Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

For All the Saints

Happy All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day (tomorrow.) And don't forget to order your 2008 Fellowship of St. James Calendar of the Christian Year, with its hundreds of saints listed from East and West, along with the Feasts of Our Lord and saints from the pages of the Old and New Testament. (Did you know that in some Western calendars Rachel, Deborah and Ruth are commemorated tomorrow? You would with our calendar.) That great cloud of witness remains our sure fellowship in the Body of Christ. Don't let that cloud be to you vague, foggy. It has names and dates, and they speak with one voice, "Glory to Jesus Christ!"

Putin & Martyrs

From Ecumenical News International:

Russia's Putin honours Stalin’s victims at Moscow killing field
ENI-07-0845

By Sophia Kishkovsky
Moscow, 31 October (ENI)--President Vladimir Putin has attended a memorial service conducted by Patriarch Aleksei II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, at a church built near a Soviet police secret killing field, where at least 20 000 people were executed at the peak of dictator Joseph Stalin's bloody purges.

The visit to the site, known as "Butovsky poligon", or "shooting range, on 30 October was for Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB secret security services, his first. The newly built Church of the Resurrection and the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia honours the 355 "new martyrs" who the Russian Orthodox Church has so far canonised after they were executed at Butovsky poligon.

About 1000 people are known to have died for their Orthodox faith at the shooting range. The church on the site was consecrated in May 2007 as part of ceremonies marking the reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. The latter is an émigré group that for decades called for proper acknowledgement of the new martyrs.

Willow Creek Was Wrong

A study of the "effectiveness of their programs and philosophy of ministry" from the leadership of Willow Creek Community Church reveals that it has been a "mistake" and is "not producing solid disciples of Jesus Christ." Read the story in Townhall.com here.

It appears that the church growth model brings in lots of people, but does not form strong Christians. And the report comes from inside Willow Creek. Bill Hybels says "we made a mistake." That's a pretty big mistake.

Murchison on the Right

Occasional contributor Bill Murchison writes this column today on the Religious Right at Townhall.com. Much is made about religion and politics. My point, which I've made before, is that the "religious left" puts more stock in politics that does (or has, I would argue) the "religious right." The "right" has been, rightly, concerned about the blatant trampling down by judicial fiat of longstanding views on abortion, and now, marriage.  Since I consider those foundational matters, which no society can fail to uphold without peril to its very existence, I have chosen to express that concern through the one political act I have at my disposal: voting. Sometimes, however, I don't even have that choice to make in a given race. However, just as Bill reminds us with the scriptural quotation at the end, I do not put my trust in princes. As far as my mental and spiritual energy goes, voting is barely a blip, but one that I will have to give account for. Afterwards I lose no sleep over Who's on First.  Politics is not only downstream from culture, it usually seems to work best for bottom feeders. I watch it here in Chicago. Fat contracts, open pork barrels, party hacks and patronage. Where's mine?

But you will read much in the next year about the disappointments of religious voters and how the game has now changed; about how those on the left have embraced religion. Everybody's religious, these days, everybody supports the troops, everybody wants to end poverty, everybody wants to grow the economy, everybody wants to improve education and test scores. Politicians seem born to talk and born to disappoint. But I've been disappointed since about 1968, so I can't even be disappointed anymore. Thank God for the judgment seat of Christ to keep your head straight.

Evangelicalism and the Gospel Coalition

The recently released November issue of Touchstone’s feature article is an interesting symposium on “Evangelicalism Today,” the participants in which are Russell Moore, Denny Burk, John Franke, Darryl Hart, Michael Horton, and David Lyle Jeffrey. I would not characterize most of the participants here as “Evangelicals” except in a broader sense than I customarily employ the term. Drs. Moore and Burk, for example, are Southern Baptists, Drs. Hart and Horton carry conservative Reformed credentials. Drs. Franke and Jeffrey seem closer-in, but in general, the view is from the periphery. That method of putting something under the microscope can be reasonably defended, but I would have found the piece somewhat more engaging if there had been more participation from the center.

When I speak of Evangelicalism without some kind of qualification, I am referring to the post-fundamentalist variety identified with admirable precision by Dr. Horton as having “moved beyond reactionary fundamentalism and built institutions that sustained a vital witness within mainline denominations and also provided an international network of parachurch agencies for cooperative mission.” The Southern Baptist Convention has a life and history of its own that touched upon all this, but operated quite independently; the same is true of Reformed confessionalism, which has always been very uncomfortable bedfellows with the Arminianizing revivalism that characterizes the mission of the groups Dr. Horton describes. As my grandmother complained from the other side about a member of her Baptist church that had apostasized to Westminster Seminary Presbyterianism, “they baptize babies and don’t believe in being born again.” In general, that’s not true of Evangelicals. And Southern Baptists are Southern Baptists.

Having spent the first half of my life with one foot in Evangelicalism and the other in fundamentalism (my grandfather, whom I loved deeply, was a pastor in the General Association of Regular Baptists), I wish to underline one of the principal differences between fundamentalism and Evangelicalism alluded to by Dr. Horton. The former is characterized by a morbid and triumphal individualism to which the founders of the Evangelical reaction (and Evangelicalism cannot be understood except as a reaction from fundamentalism) referred constantly, and condemned. It was hard for the fundamentalists to cooperate because this attitude was typical of its leaders. Like early continuing Anglicanism, or the Mafia, or the China of Confucius' day, or Europe between Charlemagne and the rise of the nation-states, or Germany in Kleinstaaterei, there was a kind of feudal mind at work that made large-scale combinations difficult.

Evangelicalism corrected this, set to dissolving old tribal barriers, including selected theological ones, and became a cooperative effort par excellence. In essence Evangelicalism was a liberalizing or opening movement, but this has been its own downfall--the antifundamentalist solvent it concocted for itself created a movement that had no confessional boundaries or identity with Christian tradition with sufficient depth or fiber to resist the egalitarian virus, an anti-Christian influence that neatly penetrated a defense system unequipped to handle it, so that the majority of Evangelicalism’s most prominent institutions are now thoroughly egalitarian. Evangelicalism finds itself reliving in our generation, under the influence of feminism, what Evangelical Protestantism of the nineteenth century found itself undergoing under the corrosive influence of biblical criticism--and it fell far more quickly completely.

While there has always been resistance to this, as there has been resistance to religious modernism within the Protestant mainline, it is interesting to note the emergence of a group within Evangelicalism that wishes to define the Gospel, the evangel upon which the movement is based, as “complementarian”--that is to say, an insistence that this is not just a point of view within Evangelicalism, as it has heretofore appeared in groups such as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, but of the essence of the Gospel. The Gospel Coalition’s confessional statement says,

In God's wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments.

