Seven "New" Not-so-Deadly Sins
A couple of weeks ago, several news organizations released the story
that the Catholic Church had updated the Seven Deadly Sins by adding
seven more. Organizations such as Fox News, the London Telegraph, and
BBC News reported that damaging the environment, genetic manipulation,
abortion, excessive wealth, contributing to socioeconomic gaps,
pedophilia, and drug dealing were the seven “new” deadly sins. These
new sins were based on an interview with Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti
in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, where he stated that
because the world is becoming increasingly global, sin takes on a new
global dimension. News organizations jumped at this information and
reported that the Vatican had altered its well known list and added
these seven new more global sins.
Many of our readers may have seen the signs advertising Eve Ensler’s upcoming speech and book signing here in honor of V-Day. Many students new to Vanderbilt may also have wondered, “Who is Eve Ensler?” and “What the heck is a V-Day?”
Edward J. Renehan Jr’s new biography Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt is the first major biography of our university’s founder in almost seventy years, and that is the most interesting aspect about the book. It reads like three hundred pages of the most boring paragraph of a U. S. History textbook, touting fact after uninteresting fact, and, as with a textbook, the reader may find himself rereading the same sentence twenty times without realizing it, or reading ten pages before noticing that he has not grasped a single word of what he just read.
