Ephemera in die decimo Novembri; in praise of the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum

The Bollandists have been 'blogging for about four hundred years, only recently digitally. Previously they communicated only the old fashioned way -- all on paper, manuscript and print. But their network of subscribers was, and is, a worldwide web. And the basic method of organizing the prodigious work they've offered that network over the centuries -- they assign each subject of the biographies they unearth and publish to a particular date, thus creating a small library of entries for every day of the year -- is truly a calendared log. The subject matter of the Bollandists' 'blog is less this day's news cycle than all days' saecla-news. Ha!

Yes. OK. All that's a strained conceit, I know, because there are far fewer similarities than differences between their work and that of real bloggers. Well, really, there is only one similarity: The work of both is meant by their authors to be reviewed in small chunks each day.

And that's half my point. The other half is that there is this big difference:

Blogs are intended to be ephemeral thoughts, but the Acta Sanctorum are intended to be timeless thoughts, kind of dia-hemeral thoughts, if that's an apt coinage.

Bloggers intend their thoughts to be public chitchat not worth remembering beyond today. Or, even if they don't intend that, they usually achieve it all the same (your author un-excepted). But the Acta Sanctorum is intended to be just the opposite: Rather than daily broadcasting forgettable thoughts for daily public review and moving on, as bloggers do, the Bollandists collected, through centuries, thoughts forgotten by the public, and they brought them back, permanently, for daily public review. If the public please.

Maybe not edifying, but maybe so. And fun, I suspect some might find, too.

Anyhow, here's a link to the first few pages of the biography of one of the saints logged and feted in die decima Novembris, a certain Aidan, episcopus Killariensis (not the more famous Aidan of Lindisfarne). The Latin is easy (a lot of the Acta of the eastern saints are in Greek, too), the stories are quaint, and there might be something edifying in it, too.

PS - Note especially the naive suavity with which Aidan shrugs off the heavy implications of the angelic vision that that holy vagrant Brandan (sc. St. Brendan of Navigatio fame) describes on first meeting our hero.

Angels, eh? OKay! But you haven't seen my pigs, have you? My family will kill me if I come home without them.

In llinois IVF-blastocysts are not human beings

The Illinois Appellate Court in Chicago has just held that the state's wrongful death act does not apply to blastocysts created by in vitro fertilization before they are implanted in a woman's uterus. The decision is online at the court's website.

The decision employs the fairly rare, and often derided, technique of consulting the "legislative history" of a statute to construe its meaning. The technique is often derided because that "history" usually consists only of some remarks by the statute's sponsor (or sponsors) trying to soft-pedal something about the proposed bill that is controversial (as is the case in the legislative history quoted in this decision; the remarks deal with the interplay of the statutory amendment with abortion procedures, not IVF procedures). That technique, critics say, gives insight only into the thoughts of one person, rarely does that insight help construe the meaning of the words used, and never does it reveal the collective intent of the body by whose authority the bill became law.

I did some quick web research to see when the first IVF baby was born. It turns out that it was a year or two before the relevant statute was being debated (1979), so the Illinois General Assembly could have expressly included pre-implantation IVF blastocysts in its coverage. But the truth is, of course, that nobody ever thought of the problem before it came up in this case.

I read the decision quickly, but don't remember seeing citations to authorities outside of Illinois dealing with similar problems. Commenters, are there any that you know of?