"MARRIAGE IS FOR WHITE PEOPLE": Fr Tucker wanted to know if I would blog about this Washington Post piece, which is very much worth reading. I don't know that I have too much to add really--here's a relevant passage from my 2003 Weekly Standard piece on working at the pregnancy center:

...Growing up fatherless affects how women view their own relationships and their pregnancies. Because so few of our clients have known men who consistently met their family responsibilities, they rarely demand responsibility from the men they date. Even women who want children generally view adult men as a fleeting part of the household. Men flit in and out of women's lives, exotic but untrustworthy creatures, exciting but ultimately irrelevant to the formation of a family.

We see some boyfriends who want to be responsible. But men too suffer from the lack of strong models of paternal and spousal responsibility. Our observations coincide with the findings of Jennifer F. Hamer, author of a study of the attitudes of black non-custodial fathers published under the title "What It Means to Be Daddy" (though not with her policy prescriptions). Hamer believes that marriage is not a necessary or even a superior way to harness men's desires for fatherhood. But even the men she studied who tried to be more than "absent fathers"--more than statistics--didn't do many of the things that distinguish reliable fathers. Because they didn't marry the mothers of their children, they didn't refrain from fathering children by different women (thus splitting their resources and attention, and creating "drama"), or become stable fixtures in their children's homes. Women didn't demand this--and the women's mothers sometimes even shooed the men away, viewing them as threats, rather than encouraging men who wanted to take responsibility to do so. (In my experience, mothers are also at least as likely as boyfriends to pressure their unmarried pregnant daughters to have abortions.)

The women we counsel say they want to get married, just as the men Hamer interviewed want to be good fathers, but they have little sense of how to get what they want. ...When marriage is a chimera, there's nothing to wait for, no reason to be chaste. There's nothing for a woman to demand from men, no reason for her to put "responsible" above "fun" on the checklist of qualities to look for in a potential boyfriend. When responsibility is almost unknown, where would a man acquire the notion that the best thing he can do for his girlfriend is stop having sex with her; or, if she conceives, that the best thing he can do for his child is marry and love the mother? Instead of attitudes conducive to marriage, fatherlessness fosters the second huge problem, fatalism.

(the rest)

And when I interviewed the guy who worked with the boyfriends who came to our center, he pointed out that a lot of the younger black guys would use the term "wife" to mean their "main girl"--their steady girlfriend, basically--but they'd still have, as he said, "a side dish or an appetizer"....

LINKS...: Christians in Iraq (and elsewhere in the Muslim world):

Baghdad's Auxiliary Bishop Andreas Abouna has given his bleakest assessment yet of the situation in Iraq, speaking of the despair that is driving more and more Christians to leave the country. Describing a worsening of the security situation since last December's parliamentary elections, the Chaldean prelate told how people were living in fear of their lives.

more

Fasting and prayer:

Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly of Baghdad has proposed April 3-4 as days of fasting and prayer for peace in Iraq.

more (via Disputations)

And from Amy Welborn, links on the martyred monks of Tibhirine, in Algeria (killed ten years ago):

Theirs was "a message of poverty, of abandonment in the hands of God and men, of sharing in all the fragility, vulnerability and condition of forgiven sinners, in the conviction that only by being disarmed will we be able to meet Islam and discover in Muslims a part of the total face of Christ," the priest said.

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HA!: Jaroslav Pelikan, from his new book:

...Every age has its own heresies, Pelikan says, and ours seems "especially vulnerable to an aestheticism that finds the ultimate mystery of transcendence in the beauty of art and music, which have the magical capacity to transport us into an otherworldly realm without calling us to account for our sins in the presence of the holy God and the righteous Judge of all mankind".

We modern, half-non-believing aesthetes, who ooh and aah over the words of the Bible, gushing over their exquisite beauty, are, he says, like people who stand admiring a shiny set of dentist's instruments. Until, that is, the drills and knives are set to work. "Then all of a sudden the reaction changes from 'How beautiful they are!' to 'Get that damned thing out of my mouth!'"

