Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Inclusive Public Prayer

Join the discussion on our Treaders site of what is really behind inclusive public prayers from John Parker's Benediction Fiction article in Touchstone.

At the same place the discussion continues of Allan Carlson's Children of the Reformation. Please add your comments.

Mohler on Mormons: Beliefnet

Are Mormons Christians? Absolutely not, says Al Mohler. He debates Orson Scott Card, Mormon author, who begs to differ, here at Beliefnet. Just because a new religion comes along and is initially persecuted, does that make it right? Americans didn't consider Catholics Christians, and some still don't. But if you can write a new book of scripture and spin the New Testament a bit thereby, you might fit into the category of something like Islam. (Does that make Joseph Smith the founder of a modern American "Islam"?)

Now, I have to run and visit our local neighborhood festival, where the only religious booth on hand, I believe, is the latest Kabbalah religion. They might have some water bottles, Kabbalah water, you know:

The Kabbalistic blessings and meditations that are used to create Kabbalah Water, for example, bring about elegant and balanced crystalline structures in water, while negative consciousness has an opposite effect. This is hugely important. In a very literal way, Kabbalah Water is life's original blueprint information brought into the modern world.

So is this new Kabbalah religion Jewish? Is Mormonism Christianity? Depends on how elastic you want to make names. Let's just say it's a stretttccchhhh.

New Salvo Site

Touchstone's sister publication, Salvo, has just launched a completely redesigned website. There is a lot of content up there, especially for such a young publication. There is plenty of content from the two issues that have already printed, as well as some audio, some permanent resources like ISM Central, a glossary. Salvo's blog, Signs of the Times, has also moved to reflect the new design.

Never Reverse?

By now, you are probably already sick of hearing about the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" ruling (Morse v. Frederick) handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court this week. But an article by the always thoughtful Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal brings out a dimension of the case that is worth noting, for future reference. The opinion of the Court, rendered by Chief Justice John Roberts, decided the case on very narrow grounds, arguing merely that the student involved, one Joseph Frederick, had not had his legitimate free-speech rights infringed upon, because the banner he and his friends had unfurled appeared, to the extent that it was saying anything at all, to be advocating illegal drug use, and doing so at a school event. Read the opinion, if you like, and you will see that there is an almost ludicrous amount of huffing and puffing about how drug abuse among the young is a real problem, and remains a problem of "compelling interest" to our courts, and so on, all deployed to justify what ought to have been crystal-clear on entirely different grounds. The opinion is careful to repeat the familiar mantra that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” but ends up affirming, narrowly, that "schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use."

Well, the decision was certainly correct, but count me completely uninspired by such reasoning. Suppose that the student had raised a banner using rank four-letter obscenities to argue against drug abuse. Would that have been OK? Would the principal have been any less right in demanding that they take it down? Would the Court then have to deliberate on the subject, and produce yet another narrowly tailored opinion justifying the obvious?

In short, it's a rather disappointing decision, which dutifully respects wrongheaded or mushily stated precedents (notably the 1969 Tinker decision), while failing to recognize that the real issue at stake here is whether public schools can possibly do their job when those tasked with running them have been divested of all vestiges of institutional, legal, and moral authority. "School principals," the opinion rightly concludes, "have a difficult job." You can say that again. And the courts have done a great deal to make it more so.

Presumably the timidity in this opinion explains why Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who is one of the most underrated jurists in American history, chose to submit a much more robust and idea-rich concurring opinion, which addresses itself to precisely these issues, and seeks to show that the Tinker standards violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution, not to mention the most rudimentary common sense. Thomas looks at the historical origins of public education in America, which was built upon the assumption that schools had a morally authoritative and formative role, which clearly took precedent over the free-speech rights of students. He revisits the much-abused principle of in loco parentis, and shows the damage done by Tinker, which substituted "judicial oversight of the day-to-day affairs of public schools" for the authority of teachers and principals. And he concludes that an opinion that merely adds to the "patchwork of exceptions" to Tinker does not get at the root of the problem.

This is not the first time that Thomas has taken a far more principled and less lawyerly (and less institutionally protective) stance than his conservative colleagues. Perhaps the Chief Justice had good reasons for acting as he did in this case. Perhaps taking a narrow position was the price of getting Kennedy and Breyer on board, and perhaps that was a price worth paying. But it is hard to see how the damage that the courts have done through their bad decisions can be reversed without some opinions also being reversed.

This seems increasingly unlikely. As I write this, word comes that the Court has handed down another decision in a school-desegregation case, in which it has rejected the use of certain explicitly race-based standards, while explicitly affirming its 2003 decision upholding affirmative action. Without having studied the new opinion yet, I can only say that the pattern would appear to be familiar.

Behe Replies to Bluster

Last week I posted a note about a review of Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution. The 7500-word review by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago was not friendly to Behe's book.

Behe has written several responses to reviews of his book here at Amazon's blog, including Coyne's. It's response number one, which is the last one toward the bottom of the page.

But the other two responses are worth a look, too. Behe says the second review "is three parts bluster to one part substance, which at least is more substance than Jerry Coyne’s essay."

I see no end to the bluster in these "debates." There's way too much at stake, too much ego involved, and prestige.

Deus Absconditus

     Why, if God wants us to have faith in Him, does He play hide-and-seek with us, asking us to find what we do not see, and even requiring us to toss our lives away for a promise, a hope in light on the other side of what sometimes seems impenetrable darkness?  Now I could venture many answers to the question, answers that spring from the Love that God has revealed Himself to be, and from what it means for us to bear the image and likeness of that Love.  For there is something dangerous about Love -- and it may be that our answering love for a God we do not (and, given the structure of our beings, could not) immediately see, is a powerful reflection of God's own self-giving in creation, brooding over the nothingness and bringing forth light.

     But then another question comes to mind: would it really be any better for us if God made His presence more easily known?  The dark angels knew of His existence, and fell.  Satan is faithless, and no atheist.  Take this story, for example.

     A woman is diagnosed with inoperable cancer in both lungs.  The doctors say there is nothing they can do for her.  On the way home, her daughter and son-in-law, faithful Catholics, plead with her to visit a local priest in retirement, who once had a healing ministry.  She refuses.  Her other children scoff at the idea -- for them, the Church is nothing but a coven of charlatans.  A week or so passes, and the old woman is overtaken by a feeling of impending death.  She has lost all her appetite.  Finally she gives in, and agrees to visit the priest, who prays over her and blesses her.  On the way home they stop at a restaurant where she eats an entire steak -- the biggest meal she has had in a long time.  A few days later she returns to the hospital for a check up.  "We don't understand," they say.  "We can find no cancer in your body."

