Month: June 2009

Books

The Ordering of Knowledge

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

One of the benefits of my recent living space changes has been the opportunity to revisit my library cataloguing scheme. For years, I used Dewey Decimal Classification coding to organize my books. The Dewey system has the advantage of having had the majority of books already catalogued within the system – and most of the newer volumes include a Dewey number assignment within the Library of Congress cataloguing information after the title page, meaning that not only would I not need to go through the process of categorizing and assigning lookup numbers to...

Church

Catholic Education & Sotomayor

Posted on by John W Gillis / 2 Comments

I don’t agree very often with what Michael Paulson says over at the Articles of Faith blog at Boston.com – he doesn’t even ask the right questions, as a rule – but I had to concur with something he said the other day about President Obama’s address introducing Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for Justice Souter’s Supreme Court seat: he said he was struck by “the language he used to describe the role of Catholic schools in offering children a path out of poverty.” Here is the quote from the President’s remarks: “But Sonia’s mom bought the only set of ...

Critical Issues

Tiller and the Reaper, Part 2

Posted on by John W Gillis / 2 Comments

Still thinking tonight about the assassination of George Tiller; a few things have surprised me. I lead a busy life, and don’t spend a lot of time perusing news sources and other media outlets, so my sample size is rather small, but it seems from my limited perspective that the press coverage has been strangely muted. There is no serious debating that the journalistic class almost purely represents the cultural elite that embraces abortion, and I really thought they would be harping all over this. I suppose it’s early yet, and it could still become a cau...