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The Voice of the People Is the Voice of God

I found this post on

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Cardinal Ratzinger on EWTN Comment

The Cardinal came across very well on TV, surprisingly. But he also came across as being reserved to a fault, the kind of person who takes a lot of time to warm up and show his real personality to others. He also is definitely the sort of German guy who believes in discipline, authority, and duty. He likes lines and clear-cut statements. I can really see how this could cause personality conflict.

Others who watched included A Catholic Blog for Lovers. Everybody else is too busy enjoying the nice festival weekend to blog….

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A Pretty Darned Good Artist

PBS’ interesting (and it better be, to get me up to watch at 7:30 AM on a Sunday!) Religion and Ethics Newsweekly focused this week on the 9/11 anniversary. One of the folks they featured was sculptor John Collier, who is making a memorial for St. Peter’s Church in New York. The memorial features four saints, the patrons of those who died: St. Joseph for workers, St. Michael for the police, St. Florian for firefighters, and St. Mary Magdalene hurrying to tell everyone about the Resurrection, her spice jars unopened because she found no body in the Tomb. (I suspect she’s also there for those who found no body to bury, but Collier doesn’t say so.)

The Religion and Ethics Newsweekly page links to Collier’s homepage (or rather, his distributor’s). There’s also a link to a story on the parish’s project from St. Anthony’s Messenger, which is still the best Catholic magazine out there!

Raised in the Protestant tradition, Collier and his wife, Shirley, currently attend services at Dallas’s Episcopal Church of the Incarnation.

“I’m halfway to being a Catholic,” he says with a smile. “The greatest art in the history of the Western world,” he asserts, “has been commissioned by the Catholic Church.”

***

“As grand as any secular memorial might be,” he says, “it can only say ‘Remember.’ But Our Lord offers more. He offers resurrection, which is the hope of the dead. This commission has given me the freedom to say that!”

I really like his homepage’s section on his paintings. They may even be better than his sculpture, although his stuff definitely has something. They showed “The Woman Clothed with the Sun” on TV this morning, but I like that more as a picture of Mary than a picture of the vision from Revelation. (I wouldn’t have known that was the subject without the title! It’s a valid interpretation, but is just too restrained for my tastes.) However, his “Annunciation”, with Mary as a gawky American schoolgirl in a suburban neighborhood, is brilliant. His “Pieta” is even more heartbreaking after that. “St. Joseph and the Child Jesus” is nicely done, but I keep thinking St. Joseph should look more like Norm Abrams and talk in a New England accent. It’s the beard, probably. Still, the galaxy on the back wall is a very nice touch. “Our Lady of Guadalupe” being adored by North American saints is very nice. There’s a lot more, too. The good thing is that all his people have a good rounded look to them; none of those flat folks from flat photograph-models. Even the portrait of the Guadelupana starts coming out of her frame at the bottom. (I do wonder why there’s a cat…but I guess a cat can look at a queen!) I also like the American landscapes he uses. We have as much right as the medieval Tuscans and French to show the stories of the Bible taking place in our cities and countryside. It gives those stories an immediacy that makes them harder to ignore or rationalize away. Like Kolbe in the “Crucifixion with Saints”, a familiar modern face stares out at you, reminding you that the Crucified is not far away, but here with us; and that sainthood is not just for other people in other, “simpler” times.

I had a certain amount of difficulty finding pages on this John Collier, as there was a Pre-Raphaelite by that name in Victorian times, a photographer interested in Catholic stuff (John Collier, Jr.), and other folks with similar interests. Also, the Jesuit Dallas Museum has recently been given his statue “Prodigal Son” (scroll on down). As an illustrator, he worked on books as diverse as

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Community Goes Hand-in-Hand with Authority?

Apparently that’s the conclusion of Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America. There’s some big chunks of excerpt on a faculty book recommendation page over at Wright State. It’s several years old, but I don’t recall hearing about it before. Apparently it examines the life of three neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1950′s versus what’s going on today. I’m going to have to look for this book at the library; it sounds fascinating.

