"A lone rooster sees a lot of all the hens in the flock, but the hen with the largest comb gets a bigger dose of sperm."

A discovery about chickens.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O gets it:

There should be a Bulwer-Lytton type contest for the world's worst written aphorisms.

"Maria would please me muchly by denying herself the Christmas frolic because it’s a fool’s day."

So wrote Jonathan Blanchard, president of Knox College, in 1858, in a letter to his wife Mary, as noted by Paddy O in the comments. Paddy O also says:

Back in the 1800s... very conservative Christians assumed that Christmas was in fact a pagan holiday and would not celebrate it.

The founder and first president of my very Evangelical college, Jonathan Blanchard, did not even want to cancel classes on that day....

Yet, Christian ritual is by its very nature adaptive. Unlike in the Torah, there's no liturgical prescriptions, so Christians are able to adapt within a culture, honoring their savior in culturally imbued ways. For our culture, a day of birth is the day we honor especially those we value. So, to honor the day of Christ's birth is to honor this man, to honor indeed the incarnation itself, making it a theological statement.

Following this analysis, we should approve of the early Christians who fell into the celebration of the Feast of the Sol Invictus. Right?

There's also an issue of theology and culture involved. Do Christians hide from the culture or do they interact with it? How do they interact with it? I very much like the transformative approach, shining light on a culture through culturally understood celebrations. 

I think your answer to my question needs to be yes. It's the old question of whether religions need to be kept pure and, if so, what counts as pure. Paddy goes on to stress "goodness, love, community, giving, peace, joy," so perhaps he would lean toward purity but define what is within that circle of purity to include a set of virtues that are not limited to Christianity or even to religion.

We celebrate that we are to be good, to live at peace, to sing and laugh and hope together. Christmas, much more than Valentine's Day, is really a celebration of the deepest reality of love. We wish each other love on this day, not sentimentality or cheap romance or egotistical lust, but actual deep, fulfilling, holistic love.

May your day be merry and full of life, full of love. On this day may we taste that fullness of love that is at the heart of God's work in this world, sending his son, to us, for us, with us, among us, seeking us out, because God first loved us.

The end of the Post Office?

Is it unthinkable?

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances.

Why not close it down? Isn't it strange that it's on the brink — or really over the brink... in that Wile E. Coyote way...



... of collapsing entirely... and yet they still haven't eliminated Saturday delivery?

[D]ecades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees....

“The situation is dire,” said Thomas R. Carper, the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the postal service. “If we do nothing, if we don’t react in a smart, appropriate way, the postal service could literally close later this year. That’s not the kind of development we need to inject into a weak, uneven economic recovery.”

My preference is always: do nothing. That's the presumption you need to overcome. It's good for government and it's good for your individual life too. (For decades, my personal motto has been: Better than nothing is a high standard.)

Why not let this propped-up competitor to FedEx and UPS (and the internet) fall? There would be losers but there would also be winners.



Why are we so afraid to find out? Remember what Rahm says:



"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

ADDED: My postman just delivered a 615-page catalog from Restoration Hardware. Why was that a feasible business move for Restoration Hardware? I've never mail-ordered anything from them. Why is the government subsidizing this inefficiency? If I were interested in buying something from RH, I would go to their website. Instead, I have to lug this heavy object to the garbage can/recycle bin? Think of the carbon footprint. I do! But I don't believe the government believes the climate change hype. Because they never act like they do.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said:

Ann, watch out. Don't mess with the mail. I shouldn't even be talking to you, but I'm telling you as a friend. Here's how it's going to happen: you may be walking. Maybe on a crisp, autumn day just like today. When a mail truck will slow beside you, and a door will open, and a mailman you know, maybe even trust, will offer to give you a lift. And no one will ever see you again!

Qaddafidils.

As in: Pushing up Qaddafidils. Could someone illustrate my coinage by photoshopping (or drawing) a daffodil combined with Qaddafi?

Or Gaddafi/Qaddhafi/Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Kaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi/Qadaffi or however the hell you spell that in Latin letters.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O makes this:



Chip Ahoy makes this:

Voir Google.

Voir dire — the juror selection process — is transformed by Google.

While interviews suggest that Internet vetting of jurors is catching on in courtrooms across the nation, lawyers are skittish about discussing the practice, in part because court rules on the subject are murky or nonexistent in most jurisdictions. Ten law firms and five jury consultants declined requests from Reuters Legal to observe them building juror profiles, many saying they weren't sure judges would approve. "Lawyers don't know the rules yet," said John Nadolenco, a partner at Mayer Brown in Los Angeles. "It's like the Wild West."

Is this wrong? An invasion of the juror's privacy? It's so easy to do that it seems to me that making a rule against it is unfair to honest lawyers. (Cue the typical jokes.) I'd say get used to it. This is the world we live in. The information that's out there is out there. Deal with it.

IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 says:

I hope it catches on. I'll never have to sit on a jury again. 

Pogo says:

Fake posts implicating jurors and cops and witnesses will escalate.

Paddy O says:

I used do tweet to amuse me, now I'm hoping it'll excuse me.

If twits do tweet, then raps aren't beat.

"Honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain'..."

"... and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!"

Via Instapundit.

The stolen article begins with the line: "'As American as apple pie' isn’t." Ah, funny! Just yesterday, I was saying: "Americans say: as American as apple pie."

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O says:

The Cooks Source Facebook page is hilarious now.

Ha! Poetic justice.

"[M]ore arousing than anything I’d glimpsed in furtive schoolboy copies of Playboy."

That would be the cover photo of "The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan," to the young Sean Wilentz, who has grown up to be a Princeton history prof and author of a book that fawns over Bob Dylan.

Sometimes you walk into a room and know that something is going on even though you don’t know what it is. But that’s no excuse for paraphrasing well-known song lyrics, and Mr. Wilentz sometimes paraphrases excruciatingly. “He was weary, unable to keep a grip, but also unsleepy, and with no particular place to go, he would follow the musical figure to his ‘magic swirling ship,’ out to the inspired windy beach beyond crazy sorrow,” he writes murderously of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You love this man’s work enough to deliver a book-length tribute? Then just let him speak for himself.

Ha. Do you ever amuse yourself talking just like Bob Dylan approximately? Do you ever find a photograph of a man walking down the street with his girlfriend intensely erotic?



IN THE COMMENTS: Paul Zrimsek said:

This cries out for a photo of The Freewheelin' Meade.

Paddy O hears the cry:

"I think the internet encourages a kind of acedia...."

"... an increasingly listless wandering that can exacerbate a frenetic soul. Fasting from it, whether wholly or in a lurking state that calms our need to say something to everything, can be wonderfully re-centering."

On the occasion of vbspurs's reemergence in the comments — Paddy O. — tells us about an a sin we may not have heard of.

"Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions..."

"... that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like 'scholarships,' 'internships,' and 'online learning' — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism."

Camille Paglia on Obama's Cairo speech.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

She seems to want some kind of Mullah Obama, who can parse religions in expert ways so as to provide a path in which all religious devotees can, at the same time, be convinced by their own misunderstanding of others and the wrong nature of their own religious awareness that invokes chaos.

She wants a Messiah, a clear figure who dashes aside millennia of religious and cultural conflicts within a single speech. And, the fact is, people don't even want to listen to a messiah on these topics. The issue is religious but it's so much more than religious. It's about ego, and power, and control, using religion as a tool as much as a source.

Obama's lack of fervor is probably the best thing that can be delivered to a region wracked with fervor. Blessed are the peace-makers, after all.

Fervor is not overcome by more fervor, a waged war of passion. Rather, fervor is overcome by refusing to engage in the frenzy, absorbing and deflecting the rage into something constructive. The sins of the world are not addressed by talking them over in excited and rhetorically impressive ways.

She is conflating fervor with belief and frenzied excitement with persistent character. Most fundamentalists aren't acting out of real fervor for their chosen god, most are acting out of insecure egos who are attempting to manipulate the seen world so as to secure their own identity as dominating and secure their meager faith in some kind of obvious sign of their supposed devotion.

The religious passions of so many are not really religious at all, but are expressions of a deep-seated insecurity in the face of a rather dismissive world.

