Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Jesus & the Mysteries

A conference some of you will want to go to: Jesus & the Mysteries, a conference sponsored by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. It starts on Friday evening, October 26th, with a lecture by Scott Hahn (the founder of the Center) on "What do we mean by mysteries?" and continues all day the next day, with several lectures (one by R. R. Reno) and Mass celebrated by the new Bishop of Pittsburgh, ending with a lecture in the evening on "Jesus and the Jewish Festivals" by the Catholic biblical scholar Francis Martin.

The conference is being held at St. Paul Seminary in Crafton, which is just off I-279 west of Pittsburgh. The registration is only $79, which includes three meals and a copy of the Center's journal Letter & Spirit. As things stand now, I plan to be there.

The Challenges of Being Young & Single

We've started getting responses to Helper's Meet, the forum in the October issue on dating, courtship, and marriage. We will be publishing a selection of responses in a future issue. If you would like to send one, of up to 400 words (though shorter is always better, and all things being equal, more likely to be published), send it to me at editor [little "at" sign] touchstonemag.com, by October 26th.

One of the responses included a p.s. pointing me to a website dealing with the question. It is titled Dear Young Christian Single, and is a series of letters written by a mother answering all sorts of questions relating to finding a mate, dating, courting, and marrying.

Who Thinks Like You?

Regular reader James Altena sends the link to Select a Candidate 2008, which asks you your position on eleven questions and how important each issue is to you, and then tells you the extent to which you agree with the Republican and Democratic candidates. (I noticed that if you say that the issue is not important to you, the candidate whose position you chose only gets one point.)

Feel free to share your scores. I'm not really expecting many surprises, though Mr. Altena apparently was a little surprised to find himself most in agreement with Hilary Clinton and John Edwards.

That was a joke.

Humanitas Forum on Biotechnology

Our friends at the Humanitas Forum on Christianity and Culture are sponsoring: Listening to Biotechnology: What It Tells Us about Our Souls
Speaker: Peter Augustine Lawler, PhD
October 5-6, 2007
Belmont Church, Nashville, Tennessee
More information is available in a PDF at the website above.

Centurions Sought

Chuck Colson's Centurion program is looking for a hundred Christians to enroll in this year's class that equips Christians with worldview skills for ministry:

The Centurions Program is a distance-learning/networking program that equips Christians to engage a starving culture with the choice fruits of biblical truth. Studying under Chuck Colson and other great leaders and teachers, students learn to handle accurately the word of truth as it applies to every area of life and culture—including politics, education, mass media and the arts, bioethics, business, and marriage and family. And they gain confidence to speak persuasively and winsomely amid the stew of distorted beliefs and values.

Equip, educate, engage.
Each year we select 100 Christians—from hundreds of applications—and train them through an intense combination of rigorous reading and writing assignments, teleconferences, three weekend residences, worldview devotionals, monthly meetings with accountability and prayer partners, and a thriving online forum that supports a free-flowing exchange of ideas and experiences.

Will you consider becoming one of a hundred in 2008?
To apply, you can visit our website to download an application and get more program details. Or call 1-877-478-0100. We will be accepting applications through November 30, 2007.

PsalmTube

GL sends this link to, of all things, a psalm-singing "contest" that might be of interest to some of you. Videos are to be posted on YouTube. The preference is for a cappella singing; this reminds me of the post I wrote a couple of years ago, Black Church Music from Scotland? about Gaelic psalm singing from the Hebrides. I never did purchase that CD, but now I am reminded to. If anyone participates in the above contest, feel free to send me a link!

Hitchens Book Review

Judy Warner sent me this link to Benjamin Wiker's review of that book by Christopher Hitchens. Which reminds me, I've wondered why Hitchens hasn't legally changed his first name....

Mission Moving

The photo caught my eye.
Chicago's landmark Pacific Garden Mission is moving from downtown to a new location about 1 1/2 miles from the Loop, where it had been for 50 years. I remember the old South Loop location, and for a long time that was the seedier side of downtown. I am not surprised to see it move--I think a few years ago there was some talk of a move as the South Loop was becoming less of a "bum's row" and a bit more "upscale." A big neon sign proclaiming Christ Died for Our Sins is out of place, though advertising and window displays enticing people to sin are not.

City "missions" seem to me a vanishing thing of the past. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens now serve, though in the old rescue missions most of the clientele were "bums" who came in for a meal and a bed, after sitting through a gospel service.

I once visited the old Detroit City Rescue Mission with my Baptist youth group when I lived in the Motor City. I am pretty sure I saw it still standing a few years ago on my way to a baseball game at the old Tiger Stadium. I even gave my testimony there back then. I can only guess what a middle-aged bum thought about a teenager talking about sin and redemption. But everything I said was true, and they all were better off, I think, hearing the same old message before the meal. And who knows what hunger and thirst has been quenched over the years at old Pacific Garden Mission.

GodblogCon

For those who might be interested: GodblogCon 2007 will be in Las Vegas, November 8-9. It "will equip you with a working knowledge of new media technologies and its impact on society, empowering your ministry to employ quickly and easily new media technologies to engage culture for the cause of Christ." The conference is part of the larger Blogworld & New Media Expo.

Manimal Crackers

Cybrids, hybrids, clones, cyborgs, androids, humanoids, homonids, manimals--fact or fiction? The imagination of man is not content with the life he sees in the mirror each morning. We do not study nature for nature's sake but seem bent on bending and shapeshifting human (and other) forms. We even think we see ourselves in the past as some sort of half-ape half-human. (What is "half-human," anyway?) The Howard Center's latest posting on "Cybrids" gives just the latest update on our progress into the bright future of manimals or cybrids.

$10,000 in Tuition Aid?

Question: What role should “women’s issues” play in the 2008 elections and how do you define women’s issues?

Undergraduate women are invited to answer this question, after reading the two articles listed here, and submit their essays to the Independent Women's Forum. The first-place winning essay will be awarded $5,000. According to Allison Kasic, director of campus programs,  $10,000 total prize money is "up for grabs." Details can be found right here.

Christophobia

     In the middle of a provocative interview with Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the director of Jihad Watch, the question arises as to why the Left in the west seems so supinely ready to accept Islamic statism.  Don't they know what will happen to them under Sharia law?  Spencer attributes their inattention to ignorance -- they cannot imagine that Muslims are not going to be just as enticed by creature comforts as they themselves are.  Rather, they can't imagine that Muslims won't be enticed in exactly the same way as they are, since in Muslim states moral decadence -- for some of the men -- jives very nicely with authoritarian rule.  The interviewer, Jamie Glazov, ventures a different and daring explanation:

     "Just like in the days of communism, the Left venerates tyranny and yearns for submission under it. The Left knows exactly what it is doing when abetting and supporting an entity that it knows it itself will be consumed by. There is a logic to why leftist intellectuals support societies that butcher intellectuals, why leftist feminists support societies that mutilate women and why leftist homosexuals and minorities worship societies that barbarize homosexuals and minorities. It's a death wish based on self-loathing."

I don't know that that's true, but it is intriguing: it's the Christian virtue of seeing the beam in one's own eye, and turning the other cheek, and humbling oneself, but all divorced from Christ, and grown tumorous and malignant.  Yet there may be a different explanation, one that combines Glazov's and Spencer's, and that explanation would focus on the person of Christ.  I'll say more about this later, when I can catch a few free minutes -- but sometimes people will take the devil they don't know, before the Savior they do.  It's because you can sneer at a devil, you can dismiss simple superstition, you can scorn Christians, but you can't dismiss that man on the Cross.  They know or fear that that Savior comes to change them utterly and bring them to life again.  Nothing more terrifying than birth to the grownup hardening in the womb.

I Hear Stringed Instruments

Brian Greene, physicist popularizer, notes that string theory posits that all matter is from one fundamental ingredient—the string. A string is a “tiny, vibrating" bit of energy; it has “no thickness, only length, and so strings are one-dimensional entities.” (The Fabric of the Cosmos, p. 345)

These strings render energy into different components of matter depending upon the frequency at which they vibrate. Greene: “Instead of yielding different musical tones, the different vibrational patterns in string theory correspond to different kinds of particles.” So ultimately, there is no matter, or rather, all matter is simply energy: “At the ultramicroscopic level, the universe would be akin to a string symphony vibrating matter into existence.”

But for "science" there’s a catch: How small are superstrings? “Some hundred billion billion times smaller than a single atomic nucleus (10-33 centimeters).”

How small is that? “No one has ever seen a string …. And it is likely that . . . no one every will. Strings are so small that a direct observation would be tantamount to reading the text on this page from a distance of 100 light-years: it would require resolving power a billion billion times finer than our current technology allows.”

So are we talking science here or metaphysics? Greene admits: “Some scientists argue vociferously that a theory so removed from direct empirical testing lies in the realm of philosophy or theology, not physics.”

Here’s where science has reached a limit, I believe, and a metaphysical threshold stands. Can science keep going and cross it, and remain "science"? Or is it just the scientist who's crossing it, using his rational faculties and imagination? Greene thinks legit science can keep going: “I find this view shortsighted, or, at the very least premature. While we may never have technology capable of seeing strings directly, the history of science is replete with theories that were tested experimentally through indirect means.”

Well, the question is, how indirect? And what constitutes indirect means? I suspect that in the answer to that question lies the solution to much of the current debate between "science" and "religion."

May I just suggest that if Greene and company can either cross into metaphysics without checking their lab coats at the door, or verify something like one-dimensional objects, invisible points of energy through indirect means, perhaps we can detect something like intelligence or design through indirect means as well?

Aren't there things in life that, strictly speaking, are simply not empirically testable, but that may be known using one's rational faculties, imagination, and intellect?

Of course, some are not buying string theory at all, in some cases because it's simply not accessible to testing equipment. But why should our grasp of reality be limited to the instruments that we happen to be able to build? Are Beethoven's String Quartets simply so many soundwaves, or are they something more than that? If superstrings are there, how did they get tuned to come up with a "thing" like Beethoven?

Mere Conservatism

In Touchstone, and in these pages, I have developed reputation for criticizing church innovators, in particular those who would make obnoxious changes in the interest of apologetics (which Karl Barth identified as an essentially unchristian enterprise), and those with an unadmitted desire to serve, and be rewarded by, the Spirit of the Age. It is in these areas where I believe the clearest and most emphatic testimonies need to be given in our day on behalf of the faith once delivered to the saints. It is here where the hungriest wolves, the falsest shepherds, and the most foolish sheep are found.

I would not leave my post, however, without equal clarity and emphasis on the danger of another phenomenon, something that would appear to answer the innovators, but is not the sort of conservatism I believe the Lord requires of the church. I have before me some of the literature of a society (and they are legion--the like is found in and among many churches) that seeks to preserve some of the forms of worship that were used earlier in its communion--not that much earlier than our own day, to be sure--but which have been largely supplanted during the last several generations by liturgical innovations--attempts to change the teachings of the church to something more acceptable to the modern mind.

Over the years I have followed the proceedings of this and similar traditionalist groups, and have become convinced that at the bottom of many of them there is something not only selfish, but self-deceptive and sinful. The selfishness comes from the refusal to make or accept changes that charity and common sense would seem to require, simply because one is more comfortable with the way things have been, a “mere conservatism,” that has no place in the Church.

To be sure, all that has to do with worship has to do with the teaching of the church (lex orandi, lex credendi), and in this respect our worship is essentially conservative. We have something to conserve, to pass on whole and pure to the next generation of Christians. This requires and justifies an absolute conservatism in doctrine and the worship in which it is expressed; it is not this principle that I wish to question. Nor do I agree with those who insist on the nonsensical idea that all the church does and says in worship must be transparent to the novice or the spiritual infant: indeed, at its heart is a Mystery impenetrable to the greatest saint.

Rather, it is an attitude that makes its own comfort, or spiritual exultation on its own terms, paramount in worship. This may be found not only in those who want drums and electric guitars, but among those who insist that the cadences of an older English are more suitable to the grandeur of deity than the modern pronominal forms, or that only certain musical genres are valid for worship. (I am willing to consider these arguments, but often find their advocates unconvincing because I question their motives for saying so, and thus also their qualification to advise the churches in such matters.) The same applies to those for whom the only acceptable language for the Mass is no longer understood by the people--priestcraft against which rebellion is justified. The Church requires for its leadership wiser heads than the partisans can supply.

I am not attempting to overrule or illegitimize any of these forms in and of themselves, or say they should not be used, or even that many of the arguments employed in their favor lack weight. That is not the point, nor is it my place to pass a defining or controlling judgment on these matters by myself. Rather, I am saying that among the considerations those responsible for the teaching of the Church must judge as best they are able is whether any proposed changes or retentions in its worship or its language--including its translations of the Bible--arise from the desire to maintain the comfort level of some faction (including the clergy), or whether they are called for by the love of truth and the requirements of charity. And by the latter I do not mean “ease of comprehension,” for this sometimes comports with neither truth nor love--a lesson our generation has yet to learn.

Can these judgments be made? Yes, they not only can, but must be, for decisions on leading the churches depend on them. It is one of the demands placed upon the apostolic leadership, which must consider these matters in as great a depth as possible before making decisions that affect the churches’ language, which include its music, its prayers, its Bibles, its lectionaries, and all that touches the communal worship of God.

I have been reading the literature of the society that motivated these remarks for more than twenty years now. My opinion is that any professed desire it has to maintain theological orthodoxy (that is, the proper worship of God) by the retention of older language forms is incidental to the sentimental antiquarianism that is its deepest root, which shall wither with the passing of a generation. I gave its members a fair chance to convince me that the altered forms they dislike are the necessary and inevitable carriers of heresy, but they did not, the heretics among the innovators having, in that regard, failed in their revisional mission.

To change language to what is susceptible to interpretation in a heretical way (as are all orthodox texts) is not the same as changing it to heresy. My experience in liberal churches has given me to understand that even the most apostate of its preachers must depend on heretical understandings of their words to convey their message to their party members in the congregation. For a very long time in their campaign to de-Christianize the churches they must retain the appearance of orthodoxy. //

Episcopal Bishops Look for Ambiguity

Also known as convenient darkness. Archbishop accused of dehumanizing gays, declares tomorrow's Daily Telegraph, reporting the apparent failure of poor Rowan Williams' attempt to dissuade the Episcopal Church from saying . . . a very rude thing to the Anglican Semi-Communion. The significant paragraph goes:

the Daily Telegraph has seen a draft document drawn up by a senior bishop [Henry Parsley of Alabama] who urges his colleagues to adopt a far less clear position that will be open to a wide range of interpretations, allowing liberal American bishops considerable leeway.

The trouble is, speaking as someone who covered the house of bishops from the press gallery at five General Conventions, these people don't see any problem with this kind of deceit and deception. They think it's prudent, even pastoral, not dishonorable. No letting their yeas be yea and their nays nay, because then they might not get their way, or if they do it might cost them something.

From the Inbox 21 September 2007

A small matter, in both senses: Hyphens fall victim to the email [sic] society, from the Daily Telegraph, announcing that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary "has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words."

Also from the DT, Sex and the internet used to promote Israel, in which the deputy director general of the Israeli foreign ministry says the group with the most negative views of Israel is "the cohort of young men, aged from 18 to 35, so we took advice on how best to get a positive message across to them and the answer was by using sexy images."

From the English Catholic magazine The Tablet, Alex Kirby's Green prayers for a beautiful world, about the Patriarch of Constantinople's latest interfaith meeting on the environment.  It included an amusing typo in the second paragraph: "t was the place chosen for the service celebrated by the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, titular leader of 250 Orthodox Christians" (they get it right several paragraphs later).

In his opening address to this year's symposium, the patriarch himself verged on the apocalyptic. He began with a warning that "the danger of an avoidable environmental catastrophe is now more acute than ever". All was not yet lost, he said: "Neither our scientific friends nor our fellow leaders of the world of faith would have come to Greenland if we thought the future of the planet was utterly hopeless."

But his conclusion was stark: "Senior figures from many religious traditions have offered up, each in his own way, a silent prayer for the future of our beautiful world, for the people who live on Earth now, and for the generations that will succeed us, assuming that human folly does not destroy life on earth altogether."

Also from The Tablet,  a review of the Catholic philosopher and Templeton Prize winner Charles Taylor's latest book A Secular Age. The theologian Fergus Kerr writes that

Taylor wants to lay out what it takes to go on believing in God, in the absence of any equivalent to the intellectual, cultural and imaginative surroundings in which pre-modern religion was quietly embedded. This is what he calls our "social imaginary": how we collectively sense what is normal and appropriate in our dealings with one another and with the world around us. This is something deeper and more diffused than philosophical theories or thought-out positions.

From the Wall Street Journal, a short article on Finding room for conservatives in interfaith dialogues.

From Salon.com, The Mormons are coming, by Andrew Hehir, a review of the Mormon historian Terryl Givens' People of Paradox. Among other interesting ideas in the review:

In his introduction, Givens speculates that Mormonism is on the path toward becoming "the first new world faith since Islam." That may be premature, since the global ratio of Muslims to Mormons is roughly 115 to 1. Still, the longer you consider the parallels between these two faiths, the more provocative they become, which I'm pretty sure was not Givens' intention. Most obviously, both religions involve divine revelations directly communicated to a charismatic latter-day prophet, who rapidly attracts followers but is widely viewed by outsiders as a huckster, a fake or even a madman.

To their respective followers, Mohammed and Joseph Smith are not the inventors of new denominations but restorers of the original, uncorrupted monotheistic tradition of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Even the language of the two faiths' central tenets is strikingly similar. In reciting the Shahadah, or principal declaration of faith, Muslims may say: "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His Messenger," or "I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God." One of the most frequent forms of "testimony" in a Mormon meetinghouse comes when a worshiper rises to declare: "I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God."

From the Times Literary Supplement, Ryszard Kapuscinski: enemy of provincialism, a review by Edith Hall of his Travels with Herodotus.

And finally, something sent to me by a regular reader of Mere Comments: Zipskinny, which gives you various demographic information for every zip code in the country. The value of the information is limited, for all sorts of reasons (e.g., one zip code may cover two very different communities, so that the average for the area tells you little about either), but you may enjoy it.

The Federal Vision

One of our editors has pointed me to the De Regno Christi website, which is now discussing the Federal Vision now being debated among Reformed Christians, and a movement led by, among several others, our own Peter Leithart. The contributors include Peter and our own Darryl Hart. For more information see:

The Federal Vision, which includes the Joint Federal Vision Statement and several articles by Peter;
The Federal Vision: In their own words, a site compiled by critics giving a lot of talks and papers by the advocates of the Federal Vision; and
Debating the Federal Vision, a short critical article from the Banner of Truth website.

And here are the Wikipedia and the Theopedia articles on it.

Book Notices, April 2006

THE LIFE OF DAVID
by Robert Pinsky
Schocken, 2005.
(209 pages)

I was prepared to dislike Pinsky’s book, and the howler on the first page of the text was not encouraging (“David and the Witch of Endor”!?). My dislike deepened as the book progressed: Pinsky, a widely admired poet who teaches in Boston University's creative writing program, plays source critic for a few pages, gossips inconclusively that Jonathan and David might have been homosexual lovers (thus missing the point of Jonathan's disrobing before David: namely, Jonathan abdicates as crown prince), passes on the bizarre legend that Goliath and David were cousins.

Yet, the book has its strengths, as Pinsky captures the drama and passion of the David story, as well as the complex piety of the man after God's own heart, that is missing from most commentaries on 1-2 Samuel.

— Peter J. Leithart

JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL
by Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005
(846 pages, $15.95, paperback)

Alan Jacobs wrote in The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis: “The surreptitiousness of Faery’s true dangers is harder to capture [harder to capture than the “overt” dangers of Faery Tolkien portrayed in The Lord of the Rings]; I have seen it done nowhere better than in Susanna Clarke’s extraordinary novel. . . . That surreptitiousness lies primarily in the old idea that Faery overlaps our world — that one can, unwillingly and unwittingly, pass from one into the other.”

It is an extraordinary novel about two magicians trying to return English magic to its former glory. Mr. Norrell clutches his knowledge of magic, Gollum-like, to himself, while Jonathan Strange, his only pupil, attacks the study and practice of magic with abandon and, eventually, madness. Both help England win the Napoleonic Wars. There are many haunting scenes, both in our world and in the world of Faery, whose thistledown-haired king is the most endearing and fearful villain you will ever encounter.

Anyone who likes the writings of the Inklings will love this book. The only caution here is that there are horrendous scenes graphically, but not gratuitously, displayed.  One of the novel’s delights, for those so inclined, is its generous use of long elaborate footnotes which include many stories of magic and Faery. This is a bookish book. Yet it is a novel that provides, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “an enlargement of our being.”

— Frank Freeman

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK:
MEANING AND MESSAGE
by George Martin
Loyola, 2005
(477 pages; $22.95; paperback)

Martin, the founding editor of God’s Word Today, helps ordinary Christians apply the best of modern and ancient scholarship for an imaginative entry into the biblical text and the biblical world. His Gospel According to Mark is a verse-by-verse commentary with maps and many helpful, concise articles on historic, cultural, and geographic background. Martin devotional presentation, moving from historical material to practical life-application, provides enough information, but not too much for the general reader. This is the first volume in Loyola's “Opening the Scriptures” series.

