessing Ottawa.
Only a fraction of contestants guessed incorrectly this week. The first of a few hundred correct guessers needed only 14 minutes from when the photo was posted:
Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America
A former resident elaborates:
This photo is undoubtedly of downtown Providence! I have long enjoyed reading the submissions and marveling at those who could identify the far flung places featured in VFYW so seeing my almost home state was a treat.
This was taken from the north side of the balcony about halfway up the GTECH building at 10 Memorial Boulevard in downtown Providence. You can see the church I grew up attending far to the right and the river with WaterFire baskets installed below. The red triangular building is home to Cafe Nuovo, which is a great (although I haven’t been in years, my parents go) restaurant.
I grew up in a small town outside Providence, but my parents are professors at Rhode Island College in North Providence, so I spent a lot of time in the city. Buddy Cianci was responsible for a lot of the downtown development that took place in Providence when I was growing up and it’s hilarious to me that he’s running for mayor AGAIN. People love him. I’m not up on all the politics as much anymore (I live in DC now so we have plenty to keep up with here) but I know enough to admit that the downtown area is much more pleasant than it used to be. RI still struggles economically and a half-dozen WaterFire festivals each summer won’t fix that, but it’s a beautiful city with an incredible food scene and a lot of great art in general.
Wondering what a WaterFire basket could be? Dishheads have you covered:
I’m a master’s student studying water quality and sustainability, and I immediately recognized the floating bonfire pits of WaterFire in Providence. In the 1990s, the city daylighted the previously covered Woonasquatucket River and installed the bonfire pits in the river as a civic art project. During WaterFire nights, the city lights fires on the river and it becomes a center for activity in the city. It has been a huge success story for Providence and a model for other cities to rebuild and reinvigorate their downtowns.
Another gives you a look:
The balcony overlooks the circular basin that marks one end of the Fire Water celebrations, where the city builds bonfires in metal baskets set in the middle of the Woonasquatucket and Providence Rivers. Fire Water is the centerpiece of the renaissance of downtown Providence that occurred during the tenure of Buddy Cianci, Providence’s notorious once and future mayor. All of the tall office buildings in the picture were built during that renaissance, in which Cianci spearheaded the redevelopment of the downtown riverscape, which had been covered over for much of the twentieth century. It is extraordinary how much the city has changed as result of the public and private investment in the downtown. It is an amazing spectacle, truly carnivalesque, as well as a brilliant way of bringing tourists and suburban residents back into the city.
More on Cianci in a bit. A former winner notes:
It is probably not a coincidence that this view appeared on the day that “Full Light” takes place and it’s the event’s 20th anniversary. I suspect someone will submit an entry that includes this Saturday’s spectacle.
Total coincidence! And sadly no, it seems no Dish readers were there that night. But another reader is friends with the artist who created WaterFire, Barnaby Evans. Another passed along this video:
A more expert take:
I’m an architect, and at first glance all I saw were those relatively new banal buildings found in countless north American cities. But in the hilly background were some brick and clapboard buildings that reminded me of coastal New England towns such as New London. Of course if you combine coastal New England with a spanking new Riverfront you immediately come up with Providence, Rhode Island, which in 1994 uncovered its long-buried river by removing what was euphemistically termed the “world’s widest bridge.” An aerial view of downtown immediately shows the distinctive basin and amphitheater and that’s all that you need as the balcony of 10 Memorial Boulevard is pretty evident in photos.
Another had more trouble:
I became convinced that the view was looking out over a canal with fountains in it, and started searching based on that idea. There’s a Wikipedia page documenting US canals, which counts over 18,000 of them, although I got the impression most of those are for agricultural use.
As far as the right window, the following entry is probably the closest the contest has ever gotten to accidental modern art:
That entrant adds, “I tried to say “Woonasquatucket” to my wife and she chortled “is that an invitation?” Meanwhile, this reader reminds us about the soul of wit:
What really clued me in on this one was the bush. It’s centered in the frame, very nearly the subject of the photo. It seems to regard the viewer quizzically, “Why are you looking at me?” or rather, and more introspectively and shockingly self-aware, “Why can I see you looking at me?” And its the bearing of the bush, the very regal, upright, staid look on what I can only refer to as its ‘countenance,’ that bespeaks a soul bestirred, a corporal glove filled with a heavenly hand, the capital-D Divine, and when I thought “capitol” and “divine” I realized I was looking at Providence.
Incidentally, I was born in Rhode Island, in the town of S. Kingston, and have long loved the Blossom Dearie tune “Rhode Island Is Famous for You”:
With lyrics like:
Pencils come from Pennsylvania
Vests from Vest Virginia
And tents from Tent-esee
They know mink / where they grow mink / in Wy-o-mink
A camp chair / from New Hampshair / that’s for me.
Minnows come from Minnesota
Coats come from Dakota
But why should you be blue?
‘Cause you / you come from Rhode Island
And little old Rhode Island / is famous for you.
The following reader, as well as most of the numerous Dishheads who went to school in Providence, just needed the steeple to the far right of the image:
I took the steeple as the most useful clue. Searches for “New England steeple” and “Connecticut steeple” were fruitless, but “Rhode Island steeple” brought me this among the first images (left-most)
This is the steeple of the First Baptist Church in America, built in Providence in 1774-75. But there might be other U.S. steeples that are nearly identical; it is very close to a model in James Gibbs’s classic Book of Architecture from 1728.
More on the church:
The white steeple all the way on the right edge of the picture is First Baptist, as in Roger Williams’s FIRST Baptist parish in America, which, unlike their Southern component’s image nowadays, was a huge mover for religious freedom in colonial (Puritan) New England, and, not incidentally, was the great and wonderful late Rev. Mr. Gomes’s denomination (though his accents and tastes seemed those of a High Anglican).
Another notes:
While the church was started in the 1630s by Roger Williams, the meeting house was completed in 1775. At that time the steeple was erected in three and half days and has ” survived time and hurricanes since then.” Quite amazing don’t you think!
