Attention Lutherans. Please read this

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Well, I found some prose - which I CAN download and CAN read. Some extracts:

The spending of the charity money received has been criticized by some. Christopher Hitchens and the German magazine Stern have said Mother Teresa did not focus donated money on alleviating poverty or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new convents and increasing missionary work.[55]
Additionally, the sources of some donations accepted have been criticized. Mother Teresa accepted donations from the autocratic and corrupt Duvalier family in Haiti and openly praised them. She also accepted 1.4 million dollars from Charles Keating, involved in the fraud and corruption scheme known as the Keating Five scandal and supported him before and after his arrest. The Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, Paul Turley, wrote to Mother Teresa asking her to return the donated money to the people Keating had stolen from, one of whom was "a poor carpenter". The donated money was not accounted for, and Turley did not receive a reply.
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Mother Teresa of Calcutta is one of the most admired and respected persons of human history. Yet her approach to human suffering is a serious challenge to the American spirit of efficiency. Mother Teresa and her sisters, The Missionaries of Charity, do not mount efficient, high tech programs to change the political, social and economic lives of the poor. From their world of faith, they see Jesus, their God and Saviour, in the poorest of the poor, the rejected, the neglected and abused ... The sisters serve the individual, providing more loving comfort than medical healing, and do virtually no activism for systemic change. ...
Joe Bentivegna comes up against the "Mother Teresa syndrome" and rejects it. Comforting the individual is not enough to count as success. He realizes he cannot fix Haiti. He has heart breaking experiences of healing people only to return them to the impoverished environment which destroys them in short order.
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During one of her hospitalizations in Calcutta, the local archbishop noticed that Mother T had a habit of fitfully pulling out her EKG sensors at night. He told her that she "might be under the attack of the evil one" and offered to arrange an exorcism. She agreed. After it was over, the archbishop says M.T. "slept like a baby." From which one could reasonably conclude that Satan had indeed been working to possess her.
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Okay.
So her big sins seem to be (not going for a full list):
A. She was a small but feisty Albanian woman. I can tell you some things about Albanian women. They are, let us say, strong willed and not everybody's cup of tea..
B. She did not try to evangelize the people she brought in.
C. She did not try to change the societies she was working in.
D. She took money the wrong people.
E. She said positive things about bad people.
F, She seems to have indicated it is possible to be saved outside the Roman Catholic Church.
G. She had problems with some Vatican II reforms.
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You know what? All that sounds like she was a Catholic Albanian woman not constitutionally designed for conformity and submissiveness.
Kind of like Hilary Clinton if she were Catholic and Albanian.
How does ruveyn feel about Hilary? Should she die?

If you wanted to discuss - not debate, not restate - some of the very interesting issues in these various quotes, including the question of donations, the question of calling, the roles in religious orders of poverty, chastity, obedience, stability and if there be any other .. - I could not guarantee either of us would reformulate our current position in light of new data or different viewpoints, bu there are certainly some interesting questions.

At present, everything coming in on the lady confirms my analysis. I worked for two years with an Albanian woman as supervisor - a tall one, but not dissimilar. I know what it is like - what they are like to deal with.

There is a very good book I just recently read:

http://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Little-H ... 886&sr=8-1

If the topic of poverty chastity and all is of interest, this is not irrelevant. By no means theoretical and not religious in mindset, but it illustrates the topics very clearly.

"perhaps i should just discuss the book without even reading a synopses. i feel this would more appropriately fit your style. perhaps the reason you doubt whether either of us would reformulate our current position in light of new data or different viewpoints is that you don't expect to read/watch/listen to any new data or different viewpoints. this is no way to discuss any topic"

You clearly have not been watching my style. If you go a couple posts back you will see that I scurried around to find a few relevant sources of data on the Haiti reference. I am constantly pulling in new data - and with those who will discuss different viewpoints. If you came to my office [while I still had one] and talked I would gladly listen, respond, ask questions, bring up relevant data from my stock - then process anything you came out with.

I will not try to watch video snips, no - technically hard for me, and usually unproductive. Certain inputs do not work as well as others. My wife can listen to books on tape all day long and get much out of it. I can't - that kind of oral delivery makes my mind turn off. It was a problem in courses whereI had to be attentive to lectures. I can read. Good at it. And I can talk - discussion does not shut my ears down.

I also will not try to read Hitchens. My mind can receive very well from some personalities, not from others. I can read Feynman on physics and even when he says something counterintuitive I am inclined to take it as wofrking hypothesis pending more data. If I read Hawking, it is not so. I do not take what he says as probably false, but it carries no conviction and I would need many data to decide to agree.

Hitchens - I have known and dealt with several of his general style - and that type interacts with me in such a way that if he agreed with me I would start to doubt my position. Little point my reading his stuff - whatever it is, it will just set me off, need to find someone else talking about it. I could handle you summarizing Hitchens - but not him direct. That is how my brain operates.

The REAL reason I doubt either of us would significantly reformulate our positions - if you are interested enough to have read this far - is this:

First - why I would not likely shift gears:

I have experience of the Mother Teresa type - several varieties, face to face interaction. Like my friend Hieronymos - Jerome to you - she may be a saint, but she is no picnic to deal with or work under, and she is by no means perfect.

Stripped of hype pro and hype con - which is a necessary step - everything I have seen and read about her - which is not limited to today nor to her fans - is totally consistent with the type of person she appears to have been and readily accounts for the complaints about her from Evangelicals, from traditional Catholics, from liberal Catholics, from social activists, and all the many other people she will - how well I know it - have annoyed.

To change that view would take some significant data from a clearly reliable source. The Susan Shields thing seems a good source - but its content just focusses the picture, does not change it.

Second, why I THINK - just hypothesis, I could easily be wrong - you would not change:

If you can receive from Hitchens - which it seems you can - that says your mind works on a different wavelength from mine. Experience shows that some people cannot readily receive data from me, as I cannot from people of Hitchen's probable type. Some - like my Oprah and View watching sister in law, can barely hear me talking, let alone process the words.

And in fact, previous interchanges in other threads show a clear pattern where we often find one another's posts irritating , or irrelevant, but certainly not convincing.

So it is not stubbornness, reluctance, unwillingness - just it is hard for an AM radio to pull in an FM signal.

We can talk about who gets to be FM some other time.