Archive for July, 2013

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Please note the example being used

Posted July 15, 2013 By John C Wright

Under the definition of ‘mensal’

http://wordsmith.org/words/mensal.html

Science-fiction author Robert Heinlein once said, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

While the world has become so complex we do need specialists, there’s a point to Heinlein’s assertion. Not a bad idea to be able to do a whole bunch of things, even if not to perfection.

If words were to heed Heinlein’s advice, the word ‘set’ would win the prize. It’s listed with more than 400 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. The words featured in this week’s A.Word.A.Day are not as multi-faceted, but they do have multiple meanings.

mensal

adjective:
1. Monthly.
2. Relating to the table.
ETYMOLOGY:
For 1: From Latin mensis (month). Earliest documented use: 1475.
For 2: From Latin mensa (table). Earliest documented use: 1440.
USAGE:
“I refer to your addled account of an exchange between you and Mike Butler relative to mensal checks from home.”
John Lewis-Stempel; Fatherhood; Simon & Schuster; 2001. “Daphne was good at mensal ceremony; her each gesture and nibble, each sip from her tea bowl, was as graceful as a small ballet.”
John C. Wright; The Golden Age; Tor Books; 2003.

Aha! Impressed? Keep your Nebhugo Award! There is real fame for you!

 

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A Universal Apology Point Eleven: ON TRADITION

Posted July 15, 2013 By John C Wright

ON TRADITION

I am recounting the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is. I had become convinced that any denomination with no continuity to the historical church could be a guard of the traditional Christian faith.

This lack of history logically necessitates a lack of tradition, which implies also a lack of completeness, of universality, or of depth in art and ritual.

During this period of my life, I went to services of one denomination or another weekly or biweekly. Hand in hand with my growing sense of discontent to be in the midst of Christians utterly isolated from their Christian fathers, I began to notice how frequently the preaching lingered on the words of the founder of the particular sect I was visiting, and how comparatively infrequently on the words of Christ and His Apostles, and how no disciple of any Apostle was mentioned even by name, much less quoted.

I felt like a man starving for stew, and being given a watery broth without meat and without substance. It was thin soup indeed.

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Chick Fil A Day for Orson Scott Card

Posted July 14, 2013 By John C Wright

I heard on the radio, as front-page news headline, that Leftists are planning a boycott of the Ender’s Game movie to punish Orson Scott Card for daring to oppose gay marriage. The news particularly mentioned that the movie has nothing to do with marriage or with sex or sexual deviance: the boycotters just want Card punished for thinking wrong thoughts.

I could not care less about this movie. I will certainly see it on opening night, paying full ticket price, rather than waiting for its release to second run theaters or on disc or streaming.

I want to reward Card only because Left wants to punish him.

I want to live in a free society rather than one where men with unpopular views are hounded down by mobs of craven zealots. I want to live in a society where those who cannot tell the difference between a sexual perversion and a civil right are shamed into silence, and their moral blindness and brutal ignorance no longer tolerated among honest men.

Come, my friends, my fellow citizens, my fellow science fiction fans. Are we to let talented writers be savaged and punished and silenced, and allow these barbarians to have their way?

Let us make the opening night of this movie one of the most successful ever.

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A Universal Apology Point Ten: IGNORANCE OF THE FATHERS

Posted July 14, 2013 By John C Wright

IGNORANCE OF THE FATHERS

I am recounting the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is. I had become convinced that any denomination with no continuity to the historical church could not be the eternal Church.

At this point in my investigations, I ran into a very odd and unexpected problem. The people to whom I turned to help me in this search—and I freely confess that I merely mean average amateurs like myself, not professors of theology—knew nothing about the history of the matter.

Aside from St Augustine, none of them even knew the names of the Fathers of the Church.  When I asked them about Arius and Photius, no one knew who I was talking about. They knew the Nicene Creed, but apparently they thought Luther or Calvin had written it. They had never heard of the council of Nicaea, or regarded it as insignificant. They did not know what the Ecumenical Councils were. They had no idea where the Bible came from or when it had been canonized.

