bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Translation.

    As the entire Catholic blogosphere knows by now, in the next few days the U. S. Bishops will vote on the new English translation of the liturgy:

    The head of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy expects a showdown in Los Angeles this week.

    After years of disputes over the English that is used in the 1970 English translation of the Order of the Mass, the bishops’ conference will vote on a proposed new translation of the Order of the Mass that is intended to be more faithful to the original Latin and more fitting for worship. Extensive debate is expected between bishops in favor of a more sacred, noble style and those who want simpler, more contemporary language.

    The bishops, who will meet for their annual spring meeting June 15-17, are considering a new translation of the Order of the Mass proposed by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). That’s the panel created during the Second Vatican Council by the bishops’ conferences of 16 English-speaking nations to translate the Missal from the Latin. The Holy See published a new version of the Roman Missal in Latin in 2002, prompting the need for a new translation.

    I’m hoping and praying to see new, accurately translated texts.  I’ve only been trying to teach myself Latin for a few weeks, but already I can see how poorly the existing liturgy meshes with the Roman Missal that is supposed to be the liturgy of the universal church.  Here’s the example in the NCR article linked above:

    The Latin text: “hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam, Panem sanctum vitae aeternae.”

    ICEL’s 1970 translation: “this holy and perfect sacrifice: the bread of life.”

    Credo’s translation: “a pure victim, a holy victim, a spotless victim, the holy Bread of eternal life.”

    After only a few weeks of learning Latin, even I can figure this out:  hostiam = victim, Panem = bread; puram = pure, sanctam = holy, immaculatam = without spot (macula = spot); vitae = of life, aeternae = eternal.

    Um.  Yeah.  Is this supposed to be difficult?

    Nevertheless, some disagree — in ways that betray concerns that are not about accuracy, but rather, about distaste for the way things are put in the source.

    But Bishop Trautman told the Register that he and about half of the nation’s bishops believe the proposed text contains too many complicated words, as well as sentences and phrases that are too long. The words “precious chalice,” for example, replace the word “cup” during the consecration prayers.

    “To me, ‘precious chalice’ says something gold with diamonds all around it,” Bishop Trautman said. “Jesus used a drinking cup at the last supper, not a precious chalice.”

    I’m assuming that it’s not the cup, but the contents, that makes the vessel precious. 

    Archbishop Chaput, of Denver, has the right attitude:  “…the Holy See has a much clearer perspective on how to interpret Vatican II than any individual bishop or any bishops’ conference,” he said in an interview. “We shouldn’t confuse our own reading of the council with its accurate interpretation. That work belongs to the Holy See.” 

    Here’s another example:

    …in the beginning of Eucharistic Prayer I, below, the words in uppercase were simply left untranslated, in accord with the principle of “dynamic equivalence”:

    Te IGITUR, CLEMENTISSIME Pater,
    Per Iesum Christum, Filium tuum, DOMINUM NOSTRUM,
    SUPPLICES rogamus AC PETIMUS,
    Uti accepta habeas
    Et benedicas
    Haec dona, HAEC MUNERA,
    HAEC SANCTA sacrificia ILLIBATA.

    In the following text, the familiar 1970 ICEL translation of the Latin text above, the words in uppercase were not in the Latin text:

    We COME TO you, Father,
    WITH PRAISE AND THANKSGIVING,
    Through Jesus Christ your Son.
    Through him we ask you to accept and bless
    These gifts WE OFFER YOU IN sacrifice.

    The 1970 text leaves untranslated 12 Latin words out of 28, and adds 10 English words that were not in the original Latin.

    Translators must always struggle with idioms and style; but the proper goal should always be faithfulness to the original text, with an eye to the purpose of the text.  Translators of novels, of newspaper articles, of scientific journals, of history textbooks all have different definitions of faithfulness.  The purpose of this text is, in fact, ceremonial:  It’s liturgy.  It’s rite.  This says to me that literal faithfulness to the words is the most important goal.

    What, after all, is the point of leaving out Dominum nostrum (Our Lord)?   How does that adhere to the text?  How is that "simplification" not also a poverty?

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  • Homeschooling in Belgium.

    Or, a very good reason to be glad we live in the United States.

    via Instapundit.

