The final stretch

So here we are, the last two weeks of the semester! Actually it's just a week and 3 days. I still have all of my end-of-the-semester coursework due, beginning with a paper and final quiz in Film on Monday. Things are moving along well, but there is still plenty of work to do. We also have our Lessons & Carols service this Tuesday evening (see the St. Clement Shrine website for more information and join us if you're in the Boston area!)

Pope Benedict XVI has made his Christmas wishes public at the lighting of the mountain-sized Christmas tree of lights in Gubbio, Italy. Zenit published his wishes this week. The pontiff asked:

1. "that our gaze, that of our minds and our hearts, not rest only on the horizon of this world, on its material things, but that in some way, like this tree that tends upward, it be directed toward God. God never forgets us but He also asks that we don't forget Him;"
2. "that we recall that we also need a light to illumine the path of our lives and to give us hope, especially in this time in which we feel so greatly the weight of difficulties, of problems, of suffering, and it seems that we are enshrouded in a veil of darkness. But what light can truly illuminate our hearts and give us a firm and sure hope? It is the Child whom we contemplate on Christmas, in a poor and humble manger, because He is the Lord who draws near to each of us and asks that we receive Him anew in our lives, asks us to want Him, to trust in Him, to feel His presence, that He is accompanying us, sustaining us, and helping us;" and
3. "that each of us contribute something of that light to the spheres in which we live: our families, our jobs, our neighborhoods, towns, and cities."

Let us align our intentions with those of Peter and seek to embody these wishes in our own lives.

Something that lies at the intersection of the topics of this blog and my technical blog (Penguins 'R' Us) is the recent introduction of .xxx domain names on the Internet to designate sites with "adult content." A news story that was tagged as being relevant to the computer programming field described a business move by prominent academic institutions and various corporations to acquire the .xxx domain names that contain their respective trademarks and brand identities, in order prevent the public from scandal through a presumed affiliation of these organizations with the less-reputable web content that could be posted to sites hosted on those domains. This technique, known as domain squatting, is not an unfamiliar process for large companies, but this is a nuanced case that was not possible until the ICANN decided that it would permit the new .xxx top-level domain (TLD) suffix earlier this year. On the philosophical level, it is an interesting question to ask - is the public availability of .xxx domains a good thing or not? On the one hand, it does enable organizations to filter network traffic to exclude traffic from all .xxx domains, which is much easier than human-assisted blacklisting or keyword-based blacklisting (which inevitably yields both false positives and fails to identify other sites that the organization would desire to block). On the other hand, adult content can still be present on .com and other TLDs, and the press coverage and time and energy spent by the ICANN to decide whether to offer .xxx certainly drew attention to the multi-billion dollar industry and now provides a space within which it can thrive, in a sense enabling and possibly even legitimizing its existence and proliferation. It remains to be seen what economic and ideological impact this move will have on the adult website industry and on consumers of the Internet in general. As always, we can always pray and sacrifice more for the triumph of the culture of life over the culture of death, of which the adult website industry is a strong part, and we can do our part to call attention to the violence that it does to human dignity across the board.

Now it is time to prepare for Mass and then take to the kitchen for a Southeast Asian culinary adventure!

Love the Immaculata!
Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca