Prayer Requests:
I would ask for prayers for the soul of 17 year-old Brittany Salzano and her family...she was hit by a car last weekend and killed instantly. Please also pray for the driver who hit her. Thanks.
I forgot to post this last week so I will post it now. As one who believes in a concept known as the communion of saints I do believe that prayer for those who have passed on can be beneficial for them much as prayer for those who are on earth can be.
With that in mind, pray please for Gloria Strauss and her family and help them out in other ways too however you can.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Points to Ponder:
War is not the answer to everything, but in the recent past it has been the answer to slavery, German imperialism in 1914, fascism (1922-1945), and communism at various spots around the world until in 1989 -checkmated and wildly overspending on arms- the beast withered from within and gave up the ghost. [Michael Novak]
War is not the answer to everything, but in the recent past it has been the answer to slavery, German imperialism in 1914, fascism (1922-1945), and communism at various spots around the world until in 1989 -checkmated and wildly overspending on arms- the beast withered from within and gave up the ghost. [Michael Novak]
Monday, May 07, 2007
On the "Unsinkable Cork":
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
Those who are familiar with Bill Cork and an email address/website he once had will know what I mean by the title of this posting. Anyway, I start this post off by noting a recent circumstance that when it was brought to my attention was quite a shock to see. Without further ado:
The Journey Home (Bill Cork)
Much as with Rod Dreher's situation, I predict a storm of people will try to impute to Bill the worst of motives. I repeat now what I said after observing this happen with RodDreher earlier this year then end this with some expository musings on Bill personally and his situation. First though, the noted rehash of my statement pertaining to RodDreher:
I had intended to comment on this thread some time back but circumstances and time constraints made me postpone it until now. I noticed that some of Rod's feedback was of the predictable nasty sort and others tried to play the "let us throw apologetics arguments at Rod" approach which at this point is not going to work. I will simply note that Rod's approach to the historical record is selective and arbitrary on the whole papal issue and if he was consistent in his rationale, it would undermine his current position in very significant ways. That is all I will say about it since no argument has a chance of persuading Rod while he is in the "honeymoon phase" of his religious transition. I therefore wish him the best and only ask that he remain open to reassessing his foundational presuppositions from time to time. (Or as Benjamin Franklin liked to say "question his own infallibility.) [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa January 8, 2007)]
The same situation I see as impacting the movement taken by Bill Cork but obviously Dreher has the glorious tradition of Orthodoxy he retreated towards. Bill by contrast went with what I must call a cult and I say that as someone who had my own affiliation with two different cults of my own in my lifetime. The first as some might be aware was the Society of St. Pius X schismatic "Catholic" movement but the second was the cult of the conspiracy theorist. The latter was not a long affiliation but it certainly influenced my views on not a few matters particularly after I intellectually worked my way through it, routed it as a viable theory{1} and cast it aside as logically and rationally specious (to put it nicely). But the purpose here is not to delve into that -I merely note it at the outset so that readers can get a grasp of how I am going to approach this posting to some extent.
To give a bit of history on my familiarity with Bill Cork (to the extent there was a familiarity), I remember Bill as someone who was heavily involved in a large effort against a radical fringe extremist "apologist" five years ago. That was in fact how I became familiar with him and while there were many involved in that endeavour, Bill was among the most tenacious. For that I had a measure of respect for him. Bill was also ahead of the curve on the war in Iraq -heck I remember Bill beating the drums for that when I was still sorting out my own position{2} before taking a definitive stand. It took me longer than Bill but I also set forth a cement-like position that has not wavered and will not. By contrast, I was not comfortable with the position as Bill and not a few other Catholics set it forth -viewing it as being too grounded on tenuous and less definite evidences and less on the more solid and irrefutable factors involved. This had its predictable effect when Bill and several others later did a complete 180 when the foundation they built their houses of argument on washed out and left them with nothing on which to stand.
Bill was also involved in a kind of opposition to Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ and I disagreed with him on this matter in late 2003 by taking a stand on principles which were consistent. I saw at that point and in some later situations a number of things that bothered me about some of Bill's statements but I am never one to rush in on these matters for a variety of reasons. Most significant perhaps is that people need the opportunity to ponder issues and this approach rarely is in a straight line for anyone. Instead, the pondering (note I do not say "thinking"{3}) by its nature involves many facets of the human person and for that reason there will be a waxing and waning, a pulling one way and then another depending on the particular circumstances a given person faces.
The spiritual life (of which I would never be presumptive to say I am anything akin to an expert on) has its ebbs and flows like the tide on a beach. And while I can say that I sensed some of that in Bill's work when I actually looked at it, this was something that happened with less and less frequency over time admittedly. Some of that may have been that there was a perceived difference in priorities subject-wise, differences in core interests, or whatever. Admittedly my own conscious attempt to distance myself from the St. Blogs contingent -a move that happened in stages{4} played a part in that. But that point aside, there were indicators that something was afoot with Bill even if I could not connect all the dots as to what eventually happened.{5} I will go over some of this now since this subject is one that many will probably make uncharitable swipes at Bill on. I hope nonetheless that he will review what I am going to say in the proper spirit of authentic dialogue as I have enunciated it over the years.{6}
As I said already, there were small signs in retrospect that Bill was having a hard time of sorts finding a consistent voice -the first of which was that he kept renaming his weblog. I cannot recall how many Latin names he went with offhand -I remember Pro Deo et Patria at one point, Ut Unum Sint at another point. Then he used Built on a Rock -the latter was not in Latin but one need not have a Latin name for their blog.It was a fashionable sort of thing for Catholics of the "St. Blogs" contingent to give their blogs a Latin name and that was themotivation I took for choosing the name I did initially. Over time, I have come to see a greater depth to the choice of weblog name I made but one can say that a name denotes to some extent an identity. That Bill kept changing his weblog name to me looked as if he was trying to find an identity of sorts. It might sound overly-simplistic to put it that way but that is how I see it. Here is a more complex approach to the same subject and I will use the analogy of the Supreme Court to make.
After recently completing a very good book on the Supreme Court called Supreme Conflict which goes into not only the selection but also the psychology of the court, I see a mirror in Bill with Justice Anthony Kennedy and it gets back to what I said earlier about Bill struggling to find an identity. The book well outlines how this was Kennedy's problem and why he ended up looking so promising to conservatives but has on key conservative issues been such a let-down. Kennedy started with conservative instincts and still to some extent has them but without a solid template of sorts from which to operate from, there were and are inconsistencies in how he comes down on a given issue. Too often without such a template the environment to some extent can play an influence that may well go unnoticed and a sequence of small shifts (each in and of themselves seemingly innocuous) can create over time the materials for a completely different paradigm altogether.
Basically, the identity issue was one clue to me along with his war flip flop{7} and the handling of the whole Mel Gibson Passion of the Christ situation already noted above. To those who would be reading up to this point and wonder why I would bother with the subject in question, I remind them of the subtitle of this weblog in part{8} but also a reason is because Bill was to some extent a minor celebrity of sorts in certain circles in which we both ran in to the extent one can "run" in cyberspace.
I say he was a "minor celebrity" because he was one of those who were in the "Catholic convert" stories -if memory serves his story was in the Surprised by Truth series somewhere.{9} In making this recent decision, Bill did decide to resign his position with the Galveston archdioceses which was certainly a proper thing to do and I am sure Bill will seek to make a more detailed accounting of certain factors motivating his decision over time. This pattern is the natural course of things for a convert to a particular outlook or a revert to a previous outlook to do. (I expect it in other words and would be surprised if he did not actually do this at some point.) In the above thread he makes the following statement which I want to briefly focus on before ending this thread of musings:
I’ve been laying out theological and ecclesial issues over the past two months that were contributing factors to my loss of trust in the authority of Rome and the Catholic Magisterium.
If what I noted above does not give a hint already, I will spell it out here more bluntly: I never thought Bill Cork had a significant grasp of matters theological. Bill would probably expect me to say that but now the cat is out of the bag. It is not unique to Bill but frankly, most Catholics do not and I do not see the apologetics oligarchy as being of much assistance in this area at all. They are such a predictable lot that if they have not done it already I will tell you what many of them will do: they will bombard Bill either with shrieks of how he is "hell bound" for his "apostasy" or they will try to respond to whatever he posits as his reasons or difficulties with apologetics arguments. Those sorts love to argue after all (seemingly for the sake of arguing at times) and I am not saying they are wrong per se in what they will say.{10} They are wrong though to assume it will have an effect on Bill at this stage.
Remember, a change in one's viewpoint is not an instant situation but generally takes a good period of time. There are also a variety of factors involved and not all of them are intellectual ones. Indeed, some of them are of a more personal nature{11} and this is seldom recognized. They can be personal, they can even be financial or whatever but I am not about to engage in assuming nefarious reasons for Bill's recent about face. Indeed, having not seen enough of his stuff in recent years,{12} I am hardly in a position to take a definite statement on it. For this reason, I will only presume that Bill was not adequately formed theologically and I can probably predict some of the issues where there were problems.
Among the biggest of the problems is what happens with those who do not fully understand what is and is not magisterial; namely, what is and is not a matter of required assent in other words and what is not. This is something that apologists in recent years have shown a fairly general consensus on with regards to not understanding these distinctions all that well. Bill was not an apologist but he was involved with church bureaucracy to a certain extent. I also believe this put him in a position where he may have felt he had to defend certain bureaucratic statements which he may well have not been comfortable with. Two in particular come to mind which I will mention briefly in a footnote.{13}
Now admittedly, some of these musings are based on incomplete information and supplemented with intuition. As I noted already, I did not read Bill's weblog much in recent years{14} -certainly not enough to fill in all the blanks. But frankly, even if I had, I would not have seen this one coming. A move to Orthodoxy, sure I could see that to some extent if the problem is the authority issue. Heck, even a move to a kind of Anglo-Catholic view or (stretching it a bit) a form of high church Lutheranism perhaps as Bill was a Lutheran pastor at one point. But a return to Seventh Day Adventism??? No my friends, I would not have seen this one coming for a variety of reasons. And when you consider that Bill is being offered a pastors position at a parish coupled with some of what I have heard through the grapevine{15}, it does lend one to wonder a bit but that is all I will say on those matters. Bill will get a lot of abuse on this from other people -not from me.
I want to note in closing, if it is not obvious in what is noted above that I wish Bill Cork the best and I only ask him to do what I would ask anyone to do: from time to time reappraise their foundational presuppositions. This time, I would request of him to try and fill in those areas where he was lacking before even if only to better understand these issues from an ecumenical context to better serve authentic dialogue with Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists. In a nutshell Bill, be open once again to "questioning a little of your own infallibility" (cf. Benjamin Franklin), that is all I would ask of you, me, or indeed of anyone else.
Notes:
{1} That is not to say that I solved every previous puzzle involved in this mind you. However, by identifying the root causes or foundational presuppositions that guided that particular weltanschauung, I was able in applying them to so many of the positions taken by the conspiracy sorts to see the viability of the overarching theory itself melt away like ice cream on a hot July day. Hence, when I set that outlook aside definitively, I basically imposed a kind of self-agnosticism on the areas I had not yet solved. Over time and with greater research and reflection on a host of issues, most of them have resolved themselves of their own volition without the need for active intellectual involvement on my part. (And on occasion in responding to conspiracy-theorist sorts on issues I once set aside in this fashion, I was able to intellectually overcome them when revisiting them anew.) The very few that remain will likely go by the wayside in the same fashion as most of the others; ergo I see no reason to alter my approach to them taken lo these past eleven odd years.
{2} Bill Cork goes over his recent about-face on the war issue here. I have to admit that these so-called "war protesters" have moved me towards a more hawkish stance myself then even the one I outlined here. I anticipated in that entry the war protesting angle and my view has not changed about protesters. If Bush was handling this as Johnson handled Vietnam, then to some extent I could grant the protesters some leeway. But in my gut I know this is simply liberal idiots trying to play politics. After all, where were they when Clinton was bombing Kosovo???...
If we do go to war and these people try to gum up the machinery, they should be treated the same way a soldier would be treated if he tried to abandon his unit in battle. That is all I will say on the matter at this time because I am starting to get livid thinking about these clowns and that is not a good mindset to be in for blogging. [Excerpts from Rerum Novarum (circa January 25, 2003)]
{3} No one can claim to approach issues in a purely abstract way and apart from personal mitigating factors in their apprehension of reality. This is why I have focused more and more on foundational presuppositions and less on the round and round kinds of arguments that go nowhere as I have gotten older and (hopefully) aged with some measure of grace. In a nutshell, someone who is not willing to reassess themselves in this area from time to time -to (in paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin) "doubt a bit of their own infallibility" makes themselves incapable of any potential progress as a human being. Bill certainly did such a reassessment himself as of late and while I do not agree with where it took him, that he did the reassessment certainly earns a measure of respect from me. I only ask of him the same thing I did of Rod Dreher and it is this: remain open to a future reassessment and "doubting your infallibility" again at some point.