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  • Study: Sex doesn’t hasten childbirth.

    (In the short term, that is.)

    From an Ohio State University Medical Center press release:

    Women who were sexually active in the final three weeks of their pregnancies carried their babies an average of 39.9 weeks, compared to average delivery at 39.3 weeks among women who abstained from sexual activity at term.

    “Patients may continue to hear the ‘old wives’ tale’ that intercourse will hasten labor, but according to this data, they should not hear it from the medical community,” concludes Dr. Jonathan Schaffir, an obstetrician at OSU Medical Center and author of the study published in the June issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

    Well, what do you know.  I can’t count how many times I’ve heard it said that sex at the end of pregnancy encourages labor to start. 

    Question:  Does this now spell the end of the recommendation that women at risk for preterm labor avoid intercourse?

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  • “Do Catholics have Mass in space?”

    Yes and yes, of course… unless they have no priest with them, in which case the answer is no and yes.

      The jest is taken from the comments to this post at JimmyAkin.org.  (Jimmy Akin is probably best known as a knowledgeable and entertaining apologist on the radio show Catholic Answers.)  A questioner asks: 

    My wife and I have been debating the hypothetical situation of a space ship of Catholic colonists crashed and stranded on a far-distant planet, with no possibility of return to Earth or communication with Earth. And all the bishops and priests and deacons aboard have been killed in the crash.

    Can they acclaim a new bishop and continue the Apostolic Succession, and have sacraments? She says no way. I suspect they could.

    Jimmy says no, too, to the question of ordaining a new bishop, which (if you ask me) is the obvious answer. 

    I once brought up this exact same hypothetical in a conversation with a Lutheran friend when we were discussing the differences between the Catholic sacrament of Holy Orders and ordination of ministers in her own faith.   I don’t remember exactly how it went — she had to get back to me after asking her dad, a Lutheran minister himself — but she was pretty sure that in her particular tradition, it was possible for the faithful to elevate a minister from among the community, who would then be able to effect the eucharist as they understand it (consubstantiation, in case you’ve forgotten).

    On the surface, it appears to be a great disadvantage to our faith that there’s no way to generate a bishop, or a priest for that matter, in an isolated system of Catholics that doesn’t already possess a bishop- or priest-generator — i.e. a validly ordained bishop.  Especially since, without a priest, there’s no ability to confect the Eucharist — so that extremely important sacrament is forever lost to such an isolated system of Catholics, unless they happen to have brought some consecrated hosts with them.  (And in that case, I suspect the best disposition for such hosts is in Adoration.  Maybe Viaticum if the entire community faces certain death.)

    But it also serves as a good thought-experiment to show the essential quality of the Christian priesthood and episcopate as we understand it, the quality of being (literally) handed down from man to man from the apostles.  It is what it is, and even the gravest necessity cannot change it. 

    Yet it’s not actually "the gravest necessity."  Of the seven sacraments, only five — sacramental absolution, Eucharist, holy orders, anointing of the sick, and confirmation — require a priest or bishop to confer them.  The sacraments which are the means of making new Christians, marriage and baptism, do not require a priest.  So a Christian community can indeed sustain itself, and provide the means of salvation, to all generations, even if it has no priest and no possibility of obtaining or producing one.  Neither confirmation nor the Eucharist is thought to be absolutely essential to salvation, in that no one is thought to be lost simply because he never had access to those sacraments (refusing them when he did have access is another matter).  Nor is sacramental absolution; it’s one means that God gave us for forgiveness of our sins, and it’s the ordinary means, but it’s not the only means.  Presumably God forgives whomever He wants.

    Jimmy’s post also contains an excerpt from a remarkable story about Christians driven underground in Japan during the persecutions of the 17th-19th centuries.

    (It’s worth noting that my Lutheran friend who was certain that the community could elevate a minister from among themselves, became less certain in the case that the community contained no males.  In the Missouri Synod, the ministry is barred to women.  So it turned out that she agreed, that there were certain things that couldn’t be changed about it even in case of apparent necessity…)

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  • Seven sacraments. Twelve apostles. Seventeen syllables.

    Results of a Catholic haiku contest at Ironic Catholic.

