Life keeps getting better! Plus an Unintelligible Rant.

I just found out that the $4000/semester cost of housing at school includes free local phone, free high speed 'net and a potential 17 meals/week! Sweet. Though, if I work it out on paper... (this is the part where I exercise my feeble math skills) Dang. It still costs more to live at school than at my house.

Waitasec. Maybe not.

I didn't take into account the savings in gasoline and auto maintenance. I might just be breaking even. Oh well, that’s okay. If I was living at home, I wouldn’t get to participate in all the “student life” activities I just found out about.

That’s right folks. Catholics like to party. According to the Student Life Office, we like to party once a month, and then only according to the Dogmatic Constitution on Holy-Hellraising and its interpretive document The General Instruction on the Roman Kegger. Of course both documents are open to vast interpretations based on their historical context. Holy-Hellraising was written in a time of greater partiological freedom and innovation, but the GIRK was written more recently to counter what some considered to be “abuses” in partiological practice. Hence, many of the seemingly obvious provisions in Holy-Hellraising for culturally significant and relevant food, drink, and music have been reduced in the GIRK to exclude everything except flat-bread (with hummus), red wine and Journey. We hope that with the election of a German pope, some of the restrictions (on stout and bratwurst for example) will be removed.

The historical archetypes for the monthly Catholic parties can be found in Scripture, but recent historical criticism has discovered that Jesus and the disciples in fact partied far more often. Not only that, but the more we learn about the historical Jesus, the more likely it becomes that women actually threw parties which Jesus attended. It also appears that anyone who knew how to throw a good party was good enough for Jesus. Given these findings, scriptural scholars are in a position to challenge, ever so gently, the Catholic doctrines of the monthly party and the requirement that all party hosts be men specifically designated to party. However, in the current climate in the Church, it may not be prudent to push these issues.

In conclusion, all Catholic intellectual party-goers can do is get together once in a while, outside the auspices of the monthly Catholic party, and continue to develop their informed criticism of the reactionary GIRK, placing it in its proper historical context. They must never cease to study the history of partying in the Church from its origins, and test the doctrine against history rather than to interpret scripture to uphold a doctrine with no basis in history.