My Suggestions for an 8-Team Playoff in College Football.

1. Each conference champion from the power 5 conferences (SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and Pac-12) gets an automatic invitation.
2. The "best" conference champion (in the opinion of the selection committee) from a non-power 5 conference also gets an automatic invitation.
3. The remaining two slots are to be filled by the selection committee, BUT no conference is allowed to have more than two teams in the playoff.  If an independent like Notre Dame gets in, it will be through one of these two slots.
4. If a conference has two teams in the playoff, they must be seeded so that they would face each other in the quarterfinal or semifinal round, NOT in the championship game.

Book Review: Why Does the Heathen Rage?

I recently completed Why Does the Heathen Rage by J. Stephen Roberts.  On the whole, my impression is that it is a decent attempt by a skilled amateur.  The book has two things in its favor.

1. It provides insight into a period of history about which most people have at best cartoonish ideas.
2. It provides a sympathetic perspective to the Crusaders, something in very short supply these days.

Both of these are important, and I am strongly inclined to favor this book ... but it still comes across as the work of an amateur due mostly to the stiff characters.  There is no arc of meaningful character development in the book.  There is no temptation, fall, and redemption.  There is not even a heroic resistance to temptation; there are temptations of various kinds, but the characters always seem to have, or to accept, pat, pious answers.  Think how The Empire Strikes Back would have unfolded if Luke had sadly but meekly accepted Yoda's insistence that Luke was not ready to face Vader but should abandon his friends to their fates while he completed his training.  That would have made a poor movie, but it is more or less how the book plays out.  A knight flirts with a princess, but it really never gets beyond flirtation, and they both conclude the romance is politically impossible and just get on with their lives.  Of course, history strongly constrains the plot, but the author had the freedom to choose his main protagonist.  If the protagonist had been a sinful aristocrat who went on the Crusade as a penance, rather than a goody-two-shoes knight born in the Holy Land, there would have been much more opportunity for character development that would have breathed life into the historical events.

The dialogue is also a bit off.  This is a bit hard to judge, since of course Medieval knights were neither Victorian prudes nor as crude as today's potty mouths, and some of their cussing might seem odd to us today.  I know that "God's Body", "God's Blood", and "His Wounds" were actually used, but then the Body and Blood are of course presented in the Mass, and devotions to the Wounds of Christ were widespread, so these would naturally be prominent in the Medieval mind; and to use such a phrase for cussing would have been considered blasphemous even in my non-Catholic Christian elementary school.  The characters in the book, though, use strange combinations, like "God's Feet" and "God's Bones", which somehow combine silliness and blasphemy in a character meant to be serious and pious.  Beyond this, the characters are supposed to be aristocrats, but they lack the eloquence that should mark their rank.  Twitter has not been kind to language -- or to the thoughts language conveys -- and something of the shallowness of our current era seeps through.

Would I recommend the book?  Yes, to the right people.  I doubt it will change a reader's mind about the propriety of the Crusades, and I think there are other books that give better insight into the Medieval Catholic mindset, so it should not be the first, let alone the only, book one reads or gives to a friend on the subject.

High-level statements about the death penalty

As you probably know, Pope Francis has revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to present a much more forceful opposition to the death penalty.  Briefly, I find Dr. Edward Peters's take on this to be very reasonable, as his opinions are with extraordinary reliability.  In addition to his take, and to points I have made previously, I have just two additional comments on the changes to the Catechism.

1. Any opposition to the death penalty from a Christian, let alone a Catholic, is woefully incomplete without a discussion of the virtue of charity (love), mercy, and forgiveness.  None of those words appear in the revision.
2. The revised version claims, "Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes."  That is a very, very dubious claim.  (a)  Previous generations would have recognized that the dignity of the person has its origin in our creation in the image of God, in the Christ's Incarnation as true man, and in Christ's atoning sacrifice for our sins; and indeed, they would have understood quite well that none of these are changed even after the commission of very serious crimes.  The difference is that they also obviously understood that there is no direct connection between "the dignity of the person" and "no death penalty".  (b)  It is very hard to see this sentence in the Catechism as anything other than chronological snobbery, as though it were self-evident that Popes and bishops over recent decades are smarter or holier than those of previous generations.  It also tends to confuse the Zeitgeist with the activity of the Holy Spirit.

You might think, then, that I would be a big fan of the "Declaration of Truths" that, among other things, defends the possibility that the death penalty may be proper under some circumstances.

