An article in today’s Pitt News has some misleading information. In the section addressing Lent, "Father" Bill Hausen, of Christ Hope Church, is quoted. Hausen broke away from the Catholic Church in 2004. He has been excommunicated and is no longer longer recognized as a priest by the Church, the sacraments he offers are not valid, and attending services at Christ Hope does not satisfy one’s Sabbath obligation.
I’m sorry for not posting this sooner.
This year for Holy Week Carnegie-Mellon is hosting what amounts to the full Monastic liturgical schedule of the Divine Office. The Office is the public prayer of the Church, consisting mostly of psalms and biblical readings. The Vespers said on Sundays at the Oratory and Compline said daily at CMU are parts of the Office, but for Holy Week we will be breaking out the full liturgy. We will also be turning CMU’s chapel into something that actually looks like a Church. There will be candles, chanting, and yes Eddie, incense. These offices will be done as “Reader Services” (as we aren’t forcing the priests to put in more work than they already do during Holy Week). This means that we need people who can sing (still come if you can’t). If you have the slightest idea how singing goes (even better if you’re familiar with Gregorian or Byzantine chant) let our Pitt VP, Steven Kesslar, know so that he can send you the texts/music so that we can sound a little better. If you don’t know how to sing a brief tutorial is all you need (most of the parts only have two notes). We need three leaders for each office and some powerful people in the choir (that’s everyone else, liturgically speaking). So volunteer! Steven’s e-mail address is anthrakeus@gmail.com.
![[maryjesusstatue.jpg]](http://alesrarus.funkydung.com/images/maryjesusstatue.jpg "Maternal Bond")
Hot on the heels of one controversial pro-life statue, we have another.
“A SCULPTURE OF the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, proposed as a ‘memorial for the victims of abortion’ at Villanova University, has upset some students, including some who oppose abortion.”
[…]
“Pro-life freshman Clint Gilliam agrees with the concept of the statue, but thinks its high-profile placement is a bad idea. ‘It’s just a little in your face,’ he said. ‘It sort of makes people who don’t believe in those things uncomfortable.’ Adds freshman Peggy Costello, ‘I’m personally pro-life and I don’t like the statue at all.’ ‘I feel that putting up a statue like that completely counters the diversity we’re trying to advocate or uphold,’ said Costello, 19, who thinks the memorial could alienate non-Catholics.”
Villanova is a Catholic university for heaven’s sake! There should be no need whatsoever to justify a tasteful pro-life statue, especially one with of Mary and Jesus.
Remember the post I wrote about Chuck Colsen’s critique of trite worship music? I agreed with Colsen’s distaste for “Draw Me Close to You” and its ilk. My buddy Rob didn’t. When discussion on both blogs died, I figured the matter was closed for the time being. I didn’t think the article had legs beyond my little corner of the net, but it seems I was wrong.
Sam Storms of Enjoying God Ministries and Justin Tayler of Between Two Worlds threw their two cents in with Rob. I wouldn’t have know that, though, if Godblogger heavyweight Tim Challies hadn’t joined the fray. I’m happy to say he’s on my side. 😉 Challies presents a seven-part test for “whether a particular song is suitable for worshiping our God, especially in a corporate setting”, borrowed from a book by Elmer Towns and Ed Stetzer. He also adds an eighth criterion of his own.
Researchers in both the USA and Germany claim to have produced embryonic-like stem cells from testicular cells. The Germans published the results of their work on mice in Nature last week; the Americans claimed to have done similar things with human testes (ouch), but have not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but rather presented it at a conference. The group that did the work in America is also studying similar work on ovaries.
Presumably these cells can be entirely legitimate from a Catholic bioethical standpoint, provided that the germ cell (i.e., testicular or ovarian tissue) material is donated and procured in an ethical manner (which can get complicated, but we’ll leave that for another entry). The problem with embryonic research to date is that the process involves killing or harming human embryos, and perhaps involves involves cloning to boot. Since this embryonic-like cells are taken from adult donors, this intrinsic stumbling-block is removed.
In addition to avoiding that big ethical issue, this technique, if it works, would also avoid some serious technical barriers facing embryonic stem cells. If you give a patient stem cells derived from an embryo, you must either try to create a cloned embryo or else face the risk of tissue rejection. Human cloning has yet to done, now that Dr. Hwang was exposed as a fraud, and any therapy that involves such a concept faces quite a few issues with expense, technical validation, etc.
In other news, Geron Corporation, which holds the rights to the original human embryonic stem cell lines that Dr. Thompson derived at the University of Wisconsin Madison (thus sparking this whole debate) is preparing to launch a clinical trial of human embryonic stell cells on human patients–and just to clarify, unlike the embryonic-like stem cells that I mentioned above, these ones are derived from destroyed human embryos. I believe that this is the first such trial to happen in the USA in several years–in the last trial on Parkinsons Disease patients, the subjects’ symptoms got worse after getting the cells.