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Stanford Scientist finds a "A solution to the stem cell dilemma that even the Vatican can love"

According to the report "How to Farm Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul" in the June Issue of Wired, Stanford scientist William Hurlbut has found a way to harvest embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Here is an excerpt from the report:

William Hurlbut clicks his laptop, and an x-ray pops up on the projection screen behind him. It's a picture of a tumor in a woman's ovary - a ghostly blob floating near the spine. In the middle are several strange, Chiclet-shaped nodules. "Those white opacities," Hurlbut says, "are actually fully formed teeth."

A few audience members blanch. Though we're in an ordinary conference room in Rome, it feels like church. The seats are filled with some of the Vatican's top thinkers, including a dozen men in clerical dress, a nun in a flowing brown habit, and a Dominican priest whose prayer beads quietly clatter. Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Stanford, has traveled here to tell them about a new way to create human embryonic stem cells.

I'm not sure that the solution is one that "even the Vatican will love", but at least this shows there are some scientists out there trying to find an ethical solution to it all... which seems to me to be a good thing.

It is creepy, indeed.  More disturbing to me... and to the credit of the author, the story does point this out... is that it remains  problematic due to the fact that many Christians believe that the soul is infused at conception, so when an embryo is altered by extracting a gene and thereby prevented from developing properly, that's equivalent to murder right there (hat tip to BP)...back to square one.

I thought it was encouraging to see someone concerned enough about the ethics to try and come up with a solution, nevertheless.

UPDATE: I am convinced that Dr. Hurlbut's work is morally acceptable and something we need to support.  Please read the comments for more details...

Question now answered over at IgnatiusInsight.com...

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, laments state of the Church in Europe

From The Times:

In a lecture at Westminster Cathedral, the spiritual leader of more than four million Roman Catholics in England and Wales said the Church in Europe, and in particular in Britain, was in a time of crisis and of "dying and rising".

He described the modern European as a "person of angst", in spite of or perhaps because of the many liberties enjoyed in contemporary western culture. He warned that Europe will "fall into anguish" if it forgets God and loses touch with its Judeao-Christian tradition.

The text of the entire lecture can be read here and it's not all doom and gloom, as the concluding remarks indicate:

The Church is alive – and on pilgrimage - as it has been for 2,000 years, as I saw so vividly out on that balcony above that roaring throng in St Peter’s Square just a few weeks ago. What we have to offer is no less than Jesus Christ. It is a task which, carried out well, will recall Europe to its eternal destiny - to the life, meaning, and hope for which our Continent yearns. “People are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death, in a sea of darkness without light,” Pope Benedict said at his inaugural Mass. “The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light – into true life,” he added. This is the purpose of the Church. This is our purpose. It is an awesome, and wonderful, task, to help Europe to be itself once more, to relive its roots, to discover its soul. And we are secure in the knowledge that God never fails us. Only when God is glimpsed does life truly start. Europeans are in need, as never before, of seeing God. We are the ones, with the help of God’s grace, entrusted with revealing Him.

Do you know your rites? IgnatiusInsight.com helps...

Frank Schaeffer

After following with interest the conversation here about Frank Schaeffer's article "With God on their side, " I decided I'd send him an email and see if he would tolerate a few questions from a fan (and I am a fan... he's written some good stuff, especially "Fundamentalists to the Right, Funadamentalists to the Left" for instance).  He was kind enough to reply to my question, which essentially was, "I think you make some valid points but I also think you are wrong about Pope Benedict.  What is your 'beef' with the new pope, anyways?" 

His answer is below and he said "Feel free to post it." Essentially, I think he's frustrated over what he perceives as a lack of humility on the scene these days, and I suspect he might have a point in that regard:

Dear Jeff:

Look, any misreading of my op-ed is my fault, not yours. That said please note that my op-ed is not "about" the pope. Nor is it "about" the Roman Catholic Church. It is about a trend in the world toward conservative fundamentalism and the political consequences of the collision between the "tolerant" and multicultural, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil crowd and people on the fundamentalist side who do speak, believe and act. The piece is also about seeing the mystery of faith as contradicting the scholastic fundamentalism of both the west and east.

"The final irony of fundamentalism, and the scholastic Catholicism represented by the new pope, is that fundamentalists turn out to be rationalists unwilling to abandon any part of their intellectual systems to embrace the mystery of spirituality."

