Three Links Wednesday (vol. XVII)

I almost didn't do these today. Part of the trouble in doing these is that it means I have to sift through a week's worth of links, and reserve a few from going to facebook (or else offer a link which has been previously offered submitted); and often I forget the older links, so these are inevitably front-loaded with links from Monday/Tuesday or Wednesday Morning, and light on everything older. For example, in the typical week I would probably have forgotten a link to this moving reflection by Mrs Jennifer Fulwiler concerning grief and the meaning of suffering, though to be fair I did also link it from facebook.

--I--

The Obama administration's tyrannical HHS mandate has its first official set of victims. These won't be the last. Franciscan University at Steubenville is doing the right thing here, but I fully expect them to get lambasted by the well-meaning head-in-the-sand crowd (to say nothing of the overtly hostile to religious freedom crowd) for doing this, akin the the way that Catholic Charities is often criticized for closing its doors rather than compromising on Church teachings. This mandate--like the closures over mandatory placement with gay couples--is something being needlessly foisted on the Church (and her institutions) from without; often supported with the unspoken intent of specifically forcing these institutions to close. This, without actually doing anything to help out the supposed victims (gay couples who could find any number of other agencies which will place children with them; sex-crazed women who already have ready access to contraception, which is costing them as little as $9/month).

--II--

One meme which is often trotted out by those who disagree with the Church on her moral (and especially sexual) teachings is that "the bishops only care about sex!" One of Mr Mark Shea's readers has helped him to call BS on this particular meme. There is, in fact a sense in which they haven't done enough to present the fullness of the Catholic teaching on these issues. I have even heard the argument made that because the bishops spend so much time pontificating on a number of things which are not matter of faith or morals--and on which they don't have any particular expertise--that they have to some extent weakened their own authority when speaking on such matters. I disagree with that argument to at least the extent that their authority on this matters of faith and morals is given to them from God by virtue of the office each of them holds, and thus can't be weakened by pontifications on matters of (say) economics or evironmental policy, however wrong or misguided these may be. What is weakened is their flocks' perception of that authority, which in turn means that many Catholics begin to tune out their bishops even when those bishops are actually exercising the authority (and responsibility) of their offices to teach on matters of faith or morals.

--III--

Professor Lawrence Krauss's book--purportedly about physics and philosophy--continues to take a shellacking from actual philosophers; this time, it's Prof. Edward Feser's turn:

"Critics have exposed their errors and fallacies again and again. Yet these writers keep repeating them anyway, for the most part simply ignoring the critics. What accounts for this? To paraphrase a famous remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, I would suggest that a picture holds these thinkers captive, a picture of the quantitative methods of modern science that have made possible breathtaking predictive and technological successes.

What follows from that success is that the methods in question capture those aspects of reality susceptible of mathematical modeling, prediction, and control. It does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality."

--Bonus--

From the Files of the Narcissistic:  President Obama's latest round of self-promotional hackery is the addition of little "did you know" boxes to the profiles of past US presidents in their official online biographies. The purpose of these boxes is to tie the accomplishments of past presidents to the policies initiatives of the current president.