Wednesday, May 12, 2010

GOOD for Abp Listecki!!

The right call at the right time.

Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki and the judicial vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee separately raised red flags over Marquette's hiring of a Seattle University professor as Arts and Sciences dean.

Listecki called Marquette President Father Robert A. Wild about the university's offer to Jodi O'Brien after receiving calls from clergy and lay leaders, the archbishop's spokeswoman said.

Also expressing concerns about O'Brien's appointment was Father Paul Hartmann, the archdiocese's judicial vicar.

(Hartmann also dealt with the principal of Catholic Memorial HS after that twit put up a large "Obama for President" sign in his yard, directly across the street from the school. The principal is no longer with the school.)

As to O'Brien, there's little doubt about her.

"Besides articles explicitly advocating gay marriage, her writings included an article ("Changing the Subject") on whether there are closets in cyberspace, which alternated turgid post-modernist prose with imaginative lesbian sex vignettes and dialogue, including gender-bending and domination.

"The problem with theories of social construction - which assume that there are no fixed "natures" of things that determine what they are - is that they are self-contradictory. If everything is socially constructed, then the theory of social construction is socially constructed - we have no reason to think it says anything about reality itself.

"That is not a problem for social constructionists, who always put "reality" in quotation marks because they deny that there is such a thing. But for others, it is a serious problem. Why should we bother attending to social constructions at all? Their answer is simply that we can or cannot, depending on whether we feel like it. But there is no reason to do so or not do so.

"And that is the nub of the problem: no reason." --Christopher Wolfe

Listecki, Hartmann, and (eventually) Wild noticed that if irrationality were to enter MU's domain, there would be 'no reason' for Marquette to continue to exist, and certainly 'no reason' to have an Archbishop, whose principal duties are to "teach, sanctify, and govern" his flock.

Kudos to the Archbishop and Fr. Hartmann!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pitter patter goes the heart of Patrick M., your partner in crime! Sad indeed!

Marquette can make their own decisions, thank you very little!

GOR said...

And to all the undergraduate twits protesting the withdrawal of the job offer: the issue is not that the offer was withdrawn, it is that it was ever made in the first place.

That she was even considered says a lot about the Marquette 'Search Committee' - just dumb or have they an agenda?