— Mike Aquilina

THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS
by Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Andrew Hurley & illustrated by Peter Sis
Viking, 2005
(236 pages, $25.95, hardcover)

Borges is a humble virtuoso, a skeptic fascinated by religion. In this new translation of a book that first appeared in 1957, Borges gives the reader a modern bestiary (or mostly bestiary, as it does include other beings) culled from books of folklore, myth, and even from C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (Lewis gets two entries, Kafka three, Poe one).

“Like all miscellanies,” Borges writes, “like those inexhaustible volumes by Robert Burton, Fraser, or Pliny, The Book of Imaginary Beings has not been written for consecutive reading. Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”

This alphabetical miscellany includes 116 entries, such as The Monster Acheron, Swedenborg’s Angels, Banshees, The Brownies, The Centaur, Elves, Fairies, The Golem, The Hippogriff, The Kraken, The Unicorn, Valkyries, et. al. Most of the entries are one to three pages long and refer to a wide range of classical and esoteric works. He includes Dante’s versions of various famous creatures, and mentions G. K. Chesterton’s dream of a tree “which devoured the birds that rested in its branches and which put out feathers instead of leaves when springtime came.”

Borges’s skepticism, though it can be soul-wearying in his other works, here works to his advantage and his touch is light. He gently mocks all religions, but also the modern age’s claim to know oh so much more than the Dark Ages. He does not practice what Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”

— Franklin Freeman

LIQUID LIFE
by Zygmunt Bauman
Polity Press, 2005
(164 pages)

Liquids are protean, shape-changing substances. According to Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw and one of the chief observers of “postmodernism,” contemporary life is liquid life. In a liquid society, conditions change so fast that the society never has the time to freeze into routines, habits, institutions and “individual achievements cannot be solidified into lasting possessions because, in no time, assets turn into liabilities and abilities into disabilities.”

Unlike premodern societies, where individuals are “raftsmen” carried by the currents of tradition, modern society produces “sailors” who have to chart their own course. Liquid Life is a vigorous exploration of liquid society, especially as life is shaped and reshaped by market forces, turning all activities and goods (including religion) into consumables that lose their value in use and are tossed away as trash.

Bauman urges an ethic of responsibility for those who are excluded from the top echelons of the global economic hierarchy, and urges the renewal of loyalty and enduring friendship. Liquid Life suggests a radical strategy for combating the world: A strategy of staying put.

— Peter J. Leithart

THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES
by Ian Shapiro
Princeton University Press, 2005
($24.95, hardback)

If method in science (as the search for what is true) may be regarded as dialectical movement between visions of wholes — theory — and experience, refined and controlled as “experiment” in the natural and social sciences, truth is harmed by any fault in the movement. Ian Shapiro’s The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences is a Baconian objection to the all too frequent dominance of theory over reality in the human sciences — particularly in his own field of political science — such that the researcher is far more concerned with how reality can be made to fit the theory than the actual state of things which is his putative object of study.

The catalog description of the book caught my eye because Shapiro is dealing here in his own field with what theologians define as heresy: attempts to minimize and distort the subject matter of theology in service of a vision of reality controlled by the illegitimate dominance of one of its aspects. In Arianism, for example, the humanity of Christ overcomes his deity, in egalitarianism, equality dissolves the divine and human hierarchies.

All such intellectual movements may be understood as the attempt to make reality fit an explanatory theory with insufficient attention to the reality itself, the inevitable result of which is failure of the theory. The book is written for specialists in the “formally oriented social sciences that are principally geared toward causal explanation.” The monitory finger Shapiro raises here, however, points to a rule of universal application.

— S. M. Hutchens

AUDEN AND CHRISTIANITY
by Arthur Kirsch
Yale University Press, 2005
(207 pages)

Famous for being a Christian and an artist, W. H. Auden was once asked to describe his particular brand of Christianity. Auden distinguished: Theologically, an Augustinian with an apophatic reticence; liturgically, “Anglo Catholic, though not too spiky”; organizationally a skeptic, since “none of the churches look too hot, do they?”

Kirsch, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of various works on Auden, has written the first book-length study of Auden’s profoundly comic faith. Kirsch weaves together biography and literary analysis, quoting at length from Auden’s diverse corpus of poems, essays, lectures on Shakespeare, Melville, and Cervantes, sermons, and letters, to reveal a deeply idiosyncratic, and not altogether appealing, believer.

Auden’s homosexuality is well-known, but Kirsch shows how, in Auden’s own words, his thoughts “pottered / from verses to sex to God / without punctuation. His exploratory sort of orthodoxy veers close to heterodoxy at various points. Yet, he remains an essential and essentially Christian thinker and poet, and Kirsch’s book provides a fine introduction to his work.

— Peter J. Leithart

The Liturgical Referee

A friend sends a link to New Liturgical Position, announcing the creation of a new position in the Church, the liturgical referee.

Liturgical Referees will travel around the world randomly attending Masses. Liturgical Referees will stand, mostly quietly, to the side of the sanctuary during Mass and call out signals if he observes any liturgical penalties according to the GIRM and other liturgical documents. Only in the case of penalties that would make the Mass itself invalid will the Liturgical Referee blow his whistle and when necessary call for any replays to correct any mistake made. Penalty markers may be thrown during the Mass to alert the celebrant to any problems that might need immediate correction.

The story offers a picture guide to the signals the referee will be using.

Talk Like a Pirate

News you can use: today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. According to the Daily Telegraph, you must:

Growl - and scowl often. Pirates don't use a cultured, elegant, smooth vocalization - they mutter and growl.

Gesture with your hands frequently. Don't forget that pirates do most of their talking on the deck of a ship - out on the ocean, where wind, waves, and bird calls make it tough to hear. Gesturing often gives you a sense of "being there."

Run words together. Saying, "The boys and I were out for a lovely day on the water today" sounds like something you'd overhear at a yacht club. Instead, try, "Me'n'these here scurvy scallywags drug our sorry keesters out t'th'ship'n'had us a grand great adventuaaarrr! We almost had t'keelhaul Mad Connie f'r gettin inter th' grog behind our backs!" Note that you should always endeavour to call the addressee by some insulting name, usually involving an animal. "Yer a scurvy bilge rat, ya pompous gasbag" or "Here's yer dinner, ya mangy cockroach."

Those of you who are pastors might translate today's sermons into Pirate. You wouldn't have to wonder if people were paying attention.

What I Think of ID

Rod Dreher, in his beliefnet blog, writes about Farrell on ID and the Conservative Press, in which he describes a "fiery post" by John Farrell in which "he tears into conservative journals and journalists who have, in his view, given unmerited aid and comfort to ID backers."

Rod himself says he doesn't think much about ID at all, and says that while his sympathies are with IDers--often because of their reasonableness and the way they are sometimes trashed by anti-IDers--that doesn't mean he agrees with ID.

But, he wonders, "I'd love to know how the guys at Touchstone, which has been a big supporter of ID, respond to Farrell's post."