At least one faithful Christian scorned me for having any concern with the history of the Church. I thought this a paradox, for that faithful Christian was a member of a sect whose entire claim was a specific claim of historical fact, namely that the Church once possessed, and then lost, the exact teachings of this sect.

Another faithful Christian told me specifically not to read the Early Church Fathers, on the somewhat elliptical reasoning that, since the Fathers knew the Apostles personally, or knew their immediate disciples, they had nothing but misleading opinions about the scriptures those Apostles entrusted to them: whereas men living over a thousand five hundred years afterward, across the gap of lost records and the oblivion of history, speaking another language and from an entirely alien cultural milieu, could grasp the subtle nuances and shades of meaning of the Apostolic writings in a fashion the immediate disciples of the Apostles, who read the words in their native tongue and spoke to the authors face to face, could not.

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A Universal Apology Point Nine: ON HISTORICITY

Posted July 13, 2013 By John C Wright

ON HISTORICITY

I am recounting the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is. Upon investigation, I became convinced that many of the denominations were Christian in name only, no longer motivated by any authentic Christian spirit (or Spirit) and no longer afire with the enthusiasm which originally provoked them to break away from their previous traditions and institutions.

At this point in my search, the idea of an Apostate Church versus a Primitive Church began to seem more and more unlikely. The whole argument that the Church was apostate turned on the date selected for its Apostasy.

Protestants, Heresiarchs, and Schismatics rarely utter a specific date, but logically, if the modern Catholic Church is an apostate corruption of the Primitive Church then there must be a point before which the Primitive Church was still pure, and a point after which the corruption was irrevocable.

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Just passing this along

Posted July 12, 2013 By John C Wright

A comment about Obamacare from a health care professional (http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=105&load=8639)

It’s hard to relay to non-healthcare workers just how much despair there is in the industry, both from knowing that what is already far too expensive will only get worse and the patients that we represent will suffer from the bureaucratic morass. We are all getting paid less, our hospitals are providing worse care, para-health professionals such as speech therapy are losing jobs, and people are forgoing necessary “elective” procedures because of deductibles that are beyond their means.

And all of this is exacerbated by the uncertainty of both the near future of our sure-to-be futile responses to the rules of Obamacare and the coming collapse of the whole system.

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A Universal Apology Point Eight: ON CHASTITY

Posted July 12, 2013 By John C Wright

ON CHASTITY

I am recounting the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is.

A eighth point was the matter of the Holy Spirit and its war with the Sexual Revolution.

During the time when I was meditating and searching, the Episcopalian denomination was suffering a schism, because the Progressive Episcopalians, searching diligently through the writings of Saint Paul and the Patriarch Moses, not to mention the entire canon law from the First Century to the Twentieth, had allegedly found some emanation of a penumbra of some Right to Privacy implicit in Christianity, albeit not formerly enunciated: in addition to married priests and priestesses (oddly, for some reason always mislabeled ‘female priests’—I wonder if Queen Elizabeth is now going to be called a ‘female king’) , now there would be admitted lesbian and homosexual priests and priestesses. And no doubt lesbian priestesses joined in the holy sacrament of same-sex union to each other was soon to follow.

The laity and clergy more interested in following the teachings of Jesus Christ than those of Albert Kinsey decided to divorce themselves from their Progressive brethren.

Now from my own coign of vantage, the only thing I respected about the Christians back in the days when I was an atheist was the sobriety and strictness of their teachings about chastity. Since this is one feature which is the source of all real hostility toward Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, it merits a word of explanation.

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A Universal Apology Point Seven: ON CONTINUITY

Posted July 11, 2013 By John C Wright

ON CONTINUITY

I am recounting in chronological order the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is.

The seventh point is the matter of historical consistency or continuity.

I was shocked to learn that it is not merely the Catholics who forbid the use of contraceptives, but all Christian denominations throughout the world, until the 1930’s did also.

