much and earnest

Here’s a snip:

LOPEZ: What is “real freedom” and should Americans worry about its future when voting?

FR. WILLIAMS: “Real freedom” is more than the absence of external constraints on our choices. It involves an accomplishment, a conquest of ourselves that allows us to govern our own actions. There is a slavery that we impose on ourselves from the inside, when we don’t have the upper hand over our impulses, passions and inclinations. As has been said, “a man has as many masters as he has vices.”

You and I may be “free” to climb Mount Everest, in that no one will stop us. But we are only truly free to do so if we have trained enough to be able to make the climb.

What applies to the individual applies to the nation as well. A virtuous nation is a free nation, since its people are able to discern good and evil, and have the willpower to choose the good. A nation where vice is celebrated, and virtue is scorned, can have no claim to true freedom.

- from “A Matter of Conscience,” an NRO interview with Fr. Thomas D. Williams

We’re having another baby. :)

The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. The most-assigned living authors were Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. (Roth himself may not be so pleased with the company. His forthcoming “Exit Ghost” includes a character’s rant about a library display: “They had Gertrude Stein in the exhibit but not Ernest Hemingway. They had Edna St. Vincent Millay but not William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell,” the character says. “Just nonsense. It started in the colleges and now it’s everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner.”)

But many scholars see these changes as part of a necessary evolution. To Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” (2006), the changes have been particularly beneficial in American literature, which has seen the most canon revision in part because it never had a very stable canon to begin with. “The old guard had very little to offer in the way of serious intellectual argument against the reading and teaching of … Olaudah Equiano or Djuna Barnes or Zora Neale Hurston, so the canon of the past two or three centuries got itself revised in fairly short order,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Only the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.”

Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped. One can debate the changing fortunes of writers on the literary stock market, but it’s clear that today the emphasis is on the recent past — at the expense, some argue, of historical perspective. As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

- from Revisiting the Canon Wars in today’s New York Times

Ah. This is refreshing. I’ve recently begun listening to a number of various podcasts. Audition is smart podcasting.

The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had as least one definite effect. It has ensured that everybody should only hear the end of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and heroine are just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable perversity prevented them from doing in the first) the rather misleading words, ‘You can begin this story here.’ But even this is not a complete parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a summary of the story, while they never give anything remotely resembling a summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new. Tutankhamen, for instance, was entirely new. It is exactly in the same fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that he has ever been born. [...]

Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the history of Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they cannot explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we hear of the admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born, so we all heard a great deal about the dissolution of monasteries, but we heard next to nothing about the creation of monasteries.

- Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, ch. 2 (1924)

Pray for the Virginia Tech community.

“If Dickens was alive today, he would probably have built the place himself,” Hutchins said of the theme park in Chatham, once a big unemployment blackspot after the dockyards closed in the 1980s but now a major regeneration target. [...] He was very much a populist.

Hutchins may be right. Dickens would have leaped at any chance to increase the size of his audience. But he probably also would have made the park fantastic. I’m not sure that anyone else can – at least while retaining its Dickensian nature.

Here’s the whole article.

Today’s campus newspaper covered the recent price hike for UK students who purchase birth control pills through the University’s health program. As a consequence, one UK official suggested that students simply start using other (non-oral) methods of contraception. This is not a very pleasant idea to some students:

“I know plenty of people … that the lower bracket of the pill does not work with their body chemistry,” Bass [a student] said. “I definitely don’t think that in order to avoid pregnancy you should have to go through side effects like weight gain and acne, nausea and depression.”

Many of the cheaper alternative forms, such as diaphragms and condoms, are much less effective in preventing pregnancy, according to the Planned Parenthood Web site. The site’s statistics are based on the typical use of the contraceptive device, which allows for error.

Condoms are 85 percent effective and diaphragms are 79 percent effective. In contrast, birth control pills are 92 percent effective. Although the ring and the shot are equally effective as the pill, they cost just as much and sometimes more.

Need I note which birth control method gets no press? The 100% effective alternative of abstinence.

From the article’s conclusion:

The discounts were a nice bonus for the students, and this change will probably have an adverse effect on some of the population, Wells said. For most students though, it’s just a matter of redistributing where their money goes.

“Students typically have many financial challenges,” Wells said. “It will be a decision the student has to make.”

Increased prices “will probably have an adverse effect on some of the population.” Surely I’m not the only one to find this claim ironic. Which part of the human population suffers the most from (sometimes abortifacient) birth control pills? (On which, read this longish but clear article.) Surely it is the population of miniscule human eggs–conceived but not yet implanted–which are the beginnings of human life.