And we learn that Brown’s grad ceremonies happen in that church:
In the far right of the frame is the steeple of the austerely beautiful First Baptist Church in America (located, appropriately enough, on the corner of Steeple St.), where I graduated from Brown University, and which celebrated its 375th anniversary last year. On that occasion, congregant David Coon composed the following:
Who are the members of the First Baptist Church in America?
We are not Southern Baptists.
We are not Jerry Falwell Baptists.
We are not Westboro Baptist Church Baptists.
Nor are we an ethical debating society.
We are followers of Jesus Christ, as study and prayer and teaching and worship lead each of us to an individual belief in what that means.
We are Roger Williams Baptists.
We are “soul liberty” Baptists.
We are “separation of church and state” Baptists.
We are a “shelter for persons distressed of conscience,” a place where everyone has the right to approach God in her or his own way.
Here, we take the Bible seriously, not literally.
Here, we worship a God who provides “minimum protection, maximum support.”
Here, we expect acceptance, not judgment – humility not hubris – laughter not gloom.
Here we listen thoughtfully rather than speak loudly.
Here, we sing – we sing praises, we sing thanks, we sing prayers, we sing because we love to sing.
Here, we honor, we truly honor, the differences of opinion among those who are reverently seeking their own way to God.
We are the First Baptist Church in America and we reserve the right to accept everyone.
Another notes that First Baptist “seems to take pride its punny sign out front (“This church is prayer conditioned”)”. Another reader has more:
Interestingly, the Providence Plantation, founded by Roger Williams in 1626, is described as “the first place in modern history where religious liberty and the separation of church and state were acknowledged.” Williams founded this church two years later. It would be interesting to hear how Williams might evaluate his own legacy in the US today, 388 years later.
He adds:
Another week where I am feeling the fleeting satisfaction from correctly discovering the view location, followed by the lingering sadness that comes from knowing that hundreds of others (many who actually LIVE in Providence, or went to Brown University, or have some other clearly unfair advantage), are at this very moment getting this week’s view correct also, and that my response will likely be put into the “correct answer collage”. I have no doubt that some reader in posession of too much leisure time as well as the building blueprints and intergalactic coordinates of the boxwood will edge me out. Oh well. At least last week’s contest was won by someone who wrote impressively about naturalized, cultivated Norway spruce trees and temperate forests transitioning to aired steppes. That guy DESERVES the book.
And you deserve a collage:
A reader reaches a important milestone:
Man, that art history degree FINALLY paid off (well, enough to know where this photo was taken, the student loans are still a monthly burden. Mind you, I started paying them off in 1993.) I immediately recognized the steeple of the First Baptist Church in America in Providence, Rhode Island. It looks like the view is from the GTECH Corporation building. It’s that window off the corner of the balcony jutting out riiiiiight … THERE:
The architecture critics really came out of the woodwork this week:
Collectively, this photo is taken from and of several pieces of Modernist architectural banality that have stymied the civic momentum represented by the work done in Providence during the 1990s to revive downtown through traditional urban planning and architectural. These buildings, with the GTech building being the worst offender, represent the resurgence of the “avant garde” as they bravely resisted the civic pride that was being rediscovered, via PoMo blandness, Vancouver-ish soporifics, and good ol’ Dallas-Ft. Worth office park cheap’n’boring respectively. Fortunately, Providence still retains a great deal of its historic fabric from the late 1700s through the 1930s, so ugly junk like this is mostly the exception, not the rule.
Another:
The buildings look part of the mixed use redevelopment trend, but it also seems this is a tourist district. It’s nice enough, and almost certainly better than the old industrial complex that was probably there 50 years ago. But the architecture leaves me a little cold and I wish they had riffed a little more off the brick that dominates most New England downtowns. I’m not alone in the critique – found these quotes from an article about the design before the building went up:
“The structure has no place in Providence,” said Gregory Mallane. “It really belongs in an industrial park.”
“This building is completely out of place” in Providence, said Charles Pinning, a Providence property owner. “This building would be appropriate . . . in a city that has either obliterated its history or doesn’t have any.”
Another critic takes us to city planning school:
The Gtech building sabotaged what had been a really interesting experiment in architecture and urban design Providence had going for 20 years. A new take on urban renewal that would eventually emerge as a critique of the bomb-and-rebuild modern method of urban renewal that had marred cities from coast to coast. In the 1980s the federal, state, and city governments cooperated to bury the massive train yards between the State House and downtown, and to move and expose the two rivers that join to form the Providence River. In doing so, 80 acres of formerly industrial land right next to downtown were opened up for development.
It got interesting when regulations were drawn up to ensure that development here would feel complementary to the existing downtown. Above-ground parking was prohibited, and buildings had to built out to their lot lines, to create a consistent street wall and an urban rather than suburban feel. Further, a commission was appointed to enforce these regulations and to approve the design of individual buildings. This type of committee is certainly a potential nightmare for developers, but there was plenty of development and for a good while the commission worked surprisingly well. From 1988 to 2002 eight large buildings were built, among them a 30 story hotel tower and a 1.4 million square-foot shopping mall.
Initially the designs were postmodern but as years passed, shaped by the Commission, the designs became less postmodern and more unabashedly neo-historic, using traditional elements without irony or distance. Most architects and critics where lukewarm at best towards these buildings, but the public and vistors tended to love them. It was an intriguing experiment- what might an urban district built entirely anew at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries look like without the reigning prohibition on designing in historic styles? At the intersection of Francis Street and Memorial Boulevard the experiment had achieved some real intensity, with the proximity of three buildings patterned and decorated to sharpen, rather than dull, the sense of scale of large buildings close together.
Then in 2004 the empty lot at the fourth corner of this intersection was filled by the Gtech building, a clunk of offices wrapped in a glass curtain wall that would have looked dated in 1965.