{4} There are hints in this in the weblog archives starting in late 2003. The process was a gradual one picking up steam through a series of events and circumstances coupled with realizations about the nature of that group. Eventually, it hit critical mass and compelled me to make my own formal exodus from them as a collective last year for reasons I outlined in no small detail HERE.
{5} And I obviously did not as this news came as a surprise to me. (Though in my own defense, I had not read enough of a cross-section of Bill's work in recent years to likely see such a shift anyway even if it manifested itself in his work which -since he deleted it all- I do not know if it was there all along or not.)
{6} Some Principles For Authentic Dialogue and the Proper Use of Sources in Papers (circa February 9, 2006)
{7} I mean no disrespect to you in phrasing it this way Bill but I would be less than honest if I did not tell you how I viewed that matter.
{8} My musings on ...well...basically whatever I want to muse on...[Subtitle of this weblog from virtually (if not actually) day one]
{9} I am really going off of memory here because I have not read any of those books and have relied for my information of who was in them from second and third hand sources -not the most reliable of ways to get information sometimes but I note it here nonetheless.
{10} Some of them are actually quite good at what they do -either in general or on particular subjects.
{11}I bring up the fact that Bill's entire family is Seventh Day Adventist as a huge factor here far and above any intellectual reason he may give. Those Catholics who seize on this idea and run with it I only hope are not among the same crowd who took issue with me making the exact same argument when I challenged in no small fashion a position espoused by Karl Keating a couple years ago along these same lines. I am only being consistent here, not playing the "it is okay to criticize apostate Bill this way but not Supreme Maximum Leader Karl" hypocritical bullshit that so often permeates those whose vision is so badly impaired with fallacious provincialism that they cannot see the forest for the trees. But I digress.
{12} See footnote five.
{13} The first is the 2002 USCCB subcommittee text on Jewish-Christian relations which was not well formulated and lent itself to being badly misinterpreted as indeed most people did. The second (I suspect but I have nothing to go on here but intuition with the latter one) is the USCCB's campaign in 2005 to abolish the death penalty in the United States. I cannot recall offhand Bill's position on the death penalty but I can only imagine that if he did not share the view of the USCCB on the matter (as I indeed do not) that he could have a serious problem with the manner in which they have gone about this issue.
{14} Which was not that often over time admittedly. Some of that may have been that there was a perceived difference in priorities subject-wise, differences in core interests, or whatever.
{15} I have heard through the grapevine a number of things that I do not believe would be helpful to note here. It remains my view that the family situation as a Catholic in a sea of Seventh Day Adventists was the most significant factor. It is natural to not want to rock the boat on these matters and my guess is that is a more significant factor than most of the others that could be mentioned.
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
Those who are familiar with Bill Cork and an email address/website he once had will know what I mean by the title of this posting. Anyway, I start this post off by noting a recent circumstance that when it was brought to my attention was quite a shock to see. Without further ado:
The Journey Home (Bill Cork)
Much as with Rod Dreher's situation, I predict a storm of people will try to impute to Bill the worst of motives. I repeat now what I said after observing this happen with RodDreher earlier this year then end this with some expository musings on Bill personally and his situation. First though, the noted rehash of my statement pertaining to RodDreher:
I had intended to comment on this thread some time back but circumstances and time constraints made me postpone it until now. I noticed that some of Rod's feedback was of the predictable nasty sort and others tried to play the "let us throw apologetics arguments at Rod" approach which at this point is not going to work. I will simply note that Rod's approach to the historical record is selective and arbitrary on the whole papal issue and if he was consistent in his rationale, it would undermine his current position in very significant ways. That is all I will say about it since no argument has a chance of persuading Rod while he is in the "honeymoon phase" of his religious transition. I therefore wish him the best and only ask that he remain open to reassessing his foundational presuppositions from time to time. (Or as Benjamin Franklin liked to say "question his own infallibility.) [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa January 8, 2007)]
The same situation I see as impacting the movement taken by Bill Cork but obviously Dreher has the glorious tradition of Orthodoxy he retreated towards. Bill by contrast went with what I must call a cult and I say that as someone who had my own affiliation with two different cults of my own in my lifetime. The first as some might be aware was the Society of St. Pius X schismatic "Catholic" movement but the second was the cult of the conspiracy theorist. The latter was not a long affiliation but it certainly influenced my views on not a few matters particularly after I intellectually worked my way through it, routed it as a viable theory{1} and cast it aside as logically and rationally specious (to put it nicely). But the purpose here is not to delve into that -I merely note it at the outset so that readers can get a grasp of how I am going to approach this posting to some extent.
