MaybeToday.org

While Pope Benedict XVI is busy bracing the winds of ill-will to find a way to heal rifts of schism within the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion continues to rush breathlessly toward implosion. Harvard’s Episcopal Divinity School announced today the appointment of the Reverend Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale as the new president and dean of the seminary, a woman with apparently no academic credentials whatsoever, but who luckily happens to be an ordained lesbian Episcopalian priestess. Not only that, but she is a stalwart supporter of the legal right to kill prenatal children, and executive director of a self-identifying “progressive” organization, Political Research Associates, devoted to saving the world from conservatism – which includes, says their homepage, reports explicitly aimed at “debunking” the value of marriage in combating social ills such as poverty! Yes, God save us from marriage, and other right-wing conspiracies – by all means.

I reckon that, at this point, that’s about all the credentials you need to be charged with the formation of the ECUSA’s intellectuals and divines. I’m tempted to say “last one out please shut off the lights,” but I have a hunch carbon footprinting is probably the highest priority moral issue in those environs these days, so there’s probably no need. I’m sure I sound cynical, but, well…

A couple weeks ago, I came across an article on Boston.com that really struck me as being foreign to the world I live in. "Patients with strong faith more likely to get aggressive end-of-life care" looked at a Journal of the American Medical Association article that explored the influence of religious faith on end-of-life medical decisions by terminal patients.

What startles me in the writing is the apparent assumption that religiosity among these men and women was not something constitutive of them as persons, but a selected process of "coping." The clinicians quoted in the story seem fascinated by what they call "religious coping," expecting that some kind of objective analysis of the phenomenon will yield a "better understanding" of how it factors into decision making. These patients, essentially, were viewed not as persons of particular personal character, but as a sample of concept-consuming human laboratory rats who "used religion to some extent to cope with their illness."

Aside from the sadly comical image of clueless empiricists standing around a scene of deep human meaning with clipboards, kind of like they’re trying to measure changes in friction, for example, to explain human sexuality, I’m left with the disturbing realization that these people see "coping" as the fundamental human act. Everything is a tactic to be utilized in a complex story of universal manipulation. Even the human being as a subject is nothing more than the object of external phenomena that must be "coped with," for there is, in this barren and shallow worldview, no truly interior life.

Of course, the belief that reality can be manipulated is the very heart of superstition…

Even the chaplain gets into the act, finding “diverse choices” associated with “high levels of religious coping.” This makes her almost a dissenter to these “findings.”

I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine entrusting someone I love to these imbeciles during his or her final days. I just don’t know how I’d cope.

March 1st came and went largely unnoticed this year. I would have expected myself to pen a one-year mark post, to commemorate the first year of the maybetoday.org web site. I‘m guessing I slept through it. I’ve been feeling quite run-down as of late, and I’m not sure if this is simply a case of the late winter blahs, or if I have something else going on.

It’s been a far less productive year on the site than I had hoped for when I started out, but that doesn’t surprise me much. Although I am surprised I’ve made as little headway as I have in putting together information on Bible Study software – that was one of my primary goals at the outset, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I’d intended to do.

I also got nowhere integrating LibrayThing into the site, which I decided to do after determining the Now Reading plugin was not what I was looking for. I’m in the middle of reorganizing my physical library as I prepare to move my office up two flights of stairs, and perhaps I can use the opportunity to collect the missing ISBN numbers I need to get the collection migrated into LibraryThing. It shouldn’t be too much work after that to integrate it into the site.

Technically, I think the theme has held up pretty well. Seeing as I had no clue what I was doing when I started, and that there is a considerable level of customization of the base theme, I’m pretty satisfied. I still need to fix the drop-down menu to work right with all browsers, and the poor formatting of Comments text only got addressed within the past week or so, but that’s OK. I now need to implement threaded comments, and I’m seriously considering widening all three columns. Otherwise, I just need to focus on mission, and praying for energy.