Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law, and Occupy Wall Street

This could well be a sign held by an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator: 

Those things which some possess in excess of reasonable needs are owed by natural law to the sustenance of the poor.

The Catholic theologian who stated this?  Thomas Aquinas, the "angelic doctor" who is often cited by the magisterium as the Catholic theologian of all time.  The citation is from Aquinas' Summa Theologiae II.II, 66, art. 7.

News Tidbits: Maddow on Gay Marriage, Alabama Immigration Law, Occupy Wall Street

A number of disparate news stories that have caught my eye in recent days, which I'd like to mention as the week ends:

1. I like Rachel Maddow.  But I do think James Peron makes a valuable point about her misgivings re: marriage equality and the end of gay culture.  As I've noted before on this blog, while affluent gay folks living in educated, powerful cultural centers of the nation entertain the question of whether gay culture is waning (and/or should wane), a large number of us live in the heartland.  Where just being gay and out of the closet is still problematic and sometimes dangerous, especially for younger folks.

Weekend Resources to Feed the Spirit: Phil Ewing on Desmond Tutu, Tom Beaudoin on Occupy Wall Street

Food for the spirit at the end of a long week:

At her beautiful Blue-Eyed Ennis site, Phil Ewing posted two tributes to Desmond Tutu recently on the occasion of his 80th birthday--here and here.  I particularly like the video resources Phil includes in both postings.  In the first of the two pieces, Michael Scherer of Time interviews Tutu in one of the magazine's "10 questions" segments.  And the second links to an AP clip of Tutu's birthday celebration at St. George's cathedral in Capetown, in which Bono sings for his "boss."

Daniel Maguire Gets the Commonweal Crowd Right

And speaking of centrist Catholic opinion makers who predictably tack right while they inform us that they and they alone represent what Catholicism is really all about, ignoring all the while the wide divergence between their hierarchy-serving positions and those of the large majority of their fellow Catholics (I'm building here on comments I've just made about John Allen's latest advertisement for Rome and the U.S. bishops):

John Allen on Religious Freedom: Premier Catholic Concern of 2011

Remember how, when 2011 began, I started blogging about the sudden discovery of the notion of religious freedom by Catholic pastoral leaders, and by the religious right in general?  I pointed out Pope Benedict's sudden preoccupation with the concept right as the year began, and then I noted how Cardinal Pell, ever the pope's loyal man and a darling of the Catholic right wing around the world, took up the theme that Catholics' religious liberty is under assault and that religious freedom is the Ur-value on which all other values rest, immediately after Benedict began pressing these points from the very beginning of the year.

I Meet (and Re-Meet) Cousins

I don't think I've blogged about this yet, but the past few weeks have been interesting ones of reconnecting to cousins I haven't seen in some time, and, in a few cases, meeting cousins I hadn't yet met.  I haven't really planned for all of these meet-and-greet sessions to happen at one time.  Life has simply brought them my way, all at once.

Quote for Day: Jay Michaelson on Queer Discernment and the Huck Finn Moment

Quote for today: Jay Michaelson writing at Religion Dispatches about tshuvah, the call to repentance during Yom Kippur, and the dangerous heteronomous ethics with which we end up when we absolutize biblical texts and refuse to respect the process of interpretation that requires us to wrestle with texts if we're ever to fathom their authentic meaning or to make that meaning significant for our own lives: