I finally saw Schindler’s List a mere 12 years after it came out in the theaters. I’ve been meaning to see this movie ever since it came out but wanted to be able to fully experience it by being ready for the graphic nature of the story and that moment never seemed to come, until last night when I got home from work and Wendy and the boys were still in Oroville visiting their Great Grandparents.

It was a very good movie and it is understandable why it won the awards that it did. It was far less graphic than I expected it to be from Holocaust perspective and much more graphic from a sexual perspective than I expected. There were way to many women in bed with exposed breasts. The Holocaust violence was well balanced in the sense that nothing was hidden but nothing was over “exploited” to pull on the heart strings. It was just raw. But again, there was far less of it from a number of minutes perspective than I expected.

I also thought that this was a two, maybe two and a half hour movie stretched to three plus hours. The beginning of the movie felt very surreal and didn’t do much to build up the movie other than to force the viewer to concentrate very intensely to try and understand what was being put together.

The heart of this movie doesn’t really kick in until the last hour although the preceding portions do a lot of necessary ground work the make the last hour have the impact it does. Particularly moving is the climax when Oskar realizes what his work had actually accomplished and as a consequence realized how much more he wishes he could have done.

If you haven’t seen it, you should. It is an important movie that touches on more than just the Holocaust but also the nature of oppression, suffering, opportunism, redemption and salvation.

I had a number of “out-growth” thoughts regarding the movie:

– Oskar in the end is made out to be the hero of the movie when in many ways he was a compromised soul going through the process of redemption. It makes me sick to think the far more holy soul Pope Pius XII is called “Hitler’s Pope” when he in fact saved far more lives than Mr. Schindler did while maintaining the moral high ground. For anyone who’s interested in reading another story of a man who is struggling behind the scenes to save as many lives as possible should read Hitler, the War, and the Pope.
– There is a great temptation amongst religious of all stripes to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. This is an understandable desire as there is so much temptation in the world that we’d like to avoid. However, it is only by operating in the world that we can do good for others. Oskar was definitely a man of the world. A man locked up in a monastery would not have seen what Oskar saw and would have been powerless to do what Oskar did. As it is said, we must live in this world but not of this world.
– On a completely different topic, it’s amazing how many movies use the same stupid tactics to entertain or make an impact. This movie definitely used the “wear the audience down before we hit them with it” technique and I think that’s why the movie was 3+ hours long. Other examples not in this movie include “add a heart string tug that has nothing to do with the plot”, “the obligatory happy ending”, “the comic relief character” and of course “the gratuitous sex scene” amongst others. In fact, I’d be interested to hear what other ones you guys could come up with for stupid techniques used over and over to try to make a movie good.

As all my Netflix friends know, I’ve had the same 3 movies for a long time. Well, we finally watched Coach Carter (it was alright, I guess) and I finally started watching the show Monk that so many people who’s opinions I respect liked.

It was REALLY good. I particularly liked the under-current about Monk’s disorder and people’s sympathy or lack of sympathy there of. I can’t wait to watch the 2nd DVD of the first season.

While there shouldn’t be any confusion where my primary college football loyalties lie, but ever since I’ve become Catholic, I’ve had a secondary affinity for Notre Dame football. Stories like this only reinforce this.

If my memory serves, Weis is a former Notre Dame player and from a generation where the majority of players were Catholic. I suspect he is Catholic as well. I think that will be good for the team both on and off the field. One of the things that I believe made the team strong in the past was their shared faith. Weis would do well to restore that legacy.

All I could say after reading this was… WOW!

For those too lazy to click the link, here’s the money quote:

“The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.”

It’s very rare when someone is willing, particularly when it is amongst so many jabs, to make an admission like this no matter how much the truth stares them in the face.

This week I’ve heard Sacramento’s first mega-church (we have many more now, but they were the first) advertising that they’re going to be having added choices in their Sunday church services. They advertised that there will now be 4 services: A traditional, a classic, a casual and a post-modern. I’ve been to this church, Capital Christian, before and their services were pretty standard evangelical affair. There was about 30-45 minutes of choir led praise music followed by 45-60 minutes of a sermon which included props and little plays or video as transitions from one section to the next or to illustrate a point in the sermon.

