David Ancell / Monday, May 24, 2010 / Comments(0)
One of the changes expected when the new Missal arrives is that we will be saying “And with your spirit” instead of “And also with you.” As much as I look forward to using the new words, it will be a bit awkward to use and even more difficult to explain. Louie Verrecchio wrote an excellent article on Catholic Exchange to explain the new wording. This is the same man who has done some work in creating a study series on Vatican II.
In his article, he mentions the need for liturgical instruction. Of course, this is nothing new. Vatican II itself called for solid liturgical instruction. My fear is that it will never come, at least not to people who don’t search for their own resources because they don’t know that they exist. I’m even more afraid that any instruction that does exist will look like something I’ve seen in various forms since I was in high school and had just joined the Church.
I have seen varying forms of “The Vatican says we need to do this for some strange reason. It doesn’t make any sense.” It just gives the impression that the bishops and even the Holy Father himself just go and make arbitrary rules with no thought about “real life,” whatever that is. Since many have no awareness that there is another side to the story, they will just believe this, as I often did. Given all of the bad press the new translation has gotten in the liberal publications, this scenario seems quite likely.
The new translation, from what I have seen, is a much more beautiful work than what we currently use. I cannot wait for its implementation. If you know of good resources about it, please point anyone you know in that direction. I still recommend Jeffrey Pinyan’s Praying the Mass. If we hope to have an authentic liturgical renewal, we need to spread the word, possibly against our own parish or diocesean instruction program.
Category: Liturgy
David Ancell / Friday, May 07, 2010 / Comment(1)
When I bought my first Palm, the Tungsten T, in 2003, probably my favorite app for the thing was Pocket Quicken. I could buy something with a debit card, record the transaction, and have it go into Quicken as soon as I did a HotSync. As I’ve said before, it’s the one thing that I really, really miss on my Droid.
Well, now I know one reason why it isn’t available for the Droid. In what has to be one of the most disappointing moves I’ve ever seen, Intuit terminated its license to Landware to make and sell the product. For a long time, Quicken was the software that worked better than anything else, especially on Windows. The Mac version works, but it’s really clunky. I’ve heard many, many complaints about Quicken Essentials for Mac, and I have to wonder why Intuit thought they’d get away with releasing that in the state that it is in at its price.
I am now looking to replace Quicken. I will most likely replace it with the first good Mac product to provide an Android mobile version, especially if it syncs over the air. If anyone knows of such a product, please do let me know.
Category: Technology
David Ancell / Monday, April 26, 2010 / Comments(0)
E-mail and comment spam is something that I’ve never really understood. How do people really earn money from posting and e-mailing offers to people who usually don’t want them? Ok, I guess someone is doing business with them, or it would be a waste of effort.
Apparently, some companies are paying people to go through and enter CAPTCHA codes. I just don’t get how this is worth someone’s time and resources. A CAPTCHA code is something to keep automated processes from entering spam messages and comments. The very presence of the code should tell people that these unsolicited offers are not wanted there. Who makes money by targeting offers to people who do not want them? Companies like Facebook and Google make at least part of their money by trying to produce targeted ads. In other words, they use information to find out what people might be interested in.
My site uses CAPTCHA on my e-mail link, and all comments on my blog have to be approved before they will appear. I also utilize spam filters in both my e-mail and the blog. If you are a spammer, don’t even bother to post here. Even if you get past my filters, I will delete your e-mail and never post your comment. Even if I wanted your product, I would never buy from someone who uses these tactics. I wish I could just allow comments to instantly post. However, even if I let the spam post and deleted it later, there’s a possibility that it will get to a search engine and help their ranking. I want to take no chance of letting a spammer do that.
Category: Technology
David Ancell / Tuesday, April 13, 2010 / Comments(2)
Most people who know me are aware that I am a big computer and gadget geek. A priest friend of mine once remarked that I use technology to simplify my life. It’s true, for example, that I like having my iPod so that I don’t have to carry around, sort through, and change CDs in the player. It’s all on one device that I can carry around.
Being as I am, I’m not content to carry around a phone that only makes calls. I like to have a device that will allow me to keep in touch with e-mails and sites like Facebook. However, I don’t want something that will annoy me with pop-ups or pause to check e-mail when I’m actively trying to use it. I don’t want something beeping all night while I’m at work. Just a few weeks ago, I found something that is easily the best phone I’ve had – the Motorola Droid. It’s a perfect replacement for my Palm Treos that I’ve used since 2005.
I am a big Apple fan, but I’ve never really wanted an iPhone. It didn’t have enough disk space to serve as my media player, and I was concerned that using a phone as my media player would run the battery down too quickly. I wasn’t attracted to the touch-screen only interface because I have fat fingers. The first generation didn’t have 3G support, and I wasn’t about to spend the money that it would cost without it. The non-removable battery is a deal killer in a cell phone. Besides all this, I switched to Verizon early in my courtship with the woman who is now my wife, and the iPhone is only available for AT&T.
The Droid does so many things that it is a huge step up for me from my old Treo. The multitasking works well, and I am able to continue to work in another application while it checks my e-mail. Because of this, I can now have it check my e-mail more often. The e-mails now look much more like what they would look like if I were using my desktop or laptop. Web browsing on this thing is very nice. Verizon’s 3G is plenty fast. The pages look similar to what they do on a full-size computer. I can double-tap when a web page comes up and zoom it so that the article just fits across the screen. I get a lot of reading done on the phone now and don’t have to wait until I get to a computer. The only problem is that, when you are in a spot where 3G isn’t available, any web function is very slow.
I’d probably still like my Droid if this were all it did. However, there is so much more. My calendar and contacts sync with my Google account which can then sync with iCal and Address Book. The Treo would sync these also, but there’s a major difference. I don’t have to plug the Droid in to do this. It does it over the air. I add someone’s info while I’m out at the mall or a restaurant, and it’s on my computer when I get home. I only wish that there were an app like Pocket Quicken that could do this with financial data. Pocket Quicken is the one thing I really, really miss on the Droid.
The GPS is amazing. Since it’s powered by Google Maps, you don’t have to buy those ridiculously expensive updates to the maps. You can even use voice search to find an address. The directions are more clear than they are on my Garmin. However, it’s not perfect. The smaller size and glossy screen (which is normally beautiful) can be kind of hard to see, especially if I’m wearing sunglasses. My wife doesn’t like the voice of the navigation. The biggest downside of it, though, is when you get a call. The call screen gets in the way of the GPS, and you can’t use the navigation while you are on a call. Maybe this is a safety feature, but a call when I’m trying to go through a multi-directional exit would not be good.
On a less-important but still useful note, it’s great for checking the weather. The new Android 2.1 download that I got comes with a news and weather program. It shows the current temperature, weather forecast for my location (which it detects), and important news headlines. It has a good photo application that I can use to show off pictures of me with my beautiful wife and even some video. Having a 5 megapixel camera with flash isn’t too bad, either. The included video camera worked well in my test, but I have yet to use it for real. Yes, you can use the device as your MP3 player, and it comes with a 16 GB memory card. I have MP3s on the device, but I don’t play them that much.
I have heard that there aren’t as many apps available for Android as for the iPhone, but that hasn’t seemed to matter to me. I haven’t spent a cent, and I’ve been able to find a number of useful apps and some games: Solitaire, Euchre, Connect Four, Tic Tac Toe, and Othello. There are apps for using Wikipedia, Skype, WordPress, and Facebook. I even have an app that tells me what movies are playing near my current location (which it detects automatically) and the times and lets me view the trailer. I also have my pharmacist databases installed on the device – Lexi Drugs and ePocrates. Installing the software from the app store is very, very easy. The phone, unlike the iPhone, isn’t restricted to software from the store, but there’s a setting you have to change to get it to install other software.
As for the call quality, it’s the best I’ve heard in a long time. The speakerphone is loud and very clear. My parents could notice a difference immediately when I called them on the phone. I could also tell a difference when talking to my wife. Everyone was much easier to hear than they were on my Treo.
All is not perfect, though. My biggest gripe about it is the way to answer the phone. I have to slide a slider across the screen to answer or ignore a call. This is a great for preventing myself from accidentally answering the phone, but the sliders are so hard to slide across that I normally have to try several times and then almost miss the call. I also have to use a slider to unlock the phone almost every time the screen goes off. These sliders are fairly easy to use but annoying. Can’t there be a certain amount of time that must pass before the phone locks? I looked for settings but could find none.