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The Grave of a Dream

This gentleman went to Atari’s old offices to take pictures and ended up buying and bringing home most of what you see. What I found most touching was the Atari gravesite. It also seems Atari’s employees had a soft spot for the Franciscans.

You really do have to love Slashdot.

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Sign of Hope

This ISP in Jackson, MS was hit by a tornado. But they had a plan, and they were back up in 72 hours. If you live nearby, I’d say you should switch to them. A good ISP is a joy forever.

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More Signs of the Decline and Fall

A couple of IT stories, courtesy of Slashdot. (If you’re not reading Slashdot every day, maybe you should be.)

Read Cringely’s column “The Innovator’s Ball: Why Business Isn’t Fun Anymore” for cautionary tales of how corporate grifters steal companies from their founders and do other fun things.

Sharp business is cheating and not getting caught…We’ve gone from following the rules to playing the odds.

Meanwhile, there’s a warrant out for the arrest of a “white hat” famous for finding holes in company computer security, then informing the company so it could fix them. This man who does no damage and makes no money from his activities, who has saved corporate America countless millions of dollars — this man is to be treated as a criminal. I bet they’d throw Shane in jail, too.

In December, 2001, Lamo was praised by communications giant WorldCom after he discovered, then helped close, security holes in their intranet that threatened to expose the private networks of Bank of America, CitiCorp, JP Morgan, and others.

Lamo believes the arrest warrant is for his most high-profile hack. Early last year he penetrated the New York Times, after a two-minute scan turned up seven misconfigured proxy servers acting as doorways
between the public Internet and the Times private intranet, making the latter accessible to anyone capable of
properly configuring their Web browser.

Once inside, Lamo exploited weaknesses in the Times password policies to broaden his access, eventually browsing such disparate information as the names and Social Security numbers of the paper’s employees, logs of home delivery customers’ stop and start orders, instructions and computer dial-ups for stringers to file stories, lists of contacts used by the Metro and Business desks, and the “WireWatch” keywords particular reporters had selected for monitoring wire services.

The real scandal is how incompetent, lazy or (to be charitable) overworked these major companies’ IT people must be. Small companies usually keep tabs on their folks, and though underpaid, they’re diligent
about patches and the like. Meanwhile, the big companies suffer from virus outbreaks again and again, or have horrible security. (Sigh.)

Some of this also may be cultural misunderstanding. I know a guy who’s a security expert. The first thing he usually does at a company is find a computer with the user away from the desk and the email program up, or accessible without a password by clicking on the icon. From there, he can almost always find all sorts of goodies. And in fact, looking through emails is one of the most popular tricks used by corporate spies. I was very impressed by this and have tried ever since to spread the word and keep my emails protected. But many to whom I’ve told my story are more appalled by my friend’s actions than what makes them possible. Even though he was explicitly hired to find such security holes, they think he shouldn’t do it!

Furthermore, many people simply have different goals which are fundamentally incompatible with security. I was recently instructed by my boss that I must keep my email open all day, so as not to miss getting an email five seconds after it’s sent. (The fact that our corporate email is actually not as fast as all that aside. And never mind all the impact on my productivity of having to stop and read email every time someone sends me some forwarded thing with forty large pictures included….).

But the real problem — the reason there’s a problem with people cracking systems in the first place — is that Microsoft and other irresponsible corporations believe in mind control over substance. As long as nobody knows there’s a great gaping hole in security you can drive a truck through, you’re safe. The person who left the hole there, endangering everyone, is a respectable businessman who finished the walls on time — whether or not the walls were any good. But the Mack truck driver who points out the dimensions of the hole is a criminal and a danger to the bottom line.

Historical Fiction Writers, Take Note

The Social Security Administration has put up a page on popular baby names back to 1880. Writers now have no excuse for naming that Victorian girl ‘Brittany’….