Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

The 2nd Best Non-Move I ever made Anna Maria College 12 Years Later

Posted: July 10, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine, culture, personal
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Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

Jesus via Matthew 6:19-21

My oldest son turns 30 next week and when I was writing my under the fedora piece for today (that is going up tomorrow instead) I touched on a story that brought this to mind.

Back in 2009 he had been offered a big scholarship to Anna Maria college and we went to visit the place. What I saw at the “catholic” college was less that overwhelming:

My problem with the place is one of my pet peeves. The college is a Catholic College There are old crosses on buildings and portraits of older bishops in one or two places, but I saw nothing affirming their Catholic identity. No portrait of the pope, no schedule of Masses (although they do offer daily Mass).

There were pictures celebrating the new president all over the place, banners celebrating diversity, announcements of the woman’s study courses but nothing on the March for Life later this month in Washington. The concert was a “holiday” concert. In the Anna Maria in the news bulletin board at the admissions office there was an article talking about protesting the pope in the US. That was the extent of any recent mention of religion.

Of course that was written in the days when “Is the Pope Catholic” was a one liner rather than a legit question but I digress…

When he was offered a full boat at the local Fitchburg State college (before it became Fitchburg University) which never pretended it wasn’t a secular organization he jumped at it allowing him to live at home and continue in our parish where his faith was well formed. I was going to let it go at that until we got a letter from the Bishop congratulating us on being accepted at Anna Maria and the Scholarship and the importance of a Catholic education.

At that point I wrote a letter to the Bishop that said in part:

We were excited when Sam was accepted at Anna Maria; even more so when they offered the largest (in dollars) scholarship of any of the nine colleges that have accepted and attempted to recruit him. We looked forward to the visit to the college and liked the prospect of a college that would expand both his faith and his educational horizons.

Then we actually visited the college.

Comparing your description of the college as a “great example of a Catholic institution…” and my experience I thought of George Weigel’s line commenting on the differing press releases concerning Speaker Pelosi visit to the Holy See: “Were Benedict XVI and Nancy Pelosi in the same meeting, or even in the same city?”

it continued:

When I talked to the gentleman from admissions after the tour he informed me that this was not unusual at Catholic colleges and seemed to stress diversity rather than the Catholic identity, in fact seemed happy to reassure the next visiting student that he would not have to take any courses having to do with religion. Continuing my quote from the blog:

…It would be nicer if Catholic identity actually meant something. I’ve spent much more than I can afford over the last 10 years giving my sons a Catholic education. If I’m going to spend a whole lot more for a Catholic College then I expect a Catholic College.

I can’t reconcile your description of Anna Maria with what I saw and I can’t believe you would make that description after visiting the college yourself. While academically I believe it would be strong I don’t believe attending would foster his faith, in fact I suspect if he choose to wear his faith proudly it would go hard on him there.

The Bishop forward my letter to the president of the college who wrote me to dispute my impression and I posted both letters on the blog trusting readers to make their own decision.

Because I was referencing this story in the post I took the liberty of visiting the Anna Maria Web site curious if things had changed in twelve years and under a different president.

The front page like many sites has a rotating gallery highlighting many different things none of them involving the faith and while on other tabs you could find a reference particularly on the Campus Ministry page you will be hard pressed to find a sign of it. For the fun of it I did a search for the phrase: “Jesus Christ” on the site here were the results:

search result 7/10/21 10:20 am

two of those are blog posts from 2020 and the other two are programs offered.

Now if you search for “diversity” however…

Search 7/10/21 10:24 AM

You’d have to go to additional pages to see all the results you can find but I figured the 1st page was enough to make my point. If you search for LGBT…

search result 7/10/21 10:26 AM

Well at least Jesus does equally as well as LGBT in the search results. I’ll wager there are plenty of Catholic Colleges where he doesn’t.