(more)
(via Amy Welborn)

Blogwatch makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel...

Claw of the Conciliator: He's started a series of posts on Christianity and science fiction and fantasy; scroll up from here. And this is a really interesting, fun post about how attempting a "view from nowhere" damages one's understanding (of religion, in this case, but I think the point has wider applicability).

Disputations on my post about forgiveness.

The Rat on V for Vendetta.

Virginia Postrel makes containers interesting:

...My column barely mentions one important part of the story--the regulatory environment. At first, containerization grew through cracks in the rigid regulatory structure of the 1960s. But today's fully integrated systems became possible only after trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s and maritime rates were deregulated (to very little fanfare) in 1984. Assumptions about transportation regulation have changed so radically that reading about the bad old days seems like science fiction.

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The love story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.
--Deus Caritas Est

One of (at least) three things seems to happen to me each time I attempt this self-abandonment: 1) I remain trapped in the self, feeling spiritually clumsy, very caught up in my own feelings and reactions, confused and ashamed and bored!--focused inward; 2) I get distracted, the mind goes elsewhere, I attempt to make a mental escape from the situation and its demands, and thus escape all the problems of my own will--focused outward but not on any Person; 3) I am able to apprehend, even briefly, God's love and His creation of this world, and it's actually very joyful and fulfilling just to kneel and pray and be there, to get a sense of what is really always going on whether I notice it or not--focused on God, usually on Christ. My own attentiveness and perseverance are necessary for 1) or 2) to move, even fleetingly, into 3). I need to be attentively, not passively, receptive to grace. ...I also, yes, I know, need to go to Confession and receive Communion much more often. Very basic things cause major changes in one's spiritual life....

RAHMAN TO BE RELEASED--but that isn't even close to the end of the story....

PARIS BURNING, ONCE AGAIN: Claire Berlinski:

..."It's us they hurt," added the second man. By this he meant immigrants and their children, particularly the residents of France's suburban ghettos, where unemployment runs as high as 50 percent. And, of course, he was right, as everyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economics appreciates: If employers are unable to fire workers, they will be less likely to hire them. It is now almost impossible to fire an employee in France, a circumstance that disproportionately penalizes groups seen by employers as risky: minorities, inexperienced workers and those without elite educations, like the outraged man sitting beside me.

This is the second time in four months that France has been seized with violent protests. And in an important sense, these are counter-riots, since the goals of the privileged students conflict with those of the suburban rioters who took to the streets last November. The message of the suburban rioters: Things must change. The message of the students: Things must stay the same. In other words: Screw the immigrants.

The issue at stake is not, of course, the CPE, which in addition to being unknown in its effects would apply only to a two-year trial period, after which employees would still, effectively, be guaranteed jobs for life. The issue is fear of a real overhaul of France's economically stifling labor laws. While some of the suburban hoodlums have joined in these protests -- after all, a riot is a riot -- it is clear that unless this overhaul proceeds, the immigrants are doomed. If so, last year's violence will seem a lark compared with what is coming. ...

...If the CPE is enacted, said one young woman, "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked."

more (via Hit & Run)

SPEAKING OF FOOD: Jamie Oliver:

...Every so often, he apologises. He keeps saying, 'Sorry--I'm ranting.' He tells me not to quote him when he curses too much. He develops his theme, getting more and more animated. As he keeps saying, the problem of nutrition is very easily solved. But circumstances conspire against it. He tells me that, when he lived in east London, a lot of his neighbours were unemployed. And what was in their trolleys? Packets of processed food. Nothing fresh.

'It's cheaper to buy raw ingredients,' he says. 'And it's tastier. And it's better for you. But there's one thing missing in this country, which is the knowledge to turn a beef shin and two carrots and an onion and water and a pinch of salt and pepper into an incredible glippy bastard of a stew that you just wanna mop up with some good bread that costs bugger all and will feed eight people.'

