A Sound of Sheer Silence

1.  Two weeks ago, the Episcopal Church voted to give general authorization for same sex weddings to be conducted in Episcopal Churches.  Having followed this story as an outsider, the outcome was not a surprise--all of the commentary I had read suggested it was going to pass.  What was surprising, at least for me, was the margin of victory.  Out of 160 Episcopal bishops, only 26 voted no, with five abstentions; it other words it passed with an 64 percent margin of victory, which is an enormous number.  But it is actually even bigger than that--if you take out the retired bishops, the assisting and auxiliary bishops, and the the bishops from places outside the United States that are part of the Episcopal Church (all of whom are included in the vote), you end up with only eight  dicocesan bishops voting no out of 99 dioceses in the 50 States.  That's a land slide in by any measure. I also found the reactions from the other elements of the Anglican ...

I stumbled across this old article this morning.   Here, Fr. Bill Daly, who I've talked about before , gives a Real Talk assessment of the role of NFP in his parish. There is a line in this article that reinforces the division between "birth control" and "expected value reduction" that I spoke about in yesterday's post. Most couples in our parish, like couples in most parishes in the developed world, are certainly using artificial contraception. Practically every young family has two or three children. I doubt that they are practicing natural family planning. Why does he doubt that these young families with two or three kids are using NFP?  If Fr. Daly believed (as he says he does when he claims that NFP "works") that NFP allows for the kind of control comparable to artificial methods, then there is no reason for that skepticism.  Why would it?  If the effectiveness claims of NFP were true, then there would be no reason to doubt that a parti...

When people start talking past one another, the solution is almost always to reframe the parameters of the discussion.   On complementarity, I relied on a professional theologian to help reframe the issues.   Unfortunately, I could not find anything Professor Coakley has written about another issue that has become completely stuck (at least among Catholics)--birth control.  So, I did the next best thing--I called my friend Jason. Now, my friend Jason is Jewish, and generally speaking identifies with the Reform movement in Judaism.  The truth is that I asked Jason to think through and give his perspective on this topic because he is my friend and that I knew he would do it.  But, as it turns out, Jason is a perfect conversation partner for this topic.  As someone who takes his Judaism seriously, he is open to the idea of moral and ethical rules that are derived from religion, even if they are counter-cultural.  On the other hand, the Reform approach...

I should probably stop writing about our buddy Dr. Popcak.  He's really not that important in the grand scheme of things.  Still, there is something about him that really rubs me the wrong way, especially when he talks about birth control.  What bothers me is not that I think he is wrong when he talks about NFP; I certainly think he is wrong, but that's not what bothers me.  What bothers me is that I think he is deliberately misleading people when he talks about the topic.  He is so committed to the notion that NFP is the only way to go that he seems willing to twist any evidence or circumstances into an argument supporting his position. That, combined with his incessant pimping of his books, makes me think this guy is basically a huckster--a version of the old patent medicine sellers.  Like patent medicine, real people can suffer real consequences from swallowing Popcak's medicine.  He has an obligation to be truthful about what he is selling. I don...

Did you know it was "NFP Week"?  I certainly did not, until I was informed of it by our old buddy Dr. Popcak.  No surprise, he is a big proponent of NFP Week, and has been writing a series of posts on in celebration of this date on the calendar.   I would like to talk about yesterday's post , but before I do, a couple of notes from the Monday post .  First, I was pleased to see that Dr. Popcak acknowledges that approximately one out of every fifty Catholics are actually using NFP (i.e. 2%).   I've mentioned the same statistic before , but I am not sure people truly understand what 2% of the female population actually means.  For example, that's approximately the same percentage of the overall population of women who are U.S. military veterans .  Or, in another direction, it is the percentage of British women who prefer their man to wear a Speedo at the beach .  It is a very, very small number of people.  Nice to see a bit of reality creeping ...

Chapter 10 is about Natural Family Planning or NFP.  To keep the topic together, I am also going to skip ahead and also cover Chapter 15 in Part 4, entitled "When NFP is Too Hard," which deals with problems and objections involving NFP. For those that might not be familiar with NFP, the idea is that the woman monitors certain physical signs in her body to determine when she is or is not fertile, and then the couple avoids sex at those times in which she is fertile.  The mechanics of how this is done varies depending on which of several methods are employed.  As NFP supporters are eager to point out at every opportunity, it is not the "rhythm method," in the sense that it does not exclusively rely on counting out the days on the 28 day ovulation cycle.  It does involve attempting to map out that cycle in detail, using those physical symptoms to plot where the woman is in the cycle at a particular point in time.  I think it is fair to think of it as "Rhythm M...