Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Gay Debts

Did you know that the infamous Gay Games (held in Chicago this year), has always run a deficit? It's an event that can't pay for itself, so how does it survive? Without corporate sponsors, which don't pay all the bills even so, it's hard to see how the games would even get to the point of being and event in the first place.

A story from Northwestern University's Medill News Service gives the details about fundraising auctions to pay off the debts, as well some details about corporate funding: this year's games had 10 times the number of corporate sponsors as the 1994 games in New York. For some reason corporations seem to jump on the politically correct bandwagons, especially the gay one. The reality is that corporations, I think, could do just fine without promoting such silliness as gay games (which were open to all "orientations," by the way). Well, someone might point out that some sports franchises would fail without their corporate sponsors, too. Perhaps some even run deficits, but I don't know of any.

Mr. Hefner's Fertility Clinic

I must admit that I had never heard of Cindy Margolis until I read the Associated Press wire this afternoon. But I must be one of very few, since Guiness Book of World Records has dubbed Mrs. Margolis "Queen of the Internet" because of how many times her "girl next door" pictures are downloaded from the Internet. And now, at the age of forty, Margolis tells the the Associated Press she's ready to go to the next level: a nude photo layout in Playboy magazine.

But it is all for the children.

Margolis assures us she never wanted to pose nude before "because my mom would kill me, and I thought it was more mysterious keeping my clothes on." This year, however, things have changed. As Margolis puts it:

But, this year, when I got the call from Mr. Hefner, it was my 40th birthday. So I thought, "Wow -- at 40, they still want me?" And I thought it's almost an inspiration -- like a "you go, girl" moment. I feel empowered that you can be married and have three children and still be sexy and confident and look great.

My mom would have killed me before, but I'm an adult woman now, and I'm ready to show the world that you can have it all at 40 -- be fabulous, 40, and pose for Playboy.

But the real reason, Margolis says, she was willing to sell pictures of her nakedness for the men who subscribe to Playboy is because "I am posing for a purpose: a portion of the proceeds from each issue sold is going to go to my charity."

The charity? A group that helps women procure in vitro fertilization and surrogate mother technologies, the technologies Margolis herself used to bring about her children. These babies are "one hundred thousand dollar babies," Margolis says, even before they are born.

Does Margolis not see the sad irony that her "empowerment" comes about because Hugh Hefner "still wants her," even though she's forty? Does she think about the sadness of her becoming a sex object for other women's husbands, other women's fathers, in order to, through Frankensteinian modern techonology, help other women become mothers?

Welcome to Hugh Hefner's America. We love women, as long as they are still hot. We love babies, as long as we can control them.

Let's pray for churches that will honor and respect women, even those too old and too modest for Mr. Hefner's appetite. Let's pray for churches that will welcome children, praying with infertile couples and helping them with adoption. And let's pray that one day, maybe when Mrs. Margolis is no longer considered "sexy" by the playboys, she'll find her way to a community of the Kingdom, a church that will welcome her as a sister and not as a plaything.

Cross Free Chapels

One by one, they disappear. They go into storage, closets, or God knows where. Crosses, I mean. Some "churches" even remove them from their own buildings, sanctuaries. Some are removed by judicial fiat from municipal logos. St. Paul said the Cross is offensive, a stumblingblock.

God truly have mercy upon those who chose to remove the sign of atonement from their eyes, their lives, and their hearts. While it may be for them merely an ornament, they still know not what they do. When the symbol of the Cross is gone, that for which it stands will fade from the memory and imagination. In many cases the removal, perhaps, follows the latter. Still, some child may look and ask someone, what is that symbol? If he finds the answer, he may come to embrace it. "Better, Screwtape, that we put the Cross into a childproof closet." We wouldn't want someone to get the Wrong Idea.

The latest Removal took place, it is reported here by Todd Starnes, from the chapel of the College of William and Mary. While it may seem more inclusive to remove the Cross of Jesus, He would disagree, He who intends to draw all men, all nations, every tribe and tongue, to the sign of the Divine Mercy and forgiveness that all men need.

Love, Sex, and Parenting...and Halloween

As Linus Van Pelt waits for the Great Pumpkin (if you don't know what I'm talking about; good for you. Your parents more closely monitored television intake than did mine), two current articles seek to point out what Halloween reveals about contemporary attitudes toward sex and parenting.

The Los Angeles Times features the lament of a busy Mom who worries that the elaborate costumes of her neighbors' children just reminds her how inadequate she is as a parent. Brett Paesel, author of Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom (On second thought, never mind the television. My Mom was just fine), writes this:

I suggested that my 6-year-old wear a shirt and a tie and go as a politician, but he wants to be a Komodo dragon. I told my 3-year-old that I could paint bruises on his arms and legs and he could go as a kid who falls down a lot. But he wants to be a red cat because a friend of ours works at the REDCAT Theater downtown, and he's been obsessed with the image ever since he heard of it. I'm figuring that we'll do red sweats and a few whiskers drawn on with a lip liner. The Komodo dragon is going to require some re-imagining of last year's T. rex costume.

Things used to be a whole lot easier for underachieving moms. In addition to being one, I'm the daughter of one — and she seemed to have more like-minded company in the '60s. One year, she and my dad couldn't be bothered to take us trick-or-treating. They gave my brother and me some crepe paper and newspapers to take upstairs and told us to make a different costume for each time we came back down into the living room. My parents then kicked back to discuss the day over martinis; every time we emerged in a new paper creation, they threw candy at us.

The next day my mother told a neighbor about our evening. She was impressed and passed on her own timesaving tip: "I threw a black wig on Grace and told her to go as her evil twin."

I long for those days when a mom could throw a sheet over a kid to make him a ghost without worrying that she's falling short of everyone's expectations. Or simply her own.

The Albany Times Union points out that the daughters of high-achieving parents have a growing theme in Halloween costuem trends: sexiness. Reporter Kelly Smith writes:

The idea of sexy Halloween is not necessarily a new one. For years, Halloween parties have had their share of hot nurses and seductive pirates. But these are parties for adults, right? Not anymore. With names like "Transylvania Temptress,"..."Major Flirt," and "Red Velvet Devil Bride," there is no doubt that costumes marketed to children and teens have become more suggestive.

Such costumes, which typically feature plunging necklines, fishnet stockings, knee-high boots and very short skirts, dominate the display at most costume shops and party supply stores, and parents are having a hard time avoiding them.

Thankfully there are "experts" who can help parents cope with whether or not their daughter should dress up as a sex huntress for Halloween. These tips include:

Use this as an opportunity to talk to your daughter about sexuality and appropriate ways of exploring and expressing it. Talk to girls about what they fear as well as hope for in terms of intimacy and teach them that there is more to sexuality than looking sexy for a guy. She said dressing up in sexy costumes is a way of presenting oneself as sexy, not of expressing oneself sexually.

and:

Add an element of power to the character she chooses. If she wants to be a fairy, let her imagine she's a fairy in charge of her whole kingdom. If she wants to express her sexuality, suggest that she be a toga-wearing goddess of wisdom. It's not that wanting to look pretty or sexy is bad, it's just that it's the only option girls are being presented with.

Whatever one's views on Halloween, the haze of confusion couldn't be more evident than it is in contemporary parenting, at Halloween or at any other time of the year. It will take more than Linus's Great Pumpkin to get us out from this one. Thankfully, the young man also knows how to turn that blanket into a shepherd's gear just in time to speak of good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.

If you don't know about Linus's shepherd speech or what that has to do with a blanket, again, thank your Mom and Dad. If you don't know what the good tidings of great joy are, give me a call.

Bloc québécois Acclaims Priest-Prostitute as Candidate

Le Devoir reports that the Bloc québécois has acclaimed Raymond Gravel as their candidate.

     He assured them that religion will never influence his actions:

«Je veux leur rappeler que la religion et la politique ne se mélangent pas.» Selon lui, «la droite religieuse est très forte, et il est temps de dire qu'on ne partage pas toutes leurs idées».

