So I'm doing some random surfing Sunday evening (our house was filled with 11 children, and my study is sequestered in a quiet corner of the basement), and I ran across a list of 25 promising occupations. I clicked on "clergy" and discovered that the median salary for clergy is currently $78,690. Does anybody else find that, um, high? Is this prosperity theology at its best? The median salary for architects is only $46,840, professors: $73,666, engineer: $72,156.
I'm told, incidentally, that my parish priest makes $5,000 a year and receives a small food allowance, housing, and whatever he gets from the Christmas offering. Does the Catholic Church really want married priests? If so, get ready to completely re-make the church's economic structure.
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David Warren is always good. In his most-recent column, he gives an overview of little-known essayist Lee Harris's views about our trouble with Islam. Sobering and thoughtful excerpt:
We are not dealing with an anomaly, as our use of that word “fanatic” would suggest, but with an alien social order that is perfectly viable on its own turf, and within its own terms, whose premises are entirely non-Western.
We in the West, and especially we in such places as North America and Australia, have lived so long and so comfortably with the contrary premises, that we cannot look at the enemy without translating his behaviour into what is familiar to us. We imagine him to be playing by our rules, even when he is obviously not. We dream about “negotiating.” We suffer hallucinations in which we describe the means and ends of the Jihadists in our own political vocabulary of give-and-take. We have been made myopic by the very success and endurance of our own social order, forgetting that it is itself a fluke of history.
There is no inevitable progress in this world towards democracy and the rule of law.
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From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Myrmidon. Any rude ruffian; so named from the soldiers of Achilles.