28. In accordance with Holy Scripture and the constant tradition of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, the Church did not err in teaching that the civil power may lawfully exercise capital punishment on malefactors where this is truly necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies (see Gen 9:6; John 19:11; Rom 13:1-7; Innocent III, Professio fidei Waldensibus praescripta; Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, p. III, 5, n. 4; Pius XII, Address to Catholic jurists on December 5, 1954).

Notice, however, what is missing:  any discussion whatsoever of justice!  Has any government ever massacred innocents without claiming it was "necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies"?  No doubt that was what Herod would have said about the infants of Bethlehem, what the Hutu would have said about the Tutsi, what Stalin would have said about the kulaks.  Unless the "malefactor" has committed a crime so grave that it justly merits death, no prudential consideration can justify the death penalty.  In other words, prudential considerations can never be the primary reason for capital punishment; they can only limit the freedom of rulers to apply more lenient punishments.

What Can I Say?

Just this morning I (along with millions of other members of the Knights of Columbus) received an email from Supreme Knight Carl Anderson that begins,

Dear Brother Knight,
I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators today, and ask them to support the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

Don't get me wrong:  I support the act, minimal though it is, and years ago, I definitely would have acted on Anderson's suggestion.  So why am I reluctant to now?

• I find it impossible to believe that any adult does not know, deep down at any rate, that every baby has a right to live -- not just a negative right (a right not to be actively murdered) but a positive right (a right that morally compels us to see to it that the child has food, shelter, etc.) -- and that this right is inherent in the baby's nature (so saying, "If the baby wants to eat, let him get a job," is not an answer).  And whatever mental gymnastics might allow one to imagine that a baby in the womb is not really a baby, but something else (e.g. a "potential person"), it is clear that if a baby after birth is not really a person, no one is.
• If an adult genuinely did NOT know that, what could I say to him?  Where would be the common ground on which I could construct an argument?  It would be easier to try to persuade a person deaf from birth of the beauty of a Beethoven symphony -- at least the deaf person could feel the vibrations.  Someone insensible to even the most basic moral principles is far more unreachable.  This is not something about which morally sane people can disagree, like how high the minimum wage should be.
• Alternatively, suppose the adult DOES know that the baby has a right to live, but pretends to be ignorant of this fact.
• I would find it extremely distasteful to interact with this person at all.  Friendly relations are out of the question as long as this behavior persists.
• The only way I would be able to influence such a person would be through some sort of bribe or some sort of threat.  I do not, however, command vast wealth or political power.   All I can do is offer to give or withhold my vote.  Even this is out of the question, though, both because there are other minimal standards the politician is unlikely to meet, and because it would be foolish to trust someone who requires a bribe or a threat.
• I should add that I have written to senators and other public officials before.  Their responses have been very, very dissatisfying.

There seems to be little point in saying anything to my senators.  All I can really do is to watch what they do, and to remember the choices they make.

University of Alabama Campus Photos (1)

Here are some pictures I took on the campus of the University of Alabama.  I think these were from the weekend of the Iron Bowl in 2017.

The white building near the center is the President's Mansion.  My dorm was Byrd Hall, which used to stand right behind the mansion (to the left as seen in the photo).  This road shows that Byrd Hall has indeed been torn down, though it is still one of the more common real-world locations featured in my dreams.  Of course there was no going back, but I hate to see my dorm is gone.  I have some good memories from that place (August 1986 -- May 1990).

Between Byrd Hall and the President's Mansion there had been a few oak trees.  They are also gone, as can be seen more clearly in this photo.

We used to have "war games" in the spring, which was a competition involving shooting each other with dart guns -- the cheap, spring-powered plastic toys -- outside the dorm.  According to a story I was told, a student years before had gotten into trouble by climbing one of the trees at the back of the President's Mansion in order to ambush another player.  The problem was that the President of the United States (I think it was Nixon) was staying in the President's Mansion at the time.  If there was any truth to the story, it was stupid to be playing that game anywhere NEAR the Secret Service, but the kid was lucky and was scolded, not shot.

Here the President's Mansion is off the left side of the photo (behind the fence), the Rose Administration Building is to the right, and Butler Field used to be straight ahead on the other side of a girl's dorm that was also torn down.  Yes, I know the Million Dollar Band still practices on a Butler Field, but it is not the one that was used when I was a freshman.  To get to Byrd Hall, I would take a left at the end of this sidewalk.

This is the view facing 180 degrees from the previous photo.  At least this view looks just like it did when I was a student.

This is looking across University Boulevard from the base of Denny Chimes back towards the President's Mansion.  To me, the mansion looks sort of "naked" without the trees in the back to help frame it.  That big patch of empty sky just above it seems wrong.

That's enough for now.