[gallery] Love this photo
[gallery] from Laurence Hyde’s’s Southern Cross
The papal entourage eventually decided to give in to the dissidents’ pleas for a meeting at the last minute, as an afterthought, but the results were predictably disastrous. When some democracy advocates were suddenly and unexpectedly invited to meet with Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature in Havana all of them were arrested as soon as they left their homes. In addition, many other non-violent dissidents were rounded up or placed under house arrest, to prevent them from attending the pope’s open-air Mass. Meanwhile, the Castro regime sent busloads of its own hand-picked supporters to the papal Mass, to ensure that Pope Francis would have a sufficiently large audience of politically-correct Cubans. Worst of all, the selection process for those who were crammed into those buses was vetted at the parish level by the Cuban Catholic Church, and approved by its bishops.
When four dissidents somehow managed to get close to Pope Francis, despite the efforts of church and state to keep all such Cubans away from him, they were quickly attacked by plain-clothed state security agents and whisked away to prison. Has Pope Francis denounced these injustices, which amount to religious persecution? Has he voiced concern over the compliance of his bishops in this persecution? No. Not a word. His silence is deafening.
[gallery] clawmarks:
Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita - Paradijsvogel (1914) - Hoornull (1915) - Ringull (1878-1943)
Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy
Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy
Elite law faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. Jim Lindgren has proven the point empirically. I will just add my impressions from Georgetown Law School to reinforce the point. We are a faculty of 120, and, to my knowledge, the number of professors who are openly conservative, or libertarian, or Republican or, in any sense, to the right of the American center, is three — three out of 120. There are more conservatives on the nine-member United States Supreme Court than there are on this 120-member faculty. Moreover, the ideological median of the other 117 seems to lie not just left of center, but closer to the left edge of the Democratic Party. Many are further left than that.But at least there are three. And the good news is that this number has tripled in the last decade. The bad news, though, is that, at Georgetown, the consensus seems to be that three is plenty — and perhaps even one or two too many.
The church is not tied to a text in such a way that nothing will ever be done for the first time. In new situations those who ‘indwell’ the story of which Jesus is the centre will have to make new and risky decisions about what faithfulness to the Author of the story requires. There can be no drawing of a straight line from a text of scripture to a contemporary ethical decision; there will always be the requirement of a fresh decision in responsibility to the One whose story it is.
[gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson:
Maurice de Vlaminck (France 1876-1958)
Le village (n.d.)
watercolor on paper 15.5 x 20.5 in.,
making book
So after my talk at Carleton College today, in which among other things I praised the technology of the codex, my host Fred Hagstrom asked me, “Have you ever made a book?” I coughed gently and acknowledged that I had not. Fred replied, “Do you want to learn how?” I said that I very much would, at which point Fred marched me over to his studio, where we made a book. We chose and cut paper, sewed signatures, chose boards for covers and wrapped them in two tones of cloth, put the whole thing together and popped it into a press. I’ll stop by this evening to pick it up.
How cool is that?
If you want to learn the same basic technique Fred taught me, you can watch this video tutorial he made.
[gallery] drawingarchitecture:
Eu Jin Lim, Unfolded internal elevations of Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, Penang, Malaysia.
