confused Posts

Please read Galante and Follieri: the Bishop and the Con Man, which lays out the details mentioned in this post.

The Diocese of Camden is in frantic spin control mode after yesterday's revelations that Bishop Galante personally received $400,000 from high flying Eurotrash con man Raffaelo Follieri for the sale of a beach house the Bishop had been unable to unload. Follieri's the guy who's been trying to buy up Catholic church properties across the country while making out with his Hollywood girlfriend on San Tropez beaches and partying it up with Bill Clinton's sleezy billionaire buddies.

It seems like a pretty clear cut case. Galante had his hand in Follieri's cookie jar. Sold his beach house to the guy who stood to profit most from the Bishop's plan to sell off half of South Jersey's churches. Oldest story in the book. Give him the cell next to Follieri's and they can reminisce about the good old days (NSFW).

I've been wondering just how the Diocese would try to spin this story as it waits for federal investigators to come knocking at the door. And today the official Spokesperson in Charge of Fairy Tales called up all the papers. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with:

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Turns out someone at the Vatican called someone at the Diocesan offices back in 2004 telling them to sell to Follieri. That's it. No one can remember who made the call. No one can remember who took the call. For all we know Follieri filled his mouth with cotton balls and did his best Marlon Brando imitation from the pay phone across the street.

The Archdioceses in Boston, New York, Newark and elsewhere told Follieri they had enough bridges thank you very much, but poor Grandpa Joe was confused and started lending him priests and giving him the keys to the beach house.

How could anyone imagine that Follieri was a crook? He seemed like any other Mother Teresa choir boy with his $10,000 suits, New York penthouse, heroin habit, convicted mob associates, San Tropez weekends and expensively-maintained Hollywood girlfriend. "Nobody was aware of problems with Mr. Follieri or his company at that time." Yeah right. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. And I'm the widow of the late John Paul II, recently deceased President of the Vatican, with frozen assets in Nigeria I'd like your help in securing. Please email me back at your earliest convenience Andy Walton, I know you won't be disappointed.

• Flourishing Jaime wonders if pacifism really is a Quaker belief
  Quakers have made a doctrine out of pacifism when it was not intended to be so. Fox [argued] pacifism based on personal feelings against serving as an officer in the army. [Early Fds] never explicitly state that to be Quaker means to be pacifist.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Johan M on Quaker scale in a church where there are three services each Sunday
  I was curious about how it would feel inside to speak three times from essentially the same burst of inspiration. Would it feel artificial the third time--would the inspiration "wear out"?. Would I get confused?
  (tags: quaker quaker.evangelical quaker.ministry)
• Allison on outsider pain
  I guess the way to heal in this situation that causes me pain is to forgive. First, forgive myself, allow myself to mourn the fact that the place that feels good to me is full of people that don't look like me.
  (tags: comment)

I've moved the Quaker Blog Watch material to a new website, QuakerQuaker.org. It's more-or-less the same material with more-or-less the same design but the project has become popular enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of making it more collaborative in the near-future.

You can subscribe to the QuakerQuaker Watch via Bloglines or to the daily email by following the links. If you're already following the Watch in a subscription reader, you should change the source of the feed to http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker if you don't want to miss out on any future innovations. If you have the Watch currently listed in your blog's sidebar you won't have to change anything.

At some point when the dust of the move has settled (and I have the new Quakerfinder.org launched as part of my FGC work), I'll take a moment to wax philosophical about the evolution of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the meantime, let me know if anything is broken, confused or grammatically mangled.

A kind of retrospective history of the project is available on the quakerquaker thread of the Ranter.

This past weekend I took part in a "Youth Ministries Consultation" sponsored by Friends General Conference. Thirty Friends, most under the age of 35, came together to talk about their experience of Quakerism.

A guest piece by David, originally posted on the Plain and Modest Dress Yahoo Group

"Here are a few things I do know that apply to me. First, I feel very at odds with our society that focuses on the most superfical things. Our society spends BILLIONS on make-up, hair dye, plastic surgery, breast inplants, push-up bras, designer clothes... Beyond that, my feelings about plain dressing get less clear. Is a uniform what I am seeking? Those groups who were very uniform clothing tend to be insular and often attact as much attention to themselves as a belly shirt and designer jeans!"

When I posted the Slate article last night I missed that the New York Times' From the Editor piece had been published

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into iraq... It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In the last year we've become accustomed to reading newspaper apologies. The medium itself is shifting, in response to 24-hour cable news programs and innumerable news websites. The old newspapers themselves are less about detail and more about context. There's more of an editorial voice coming in and more attention to good writing and story-telling. Papers like the Times are becoming daily magazines. The pressures for good stories has led editors to overlook lapses in the work of star reporters like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. This new era of apologies is a correction of sorts, and the major papers' reaffirmation of their strict accuracy standards perhaps signals a commitment to hold the line of newspaper transformation right here.

Perhaps. "From the Editors" doesn't feel honest to me. It's full of details and reads more like an combined "Corrections" piece for the last two years. By nitpicking on each error with such diligence, the message is that the mistakes have been one of details. "From the Editors" talk about the "critics of our coverage" in a way that makes it clear that this piece is a defense, not a mea culpa. The editor's unstated message is that anyone who would critique them is overly obsessed with details.

But we're not talking details. Most Americans have had their post-9/11 worldviews shaped by news organizations that had decided that critical thinking was unpatriotic. The Times coverage has actually been better than most. Watch the unsubstantiated hyped-up garbage that runs of most local TV news and you'll see scare-mongering continuing every night. Even as Americans slowly rethink this war and even as President Bush's polls drop, we can't undo that two major wars have been fought with faulty information.

The mainstream media still aren't asking the right questions, following up the details, asking critical questions or putting the news into larger context. At this point, the Bush Administration's national security credibility has been used up. There were no weapons of mass destruction in iraq, Saddam Hussein had no hand in 9/11, opposition iraqi "leader" (and Bush favorite) Ahmed Chalabi is not a trustworthy fellow. Add to that the mess that is the Afghanistan and iraq occupations. The U.S news media shouldn't publish anything coming from the offices of the Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, or Attorney General Ashcroft without collaborating evidence from at least three independent sources. The national news media needs more of apology than this if it's going to mollify the critics.

Update May 28:

Today's column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, To Tell the Truth, also talks about how the news media protected President Bush and his administration's war claims from any serious questioning:

People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness... But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened?

In the Bruderhof magazine, an "interview with actor Martin Sheen":www.bruderhof.com/articles/sheen.htm?source=DailyDig. It's a profile that focuses not only on his acting fame or activist causes but on his religious faith and how it underpins the rest of his life. Read, for instance, Sheen on civil disobedience: bq. It is one of the only tools that is available to us where you can express a deeply personal, deeply moral opinion and be held accountable. You have to be prepared for the consequences. I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it. Sheen's radical Catholic faith is not a superficial confession that provides him with a place to go on Sunday morning, and it's not passive identity from which to do political organizing. Rather, it's a relationship with God and truth that demands witness and sacrifice and suffering. It's the faith of someone who has personally gone through the depths of spiritual hedonism, and who has watched his country become the "most confused, warped, addicted society," and who has found only God left standing: bq. God has not abandoned us. I don't know what other force to appeal to other than almighty God, I really don't. I could quote him for hours, but read the interview.