There are a few other things that’s I’d like to see improved. When using Gmail, you can’t change the Send From account like you can in the full web version of Gmail. It can check mail pretty often, but I’m pretty jealous of the speed of the push mail that my wife has in her BlackBerry. With multitasking ability, I have to worry about something in the background sucking the life out of the battery. Applications don’t have their own “exit” function, so the Task Killer is a must. The battery life is good enough for me, but I’ve found that I do need to watch it. Many people have complained about the slide-out keyboard, and I will add that it does take getting used to. The device will change from portrait to landscape when you rotate it, but it isn’t as smooth as I’d like.
Overall, this is the best gadget I’ve ever owned. I am sure that Google will continue to update Android, and it will get even better with time. It’s a great phone, and it does a lot of stuff. I am having a lot of fun with it.
Category: Technology
David Ancell / Sunday, April 11, 2010 / Comments(0)
Some people in their writings have tried to use the scandals in the Church to discredit the Church’s teaching. Mark Shea explains why this doesn’t work. If you ever get into this argument, here’s a quote that explains it nicely:
The used car salesman who says, “Trust me” can be refuted if you produce his rap sheet. But the math teacher who says that 2+2=4 is not refuted when you show him to be a drug dealer. The truth that bishops hand along does not depend on their personal holiness, any more than the truth of our salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ was disproven by Peter’s chickenhearted failure to live by his own preaching at Antioch.
On a related note, the idea that the efficacy of the Sacraments is based on the holiness of the priest or bishop who administers them is a heresy known as Donatism. Be thankful for this. We can go to Mass or to Confession and not have to inquire on the state of the priest’s soul.
Category: Response
David Ancell / Friday, April 09, 2010 / Comments(0)
The New York Times has struck again with another story in which they are claiming inaction on the part of the Church against a priest who was sexually abusing minors. I won’t go into much depth here, but there is more to the story than they tell us (surprise, NOT!). Good summaries of the real story can be found here and here on Jimmy Akin’s blog for the National Catholic Register. If you’d rather get some perspective from someone who writes fairly but isn’t necessarily going to outright defend the Church, try this article from John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter.
While all of this, as well as the stories from Europe, were coming out, I read this article from Phil Lawler. In it, he explains how sexual abuse is a problem in society as a whole, not just the Church. He is very careful to explain that he understands, as I do, that this does not mean that we should excuse those in authority in the Church for their actions. The Church must uphold and be held to a higher standard than secular society. In fact, I would argue that the problem is not that the Church has become worse than secular society but that the Church and her institutions have largely become secularized and then experienced the attending problems.
So, if the fact that sexual abuse and its cover-up is a societal problem doesn’t excuse the Church, what does it mean? Well, it means a couple of things . . .
First, we have evidence that our media is targetting the Church, whether out of animosity or the desire to sell stories. After all, if the media’s real interest were sexual abuse, they’d be taking a lot of other people to task for sexual abuse cover-up. Even the New York Times story mentioned that local law enforcement was aware of the case but did not prosecute. Amidst calls for Pope Benedict’s resignation, why has there not been a call for an investigation of the law enforcement offices in Wisconsin?
Second, it means that there is nothing inherit in the structure or discipline of the Church that is causing the problem. The usual gang has used this as yet another excuse to promote their pet agendas: married priests, women priests, changing the Church’s teaching on sexuality, etc. However, if the same problem is happening in wider society, it’s hard to make a case that the problem is caused by anything particular to the Church.
The problem of sexual abuse is, in my opinion, nothing but a symptom of the real problem plaguing the Church – secularization. This is seen in many of the more horizontal liturgies that we see in parishes today. It shows in Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities that are now difficult to distinguish from their secular counterparts. It shows in a Church who is afraid to teach her doctrine. It shows in orders of nuns that have become little more than social workers (hence the apostolic visitation). Pope Benedict XVI is doing all he can to try to combat these trends. While people in the media call for his resignation, I see him as the man whom the Church needs most.
Category: Response
David Ancell / Friday, March 26, 2010 / Comments(0)
Last weekend, Yana and I went to the Ignited by Truth conference in Raleigh. I’m not even sure how to tell you all about it, but it was great. If you have ever been to a conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, the conference kind of reminded me of it. There just wasn’t praise and worship music, and they actually took breaks in between talks.
I was especially glad to see Greg and Lisa Popcak and Fr. Dwight Longenecker in person. I have read several of Dr. Popcak’s books, and I had somewhat followed the story of Fr. Longenecker. Now, I have heard them speak, and they were great!