Obama's approach won't really change anything, but America is not the salvation of the middle east, and cannot leap into the frenzy with the same passion. We are the people who can show, in our actions, what it means to live for something greater -- our children, our future, our peace -- and how a steady approach is the way lives are built and rebuilt.

The Middle East does not need more fervor. It needs calm, but a calm that is trustworthy, and listening, and pushes for real changes in substantive ways within the societies themselves, pointing out that the answer is within not by changing someone else.

"Should I stay with my girlfriend after she gave up sex for religion?"

For some reason, I read that as: Should I stay with my girlfriend after she gave up religion for sex?

I thought that was a more interesting question!

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. said:

"I wonder how many married men would have agreed to marry their wives if she told him in advance that she would never, ever have sex with him, even after they were married."

I would have. I would have been heartily disappointed in some ways but the chance to spend my life with my wife far outweighs the delights of sex.

That's how much I love her. I would be willing to give up even that. Sometimes that's not always a choice. If there was an accident, or something happened that physically prevented sex, that would in no way mean I'd see the relationship as over. It would just mean living the life as it was handed to me, and being the better person for walking with her throughout my life.

As far as the article goes, of course he should break up with her. Unless he's on the same page spiritually they will run into problems no matter what. Good for her that she's taking a step to find more wholeness and inner peace, and it'll be better for her to get away from this guy and find someone who is a much better match.

"You are also a paid astrotroller."

A comment on the "Brokaw's bizarre" post that got me wondering.

I know what an astrotroll/astrotroller is (and it hasn't even got an Urban Dictionary definition, which makes me feel very in-the-know). It's a commenter engaged in astroturfing.

Wikipedia says:

Astroturfing in American English is a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event.

Does anyone really think that some of the commenters here are paid representatives of any political campaign or cause? It seems to me that there are many self-appointed boosters of one candidate or another, willing to put in a lot of effort for no pay. I've seen the comments of the particular individual who was accused of astrotrolling, but I can't believe a campaign would pay someone just to post numerous boring/abusive comments. Wouldn't the campaign hire someone competent who would blend in with the style of the blog comments section, seem like a real person, and slip in strong pithy arguments?

The real AstroTurf™ is green, not orange. The real Althouse astrotroll should be offbeat, funny, and smart -- with a memorable pseudonym and some personal details. Up your game if you're getting paid.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. quotes my questions -- "Wouldn't the campaign hire someone competent who would blend in with the style of the blog comments section, seem like a real person, and slip in strong pithy arguments?" -- and says "You miss Titus, don't you?" Well, let me ask you people:

Do you miss Titus?
	Yes! Whatever that dispute was, I wish he'd come back.
	I'd like him back, but "miss" is going a bit far.
	No! He was off-topic/obscene/a troll/unfunny.
	Who's Titus?
pollcode.com free polls

Will pro-choice activists give any moral weight to the unborn?

They will when they have to.



SUBSTITUTE UPDATE: The video is working now.

ADDED: I have long supported abortion rights, but I cringe at the level of moral reasoning in this short clip. Rebecca Traister says that technological advancement is making it harder to support late-term abortion, and the technological advancement she refers to is not the way doctors can keep a very premature baby alive, but the clarity of the images we now have of the being in utero. As if not being able to see someone deprives him or her of moral significance!

We can't see the people in other countries or in prisons, but we still realize we have to take account of them. Could it possibly be that without advanced imaging technology, you just couldn't summon up the picture of what was inside a 7-months pregnant woman? Why should I listen to the moral reasoning of someone with such a dangerous lack of imagination? And I don't mean to let Michelle Goldberg off the hook. Her baby-or-blob quandary is worse.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. responds to my comment ("As if not being able to see someone deprives him or her of moral significance!"):

We would want this to be true more than it is a human reality. There's a reason why images have changed global politics over the years. Auschwitz is simply unimaginable. But there are pictures. Movies like Blood Diamond and Hotel Rwanda makes a difference. In exactly the same way that Uncle Tom's Cabin made an impact.

We honestly have a hard time really caring for those we don't know, and can't see. Most of us anyway. That's why brutality likes to stay hidden and de-humanize the brutalized.

If we don't see the victims our rationalizations work. So we commit to not seeing them. We avoid the images. We avoid the stories. Even if we are not proponents we are saved from the burden of becoming opponents by the victims just being blobs, or uncivilized, or 2/3 human.

They don't feel like we do. Don't have pain like we do. So they can work harder, become conveniences to cast off or prize upon our whim.

Images change that. Because we can't help but see ourselves when we see other humans, in native dress or inside the womb. Our rationalizations become strained, even if we are desperate to hold onto them.

Humans are visual creatures who need visual stimulus for our emotions and empathy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of concern.

Technology is changing that in global affairs and in personal choices that seem to actually not just be about our own private choices at all but involve others-- real, feeling humans--whether we like the idea or not.

This is an important point about the power of photography.

Where are the children?

Of all the things that make me feel as though my time was in the past and I don't understand this world today, first on my list is the absence of children playing outdoors in suburban neighborhoods.



Here in Madison, I go for walks past 20 or 30 blocks of houses — good-sized houses with lovely yards and neat sidewalks. Big shade trees line streets that are too narrow to attract any through traffic. And I don't see any children playing. I see an occasional toy vehicle like the one in the photograph, but not one child. No one rides by on a bike or a tricycle or scooter. Swing sets are empty. No one is playing hopscotch or jumping rope. There are no ball games or frisbees. No kids are running around and yelling. Nothing! Where are they?

It's like Episode 1 of "The Twilight Zone": "Where Is Everybody?" That aired in 1959. A man arrives in a town and finds it devoid of people. The story wouldn't even work today. You wouldn't understand what was so weird about a town without people in it and why the man found it so upsetting. You'd just be yeah, yeah, it's a town. So what? What is that guy's problem?



IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. said"

No children outside? Excellent. It's quiet! I can now get to all those great books I've been meaning to read. I can sit outside on my hammock and read and read and read. I have stacks of books I can now focus on. Hooray!

Oh no! I just sat on my reading glasses. Alas...

ADDED: National Review's Lisa Schiffren responds here. Like many of the commenters on this post, she speculates that the children are involved in scheduled activities or indoor pursuits (like TV and video games). But she also thinks the birth rate is low, especially in Madison, which she says (correctly) "is very blue."

Shiffren then says a few things about abortion. I tend to think that the people who can afford to live in these nice suburban houses are competently using birth control and making their own free decisions about how many children to have. That may be why they send their kids to various planned activities. (Many commenters mentioned camp and pools.) It makes me wistful to see all the unused beautiful yards, and it's less sad if the kids are doing good things like camping. It's more sad if they are staring at TV and computer screens all the time.

And although it's really sad if the birth rate drops too low, but it's still good that people plan their family size, and I would not assume that that they achieve their goals by using abortion.

More importantly, it is incorrect to think that the incidence of abortion correlates with support for abortion rights. It doesn't! Look at the statistics. I haven't clicked on all 50 states, but I clicked on a lot of them and haven't found one with a lower incidence of abortion than Wisconsin's. It may be that people who support abortion rights are well-educated and realistic, that is, better at running their own lives and not getting pregnant by accident.

Exorcism and the First Amendment.

The Texas Supreme Court reversed a judgment against the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God Church:

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion, said the church's exorcism sessions were a matter of church doctrine and were thus subject to certain, though not absolute, First Amendment religious protections....

In her original suit against the church, Laura Schubert said she suffered lasting emotional trauma in 1996 when, on two separate occasions in one week, church members held her down and "laid hands" on her while she cried, kicked, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth and made guttural noises.

Here's the opinion. Key passage:

The “laying of hands” and the presence of demons are part of the church’s belief system and accepted as such by its adherents. These practices are not normally dangerous or unusual and apparently arise in the church with some regularity. They are thus to be expected and are accepted by those in the church. That a particular member may find the practice emotionally disturbing and non-consensual when applied to her does not transform the dispute into a secular matter. “Courts are not arbiters of religious interpretation,” and the First Amendment does not cease to apply when parishioners disagree over church doctrine or practices because “it is not within the judicial function and judicial competence to inquire whether the petitioner or his fellow worker more correctly perceived the commands of their common faith.” Thomas v. Review Bd., 450 U.S. 707, 716 (1981). Because determining the circumstances of Laura’s emotional injuries would, by its very nature, draw the Court into forbidden religious terrain, we conclude that Laura has failed to state a cognizable, secular claim in this case. See Ballard, 322 U.S. at 86.