I'm not the first Orthodox to point out that scholastic Western Christianity is at odds with the Orthodox view of mystery/theological reasoning. This is hardly earth shaking news.

So I don't know why this is read as a "beef" with the pope any more than observing that President Bush is part of the resurgent religious right would be a "beef" with the president. We are all defined by our moment of history and right now so is the pope. He is one of several examples in the op-ed not the focus any more than Bill Frist is, though I mention him too along with fundamentalist Jews and Muslims.

Everybody sees their own issues in a story. I'm getting email from Evangelicals that don't mention the pope but who think the op-ed is "about" my father since I speak of him in it.

I'm reminded of the story about the African village where some missionaries showed a movie about Jesus to people who had never seen a film. After the movie the missionary asked "What do you think that movie was about?" "A chicken," responded one villager. The missionary realized that the chicken was the only thing in the movie that was familiar. The village had chickens in it, but not actors dressed in bathrobes.

A Jewish friend emailed me about how she thought my piece was an "unjustified rebuke" of people like her on the politically correct left for being too tolerant. We all see the chickens we know. Me too.

Best, Frank

PS, If you want to post this letter on your site go ahead.

Card on Lucas' Jedi/Sith Religion

"It's a terrible thing," writes the prolific sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card, "for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it."

Card refers to George Lucas and the religion(s) of the latest Star Wars movie:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16700.html

Catholic women celebrate the papacy!

      

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Living in San Fran can make you "enlightened"

So says Tom Ammiano, a San Fran Supervisor who is also homosexual. He makes the remark in commenting on the appointment of Archbishop Leveda's appointment to head the CDF, as reported in Gay City News:

“Levada, just by his exposure to what has happened in San Francisco, is a tiny bit more enlightened, but that’s a very small step for a very big price,” the city supervisor said. “He’s not changing on pastoring for gays. He’s not changing on the gender issues. None of that will stop. “It’s like the old days of gay lib. We’ll have to go a lot further than Levada to get full equality from the church hierarchy.”

Ah....um....oh...alright.

Speaking of Cardinal Pell, he was part of a record...

...setting event that recently took place in Sydney, Australia:

Five thousand primary school students packed the Superdome in Sydney today for Australia's biggest Catholic confirmation ceremony. Split into two sessions to accommodate the huge numbers, 80 priests conducted the ceremony, overseen by Cardinal George Pell and six bishops. More than 40,000 parents, teachers, friends and parish members were on hand to support the students as they entered into a more adult relationship with the church.

Wow!

"The Inconvenient Conscience"

That's the title of this excellent piece by George Cardinal Pell of Australia, published in the May 2005 issue of First Things and now available online. Cardinal Pell writes:

Nearly every theologian would agree with Newman that conscience is “a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator.” But while some see conscience as God’s invitation to embrace His law as free subjects, others see it as a radical call to personal freedom. Indeed, for many people today, the word “conscience” suggests not law at all, but the freedom to judge by our own personal resources and the right to act as we each think best—a rejection, in other words, of the need for morality and creed; a claim that I should be allowed to live as I choose.

Of course, this view is often dressed up with the claim that conscience is a special faculty that speaks to us, rather like an oracle, and it may even be elevated to the status of a doctrine: the “primacy of conscience.” But however it is presented, it stands in contrast to the view that conscience is instead simply the mind thinking practically and morally. We think well when we understand moral principles and apply them in clear and reasonable ways; we think badly when we ignore or reinvent moral principles, or apply them in ambiguous and unreasonable ways. “Good conscience,” in this way of understanding, means a good grasp and a good application of moral truth—for it is the truth that remains primary, the truth that is grasped and applied by the practical mind.

Highly recommended. Cardinal Pell is one of the Church's true intellectuals and a man of courage and holiness, as Tess Livingstone shows so well in her biography of the Cardinal, George Pell: Defender of the Faith Down Under. An IgnatiusInsight.com interview with Livingstone can be read here and an interview with Cardinal Pell is located here.  

Filibuster Wars

As the U.S. Senate continues to work on the Republican leadership's goal of ending the filibusters of judicial nominees--which by the way does not end all use of the filibuster, even if it is successful--the Federalist Society has published a cornocopopia of information on its website, here--

http://www.fed-soc.org/judicialnominations.htm

I think there are valid arguments on both sides of this issue, but personally feel the chance of getting pro-life judges on the courts trumps the other issues at this point.