     The woman's children, however, continue to work on her, and she herself refuses to admit that anything really surprising has happened.  "It was a false positive!" they say -- in both lungs?  "They made a mistake" -- surely a lifetime smoker would not get lung cancer.  Well, mistakes do happen; and people do blind themselves, and one must never underestimate the hardness of a human heart.  The woman denies the miracle.  She will not believe.  She will not return to church.  She will not give God the glory.

     Several years pass by, and the same woman is diagnosed with cancer again.  This time it is rampant in her ovaries and uterus.  The doctors remove the ovaries, and were about to do a hysterectomy when they discovered that the large tumor in the uterus had fused itself to the bowel, making an operation absolutely impossible.  They close the woman up and tell her that she has about a month to live.  After a couple of weeks they suggest "palliative care," which is sometimes merely a euphemism for hastening the inevitable.  Again the daughter and son-in-law beg her to see a priest; this time, a Father Albert MacPherson, who has a healing ministry and who had some connections to the area.  She gives in after much pleading -- allows the priest to call her on the phone and to pray with her.  His only request is that if she should be healed -- if it be the will of the Creator in whom we live and move and have our being, for whom the physical laws of the world are but one of the expressions of his sovereign will -- that she proclaim the healing, to help bring others to the faith.

     What happens then?  She goes to the hospital for her next checkup.  "We don't understand," they say.  "The cancer has entirely disappeared."  The woman is alive and quite well, seven months later.  We are not talking about the mysterious effects of optimism here.  She was healed despite the fact that she did not believe.  Has she now given praise to God?  Have her other children repented of their contumacy?  Struck by the lightning of God twice over, has she begun to entertain the suspicion that maybe the Creator of all this universe can do as He pleases?  Has she spoken out, to assist others in their despair?

     Nothing of the kind.  She is adamant.  Even if someone should rise from the dead ...

How to Talk to Us (or Not)

You can read a very long conversation between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence M. Krauss in the current Scientific American here. It's billed as: "Should Science Speak to Faith? Two prominent defenders of science exchange their views on how scientists ought to approach religion and its followers." (Thanks to Scott Rosenblum)

Village Voice: Giuliani's "Catholicism"

Lest anyone think I was exaggerating about the storm/tornado in yesterday's post: The storm here reportedly dumped 4 inches of rain in less than an hour, with winds of nearly 50 mph. I know those who live in hurricane country will think, "big deal." You're right, of course. The worst thing that happened was I couldn't get to the train station because the entrances were underwater.

Enough of that. I got this link today, from contributing editor Bill Tighe, to an article in the Village Voice on the non-Catholic Catholicism of Rudy Giuliani. It's a long article, with lots of personal history of the presidential candidate, for those interested in such details. The issue of a politicians and the role of his religious beliefs is an ecumenical one, which running up to the 2008 election will include the Mormon beliefs of Mitt Romney. Giuliani's comments on abortion are amazingly elastic.

Jim Kushiner on the Treadmill

In the latest issue of  World magazine, editor Marvin Olasky compiles his all-time favorite one-hundred books to read while on the treadmill, "books that exercise my mind while I exercise my body." Included on the list is Signs of Intelligence, edited by Touchstone publisher James Kushiner and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor William Dembski. The book is an expansion of the July/August 1999 issue of Touchstone on Intelligent Design. You can order your copy here, and then head to the gym.

A Book You'll Love with Help from Our Friends

Besides watching a storm that I thought might include a tornado outside the office windows here, I've been signing dozens of thank you letters and copies of our Touchstone "reader" Creed and Culture (published by ISI Books). Since our fiscal year ends this coming Saturday, and we should (and need to) reduce our substantial deficit as much as possible, I'd like to make a similiar offer on-line as I made in print to our mailing list last month: for your gift of $125 or more made on-line between now and June 30, I will send you a hardcover copy of Creed & Culture, which includes 21 of our best essays published between 1990 and 1997. (Hitchcock, Mills, Hutchens, Reardon, Podles, plus Russell Kirk, Thomas Howard, Vigen Guroian, Paul Mankowski and many others included! A recipient just called back today to say that he "loves this book!") I must say, honestly, it really is a handsome volume and a great read.

Also, if you make a gift between $75 and $125  on-line between now and June 30 I will send you one of our Touchstone coffee mugs, if you like. (See pic below)

And yes, beside outright gifts, there are several other ways you can help us at this time (and others) as well:

1) Subscribe to Touchstone yourself or give a gift subscription to Touchstone to a pastor, colleague, friend, son or daughter.

2) Subscribe to our new Salvo magazine or give a gift subscription to Salvo to a 20-something or 30-something who could use some straight talk about this toxic culture in which we live. (We've received many requests from college and highschool students as well, and many rave reviews.)

3) Subscribe to our Daily Devotional Guide (why put it off getting into a regular Bible reading program any longer?).

4) Purchase some of our great coffee mugs, "Caffeinated Christianity."

Thanks to all of you for your support this year. (And after June 30, I won't trouble you with these appeals . . . until, say, November or so. That's the plan!)

Well, it's finally stopped thundering and lightning here on the northside of Chicago. It rained in buckets and great blowing sheets. There's a bit water in the basement of the bungalow, but not enough to worry about. The boxes of Creed and Culture are down there, but up on shelves and dry, just waiting to get shipped and read!

Mohler & the Ace Hardware Man

Dr. Al Mohler' writes on his blog today about the controversy over the nomination of Dr. James Wilson Holsinger to the post of Surgeon General. Will his nomination go down because of his views on homosexuality? Does this amount to, ultimately, a religious test, since his religion supports these views? But what if medical science supports his views as well? In other words, certain negative physical, medical, side effects seem to come with the gay territory. Is "gay" sex really healthy? The crack about the ACE hardware man was sarcastic, of course, as Mohler notes. But now that I think of it: is it surprising that society elites who in the 1970s really thought that it was primarily socialization and upbringing and environment that makes little boys into little boys and little girls into little girls and that sexual hardware (or, if you prefer, hardwiring) could be overridden simply by raising a boy to play with dolls--those folks still can't tell the difference between male and female? (Not to mention two different types of plumbers.)

     My earlier post on sentimentality -- as destructive of genuine feeling -- in the liturgy has caused me to think again about the embattled status of both reason and what Plato called thymos, "spirit" or "drive" or "noble ambition."  Many of you will recall his famous metaphor in the Phaedrus, where he compares the human being to a charioteer whose rig is driven by a pair of horses, one of them noble and high spirited, the other tending to be fiery and wayward.  The charioteer represents the reason or intellect; the noble horse, thymos; the wayward horse, appetite.  It's a brilliant metaphor, capturing the truth that without the passions we literally get nowhere.  It also distinguishes passion from passion, inasmuch as there is something about the noble horse that is friendly to reason -- in a sense it aspires to reason.  It is wrong to call it simply irrational.

