St Augustine, Tea Partier...

From a good talk by Archbishop Chaput:

...Robert Dodaro, the Augustinian priest and scholar, wrote a wonderful book a few years ago called Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine. In his book and elsewhere, Dodaro makes four key points about Augustine's view of Christianity and politics.

First, Augustine never really offers a political theory, and there's a reason. He doesn't believe human beings can know or create perfect justice in this world. Our judgment is always flawed by our sinfulness. Therefore, the right starting point for any Christian politics is humility, modesty and a very sober realism.

Second, no political order, no matter how seemingly good, can ever constitute a just society. Errors in moral judgment can't be avoided. These errors also grow exponentially in their complexity as they move from lower to higher levels of society and governance. Therefore the Christian needs to be loyal to her nation and obedient to its legitimate rulers. But she also needs to cultivate a critical vigilance about both.

Third, despite these concerns, Christians still have a duty to take part in public life according to their God-given abilities, even when their faith brings them into conflict with public authority.  We can't simply ignore or withdraw from civic affairs. The reason is simple. The classic civic virtues named by Cicero – prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance – can be renewed and elevated, to the benefit of all citizens, by the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. Therefore, political engagement is a worthy Christian task, and public office is an honorable Christian vocation.

Fourth, in governing as best they can, while conforming their lives and their judgment to the content of the Gospel, Christian leaders in public life can accomplish real good, and they can make a difference. Their success will always be limited and mixed. It will never be ideal. But with the help of God they can improve the moral quality of society, which makes the effort invaluable....

 

"That awful, never-dying duel"

[Word Notes: "Awful" here has its old meaning of "awe-inspiring." And "apologia" does not mean: "apology," It comes from the Greek apologeisthei, "to speak in one's own defense." The title of Newman's famous book, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, means "a defense of my life."]

...it will at first sight be said that the restless intellect of our common humanity is utterly weighed down [by the authority of the Church], to the repression of all independent effort and action whatever, so that, if this is to be the mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be destroyed. But this is far from the result, far from what I conceive to be the intention of that high Providence who has provided a great remedy for a great evil,—far from borne out by the history of the conflict between Infallibility and Reason in the past, and the prospect of it in the future. The energy of the human intellect "does from opposition grow;" it thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon, and is never so much itself as when it has lately been overthrown.

It is the custom with Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private Judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly carried on.

Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;—it is a vast assemblage of human beings with willful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power,—into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.

St. Paul says in one place [2 Cor. 10:8] that his Apostolical power is given him to edification, and not to destruction. There can be no better account of the Infallibility of the Church. It is a supply for a need, and it does not go beyond that need. Its object is, and its effect also, not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance. What have been its great works? All of them in the distinct province of theology:—to put down Arianism, Eutychianism, Pelagianism, Manichæism, Lutheranism, Jansenism. Such is the broad result of its action in the past;—and now as to the securities which are given us that so it ever will act in time to come...
    -- John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chap 5. [Link]

Being "anti-torture" kills...

This news is bad for the war, but it also points up the serious moral error of the anti-torture (so-called) crowd, who have gummed-up the interrogation process to the point where the administration would rather just kill people. To put it simply, the only reason to snatch terrorist leaders rather than kill them, is to squeeze info out of them. Therefore the Mark Shea types are effectively putting a gun to the heads of people like Saleh Ali Nabhan and executing them.

And the moral error is double because every one of those anti-torture types, if offered the choice between death and water-boarding, would himself chose the latter. But they are making the opposite choice for other people, and condemning them to death. And feeling smug about it!

And they are triply wrong, because they, and pacifist types in general, are always slippery about their own responsibility. None of them ever comes out and honestly says, "My policies will result in deaths, and I take responsibility for that." And quadruply wrong because the brute fact is that Islamic terrorists kill about 10 Moslems for every Westerner. So the small extent to which the pacifistic crowd does acknowledge that they want less done to protect us still leaves most of the iceberg underwater: A little less protection for us is a lot less for wretched folk in the Third World.

This is a specific instance of my more general point that the sort of people who call themselves "pacifists" are always engaged in turning someone else's cheek. They are happy to let some niggers in Pakistan do the suffering and dying, while they toddle home to a comfy bed. And if hoodlums are breaking their back door at night, they instantly call the cops, to come with guns and protect them! I'll believe there is such a thing as "Christian pacifism" when I start to hear stories of pacifists dying rather than protecting themselves.

Washington Post Confirms We Are No Longer Capturing & Interrogating High-Value Terrorists:

The Washington Post reported yesterday morning front-page, above the fold that the Obama administration has stopped capturing and interrogating senior al-Qaeda leaders, killing them instead with Predator drones. This confirms my story last week in Foreign Policy, "Dead Men Tell No Tales," explaining the danger of this approach.

The Post tells the story of a senior leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa named Saleh Ali Nabhan who was located last September. The White House was given the choice of either killing him or capturing him alive for interrogation. The military wanted to take him alive. But the White House chose instead to take him out. A senior military officer is quoted as saying: "We wanted to take a prisoner. . . . It was not a decision that we made."

The Post adds: "The opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever."

And the paper quotes a senior military officer explaining why the opportunity to interrogate this senior al-Qaeda leader for intelligence was sacrificed: We "don't have a detention policy or a set of facilities" to hold high-value terrorists.

A former intelligence official briefed on current operations tells the Post that killing, instead of capturing terrorists is far from ideal, saying "now there's an even greater proclivity for doing it that way."...

"Life is full of things which don't lend themselves to precise definition"

Macklin Horton has a very good piece on what conservatism is, Catholic and Conservative (1):

...My opponents in the disagreement documented above seem to believe that it [conservatism] is, or at least intends to be, a systematic philosophy, which makes it a rival to the Church, which in turn makes a Catholic who is also a conservative less than fully faithful to the Church because, as we all know, a man cannot serve two masters. They also insist that it fails as a system, because it is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; it is not only a rival to the Church, but an incoherent one.

I have to say that the attempt to respond to this complaint reminded me of arguing with objectivists, in that in both cases there is an insistence that certain terms must be defined with absolute precision or be dismissed as meaningless. The statement that the word "conservative" does not have a very precise meaning is taken as an admission that it has no meaning at all.

But life is full of things which don't lend themselves to precise definition, but yet exist, thereby making meaningful the words by which they are named. There are many such terms in the arts. Terms like "romantic" and "classical" cannot be defined in such a way that as to remove all doubt about whether or not any given work belongs to one of those categories, and there are others that are even more slippery—post-romantic, neo-classical, jazz. There are very few, if any, artists or individual works of art which fit perfectly into any of these categories, or which does not contain elements of both. Yet we continue to use these words because they serve a purpose in describing broad tendencies. If a critic describes one pianist's playing as more romantic than another's, everyone knows what he means; no one shouts Define your terms! And if he did, he would be laughed at, and deserve to be.

In answering the question "what sort of thing is conservatism?" these aesthetic terms provide the most useful analogy I've been able to come up with. Like them, the word "conservative" is more descriptive than prescriptive (as conservatives often note). Like them, it does not begin with a set of abstract principles. Like them, it is more understandable as a product of temperament and attitudes than as a book of rules. As Russell Kirk insisted, it is not an ideology, but rather the negation of ideology. It is a concrete human phenomenon, not an invented system. It has no necessary metaphysic, and one may be a conservative and an atheist, or a conservative and a Catholic. It is a loose alliance of people with broadly similar views about the management of worldly affairs....

Walk against death...

Here's a few short clips from the San Francisco Walk for Life today. I'm sure the "press" will pretty much ignore it, but it was even more impressive than last year. The last section of the video is above Fort Mason, heading towards the Marina Green. Charlene and I sat on a bench and ate our picnic for more than 45 minutes while those crowds passed non-stop. They were still going when we finally moved on. I'd say there were no less that 20,000 people in the march, and we had lots of rain....

The first clip is along the Embarcadero, and the second is going up the hill into Fort Mason. In the last bit you can see some red-roofed buildings in the background. Those are the buildings and piers of Ft. Mason from which 1.36 million Americans embarked for the Pacific campaigns of WWII.

A passion for justice...

The Just-War Tradition by George Weigel on National Review Online:

...The classic just-war tradition did not begin with a "presumption against war." Augustine didn't begin there; Aquinas didn't begin there. And indeed, no one in the tradition began there until the late 1960s (surprise!), when a Congregationalist moral theologian (James Gustafson) sold a Quaker moral theologian (James Childress) the idea that the just-war way of thinking began with a prima facie moral duty to do no harm. Childress then successfully sold the notion to J. Bryan Hehir, the Catholic theologian and political theorist who was the chief architect of "The Challenge of Peace."

In fact, however, the classic just-war tradition began, not with a presumption against war, but with a passion for justice: The just prince is obliged to secure the "tranquility of order," or peace, for those for whom he accepts political responsibility, and that peace, to repeat, is composed of justice, security, and freedom. There are many ways for the just prince (or prime minister, or president) to do this; one of them is armed force. Its justified use can sometimes come after other means of securing justice, security, and freedom have been tried and failed; but it can also sometimes mean shooting first. Two obvious examples of the latter come from modern history.

The first (to which the president alluded in Oslo) was in the case of humanitarian intervention to forestall or end a genocide. (Thus all those liberal synagogues and churches with "Darfur: A Call to Your Conscience" on their lawns might consider whether there is any solution to that humanitarian disaster other than the use of armed force.) The second comes from a more classic instance of an "aggression under way" (as some just-war thinking construes "just cause"), but without a shot having yet been fired. As students of World War II in the Pacific know, a U.S. carrier battle group under Adm. William Halsey was steaming off Hawaii in early December 1941. Suppose Halsey and the Enterprise had run across Admiral Nagumo's carriers in their stealthy approach to the Hawaiian archipelago. Would Halsey have been justified in assuming that Nagumo wasn't there to check out vacation real estate on Oahu — and shooting first? Of course he would have been, and from every rationally defensible moral point of view. (The analogy here between my Halsey hypothetical and hard intelligence of Iran loading a nuclear warhead onto a medium-range ballistic missile will strike some as suggestive.)

So the notion that just-war analysis begins with a "presumption against war" (or, as some put it, with a "pacifist premise") is simply wrong. The just-war way of thinking begins somewhere else: with legitimate public authority's moral obligation to defend the common good by defending the peace composed of justice, security, and freedom. The just-war tradition is not a set of hurdles that moral philosophers, theologians, and clergy set before statesmen. It is a framework for collaborative deliberation about the basic aims of legitimate government as it engages hostile regimes and networks in the world. The president's lifting up of this venerable moral tradition, which has deep roots in the civilizational soil of the West, was entirely welcome, if not to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and other bears of little brain. The next step is the retrieval of the classic intellectual architecture of just-war thinking and its development to meet the exigencies of a world of new dangers and new international actors.

   

Rights come from Big Brother...

One reason among many why the Massachusetts Senate race is important...

Kathryn Jean Lopez, It's a Good Thing for Martha Coakley That There Are No Catholics in Massachusetts:

During an interview today, Martha Coakley was asked about the conscience issue Catholic medical personnel encounter when it comes to a law that mandates the distribution of  emergency contraception, which sometimes works as an abortifacient. (I wrote about the details of this issue as pertain to Scott Brown and Massachusetts and Martha Coakley's misrepresentation of all of this here.)

Coakley explained that this should not be a problem because "we have a separation of church and state." "Let's be clear," the attorney general added.

The radio host, Ken Pittman, pointed out that complex legal principle that "In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom."

Coakley agrees that "The law says that people are allowed to have that." But, making clear her view — the attorney general who wants to be the next senator from Massachusetts — she declared that "You can have religious freedom, but you probably shouldn't work in an emergency room....

"The law says that people are allowed to have that." In other words, rights are given to us by the government. If you change the law, you change our "rights." I'd guess the majority of Leftists believe exactly that. Coakly doesn't seem like a person who actually thinks about such things, or even is capable of so doing; I'm sure she's just absorbed it from the kultursmog.

I assert that rights exist, not only regardless of government, but regardless of the existance of humankind. They are part of the moral law which is embedded in the fabric of the universe. They are implicit in our being made in the "image of God."

Podcast project...

I and a few others in our parish, St Dominic's San Francisco, have been working on getting podcasts of homilies (sermons) up on the parish web-site. It has not been easy to get the ball rolling! But at last there is progress...

You can see them here. Just click on the "Homilies Podcasts" button on the left. They are all good so far (the Dominicans are not called the "Order of Preachers" for nothing) but I especially recommend anything by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, our pastor.

I assembled most of those. (Feel free to criticize.) I've been using the Apple program Garageband, which is quite astonishin', and very easy to use...

A happy and holy Christmas to all of you...

From The Pope's Christmas Eve Homily, 2008:

Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down upon the heavens and the earth?" This is what Israel sings in one of the Psalms (113 [112], 5ff.), praising God's grandeur as well as his loving closeness to humanity. God dwells on high, yet he stoops down to us! God is infinitely great, and far, far above us. This is our first experience of him. The distance seems infinite. The Creator of the universe, the one who guides all things, is very far from us: or so he seems at the beginning.

But then comes the surprising realization: The One who has no equal, who "is seated on high", looks down upon us. He stoops down. He sees us, and he sees me. God's looking down is much more than simply seeing from above. God's looking is active. The fact that he sees me, that he looks at me, transforms me and the world around me. The Psalm tells us this in the following verse: "He raises the poor from the dust." In looking down, he raises me up, he takes me gently by the hand and helps me to rise from depths towards the heights. "God stoops down". This is a prophetic word. That night in Bethlehem, it took on a completely new meaning.

God's stooping down became real in a way previously inconceivable. He stoops down: he himself comes down as a child to the lowly stable, the symbol of all humanity's neediness and forsakenness. God truly comes down. He becomes a child and puts himself in the state of complete dependence typical of a newborn child. The Creator who holds all things in his hands, on whom we all depend, makes himself small and in need of human love. God is in the stable. In the Old Testament the Temple was considered almost as God's footstool; the sacred ark was the place in which he was mysteriously present in the midst of men and women. Above the temple, hidden, stood the cloud of God's glory. Now it stands above the stable. God is in the cloud of the poverty of a homeless child: an impenetrable cloud, and yet a cloud of glory!...

A little Christmas info for your files...

If some black-hearted secularist ever hits you with that old chestnut about Christmas being celebrated on December 25 because it was a Christian take-over of pagan solstice celebrations, or some such... well, there's not a shred of historical evidence for it. However, there IS good reason to believe in an entirely different explanation...

How December 25 Became Christmas - Biblical Archaeology Review:

...Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus' conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

This idea appears in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which appears to come from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise states: "Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March [March 25], which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered." Based on this, the treatise dates Jesus' birth to the winter solstice.

Augustine, too, was familiar with this association. In On the Trinity (c. 399–419) he writes: "For he [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th."

In the East, too, the dates of Jesus' conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the easterners used the 14th of the first spring month (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar—April 6 to us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6—the eastern date for Christmas. In the East too, we have evidence that April was associated with Jesus' conception and crucifixion. Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis writes that on April 6, "The lamb was shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin, he who took away and takes away in perpetual sacrifice the sins of the world." Even today, the Armenian Church celebrates the Annunciation in early April (on the 7th, not the 6th) and Christmas on January 6.

Thus, we have Christians in two parts of the world calculating Jesus' birth on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and coming up with two close but different results (December 25 and January 6)....

What you learn from being a Dad... (or Mom)

From a piece titled The Gift of Authority, by Matt Teel, a former Episcopal priest, now a Catholic...

...Now, up until that point, I was not very happy with the lack of authority in the Episcopal Church. It seemed to me that anyone could do anything and call it legitimate. No one was really 'in charge.' The buck didn't stop anywhere.

With the Catholics, the buck stopped with the pope.

With the Baptists, the buck stopped with the Bible.

But we just muddled through and came to our own conclusions.

I remember one of my professors in seminary telling us, with some pride in his voice, that Anglicanism is 'Christianity for adults'—the implication being, of course, that we weren't like those 'children' in the other churches who needed to believe that they could get all the answers from someone. Only very weak people need to believe that the pope is infallible. Only very childish people need to believe that the Bible is infallible. We Anglicans don't need anything to be infallible: we are responsible for ourselves. Don't take your answers from some guy in Rome, we'd say, or some book (no matter how holy): forge your own path. Find your own way. Figure things out for yourself. This is Christianity for adults!

And as I said, I wasn't too enthusiastic about that, but I bought into it and I thought I could live with it. For a while.

And then I had my first child.

And it was the experience of having a child that forced me to the conclusion that that is a very sad way of exercising one's authority. Parents have a RIGHT to tell their child how to act, they have a DUTY to raise them right and tell them the truth, and they have a RESPONSIBILITY to give them direction.

Have you ever known a man or a woman who refused to take responsibility for raising their children? They don't want to tell the child to stop jumping on the couch because they don't want to be perceived as mean or grumpy. They don't want to tell the child to do his chores because they don't want to be perceived as a buzz-kill. They want to be the cool dad, the friend dad, the buddy dad. And what happens to those children? They generally act like brats and run roughshod all over everybody else and bring the whole family down around them. Which is basically what we see going on in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

It was the experience of having children and being a father that told me that NOT exercising the authority you've been given is actually very CRUEL.

Here's what I have learned in being a dad for twelve years: When you are speaking to your child, especially about something very important, you give them very clear and simple directions, so that they can understand what you're saying. And you tell them what the results will be if they decide not to follow through. And sometimes, that doesn't even require coming up with some elaborate punishment for them; sometimes, the results of their actions will be enough.

"Abby, don't stand on the coffee table or you'll fall and hurt yourself."

"Abby don't stand on the coffee table or you'll fall and hurt yourself."

"Abby don't—okay, see? What did I tell you? I told you you'd fall and hurt yourself and you did. Yes, I know it hurts. Yes, I still love you. But now you know, don't you?"

A good parent says, "This is what you need to do, and this is what will happen if you don't do it." Or he says, "Don't do that. And if you do, here are the consequences."

And it seemed to me that, no matter how much I loved Anglicanism—and she was a good mother to me in many ways—she had to do more than let me parent myself.

Here's another:

A good parent does not say something that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, unless it doesn't MATTER if it's interpreted a variety of ways.

My oldest daughter is a little Jesuit. We tell her all the time: she needs to go into the law as a profession: she will find the loophole in whatever direction you give her.

"I told you not to eat cookies before dinner."

"Yes, but you didn't say I couldn't eat a SANDWICH before dinner."

A good parent will frame his directions in such a way that he will catch the loopholes. Do you do that because you're the tyrant your children always say you are? No, you do it for their own good, even if they don't understand that.

Let me ask you: would you leave a morally ambiguous babysitter in charge of your children? Of course not. Would you leave NO babysitter in charge of your children? Of course not. But that's what I, as an Anglican, was asked to believe about Jesus: he left no one in charge. And if he did, the directions are so ambiguous they can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. Only a cruel or neglectful parent would do that...

Given the corrosiveness of human imagination and creativity and restlessness, it is simply not possible that Jesus could have left us without some rock-like infallible guide to conserve his message. Without that, the whole enterprise would be pointless.

People change things, sometimes out of sheer fidgetiness. And then they change the changes. And change the changes to the changes. And the people immersed in the changes become self-referential. The endlessly-mutated realm becomes the only reality they know, and they forget totally the original ideas. Reality drifts, and those inside the system don't even know it, unless they have some reference point outside.

Poor Hitchins.... Straining so hard to be an atheist...

I started out to mock and fisk this piece by Ebenezer Scrooge Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens: Merry Christmas. Now, about that public display...

But I gave it up. It's a parody in itself. Poor Hitch, a fine fellow, I like him, but working so hard at the atheist schtick, and looking like something else altogether. You can run, daddy-o, but hide? And his fantasizing about America being a "secular republic." Ha ha. You'll be long in your grave before that happens, Mr H.

David Furst / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Soldiers from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division gather together to pray moments before setting off on a patrol of western Baghdad on Thursday. Army Times 11/8/05

"Totalitarian in the strict sense"

From a talk by Fr. Michael Sweeney, O.P., President of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Expressing the Good

...A second example: That everyone should have access to health care would seem to be –and is– a very good thing. However, we must keep in mind that universal health care is not a good, but an ideal. Therefore, there has been little discernment of why it is a good thing, and little clarity concerning what we are attempting to achieve. There is no consensus concerning what we might mean by "universal" (should the health of all children be included, even those of illegal immigrants?) and no consensus concerning what we might mean by "health" (does health involve access to abortion?).

The role of government is regarded as one that proposes new social possibilities –posits ideals– and therefore the government has the task of legislating the ends, along with the means to fulfilling the ends. Therefore there is an urgency that "universal" and "health" must not be too closely defined; they must have the character of an ideal that we are striving for, so that everyone remains free to insert his or her private notions, founded upon previous social constructions, of what that ideal might look like in realization.

I do not suggest that government is bent upon tyranny or that those who govern are not attempting to seek good things; I do suggest that, willy-nilly, this process is totalitarian in the strict sense, in that it must relativize the particular communities that were once subsidiary societies –families and churches, for example– in order to create consensus around an ideal. I do hold that a totalitarian state is one that admits of no subsidiary societies, and that a government that presumes to define what is a family is precisely totalitarian....

I think that the way Catholic opposition to the healthcare bills has focused on abortion is a grievous mistake. Abortion is just one particular outcome of the much deeper problem of letting government define and control ever-increasing amounts of what we do and what we are. Tomorrow abortion may go out of fashion, and government-controlled health-care may be implanting genes to make us more healthy and..... cooperative. Or the court may decide that our "right to privacy" lets us kill red-headed stepchildren. Or any number of helpful things, with "helpful" decided not by us, but by the the "helping bureaucracies." Or the popular fad of the moment.

I'd guess that if the Founding Fathers had dreamed that in the future people would be re-defining morality by whim, or re-defining who is human and who is not, they would have instantly and firmly enshrined in the Constitution traditional Judeo-Christian moral beliefs. All of them in fact just assumed that those beliefs would continue as part of normal culture, even if individuals did not have any Christian faith.

Not all trends are down... Even in Europe

Spanish cloistered nuns see surge in vocations:

Madrid, Spain, Nov 5, 2009 / 01:51 pm (CNA).- A 43 year-old prioresses has revolutionized an old Poor Clares convent in Spain, turning it onto a magnet for dozens of young professional women.

Sister Veronica joined the Poor Clares Convent of the Ascension founded in 1604 in Lerma (Spain) at at time when it was going through a vocations crisis. It was January 22, 1984, and Marijose Berzosa - Sr. Veronica's name prior to entering the convent - decided, at age 18, to leave behind a career in medicine, friends, nightlife and basketball.

"Nobody understood me. There were bets that it would not last, but they did not feel the force of the hurricane that drew me in," says Sr. Veronica. "I was a classic teenager looking for a way out ... and I made a decision in just 15 days."

Sr. Veronica joined the convent which had not seen a new vocation in nearly 23 years....

"It is whatever its various adherents say it is."

Charlene recommends some good stuff from Mark Shea (thanks to Kathy Shaidle):

...We want very much to believe that Violent Islam is a perversion of the Islamic tradition and Wise and Benevolent Islam is the Real Islamic tradition. But the reality is that Islam is an invented human religion that borrows from fragments of Judaism and Christianity, mixes in Mohammed's own delusional (or lying) claims of revelation, and completes it with a dash of conventional wisdom from seventh-century Arab culture. It is not a magisterial faith with some adjudicating body that defines what is and is not the orthodox reading of the Koran. It is whatever its various adherents say it is.

That means that if you are looking for a sanction for violence in the Koran, you can find it, because it's there. So is the wisdom, almsgiving, and peace stuff, if you want that. So Muslims who commit these heinous acts with such frequency are not "betraying Islam" when doing so out of self-described piety. They are, in fact, implementing one possible interpretation of the Muslim tradition (and often slaughtering a great many other Muslims in the process). Westerners who lie to themselves that these monsters are "not real Muslims" are simply self-deluded fools. They are as Muslim as Mohammed, as are their Muslim victims. There is no Islamic Magisterium to excommunicate them. They don't speak for all Muslims, but they most certainly do speak and act for the disturbingly large percentage of Muslims who either applaud them, remain silent, or complain about being victims of suspicion and distrust by the victims of terror instead of complaining about the thugs who commit the terror in the name of Islam.

That said, the reality is that the cure, if it is to come at all, will have to come from within Islam: from Muslims who inculcate in their children a sense of shame for Radical Murderous Islam, just as Christians have successfully inculcated shame in their own ranks for expressions of Christianity that turned a blind eye to slavery, terrorism, oppression of women, and racism. It will not come from the preferred Western dream of a post-religious secular world scrubbed clean of "religion." Such experiments have been attempted in communist countries; they are akin to saying, "We've noticed a correlation between immune systems and disease, so let's get rid of immune systems." Not accidentally, the disease of human sin has only prospered in such regimes to the tune of millions slaughtered. Instead of pretending the beast of Radical Islam is not there, the West will sooner or later have to learn how to educate itself about theology again -- or perish. It will also have to profile those who have not a particular skin color but a particular ideological paper trail of ideas and views that makes it obvious they sympathize with Radical Islamic violence, just as we should profile those who sympathize with skinheads, Klansmen, or tales of the Glorious IRA Terrorists.

Most of all, it means we need to get theologically literate again and find a more sophisticated way of understanding things than simply dumping Christianity and Islam into a bucket and calling it all "religion" (which, as we all know, leads to undifferentiated "violence"). The only way to counter an inflamed theology like Islam is with a healthy one, not with the watery delusions of postmodern secularism. And that, sooner or later, means a return to the sanity of the Catholic Faith.

Reagan could act because he KNEW. Because he could SEE...

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, and the announcement of Personal Ordinariates* for Anglicans seeking union with Rome...

...Benedict will be seen as a kind of Ronald Reagan of the Vatican. When Reagan got to the White House he discovered that the established way of dealing with the Soviets was detente, talk, talk, talk and more talk. He decided that victory was in his grasp and proposed a firm confrontation. "Mr Gorbachev, pull down that wall!" His professional statesmen and diplomats were shocked at his 'foolishness.' But it worked. Communism was already fragile all it needed was a puff of air to knock it down completely. [Well, that's just about what happened. There were also some trifling matters like overstraining the Soviet economy by challenging them with a massive military build-up, Pershing missiles and SDI. And he had help from Mrs Thatcher, and J-P II.]