I’d be curious to know how the new services would diverge from that format. I suspect that either the traditional or classic would pretty much be the same and the other would make strides to be more like a liturgical protestant service, possibly having a somewhat baptist feel to it. Casual I expect would have more to do with how people are expected to dress and act and may “tone down” the standard service with a smaller choir and the pastor having a more relaxed persona (on average). But for the post-modern service, I have NO IDEA what the heck that means! I know what post-modern means in both philosophical and theological senses, but it’s very confusing to me to hear that term in a liturgical sense. My only thought is that there will be far more multimedia in the service.

Why do I care about this? Well, for starters, I’m very interested in how various Christians celebrate their faith. It is very interesting to me to see where groups that don’t have a big emphasis on the Eucharist go.

I guess I wish that I could impress that upon those who don’t like the Catholic Mass, that Mass has a COMPLETELY different goal that most Protestant services. The goal of Mass is not to praise God or learn about God, although those are things that do happen as a part of Mass. The goal is to receive God in the Eucharist. This is why Mass is so different. This is why it SHOULD be so different. There’s nothing casual about Mass. Christ, or said another way God, is PHYSICALLY present in front of us. How can you just walk in there with a starbucks coffee and start chatting with your neighbor? How can one spend 90% of the service focusing on other things? When one see’s Mass in this light, it takes on a completely different meaning and purpose. It changes everything. In fact, those Protestant services that most resemble the Catholic Mass are the ones that most care about Communion.

I think there are many Christians, particularly many liturgy-disgruntled Catholics who would appreciate Mass a great deal more if they understood this.

Well, it has been a while since I’ve written a letter to the editor…

Today’s letter is a short one because I actually hope it’ll get published. It is in regards to an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chroncle published on Tuesday by Peggy Drexler. She is current promoting her new book “Raising Boys Without Men : How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men”.

Before I get to the letter (in which I would make the following points if not constrained for space), let’s make sure we’re clear on exactly what she’s promoting. While she may soft-sell it in certain circles (like in the opinion piece in the Chron.) what she’s saying is not that single and lesbian mothers can raise good children, she’s saying that they do a BETTER job than a family with a father. The title isn’t “How Maverick Moms Are Raising Exceptional Men”. No it’s “How Maverick Moms Are Raising THE Next Generation of Exceptional Men”. It’s not even “A Generation”. It’s “THE Generation”. In other words, the children of fatherless families will be the best children in the future. She is effectively disgarding men as acceptable parents. I’m sure she’s a big fan of the research for conception without sperm, which I mentioned a few days ago, because that’s what she needs to fully accomplish her goal to get men out of the picture.

In any case, on to the letter:

I am writing in regards to Peggy Drexler’s recent Open Forum opinion piece titled “Changing Attitudes About Families”.

In her piece, she argues that “maverick moms”, or said differently fatherless families, are just as capable of raising children as traditional families. While she quotes numerous statistics, what she fails to do is quote any statistics to support her thesis.

Children from fatherless families are more likely to go to jail, drop out of school, become addicted to drugs, have a teen pregnancy and commit suicide, amongst other things. These results have been repeated over and over in studies from organizations as divergent as the Census Bureau and N.O.W.

She correctly states that “socioeconomic status is a stronger predictor of child welfare than almost any other index.” However, I don’t see why that means we should ignore all other indexes. I suspect being drunk is the strongest predictor of whether you’ll cause a fatal car accident. Does this mean we should stop being concerned with seatbelts?

Finally, the “research” that she performed fails every test of scientific accuracy. She uses metrics which are completely subjective in nature, doesn’t have a control group to compare her results against and uses a self selected sample set. Those are all completely unacceptable in scientific research and reflect the fact that she is more concerned with making unsupportable assertions that reflects her bias and lack of objectivity.

I urge the Chronicle to have higher standards for who you allow to publish in your newspaper.