     But here is what modern man has done, in brief.  The thoughts are by no means original to me -- you can find them in Alasdair MacIntyre, or in John Paul II, or in Benedict XVI, or in Dostoyevsky:

     1. "Reason" is shouldered off the chariot.  A small subset of reason -- an amputated charioteer -- is put in reason's place.  What is now called "reason" can no longer discuss, rationally, the nature of the good or the beautiful.  It can do two things: it can spin out sentences of symbolic logic or mathematics, which, despite their complexity, it asserts are only tautological, without any real connection to the world of stars and mangrove trees and bicycles.  Or it can manipulate matter according to the physical laws it imputes to the world, inferring them (as things that happen to "work," rather than as things that really do exist in themselves) from empirical observations and mathematical analysis.  This "reason" can thus tell you how to build a Gothic cathedral, but cannot even begin to tell you why you would want to.

     2. All other discussion of the good, the beautiful, and the true (except for the sorts of truths mentioned above) is relegated to the status of "feeling".  This is the position of the emotivists; it is the position Lewis inveighed against in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength.  It is also the default position in every school and university in our country -- it is what the professor and student must consciously resist.  So, to say "X is good," amounts to no more than "Hurrah for X."

     3. All feelings are regarded as irrational.  So then, not only is most of the function of Plato's charioteer assigned to the horses, but the good horse, the horse representing the rationality-aspiring passion for beauty, is eliminated entirely, leaving us with nothing but appetite.

     And there it is, appetite in the service of an amputated reason -- the second-rate faculty of the intellect that may soon discover how to cobble together monsters of animal and human genetics, without questioning why it should be done, or rather insisting that any moral discussion of it is simply a matter of feeling.  And all feelings are irrational.

     My sense is that sentimentality is a very poor horse, a false substitute for thymos, in that it dampens the desire for the truly great and beautiful.  It turns instead to the easy, to pretty trifles, to the frills and lace of an emotional etiquette, rather than to the deep feelings themselves.  And that would leave appetite and the quasi-rational usurper with all the freer rein.  Maybe there have been times when we could indulge a lot of sentimentality in liturgical art.  Maybe -- but now?

As When Listening to Music

I came across this quote in a footnote of an article by John Lukacs in the March/April issue of Historically Speaking (on "George Kenan the Historian").

A feeling of immediate contact with the past is a sensation as deep as the purest enjoyment of art; it is an almost ecstatic sensation of no longer being myself, of overflowing into the world around me, of touching the essence of things, of through history experiencing the truth . . . . The historic sensation is not the sensation of living the past again but of understanding the world [perhaps] as one does when listening to music . . . ." --Johan Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages

What are we to make of this and of other such transcendent experiences? What, more to my intended point, does the practitioner of scientism** make of them? Evolutionary psychology will have the answer? There are those who believe they will discover the survival benefit of transcendent experiences. The problem is, it seems, just about anything--even rape--can or even has been described as arising from some aspect of evolution and survivability. The brush gets so broad; does it really end up explaining much of anything in a way that helps us understand ourselves or become better humans?

Whatever one thinks of various aspects of what is loosely called "evolution," that is, whatever one makes of the question of common descent, hominids, fossil records, the first living cell, all the DNA, all the information, the issue of random mutation and genetic pathways to speciation, and all that: Whatever. Modern man, as we know him, and as we know ourselves, while having a clear biological nature that shares many things with the animal kingdom, is also a thing unto himself. Our imaginations, our transcendental yearning, our flashes of mysticism, so many of our faculties that we collect underneath the umbrella we call the image God--how does these things arise from mere matter? Is fidelity part of the material universe? Is the number four? We all have a sense of beauty? What molecules and random genetic mutations brought that on?

Man is modern and we know no other creature such as ourselves. Forget about Lucy and wandering hominids on the savannahs of Africa. Who are they and what, truly, do we have to do with them? What can they give us that will make us happy and better?

We are stuck with this thing called modern man and his history. When we read Plato, when we see the Spartans, the walls of Troy, the sailings of Odysseus, the code of Hammurabi, the burials of the Egyptians, the saga of Njal and the Irish legends, our sense of time and history, of loss and lives we labor to remember, we look into a mirror and we are the same men and women from beginning of mankind to its end, who love, procreate, cheat, steal, protest, look for weal and bend our necks under woe, and curse the gods at the vanity and injustice that visits the innocent.

There is nothing for us to see in the mind of a non-human with whom we share no imagination but only biological organs, approximate, that digest food, filter blood, and procreate. Are we not men and not beasts? Man was higher than the animals, though lower than the angels. He is made of memory, transcendence, time, yearning, joy, and beauty.

The past of our ancient history is near, and we can feel the breath of Pharoah's charioteers and their horses hot on the heels of the Hebrew slaves. In the poetry of the shepherd king of Israel, words three thousand years old and unevolving, our hearts and minds hear reflected their own inner turmoil and we feel the balm offered, the sharp and bracing call to become the sons of God. It is all one story, the story of man, put to everlasting music.

Note:
**scientism: 1 : methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to the natural scientist
2 : an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities) (Merriam-Webster, online)

New Archives: Henry, Howard, Hutchens, Kirk

A reader mentioned yesterday what a "gold mine" the Touchstone archives are. Well, here's some new gold: Volume 4 Number 2 has been posted now. Originally published in 1991, it includes:

The Bible Under Spirit & Church: Some Light from the East for the Perplexed Inerrantist
by S. M. Hutchens

A Response to The Bible Under Spirit & Church
by Carl F. H. Henry

Muggeridge: A Memoir 1904–1990 by Thomas Howard

The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man by Russell Kirk

Recovering the Spiritual Sense of the Scriptures:
An Interview with Fr. Paul Quay, S.J.

Enjoy!

Widespread Abuse

I just got this Fox News link sent to me. I appreciate Fr. Jonathan Morris's attitude and comments in reporting this story. Sins in any church affect all of us one way or another. The sins are widespread. All the more reason to heed the message of John the Baptist, whose birth many of us celebrate tomorrow. Lord, have mercy.

Midsummer Light

Tomorrow, June 24, is the Nativity of John the Baptist, and it used to be the longest day of the year, hence called midsummer. (The solstice shifted 3 days over a period of four centuries; until it was more or less fixed on June 21 when the calender was revised by Gregory XIII.) Have a pleasant midsummer and enjoy the extra daylight. May it remind us of the ministry of John the Baptist: "For the Light exceedingly bright followed John the Forerunner." Indeed, John "was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light." Christ, that is, the true light that enlightens every man. There is no greater light--of wisdom, of knowledge, of virtue, of beauty, of truth, of goodness--than that of Christ. The world takes all this for granted. John reminds us to be grateful, and repent.

Thank You Again

The editors, staff, and I will be grateful if you would help us out at this time with a financial contribution to support the work of Mere Comments, as well as Touchstone. We have been blessed to be able to continue this work, encouraged by not only your support but also the level of intelligent conversation about important matters. Any contribution, whether $25 or $100 or $1,000, will be received gratefully, with the knowledge that without our subscribers and friends we would not be able to continue. We are in need of this support at this time, especially as we end our fiscal year running at a substantial deficit. More than half of our total income comes from supporters like you. We are grateful.

Bear & Grin: Hugo the Prophet

We get some interesting book catalogs here. The latest is the Fall - Winter 2007 Inner Traditions Bear & Company catalog. First entry: Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius's Hidden Life by John Chambers (Destiny Books). It's 352 pages and an expanded edition of Conversations with Eternity.

During Victor Hugo's exile on the Isle of Jersey, where he and his family and friends escaped the reign of Napoléon III, he conducted "table-tapping" séances, transcribing hundreds of channeled conversations with entities from beyond. Among his discarnate visitors were Shakespeare, Plato, Hannibal, Rousseau, Galileo, Sir Walter Scott, and Jesus. According to the transcripts, Jesus, during his three visits, condemns Druidism, faults Christianity, and suggests a new religion with Hugo as its prophet.

The Hugo book also examines his contacts "with aliens from the planets Mercury and Jupiter and the revelation that our entire universe is a quantum hologram." (I didn't know that Hugo knew anything about quantum anything. Perhaps the author is putting two and two together from Hugo's discoveries.)

The author, John Chambers, writes articles "ranging from sports to mall sprawl to alien abduction and has seven essays appearing in Forbidden Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West."

The book won't be out until January 2008, so you'll have to wait.

Nothing More Than Feelings

     Never will human beings lie so glibly, or deceive themselves so easily, as when they are talking about their feelings.  The reasons aren't hard to find.  If I say to my wife, "Yes, I painted the picnic table," I know that she can walk out to the backyard and check.  But there is no checking someone else's feelings.  You can only see them in action, and, given the vagaries of feeling and the fact that we sometimes fail to act on them -- rather, we sometimes act against them -- there is no easy way to tell whether and to what extent someone is lying about them.  Nor are our own feelings easy to read.  I'd go so far as to say that for people who do not practice a regular examination of conscience (of one sort or another; I'm not talking about the Catholic preparation for the sacrament of penance here), their feelings can be deeply mysterious to them, depending upon their personalities.  Sometimes they can be positively opaque.  Many are the parents, for example, who say they feel love for their children, and who have persuaded themselves that they do feel that love, who nevertheless do all in their power to crush them.  I've seen a few examples of that.

     Besides, feelings come and go; they're crucial to the constitution of a virtuous person, as Plato teaches us in the Phaedrus, but they cannot be relied upon to lead.  They are powerful assisters of reason -- they aspire to reason, you might say, but they are not rational in themselves.  In man they are stirred or shaken not only by tsunamis, but by perfect trifles.  The Cardinals win, and I can hear birdsong in a driving rain.  I get stuck for a bad lunch at a high price, and I'm kicking the dog when I get home.  They also remain quite unruffled when we know we should be feeling something.  Jonathan Swift has the true feelings of his own friends pegged, when he writes Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift -- imagining their reactions after he dies.  His female friends (of whom he had many -- Swift was an excellent dinner companion) intersperse their expressions of dismay with chat during a game of loo.  I'm quoting from memory, but the lines go on after this fashion:

     The ladies moan in doleful dumps:
    "The Dean is dead -- and what is trumps?"

Dr. Johnson too pinned his friend Boswell on the same point: people talk about their feelings as a way of getting on in society, the kind of light hypocrisy that lubricates easy and trivial conversation.  In this sense we can hardly get on without a little bit of it.  Says the Doctor (again I'm quoting from memory): "You may say to a man, 'Sir, I am sorry that you had such bad weather on your trip, and were so much wet.'  You don't care tuppence about the weather.  You may say, 'Sir, I am your most obedient servant.'  You are not his most obedient servant."  He concludes that we may talk this way, but that at all costs we must avoid taking the talk seriously.  We may not think it.

     What happens when talk about feelings predominates in popular piety and the liturgy?  I'm sure you'll have plenty to say about this.  I'd like to make a few observations:

     1. People lose the sense of a sharp difference between that talk and the secrets of the heart, that only God knows.  The Pharisee who made his "confession" at the Temple, while the publican languished in the back, no doubt felt quite elated by the contrast.  He did not know the pride of his own heart.  He did not understand his dire need for conversion.  It may be the same with us when we sing "hymns" that declare that we are happy, rather than giving us theological and historical cause to be happy.  The difference is between a hymn of joy because the Lord is risen, and a hymn about our supposed joy, because, don't you know, something really important happened two thousand years ago, and I might tell you about it after I get done singing about how joyful I am.

     2. People are compelled to raise the necessary hypocrisy of small talk to a liturgical act.  Even the best of these my-feeling hymns can at best be occasional, extra-liturgical outbursts -- Granny Clampett stomping left and right and a-singing, "I've got that joy joy joy joy down in my heart!"  But if everybody must sing "I am happy, oh so happy," then that will turn most of the congregation into liars, scoff-graces, if I may coin the term.  The plain fact is that at any moment in a church, most of the people are not especially happy.  They may be moderately contented, and that may or may not be a good thing, depending on what they are contented about.  Some may be suffering, and that may be a wellspring of devotion for them, if they are suffering with Christ; but some may be suffering the lacerations of their sins.  Others may be trekking through the dry land, the waste regions without water -- Mother Teresa knew of these, and Sister Therese of the Child Jesus, racked with agony as she lay dying of consumption, knew of the terrors of feeling utterly abandoned.  We have cause to be joyful, and should sing of that cause: I am certain that John of the Cross, even undergoing the dark night of the soul, sang exuberantly of the resurrection of Christ.  But the truest feelings are deep and powerful things, of which we know little enough, and about which we should not speak without some trepidation.