Pope Benedict's move this week will have similar impact in the world of Christian dialogue. With Personal Ordinariates not only have the professional ecumenists been shown the way forward, but the duplicitous liberal Catholic bishops who would have stalled, moved it into 'discussion groups' and presented 'further obstacles' have also been very effectively gone around. No longer will a gifted, willing and able convert priest have to wait years to be ordained and in the meantime be pushed from pillar to post by Catholic bishops who are driven by a liberal agenda that is actually illiberal....

Most of my readers—bless you all—will not have too much interest in this, or even know what's going on. But I assure you the comparison with Reagan is in no way an exaggeration. I'm just dazzled. And both cases are ones where true leaders cut through the malarky while "experts" simply could not SEE what was right in front of them.

I read somewhere a fascinating piece about how one of Reagan's men put out a request to the researchers in our intelligence agencies for any information they had on unrest or things-falling-apart in the Soviet Union. It turned out that there was a huge amount of information on things like wildcat labor strikes, and riots and protests. But it had never been collected or analyzed because no one had asked the question before. The experts had all decided that Communism worked, so they never looked for signs that it didn't.

But Reagan KNEW! He knew that communism (and socialism and big-government liberalism) Don't work. He could see, like the boy who could see that there was no emperor inside the fancy clothes.

And Pope Benedict could see that "dialoging" (ugh—spit on ugly word) with a zombie like the Church of England so-called was never going to yield fruit. (Actually Newman saw it in the late 19th Century.)

*A bishop is the "ordinary" of a diocese. (From Latin ordinarius, ‘orderly’). A diocese is a district. A personal ordinariate is a bishopric over certain persons, without regard for territory. B-16 has just cut his liberal English bishops out of the loop. And all the talk-talk-talkers. Anglicans now have the possibility of joining Rome while keeping things such as their ancient and beautiful liturgy and music.

A couple of famous characters
from long long ago...

Ya know what the best thing about not being a "cradle Catholic" is?

I have NEVER voted for anyone named Kennedy!!!!!

TED KENNEDY: "I SLEPT WITH OVER A THOUSAND WOMEN" —National Enquirer:

Ted Kennedy slept with more than a thousand women — and spent at least $10 million in hush money over the years to keep his skirt-chasing a secret!

The late senator made those sensational confessions in a chapter of his autobiography, but horrified family members and advisers cut them out.

Before he died of brain cancer at age 77 on Aug. 25, the womanizing politician also revealed that he planned to seduce Mary Jo Kopechne on the night she drowned, said a close source.

"While dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder, Ted decided to tell the whole truth about his life - including his love life. He said that his first lover was an Irish nanny. She was about 19, and Ted was only 13," the source divulged....

Perhaps even creepier than the fact that Catholics vote for those animals is that "feminists" do. Yechhh.

Subsidiarity. Something all conservatives should be for...

From a column by Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis...

....Reading the commentaries of my brother bishops, I realized that I did not mention another essential Catholic principle that should have been included in my last column: subsidiarity, which posits that health care ought to be determined, administered and coordinated at the lowest level of society whenever possible.

In other words, those intermediary communities and associations that exist between the federal government and the individual must be strengthened and given greater control over policies and practices rather than being given less and less control. [have this sentence tattooed on your arm.]

To usurp this "hierarchy of communities" is terribly damaging in the long run, both to society as a whole and the individual citizen (See Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1883, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, No. 185 ff).

Papal insights

Two quotes from Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are instructive in this regard:

Pope John Paul II has written:

"By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending" (Pope John Paul II, "Centesimus Annus," No. 48).

Pope Benedict writes:

"The State which would provide everything, [That sounds familiar somehow] absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person — every person — needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need . . . . In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live ‘by bread alone’ (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3) — a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human" (Pope Benedict XVI, "Deus Caritas Est," No. 28).

To neglect the principle of subsidiarity inevitably leads to the excessive centralization of human services, which leads to higher costs, less personal responsibility for the individual and a lower quality of care...

Leftism always tends toward increasing the power of the state, and decreasing that of individuals, families, communities churches, and organizations of mutual benefit. In this, and in many other things, Leftism is profoundly anti-Christian. (Also anti-American) It is materialism, it is living by bread alone.

A Christian (or conservative) health care plan would put power into the hands of individuals and families. How to do that? Easy. Put the money in their hands, and let them choose how to best spend it. Then health care organizations and providers would bend their efforts to serving the people, the same way businesses work tirelessly to satisfy and keep customers. (Here are examples. Link. Link]

But that's what you will never see in a Leftist health-care proposal. Instead you get thousands of pages of rules and laws and fines and criminal penalties. And that's just the laws themselves. Those are always supplemented by the regulations. They will end up being tens-of-thousands of pages of the CFR. Just as with the tax laws and regs, no one will know them all, so everyone will be a criminal in having violated some regulation they've never heard of. Which is precisely the point.

"Inextricably intertwined"

Why Should America Support Israel? -- Spengler:

...But there is a far more fundamental reason for America to support Israel. Israel is part of America's DNA. As Michael Novak showed so effectively in his book On Two Wings, America's founding drew on the uniquely Hebrew concept of holiness of the individual and divine love for the weak and powerless, as much as it did on the natural law tradition of Grotius and Locke. The destiny of the United States of America and the people of Israel are inextricably intertwined for that reason, and America's affinity for Israel and deep interest in the welfare of the Jewish people are bred in American marrow.

From this point of view, what is sacred about America is a reflection of the holiness of Israel. If America succeeds in banishing the sacred from public life — and that is the broader agenda of the liberal Democrats [precisely so.] — there will be little reason for America to have a special relationship with Israel except for military convenience. And if this banishment of the sacred from public life were to coincide with a demoralized retreat from the exercise of power in Western and Central Asia, there would be little reason at all for a special relationship.

America's Jewish leadership has failed on all counts.

The liberal left with its smarmy universalism has demanded that Israel make any concession required to appease the paranoia of the Arab world. But this is a paranoia that cannot be appeased, for the patient really is dying. [See Spengler here.]

The secular right argued that because Israel is the region's only democracy, it deserves a special relationship, and argued further that imposing democratic governments on other countries would lead to cheer and goodwill everywhere. But Americans never cared enough about whether other countries were democratic to make it the criteria for a special relationship (how about Iceland?), and project of imposing democracy on the Arab world came to a horrible end. [I disagree on both points. And if Iceland were beleaguered we would discover that the Icelanders are our cousins, and their democracy emerged from the same Dark Ages germanic WALD as did the "Rights of Englishmen," for which we fought our revolution.]

The religious leadership should have had the most to say about Israel's holiness and the American character. Not only did it fail to make this argument, but it stuck its fingers in its ears and turned its back when Christians made this argument—Michael Novak, for example. Rather than make common cause with the Christians who sought Jews out in friendship in the clear belief that the welfare of the Jewish people was of existential importance for the United States, the religious community for the most part dwelt on past injuries. That, perhaps, is the most disappointing of all.

Obama's betrayal of Israel forces a reconsideration of Jewish policy in general. It exposes the left the rage of the majority of the Jewish organizations (weighted by donors), although younger secular Jews will continue to pursue their pipe-dreams....

Israel is us. America and Israel are the only countries that are, in their essence, ideas. Not "nations," not a volk, not a language, not a history...but an idea. Therefore they are the only two countries one can easily join, just by accepting the idea. (Technically an Israeli Jew needs to be born Jewish, but in practice one can convert. But even without that, Jews from long-isolated regions, who have almost entirely forgotten Jewishness, can still be Israelis.)

And Israel and the US were both founded by escapees from domination by European elites. (That's one of the reasons Leftists are so anti-) They are countries of the self-made, of pioneers who started with nothing, fought savages and reclaimed the land. The first Israelis had much more in common with Sarah Palin than Barack Obama.

And both are The Chosen People. The Jews of course. And Americans symbolically, in virtue of America being a Christian refuge and project, for Christians are God's New Israel. And because we see ourselves as a"City on a Hill." A light unto the nations. That's the biggest reason why our Leftists and fake-pacifists hate both America and Jews, and cling lovingly to any supposed sin by either, and repeat them gloatingly for generations. They hate God.

Or rather, they hate the demand to serve God. Not themselves. (It's not really a demand demand....it's just the obvious thing one should do given the situation. If the guy who created a universe of at least 100 billion galaxies cares about—loves—little me....there is no other reasonable response.) The self-worshipper feels imposed-upon by Jews and Christians and American and Israeli patriots, even if he or she doesn't have any contact with them at all. It's really their conscience speaking, through Jews and Americans as symbols.

Believing impossible things before breakfast...

I wasn't going to mention l'affaire Van Jones, since everyone is doing it this morning. But this bit made me think about my own conjecture, that leftists are (unconsciously but intentionally) lowering their own IQ's, in order to not see the contradictions in what they believe.

Mark Steyn:

...Traveling through the Middle East about six months after 9/11, I was struck by the number of Arabs, from Egypt to the Gulf, who simultaneously believed (a) the Mossad were behind the attacks and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim world. Van Jones would seem to be an American variant of the same phenomenon: a man who believes 9/11 was (a) blowback for the actions of the US government's war machine and (b) an inside job by the US government's war machine.

No wonder the left derides those boorish enough to bring this stuff up: Why, surely all sophisticated persons know these positions are little more than lifestyle accessories or fashion hemlines. One season, everyone on the catwalk is agreed 9/11 was blowback by Jihadists for Social Justice. The next, everyone is equally agreed that Bush called up the White House Steel Melting Czar and buried the whole thing under "miscellaneous" in the budget....

"Jihadists for Social Justice." I like that!

I suspect the same "IQ lowering" thing is at work in some of the traits we see in the Islamic world. They are trying to believe a faith that does not quite make sense (Islam is a Christian gnostic heresy, and like all heresies it takes a portion of Catholic Truth and tries to make it the whole.)

Also the Islamic realm needs to ignore the huge fact that their religion is an utter failure civilizationally.

Can we get equal time?

The obvious conservative objections to this have already been made by bloggers, I'm sure. [Link] But I have a few other thoughts...

ADF: NH court orders home-schooled child into government-run school:

...The parents of the child divorced in 1999. The mother has home-schooled their daughter since first grade with curriculum that meets all state review standards. In addition to home schooling, the girl attends supplemental public school classes and has also been involved in a variety of extra-curricular sports activities.

In the process of renegotiating the terms of a parenting plan for the girl, the guardian ad litem involved in the case concluded, according to the court order, that the girl "appeared to reflect her mother's rigidity on questions of faith" and that the girl's interests "would be best served by exposure to a public school setting" and "different points of view at a time when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief...in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs."

Marital Master Michael Garner reasoned that the girl's "vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view" and then recommended that the girl be ordered to enroll in a government school instead of being home-schooled. Judge Lucinda V. Sadler approved the recommendation and issued the order on July 14...

But think of the possibilities! I'm surrounded here in SF with children raised with rigidity in the faith of secular humanism. Surely we should be able to take them away from their parents and the government schools, and give them exposure to "different points of view at a time when they must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief..." I can think of quite a few "points of view" I'd love to see little lock-step liberals exposed to.

Also, the article makes no mention of a specific faith. But we all know that it is Christianity. This could be considered yet another item of evidence of the truth of Christian faith. No Lefty judge would care if a child is raised rigidly Buddhist or Baha'i. None of them hate Unitarians or Quakers.

And it would be hilarious if a similar case had been presented just after to the same judge, with the parent being a Moslem, and raising a child as a rigid little jihadi! How funny to watch some cowardly Lefty weasel judge squirm and sweat, and then declare that we must consider all cultures equally valid!

Rationalism..

Newman Reader - Essays Critical & Historical I - Rationalism 1:

RATIONALISM is a certain abuse of Reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. To rationalize in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonized with our existing stock of knowledge. And thus a rationalistic spirit is the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach, simply and absolutely upon testimony....

[...]

...Conduct such as this, on so momentous a matter, is, generally speaking, traceable to one obvious cause. The Rationalist makes himself his own centre, not his Maker; he does not go to God, but he implies that God must come to him. And this, it is to be feared, is the spirit in which multitudes of us act at the present day. Instead of looking out of ourselves, and trying to catch glimpses of God's workings, from any quarter,—throwing ourselves forward upon Him and waiting on Him, we sit at home bringing everything to ourselves, enthroning ourselves in our own views, and refusing to believe anything that does not force itself upon us as true. Our private judgment is made everything to us,—is contemplated, recognized, and consulted as the arbiter of all questions, and as independent of everything external to us. Nothing is considered to have an existence except so far forth as our minds discern it. The notion of half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, surmises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood, of isolated facts in the great scheme of Providence, in a word, the idea of Mystery, is discarded...

Like most of the Christian thoughts I post, this would still be true even if we knew that God did not exist. Rationalism would still be an abuse of reason. Because there would still be large realms of existence that our private judgement would not be adequate to understand.

And also because rationalism would still be psychologically wrong. Or perhaps one should say, anthropologically wrong. If our own selves are "contemplated, recognized, and consulted as the arbiter of all questions," as Newman puts it, we are in big trouble. One will be guiding oneself by imagining a compass, and then following where it leads.

The distinction is between unhappy atheists and happy atheists...

I'm reading an excellent book containing the Pensées of Blaise Pascal, with interspersed commentary by Peter Kreeft. Here's a morsel from it...

(Pensées means "thoughts." They were a collection of notes written on odd scraps of vellum that Pascal wrote over many years, hoping to turn them into a book which would appeal to the young people of his time, who were almost as heedless about the important things of life as people are now. It is generally conceded that Pascal's early death was in one sense a good thing, since his book could probably never have had the intensity and vividness of his dashed-off thoughts. There are very few books written in the time of Louis XIV that can still excite people the way Pascal's "non-random jottings" do.)

...And that is why, amongst those who are not convinced, I make an absolute distinction between those who strive with all their might to learn and those who live without troubling themselves or thinking about it.

I can feel nothing but compassion for those for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business.

But as for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end of life and who, solely because they do not find within themselves the light of conviction, neglect to look elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion is one of those which people accept out of credulous simplicity, or one of those which, though obscure in themselves, none the less have a most solid and unshakable foundation: I view them very differently.

This negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appals me; it seems quite monstrous to me. I do not say this prompted by the pious zeal of spiritual devotion. I mean on the contrary that we ought to have this feeling from principles of human interest and self-esteem....

Peter Kreeft comments on this section:

The absolute distinction, which will become the distinction between the Heavenly and the Hellish, is not between believers and unbelievers but between seekers and non-seekers; for all unbelievers who seek will eventually become believers who find , according to the very highest authority (Mt 7:7-8). The distinction between believers and seeking unbelievers is only temporary; but the distinction between seeking unbelievers and un-seeking unbelievers is eternal.

The absolute distinction is between unhappy atheists and happy atheists. Unbelievers who are content and happy now will be unhappy eternally, but those who are unhappy and seeking now will be happy eternally (Lk 6:21-26).

Pascal's judgement simply follows God's. God does not judge unbelievers by the supernatural standard of faith but by the natural standard of reason. As St Paul says in Romans 1, the truth they know by natural reason is what they hold down or suppress because of their unrighteousness (1:18), and this--natural reason, natural law, natural sanity is enough to condemn them.

The battle for eternal souls is largely decided here in the beginning, in the plain plains of natural reason, rather than later, in the mysterious mountains of faith. If we are honest with truth, reason will lead us to faith...

Here's a link to another post I wrote on Pascal, which is worth reading—because of the good stuff I quote, not because of my own thoughts.

Muddled thinking...

Mark Shea (A writer I highly approve of...except when I want to wring his neck for his partisan venom):

...But the knee-jerk Talk Radio junk about how health care is not a right appears to me to owe far more to maintaining a system in which money is exalted over the good of the person than to anything remotely connected with Catholic teaching or common sense. One can base a credible opposition to so-called "health care reform" on worries that it's going to wind up killing a lot of innocent people as a cost-cutting measure. That I can respect.

But basing opposition to health care reform on the parroted claim that "health care is not a right"--a claim that is demonstrably rubbish if we are paying any attention to the Church's teaching, suggests that other agendas besides the desire to enact Catholic social teaching as public policy are the guiding principals at work in our thinking. That's no longer really a surprise to me, given the spectacle of Faithful Catholics[TM] striving with might and main to justify torture, but it still may be worth pointing out for Catholics who may be sensing a disconnect between the Church's actual teaching and what they are hearing from the conservative side of the blogosphere that so commonly claims adherence to the Church teaching in stark contrast to the Awful Dissenters....

This is mostly a case of getting two different ideas muddled together. Two different "rights."

I have myself actually heard Rush Limbaugh talk on this point. (I betcha Shea has just picked up some leftish rumors, and doesn't know or care what's actually said.) Rush's point was that we have a responsibility to maintain our own health, and we have a moral obligation to help those who can't help themselves. And I think (I'm not an expert) that this is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church is actually saying when it asserts that people have a right to health care.

People have a right to expect that we will assume our moral obligation, and help them if needed.

But the leftish position is something different. It is that people have a right to health care in the same way that they have a right to, say, freedom of religion. What our Constitution calls "inalienable rights." Rush's point is that this would destroy both our responsibility and our moral obligation. It would destroy Caritas.

And I would add another point, which I think is desperately important. In America we have always regarded our rights as coming ultimately from God, and thus being inalienable. They somehow exist regardless of what laws we may pass. But once you start inventing new basic rights, that concept goes out the window. Rights become just human inventions, and can be given and taken away at will.

commenting on commentings...

Hale Adams wrote, in a comment on the previous post,

I've said it before, John, and I'll say it again: You're mixing religion with politics.

If the Church wants to insist, for its own purposes, that homosexual or multiple unions are not marriages, that's fine. Far be it from me (and it should be far from anyone else) to dictate to the Church how it deals with parishoners who break its rules.

As far as the State is concerned, however, marriages are simply contractual arrangements voluntarily entered into by the parties concerned. Yes, traditionally, such arrangements have been between one man and one woman, but if two men or two women (or any permutation of one or multiple men and/or women) want to enter into such a contract-- I say, "Let them." Maybe their arrangements will work, maybe they won't. And if (when?) the arrangements don't work, then they should suffer the messiness inherent in the dissolution of the contract. (It just might discourage others from following their example, and your position carries the day, John.)

Actually, even if marriage is just a contractual arrangement, what I wrote is still valid—that the argument made by Boies is fallacious, since it sneaks past the point that people are really divided about. (And any state regulation of contracts involves defining things, and people will always have a valid gripe if someone moves goalposts by slipping in a re-definition of terms. I myself have a valid gripe on a purely contractual level, since I'm a party in a marriage contract, and now people are trying to change what my contract says!)

But I don't think that people will ever consider marriage just part of the realm of contract, nor will they want the state, which reflects our wishes, to do so. (Nor do I think you really believe that, Hale.)

In California we already have a domestic partners law which is close to a marriage contract, and hardly anyone notices it. WHY?

People sometimes understand things without being able to think clearly about them. They drift along with what they are told by "experts," (like, say, materialists who think life can be just regulated by contract and majority vote) not realizing where the small steps are leading. Until they crash against something like the marriage issue. Then suddenly they are howling in pain, and the experts say, "Tsk tsk, how irrational the little people are. Democracy is a poor system of government. Decisions should be left to the experts."

In fact the experts usually know where they are heading all along, and carefully conceal the truth, just because democracy works pretty damn well when people have enough information. And boy do they heap contumely upon anyone who says that such-and-such a small step is leading to some big step that people will hate. The people who said that overturning state sodomy laws would lead to gay marriage were called crazy, and bigots!

Politics and religion are always going to intersect, because they are both about what human beings really are. They both define us, although politics is much less explicit about this. In America we hope to use politics to merely create a neutral space for personal decisions to be made. But that is pretty much impossible, because even the smallest political decision tends to define us. If the small town of Mudville puts up the first traffic light on Main Street, that says something about the people who go along with it. A little bit of customary law has been replaced by explicit law, and that changes the definition of citizens of that town.

It seems silly to say it about such a small matter, but it is a religious decision. A tiny bit of life has been removed from the realm of conscience and morality and personal responsibility. After that when the preacher gets up in the pulpit and says that our moral choices have big consequences, and that even tiny sins can lead to bigger ones and get us into trouble, the government has also preached a tiny but different sermon.

Everyone has a religion. That is, everyone has beliefs about the universe and existence that are not based on logic or science. Hale Adams has a religion. He is making a political proposal based on his personal faith; he has no formal or scientific proof that his view of what people are is true.

Update: Actually, Hale's sentence: "If the Church wants to insist, for its own purposes, that homosexual or multiple unions are not marriages, that's fine..." is, itself, a religious position. One which the Catholic Church rejects. We think that our view of marriage is part of Natural Law, and is just as valid—and real—in the Cannibal Isles as it is among Christians.

"The very lawfulness of nature points to a divine Lawgiver..."

From an excellent piece, How God and Science Mix, by Stephen M. Barr...

...My fellow particle physicist Lawrence Krauss has argued that "God and science don't mix." He began with an interesting statement of J.B.S. Haldane, an eminent biologist of the last century:

"My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course."

Scientists are atheists in the lab, said Krauss, and so it is only logical that they should be atheists everywhere. This is a logical argument, yes, and also quite popular, but it is based on a conception of God that is alien to Jewish and Christian tradition. For Haldane and Krauss, religion is about miracles, and miracles are about magic and the irrational, and therefore belief in God stands in opposition to the world revealed by science, a world intelligible by reason and governed by law.

For Jews and Christians, however, pitting God and the laws of nature against each other in this way is an absurd mistake; for it is the very lawfulness of nature that points to a divine Lawgiver. In the Bible, God gives laws not only to the people of Israel, but to the cosmos itself, as in Jeremiah 33:25, where he declares his fidelity to Israel in these terms: "When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David."

In arguing against pagans for the existence of a creator God, ancient Christian writers pointed to the order and lawfulness of nature, not to the miraculous. The following passage from the second-century writer Minucius Felix is typical:

If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat, and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world.

...What then of miracles? Doesn't belief in them make nonsense of everything I have just said? On the contrary; there is no logical contradiction in believing in both natural laws and miracles; for if the laws of nature are God's ordinances to begin with, then what he has ordained he may also suspend. Indeed, to speak of a miracle in the absence of law would be meaningless...

...In the Christian view, miracles are not mere outbreaks of lawlessness in nature that happen in an utterly capricious way. Since only God can suspend his own laws, miracles are always divine acts, and serve a divine purpose. In the Bible and Christian tradition, that purpose is always to manifest God's love and mercy, and to attest to the authority of singular figures who teach or act in his name. Miracles are thus exceedingly rare events, fraught with deeply symbolic religious significance. The idea that God would interfere in the scientific experiments of Haldane or anyone else, as if he were a mischievous imp or poltergeist, is utterly silly from a Christian point of view. And to consider the fact that he doesn't do so an argument for atheism is on a par with Khrushchev's triumphant announcement that the cosmonauts had not seen God in outer space...

"With the lifted head of a lion-tamer..."

From The Catholic Church and Conversion by GK Chesterton, 1926

...To us, therefore, it is henceforth impossible to think of the Quaker as a figure at the beginning of a new Quaker history or the Calvinist as the founder of a new Calvinistic world. It is quite obvious to us that they are simply characters in our own Catholic history, only characters who caused a great deal of trouble by trying to do something that we could do better and that they did not really do at all. Now some may suppose that this can be maintained of the older sects like Calvinists and Quakers, but cannot be maintained of modern movements like those of Socialists or Spiritualists. But they will be quite wrong. The covering or continental character of the Church applies just as much to modern manias as to the old religious manias; it applies quite as much to Materialists or Spiritualists as to Puritans.

In all of them you find that some Catholic dogma is, first, taken for granted; then exaggerated into an error; and then generally reacted against and rejected as an error, bringing the individual in question a few steps back again on the homeward road. And this is almost always the mark of such a heretic; that while he will wildly question any other Catholic dogma, he never dreams of questioning his own favourite Catholic dogma and does not even seem to know that it could be questioned. It never occurred to the Calvinist that anybody might use his liberty to deny or limit the divine omnipotence, or to the Quaker that anyone could question the supremacy of simplicity. That is exactly the situation of the Socialist...

Bolshevism and every shade of any such theory of brotherhood is based upon one unfathomably mystical Catholic dogma; the equality of men. The Communists stake everything on the equality of man as the Calvinists staked everything on the omnipotence of God. They ride it to death as the others rode their dogma to death, turning their horse into a nightmare. But it never seems to occur to them that some people do not believe in the Catholic dogma of the mystical equality of men. Yet there are many, even among Christians, who are so heretical as to question it. The Socialists get into a great tangle when they try to apply it; they compromise with their own ideals; they modify their own doctrine; and so find themselves, like the Quakers and the Calvinists, after all their extreme extravagances, a day's march nearer Rome.

In short, the story of these sects is not one of straight lines striking outwards and onwards, though if it were they would all be striking in different directions. It is a pattern of curves continually returning into the continent and common life of their and our civilisation; and the summary of that civilisation and central sanity is the philosophy of the Catholic Church. To us, Spiritualists are men studying the existence of spirits, in a brief and blinding oblivion of the existence of evil spirits. They are, as it were, people just educated enough to have heard of ghosts but not educated enough to have heard of witches. If the evil spirits succeed in stopping their education and stunting their minds, they may of course go on for ever repeating silly messages from Plato and doggerel verses from Milton. But if they do go a step or two further, instead of marking time on the borderland, their next step will be to learn what the Church could have taught.

To us, Christian Scientists are simply people with one idea, which they have never learnt to balance and combine with all the other ideas. That is why the wealthy business man so often becomes a Christian Scientist. He is not used to ideas and one idea goes to his head, like one glass of wine to a starving man. But the Catholic Church is used to living with ideas and walks among all those very dangerous wild beasts with the poise and the lifted head of a lion-tamer. The Christian Scientist can go on monotonously repeating his one idea and remain a Christian Scientist. But if ever he really goes on to any other ideas, he will be so much the nearer to being a Catholic.....

Street of the dead...

Here is a really cool virtual tour of the Scavi, the Roman necropolis under St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City. (Thanks to Argent.)

