Today is nine months before Christmas, making it the festival of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, the time to commemorate the conception of God in the flesh. We have the perfect way to bring back this holy day into our culture: Make it a time in the church to mark and protest and fight the evil of abortion!

The life of Jesus began with His conception. We proclaim Christ as not just the Baby in the Manger but the Embryo in His mother’s womb. For Christians, the Annunciation proves that human life begins with conception. Read this post from Scott Stiegemeyer and celebrate this anti-abortion day.

UPDATE: I should have said YESTERDAY, March 25, was Annunciation Day. I hope you had a happy one.

IN MY OWN DEFENSE: I thought TODAY was March 25.

Should we boycott the China Olympics, or at least the opening ceremonies, because of China’s oppression of Tibet and other human rights violations? Lots of people now are calling for a boycott, including some athletes who believe that competing while breathing China’s polluted air will hurt them. Read this (which argued that Olympic boycotts HAVE been effective in this past) and this (arguing that the China Olympics are going to be a mess anyway).

While being utterly opposed to China’s policies–I still insist on calling it COMMUNIST China, which it still is despite its exploiting free market tactics to gain worldwide economic power, the capitalist phase being a pre-requisite according to Marxism for true socialism–my instinct is to oppose a boycott of the Olympics, though I’m not sure why. What do you think?

We are so used to complaining about how court system that we can be surprised when it works as it was intended to do, upholding the law and defending our rights. The Supreme Court ruled that the World Court has no jurisdiction over the United States of America.

In a comment to “Aesthetics & American Idol,” Reader Mason Ian perfectly describes the “arduous” process of perceiving the greatest beauty:

Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:

When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I “should” treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.

Then, after forcing yourself to merely “mentally ascribe” the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.

This is achieved in literature by reading more. The more you read, the more you read. Sounds like very droll truism, but by it I mean the process by which reading one book end us turing you on to several other books, other authors, different ideas and concepts and styles. I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge and find a dozen more obscure authors through his quotes and references, which in turn leads me to more reading. Then, after ten years I come back to Milton and find that Paradise Lost IS beautiful to me in a very different way than the alien beauty I had firs admired as an outsider.

So at first I liked it for reasons outside of myself (others regarded it as the pinnacle of English poetry, etc, etc) then I learned to love it myself, through my own tastes and my own reflection.

We go from being outsiders to being insiders.

However, as it was pointed out, hollywood goes another way. The simple and quick way. the way of the lowest common denominator. Grasping beauty and goodness is a slow art that requires years of honing and exercise. Who has time? Pare down the representation of love to three lines of cheesy dialogue and a wet kissing scene and the audience is satisfied right?

Hardly. Here’s to those who take the time to find and create what is beautiful. It is a long and arduous journey but one which holds the most epic of rewards.

See, Milton and Shakespeare don’t make concessions to our impoverished vocabularies. You may have to read them with a dictionary at first. And they don’t pause every twelve minutes for a word from their sponsors. They go their own way and we have to catch up. But it is worth it when we do. The very subjective pleasure, if you want to reduce everything to this, is so much greater and deeper and more intense with these writers than with the lesser entertainment we content ourselves with (for one thing because we don’t always want to involve ourselves so much or work so hard–which is fine sometimes, as long as we don’t reduce our aesthetic standards to our own lazy pleasures and exclude what is really objectively good).