     3. Wary strangers who enter the church are liable to see, instead of devotions that might stir deep feeling, the putting-on of an act, a profession of deep feeling.  Now there are two possibilities that enter his mind, neither of them good.  The first is that the people are deceiving others or themselves; they do not really feel what they profess.  So he leaves, half disappointed, half pleased that he can look with some contempt upon people that he would prefer not to have anything to do with.  The other possibility is that their professions of feeling seem genuine.  But he himself has no such feeling.  He can hardly imagine having it.  The social critic Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in The Timeless Christian, notes shrewdly that as people differ in their physical prowess, intelligence, originality, and temperament, so too they differ in their capacity for the "spiritual" response, for mystic ravishment, or for devotion broadly conceived.  Such people learn that church is not for them, in the same way that most lefties learn that golf courses are not for them, or most men learn that quilting is not for them.

     4. Worst of all, the sentimentality that almost inevitably ensues obstructs genuine feeling.  Talk long enough and sincerely enough about feelings that you do not feel, and eventually you will cease to be able to feel deeply, whether or not you have the words to express it.  That's because, as a matter of social intercourse again, we place a censor upon our admitted feelings.  We know that we are supposed to feel sad when we hear that an acquaintance has died.  We say we feel sad.  We may have to say it, as Johnson suggests.  But if we dress that supposed sadness up in finery and parade it all the time -- if we breathe a false life into the non-feeling -- then we may no longer be fit to distinguish the genuine from the bogus.

     Take for example these excerpts from a couple of famous hymns. One is a hymn that expresses a deep feeling -- a gentle love, but one that is occasioned by a specific cause.  The words are pregnant with powerful scriptural and theological allusions ("Tarry with us, Lord," "Can God spread a table in the wilderness?", "He broke the bread") that lift the feeling from the personal and adventitious to the universal:

     Be known to us in breaking bread,
     But do not then depart:
     Savior, abide with us and spread
     Thy table in our heart.

Then this, a model for the contemporary hymn in praise of our feelings of praise:

     And he walks with me and he talks with me,
     And he tells me I am his own.

Oh, He does, does He?  You are one of those rarest of mystics, then?  If you were, and you did feel such ravishment of love, would you sing about it so blithely?

Calendar of the Christian Year

Today marks the first official day of summer. That means that we are almost half way through 2007. We still have some of our beautiful St. James Calendar of the Christian Year 2007 available. Since only half of the year is left, we are selling them for half of the full price.

The Calendar has all of the major feasts and fasts of the Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran liturgical traditions as well as some of the biblical Jewish holidays. There is a special emphasis on recognizing saints from the undivided Church of the first millenium. Tomorrow marks the feast of St. Alban, the first Christian martyr of Britain, who died in 304 AD.

Each page in the calendar has a handsome image based on a passage of holy scripture by such artists as Dore´, von Carolsfeld, and Rembrandt.

Grounded in the concept of the sanctification of time and the experience of the early Church, the Christian calendar, through its liturgical seasons of preaching, teaching, and celebration, unfolds a full and balanced gospel of Jesus Christ. When properly understood, it can serve as an aid to the faithful in their worshipful participation in the drama of salvation.

Click here to order one today.

Solidarity & the Soviet "Fall"

Why did the Soviet Union fall?
I received the letter about an article we ran in the December 2006 issue from one of Jim Hitchcock’s colleagues at St. Louis University, Charles Ford, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Below is the letter, my reply, and his response, followed by a few more comments of mine.
--Jim Kushiner

RE: the article by John Harmon McElroy, “Workers of Another World United” (December 2006).

A great strength of this article is its emphasis on the central role of Christianity in Solidarity and in the broader movement that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. I wish to comment on a statement near the beginning of his artlcle.

"[W]ithout Solidarity in Poland in 1980 there would have been no disintegration of the Iron Curtain nine years later, no crumbling of the Soviet empire, and no dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991."

By the time of Solidarity, developments were under way in the Soviet Union that would bring the Soviet system to an end, even if there had been no Solidarity. By 1980, virtually all serious Russian literature produced in the Soviet Union was implicitly Christian. Komsomol and other Party organizations railed against this trend, but to no avail.

The leaders of the Party had come to the conclusion that they no longer wanted to live in the society communism had created. They chose Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Party in March 1985 for the express purpose of creating a society that would reflect Christian, not communist, ideals. Solidarity was a vibrant and visible expression of this trend and undoubtedly hastened it along. But developments in the Soviet Union were decisive in bringing the collapse of the Soviet system.

REPLY
Readers may be curious to know of a source for your astonishing (to me) claim. Otherwise, it may come across simply as a conjecture of some sort, an assertion made out of the blue.
--Jim Kushiner

REPLY
Jim, Yours is a fair question.

There are two parts to my response. The first discusses the policies pursued by Gorbachev. The second addresses the intentions of the party leaders in choosing him.

For most of Soviet history the regime categorically denied that the Church had any role to play in societal life other than “the satisfaction of the cult” for the superstitious elderly believers who were dying out. After 1945, the regime found it useful to have the Church engage in public campaigns on behalf of world peace, in which it expressly proclaimed the Soviet Union as the leader in international peace.

By 1980 I was studying Christianity in the Soviet Union carefully, from such sources as Keston College, Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, Voice of the Martyrs, and others. Once Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary in March 1985, I followed in specific detail his actions with respect to the churches. 

It became apparent that Gorbachev’s policies toward the churches, especially the Russian Orthodox Church, were designed to free them from state and party control. There were times when Gorbachev had to prod the churches, again especially the Russian Orthodox Church, which had long histories of conformity to Soviet control. I watched as his policy was followed consistently for the next five years. Gorbachev spoke frequently about the importance of things spiritual for society.

In 1990, on the first of my eight trips to Moscow, I asked my Moscow [colleague], an Orthodox Christian and historian of mathematics, about Gorbachev. He told me that the following story was circulating, while acknowledging that he could not independently verify it.

When Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary, a series of public figures were on hand to greet him. One of these was the representative of the Orthodox Church in charge of contacts abroad. He reportedly greeted Gorbachev as follows. “Congratulations Mikhail Sergevich, you can be sure that the Church will continue all its activities on behalf of world peace.” Gorbachev's response is reported as follows. “You know, world peace is the task of the state. Perhaps the Church can help create a new moral climate in our society.”

The evidence is clear that Gorbachev pursued a policy of promoting the independence of the churches and spoke of the importance of spiritual life for society.

The evidence that the Soviet leadership specifically chose Gorbachev for this purpose is less obvious. I do not remember where I first heard the assertion that they had, but a variety of things have seemed to support the possibility.

It is consistent with occasional reports I was reading in the 1980s, for example, about even prominent party officials being distraught at the cold, uncaring service their parents received in hospitals, and being moved by the merciful attitude of the nuns who worked at some care facilities.