    They should be reassured because he has never let Catholicism dictate any of his actions his entire life, and his career as a male prostitute in a leather bar proves it.

    I have monitored the Québec press, and I do not believe that any mention of Gravel’s former career has ever been made. Perhaps it is impossible to translate “leather bar” or “rough trade” into French. Or perhaps the delicate citizens of Quebec would have a case of the vapors (un cas des vapeurs) and faint (s’évanouir) at the use of such language in public.

Deliver Us From Evil

I saw the film today. Here is the trailer.

It is a powerful film. I have a long section on the abuser Oliver O’Grady in my forthcoming book:

“O’Grady was an equal opportunity pedophile, targeting males and females, with whom he variously engaged in oral and anal sex, masturbation, digital penetration, groping and fondling. This, while having illicit affairs with at least two of the children’s mothers.”

We see and feel the parents breaking down when they realize they have let their five year old daughter be raped night after night by O’Grady.

We see Roger Mahoney lying and lying and lying. He lied his way into becoming Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles, and I presume he thinks he can lie his way into heaven.

I have only a few disagreements with the film. I don’t think celibacy is a root cause of the abuse, because the Anglican Church has similar problems. It has married priests who have raped children, and married bishops who have covered up for them.

O’Grady, who agreed to be interviewed for the film, is a complete narcissist and sociopath, but differs only in degree from the bishops who enabled him. He is however atypical in being a pedophile who liked small children. Most abusers liked 12-16 year old boys, and therefore most of the abuse is connected in some way with a type of homosexuality, despite the film’s denial of this.

I hope its minor flaws do not prevent the film from having a big impact: first of all the resignation and jailing of Cardinal Mahoney and second the purification of the Church from the corruption that besets it (see previous post).

Politician-Prostitute-Priest

Raymond Gravel, the pro-abortion priest and former male prostitute has received permission from the Vatican to run as a candidate in Canada. The Globe and Mail reports:

Rev. Raymond Gravel had to get permission from the Vatican to run in a federal by-election. Now, the former prostitute who used to work in gay leather bars has to convince the voters of Repentigny riding that he is the right man to represent them.

(snip)

He followed a childhood dream and entered the priesthood in 1982 after a rough-and-tumble life that included work as a prostitute and in gay leather bars between 1976 and 1982.

Mr. Gravel gave up prostitution after being so severely beaten by a client that he ended up in hospital.

His tenure as a priest has not been low key, either. An outspoken advocate, Mr. Gravel has publicly decried the Roman Catholic Church's position on same-sex marriage. He also received a disciplinary letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

Mr. Gravel was also one of 19 priests who created a tempest in February when they signed an open letter criticizing the church's position on same-sex marriage and its opposition to ordaining gays.

"I would say that 50 per cent of the priests in Quebec are gay, but if I became a priest, it's because I'm a believer and I believe in the message of Christ," he said in an interview last year with Fugues, a gay magazine.

Some claim to see an improvement in the Catholic Church under Benedict; however it gives every indication of continuing its downward slide into a pornocracy.

Unitarian Revivalism

The old joke asks what you get when you cross a Unitarian-Universalist with a Jehovah's Witness. The answer, of course, is someone who goes door to door for no apparent reason. The joke is now a reality. Unitarian-Universalists have discovered personal evangelism.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the nation's most liberal hyper-Protestant denomination is using advertising media and word-of-mouth to spread the gospel of a creedless faith in which new members may worship God, gods, a Goddess, or no god at all. One may be a Buddhist Unitarian, a Hindu Unitarian, an atheist Unitarian, a polyamorous Unitarian, even a Wiccan or neo-pagan Unitarian.

The Times reports that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) seeks to borrow "outreach techniques of evangelicals" in order to reach those seeking to "escape" evangelical Christianity and orthodox Catholicism. This includes an upcoming Unitarian revival meeting "in the tradition of the old-time tent meetings." No, I am not making this up.

So far the results are mixed, the newspaper observes:

"I like that it embraces all religions," said newcomer Teresa Geldmacher, 50, who said she was raised Roman Catholic but hadn't been to church in years. "I was brought up Christian, but couldn't accept the teaching that Jesus died on the cross for our sins."

The service, she said, "was much more along the lines of what I consider true spiritual teachings, which look to accept rather than to reject."

James Law, 66, who recently moved to Southern California from the Mississippi Delta area where "there are no Unitarians for miles," said he wasn't sure just how to react: "I've never been to a service without somebody pounding the pulpit and telling us how to change our lives."

I am a product of Deep South Baptist revivalism, a tradition that brought me to Christ and that I appreciate more the older I get. I have to admit that, if a Unitarian revival meeting comes anywhere near Kentucky, I'm going to go, just so I can see the Unitarian evangelist's altar call: "Every head bowed, every eye closed no one looking around. If you were to die tonight...well, you'd be dead. Wouldn't you like to use eco-friendly bio-degradable paper products in the meantime?"

The Pastor's Pitch

My brother David, pastor of Walnut Hill Bible Church in Baraboo, Wisconsin, writes a monthly column in his church newsletter. In his latest, he writes of my nephew’s experience as an American soldier guarding the Iraqi elections:

While stationed in Iraq my son joined fellow soldiers in securing polling places in cities along the northern border. He was able to see Kurdish men and women participate in democracy for the first time. There are forces that desperately want it to fail and are willing to do just about anything to see that it does. Clint was relieved that the polling compound where he was stationed only received one mortar shelling. A young boy was wounded but still alive when Clint put him on the medical helicopter . . . a serious head injury. He had not, until then, seen brain tissue. He thinks the boy survived.

Many Iraqi citizens (not Kurds) had voted before, but this was the first time they had choices. Fingers were dyed blue—no one could vote more than once. No Iraqi had ever participated in a fair election. That night, voters danced for joy in the streets of their towns and villages, celebrating the privilege of expressing the power of their convictions. One person--one vote, was exhilarating. American soldiers danced with them and set off flares to light the festivities. Clint said it was one of the most joyous and satisfying experiences he had during his tour of duty in Iraq. He also wrote, “I don’t think I’ll take the privilege of voting for granted again.”

It is easy to take voting for granted in the U. S.  Voting is easy here—even dead people and aliens seem to make it to the polls in some cities. Perhaps this is why many people don’t take the time to vote: we feel like little fish that don’t make a difference in a big sea. But this attitude plays into the hands of the Great Deceiver. He would like Christians to feel separated from the strength of Christ expressed through the collective wisdom of his Body. The Enemy understands the strength of our power as a voting bloc—why don’t we? Perhaps because we are too easily deceived.

Prayerfully study the issues and positions of the candidates. Talk to other Christians who are informed and who walk closely with the Lord—and vote! Be a good and responsible citizen. God’s Word demands it. You’ve been born into a time and place that allows you this privilege. Don’t waste it.

 

And We're Pro-Free Speech Too, So Shut Up

A pro-life group of demonstrators apparently caused a ruckus at the liberal University of Washington campus in Seattle this week. Not all Christians will agree with the group's tactics and few will be surprised at the venom with which the anti-abortion placards were greeted by the abortion rights majority on the campus. What is a bit disorienting to see in print is the response of one liberal, freedom-loving yute:

"I think it's absurd that they're here," said Grant Mandarino, 25, who is working on a graduate degree in comparative literature. "These people are not wanted. This is a pro-choice campus, and there isn't a place for them here."

He's a comparative lit scholar so surely he was just trying to employ some humorous irony.

Jesus the Ill-Advised

As Christians we are called upon to “speak the truth in love.” This is commonly translated to mean that if you have something unpleasant to say to someone by way of correction, you must say it nicely—gently and kindly. There is something to that interpretation, and we will never go wrong if we enlist gentleness, kindness, good humor, and the golden rule as guardians of our speech and writing. 