The challenge the Coalition lays before Evangelicalism is nothing less than the requirement of a thorough reformation of the institutional mind and life in which Evangelicalism rose in reaction to fundamentalist privatism, counteracting changes which those institutions eventually underwent in accordance with an influence that was at the heart of Evangelicalism as a liberalizing (not just a de-fundamentalist-izing, but an anti-fundamentalistic) movement. In that sense it is requiring something contrary to the essence of Evangelicalism itself.

Shall it succeed? I wish it well, noting, however, that its success depends on its ability not to reclaim a lost Evangelical distinctive, but to become something Evangelicalism has never been.

Conservative Christians and the Available Choices

Two political stories:

First, two takes on Mitt Romney's Mormonism. The Religion News Service (to which the magazine subscribes) reports that fundamentalist leader Bob Jones III has endorsed the Mormon Mitt Romney. "As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism. But I'm not voting for a preacher. I'm voting for a president. It boils down to who can best represent conservative American beliefs, not religious beliefs."

Ethicsdaily.com reports that Southern Baptist leader Richard Land has called Mormonism "the fourth Abrahamic faith." It is "another faith" in the same sense as Islam, he says.

I think the fairest and most charitable way to define Mormonism would be to call it the fourth Abrahamic religion--Judaism being the first, Christianity being the second, Islam being the third, and Mormonism being the fourth. And Joseph Smith would play the same character in Mormonism that Muhammad plays in Islam.

It is not, he continues, a cult. A cult

does not comply with the essential teachings of the Christian faith but claims to be within the Christian faith or to be the true expression of the Christian faith, as opposed to being another religion like Judaism.

I wasn't going to comment in this post, but I can't help but say that I thought being the true expression of Christianity was precisely what Mormonism claims, and the reason Mormons get narked at those of us who reject their claim to be Christians at all. What Dr. Land is describing is a heresy, not a cult, and I don't think Mormonism is even that close to Christianity, even though its founder ransacked the Bible when he wrote his own scriptures. Another religion, okay, but not a heresy.

Second, here is a useful analysis of the state of the "religious right": Jeff Sharlet's New York Times Declares Religious Right Dead. Again. from his website the revealer, in which he analyzes a long essay in today's NYTimes Magazine (link in his article). He argues that

That there's a crack-up in political evangelicalism's old guard is indisputable, but the movement, the evangelical vision, is stronger now than it ever was in the 20th century.

. . .To suggest that evangelicals are reviving that Democratic tradition -- mildly populist economics combined with social conservatism and a fundamental belief in American power -- doesn't so much herald a moderation as an expansion of cultural influence. And culture, as evangelical activists understand in a way that the NYT does not, is politics.

You will have to get past a lot of snide and sneering writing, but  he offers a good argument against the popular "At long last, that disgusting thing is dead" story.  I suspect some people who tell it wish it were true so convince themselves it is, but I wonder how many tell it in the hope that they can make it come true. Sharlet sees more clearly.

Coping with Seventy Thousand Fathoms

On occasion the life of the spirit we call conscience calls for a significant alteration of course, turning from an opinion which thought and experience now identify as erroneous. Sometimes, perhaps most often, this can be arranged for quietly, with little embarrassment to one’s self or surprise to others. Other times it cannot, particularly when the life of the mind has been lived in public and exercised with authority, whether that of rhetoric used to convince others of a truth now doubted, or, at the other extreme, power to traduce or govern by an article now questioned. Now doing the right thing becomes costly: one is confronted with the loss of reputation, livelihood, and the comforts of association. As soon as such possibilities appear on the horizon a decision must be made on what to do and how to do it, and one must deal with all the natural desires--let us now call them temptations, because they appear as alternatives to doing right--to avoid public renunciation of a publicly confessed error, and to take an easier road.

There are a number of ways this may be done. One is simply to make oneself blind to the disturbing possibility and commit with increased vigor to partisanship of the error. Another, fairly common among intellectuals, I believe, is to avoid the larger issues that once caused concern and concentrate on minutiae. The Lord called attention to the broader phenomenon this involves, characterizing it as tithing mint and cumin while ignoring the greater matters of the law. It is a way of evading the demands of conscience. Another, much spoken of by Kierkegaard, is objectification of the problem, refusing to recognize the personal dimensions of the question with the passion that love and appropriate regard for reality require.

Another is to engage in friendly relations with those who do and believe what one now suspects is right, patronizing them without joining them. Or one might invent or join a mediating caucus that recognizes good, honest, intelligent people on both sides of the question, all of whom should recognize their deeper association in fundamental truth and be at peace with each other--thus hoping to satisfy conscience by doling out a portion of what it demands. Or one might contrive to ignore the matter by concentrating on the cultivation of one’s own garden, relegating the brush with an authoritative conscience to a buried past, retaining it now not as the voice of a master, but as a kind of domestic servant, useful in a restricted sphere, but not allowed to venture into the greater world where in former days it had roamed more freely, and so spoken with more general authority.

I am writing here of things I have seen among Christians. The irony of this is that if they noticed the same reactions to the directions of conscience among non-Christians considering the abandonment of their errors and belief in Christ, it would be clear that these were unbelievers evading the truth, and so risking the direst eternal consequences. What then shall the Lord say to professed believers who, coming to suspect within the precincts of the Faith that something once thought true is false, or something once thought false is true, find a way to ignore the thought or temporize it away?

The Evangelicals & the Fathers

"To me, tradition is very important, and it's something we should use," says Prof. Bryan Litfin of Moody Bible Institute, interviewed by Christianity Today in A higher ecclesiology for Evangelicals. But

It's not something to be equated with Scripture as a second source . . . . [T]radition is rather a friend and a guide. It is a witness and it does not stand over Scripture, but it can serve Christians by helping us to understand what Scripture means.

He is being interviewed on his new book Getting To Know the Church Fathers, and in the interview gives what seems, to an outsider, a helpful explanation of the conservative Evangelical's understanding of the Fathers and their place for Christians today.

The Brother Many Ignore

In Like a slave, is an unborn child not a brother?, published in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore reflects on the opening of a museum exhibition on the history of slavery and asks how curators will see abortion in 200 years.

It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.

It could compare the procedure by which the corpse of a baby who had died after or during premature birth was presented by the hospital to the mother to assist with grieving, with the way a similar corpse, if aborted, was thrown away.

It could display the various instruments that were used to remove and kill the foetus, rather as the manacles and collars of slaves can be seen today.

He ends with an argument that "with the passage of time, abortion, especially late abortion, is slowly coming to be seen as a "solution" dating from an era that is passing. It will therefore be discredited." I hope he is right, but the drive (need/desire/addiction) for sexual license is so strong, and therefore the need for abortion so great, that abortion's coming to be seen as outdated strikes me as unlikely.

