Political, Religious, and Social Commentaries
The Struggle for Dignity, Justice, and Equality in the 21st Century
Monsignor John W. Sweeley, Th.D.
the commentaries included in each book of the series are cited below
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
As a Democratic Socialist since college and as that term is understood in European politics and by the Roman Catholic Church's understanding of Democratic Socialism as a positive value in moral theology, for much of my life I didn't see a compelling difference between the Democratic and the Republican Parties. And, although my parents were Republicans, they were Republicans in the mold of the political theorist and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. and U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater who was known as "Mr. Conservative". As a consequence, although my political inclinations leaned to the left, I was not a political person as neither Party represented the core values of my political beliefs.
All of that changed with the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush in 1999. It quickly became obvious to me, Mr. Bush was a very different kind of Republican than were my parents and posed a clear and present danger to America and all Americans. As a baseball fan, I knew as president of the Texas Rangers Baseball Team he had run the organization into the ground. More telling, he had bought the team with the profit he made from selling the oil company he owned just days before it went bankrupt leaving his investors to lose their money while Mr. Bush skated away with a significant profit without so much as a twinge to his conscience.
This is how it happened. Mr. Bush had sold his company, Arbusto Energy, to Spectrum 7 in 1984 with himself as its new CEO and then merged Spectrum 7 with Harken Energy in 1986 becoming one of its Directors. In 1989, Mr. bush and his co-investors bought the Texas Rangers Baseball Team. Mr. Bush received a 2% share for an investment of $606,302 of which $500,000 was financed by a bank loan. Against legal advice, he paid off the bank loan by selling $848,000 worth of his stock in Harken Energy.
According to Craig Unger, Mr. Bush sold his stock when Harken Energy was scheduled to run out of money to operate within the next three days. This led to charges of insider trading, but Mr. Bush again skated away when in 1992 the Security and Exchange Commission, whose president had been appointed by Mr. Bush's father George H.W. Bush who was at that time President of the United States, concluded George W. Bush had a "pre-existing plan" to sell his stock and that he had a "relatively limited role in Harken Management". The SEC also stated their decision, "Must in no way be construed as indicating the party [Mr. Bush] has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result."
In short, I knew Mr. Bush was a man not to be trusted to walk my dog to say nothing about being president of the United States of America. However, the biggest red flag raised by Mr. Bush was his mantra that he was a "compassionate conservative". Aside from this phrase being an oxymoron, I was well aware that Texas has a well established history of being the state with the highest number of persons executed per year and that in all the years he was governor, Mr. Bush never found a reason to exercise his self-proclaimed "compassion" by granting a condemned man or woman executive clemency or a pardon which would have reduced their sentence of capital punishment to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
To me, this made John Wayne in The Shootist look like a choirboy.
However, the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back was the Florida fiasco of fraudulent vote counting in the 2000 election when Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, was the Florida State Governor and the Registrar of the State was a political confidant of the Bush family. It is from this toxic combination of reprobates the decision was made to cancel the recount of votes due to the demonstration against it that was later found to be Republican Radicals brought to Florida to disrupt the recount including a plane load of demonstrators on the private airplane of Republican Speaker of the House, Tom Delay.
This fiasco is what led to the 2000 election being decided by the Supreme Court of which 5 of the 9 Justices had been appointed by either Ronald Reagan or George Herbert Walker Bush who is George W. Bush's father with 3 being appointed by Robert Reagan and 2 by George Herbert Walker Bush (David Souter and Clarence Thomas). To the discredit of Justices Souter and Thomas, they refused to recuse themselves to avoid the possibility of favoritism and voted to nominate (not elect by the will of the people) George W. Bush as president.
To paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet, something smelled rotten but it was not in Denmark. Instead, the stink was uniquely American and it was George W. Bush both for his unethical if not illegal business practices and becasue the Bush's had stolen the 2000 election by first stopping the recount of Florida votes when Mr. Bush was clearly behind, and then orchestrating the decision be made by the biased Supreme Court Justices two of whom were put on the Court by Mr. Bush's father.
The events described above jolted me into the reality that with the advent of George W. Bush as president, America had begun a downward slide to the right into Fascism. As Mr. Bush's presidency unfolded, it became obvious that I had to do all I could to illuminate and oppose the evil he was perpetrating on both America and the American people.
But, what could I do as one person? It was then I remembered the old saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword.
That sentence crystallizes similar thoughts that had been expressed in earlier forms. It was coined by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. The play is about Cardinal Richelieu, although the author stated his words take, "license with dates and details...has been, though not unsparingly, indulged."
The Cardinal's lines in Act II, scene II, discloses this more fully:
True, This! --
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword, Behold
The arch-enchanter's wand! -- itself is nothing! --
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyze the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! -- Take away the sword --
States can be saved without it!
With these words in mind, I began two projects. The first is my book, Rights, Liberties, and Social Justice: The Ethics and Politics of Science and Religion, Abortion, Intelligent Design, Women's Rights, and the Separation between Church and State. This book is a critique of these and other topics from the perspective of a Democratic Socialist as well as from the liberal Roman Catholic point of view.