So why can't we cook? One of the reasons is that children are taught very little about cooking in school. Jamie says, 'Twenty years of governments don't see a serious place for food. We've given up teaching kids how to cook at school. How can that be unimportant? How can looking after yourself and, most important, just prepping you in the bare essentials to be a young parent not be a part of it?'

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And Theodore Dalrymple on "the starving criminal":

...Moreover, unlike the people who spoke so fluently of the food deserts, I had, in the course of my medical duties, visited many homes in the area. The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short.

The Indian immigrants and their descendants inherited a far better and more elaborate cuisine than the native British, of course, but this is not a sufficient explanation of their willingness still to buy fresh food and to cook it: they continue to cook because they still live in families, and cookery is a socially motivated art. Even among Indian heroin addicts (principally Muslim), the kind of malnutrition I have described is rare, because they do not yet live in the solipsistic isolation of their white counterparts, who live alone, even when there are other people inhabiting the house or apartment in which they themselves live. Drug addiction is thus a necessary condition for much of the malnutrition that I see, but not sufficient.

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The ancient world had dimly perceived that man's real food--what truly nourishes him as man--is ultimately the Logos, eternal wisdom; this same Logos now truly becomes food for us--as love.
--Deus Caritas Est

MORE SNAKES! MORE PLANE!: Hee hee hee.

..."Who wants to be in a movie called 'Snakes on a Plane'?" asked one talent agent at the time, seeming to echo the studio's concerns.

But once production began, a funny thing happened. Movie fans began noticing the black sheep of the New Line slate. They seized upon the title and created fan sites, blogs, T-shirts, poems, fiction and songs. The title itself, sometimes abbreviated as "SoaP," has emerged as Internet-speak for fatalistic sentiments that range from c'est la vie to "s--- happens."

"The title is so clear and so straightforward," said Brian Finkelstein, a Washington, D.C., native who created the blog http://www.Snakesonablog.com and who hopes to score tickets to the movie's premiere. "You know exactly what you're going to get."

Like Harry Potter, whose first suggestion that he's got magic on his hands comes when he discovers he can talk to snakes in their language, New Line got the message. Deciding that so many anonymous fans couldn't be wrong, the studio decided to revert to the movie's original title.

Jackson publicly endorsed the move. "That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title," Jackson told entertainment site http://www.Collider.com. He added, "You either want to see that, or you don't."

more snakes!
via Ratty.

WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?: Not a trick question. Those who know me well might know that this is something I've puzzled about for a while. I want to know when it's over!--when have I finished forgiving these people who irk me?! ...Which is not really a helpful approach. Still... here are some very scattered thoughts about how to forgive, for people, like me, for whom this is far from obvious.

a. Act to promote the other person's well-being. Seriously. Take some specific action to make the other person's life better. This only counts if your action is not related to the things you dislike about the person!--i.e. you can't be all, "Telling her she's a great big moron was my way of contributing to her spiritual well-being! It's tough love, baby!" No--take particular, specific actions that improve the other person's life.

b. What if it were easy? There is probably at least one person in your life whom you find it very easy to forgive. This is a person you love: a spouse, a friend, a parent, a child, somebody. If this person goes around being horrible to others and to you, you don't just sit there and take it--for her sake, you tell her why what she's doing is wrong. You do your best to stop her from acting wrongly. This even though she's the person you forgive quicker than anyone else.

From this experience we learn one important thing: Challenge isn't separate from love. You adore her, therefore you try to stop her when you think she might harm herself or others. Love doesn't mean, "Okay honey, do whatever you want, I don't care."

Okay... so try to apply this, analogously, to people you don't immediately love. What if you loved them? What if it were easy to forgive them?

