Outside The Asylum

  Assume a "Coruscant Earth"- an Earth where *all* potential space is used, both land and sea, for a combination of food production and living space. Use the Permaculture formula of one acre per person of absorbed sunlight, with 100% conversion to whatever mass/energy combination we need to create food and energy of one person to live. Earth is about 510,000,000 km^2. There are 247 acres in a square kilometer. This yields (with much better technology than we currently have, of course) a maximum population of 125.97 billion people, each owning one acre. Of course various contracts would increase efficiency and there'd be the normal range of capitalism creating rich and poor in the long run, but at least there'd be an agreed upon base lifestyle- even if it's only a kayak with a net anchored at sea or a tent on land.

  What in the church fills me with life?  I can split it easily into three parts, none of which we've done well under COVID-19, but all of which I hope will one day return. 1. Fellowship- as I Knight I value fraternity.  But more than that, the old dinners and breakfasts and picnics and the easter egg hunt.  Perhaps if we can get the Knights and the Young mothers to lead, these signs of community life can return, as the danger of COVID-19 wanes. 2. Moral Certainty, leading to hope of salvation - this too under the extreme partisanship that has appeared under COVID-19 is something that I miss.  I used to shock everybody back in the 1990s by saying "I'm aiming for purgatory because I'm not good enough for Heaven, but if my Lord Jesus Christ sends me to Hell I shall gladly go and serve him there".  Little did I know that a political party would arise in Rome to take me up on the offer- and that the Sacraments themselves would be denied me under threat of a dis...

 In the February 1st  Voice of the Shepherd, Archbishop Sample informs us of his recent road trip to the largely rural parishes of Marion County in Oregon. This is an area that has been extremely Catholic for a very long time- every parish that he visited, celebrated a 100 year anniversary within the last 50 years, and one of the parishes he visited contains the grave of Archbishop Blanchet, first Bishop of the now defunct diocese of Oregon City, that the Archdiocese of Oregon replaced. The talk linked to above is well worth listening to, but one should be aware that in Oregon, there is a huge political gap between such small, rural, close knit communities and the Urban Majority, who has kept Democrats in power for the past 40 years. Due to this it is perhaps understandable that our dear Archbishop interpreted the encounter with a man who could be from my own family, as being primarily political when he asked for an end to pandemic restrictions such as mask mandates.  T...