The fact that Gorbachev spoke so publicly, from the very beginning of his appointment as general secretary, about promotion the independence of churches and the importance of the spiritual life for the people is evidence that he had the support of the top leadership. I never saw anything that indicated opposition to his program. The attempted coup in 1991 did not involve any of the top party leadership. It represented an extremely belated attempt by a tiny remnant of committed communists to stop the process and came far far too late.

I hope this offers some of what you are looking for.

Charles Ford
St. Louis, Missouri

Some final thoughts:
I have not read deeply on this issue at all, but I can see how it could be argued that too much attention has been given to external players and factors—Reagan, “star wars”, Thatcher, Polish Solidarity, and, of course the role of John Paul II, as important as all of this was, and less attention to internal factors.

What’s the explanation for the collapse of such a regime? The first place to look for primary causes would be inside the regime itself. Decisions in the Soviet Union surely had to be “decisive” for what transpired. But did top leaders really wish to open the country up to "Christian ideals"?

I recall the celebration of the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988 and being surprised at how much was being allowed, even promoted, by the Soviet government. (Of course one always suspects, at the same time, calculated political reasons for this.)

As to literature "by 1980", I cannot speak to that. As to film, Tarkovsky's films of the 1960s and 70s, I believe, are ultimately deeply Christian. And Repentance, the 1984 film by Tengiz Abuladze, initially banned in the Soviet Union, was released there in 1987, two years after Gorbachev. It has clearly Christian elements, ending with the line (from memory): What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?

--Jim Kushiner

Secularist Fascism in Australia

It is once common to call conservative people "fascists" when they insisted on some law the leftist libertines did not want to obey or some idea of public order the libertines did not want recognized. It was never an accurate term, not least because Mussolini's Fascists were leftists themselves.

You don't hear the word used very often any more, even by the leftist libertines, but I'm beginning to think that it might be worth resurrecting for the leftist libertines themselves.  From Australia comes the news that Cardinal Pell [is] to be interrogated by parliamentary committee for contempt of Parliament, a crime punishable by up to 25 years in jail.

He had told Catholic MPs that their vote on "therepeutic cloning" (the propagandists' euphemism) would affect their participation in church life. (Neither news story I have to hand gives his quote.) He had, I assume, warned them of the effect of voting for the murder of embyronic human beings on their worthiness to receive the eucharist.

In other words, he pointed out that their membership in a purely voluntary association is contingent on their holding and acting up on certain agreed beliefs. They are perfectly free to act on other beliefs and under no constraint to agree with him nor continue to be members of that voluntary association. What the secularists want is the right to tell the Church who may be a member and forbid it to set qualifications for membership with which the state disagrees, which kind of state control is reasonably called fascist.

The charge was brought by a Greens Party MP, though what connection there is between a concern for the environment and "therapeutic cloning" I have no idea. But it is true disturbingly often that when you find someone who believes in saving the whales he also believes in killing the unborn humans.

The Legal Benefits of Marriage

Unmarried couples lose legal benefits is the headline of a story in USA Today, sent by a reader. It begins:

States that have banned gay marriage are beginning to revoke the benefits of domestic partners of public employees.

Michigan has gone farthest, prohibiting cities, universities and other public employers from offering benefits to same-sex partners. In all, 27 states have passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as the legally sanctioned union of a man and a woman.

Our reader comments:

There's an interesting dynamic going on. Once gays asked for and got benefits for their partners, straight people asked for benefits for their live-in partners. And they frequently got them; it would have been "unfair" otherwise. In states where gay marriage has been banned by law or state constitution, courts are now ruling that neither gays nor straights can have these benefits. It's a little step toward defining marriage as worth more than domestic partnership.

Go To Uffle

A note about a good thing: This year's conference of the University Faculty for Life, which I attended, was very good and something I'd commend to you. Next year's conference will be held in Milwaukee at Marquette University at the beginning of June.

Do not be put off by the "faculty" in the title. The papers are serious and weighty, but none that I heard were academic in the sense of dull, pedantic, arcane, and pointlessly hair-splitting, nor in the sense that they would sail well over the head of the average reader of Mere Comments. They were academic only in the sense of thoughtfully and with learning engaging the breadth of questions raised by the defense of life in this culture.

This year's papers — this was the first UFL conference I've been able to go to — were uniformly interesting and some were very good. Some offered provocative or stimulating arguments, while others provided useful information and insights into events, texts, etc. I have been to lots of conferences, but of few could I say this. And the people who came were a treat to be with: thoughtful, firmly pro-life, and cheerful too.

The UFL produce bound collections of the papers and also generously offer them on the web. The collections from the conferences held from 1992 to 2005 can be found here.

This year two of our contributing editors gave papers: William Saunders and Anne Gardiner. This was Bill's first paper but Anne has become a regular contributor. Her papers are: "One Just Man Found in Gomorrah," subtitled "Father Morrow vs. the Catholic Bishops of Britain in 1993 (2004);  Stealing Fire From the Sky, subtitled "Transvaluating religion in the service of abortion" (2003); and The Interrelated Defense of Abortion and Pornography in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (2002).

I would commend membership to those of you who teach in a college or university and the conference to all of you.
 

Stones Among Stones

Nicholai Velimirovic, a canonized saint of the Orthodox Church who died in 1956, wrote a booklet about the Lord's Prayer. In the section entitled, "And lead us not into temptation...", he writes:

    O how little is necessary for a man to turn his face from Thee towards idols!
    ... If evil knocks at his door, he encounters the temptation of making a bargain with Thee, or even of casting Thee away altogether.
    If Thou callest him to sacrifices, he revolts. If Thou sendest him to death, he trembles.
    If Thou offerest to him all the pleasures of earth, he will be tempted to poison and kill his own soul.
    If Thou disclosest to his eyes the laws of Thy creation, he murmurs, "The universe is wonderful and lawful in itself, without a Creator."

The ultimate temptation, the one perhaps that the demons most rejoice in when it succeeds, is to forget the Creator. At that stage, what's left? Even primitive Man knew something was "up" beyond him. Velimirovic writes about this earlier in "Our Father":

There was a time, a long and fearful time, when man ... spoke to Thee and called Thee: Lord, or Creator, or Master! Yea, when man felt himself to be only a thing among things. But now by merit of Thy First-Born and Best Son we learned Thy right name. Therefore, I too, with Christ, dare to call Thee "Father."
    If I address Thee as "Lord," I bow in fear before Thee as a slave amongst an army of slaves. If I call Thee "Creator," I separate myself from Thee as night is apart from day or as a leaf from its tree.
    If I look to Thee and say, "Master," I am as a stone among stones, and as a camel among camels.
    But if I open my mouth and whisper "Father," love takes the place of fear, earth seems lifted nearer to Heaven, and I walk with Thee, as with my companions in the garden of this world and share Thy glory, and sorrows, and strength.