The Romans liked to construct little shrine-like buildings to bury their dead in. The Vatican Fields was a sort of trashy district outside of ancient Rome, which included a "village" of such tombs, with the buildings lined up along a "main street.". A necropolis. After St Peter was martyred, Christians buried him there secretly, and would slip off to the necropolis to pray by his grave. Pretty clever, hiding a tomb among tombs!

When Christianity became the official religion under Constantine, the first St Peter's Basilica was constructed right over the site of the burial place of Peter. The sloping area had to be built up to level ground, using, as I recall, 10 million baskets of soil. The necropolis was simply buried in the process, thus preserving it for us.

It was excavated from 1939 to 1950. Now you can tour the Scavi, something we'd love to do someday. The actual bones of Peter were found there, to a high degree of certainty! The "obvious" spot turned out to have some odds and ends of human and animal bones. But close by was a chamber embedded within a wall, and lined with slabs of marble. A graffito was found on the wall that said something like "Peter here." Inside were a man's bones, minus the feet. By tradition Peter was crucified upside-down, and might well have been just cut loose at the ankles.

(There's no mystery about the way Christians would have obtained the body. A bribe to the guards would be the expected thing. People being "disappeared" only began to happen in the Industrial age, when governments could afford bureaucratic organisations of regularly paid workers.)

[Note: The virtual tour locations can be navigated not only 360 degrees around, but also up and down. I got confused because I couldn't see the arrows to go on to the next spot...but actually I was looking down towards the floor!]

For Pentecost...

From the Book of Joel, Chapter 2.

...Thus says the LORD:
I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.
Your sons and daughters shall prophesy,

your old men shall dream dreams,
your young men shall see visions;
even upon the servants and the handmaids,
in those days, I will pour out my spirit.
And I will work wonders in the heavens and on the earth,
blood, fire, and columns of smoke;
the sun will be turned to darkness,
and the moon to blood,
at the coming of the day of the LORD,
the great and terrible day.
Then everyone shall be rescued
who calls on the name of the LORD;
for on Mount Zion there shall be a remnant,
as the LORD has said,
and in Jerusalem survivors
whom the LORD shall call...

Just as a point of information (sort of like one of my word notes), the old timers didn't really expect the moon to turn to blood, or the sun to go out. When you read things like that, they are not about *gasp* the End of the Earth. Rather apocalyptic, which is what that kind of writing is called, is and was a literary genre. God acts in history, acts in the world we live in. And saying that the "stars were going to fall" and similar things was understood by everyone to mean that God was going to be making big changes. Not that he was striking the circus tent, and ending the show.

The great irony is that when certain Protestant sects have calculated, from apocalyptic Bible passages, that the world is going to end on a certain day, their thinking is very much a product of the Enlightenment. They are taking, in fact, a rationalistic or "scientific" approach to scripture. They have lost the ability to "see" what Joel was saying. Even if they are Six-Day Creationists, and think dinosaur bones were planted by the Devil, they are as much chained to the narrow room of natural science as Richard Dawkins or poor Christopher Hitchins.

That's why we have the Church. The Church does not forget.

The Catholic Church is the only thing
which saves a man from the degrading
slavery of being a child of his age.
    -- GK Chesterton

Base camp. High above the tree line...

From If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are, by Edward Tingley:

..."Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy," as Dawkins says—though it is odd that he does so in a discussion of Pascal, who, like him, is a skeptic. A complete misunderstanding of Pascal, however, is crucial to the way that Dawkins and every one of his fellows (past and future) always think.

Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists.

"I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, [nature] should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether"—but nature prefers to tease, so she "presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt" (429). "We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty" (401). "We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is" (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of "progressive" folk who claim to "think critically" about religion and either "take theism on" or claim they are "still looking"—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual....

[...]

...Pascal the skeptic has ruled out a fruitless path, the path to God via logic or concrete evidence: the easy route to the summit, sought for centuries but never found. The only way forward is up from where we are, onto the icy slopes out past the limit of concrete evidence. If that is possible.

At this point, of course, the venture is not looking especially promising. The mind is made for hard evidence. It gets traction on rough ground, but what stretches before us is sheer ice (minds are not issued with crampons). Is there a way forward?

That is now the question. If we care about the truth more than we care about some favored means of data-collection, we need to discover whether there is any other way, up here where the air is thin and the ice treacherous, that a rational person could settle the question of God.

A Question, Not an Answer

"Is there anything more?" is the scientific question, but as Pascal asks it, the "scientists" vanish.

The agnostics ski down the mountain into the woods, searching for hard evidence on the basis of which to decide whether God exists—which is very odd, given that a moment ago they were standing here with us, ready to climb as declared skeptics. Agnostics, plainly, are wafflers in their skepticism: As the team gets going, they U-turn back to the foothills, where every true skeptic says there is nothing to find. They do not care about the truth.

But even more astonishing than that, the atheists have just gone home. They are not down in the valley looking for evidence; they are not looking at all. They have packed in the science without lifting a boot, as if the summit were already taken, the question answered.

The atheist is the team-member who was always talking up the loftiness of the mission, but after all his fervid urgings to "search for what is true, even if it makes you uncomfortable," to go on no matter how hard and painful the going gets, he is the chap who grandly announces, without bending a knee, that victory is ours: "God should be readily detectable by scientific means." "Absence of evidence is evidence of absence." We now "rule out the God worshiped by most Jews, Christians, and Muslims." The climb is done, and the atheist scampers back to town to meet the press....

Commenting on a comment...

I started to answer a comment by our friend Bisaal at this post, and decided to just make my answer—or rather, partial answer—a post in itself.

I am not clear on this subject at all but are you saying that rough work works so it is OK to do it now and then?.

Mark Shea I don't think radiates any partisan hatred or venom. He is consistent: anything that deviates from Church preaching is to be rejected.

Had the Catholics consistently followed this principle, a lot of past trouble eg World Wars might have been avoided.

Maybe you will object, that this goes against Prudence and thus Catholic States never applied such standard to themselves. But perhaps USA needs to set higher standards for itself.

The virtue of Prudence is crucial for Moral Reasoning. (For all people, not just Christians. Moral law exists objectively, applies to all of us, and can be apprehended by reason.) Prudence is not optional. It is not a "lower standard." It is not some sort of fudge-factor added on so that people can compromise with the strict demands of doing what is just. ALL good deeds and good things can be bad if done at the wrong time or place or situation. The beautiful poverty and service of St Francis would have been an evil thing if he had left a wife and children to starve to death!

There is NO situation—either personal or societal—to which one can simply "apply Church teachings" without considering Prudence.

And therefore there is no complex situation where one can simply take one small aspect and demand that people do the moral thing, without considering the whole. Prudence demands looking at the whole picture.

Therefore, if a moralist is going to try to influence people on how we should fight the "War on Terror," then he or she must consider the situation as a whole, and think through things. Think about questions like how, in general, this new kind of war can best be fought. And how those tactics and strategies fit in with moral principles.

As an example, people need to ponder how Christian "Just War" thinking should be applied to a new sort of war Aquinas never imagined. Another example: one needs to think about how our words and actions will be seen by others, and what behavior they will elicit. Are we tempting people to wrong-doing? (I'd say that Mr Shea is broadcasting messages that encourage terrorism.)

There are lots of similar things that need to be considered to decide what the moral way to deal with our world situation is. I don't follow everything Shea writes, so I may be doing him an injustice, but, it looks to me like he has cherry-picked those issues he happens to be interested in, and opines on them without ever articulating a philosophy of how the situation as a whole should be seen, and how dealt with. This is morally wrong; it is a failure to exercise Prudence.

In fact he not only has the duty to think through the whole situation, he also has the duty to encourage criticism and discourse. The way he sneers at those who disagree with him is itself a moral failure—it is doubling-down on his basic failure of Prudence. I wouldn't even consider challenging Shea's ideas at his blog, because I've never heard of him making reasoned responses like this one I'm trying to write. (Bisaal is doing me a favor by criticizing me, by prodding my reasoning, and I'm grateful.)

And I think Shea is partisan because his attitudes and the issues he in interested seem to match precisely those of far-left political activists. You can SEE this. The issues that make his cheeks glow and his eyes sparkle match up closely with groups like moveon.org or Code Pink. And he never seems (I don't read everything he writes, so I may be mistaken) to work up a sweat over the victims of terrorism, or over the war crimes that groups like al-Qaeda commit every day.

Who are the REAL Christians today? Well, I've blogged my opinion on one that often enough. Try this post. Or this....

(photo by Michael Yon, of a child deliberately slaughtered by terrorist madmen.)

(And now I've really got to get to work, and I haven't even addressed torture specifically. Oh well, another day)

"Truth's priority over goodness in the order of virtues"

Cardinal Ratzinger on Newman. From Conscience and Truth: (paragraphing added)

...For Newman, the middle term which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought of Newman's intellectual grappling. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. To put it differently, the centrality of the concept conscience for Newman, is linked to the prior centrality of the concept truth and can only be understood from this vantage point. The dominance of the idea of conscience in Newman does not signify that he, in the nineteenth century and in contrast to "objectivistic" neo-scholasticism, espoused a philosophy or theology of subjectivity. Certainly, the subject finds in Newman an attention which it had not received in Catholic theology perhaps since Saint Augustine. But it is an attention in the line of Augustine and not in that of the subjectivist philosophy of the modern age. On the occasion of his elevation to cardinal, Newman declared that most of his life was a struggle against the spirit of liberalism in religion. We might add, also against Christian subjectivism, as he found it in the Evangelical movement of his time and which admittedly had provided him the first step on his lifelong road to conversion.

Conscience for Newman does not mean that the subject is the standard vis-a-vis the claims of authority in a truthless world, a world which lives from the compromise between the claims of the subject and the claims of the social order. Much more than that, conscience signifies the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself. It is the overcoming of mere subjectivity in the encounter of the interiority of man with the truth from God. The verse Newman composed in 1833 in Sicily is characteristic: "I loved to choose and see my path but now, lead thou me on!" Newman's conversion to Catholicism was not for him a matter of personal taste or of subjective, spiritual need. He expressed himself on this even in 1844, on the threshold, so to speak of his conversion: "No one can have a more unfavorable view than I of the present state of Roman Catholics." Newman was much more taken by the necessity to obey recognized truth than his own preferences, that is to say, even against his own sensitivity and bonds of friendship and ties due to similar backgrounds.

It seems to me characteristic of Newman that he emphasized truth's priority over goodness in the order of virtues. Or, to put it in a way which is more understandable for us, he emphasized truth's priority over consensus, over the accommodation of groups. I would say, when we are speaking of a man of conscience, we mean one who looks at things this way. A man of conscience, is one who never acquires tolerance, well-being, success, public standing, and approval on the part of prevailing opinion, at the expense of truth. In this regard, Newman is related to Britain's other great witness of conscience, Thomas More, for whom conscience was not at all an expression of subjective stubbornness or obstinate heroism. He numbered himself, in fact, among those fainthearted martyrs who only after faltering and much questioning succeed in mustering up obedience to conscience, mustering up obedience to the truth which must stand higher than any human tribunal or any type of personal taste. Thus two standards become apparent for ascertaining the presence of a real voice or conscience. First, conscience is not identical to personal wishes and taste. Secondly, conscience cannot be reduced to social advantage, to group consensus or to the demands of political and social power....

"...not a matter of personal taste or of subjective, spiritual need." That is very important. When I first became a Catholic a friend said something to the effect of: "That happens to be what works for you. My [insert Protestant denomination] is what works for me." But if you are a Catholic it is of great importance to simply NOT think in those terms at all. Don't look for "what works for me." The working of the Church is objectively true, like a car takes you places whether you like its style or not. Ex opere operato.

And it is our duty to be in communion with God's Church even if the local manifestation is repulsive. Charlene and I love our parish intensly, but suppose we moved to some small town where the only parish was similar to what Fr. Dwight described recently:

...Then in becoming a Catholic I had to give it up. The churches we attended were dull modern auditoria. Some of them not too bad, many of them awful. The liturgy was often the usual modern Catholic Howdy Doody show with felt banners, priests walking around with a hand held mike being folksy. The music was torture. Plump middle aged ladies strumming guitars, beardy weirdy men in sandals standing at a keyboard swaying to the beat. Bad music. Heretical words. Excruciating.

But we had to be Catholic. So we made the sacrifice. The beauty, the reverence, the dignity, the sublime music, the architecture, the learning, the glories of Anglicanism: all of it went on the altar...

Yeah, like he said. Charlene and I would still faithfully attend Mass, even if we hated every minute of it. And when I considered becoming a Catholic, I dug that almost immediately. I take a little bit of pride in that.

So why do you CARE?

One of the squirrelier things I've stumbled on today is this: Happy Easter - To hell with the Vatican edition...

The old celibates and child molesters at the Vatican have said no to a US Ambassador who supports abortion and stem cell research. Vatican blocks Caroline Kennedy appointment as US ambassador...

...Now I'm not sure why we even need an ambassador to a church but I think my friend Jazz gets it right.

"The broader point there, though, is the truly bizarre concept that foreign entities should be rejecting ambassadors because of policy differences between them and the person selected. Perhaps our ambassador to Venezuela should only be someone who supports Castro, hates America and wants Russian missile installations throughout Central and South America? Here's an idea... let's have an ambassador to England who wants the United States to forfeit its independence and go back to being a territory of the U.K.

A quick note to our Obama bashing pundits who are cackling with glee over this: ambassadors, by definition, are representatives of our nation and, in particular, of the positions and views of the current administration. The current administration happens to be pro-choice, and to the extent that should ever come up in discussions, they need to represent those views. All they really need is the ability to communicate well and be, well... diplomatic. They deliver messages, gather information and facilitate relations behind the scenes."

This is a false analogy. For a better analogy, think of the old days when we would send ambassadors to communist countries. They never were upset that our ambassadors were mostly capitalists. BUT, suppose we had sent an ambassador who was a prominent Communist who believed fervently in the right to private property! THAT they might well have objected to, since it would be a clear attempt to subvert Communist beliefs using fake Communists.

More interesting would be what the nomination of that "pro-private property communist" would have said about us. It would have said that we believed in Communism, and needed to subvert it within its own philosophical framework.

That's what Obama (and the quoted bloggers) are revealing about themselves. They know exactly who their real opponent is, and they CARE. Same thing with Obama's HHS picks, Daschle and Sibellius. Pro-abortion Catholics both of them. Why did he choose them?

This all reminds me of the way satanic cultists will steal consecrated hosts from a Catholic Mass to use in their ceremonies. Why do they care?—why not just BUY communion wafers from a religious supply company? The satanic-types are admitting that what happens in the Liturgy, in the central Christian Mystery, is real! (also interesting is that nobody steals communion bread from Protestants! The Devil knows what's what.)

Also, if one is honestly interested in diplomacy, then the reaction to being told that one's ambassador is unacceptable is to say. "Thanks, we almost made a big mistake." It's not diplomacy Obama's pursuing here in his sneaky cowardly way, it's war.

Have you ever been to a clambake?...

...."Wait without hope," wrote TS Eliot, "for hope would be hope for the wrong thing." If you frame Easter in the terms of the perceived problem, you belittle it. Whether you think in terms of pie in the sky (at best a thoroughly subChristian concept) or a better society, all you get is a happy ending after a sad or sinful story.

And whatever Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were doing in writing the final sections of their books, they were not telling the story of Jesus's resurrection as a happy ending. They were telling it as a startling new beginning. Easter morning isn't a slow, gentle waking up after the difficult operation. It's the electric shock that brings someone back to life in a whole new way.

That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.

Equally, they knew the risen Jesus wasn't just a resuscitated corpse, still less someone who had almost died but managed to stagger on after all. They had the puzzled air of people saying, "I know this sounds wacky, but this is truly how it was." They were stumblingly describing the birth of new creation, starting with Jesus but intended for the whole world.

It sometimes seems that the church can hardly cope with this any more than the world can. Perhaps that's why, after 40 days of Lent, many churches celebrate Easter for a few hours and then return to normality. But nothing can be "normal" after Easter. New creation has begun, and we are summoned to get on board. We should at least have an eight-day party, or even a 40-day one.

And if Easter is all about the surprise of new creation, there is every reason to suppose that it will ripple out into the world in ways we would never imagine. Gangsters and drug-dealers get radically converted and set on fire with God's love, while pale churchmen drone their disbelief and warn against extremism.

Extremism? What can be more extreme than God raising Jesus from the dead after the world has done its worst to him? Supposing the power of that event were to be released into the world, into local communities, into ordinary lives, here and now? What might that look like?...

      -- NT Wright (Link)

"That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports..."  Exactly. And what does that mean? Well, for one thing it means that nobody just made the story up while sitting at a desk wondering how to get a new "religion" started. It's just too messy and even slightly comical a story. Various scholars have opined that the disciples had some sort of "spiritual" experience, and then later interpreted it as something concrete like a resurrection. Pahhh! That's just stupid. (And I know what they are up to because I used to feel the same embarrassment about Easter, and used to wish that Jesus had been more like, say, Lao Tze.)

And the thing that has always tormented gnostics—and we have more of them now than ever—is that there's nothing "spiritual" about the Passion and Resurrection. It's all so grittily real and physical, it's kind of a pie-in-the-face to all the lofty "spiritual" types. Have you ever been to a clambake?...

...When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, "Bring some of the fish that you have just caught." So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn.

Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast." Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, "Who are you?" because they knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead...

Well, Charlene and I have been there, by that very sea. Who knows, maybe on the very same spot--this picture is taken near Caperneum. It's an awesome place, but it also resembles San Diego County to a disappointing degree. And it's nothing like a Zen monastery. If you want "spiritual," go trekking in the Himalayas.

Our friends Fr. Francis Goode and Shelley Goodale by the Sea of Galilee...

  

The Left doesn't care about gays...they're just cannon fodder in the real war

Dafydd asks a great question. There are surely far more homosexuals affected by the ban on their openly serving in the military than there are gays who really want to get married. And far less justification for a ban. So, where is the Left? Why are no "liberals" clamoring for lifting the ban?

...At a guess, I believe that at least a hundred times as many gays serve (more or less secretly) in the military as want to get married to members of the same gender, and an even larger number are veterans or would like to serve in the future. At a guess, if about five million legal American residents are homosexual (loosely defined -- say 2% of men and 1% of women), easily as many as a million could be directly adversely affected by the policy. (I cannot imagine that anywhere near ten thousand gays and lesbians seriously intend to get married.)

And Congress or the president could enact that change right this very minute; I don't think Republicans could possibly muster 41 votes to filibuster a bill to lift the restriction, even if they wanted to -- and assuming congressional action is even required; it's possible that all it would take is an Executive Order from the Commander in Chief.

The Left could do it in a snap, even against unified Republican opposition (which I doubt could be mustered anyway). So why don't they?

Well, I didn't plan to leave that hanging as a rhetorical question. As anybody who has read more of this blog than just the seven paragraphs above knows, I ask because I think I know the answer -- which is simply this...

Democrats and liberals couldn't care less about gays, lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites, or any other such subgroup. They only champion the gay (or blacktivist, or feminist) agenda when a particular policy serves the larger agenda of the hard Left: the destruction of traditional Western culture and its replacement by secular humanism.

Simply and brutally put, destroying traditional marriage advances that liberal agenda, so liberal Democrats pursue it with a passion; but allowing gays to serve openly in the military does not advance that vile agenda -- so liberal Democrats truly could not care less...

There is really only One War. The only thing different now is the openness of the fight. (And yes, you are choosing sides even when you think you are neutral.)

Contrary to Reason...

Charlene recommends this post from ShrinkWrapped: Scientists and Morality. I started to blog my agreement, but was sidetracked by this paragraph...

...Scientists spend their working lives pursuing a rational understanding of the world around them. They are often both ignorant of, and intolerant of, the irrational. Because they pursue a rational understanding of the world they typically do not recognize their own irrationalities. This can be a problem when scientists venture into discussions of politics and morality....

Christians do NOT think that morality or faith in God are irrational. Not one little bit. (Well, actually, there is a modern splinter-movement, calling itself "Protestant," that has abandoned reason for a make-stuff-up-as-you-go approach. Perhaps the author is influenced by them. But the result of that experiment is that there are 30,000+ different Protestant groups--all claiming to have "the truth!" Nuh uh.)

I can't really blame people for not understanding this, since I am only starting to discover it myself. I'd heard the general idea of our catholic faith being based on reason, but, as a former Protestant I assumed that it meant that there was a glaze of philosophical justification painted over the totem pole. Turns out, not so. Christian faith is based on deductive reason in exactly the same way a proof in geometry is. Reason can prove to even a pagan like Aristotle that there must be one all-good and all-powerful god, and also the basics of traditional morality. (In addition to this other things are revealed. We are given additional information by God such as the Trinity or the Incarnation.)

That's why I've been recommending [link, link] the book The Last Superstition by Feser. He refutes the "new atheists" with a clear explanation of the metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas, which has been a huge "ah ah" moment for me. (And no one has ever refuted their logic, by the way. Modern philosophers have just tagged it "Medieval," laughed at Aristotle's mistakes in physics—which his metaphysics is not based on—and moved on.)

Scientists today have no philosophy that ties their work into the wider world, or helps them even think about such things. The result is that scientists are vulnerable when they try to extend their discipline into realms like politics or morality. They don't even notice that AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) has become a quasi-religion, and they excommunicate heretics and take things on faith, all the while telling themselves that are just "doing science," and are being hindered by "irrational" people.

And they don't understand that Secularism and Materialism are "faiths" just as much as the conventional religions. They can make "scientific judgements" on, say, the value of human lives compared to endangered species...and not realize they've left the realm of things that natural science can speak about.

Mr Shrinkwrapped also writes something that I've tried to get at before:

...Note the assumption that the greatest danger now resides in the alliance between science and business, ie the profit motive. Many, perhaps most, scientists are liberal by temperament and intellectual insularity. They have generally focused far more on their areas of expertise than on the political and moral dimensions of their work. Since liberalism has gained a monopoly (in the popular press and especially in academia) on morality, the assumption is that government run programs will be protected form the dangers of avarice. Government research is therefore, somehow more pure than business supported research. (We see this all the time when research supported by business is always reported in ways conducive to accepting that such research is tainted by its funding whereas government supported research is never considered tainted by the analogous human desires that determine its course and contents.)...

One can be avaricious for all sorts of things besides money. I suspect that many a scientist would kill (if there was an easy fool-proof way to do it) to be known for a significant discovery. Or to have a big lab full of top-notch post-docs. Or to be invited to important conferences. This is just as much greed and covetousness as wanting to earn millions of dollars. And it can corrupt people in just the same way. Actually, one could live like St Francis, and give the clothes off your back to the shivering poor... and still be a greedy miser. If, for example, what you coveted most was being considered "saintly."

And of course even in government-funded science there are potential big monetary-equivalent rewards. A "science star" might be flown first-class to a posh resort to mingle with rock-stars and shake hands with Al Gore or Prince Charles. That's worth enough money to corrupt almost anyone.

To repeat, it's a really good book...

I'm starting to re-read Feser's The Last Superstition. (I mentioned it last week.) By the time I got to the end I'd become fuzzy about some of the arguments from the beginning of the book, and the structure rests on them. So I'm starting over.

Here's a little more, from the first chapter, just in case some strange soul out there in the "audient void" still actually reads books to try to understand things...

...Nothing that follows will require of the reader any prior aquaintance with philosophy or its history, but the discussion will in some places get a little abstract and technical—though never dull, I think, and the dramatic relevance of the occasional abstraction or technicality to issues in religion, morality and science will amply reward the patient reader. Some abstraction and technicality is, in any case, unavoidable. The basic philosophical case for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the natural law conception of morality is at one level fairly straightforward. But the issues have become ever more greatly obscured in the centuries since so-called "Enlightenment" thinkers and their predecessors first started darkening the understanding of Western man, and a nearly impenetrable philosophical smokescreen of unexamined assumptions, falsehoods, clichés, caricatures, prejudices, propaganda and general muddle-headedness now surrounds the average person's (including the average intellectual's) thinking about religion. It takes considerable intellectual effort to dissipate this kultursmog (to borrow R. Emmett Tyrrell's apt coinage).

The task is not unlike that which faces debunkers of popular but intellectually unsupportable conspiracy theories...

...Similarly, everyone "knows" that the cosmological argument for God's existence says "Everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause, namely God" and that this argument is easily refuted by asking "Well, if everything has a cause, what caused God then?"— except that that that is not what the cosmological argument says, and none of the philosophers who have famously defended the argument — not Aristotle, not Aquinas, not Leibniz, not anyone else — ever committed such a stupid and obvious fallacy. Everyone "knows" that to say that morality depends on religion means that God arbitrarily decides to command something or other ("just 'cause He feels like it," apparently) and the only reason to obey is fear of hellfire — except that that is not what it means to say that morality depends on religion, certainly not in the thinking of the many serious philosophers who have defended that claim. And so on and on...

...As we heard Quentin Smith and Jeremy Waldron complain above, apart from the few who make a professional specialty of arguing about religion, secularist thinkers are generally unacquainted with anything but absurd caricatures of traditional religious idea and arguments, are utterly unaware that anything other than these caricatures exist, and thus don't bother to look for anything but straw men to attack. They simply don't know what they are talking about, and they don't know that they don't know it...

Kultursmog! Great word. This kind of thing is worth studying just because kultursmog describes our world so very well. To think clearly about anything is an accomplishment. (One needn't, by the way, be interested in religion to appreciate Feser. His skewering of the muddled philosophy that underlies natural science is very good.)

We "are called to the same most high dignity"

Pope Leo XIII on Socialism...

For, indeed, although the socialists, stealing the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary, have been accustomed to distort it so as to suit their own purposes, nevertheless so great is the difference between their depraved teachings and the most pure doctrine of Christ that none greater could exist: "for what participation hath justice with injustice or what fellowship hath light with darkness?"

Their habit, as we have intimated, is always to maintain that nature has made all men equal, and that, therefore, neither honor nor respect is due to majesty, nor obedience to laws, unless, perhaps, to those sanctioned by their own good pleasure. But, on the contrary, in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel, the equality of men consists in this: that all, having inherited the same nature, are called to the same most high dignity of the sons of God, and that, as one and the same end is set before all, each one is to be judged by the same law and will receive punishment or reward according to his deserts. The inequality of rights and of power proceeds from the very Author of nature, "from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named."...