It somehow manages to feel insubstantial and leaden at the same time. The truncated corner tower is flat-topped because no one could come up with a satisfying modern minimal spire that didn’t look cheesy. It’s as graceful an amputation. The designers of this building either didn’t know how to or weren’t interested in respecting the very strong, albeit newly-created, context of this very prominent intersection, not to mention the downtown beyond. The building is twelve stories tall but thanks to its lack of lack of surface detail feels like half that. Whereas the surrounding buildings are romantic and exuberant, playing up the urban drama of congestion and vertical space with details that allow the eye to measure height to 30 stories, the Gtech building refutes all that with an obstinate blankness. It is as wrong for its site as if dragged in from a suburb of Atlanta or San Diego. (Both cities I like, by the way.)
Once Gtech went up the floodgates were opened and the rest of the capitol center filled up with modern somewhat minimalist buildings, which are visible in the window view. None are as bad as Gtech.
And back to the political angle of this week’s contest:
The scene is timely at the moment as we are in the midst of a pretty amazing Mayoral election that features Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci trying to return to the office he has had to leave twice previously due to felony convictions. He was leading in the one publicly released polled and it will be amazing if Providence voters return him to office.
Many readers covered Cianci:
“Buddy” was mayor of Providence from 1974 to 1984. He was forced to leave office after pleading no contest to an assault. He had allegedly taken a burning log from a fireplace and beaten a man whom he believed was having an affair with his wife. His wife’s name is Nancy Ann, which makes her full name Nancy Ann Cianci (say it out loud).
In 1990, he ran for mayor again. His slogan was that “Providence needs to be made love to again.” After he won, his particular form of romantic devotion was to have the dreadfully polluted Woonasquatucket River (one of the two branches of the Providence River) converted into “Riverwalk,” a series of paved bridges that is billed as “the widest bridge in the world” (on the theory that all the bridges that cross the river are part of a single bridge). He was sent to federal prison in 2002. He has served his time and will be on the ballot as a candidate for mayor in a few weeks.
So much more:
Since this is Providence, public corruption is never far away. WaterFire opened during Vincent “Buddy” Cianci’s second stint as mayor. And here’s a 1997 photo of Cianci in front of the redeveloped WaterPlace Park before he was arrested during Operation Plunder Dome, convicted of racketeering charges, and spent over five years in federal prison. (According to the Solicitor General, “the government presented evidence at trial that [Cianci] and his co-defendants awarded (or caused to be awarded) municipal jobs, city contracts, tax abatements, and building-code variances in return for cash (including contributions to Cianci’s campaign fund) and other items of value.”)
Not that a prison term should ever stop someone from a life in Rhode Island politics. Cianci is running for mayor again and, according to a recent poll, maintains a slip lead over his closest competitor.
Another provides some art history connected to Cianci:
I believe the viewer is looking in the direction of one of Shepard Fairey’s alleged first acts of political art; he was a RISD student in the ’90s. Then candidate Buddy Cianci’s face was super-imposed over a billboard advertising the Providence Zoo’s naked mole rat exhibition.
Actually, as this reader explains, Cianci was the original inspiration for Fairey’s “Obey” images:
An interesting bit of trivia: Behind the red triangular building, on the corner of N Main and Steeple streets, was where Shepard Fairey began Obey Giant (or more specifically, it’s earlier incarnation of “Andre the Giant has a Posse”), which predates his famous HOPE posters for Obama. It was 1990, and convicted felon Buddy Cianci, was running for Mayor for a second time after being released from prison. He had a large campaign billboard at the foot of College Hill facing RISD, where Shep and I were both students. As part of a class assignment, Shep wheat-pasted Andre the Giant’s head over that of Cianci’s, scrawling the soon to be famous words “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” over Buddy’s reelection message.
Someone made a short film telling the story as well. Speaking of stories:
I got into a fight with my girlfriend in that little amphitheater on the left, so thanks for re-opening those wounds. At first I wasn’t sure which floor the balcony was on, so I called GTech and asked the security guy. It’s the 5th floor. (He was very confused so I told him I was planning an elaborate proposal for my girlfriend. Haha, he has no idea we already broke up.)
And a few readers have actually been to the GTech balcony in question, but only one has puked there:
Good lord do I remember this view. Late afternoon cocktail party that went on a bit too long. I found refuge and comfort on that balcony. Don’t want to mention the company’s name, if anyone there is reading this they’ll know who I am. I assure you the box fern in the pic is a replacement.
And finally, this week’s winner is a veteran of more than 20 contests:
Time to give the novice players a chance, huh? I imagine Chini got it before his coffee got cold. This week’s window actually looks to be a glass door, leading to the balcony on the 7th floor of the Gtech headquarters. The balcony overlooks picturesque Waterplace Park in Providence, Rhode Island:
I found the location by doing a Google images search for condo “random balconies”. The main building the view shows up about halfway down the first screen. Interestingly, putting “random balconies” in quotes was the key. Without the quotes, the building doesn’t show up at all. Makes me a little proud of my “Google Fu”.
Not pictured is the gorgeous Rhode Island State House, just out of view to the left. In my opinion one of the most beautiful capitol buildings in the country, both inside and out:
Beautiful, and likely corrupt, it seems. As it turns out, this week’s view originated on a field trip:
As a regular incorrect guesser of the contest, I feel a bit bemused to have the photo chosen for the contest! We took URI’s full-time MBA students to visit GTECH’s North American HQ, located at 10 Memorial Blvd in Providence. I took this photo from the northeast corner of 7th floor of the building, which overlooks the Providence River. GTECH uses this balcony to host special events, and this window is the first window of that balcony. If anyone has attended a Waterfire event, they’ll know this spot.
Too bad I can’t enter a guess in the contest, because I’d nail it this week!
Instead we’ll see you for next week’s (more difficult) contest.
