{"id":865,"date":"2008-11-06T10:03:17","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T10:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/11\/varia-3.html"},"modified":"2008-11-06T10:03:17","modified_gmt":"2008-11-06T10:03:17","slug":"varia-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/11\/varia-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Varia"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve not done this for a while, so let’s go – cleaning out the emailbox, etc.
\nThe Worst Election Day of My Life<\/a>\u00a0via Dawn Eden<\/a>\u00a0who has a wondeful post on a book written and drawn by a young woman with Down Syndrome.\u00a0 (scroll down to 11\/3)
\nAlso via Dawn – a post from Fr. Stephen Freeman on “The Death of Religion.”<\/a>
\nLiveChastely – an effort in support of Humanae Vitae<\/em><\/a>
\nFrom a Philadelphia acquaintance, an article about a book she says will be helpful to many <\/a>– letters written by a mother to her daughter who died, too young, of a brain tumor.
\n\u00a0Gearing up for Advent? Well, Aquinas and More is ready – they have everything you need!<\/a>
\nCongratulations to Jen Ambrose on the birth of\u00a0 her daughter over there in Hong Kong!<\/a>\u00a0(And scroll down a bit for her post with a clip featuring audio from the singing of “Immaculate Mary”<\/a> at her parish over there. Lovely.)
\nPatrick Hannigan <\/a>is always good, but this post is particularly worth a look.<\/a>
\nJennifer at\u00a0Conversion Diary is a must read here – \u00a0<\/a>“How Would You Know?”<\/p>\n

Recently I was looking through some genealogy documents and noticed that a distant ancestor of mine owned a slave. My own flesh and blood, people probably not unlike me at all, participated in the horror of slavery. Can I be so sure that I would have seen the truth?<\/span> Or, if I had lived alongside my ancestor, would I have included a human being on the list of possessions I owned? Even if I didn’t own a slave myself, would I have shooed the distasteful subject from my mind by surrounding myself with the comfort that all my friends seemed to think it was fine and, after all, it was perfectly legal? Evil’s most powerful tool is that it always works through lies<\/span><\/a>; the lure to tell yourself that something bad is not really bad at all is a powerful temptation, and one that I’m not sure I could have resisted.
\nSometimes I think about this, and wonder what advice I would pass along to my own descendants to make sure this never happens again; to help future generations guard against being blinded should they find themselves in the midst of a culture where something terrible is taking place.
\nBut the question is: How would you know?<\/span>
\nWhat litmus test could you offer that would apply to all places and all times as a way for a person to look around themselves with completely clear eyes, piercing through even the thickest fog of self-delusion and widespread cultural acceptance, and see that they are surrounded by grave evil? Is there any simple way for a person to immediately undergo an earth-rocking paradigm shift in which they look up and realize that the world around them is not what they thought it was?
\nOne thing that stands out in all these examples is that the victims of the widespread evil were categorized as something less than human.<\/span> In fact, though the exact level and degree of evil that took place may vary, one thing that unites all of these practices as worthy of a place in the Human Depravity Hall of Fame is not only that innocent people were killed or enslaved, but that their humanity was taken away by the societies around them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Finally, I’m a bit deliquent on this, but some of you who have been reading religious blogs for a long time might recall one of the earlier blogs – Holy Weblog! The blogger produced an entertaining daily collection of quirky religious links. I always really enjoyed it, and was sorry when the blogger’s family obligations moved her to hang it up..
\nBut Holy Weblog is back! Go check it out and bookmark. It’s a welcome return. <\/a>
\n\u00a0
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve not done this for a while, so let’s go – cleaning out the emailbox, etc. The Worst Election Day of My Life\u00a0via Dawn Eden\u00a0who has a wondeful post on a book written and drawn by a young woman with Down Syndrome.\u00a0 (scroll down to 11\/3) Also via Dawn – a post from Fr. Stephen…<\/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-865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nVaria - 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\/11\/varia-3.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Varia - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve not done this for a while, so let’s go – cleaning out the emailbox, etc. The Worst Election Day of My Life\u00a0via Dawn Eden\u00a0who has a wondeful post on a book written and drawn by a young woman with Down Syndrome.\u00a0 (scroll down to 11\/3) Also via Dawn – a post from Fr. Stephen…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/11\/varia-3.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-11-06T10:03:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Varia - 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\/11\/varia-3.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Varia - Via Media","og_description":"I’ve not done this for a while, so let’s go – cleaning out the emailbox, etc. The Worst Election Day of My Life\u00a0via Dawn Eden\u00a0who has a wondeful post on a book written and drawn by a young woman with Down Syndrome.\u00a0 (scroll down to 11\/3) Also via Dawn – a post from Fr. 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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\/865","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=865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}