My latest at IgnatiusInsight.com...

FIRST THINGS review of Benedict XVI/Cardinal Ratzinger's "Truth and Tolerance"...

... is now available online here.

There was a time when Frank Schaeffer's anger...

... was understandable and paid homage to reason. No longer. The son of famous Evangelical/Reformed author and theologian Francis Schaeffer seems to have finally allowed anger to burn up all reason and charity. And so he produces rants such as this one in The San Fran Chronicle in which he identifies everyone he dislikes as a "fundamentalist" — including his father, Benedict XVI, and Republican leaders (how the Chronicle must love printing this!):

It is perhaps not coincidental that Cardinal Ratzinger, the most fundamentalist Roman Catholic cardinal, was chosen as the new pope. Fundamentalism is the big story of the 21st century. Ask anyone trying to teach evolution in a public school. Consider the 50 million copies sold of the "Left Behind" series about the second coming of Christ. Or listen to mullahs earnestly explain how to apply seventh-century religious law to so-called modern life -- say, why women should not be allowed to vote. Or watch Tom DeLay and Bill Frist attacking the judiciary for not being sufficiently fundamentalism-friendly.

When you start calling Benedict XVI a "fundamentalist," it says much about you and nothing about the pope. It says that you have not only started to lose your grip on reality, you have no respect for words, theology, history, and simple fairness. Really, Frank, which is more difficult: to teach Darwinian evolution or Intelligent Design in public schools? Apparently Schaeffer thinks that his anger at his "fundamentalist" upbringing makes him uniquely qualified to intolerantly and unfairly castigate "fundamentalists" for being intolerant and unfair:

I'm a novelist. I'm also the son of Francis Schaeffer, who, until his death in 1984, was one of the best-known fundamentalist theologians. My dad's followers included the founders of the religious right: Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. I fled the hot and heavy world of fundamentalism long ago. Then I wrote a farewell-to-all-that-craziness trilogy of novels about how fevered religion impacted my life.

We could probably debate whether or not Francis Schaeffer was really a fundamentalist in the strict, historical sense; despite his dislike of the Catholic Church I think that his often-impressive knowledge of history, theology, and the arts indicates that he was much more of an Evangelical. (I happily note that I read many of senior Schaeffer's books while in college and benefitted immensely from them.) Be that as it may, I find Frank Schaeffer's attitude distasteful. Obviously, as my first book (Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"?) indicates, I have no problem critiquing fundamentalist theology and the anti-Catholic beliefs of many fundamentalists. But to launch thinly veiled attacks on your father (via the "trilogy of novels") — and to continually lick this festering wound in public — borders on neurotic.

So, what exactly is Schaeffer attempting to say? A brief break in the smoke reveals this statement:

The final irony of fundamentalism, and the scholastic Catholicism represented by the new pope, is that fundamentalists turn out to be rationalists unwilling to abandon any part of their intellectual systems to embrace the mystery of spirituality.

This is a truly sad and pathetic remark. In fact, it is the sort of statement that a true fundamentalist would make: highly bigoted, unsubstantiated, and full of angry bluster. Has Schaeffer read any of Benedict XVI's twenty-some books? If he has, he has recklessly misrepresented his thought; if he hasn't, he is far more ill-informed than the "fundamentalists" he attacks. There is a place for righteous anger, but I fear that Frank Schaeffer's anger is of another kind — the sort that is unwilling to abandon any part of its intellectual system to fairly represent those who believe differently.

"Pope John Paul feared Bush was antichrist"

So claims "freelance journalist Wayne Madsden [sic]," according to this article in the Egypt Election Daily News (which originally appeared in the Catholic New Times):

"George W Bush's blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs and his constant references to 'evil doers,' in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations--the anti-Christ."

Madsen, a Washington-based writer and columnist, who often writes for Counterpunch, says that people close to the pope claim that amid these concerns, the pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations. John Paul II always believed the world was on the precipice of the final confrontation between Good and Evil as foretold in the New Testament.

Before he became pope, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said, "We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel."

