{"id":823,"date":"2008-10-17T11:07:48","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T11:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html"},"modified":"2008-10-17T11:07:48","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T11:07:48","slug":"fray-entered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html","title":{"rendered":"Fray, entered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here goes.<br \/>\nI want to start politico-blogging, but I&#8217;m going to be all schoolmarmish and lay down some requests about commenting.<br \/>\nWhy the requests?<br \/>\n(<em>&#8216;Cause you really want to say &#8220;rules&#8221; but that would be too much. Admit it. Okay, admitted.)<\/em><br \/>\nBecause I&#8217;ve being faithfully reading a lot of the Catholic-based political commentary that&#8217;s out there on blogs and such and find it problematic in some ways, and I&#8217;d like to avoid those problems and pitfalls here.<br \/>\nBecause those problems result in endless rounds of commentary that are boring, repetitive and predictable.<br \/>\nIn fact, it&#8217;s gotten tot he point that most comment threads can write themselves, most of them devolving into a tedious stream of<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fallacyfiles.org\/tuquoque.html\" target=\"_blank\"> <em>tu quoque <\/em><\/a>and (most irritating to me) generalities and assumptions tossed around like magisterial truth, often by anonymous commenters and bloggers.<br \/>\nSo&#8230;how I&#8217;d like this place to be different than that for the next few weeks.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Can we try to avoid generalities? Most specifically (heh), I&#8217;m talking about generalities related to that creature called &#8220;Catholic Social Teaching&#8221;, referred to by the cool kids as &#8220;CST,&#8221; not to be confused with &#8220;Central Standard Time.&#8221;\u00a0 If we&#8217;re going to refer to &#8220;Catholic Social Teaching,&#8221; let&#8217;s be specific about statements, sourcing and authority of whatever document or text we are citing.<\/li>\n<li>Let&#8217;s avoid the Strawmen and all the Straw Nation as much as possible. I blogged at length about one a couple of weeks ago, but there are more. To say, for example, that &#8220;Anti-abortionists need to understand that abortions won&#8217;t end even if <em>Roe <\/em>were overturned&#8221; gets a resounding &#8220;Well, duh&#8221; from me and every other pro-lifer out there. For example.<\/li>\n<li>Be ourselves,\u00a0 I am pretty unimpressed by anonymous blogging, period, unless the blog involved has a confessional quality or\u00a0 is written by someone in a truly dangerous situation. But other than that, I find the spectacle of anonymous bloggers and commenters castigating others for being less than perfect Catholics for their political views and votes and declaring that we need to be all prophetic and stuff in the same breath&#8230;ironic.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Okay. Let&#8217;s go.<br \/>\n(One more words on comments. They are moderated, which means a time lag &#8211; since I approve almost all comments (the exceptions being, these days, mostly exhortations for us all to read the insights of some heated pseudo-mystic or other), if yours doesn&#8217;t appear quickly, it simply means I&#8217;m not always sitting at the computer. Which, I think you&#8217;ll agree, is a good thing. Which leads me to another advantage of moderating comments, just for the time-delay factor. Here&#8217;s where I <em>really <\/em>get schoolmarmish. I just don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s good for anyone &#8211; you, me, or anyone else &#8211; to be hanging around computers all day, intensely arguing back and forth on a comments thread. Because, of course by now, everyone&#8217;s seen this:<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/386\/\" target=\"_blank\">(Source)<\/a><br \/>\nYup.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here goes. I want to start politico-blogging, but I&#8217;m going to be all schoolmarmish and lay down some requests about commenting. Why the requests? (&#8216;Cause you really want to say &#8220;rules&#8221; but that would be too much. Admit it. Okay, admitted.) Because I&#8217;ve being faithfully reading a lot of the Catholic-based political commentary that&#8217;s out&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Fray, entered - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fray, entered - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here goes. I want to start politico-blogging, but I&#8217;m going to be all schoolmarmish and lay down some requests about commenting. Why the requests? (&#8216;Cause you really want to say &#8220;rules&#8221; but that would be too much. Admit it. Okay, admitted.) Because I&#8217;ve being faithfully reading a lot of the Catholic-based political commentary that&#8217;s out&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-10-17T11:07:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Fray, entered - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Fray, entered - Via Media","og_description":"Here goes. I want to start politico-blogging, but I&#8217;m going to be all schoolmarmish and lay down some requests about commenting. Why the requests? (&#8216;Cause you really want to say &#8220;rules&#8221; but that would be too much. Admit it. Okay, admitted.) Because I&#8217;ve being faithfully reading a lot of the Catholic-based political commentary that&#8217;s out&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2008-10-17T11:07:48+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png"}],"author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html","name":"Fray, entered - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png","datePublished":"2008-10-17T11:07:48+00:00","dateModified":"2008-10-17T11:07:48+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png","contentUrl":"http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/duty_calls.png"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/fray-entered.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Fray, entered"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}