Well that’s Anna Maria College 12 years later. As for my son twelve years later last week I had a rare Sunday off and so I had the pleasure of my wife and sons all with me at the 6 PM mass at our parish. Neither of my sons received communion but both went up to the priest arms crossed for a blessing. When the mass was over they asked him for confession. When they had both received the sacrament the pastor took them to the tabernacle and they received Holy Communion after mass. I can imagine my mother & father punching the air in heaven at this and as their dad I can’t adequately state how proud I was to see this.

The best non-decision my wife and I ever made still remains not moving to the Portland Oregon area after our Honeymoon there 33 years ago but I’m thinking giving Anna Maria a miss twelve years ago comes in as a pretty solid second.

DaTechGuy’s Two Generation Rule We Demonize Police At Our Peril

Posted: July 5, 2021 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
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Martin: You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you’re honest you’re poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.

High Noon 1952

One of the things that my study of history has told me is that radical horrible change usually takes two generations to really have the impact to destroy a society.

For example when you removed prayer from the public schools it wasn’t a big deal for the first few years because all the adults , all the teachers and all the students still knew and remembered the cultural lesions that they entailed.

One generation later things were a lot worse but not completely gone because even though the kids were not being taught the cultural lessons their teachers had been and the adults running the land had been brought up with them so there was still some restraint on disaster.

But by the 2nd generation neither the teachers nor the students they had were exposed to the cultural lessons that the older generation still remembered and that generation that had embraced the rejection of those lesions found themselves wondering why police were required in classrooms, why drug gangs were running rampant in cities and that teens and twenty somethings could not cope in a world so much easier than the one they grew up in.

Generations of kids not brought up with a moral code (and also not brought up with mothers in the house but instead raised by daycare strangers who aren’t teaching any moral code) have led to a society willing to walk away from basic freedoms and responsibilities because they were never given an understanding of them.

Thus we went from a generation that was told they were entitled to a trophy for showing up to being entitled to EVERYTHING.

But now with Critical Race Theory on the rise and the teachers Unions embracing it nationally with its demonization of police it’s about to get a lot worse in a few years.

For generations we treated police officers with respect in our schools, in our culture. Kids dreamed of being police officers to “Serve and Protect”. Now we have labeled police as villains, as evil racists as beyond the pale and we are giving that message to our kids in public schools.

Tell me how many of those kids that you are teaching this to now will decide that law enforcement is a good career option in ten years or in twenty?

Cities defunding police is a bad idea, the left and media targeting police to the point where they are retiring en masse is even worse but when you teach your kids that police officers are bad then it won’t matter how much you fund police, you won’t have people willing to do the job.

And it won’t just be the kids who aren’t taught this running away. Children of police officers who know the truth, who see their fathers and mothers doing an honorable job to protect their communities are watching what’s being done to their parents and will decide that despite pay and incentives it’s not the place for them.

If you think the cities are in bad shape just wait till we have two generation of this funneling though the system and cities desperate for any kind of police presence wave standards that are taken for granted today.

If this isn’t nipped in the bud now this is the future we are creating for our children and grand children, but not of course for those of the elites or the Build Large Mansions squad. They and the backers who are financing this will make sure they have enough for gated communities with well armed security so that they and theirs will not have to suffer the consequences of their actions.

Unexpectedly of course.

Stopping cities from Defunding the Police is important but it isn’t the primary battle, it’s a smoke screen a feint by the left and our enemies who fund them.

Stopping our culture form demonizing the police in the classroom and to our kids is the make or break fight we have to win as a society, because if we don’t we won’t have a society left to protect.

Five Thoughts about The Chosen Under the Fedora

Posted: July 2, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, culture, entertainment

I’ve been watching the TV series “The Chosen” which incidentally is the only TV series I watch these days and have a few thoughts.

