July 2005 Archives

I will be redesigning the site over the next few days. Though I’m a programmer, I don’t have much experience with with CSS or HTML and this site has been like a new toy. I like toys — I like to tinker with them and see what I can make them do. Sometimes I like to bend toys and sometimes I like to break them. I now know what I don’t like and the site will begin to look more like something that I do like. Simplicity and restraint are the new keywords.

Simplicity and restraint are also the new keywords for the site’s contents. I work long hours at the office, have few breaks, and I simply cannot compete with good sites like Instapundit or Little Green Footballs for breaking news or instant analysis. The original purpose of this site was to discuss current events from a Christian perspective and to chronicle the daily Christian life. I now want to remake this site to reflect my original purpose.

If people like this site, they will come, and I do not need to concern myself over whether I have 10, 20, or 100 visitors on a particular day. It is my hope that my Christian musings will form the basis for a book in 18 months or so. I need to get back to thinking of this site as a repository for serious writing rather than as a platform for becoming the next Glenn Reynolds. God knows what he wants for this site and I have to listen to his voice, not my ambitions.

I mentioned Leonard Leo in a previous post but didn’t go into much detail about him. I’m well aware of who he is and wrongly assumed that every reader would as well. Fortunately, Confirm Them (cross-posted at Southern Appeal) has stepped up to the plate to provide a little more information on Leo. He’s Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society as well as the chairman of Catholic Outreach for the Republican Party.

The conservative Catholic Site BeliefNet has some very interesting things to say about Roberts and his family:

If Catholics in America tend to fall into two broad categories—those who dissent from controversial Church teaching and those who subscribe to it—Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts, Jr., would appear to fall into the latter category. He attends Church of the Little Flower, a Maryland parish that heterodox Catholics would regard as an outpost of traditional Catholicism.
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On the Church of the Little Flower’s website, which links to the Vatican and promotes traditional piety and devotions such as “Forty Hours of Eucharistic Adoration,” Monsignor Vaghi has posted a meditation on chastity.

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In another meditation, Monsignor Vaghi staunchly defended the Church’s teaching on abortion. “After all, since Roe v. Wade in l973, the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion, there have been over 44 million abortions, young children dying before they had the opportunity to enjoy life outside the womb as we enjoy life,” he wrote. “Our church is always, and will always, be on the side of life, life from conception until natural death. And it is precisely because Jesus took on life, took on flesh and ennobled it by becoming man and like us in everything but sin that we value human life so much, that we were born in His image and reborn in Christ Jesus.”

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Several press accounts have noted that John Roberts and his wife Jane Sullivan Roberts followed Monsignor Vaghi from St. Patrick’s, his old parish in Washington, D.C., to Little Flower, and that Vaghi presided at their wedding. This has given conservative Catholic leaders who respect Vaghi confidence that Roberts is not cut from the same liberal cloth as Catholic Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

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Jane Roberts has been a diligent and open pro-life advocate, providing legal assistance to Feminists for Life. She is also active in the John Carroll Society, an organization that encourages Catholic lawyers (she is a partner in a Washington, D.C. law firm) to practice their profession according to high moral standards. Monsignor Vaghi is chaplain to the group.

As I wrote earlier, the more I know about John Roberts, the more I like him and the more comfortable I feel that he will interpret the constitution as it is written, not as the leftists wish that it were written.