Christians, I remember, are called to give witness to the Father, because of the Son. It's well beyond monotheism and creationism. Perhaps some fear slavery to a deity, and forget that they are called to return to The Father who loves them more than the father of the prodigal. If we cannot fathom this, we can at least see the glory of the Father's love in the arms of the Son, and hear his voice in the words of Son in the Gospels.

But if we can't even acknowledge creation in some fashion, then what?

Then this: we are the most intelligent beings in the cosmos, the most knowledgeable, and the most powerful as it turns out. We are the new gods, gods alone in a material universe. And the serpent said, "Ye shall be as God...."

Can I Follow Evolution?

The June 18, 2007, issue of The New Republic devotes more than 6 full pages of text to a review by Jerry A. Coyne trashing Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (Free Press, 320 pp. $28).

I haven't read the book. Should I? Coyne warns: "The general reader, at whom The Edge of Evolution is aimed, is unlikely to find the scientific holes in its arguments."

"Someone lacking formal training in biochemistry and evolutionary biology may be easily snowed by his rhetoric." In other words, you have to be previously schooled in not just, one would assume, high-school level evolutionary arguments, but biochemistry and evolutionary biology, something I assume you really can only study well at the college level, in order to handle these matters.

Now Coyne admits that "molecular biology is a very young field, and molecular evolutionary biology is even younger." And that's the reason there are gaps in understanding how complex biological features, such as the bacterial cilium, gaps that permit Behe to advance "fatuous" arguments.

But it seems to me, unevolved layman that I am, the arrival of molecular biology and the growing knowledge of the complexity at the most basic level of life should have been enough to make biologists who accepted Darwin's theory to say, "This simple one-cell life ain't nearly as simple as Darwin thought it was. This isn't simply 'protoplasm,' but a veritable encyclopedia's worth of information, all in one cell."

In other words, Darwin's starting point was a simple protoplasm being worked on by the sort of adaptions he saw in finch beaks. Maybe a single-cell life form might add a second cell, and so on. But getting to something living in the first place ids daunting: no one knows how this happened. It's life, full of information, the highly complex means of reproduction. Behe saw this in his lab, and had second thoughts about Darwin.

But I digress; I'm not qualified to read the book or think intelligently about these things. So I have to take somebody's word. The battle, really, is heating up, and a lot of the heat is from the questioning of authority. These debabtes will be settled, so to speak, in courts and in legislatures, I presume, not known for having microbiologists in large numbers.

Protestants and Contraception

The May issue of Touchstone included the feature article Children of the Reformation by family scholar and contributing editor Allan Carlson. Please join the discussion of the article over on our Treaders site.

Touchstone Editors Audio

In case you missed this, here you can get an audio file from the Carl F. H. Henry Institute, recorded last September at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. It was panel discussion called "Beyond the Culture Wars?" Differing Viewpoints Look at Post-Christian America: A Conversation with the Editors of Touchstone Magazine. Featuring: Russell D. Moore and the editors of Touchstone.

A Time to Help

I will be making plugs now and then during the next week or two, asking for a bit of help so that Touchstone, Mere Comments, the whole lot of us, can end our fiscal year without going too deeply into the red ink. Things are still tight and will remain so until we make some more progress on foundation support (We're working on it, honest! It's just "takes time." We've made a good start, with one grant in the bank.) In the meantime, with generous reader and donor support between now and June 30, we can limit our deficit to around 40k. We need your strong support now to even do that. With your help, we can end strongly and make next year more manageable, with a projected balanced budget (very tight, but balanced!)

If Mere Comments benefits you, if Touchstone benefits you or someone you love, please help us continue this service to you and our many other readers.

You may make an on-line gift here.
Or mail to: Touchstone, 4125. W. Newport Avenue, Chicago, IL  60641
Or call 773 - 481 - 1090.

The Summer of Love at 40

Ah, yes, it's been 40 years since the Summer of Love. Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Seven. Sweet psychedelic pot-clouded hazy days of nothing to do but "just love everybody" with flowers and stuff.  Here's a plug in the L. A. Daily News for all the good that came out of the hippie "culture." (Peace, freedom, and the Earth.)

I would be surprised if the author, Larry Atkins, was old enough to remember the Summer of Love. Dawn Eden has written a counterpiece to Atkins in the L. A. Daily News, trashing the Summer of Love. I doubt she was even born by the Summer of Love, but anyone who lived in its aftermath might be able to comment on the fallout.

I was a couple years too young to go to San Francisco, even had I wanted to go, and I would have been embarrassed to wear flowers in my hair. I was mostly watching and playing baseball and delivering the Detroit News in my neighborhood. One of the stories the newspaper covered during the Summer of Love, delivered fresh daily to the doorsteps of my customers was a local occurrence the paper called "race riots":

(Wikipedia)  Over the period of five days [In July, 1967], forty-three people died, of whom 33 were black. The other damages were calculated as follows:

*    467 injured: 182 civilians, 167 Detroit police officers, 83 Detroit firefighters, 17 National Guard troops, 16 State Police officers, 3 U.S. Army soldiers.
*    7,231 arrested: 6,528 adults, 703 juveniles; 6,407 blacks, 824 whites. The youngest, 4; the oldest, 82. Half of those arrested had no criminal record. Three percent of those arrested went to trial; half of them were acquitted.
*    2,509 stores looted or burned, 388 families homeless or displaced and 412 buildings burned or damaged enough to be demolished. Dollar losses from arson and looting ranged from $40 million to $80 million.

LBJ sent US troops into Detroit at the request of Michigan Governor George Romney, father of Mitt. My aunt saw a tank rumble down her street. Noboby was talking much about flower power. 

Uncle Tony's Poetry Corner and Butcher Shop

     Ah, it's been a tough week for fathers up here in Canada.  From the hostess of 100 Huntley Street, the northland's ultra-nice answer to The 700 Club:

      "It's such a shame that fathers on television are portrayed as abusive and incompetent.  Many are not."

     Transpose that into a black key, madam -- or Jewish, or female, or Indian.  Then this wisdom, gracing the back of the bulletin for our parish (actually, our "pastoral unit," headed by two sacerdotal units, a consecrated female unit, a secretarial unit, and various ministerial units):

Fathers are wonderful people
too little understood,
And we do not sing their praises
as often as we should...

For, somehow, Father seems to be
the man who pays the bills,
While Mother binds up little hurts
and nurses all our ills...

And Father struggles daily
to live up to "his image"
As protector and provider
and "hero of the scrimmage"...

And perhaps that is the reason
we sometimes get the notion
That Fathers are not subject
to the thing we call emotion,

But if you look inside Dad's heart,
where no one else can see,
you'll find he's sentimental
and as "soft" as he can be...