Category: News, News on My Life
David Ancell / Friday, March 05, 2010 / Comments(0)
Sometimes I think I really should watch what I read because it makes me want to rant about pet peeves. Jeff Miller blogs about replacing water in holy water fonts with sand. For those who have questions, no, this is not allowed. Read the letter at the bottom of Fr. Z’s post from the Congregation of Divine Worship.
Although the practice bothers me, the attitude behind it is what really gets to me. I never understood why priests and other parish leadership thinks that they can just make up their own practice and just do stuff. When it comes to the church, if it’s not in the book, don’t do it!
Category: Liturgy
David Ancell / Friday, March 05, 2010 / Comments(0)
In the last ten years, I’ve been a more avid reader of theological and spiritual books. It wasn’t always so. In fact, I found a lot of the spiritual books I read in the first few years of being Catholic at best bland and at worst depressing. This is one reason why I now keep a list of good Catholic reading on my web page. There are a lot more good Catholic resources than there used to be, but the bad ones are still out there.
One of the most depressing things that I read (I don’t remember where.) was this article that said something along the lines of “The ancient people saw the order and complexity of creation, and they reasoned that there was a God who created it all.” In other words, God has never truly revealed himself. We just kind of guessed at one time that there might be a God.
A more subtle statement was made in a group in which I participated some months ago. It goes somewhere along the line of “If it weren’t for our patriarchal society, we would be calling God ‘mother’ instead of ‘father.'” For this to be the case, our knowledge of God would have to be purely a product of society. At the very least, this person was saying that God cannot reveal himself in any terms other than our societal framework. If this is true, then I have to wonder why we would worship such a wimp.
The proponents of such ideas would have to deny the authenticity of Scripture. In other words, nothing in Scripture could possibly have happened as it is stated. Alternative explanations had to be derived. The problem with the alternative explanations is that they were all based on speculation with no long-lost documents discovered to substantiate the “real story.” There are sources available outside Christianity that speak of Jesus and the early Christians, but none tell us the “real story” of what happened instead of the Resurrection.
Once I realized the highly speculative nature of the skeptics, it opened the floodgate for me to know and believe that God’s revelation, and our salvation, is God’s initiative. God is the one who wanted us to know and love him and be with him forever. He wants this more than we want it. In fact, he wanted it so much that the second person of the Trinity took on human flesh, which he will have forever.
Category: Doctrine
David Ancell / Wednesday, March 03, 2010 / Comments(0)
I just received a link to this speech by Archbishop Charles Chaput. It was given at, of all places, Houston Baptist University. In it, he talks about how John F. Kennedy’s Houston speech caused major problems for the role of Christians in public life. I learned quite a bit about the historical background of the use of the phrase “separation of church and state” which appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.
I wouldn’t limit the applicability of what he said to politics. During my first year in pharmacy school, a well-known professor of one of our classes stated that they should have vending machines for birth control in every school. He said that “personally, I’m against it.” He went on to say that our “professional duty” comes before our “personal beliefs.”
Even today, you hear people often debating on whether one may do or not do something on the basis of “personal beliefs.” It’s as if they’ve forgotten that there might really be a God who will one day judge them, or they have decided that such a concern is of no consequence. Whether such is true has little to do with one’s “personal beliefs.” Here’s a quote on this from Archbishop Chaput:
Too many Catholics confuse their personal opinions with a real Christian conscience. Too many live their faith as if it were a private idiosyncrasy – the kind that they’ll never allow to become a public nuisance. And too many just don’t really believe. Maybe it’s different in Protestant circles. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I say, “I doubt it.”
“Too many just don’t really believe.” I can never know for sure what is in someone’s heart. However, the actions and attitudes I’ve seen displayed on the part of many people show so little concern for God. I have talked to many people in my life who seem quite satisfied to believe that neither they nor anyone else knows anything about God. Either there is a God, or there isn’t. God cannot exist and not exist at the same time. Either he has revealed himself or not. This has eternal significance, so take time to find these things out.
Archbishop Chaput gives us an answer that is both simple but yet very difficult in today’s world. We must all have, first and foremost, “a zeal for Jesus Christ and his Church.” The Archbishop himself states that he is a Catholic Christian first and then an American citizen. We most certainly must love our country, but we are citizens of Heaven first.
Category: Response