Abortion: Un-natural Selection

Tony Miller of Catholic Pillow Fight has some thought on how abortion is costing the Democrats votes, literally.

Another commenter points to the WSJ's great article on the topic from a year back in which they call this the Roe Effect.

Back to School

The Wall Street Journal had a really moving article on Monday by Roger Thurow about a Nigerian girl named Anafghat Ayouba. (The link is a Pittsburg Post-Gazette reprint which you can read without a subscription.)

As is not uncommon in Nigeria and other counties in central Africa, Anafghat was married at 11 to a man twice her age (the dowry was one camel). She lived with her family till she reached puberty, when she went to live with her husband. Soon she was pregnant, and her husband left to work in Libya.

Young and small for her age, she had trouble in delivering her baby. After three days of hard labor during which she was unable to deliver her baby, her father pulled together the money to drive her to a hospital, where her son was delivered, but stillborn. However, the long hard labor had torn a hole, called a fistula, between her bladder and her vagina, leaving her incontinent.

Now, after surgery from visiting American surgeons, she has gone back to school (she was a third grade drop-out) to persue her dream of getting a college education and making something of herself. And her father, a muslim cleric (and goat herder) is behind her:

Anafghat is back living in the small round hut with her family. She and her father say she has no plans to return to her husband and she will stay with her family until she advances to the higher school. And she wants to make sure her younger sisters follow her. Mr. Mahomed sat on one of the beds stirring a bowl of rice, surrounded by all of his daughters.

He says he will keep his promises to Anafghat. "Even if one of my daughters asks to get married while they are still in school," he says, "I will refuse."

Read the whole thing.

Interview in Iraq

Steven Vincent (currently living in and blogging from Iraq) has a great article in National Review Online today in which he interviews an Iraqi stringer about life in Iraq, Hussein, and the invasion.

Levada, Theology and Intellectual Freedom

An interview with the newly appointed head of the CDF, Archbisop Levada, has been causing some comment around the blogsphere.

Others have already speculated on what may discerned about Levada's MO based on his responses. I'll leave that to them, but this section really stuck me:

He said one of the "negative aspects" of the congregation's work is that it must occasionally intervene and ask theologians how they justify their positions or square them with the faith. That can be misunderstood as a form of repression, he said.

"I think people have sometimes gotten the idea that if you don't let every theologian say everything that he or she thinks, or if you challenge them in any way and say, 'That's not correct,' that somehow you are impeding freedom of conscience or freedom of inquiry," he said.

"But that's not the case. We have freedom to inquire. But a theologian himself or herself is called to discriminate between where that inquiry leads and how it corresponds to the faith that the church continues to receive and to live by. Otherwise they would not be doing true theology, it seems to me," he said.

"Theology itself is in dialogue with revelation, which has some things to say. And you can't just say that revelation says anything you want it to say," he said.

This tied in in with a subject that's been simmering on my mental back-burner since the whole stink about America's editor resigning hit the news: what exactly is "legitimate dissent" vs. "unacceptable dissent" in the theological world?

Really, though, perhaps "dissent" is the wrong word. After all, the Church is not a policy making body, it is the body of Christ, comissioned to spread His Word to all nations. The job of theologians is help the faithful by developing an ever clearer understanding of what scripture and tradition tell us about God, the faith, and ourselves.

The relationship of theologians and scripture/tradition should be much the same as that between scientists and the physical world. Scientists are often passionately attached to their favorite theories, but when the verdict increasingly comes in that their theories and physical reality don't match, they're expected to back down and come up with a new theory, not keep insisting that their theory was better than that reality is wrong.

The trick is, although as Catholics we believe that the Church has the ability to speak athoritatively on matters of faith and morals, it is through the human instruments of the Church (other theologians) that a given theologian might recieve words that his latest theories do not fit with scripture and tradition. (In science, it will be other scientists who point at the problems with a given scientist's theories, but at least there's an objectively verifiable physical process which he can fall back on and see for himself.) So all to often people seem to read the situation as: so-and-so doesn't like what I'm saying, so he's telling me to shut up.

People become attached to their ideas, and although we have the final authority of the the magisterium and the Holy Father theoretically doing gate-keeping duty, I think far too many Catholics probably convince themselves, "I'm not really outside the magisterium, it's just that venal [conservative, liberal, etc.] who doesn't like my work and is invoking Rome to back up his personal dislikes." It can't be easy to admit, "No, I'm wrong. My teaching contradicts the magisterium."

But as Catholics we believe that Christ didn't just turn us all loose with the Bible and the traditions (lower-case "t") of Christianity and tell us to find the truth as best we could. We believe that Christ gave the institutional Church the duty of presenting and protecting His teachings, and that he sent the Holy Spirit to guide the Church and prevent it from error. And so we have institutional gate keepers such as the CDF, whose duty it is to warn theologians if their teaching contradicts Scripture and Tradition.

This isn't the squelching of intellectual inquiry and more than physical reality "squelches" scientists whose theories prove wrong. Those organs of the Church who are responsible for preserving doctrinal integrity provide the experimental feedback (if you will) that separates truth from error. (And you generally have to stray pretty far into error before they get involved.)