To give a bit of history on my familiarity with Bill Cork (to the extent there was a familiarity), I remember Bill as someone who was heavily involved in a large effort against a radical fringe extremist "apologist" five years ago. That was in fact how I became familiar with him and while there were many involved in that endeavour, Bill was among the most tenacious. For that I had a measure of respect for him. Bill was also ahead of the curve on the war in Iraq -heck I remember Bill beating the drums for that when I was still sorting out my own position{2} before taking a definitive stand. It took me longer than Bill but I also set forth a cement-like position that has not wavered and will not. By contrast, I was not comfortable with the position as Bill and not a few other Catholics set it forth -viewing it as being too grounded on tenuous and less definite evidences and less on the more solid and irrefutable factors involved. This had its predictable effect when Bill and several others later did a complete 180 when the foundation they built their houses of argument on washed out and left them with nothing on which to stand.
Bill was also involved in a kind of opposition to Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ and I disagreed with him on this matter in late 2003 by taking a stand on principles which were consistent. I saw at that point and in some later situations a number of things that bothered me about some of Bill's statements but I am never one to rush in on these matters for a variety of reasons. Most significant perhaps is that people need the opportunity to ponder issues and this approach rarely is in a straight line for anyone. Instead, the pondering (note I do not say "thinking"{3}) by its nature involves many facets of the human person and for that reason there will be a waxing and waning, a pulling one way and then another depending on the particular circumstances a given person faces.
The spiritual life (of which I would never be presumptive to say I am anything akin to an expert on) has its ebbs and flows like the tide on a beach. And while I can say that I sensed some of that in Bill's work when I actually looked at it, this was something that happened with less and less frequency over time admittedly. Some of that may have been that there was a perceived difference in priorities subject-wise, differences in core interests, or whatever. Admittedly my own conscious attempt to distance myself from the St. Blogs contingent -a move that happened in stages{4} played a part in that. But that point aside, there were indicators that something was afoot with Bill even if I could not connect all the dots as to what eventually happened.{5} I will go over some of this now since this subject is one that many will probably make uncharitable swipes at Bill on. I hope nonetheless that he will review what I am going to say in the proper spirit of authentic dialogue as I have enunciated it over the years.{6}
As I said already, there were small signs in retrospect that Bill was having a hard time of sorts finding a consistent voice -the first of which was that he kept renaming his weblog. I cannot recall how many Latin names he went with offhand -I remember Pro Deo et Patria at one point, Ut Unum Sint at another point. Then he used Built on a Rock -the latter was not in Latin but one need not have a Latin name for their blog.It was a fashionable sort of thing for Catholics of the "St. Blogs" contingent to give their blogs a Latin name and that was themotivation I took for choosing the name I did initially. Over time, I have come to see a greater depth to the choice of weblog name I made but one can say that a name denotes to some extent an identity. That Bill kept changing his weblog name to me looked as if he was trying to find an identity of sorts. It might sound overly-simplistic to put it that way but that is how I see it. Here is a more complex approach to the same subject and I will use the analogy of the Supreme Court to make.
After recently completing a very good book on the Supreme Court called Supreme Conflict which goes into not only the selection but also the psychology of the court, I see a mirror in Bill with Justice Anthony Kennedy and it gets back to what I said earlier about Bill struggling to find an identity. The book well outlines how this was Kennedy's problem and why he ended up looking so promising to conservatives but has on key conservative issues been such a let-down. Kennedy started with conservative instincts and still to some extent has them but without a solid template of sorts from which to operate from, there were and are inconsistencies in how he comes down on a given issue. Too often without such a template the environment to some extent can play an influence that may well go unnoticed and a sequence of small shifts (each in and of themselves seemingly innocuous) can create over time the materials for a completely different paradigm altogether.
Basically, the identity issue was one clue to me along with his war flip flop{7} and the handling of the whole Mel Gibson Passion of the Christ situation already noted above. To those who would be reading up to this point and wonder why I would bother with the subject in question, I remind them of the subtitle of this weblog in part{8} but also a reason is because Bill was to some extent a minor celebrity of sorts in certain circles in which we both ran in to the extent one can "run" in cyberspace.