    The "winner and champeen" made me laugh out loud.  I am not sure why, but it appeals to me.

    h/t Happy Catholic.

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  • British gun laws.

    My take on gun control is similar to that on most regulation of objects:  in the absence of significant evidence of improved public safety, liberty should prevail.  Even when there is some evidence that regulation can improve safety, the bar should be set high in favor of liberty.  Especially when the supposedly dangerous object can contribute to safety in particular circumstances, so that the calculation of risks and benefits is highly individualized.

    And there isn’t much evidence of improved public safety from laws against guns.   So — I’ve never thought that gun control was necessary, and I’ve generally been a supporter of (for example) concealed-carry laws.  But what I’ve been surprised to learn in the past couple of years, from news out of Britain, is that outlawing guns appears to be not just unhelpful, but dangerous, at least when coupled with other associated anti-self-defense laws.  Violent crime has erupted there since possession of handguns was all but forbidden a few years ago; tellingly, home invasions (i.e. forced entry into an occupied house) have risen particularly high.

    David Kopel of The Volokh Conspiracy has a new review of a book by Joyce Malcolm called Guns and Violence:  The English Experience.  The book covers the entire history of firearms control in the British Isles; the review presents some of the data from the last few years and describes the laws.  Makes me wonder how the citizens of Britain ever agreed to this: 

    British criminals have little expectation of confronting a victim who possesses a firearm. Even the small percentage of British homes which have a lawfully-owned gun would not be able to unlock the gun from one safe, and then unlock the ammunition from another safe, in time to use the gun against a home invader.  It should hardly be surprising, then, that Britain has a much higher rate of home invasion burglaries than does the United States.

    Technically, self-defense is still legal in Great Britain, but in practice, any act of self-defense is subject to a prosecutor’s second-guessing of what is “reasonable.” For example, Brett Osborn is now serving a 5-year sentence for manslaughter.  In order to protect a friend, “He stabbed a blood-covered, drug-crazed intruder….” His prosecution stemmed from the fact that he failed to warn the criminal that he had access to a knife.

    In 2004, despite popular demand, the British government refused to reform the laws regarding victim self-defense. Home Office Minister Fiona Mactaggart claimed that self-defense reform would be a “licence to kill with impunity."

    I have to agree with Ms. Mactaggart there, but she and I depart ways when she implies that this is a bad thing.  Defending oneself against an intruder in one’s own home, even to the point of deadly force, deserves impunity.   I think it’s a reasonable assumption that such a person intends to do bodily harm, possibly extending to murder, either as an end in itself or as a means to it.

    Coming to the aid of crime victims is strongly discouraged. British subjects are taught that, if they are attacked by a criminal, they should not yell “Help! Help!” because such cries might encourager a bystander to use physical force against the criminal. Rather, victims are supposed to yell, “Call the police.” Likewise, the government tells Britons that when they are attacked, they should not fight back, but should instead curl into a ball or take a similar defensive posture.

    Good if you’re an armadillo, tortoise or similar.   Not so good otherwise.  ("Here, criminal!  Have a crack at my kidneys!")

    To be fair, the no-defending-yourself-by-any-means laws aren’t a necessary component of the handgun bans, but are a spectacularly foolish add-on.  Still, in many ways they are a logical outgrowth of an attitude that necessarily accompanies the desire to ban weapons of any sort:  Beating the bad guys is always and everywhere the job of the state, not the private individual.  Response time be damned.

    If a properly-behaved British bystander does “call the police,” the response may be lethally slow. Vicky Horgan and her sister Emma Walton were shot by Stuart Horgan on June 6, 2004.  A total of sixty calls to 999 (the US’s equivalent to 9-1-1) were made, but help did not arrive for over an hour. The Express explained that a major cause of the delay was police reluctance to confront an armed criminal.

    There’s some other good points, notably the fact that private security guards are allowed to carry weapons — so if you’re rich enough to have one, or to appear as though you may have one, your home is likely safer.   

    There’s also some fascinating data from the U. S. that appears to show that legal gun ownership makes a young male, even an at-risk one, much less likely to engage in crime.  (To be fair, I suspect that the young at-risk males who were taught how to use legal guns, were taught by their fathers, implying a connected relationship which itself is known to be protective.)