But that, of course, is not all there is to be said on the matter. The gospels provide us examples of our Lord’s intercourse with many different kinds of people. He is presented, if we may say it, as a deeply serious man who always had everyone’s highest good—their salvation—in mind, saying and doing what was needful, no more and no less, to deliver his point. This means he usually appears to our eyes as gentle, for the souls that were open to him were most often injured, damaged by sin and sorrow, and clearly the Lord followed the physician’s maxim primus non nocere—first, do no harm. With the prostitutes, the used camel salesmen, the lay sectarians, the petty bureaucrats, the soldiers, the average folks, struggling to get by in the world, the prosperous for whom something was missing, he showed himself grave, caring, and kind.

There was a class of people, however, for whom speaking the truth in love—for we hold his speech, by definition, to be truth and love--often involved delivering some of the rawest, most vitriolic insults and condemnations that literature has ever recorded coming from someone (as Bertrand Russell pointedly observed) purported to be a good man. These were delivered exclusively to men of his own class—the religious leaders--the bishops, denominational officials, the seminary professors, the certified teachers of and writers upon religion. It is hard in our day not to regard ancient Semitic locutions like “brood of vipers,” and “whitewashed tombs” as colorful and quaint, thus missing the original force of the epithets on the hearers, for whom no more crude or insulting, not to mention unkind and unhelpful, words could be imagined. 

The fundamental problem was their teaching. They were not only theological innovators, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the ancient law, but to increase their own status, power, and advantage, they had established, bureaucratized, and sacralized their innovations, ruling the people over whom God had given them charge by making him into an idol in their own service. This was true of all their parties. (That is why it is difficult to apply “liberal,” “conservative,” or “sectarian,” in the sense we normally use these terms to this group, taken as a whole, for they combined elements of each.)

It was this doctoral class of which Jesus would have been a member, and in which he would have been careful to remain collegial, had he been more concerned for his place in the world. While he recognized its office as divinely ordained, for that very reason he consistently denounced the doctrine and conduct of its incumbents in the strongest imaginable terms. 

Alas, though, had he been more practical, he would have recognized that attacking the church leaders in the way he did was apt to throw faithful into confusion. He would have contented himself to raise the standard of truth, trusting they would recognize and flock to it, without the highly questionable and deeply problematic expedient of deposing, for all practical purposes, a large, powerful, and highly influential portion of the magisterium. He would have understood the importance of church unity better than he evidently did--that given the choice between heresy and misconduct on one hand and schism on the other, the former was preferable. He wouldn’t have been so apparently enamored of the notion that one should do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. He would have recognized that we all ultimately serve the same God, and would have known if one must choose, as one sometimes must, between speaking the truth and acting lovingly, the charity which binds us together is the greater quality, and always holds truth within itself. 

He would, in short, have been more reliant upon the Holy Spirit. The resultant kindness to all people would have made it possible for him to escape the bad treatment his peevish, disruptive, and ultimately suicidal behavior eventually earned him, his lack of charity making him enemies he obviously would have known had strong government connections. They might have been his friends and colleagues had he not singled out them out for special treatment, and more consistently spoken the truth in love. 

The State Shall be All in All

     Ryan Anderson, a Touchstone reader and fellow of the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, has written an excellent analysis of the recent decision by the New Jersey State Supreme Court to compel the legislature to provide legal standing for same-sex unions.  His article can be found on the First Things page, here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=511.

     There are, of course, quite a few things for Anderson to take issue with: the "substantive error" the justices make in supposing that marriage may be whatever we say it will be; the prudential error of setting a precedent for polyamorous "marriages" and other aberrations; the contemptuous setting aside of "the manifest will of the people," whose legislators passed the very same antidiscrimination bill upon which the court pretends to base its decision, but passed it with the express understanding that it was not to be applied to marriage.  But I find most compelling of all Anderson's criticism not of the court's decision, but of the court's assumption that the decision was theirs to make:

     "That New Jersey marriage law should be left to democratic deliberation isn’t an ad hoc decision or a partisan proposal: The very nature of man—human dignity and equality—requires it. The people rightly claim the prerogative to deliberate about how to order their common life not only because sound decisions are thus more likely but because there are no natural superiors or inferiors. There isn’t a ruling class and a ruled class. All citizens stand on equal footing with regards to participation in the shaping of the state’s laws, laws that are binding on all citizens." (emphasis mine)

     We are not talking, here, about how to build bridges or dig canals, matters for which we would consult with an architect or an engineer.  We are not talking about how to train a state militia, a matter for which we might consult a professional soldier.   We are talking about how we are to get along with one another -- about "what men and women do together," as the novelist Heinrich Boll puts it.  That strikes to the heart of what sort of life we wish to live, as a people.  A society wherein all are compelled to accept, publicly, whatever sexual accomodations two or three or ten people make with one another, is a very different society from one wherein marriage of one man to one woman is celebrated as the foundation of our common life.  In these matters the "experts," if there are any at all, are the sages of the past, whose wisdom is the distilled experience and feeling of many generations of men and women who, despite their fallen condition, their proneness to lust and greed and selfishness and indolence, have managed to establish a modus vivendi that protects children, lends the neighborhood or the village something like coherence, and provides most people a decent chance of peace, and maybe even moments of true joy, this side of the grave.

     If the shoemakers, housewives, barbers, blacktoppers, and waitresses of this world are not competent to determine what kinds of customs to preserve or adopt for bringing some order to our most dynamic yet most dangerous drive -- if, men and women no less than the lawyers and jurists and academics of this world are men and women, they are yet not permitted to determine what men and women together do and what it shall mean, then what, pray tell, are they competent to determine?  Are they economists, to advise us on tax policy?  Diplomats, to advise us on foreign relations?   Inventors, to help us revise the patent laws?  They have all been children; they have been married or have known plenty of married people; they know about men and women, and, if the truth be told, those same shoemakers, housewives, barbers, blacktoppers, and waitresses could probably tell a few interesting stories about aberrations that will never make it to the sanitized case-studies peddled to the credulous jurist.  If such people cannot advise about sex -- I mean the whole gamut of issues concerning men and women and the family -- then I fail to see why they should even be allowed the right to vote.  They should be disenfranchised immediately.  And that, in essence, is just what the New Jersey court has done.

     A few months ago, a German court permitted the state to outlaw homeschooling.  Parents have an interest in the raising of their children, said the court with marvelous insight, but so does the state, and when the two conflict, the nod shall go to Deutschland ueber alles.  When I heard about the ruling, I concluded that Germany could no longer be called a free country.  I'll say the same thing about New Jersey now.  If the pansexualists can persuade enough New Jerseyites to allow, and to commend, every sexual habit that any combination of consenting adults wish to indulge, then I will call the New Jerseyites fools, but I will have to confess that they retain their political freedom to be fools.  But the court will not allow New Jerseyites the opportunity to exercise either wisdom or folly.

     One last point.  Those of us who wish to uphold the sexual mores that even secularists promoted not so very long ago are called theocrats.  I don't think I've ever met a theocrat, but if I have, that theocrat was an atheist in a faculty lounge.  God is the great curb on what a people will allow the state to do -- check out Sophocles' Antigone.  The family is the next great curb on the state -- check out Sophocles' Antigone, again.  Now there's certainly a strain of theophobia on the academic left: the fear that God does exist and does attend to the good and evil we do.  But there's more than that.  There's the championing of a false god, the State, with professors and lawyers and social workers and bureaucrats as its hierophants.  That god is a jealous god, and will brook no competition.  Nor is this a new phenomenon in the history of the world.

Adultery Ends Badly

In the simply named Match Point on his "Crunchy Con" weblog, Rod Dreher raises a matter I've raised here, and makes a similar point. After describing his reaction some years ago to the Martin Scorsese movie (I try to remember not to call these things "films") Goodfellas, he writes:

The kids were asleep (Baby Nora in my arms) and Julie and I decided to watch Woody Allen's "Match Point," about which we'd heard such good things. It got to the part in which the married protagonist begins his obsessive affair with Scarlett Johansson, and I swear, I could not watch it. It wasn't the somewhat graphic sex; it was the deed being done, this creep cheating so vividly on his kind, sweet wife. I felt defiled just watching it. I said to Julie, "You're not going to believe this, but this is making me really anxious. I hate watching this guy do this." I tried to shake it off, but finally said, "I can't do this anymore."