On Sunday, the CDC announced a second case of ebola in Texas:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that a hospital worker who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian patient who died of Ebola last Wednesday, has tested positive for the Ebola virus. This is the first case of Ebola being transmitted in the United States. Officials blame a “breach of protocol” during treatment of Duncan—and although all healthcare workers who came into contact with Duncan were wearing protective clothing, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC director responsible for overseeing agency action against the Ebola crisis, said additional cases are possible because of the breach.
Abby Haglage and Kent Sepkowitz comment on how the nurse managed to contract the virus:
The Dallas nurse, who officials confirmed was wearing gear, was allegedly treating Duncan on his second visit to the ER where he was hospitalized and diagnosed, before eventually dying. This detail is extremely important. Though much remains unclear about Ebola and transmission, we do know that any virus is much more contagious when high amounts of virus are concentrated in the sick person’s blood. It is likely therefore that Duncan was much more contagious farther into his illness, making transmission increasingly likely. …
This may have played into Duncan’s case, which has left officials in Texas such as Health Resources chief clinical officer Dan Vargas, scratching their heads. “We’re very concerned,” Vargas told the press. “[Though we’re] confident that the precautions that we have in place are protecting our health care workers.” In other words, the protocol works but many people’s ability to follow it exactly—really exactly—may pose a substantial challenge.
Jonathan Cohn thinks about how better safety protocols could mitigate the risk to health workers:
Ideally, every facility with Ebola patients would adopt the kinds of practices that groups like Doctors Without Borders have developed and honed over the years. They have thorough checklists, for example, and follow them meticulously. They also use a buddy system or, in some cases, have trained professionals who focus on the disposal of infected material and make sure caregivers take off protective gear properly. Frequently they are “WatSan” specialists, meaning they deal with water and sanitation.
The CDC seems to be moving in that direction already: Frieden said on Sunday that “we are recommending there be a full-time individual who is responsible only for the oversight, supervision and monitoring of effective infection control while an Ebola patient is cared for.” But simply “recommending” hospitals take these steps may not be enough. CDC, or some other arm of the federal government, may need to dispatch these infection control officers and pay for their services.
“A more drastic, but possibly necessary, step would be moving all Ebola patients to hospitals that specialize in these sorts of infectious diseases,” Cohn adds. Sarah Kliff voxplains what sets these hospitals apart:
Emory, the University of Nebraska, and the National Institutes of Health have all received and successfully discharged Ebola patients. These three hospitals are among just four in the nation with specialized biocontamination units. These are units that have existed for years, with the sole purpose of handling patients with deadly, infectious dieases like SARS or Ebola.
While biocontamination units look similar to a standard hospital room, they usually have specialized air circulation systems to remove disease particles from the facility. And, perhaps more importantly, they’re staffed by doctors who have spent years training, preparing and thinking about how to stop dangerous infections from spreading.
(Photo: On October 12, 2014 in Dallas, Texas a man dressed in protective hazmat clothing walks towards an apartment where a second person diagnosed with the Ebola virus resides. By Mike Stone/Getty Images)
Yesterday’s big news was the release of a remarkable document detailing the deliberations so far of the Synod on the Family, a gathering of Roman Catholic bishops called by Pope Francis to grapple with issues such as homosexuality and divorce and remarriage among church members. My take (that it’s a truly BFD that I didn’t even begin to expect) is below. John Thavis, a veteran Vatican observer, understands the significance:
In pastoral terms, the document published today by the Synod of Bishops represents an earthquake, the “big one” that hit after months of smaller tremors … While defending the traditional teachings that reject divorce and gay marriage, the synod said the modern church must focus more on the “positive elements” in such relationships, rather than their shortcomings, and open a patient and merciful dialogue with the people involved. The ultimate aim, it said, is to use these “seeds” of goodness to bring people more fully into the church.
Barbie Latza Nadeau has more on what it said about marriage and divorce:
On the discussion of whether or not cohabitating and remarried couples could be considered valid Catholics—obviously a controversial topic among the prelates—they seem at least to agree that there are positive aspects of these relationships that until now the Church has openly condemned. “A new sensitivity in today’s pastoral consists in grasping the positive reality of civil weddings and, having pointed out our differences, of cohabitation,” they write. “It is necessary that in the ecclesial proposal, while clearly presenting the ideal, we also indicate the constructive elements in those situations that do not yet or no longer correspond to that ideal.”
The bishops also suggest they need to challenge themselves to try divorce prevention by working harder to prepare couples during the engagement stage, focusing more on the challenges that lie ahead for them and less on the strictly doctrinal regulations of taking the sacrament of marriage. In other words, they agree they need to provide better advice on what marriage is in real life rather than what it is on paper. And they suggest the dioceses even provide a sort of follow-up care for newly married couples after the honeymoon, which, they conclude, is best done by other married couples with experience that celibate clerics don’t have.
That proposal to have, you know, actual married couples help other married couples is so blindingly obvious one wonders why it has until now been restricted to celibate priests – about the last people on earth with any deep understanding of what it practically takes to keep a marriage alive and healthy through its countless challenges. Burroway applauds the new tone the bishops used to talk about gay people:
This is the first time in the Church’s history that its leadership appears willing to look at our relationships in anything approaching a positive light. The document acknowledges that we have “gifts and talents” without having to, er, “balance” that that recognition with our living in sin. And it recognizes that there are same-sex relationships which rise “to the point of sacrifice” and “constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners.”
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the word “sacrifice” in Catholic doctrine. It signifies an essential opening to all that is good and holy, whether it’s Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross or the daily sacrifices that we make as we go about our lives. Sacrifice is central to the Catholic understanding. Non-Catholics see it most visibly in the Lenten sacrifices and fasting, but Catholics see sacrifices, big and small, as a daily expression of their faith. Gay people living in same-sex relationships have been hitherto looked upon as selfish and narcissistic, unwilling to sacrifice their sexuality for their faith. And so for the Bishops to acknowledge that gays and lesbians are also living sacrificial lives is to suggest that something good and valuable is happening. That word’s appearance alone in this context is, I think, the most earth-shattering aspect of this statement.
The idea of gay couples offer anything “precious” in their relationships has never appeared in an official church document before. And the phrase “intrinsically disordered,” so reflexively deployed in the past, is nowhere to be found.
I’m with Jim on the profundity of the breakthrough. B.C. at the Economist offers a similar take:
While the Vatican will almost certainly try to assuage conservative alarm by saying that nothing in the Catholic world-view has fundamentally shifted, the change of tone is startling. Under Pope Benedict XVI, the official view of homosexuality hardened considerably—with a new stress on the idea that gay orientation, let alone practice, was “fundamentally disordered” and incompatible with the priesthood. This hardening coincided with ever-more damaging revelations about priestly child abuse, cover-ups and the existence of a “gay Mafia” in the internal politics of the Vatican.
Up to now, not many prominent Catholics have publicly considered the possibility that there might be any spiritual merit in same-sex unions. One of the few was Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain to the firefighters of New York who was one of the victims of 9/11. “Is there so much love in the world that we can afford to discriminate against this kind?” he used to say. Perhaps he is smiling in heaven.
He was a Franciscan, after all. Tom Roberts asserts that one of the document’s biggest impacts is that it “takes the weapons out of the hands of the hierarchical culture warriors”:
What practically results from this document? Perhaps bishops will not be so quick to turn away from their schools the children of gay parents or to fire gays and lesbians involved in ministry because they are living openly with or married to a partner. Perhaps they will consider the “concrete circumstances,” as the document suggests, of people divorced and remarried and welcome them to the communion table.
A key term in Francis’s papacy from the start has been “mercy.” Application of the law and of doctrine, he preaches, must be tempered by mercy. In an earlier meditation, he said he wished the church to be “the place of God’s mercy and love, where everyone can feel themselves welcomed, loved, forgiven and encouraged to live according to the good life of the Gospel.” That is not a recipe for cheap grace. The good life of the Gospel places some extraordinary demands on the believer.
The approach is clearly disorienting, however, to those who believe that the church must be a place where teaching and practice are absolute and immutable, where the dividing line must be clear between those who are in and those who are out.
It’s a depth charge against the neurosis of fundamentalism. Grant Gallicho compares this document to past ones by the church:
Of course it notes that gay unions are not “on the same footing” as traditional marriage. But even asking those kinds of questions constitutes a dramatic shift. Seeing them in a synod document was unthinkable under past popes. Just a decade ago, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith instructed Catholics to oppose gay civil unions because, in part, it would lead to allowing them to adopt, which would “do violence” to children. You won’t find that tone in this document–with respect to gay people or anyone else. Francis sings in another key. It’s a tune he seems to want the whole church to learn.
Note the comparison to the “violence” done to children in gay relationships with this:
The Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.
Rebecca Leber likewise emphasizes the difference Francis has made:
To understand this reaction, consider how far the Papacy has come on LGBT issues in what is, by Church standards, a short span of time. John Paul II said in 2005 that the “family is often threatened by legislation which—at times directly—challenges its natural structure, which is and must necessarily be that of a union between a man and a woman founded on marriage.” His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, took many occasions to condemn gay marriage publicly. On World Peace Day and Christmas, Benedict equated gay marriage to an attack on the “essence of the human creature” and presenting a “serious harm to justice and peace.” He even called gay couples “intrinsically disordered.” But Francis? In September of last year he famously said, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”
John Allen draws a parallel between the Synod and Vatican II’s approach to ecumenical efforts, which sought to “find a theological logic for the widespread popular desire to break down the walls between the various Christian churches”:
Vatican II did so by elaborating a new theology of the church: While the fullness of the church, according to Catholic doctrine, may exist only in Catholicism, there are nevertheless precious elements of it to be found outside that deserve honor and respect.
With that, the world changed. Before Vatican II, many Catholics hesitated to even enter a Protestant church; afterwards, such taboos were gone. While ecumenism hasn’t yet achieved full reunion, it’s still among the most stunningly successful Christian movements of the late 20th century.
Without overdramatizing things, something similar may be going at the 2014 Synod of Bishops on the family vis-à-vis people living in what the church considers “irregular” situations – cohabitating couples, gays and lesbians, people who divorce and remarry outside the church, and so on.
Alexander Stille discusses the notion of gradualism, one aspect of yesterday’s document that’s been much-debated:
One idea that has emerged at the synod is that of “graduality”; that certain behaviors, although contrary to doctrine, can nonetheless lead people on the right path. Pope Benedict XVI, a doctrinal traditionalist, acknowledged that it was right for a prostitute with AIDS to use condoms. While this did not constitute a change in the Church’s stance against birth control (or prostitution), it was a recognition that taking care not to transmit a deadly disease to others is a moral act that points a person in the right direction. In opening the synod, Cardinal Erdo invoked the idea of graduality in speaking about the birth-control encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” In a briefing session for journalists, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, of Great Britain, said that graduality “permits people, all of us, to take one step at a time in our search for holiness in our lives.”
The draft report refers directly to gradualness as a key to welcoming those whose lives are imperfect but who wish to be welcomed in the Church.
Is graduality just moral relativism in disguise—or a more realistic approach to modern sex and spirituality?
“It’s trying to present a positive, welcoming, fully alive view of human sexuality,” explained William Mattison, an associate professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America.
“When we speak of gradualism, it’s not because we’re lightening up the rules but it’s that we’re all struggling to get there,” Mattison added. “The danger would always be that people perceive that you sacrifice the ideal, but that need not be the case.”
So take the example of an engaged couple who is living together before marriage, as 37 percent of Catholics have, or currently are. Are they “living in sin”? Or are they on their first step towards embracing the fullness of the Catholic vision for marriage? Will a priest welcome them to be honest about their situation and get married in his church, perhaps with some special classes or a request that they go to confession? Or will he turn them away for not being serious about what the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony entails?
Elizabeth Dias, however, ratchets down expectations for what the document portends:
First, here’s what the document actually is:
The relatio is a mid-Synod snapshot of 200+ Catholic leaders’ conversations that happened in the Synod hall last week. It is a starting point for conversations as the Synod fathers start small group discussions this week. It is a working text that identifies where bishops need to “deepen or clarify our understanding,” as Cardinal Luis Antonia Tagle put it in Monday’s press briefing. That means that the topic of gays and Catholic life came up in the Synod conversations so far and that it is a topic for continued reflection.
Second, here’s what the document is not:
The relatio is not a proscriptive text. It is not a decree. It is not doctrine, and certainly not a doctrinal shift. It is also not final. “These are not decisions that have been made nor simply points of view,” the document concludes. “The reflections put forward, the fruit of the Synodal dialogue that took place in great freedom and a spirit of reciprocal listening, are intended to raise questions and indicate perspectives that will have to be matured and made clearer by the reflection of the local Churches in the year that separates us from the Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of bishops planned for October 2015.”
Although there won’t be any specific doctrinal changes made until the synod gathers again in Rome next fall, the report hints at doctrinal changes to come, particularly in terms of simplifying the process for annulment of marriages. But even in the near future, the most important changes might be more subtle, pastoral shifts: The Church wants to be a more welcoming place for people whose relationships don’t fit into the template of man and wife, till death do they part.
All the caveats are well taken. But the words along have already transformed the church. That is Francis’ gift to us: a language of mercy, not judgment. It is the language of Jesus.
(Photo: Pope Francis leaves the Synod Hall in Vatican City at the end of a session of the Synod on the themes of family on October 13, 2014. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images)
Well: we can now see the seeds of growth being planted by Pope Francis. Plenty of analyses have already been written insisting that nothing much has changed in the first week of the Synod on Family Life; that established doctrine – even on matters such as the re-married being allowed back to the Lord’s table at Mass – remains unaltered; that this is window dressing, and not the window itself. The only way to answer this critique is to watch the Synod – see this extraordinary moment from last week – and read its first Relatio and to find oneself – certainly as a gay Catholic – in a certain amount of shock. The drama certainly continues; a huge plurality of the bishops appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI will be pushing back hard against what Francis has already done; in fact, they already were, which may have been why Francis appointed six new over-seers of the Relatio at the last minute.
The result – though this will never be admitted or conceded – is a thorough repudiation of the last two papacies. They were both dedicated to upholding a very traditional and uncompromising view of family life and marriage, describing those outside of that model as problems to be guarded against, and even talking of some human beings as “intrinsically disordered” because of their seeming inability to live up to the uncompromising standards the church upheld. This created a fortress church, of the holy, in which those who fell short often felt excluded, even demonized, by the language and rhetoric coming from Rome.
Evening falls on our assembly. It is the hour at which one willingly returns home to meet at the same table, in the depth of affection, of the good that has been done and received, of the encounters which warm the heart and make it grow, good wine which hastens the unending feast in the days of man. It is also the weightiest hour for one who finds himself face to face with his own loneliness, in the bitter twilight of shattered dreams and broken plans; how many people trudge through the day in the blind alley of resignation, of abandonment, even resentment: in how many homes the wine of joy has been less plentiful, and therefore, also the zest — the very wisdom — for life.
This is looking outside the church to the family dinner – with wine of course! But it also sees not some pristine vision, but also the crooked reality of so many – the countless who dine alone, or whose exhaustion after work strains family life still further, or whose career has crashed, or whose job has just been lost, or the grown children unemployed who live in the basement. The single mother; the abused wife; the frustrated father; the traumatized children. This seems to me where Jesus is – not among the perfect, but among the wounded; and not in austere and brutal judgment, but beside them, listening, caring, loving.
This is where the church should really start:
It is necessary to accept people in their concrete being, to know how to support their search, to encourage the wish for God and the will to feel fully part of the Church, also on the part of those who have experienced failure or find themselves in the most diverse situations. This requires that the doctrine of the faith, the basic content of which should be made increasingly better known, be proposed alongside with mercy.
The abstract certitudes of the Bavarian theologian cede to the pragmatic pastor from Buenos Aires. And what we are seeing here is similar to what we saw at the Second Vatican Council. Just as that Council for the first time recognized that other faiths can have insight into the divine, so this Synod is also recognizing the goods and positive aspects in families and relationships outside the pristine model.
Following the expansive gaze of Christ, whose light illuminates every man, the Church turns respectfully to those who participate in her life in an incomplete and imperfect way, appreciating the positive values they contain rather than their limitations and shortcomings … Imitating Jesus’ merciful gaze, the Church must accompany her most fragile sons and daughters, marked by wounded and lost love, with attention and care, restoring trust and hope to them like the light of a beacon in a port, or a torch carried among the people to light the way for those who are lost or find themselves in the midst of the storm.
Which is when we stumble across the nub of all of it:
The truth is incarnated in human fragility not to condemn it, but to cure it.
So let me address one of the more controversial and revolutionary aspects of this document, and one which obviously affects me deeply: the section the document actually titles:
Welcoming homosexual persons
Yes, you read that right. Instead of being seen as intrinsically disordered human beings naturally driven toward evil – and thereby a contaminating influence to be purged when we become visible (see the recent acts of cruelty and rigidity toward gay parishioners around the country), the church is now dedicated to welcoming gay people. You can write a long disquisition on how this changes no doctrine, but it seems to me you are missing something more profound – a total re-orientation of the church toward its gay sons and daughters. I have managed to find churches that do indeed welcome gay people; but even they rarely publicly declare that they welcome us with open arms – as we are, “her most fragile sons and daughters, marked by wounded and lost love.”
Here is the key section:
50. Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?
51. The question of homosexuality leads to a serious reflection on how to elaborate realistic paths of affective growth and human and evangelical maturity integrating the sexual dimension: it appears therefore as an important educative challenge. The Church furthermore affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman. Nor is it acceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.
52. Without denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions it has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.
I never thought I would live to read these words in a Vatican document. Gone are the cruel and wounding words of Benedict XVI to stigmatize us; instead we have the authentic witness of someone following Christ who came to minister to the broken and the hurt, the fragile and the strong, the people who had long been excluded from the feast – but now invited to join it as brothers and sisters – “a fraternal space” in the church. Notice too that the church is now emphasizing a pastoral “accepting and valuing” of homosexual orientation, yes, “valuing” the divine gift of our nature and our loves. Yes, the doctrine does not change. The sacrament of matrimony is intrinsically heterosexual – a position, by the way, I have long held as well. But it is possible to affirm the unique and wondrous thing of heterosexual, life-giving union without thereby assuming that gay people are somehow intrinsically driven to evil, as Benedict insisted. It is not either/or. It has always been both/and.
And look too at the positive aspects of a gay relationship: “mutual aid to the point of sacrifice.” Instead of defining us as living in sexual sin, the church is suddenly seeing all aspects of our relationships – the care for one another, the sacrifices of daily life, the mutual responsibilities for children, the love of our families, the dignity of our work, and all that makes up a commitment to one another. We are actually being seen as fully human, instead of uniquely crippled humans directed always and everywhere toward sin. And, yes, there is concern for our children as well – and their need for care and love and support.
Of course I cannot write these words without something breaking inside of me. It is like a long, dark night suddenly seeing a crack of daylight. Or rather it is like the final breaking of bread within me, a sacrament of love being released within, of a faith made more whole, of a home finally found.
Know hope. Know joy.
(Photos: A grey-beam coming through a stained-glass window, on every spring and autumn equinox, at the Strasbourg cathedral, eastern France. By Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty; Pope Francis leaves the Synod Hall at the end of a session of the Synod on the themes of family on October 13, 2014 in Vatican City, Vatican.By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)
It belongs to Alison Grimes, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Kentucky. She has repeatedly refused to disclose whether or not she voted for Obama. Mitch McConnell is taking full advantage of the situation:
Alison Grimes isn’t running for the position of Private Citizen. She’s running for the US Senate in a cycle where Barack Obama’s agenda is very much on the table — just as Obama himself insisted earlier this month. She wants Kentucky voters to replace McConnell with her, but won’t say whether she’ll vote for Obama’s agenda, instead offering wishy-washy language about independence while taking no stands on Obama policies like ObamaCare and coal restrictions. Now she wants to pretend that, even though Grimes served as a delegate to both of the Democratic National Conventions, in 2008 and 2012, that nominated Obama for President, her support of Obama in the election is somehow a mystery — and that it’s none of the business of Kentucky voters because of the principle of the secret ballot.
The problem with Grimes’s answer is that she had no problem telling Austin Ryan, who interviewed Grimes as part of a documentary for KET and the University of Kentucky, that she voted for Hillary Clinton in Kentucky’s 2008 Democratic primary.
Ultimately, who Grimes voted for in the last two presidential elections isn’t going to be what decides this race. What has hurt Grimes throughout is who won the presidency and how Kentucky views him. The president’s approval ratings hover around 30 percent in Kentucky, and McConnell has all but physically sewn Obama to Grimes.
Drum compares Grimes’ failed political dodge to those of Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst and Colorado Senate candidate Cory Gardner:
The difference is that Grimes was clumsy over her handling of a process issue: her support for a president of her own party. Reporters feel free to go after that. Ernst, by contrast, was crafty over her handling of policy issues: in this case, environmental policy and health care policy. Likewise, Gardner is being crafty about his handling of abortion and contraceptive policy. That sort of craftiness generally invites little censure because political reporters don’t want to be seen taking sides on an issue of policy—or even rendering judgment about whether a candidate’s policy positions have changed.
Jason Zengerle calls “Grimes’s refusal to say who she voted for is emblematic of her entire campaign, which, for the last 15 months, has been waged in a defensive crouch—evading and obfuscating at every turn.”:
Grimes’s candidacy is showing just how absurd—and ultimately self-defeating the modern political campaign has become. So preoccupied with not making mistakes, and demonizing the opponent, the modern political campaign often forgets what would seemingly be its most important task: to make an affirmative case for its candidate. If Grimes and Terri Lynn Land—the Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan who’s run a similarly bunkered race—both go down to defeat, perhaps it’ll serve as something of a wake-up call to strategists on both sides of the aisle.
While pondering the eternal question of how full-time artists can fund their work, Alan Jacobs looks back to a 1945 essay by the poet and critic R.P. Blackmur, “The Economy of the American Writer”:
From our vantage point, perhaps the most interesting point here is Blackmur’s uncertainty about the most likely source of support for artists: will they find their place in the world of the university, or in the world of the non-profit foundation? Well, we know how it turned out: while foundations do still support artists of various kinds, universities have turned out to be the chief patrons of American artists — especially writers.
Blackmur sees that even at his moment support for writers and artists is drifting towards the university; he’s just not altogether happy about that. He’s not happy because he has seen that “the universities are themselves increasingly becoming social and technical service stations — are increasingly attracted into the orbit of the market system.” A prophetic word if there ever was one.
The universities have in the intervening seventy years become generous patrons of the arts; but what is virtually impossible for us to see, because we can’t re-run history, is the extent to which the arts have been limited and confined by being absorbed into an institution that has utterly lost its independence from “the market system” — that has simply and fully become what the Marxist critic Louis Althusser called an “ideological state apparatus,” an institution that does not overtly belong to the massive nation-state but exists largely to support and when possible fulfill the nation-state’s purposes.
On a related note, author Jess Row recently spoke out against the idea of writing for exposure rather than pay:
My feeling is that if we’re talking about a large publicly traded media company, then the contributors ought to be paid something, even if it’s very little. The question of journalism being degraded so that it’s basically being treated as something that you just do for exposure or visibility or self-branding—perhaps it’s not a conspiracy per se, but it is by all accounts a corporate strategy.
