Definitive Catholic bathroom book

John Zmirak and Denise Matychowiak's The Bad Catholic's Guide to Wine, Whiskey & Song is a hoot. If you look up "snarky" in the Catholic dictionary, you'll find a picture of this book. You'll find the answers to questions like:

• Why do Kentucky whiskeys bear the name of the famous French royal house of Bourbon?
• How did pisco become the national drink of Peru? (See answer below)
• Is vodka Russian or Polish in origin?

It's a random walk through the history of Christendom, viewed from an epicure/enophile perspective. Thoroughly Catholic in its attitude and orthodoxy, chock full of recipes (Matychowiak is a chef), Guide to Wine takes the givenness and goodness of creation and physicality seriously. It's a funny celebration and will leave you chuckling and gabbing with friends. Highly recommended.

Oh, and about that pisco:

[Catholic clergy] march[ed] through the country on foot[,] learning a dozen languages to preach the Gospel without the benefit of gunpowder. . . . When the priests saw the conquistadors robbing the country of everything not nailed down, and enslaving the natives to work in silver mines, they started defending the Indians' rights and organizing them on farms. Jesuits taught the Indians to grow grapes and ferment them. . . . Enraged Iberian vintners — don't cross these people, trust us — rioted for their right to soak the colonials, and in 1614, the ever-meddling Spanish Crown outlawed the sale of Peruvian wine.

The ever-crafty Jesuits applied their scientific training to invent a new drink which fit neatly through a loophole in the law — a brandy that was soon named for the earthenware containers which held it, piskos. . . . "[P]isco" soon caught on throughout New Spain, and gave the long-suffering Indians an industry they could count on . . . .

Theresa Duncan, R.I.P.

The New York Times reports that Theresa Duncan took her own life earlier this month, apparently followed in suicide by her boyfriend Jeremy Blake.

Theresa Duncan was my colleague at a New Media startup in DC in the mid-90's. She and Monica Gesue were the creators of Chop Suey, a CD-ROM entertainment that was brimming with wit and whimsy. Theresa was sui generis: smart as a whip, ambitious, with a biting wit and a commanding presence. She was an outsize personality in every way -- a constant edge and a twinge of sadness. I remember being startled to find that a wisecracking fashionista was also a devotee of Martin Heidegger. It saddens me to think I'll never bump into her in NYC and have another startling conversation. Requiescat in pace.

UPDATE: Theresa Duncan created this charming clip below. Enjoy:

Scenes from a Marriage

Mike Aquilina's The Resilient Church is an effortless, respectful look at a number of episodes in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Not a comprehensive history (or even an attempt at a concise one), this book offers readers a number of vignettes from the life of the Church, through its encounters with heresy and holiness, scandal and salvation. Political events find their way in, but Aquilina's focus is on the Church as exemplifying one particular virtue: perseverance. Inasmuch as all Christian history is the story of a divine marriage, Christ and his Church, consider this book as an honest and sometimes humbling memoir of how that, as yet not fully consummated, marriage plays out in the lives of the faithful across millennia. It's an excellent read, and while not scholarly, the reader is bound to find something of interest. I particularly enjoyed the treatment of the Crusades. Inasmuch as the history of the West largely cannot be understood outside the history of the Church, this book is recommended for believers and non-believers alike.

Cheney attacks the Constitution?

Such a headline would warrant an impeachment, no? But of course it's not true. Michael Roston has another shocking headline: Cheney criticizes the Geneva Conventions in Military Academy commencement address. The Raw Story ran it, and Andrew Sullivan repeated the allegation here. Of course, it's not true, as is easily verified by reading a transcript of the actual speech.

The Vice-President's speech mentioned the Conventions exactly once:

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away. These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it. They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society. The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend.

One really must (forgive the term) torture a common sense reading of the speech to find a criticism of the Conventions. Cheney merely stated an undisputed fact, that terrorist killers demand Geneva and constitutional protections. It's in Al Qaeda training manuals, for pete's sake.

Cheney spoke of the Convention and the U.S. Constitution in the same sentence and in the same manner, because in both cases the question hinges not on the validity of the law, but on the applicability of some of its clauses to this group of people. If one posits that illegal immigrants should not be eligible for Social Security, that is an indictment of illegal immigrants, not the Social Security system. The link between the two bodies of law is revealing: neither Roston nor Sullivan tried to claim that Cheney was "criticizing" the Constitution of the United States, either because so obvious a lie would be more glaring, or because, in their minds, slagging an international treaty is a bigger travesty than trashing the Constitution (which the VP explicitly swore to uphold, twice), or both.

Those papists and their Romish ways

Is this political cartoon from Tony Auth intended to make us long for the days when vigilant citizens sought to keep Catholics in their place and keep them out of power?

One thing is certain: no one could do this sort of propaganda as well as Thomas Nast. Auth's version is . . . toothless, by comparison.

The battle is far from over

Ross Douthat, posting on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic Monthly, says that claims of a sweeping pro-life victory in the Supreme Court's Gonzalez vs. Carhart decision yesterday are greatly exaggerated. Money quote, responding to Jacob Weisberg's claim on Slate that conservatives have consistently won on abortion and gun control:

In every state, it's illegal for minors to purchase any firearm. Does Weisberg really think pro-lifers are vastly closer to attaining their goal than gun control advocates?

Carhart is cause only for extremely guarded optimism. Pro-lifers still need at least one more Justice.

The Times on Benedict

This must be a sign that we are in the End Times. The New York Times has a reasonable, intelligent piece on Pope Benedict and his place in modern Europe. Infinitely better that the recent New Yorker piece -- a real piece of reporting that didn't seem phoned in, that actually had some analysis that required more than an espresso with Marco Politi. Carl Olson has a good review of it on the Ignatius Insight blog.