The second was to write political, religious, and social commentaries that were a refutation of the hubris, policies, and political agenda of the Radical Religious-Right and Bush Neoconservatives. Over time, I also included additional topics that piqued my interest.
Heuristic Philologia is the series title for books I have titled, Political, Religious, and Social Commentaries: The Struggle for Dignity, Justice, and Equality in 21st Century America. In this series, all of the commentaries I have written are found in alphabetical order with the books published as an encyclopedia.
Volume 1: A-Am (250 pages)
Commentaries
1968: De Javu All Over Again
A Different Drummer: Memories of Ghana
A Few Thoughts on Prostitution
A Limerick to the Brassiere
A New Approach to Abortion
Abortion: A Constitutional Issue or a States Rights Issue?
Abortion and Notre Dame: Response to a Friend
Abortion and the Echo of Eugenics
Abortion Studies: What Happened to the Research Design?
Abortion and the Nature of Truth: Reflections on the Assassination of Dr.George Tiller;
A Dialogue between a Conservative And Liberal Catholic
A Priest's Prayer
A Psycholinguistic Proof of Ghosts
A Roman Catholic Church in Saudi Arabia
A Short History of the Catholic Apostolic Church of Antioch
Acts of the Apostles: Exegesis in a Nutshell by Q and A
Adam Talks with God about Eve
Adolf Hitler: World War I Hero and Political Genius
Adoption, Mothers, and Angst: Response to a Friend
Adoption: Ethics and Accountability
Adoption History: The Case for Open Records
Adoption Reform: The Quest for Open Records
Akkadian, Aramaic, Arabic, and Avestan: The Four Lingua Frankas of the Ancient Near East
Amazon Warriors: Fact of Fiction?
American Cabal: The puppet Master of American Politics and Policy
Volume 2: AM-AZ (298 pages)
America in Crisis 2000-2014: The Difference between Liberals and Conservatives;
Rise Up America; There Comes a Time
American Evangelicals Inspire Ugandan Law: Death to Homosexuals
America's Multi-Billion Dollar Prison Industry
America's Political Exhaustion
America's Sexism
Amos, Hosea, and the Republican Party
An Informed Conscience as the Hermeneutic for Co-Authenticity Between
the Roman Catholic Church and Independent Catholicism
A Reinterpretation of Communicato in Sacris According to the Hermeneutic of
Reciprocity of Consciences as it Pertains to Independent Catholicism
Ancient Syrian Advent/Christmas Theology: The Virgin Mary as You Have Never Understood Her
Anthropocentric Deity: Humanity's Need to Create Religion
Anti-Catholicism in America: The Wages of Sin
Anti-Catholicism or Legitimate Critique: Apologists v.Critics
Anti-Semitism: The Perverted Faith of Our Fathers
Archbishop Frank Bugee: Esoteric Scholar
Archbishop Raymond Burke: An Open Letter
Are My Beliefs Esoteric, Exoteric, Protestant, or Catholic: Response to a Grieving Mother
Are The Tea Partiers Woodstock II?
Assisted Suicide: The Right to Die with Dignity
Augustine's View on the Episcopacy
Avestan Cleanliness: The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees
Volume 3: C D (285 pages)
Baltimore City Public Schools: Critique and Analysis
Baptism: Invitation to Receive Grace and Salvation
Barack, Sarah, and the Bible
Bars Where Everyone Knows Your Name
Biblical Inerrancy versus The Historical Critical Method and Tools of Modern Biblical Criticism
Birth Mother Access to Adoption Records
Bishops Must be Held Accountable for the Roman Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal
Bleeding Red and Green: Celtics 2008 NBA Champions
Bona Fides and Buffoons
Book Review: The Mind of Islam by Laurent Murawiec
Buber's Ich Und Du and American Imperialism
Called versus Invitation in Biblical Scholarship
Canons of the First Four Ecumenical Councils
Cardinal Bertone's Blast: The Church's Gideon's Trumpet and Smoke Pot
Cardinal Law and the Boston Sex Abuse Scandal
Catholic Charities Snafu and Closed Adoption Records
Catholic Just War Theory Applied to America's Wars against Iraq and Afghanistan
Commentary on how Liturgical and Doctrinal Decisions are Made in the Roman Catholic Church
Cemeteries and the American Way of Death
Censorship, Conscience, and Suffering Fools
Chicken Chaplain: The Corporate Cluck
Christian Terrorists: America's Radical Religious-Right
Christmas
Clergy as Homeland Security Agents
Commentary on Bishop Robinson's Trip to Lambeth
Communicatio in Sacris via the Hermeneutic of Reciprocity of Consciences
Condoms: For Health or For Fun
Conscience: A review of its Understanding by Daniel Macguire, Timothy O'Connell, Bernard Haring, and John Henry Newman
Conservative Economic and Political Theory: Recipe for Disaster
Conservative Republican Tea Partiers
Conservatives, Bullshit, and Stooping to Conquer
Creation, History, and Eschatology
Curriculum: Continuing Education Units and Continuing Professional Units in Classical Theology