I have a lot of problems with the idea that we should be paid less for book reviews that appear online than those that appear in print. I understand that because of the internet the question of how any of these properties make money is very much up in the air, but somebody’s making money, and some people are making a great deal of money, and the people who aren’t making any money are the people who care the most about what they’re doing—the writers and the contributors and the journalists, the people on the ground. I think that’s an unacceptable position, and I think that’s an unacceptable model. It’s a good business model, but an unacceptable artistic or cultural model.
I can’t figure out whether Yglesias was being naïve when he says that “suffice it to say that ‘low and often non-existent profits’ and ‘monopoly’ are not really concepts that go together.” That’s exactly what monopolies do. They have enough capital to take a loss for long enough to wipe out the competition, then they take of advantage of being a monopoly.
Another elaborates by making a key distinction:
Amazon is not a retail monopoly. However, it is quickly becoming a wholesale monopsony (a market form in which there is only one buyer for goods) with respect to books, e-books, and likely other product categories.
By driving down prices and operating at a loss for decades, Amazon is driving out all other potential buyers and resellers of these goods. This may sound good on the surface for consumers (low prices, yay!), but the concern is if Amazon becomes the only viable buyer (and therefore the only viable reseller), there will be no one left to step up as an alternative when Bezos decides he is ready to turn a profit and jacks up prices. Not to mention what happens to the suppliers (publishers and authors) when Amazon (as the sole buyer) drives prices down to unsustainable levels, which in turn will result in less choice for consumers. Many have written on this subject, including the NYT.
Another has a favorable view of the mega-company:
Amazon, as a monopsony, is not something the government should be stomping on, as long as it continues to provide good value to consumers. Amazon is losing money in these efforts and that can’t go on forever. Other businesses may struggle, but that’s generally to the benefit of consumers. Tough for business owners, sure, but business ain’t beanbag.
As far as beating up Hachette goes, Amazon is fighting to be able to discount e-books. Hachette wants to keep prices high, and keep paying authors an absurdly low royalty for e-books. Amazon certainly has its flaws (treatment of warehouse employees among them), but in the book market – which I know about as a publisher, author, and reader – Amazon has been a massive force for good. There are thousands of authors now making good money from Amazon who would never have had a chance under the old publishing system.
But another isn’t a fan:
The issue with Amazon (and Walmart) is not that they are monopolies. Depending on the market in question, these two may or may not possess majority marketshare (in small towns, WalMart and Amazon may be your only choices for many things). On the other hand, neither of them are (per the law) predatory monopolies – companies that drive competitors out of business and then raise prices once the competition is extinguished and collect monopoly rents. Instead, Amazon and Walmart keep prices low and generally provide good service, which largely immunizes them from much antitrust scrutiny in the US. The behavior that gets companies in trouble with antitrust authorities in this country is any form of price-fixing or other scheme to charge customers more than they would be charged in a competitive marketplace. Complaints that WalMart harms consumers by “reducing choice” (not carrying a wider range of products that might be carried were the retail market less concentrated) have been generally laughed out of court by federal judges.
Instead, the issue with both companies is that they are ruthless monopsonies that viciously exploit their vendors and their workforce. Both companies demand (and get) price concessions from manufacturers that are arguably responsible for lots of outsourcing and such; both companies are also well-known for mistreating their employees. US antitrust law, which focuses on harm to consumers (in their capacity as consumers) is not well-situated to focus on predatory monopsony behavior (after all, it was Apple and the publishers who were prosecuted for anti-trust behavior in the recent Amazon fight, even though they were aligning themselves against the 800lb gorilla in the retail book market). US antitrust law doesn’t generally give a rip about mom-and-pop stores being run out of business. (European authorities are more able to deal with predatory monospony behavior; whether this is good or bad policy is an interesting question). And labor relations are, with a few exceptions, outside the scope of anti-trust law – unless business cartels attempt to fix wages in the absence of collective bargaining, anti-trust law simply doesn’t apply.
Another, more neutral observer details the company’s vast services:
I’ve been following the discussion about Amazon as a monopoly and it seems that some people miss the power of Amazon as a company that wants to be your only source for everything. The company is not only your first place to look for anything you may like to purchase from electronics, to house items, to even clothing. Amazon seems to have a hand on every slice of the consumer experience. With Amazon you have prime to get anything in two days without worrying about shipping, but in addition you get a service “prime instant video” that is a competitor of Netflix, Hulu, and regular TV. You also can get your Amazon phone (competing against Apple, Samsung, Google) and your Kindle fire (Nexus, Samsung and iPad tablet rival). Your Kindle also serves as your ebook reader (vs B&N Nook, now a Samsung tablet). On top of that Amazon has also its own app store (vs Google play and iTunes), and now I understand you can also have your music stored in the cloud by Amazon.
But Amazon is also your source for all the back-end computing cloud needs. You can have your files on AmazonCloud Drive, but if you are a company wanting a solution for your IT needs you can use Amazon Web Services and have everything you need from basic website setup to sophisticated data mining applications. AWS even has scientific clients as you can run sophisticated modeling software to do advanced drug search and any other complex data processing and searches. In fact Amazon is looking for academic clients for their AWS system.
If you need to search for anything you want to buy, you don’t even need Google to do the search. Unlike Facebook, Amazon doesn’t nag me to their website every day to waste my time with the latest viral news or inane discussions. They have never asked for anything too personal but they have everything they need to know about my personal interests if they just look at my purchases and regular browsing habits in their website.
They seem to have a knack to pick businesses and services that are going to be necessary as long as humans want to be consumers, and in principle you can have pretty much every need covered in their ecosystem.
(Full disclose: the Dish gets about 3 percent of its annual revenue from Amazon’s affiliate program, detailed here.)
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