From the dissenting opinion by Chief Justice Jefferson, agreeing with the majority that "under the cloak of religion, persons may [not], with impunity,’ commit intentional torts upon their religious adherents":

Unfortunately, this is precisely what the Court’s holding allows. Here, assuming all facts favorable to the verdict, members of Pleasant Glade restrained Schubert on two separate occasions against her will. During the first encounter, seven members pinned her to the floor for two hours while she cried, screamed, kicked, flailed, and demanded to be released. This violent act caused Schubert multiple bruises, carpet burns, scrapes, and injuries to her wrists, shoulders, and back. As she testified, “I was being grabbed by my wrists, on my ankles, on my shoulders, everywhere. I was fighting with everything I had to get up, I was telling them, no. I was telling them, let go, leave me alone. They did not respond at all.” After Schubert “complied with what they wanted [her] to do,” she was temporarily released. Fifteen minutes later, at the direction of Pleasant Glade’s youth pastor, a different group of seven church members physically restrained her for an hour longer. After this experience, Schubert was “weak from exhaustion” and could hardly stand.

Three days later, a male church member approached Schubert after a service and put his arm around her shoulders. At this point, Schubert was still trying to figure out “what had happened” at the previous incident, “wasn’t interested in being touched,” and resisted him. As Schubert testified, “I tried to scoot away from him. He scooted closer. He was more persistent. Finally, his grasp on me just got hard . . . before I knew it, I was being grabbed again.” Eight members of Pleasant Glade then proceeded to hold the crying, screaming, seventeen year-old Schubert spread-eagle on the floor as she thrashed, attempting to break free. After this attack, Schubert was unable to stand without assistance and has no recollection of events immediately afterward. On both occasions, Schubert was scared and in pain, feeling that she could not breathe and that “somebody was going to break [her] leg,” not knowing “what was going to happen next.”...

I agree with the Court that certain claims for emotional damages are barred by the First Amendment—if Schubert were merely complaining of being expelled from the church, she would have no claim in the civil courts. But again, this case, as it was tried, is not about beliefs or “intangible harms”—it is about violent action—specifically, twice pinning a screaming, crying teenage girl to the floor for extended periods of time. ...

The tort of false imprisonment is a religiously neutral law of general applicability, and the First Amendment provides no protection against it. Employment Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 879 (1990) (“[T]he right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).")

If you voluntarily become a member of a church that has a ritual that involves restraining individuals against their will when they are seen as possessed, can you sue the church for false imprisonment when it subjects you to that ritual?

IN THE COMMENTS: Amba writes:

It also reminds me of saying, if you knowingly married a man who was abusive, the state should not intervene in domestic violence.

Isn't it more like the case a person who decides to participate in sado-masochistic activities and then decides at some point that this isn't what she agreed to? In a tort suit, the issue would be the scope of consent. The problem in the Texas case was that the court thought it would require an examination of religious doctrine to determine the scope of her consent.

Chip Ahoy writes:

I should have known by the sign outside the cute little white church building that the High Octane Holy Roller Wild-Ass Aggressively Evangelical Old-World Church of Omnipresent Powerful Take-No-Prisoners God, that this might not be my style of congregation, but I decided to overlook that little signal and join anyway, and this was Texas, after all.

Jennifer asks:

Especially when you return for a service three days after they already did it to you twice?

Maybe I'm being unsympathetic but I'm straining to understand why someone would trash and scream and flail against known people for hours on end when not acting possessed would keep you physically safer and allow your physical freedom sooner?

Good observations. The screaming and crying — within the church's belief system — could have been seen as the evidence of possession. If the state says to the church, you were required to see her struggle as the reason you had to let her go, it would be saying, you are not allowed to act on your belief in demonic possession.

Joe R. says:

If she were 17 years old, I'd guess that she was being forced by her parents.

Paddy O. writes:

I was a little unsympathetic too, until I read she was 17....