Unless one is to abandon the idea the the institutional Church is the guardian of Christian Revelation and Tradition (which would mean ceasing to be Catholic) than one must accept the occasional doctrinal interventions by the Church's theological watchdogs with humility. The good theologian, like the good scientist, will take some time to figure out why that theory didn't work, and then formulate a new one.

Defying God

I was out mowing the lawn early this morning, and the blue jay that lives in our back tree objected. Any time I'd stop the mower he'd fly down and start doing little dominance displays in front of the mower, fluffing out his wings and making little charges at me, as if to say, "I don't fear you! Out of my yard. I don't want it mowed. See, see, I'm powerful!"

Then I'd start the mower again and he'd fly off.

Now the mowing is finished, the yard looks great, and the blue jay has forgotten that anything happened.

A Conservative Wakes Up

Though "conservative" is a label that is increasingly hard to define these days, one version that I wear fairly comfortably is, "One who seeks to retain all that was good from the past." I'm not speaking of mindless nostalgia for all things ancient, since in some fields (medicine, laundry, sewage processing) the past had little to recommend it. But while it shouldn't overpower, wistfulness is a good conservative emotion.

Several years ago, I found that my old fashioned instincts had gained control of my morning routine. It started when a European power converter fried my electric shaver, and I was forced to replace it with a package of disposable razors from a supermarket in Oxford. Finding the blades more comfortable than the shaver, I never went back to the shaver.

More recently, I began using Old Spice after shave, primarily because I recalled my grandfathers doing so.

Then one night, googling randomly, I thought of looking to see if anyone still sold straight razors. Indeed, they do. I found a great online store called Classic Shaving. Even better, I found a site called RazorCentral which even reprinted a shaving and razor care manual from the 1700s. I was impressed.

Still, one can't jump into things too quickly, especially when one has limited funds and a hurried morning routine.

So far I've gone from using canned shaving cream to using a cake of shaving soap and a badger hair shaving brush. (Courtesy of a Christmas gift from MrsDarwin.) And more recently I bought an old fashioned double edged safety razor. This is the simpler ancestor of your modern disposable safety razor. Rather than throwing away the whole thing, you remove the head of the razor, throw away the blade, and insert another.

One of these days, though, I'm determined to restore an antique straight razor off Ebay and do the thing properly, or buy one of the nice modern straight razors still produced by European manufacturers. In the mean time, I must satisfy myself with having turned back the clock a mere 90 years.

Kick-off

I've been threatening friends and family for some months with starting a blog, and since my personal and work commitments have reached the point where I really don't have time to add a single thing, this of course seemed like the ideal time.

Why "DarwinCatholic"?

For one thing, it's unexpected. If you're currently wondering what DarwinCatholic means, that's how I'm trying to help you remember it.

First, a little about me. (I've always been charmed by how Gregory of Tours began his History of the Franks with the creed, feeling that his readers should know what he believed before they heard what he had to say.)

I am first and foremost a Catholic.

Politically and culturally, I am a conservative.

My brief career as a published writer consisted of a couple SF/F stories and two book reviews in New Oxford Review in which I criticized creationism/intelligent design and defended the compatibility of Catholicism and evolution. Which I have the feeling is why I stopped being invited to write book reviews for NOR...

Professionally, I am a data analyst, web designer and all around entrepreneurial type.

I'm married to the beautiful MrsDarwin, and we have two little girls (monkeys?) aged 3yrs and one-and-a-half.

And I'm still under thirty.

Which brings me back to this blog's name: DarwinCatholic.

One of the things that really struck me was the cultural/demographic differences between my wife and me (and our friends from college) and most of the other people our age that we met through work.

My wife and I married a month and a half after graduating from Franciscan University of Steubenville. (We had been going out for three and a half years.) Many of our friends also married within a year of graduation. Most of us also had our first child within a year of getting married, and our second within two years after the first. We got office jobs and middle class incomes. Some of our friends had degrees in majors, such as Computer Science, designed to win jobs. Others, like me (I majored in Classics), learned on the job and caught up fast. We bought houses before we were thirty. Several of us started businesses, with varying degrees of success. We became, in the buzzwords of David Brooks, exurban natalists.

Meanwhile, my co-workers (mostly several years older than I) dated, partied, and assumed that I must be over thirty. The idea of "settling down" in your early twenties was totally inconceivable to them, and when I mentioned that my wife and I hoped to have 5-7 children, everyone thought I was joking.

After several years, we moved to Texas, where we had a number of friends. Texas, even in the liberal Austin area, is certainly more family friendly than Southern California. However even here, hearing that someone has more than three children is almost a dead give away that they are religious and at least moderately conservative in their practice thereof.

Certain (admittedly tiny) subgroups present event more extreme examples. In the homeschooling circles that I knew during high school, families of 8-12 were not unusual.

Looking at all this, I can't help wondering: at what point does all this start to become statistically significant? My wife and I both know a lot of other alumni of the Catholic, large family, homeschooling environment, and most of them, like us, as still strong Catholics and look forward to having at least moderate size families. If this holds true for a couple generations, how will the Catholic and indeed the general American demographic landscape shift over the next 60-80 years? If liberals average 1.6 children (and based on European demographics that's pretty likely) and conservatives average 2.6 children, how long will it take the country as a whole to lurch to the right? Or will it?

I continue to have vague ambitions of going to trying to find funding to do a serious demographic survey looking for correlations between religion, politics and reproduction. But more on that later...