...For, while the socialists would destroy the "right" of property, alleging it to be a human invention altogether opposed to the inborn equality of man, and, claiming a community of goods, argue that poverty should not be peaceably endured, and that the property and privileges of the rich may be rightly invaded, the Church, with much greater wisdom and good sense, recognizes the inequality among men, who are born with different powers of body and mind, inequality in actual possession, also, and holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God, the Author and Defender of right, that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another, and that thieves and despoilers, no less than adulterers and idolaters, are shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven...
      -- Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris

Leo XIII is a favorite of mine for various reasons, including that it was he who made John Henry Newman a Cardinal.

And he was the first Pope to have his voice recorded, and to be in a motion picture....in 1903!! (It doesn't sound like much--he was close to death at the time. But it's still a cool thing.)

Chewed up and spit out...

I have to recommend a very good book, The Last Superstition, by Edward Feser. It's a debunking of the recent spate of "New Atheist" books, drawing on the classic arguments of Aristotle and Aquinas. I've long been aware that they, and other philosophers, had given proofs of God's existence, but I must confess I've never studied them. In fact, like many people, I had picked up a vague impression of what those arguments might be--impressions that are simply wrong! (For instance Thomas does not base any arguments on the universe needing a creator to get it started in the first place!)

The actual arguments are very interesting, and Feser presents them wittily, and with lots of snark at the lameness and ignorance of people like Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins. If there are any people with enquiring minds left in the world, they could enjoy this book even without being interested in the actual questions... just to appreciate clear thinking.

...But enough of this unpleasantness. Let us turn to Aquinas. To understand his arguments for God's existence, you need first to understand what is wrong with the way philistines like Dawkins read them, or rather misread them. Like many who are not familiar with philosophical modes of argumentation, Dawkins assumes that Aquinas is engages in a kind of empirical theorizing, "postulating" God's existence as a "hypothesis" to "explain" certain pieces of "data." That is, he thinks Aquinas's reasoning is analogous to the sort of reasoning a detective engages in when he infers from a cigarette butt and the size of a shoe print that the suspect was probably a six-foot tall smoker...

...When understood in this light, arguments for God's existence inevitably come to seem like what are called "God of the gaps" arguments: "Here is something science hasn't yet explained; probably God is the explanation." Dawkins, Harris, et al., come along and have little trouble coming up with some imaginative materialistic exlanation of the evidence in question, and even if the proposed explanation is unsupported or far-fetched, it serves rhetorically to undermine any confidence their hapless readers might otherwise have in the whole enterprise of arguing for God's existence.

But Aquinas does not argue in this lame "God of the gaps" manner, and neither do any of the great philosophical theologians referred to above (Aristotle, Maimonides, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, et al.). I will admit that some theists argue this way: Paley did, and "Intelligent Design" theorists influenced by him do as well. But their faulty methodology should not be read back into thinkers who would have had no truck with it. Why atheists are so fixated on Paley, I cannot say, unless it is precisely because he is such an easy target: If he didn't exist, atheists would have to invent him, or find some other straw man to beat. Aquinas, as is well know, always painstakingly considered all opposing arguments, and always made a point of attacking an an opponent's position at its strongest point. (This contrast is one reason I compare the moral character of the New Atheists so unfavorably to that of Aquinas, and it is a reason they will be hard-pressed to dismiss, à la Hume, as a mere "monkish virtue.")...

...What Aquinas is doing can be understood by comparison with the sort of reasoning familiar from geometry and mathematics in general...

 

x

"Like the tides of an invisible sea"

The Anchoress quoted this...

From Flannery O'Connor's letter to Alfred Corn on May 30, 1962:

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian sceptism. It will keep you free -- not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your intellect or the intellects of those around you...

Faith, by the way, is transparent. You can't see it, or touch it, but you know that it is there because you see other things more clearly--faith is sort of like the glass in a diving mask. You don't see the glass itself, but you see the underwater world much more clearly, so you know it is there.

Actually, the statement that "faith lets you see things more clearly" is true of pretty much everything. You can not, for instance, be a good scientist or engineer if you do not have faith in those disciplines. (I suppose it would be possible to do science merely as an intellectual game that you do not believe in, but it never happens.) The engineer has at some point in his life had a "conversion experience," which turns many small pieces of knowledge gained in life into a meaningful whole. (Or it could be, Catholic-wise, a series of small conversions throughout life.)

I love history, and I well remember my "conversion experience" the first time an entire period of history snapped into focus as a coherent whole, rather than a collection of interesting facts. It was dazzling. (The book was The Fatal Inheritance; Philip II and the Spanish Netherlands, by Edward Grierson.) Once that happened, then I could presume that any period of history would be found to be a comprehensible whole, if I cared to delve into it. Politics, art, clothing, military tactics, religion....all would be inter-related and meaningful. I could "see" the idea, because I had faith.

 

Misses the real question....

Randy Barnett:

...Fair enough. But even with this admonition in mind, I will modify my claim only slightly: No avowedly creationist Republican candidate will be elected President of the United States. Not. Gonna. Happen. And if that creationist Republican candidate is far superior with respect to governing philosophy and executive experience and skills, as he or she may well be, it will be so much the worse for the country. Sorry Bobby, Tim & Mark. Republicans: Do NOT try this electoral experiment. Please!...

(Thanks to Glenn)

My guess is that Randy is off the mark here. The real issue has little to do with science*. (I am by the way a Catholic, and I think Creationism is quite silly. Darwinian evolution is the best model of biological science we have so far, and is not in conflict with Christian faith.)

The real issue is that natural science is commonly used--in a way that has nothing scientific about it--to attack Christian and Jewish faith. We absorb from the culture around us a vague idea that science (or history) has already answered the questions, and have clearly shown that there is no god, etc. Of course science doesn't say anything of the sort.

And this should be of concern even to, say, non-believing libertarians, because the same bogus methods are used to attack things like our civil liberties. Or our belief in our own Western civilization. How so? These things have always been supported by a quasi-religious assumption that they have authority, as things handed down from revered ancestors.

If you say that rights are "inalienable," for instance, you are expressing something analogous to religious faith. Something that can be destroyed by pushing the fraudulent idea that "science" has already debunked all those old fuddy-duddy notions, and that "experts" should be given a free hand to improve and bring-up-to-date. (Experts connected with government, of course.)

A Creationist is attacking an important problem with the wrong weapon. But I would gladly vote for a Creationist if the alternative were someone who vaguely implies that science has rendered things like nations and free speech and human dignity and economic freedom obsolete.

[*As an example of the sort of misuse of science I'm thinking of, I recently read some conservative secularist declare something like "we have no need of improbable events like virgin births..." But an action by God is inherently outside the realm of things we can assign probabilities to. The statement is absurd and meaningless, but many people will take it as good sense.]

Of course it's improper to critique a book just from a review....

...but liberal thinking just doesn't compute, and I'm willing to bet money this stuff wouldn't make more sense if I read the whole thing...

Beliefs - The New Atheism, and Something More - NYTimes.com:

...Mr. Aronson proposed that neither it nor the other [atheist] books under review provided "the most urgent need" for secularists today: "a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one's life." [It can't be done. You've been trying for several centuries now.]

A "new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st," he wrote. "It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today." [Tall order! You've rejected authority, so if you succeed, what authority will validate your success? It will just be a theory, competing with ten-thousand other theories.]

"Living Without God" (Counterpoint, 2008) is now the title of Mr. Aronson's own effort to provide such a popular philosophy. It is meant to take up, he writes, where books like "The End of Faith" leave off.

Mr. Aronson makes a good argument that Americans are far more secular -- or at least less religious -- than is often recognized. But, he says, contemporary secularism has lost the buoyant confidence it once gained from "its essential link to the idea of Progress, which promised so much and came to such grief during the 20th century." [Nuh uh, pal. Secularism and "Progress" caused the grief of the 20th century. YOU killed a hundred-million or two people in pursuit of various secular paradises. It doesn't work to pretend that these things just happened out of the blue. The blood is on your hands.]

"To live comfortably without God today," he says, "means doing what has not yet been done -- namely, rethinking the secular worldview after the eclipse of modern optimism." [That optimism was itself a transference of the HABIT of Christian Hope to the secular realm. But the habit's wearing off. Now you are realizing you are bankrupt. ]

Indeed, "religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness [couldn't have described it better myself], of today's atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something." [Well fancy that! Let me just guess--it's going to be a very amorphous "something." Characterized by... incompleteness or tentativeness, thinness, emptiness... Right? C'mon pal, surprise me! Invent a secular worldview that has even one one-hundredth of the gritty REALNESS of the Church Catholic.]

For Mr. Aronson, that "something" is not the ideal of an autonomous individual striding confidently into the dawning future but the drama [drama??] of an interdependent humankind embedded in complex systems of forces, knit into networks of natural environment, historical legacies, social institutions and personal relations. [What a load of galumpfh. "Embedded in complex systems of forces." What does that MEAN? Embedded like bees in a hive? Like raisins in a cookie? If you have complex systems, then decisions need to be made. Who makes them? How do people set priorities and goals?

What if your priority involves my being eliminated for the good of the whole? Hmmm? What if people don't WANT to be knit into networks? Every revolution starts with wooly-headed intellectuals sketching vague paradises of happy embeds. But the kulaks prefer not to be embedded in the collective farm. So then the ruthless rise to the top, and start forcing people into the mold. And probably sending guys like Aronson on that long march to nowhere.]

From this larger story of interdependency, he draws a ground, not surprisingly, for responsibility and morality: a recognizable left-of-center commitment to collective struggle against "domination, inequality and oppression, rooted in scarcity." [This one sentence has enough lunacy to write a whole essay on. To take just one, morality requires drawing lines. Saying X is immoral, and it is wrong to do it. Period. But just proposing your own morality gives no authority to draw hard and fast rules. How can you? What justifies your rule over someone elses?

And, importantly, who DEFINES things? Liberal morality tends to say "I can do what I want if I don't hurt someone." BUT, it's the liberal himself who is defining what "hurt" is. And who is a "someone." So they can define an unborn baby as "not human," and murder it. Or define the entrepreneurs who provide society's wealth as "parasites" and zeks, and expropriate them, or send them to the camps.]

More originally, he argues that this interdependence should summon gratitude -- gratitude "for," even if not "to." Giving thanks, he recognizes, has been central to religion, and secular culture needs to be enriched with an equivalent.... [There is no equivalent. Gratitude is, in its essence, humble. You can't be grateful for something you think you deserve; you are grateful for a gift. You must acknowledge something bigger and better than oneself. But that's a religious attitude. No one's ever going to feel gratitude to "complex systems of forces."]

I suspect that the recent spate of atheist books is not because atheists think they are winning, nor that, as some have suggested, they think they are losing. I think we are at the moment that Guardini predicted, back in the 1950's. (link) They are staring into the abyss. They are finally realizing what it's like to live without God, or without anything greater than the self.

 

"agnosticism slips out of one's hands like a soap bubble"

Benedict XVI, from Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures: ...The true way to call agnosticism into question is to ask whether its program can be realized. Is it possible for us, as human beings, purely and simply to lay aside the question of God, that is, the question of our origin, of our final destiny, and of the measure of our existence?...

...Even if I throw in my theoretical lot with agnosticism, I am nevertheless compelled in practice to choose between two alternatives: either to live as if God did not exist or else to live as if God did exist. If I act according to the first alternative, I have in practice adopted an atheistic position and have made a hypothesis (which may also be false) the basis of my entire life...

...Let us leave this question here: it is clear that the prestige enjoyed by the agnostic solution today does not stand up to closer examination. As a pure theory, it may seem exceedingly illuminating. But in its essence, agnosticism is much more than a theory: what is at stake here is the praxis of one's life. When one attempts to "put it into practice" in one's real field of action, agnosticism slips out of one's hands like a soap bubble; it dissolves into thin air, because it is not possible to escape the very option it seeks to avoid. When faced with the question of God, man cannot permit himself to remain neutral. All he can say is Yes or No--without ever avoiding all the consequences that derive from this choice even in the smallest details of life. Accordingly, we see that the question of God is ineluctable; one is not permitted to abstain from casting one's vote...

Thanks to Macklin Horton, who adds, "...I've never heard anyone say 'I don't know whether there is a God or not, so I'm going to become a Catholic.' No, a commitment to agnosticism--as opposed to agnosticism still open to the alternative-- is a form of atheism."

New Cabinet post: Department of People-elimination,

The American Spectator: Nancy Pelosi's Modest Proposal:

..."It will reduces costs," Nancy Pelosi said on This Week, in reference to the "stimulus" rationale for sending millions of dollars to the states for "family planning."

What would once have been considered an astonishingly chilly and incomprehensible stretch is now blandly stated liberal policy.

The full title of Jonathan Swift's work, A Modest Proposal, was, For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. Change a few of the words and it could be a Democratic Party policy paper. Swift suggested that 18th-century Ireland stimulate its economy by turning children into food for the wealthy. Pelosi proposes stimulating the U.S. economy by eliminating them....

...Pelosi has helpfully if dimly blurted out what's often implicit in many of the left's schemes for human improvement: that, after all the rhetorical bells and whistles have fallen silent, the final solution concealed within the schemes is to eliminate people.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us isn't a horrifying thesis to the liberal elite but enjoyable beach reading. Al Gore lists population control as the first solution to global warming and they nod and give him a Nobel Prize.

They name awards after eugenicists like Margaret Sanger. "Unwanted" children are immediately seen as an unspeakable burden. Pregnancy is a punishment, and fertility is little more than a disease. Pelosi's gaffe illustrates the extent to which eugenics and economics merge in the liberal utilitarian mind. Malthus lives.

Hillary Clinton's State Department will soon treat people-elimination, in one form or another, as "development."...

The Lefist obsession with reducing population doesn't make sense if you think of it as "liberalism." But it makes perfect sense if you realize that most leftists (you've heard this from me before--sorry) are really self-worshippers, who care for no cause higher than themselves. I can easily slip into that frame of mind myself, and then it seems obvious that a lot of people should just vanish. Think how much less crowded the freeways would be!

All this is a good example of how there is terrible moral danger in a vague "do-gooder" attitude. What's that Google motto? "Don't be evil"? Something like that. That kind of thinking is a road that leads to....being evil. Morality isn't something you can just take for granted. Your conscience has to be educated. And it has to be exercised. If it isn't you just drift into the path of least resistance, a la Pelosi, and start thinking what a better world it would be if those icky poor people would just stop being born...

   

The biggest "youth protests" of our time...

...but it's a funny thing. The people who usually want "youts" to march and protest and shake-up the stodgy sclerotic establishment seem oddly unamused. I can't imagine why.

Well, Charlene and I and our daughter Betsy had a great hike on the Walk for Life. I'd guess there were 20k of us. (another estimate says 30k) Lots of families and kids. And I kept thinking of Mark Steyn's phrase, "The future belongs to those who show up for it."

Photo by Elizabeth Weidner

Puzzling things...

Madoff the Jew: The Media's Hypocritical Obsession With the Fraudster's Faith, by Phyllis Chesler:

...Most Jews do not recognize themselves in what Madoff did; they still expect to be judged on their own merits. I doubt this will happen. I think  Jews will be judged as if we are all guilty, whether or not we are innocent or poor, and whether or not we fight for justice for Palestinians or for justice for murdered Chabadniks in Mumbai. Here's one reason why.

For days now,  I have been following the media coverage of the Madoff scandal. I could not help but note that the New York Times kept emphasizing that he is Jewish and moved in monied, Jewish circles; not once, but time and again, in the same article, and in article after article. 'Tis true,  alas, 'tis true, the rogue is a Jew: But how exactly is Madoff's religion more relevant than Rod Blagojevich's religion?  The Times has not described Blagojevich  (or Kenneth Lay of Enron) as "Christians," nor do they describe the Arab or south Asian Muslim terrorists as "Muslims."....[Thanks to Bookworm]

That last sentence is misleading. If there was some way to link Ken Lay with real Christianity, they would have leaped at it. Imagine if he had been a pro-life activist!

Still, the kind of Jew-hatred the Times is showing is strange. It is exceedingly likely that most of the Jews touched by the Madoff mess are not very Jewish, except as a cultural holdover. For most American Jews, their real "religion" is liberalism, and the percentage of them who read the NYT is probably far higher than the general population. Yet we se leftist anti-Semitism all the time, especially in the truly insane hatred of the state of Israel. Think how crazy it is--Israel is a tolerant democratic society where Muslim MP's can heckle the Prime Minister, who might well be a woman. Israel is a place that has "gay pride" parades--and yet the Left invariably prefers Muslims who oppress women and gays.

Equally puzzling is why American Jews continue to put up with this. Perhaps they have just transferred their stubborn religious faithfulness to the new faith of liberalism, and are refusing to be detered by persecution!

Also puzzling is the philo-Semitism of so many of us on the Right. We sure don't gain any tangible benefits! One of the oddest things I read this year was this piece about President Bush's speech to the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. The Israelis were quite embarrassed to be lauded as Zionists and the Chosen People. Not to mention those references to that quaint old thing, the Bible!

It's almost like nobody believes the current "non-Jewishness" of so many Jews is real. Like any day now they will pull off the mask and be the People of the Book again...

An excerpt from the article:

....nd most embarrassingly of all, what President Bush believes about the Jews is something that nearly all Jews once believed about themselves. It's aggravating to be reminded of the you you once were and would like to forget. Remember the time back in high school when you had great ambitions and thought you had a God-given talent that the world would hear about some day? Not really, because now, decades later, you've done everything you can to banish it from your mind -- which is why you cringe when you run into an old classmate who recognizes you and exclaims with a slap on the back, "Hey, it's you! I'll never forget the impression you made on me."

For many Jews, President Bush is like that classmate. They wish he hadn't recognized them.

The president, it was observed rather ruefully in Israel, gave a Zionist speech such as hasn't been heard from mainstream Israeli politicians for many years. If by that is meant that he invoked the Bible, rather than the Oslo "peace process" or his own "road map," this is certainly true. The Bible has long ceased to be bon ton in Israeli intellectual life. It has become politically incorrect for Israelis to think that just because some possibly imaginary progenitors of theirs had religious fantasies about God's pledging them a country, their contemporary thinking needs to take this into account. If an American president feels comfortable with such fairy tales, that's no reason why they should.

President Bush clearly believes the Jews are central to history in a way most Jews themselves no longer do. They find such thinking primitive. The only problem is that history itself shows signs of agreeing with the president.

This, really, is the astonishing thing about the country Mr. Bush addressed last week when he said, "Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again and America will be at your side": How central to everything it is. A tiny place with a population that wouldn't fill any of the world's ten largest cities, it finds itself in the middle of all the great conflicts of our times: The battle for democracy, the war against terror, the fight against Islamic fundamentalism, the campaign against nuclear proliferation. Practically every scenario for a nuclear Armageddon, ranging from that of the most wild-eyed preacher of the Gospel to that of the most cool-headed political scientist, revolves around Israel.

Perhaps it really is primitive to believe, as President Bush does, that this has something to do with the Jews being the people of the Bible. Certainly, most Jews themselves would like to think that it has to do with other things. They would rather not be at the center of anything. It makes them nervous when someone reminds them that, despite their best efforts, that's where they still are. The role of being a chosen people is big on them.

The president of the United States disagrees. That's part of the reason why many Jews will be relieved to see him leave office next January. It's not just stem-cell research, or even the war in Iraq. The man thinks too much of us. That's something we're not prepared to put up with...

Faxes of faxes of faxes...

I often mention "hollowing out" --that is, the way meaning seems to drain out of modern people's lives leaving an outer shell with nothing much inside. And how people construct substitutes for what they've lost, and how meaning then drains away from those substitutes...

I haven't seen a better example than this NYT editorial, When Christmas Comes:

...But, really, Christmas needs no saving. It does not exist apart from what we make of it. And, on its own, it cannot save us, though it contains the gestures of generosity and thankfulness that are halfway to being a better person, a richer community. Christmas is all the better for being a simple place, nothing more, perhaps, than two red cardinals, male and female, against the backdrop of a snowy field. They are there every day. The only difference is that today it feels like Christmas.

So what IS this "Christmas" the editors are editorializing about? Heaven knows. It's like a document that's been faxed around so many times it's turned to a gray blur. Somebody long ago fudged-up "secular Christmas." And then somebody created a secular version of that still quasi-religious thing, and then the newer blander version was refined into a yet-more secular thing..... Finally we get to "Snowflake Day," when, for some forgotten reason, we feel sort of warm and fuzzy inside when the city puts snowflake decorations on the lamp posts along Main Street!

The underlying reason for the hollowing-out is that anything that has "meaning" is bigger then the self. And therefore it makes demands on us. So if people become self-worshippers, then they will try to get rid of meaning. Get rid of the solidity, the real-ness of things.

We see this process all around us, and it bewilders me how little people will "observe" it. Everything that is tough and chewy gets tenderized into pablum. Marriage, for instance, has been repeatedly faxed throughout my lifetime, becoming ever less demanding and real. People keep hoping and wishing it will be meaningful for them, while at the same time eagerly knocking off any sharp edges that might bruise them. What a sick joke. It should be re-named "White Dress Day." And the especial insanity is that each time the document gets faxed, the proponents of that particular iteration insist that it stands alone, that this faxing is a one-time thing, and the document will really be the same.

It's all kind of funny, but once you really "see" it, you see that people are sliding over the edge of a terrifying abyss. If you worship yourself you worship Moloch. The "self" will ask for the sacrifice of anything that rivals it. We all say, "Of course I would not do such-and-such! There are lots of things I would not sacrifice for my own satisfaction." Alas that "of course" is actually for most of us just a collection of habits that we have all inherited with our culture.

But the habits aren't "real," aren't solid, aren't something you can take to the bank. We tend, for instance, to feel a bit less selfish at Christmas, to think more about family and friends..........but, that's just a habit. And habits have a way of wearing off. Especially if people are trying to get rid of the underlying reasons for them. (The ultimate source, sometimes buried under many layers, is Jewish and Christian faith.)

The more the habits (not to mention the underlying reality) wear off, the more scary things are going to be.

...As unbelievers deny Revelation more decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent practice, it will become the more evident what it really means to be a Christian. At the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies. He must learn to exist honestly without Christ and without the God revealed through Him; he will have to leam to experience what this honestly means. Nietzsche had already warned us that the non-Christian of the modern world had no realization of what it truly meant to be without Christ. The last decades [the two world wars] have suggested what life without Christ really is. The last decades were only the beginning...
      -- Romano Guardini, from The End of the Modern World

"He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies." That's what we see all around us.

Well, Wright's a prophet, doncha know...

Mary Katharine Ham, Liberal Logic: Wright vs. Warren

Let me get this straight:

A 20-year association with a radically leftist, anti-American, racist preacher whom Obama referred to as a spiritual adviser meant absolutely nothing about Obama's judgment or philosophy, and illustrated only the bigotry of those who dared criticize it.

A 20-minute association with one of the country's most well-liked, mainstream evangelical preachers who happens to support traditional marriage cannot be countenanced and illustrates only the bigotry of those who would dare allow it.

Got it.

Parasites...

Our letter to Amazon.com, regarding their: "Amazon Music's 12 Days of Holiday" promo... (Thanx to Mark Steyn.)

Please tell someone in charge who cares about your customers (if there are any) that we are people who spend a lot of money with you, and we are disgusted and offended by your "twelve days of holiday" promotion.

You probably have some BS line about "Christmas" being offensive to other faiths, but it isn't. It's only offensive to lefty nihilists. To YOU.

If you don't like "Christmas," why don't you have the HONESTY to stop having what are obviously Christmas promotions, from which you make a mint of money! And stop using a Christmas carol for advertising that is unwilling to use the word "Christmas."

John and Charlene Weidner

PS: Have a happy and Holy Christmas.

Moral choices are not made in a vacuum...

[Warning: A post that rambles away from the original topic.]

A stupid idea, from Robert Kagan...

....Rather than simply begging the Indians to show restraint, a better option could be to internationalize the response. Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas. This would have the advantage of preventing a direct military confrontation between India and Pakistan...

What's wrong with this idea? The problem is that dealing with the Tribal Areas and the frontier regions as a whole will require fighting. Murderous savage combat. Aggressive fighting by small units, willing to take casualties, and inflict lots of them. [Actually, my guess is that the region will not be pacified by anything less than neutron bombs. Expect trouble for the rest of your lifetime.]

And we have discovered over and over the last few decades that there are no "international forces" that will fight. We have seen it with UN "blue helmet" operations--often gruesomely as the international forces stand by and let genocide happen. We see it right now in Afghanistan, where the "NATO forces" are meaningless as a whole. As always, the Anglosphere nations. Americans and Brits and Australians will fight. The French a little bit, the Germans or Dutch not at all.

The whole idea of "international institutions" is a fraud and a sham, and probably always will be. When significant things are accomplished in the world, it is because people believe in something. And the essence of an "international institution" is that it does not believe in anything. Why? Because it has to be a "lowest-common-denominator" of the belief of the national components. And then you have to reduce that by a factor of ten, because the people who run or promote such institutions are almost always going to be those who like a lack of belief.

It is (sorry to bore those who have already heard this) the draining away of belief in the hearts of the developed nations that is the core problem that has caused the terror war, and caused analogous problems like piracy in the Indian Ocean. Of course we were always destined for lots of ugly violent situations as globalization collided with Third World (especially Islamic) chaos and primitiveness. But a West that still retained belief in is own values would have been slamming down hard on things like terrorism or piracy when they first arose. And doing so would be morally correct. (Because, among other reasons, it is always the locals who suffer most when lawlessness is tolerated!) Those would have been actions similar to those of loving teachers or parents not allowing children to fall into crime or vice. It would be tough-love. The same thing works in analogous ways at every level. For instance, it is morally wrong for a city to let a race-riot develop, when killing a few rioters at the beginning would prevent it. Even if the rioters have legitimate grievances.

Focus for a moment on the magistrate who has to make the moral choice that a race-riot must be stopped at its first moment, even if deadly force is needed, and even if some innocent people may die. That's a very tough choice. It takes moral fiber. If he lacks it, then the result may be weeks of violence and killing, and the destruction of whole communities. Entire neighborhoods burnt down, and schools, homes, small businesses and churches gutted. We have seen this...