    Read the review: I may want to read Malcolm’s book. 

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  • “I think it was amazingly rude to use a human being as an example of his personal politics.”

    What do you do if you’re a ballsy pro-life state representative, on the day the state House votes whether to recognize the 90th anniversary of Planned Parenthood in your state?

    Why, you invite a young handicapped woman to sing the National Anthem on the floor, and after the thunderous applause dies down, you let them know that she’s an abortion survivor.  Not a post-abortive woman — a post-abortive fetus, one who survived and grew to adulthood.  And then you get the gavel…

    Here’s Colorado Representative Ted Harvey’s remarkable story in his own words, via BaylyBlog.  Here’s the Denver Post article, from which the above quotation is taken.

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  • A penny for your thoughts.

    From Literal Minded.

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  • Wake-up call.

    We taught Milo to pee on cue when he was a baby.  I never went the whole diaper-free route, preferring to mix it up:  cloth diapers most of the time, disposables some of the time, pottying/cueing/toileting/barebottomedness at home.  No matter what kind of infant hygiene you’re using, it’s darn useful to be able to hold your baby’s butt over a suitable receptacle, make the Special Pee Noise, and have him pee right away.  Saves trouble on car trips, etc.

    I think that’s part of the reason why he spontaneously toilet trained early on.  At 18 months he was diaper-free in the daytime.  A few months later we stopped using diapers at night, too. 

    But recently he’s started wetting the bed every night.  Regression due to the impending birth of Baby #3?  Hard to believe that, when he sleeps right through it.  I think he’s just temporarily outgrown his bladder capacity. 

    Please, no more diapers!  Our solution has been to set an alarm for 2:30 AM.  When it goes off, Mark takes him to the toilet and makes the sound — cues him to pee.  Milo pees, without even waking up.  Then everyone back to bed.  It’s worked like a charm for a couple of weeks now.  But Mark’s getting tired.

    Last night I heard the alarm go off.  Mark turned it off.  But then he didn’t move again.  I rolled over and poked him.  "Hey.  Don’t go back to sleep until you take Milo to the bathroom."

    "OK," he groaned, and I heard him struggle to his feet.  Then I heard him swear. 

    "Too late?" I asked.  "Did he pee?"

    "Yeah — in the last thirty seconds!" 

    I laughed as Mark started to peel the sheets back.  "You cued him — with the alarm!"

    Now what?  A different alarm every night?  I suppose we could set the cell phone to vibrate and strap it to one of our bodies…

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  • Two updates.

    Last week, Animal Control came and rounded up the neighborhood undocumented chickens.  I miss them.

    Today, I made the midwife measure my hemoglobin again, and it was 11.5 g/dL — well within the normal range for pregnant women!  It’s not yet up to my normal level, which is 12, but it’s nice to see results in just 2 weeks. 

    Still feeling pretty tired though.

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  • “Ethical” egg donations?

    The Boston Globe wants to present in the best possible light Harvard University’s research program on embryonic stem cell research.  That’s why the Globe is praising the "ethically sensitive" standards by which researchers plan to obtain donated human eggs:

    …the Harvard researchers are doing their best to minimize risk. They will not be using Lupron [a drug that raises particular concern] and they will be regulating doses of other drugs to minimize danger.

    They also will not be offering the kind of inducements that might cause women to cast aside caution in the interest of financial gain. Egg donation for use in infertility treatment typically earns a woman $5,000 in Massachusetts. State law forbids this kind of payment for stem-cell research.

    A state advisory commission recently decided that women could be reimbursed for time off from work.  The Harvard researchers won’t even allow that. All a woman will get is reimbursement for such immediate expenses as cab fare. It’s unclear whether any women will be willing to take part in these experiments.

    These sound like fairly standard precautions to take to ensure the ethical use of human beings (in this case the women — obviously, the state advisory commission has not considered the ethical use of the human beings who might be created by cloning) as research subjects.  Whatever else one can say about them, such means of obtaining eggs — unlike what goes on in egg-harvesting for fertility clinics — can accurately be called "donation."

    Cloning is wrong.  But the point I want to make here is not that.  If the Boston Globe is ready to praise Harvard and the state advisory commission for their care in setting guidelines to ensure that women won’t be exploited by stem cell researchers, is it also ready to condemn the lack of such guidelines in the artificial-conception industry?

