I’ve always wanted to chat with faceless minions in Norway. This really will change my life.

7. You’ll chat with faceless minions

One new trend regurgitates an age-old concept: On sites such as Omegle.com, you can chat with complete strangers. AOL has provided this capability for eons (isn’t that what chat boards are all about?), but Omegle.com puts a random spin on it, pairing you safely and anonymously with an arbitrary total stranger. You can chat with some dude in Norway or Japan in less than 5 seconds.

Why the trend is important: Other than the fun factor, Omegle indicates the final piece in the globalization puzzle.

via 8 Tech Trends for 2010 – Buying Home Computer | Business Solution | Networking Home Computers – FOXNews.com.

I don’t know whether the Cash for Clunkers program was worthwhile or not. My friend gmart just posted on facebook about an Edmunds.com analysis of it. Obama’s White House fired back immediately denouncing their report as faulty.

What I do know is that I bought a Honda Civic in 2002. It has over 120,000 miles on it, but still gets over 30 miles to the gallon in the city and up to 40 mpg on the highway, and this car is not a hybrid. Obviously, it wasn’t eligible for the Clunkers program, even though we could certainly have sold it and bought a new car (like our Pilot) and gotten more money than we otherwise could have (it is worth maybe $3,500 now).

The economically and environmentally responsible decision I made to buy a Civic 7 years ago is not rewarded, but buying a guzzler that is creeping along on its last legs is generously rewarded by the government. I know, I know, I’m about 3 months late to this discussion, but it seems a backward way of running things.

Did you trade your car in through the clunkers program? What do you think of it?

“Tonight, maybe we’re gonna run,
Dreaming, of the Osaka sun,
Dreaming….
of when the morning comes”
– Coldplay, Lovers in Japan

Many dear friends are asking these days, “How are you doing with K coming next week?”  I suppose I should be very overwhelmed.  There is still work to do to prepare her room and we know very little about her and baby Edmund is due in 8 weeks.

Yet, thanks be to God through the gift of all your prayers, I am walking in a veritable bubble of surrender.  It is amazing.  It is as if I have the grace to suspend my motherly control of my home, budget, and schedule and just prepare to receive, no matter what happens.  I am growing in excitement at the prospect of having a daughter, someone with whom to read “The Secret Garden” and “The Little Princess” and someone with whom to bake cookies and shop for dresses and have tea.  I am deeply filled with peace and an interior silence that can only be supernatural.

Thankfully, in addition, Our Lord has given me a personality that thrives on adventure.  I get bored if life is too comfortable for too long, and I confess that I felt a surge of joy when we decided to receive K because my life was starting to feel rather humdrum.  Now, I get to decorate a little girl’s room and fall in love with another beautiful person and become a mother in an entirely new way.  Then, Edmund will be born soon after and I will do that all over again.   No boredom here, folks.

Thank you for all your prayers.  It feels like we are walking in miracle-land, as the hand of Divine Providence clearly pours our gifts upon our little heads.  Truly, we are worth more than many sparrows.  And, truly, the Lord provides for those He loves while they are asleep.  Blessed by His name.

I love the idea of Christendom, of a civil society that is imbued with the principles of Christianity and where the sphere of the Church is respected and valued as equally as the sphere of the state.

Europe is living its last days as Christendom.  There is not much left of the marvelous dynamism that there flourished for centuries, and, at this point, all that remains is the vague notion of a European identity embodied by the European Union.  I am beginning to wonder, however, if we are not witnessing the first days of a new Christendom, a new flowering of culture and continental identity leavened by the principles of Christianity.  I think we are, and I think it’s happening in Africa.

The political and civil societies in most African countries look very much like those of the nascent European countries following the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire.  They are marked by warring tribes and disarray and corruption and many many martyrs.  But, as in Europe, the blood of the martyrs are the seeds of the Church, and the Church is exploding in Africa.  The African bishops just concluded another synod, after having their first one ever in 1994.  That’s an awful lot of synods in just a few years.  But, these synods are necessary to keep abreast of the almost feverish pace of converts entering the Church and young men and young women with vocations to religious life entering seminaries and monasteries and convents.  Here are a few statistics for you: from 1994 to 2007, the number of priests increased by 49%, seminarians by 44%, lay missionaries by 94%, and Catholics by 60%, while the general population only grew by 30%.

It is an exciting time.  It looks like the growth of the early Church in France and Ireland and Germany, where brave missionaries risked their lives to bring the Good News of freedom to peoples who lived in darkness.  And, as those barbarian tribes became Christian, their political and civil societies began to change, incorporating principles from this new religion which offered a new worldview and philosophy.  Marriage became a valued civil institution and one in which women were protected.  Children were no longer in danger of abortion or infanticide.  The violence of vendetta was slowly curtailed.  The two spheres–civil/political and ecclesial–were separate, though from time to time one tried to rule the other; usually, it was the political sphere trying to manage the Church, though sometimes enterprising Churchmen tried to control kings (bad idea).

And, it appears to me that the same is beginning to happen in Africa.  Yes, civil/political society in most countries is a mess.  But, as the Gospel permeates the lives of African citizens, it will begin to permeate their social and political institutions, too.  And, I think we will stand back and marvel at the beauty of the art and music and architecture that begins pouring forth from this culture vivified by Christianity.  Because, truly, there is nothing more beautiful than human culture leavened and brightened by the Gospel.

Attorney General Eric Holder asked former DC Councilman Kevin Chavous to kill this ad, according to Chavous. An odd request from the Attorney General one would think. However, I can appreciate the concern of the AG about this ad. DC public schools are some of the worst in the country, chaotic and violent. This school voucher program, which I discussed in a prior post here, gives a few kids a chance to get out of this mess. Who could be against the program? Obama of course.

St Michael Society » Alert: Refrain From 2nd Collection on 11.22.09.

It’s not too early to prepare for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development in less than a month–to prepare for not giving them one dime.

That’s the Lutheran paradigm in a nutshell. The Catholic paradigm is quite different. The fundamental problem in man, in Catholic soteriology, is the absence of sanctifying grace. Here at this point is a crucial distinction between Catholic and Protestant soteriology. In Protestant theology grace is primarily understood as divine favor, that is, an attitude or stance by God toward us. In Catholic soteriology, by contrast, grace is not merely divine favor, but is also and primarily the gift of “participation in the divine nature” 2 Peter 1:4 by which we have the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and agape.

via A Reply from a Romery Person – Called to Communion.

Katie and I had only a single day to discern whether our Lord wanted us to accept Miss K into our home.

We had our initial reactions, which differed from one another.

We had an initial talk about it.

We prayed on our own and then together that evening asking our Lord to show us.

We received no illumination, special sign, nor interior insight from God as to which way we should go.

We decided to say yes.

A Robert Frost poem comes to mind...

This situation is the ordinary way in which God works with me (with Katie I think it is a bit different so I will not speak for her). I do not get spiritual visions nor direct words from God. I rarely get feelings one way or the other about something, though in this case my first reaction was elation, which could have happened for different reasons.

Usually we have to make decisions, and I have uncertainty about whether it was what God wanted or not; however, we have to act and do our best using our faith as well as our reason, and then entrust the results of the decision to God.

In the case of Miss K, reasons for saying yes were that she is the boys’ sister and that she is above the age where minority children are easily placed in adoptive homes. Also, we have the means to care for her and know of no special needs that she has which we could not handle.

Reasons for saying no were that Katie is due in a few months and is already working hard to take care of our toddler twins: Could we handle another child while having a newborn and twins, in particular a child who would also need a lot of love and attention, especially at first, as she made a very confusing and difficult transition into our home from the only one she has ever known?

We didn’t make a chart of the pros and cons and mathematically calculate the decision, but we did consider and mentally weigh each of these reasons, along with possible solutions to mitigate the negative ones. Through our faith, we believe in the beauty and dignity of every child as belonging to God, and the honor of welcoming a child into our family, to both enrich it and be enriched by it, is a great good. Wow, and we would get to have a daughter, with dresses and bows and sweetness, and we could rear her in the love of our Lord in the Catholic Faith.

When considering these positive lights from our Faith, the default decision seemed for us to be to say Yes and only to say no if we could find a compelling reason to do so, and we could think of none. So we said yes and now leave the results in God’s hands; if he wants to bring Miss K into our home next week, then we are ready, and if not, may his will be done–he asked only that we be open to receiving her as from himself.

Thank you for your prayers and kind wishes! Please also pray for Katie, who stepped wrong off a curb today and sprained her ankle (there is a small chance it is broken but hopefully not). May Christ bless you.

How do you discern what God’s will is in your life. What part does faith play? What part does reason play?

I ate lunch at work with two good friends of mine, who belong to different Protestant Communities (one is Evangelical and closest to Baptist, the other is somewhere between Plymouth Brethren and general non-denominational cessationist (i.e. the charismatic gifts like tongues ceased after the Apostolic age)).

We were discussing several different matters, and my friend M. who is Plymouth Brethren responded to a challenge I had made to him about the canon of Scripture in our last discussion. It turned out that his rebuttal didn’t work because we looked up the books that were in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and discovered that it included the 7 deuterocanonical books which Catholics have in their Bibles but Protestants do not but that it also included many other books which neither of us accept as canonical.

Anyway, I challenged both of them with a variation on why they accept their 66-book Protestant canon, and my other friend L., with whom I have had less discussions, thought for a while aloud and put together the argument I was making–it clicked for him–and over my friend M.’s objections he started explaining, “No, don’t you see that Devin is making the point that XYZ is inconsistent in our Protestant beliefs.” To which M. replied in an exasperated (but good-natured way) “Of course I see it–that’s the same point Devin makes every time we talk about this stuff!”

I started laughing because it was true. I make the same arguments everytime. Essentially my friend M. has realized that the arguments and questions I present on the canon of Scripture have painted him into the corner of having to say “I accept on faith that the Bible consists the 66-books of the Protestant canon.” No historical evidence nor witness provides a principled reason for having certainty in the Protestant canon.

That position is acceptable but unsatisfying for many reasons. For example, Mormons can say the same thing about their Bible and the Book of Mormon: They accept on faith that God revealed the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith and confirmed as true the (66-book Protestant) Bible. You cannot make an argument against such a fideistic position because the response is always “I believe it to be true.”

So is the Catholic Faith completely rational and deductible apart from faith? No, absolutely not. Faith is definitely required to believe in Christianity in any form (or to believe in Islam for example). The question is instead one of epistemology and consistency. CalledToCommunion.com is going to post an article on this subject in the next weeks or months which I look forward to linking to and discussing–those guys will explain the distinctions made between Catholic and Protestant epistemologies more clearly than I could.