I say he was a "minor celebrity" because he was one of those who were in the "Catholic convert" stories -if memory serves his story was in the Surprised by Truth series somewhere.{9} In making this recent decision, Bill did decide to resign his position with the Galveston archdioceses which was certainly a proper thing to do and I am sure Bill will seek to make a more detailed accounting of certain factors motivating his decision over time. This pattern is the natural course of things for a convert to a particular outlook or a revert to a previous outlook to do. (I expect it in other words and would be surprised if he did not actually do this at some point.) In the above thread he makes the following statement which I want to briefly focus on before ending this thread of musings:
I’ve been laying out theological and ecclesial issues over the past two months that were contributing factors to my loss of trust in the authority of Rome and the Catholic Magisterium.
If what I noted above does not give a hint already, I will spell it out here more bluntly: I never thought Bill Cork had a significant grasp of matters theological. Bill would probably expect me to say that but now the cat is out of the bag. It is not unique to Bill but frankly, most Catholics do not and I do not see the apologetics oligarchy as being of much assistance in this area at all. They are such a predictable lot that if they have not done it already I will tell you what many of them will do: they will bombard Bill either with shrieks of how he is "hell bound" for his "apostasy" or they will try to respond to whatever he posits as his reasons or difficulties with apologetics arguments. Those sorts love to argue after all (seemingly for the sake of arguing at times) and I am not saying they are wrong per se in what they will say.{10} They are wrong though to assume it will have an effect on Bill at this stage.
Remember, a change in one's viewpoint is not an instant situation but generally takes a good period of time. There are also a variety of factors involved and not all of them are intellectual ones. Indeed, some of them are of a more personal nature{11} and this is seldom recognized. They can be personal, they can even be financial or whatever but I am not about to engage in assuming nefarious reasons for Bill's recent about face. Indeed, having not seen enough of his stuff in recent years,{12} I am hardly in a position to take a definite statement on it. For this reason, I will only presume that Bill was not adequately formed theologically and I can probably predict some of the issues where there were problems.
Among the biggest of the problems is what happens with those who do not fully understand what is and is not magisterial; namely, what is and is not a matter of required assent in other words and what is not. This is something that apologists in recent years have shown a fairly general consensus on with regards to not understanding these distinctions all that well. Bill was not an apologist but he was involved with church bureaucracy to a certain extent. I also believe this put him in a position where he may have felt he had to defend certain bureaucratic statements which he may well have not been comfortable with. Two in particular come to mind which I will mention briefly in a footnote.{13}
Now admittedly, some of these musings are based on incomplete information and supplemented with intuition. As I noted already, I did not read Bill's weblog much in recent years{14} -certainly not enough to fill in all the blanks. But frankly, even if I had, I would not have seen this one coming. A move to Orthodoxy, sure I could see that to some extent if the problem is the authority issue. Heck, even a move to a kind of Anglo-Catholic view or (stretching it a bit) a form of high church Lutheranism perhaps as Bill was a Lutheran pastor at one point. But a return to Seventh Day Adventism??? No my friends, I would not have seen this one coming for a variety of reasons. And when you consider that Bill is being offered a pastors position at a parish coupled with some of what I have heard through the grapevine{15}, it does lend one to wonder a bit but that is all I will say on those matters. Bill will get a lot of abuse on this from other people -not from me.
I want to note in closing, if it is not obvious in what is noted above that I wish Bill Cork the best and I only ask him to do what I would ask anyone to do: from time to time reappraise their foundational presuppositions. This time, I would request of him to try and fill in those areas where he was lacking before even if only to better understand these issues from an ecumenical context to better serve authentic dialogue with Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists. In a nutshell Bill, be open once again to "questioning a little of your own infallibility" (cf. Benjamin Franklin), that is all I would ask of you, me, or indeed of anyone else.
Notes:
{1} That is not to say that I solved every previous puzzle involved in this mind you. However, by identifying the root causes or foundational presuppositions that guided that particular weltanschauung, I was able in applying them to so many of the positions taken by the conspiracy sorts to see the viability of the overarching theory itself melt away like ice cream on a hot July day. Hence, when I set that outlook aside definitively, I basically imposed a kind of self-agnosticism on the areas I had not yet solved. Over time and with greater research and reflection on a host of issues, most of them have resolved themselves of their own volition without the need for active intellectual involvement on my part. (And on occasion in responding to conspiracy-theorist sorts on issues I once set aside in this fashion, I was able to intellectually overcome them when revisiting them anew.) The very few that remain will likely go by the wayside in the same fashion as most of the others; ergo I see no reason to alter my approach to them taken lo these past eleven odd years.