Ken Crawford
Online reader in Roseville, CA

Down in the Brave New World post, my brother took exception to the following line:

“Additionally you’ll get the “I’m a mom” homosexuals who intend to further manipulate the concept of a family to cater to their political agenda.”

He took exception to gay couples being able to be a family, pointing to an example of a family we knew well growing up that consisted of a gay couple and their adopted son.

The problem here lies in the English language’s ability to let terms morph dramatically and that as a result the terms have a lack of precision. What defines a family? What defines a mom? What defines a dad? What defines a parent? What is a child? I could have been more clear in what I was referring to in this post.

For my purposes, unless I state explicitly otherwise, when I refer to a mom or mother, I’m referring to biological motherhood. I also mean the biological father when I refer to dad or father. I also mean biological child when I refer to children. The parent term has a more loose definition in my book, referring to the person or people who care for a child in a custodial sense. Finally, when I say family I’m referring to mom, dad, and their biological offspring. This is what I intended in the case referenced above. I refuse to qualify these terms with things like biological. I think it is a shame that these terms have been abused to such a degree that the qualifier needs to be put on the natural case, not the un-natural case. Nevertheless these term are widely over applied and this is why I probably shouldn’t have used them in the above case without a qualifier, ridiculous though it may be.

Now, there are many families out there, but many of them deserve a textual qualifier. Adoptive families are still families, but a family that needs the qualifier ‘adoptive’. For some reason as a society we’ve confused qualifier with decreased value. This is simply not the case. Sometime in the last century or two we changed from dropping these qualifiers in casual conversation because of convenience or simplicity to dropping them because it “devalues” them. This should not have ever been the case. The world is full of less than ideal circumstances and we shouldn’t fault those who are doing their best in less than ideal circumstances (minus their fault in the situation being less than ideal). Just because there is a qualifier that defines their circumstance does not mean that the people are bad nor that they are doing a bad job in that circumstance.

But all of this does not take away from, and it’s time to get religious with this discussion, what God intended. God created the family (yes, the biological one) and intended that it was the mechanism by which children were created and raised. There is a certain connection that exists between biological parents and their children that does not exist otherwise. While this connection is not necessary to be able to be a good parent, it helps in the parenting process. There are certain values and perspectives that mothers bring to a biological family that fathers do not. There are also values and perspectives that fathers bring that mothers do not. While these perspectives are not absolutely necessary for a child to have good parents, they help a great deal.

It’s because of the above truths that traditionally, adoptive parents and other non-biological families have done their best to mimic, to the best of their ability, biological families. One of the things I respect about our gay couple friends who adopted a boy was that they adopted a boy who sorely needed adopting. They did their best with a non-ideal situation. I would argue that the adopted son would have benefited more by having similarly committed heterosexual parents, but again they were doing their best to be parents in a less than ideal situation. Nobody else was going to adopt that boy. In that sense, what they were doing was very noble.

But this is not what I was referring to in my previous post. I’m referring to people who purposely abuse the creation process for their selfish desires (i.e. so they can be the real parents, not just adoptive ones). There are so many examples here, from the fairly extravagant (like attempting to create a baby without a biological father or mother) to the fairly simple (like having sex with a complete stranger to conceive a baby) and everything in between (like Invetro fertilization for both heterosexual and homosexual couples with either anonymous or provided sperm). All of these things purposely thwart God’s desire and intent. This is not the case of making the best of a non-ideal situation, it’s a case of purposely subverting God’s will.

I compare our gay friends and their adopted son to a couple of nuns who adopt a boy. Though there was sin in their lives, they were doing a good thing by adopting a child who needed adopting. The same can be said of the nuns who adopt a boy (although one assumes and hopes that their sins were of a less sexual nature). One difference might be that the nuns would have likely preferred to find a good existing biological family (childless or otherwise) to have adopted the boy. Nevertheless, I have the same respect for both actions because they are both rooted in the desire to care for a child who is not being cared for.

I do not have the same respect for those who abuse the creation process for their own ends.

A reader writes:

What do you think about this? Something about it disturbs me.