The latest episode is Episode seven, of season two and next to episode 2 of season 1 is likely the least biblical (that is the most dramatized) episode of the series. As we Catholics are not sola scripture this doesn’t offend me as much as it bothers some others but I found everything in the episode extremely plausible, particularly the idea that the local Roman authorities would have an interest in Christ when he’s drawing large crowds. The meeting between Jesus and Quintus is one of my favorite scenes in the entire series.

While some might disagree I as a daily Mass Catholic particularly like how Mary has been portrayed. She is very much humanized, which is important as is in fact human and did in fact live the life of a 1st century AD Jewish woman. What many likely do not catch is the idea that she would travel with the disciples makes a lot of sense as being a widow with no other children her son would be her only support and don’t think I didn’t notice that when Mary Magdalene fell and was afraid to face Jesus it was Mary the Mother of God who brought her in the tent and stood with her.

You don’t get more Catholic then that.

A lot of people apparently took issue with the fall and return of Mary Magdalene and it’s the one thing that the creator Dallas Jenkins really took issue with. He gives Jesus this classic line: “You thought you were never going to sin again?” As Father Z put it when talking about how to deal with a couple not married licitly:

Or course there may be times when they fail in their determination to live in continence and they have sexual relations.

What then?

Simple.  They go to confession and start over with a firm purpose of amendment.

That’s what we all do when we sin in any way.  We go to confession with a firm purpose of amendment and start over with God’s help.

Again this is very Catholic and is almost a dramatization of the first sacramental confession as there she was before Christ and receiving absolution

There is no release date for the season finale yet (at least not to my knowledge) but the thing I’m most waiting for is the introduction of Judas.

How they decide to play Judas is going to be I suspect the toughest thing they do because while John in his Gospel notes him as a thief he was still not just a disciple but an apostle in good standing right up until the last supper.

How he is portrayed and what kind of backstory they give him will be interesting. All the disciples have been humanized and in some ways sympathized but it will be very hard to do so with Judas when everyone knows what’s coming in the end. Furthermore in every scene that he’s in people will be looking for and seeing the signs of the betrayal.

Will we see Judas as the Betrayer from day one or Judas as the disciple who in the end doesn’t seek the forgiveness that Mary did in season two or that Simon Peter will have to in the final season?

That the big question mark for the remaining seasons to me.

The crowd funding for season three seems to be stuck at episode five, which is about a half million away from what they need to finish the season (They’re looking for 1.875 mill to cover all eight episodes). I suspect that it’s because this season we’re seeing more conflict both within and without and this might be turning off a few people. Still with an avg contribution of about $30 bucks a head the 1.3 mil they’ve raised isn’t chicken feed but it also means they need about 20K people to kick in to finish things off. While I recommend this show to others I’m holding off the cash spigot for two reasons:

  1. Money has been rather tight with DaWife’s illness this year
  2. I want to see what they do with John 6

It will be very interesting to see the conflict between a very devout Catholic actor who plays Jesus and a very Protestant team that’s writing and producing the series handles the bread of life discourses. Most biblical movies duck it. I don’t see how that’s done given the episodic nature of the series.

But what I think really hurts the fund raising are all the “chosen commentary” things on Youtube that are drawing potential “pay it forward” people away from the site and app that offers it free anyways.

Chicago has a street gang problem not a gun problem

Posted: June 27, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, politics
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Gang temple in 2016 on Chicago’s South Side

By John Ruberry

Last week President Joe Biden and attorney general Merrick Garland announced the latest get-tough on illegal gun sales effort.

Unless I missed it, there was no mention from either men of the major underlying reason for most murders in big cities such as Chicago: out of control street gangs.

While it’s America’s third-largest city Chicago, with about 2.7 residents, has more gang members than any other–about 100,000. 

I’m having a heck of a time finding recent statistics on the percentage of shootings in Chicago that are gang-related–so my guess is that they are no longer being tabulated. Perhaps that has something to do with the monumentally stupid deciscion by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to eliminate Chicago’s gang crimes unit in 2012. His successor, leftist ideologue Lori Lightfoot, is unlikely to bring it back. Fortunately for decent Chicagoans there are less than two years left in her term.