You still wouldn't pretend like they had never done anything wrong. Forgiveness doesn't mean pretending the wrong never happened. It doesn't mean that you can't take the wrongdoing into account when trying to figure out if you should trust the other person with a confidence, or a $20 bill.

c. See her best self. What forgiveness does mean is that you will look for the person's best self. You won't make up fantasy selves for the person; you won't pretend she's stronger than she is. But you will keep always in your head a vision of who she needs to be.

If you do that: You won't gossip about her. You won't interpret every lapse as yet another piece of evidence that she's always like that. When you find yourself yelling at the image of her you carry around in your head, you'll stop yourself, and go find something shiny to look at instead.

d. I don't even know who said this, but there's this saying that refusing to forgive is like taking rat poison and hoping that the rat dies. And this is the crux. Look--if your best friend was the one who refused to forgive, what would you want her to do? Wouldn't it break your heart to see her so wound up about the people she dislikes, or the people who have hurt her? Wouldn't you want her to act as if the important people in her life are the ones who love her?

So okay. I'm trying to live in a more forgiving way. This is very hard for me, because I do tend to carry around images of Those Who Thwart Me!!!! in my head. So if you all have other thoughts on forgiveness, I'd really like to hear them. I can use all the help I can get!

ABDUL RAHMAN: Please keep praying, writing to officials, and praying some more. This Web-Elf roundup also has a lot of links on the more general situation for Christians in Afghanistan, and is very much worth your time.

YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN THIS ALREADY, but just in case:

SADDAM'S ULTRA-LOYAL Fedayeen martyrs were ordered to carry out bombings and assassinations in London, Iran, and "self ruled areas" of Iraq in May 1999, according to a newly released Iraqi intelligence document. One such operation, codenamed "Tamooz Mubarak" or "Blessed July," was apparently intended to hunt down Iraqi dissidents and bomb other unspecified locations.

more

Thus the Song of Songs became, both in Christian and Jewish literature, a source of mystical knowledge and experience, an expression of the essence of biblical faith: that man can indeed enter into union with God--his primordial aspiration. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one.
--Deus Caritas Est

ABDUL RAHMAN--very updated, many links, inc information on contacting your local Afghan embassy.

I picked up a blogwatch--he's good with a knife
Says anaesthetic's a waste of his time
Works in a hurry but always worthwhile
Knows they won't be back for a long long time....

Andrew Sullivan: It's rare that I get to agree with Sullivan on Gay Stuff, so I'm commemorating the occasion with a link: If Paul Cameron told me water is wet, I'd run to the tap and check.

Get Religion: If you read anything about Ben Domenech's resignation from the Washington Post, read this.

And why did no one tell me that Sean Collins is blogging again??? You have all been remiss, people. Remiss I say!

The man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God.
--GK Chesterton (or possibly just attributed to him? I don't know where it's from...)--and fairly influential in my conversion.

YOUR REMINDER that the next St Matthew's Cathedral theology of the body seminar-discussion-thingy is this Saturday, at (sigh) ten a.m.

TORTURE: Balkinization: "No blood, no foul":

...In early 2004, for example, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. "Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident." And in January 2004, "the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited." (Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.")

much more

And:

...A survey by the Pew Research Center in October showed that 15 percent of Americans believe torture is "often" justified, and another 31 percent believe it is "sometimes" justified. Add to that another 17 percent who said it is "rarely" justified, and you have two out of three Americans justifying torture under certain circumstances. Only 32 percent said it is "never" justified, while another 5 percent didn't know or refused to answer.

But the portion of Catholics who justify torture is even higher, according to the survey. Twenty-one percent of Catholics surveyed said it is "often" justified and 35 percent said it is "sometimes" justified. Another 16 percent said it is "rarely" justified, meaning that nearly three of four Catholics justify it under some circumstances. Four percent of Catholics "didn't know" or refused to answer and only 26 percent said it is "never" justified, which is the official teaching of the church.

more; via Amy Welborn

ABDUL RAHMAN: Anglican.tk (the Anglican Web Elves) has a large link round-up on the Afghan Christian currently in danger of execution for converting from Islam. More here and here.