What's Your Bene/Male Ratio?

Most of us were brought up not to "curse." When I was growing up, that cover a whole range of speech: scatology and other biological rudeness, sexual obscenity, blasphemy, and damning were included. My prim daughter has added the word "suck," when used as a term of disparagement ("this game sucks").

Today, of course, there's all kinds of abuses against polite language virtually everywhere. My family has been watching Jesus of Nazareth on DVD this Lent, and the 14-year-old cynic in me finds it hard not to parody this well-produced and lavish mini-series at crucial point, to turn small scenes into SNL-like sketches before my mind's eye. One of these has Joseph repeatedly injuring himself while doing his carpenter thing -- hitting his thumb with his mallet -- and loudly taking his Son's name in vain, along with the usual scatological and sexual references that some of us are prone to when in physical pain.

But maybe we look at this backwards. Instead obsessing about what we're doing too much of, perhaps there's something we're doing too little of. What's the opposite of a curse? A curse is a "malediction," literally from the Latin roots for "bad speech." "Good speech" would be "benediction" -- blessing. How much time do we spend in benediction, in blessing, in calling down the good on people that we meet, even things that we encounter? Mindfulness about more casual benedictions in everyday life seems like a decent part of my Lenten journey.

And I say, "God bless it!"

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.

Letter from Europe: The Pope and Islam: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Letter from Europe: The Pope and Islam: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them.

The "sources" for this article are overwhelmingly Vatican correspondents. It's a little like the New York Times sending a reporter to cover Hugo Chávez and relying largely on the Venezuelan correspondents for the Washington Post and CNN for the story. This article is reliably hostile to religion and the Catholic hierarchy. But what makes it really reprehensible is just what a patchy job of reporting it represents. As Marty Peretz has noted at the New Republic, it resembles a term paper more than journalism.