And the official doesn't make his choice in a vacuum. He feels the support--or lack of it--of the community and the culture. Unless he (or she) is very strong, support is needed. If only for the knowledge that he won't be hung out to dry for making a tough call! And therefore, brothers and sisters, it is WE who are really making that decision. It is OUR moral strength that is called into question. And we exert that strength mostly through a thousand smaller moral decisions. We communicate to our surroundings our integrity, and unconsciously we influence others, at their moments of moral choice.

And the ladders of influence go from the lowest rungs to the highest, and back down. The local magistrate who makes the hard choice to stop a riot instantly, before he knows how bad it will turn out to be, sends a message to national leaders who may have to chose to violently stop piracy before they know how big the problem is destined to grow.

I remember in my youth the first airplane hijacking, or at least the first one to grab the world's attention. And the reaction of officialdom was, "Give the hijacker what he wants, to save lives." We see now that that was a catastrophic decision, one that has caused thousands of deaths, and vast loss of treasure, and led directly to 9/11. And yet in a sense that decision was based on many previous bad decisions-- for instance deciding to give in to the demands of criminals who took hostages.

Sheer prudence and logic should have told us long ago that a policy of reacting to any hostage situation by instant deadly force would save many many lives in the long run. But prudence and logic are never enough. Not when the bank-robber is holding a gun to a child's head. Logic cannot generate moral law, and engrave it on our hearts. Moral law only can come from God, or from other sources of authority [Read this.]. Countless attempts to provide alternative man-made "liberal" sources of morality have all failed. And we see the results all around us.

Based on observation of the state of religious faith around us, I feel confident in predicting that these quasi-wars that afflict our planet will continue, and probably grow. Expect Mumbai.

For many seasons, many years...

FIFTH DAY

11. THANKSGIVING.

0 Lord, my Lord,
for my being, life, reason,
for nurture, protection, guidance,
for education, civil rights, religion,
for Thy gifts of grace, nature, fortune,
for redemption, regeneration, instruction,
for my call, recall, yea, many calls besides;
for Thy forbearance, longsuffering,
long longsuffering
toward me,
many seasons, many years;
for all good things received, successes granted me,
good things done;
for the use of things present,
for Thy promise, and my hope
of the enjoyment of good things to come ;
for my parents honest and good,
teachers kind,
benefactors never to be forgotten,
fellow-ministers who are of one mind,
hearers thoughtful,
friends sincere,
domestics faithful;
for all who have advantaged me
by writings, sermons, converse,
prayers, examples, rebukes, injuries;
for all these, and all others
which I know, which I know not,
open, hidden,
remembered, forgotten,
done when I wished, when I wished not,
I confess to Thee and will confess,
I biess Thee and will bless,
I give thanks to Thee, and will give thanks,
all the days of my life.
Who am I, or what is my father's house,
that Thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog
as I am?
What shall I render unto the Lord
for all His benefits toward me?
for all things in which He hath spared
and borne with me until now?
Holy, holy, holy,
Thou art worthy,
O Lord and our God, the Holy One,
to receive glory, honour, and power:
for Thou hast created all things,
and for Thy pleasure they are
and were created.

From The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes, ca. 1600.
(Andrewes was one of the men who
created the King James translation of the Bible.)

Try to believe that 2 + 2 = 5...

From chapter five of Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua...

...People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible to imagine, I grant--but how is it difficult to believe?......

Newman is getting at an important point. (Just in case anybody out there in "the audient void" is repelled from faith because various things are "hard to believe.")

In general, Christian doctrines are not hard to believe, they are hard to imagine.

If someone told you that 2 + 2 = 5, now that's hard to believe!

On the other hand, that a god created the universe is unimaginable (ie: You cannot imagine what the event might have been like), but at least as believable as any scientific explanation I've encountered.

(Scientific explanations such as this: "The creation of the universe itself involved information processing: random fluctuations in the quantum foam, like a random number generator in a computer program, produced higher-density areas, then matter, stars, galaxies and life...").

Likewise, once you believe in a creator god, it's not unbelievable that he might be interested in us, if only on the analogy that we can be very interested in microbes and insects.

Likewise, if there is a god who created the universe, he presumably is outside the realm of this physical universe which we apprehend by our senses. Therefore it's believable that there are realms where god and other beings can exist that our five senses cannot perceive. Ie: the Supernatural.

You can apply this down the line, and find that it works...

False step....

John Henry Newman, on "religious liberalism." (He was not writing about political liberalism, but it is easy to descry the analogous false step that underlies leftist politics)...[link]

....Whenever men are able to act at all, there is the chance of extreme and intemperate action; and therefore, when there is exercise of mind, there is the chance of wayward or mistaken exercise. Liberty of thought is in itself a good; but it gives an opening to false liberty. Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation.

Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word....

This is from the notes to his Apologia pro Vita Sua. Newman's Apologia is a classic. The Latin title means "defense of one's life." It is the sort of book that you would guess would be a very dull dry book indeed, since it is purely a history of Newman's religious thought during the first half of his life, and rigorously excludes all the action and personalities of his very active life. But the book is oddly compelling and readable. Recommended for all serious people, if there are any left.

"Everything is of consequence..."

From Letters to a Young Catholic, by George Weigel

....And here's the second proposition to ponder: for all the sentimentality that occasionally clings to Catholic piety, there is nothing sentimental about Catholicism. "There is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism," Flannery O'Connor wrote, because Christianity stands or falls with the Incarnation — God's entry into history through Jesus of Nazareth, who is both the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, and the son of Mary, a young Jewish girl living on the outer fringes of the Roman Empire.

History and humanity are the vehicles by which God reveals himself to the world he created. History is the arena and humanity is the vessel, through which God redeems the world. History and humanity count, and count ultimately: not because of our pride but because of God's merciful love, the unsentimental but cleansing love of the father who welcomes the prodigal son hame, knowing full well that the prodigal has made a thoroughgoing mess of his life by his selfishness, his "autonomy," his conviction that nothing, including himself, really counts.

"If you live today you breathe in nihilism...it's the gas you breathe," wrote Flannery O'Connor; "If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now." So, I expect, would I. So, perhaps, would you. So here's one more way to think about Catholicism and its distinctive optic on the world and on us: Catholicism is an antidote to nihilism. And by "nihilism," I mean, not the sour, dark, often violent nihilism of Nietzsche and Sartre, but what my friend, the late Father Ernest Fortin (who borrowed the term from his friend Alan Bloom) used to call "debonair nihilism": the nihilism that enjoys itself on the way to oblivion, convinced that all of this—the world, us, relationships, sex, beauty, history—is really just a cosmic joke. Against the nihilist claim that nothing is of consequence, Catholicism insists that everything is of consequence, because everything has been redeemed by Christ....

"Almost the opposite of abstraction"

From Saint Thomas Aquinas, by GK Chesterton....

...First, it must be remembered that the Greek influence continued to flow from the Greek Empire; or at least from the centre of the Roman Empire which was in the Greek city of Byzantium, and no longer in Rome. That influence was Byzantine in every good and bad sense; like Byzantine art, it was severe and mathematical and a little terrible; like Byzantine etiquette, it was Oriental and faintly decadent. We owe to the learning of Mr. Christopher Dawson much enlightenment upon the way in which Byzantium slowly stiffened into a sort of Asiatic theocracy, more like that which served the Sacred Emperor in China. But even the unlearned can see the difference, in the way in which Eastern Christianity flattened everything, as it flattened the faces of the images into icons. It became a thing of patterns rather than pictures; and it made definite and destructive war upon statues.

Thus we see, strangely enough, that the East was the land of the Cross and the West was the land of the Crucifix. The Greeks were being dehumanised by a radiant symbol, while the Goths were being humanised by an instrument of torture. Only the West made realistic pictures of the greatest of all the tales out of the East. Hence the Greek element in Christian theology tended more and more to be a sort of dried up Platonism; a thing of diagrams and abstractions; to the last indeed noble abstractions, but not sufficiently touched by that great thing that is by definition almost the opposite of abstraction: Incarnation. Their Logos was the Word; but not the Word made Flesh. In a thousand very subtle ways, often escaping doctrinal definition, this spirit spread over the world of Christendom from the place where the Sacred Emperor sat under his golden mosaics; and the flat pavement of the Roman Empire was at last a sort of smooth pathway for Mahomet. For Islam was the ultimate fulfilment of the Iconoclasts....

Chesterton's book is very worth reading, by the way. If you want an introduction to Aquinas, you simply cannot do better, as many Aquinas scholars have agreed. It is highly readable and thought-provoking...

"In the waste of waters...."

Charlene and I were at a social event yesterday, with a crowd of what might be described as greying long-hairs and hippie-types of our "Baby-Boomer" generation. (And, I hasten to add, as nice a group of folks as you might hope to meet. Pleasant to be around.) But it made me think about various things that are happening around us.

One is that there were no young people among the invitees. I thought of Mark Steyn: "The future belongs to those who show up for it." I also had to contrast this with our situation in our parish (Perhaps atypical, being Dominican.) Charlene and I are dealing with young people all the time. The place is crawling with them. Good-looking, thoughtful, challenging kids. Just talking with them makes us stretch, and they are not shy about teaching us things.

This is especially interesting in our R.C.I.A, which I help out with. (R.C.I.A is Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, which is how one becomes a Catholic. See note below.) The help I provide is very minor, but just hanging around is, to me, like hanging around the lab where some world-shaking series of experiments is being run. Utterly fascinating. We have young people and old, all races and backgrounds. And most of them seem, in one way or another, to be groping for a way out of the self-worshipping traps that my generation so conspicuously flooded the world with. [Charlene adds, "They are groping for Truth." Of course, we are the original firm.]

(I hasten to add that I think that the 60's were a sort of "perfect storm" of trends that have been developing for centuries, and that things would have worked out much the same even without the grotesqueries of my youth. I'm not the sort of conservative who blames it all on the 60's!)

Newman, 1877: :...my apprehensions are not new but above 50 years standing. I have all that time thought that a time of widespread infidelity was coming, and through all those years the waters have in fact been rising as a deluge. I look for the time, after my life, when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters...."

Anyway, back to groping for Truth. My first intellectual "mentor" was Peter Drucker. And one of the things he always emphasized was the supreme importance of asking the right questions. Of figuring out what question it is that you are actually asking. Part of what intrigues me about our R.C.I.A. groups are the many people who, though they are by my standards muddled and shockingly ignorant, are groping towards exactly the right question. It fills me with awe. And fear. I think of the old saying, "God watches over drunken sailors and lost children."

Another thing that struck me about the crowd we were in yesterday was that it was pretty much all white. C and I are so used to a multi-racial multi-ethnic milieu that we feel odd and a bit out of place in that sort of monoculture. Yet it's a likely bet that they were all Obama supporters, and if he loses they will be calling Republicans like us racists!

It made me think of yesterday's post...

Shannon Love: ...I think that politics on the Left has become a social process, i.e., a means of group identification and self-validation. Leftists care less about the triumph of ideas and far more about the triumph of a group of people with which they ego-identify. They need their ego-identity candidate to win so that they can feel good about themselves. The character and policies of the actual candidate does not matter...

I suspect that yesterday we were among the original type about whom that was written. I can just imagine the bland assumption that "everyone" is voting for Obama, coupled with bland ignorance of and indifference to the queasy-making things in his actual record. Perhaps I'm wrong---hope so.

To me "searching for Truth" is not something like hiking up in the Himalayas to pose questions to a bearded swami. It's more like the California Gold Rush, which was (in reality, not the cartoon version) a matter of men doing gritty back-breaking endless work, in sun and rain, in pursuit of the tiny elusive flecks of pure gold. And this is particularly a Catholic approach. The Church is always busy writing documents in painstakingly parsed Latin, defining the truths of the faith more completely than before. (Latin is used partly because it is a dead language and so the meaning of words does not change.) The core truths of faith are mysteries---we can't possibly really understand God---that's silly. But we have been given by God some things anyone can understand, and those we Catholics like to bite on, like people used to bite gold coins.

And this gold-panning for truth is something I think we should be doing all the time, because you never know where in daily life gold may appear. That's what really infuriates me about the Obama supporters I know; their utter indifference to the gnarly tactile details of truth-seeking. (I almost wish they were the dedicated socialists some people claim they are---at least they would have a "truth" to be dedicated to.)

  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  

EXPLANATORY NOTE: R.C.I.A., Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, appears externally as a series of once-a-week classes over six months. (Alas, in many parishes insipidly taught. There are only a limited number of Dominicans.) It starts about September, and ends at the Easter Vigil, when you may, if you chose, be Baptized (if you are not already) and Confirmed in the Catholic Church.) But it is really less about gaining knowledge (important as that is) than about conversion. Conversion means, literally, "turning around." Catholics believe in "continuous conversion," not the one-swoop "I'm saved" moment of the Evangelicals.

So R.C.I.A. is the start of the conversion process, which goes on life-long. We Christians are always noticing that we have somehow got going in the wrong direction yet again, oops, and turning ourselves around for the thousandth time. And conversion comes from hearing. Cor ad cor loquitor---"heart speaks to heart." As St Thomas put it: Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, Sed audito solo tuto creditur... Which, poetically translated, is "Taste and touch and feeling, to discern Thee fail, Faith that comes from hearing, pierces through the veil." (Yes, it is not "scientific." We are in a different realm, with different rules. Be adventurous, try something peculiar.)

The usual Quaker scam...

By James Kirchick...

....Meanwhile, other religious figures are reaching out to Ahmadinejad. On Thursday, the Iranian president will be the honored guest at an Iftar dinner--the ceremonial breaking of the Ramadan fast--at the New York Grand Hyatt Hotel. That meal is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker United Nations Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches-United Nations Liaison Office (notice the absence of any Jewish organization.) According to the invitation, the assembled guests--including Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, President of the General Assembly of the United Nations and the Rev. Kjell Bondevik, former Prime Minister of Norway and President of the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights--will hold a "conversation about the role of religions in tackling global challenges and building peaceful societies." The discussion will occur "In the presence of His Excellency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

You'd think that with such a high-profile figure addressing such an important topic, the Quaker lobby and its friends would want to share their honored guest's views with the world. But the event is closed to the press. So I called Mark Graham, Director of External Relations for the American Friends Service Committee. He said that "Jewish individuals," but not Jewish organizations, had been invited to Thursday's event, though he wouldn't name any of them for me. As far as the program is concerned, the evening's discussion will consist of a "dialogue around the idea that God has created us all and our common humanity. People are going to speak about the politicial, social,and religious implications that it has for their faith perspectives." This is actually the fourth event that AFSC (which has led interfaith delegations to Iran, though, again, with no Jews participating) has held with Ahmadinejad, and when I asked Graham about Ahmadinejad's thoughts on the Holocaust, he defended the Iranian President, telling me that "he readily says that the Holocaust was an historical event and he feels for the Palestinian people since the creation of Israel." When I asked if AFSC would press the Iranian President about his pursuit of nuclear weapons capability, support for international terrorism and the murder of American soldiers in Iraq, Graham told me that, "What we hope for with this event, like with others, is that we will help to understand each other a bit better. We will have more precedent for open questioning and a two-way dialogue that's open and honest."

There will be a protest of this Quaker Meeting. Details here.

The pacifist position is simple. War is something that America and Israel do. Iran openly racing to build nuclear bombs while openly talking about frying Israel is not war. So, why should any pacifist object?

Actually, it's worse than fake-pacifism. The Quakers and all those other "inter-faith/peace" groups are completely hollowed-out. They have no faith of any kind. All that's left is leftist politics. (And they would be much more respect-worthy if they really believed in those.) You can bet money that these useful idiots will conclude that Ahmadinejad is a mis-understood peace-lover, but Sarah Palin is a threat to the planet.

And you can be sure no Quakers will be holding "candle-light vigils" about this Christian convert under sentence of death in Iran.

Interesting guy...

Peter Robinson at NRO is putting up videos of an interview with writer Andrew Klavan. (The latest installment is #3 of 5.)

I recommend them. Very intelligent and thought-provoking. Normally I don't want to see a video, I just want to read stuff. But I'd say Klavan is an exception. It's worth seeing and listening to him "in person," so to speak.

Analogy to the Inquisition...

I got another e-mail on the subject of the Inquisition, in response to my post here.

...I'm OK with people calling some beliefs heresy, but killing people for it just feels over the line, especially for someone saying they are fully authorized agent of Jesus. If that's what being a Catholic is, that's a deal breaker for me. Is it still OK to kill heretics?...

No. Absolutely not. And to a considerable extant it never was. I don't think this was ever a part of Catholic dogma or doctrine.

What you have to realize is that until recently religions were the "political" groups. And a person who secretly believed something different from the state religion was often a political danger. Someone who would fight in a rebellion, or assassinate the monarch. If you read a bit about the Wars of Religion, you will see a lot this. There was back then no concept of a "loyal opposition." (In the religious sphere that's actually something that developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries out of the bloodbath of the Thirty Years War.)

And many accounts of the Inquisitions don't give you that context. They leave you to imagine that a bunch of cruel Dominicans were simply imposing their religion on peaceful folk, when in fact the real movers were usually governments worried (often with good reason) about fifth-columnists.

There is something of an analogy in what the Communists in the earlier 20th Century were to us. A Communist back then was NOT just someone with a different philosophy, he was often a secret agent for Lenin or Stalin. For the Comintern. If an American "converted" to Communism, there was a good likelihood that he would no longer be loyal to our country, and might work actively to subvert it. A splendid book to read, to understand the period, is Witness, by Whittaker Chambers.

This justified measures that were not normally acceptable in American tradition. It has never been right in America to blacklist or harass people because of their political beliefs. The "McCarthy Era" is often portrayed by liars as if it were just that, but in fact it was about hunting down people who were secret agents of a totalitarian conspiracy. One that was responsible for at least 100 million deaths in the 20th Century. Of course many of those who were harassed were not working for the Soviet Union, and had no real desire for the triumph of tyranny.

Innocent people were persecuted. BUT, the responsibility for this rests entirely on those traitors who concealed themselves among those who were, as you might say, "loyal communists." If someone was dragged in to testify before HUAC, and maybe had their career ruined, they usually are portrayed by liberal historians as people who were crushed by America, by cruel red-baiters, etc.

Bullshit. The responsibility rests with those who were hiding among them, using them as cover for their attempts to destroy our country. The most famous of these of course was Alger Hiss. And due to the fall of the Soviet Union we now have access to archives that show that Hiss was in fact a Soviet spy. But for 50 years he was pictured by cynical leftists as an "innocent victim" of men like Chambers and Richard Nixon. In fact the opposite was true. Hiss was guilty as hell, and was working hard to give us our own American Gulag Archipelago. And Chambers and Nixon were true American heroes, fighting ugly subversion with necessary roughness.

The "McCarthy Era" is usually portrayed as a period of madness, and analogized to the Salem witch trials. (Or the Inquisition!) The difference is that in the 20th Century there really were witches, and if they had achieved their ends people like you and me might be routinely rounded up at gunpoint and sent on that long march to nowhere....

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition"

A reader wrote to me, concerning yesterday's post:

....This quote mentions, "the medieval Albigensians and Cathari" and says, "Gnosticism can't handle the Incarnation". Since the Inquisition killed and tortured them and burned their books, it's my understanding we only know what they thought and practiced through what the Inquisitors said about them.

I'm not a Catholic (or a virulent anticlerical). To me, the Inquisition seems evil and an enormous contamination of the Christian teachings and I've never seen that explained away successfully. Maybe in a future post you might touch on that a little. Maybe I've got the facts wrong, or maybe there's some positive take on it I've missed...

Neither the Cathari nor the Inquisitions are things I have deep knowlege about. But hey, that never stopped me yet...so, a few thoughts...

I've learned some things about the inquisitions just from dabbling in history. (There were various inquisitions; they were local institutions, not an arm of the Church as a whole.) I think it is pretty safe to say that they were not nearly as bad as the grim legends make them out to be. They have mostly been portrayed by Protestants or by "Enlightenment" historians who had a big big ax to grind against the Church. (Rather like Leftists today have an ax to grind against the USA, and turned the fairly minor abuse of abu Ghraib into the worst thing ever, while ignoring real torture happening all around the world.) The savage torturing and murdering of Catholics by the Tudors and Stuarts gets little mention in history books, while everybody has shivered with horror about those dreadful dungeons of the Inquisition.

The methods and ethics of the inquisitors were the same as were used in all judicial processes of their time. It's not like the civil courts back then were any less oppressive. Probably just the opposite. I have read that the Spanish Inquisition was in fact quite scrupulous and just by the standards of its age. And that over several centuries of operation it only killed about 3,000 people--that's not exactly mass slaughter. Also, anyone convicted of a first offense could recant and go free. (But if you were caught in heresy again you were toast.) That's rather better than what you could expect from the average medieval king and his justices.

And it was done for what they considered a very good reason---heresy could lead people to eternal damnation, and could spread rapidly if not stopped. Torquemada would have said that it is WE who are cruel and unjust in allowing people to imperil their souls with false doctrine! I don't agree with the usefulness of his tactics, but the logic is perfectly correct. If I could save your soul from the fires of Hell by a bit of brutality, then I as a Christian would be obligated to do so! As it happens the Church teaches that this won't work, so I can focus my energies elsewhere, like torturing people with blogposts.

My wife Charlene is currently reading a book about the Cathars, The Perfect Heresy. She says we actually know quite a lot about them, because the inquisitors kept careful records, including transcripts of testimony. We don't, however, know for sure where Catharism came from. There was a very interesting book a few years ago, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, which revealed a extraordinary amount of detail about everyday life in a medieval French village---because the whole village had been hauled in and interrogated about their religious practices, and the bulky transcript then sat in the Vatican for 600 years until a historian mined it.

The Perfect Heresy looks like an informative book, though marred, to my casual perusal, by the assumption of the author that orthodox Christian faith is something people did back in the Middle Ages, and which no modern person would take seriously....

"Albigensian" (from the city of Albi) and "Cathars" were names invented by their enemies, by the way. They called themselves "good Christians."

   

"The power of hope and the limits of fear"

Mike Plaiss sent me a link to this Tony Snow quote in the WSJ...

Tony Snow in The Jewish World Review, 2005:

The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don't. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You feel the gravitational pull of faith. And you realize you have received a unique gift – a field of vision others don't have about the power of hope and the limits of fear; a firm set of convictions about what really matters and what does not. You also feel obliged to share these insights – the most important of which is this: There are things far worse than illness – for instance, soullessness.

Jerusalem 2

Last Sunday we stood on the Mount of Olives, looking over the Old City of Jerusalem. I pointed out the narrow road on the right side of the picture. Walk down the road—it's quite steep—and you come to the Garden of Gethsemane. It may not have looked much different in the time of Jesus. Olive groves can be pleasant places, and rather garden-like even without any improvements.

It would be a good place to slip away to at night to pray, as Jesus did. To pray in his agony, knowing he would soon die a terrible death. And it was here he was arrested. The place which tradition says was the actual spot is now covered by a church, The Church Of All Nations, or Basilica of the Agony, about a hundred feet from here. (We are just north of the road, the basilica is on the other side.)

And here is our dear friend Father Francis Goode, about to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass right in the garden. Let me tell you that was an amazing moment! We are there early, and all is quiet and peaceful.

Behind him you see one of the gates of Jerusalem, the Golden Gate. But observe, it is walled up. You can't go in! Legend says it will open only on the Judgement Day. Jesus and his followers might have stood at this very spot and seen the morning sun strike the golden ornaments of the Temple. Just a few days before his death Jesus did a shocking thing, turning over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. I follow N.T. Wright's explanation that this was a brief symbolic act such as Hebrew prophets were wont to do. But also a kingly act, because it was kings who built the Temples (this was the second Temple, and you could also call it the third since it had been greatly rebuilt and expanded by King Herod the Great) and kings who cleansed the Temple. It was an announcement, which he had avoided before, that he was the Messiah, the coming king who would restore all things, liberate the Children of Israel, and usher in the Kingdom of God. He would have been well aware that the powers would have to destroy him after that. And in submitting to death, he made the Perfect Sacrifice as our Great High Priest.

We believe that Christ has three aspects, Priest, Prophet and King. These are seen, among other ways, in the Mass, when our priest, acting in persona Christi, sits in a chair as King, stands in the pulpit as Prophet, and stands at the altar as Priest. Those whose minds are dimmed by Protestantism and Nominalism will no doubt refer to these as "figures of speech," or metaphors. No, sorry, they are real, as real this chair I'm sitting in. You can say they are metaphors that have come to life. They do that, wherever the Kingdom breaks in upon our world. And if you see it, if you are bowled over one day, as I was, to see metaphors become real things (sort of like waking up in a fairy tale and hearing trees and animals talk) well then you cease at that moment to be a Protestant....

If you are the rare sort who wants to understand these things by delving into history, I give my highest recommendation to N.T. Wright's three books that comprise his Christian Origins and the Question of God.

       

Jerusalem

I haven't blogged yet about our trip to the Holy Land. Really, I'm not a good enough writer to express what feel. And what I feel will tend to be regarded as crazy by most people, since I believe that there is, all around us, much that is real without being in any way observable by natural or scientific means. I am very much not a Nominalist, and Nominalism is the factory-default setting for people in our culture. (In fact I'm coming to suspect that the common thread in all the things that creep me out, and that I blog against, such as Communism, Postmodernism, Nihilism, Deconstructionism, "Progressivism" and the like is....Nominalism. Here's a summary on that subject)

And the unseen realities are not off in some woo woo "spiritual realm;" they interpenetrate our world at every point. The eyes of Faith can, to some extent perceive them. And yes of course I'm aware that such subtleties can be just self-deception, just products of the imagination. BUT, but, going up to Jerusalem...It's like having pondered hints of the unseen that are sort of like faded postcards of Yosemite...and then actually going to Yosemite. Words are useless. The reality is awesome....

Anyway, I just blog for the fun of it, so it doesn't matter what I write. Pass by, or pay attention. SO, attendez! (And thank you Mary Anderberg for prodding me.) In the picture below you are standing on the Mount of Olives. You are looking west. In the foreground is the Jewish cemetery. (The world's most expensive, by the way. You could easily pay a million bucks to rest your bones there.) It's hard to realize it in the picture, but the hillside is steep, especially past those spiky junipers. You can walk down that walled road on your right and you will go down to the Garden of Gethsemane hidden below the brow of the hill.

