Author: simchajfisher

An indulgence for THAT?

Probably you’ve heard, you can get an indulgence if you follow the events of World Youth Day via Twitter.

Of course the secular media is reporting that you can get an indulgence “through” Twitter, as if it’s something you can download.  And wouldn’t that be an interesting topic for another day?  I can’t be the only one who reifies technological processes in my imagination, picturing digitized data as twinkling clouds that swirl through the air and down through the vent in the side of my laptop.  Zwoosh!  Downloaded.   I may be a technological moron who engages in magical thinking when it comes to computer stuff, but the typical secular person is just as childish when it comes to understanding and imagining spiritual things.  I suppose that, when they hear “grace” or “salvation,” they think of moonbeams or pixie dust.

Anyway, about those Twitter indulgences.  The usual crowd of indignant neckbeards are grousing at the loosey goosey way Francis is handing ‘em out for cheap  — forgetting, apparently, that there’s a long tradition of earning indulgences through doing things that by no means guarantee a spiritual experience.  The actual action you perform — going to Mass at a certain church, finishing a certain novena – isn’t necessarily a difficult thing.  In part, it’s kind of a hook, something to grab your attention and give you some structure, so that you get the spiritual benefit of the proscribed action, and you’re also motivated to do the other things necessary to gain an indulgence.  Here’s a good overview.

It occurs to me that Francis has actually done something brilliant here — something even the Frankophobes can’t argue with:   he’s making the media help him catechize the world.

 

I mean, imagine if he sent out a tweet saying, “Your word of the day is ‘indulgence,’” and then went on to define it.  No one would care.  Instead, he’s made it into a story, and now people are actually having to look it up and see what the deal is.  Haters gonna hate, but plenty more people will learn something they never would have otherwise.

Love that man.

Good for CVS!

Rolling Stone, in its wisdom, has chosen to feature alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover, presumably because the murder of innocents is always edgy, especially if there are big brown eyes and lavish curls involved.

CVS is refusing to sell the issue.  Here’s their statement on their Facebook page (via Gawker):

CVS/pharmacy has decided not to sell the current issue of Rolling Stone featuring a cover photo of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect. As a company with deep roots in New England and a strong presence in Boston, we believe this is the right decision out of respect for the victims of the attack and their loved ones.

Don’t waste your time with the comments, as usual.  There’s a bunch of disingenuous snark about how National Review must love and endorse Obama and Osama Bin Laden, since they put him on their cover, nyeh nyeh.  Ugh, as if there isn’t enough stupidity in the world, we have to have people pretending to be stupid.

Anyway, good for CVS.  May God for give Tsarnaev, and may the rest of us have the strength to refrain from sexifying evil.

My profile of Dr. Carpentier in OSV

I wrote this article about Dr. Paul Carpentier quite a while ago – glad they are running it for NFP awareness week!  A great doctor and a good man.

Doctor keeps medical practice in line with Catholic teaching

 

Dr. Paul Carpentier, founder of In His Image Family Medicine in Gardner, Mass., said he doesn’t have an especially unusual mission.

“It’s just one of stewardship,” he said. “I intend to do the best I can with the skills God has given me, for the community that presents itself for care.” But something sets him apart.

On his website is this notice: “Please be advised that this practice does not provide abortions, sterilizations, contraceptives, artificial reproductive technologies or assisted suicide, nor do we refer for these services.”

“I’m not inflicting some kind of hardship on patients,” Carpentier told Our Sunday Visitor. These services are available everywhere, and Massachusetts health care covers most of them. When Carpentier tells his patients that he can’t perform certain practices because they are against his conscience, he said most people don’t object.

“In 23 years, I’ve only had two patients storm out,” he said. They were mothers who had taken the day off work to bring their daughters in for contraceptives. “I actually talked to the daughters,” he said. “I told the moms, ‘Talk to your daughters. They don’t want to be on the pill.’”

Read the rest . . .

So, what else is going on in Florida?

Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville had said the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law should apply to her because she was defending herself against her allegedly abusive husband when she fired warning shots inside her home in August 2010. She told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she had already taken out a protective order.

But instead, she got sentenced to 20 years for attempted murder.

And here’s my analysis:

 

Rock and roll! What a empty generation.

Just had a nice interview with Dina Marie Hale of KBVM, in advance of the Catholic Women Rejoice conference in Vancouver, Washington this September.  I had nearly a whole hour to blather on!  I’ll post a link to the interview later, should you want to listen.