All the other denominations changed their stance, changed their teachings, and changed their minds in the years between the Great War and the Cold War.

And yet I have heard no rumor of a prophet whose many miracles convinced all these other denominations that God Almighty had excused them from what their fathers back to the First Century had taught and believed.

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A Universal Apology Point Six: ON COMMUNION

Posted July 10, 2013 By John C Wright

ON COMMUNION

I am recounting my spiritual voyage of discovery over the several years that passed between my conversion, and my reception in the safe harbor of the Roman Catholic faith.

The sixth point I encountered was the question of the Host.

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A Universal Apology Point Five: ON UNITY

Posted July 9, 2013 By John C Wright

ON UNITY

Several things convinced me of the truth of the Catholic claims. The fifth argument in favor of Catholicism was first point that impressed itself upon me after my conversion. It was the question of unity.

Upon receiving the heartrending beauty and dazzling truth of the Christian faith with as loud a wail of surprise as a baby being born, but much more joyful, I felt as if I were an foundling raised in some terrible gray-walled dystopia where all the children are orphans were born in Petrie dishes, and no rumor of fatherly or motherly love existed, of a sudden finding that both his parents were alive and loved him and sent for him to come home.

Rushing to his magnificent ancestral mansion, the foundling discovers the great house has been torn asunder so that only the Eastern and Western wings still stand, and between them, where the main nave once rose, is now a cratered and lifeless no-man’s-land. At two opposite doors on opposite ends of the majestic ruin, his parents stand. They suffered a messy and vindictive divorce, and each now crossly demands of the foundling that he choose which one to love and which to hate.

That mansion is the Church.

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Just in case you are Wondering

Posted July 9, 2013 By John C Wright

What I look and sound like, here is an interview by Buzzy Magazine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVzvJGjvE_Y

If, in the course of reading my words here, I sound to your ears of the imagination strident or angry or whatnot, listening to the sort of meandering way I talk will cure any reader of that impression. Read the word and pretending they are being spoken by a guy with a slow voice who often pauses and stares at the ceiling, and half the words get lost in the thicket of his beard and vanish.

 

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A Universal Apology Point Four: ON SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY

Posted July 8, 2013 By John C Wright

ON SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY

I am recounting in chronological order the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is.

Since the time, back when I was an atheist, when I first came across the controversy over Church authority to define canon, I have since only heard two additional arguments which support the Protestant side. Both arguments claim an independent, self-defining or self-authorizing authority for scripture.

One was from a Protestant theologian who is so wise and learned, and so clear and logical in his thinking that I tremble to disagree with him. He made this statement: “It is wrong to say that the Church formed the canon of scripture; the scripture formed the Church!”

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Summary of the General Ecumenical Councils

Posted July 8, 2013 By John C Wright

It may be of use to those readers not familiar with the history of the Church to see a list of the Ecumenical Councils and what they decided. This list is taken from the Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04423f.htm

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A Universal Apology Point Three: ON THE MAGISTERIUM

Posted July 7, 2013 By John C Wright

ON THE MAGISTERIUM

The third point that convinced me of the truth of the Catholic claims is the paradox of accepting the canon of scripture while rejecting the teaching authority, that is to say, the Magesterium, of the Church. This is asserting an infallible scripture was canonized by a fallible Church; or again that an authorized scripture was authorized by an unauthorized Church.

But if not from the Church, from where would this Magisterial authority come?

Does Christ grant to each several and separate believer the right and authority to define the canon of scripture each man for himself? Do some men have the authority and not others? If so, whence comes this authority? If not through apostolic succession, then from where?

Now, a sensitive modern reader will already notice a whiff a moral atmosphere utterly alien to all modern thought has entered this essay. Why are we discussing authority?

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A Universal Apology Point Two: ON CANONICITY

Posted July 6, 2013 By John C Wright

ON CANONICITY

I am recounting in chronological order the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is.

The second is the paradox of accepting on authority the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity but rejecting authority defining those doctrines.

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