Rod may be nicer than I am. I saw the movie (fast forwarding through the intimate scenes) and felt an intense dislike for the adulterous young man, and the wish that his wife's father or brother would discover it and beat him with a cricket bat. (I am not saying that one should wish this, only that I did.)

I'm not particularly a fan of Woody Allen's movies, as skilled as he is, but I think that in this case he should be given some credit for making an adulterer so plausible and yet so odious. The average movie, tv show, popular novel, and women's magazine article rarely shows such revulsion and often portrays him — and even more often, her — sympathetically.

Adultery is a tragedy, not a sin: Adulterers X and Y have found their true loves, the one with whom they can be all they can be, the one some cosmic force must have intended them to marry, only they met each other after marrying A and B. Should a marriage vow keep them from happiness? (A question easier to ask and answer "no" these days than once it was, now that the vow is almost universally considered to come with an option to terminate.)

The story tellers do usually hedge their bets, making A and B somehow deficient if not actually dangerous, presumably because the average American approves of adultery but only if the adulterer has an excuse. He's still not completely comfortable with pure desire. If this required bet-hedging is the result of the oft-derided Puritan heritage, then hooray for Puritanism.

At the end of the movie, the young man realizes that he is suffering the effect of a godless world, in which what were once thought sins still have consequences but without the possibilty of redemption, and though I don't think the philosophical scenes quite come off, Allen deserves some credit for trying. Seeing the man suffer the wages of sin is not so viscerally satisfying as seeing him beaten by a chivalrous father, but he does not end happily, and we all know why.

Voting Blocks

With the national election coming up, the usual coverage has become, perhaps, increasingly unusual in paying more attention to those religious voting blocks, including the one that interested in imposing theocracy on the United States. Anyway, over at the New Republic, Joe Loconte and Amy Sullivan have begun a debate today about Evangelicals and the Bush administration. I've read with passing interest a few brief notices about books or articles claiming Bush has used evangelicals.

I am not a fan of politicans, generally, and assume they all "use" voting blocks whenever they can. I suspect someone complaining about this would, if honest, admit they wouldn't mind if a president used the voting block to which they belonged. While "using" could apply to promising a constituency certain things and then not delivering, it also could apply to making promises and delivering something less than promised, but still welcomed by that constituency. Just enough to keep 'em on the line. Lots of tradeoffs are made. That's politics.

I'm thinking, also, that those who really believe the "religious right" want a theocracy would be most interested in claiming that Bush has failed to make even the beginning steps toward that theocracy. Do they imagine loads of disappointed Christian theocractic voters out there? They think they will discourage them from going to the polls because theocracy is nowhere in sight?

But it seems from what I remember from past polls that elections are mostly won by the way voters in the middle lean in the voting both when it comes down to punching the ballot or pulling the lever. Still, if a pundit or politician or activist can lower the turnout of voters on a targeted fringe, all the better for the other side, since on election day it all boils down to numbers, which means turnout.

I will turnout with little enthusiasm this year, doing my duty as a citizen as best I can. My local choices are generally uninspiring, I must say. The race for governor has featured tiresome attack ads from both sides (both "pro-choice") beginning in June. I don't want either one of them. I am uncertain if either candidate is the lesser of two evils. I've had writer's block before; maybe this is voter's block? Well, I am a citizen and I will make a choice when the time comes.

Among the highlights of the 2006 Ingersoll Symposium, held this past Friday and Saturday, was the awarding to our senior editor Wilfred McClay of their Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters. The Symposium is sponsored by the Bradley Institute for the Study of Christian Culture at Belmont Abbey College outside Charlotte, North Carolina. (It's a college parents of high school juniors or seniors may want to check out.)

Also among the highlights was meeting several readers, two of whom gave me very good ideas for future articles.

The talks, which all addressed the state of the humanities, were uniformly good, which is rather rare for a conference. James Kurth, for example, who may be the only Christian on the faculty of Swarthmore College (and was Robert P. George's mentor in college), gave a very interesting survey of the development of the humanities in a Christian culture and their deformation in the Enlightenment and afterwards, and ended with the argument that their recovery depends upon belief in Christ. Hearing someone who lives at the heart of the eastern secular establishment give such a message was bracing.

Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory who was until recently the director of research at the National Endowment for the Humanities, gave a more empirical examination of the question of whether literature and the other humanities make you smarter. He surveyed various studies of the effects of electronic media on the intellectual and moral development of children (and ended, I should note, with a plug for Touchstone because he'd gotten some of the information and sources from our news section). David Lyle Jeffrey offered an explanation of the intimate relation of the Scriptures and the Humanities, in a paper we plan to publish.

The other five papers, including Dr. McClay's lecture, were similarly interesting and helpful. The Bradley Institute will be making them available on tape and cd, and I'll post a note when they're available.

Anglican Taxonomy

Dr. William J. Tighe of Muhlenberg College, a Touchstone contributing editor, received requests from the Vatican and from Archbishop Myers of Newark (Dr. Tighe is a Catholic) to prepare, as an aid to ecumenical work, summary descriptions of Anglican organizations currently active in the United States. Having read the report and found it an extremely informative sorting-out of a complex subject, I asked his permission to publish it here, which he kindly granted. 

_____________________

ANGLICAN BODIES AND ORGANIZATIONS

by William J. Tighe, Ph.D.

I will describe some of these bodies and organizations briefly, confining myself, so far as possible, to the American scene.

The Episcopal Church: The only member of the Anglican Communion in the United States. It received its Episcopal orders from the Episcopal Church of Scotland in 1784 after the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English bishops refused to consecrate Samuel Seabury of Connecticut to the episcopate on the grounds that they had not the legal authority to consecrate anyone who could not take the oath of allegiance to the English Crown. The Episcopal Church today consists of 111 dioceses, nine of them (Colombia, Convocation of American Churches in Europe, Central Ecuador, Litoral Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Taiwan and Venezuela) outside the United States. In 2000 it claimed some 2,365,000 members in some 7,390 congregations (parishes). 

Forward in Faith: The current title of an organization that originated in 1977 in reaction to the Episcopal Church’s decision the previous year to ordain women to the priesthood. Originally entitled “The Evangelical and Catholic Mission” it sought to bring together Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical Protestant Episcopalians opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood. After the election of the first women bishop in the Episcopal Church (in 1989) the organization altered its name in 1991 to “The Episcopal Synod of America” as a token of its resolve to be a “church within the church” (ecclesiola in ecclesia). In 1998 it affiliated with the much more considerable — “considerable” in both individual and parochial membership; FIF/UK counts has 450 parishes of the Church of England formally members of it and another 450 as “sympathizers”; 950+ clergy as members and some 350 more as “sympathizers” — “Forward-in-Faith/United Kingdom” which originated in 1994, in the aftermath of the Church of England’s 1992 decision to ordain women to the priesthood. (There is also a “Forward in Faith/Australia” which was organized in the aftermath of the Anglican Church of Australia’s 1992 decision to authorize the ordination of women to the priesthood; this is a small, exclusively Anglo-Catholic, organization of some 60 clergy and three parishes — although another 15 parishes are served by FIF clergy.)  The American organization consists of about 53 “affiliated parishes” which are parishes of the Episcopal Church, and another 8 “associated parishes” which are Continuing Anglican, Reformed Episcopalian or “Independent Anglican” parishes; three ECUSA dioceses — Fort Worth, Quincy and San Joaquin — with their bishops are also members (as also is the Bishop of the Rio Grande Diocese, Jeffrey Steenson, although not the diocese). The American organization is also largely Anglo-Catholic in its membership, but it has never had a clear or unified outlook about its “ecumenical vision” or, in particular, its attitude towards the papacy and the Catholic Church. (In this respect it differs from both its Australian counterpart [which is exclusively Anglo-Catholic and with a leadership that aspires to an “honorable reconciliation” with Rome] and its English parent [which is dominated by Anglo-Papalists — Anglo-Catholics who affirm all of the defined dogmas of the Catholic Church and who likewise seek an “honorable (corporate) reconciliation” with Rome — but which includes some “anti-papal Anglo-Catholics” (about 20% of the whole) and which attempts to cooperate with the strongly Evangelical English Anglican organization opposed to women’s ordination, “Reform.”])