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  • Hot air.

    My husband is being haunted by the ghost of Buckminster Fuller.

    I admit I didn’t know that much about the guy.  If it weren’t for buckyballs, I might never have really noticed or cared that he is credited with the invention of the geodesic dome.  I suppose that, up till a couple of days ago, if you had said to me, "Who’s Buckminster Fuller?"  I’d have said, "An architect, I guess."  Buckminster Fuller had never really entered my consciousness at a very high level. 

    The other day Mark had to go to an offsite training course in a newfangled management technique or decisionmaking algorithm or teambuilding exercise or similar, the details of which are not important here (does anyone really believe the details are important anywhere?  I hear the free lunch was pretty good).  What he really remembered from the day was that another employee of his company gave a speech in which she cited, in the effort to provide an example of a useful technical insight, a quote from Buckminster Fuller which went something like "Wind doesn’t blow, it sucks."

    This infuriated my husband.  I am actually a little bit worried about him.  Apparently he spent parts of the next three days in deep investigation of why she said that, didn’t anyone try to stop her from saying that (the answer is apparently yes), what was the exact context of that quote, and who the heck is this Buckminster Fuller guy anyway that he would say something so prepopsterous.  The reason for my alarm:  this sounds like something I might do, if I were the one working in the corporate world, and it would probably lead to my getting castigated for "not being a team player" or similar.  (There are a number of reasons why I have retreated from market activities, of course, but I can’t deny that one of them is a complete inability to put up with b***s**t in the name of being a "team player.")

    Looking for the quote, I Googled "Buckminster Fuller" that evening while Mark cleaned up dinner and ranted, and noticed that the first search result page was peppered with very silly assertions, such as "Buckminster Fuller was probably one of the first futurists."   I smelled "guru."  After Mark mined Amazon.com’s "Search Inside This Book!" feature to find more details about quote, he got even angrier.  From Bucky Works:  Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas For Today by J. Baldwin, a passage about that quote (still haven’t found an exact rendition of it):

    A single sentence might contain the seeds of an entirely new vision of physics…

    When B ucky announced that wind "sucked," …he was serious.  Talking about the wind "blowing" deflects the thoughts of speaker and listeners alike from what is actually happening.  No force can push a huge parcel of air around Earth any more than you can push a flock of ducks into a barn.  Push—compression—is local.  Push doesn’t operate over long distances.  In any case, what could be doing the pushing?

    Nothing is doing the pushing:  wind isn’t pushed.  When you face the wind, you have your back to its cause.  A distant low pressure area pulls denser air to itself, just as a bucket of feed in the barn will bring in the ducks.  Suck—tension—can operate over vast distances.  Suction is not deterred by obstacles.  A northwest wind is actually a southeast suck.  Our parents  and teachers have told us wrong…. If our teachers couldn’t get wind right, how can we trust anything else they say?

    One might ask the same thing of old Bucky.  Don’t get me wrong — to say "the wind is blowing" is indeed imprecise except in a literary sense.  It’s an anthropomorphic characterization.  But then, so is "sucking."  When conventional wisdom is inaccurate, the polar opposite of that conventional wisdom — the simple refuge of the reactionary — is likely just as inaccurate.  Accuracy is found by rejecting the soothingly simple — do not confuse it with the "elegant." 

    What happens, of course, is neither blowing nor sucking:   the wind flows.     And indeed it is a local phenomenon, in response to the local pressure gradient.  And — never mind the duck analogy —what is up with this "push doesn’t operate over long distances" thing?  Has the author of this never heard of electrical (Coulombic) repulsion?

    Apparently old Bucky was one of those gurus with just enough technical jargon and knowledge under his belt to attract the trust (in technical matters) of a wide following of people who don’t know any better, including J.  Baldwin.  Perhaps Fuller was, in fact, an astute philosopher.  I am not qualified to judge that.  But I think I’m qualified to say that he overstepped himself when he spoke as an authority in, say, fluid mechanics.  Either that, or he fell victim to one of the worst of science’s temptations, that of making inaccurate technical assertions, cloaked in the respectability of technical language, to gain the adulation of a non-technical audience.

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