Then I was grousing on Facebook about how much harder it is to speak radio than to speak to a crowd in person, because you don’t get any reaction from your audience, and have no idea of whether you’re connecting or not.  My sister comforted me:  “Could be worse.  ‘In the old days you could get in there, hit ‘em with an apple or a grapefruit. Nowadays, you do dat, you need a new picture tube, fifty bucks!’”

This is a quote from an LP we used to listen to growing up.  Eddie Lawrence — weird, goofy, hilarious stuff.  Here’s the skit my sister was quoting from.  I laughed so hard, the kids didn’t know what to think.

“I say if you can’t vote six, seven times, stay home!  Supposed to be a democracy, ain’t it?”

 

At the Register: The Stupids Get a Dog

And this is the expurgated version.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to crap up the Register even further with personal pictures, but I can bring myself to do it here!
Here is our first look at the puppy, who is eight weeks old, and his name is Shane (yes, as in “Shane!  Shane!  Come back!”):

 

Here he is in the back seat, wondering who the hell we are, where his mommy went, and why we didn’t think to borrow a cage or crate for a three-hour ride, especially if the car is going to make horrible jerking movements and a grinding noise and smoke is going to billow out from the hood:

 

and here is my husband and the puppy on the side of the road, thinking about transmissions, and life and stuff:

 

Here I am after our thunderstormery walk down the highway, just starting to realize the gravity of our situation:

 

And here is the inside of my brain when my husband told me how much transmissions cost:

and here we are having a slightly illegal public aperitif before I sent him back for some food that was not corn nuts:

 and here is how things stood the very next day:

 

Sunny and happy, more or less.  Nobody has slept in four days and our house smells like pee, but PUPPYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!

#Free the Word! An apology, and explanation, and an appeal by Brandon Vogt

Brandon Vogt covers everything you need to know about the copyright issues surrounding the distribution of Lumen Fidei and other magisterial works.

 

He explains what the problem is with the current system and what a better solution would look like; and he apologizes for his error and (unnecessarily, in my opinion) for his initial reaction to the response he got from the USCCB.

He answers tons of common questions about this issue, and he has opened his comment box as a petition to the Holy See, to urge them to tweak their copyright policies so that that the light of faith can be spread more easily.

Please check out Brandon’s post.  He is a shining example of the New Evangelization:  enthusiastic, generous, orthodox, thorough, and innovative, and he makes it easy to participate.  Share his post, sign the petition, retweet his tweets. Brandon has a very good idea, and we need to help him make it happen!

The most disgusting thing you will read all day.

From some “bro-choicers” — a cheat sheet with four reasons why Texas guys should oppose #HB2.

These males — I can’t bring myself to call them “men” – shed a few crocodile tears over the health and safety of women, should — horror of horrors — abortion clinics who perform surgery be forced to adhere to the same health and safety standards of your typical LASIK eye clinic.

Because, as we know, women will only be safe once abortionists are free to shove sharp tools into their insides without having to bother with petty stuff like getting hospital privileges, or making halls wide enough for a gurney to pass through when someone made an oopsie and a bowel or uterus got perforated, or if some pesky lady is hemorrhaging again.

But then we get down to what’s really at risk, should late term abortions become harder to come by.  The bro-choicers warn:

Your sex life is at stake. Can you think of anything that kills the vibe faster than a woman fearing a back-alley abortion? Making abortion essentially inaccessible in Texas will add an anxiety to sex that will drastically undercut its joys. And don’t be surprised if casual sex outside of relationships becomes far more difficult to come by.

Vomit.  Vomit, vomit, vomit.  That’s all I have to say.  I know the protestors were just trolling when they chanted “Hail, Satan,” but Satan is not fussy.  Trolls make excellent fodder for the mouth of Hell.

“I have been brainwashed.”

I always knew I liked Dustin Hoffman. (via Upworthy)

7 Unquick Takes, Because I’m Really Tired, and I Talk More, Not Less, When I’m Tired, Unlike Most Men, Who Do the Opposite

 

1.  Today, I’m very pleased to be part of a neat website called 3 Things for Mom, created by Lauren Warner (who is the wife of Matt Warner, of Flocknote andRead the Catechism in a Year fame).