I simply lack the time to write much at all today (and this week), but let me say that the current slate of senior editors here have a range of opinions about ID taken as whole. Part of the problem, I would submit, that there are various sorts of IDers and any group is going to have many fringes, people identifying themselves as IDers whom other IDers don't accept. (Just as there are scientists embarrassed by the anti-religious ravings of Dawkins the scientist.)

What I am coming to find frustrating is how politicized things have become, as well as how imprecise some of the vocabularly is. What, for instance, does someone mean by "evolution"? You really have to ask.

And then, IDers are suspect because most of them are religious believers, while scientists such as Dawkins can speak about theology as much as they wish. I sat and listened to a lecture by Steven Weinberg that was mostly about religion (and wasn't supposed to be) while his ID opponent talked nothing but science.

As to Farrell's post, I am not sure what reasonableness it adds to the situation; my preference would be to hear lots of science debated head on. That's why I've been interested in ID in the first place, because I find science fascinating. Not polemics, but real science.

Farrell may be adding fuel to the fire. He describes Avery Cardinal Dulles's piece in First Things as "otherwise thoughtful" because he gave "a crumb of credibility" to ID. You can't give any space to ID, you see. Much of the opposition is bluster.

Well, I've given space to ID. It's a reasonable position to argue that blind natural mechanical pathways proposed in the past for the rise of life and conscious mind are  inadequate--and I believe the evidence for the inadequacy is mounting--and that a design inference is reasonable. There is a growing though quiet acceptance of a stronger anthropic principle, I would argue, and some scientists are simply retreating into multiverse theories, which means you can avoid the impression of any cosmos specially designed for man.

Things are getting very interesting from where I sit. I'll rest here for the time being and watch what comes next.

I Love Thy Rocks and Rills

     Why would certain perhaps well-intended politicians, who do not know that they do not love America, be disappointed by a general pacification in Iraq?  Or, more to the point, why would they not celebrate with beer and song?  Why would they not declare a holiday for their staff, and do Irish jigs on the table tops?

     In a superb article in The Weekly Standard (many thanks to Stuart Koehl for passing it along), David Gelernter argues that the key to understanding what he calls a desire for "defeat at all costs" is a commitment to internationalism.  The article warrants close attention, because Gelernter does not attribute malice to his political opponents.  He's suggesting that they have accepted a political religion, one that is not new.  It was all the rage in Europe after the nationalist disaster of World War I, but it lost what modest following it had in America because of those nation-uniting events that followed: the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.  According to the tenets of the internationalist faith, the worst outcome of the Iraq war would be an American victory, because that would confirm us in our separation from the rest of the world, our belief that we are special or different from or in some ways superior to that world.  We need, for the world's sake and for our own, to be brought into the fold -- they honestly believe, and if it takes a loss to accomplish that, then we should lose.  And so it is an act of international civic virtue to work hard to see to it that we do lose.

     I'm not interested, in this blog, in arguing for or against the wisdom of going to war in Iraq.  Let me serve advance notice: I don't want the discussion to veer off into wrangling about How Stupid the President Was or What Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction or Can Muslims Embrace Democracy.  Those are perfectly valid topics of discussion, but I'd like to steer clear of them and stick to Gelernter's thesis, and his observation that the typical American may still not be ready to identify internationalism with "what's best for the place where I happen to live."  Is internationalism -- by which we concede to a body of international diplomats and jurists our sovereignty, allowing them to draw up regulations for things as intimate as family life -- compatible with patriotism?

     I don't think so.  Now I happen to honor patriotism, and I'm suspicious of internationalism, but that's beside the point.  How can the two be compatible?  The virtue of patriotism is, simply, a special love and honor for one's native land.  Its soil is the small and local: it is expressed most powerfully in the celebration of our holidays, commemorating when our fathers stood against the Redcoats or the Turks or the armies of Napoleon, giving thanks to the God we worship, even if that worship is not universal.  So what if our games are clumsy and hard for strangers to figure out?  We still play them cheerfully, because they are our games.  Patriotism is not selfishness -- though human selfishness can corrupt anything.  It is a subset of charity, and is stirred by gratitude to those who gave us what we have not provided for ourselves.  It is implied in the great commandment that, among the ten, bridges our duty to God and our duty to neighbor: "Honor thy father and thy mother."  Now sometimes the world may be right, and your country may be wicked; and in those cases we must look to prudence, and to virtues that are higher than patriotism.  But unless you are living in Nazi Germany, in this world of tangled good and evil and wisdom and ignorance you will usually be called on, by patriotism, to love a country that is deserving of that special devotion despite its shortcomings, and certainly not to despise it.  For it may be that good people who love their country best will really improve it by that love -- and not the other way around, that those whose fiercest desire is to improve their country (in this case, by appealing to international wisdom) can ever really love it.  A patriot can hearken to the examples of other nations.  Peter the Great did.  But if you cannot imagine saying, even in matters of no ultimate moral import, "I don't care if the rest of the world does it, the rest of the world is wrong, the rest of the world can go to hell," then you are no patriot.  An American patriot can love soccer and not care for baseball.  He can love it for its merits as a game.  But if a man's main reason for pushing soccer is that the rest of the world plays it and we don't, and that therefore there is something wrong with us, then I think there is something wrong with him.

     But the internationalism of the left is the logical extension of statism generally.  A patriot would as soon give to Canada his authority to decide laws regarding marriage as he would give to the social worker next door his authority to tell his daughter when to be back home for the night.  Ah, but there it is -- it is exactly what the left has done with the man and his next door neighbor.  Anyone who says, "You are not competent to raise your own children, so I must teach them about sex, and I know better than you because I took a university class in the subject, taught by people who believe what I believe and what you don't," will also say, "You people in Podunk are not competent to devise your own curricula," and "You people in Iowa are not competent (beyond a certain narrow limit which I will graciously concede to you) to determine what shall or shall not be considered a marriage," and "You people in the United States are not competent to decide who are and are not your enemies, and how you should pursue war if you are threatened or attacked by them."  And this massive takeover will all be engineered under the aegis of benevolence, desire for peace, human rights, whatever.  Appealing to community -- that necessarily disincarnate abstraction called "the international community" -- they will end by destroying communities, reducing all the blessed Podunks and Nazareths of the world to mere zip codes.  Alasdair MacIntyre can tell us then what happens to the difficult training of virtues, when those bodily and earthy and bumptious things called neighborhoods and towns are no more.

Touchstone Event on Friday

This Friday, September 21 at 7 pm, Touchstone executive editor James Kushiner will be speaking in Colorado Springs on the topic: "The End of Science: Why God is Not Dead." Details can be found here. Come early to get a seat as it looks to be a full house. If you have questions, email me.

October 2007 Touchstone

The October issue is currently at the printer. It includes a critical symposium on preparing for marriage in our contemporary society, covering aspects such as the role of the churches, courtship, and romance.

This is Touchstone. So, it is not your "normal" dating symposium. It all starts with senior editor S. M. Hutchens's proposal that marriage be arranged by the parents. Then, there are responses by the young-and-married Jocelyn Mathewes, long-time InterVarsity campus worker (and Touchstone contributing editor) Kevin Offner, and senior editor James Hitchcock. We will also have a special response section in a future issue with letters from readers.

Here are some other things to look forward to in this issue:

Psychology: When trying to understand Jesus and “what makes him tick,” the customary psycho-biographical methods do not apply to the God-man.

Place: As Christians are we to identify with a specific nation or state, or be cosmopolitan citizens of the world? What are the effects of this identification?

Parsonages: A reflection on the value to the pastor and to the congregation when a pastor lives among and beside those to whom he ministers.

Journey of Faith: A profile of Washington Post social writer Sally Quinn and her journey from Christianity to atheism to her current place as a spiritual seeker.

Graduation: A commencement address to a homeschool group that reminds young people that rather than just “going places,” they should aim for where all time is headed: to eternity. 

Humanities: “The development of the humanities in Western culture cannot be fully understood apart from an appreciation of scriptural husbandry and a kind of ecclesiastical mothering which, together, have birthed and nurtured western intellectual life down to the present.”

If you haven't already, subscribe today.

The Danger of Expecting a Windfall

Hey Folks, You're Spending My Inheritance, from the journal Dissent, may spark some uncomfortable thoughts in our middle-aged readers. The writer, Lillian Rubin, writes

For the last decade or so, economists have been telling us that the baby boomers, who represent over one-quarter of our total population, are about to become the beneficiaries of the greatest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. . . . The experts estimate that somewhere between $41 and $136 trillion will pass from one generation to another in the next fifty years.

But the cost of care for the elderly may change this, and will for many people. After quoting several people who see their expected inheritance disappearing, she notes:

They don’t wish their parents ill. But for much of their lives these baby-boom children of the middle- and upper-middle class have known there was a cushion beneath them that would break any fall. They’re accustomed to being helped and supported by their parents’ generosity and have often lived their lives, made decisions about their own spending and saving based on their expectations of an inheritance. Now, as they watch that promise being washed away by a torrent of expenses related directly to their parents’ longevity, they’re finding out the hard way that this was a risky assumption.

A provocative article. In a future issue, by the way, Graeme Hunter will offer his reflections on retirement, prompted by reading this essay.

Book Notices, March 2006

From time to time, after a suitable period has passed, we post the Book Notices from a previous issue, since they can't be posted in the archives (something to do with the software). Here are the Notices from the issue of March, 2006.

THE WISDOM PARADOX:
HOW YOUR MIND CAN GROW STRONGER AS YOUR BRAIN GROWS OLDER
by Elkhonon Goldberg,
Gotham, 2005.
(337 pages; hardback)

There’s lots of bad news as we get older: Fading memory, perhaps dementia, inability to carry out sustained mental activities. Clinical Professor of Neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, Goldberg argues that aging brings benefits as well, benefits he summarizes under the heading of “wisdom.”

As he grew older, he found himself able to solve unexpected problems with unnatural ease and to connect important data in unexpected ways. Goldberg argues that with experience the brain becomes more facile with pattern recognition, which enhances problem-solving abilities. Along the way, Goldberg suggests a reformulated theory of brain duality: The left hemisphere is the repository of settled pattern while the right hemisphere processes novel situations and information.

Though Goldberg is writing popular science rather than theology or ethics, his conclusions vindicate the ancient wisdom that honors the wisdom of ancients.

— Peter J. Leithart

FACE TO FACE:
PORTRAITS OF THE DIVINE IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
by Robin Margaret Jensen
Fortress Press, 2005
(234 pages, $20.00; paperback, illustrated)

In Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity, Robin Jensen, a professor at Vanderbilt, tracks the Church's devotional art through the age of the Fathers, from representations that are mostly narrative or symbolic to icons that approach portraiture.

The book provides a judicious, theologically sensitive analysis of the way the church, in its approach to art, confronted the implications of doctrines such as the incarnation and the Trinity, as well as Old Testament prohibitions against idols. Jensen gives us sympathetic readings of the entire range of ancient opinions. A well-documented work of scholarship in both art history and theology, Portraits is also an accessible and even enjoyable tour for interested lay readers.

— Mike Aquilina

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN SIX GLASSES
by Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Walker and Company, 2005
(311 pages)

We rarely think of it as we guzzle our favorite drinks, but beverages are intricately intertwined with the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the West. What would a Greek symposium be without wine? Would there have been an Enlightenment or a French Revolution without the stimulus of coffee and coffeehouses? Would the colonists have revolted if the British had reduced taxes on tea and molasses (useful for distilling)? If Coke did not exist, how could we measure the spread of global capitalism?

Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, has written a highly readable account of the historical significance of six major beverages – beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea, and Coke – and he predicts that the most basic beverage, water, will become the most valued and contentious liquid in the future. Standage’s is a book that reminds us that our glasses flow not only with drink but with history.

— Peter J. Leithart

THE GOSPEL HOAX:
MORTON SMITH’S INVENTION OF SECRET MARK
by Stephen C. Carlson
Baylor University Press, 2005
(151 pages; $19.95; paperback)

During a 1958 visit to a monastery near Jerusalem, Morton Smith discovered a manuscript describing a hitherto unknown version of the Gospel of Mark. Or did he?

The find, which came to be known as the Secret Gospel of Mark, caused an immediate sensation for it had Jesus spending the night with a youth “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body” while Jesus “taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.” Although Smith had become a leading authority on ancient Palestine by the time he published his findings years later, many scholars suspected that the document was a fake.

Stephen Carlson comes to this question trained primarily not as a biblical scholar but as an attorney. His review of handwriting analyses shows that the manuscript is the product of a modern hand. (More conclusive tests cannot be performed because the manuscript has been missing since 1976, when the last set of photographs of it were taken.) The letter of Clement of Alexandria in which the controversial excerpt is imbedded likewise contains anachronisms that argue against its antiquity. Finally, Secret Mark’s treatment of homosexuality exudes the sexual mores of the 1950s.

Without resorting to attacks on his character, Carlson makes a convincing case that Smith uniquely possessed the means, the motive, and the opportunity to perpetrate such a scholarly fraud. Even more ingenious is his uncovering of the clues planted by Smith — involving, e.g., bilingual puns and details about the iodization process for producing table salt — that amount to a confession for anyone clever enough to decipher them.

The academy’s willingness to suspend its usual skepticism, according to Carlson, suggests that Secret Mark satisfies some deep-seated ideological desire and that Smith’s ability to fool his peers illustrates “the role of faith in academia,” especially when “usefulness trumps truth.”

— Patrick Gray

1491:
NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS
by Charles C. Mann.
Knopf, 2005
(509 pages; hardback)

American history textbooks usually propound the consensus view of historians, anthropologists, and archeologists that prior to the European exploration and settlement, the peoples of the Americas existed in an uncivilized dream-state of Edenic simplicity. It’s even the law of the land, reflected in the 1964 Wilderness Act’s claim that early Americans were “untrammeled by man.”

Yet, for several decades, scholars have been challenging central pillars of this theory. In 1491, Charles C. Mann, a science and nature writer and correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly, tells the story of these scholars and their discoveries, presenting evidence that American Indians were much more numerous, more civilized, and arrived in North and South America much earlier than the standard account indicates.

By 1800 B.C., for instance, the Olmec people in central Mexico “invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the orbits of planets, created a 365-day calendar . . . , and recorded their histories in accordion-folded ‘books’ of fig tree bark paper.” An eighteenth century Jesuit estimated there were 30 million Mexicans prior to Columbus. Europeans arrived not in empty Eden, but in a “beehive of people” (the phrase is from Bartolome de Las Casas) whose environment was already deeply shaped by human work.

No doubt the jury is still out on much of this evidence, but Mann’s elegant book makes a more than plausible case for a new paradigm.

— Peter J. Leithart

Fear of Death

     In the current issue of First Things, there's a terrific article by the pseudonymous Spengler of the on-line Asia Times, on the essential paganism of Islam.  It's not Spengler's original idea.  With his deep-revolving wit and sharp eye for the fine distinction, he analyzes the thought of the early twentieth century Jewish sociologist Franz Rosenzweig, who argued that the three religions of Abraham needed to be distinguished according to the place the love of God finds in them.  To put it simply, the experience of the Muslim believer is not that of being loved.  The theological consequence is startling: "Rosenzweig . . . requires us to see faith from the existential standpoint of the believer, who in revealed religion knows God through God's love [italics mine].  For Rosenzweig, paganism constitutes a form of alienation from the revealed God of Love; Allah, the absolutely transcendent God who offers mercy but not unconditional love, is therefore a pagan deity."

     The analysis is not meant to insult, but to probe what the individual and social implications of such paganism might be.  The key to the analysis is the universal human fear of death.  By this fear we should understand no craven terror, necessarily, but the incongruity of our minds with the finality that should silence their thought forever.  We are endowed with an intellect, as Hamlet says, "with such large discourse, seeing before and after," able to apprehend the idea of infinity, able to wonder at the stars, but knowing also that there must come an end; and without the knowledge that one is loved by the Being who is Love, it is a pointless end.

     Man finds that situation intolerable, so he seeks his "immortality" in empty extensions of his person.  In ancient paganism, and in Islam, that extension is the race or state (hence, I'll add, the fascinating contretemps between the Nazis and their anti-Judaic, statist sympathizers among the Arabs).  Spengler thus cites Rosenzweig: "The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears.  The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arise from this.  It is clear form this why antiquity never developed the concept of a representative democracy.  Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts."  Therefore the pagan risks nothing when he fights in a war for his people, even when he uses suicide as his fundamental military weapon: though he knows too that his people themselves will also someday die, his only hope is to delay that fall as long as possible, and that he matters, he is only "he," as a part of that people.  He lives not sub specie aeternitatis, among the communion of saints, but under the weight of the ever-grinding millwheels of time, one grain among others, and finally indistinguishable.

     What of the neopagans of the west?  Spengler doesn't extend the article to consider them; it isn't really relevant to his argument.  But consider the dreariness of a paganism that is not only severed from the experience of being loved by God -- a confidence that expands the heart, that can transform the petty limitations of our lives and make them shine, turning the picket fence around one's poor cottage into a gate of pearl.  This new paganism is also severed from the old pagan consolation afforded the patriot.  It has neither cathedral nor Parthenon.  It is collectivist in politics, without the slightest warmth for the collective people.  It trumpets children, though as a "resource," our "most valuable resource," more valuable even than uranium or oil, while having as few of them as possible.  How does the fear of death play out among pagans for whom a person such as, to choose one among a sorry lot, Hillary Clinton is even conceivable as a national leader -- a person with no discoverable roots to any past, and a love of country so tepid and insubstantial that, if it could be enclosed in metal and placed in her pocket, even the sharpest detectors at our airports would let it pass through?

     I don't know.  I can venture a guess.  I've wondered at the harried, and often quite loveless, pursuit of careers, everywhere and by everyone.  The career ends with death, true, and it doesn't have the same possibility of full-blooded camaraderie afforded by an army on the march.  But we've persuaded ourselves that it is something.  It matters.  Why it matters, I'm not sure -- except that if a person doesn't have one, that person is nobody, nothing, for all intents and purposes not alive.  The modern pagan cannot say, "I bow with reverence at the grave of my countryman Aeschylus, whose greatest boast was not that he wrote great plays, but that he slew the long-haired Mede at Marathon."  He cannot say, "I love my country, but more than I love her I love the Land of Rest to which I am called, by the God who is Himself love."  He can at least say, "My life, though it came from nowhere important and proceeds to nowhere important, was something: I was somebody important.  I had a career."

     Nice word, "career" -- literally meaning being bounced from pillar to post.  It makes me think of the healthiest thing I've seen all week, while visiting a boys' school in Washington: fourth and fifth graders, a dozen or more, swarming in a big grassy ravine, in the rain, playing two-hand touch football, untucked shirts and smudged knees and all.  They weren't plying a career, thank God.  And I know that I'm at my best when I'm not doing that, either.  It may be that the knowledge that you are loved sets the heart radically at ease: you can breathe freely, you can see the blessings of age, you can relieve your fear of death with a hope for the abundant life not only beyond death but also here in seed, maybe a mustard seed.  You can be free not to be important.  You can play -- without turning play into the military "exercise".  You can form a community of persons, not bricks.  You can laugh at what you do poorly, and do it anyway.  You can bid the jihad farewell.  You can look at the stars.

From the Inbox 14 September 2007

A few things of possible interest from my reading.

From the Times Literary Supplement, Down the pub with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a review of Diana Pavlac Glyer's new book The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Among other things, she argues that the Inklings kept Tolkien from ruining the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Is the Web a Threat to Culture?, also from the TLS, reviews Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. Among the interesting remarks:

. . . a naive, if fragile, faith in popular democracy endures among technological utopians, many of whom see digital technology as the means towards a more perfect polity (though recent setbacks in electronic voting have caused some to reconsider).

In 1990, computer programmers at a Xerox research centre developed an online “world”, where anyone could create characters and through them live out fantasy lives. (It was a forerunner of virtual worlds such as Web 2.0’s Second Life.) When some fantasies proved incompatible with others, the programmers assumed that plebiscites would settle the disputes.

They found instead that the disputes only escalated. As a result, the programmers were forced to transform themselves from benign returning officers reading off the ayes and the nays into little dictators issuing electronic ASBOs and expulsion orders.

From the English Catholic weekly magazine The Tablet, East Meets West — At a price by Jonathan Luxmoore.  He writes:

"We're living an American-style liberal dream here, which compels people to fend for themselves and allows shoe-cleaners to become millionaires," explains Krzysztof Zgoda, a Solidarity union vice president. "The problem so far is we've produced a lot more of the first than the second. Most Poles assume this kind of system is the norm everywhere and don't even realise that they have rights. The media and the politicians don't even discuss it now - it's unfashionable and retrograde to question the free market."

When Zgoda and other Solidarity veterans celebrated their movement's twenty-seventh anniversary at the end of August, they may well have wondered if this was the kind of Poland that they struggled for. As Communist rule collapsed in 1989, a premium was placed on quick economic growth and it was widely assumed that Poland needed a phase of unhampered capitalism to unleash its population's acquisitive instincts. Regulations have since imposed a measure of accountability. But the notion that markets define their own morality remains deeply ingrained.