However, while speaking of Chicago’s gang culture in 2015, then-Chicago Police superintendant Garry McCarthy said, “It’s very frustrating to know that it’s like seven percent of the population causes 80% of the violent crime.”

What about the shootings?

“Eighty-three percent of the shooting victims in Chicago are black,” Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery said on his Flannery Fired Up show this weekend, “and about 96 percent are black and brown.” Of course not all shooting victims are gang members. Some are small children.

With such a small population committing so many violent crimes, it’s pretty easy to determine the most-direct way to attack violent crime in Chicago and other big cities. But big city mayors, all of whom are Democrats, don’t seem to be spoiling for this necessary fight against street gangs.

In Chicago it’s worse. Chicago magazine, in a 2011 article that has been sadly overlooked, “Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance,” exposed several job-fair type meetings between aldermanic candidates and people representing street gangs. The messsage the organizer of those meetings, Hal Baskin, a candidate for the City Council that year and a former gang leader who died in 2018, received was clear to him. “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”

Gangs not only are part of the criminal culture of Chicago, but they are part of the political one as well. Which partly explains why politicians in Chicago regulary decry “gun violence” but not gang violence. Gangs and politics go back decades, including the time when Chicago was overwhelmingly white. While not a gang in the modern sense, the Hamburg Athletic Club, which did not peddle drugs, was involved in politics. The “Hamburgers” were blamed for some of the violence of the bloody 1919 Race Riot in Chicago, part of the tragic “Red Summer” that year. Three years after the riot future Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was the president of the Hamburg Athletic Club. 

In 1984 while running for president, Jesse Jackson publicly thanked the infamous El Rukn gang for their help in a voter registration drive. The gang’s founder, Jeff Fort, is now an inmate at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Jackson’s half-brother, Noah Robinson, is serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering schemes that involved the El Rukns. 

In the 1990s the Gangster Disciples gang, which was started by Larry Hoover, now a lifer at the supermax, founded a political organization, 21st Century V.O.T.E. They were organizing a national gang summit at the Congress Hotel in Chicago, where I was working at the time. Man oh man, that was a wretched experience. Oh, Al Sharpton was there. Isn’t that special!

Back to 2011:

According to that Chicago magazine article there were similar gang-pol gatherings before 2011. 

I have no proof but I suspect such meetings still occur. After all we are discussing Chicago, one of the most corrupt cities in America. 

Chicago’s aldermen are notoriously crooked, since 1973 over thirty members have been sentenced to federal prison. Do the math, that’s one “public official” locked away every 18 months.

So, how many Chicago public figures have ties, however casual, with gangs? We’ll probably never know. 

One current Chicago alderman who sees the truth on gangs is Raymond Lopez of the Southwest Side’s 15th Ward. “If you really want to get to what is at the heart of a lot of this [the violence], it is gangs, and it is the borderline collapse of the family unit in many of our neighborhoods,” Lopez told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “Lightfoot] has avoided calling out gangs in our community as a source of violence in our city.”

In a Tweet, Lopez offered indirect support to the “broken windows” theory of policing. Big time criminals also commit petty crimes. “In less than 24 hours, a new gang ‘family’ moved onto a block, they immediately opened a fire hydrant after settling in, and just moments ago took to shooting at a passing vehicle.” Lopez Tweeted two weeks ago. “The property owner can expect a call from me tomorrow. I want them gone. Now!”

Instead of “defunding the police” the far-left is now parsing their words, calling their approach “reimagining the police.” I’m calling for reimagining law enforcement. Federal authorities, to crush the gangs that have destroyed American cities, they need to aggressively utilize wiretaps, informants, and offering those who testify against gangs participation in the witness protection program.

Street gangs nation wide need to be neutered by the feds. Just like they did to the mafia.

It would take many years for such a crackdown to succeed but that should take care of the urban gun violence problem.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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