 

3 Things for Mom delivers bite-sized nuggets of information and insight from one mom to another, with a truth, a tip, and a find.  Their line-up includes moms who are, oh, editors-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living and Redbook, writers for the NYT, producers of the Today Show, anchors of the news (is that how you say it?) at ABC and CNN, and sitters around in their kitchens, picking their scabs at 3 a.m. because they can’t sleep because they’re worried their children can’t recite the seven deadly sins, and besides, it’s hot.

My entry includes very edifying photo of Benny sporting a huge mosquito bite on her eyelid, and spazzing out at the beach, wearing nothing but a swim diaper and a string of plastic beads.  They’re homeopathic beads.  For her mosquito bite.  Why do you fear the things you don’t understand?

2.  I love photoshopped “what if” pictures.  Not to be an overanalytical creep, but I often can’t help thinking, “Yeah, but if the change you’re depicting actually happened, that’s not all that would be different!” Like the series about what the sky would look like if other planets were as close to Earth as the moon is. 

 

 

Pardon my scientific pea brain, but if Saturn were that close to the Earth, wouldn’t the Earth also be drawn to Saturn and pulverized more or less instantaneously?  Or is Saturn, like, gas or something?  But it still has gravity, right?  Or else it wouldn’t have rings.  Can you be pulverized by getting drawn into gas?  Or doesn’t it have an ice core or something?  This is why we don’t homeschool anymore.

Or here, as long as I’m ruining stuff, there’s this gorgeous series, that combines city scenes with starry nights from another place on the same latitude, showing what the night sky would look like if there were no light pollution.

 

 

But I can’t help thinking that the scenes would only exist if all the people were suddenly dead.  Because the only reason the bridge is there is because there’s lots of people who need to cross it, and if there’s lots of people, there’s going to be lots of light.  I’m not really complaining; I’m just saying that these are works of art, not portrayals of anything possible or even desirable.

Sort of along the same lines, we have Celebrity Makeunders, which imagines what famous faces might look like if their lives were a little bit more like the lives of me and thee.

 

Scientology would be like, “Never mind, forget it, you can go now.  Sure, sure, you’re clear, just go!”

I actually play the opposite of this game in my head all the time — trying to spot people who, if they had better clothes and a personal makeup artist and didn’t work at the Walmart dressing room, would look like models or movie stars.  O fortuna!

3,  Speaking of fortuna, did you realize that there’s such a thing as tuna Jello salad?

 

 

Apparently the advantage of this dish is that the Jello really binds the tuna together, so.

4.  Today you can read Lumen Fidei, started by Benedict XVI and finished by Francis. Brandon Vogt, the second most helpful man in the world, has converted it to several popular formats so you can download it for free. The most helpful man in the world is the one who got my van unstuck from that unexpected median in the Citizen’s Bank parking lot.

5.  Despite my gloomy ruminations, we had a lovely day on the Fourth of July.  My teenage daughter read the entire Declaration of Independence out loud.  My brother, who studied Jefferson very closely in college, says that the description of the “long train of abuses” was actually the heavily edited, carefully toned down version of what he actually wanted to say.  Things were, apparently, much much worse than what they describe.  I asked why they heck they would do that, since they were already declaring their independence.  Why make their case weaker?  He says that some of the signers were hoping to sort of make a clean break with England, without any bloodshed.  Just kind of, “Hey, we’re just gonna . . . go over here now, okay?  Cool?  Cool?”

I don’t even want to tell you how long I just spent looking for a photo of George Jefferson giving the thumbs up.

Anyway, my parents, two brothers, nephew, niece, and mother-in-law all came over, we grilled meat, drank beer, argued about movies, laughed and told stories, and set off fireworks.  It was great.

6.  This is Benny on Albuterol.

 

She struck this pose and then froze until I took a picture of her.  Lots of moms told me that Albuterol makes their kids nutty, but this is actually what Benny is like all the time, except when she can’t breathe.  She’s much better now!  Still coughing, but her lungs are clear, and the fever is gone.

7.   I had a fascinating two-part interview with the charming and talented Steve Gershom

 

planned for this past Wednesday and Thursday, but I didn’t want it to get overlooked because of the holiday.  So I’ll save it for Monday and Tuesday.  It’s tentatively titled, “Ex-Gay:  Is That Even a Thing?”

Check out everyone else’s 7 Quick Takes at Conversion Diary, where Jen is contending with a huge and daunting deadline.  We all know that she is awesome enough to absolutely crush it, but still, a prayer couldn’t hurt.