Three Links Wednesday (vol XV)

"I submit to your candid judgment that the science fiction story, or, as it is properly called, scientific romance, is the conflux of the roman or romance which was the unique cultural product of the Christian Middle Ages, and the scientific revolution, which was the unique cultural product of the Christian Middle Ages."
--John C Wright

--I--

Election cycle notes: know thy media's (self-fabricated) myths concerning the candidates. CatholicVote's Mr Tom Hoops has four such myths concerning the presidential candidates.

--II--

Cultural Catholicism: a boon to the evangelicals (and fundamentalists) who are looking for relatively easy pickings for proselytism, but are they good for the culture or the Church? They tend to not do the Church any favors (especially if they work for the Obama Administration), but (as Mr Brent Stubbs notes) there are occasional flowers among the weeds, and wheat among the tares.

--III--

The American Thinker has a post which discusses Obama's attempts to create schisms in the Catholic Church in America (among other places). If Bush was polarizing to Americans, this President is the president of social, political, and religious disunity:

Black versus white, rich versus poor, Catholic versus Catholic, and everybody versus everybody -- all so Barack Obama can get re-elected?  The costs clearly outweigh the benefit.  Pity the liberal, wealthy, black, female, or anything Catholic, who must be undergoing a pretty severe identity crisis right about now -- all because President Obama is a self-obsessed one-trick act.  His disdain and lack of charity are evident in every attack, but his presumptuous arrogance is at its maximum in his attempt to sow discord among Catholics by challenging the teachings of their faith.

--Bonus--

Reading and then demolishing Ms Maureen Dowd's idiotically uniformed screeds libelous rants articles: it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do. In this case, it's Mr Carl Olson.

"Dowd, in conclusion, gets almost nothing right about the Church; she does get much wrong, and in a way that speaks poorly about her motives and integrity. Her writing is lazy, her arguments are non-existent, and she is so intent on grinding her axe she cannot see the forest for the trees. She is, in sum, a female Dan Brown, but without the bestsellers or the movies."

And Mrs Dowd calls herself Catholic. A Church-hating Catholic is, unfortunately, not such a rare thing in this troubled world.