A new project

I am sure some of you are wondering what has been going on - I have been busy, even with all the changes of the recent weeks. I have begun a new major writing project.

It is a book on a very important idea: subsidiarity - that is, the way of organizing individuals into groups and groups into larger groups, of justice and of society and of getting things done, of the human person, and families, and goverments. Some call it "Catholic Social Teaching" and think it is some dull, esoteric branch of social justice, chock full of complex terms - so people get bored because they think it is probably very abstract and not useful in a high-tech world.

Even stranger to report, this book will also include some of that stuff you saw in the two postings about my former company. For in that place, subsidiarity was implemented and found useful...

Yes, I doubt that even our intrepid friend known as "Rhapsody" was able to enlarge that artwork sufficiently to zoom in and read the title on that little yellow book. It is none other than that great masterwork of the late 19th century, Rerum Novarum, by Pope Leo XIII.

For there, in that Control Room, all the operators knew that our transport machinery was performing SUBSIDIARITY...

But for more details, you will have to wait.

So please pray that I will be able to write well on this important topic.

Meanwhile, I have some other stories to do, and then there's that work thing. And you are probably wishing there was a new poem or something. And there is fresh unpainted canvas beckoning as well... well, let me see what I can do. OK, it took lots longer than I had hoped:

Secret Arts

Somewhere in Rome, is a work of art great
God and that first man whom God did create:
A master design so carefully planned
Vast inches between His Hand and his hand.

A "spark struck off" you may have heard
Three gigs [*] excerpted from the Word,
Made in His image, made first to be,
To love and know: the All to see.

For as D. L. Sayers said,
(The Maker's mind a writer read)
Creation just is not complete
Without that one three-fold repeat.

And so when I had to design
A system far, far from divine,
Its smallest task thus had to be
Built as if performed by me.

This secret very few will tell:
Software, like music, can't excel
Its writer's skill to make his own
The tasks and rhythm, time and tone.

The hobbits (Tolkien once did sing)
Heard how Sauron made his Ring:
Of his strength he put some part
But such is true of every art.

Art's secret, and each artist's goal
Is sharing part of one's own soul.
In subcreation, poor or great,
Our God we thereby imitate.

9/11/2005

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* "three gigs" - this means the roughly three gigabases (3,000,000,000) of the human DNA sequence. The Word - the Second Person of the Trinity.