Anglican Communion Network: An organization of conservative, mostly Evangelical, Episcopalians organized in November 2003 to oppose theological heterodoxy and moral revisionism, and particularly the acceptance of active homosexuality and the blessing of “homosexual partnerships” in the Episcopal Church. Its membership consists of about 10 dioceses and their bishops (Albany [NY], Central Florida, Dallas, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Quincy, Rio Grande, San Joaquin, South Carolina and Springfield [IL]) — plus the Bishop of the Diocese of Western Kansas (although not the diocese), and some 98 and parishes (about 34 of them also members of Forward-in-Faith/North America) and 170 clergy in member and non-member dioceses. Its leaders largely support the ordination of women as deacons, priests and bishops, although three of the four remaining dioceses in the Episcopal Church whose bishops remain opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood (Fort Worth, Quincy and San Joaquin) are also members, as also is the Forward in Faith organization, whose member parishes and clergy constitute a “non-geographical Convocation” within the Network. The organization emerged from the American Anglican Council, an organization of Evangelical Episcopalian clergy and laity dating from the “Briarwood Consultations” of 1995 and 1996 which wished to oppose liberalization of doctrinal and moral teaching in the Episcopal Church, but which was unwilling to break with the Episcopal Church or its bishops.

Anglican Mission in America: This was an organization that arose out of the “Briarwood Consultations” of 1995 and 1996 in the same milieu and to a large extent among the same constituency as was to produce the American Anglican Council and the Anglican Communion Network, although it was more directly linked with a movement entitled “Concerned Clergy and Laity of the Episcopal Church” — or, more popularly, as the “First Promise Movement.” It differed from these other bodies in that it was more willing to take action to break with and defy those bishops of the Episcopal Church whom it viewed as heterodox or apostate. In January 2000 two of the leading figures in this milieu, John Rodgers, formerly Dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry (one of the two remaining relatively conservative theological schools/seminaries in the Episcopal Church) and Charles (Chuck) Murphy, were consecrated bishops in Singapore by the then Archbishop of the Anglican Province of SE Asia, Moses Tay and the then (and current) Archbishop of Rwanda, Emmanuel Kolini. Subsequently that date the AMiA was for a time under the supervision of the archbishops of both SE Asia and Rwanda, and is currently under that of Archbishop Kolini of Rwanda. At the present time it consists of six bishops, 102 congregations, approximately 120 clergy and approximately 13,500 lay members.. After it was organized it undertook a study of the issue of the ordination of women and in October 2003 resolved upon a “moratorium” upon the ordination of women to the priesthood (although it continues to ordain women to the diaconate). However, female clergy from the Episcopal Church who join the AMiA (as some two or three have done) were allowed until recently to exercise a priestly ministry in congregations with which they are affiliated or which wish to call them to such a ministry, but that policy has now been discontinued. The AMiA is largely an Evangelical organization (with some Anglo-Catholic congregations), and many of its congregations have been marked strongly by the “Charismatic Movement.” Although the AMiA was originally conceived as a mission to and within the Episcopal Church, it is now effectively separate from it and draws most of its new membership and congregations from non-Episcopalian sources.

Reformed Episcopal Church: This body was organized in 1873 by Evangelical Anglican Episcopalian clergy and laymen who objected to the spread of Anglo-Catholic ideas and practices in the Episcopal Church and the refusal of the generality of Episcopalian bishops (and of the triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church) to take measures to suppress these practices. The REC adopted as its foundational principles in 1873 a repudiation of jure divino episcopacy, of ordained ministers being in any sense “priests,” of the “Lord’s Table” as an “altar” on which an oblation of Christ’s Body and Blood is “offered anew,” of any “Presence of Christ” in the elements of bread and wine, and of Baptismal Regeneration. In 1874 the REC went on to produce a more clearly Protestant version of the Book of Common Prayer, and in 1875 a more clearly Protestant version of the 39 Articles of the Church of England (and of the Episcopal Church, as adopted by the latter in 1789) entitled the 35 Articles. The REC initially spread widely in the United States and Canada (as well as acquiring a “sister-church” in England, the Free Church of England [FCE]) but after 1900 it entered a slow decline which by the 1960s had reduced it to some 5,000 members in some 100 congregations in the United States and some 300 in some three or four congregations in Canada. From the 1970s onwards, the REC has experienced a modest revival and increase in numbers in both Canada and the United States (it now claims some 1,000 members in two dioceses and 10 congregations in Canada and some 8,500 members in 140 congregations in the United States, with 175 clergy and three dioceses), as it has attracted both firmly Protestant and “middle-of-the-road” refugees from the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in the United States, but this has also led to strife within the REC between those who wish to maintain its clearly and prescriptively Evangelical identity and those who want to find a via media position in which they might recover elements of their Anglican identity. For example, while the REC retained episcopacy as “an ancient and desirable form of church polity” it accepted clergy from other Protestant denominations who wished to join it and minister in it without any form of reordination, and its bishops routinely licensed its own ordained deacons who had not yet been ordained to the presbyter ate to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. More recently, however, its has ceased to license deacons to celebrate the Eucharist and it has received some Protestant clergy from other denominations as deacons, subsequently ordaining them to the presbyterate (although it appears that the RE bishops do not consistently follow this new practice). It has also produced a revision of its Prayer Book that omits some of the more prescriptively Protestant additions of 1874 and had declared the original 39 Articles to be its doctrinal basis, while relegating the 35 Articles of 1875 to the status of “an interpretation” of the 39 Articles. (It is legally unable to alter its foundational principles of 1873, however, without leaving itself liable to legal challenge to its assets by dissenting groups within it.) This has caused contention within the REC and, in addition, has caused its English sister-church, the FCE (a body consisting of some 28 congregations and about 1,100 adherents) to undergo a schism in 2003-04 between proponents of a more visa media stance and those who uphold an uncompromising Evangelical identity. The REC itself, in 2006, is in the midst of a ten-year merger process with the Anglican Province of America (APA), a more “centrist” Continuing Anglican body that originated in 1995. Depending upon the persons with whom one engages in conversation, different answers will be given to the question of whether the REC regards itself as part of the “Continuing Anglican” movement (sometimes known also as the “Anglican Continuum”).

Continuing Anglican Churches: Most “Continuing Anglican Churches” emerged as a result of the 1976 decision of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church to authorize the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate. In September 1977 the “St. Louis Congress,” which gathered some 2000 Episcopalian clergy and laity (as well as a few bishops) to take stock of the situation in the Episcopal Church, pledged to oppose the ordination of women and, at the appropriate moment, to erect a “Continuing Anglican Church” which would maintain “the Catholic Tradition” of Anglicanism. It also issued the “St. Louis Declaration” which pledged adhesion to traditional Anglican doctrinal formulae and practices, but went on to situate them in a broadly “historically Catholic” context, by (for example) indicating unconditional adhesion to the definitions of the Seven Ecumenical Councils (whereas previously Anglican formulae had limited such explicit adhesion to the first four councils only: while the fifth and sixth councils
were in practice without opposition in historic Anglicanism, the Seventh Council and the iconodulia that it both endorsed and prescribed has been rejected by the more Protestant figures and constituencies in many Anglican churches). By 1978 an Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) was in the process of formation, and four bishops were consecrated on January 28 of that year in Denver, Colorado. The retired ECUSA bishop of Springfield, Illinois, Albert A. Chambers (Bishop of Springfield from 1962 to1972) and a bishop of the Philippine Independent Church (a body that obtained its episcopate from the Episcopal Church in 1947), Francisco Pagtakhan, together consecrated to the episcopate a priest of the Episcopal Church, C. David Dale Doren (b. 1915), and Doren than joined with the two other bishops to consecrate Robert Sherwood Morse (b. 1924), James O. Mote (1922-2006) and Peter Francis Watterson (1927-1996) to the episcopate. In addition, a letter from the Korean Anglican bishop of Taejon, Mark Pae, was read at the consecration ceremonies, in which the bishop both regretted his inability to be present and to participate in the acts of consecration and endorsed the consecrations. However, a “constituent assembly” for the ACNA, which met in Dallas in October 1978, ended in deadlock over issues of church government, and in particular the authority of its bishops (the assembly also voted to change the name of the new church body to the Anglican Catholic Church [ACC]). Bishops Morse and Watterson refused to adhere to the decisions of the Dallas assembly, thus effectively separating themselves from the ACC, and formed a body then, as now, entitled the Anglican Province of Christ the King (APCK), of which Archbishop Morse remains the Archbishop and Primate (the APCK currently has five dioceses, 57 congregations, 110 clergy and 8,000 to 9,000 members). Bishop Watterson, however, subsequently became a Roman Catholic , was ordained a Catholic priest under the later “Pastoral Provision” and died some years later, in 1996. A short time afterwards, in early 1980, Bishop Doren withdrew from the ACNA and formed a more “low church” body entitled the United Episcopal Church, which still exists, although it is rather small in numbers (one diocese, 26 congregations, 45 clergy and about 600 members). In 1983 Louis Falk, who was consecrated a bishop in 1981, became Archbishop and (first) Primate of the ACC. In the late 1980s, under Falk’s leadership, the ACC entered into discussions with the American Episcopal Church (AEC) to effect a union between the two bodies. The AEC had originated in 1968 as a protest of some Episcopalian clergy and laity against the growing theological and social liberalism of the Episcopal Church, and it was generally less Anglo-Catholic than the ACNA. The two bodies united in October 1991, and after the mutual reconsecrations of the bishops of both bodies, the Primate of the AEC, Anthony Clavier, yielded the primacy to Archbishop Falk (Clavier subsequently resigned his office of bishop and entered the Episcopal Church, where he is currently Rector of an Episcopal Church parish in Arkansas), and the newly united body adopted the name of the Anglican Church of America (ACA), which it retains to this day (the ACA membership statistics that I have been able to obtain record four dioceses, 84 congregations and 138 clergy; for lay membership the record that I have is both incomplete and records only communicant members, which it numbers at 5,240). However, a considerable portion of the bishops, clergy and laity of the former Anglican Catholic Church rejected the union with the AEC and repudiated Archbishop Falk as their primate, and these subsequently took the name of the Anglican Catholic Church (Original Province) (ACC - OP) which it retains to this day (the ACC-OP claims six dioceses, 88 congregations, approximately 110 clergy and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 members). In 1997, personality disputes among the bishops of the ACC-OP resulted in a split in that body; the minority formed a small body which terms itself the Holy Catholic Church — Anglican Rite (and that body, in turn, split in 1999, when strongly Orthodoxophile elements within it, who wished to repudiate Anglicanismaltogether, formed the Holy Catholic Church - Western Rite). Meanwhile, upon the retirement of Anthony Clavier as Bishop of the Diocese of the Eastern United States (DEUS) of the ACA, a dispute over the election of a successor resulted in 1995 in the secession of a considerable portion of that diocese from the ACA. These were lead by a bishop of the ACA, Walter Grundorf, and the body formed by this secession adopted the name of the Anglican Province of America (three dioceses, 69 congregations, 126 clergy and roughly 6,000 members): it has Archbishop Grundorf as its primate and is, as noted above, currently in the midst of a gradual merger with the Reformed Episcopal Church. There are, of course, numerous other “Continuing Anglican” bodies in the United States and elsewhere that originated either from splits within some of the bodies mentioned above, or from subsequent departures from the Episcopal Church. (An example of the latter might be the Episcopal Missionary Church which was formed by the retired bishop of the Diocese of Dallas of the Episcopal Church, A. Donald Davies, in 1991, and which, after Davies’ subsequent retirement, is now headed by William Millsaps [himself formerly a bishop of the ACA]; Davies later emerged from retirement and created another Continuing Anglican body, the Christian Episcopal Church.) I might note here that, by contrast with the situation in the United States, Continuing Anglicans in Canada and Australia have managed to remain for the most part united. In Canada, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada was originally a part of ACNA/ACC in 1978, but became an independent body as the bishops of ACNA began to go their separate ways in 1979 It remains the only significant Continuing Anglican church in Canada, although, as noted above, the Reformed Episcopal Church has a presence in Canada as well. In Australia, the decision of the Anglican Church of Australia to accept the ordination of women to the priesthood in 1992 resulted in the formation of a Continuing Anglican church, the Anglican Catholic Church of Australia, which remains the only organized Continuing Anglican presence in that continent. Archbishop John Hepworth is its current bishop, as well as Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion. Statistical information on the various Continuing Anglican bodies, especially concerning lay members, is of variable reliability. Still, it seems reasonable to postulate a total lay membership of the three most considerable Continuing Anglican bodies in the United States, the ACC-OP, the ACA and the APCK of 25,000 to 30,000 members (of whom perhaps 5,000 live without ready access to the pastoral ministrations of Continuing Anglican clergy or congregations), and perhaps 250,000 to 500,000 worldwide. In the United States alone, there are probably between 40 and 45 Continuing Anglican bodies, many of them tiny in size and some of them perhaps containing more clergy than lay members.

The Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) was formed in 1990 by Archbishop Louis Falk of the ACA. It brought together various Continuing Anglican church bodies throughout the world. In 2006 the TAC consists of 14 bodies: the Anglican Church of America, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada (one diocese, 45 congregations), the Missionary Diocese of Central America, the Missionary Diocese of Puerto Rico, the Anglican Church in Southern Africa - Traditional Rite, the Church of Umze Wase Tiyopia (South Africa), the Continuing Anglican Church in Zambia, the Anglican Church of India, the Orthodox Church of Pakistan, the Nippon Kirisuto Sei Ko Kai (Japan), the Anglican Catholic Church of Australia. The Church of Torres Strait (Australia), the Traditional Anglican Church (England) (12 congregations), and the Church of Ireland - Traditional Rite (three congregations). Archbishop Falk of the ACA was the first primate of the TAC. In 2002 he was succeeded in this position by Archbishop John Hepworth of the Anglican Catholic Church of Australia, but Falk remains archbishop of the ACA, although he has recently announced his forthcoming retirement, and in October 2006 its bishops chose the Rt. Rev’d George D. Langberg, Bishop of the Northeast, as Falk’s successor.

The International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church (ICCEC or CEC) is not an Anglican body, either in its origins or its current stance, but as it has had an attraction for conservative Episcopalian clergy and laity sympathetic to the “charismatic movement” and yet with a liturgical and sacramental orientation it is worth mentioning in this paper. The CEC formed out of for the most part independent churches with roots in the Charismatic, Pentecostalist and Wesleyan traditions which, influenced by the so-called Convergence Movement, between 1976 and 1990 began to blend charismatic worship with liturgical and sacramental elements drawn largely from Anglican sources. As time went on, those individuals and churches involved in this milieu began, through contacts with Evangelicals who had found a home in Anglican churches and with Catholics with whom they shared in anti-abortion activism, to have an increasing sense of the traditional
(Catholic and Orthodox) view of the Church’s sacramental nature and apostolic structure. In June 1992 one of the leaders of this movement, Austin Randolph Adler, was consecrated a bishop by Bishop Timothy Barker of the International Free Catholic Communion — a body of decidedly heterodox and theosophical views — and went on to found The Charismatic Episcopal Church of North America, of which he became and remains Primate (and, later, Patriarch); subsequently Bishop Adler consecrated Randolph Sly to the episcopate. In 1993 Bishop William Millsaps of the Episcopal Missionary Church (formerly a bishop in the ACA) consecrated Dale Howard as a bishop of the CEC and reconsecrated Bishops Adler and Sly. The church grew rapidly from 1995 onwards, but by 1996 its bishops had become concerned at the problematic sources of their Holy Orders and episcopate. In that year they made contact with the Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil (Igreja Catolica Apostolica Brasiliera [ICAB]), a church which had been founded in 1945 by the excommunicated Roman Catholic bishop Carlos Duarte Costa (1888-1961), who became first Patriarch of the ICAB (he had been Bishop of Botucatu from 1924 to 1937 and after his resignation in that year was made Bishop of Maura in partibus, remaining such until his excommunication in July 1945). Duarte Costa’s successor as patriarch, Luiz Fernando Castillo Mendez, agreed to an intercommunion agreement between the ICAB and the ICCEC, and on November 5, 1997 Castillo Mendez and two other bishops of the ICAB reconsecrated five bishops of the ICCEC (later all the remaining ICCEC bishops were reconsecrated, and subsequently all the priests and deacons of the ICCEC were reordained; and a the request of the ICAB the ICCEC agreed to use the Roman Pontifical for all future ordinations and consecrations). The CEC in 2002 claimed 400 clergy and 136 congregations in the United States, numerous congregations and clergy in Kenya and Uganda, and congregations and clergy in Brazil, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Burundi, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Portugal and Switzerland. Early on in its history, the CEC took a strong stand against the ordination of women to the episcopate, priesthood and diaconate, a stand which it firmly maintains. This stand, however, alienated some of the individuals and congregations involved in the Convergence Movement mentioned above, and in 1993-94 these elements formed the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC), a body which derives its Episcopal succession from the same pseudo Old Catholic and episcopi vagantes sources from which the CEC obtained its initial Episcopal consecrations in 1992 and which allows “diocesan option” as regards the ordination of women to the presbyterate and diaconate. As of the present year (2006) the CEC in the United States has been experiencing a painful period of division among its bishops, leading to resignations and separations, and in one case the conversion to Catholicism of one of the original CEC bishops (Randolph Sly).

Muhlenberg College
Allentown, Pennsylvania

October 14, 2006

Village Voice Virginity

The call to sexual purity is examined in, of all places, the Village Voice. Columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel looks at current expressions of sexual chastity, which she warns her readers not to view, necessarily, as freakish.

The article notes the forthcoming book on the subject by Dawn Eden, along with modesty writings by Wendy Shalit and a Jane magazine blogger who allows reader input (including from her father) about the man for whom she's looking, to whom she plans to lose her virginity when finds him.

The Village Voice doesn't see chastity as freakish, but only because it is one more sexual lifestyle choice. Bussel writes:

Nobody should be made to feel ashamed of bedroom adventures or lack of them. Sexual freedom shouldn't come with the price tag of promiscuity, but I also think there's nothing wrong with promiscuity per se. Instead of dictating a single standard, we need to embrace each individual's right to make sexual decisions based on his or her own values.

Sadly, this kind of "values" talk is precisely the kind of language used often in allegedly Christian emphases on sexual purity. Rather than press the biblical mandate of holiness, we adopt the language of personal autonomy and choice in order to support the "decision" to "save sex for marriage." We seek to co-opt the sexual revolution in order to plunder its rhetoric to make the world safe for virgins.

Sanctity of Tax Cuts

Partly as an extension of the previous post, which referenced the article today about the divisions among conservatives, and partly as comment, though in a separate post, I write about a remark made earlier today in Chicago by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback.  He pointed out the need for many conservatives to "fall in love with life [i.e., the life issues] as much they are in love with tax cuts." He believes a battle for the heart and soul of America is underway, and the sanctity of human life, from conception on, is one of the battlefields. Another one is looming, on end of life issues. Polls, he said, show that 42% of Americans support assisted suicide, and this is even before any serious debate on this has been engaged, one that must take place.

The Almost Godless Party

Today's New York Times features a front-page, above-the-fold story on fissures within the conservative wings of the Republican Party, leading up to next month's midterm elections. The question is, why is President Bush and his party so unpopular with the American people?

Neoconservatives such as the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol argue that it is because the Administration is not hawkish enough (!) on foreign policy. Budget balancers such as Grover Norquist argue that deficit spending, along with Iraq and Katrina, are the root issue. Still others, such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, argues the problem is religious voters.

Armey argues that economic conservatism, not social conservatism, is the answer to what ails the GOP. In so doing, he calls James Dobson and Focus on the Family a "gang of thugs" and "really nasty bullies."

Dobson, rightly I think, responds that the GOP can decide whether it wants voters concerned preeminently about issues such as fostering a culture of life and, if not, conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics can go elsewhere.

This debate is not of ultimate importance. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party will last past Armageddon, if they make it that long. It is important to see, however, how the country club wing of the "pro-life, pro-family" Party will choose to view the constituencies that care about such things. Religious voters shouldn't see themselves as a voting bloc or an interest group to be appeased by Party officials. We're up to much more than that.

But, at the same time, neither should we throw up our hands and say to the Republican Party, "To whom shall we go?" We only say that to One who is not a democrat or a republican, but, at the end of the day, a Monarchist (John 6:68).

Under the Bus

     My students in our course in western civilization are fighting through Plato's Republic, using a new translation that is pretty lively, but whose notes eagerly point out that homosexual relations between older men and young men, even pubescent boys, were accepted in Athens, "especially among the upper classes."  One is tempted to wonder whether carpenters and cobblers are not so easy to fool.

     Yet for all that the annotator seems ready to talk about sex, he always shies away from talking about the men themselves.  For there are two startling facts which he passes over in silence.  The first is that effeminate men are treated, in the Republic, with deep contempt.  It is the object of Plato's educational scheme to produce thoroughbred watchdogs, high-spirited fighters on behalf of the ruling philosophers.  Men who play the part of women, in Plato as elsewhere in Greek literature, are ridiculed as useless and silly (I cannot print what Aristophanes has to say in The Acharnians about his enemy Cleon, the leader of the democratic party in Athens during the middle years of the Great Peloponnesian War).  It should also be noted that the term "effeminate," through the Renaissance, applies likewise to men whose lives are governed by their sexual desire for women, or who are ruled by the women with whom they entangle themselves: Menelaus and Paris, for instance.  Hillary's face might never launch a thousand ships, at least not in her direction, but Homer would have seen the Helen in her, to be sure.

     The second point is that these relations, unnatural as they are, are yet a perversion of something natural, and that natural thing is not the desire of a man for a woman.  They are, in Greece, a strange sexualization of the army and the school -- the band of brothers.  Consider the gymnasia, where boys learned to read and write, and where young men would be trained up in military discipline, the "two years of rocks" required at Athens, for instance; and where older men would go to work out, to transact business, to argue about the affairs of the day, or to enter intelligent conversation with an Anaxagoras or a Socrates.

     In short, you have to confront the severe division of the sexes in Greece, and the establishment of all-male enterprises of considerable complexity.  For however the Greeks fell afoul of the natural law, they did understand the dynamism of the male protective group.  It is absurd to suppose that if the Greeks had enjoyed the luxury of our sexual indifferentism -- the idea that a woman is just like a man, but with skinny wrists and a womb -- they would have achieved far more than they did.  What more?  They invented politics, democracy, drama, literary criticism, systematic philosophy, historiography, and geometric demonstration.  They bequeathed to us the greatest architecture of the ancient world and the greatest sculpture until, perhaps, the Renaissance.  We have, surviving, but a few of the one or two hundred plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  They gave us the medical treatises of Hippocrates, and an accurate measure of the earth's circumference, and a man who would have invented the calculus almost two millenia before Newton and Leibnitz quarreled over the honor had he had Arabic numerals, and who came within an infinitesimal of doing it anyway.

