Milwaukee Specialty Food and Coffee

Off Topic: Religion: Go Knights! (All 86 of You)

I regret that my first post back is an off topic one, but today I saw in my high school, Dominican, alumni newsletter that they are graduating classes of only 86 students. At the same time, the Roman Catholic parishes of Milwaukee's East Side have been consolidated to the point where nearly a dozen share three priests. In light of these facts, I believe that the Church needs to speak some prophetic words to our society about its priorities.

I include myself in this indictment, but I was lucky to have grandparents who seemingly had nothing but priorities. My parents, in turn, raised me and my brother and sister in a smallish house (certainly by today's standards.). Yet all three of us went to Dominican.

I'm so grateful that in that time, educators still placed great value on diversity and that political pressures did not dictate "teaching to the test." I am grateful that there was busing and that not only in school, but in my first jobs, I had to interact with people of other races and socioeconomic backgrounds. I think that making the student body more economically and intellectually rarified will only worsen society's problems.

I don't think we are falling behind globally because don't have enough technical and scientific knowledge. We have Google for that. I suspect we're falling behind globally because we devote unreasonably much time, attention and money to frivolous things. Maybe we don't have to look much further than six months of Halloween, which competes for mindshare only with the Packers (and ex-Packers).

I don't think the Church should have to apologize for taking people away from football on Sunday, and I wish that the entire Dominican facility were again filled with over a thousand young Knights. After all, it presumably costs pretty much the same to heat and light the physical plant whether there are a hundred or a thousand students. As educators, parents, and single people in the peanut gallery like me, I hope that more of us will reassess our priorities to make this happen.

Religion: Photos: St. Robert's in Shorewood

In celebration of Holy Week, here's a picture of my latest infatuation, St. Robert's Catholic Church in Shorewood.  (Taken around Christmastime, as you can tell.)

 

Blog News: Spirituality Forum

A new article has been published in the Sprituality Forum. 

Blog News: Spirituality Forum

A new article has been posted to the Spirituality Forum page.

Blog News: New Roman Missal Translation Page

I'm convinced that the new English translation of the Roman Missal is an issue to which I should devote some of my attention, at least for the time being.  Perhaps it will be moved to another blog or someplace else later, but for now, I've added a page here.

Blog News: Spirituality Forum

A new article has been posted to the Spirituality Forum.

Blog News: Spirituality Forum

A new article has been posted to the Spirituality Forum.

Editorial: Too Much Information, Too Little Truth

I'm amazed at the power of Internet-based communication tools to be both value-neutral (indeed, possibly content-neutral) and self-perpetuating.  I'm amused at how perfectly natural it is considered for us all, it seems, to build our personal brand using Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.  I know whereof I speak--after all, that's why you're reading this!  I watched the TV news Friday night (a relatively rare event) and noted with interest that a fellow blogger was quoted as the source for a story about the selection of Milwaukee's new Roman Catholic Archbishop.  What a crazy collision of the ultimate top-down organization--which has, amazingly, been able to entrench its centralized authority and reassert its command-and-control nature since the 1960s--with the bottom-up world of blogs. 

For the good of humanity, I hope we will be able to discover (or rediscover) a middle way.  Let's not abandon the idea of authority, but let's also not accept everything that's handed down from above and lose the gains made since the 1960s towards participatory democracy.  Please don't interpret this as a religiously bigoted statement, but in my view, the Vatican is a human government that is no more or less morally valid than any others.  I admire many, many things about the Roman Catholic church--a fact I've been meaning to blog about for some time--but also think she has lost the thread since Jesus' day, to put it mildly.  I would level the same criticism at most Christian churches.

This must all seem a bit far afield, but I think a basic problem is that we've allowed ourselves to become way too dumbed down, particularly in our reading and writing level and ability to communicate.  Language is power, and no one understands that better than the Vatican.  Big words are power.  The powers that be--big brother, little brothers, and lots of people who just want to sell us useless junk--use language to confuse, contort and connive.  If we can't analyze and scrutinize the information we take in, we become defenseless against it.

These days, getting up every morning and seeking to impose a stamp of order and meaning on life is the very definition of an uphill battle.  The goal of trying to turn one's information intake from meaningless bits of disconnected information into a coherent narrative seems almost impossible.  However, I believe that it's a worthwhile and necessary pursuit.  After all, if we don't do it for ourselves, someone else will--someone who is likely to be as far away from our wants, needs and best interests as Rome is from Milwaukee.   

Current Affairs: Halloween

I've never been a fan of Halloween, but for whatever reason, I found myself enjoying it this year--though I didn't actively participate in any observances.  Doing a little Google research, it was good too see, for example on Wikipedia, that its pagan origins basically have to do with a festival commemorating the end of the lighter half of the year and the beginning of the darker half.  ("Good" in the sense that it's hard to see the outrage of more Levitically-minded Christians as being justified, at least by that particular fact.) In the meantime, of course, the holiday has become Christianized or at least intermingled with Christianity, specifically All Saints' Day.

Snapshots: The Second Coming of Joe

In a tight economy, the volume of Public Relations is amped up to the max. As you may be able to imagine, especially on this beat, one hears a lot about how various companies are saving the world (*swelling, stirring music, stir, swell, stir...swell...*).  It's rare to actually see this in action rather than hearing about it.  I'd like to offer a little anecdote.

This afternoon, I walked to Bayshore's Trader Joe's.  I picked up a few staple items--they have a whole-grain S. Rosen's (a brand of Chicago's Alpha Baking) bread that's really good, and cheap...OK, the "cheap" is pretty much understood.  Even more remarkably, they've lately introduced Joe, a coffee that retails at $3.49 for nearly a pound--thirteen or fourteen ounces, something like that?--and is really good. Today's purchase of this new coffee offering was my second.  When it first came out a month or so ago, I bought a can to see just how bad it would be.  I brew manual pourover at home, and I think the fact that the grounds bloomed (indicating freshly roasted coffee) was the first tipoff that this wasn't going to be quite what I expected.  To be honest, I like it better than many $7-9 a pound coffees and some $10 or higher coffees.  Moreover, I'm not quite sure how they make the numbers work on this, considering the fact that there must be little or no cheap filler in the blend (that, and/or the roaster has a Karl Rove-like genius for making something out of...not much).

A lot of companies pay a PR person or department good money to let the world know how it's being saved by said company.  Obviously, that's business.  However, I think giving people the stuff they want and need cheap--without a lot of fanfare--is saving the world too.  When it's done with the sense of humor and fun that Trader Joe's exhibits, that's even more admirable.  (And need I mention the lack of plastic bags?)  Honestly, I almost feel like I better stop thinking about all this, lest I lose my stomach for some of the other regular stops on the beat.  I'm not sure I would be cut out to be a writer for the Religion page, despite my religiosity.  It's the taking oneself too seriously that I find a bit wearisome.  I know extremely well that when you put a message out there, you can't really control how it's going to be interpreted, but still--if you're paying marketing and PR folks, why not pay 'em to lighten things up a bit?

As far as I can tell, Trader Joe's doesn't pay a lot of people to tell us all how they're saving the world.  So I'm going to do it for free.  When I walked away from the store, I saw that a Feeding America truck was backed up to the loading dock.  Arrayed next to the vehicle were bags upon bags of food about to be loaded up.  I didn't read about this in a press release, and indeed, searching the Feeding America site for "Trader Joe's" yields no hits.   I've long though that the best news is that gathered with one's own senses while on one's feet walking, and this was no exception.