{2} Bill Cork goes over his recent about-face on the war issue here. I have to admit that these so-called "war protesters" have moved me towards a more hawkish stance myself then even the one I outlined here. I anticipated in that entry the war protesting angle and my view has not changed about protesters. If Bush was handling this as Johnson handled Vietnam, then to some extent I could grant the protesters some leeway. But in my gut I know this is simply liberal idiots trying to play politics. After all, where were they when Clinton was bombing Kosovo???...
If we do go to war and these people try to gum up the machinery, they should be treated the same way a soldier would be treated if he tried to abandon his unit in battle. That is all I will say on the matter at this time because I am starting to get livid thinking about these clowns and that is not a good mindset to be in for blogging. [Excerpts from Rerum Novarum (circa January 25, 2003)]
{3} No one can claim to approach issues in a purely abstract way and apart from personal mitigating factors in their apprehension of reality. This is why I have focused more and more on foundational presuppositions and less on the round and round kinds of arguments that go nowhere as I have gotten older and (hopefully) aged with some measure of grace. In a nutshell, someone who is not willing to reassess themselves in this area from time to time -to (in paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin) "doubt a bit of their own infallibility" makes themselves incapable of any potential progress as a human being. Bill certainly did such a reassessment himself as of late and while I do not agree with where it took him, that he did the reassessment certainly earns a measure of respect from me. I only ask of him the same thing I did of Rod Dreher and it is this: remain open to a future reassessment and "doubting your infallibility" again at some point.
{4} There are hints in this in the weblog archives starting in late 2003. The process was a gradual one picking up steam through a series of events and circumstances coupled with realizations about the nature of that group. Eventually, it hit critical mass and compelled me to make my own formal exodus from them as a collective last year for reasons I outlined in no small detail HERE.
{5} And I obviously did not as this news came as a surprise to me. (Though in my own defense, I had not read enough of a cross-section of Bill's work in recent years to likely see such a shift anyway even if it manifested itself in his work which -since he deleted it all- I do not know if it was there all along or not.)
{6} Some Principles For Authentic Dialogue and the Proper Use of Sources in Papers (circa February 9, 2006)
{7} I mean no disrespect to you in phrasing it this way Bill but I would be less than honest if I did not tell you how I viewed that matter.
{8} My musings on ...well...basically whatever I want to muse on...[Subtitle of this weblog from virtually (if not actually) day one]
{9} I am really going off of memory here because I have not read any of those books and have relied for my information of who was in them from second and third hand sources -not the most reliable of ways to get information sometimes but I note it here nonetheless.
{10} Some of them are actually quite good at what they do -either in general or on particular subjects.
{11}I bring up the fact that Bill's entire family is Seventh Day Adventist as a huge factor here far and above any intellectual reason he may give. Those Catholics who seize on this idea and run with it I only hope are not among the same crowd who took issue with me making the exact same argument when I challenged in no small fashion a position espoused by Karl Keating a couple years ago along these same lines. I am only being consistent here, not playing the "it is okay to criticize apostate Bill this way but not Supreme Maximum Leader Karl" hypocritical bullshit that so often permeates those whose vision is so badly impaired with fallacious provincialism that they cannot see the forest for the trees. But I digress.
{12} See footnote five.
{13} The first is the 2002 USCCB subcommittee text on Jewish-Christian relations which was not well formulated and lent itself to being badly misinterpreted as indeed most people did. The second (I suspect but I have nothing to go on here but intuition with the latter one) is the USCCB's campaign in 2005 to abolish the death penalty in the United States. I cannot recall offhand Bill's position on the death penalty but I can only imagine that if he did not share the view of the USCCB on the matter (as I indeed do not) that he could have a serious problem with the manner in which they have gone about this issue.
{14} Which was not that often over time admittedly. Some of that may have been that there was a perceived difference in priorities subject-wise, differences in core interests, or whatever.
{15} I have heard through the grapevine a number of things that I do not believe would be helpful to note here. It remains my view that the family situation as a Catholic in a sea of Seventh Day Adventists was the most significant factor. It is natural to not want to rock the boat on these matters and my guess is that is a more significant factor than most of the others that could be mentioned.
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