Fr. Z's Blog

My visit yesterday to the Catholic League’s Nativity Scene on 5th Ave and 59th (by Central Park) reminded me of their advice for attending parties at this time of year.  In case you didn’t see their excellent suggestions, here they are:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue offers seasonal advice:

There is no shortage of advice on how to throw an office Christmas party. For example, Helene Wasserman, a Los Angeles labor-law attorney, warns it is important to call the Christmas party a “holiday party.” Human Relations specialist Suzan Sturholm is even more sensitive: she suggests naming it an “end-of-the-year celebration” (good idea—that way no one will know what they are celebrating). Attorney Duane Morris advises, “Assign certain managers to keep their eyes and ears open for individuals who appear intoxicated at the party.”

We demur. Here’s what the Catholic League counsels:

• Have an open bar
• Start with Champagne laced with Chambord
• Assign managers to keep their eyes and ears open for individuals who don’t drink
• Assign bouncers to keep an eye on the managers
• Sing “Joy to the World”
• Put a nativity scene in one corner for Christians; a Christmas tree in another for recovering Christians; a menorah in the third corner for Jews; and leave one corner empty. The latter is for atheists.
• Proselytize
• Invite everyone to join the Catholic League’s “Adopt An Atheist” campaign

Regarding our timely campaign, I couldn’t help noticing that a writer at Salon.com, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, found our initiative to be puzzling. “It’s uncertain whether it’s an attempt at satire or a real call to arms. Donohue is not known for his sense of humor about these things.”

Don’t you just love these guys? Can’t make it up! Let’s keep him guessing again about our Christmas Party rules. Maybe he’ll see that as a “real call to arms” as well.

Speaking of atheists and inebriation, I must share a quote.

The successes of the movement to recognize “same-sex marriage” have been nothing if not sudden. Just over a decade ago the very idea would have been laughed off as crackpot or extremist; now it is those who oppose it who are frequently labeled crackpots and extremists. But equally sudden has been the rise of ostentatious unbelief as the de riguer position of the smart set. Mainstream progressives and non-conformists of earlier generations would have found it necessary to profess belief in at last a “social gospel” and to hide their doubts about the metaphysical claims of religion behind a haze of pseudo-theological psychobabble. Yet atheist chic is now, out of the blue as it were, the stuff of best sellers, celebrity endorsements, and suburban reading groups. It is as if the urbane cocktail hour secularist liberalism of the twentieth century has, by way of the slow but sure inebriation produced by an unbroken series of social and judicial triumphs, now become in the twenty-first century fall-down-sloppy drunk and lost all inhibition, by turns blaspheming, whoring, and otherwise offending against all sane and decent sensibilities as the mood strikes it.

This was penned by Edward Feser and is found in The Last Superstition: a reputation of the new atheism.

Stop what you are doing and order this book.

I am reading a borrowed copy and… holy cow.  It is now on my wishlist.

Here is the opening paragraph from the “Acknowledgements”. First he quotes Plato’s Phaedrus about confusing the ass and horse. Then:

At the time of this writing, exactly one week has passed since the Supreme Court of the State of California decreed that homosexuals have a “basic civil right” to marry someone of the same sex. Whether these Golden State solons will follow up their remarkable findings with a ruling to the effect that an ass is the same as a horse, it is too early to say; but they have already gone well beyond the sophistical orator of Plato’s dialogue in “confounding good with evil,” not to mention reason with insanity.

Brilliant.

Have a college student in the family?  Get this book.

The whole book is like this.