The Valley is the Kidron Valley. Above the spiky trees you can see its other slope. There are the remains of old terraces of olive trees, then a road, then the Moslem Cemetery, and then, the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Which on this side are where they have been for more than 2,000 years. (They've been rebuilt a few times, but in the same place.) Behind the wall you see a lot of greenery. That is the Temple Mount. It is a broad plateau built up over what was once a hill by the construction of vast retaining walls, the largest of them built by Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C. Before AD 70 the plateau was covered by the Temple Complex, and, where that gold dome is, The Temple of Jerusalem. The gold dome is on the Dome of the Rock, a Moslem shrine (Not a mosque.)

When you look at that dome you are looking at the center of the world. Not the scientific center, but the real center. That's the very hill where Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son. The very place where King David planned, and Solomon built the first Temple...

Or, more accurately, you are looking at what used to be the center. 2,000 years ago the center was moved. Look to the left and a little above the dome. You will see a small grey shape, below the tallest building on the horizon. That's the grey dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (It's not really small—just distant.) That's the place where Jesus of Nazareth was killed, buried, and rose again to life.

In Roman days it was a knob of rock just outside the city walls, with quarries, and also with the rock-cut tombs used by those who could afford them. A good conspicuous place for making an example of those who don't appreciate the benefits of big government....

Now I had none of this geography clear in my head when I went to Jerusalem. Perhaps I dozed off in Sunday school, but I had never got the hang of how things fit together. Saliba, our splendid guide, would always get us going early in the mornings to miss the crowds. So we wandered onto the Temple Mount when almost no one else was there. That in itself was a moment of a lifetime. But then we walked to the Dome of the Rock, and Saliba pointed out that you could draw a straight line between the Holy Sepulcher and the Garden of Gethsemane, and it would pass exactly though the Temple. You can see it. That just made my hair want to stand on end.

If I maintain my energy perhaps next Sunday I'll walk you downhill, down the walled road that's on the right side of the photo...

"The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare..."

In one sense, much of my blogging is just wasted electrons, since I'm often arguing against liberalism, which is incapable of arguing back. Or even thinking clearly. I've never once, since 11/2001, been given a real argument by a leftist. The poltroons carp and sneer, but don't dare think, or express their philosophy clearly

But I have often been counter-punched by my libertarian readers. Actually been forced to think to defend my hasty posts. Thank you, friends!

And in that spirit, this is a criticism of libertarian thinking that puts clearly things I've sort of groped towards...

R.R. Reno, in First Things, writing about the book Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage, by Douglas Farrow...

...In other words, in the old system, the state presumed the existence of a substantive, natural reality that required legal adumbration: the union of a man and a woman, and the children resulting from their sexual relations. Now the Canadian government sees that it must intervene and redefine marriage and parenthood in order to give fixed legal standing to otherwise fluid and uncertain social relations. When the gay friend donates his sperm to the surrogate mother hired by a lesbian couple, the resulting “family” is a purely legal construct, one that requires the power of state to enforce contracts and attach children to adoptive parents.

The result is the opposite of the libertarian dream of freedom. As Farrow observes, with gay marriage we are giving over the family to the state to define according to the needs of the moment. The upshot, he worries, will be a dangerous increase in the power of the state to define our lives in other realms once thought sacrosanct. “Remove religiously motivated restrictions on marriage,” he writes, “and it is much easier to remove religiously motivated restrictions on human behavior in general, and on the state’s power to order human society as it sees fit.” The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare. Who can or cannot be a spouse? That’s for the state to decide. To whom do children belong? It’s up to the state to assign parents as its social workers and judges think best...

One of the big "projects" of Enlightenment thinking was (and is) to try to construct morality without religion. "Morality without dogma." As far as I know, it's never worked, never happened. What really happens is that secularists retain a lot of Jewish and Christian morality, and fool themselves into thinking that that's what people can come up with as a matter of course, using reason, without needing religion.

Same with libertarianism, which is an off-shoot of this project. The libertarian assumes that people, if they are free to choose, will choose the good. But in fact each generation of libertarians re-defines "the good" down to whatever reduced level of morality prevails at that moment. A libertarian of fifty years ago would have said that people, if free to choose, will—most of them—form stable marriages of a man and a woman, and raise several children, and act wisely in a variety of similar ways, without those hectoring preachers and restrictive laws. And indeed they did, back then.

Libertarians now probably say that we shouldn't worry; if people are free to choose they will, most of them, marry other human beings. Or at least form caring relationships that can be expected to last for a period of several years.

And I'll bet that fifty years from now, libertarians will be scoffing at those stick-in-the-mud theists with their fear-mongering about the rise of cannibalism-as-entertainment. "Just let the market-place work, and people will choose the good. Most of them, anyway."

The old Manichean error

A bit of Michael Heller, quoted at First Things:

....And what about chancy or random events? Do they destroy mathematical harmony of the universe, and introduce into it elements of chaos and disorder? Is chance a rival force of God’s creative Mind, a sort of Manichean principle fighting against goals of creation? But what is chance? It is an event of low probability which happens in spite of the fact that it is of low probability. If one wants to determine whether an event is of low or high probability, one must use the calculus of probability, and the calculus of probability is a mathematical theory as good as any other mathematical theory. Chance and random processes are elements of the mathematical blueprint of the universe in the same way as other aspects of the world architecture.

Mathematical structures that are parts of the composition determining the functioning of the universe are called laws of physics. It is a very subtle composition indeed. Like in any masterly symphony, elements of chance and necessity are interwoven with each other and together span the structure of the whole. Elements of necessity determine the pattern of possibilities and dynamical paths of becoming, but they leave enough room for chancy events to make this becoming rich and individual.

Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories that ascribe a great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They implicitly revive the old Manichean error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising Mind of God, what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation....

-- Michael (Michał) Heller is a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest. These remarks were made at the news conference announcing his reception of the 2008 Templeton Prize.

PS: I just saw this, posted by JB Watson:

Any deity worthy of a graven image can cobble up a working universe complete with fake fossils in under a week… But to start with a big ball of elementary particles and end up with the duckbill platypus without constant twiddling requires a degree of subtlety and the ability to Think Things Through: exactly the qualities I’m looking for when I’m shopping for a Supreme Being.
-- a Usenet poster

"Stultifying spiritual emptiness"

Spengler's latest offers us a clear view of what may really be going on with the Pope's baptism of Magdi Allam.

...Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance. Much as I admire Hirsi Ali, she will persuade few Muslims to reconsider their religion. She came to the world's attention in 2004 after a Muslim terrorist murdered Theo van Gogh, with whom she had produced a brief film protesting the treatment of women under Islam. As an outspoken critic of Islam, Hirsi Ali has lived under constant threat, and I have deplored the failure of Western governments to accord her adequate protection.

Yet the spiritual emptiness of a libertine and cynic like Theo van Gogh can only repel Muslims. Muslims suffer from a stultifying spiritual emptiness, depicted most poignantly by the Syrian Arab poet Adonis (see Are the Arabs already extinct?, Asia Times Online, May 8, 2007). Muslim traditional society cannot withstand the depredations of globalized culture, and radical Islam arises from a despairing nostalgia for the disappearing past. Why would Muslims trade the spiritual vacuum of Islam for the spiritual sewer of Dutch hedonism? The souls of Muslims are in agony. The blandishments of the decadent West offer them nothing but shame and deracination. Magdi Allam agrees with his former co-religionists in repudiating the degraded culture of the modern West, and offers them something quite different: a religion founded upon love....

It's worth reading...

"Don't be foolhardy"

Gerald Augustinus posted some comments from the National Catholic Reporter on the Pope's recent baptism of a prominent Muslim who has converted to Christianity...

They make, for me, painful reading. If you want to know WHY we are in a Global War on Terror, this one comment is worth thinking about:

This does seem to be a very dangerous political game for the Vatican to be playing. It is like poking a stick in their cave. It seems rather foolhardy.

Western Civilization is, more than anything else, Christian Civilization. And there is no moment and no place that is closer to the heart of Western Civilization than St Peter's at Easter. And there is no human being who has better right to claim to be the leader of our civilization, than Benedict XVI. (Think not? Name another.)

And there is nothing closer to the heart of all that is Christian, than the Sacrament of Baptism, especially baptism of an adult catechumen, one who may be risking martyrdom for the Faith.

There could not possibly be a better moment to stand bravely—defiantly—up for what we of the West believe in than this one. Stand up even at the risk of death and war. Ruat caelum fiat iusticia. Even an honest atheist should see that flinching away at this moment would be a grave error.

But what is the reaction of today's "Christian?" "Don't poke a stick in their cave."

Imagine the early Christians saying, "Best not poke a stick in Caesar's cave." Imagine the countless Christian martyrs saying: "Don't be foolhardy. Don't poke a stick at Mao/Hitler/Henry VIII/Emperor of China/Emperor of Japan."

Imagine Martin Luther saying, "Here I stand. Er, umm, on second thought, maybe not. It would be foolhardy to poke a stick in the Pope's eye."

Imagine the heroes of Lepanto and Vienna and The Siege of Malta saying, "Let's not poke a stick in the Sultan's eye. Better to be a live coward than a dead hero."

And the kind of thinking expressed in the comment is not only profoundly non-Christian, it is precisely the thinking that has resulted in WAR.

The War on Terror is not an affair of one nation trying to conquer another. It is a matter of violent crazy criminals growing bolder and bolder over the course of many decades, while the West has repeatedly flinched. Think of a violent gang in your town. And think of the authorities saying, "It's dangerous to poke a stick in their cave. Better to just leave them alone."

If any lefty Christians are reading this, THINK! You are the warmongers.

Turning over a rotting log...

OBAMA'S JEREMIAD. By Investor's Business Daily:

Election 2008: Imagine the uproar if John McCain's pastor used the "N"-word and asked God to "damn" blacks. Yet Barack Obama's pastor condemns whites, and liberal pundits bite their lip.

This newspaper was the first to draw attention to Obama's hate-mongering preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, and his black segregationist church in Chicago. Our January 2007 editorial, "Obama's Real Faith," exposed their preaching of a militantly anti-white and socialist doctrine called the "Black Value System," triggering a major story in the Chicago Tribune, which led to other stories.

Now comes the leaking of recently videotaped sermons by Wright angrily condemning whites as racists and America as evil. If you close your eyes, you'd swear you were listening to the hateful rantings of uber-bigot Louis Farrakhan. Like the Nation of Islam minister, Wright feeds his 8,500-member flock, including Obama and his family, legends about whites keeping blacks down by getting them hooked on crack and then locking them up. He even claims whites invented AIDS to destroy blacks.

Obama is not immune to such myths. Until recently, when he was informed it wasn't true, he repeated a favorite Wright line that "we've got more black men in prison than there are in college."

"The government gives (black men) drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," Wright thundered in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Locked in a Jim Crow time warp, he claims America — which he affectionately calls "the US-KKK-A" — is "controlled by and run by rich white people." Never mind that institutionalized racism is a distant memory. Or that the most popular candidate in the country right now, according to some polls, is his top acolyte.

In 2006, Wright said from the pulpit: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. And. And-and! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this sh*t!"....

If Mr Obama has been sitting in the pew for twenty years listening to this foul lying stuff, he not only does not deserve to be President, he does not deserve to be welcomed into the company of decent people. And if Democrats are not anti-American racists, they will repudiate him. Ha ha...I won't hold my breath on that one.

Of course in one sense he wasn't sitting in a pew, since this is not religion. It's politics. Mr Wright's church has been "hollowed-out," its faith replaced by politics, just as much as the many mushy white churches that have replaced salvation through the Lord Jesus with "peace 'n justice 'n the UN Millennium Goals."

And of course this is a perfect example of how the news-media hurts Democrats by trying to help them. Maybe, just maybe, certain Democrat Primary voters would have wanted to know this stuff. Hmmm? D'you think? Too late now, suckers. Maybe you Dems should think about telling the press to just report the damn news honestly, instead of trying to mold the country with their superior elite wisdom.

"When mystery no longer counts for anything, then politics necessarily becomes the religion"
      --Pope Benedict XVI, Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions, p. 126

Information post—R.C.I.A.

[Note: This post is NOT aimed at my usual readers. I'm just dropping it into the Interweb as information for people around here who might be Googling the subject. Blogs are useful that way; they get high Google rankings because they change frequently. Or so I've heard.]

[Some search-terms: R.C.I.A. San Francisco, RCIA San Francisco, RCIA Program San Francisco, RCIA Program Bay Area, RCIA Program St Dominic's.]

R.C.I.A. stands for Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. This is how you become a Roman Catholic, whether you are coming from another Christian tradition, or are not a Christian at all. It's also for Catholics who have never been confirmed, or who just wish to learn more. The program includes a weekly class, from September to the following Easter, when candidates join the Church. Attending the program doesn't commit you to anything--you can come and explore and see how you like it. You won't be put on the spot.

And our program at St Dominic's is simply the best. I kind of follow these things on the Web, and I've never heard of any RCIA half as good. Father Xavier, our pastor, and Scott Moyer, our Director of Adult Faith Formation, will give you more information and ideas than you can possibly absorb. You will learn what the Church is, and WHY. You will learn about Sacraments, moral reasoning, history, saints, prayers, and rites. You will find out what God is up to. You won't be bored!

I'm currently on my second time around. I entered the Church on Easter of 2007, and now I'm back in the program as a humble helper. And I don't feel like I've learned the half of it!

(We also have a very fine Landings Program. That's for Catholics who have drifted away from the Church, and wish to return. My wife Charlene helps out with that program.)

Contact Scott Moyer for info (scott@stdominics.org 415 674-0422) or feel free to e-mail me, John Weidner: weidners@pacbell.net.

Pull of gravity...

This article from the WaPo about evangelical churches adopting traditional Catholic practices such as Lent, confession, ashes on Ash Wednesday... well, it made me smile. We Catholics know what's happening (don't tell anybody).

Chesterton put it rightly long ago:

...It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair..
-- GK Chesterton

[Thanks to Gerald]

Tough-love...

AOG writes:

Gateway Pundit has an article about various Islamic radicals threatening and / or encouraging the assassination of Prince Harry. What struck me as odd is that these radicals live in the UK. I am a fervent supporter of free speech, but even I think that kind of direct, personal, encouragement of political killing is over the line. As far as I know, saying something like that here about a member of the President’s family would result in an arrest and hopefully prosecution.

In my opinion, the proper course of action is internment, not prosecution. These things are not really within the scope of criminal law. This is a very different matter from, say, those leftists who have "suggested" that Bush ought to be assassinated. We are at war with Islamic radical terrorists, and these British radicals are, at the very least, giving them encouragement.

We are at war, and it is not our fault that our enemies are violating the laws of war. Our situation now is analogous to that which Lincoln faced. The uniformed armies of the Confederacy were, of course, fought openly and honorably. But, there were also large numbers of Confederate sympathizers scattered among the northern population, among whom were spies and saboteurs, and all sorts of ankle-biters and foot-draggers.

The situation required that Lincoln that Lincoln win the war. That was his Christian and American duty. And therefore it required that he use irregular methods against those who opposed us by irregular means. And for that reason he tapped telegraph lines repeatedly (no warrants), suspended Habeas Corpus, and had Lafayette Baker and the 1st DC Cavalry out kidnapping people and disappearing them into Old Capitol Prison. (Known locally as "Baker's Bastille.") And, yes, squeezing information out of them by methods you would not prefer over waterboarding. (Baker was, alas, far less clever than he thought he was, and the assassins who killed Lincoln gathered right under his nose.)

Our schoolchildren are subject, at least in California, to relentless propaganda about how wrong the US was to intern Japanese-Americans during WWII. This is a product of America-hating leftists. In hindsight it looks like Roosevelt was wrong—in practice—to intern them, BUT in principle he was absolutely correct. If he honestly feared that there were significant numbers of saboteurs among the Japanese-American population, who could not be easily identified, it would have been morally wrong not to intern that group. Roosevelt's duty—his Christian duty—was to win the war, and if the methods needed were irregular and brutal, then it was his duty to use them.

If the Western nations interned Islamic radicals who were inciting violence, the moral opprobrium would rest on the terror groups who use these people. Not on those doing the interning. There are laws and moral norms for waging war. Leftists tend to use these (and things like "International Law" and "Just War Theory") as if they only apply to America and her allies. Doing so is utterly dishonest and despicable. If the Islamic radicals mentioned above have gone so far as to actually encourage someone to assassinate Prince Harry, they are waging war. And committing a war crime. They could, with perfect legality, be stood up against a wall and shot. And that would arguably the morally correct thing to do, though in practice we would more likely give them a long comfortable vacation somewhere.

Our fake-pacifists often argue from Christian morality, saying in effect that we should "turn the other cheek" to terrorists or genocidal tyrants. This is false reasoning. Why? Because they are turning someone else's cheek! They don't suffer. They condemn some poor devil in the Third World to suffer, and then jump in the Prius and go home to a gourmet dinner and a safe (Thanks to our armed forces) night's sleep.

The analog, on the level of nations, to "turning the other cheek," is to flatten your enemy utterly, so he does not think of starting another war. And THEN to extend the hand of friendship, and give him aid and encouragement, and help him onto a better path. That's what we did after WWII. That's what Lincoln wanted to do after the Civil War.

And if any of you "pacifists" out there don't like what I write, don't sneer and carp, like scrubs. Make a case. Show me where my reasoning is wrong.

Risibly lame.....

Diogenes writes:

The Religious Right is what Lefties call believing Christians during an election year. Believers are generally loathed by the glitterati, but there's votes in them thar hills, and every four years, in order to score higher in the southern states, the Democratic leadership makes tardy and risibly lame attempts at church-going. It always backfires. The news footage of Hillary leaving church with her white-gloved hand clutching a prayer-book is as convincing as the famous shot of the senior George Bush tossing back a beer in that Jersey City tavern. To fake an interest, you need a trace of familiarity with your subject....(There's more. Fun.)

Too true. Obama has a huge advantage here, because he can tap into the whole "Christianity equals the Civil Rights Movement equals liberal Democrats" thing. It's a fake, but it always plays well. Blacks have a pass on the derision that liberals heap on Christians. It's allowed, as a sort of charming folk-custom among the colorful simple folk. White liberals can patronize their darkies, much as they might go watch whirling dervishes or Hindoo fakirs. It's understood that this faith stuff has nothing to do with the elites.

Things are much harder for Lefty white guys. I always remember Al Gore saying that we do such-and-such "In my faith tradition." Clang! He gave away the game right there. Fake, fake, got no rhythm. I bet Bush senior gave away his little game of being one of the guys, by politely sipping his schooner of beer, and leaving half of it unconsumed. He should have downed it with a smile, and wiped the foam off his lip with the back of his hand. And maybe asked for a shot to go with it...

New prince...

If anyone's interested in Catholic stuff, you might like Rocco Palmo's long piece on (newly-minted) Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston. An awesome guy.....

Merry Christmas to you all, from the Weidners...

From last year's Christmas homily, by Benedict XVI ...

....God's sign is simplicity. God's sign is the baby. God's sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby — defenceless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will — we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him.

The Fathers of the Church, in their Greek translation of the Old Testament, found a passage from the prophet Isaiah that Paul also quotes in order to show how God's new ways had already been foretold in the Old Testament. There we read: "God made his Word short, he abbreviated it" (Is 10:23; Rom 9:28). The Fathers interpreted this in two ways. The Son himself is the Word, the Logos; the eternal Word became small — small enough to fit into a manger. He became a child, so that the Word could be grasped by us...

Evangelizing the world...

Charlene and I just read a great book, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power, by David Aikman. There are amazing things going on in China, with Christianity growing and spreading ceaselessly, despite cruel persecution and harassment. But what really made my hair stand on end was that these people are not just content to survive, they are seriously dreaming of missionary work in other lands. Their central driving idea is that, over history, the main movement of Christianity has been westward, from the Near East across Europe, and to the New World, and across the Pacific to Asia.

And so, what's the next step for Christianity and its missionaries? To go from China westwards, along the Silk Road, through the Moslem world.....to Jerusalem! Here are a few snippets, to give you a bit of the flavor ...

...A few of the Americans present were familiar with this notion: 100,000 Chinese missionaries on a global evangelization expedition. [Dr Luis] Bush was dumbfounded. For a comparison, the total estimate for American Protestant and Catholic missionaries working overseas in any given year is 40,000 to 50,000. The U.S. annually sends more missionaries overseas than any other single country by far; the current effort is built on two centuries of experience, and the considerable wealth of ordinary Americans. Could 100,000 Chinese be prepared for missionary work and sent out by the year 2007? Almost certainly not. But the process could begin. In fact, even before the Beijing Forum of February 2002, it had already begun...

..."Back to Jerusalem." It was impossible not to hear this term from Chinese house church Christians of all ages in all parts of the country. The origins of the movement are as complex as they are dramatic.

The first time the notion that China's Christians had a role to play in evangelizing the world, and in connection to Jerusalem, seems to have been in the 1920's in Shandong Province. 1n 1921, Jing Dianying founded a small independent Christian group. It was called the Jesus Family, and was not dissimilar in format to the Little Flock, founded by China's most famous twentieth-century Christian, Watchman Nee... The five word slogan of the Jesus Family was "sacrifice, abandonment, poverty, suffering, death." This turned out to be the fate of the group's members who set off on foot spreading the Gospel in nearby towns and villages...

...It isn't clear what rekindled the Back to Jerusalem fervor among China's house church Christians from the mid-1990's onward. It could have been the influence of Zhao's story or simply the spontaneous reemergence of the same vision that animated the Northwest Bible Institute students and others back in the 1940's.Certainly the enormous confidence that the house church networks had acquired during the phenomenal expansion of the 1980's was part of the explanation...

Reason 898 why I hate "the press"

I hate them, and I laugh with bitter pleasure each time I read of declining circulation for the nation's newspapers....

From NCR:

NEW YORK — When the Associated Press set out to investigate an apparent problem with sexual assault of children in public schools, the organization spared no expense. A congressionally mandated study by Hofstra University had already found school-based sexual abuse to be a big problem.

“It was one of our priorities for the year,” said John Affleck, editor of the AP’s national reporting team.

The result was a three-part series, available to editors throughout the country beginning Oct. 20, that revealed widespread and routine sexual assault of public school students throughout the country. The first story summarized: “Students in America’s schools are groped. They’re raped. They’re pursued, seduced and think they’re in love.”

The series told of an entrenched resistance to stopping abusers on the part of teachers, administrators and the National Education Association, a teacher’s union.

So why apparently have only a handful of newspapers nationwide run the series — in stark contrast to the avalanche of press received by the Catholic Church since 2002? Paul Colford, corporate communications director for the AP, said he was inundated with complaints from people wondering why their newspapers were not carrying the series...

And, a few figures for contrast...

...“The Boston Globe began publishing on Jan. 6, 2002, a series of reports regarding sexual abuse of children by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston,” Nussbaum wrote “In a flash, newspapers around the country began reprinting the Globe’s reports and developing their own. They published 728 stories in January; 1,095 in February, and 2,961 in March. By April, these papers were publishing a new story every nine minutes, 160 every day, 4,791 for the month. By year-end, American papers provided their readers over 21,000 stories of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.”

Boston Globe editors contacted by the Register claimed only vague knowledge of the AP series, and could not answer as to whether part of it ran in their paper....

Indispensable man...

(I'm not, by the way, signing on to the views on the War on Terror of the columnist who dubs himself Spengler. But for 'thought-provoking," he's hard to beat. And this book sounds great; I'm surely going to read it.)

Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr. Reviewed by Spengler

It may seem eccentric to hail a theological text by a Scots Dominican, ranked 133,692nd in recent Amazon sales, as the year's most important work on global strategy. Now that I have your attention, humor me for a paragraph or two.

To win a gunfight, first you have to bring a gun, and to win a religious war, you had better know something about religion. America's "war on terror" proceeds from a political philosophy that treats radical Islam as if it were a political movement - "Islamo-fascism" - rather than a truly religious response to the West. If we are in a fourth world war, as Norman Podhoretz proclaims, it is a religious war. The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West.

None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehend this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address. Who is Joseph Ratzinger, this decisive figure of our times, and what led the Catholic Church to elect him? Fr Kerr has opened the coulisses of Catholic debate such that outsiders can understand the changes in Church thinking that made possible Benedict's papacy. Because Benedict is the leader not only of the Catholics but - by default - of the West, all concerned with the West's future should read his book...

....Kerr's subtitle is, From Neo-Scholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism. By this he means something quite accessible to laymen and non-Catholics. Between the early years of the 20th century, and the papacies of Wojtila and Ratzinger, emphasis in Catholic theology shifted from attempting to prove the tenets of the faith by philosophical argument, to portraying God's self-revelation through love by reference to such Biblical texts as the "Song of Songs". The present pope's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est ("God is Love"), summarizes what Kerr calls "nuptial mysticism".[3] ....

...In Kerr's engaging account, the rationalistic mainstream was challenged by theologians at the margin of the Church, such as the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac and the Swiss Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar, now widely regarded as the greatest Catholic theologian of the century. They were encouraged by the research of medievalists such as Etienne Gilson and Marie-Dominique Chenu, who challenged the Enlightenment distortion of Thomas Aquinas. These dissenters spent long and lonely years in the wilderness, sometimes forbidden to write or preach. Their day came with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and the reigns of John Paul II and Benedict XVI....

"Come home"

From Michael Yon's latest dispatch, on the re-opening of a Christian church in Baghdad....

....A Bishop came to St John’s Church in Baghdad today, 15 November, where a crowd of locals welcomed him home. They were joined at the service by soldiers from the 2-12 infantry battalion, many of whom had fought hard to secure these neighborhood streets. Members of the hard-fighting Iraqi Army 3rd Division were also here for this special day...

....LTC Michael told me today that when al Qaeda came to Dora, they began harassing Christians first, charging them “rent.” It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda. Real Muslims here are quick to say that al Qaeda members are not true Muslims. From charging “rent,” al Qaeda’s harassment escalated to killing Christians, and also Muslims. Untold thousands of Christians and Muslims fled Baghdad in the wake of the darkness of civil war. Most of the Christians are gone now; having fled to Syria, Jordan or Northern Iraq.....

....Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”....

I don't know how many of those Christians will return. ALL the Christian communities of the Middle East are shrinking, even disappearing. Or rather, they've moved--nobody disappeared, they've moved to Australia or Britain or the US. One thing is for sure, the America-hating Leftists who used the flight of Baghdad's Christians as a club to bash the Bush Administration and our nation will not take any notice if they do.

And of course they will never criticize the real villains--the vile murderers of al Qaeda. You can't criticize your allies! And anyway, only the United States does bad things to the world.

In 1900 Istanbul was about 50% Christian--Now there are only a few thousand Christians left there. Iraq is actually more hospitable to it's old Christian communities than most Moslem countries.

Faith involves the whole man...

From A Newman Treasury, edited by Charles Frederick Harrold...

...In other words we actually know more than we can express in conscious logical statements. We are constantly entertaining convictions with absolute certainty on grounds which we could never reduce to explicit argument. This is because a great deal of our reasoning is what Newman calls "implicit" or what we should call subconscious. If the mind is "unequal to its own powers of apprehension," then conscious logic cannot always adequately test the accuracy of its apprehensions.

Thus Newman must disagree with Locke, whom he quotes in the Grammar of Assent, that no one should "entertain any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant." Life is too short for a philosophy or religion of inferences; it is also too concrete, too rich, too unbounded. We cannot always wait for proofs. In fact, says Newman, we do not wait, but proceed in our daily lives upon a vast number of implicit reasonings on probabilities, and only now and then follow the dictates of a syllogism. We are therefore living by faith far more than we realize. And when we face the problem of religious faith, the same facts of human nature spring into view, except that the virtue of a "right state of heart," and the moral imperatives of the conscience have a far greater rational import than than is commonly supposed.

In religious faith , the simple and the unlettered have the advantage over the mere intellectual, if the latter does not qualify his explicit reasonings with the right moral disposition and with the realization that faith involves the whole man and is never a matter of logic alone. Clearness of statement or even of thought is often not essential at all for the recognition of a great truth. Thus the ignorant but inspired man may arrive at truths which only a logician could analyze or debate; similarly, says Newman, "consider the preternatural sagacity with which a great general knows what his friends and enemies are about, and what will be the final result, and where, of their combined movements."...

 

"What was I to myself, but a guide to my own destruction?..."

From an excellent essay by R. R. Reno, in First Things...

....We tend to see what we want to see in the books we read. Our culture is one of leave-taking and it champions the seeker as the hero of the spiritual life. We think that we must brave arid deserts and snowy mountain passes on our quest for God. Recall Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, William James’ will to believe, and Paul Tillich’s courage to be. Having read Sartre’s hot rhetoric of existential choice and Heidegger’s cooler image of the heroic modern man patiently walking the meadows of our disenchanted culture as a shepherd of Being, I came to believe that truth and holiness, like elves and unicorns, had been veiled and hidden in distant realms and secret forests. It was our vocation to energize our souls and get on with the search. Or so I imagined.

After many rereadings of the Confessions, I have been mortified to discover that St. Augustine does not commend the great preoccupation of modern Christianity, the quest for faith. For him, the journey of his young adulthood was a futile circular movement. Imagining himself to be a seeker after God, he was in fact ever returning to himself. What began as a projected heroic journey ended in exhausted despair. Ten years after Cicero had ignited in him a love of wisdom, St. Augustine reports, “I had lost all hope of discovering the truth.” What seemed like a journey was nothing more than the huffing and puffing of a presumptuous soul that thought it could storm the citadel of God with earnest longing and good intentions. The upshot was paralysis,...

....Still, our inability is not a condemnation to stasis. There is a journey of faith for Augustine, but the guidance comes from God, not us. Far from finding God, Augustine confesses, “You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love.” Indeed, the arrows had already been loosed many times, but in his agitated desire to control his own destiny, Augustine had dodged and deflected them. Only after Augustine has recognized the vanity of his own efforts does the arrow of divine love strike its mark. In the silence of the garden, God’s Word finally reaches his heart. “The examples given by your servants,” Augustine reports, “burnt away and destroyed my heavy sluggishness.” Then and only then does his journey begin: to baptism, back to Africa, and to Hippo.

The general principle of Augustine’s own self-analysis is clear, and its relevance to the temptation to embark on our own searches for God is direct—even, and perhaps especially, when that search takes us across the strange terrain of denominationalism. “The soul needs to be enlightened,” he writes, “by light from outside itself.”.....

"The opportunity to lead a hidden religious life"

Charlene and I have been reading an entrancing book, German writer and novelist Martin Mosebach's Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and its Enemy.

I have no plans to blog here my opinions on various controversies within the Church. Or get involved in them at all—there are plenty of others who can handle that job better than I. But I did want to give you a little of the flavor of Mosebach's book, just in case there are any others reading this who find these sorts of things intriguing...

In 1812, in Carlsbad, Goethe encountered the young empress Maria Ludovica; when the empress heard what a profound impression she had made on Goethe, she communicated to him the "noble and definite sentiment" that she "did not want to be identified or surmised" in any of his works "under any pretext whatsoever". "For," she said, "women are like religion: the less they are spoken of, the more they gain." It is a fine maxim, and one that deserves to be taken to heart. However, I am about to ignore it by speaking to you about religion in its practical aspect, lived religion, that is, liturgy. Perhaps the greatest damage done by Pope Paul VI's reform of the Mass (and by the ongoing process that has outstripped it), the greatest spiritual deficit, is this: we are now positively obliged to talk about the liturgy....

...We have had to delve into questions of worship and liturgy—something that is utterly foreign to the religious man. We have let ourselves be led into a kind of scholastic and juridical way of considering the liturgy....And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy—a monstrous act....

...what have we lost? The opportunity to lead a hidden religious life, days begun with a quiet Mass in a modest little neighborhood church; a life in which we learn, over decades, discretely guided by priests, to mingle our own sacrifice with Christ's sacrifice; a Holy Mass in which we ponder our own sins and the graces given to us—and nothing else: rarely is this possible any more for a Catholic aware of liturgical tradition, once the liturgy's unquestioned status has been destroyed...

"out of touch with the body of Christ"

[Thanks to David Schütz, and Louise...]

Peter Holmes writes:

Several friends have, of late, admitted they send their children to Protestant bible classes because "there is nothing Catholic" or "the Protestants are much better at this" and the old "at least they are getting something."

I surprised them by advising they remove their children immediately and take steps to remedy the damage done so far. "But isn't it better that they know Scripture? Isn't that what you've been saying all along?" they protest. My point wasn't about knowing Scripture. It was about knowing the truth, and where it all fits.

As an evangelical I learned 200-300 verses a year in Sunday School and had to recite them all at the end to get my 'prize', and yet never understood sin or grace. I understood a wickedly twisted version invented (in human terms) by a reformer hundreds of years ago, and seemingly supported by the selective choice of verses interpreted by my teachers.

As a Lutheran seminarian I read the Bible backwards, forwards in the original Hebrew and Hebrew, in later translations of Latin, German and various historic English translations. I learned critical method and medieval exegesis, read the fathers take on Scripture and STILL didn't understand grace and sin (I persist with these examples though there are many others) in the Catholic sense.

It's hard for a Catholic with a positive outlook to suspect a Protestant is undermining their belief when they use all the same words, even some of the same formulae, but only discover later that they mean different things. (The joint statements b/w Catholics and Protestants tend to be full of such language.)

If a Protestant encourages me to read the Scriptures, that is a great and noble thing. If they offer to TEACH me the Scriptures, I have to decline. They are lacking the context they were written from, and into. They are out of touch with the body of Christ that preserved them and interprets them authoritatively.

Specifically they justify their non-catholicity on the basis of Scripture. We should expect their interpretation to contradict the Church not only in some aspects, but in method, content, context and in spirit.

I am astounded when good Catholics, who would not let a religious sister or priest within a mile of their children's faith education, will entrust their education in the central aspect of the Catholic Tradition to people who reject Catholicism...

I'm just starting to understand the slight-of-hand involved in supporting Protestant theology sola scriptura. Fascinatin' subject. A book to begin with is Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, by David Currie. Charlene and I both give it our highest marks...

"The open obvious democratic thing..."

...Some how or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.The open obvious democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder...
-- GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Everyone has a faith. Everyone has a religion, in the sense that they have beliefs about the universe and human existence that they cannot "prove" using any thought-system such as natural science, or formal logic, or "common sense." And it really nettles me that most people won't acknowledge this.

The person who says, "I believe only things that can be scientifically proven" is expressing faith in a proposition that science cannot validate. But try to tell him that, and you will often find a person more dogmatic and blinkered than any superstitious peasant. And usually more fearful than the peasant of ideas that might threaten his security.

Good corrective to the stuff you are hearing...

What Bono Doesn't Say About Africa, By William Easterly (Thanks to Orrin)

....It's a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that's being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help.

Let's begin with those rampaging Four Horsemen. Do they really explain Africa today? What percentage of the African population would you say dies in war every year? What share of male children, age 10 to 17, are child soldiers? How many Africans are afflicted by famine or died of AIDS last year or are living as refugees?

In each case, the answer is one-half of 1% of the population or less. In some cases it's much less; for example, annual war deaths have averaged 1 out of every 10,800 Africans for the last four decades. That doesn't lessen the tragedy, of course, of those who are such victims, and maybe there are things the West can do to help them. But the typical African is a long way from being a starving, AIDS-stricken refugee at the mercy of child soldiers. The reality is that many more Africans need latrines than need Western peacekeepers — but that doesn't play so well on TV....

A lot of people have a vested interest in a "a helpless, backward continent." (Not least from the superiority implied by being the advanced people helping the poor wretches who can't help themselves.) My own Christian community is among them, and I suspect that they will not want to hear messages like this for the additional reason that African poverty is an easy problem. My estimate is that in our world prosperity is far more dangerous to souls and bodies than poverty, but is a much tougher nut to crack, or even to get a grip on. It's easy to drop a twenty in the collection basket to help the poor darkies, and feel like one has done something. What to do about our own world of prosperity, where we absorb nihilism and corrosive change and the "Culture of Death" through our pores?—That's tough! And baffling.

I put a bit more of the article below...

...Further distortions of Africa emanate from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's star-studded Africa Progress Panel (which includes the ubiquitous Geldof). The panel laments in its 2007 news release that Africa remains "far short" of its goal of making "substantial inroads into poverty reduction." But this doesn't quite square with the sub-Saharan Africa that in 2006 registered its third straight year of good GDP growth — about 6%, well above historic averages for either today's rich countries or all developing countries. Growth of living standards in the last five years is the highest in Africa's history.

The real Africa also has seen cellphone and Internet use double every year for the last seven years. Foreign private capital inflows into Africa hit $38 billion in 2006 — more than foreign aid. Africans are saving a higher percentage of their incomes than Americans are (so much for the "poverty trap" of being "too poor to save" endlessly repeated in aid reports). I agree that it's too soon to conclude that Africa is on a stable growth track, but why not celebrate what Africans have already achieved?

Instead, the international development establishment is rigging the game to make Africa — which is, of course, still very poor — look even worse than it really is. It announces, for instance, that Africa is the only region that is failing to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs in aid-speak) set out by the United Nations. Well, it takes extraordinary growth to cut extreme poverty rates in half by 2015 (the first goal) when a near-majority of the population is poor, as is the case in Africa. (Latin America, by contrast, requires only modest growth to halve its extreme poverty rate from 10% to 5%.)

This is how Blair's panel managed to call Africa's recent growth successes a failure. But the reality is that virtually all other countries that have escaped extreme poverty did so through the kind of respectable growth that Africa is enjoying — not the kind of extraordinary growth that would have been required to meet the arbitrary Millennium Development Goals...

Not reported...

I highly recommend a piece by Rod Dreher, The Godless Party: Media Bias & Blindness—And the Big Story They Missed

....Indeed, religion has become such a galvanizing issue for both parties that, say the authors, "the religious gap among white voters in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections was more important than other demographic and social cleavages in the electorate; it was much larger than the gender gap and more significant than any combination of differences in education, income, occupation, age, marital status and regional groupings." The media have thoroughly reported the key role religious conservatives play in Republican Party politics; what they’ve ignored is the equally important role militant secularists play in setting the agenda of the Democratic Party—as the late pro-life Governor Bob Casey, denied a decent podium at the 1992 Democratic convention, could have attested.

The divide has become so stark that the authors have discerned a new kind of voter: the "anti-fundamentalist." According to the 2000 ANES data, the hatred of religious conservatives long apparent among Democratic convention delegates has found a home among a disproportionate number of Democratic voters. Twenty-five percent of white respondents in the ANES survey expressed serious hostility towards religious conservatives, as opposed to only one percent who felt this strongly against Jews, and 2.5 percent who disliked blacks and Catholics to a strong degree. (Ironically, these are people who say they "‘strongly agree’ that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one’s own.") Eighty percent of these voters picked Bill Clinton in 1996, with 70 percent choosing Al Gore in 2000. Conclude the authors, "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America, when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over Prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group." If Al Smith were to return and run for president today, his enemies wouldn’t be yesterday’s rustic anti-Catholic bigots of the Bible Belt, but today’s urbane anti-Christian bigots of liberal coastal cities dubbed (by the Wall Street Journal ) the Porn Belt...

....But their most striking finding was the near total lack of editorial and news coverage devoted to the increased importance of secularists to the Democratic Party versus the role of traditionalists in the GOP. The numbers are mind-boggling: 43 stories on secularist Democrats, 682 stories on traditionalist Republicans. In 1992, the Times alone published nearly twice the number of stories about Evangelicals in the GOP than both papers did about secularists among the Democrats for the entire decade. The bias is even worse among television journalists, who filled the airwaves with stories about the "Religious Right" and the Republican Party, but who didn’t file a single story—not one—about the Secular Left’s relationship to the Democrats. But their most striking finding was the near total lack of editorial and news coverage devoted to the increased importance of secularists to the Democratic Party versus the role of traditionalists in the GOP. The numbers are mind-boggling: 43 stories on secularist Democrats, 682 stories on traditionalist Republicans. In 1992, the Times alone published nearly twice the number of stories about Evangelicals in the GOP than both papers did about secularists among the Democrats for the entire decade. The bias is even worse among television journalists, who filled the airwaves with stories about the "Religious Right" and the Republican Party, but who didn’t file a single story—not one—about the Secular Left’s relationship to the Democrats....

The numbers would seem to indicate a cover-up, but my guess is that it's mostly a matter of people in the news media considering secularism so normal, that they don't even see it. Sort of like the way you don't hear your own accent, and think you are just speaking "normally."

But I think there is a huge psychological cover-up going on, as liberals try to pretend that they are still the modern mainstream, and anyone who disagrees is kooky or primitive. And that psychology is a subject that utterly fascinates me...

Driving us apart...

I can't resist commenting on Mr Obama's latest, Obama Says Some Have `hijacked' Faith...

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right- wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division. [No other motive, I'm sure.]

"Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked," the Democratic presidential candidate said in remarks prepared for delivery before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ. [Faith is not supposed to "bring us together." Faith's loyalty is to Truth, not togetherness.]
"Part of it's because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who've been all too eager to exploit what divides us," the Illinois senator said.

"At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, [I'm in a city that's about 85% Democrat, and yes, you Democrats DO "disrespect" my values and my church.] while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design," according to an advance copy of his speech. [Religious Americans care about those and a LOT of other things. Those issues are in the news because our traditional beliefs there are under attack by nihilists like Obama, and so we fight back.]

"There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich," [That's simply a lie] Obama said. "I don't know what Bible they're reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version." [Tax cuts help the poor, as our current very low unemployment rates attest. The welfare state corrupts and destroys the poor, morally and spiritually and economically.]

Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, a church of about 1.2 million members that is considered one the most liberal of the mainline Protestant groups. [Which have also been corrupted and destroyed by Leftist/Democrat thinking.]

In 1972, the church was the first to ordain an openly gay man. Two years ago, the church endorsed same-sex marriage, the largest Christian denomination to do so. [Oh. And those aren't things that tend to "drive us apart?"] Obama believes that states should decide whether to allow gay marriage, and he opposes a constitutional amendment against it. [Way to take a strong moral stand there, Barak. Real "Profiles In Courage" stuff.]

Conservative Christian bloggers have linked Obama to what they call the "unbiblical" teachings of his church. Theological conservatives believe gay relationships violate Scripture, while more liberal Christians emphasize the Bible's social justice teachings... [Notice the multiple slights-of-hand here by the unbiased reporter. Like the substituting the word "relationships" for "marriage." And the side-stepping into "social justice," without touching on whether liberals say gay marriageor ordinations ARE scriptural. And never a mention of 2,000 years of Christian traditions.]

[End of article. I put a few more thoghts below.]

I'm sorry, but Mr Obama's complaints are pure bullshit. It is a grave error for any Christian group to conflate its politics with its faith. But the Christian Right is in fact far less guilty of this than the "Christian Left." The Christian Right has been driven into politics by massive attacks on things that most Americans have always just believed in, and is always a reluctant partner in the Republican coalition. The Christian Left has been "hollowed out," and has simply jettisoned traditional Christianity for a mush of leftist ideas. Nobody forced them into the Culture of Death, or gay marriage, or being anti-American, or anti-Semitic. They just go along with whatever the current leftist positions are without a qualm. Without a thought. Without giving a damn whether they are "scriptural."

One of the most creepy things I ever read was some writer's account of sitting with a group of Anglican leaders as they discussed one of the "issues." I think it was female clergy, a few years ago. He was shocked, because there was no mention of morality or theology, or even, to put it bluntly, Christianity. Their talk was was pure brute politics: How do we ram this through, how do we smash or sideline the opposition.

"Clarion of freedom"

Sorry, I'm probably out of the mainstream here, but I think you all oughta appreciate George W Bush now, because you aren't going to see his like again in your lifetime. And in about 20 years, when he's regarded as bigger than Reagan, you will have to scurry over and pretend you gave him heartfelt support all along...

This happened weeks ago, but just came to light today...

By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, June 21, 2007; Washington Post:

On May 31, President Bush met for 35 minutes in the private living quarters of the White House with Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Hong Kong, in an event that was not announced and did not appear on his official schedule. Their meeting did not please the State Department, elements of the Catholic hierarchy and certainly not the Chinese government. But it signifies what George W. Bush is really about.

In Hong Kong, Zen enjoys more freedom to speak out than do his fellow bishops in China proper, and he has become known as the spiritual voice of China's beleaguered democracy movement. Since Hong Kong was handed over to Beijing by the British government in 1997, he has increasingly called for both religious freedom and democracy in China. Consequently, the China desk at the State Department in Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing contended that, for the sake of Sino-American relations, it would be a bad idea for the president to invite the cardinal. So did some of Zen's fellow cardinals.

So, why did the president invite him? The fact that no news of the session leaked out for two weeks indicates that this was no political stunt to revive Bush's anemic poll ratings. The president got divided counsel from his advisers regarding the impact the meeting would have on China's rulers. As he nears the end of a troubled presidency, Bush as a man of faith places the plight of the religious in unfree countries at the top of his agenda...

Cardinal Zen! And the cowboy! Two titans. This must have hit State Department commies and certain Vatican Euro-weenies like being doused with pails of ice-water. Makes me cackle and grin. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Charlene says, "They have no clue what's going on." That's for sure.

...But more important to Bush than advice from a college chum is what he believes, as the difficult days of what has been an unpopular presidency dwindle. He met in Washington last year with dissident "House Christians" from China. Speaking in Prague, a week after his talk with Zen, Bush affirmed his position on the side of religious dissidents everywhere: "Freedom is the design of our Maker, and the longing of every soul."...

...Bush asked Zen whether he was the "bishop of all China." Replying that his diocese was just Hong Kong, Zen told Bush of the plight of Catholics in China, including five imprisoned bishops. The cardinal is reported by sources close to him to have left the White House energized and inspired. George W. Bush is at a low point among his fellow citizens, but he is still a major figure for Catholics in China who look to him as a clarion of freedom....

"but he is still a major figure for Catholics in China who look to him as a clarion of freedom..." Got news for you, kiddos. People all over this planet think the same thing. Just as prisoners in the Gulag used to pass scraps of paper with Reagan's words of freedom on them, people are passing the words and deeds of George W Bush right now. And Reagan came through for the hundreds of millions who were oppressed by communism, despite everything the Democrats and pacifists and realists doing everything they could to keep them enslaved.

And the same thing is happening now. As always, the process is messy and bloody and slow, but the Freedom Train is rolling, and the Democrats and sneering leftists and diplomats and Quakers won't be able to stop it.

Odd stuff...

Phillip Jenkins has a "counterintuitive" piece relevant to the question of the decline of Europe. I'm always interested in such counter-trends, though I have to say I'll have to see a lot more of them before I'm likely to change my opinions. I tend to suspect they are just chips tossed in a larger stream.

...For all we hear about Islam, Europe remains a stronger Christian fortress than people realize. What’s more, it is showing little sign of giving ground to Islam or any other faith for that matter.

To be fair, the trend is counterintuitive. Europe has long been a malarial swamp for any traditional or orthodox faith. Compared with the rest of the world, religious adherence in Europe is painfully weak. And it is easy to find evidence of the decay. Any traveler to the continent has seen Christianity’s abandoned and secularized churches, many now transformed into little more than museums. But this does not mean that European Christianity is nearing extinction. Rather, among the ruins of faith, European Christianity is adapting to a world in which its convinced adherents represent a small but vigorous minority.

In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness...

....Similar trends are at work within the Protestant churches of Northern and Western Europe. The most active sections of the Church of England today are the evangelical and charismatic parishes that have, in effect, become megachurches in their own right. These parishes have been incredibly successful at reaching out to a secular society that no longer knows much of anything about the Christian faith. Holy Trinity Brompton, a megaparish in Knightsbridge, London, that is now one of Britain’s largest churches, is home to the amazingly popular “Alpha Course,” a means of recruiting potential converts through systems of informal networking aimed chiefly at young adults and professionals. As with the Catholic movements, the course works because it makes no assumptions about any prior knowledge: Everyone is assumed to be a new recruit in need of basic teaching. Nor does the recruitment technique assume that people live or work in traditional settings of family or employment. The Alpha Course is successfully geared for postmodern believers in a postindustrial economy....(Thanks to Orrin).

I read Jenkins' book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. Fascinating stuff, especially about the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa. Maybe this article portends a new book.

"As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts."

A D-Day Prayer, broadcast by President Franklin D Roosevelt...

My Fellow Americans:

Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944

"For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home..."

So it was then, so it is now. Our soldiers are today's "Samaritans," who succor those in need, while elitists pass on the other side of the road. The difference is that then all Americans recognized the basic Christian goodness of our troops and the rightness of their mission. Now our country is divided, divided into Americans and poisonous nihilistic reptiles who miss no opportunity to slander our brave soldiers, and to suggest that their deeds are meaningless, or even evil.

"he did not have much company on the road now so well known..."

For Sunday, here's yet another quote from Meriol Trevor's Newman (vol. II, Light in Winter):

...True son of Philip Neri, he had no desire to repudiate the new techniques of knowledge or to oppose theories which seemed at first sight to contradict Christian tradition: patience would reveal the truth in time. But he wanted Christians so to exercise their minds as to assimilate and contribute to what was good in natural science and social improvement, without losing their grip on the supernatural reality which was the source of true happiness and real power. He wanted to help the young generations so to orientate themselves as to be able to explore the new worlds of knowledge and yet be firmly rooted — not in the old, but in the eternal.

It was here that Newman's vision went beyond the view of many who misunderstood him, of whatever Christian allegiance. It was the partial identification, in the nineteenth century, of the eternal with the old that led to the loss of so many from Christian belief. The nostalgia for an imaginary medievalism, imitation Gothic churches, effete naturalism or unreal sentimentality of religious statues and pictures — all this was the secondary effect of deep fears, an inability to shed the habitual in order that the eternal might work freely in a world that was changing. Of course there is danger in mere novelty, but it is rarely a pressing one in the Cathulic Church, which on the human side is ruled by a multitude of old men and the customs of hundreds of years.

Newman always puzzled his contemporaries by being at the same time so ancient and so modern. He was at home with the Martyrs and the Fathers — and with scientists and factory girls. He practised fasting and penance — and was an immediate and inveterate train traveller. He read St. Athanasius and Anthony Trollope. He was a venerable man, but he talked the slang of the moment. Puseyites were disconcerted by his modernity. Catholics by his antiquity — for most of them had forgotten what their spiritual ancestors were like. Protestants are apt to imagine that it is only they who renew themselves by a return to the beginnings, but there are Catholic renascences too. Since Newman was a pioneer in the return to the Fathers, and to a new understandins of the Scriptures, he did not have much company on the road now so well known. He was regarded with suspicion by those for whom the last hundred years was the standard measure, and who could not conceive that the next hundred would be very different. Psychologically the great difference between Newman and the Ultramontanes and Anglican conservatives was that they were ridden bv fears and he was not...

Vatican Council II is associated in our minds with "dangerous mere novelty," and certainly there has been a catastrophic lot of that! A great many Catholics used the council as an excuse to say, "Wheee, I'm freee.....time to party!" But that was never the intent, and not what is in the actual documents produced by the council. The true spirit of which is now reasserting itself in the Church in a myriad of ways. (Historically, councils have usually produced 50 years or so of turmoil in the Church. So I'm signing up at the right time.) The actual results of the council will probably have their effect over centuries. The world needs them.

And it is a commonplace to say that the Venerable John Henry Newman is the "father of the Council." More than anyone else, Vatican II was about his ideas. (Such as ecumenism, return to the teachings of the Fathers, Development of Doctrine, and the correct approach to the modern world.) He saw and understood our world more than anyone else.

That's certainly been my conclusion (in my own humble realm). 9/11 was a revelatory event, and my 5½ years of blogging has been a process of peeling the onion to try to see what it was that was revealed. And then I recently discovered Newman, and found that he had explained it all 150 years ago! So he's my hero, no doubt about it.

"...An inability to shed the habitual in order that the eternal might work freely in a world that was changing." "...without losing their grip on the supernatural reality which was the source of true happiness and real power."