What may happen is that the social disorder and chaos created by a society consumed by sexual license will encourage a harsh reaction, and continence will be socially and perhaps legally required and as a result abortion made illegal, but that it is not the same thing as Moore's hope. He hopes the baby will be kept when the bathwater is thrown out, I suspect that the baby will go out with the bathwater.

Mankind has only a limited tolerance for disorder, and the pain of chaos can only be anesthecized so long by the drug of consumption. At some point, most people will say, "Just give me some rules." Look, for example, at the attraction of Islam for so many of its converts from Western Christianity: they almost always mention the contrast between the order given by its rule of life and the chaos of modern Western life, particularly sexual.

Bella and One More: At the Movies

Bella, which I wrote about earlier this week, opened this weekend, predictably to mixed reviews. Some want to find it too, what's the word, oh preachy, but I can't see that. I've thought about this comment and compare it to so many other movies with messages over the years that are well-respected and most of them have their moments whent the Point is made, or several of them. So here's what Roger Ebert had to say, if you're interested. I'd say at least take a look. Final thought: on its own terms it won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival.

I also note another movie, an oldie, from the Criterion Collection, Ace in the Hole starring Kirk Douglas. Like me you're probably sick and tired of the media circuses and feeding frenzies over whatever happens to become a fashionable celebrity or news event, fanned into national or international prominence. In this film you'll get look at a circus springing up in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico when a man gets trapped underground in a cave-in. Douglas milks the story and risks the man's life. I like the portrayal, as brief as it is, of religion in the film. And speaking of messages in movies, this doesn't always dance subtly around, with it's Tell the Truth sign in the newspaper office.

Well, so what? If it's religion, faith, virtue, pro-life, it has to be done oh so quietly, subtly, whispering-soft, and the slightest bit of "can't miss this clarity" disbars the film from being 'serious'; but if it's a celebrity-sanctioned cause or PC virtue, no holds barred. Anyway, Kirk Douglas is anything but subtle in Ace, which, by the way, was directed by Billy Wilder.

Finally, another film, Juno, due out in February 2008, is also about an unwanted pregnancy. I can't recommend it, not having seen it, but note it simply because it deals with the topic.

Teaching Them to Obey

Touchstone (and Salvo) will have a booth in the exhibit hall at the 59th annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. This year's conference is at the Town & Country Resort in San Diego and runs from November 14-16. The theme of the conference is "Teaching Them to Obey." Touchstone editor David Mills and I will be there. If you will be at the conference, please come see us.

We will be handing out sample copies of the November 2007 issue which has the symposium on Evangelicalism Today. We will also be taking subscription orders.

Hundreds of papers will be presented at the conference. As I briefly flipped through the program book I saw that several Touchstone contributors will be presenting, including Donald T. Williams, Denny Burk, Angus Menuge, Jay Richards, Bryan Litfin, Francis Beckwith, Timothy George, and Ralph MacKenzie.

Curb Your Wrath

Theodore of Mar Sabba monastery in Palestine is commemorated this Sunday, October 28, in the Orthodox Church. I am responsible in my parish for overseeing the chanting for vespers and matins, so I look ahead of time (mostly) to review the texts. I read in the first selection for Theodore that he "curbed his wrath with manliness." I don't have the original Greek here, so I am unsure exactly how wrath might relate to another common word in translation, "passions," but all the same what struck me is the notion of manliness being the thing that controls wrath: It takes a man to be angry yet not sin.

Nowadays many people at least in the public popular media equate manliness with something along the lines of macho, which includes swagger, and when a guy gets really angry and just vents, well that's what men do; he's just being a guy. But this text reminds us that it takes a real man to keep wrath--and passions--in check.

About keeping things in "check": I used to think, or maybe I just assumed, that the "inner landscape" of human beings is pretty much the same from age to age and culture to culture. But I am not so sure about that: haven't we "reformed" something called the "inner check" of former times--something tethered to a well-informed conscience attuned to society and our community as a whole--and turned it into a reprogrammed inner check that runs along the lines of political correctness and non-judgmentalism?

In other words, we're stuck with a faculty of an inner check, but it can be reprogrammed to kick in, say, when a teacher asks a class "Who thinks sex outside of marriage is wrong? Raise your hand..." while it sits idling, inactive, when one feels the urge to make a one night stand. The morally-minded student will feel shame in raising his hand, while others will feel no shame in boasting about a one-nighter.

We need to keep our eye on the ancient virtues we see in the saints, lest we be reprogrammed to curb even moral outrage itself. Or has that already happened?

Che & Fidel, Muslims

Something amusing from the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web:

Strange Bedfellows   

Sarah Baxter of London's Sunday Times tells a hilarious story about the far left's uneasy alliance with the jihadist far right:

*** QUOTE ***

The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president. 

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union."

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted. 

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God.

*** END QUOTE ***

It's the Hitler-Stalin pact all over again, the second time as farce.

Your Thoughts on Dating and Marriage

There is still time to respond to Helpers Meet?, our October symposium on dating, courtship, and marriage. Tomorrow is the deadline, though responses that come in over the weekend will be accepted, for possible publication. Please keep your response under 400 words (and the shorter the better) and send them to me at < editor [at sign] touchstonemag.com >.

The Rise of the Pornogogue, II

     Judy Warner has sent round this fine satirical piece on the differences between school fifty years ago and school nowadays:

     SCHOOL - 1957 vs. 2007
Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1957 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2007 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.
Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1957 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.
2007 - Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it.
Scenario: Jeffrey won't be still in class, disrupts other students.
1957 - Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2007 - Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.
Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1957 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
2007 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has affair with psychologist.
Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school .
1957 - Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock.
2007 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.
Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.
1957 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, goes to college.
2007 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.
Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, blows up a red ant bed.
1957 - Ants die.
2007 - BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated, Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.
Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1957 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2007 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

     It's a witty exaggeration of our current madness, but not much of an exaggeration, either.  I'd have been doped up on Ritalin myself if the junkies could have persuaded my parents.  After all, what but a dire chemical imbalance might cause a boy to stare out of the window for hours, or to draw embarrassing pictures of nuns deshabille, or to read backwards from the back of the book, or to write messages in an invented language?  As for my brother, forget it.  That young fellow who never earned an A in his life (though he was given a few he didn't earn), who in another age would have led his troops in triumph through Persepolis and who now is doing quite well for himself selling insurance, would have been tossed among the mind-stiflers for certain.

     One thread is common to almost all of Judy's scenarios: the loss of trust.  In The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (I may be botching the title there), Edward Banfield noted that you can't get anything so complex as a large business off the ground when you aren't reasonably sure of a moral orderliness and sobriety around you.  That is, you have to be sure that most of your workers will show up on time, that they will not steal from you, and that the local officials will leave you alone and not soon ask for protection money once you start to clear a profit.  But even in the society that Banfield focused on -- the southern Italy of my ancestors -- you could trust in many things, though not the ones that assist you in developing a modern economy.  You could be sure that if Giovanni had his way with Filomena by force, Filomena's brothers would see to it that he could never do such a thing again.  In general, you could count on families to protect and promote their own.  You could expect hospitality, some cleanliness (not as much as in Switzerland, but still more than you will find in middle class American flophouses now), respect for the aged, and self-reliance.

     What happens when the windows in a neighborhood are smashed?  Rudy Giuliani, no moralist, can tell you: crime sets in.  That's because the causal arrow goes both ways: where there's crime, you'll find broken windows, but broken windows themselves attract crime.  The people lose heart.  They grow used to disorder.  They lose trust: you cannot depend that the owners of the properties around you care enough about them to evict a dope-peddler, when they do not trouble to fix a window.  Your street looks like a crime scene, and that's enough to set it on the way to being one.

     Our schools have perversely chosen to permit their moral windows to be smashed.  More: administrators and teachers have taken up the hammers and done plenty of smashing themselves.  It isn't only that they have permitted students to dress like knaves and hookers.  Nor that they habitually teach a moral relativism that justifies knavery and whoring.  Nor that they pride themselves on running down their nation, turning American history into one vast criminal enterprise.  All these things undermine trust.  But there's one thing that blows it sky high -- and that is their decision to set themselves essentially at enmity with the family, arrogating to themselves the rights of parents.  I may trust a friend, or, upon a friend's recommendation, a stranger.  I may make a pact with an enemy.  The enemy may be a fine person.  But a relational enmity remains.  Therefore I cannot trust the enemy.  I must always watch for the knife.

     In some of the cases above, the reaction of the school now would be quite understandable -- because there is no trust between the school and the community, nor is there much of a "community" to trust the school or to be trusted.  A frequent visitor to the Mere Comments site (but not a blogger; he won't engage us in argument here) once taunted me for saying that I longed to see more guns brought to school.  I don't care if there's never a gun brought to another American school for the next hundred years.  I long for a world wherein bringing a gun to school would be inconsequential, because everybody could be sure that it was for hunting rabbits, or for a Civil War display, not for shooting your fellow students.  That would be a world of self-reliant and stable families, the communities they foster, and the schools they permit to teach their children.  The windows wouldn't be broken.  In that world, you would no more teach high school students puerile obscenities, or you would no more hand out estrogen to little girls, than you would take a gun to pepper the gym class -- or smash the windows of your own home.

    

Wenders Away from God

Image journal, published by Gregory Wolfe, has "Why Believe in God?" for its Fall 2007 cover story. German film director Wim Wenders has a brief entry in this symposium of artists and writers. In it he writes:

I've been away from God for a large part of my life, so I remember his absence. No, that's the wrong way to say it. He wasn't absent, I was. I had gone into exile of my own free will. I meandered through all sorts of philosophies, surrogate enlightenments, adventures of mind, socialism, existentialism, psychoanalysis (another ersatz religion). Some of these I won't deny or badmouth. I'm happy to have been there--and back.

I remember how tentatively I started to pray again. I remember how that slowly changed me. I remember how I wept when I realized I had finally come home, when I felt that I was found again.

And how that feeling slowly transformed into a certainty.

Yes, a certainty.

But can I now answer: I believe in God because I remember how lost I was when I didn't care? Or: I believe in God because I couldn't take his absence anymore? Or: I believe in God because I cannot imagine any alternative? Or could I even conclude: believe in God because in my life God has become such a reality that the very question is like asking myself why I breathe?

Wenders seems to have experienced the coming home of the prodigal as he describes his return "home." Wenders directed Wings of Desire, for those who've not seen any of his films, by the way, the one I'd most recommend.

The Fixers

In what was to a Roman of his times the beginning old age, Aurelius Augustinus, the Christian bishop of Hippo, wrote his Confessions. While they were on one hand privately addressed to God, they were also intended to be public and at least to some degree monitory, for he was a bishop, living before people for whose guidance he was responsible. There were things of which he needed to unburden himself, not simply for psychic catharsis, or even to cleanse his soul before he went to meet his Lord, but because others needed to know of them and take heed. These confessions are a courageous but in a certain sense necessary work of public penance, and are meant, among other things, to be an example to those similarly situated. It was important, the bishop decided, that the people he was influencing with his preaching and writing take his accomplishments for what they were worth, considering their source. He would pretend to be nothing more before them than a saint in the common sense.

Frequently an alternative road is taken by Christian leaders. Instead of confessing their sins and retracting their errors before those they have led, they make a late attempt to fix whatever damage they perceive to have had a hand in causing. Instead of explicitly identifying their faults with the greater wisdom, knowledge, and clarity that advanced years often bring to those whom God blesses with them, they take steps to create or encourage influences that will to some degree repair the damage any errors in which they have lived and by which they have profited have done--without the humiliating but radically liberating public confession of public sin.

I believe this is true not only of individuals, but of entire churches or denominations, which over the course of years become blessed by a patient God with the knowledge that they have been wrong about something all along, usually something that is the characteristic or perhaps even eponymous distinctive of the group. It is not identified as an error, repented of and officially abandoned to the health and wholeness of the Body of Christ, but smoothed over, ignored, buried, or otherwise partially and imperfectly disposed of, the decaying corpse of an error that is no part of that Body, but a hidden source of many infections that shall eventually kill whatever clings to it. Once a religious society seizes upon and lets itself be formed by an error, the resulting deformity appears to be eradicable only by the death or departure of its members. Mass repentance, mass renunciation of the doctrines of the honored sectarian founders in favor of the catholic faith, is so rare as to form a rule that it does not happen.

The fixers usually recognize each other and form some sort of restorative enterprise. They, like Dives of old, are not bad people; they are not without consciences. They recognize that they have cooperated in error, or at least not resisted it in a timely way with appropriate words or measures. They know they have labored to marginalize as “extreme” or in some other way deficient those who have done their duty in this regard. They know they have cooperated with the ideologues or enthusiasts who have done most of the actual dirty work, and that they have done this cooperating in the name charity, expressed in some popular virtue (loyalty, orthodoxy, group piety, tradition, inclusivity, or the like). They know they have assisted in making fundamental and probably irreversible changes for the worse in the institutions where they have had authority and influence--where, had they chosen to, they could have once helped to join battle for what they avoided thinking too hard about in the days when that kind of thinking could have cost them their jobs, or at least the reputations they were so busily assembling.

But now they are more secure. They are tenured, have a large and devoted following, or their pensions have kicked in. While they can afford to speak, there is still a great deal to lose by the use of sackcloth and ashes. Augustine was, for all his brilliance, a simpler man living in simpler times, in which simpler people admired him for putting himself down among them. And say what you will about the Confessions, he would have had a higher reputation if they had never been written. Better to have started a group that generated diplomatically worded manifestos against overemphasis on the light/darkness theme, against fornication and pear-stealing, perhaps sponsoring a few conferences along those general lines.

The Fellowship of St. James

Today, October 23, is the feast day of James of Jerusalem, the patron of the Fellowship of St. James. He is the James of 1 Cor. 15:7, Acts 21:18, and considered the first bishop of Jerusalem. He represents as a witness that important juncture of the Jewish faith and the Christian gospel, the place at which the rich root of Israel sprouted the Church of the nations, the gentiles. He was well-respected by the Jerusalem community, but eventually ran afoul of the leaders in his old age, and was martyred in AD 62. He was known for constant intercession on his knees in the temple for the people and for their forgiveness.

Eusebius the historian says of him,

Thus it seems that James was indeed a remarkable man and famous among all for righteousness, so that the wise even of the Jews thought that [his martyrdom] was the cause of the siege of Jerusalem immediately after his martyrdom, and that it happened for no other reason than the crime which they committed against him.

Josephus also records the death of James in his Antiquities. He states that the high priest, Ananus, who instigated the plot against James, was stripped of his office by King Agrippa for his crime.

I've always taken these verses from his Epistle as an instruction for the spirit in which relations between Christians, especially ecumenically, should be found:

For where jealously and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity. And the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (3:16-18)

It is all too human for a Christian in our divided times, who has embraced one tradition, one church, one denomination, over another, to be a bit partisan about his chosen church home--and clearsighted about the errors of the others.

Well, we shouldn't be reticent to speak about our differences when that is helpful. But what is also too common is seeing ills befall another church and thinking, "Well, all the better for our side." Sometimes we think the failing of the others only proves their errors or our superiority. Especially when it comes to scandals.

But I believe James would agree with Paul in saying that we should never take any comfort in such failings, but rather pray for our fellow brothers and sisters. ("Love does not rejoice at wrong.") When they suffer, we suffer, whether we think so or not. The world sees only "Christians," and a scandal in a church not our own should be a cause for prayer, not secret responses amounting to "Well, that's what they get."

It may well be that a scandal stems from a prior sin or even some heresy, but still, the moment when another Christian, another parish, a rival denomination, fails in its basic Christian witness is not a time to count points and fan ambitions, but a time to show genuine concern for the bottom line: the salvation of souls in Christ.

Prying Pediatricians

While I'm reading Lydia McGrew's posts, here is a shocking one: No Pediatricians. She reports, from an article in the Boston Herald (link in her article) that the American Academy of Pediatricians

has issued "guidelines" to its doctors suggesting that they ask scary-crazy questions of children during routine checkups. And in the case of teenagers, these questions are to be asked if possible without parents present. The questions include how much the parents drink, whether they have a gun in the house, and (this is the worst of all) whether teenage girls' fathers "make them feel uncomfortable." Let me emphasize: These are not cases where there is probable cause of abuse. The doctor is supposed to ask these questions routinely of girls who come to him for, say, a sports checkup for school.

She expresses, as a "proto-anarchist," "some sympathy" with a father who decked the doctor. I have every sympathy with a father who decked the doctor, because that doctor has assaulted his child. He has assaulted her mind, her understanding of the world and the family, and he has assaulted the relation with her father crucial for her health and growth.

And he does so from a position of authority and trust that the poor parents have taught their children to give him. Which means, now that I think of it, that he has betrayed their trust as well. Not honorable. And no more honorable because he thinks he's doing a good deed.

To anticipate the cliched response, of course there are some bad fathers out there, and the doctor's questions might find a few, but at what cost? This kind of thing does not happen without unanticipated effects, most of them bad.

Nevermind how difficult it will be for a doctor to get from the girl who answers "yes" to a real knowledge of the situation, and about how much pain will be caused to innocent people by doctors who pursue the matter and get it wrong. You might think the balance of suffering prevented versus suffering caused justifies the questions.

Even if the method were foolproof, such a doctor introduces into every family whose girl he attends at least a note of suspicion, and not only about her father but about fathers in general. He teaches her that the world is such a place that her kindly doctor has to suspect every father of being, at least, the kind of man who makes his girl "uncomfortable."

The problem is not that the action teaches the child a particular idea, though older children might twig to it, but that it associates in her mind, in a vague but still effective way, fatherhood and that feeling of discomfort conveyed by that question about feeling uncomfortable. And she is likely to feel this even if she answers the question with a quick and happy "no."

One begins to feel, from stories like these, and from reading the major newspapers and the elite magazines, and watching highly-praised movies, and reading the reviews of highly-praised memoirs, that many people see the natural and normal family as a horrible thing, a site and source of perversion, oppression, psychological damage. They hate the normal. It's not hard to guess why.

Even in a fallen world, where even the normal is corrupted, it is still infinitely better than the abnormal. Mom, Dad, and the Kids are sinners and their family a system of sinners, sometimes of monsters, but still, they're closer to what God and Nature intends than Mom, Mom, and the kids, or Dad, Dad, and the kids, or Mom and the kids, or Mom and this month's boyfriend and the kids, or Dad and the stripper and the kids.

Just look at how much more likely a girl is to be molested by a live-in boyfriend than her father, but the APA doesn't suggest asking a girl if her mother is married to the man she lives with.

Against ANT-OAR

In Against ANT-OAR, published on the What's Wrong With the World weblog, Lydia McGrew argues against "Altered nuclear transfer oocyte assisted reproduction," an attempt to get embryonic stem cells without creating and destroying a human being. Hers is the kind of step-by-step argument difficult to summarize accurately enough, at least in the time I have at the moment, so I commend it to those of you interested in the subject.

The weblog's title is taken from Chesterton's entertaining and wise book What's Wrong With the World. Dr. McGrew is, with her husband, the author of a new book, Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason (Routledge, 2007). Her other items can be found here.

War as We Babble On

In the "The exodus from the Tower of Babel," Marco Visscher writes in Ode magazine that it's probably a good thing for world peace that 50 percent of the world's 7,000 languages are threatened with extinction. Contrary to the alarm sounded by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute, Visscher's brief commentary suggests that, "just as extinction of several European currencies ultimately yielded economic and practical advantages, the same applies--to an extent--to the extinction of languages."

Parents in Lausitz, on the border of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, would rather teach their kids German than traditional Sorbic simply because German will help them  get on in the world. A forgotten language should be seen as signalling rather than causing the loss of cultural identity.

Language was conceived so people could understand one another. In a world in which people are increasingly connected and work in close co-operation, it is only logical that the need for local languages would fade.

More to the point, less confusion in our Tower of Babel is conducive to world peace. How different might things be if Israelis and Palestinians could--literally--understand each other?

Well, just ask the Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland. What's the optimum number of languages we need to go extinct? 6,999?

A Pro-Life Film

Bella, the "People's Choice Award" winner from the Toronto Film Festival is opening this coming weekend, October 26 in select theatres around the country. I encourage you to see this movie this weekend, and if you like it, tell as many of your friends as possible to go see it. I have not seen the movie, but several staff members here at Touchstone/Salvo saw it and liked it.

I met one of the producers of this film on Saturday and he spoke of his pro-life motivation behind the film. On Friday, after I gave a talk on "Voting for Pontius Pilate: Washing Our Hands of Abortion," I was told about a government hearing that had just ended the same day in which several dozen women testified to the harm they suffered due to abortion.  Also, I was told, several thousand women have been filing affadavits about the after-effects, the harm they experienced from abortion.

I was told a few weeks ago by a Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois that the pro-life cause was over and that we live in a pro-choice culture, and, not these exact words, get over it. He was just being realistic. So why bother with pro-life efforts? I have no way of predicting the results from such efforts mentioned above, but I do know that viewing Bella has already persuaded several women not to have abortions. In other words, someone's efforts just saved someone's life.

From the Inbox 21 October 2007

Some random items of possible interest.

First, from Townhall.com, Want Protection from Breast Cancer? Have Some Babies, by Miriam Grossman. You won't, she says, find the best lifestyle choice for preventing breast cancer

highlighted in women’s magazines or health websites, but it’s the mommy track that provides the greatest protection against breast cancer: giving birth before thirty, having a bunch of kids, and breastfeeding them—for a long time.

. . .Emphasizing the benefits of early motherhood could—gasp!—encourage some young women to give marriage more priority, and postpone their demanding career. They might decide it’s a diamond they most want now, not a PhD.

From the New York Times Book Review, Mobilizing the Religious Left, Alan Wolfe's reflection on Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis, published 100 years ago and now being praised in a new book by Cornel West, Jim Wallis (whom he, surprisingly, describes as "one of the most astute of the contributors to this volume"), and others. Wolfe suggests, but does not say, that Rauschenbusch offered the windiest and most useless of ideological platitudes and generalizations, and that his uselessness is made obvious by comparing him with Reinhold Niebuhr and others, who had actually paid attention to what the world is like.

From The Tablet, the English sociologist (and practicing Anglican) David Martin reviews a sociological study of the Second Vatican Council and its effects in Backstage politics and the Council. It is an interesting review though he, and apparently the author, depend on the inadequate and biasing categories of "progressive," "fundamentalist," and the like, and he seems to read the Council through his own commitments, mainly that the Council failed to the extent it didn't turn the Catholic Church into the Church of England.

A sign of this kind of reading is its explaining failures to move left as political moves, or non-moves, as if no one involved might actually have believed in the traditional position. Contraception is the usual issue invoked here, always with a reference to the fact that much of the laity didn't obey the teaching, which is apparently intended as an indirect argument for change, though writers of this sort don't write like this when the laity refuse to accept some teaching they like. The Southern Baptists, conservative Presbyterians, and others get the same king of treatment from those who think they haven't moved in the right direction.

Also from The Tablet, Uncommon Overture examines the Islamic leaders' statement A Common Word Between Us and You. The writer, John Borelli, argues that

Despite . . . the not-so-subtle references to the oneness of God throughout, passages often used against the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, "A Common Word" is not polemical like the centuries-long arguments and debates between Christians and Muslims. Some may feel that it goes too far in outlining common terms for agreement and interpreting Christian and Jewish Scriptures. Others may not agree with the way Scriptural and commentarial citations are used. Still, even with its traditional aspects, "A Common Word" is a new departure. It is a response to the urgent need for a united voice from Muslims on the essentials of their faith to counteract voices of extremists and those preaching violence and hatred.

For those of you interested in such things, the NYTimes reports on the battle over whether to publish the unedited version of Raymond Carver's stories in The Real Carver: Expansive or Minimal?.

Largely as a result of that collection [his "Breakout 1981 book," What We Talk About When We Talk About Love], which became a literary sensation, Carver was credited with popularizing a minimalist style. But many of his fans have been aware of reports that Gordon Lish, Carver’s first editor at Alfred A. Knopf, had heavily edited, and in many cases radically cut, the stories before publication to hone the author’s voice. At the time, Carver begged Mr. Lish to stop production of the book. But Knopf went ahead and published it, to much critical acclaim.

This I did not know, and it's nice to have evidence of what an editor can do for his writers (like make them famous, sometimes, besides making them coherent, often). I've only read some of Carver's stories, and wouldn't recommend all of them, but "A Small, Good Thing" is wonderful.

Something else from the NYTBR, the English novelist William Boyd's review of the latest collection of William Trevor's short stories, Show and Tell. I've been meaning to reread his collected stories, and this has spurred me to start. They are generally bleak, but they are often either quite moving or quite convicting.

I remember one about an Irish landlord spending Christmas day with an English family that were tenants of his, as he had for many years, and making some general remark about England's treatment of Ireland, and how their friendship quickly unwound and dissolved. Having grown up in an ideological world, it taught me much about the limits of politics and the nature of courtesy.

Again from the NYTBR, Guy Gone Wild, an amusing review of a biography of the ghastly writer Harold Robbins. The reviewer is obviously enjoying teeing off on Robbins. For example, his comment at the beginning:

doesn’t a hustling subliterate whose oeuvre changed American publishing deserve at least one kudo, to use a solecism Robbins himself would have been likely to commit to print? Crammed with moronic prurience, achieving logorrhea with the barest of resources, your average Robbins page turner read as if he’d clacked it out using 10, if not 11, thumbs, and his 20 or so engorged books sold more than 750 million copies combined. If you’ve ever wondered just when quality literature and commercial fiction parted ways for good with a shudder, call him Harold Rubicon.

And finally, supplied by regular reading James Altena, a discussion between Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on The Lord of the Rings. I hate to have to say this, but experience has taught me I'd better: It is a satire. And a very funny one. For example:

Chomsky: Naturally, it's in Rohan/Gondor's interest to keep the Orcs obscured, to make everything as restricted and dehumanizing as possible. It's always the first step toward genocide. And is this — is there anything less than genocide being advocated in this film?

Zinn: I don't think so.

Chomsky: Is there any kind of idea that men should live in peace with the Orcs?

Zinn: Think of the scenes in the prologue with all the arrows hitting these thousands of Orcs. We're supposed to think that this is a good thing.

Chomsky: I think this is a tragedy, this story. Because it's about two cultures. And poor leadership. It's a human tragedy, and an Orcish tragedy.

Zinn: A perfect example of what you're talking about is right here, when Strider attacks the Black Riders, "saving" Frodo from them.

Chomsky: Think of it from the Black Riders' perspective. No doubt they arrived at Weathertop thinking, "Can we ask a few questions? We'd like to talk to you."

Louisiana Turns a Corner

In 1991, my old Ford Futura had a "Vote for the Crook, It's Important" bumpersticker on it, signifying support for the corrupt and contemptible Edwin Edwards' candidacy for governor of Louisiana. This was a bit odd since I was a registered voter in Mississippi, not Louisiana, and since I had (and have) nothing but disdain for Edwards. Still, he was running against former Klansman and American Nazi Party sympathizer David Duke, and it was a real contest. Things have changed.

Last night, post-Katrina Louisiana signaled that the state has turned a corner to a post-Duke, post-Edwards era with the election of the nation's first Indian-American governor, Bobby Jindal. The election of Jindal, a conservative pro-life Republican who will also now be the nation's youngest governor, was a cakewalk at the polls but not on the campaign trail. The Louisiana Democratic Party insisted on referring to Jindal as "Piyush," using his given Indian first name rather than his preferred "Bobby" (which he chose from watching The Brady Bunch).

When the veiled references to a former Hindu sitting in Huey Long's chair produced nothing but yawns from the voters, Jindal's opponents turned to his Roman Catholicism. Citing Catholic apologetics articles Jindal has written for the New Oxford Review, advertisements run in heavily Baptist northern Louisiana deemed Jindal "insulting" to "Louisiana's Protestants." Baptists and Pentecostals, though, stood by Jindal.

Louisiana is just one state and, I'll be the first to admit, not representative of the rest of the nation. But Louisiana just elected the son of Indian immigrants who looks like he's twelve years-old on an ethics reform platform. They turned aside race-baiting and old Catholic-Protestant rivalries in the process. And they didn't even have to elect a crook to do it.

The Rise of the Pornogogue

     The Howard Center, a research institution devoted to affirming the natural family (www.profam.org) and directed by Touchstone's contributing editor Allan Carlson, has posted the following item today.  I trust they won't mind my reprinting it here:

     World Congress of Families Global Coordinator Allan Carlson says a measure just signed into law by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is “a blatant attack on the natural family orchestrated by the alternative-lifestyles lobby.”
     SB777 prohibits any “instruction” (including textbooks) or school-sponsored “activity” perceived to “promote a discriminatory bias” against “gender.” Under the law, “gender” includes cross-dressing and sex-change operations, as well as so-called sexual-orientation.
     Carlson charges, “It will prohibit anything that suggests that the natural family -- a man and a woman, married, with children -- is normal or typical.”
     “Thus, under this latest advance toward a Brave New World of polymorphous perversion, California textbooks will no longer be able to use words like ‘mother and father’ and ‘husband and wife,’ because they suggest that heterosexuality is the norm – even though that is manifestly the case, even in California,” Carlson commented.
     Teachers and students who oppose same-sex marriage, who suggest that homosexuality isn’t innate, or who express disapproval of cross-dressing or sex-change operations could be disciplined as “harassers.” Unbelievably, the law even allows students to use the restrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex if they identify with that gender.
     Carlson observed: “California parents who don’t want to see their children subjected to gender indoctrination will now have no alternative but to withdraw from the public education system – which they will be required to fund, nonetheless.”
     “This is another sign that the gay-rights movement isn’t interested in non-discrimination – SB 777 discriminates against families as well as adherents to traditional religions – but in turning the public schools into indoctrination centers and forcing its views on an unwilling public.”

     Thus, as Dr. Carlson interprets it, the California legislature and the governor have relegated the natural idea and the natural reality behind the words "mother" and "father," at least in textbooks, to the category of the obscene -- literally, things that you have to hide backstage.  Maybe in the schools in Santa Barbara and San Jose, little Tommy can get his thrills scrawling "Mommy" and "Daddy" on the bathroom walls, and drawing a picture of them holding hands, with Mommy wearing a dress and Daddy wearing a suit and tie.  Some things are too horrible to consider.

     Now that doesn't mean that the schools have decided to abjure all discussion of sex.  Heavens, no.  There's not the slightest suggestion that Californica teachers will also be prim and proper about male-male hookups and white balloons and funny gifts from stores without windows.  I'm sure that The V Monologues will be a part of many a fine finishing school in the state.  (If anybody thinks I'm engaging in sheer speculation, I challenge him to search for "Ensler" and "lesson plan" and see what comes up; or try the same with "Kushner," or "Chocolate War," or "Two Princes".) 

     Meanwhile, here in New England today we're watching the story of the middle school in Portland, Maine, that has decided, regardless of the parents' objections, to make the pill available to eleven year old girls.  Why they believe it is their business to do this, I can't fathom.  Who gave them the right to oversee the upbringing of other people's children, in a matter of such delicacy?  Or, if a mother and father (please forgive my French) do not have the authority to determine whether their eleven year old daughter should be doping her system up on estrogen, so that she may then bed down with teenagers with impunity, what authority can parents possibly have left to them?

     But school administrators know best, yes they do.  Why, they've taken a three-hour seminar on sex, and some of them, it is said, have actually engaged in the activity.  They can't be counted on to perform the modest but necessary tasks for which they have been hired.  Our graduates can't tell us anything about Alexander Hamilton, or read The Federalist, or understand what simultaneous linear equations are all about, or identify the passive voice.  If condoms were commas, we'd be in big trouble, because I never meet a college freshman who knows where to put one.  But no matter.  If you can't teach your subject, because you don't really know it, you can still perform the function, though not yet the act, of the town pig or rake in the back seat of a Buick.

     I've promised one of our faithful Touchstone readers that I'd post a blog on a certain literary work, well, a certain piece of porno-twaddle, that is tremendously popular in high schools and colleges now.  For the moment, I'm wondering what kind of mind one can possibly have, if you are embarrassed to say "mother" and "father," or you want to smother those words in silence, but you do want to talk to other people's children about sex.  I suppose that if it were absolutely necessary, you might find some decent lady or gentleman to talk about the mechanics of it frankly, to boys and girls separately -- but he or she would do so under some duress.  But to be eager to talk about sex to children, to go out of your way to introduce them even to the natural passions they cannot yet understand, not to mention the gnarls and knots of human lust, you have to be sick.  On some level you have to be a pornogogue, like a leering drunk who corrupts the neighborhood kids with magazines.

     It took Christianity many centuries to establish, in the thick mind of man, the idea that there is something holy about the innocence of a child.  The child is not a resource, not simply a small adult, not an inconvenience, and not an object of sexual desire.  But it is not a long step from corrupting the imagination of a child to corrupting the body.  The only barrier left now is the notion that a child cannot give informed consent to sex with someone whom statutes recognize as a man -- though apparently she can give informed consent to taking the Pill, if she wishes to have sex with a boy.  Not much protection, that.

Evangelicals in Power

BeliefNet explores the question of Evangelicals in Power, in a "roundtable" discussion between secular journalists, a sociologist who has written on the subject, and two Evangelicals, Jerry Jenkins (co-author of the Left Behind series) and David Kuo (former Bush aide who became famous for claiming he had been seduced).

One might feel a little narked that they chose Jenkins rather than a more insightful Evangelical. (His contribution is inane.) Like Russell Moore or Darryl Hart, just to name two. Kuo, all right, given his book, but he ought to be balanced by someone more affirming of Evangelical political involvement, if, that is, the editors really want to illuminate the matter.

From the Inbox 16 October 2007

Several unrelated items of interest to various readers:

First, "Full, corporate, sacramental communion" from the Anglican weblog The Continuum, reporting a statement by the bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion that they had "unanimously agreed to the text of a letter to the See of Rome seeking full, corporate, sacramental union."

Second, Family breakdown due to inadequate gospel understanding, an extensive report from the Southern Baptist Texan of a talk by our own Russell Moore.

Moore argued that understanding the identity and purifying work of Jesus Christ is the answer to what ails the family and that social ills are reminders “of the wreckage of Eden.”

Yet, Moore said, the solution is not so much about recovering a series of doctrines or abstractions or “communicating principals more clearly.”

“It’s about recovering a theology. It’s about recovering a big picture that … understands what we mean when we talk about the family,” Moore explained.

And third, Kay S. Hymowitz's The New Girl Order, from FrontPageMag.com. She argues that

Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

. . . The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world—with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East—toward a New Girl Order. It’s a man’s world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much.

Fourth, from the NYTimes Book Review, Good Grief!, a review of a biography of Peanuts' creator Charles Schulz, that argues that he was an innovator but not a happy man.

Fifth, from the Daily Telegraph, The food that fed the English. Among the interesting bits:

The Romans brought parsley, rocket, thyme, watercress, sage, aniseed, rosemary, spearmint, borage and chervil, asparagus, parsnips, endive, celery, lettuce, cucumber and onions. They gave us the word "recipe", which (as Latin for "take") is the first word in each of the accounts of Apicius. Such was the conquerors' appetite and ingenuity, indeed, that laws were passed to control it. Lex Fannia restricted the number of courses a host could serve; Lex Aemilia prohibited the eating of stuffed dormice.

Sixth, from the Times Literary Supplement, another entry in the "Do men and women speak differently?" debate, this one arguing no: The myth of Mars and Venus, a review of Deborah Cameron's book of that title.

Seventh, the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, whose homepage includes links to several interesting articles, including Kay Hymowitz's.

And finally, a significant quote from a PBS cultural icon, Garrison Keillor, writing on Salon.com in a short article titled Reason to Believe. Near the end he gets to the point:

I am one of those grandpa daddies who sits with his old jowly friends with thinning hair as they reminisce about the '60s, and on my lap sits a little girl with her arms around my neck. She was not conceived in the time-honored way by excited people in the back seat of a car, but rather in a doctor's office. I had gone along for years imagining that my sperm were good swimmers, but it turned out not to be so. Thus, the miracle.

The nurse handed me a plastic cup and said, "If you need them, there are magazines in the bottom drawer." Nurses are very matter-of-fact about sacred things. The magazines had pictures of tan blond women with breasts like artillery shells. Soon after, a technician named Ron fertilized some souped-up eggs he had extracted from Madame and after 48 hours two of them looked pretty good and were put back in the mother and one of them became my daughter and the other one, I don't know what happened to it.

Not a Parody

I hear from a reliable source that someone gave the moribund United Church of Canada $10 million. And here's what they spent a good part of the money on: WonderCafe.ca. The bobble-head Jesus poster is NOT a parody. How relevant is this website? And another wave of future in outreach? Well, have fun exploring the site.

Touchstone Event in DC Friday

Touchstone executive editor, James M. Kushiner will be speaking on the topic, "Voting for Pontius Pilate: Washing our Hands of Abortion" at noon this Friday, October 19 in Washington, DC. The event is sponsored by Faith & Law and will take place at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 406. Lunch will be served. RSVP via email. The title of the talk comes from the editorial that Mr. Kushiner wrote with David Mills in the April 2003 issue of Touchstone.

Princeton Talk

     For anyone in the Princeton area who might be interested: I'll be giving a talk for the James Madison Program, on Dante and autonomy -- that is, the difference between two ways of understanding what it means to be a law unto oneself, and to what places those ways must lead, by their own inner logic.  It's on Monday the 15th, in Aaron Burr Hall, room 219, at 4:30 PM.  I believe there will be time afterwards for Q & A.  So, if you have a free hour or two, I'd be delighted to meet any friends of Touchstone at my old alma noverca, which apparently in the intervening years has witnessed an astonishing renaissance of the Christian intellectual life.  If Jesus could raise Lazarus from the dead, why not Princeton?  Let Harvard and Yale beware!

No Right to Know

In The Tablet, Clifford Longley explains that We have thrown the baby of courtesy out with the bathwater of class deference, discussing the deceit of a BBC controller, who lied about the Queen and spliced the film to prove it. Which, as Longley notes, would have greatly raised the amount he could sell the film for overseas.

He notes at the end that

Intrusion is a highly profitable business. Countless ordinary people who find themselves caught up in some public event find that they lose the right to privacy that they had up to then taken for granted, and there are few limits to the intrusions to which they can be exposed. Personal boundaries are crossed simply because it suits the media to cross them.

It is extraordinary to see how reporters hound and harass people who have suffered some tragedy or embarrassment, making their suffering worse, when the news is in fact nobody else's business. It's reasonable to say that they steal the family's privacy, and claiming "the public's right to know" as a high-minded justification for stealing is contemptible. We have no conceivable right to know what these people are feeling, doing, or thinking, if they don't want to tell us. And even then I'm not sure we do.

The rest of us could do our part by not buying the magazines that do this to people, and try to learn a kind of mental chastity. As you would avert your gaze from pictures giving you more intimate knowledge of some young woman's anatomy than you ought to have, so you can avert your gaze from news stories of some poor parents "door-stopped" by gangs of reporters. It won't stop them, of course, but that doesn't mean we should go along with them anyway.

A good example of how television producers make other people look bad and themselves look good is given in one of the essays in Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up, portraying a thinly disguised Sixty Minutes.

Brave Parish's Website

Regular respondent James Altena sends the link to the just redesigned website of The Church of St. Michael the Archangel, his parish in Philadelphia. He notes in p