I, for one, am not overwhelmed by the evidence for the late Holy Father's supposed statements about Prez Bush. Not that I should even take this seriously, but a couple of points to consider, just for kicks. First, there's nothing that I know of in JPII's writings or speeches that even hints at such a silly belief. Secondly, Madsen is, well, a little bit off of his radical activist rocker. For instance, he describes Karl Rove this way: "He's America's Joseph Goebbels" — and he's just getting started. Besides, the idea that Bush is somehow the/an Antichrist has been a favorite spewing point of leftist crazies for a while now.

In the meantime, if you'd like to be convinced that Prez Bush is indeed the Antichrist, here is a plethora of evidence for you to sift through. But do keep in mind that it has been firmly established that the Pope is the Antichrist: here and here and here. Or is it Charles of Wales? Or Bill Gates? Or all of the above?

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You left out "pithy"...

I know very little about Brian D. McLaren other than that he is a Christian author and founder of of Cedar Ridge Community Church, an "innovative, nondenominational church" in the Baltimore area. What struck me, upon stumbling across it, is the title of his recent book:

A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN

Yes, that's the entire title. Clever, fun, eye-catching, etc., etc. But McLaren left out "Thomist," and probably for good reason. In addition to not being pithy (one of St. Thomas's great virtues), he admits a certain suspicion for clarity: "I have gone out of my way to be provocative, mischievous, and unclear, reflecting my belief that clarity is sometimes overrated" (p. 23; quote from online review). Well, perhaps. Maybe. Could be. But I suspect that trying to be everything is a sign that one is on the road to believing little or nothing. I hope that's not the case with McLaren (again, I know very little about him). In the meantime, he has recently left his position as pastor of Cedar Ridge and is now a head of ILS Coaching and Consulting. He states:

At ILS Coaching and Consulting, we are committed to walking with you on the journey of organizational culture change over time. Our coaches have years of experience working with churches and their leaders. Our approach is based on helping you understand the modern to post-modern transition, facilitating your discernment of a new vision for your unique culture, and then helping you alter leadership roles and systems to realize your God-given dreams.

Like I said, definitely not a Thomist. But, I suspect, Unfinished.

"Pontifications" blogger entering the Catholic Church

Thanks, Teresa Polk, for alerting me to Episcopalian priest/blogger Alvin Kimel's decision to resign from his position as pastor of St. Mark’s Church (a parish of approximately 200 members in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh) in order to enter the Catholic Church:

Last night I tendered my resignation to the Vestry of St. Mark’s Church, effective July 1st. It is my intention to renounce my orders as an Episcopal priest and to enter, for the sake of my salvation, into full communion with the Catholic Church. I freely affirm the Catholic Church to be the one true fold of Jesus Christ. It is also my intention to avail myself of the Pastoral Provision and to apply for ordination to the Catholic priesthood.

Much more at Kimel's "Pontifications" blog.

Benedict XVI speaks informally to priests...

...and, ZENIT reports, encourages them to provide a dynamic apologia for their faith in Jesus Christ and His Church:

In the First Letter of St Peter, in the Greek text, with a fine play on words, it is written: "apologia," the answer to the "logos," of the reason for our faith. And so, the "logos," the reason for the faith, the word of faith, must become the answer of faith. And we know well that the language of faith is often very far from today's men and women; it can bring them close only if it becomes in us our modern-day language. We are contemporary, we live in this world, with these thoughts, these emotions. If it is transformed in us, one can find the answer.

Naturally, I am aware and we all know that many are not immediately able to identify themselves with, to understand, to assimilate all that the Church teaches. It seems to me important firstly to awaken this intention to believe with the Church, even if personally someone may not yet have assimilated many particulars. It is necessary to have this will to believe with the Church, to have trust that this Church -- the community not only of 2,000 years of pilgrimage of the people of God, but the community that embraces heaven and earth, the community where all the righteous of all times are therefore present -- that this Church enlivened by the Holy Spirit truly carries within the "compass" of the Spirit and therefore is the true subject of faith. ...

Romano Guardini correctly said 70 years ago that the essence of Christianity is not an idea but a Person. Great theologians have tried to describe the essential ideas that make up Christianity. But in the end, the Christianity that they constructed was not convincing, because Christianity is in the first place an Event, a Person. And thus in the Person we discover the richness of what is contained.