Also from The Tablet, Argument Not Always Angelic, a review of John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel, a response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in letters from his guardian angel, who was also Gregor Mendel's and Charles Darwin's guardian angel. The reviewer, the ex-Catholic philosopher Anthony Kenny, is hard on the book.

For you mystery fans, from the Daily Telegraph: Ian Rankin: Why Rebus could return.

And for those of you interested in Anglican life: Rwandan Politics Intrudes on American Church from the Christianity Today site.

And for those of you interested in Islam in America: An American Muslim in Cairo from the Los Angeles Times.

Finally, from Vanity Fair, an expose of a cultural hero, Arthur Miller's Missing Act.

From the Archives: Art Crisis

Waiting for your next Touchstone? Here's is something from our archives you might want to spend some time reading, if you're interested in art and culture: Heinrich Stammler's The Crisis of Modern Art, from our Summer 1991 issue. Stammler, who died last fall, was Professor Emeritus of Soviet and East European Studies at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. An excerpt:

[T]o the attentive reader [of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset] there will not escape a subdued note of apprehension in Ortega's spirited advocacy of modern art. Too much a son of the Mediterranean landscape, so rich in natural, organic forms and the greatest monuments in all branches of the arts, he could not but note with some alarm the destructive, quasi-nihilistic elements in modernism. Would it not be possible by means of a philosophical analysis of its art, to diagnose, amidst the bewildering phenomena of the twentieth century, the dangers, fevers, and uncertainties besetting the age? And so the following worrying questions suggested themselves to him:

“Should that enthusiasm for pure art be but a mask which conceals surfeit with art and hatred of it? But how can such a thing come about? Hatred of art is so unlikely to develop as an isolated phenomenon; it goes hand in hand with hatred of science, hatred of State, hatred, in sum, of civilization as a whole. Is it conceivable that modern Western man bears a rankling grudge against his own historical essence?”

Yet at this passage, just when the reader is becoming really curious about what this astute observer might be able to tell him about the destiny of his own culture, the canny Andalusian pauses. Did his inborn Latin realism at this moment warn him against launching into further predictions? He simply dismisses the reader with the tantalizing sentence: “This is the moment prudently to lay down one’s pen and let a flock of questions take off on their winged course . . . .”

Among thinkers and critics less cautious stands the celebrated Russian philosopher, Nicholas Berdiaev. He was one of the first to discern in the art of the twentieth century unmistakable indications for the universal crisis which ceaselessly agitates the contemporary consciousness and conscience.

The subtitle of Stammler's article is "Nicholas Berdiaev’s Prophetic Critique." He gives Berdiaev's description of Picasso's art:

All the joy of life under the sun incarnate has vanished. A cosmic winter storm has torn away veil after veil, all colors have peeled off, all leaves fallen. The skin has been flayed from all things; all garments have been torn away; and all the flesh made manifest in the images of imperishable beauty has withered. It seems that a new cosmic spring will never return—there will be no more leaves, green, beautiful veils, incarnate synthetic forms. . . .

Holy Cross Day

A blessed feast day to those observing the Exaltation (or Triumph) of the Holy Cross today, September 14. Robert Hart has posted his homily on Sept. 14.

This is also the date on which St. John Chysostom fell asleep in the Lord, while en route to exile along the Black Sea in 407. John knew the way of the Cross, dying from exhaustion after long forced marches. In the West, the commemoration of John was moved to Sept. 13 because of Holy Cross; in the East it was moved to November 13.  Our new Calendar list both dates.

The Missionary Date

Yesterday I mentioned a symposium in our October issue on dating, courtship, and marriage. In the Wall Street Journal today we have "A Match Made on Earth" about when Christians marry "outside the fold."

The writer is Naomi Schaefer Riley. She notes:

For evangelicals who want to pair up with others of the same faith but don't manage to do so in their early 20s, trouble lies ahead, particularly for women. Evangelical churches now typically have a 60-40 split between women and men, which means that there are many more single evangelical women out there than their male counterparts. As [Lisa Ann Cockrel, managing editor at Brazos Press] explains, "I have friends who wanted to marry a Christian guy, are still single, and are more and more open to dating non-Christians as they get older. They're tired of waiting."

I think we know what St. Paul would say. But I also wonder if the waiting game isn't out there in the general population as well.

Oh, Riley does write about "missionary dating" as well. You know, where one dates a non-believer assuming or hoping that falling in love will help bring the other to Christ. Sometimes, I've heard, it works, but not usually.

Advice to Christian College Students

Kevin Offner, a veteran of the college campus, and a veteran working with InterVarsity (now with graduate students), writes this article offering advice to freshmen. Perhaps it will be of some benefit to you or someone you know.

Kevin, by the way, has just contributed an article on "Christian dating" to our symposium on dating, courtship and marriage in the October issue, which went to the printer this morning. You can subscribe or give a gift subscription here.

Catholics & Evangelicals In Naperville

Chicago-area readers should know about "The Roman Catholic and Evangelical Dialogue: Reflections on Ecumenism for the 21^st Century" being held this coming Sunday evening, September 16, in Naperville. It is sponsored by Act 3, a ministry founded by my friend John Armstrong.

Speakers:
Rev. Dr. Thomas Baima and Rev. Dr. Robert Barron (Catholic Participants)
Rev. Dr. John H. Armstrong and Rev. Dr. P. Andrew Sandlin (Protestant Participants)

 Alan Krashesky, anchorman for ABC News 7 in Chicago, will be the moderator for this event. Issues that divide and unite Catholics and Evangelicals will be discussed openly and a time for questions from the audience will follow.

Time: Sunday, Sept 16 - 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Location: North Central College in Naperville, Illinois @ Pfeiffer Hall, 310 East Benton Ave.

For more information call (630) 221-1817 during weekday business hours. There is no charge or required registration for these events. A free-will offering to cover expenses will be taken. A DVD version of this event will be made and sold several weeks after the Forum takes place.

And Puppy Makes Three

     There's a scene in the very good movie Scott of the Antarctic (scored with eerie brilliance by Ralph Vaughn Williams, by the way), in which Captain Scott is trying to persuade an experienced Norse explorer to come along with him.  The Norseman declines, but tries to press a piece of crucial advice: take more dogs.  The dog is only a dumb animal that man uses for his purposes.  They can be hitched up as draught animals, he says, and then, when they are no longer needed for that, they can be eaten.

     Scott understands -- but declines.  "We Englishmen think of dogs differently," he says, half trying to persuade himself to assume what he knows must be an extra risk.  "They are not only our servants, but our friends."  Not to say that, when it became quite necessary, Scott and his men in the final team spared the dogs.  But they didn't want to think of those animals as merely muscle for pulling and for calories.  Scott's hesitance, his underestimating the severity of the winds, his over-optimistic assessment of the capacity of nordic ponies to brave the cold, and a series of horribly bad breaks undid him in the end, as he and his last few companions froze to death on their return from the pole, a few short miles from their base camp.

     He may have been wrong for a trek to the South Pole, but I say his attitude was saner than the Norseman's -- that beca