     If male civic groups are so dynamic -- if, despite their danger, they bring so much to life -- why can we have none of them now?  I'm not arguing that we should have only such groups -- I find the dismissal of femininity in Plato to be both consonant with feminist theory and appalling -- but why none?  The young men languishing in our cities, especially the African American man whom the bus driver can no longer see, and for good reason, since he is no longer riding at the back of the bus but is pinned under it, might well flourish in something which, scoured of its paganism, could serve as school, gym, barracks, and public house.  I repeat what I've said here before.  We are not afraid that such an institution would fail.  We are afraid it would succeed.

Leithart on 1 & 2 Kings

Touchstone contributing editor Peter J. Leithart's new commentary on 1 & 2 Kings in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series is released today. Peter and I could not be further apart on some ecclesiological, eschatological, and soteriological matters within our conservative Protestant tradition, but I am in full agreement with the way in which he reads the whole Bible, as the apostles did, as Christian Scripture. His commentary on 1 & 2 Samuel, A Son to Me, is probably the most thought-provoking and devotionally stimulating biblical commentary I've ever read. I look forward to reading Peter's work on 1 & 2 Kings as well.

Feminist Bible

How do you remain a feminist egalitarian and an orthodox Bible scholar?  Please read S. M. Hutchens's review of a new book by noted evangelical scholar John G. Stackhouse, Jr. and then join the discussion on the Treaders site.

Does America Hate Women?

Bob Herbert's op/ed column, "Why Aren't We Shocked," in today's New York Times is must reading for Christians. You'll need a hard copy of the newspaper because the column is not available online except for "TimesSelect" subscribers, all ten of them.

Herbert takes up the cultural roots behind such actions as the recent Pennsylvania gunman who separated girls from boys, killing only the girls. Herbert, correctly I think, identifies an increasingly violent misogyny in American culture fed by commercial corporatism and sexual libertarianism. He opens his column with a caption from an Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt for sale in a mall near you: "Who needs a brain when you have these?" Herbert wonders why, after ten years since the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey, we are still watching the sexualized images of this prepubescent child dancing around in make-up and high heels. He further points to gangsta rap depictions of women and commercial advertisements of products such as Clinique makeup that evoke imagery from pornographic depictions of women.

Herbert concludes:

You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. it's all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.

Bob Herbert and I would disagree on the solution to this problem. He sees more egalitarian feminism as the answer; I would argue it is the conspiracy between feminism and libertarianism that provoked this plight. He would probably find the solution in a more rigorous application of the ethics of Gloria Steinem. I would find it in an application of the woman-affirming Christian ethic of Peter, Paul, and Sarah.

But, even if just for a moment, we can agree that something has gone horribly wrong in a commercial culture in which women are regularly depicted as objects of loveless sex and ruthless violence.

The Sentimentality of Scientists

     This week I gave a talk on Shakespeare and wonder, for the Maclaurin Institute at the University of Minnesota.  (While I am at it, I'd like to thank them publicly for their good cheer and hospitality, and I urge anyone in the Twin Cities area who wishes to see how Christians can help irrigate the desert of higher education to pay them a visit; they are doing extraordinary work.)  The thesis of the talk was that in our grade schools and secondary schools we have scorched the fields of the child's imagination, mystifying the self while slandering or stifling three principal objects of wonder: the hero, the beloved, and God.

     I'd been told that there might be a few opponents in the audience.  In fact, the first man to speak up objected, "I'm a biologist and I do not believe in God, yet when I look at the beauty of nature I think I can feel that wonder you are talking about.  So, obviously, belief in God is neither here nor there."  Although I had said that "God is the source of our wonder, and the guarantor of its truth," I'd been careful also to note that there would always be a few souls, though only a few, who could respond fully to the wondrous beauty of nature or of man while denying the ground of that wonder.  In any case, I responded by noting that at all costs I wished to affirm that what I was talking about was not a mere sentiment, but a reverence for nobility or grandeur that an object actually does possess.  My fear, I said, is that the unbeliever who begins with that reverence will end, by the force of his logic, by consigning it over to irrelevance.  It will be a kind of neural tic; it will depend wholly upon the disposition, even the gastric temperament, of the unbelieving beholder.

     I am well aware that atheistic scientists can be enthralled with the complexity and magnificence of natural phenomena.  The late Carl Sagan was such a man; yet as he grew older he also grew sourer and angrier, more and more determined not to show how beautiful nature was, but how beautiful it was not, lest the beholder be brought to the threshold of belief.  In that sense he was a sentimentalist, as was my interlocutor in Minnesota.  Such men want to bask in what they must concede is simply a feeling, pleasant enough, but not logically or empirically warranted by the object.

     How far such a feeling can take you, as you grow old and your bones ache, or cancer ravages your body and you confront the great fact of death, may be shown by my favorite materialist, the ancient poet Lucretius.  He too, as logically ruthless as he thought himself, was another sentimentalist, and he too had a keen eye for the glories of the natural world.  So his poem On the Nature of Things begins with a hymn to Venus, an allegorical representation of the fecundity of nature:

     Mother of Romans, delight of gods and men,
     Sweet Venus, who under the wheeling stars of heaven
     Rouse the ship-shouldering sea and the fruitful earth
     And make them teem -- for through you all that breathe
     Are begotten, and rise to see the light of the sun;
     From you, goddess, the winds flee, from you and your coming
     Flee the storms of heaven; for you the artful earth
     Sends up sweet flowers, for you the ocean laughs
     And the calm skies shimmer in a bath of light.

But the sixth and final book of the poem ends with a horrible description of the great plague of Athens in 430 BC.  The dead and dying are everywhere, and there is no remedy, no consolation, no Epicurean calm; only miserable mankind born to die:

     Many lay flat in the street for thirst, lay prostrate
     Before the fountain-statues of Silenus,
     Breath choked by the great desire for that sweet water.
     And strewn about in the roads and parks you'd see
     Legs and arms, nerveless, attached to half-dead bodies,
     Ragged and dirty, clothes caked with excrement,
     Dying, with only bare skin left to the bone,
     Nearly buried already in pus and sores and filth.
     Yes, all those holy temples of the gods--
     Death stuffed 'em with corpses, and the shrines of heaven
     Were charnel houses, burdened by cadavers,
     Places the priests had filled with worshipers.
     Now their religion, now the will of the gods
     Meant nothing: present pain was conqueror....
     The suddenness and poverty incited
     Horrors.  On funeral pyres heaped up for others
     People would lay their own kin down, and wail,
     And set their torches underneath, and sometimes
     Brawl and shed blood, rather than leave their dead.

So the poem ends.  Me, I prefer not the sentiment of wonder, so quick to flee, but the real thing, granted by God and affirmed by the testimony, objective testimony, of those apostles who have made known to us the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, who were eyewitnesses of his grandeur.

Was Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life?

Was Susan B. Anthony pro-life? Does it matter?

That's the question taken up on the op/ed page of today's New York Times. Stacy Schiff points to the purchase of the estate of the early pioneer of American feminism by the pro-life group Feminists for Life. She then questions whether Anthony really fits the model of a pro-life feminst. It is questionable, she argues, whether Anthony actually wrote the essay against "child murder" quoted by pro-life groups, and these groups, she concludes, never mention that the same essay opposes legislative measures against abortion.

Schiff further contends that Anthony's attitude was hardly pro-natalist. She writes:

In her personal life Anthony was clear in her conviction that women were not preordained to motherhood, that sometimes a woman and her womb might go their separate ways. A devoted aunt, she claimed to appreciate her colleagues’ offspring, some of whom even felt warmly toward her. But she had little patience for maternity. At best she was the ever-helpful friend who asks if you realize what you are in for just as you have vomited your way through your first trimester. At worst she was a ruthless scold.

I wonder how useful this debate is for either side of the abortion debate. Would Anthony's feminism have trumped her concern for the harm abortion does to women, were she living in the contemporary American context? Who knows. Perhaps though the conversation is worthwhile. Schiff, after all, at least recognizes the link between abortion and babies, a truth often lost in the sloganizing over "choice" and "who decides."