I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while now (I’ve read a number of articles on it), so I have a lot to say about it. For starters, I liked the article. It was a very balanced one in a realm where balance is VERY rare. Many of the articles I’ve read in the past were too biased on either side to take an honest look at the future of the abortion catastrophe from this perspective.

As for the issues of artificial wombs and viability, I think that it holds much promise, but like every new technology is ripe with possible abuses.

Celebrities are already routinely inducing labor 4-6 weeks early to avoid stretch marks and the rest of the body altering aspects of pregnancy that can be minimized by shortening a pregnancy. These type of people will likely be the first on board to manipulate a natural process for reasons of vanity and self centeredness.

One can also imagine a world where lots of women who are unwilling to deal with the difficulties of a pregnancy are willing to give it a go if they can do it artificially. One wonders how someone who is unwilling to make the sacrifice of pregnancy is going to be able to make the sacrifices of motherhood.

Additionally you’ll get the “I’m a mom” homosexuals who intend to further manipulate the concept of a family to cater to their political agenda. The article even mentions research to create an embryo without a man being involved. Gee, I wonder who wants that? The artificial womb opens up the idea of a baby without a woman involved too. Ugh.

And from a Catholic perspective (and some Protestants I’m told), the continued trend of people “playing God” and excessively manipulating the life creation process to be able to conceive a child when they were unable to do so naturally, will only get exacerbated by the creation of an artificial womb.

But even with all of these potential abuses, the artificial womb could do much good. Babies like Susan Torres, the daughter of the comatose woman who was kept on life support as long as possible so that the baby could be born and have a fighting chance, but ended up dying in the end, may have better success at a sustained life. There are a number of scenarios I can think of where this can be very beneficial without any moral questions.

As for abortion, I think it is a red herring solution from the perspective of women choosing this over an abortion. Women who get abortions are looking to avoid shame and to forget. Putting the baby up for adoption isn’t a “viable” option for most who get abortions because it both doesn’t avoid the shame (because everyone knows you were pregnant) and makes it hard to forget because your child is out there somewhere. The artificial womb does not solve the problem of the child being out there somewhere. That child may try to come and find you some day. It makes it hard to forget.

As well, while science continues to amaze me, I suspect it’ll be a long time after we can create a pregnancy in an artificial womb before we can TRANSFER a very small fetus from a natural womb to an artificial one. Fetus’s are very delicate and we’d have to figure out how cut the umbilical cord and re-attach it to the artificial one. This would make it so that a woman would have to carry the child for a number of months, probably past the point of the pregnancy showing (a key moment to avoiding the shame).

But all of these factors should not stop us from embracing the technology. I think the underlying theme of the article was that embracing these technologies will be the key to getting beyond the current “stalemate”. Said another way, whoever is able to effectively embrace the technology and use it to their advantage (whether that be continuing down the road to objectifying life or towards having a great respect for the value of life by going to amazing ends to save it) will likely be the victor in this war. I’m not sure this is the case, but I think it is a reasonable assertion to test out.

To sum up, I’ll quote what I think is the key admission in the article to why this provides promise to the pro-life movement:

“Many pro-choice women, like me, have been deeply disturbed by ultrasound scan photos that show fetuses, at earlier than once thought periods of gestation, sucking their thumbs, appearing to smile and otherwise resembling a full-term baby.”

Those same people (I’ll include men too) will be awful disturbed to know that the baby they’re allowing young women to flush down the toilet could be saved, without them “forcing” a pregnancy on those same young women. While the young women may not be sympathetic to that logic for the reasons stated above, it could, along with further progress in early viability, help turn the tide on this very important issue by forcing many to admit that the current lack of substantial limitations on abortion is treating life far to casually.

To use this technology to that advantage, we must embrace it, lest it be used against us.

I don’t think anyone will be sad to see it go… However read the story.

Funny stuff.

For those too lazy to click: “Pope Benedict, Successor to the Prince of the Apostles and College Football Expert, moved quickly to quell general fan nervousness about the legitimacy … of the new pollsters.”

In a world where a Catholic education contains less and less Catholicism, I thank God for Notre Dame when they create comercials like this (link points to both a 30 and 60 second version).

Now if we could just work on that tuition…