Flying in the face of truth

My moral theology class wanted to hear stories about my time in the Oxford movement and I had promised to spend some time doing just that. Nevertheless they did have an exam the next day and I wanted to be sure that they were able to use technical terms properly. So I opened the class as follows:

But first - business - economy, class, is the term from moral theology to discuss the telling of a falsehood. It is distinguished from lying because it is sometimes held that the telling of a falsehood may not be wrong - i.e. a lie - but still a falsehood hence economy. This is why Newman has a discussion in an appendix to the Apologia on the Economy. He is not discussing the balance of trade or anything like that.

Caine's Arcade

Reminds me of someone.

Mankowski: What Went Wrong?

Robert Conquest says somewhere that the “behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies". Of couse, he means enemies of the organization: the idea of a bureaucracy being taken over by its enemies fills me with a mixture of hilarity and dread.

That reminds me of Fr Paul Mankowski SJ's paper from July 2003 (I blog slow but exceeding fine): What Went Wrong?

In thousands and thousands of pages of records one scarcely, if ever, is edified by a pleasant surprise, by discovering that a bishop’s or superior’s concern for the victim or for the Faith was greater than that known to the public, that the engines of justice were geared up and running at full throttle, but in a manner invisible to those outside the circle of discretion. Didn’t happen.

A brief shock

Putting http://www.merton.ac.uk into a browser gave an alarming result. It seemed the alma mater had closed down.

I had left out the ox.

Naming South Australia

Somebody was asking I was boring somebody about Adelaide names. Tim Blair attributes the observation of the peculiarities of the names of Adelaideans to Alex Buzo. Examples (some of them spoofs, d'uh): Bright Greene, Pullen Hare, Falkland Waugh, Clayvel Badcock, Steele Hall. Blair also passed on a method of creating your own name for when you move to that bright thrusting city of the late 1950s. All this comes up again because somebody thinks South Australia should change its name (note to non Australians, Adelaide is the capital of the state of South Australia). Naturally Blair is on the case.

Kyrie eleison ©

One of the things boring in an interesting way I would like to understand is how copyright law applies to the liturgical books. This post nibbles at the edges. The title says it all: The Catastrophe of Catholic Copyrights.

Hyperdox Herman

You need a Facebook account for this. (Yes yes, I know). He has an archenemy Cradle Christopher. Hilarious.