My initial lack of sympathy for this as a court case was also far outweighed by my sympathy as someone interested in churchy things. In that respect this is outrageous. Because it's not about this girl at all. It's about very, very immature men and women trying to play at being super-Christians and instead being laughed at by forces natural and super-.

The girl is a victim--a victim of atrocious theology and spiritual abuse that will likely drive her away from thinking there is any comfort in churches and probably try to find comfort in less than holistic ways. Maybe not. Let's hope she is able to move on in her life, spiritually and emotionally.

"The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault."

"Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance."

Write Alan Fram and Eileen Putman. (Via Drudge.) They summarize the evidence:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Polar bears are adrift. They just don't know what to do with themselves any more. Slaughtering baby seals with our bare paws, what kind of a life is that? It may nourish the body, but what about our souls? Oh, you mean they are drifting on that melting iceberg?

Anyway, the point is that everything seems to be going to hell:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change."

Thanks for the tip.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

My great-great-great grandmother had six kids in Indiana when her husband and oldest son went off to fight in the Civil War. Both died, leaving her with five kids and a farm.

She worked hard and they did okay. Her oldest kids grew up and moved to California in the 1870s. She followed not long after, and continued to work.

“Soft,” she said in a newspaper article when she turned 100, talking about that present generation. “The world is full of weaklings.”

People with heart and courage respond with heart and courage. Those that never really did like to complain about how bad things are, in order to justify their own anxiety and give fuel to their fretting.

AND: Also from the comments, read this from Steve.

"They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life..."

17 high school girls make a pact: Each will become pregnant.

Why did they do it? The quote I used in the title is from Carolyn Kirk, the mayor of the town, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Does she really know why the girls did it? She's dishing out the cliché reason why young girls have babies, but how can your life be empty if you have 16 dedicated friends?

ADDED: Of the 17, "nearly half became pregnant after making a pact to do so and raise the children together." We don't know how many may have been in on the pact who did not become pregnant. So I'm speculating about how many friends these girls really had. It could happen that many girls would join such a pact in an effort to win favor from other girls, not because they were really true friends. Eh, for all I know the pact was b.s. made up after the fact.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

What is frustrating is that by emphasizing the stock response to this they, the officials and likely the church leaders, miss the really key part: "They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life."

What is the point of having churches around if not responding to these precise feelings? That's what churches should be emphasizing — helping these girls find love, and acceptance, and status and fill the empty space in their lives. If churches aren't doing that then they should really just shut up, their words and their doors, because clearly they've missed the point of their message and existence.

Instead of arguing about contraceptives or debating yet more sex education what about responding to the core issue of their self-value. This story isn't about sex and these girls are certainly responsible for their own decisions, but they're also victims of their elders who have decided policies, whether liberal or conservative, are more interesting than people.

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."

Wrote Mother Teresa in letters to her confessor.

The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."

Via Metafilter, where the comments include:

My view: Mother Teresa saw the reality of life more intimately than nearly anyone who has ever lived; she saw no kind and benevolent God because it doesn't exist. Kindness and benevolence comes from us, not an invisible superhero in the sky, and there wasn't much of it to be found toward her chosen charges....

[Another commenter:] In the hospital she ran, patients dying of cancer were offered aspirin instead of morphine and were told to offer up the pain to God. Dying patients were baptized regardless of what their religion was. Mother Teresa got a donation from one of the men involved in the Lloyd's of London mess and would not return it despite knowing that it was stolen money. Instead she told the victims to forgive the people responsible for the theft. She was fanatically opposed to birth control. She turned every donation her hospital got over to the Vatican - meanwhile, her hospital was criminally undersupplied. If Mother Teresa didn't believe in God anymore, what was her excuse for maintaining the Catholic line?...

[Another:] [A]s Hitchens documents, she didn't work selflessly for mankind. She was a sick, twisted suffering fetishist who raised millions of dollars that were split between building more places to die (and that's literal- the "shelters" she built are horrible hellholes) and the Vatican coffers and cavorted with dictators. She was a horrible individual, and her veneration is a symbol of all that's wrong with the Church and all that's wrong with modern humanity.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O:

She didn't see God. But she saw God in others. And those others knew it.

Original Mike:

That she did what she did with all those inner doubts makes her all the more saintly.