But he's too busy every day
in the gruelling race of life,
He leaves the sentimental stuff
to his partner and his wife...

But Fathers are just wonderful
in a million different ways,
and they merit loving compliments
and accolades of praise,

For the only reason Dad aspires
to fortune and success
is to make the family proud of him
and to bring them happiness...

And like Our Heavenly Father,
he's a guardian and a guide,
Someone that we can count on
to be always on our side.      -- Helen Steiner Rice

Yes, the Father is a "guardian and a guide," "always on our side."  We are supposed to be on the Lord's side, but I suppose it could be worse.  I can't at the moment imagine how, but human ingenuity does often stagger the imagination.  We were also treated to such cute stuff on the front of the bulletin, clearly translated from bad English idiom to bad French: "un papa" is someone who can "etre present pour toi quand tu as besoin de lui," who listens, who supports, who gives you his best, and who can be one of your "meilleurs amis".  Clearly written by someone who is not a father, will never be a father, and has never given any deep thought to what it means to be a father. 

     I'm writing this on the quick, from a computer in a public library -- I don't have much time.  I'll be posting a blog on the difference between feeling and sentimentality, especially as regards church music and liturgy, sometime later this week -- I promise.  Meanwhile, after all that saccharine, and all that mendacity, here from the poet Robert Hayden are a few lines that touch upon some deep truths about fathers, imperfect as they are, and even about the Father whom they dimly reflect.  I'll quote them without comment:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then from cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

H. O. J. B.

I gratefully use this website for the opportunity to inform our readers of the imminent death to the world of the Protestant theologian Harold O. J. Brown, an old friend of mine and of Touchstone.  I spoke to Grace (Mrs. Brown) last night, who told me that several weeks ago the cancer which took his left eye in the '90s reasserted itself in his throat.  He is under hospice care at home, cannot speak, and has only scattered moments of lucidity.  His time left here is being spoken of in terms of days.   Joe will be buried in Florida with family attending, and there will be a memorial service sometime thereafter in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he finished his teaching career.  The Brown family thanks you for your prayers.

Father's Day

One of the burdens parents must bear came across in a statement my daughter recently heard from the pulpit: “There are no perfect families.” I’m pretty sure I heard some indignation in her response that, while this is certainly true, hers comes pretty darn close. Thanks, Sweetheart, we’ve been working on it. To say that there are no perfect families is very much like saying that there are no perfect angels. It’s technically true, but practically meaningless.

What “no perfect families” implies in the context of our age is a leveling in which all families are regarded as pretty much the same, as essentially “dysfunctional” to one degree or another, thus allowing everyone to blame their parents for what’s wrong with them, and blotting the escutcheons of every father and mother who might be praised for their excellence—for the love and care and wisdom and holy discipline in which they have raised their children.

Well, on this father’s day I wish to remember and honor my own father, now with the Lord, as an imperfect man who was a truly great father to a great many children besides the sons of his own body, who filled all he touched as a father with health, vigor, wonder, and the love of God--who, when a young man, learned the lessons that young men are supposed to learn, and so grew as he aged into a good strong tree, full of wholesome fruit. I watched him die as I watched him live, a testimony to the truth that imperfect man can be a good man and a good father, the kind of man his imperfect sons wish to be as fathers to their own children.

Gambling

One of the most perplexing problems I have tried to puzzle out involves the morality of gambling. So far as it is a vice, it is one to which I have never been strongly drawn, but I have never until lately been able to establish the ethics of avoidance in any virtue greater than prudence:  it tends to be addictive; organized gaming is set up to profit only its organizers--the lottery is a tax upon stupidity--it encourages criminal activity, gambling is a recognized portal and companion to other, and worse, activities, and so forth. 

But I find no command against the thing itself. On the contrary, in fact, life as it must be lived in the world, especially for men, and the faith of Christians, is full of the deliberate taking of calculated risks, which from our standpoint can either fail or succeed, the end of which is the winning of something strongly desired, and without which life would be empty of meaning or reward. I no longer believe what most of my teachers of religion in my earlier years taught me, that faith in fact is a “sure thing,” that we may live as those who are fully and positively assured of the truth of we believe.  What we were taught was a flat contradiction of what the Epistle of Hebrews teaches about those who died seeing cities afar off and not having received the promises. I have come to believe that Peter had it exactly right when he instead came to the rather dry conclusion not that there was “no game”--because of the pure and unalloyed faith in Christ he had attained as a disciple, but, if I may represent him, and I think with entire accuracy, that the Lord’s is really the only game in town: “To whom shall we go?” (This is the faith in which he was crucified—in which he “went”—and although somewhat ingloriously expressed, as he full well knew, it was sufficient.)

As crude as this may sound, we stake our lives, which we know we shall lose anyway, on the truth of what we hope is his word, in the desire that he will, in the end, pay off. We can perceive the devil’s work in anyone who tries to sell us eternity with no earthly risk.

If this is so, the fundamental problem with gambling is not its essential falsity, as though taking risks with our substance were an evil in itself, but its frivolity, its making light of something heavy, its dispersal of the effort and intensity and seriousness of the real business of life as if it were something worthy of the time and the money that are the icons of our substantial selves. It is the spilling of our seed upon the ground, a confusion of things that should not be confused, an attempted communion of the profane with the holy, a distraction from the Risk that is the whole business of life. 

Father's Polish Boots

"... conservatism is a way of looking at the human condition. As a conservative Polish proverb puts it, "Old truths, old laws, old boots, old books, and old friends are the best." The conservative impulse is a man's desire to walk in the paths that his father followed..." [Russell Kirk, "What is Conservatism?"]

Sabbath Recreation

Here's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on-line about the decline of the Sabbath. An excerpt from the article by Mollie Hemingway:

In another new book, "Sunday: A History of the First Day From Babylonia to the Super Bowl," Craig Harline shows how all sorts of complicated rules governing work, travel, sex and leisure grew up around the Sabbath in medieval Europe, creating a tangle of proscriptions that had overwhelmed the day by the 14th century. One genre of church mural at the time, known as the "Sunday Christ," showed Jesus surrounded by tools of the fishing, carpentry and farming trades. Each ax, rake and fishing hook inflicted a fresh wound on the crucified Christ. The message was not lost on worshipers: Work on the Sabbath only added to Jesus' suffering.

Reformation leader Martin Luther resisted such Sabbath guilt, saying that the commandment was kept by daily worship and high regard for God's Word, not strict rules governing behavior. Discussing the Sabbath, he highlighted Paul's relief at being free from the demands of Jewish law. And yet from th