No argument from me on that first point, but I generally avoid making that call when the person's bishop, or the Vatican, hasn't spoken. I have been wondering, though, since the HHS mandate was propounded, why Kathleen Sebelius shouldn't be formally excommunicated. It seems like that sort of direct attack on Christian freedom of conscience would warrant it. The bishop of New Orleans in the early '60s or late '50s excommunicated a segregationist politician, and there are all sorts of cases now that seem at least as egregious. Though I think Sebelius may be under a sort of unofficial "it would be better if you don't receive" excommunication.

Yes, and more specifically The Atlantic is the heir of the New England transcendentalists, a fairly sorry crew and arguably the first of our current secular progressives.

I'm not aware of any Catholics currently involved with either the mag or the web site, though no doubt there are a few at least nominal ones. The mag has really gotten worse wrt religion in the past few years. Sullivan was editor and Douthat was something high up, too. But Sullivan...what can you say? Never heard that McArdle was Catholic. That's sort of surprising.

The "fair" part doesn't surprise me--she does seem generally very fair-minded. I thought she was some kind of libertarian-atheist, and I just remembered why: she had a blog called "Jane Galt."

Right, undoubtedly a play on John Galt.

"The Atlantic is the heir of the New England transcendentalists, a fairly sorry crew and arguably the first of our current secular progressives"

Much of what's bad in current American politics and society can be traced one way or another to that crew. I recently read a book describing how vehemently anti-Catholic much of the abolitionist movement was. Why? Because Catholicism was a form of slavery of the soul, and prevented men from being "free" in thought.

The same crowd rallied for our entry into WWI. In many cases it was even the same families of rabble-rousing do-gooders -- the Beechers, Stowes, etc.

Wasn't anti-Catholicism sort of in the Protestant DNA of the U.S.?

Here's John Adams writing in his diary while in Spain in 1779:

"The Orders of Ecclesiasticks at Corunna are only Three, The Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Augustins,1 but the numbers who compose the Fraternities of these religious Houses are a burthen beyond all proportion to the Wealth, Industry and population of this Town. They are Drones enough to devour all the honey of the Hive. There are in addition to these, two Convents of Nuns, those of St. Barbe and the Capuchins. These are a large Addition to the Number of Consumers without producing any Thing. Lord Bacons Virgines Deo dicatse quae nihil parturiunt. They are very industrious however at their Prayrs and devotions that is to say in repeating their Pater Nosters, in counting their Beads, in kissing their Crucifixes, and taking off their hair Shifts to whip and lacerate themselves every day for their Sins, to discipline themselves to greater Spirituality in the Christian Life. Strange! that any reasonable Creatures, any thinking Beings should ever believe that they could recommend themselves to Heaven by making themselves miserable on Earth. Christianity put an End to the Sacrifice of Iphigenias and other Grecian Beauties and it probably will discontinue the Incineration of Widows in Malabar: but it may be made a question whether the Catholick Religion has not retained to this day Cruelties as inhuman and antichristian as those of Antiquity."

Ross Douthat is an observant Catholic. Megan McArdle has described herself as an 'agnotheist'. Her marriage was solemnized by a Lutheran minister, but at the Cosmos Club in Washington, not in a church. I believe Francis X. McArdle is still alive. When I would read her regularly, she usually talked about her mother's family, which is from Newark, N.Y. About her own upbringing, just discussions of her old neighborhood in Manhattan. You get the impression she is an only child. Her parents are evidently divorced.

One of the agreeable things about McArdle's writing. She appears to be not the least other-directed, and does not manifest any anxieties or regard for appearances about stating her view.

For decades the Editor was William Whitworth, and it was a good magazine. With a change of ownership, he was retired and replaced with Michael Kelly, who had quite a history as a reporter and an engaging columnist. He had been editor of The New Republic and been canned for criticizing Albert Gore, Jr. He then edited National Journal. After he was killed in Iraq, the magazine was edited by Cullen Murphy, who is a rather offbeat character (a cartoonist on the side). For seven years it has been edited by someone hired from The New York Times whose brother is a Democratic pol.

:D

"someone hired from The New York Times whose brother is a Democratic pol." Well, that goes a long way toward explaining the decline.

I wonder if they're embarrassed now by a long long worshipful piece by Andrew Sullivan published before the 2008 election explaining why an Obama presidency would heal our cultural conflicts.

I won't bother locating it again because you know what it says

so true and I wouldn't bother reading it anyway

Sullivan is paid to write. He does not always have material, so you get sophistry and the flotsam and jetsam of his imagination.

Actually, we really do not have much in the way of racial problems in mundane life, and what we do have is the result of the stupidity and nonfeasance of one particularly incompetent occupational group: school administrators and those adjacent to them (with the assistance of the legal profession, natch).

In our public life, yes there are racial problems. I will offer they have a great deal to do with the self-understanding of certain occupational groups (e.g. the higher ed nomenklatura) vis a vis the rest of the population, the crude interests of certain politician / hucksters (e.g. Kwame Kilpatrick), and how those in certain ethnic groups (e.g. blacks) process the disappointments and irritations of adult life. Not much Obama could do about any of that, even if he were at all interested in doing something about it or had much understanding of it.

The 85 year old priest, who is an excellent movie critic, in the office next door to me told me last week that priests are not in the NT and it's not an indelible mark, and he won't be a priest in heaven. Now I know where he got that idea from. He did say 'Gary Wills' but I didn't know it was a recent book. A young priest was passing when he said that, so I said to him, will you be a priest in heaven, and he said yes, it's an indelible mark. The younger priest's view is more typical of the University in which I work.

It's a good question. I geuss they will be vaguely clerical :)

My friend Gilles hates his long sleeves on his Dominican habit - they flap on his wrists when he is typing. But in all the pictures by Fra Angelico they are wearing Dom habit. So there is no avoiding it, in my opinion. Funny sobrero hats are another question.

I'm amused by your Dominican friend's quarrel with his habit, Grumpy. But maybe he won't have to type in heaven?

Wills was recently on The Colbert Report pushing his new book; here’s some of what transpired:

“Mr. Colbert asked the author why the priesthood is a failed tradition. Mr. Wills responded: ‘Well, they continue to pretend to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, which doesn’t happen.’ When Mr. Colbert mentioned that the Eucharist is ‘a mystery, Mr. Wills responded: ‘No, it’s a fake.’ A very awkward three-second pause ensued.

Some longtime watchers of the show noticed that a shocked Mr. Colbert, a devout Catholic in real life, nearly broke character. But Mr. Wills wasn’t finished: In the remaining two minutes of the interview, he went on to say that the priesthood and the papacy should be abolished and that the sacrament of the sick is ‘an invented sacrament’.”

Wow.

Found that in an article “Questioning Garry Wills,” at the America magazine site. http://americamagazine.org/content/all-things/questioning-garry-wills

I skimmed through the first page of comments on that piece. I have not been face-to-face, so to speak, for a long time with those diehard progressives who think Vatican II pretty much invented a new Church. Which made the last comment hilarious: "People on the internet be straight up cray-cray."