If you are going to "shed the habitual," you have to have a firm grip on some things that are solid and unchanging. Not just religious truths, but authoritative traditions of other kinds, such as you might find reading the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. Which are themselves based on the authoritative and immemorial tradition called "the Rights of Englishmen." And, brothers and sisters, I have to tell you that you are going to have to discard the habitual whether you like it or not! Because we are all trapped in a science fiction story. We are being shoved into a time-machine and sent into the future at fearsome speed. Our world is changing drastically. Mere habits or prejudices won't be weighty enough to keep us in ballast.

That's what I'm talking about when I complain that left-leaning people are nihilists. In my generation and after, being "Left" is just a habit of thought, not the philosophical system (false though it was) that used to ballast many people's lives. (If you don't believe me, try to get a leftist in a real philosophical argument, one that goes down to first principles.) But mere habits won't cut it anymore; change is happening too fast and too scary. Which is why leftists are so brittle and angry of late. (And some rightists too—think of Paleocons like Pat Buchanan.)

Here's a link to the splendid St Phillip Neri.

For Sunday..." the clever and charming sons of men"

From the book I am currently reading, Newman: vol. II, Light in Winter.

Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training<. It was Saint Monica's feast, and he took her, the mother of that convert intellectual, St Augustine, as a type of the Church, weeping and praying for the clever and charming sons of men, spiritually dead in spite of all their gifts, until they yielded their rebel wills to God. He gave a vivid account of how a young man may drift out of his faith if he never thinks about it; for him Newman made the excuse that he was an intellectual as well as a moral being, and must have teachers in whom intellectual training was equal with moral. 'I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom and religion to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for is, that they should be found in one and the same place, and exemplified in the same persons. I want to destroy that diversity of centres, which puts everything into confusion by creating a contrariety of influences. ...I want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and the moral discipline.

Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap...an ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.'...

Of course you could just click on this link and read the actual sermon; it is worth ones time...

Girl, sword, Brobdingnagian opponent...

On the very very slight chance that someone reading this is BOTH in the Bay Area, and is interested in the work of Alyssa Pitstick, she will be giving a Lenten reflection at our Parish, St Dominic's of San Francisco, on March 21, at 7:30.

Dr Pitstick is famous and controversial right now for challenging parts of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. I had to laugh; I was Googling and found a partisan who had illustrated a blogpost on her with a picture of Eowyn taking a sword to the horrid whatchamacallit in Lord of the Rings!

(I myself have no settled opinion on the issues, but I plan to read (I skimmed it before) her debate with Edward T. Oakes, S.J., in First Things.)

"critics by conviction and Christians by habit"

From Meriol Trevor's excellent biography of John Henry Newman, vol 1, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud.

...Liberal Churchmen had no monopoly of the social conscience, though they were more concerned with politics than other parties in the Church. What really distinguished them was their approach to the doctrines and history of Christianity. In effect, if not always in theory, they gave the highest authority to Reason.

But Newman had just come to believe that Reason, improperly exercised to judge the data of a divine revelation, was the chief instrument of the World in the modern age — the World of which Satan was the ruler: nature, human and non-human, so far as it is in rebellion against God and in opposition to the kingdom of Christ. During 1829 and 1830 his sermons in St. Mary's expressed these ideas of the World and the Church, which were basic to his thought for the whole of his life. He published his last words on the subject when he was eighty-four and quoted some of these early sermons.

With his clear mind — Whately himself had said it was the clearest he knew — Newman foresaw the general development of the liberal idea in religion, as in fact it has come to pass. Wherever reason is made sole judge of religious truth, faith weakens and in logical minds is destroyed ; not because the Christian faith is irrational or false, but because it is something given to the human mind, not discovered by it. Reason is within the scheme, not superior to it. Perhaps Newman saw this so clearly because of his own early scepticism ; Christianity could never be to him merely an habitual frame of reference, within which the individual critical reason could be let loose without danger. But to most of the liberal Churchmen, this was just what it was ; they were critics by conviction and Christians by habit. Later generations shocked them by losing the habit. Newman was not shocked, though he was grieved, because he expected it. In fact, he began by expecting general scepticism to arrive sooner than it did.

Whately never understood the nature of Newman's opposition to Liberalism. He thought Newman abandoned the liberal cause for orthodoxy because orthodoxy was in power, that his motive was worldly ambition ; yet the truth was that Newman parted company with the liberals because he saw that their principles, though they did not realize it, would betray the Church to the World...

The Anglican (in America Episcopalian) Church has three main factions or flavors. Evangelical, Liberal, and Anglo-Catholic. A bit of history that I find quite stupefying is that two of these groups originated, in the 1830's, in the common room of Oriel College, Oxford! (The Evangelicals arose in the 18th Century. The most famous of them were John and Charles Wesley, who left to form the Methodists.)

Richard Whately, mentioned above, "...was a strong liberal, and bid fair to be the leader of the new party of progressive men in the Church...He did not look on the Church as a sacred society preserving divine doctrine, but as a kind of moral order within society..." He and other Oriel men, Hampton, Hawkins, and Arnold of Rugby, started the liberal movement in the Anglican Church that spread rapidly through Oxford and beyond. And Newman raised up an opposition, known to history as the Oxford Movement, or the Tractarian Movement. Whose most important members, Newman, Keble, Pusey, and Froud were also Oriel men. (Though some had taken "livings," that is, positions as rectors or vicars of parishes. But they remained members of their college. All Oxford and Cambridge Fellows were, in those days clergymen, usually young, who expected to take up livings as soon as possible. If for no other reason than that they could not marry as long as they remained in the university. There were no old fossil college teachers then.)

The Evangelicals are still a large part of the Anglicans. The liberals are still the liberals, culminating in a certain peculiar lady bishop now head of the Episcopalians. The Tractarian flavor became what is now known as "Anglo-Catholic," that is, those Anglicans who feel that their church is part of the "Church Catholic," though not Roman Catholic. Newman, and many since, came to the conclusion that that just wasn't true, and left to join.......The Church.

"Social Justice:" A definition...

One hears the buzzwords "Social Justice" very frequently these days. But I've never heard the term defined. I suspect—Oh dear, how can I be so cynical—I suspect that this is intentional. That if we knew what was really meant....we would not be too happy.

Charlene heard something on the radio that I think may shed a bit of light. Someone she was listening to on KSFO quoted from a "progressive teacher" magazine. The subject was using Legos to build a town, as part of some sort of curriculum. For the very young, I would assume. And the comment in the magazine was, that this was a great tool for teaching "social justice." Because all the houses could be the same size, and they could all be communally owned!

What an exciting new idea...

"to be an enemy of a man's creed but a friend to the man himself"

I was noodling around looking for a Chesterton quote, and came upon this great little essay by Paul Cella, from 2003: What Threatens Us. I think I read it back when, and it's worth re-reading. It's partly about how modern secularist society just can't "see" faith, and can't therefore get any feel for the threat posed by Islam. And that we need to consult men who did understand, such as GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. Both of whom were astonishingly prescient, both of them predicting the future rise of Islam at a time when Moslem lands were impoverished backwaters, and seemed to "rational" types to be of no account whatsoever.

I liked this part in particular, since last Sunday's lesson was on the old "loving your enemy" thing. Ouch. Hard, if you take this stuff seriously, especially if your enemy is a jihadi who would torture and kill you just for the heck of it. (Or, far worse, if your enemy is a leftizoid nihilist whose non-creed is eating like acid at the roots of our beloved civilization.)

...In this, "ChesterBelloc" again reveal narrowness of the modern world's bluster about tolerance and pluralism: having repudiated in a glib and small-minded way the power of faith on the minds of men, the modern mind makes itself ignorant as mud, and walks about the world in a kind of daze. The hardest thing for the Modern Age to do is actually see a thing other than itself.

Chesterton and Belloc saw in Islam precisely the sort of spiritual energy which was proving evanescent in the West even in their time. Belloc, for example (and probably Chesterton too, although I myself do not recall reading it) emphatically declared Islam a heresy -- a heresy which derived its strength from the affirmation of some true doctrines of Christianity while denigrating fatally other true doctrines. A heresy is not necessarily evil; it is simply wrong; staggeringly, definitively, but plausibly wrong. This sort of judgment is very nearly impossible today: it provokes the charge of crankishness, or even bigotry. But therein lies our suffocating narrowness. We have resolutely undertaken to amputate some of our mental faculties; like the faculty of distinguishing a creed from its adherents. The rigid secularist cannot see the creed, only its followers. But it is, I think, a solid fact, no matter what modern insularity avows, that a man may be an implacable enemy of Islam and still a friend of Muslims.

Modern multiculturalism denies this fact. And I will grant it this small concession; that it is no easy mental task to be an enemy of a man's creed but a friend to the man himself. Not easy, but possible -- and indeed necessary. In this sense secularism, along with its accomplice multiculturalism, is a capitulation or abdication of responsibility; it is the surrender of clever poltroons. In the face the challenge of charity, the challenge propounded by the awesome equality of the Christian creed: "love your neighbor as yourself," the modern world resigns itself to dull platitudes....

Mr Cella blogs here. Some recent interesting posts concern his A Reactionary’s Shorter Catechism, which is thought-provoking, to say the least...

Job done...

I just finished installing these wardrobes, for a choir rehearsal room. I think they turned out well, but this project beat me up in a bunch of ways. A lot of them just because the two units are big! 7 1/2 feet high, and 5 feet wide. That complicates everything. For instance, there's no 1/4" plywood available wide enough to form the backs— I had to stitch two pieces together for each one. And once the cases were assembled, it's not like I could pick them up and move them about...

However, it was for our own dear parish, St Dominic's, of San Francisco, and for its world-class choir, so it was a labor of love...

For any woodworkers who might be interested, those sliding doors are not really frame-and-panel construction (which would be pretty scary at that size). They are pieces of 1/2" Birch plywood (I was lucky to get some good-looking C-2 at a good price) with strips of 1/4" thick Birch glued on. It worked out well, but there were a lot of pieces to put together. They are lightly dyed to match some other wood in the room..

They are hanging on Hettich System 72222 tracks and wheels--very cool. But the little bottom guides sold with the system were useless--I threw them out and made some long guides of my own.

Sunday Thought--don't add cornstarch

.

True faith is what may be called colourless, like air or water; it is but the medium through which the soul sees Christ; and the soul as little really rests upon it and contemplates it, as the eye can see the air. When, then, men are bent on holding it (as it were) in their hands, curiously inspecting, analyzing, and so aiming at it, they are obliged to colour and thicken it, that it may be seen and touched. That is, they substitute for it something or other, a feeling, notion, sentiment, conviction, or act of reason, which they may hang over, and doat upon. They rather aim at experiences (as they are called) within them, than at Him that is without them. —John Henry Newman

For Sunday, a little pome from about the year 800...

This life is naught but a struggle for good men.
The holy book hath sung it in your ears.
The son the father loves most tenderly
He chastens most: and so God proves his saints
By hard blows here, and recompense of joy hereafter.

So take it not to heart, my brothers,
This inconsistency of earthly things,
      The swirling eddies.
So was and so shall be this changing world,
And let none think that he is sure of joy.
He lies bedridden now, who coursed with stags
Over the ploughed lands: age was far away.
And this man tugging at his ancient tatters
To hide his shivering legs
Slept under purple once.
The eyes are dim and fogged with length of days,
That counted dancing atoms: the right hand
That swung the sword and brandished
      the stout spear
Is shaky now, and finds it hard enough
To carry to the mouth a piece of bread.
Beloved, let us love the lasting things
Of heaven, than the dying things of earth.
Here time brings change, and nothing
      canst thou see
But suffers alteration: there abides
One sole unchanging everlasting day...

For He that cast down raiseth up again,
He maketh sore and bindeth up,
He woundeth and his hands make whole.
Breaketh in shards and buildeth up again.
By day and night entreat in holy prayer
The kind Christ, that He keep you everywhere;
And if ye learn the things that please Him best,
Then let your hand do what the heart hath willed.
So Heaven itself shall be your shield and buckler,
And God's own hand protect and be your guide.
    -- Alcuin

Alcuin (died 804) was a noted churchman, scholar, and confidant of Charlemagne.

I'm all agog...

This article, Holland's Post-Secular Future, by Joshua Livestro (Thanks to Amy) is just fascinating. Even though you frequently read here about the decline of Europe, I'm also always hungy for any signs of renewal. I'd be thrilled if things turned around. I've blogged two or three possibilities over the years, but they've always seemed like too little, too late. Mere crumbs. But this looks like more than a crumb. Maybe a snack. (And of course I'm aware that connecting the general European decline with the decline of Christianity is just a hypothesis. Maybe it's a symptom, not a cause.)

....According to Bakas and Buwalda, God is back in Europe's most notoriously liberal country. Or rather: The Dutch are moving back to God. It seems an implausible hypothesis. After all, Europe was supposed to have entered the realm of post-Christianity, to use C.S. Lewis's term--a state of eternal unbelief from which there is no return. And yet, Bakas and Buwalda claim, the Dutch are turning back. Take the almost unnoticed reintroduction of crucifixes and other religious artifacts into the classrooms of Catholic schools throughout the country. Years of gradual but seemingly unstoppable secularization have given way to a reaffirmation of old religious identities. The change is also starting to affect the attitudes of pupils at these schools. In a recent newspaper interview, a head teacher at a Catholic secondary school in Rotterdam observed, "For years, pupils were embarrassed about attending Mass. Now, they volunteer to read poems or prayers, and the auditorium is packed."

There's also the remarkable critical and commercial success of a number of openly Christian writers. Holland's most prestigious literary prizes were awarded in 2005 to books dealing in a sympathetic way with Christian issues of faith and redemption. The Libris Literatuur Prize went to the Catholic author Willem Jan Otten for his Specht en zoon (Specht and son) while the AKO Literature Prize was awarded to Calvinist Jan Siebelink's Knielen op een bed violen (Kneeling on a Bed of Violets). Siebelink's novel sold nearly 350,000 copies in its first year, making it the single bestselling Dutch-language book of the past decade--apart, that is, from a new Bible translation published in 2004, which sold more than half a million copies (in a population of 16 million people).

The success in the Netherlands of the so-called Alpha Course program--a sort of Christianity 101 for beginners--is another case in point. The Alpha formula, first developed at Holy Trinity Brompton in London, aims to provide small groups of interested people with an introduction to Christianity through a series of meals-with-discussion evenings. Since its inception in 1997, 120,000 people have taken the Dutch version of the course. The number of related courses is growing by around one hundred a year. Prison Alpha, Business Alpha, Student Alpha, Youth Alpha, and more recently the Alpha Marriage Course: Collectively, they seem to have struck a chord in Holland's secular society. Jan Bakker, national coordinator of Alpha Holland, admits he is as surprised as anyone about the success of the program: "There are still those who laugh at Christianity. But there's a growing group, most of them young people, who are genuinely interested, for whom this is all completely new."

There's statistical evidence to back up the "new orthodoxy" hypothesis....

The article also has interesting stuff on Islam in the Netherlands....

....They're symbols of Dutch Islam's remarkable growth over the past 30 years, from less than 1 percent of the population in 1970 to 6 percent today. According to SCP predictions, that growth is set to continue to around 7.5 percent in 2020--a significant increase, to be sure, but nowhere near the apocalyptic figures predicted by those who fear Holland will become a majority Islamic country by the end of the 21st century. One reason it won't is that Islam, at least in its Dutch variant, is not a proselytizing faith. When asked about the importance of proselytizing, Dag volunteered that, on his list of priorities, trying to convert the indigenous Dutch population comes "just about last." Even the most optimistic estimates of Dutch Muslim organizations put the number of converts to Islam at no more than a few hundred a year. With immigration from Islamic countries grinding to a halt and birth rates among the Muslim community further approximating average Dutch birthrates with each new generation, it seems unlikely to say the least that visions of a caliphate in Holland will come to pass in this century--or the next, for that matter.

Since they don't seem to be interested in spreading the good news of Muhammad, the main priority of the Islamic communities in Holland will be to fight off the twin challenges of apathy and apostasy. Apathy is not yet a challenge in a community that defines Islam largely in cultural rather than religious terms. But once the third and fourth generations of offspring of the original immigrants start to replace the first generation, these cultural ties will start to lose some of their binding force. At the same time, it's far from clear that Dutch Islam will be able to keep religious liberalism at bay indefinitely. With government sponsorship--and the accompanying demands of gender neutrality--of university-based imam training courses about to become a reality, the day is not far off when the first feminist and gay imams will start preaching in mosques in Holland. There is no reason to assume Islam will be any better placed to deal with this liberal onslaught than mainstream Christianity was in the 1950s and '60s....

One of the things that's kept Christianity alive in America is that we've never had a state church. so the denominations are all in competition, and any that become slack or complacent are culled by a sort of "darwinian" pressure. something of a similar situation may grow in Europe as the state and "mainline" churches shrink and become irrelevant. And of course having a mosque built in your neighborhood tends to concentrate the mind too...Read the whole thing. The world is stranger than we think...

Cool tool...

My collegiate son is studying Classical Greek, and showed me this web site, The Unbound Bible. It lets you compare bible passages in an astonishing range of versions and languages. You could, for instance, see side-by-side the same verse in Armenian, Amharic, Africaans and Aramaic....

Not an end in itself...

Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be the aim in the lives of individuals and societies. In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.
    — John Paul II

There are those people who believe that little things matter....

I liked this bit, which was written by a commenter at Amy Welborn's blog. You don't have to be interested in the religious aspect of this to appreciate the philosophical divide among people. I myself am among those who think the little things are crucial, and if I could live life as I wished...well, I'd have to live at least 10,000 years to have enough time to get all the details properly savored and squared away...

Amy writes:

"The recognition - the profound recognition - that the little things exist at the service of the greater—the life-changing presence of Jesus Christ in the world..."

This is a good insight; one of the central divides that I'm finding as I grow older is between those people who believe that little things matter and those who believe that they are...well, just little things....

...There is a wisdom in the small things that is hidden from the big minds, almost an inability to see the importance of the little stuff unless we can directly see the big changes linked to it...and even then only admitting to it with grumbling. The joy of the world as God created it is that not only do the little things point to and affect the big things, but even the littlest thing has a value that the Lord does not miss in his count of all things. Only a God-made-infant could arrange a world in which the most common of all people is offered, each day, the chance to participate in the salvation of the world by the careful love of so many little things.

The small things are important because, at the very least, we seem to have a God who is deeply amused at making the little things matter...

"Don't mince matters...Give it to them good and strong"

For Sunday, a bit of one of the all-time great conservative essays, Isaiah's Job (here's the whole thing) by Albert J. Nock...

...I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah....I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech since it has to be pieced out from various sources. . .

The prophet's career began at the end of King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.

In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are,'' He said. "Tell them what is wrong, and why, and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,'' He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.''

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job in fact, he had asked for it but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so, if the enterprise was to be a failure from the start, was there any sense in starting it?

"Ah,'' the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it''....

There's only one war....

Charlene and I caught on the radio a little of author John O'Sullivan discussing the events he writes about in his new book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. It sounds like a great book! Three oddballs who no one expected would be put in charge of anything, especially not the crusade to defeat the evil of Soviet Communism. In fact, most "experts" didn't think there was, or even should be, a crusade.

Then, just afterwards, I found this very interesting piece, on just what the present Pope is up to. One doesn't have to be religious to suspect that we have an ally in the Vatican, just as we did during the 80's. I suspect Pope and President would both be saying that we are not at war with Islam (Yeah, yeah, I read Michelle Malkin too, and sometimes I doubts it myself) but rather we are tacitly allied with the majority of Muslims (though they may not have figured it out yet; they don't seem to be too big on thinking things through), who don't really wish to be clamped inside some Taliban death regime, OR to have their faith dissolved by corrosive secularism. And if that's true, then probably only the Pope has the standing to convey the message to them.

...Thus Benedict's true purpose in Turkey is that of uniting all the monotheistic faiths against a militant and self-consciously destructive secular culture. To that end he will seek a new political communion with Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople — the symbolic leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians. Even the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Alexei II, who rejected overtures by the late Pope John Paul II, has indicated that he would now welcome talks with Rome.

Nor are the pope's attempts to produce a concerted monotheistic alliance restricted to Christians. On the first day of his visit, Benedict quoted an 11th century pope, Gregory VII, who talked about the duties that Christians and Muslims owe each other "because we believe in one God."

Far from being anti-Muslim, the pope views Islam as a key cultural ally against the enlightenment liberalism that for him corrodes the moral core of Western society.

It is important to realize, however, that Benedict recognizes a mutual problem in this explicit project of religious realignment around shared critiques and common discernment. Secular conceptions of race, state and nation have corrupted all the faiths, too often turning them into a vehicle for nationalism or racism...(Thanks to Amy)

It's worth reading the whole thing. I'll paste in a bit more below...

...But the papal visit is not primarily an attempt to pacify relations between Christianity and Islam. Instead, Benedict is there to engage with Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy in the hope of persuading both to join his project of overcoming secularism.

The Pope, far from being sectarian, wants to inaugurate a new religious renaissance in Europe that opposes both secular and religious fundamentalism. This apostolic journey is of a piece with the logic of the Regensburg address, rather than a belated act of repentance for it.

Benedict opposes secularism because it is both absolute and arbitrary. In the name of being neutral with regard to values, secular ideology eliminates all rival world views from the public sphere. By denying the existence of objective moral truths, it elevates self- assertion as the measure of all things. Social life is reduced to the arbitration of conflicting self-interest — a process in which the most powerful always win.

Ultimately, this arbitrary absolutism produces a society ruled by an unholy alliance of utilitarian ethics and the proxy politics of the managerial class. This collusion destroys the very idea of common action and a binding collective discernment. Thus does the pope attribute the failure of Europe's common political project to the growing secularization of European culture.

Benedict's religious alternative is not some form of theocratic absolutism. On the contrary, the Pope is a staunch defender of secularity — the separation of church and state. Benedict wants to disentangle the church from the state, but without divorcing religion from politics, because only a religion freed from subservience to the state can save modern culture from itself...

One has to suspect that the Regensburg speech was the equivalent of the old joke about hitting the mule with the 2 x 4. "You don't have to beat this mule. You just have to get his attention first."

From heroes to bums in not much more than a generation...

[Rambling Sunday thoughts] I've been thinking about how in the comments at this post of mine, Andrea Harris and I got onto a discussion of the decline of Europe (and perhaps the USA), and it's possible cause in the enormously high levels of welfare common in European countries.

I for various reasons have Germany much in mind these days, and I wrote:

....West Germany in say 1960, was to outward appearances, hard-working, economically vibrant, Christian, confident, with a rapidly growing population and lots of young people. Experts were saying that we Americans had better pull up our socks or be totally out-classedI

And that's all gone! All of it. The corpse is still walking but nobody's fooled except those who want to be fooled. We're not talking slow decline-of-the-Roman-Empire here, these guys went from heroes to bums in not much more than a generation. If that's happened before in history I really missed something....

I'd say the proximate cause is welfare, which I know increased hugely in Germany in the 1970's. (By the way, the post-war German economic miracle was made possible by low taxes and reduced regulation. It's not like Germany is unacquainted with what makes for success.) Welfare meaning not just checks for the poor or unemployed, but all sorts of cozy security blankets for the whole population.

And I'd say the ante-proximate cause, the cause right behind the cause, is socialism. Socialism promotes the welfare state because it wants to destroy souls, and to make men dependent on the state. It has given up on the Revolution, and the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," but the goal is still the same.

But frankly, these things are so obvious they've become boring. There is no intellectual battle to be waged against socialism or the welfare state. There is ceaseless war to be waged against the things themselves, of course. But no open intellectual fight. Any leftist reading this will curl his lip in disdain, but not one of them will have the guts to make a case for what he believes. "Fell-lurking curs," as Shakespeare put it.

So, what interests me is, what is the root cause? Welfare is destructive, but why wasn't there resistance, in Europe, to its terrible threat? In the US every increase in welfare and other socialistic innovations has generated vigorous criticism and political opposition. One result of which was the federal Welfare Reform law in the 1990's, which cut our welfare rolls in half!

Why was there—is there—little or nothing like this in Europe? I can think of several possibilities. One clue that smells right to me—can't prove anything here—comes from one of the smarter chaps living...

...Bonn in those years was the almost accidental capital of Adenauer’s Germany. In the divided land, whose eastern states were behind the Iron Curtain, economic and civilian rebirth was proceeding at a dizzying pace. In the 1957 elections, the Christian Democratic Party had won an absolute majority in Parliament. After the Nazi nightmare, the German Church, with deserved pride, offered an essential contribution to Germany’s new beginning.

In an atmosphere that could have encouraged triumphalism, the young professor-priest Ratzinger had just written an article in 1958 for the magazine Hochland some reflections arising from his brief but intense pastoral experience as a chaplain in the parish of the Most Precious Blood in Bogenhausen, an haute-bourgeois section of Munich.

In that article, he uses the term “statistical deception” for the cliché that described Europe as “a Continent that is almost totally Christian.” The Church in the postwar modern world appeared to him instead as “a Church of pagans – no longer, as in the past, a church of pagans who have become Christian, but a Church of pagans that still call themselves Christian but who have really become pagans.”

He tells of a new paganism “which is growing ceaselessly in the heart of the Church and threatens to demolish it from the inside.”....[link]

I'd sure love to know what tipped him off! He knew, all-right. He saw. But nobody else seemed to see it. What did he see?

<armchair theorizin'> One of the things you have to do, if you are going to grow in faith, is to fight against ones natural desire to avoid suffering. (Or just grow psychologically. It's not a specifically Christian insight. One of the Noble Truths the Buddha taught was "Life is suffering.") It seems wrong-headed; avoiding pain is just good sense, right? (Seems like that to me too, most of the time.) But it's a mistake. And if your goal is to avoid pain, your faith will shrink. (And you'll get the suffering anyway.)

And a priest is going to observe people's pain and suffering up close. This will tell him a lot, if he has eyes to see. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something like that that was clear to young Fr. Josef Ratzinger. It would not be surprising in a nation that had endured millions of deaths in two world wars...</armchair theorizin'>

Josef Ratzinger, priest and professor of dogmatic theology, Freising, 1959

"some truth that he has never seen before"

...Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

There is one only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell.” No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day.

And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk to Westminster to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their procession...[Link]

(Sketch by Zach Brissett)

Posted by John Weidner at 08:10 AM | Comments (2)