Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

His Dark Debate

Over at the American Papist, Thomas Peters writes about The Golden Compass and the recent approval of the film by Catholic bishops. He is wary and thinks the film to be avoided, summarizing his take:

I remain open to the possibility that I'm making too much of all this, but I can't shake the sense that part of building up a Catholic culture, in this instance, involves sedulously resisting the lure of His Dark Materials.

I have no opinion on the matter, for I have neither read the book(s) nor seen the movie. I would, however, note that if the books should be avoided, and the movie may result in more people reading the book(s), then I see a problem.

David Mills has written briefly about Pullman, last December (not on-line).
Leonie Caledcott at some length.

It Begins with Nahum

It is our 2008 St. James Calendar of the Christian Year, and since it's a 13-month calendar, it starts tomorrow with the first saint listed for December 2007: The Prophet Nahum.

We've still plenty on hand for sale and we will get them into the mail quickly for  buyers (We get more orders in December than any other month, for obvious reasons).  If you order our 13-month calendar soon, you'll have a calendar that you can put up most of December that you won't need to change until the end of next year.

The First Sunday of Advent this year is December 2, which is also the commemoration of the Prophet Habakkuk. In case you missed it, I've mentioned elsewhere that our calendar shows saints of both the East and West that are commemorated on the same dates in the calendars of Orthodox and Western churches. Plus significant saints that are unique to various calendars. And Old Testament and New Testament saints, and all the feast days of the Christian Year.

Our convenient, secure Calendar web-order page is here.

Scots Wha' Hae With Wallets...

I'm reposting a revision of something I wrote exactly a year ago:
First, happy St. Andrews to those who observe it. (Patron of Scotland, and a few other places: Russia, and Constantinople, or "Istanbul" these days, the meeting place of Pope Benedict XIV and Patriarch in 2006.)

I did not observe Nov. 30 in any way as a youth, despite membership in a Scottish clan, so it, like most Saints Days are discoveries as an adult. As far as ethnic Scottish fare, basic "fish and chips" is great, if you like, then there's haggis. (A relative keeps reminded it was once condemned by the Detroit Board of Health; but that was before Detroit itself became a health hazard. I can say that; I grew up there.) I miss my Scottish grandparents and great-aunts and uncles dearly, and I pray for the conversion of their homeland, as well as other nations. St. Andrew's Day in some churches has been observed as a special day for World Missions.

Second, let me get more "Scottish" for a moment, though that doesn't mean cheap, as my grandmother often reminded us, but simply thrifty. There's cheap and there's thrifty.

Thrifty is spending what money you have wisely and well, which is something we try to do here with Touchstone without wasting too much time figuring ways to do it. I bring this up because we are now beginning the last month of the year when we will be asking by letter and here at Mere Comments and in some cases in person for contributions (tax deductible in the US) to help support the ministry, and our needs have grown along with the ministry. In 2006 postage rates went up about 10 percent and last month we we were informed that paper costs are expected to jump 8 percent.

I am always amazed at the generosity of so many who have provided the support for this voice for Christian orthodoxy. I invite you to join the company of other Friends this month, I and the whole staff, and the writers and editors will be very grateful.

Last year nearly a thousand contributed to the Fellowship of St. James, publisher of Touchstone. More than half of our needed revenue comes from charitable gifts.

We believe that the crises in both society and the churches today call out for a resolute return to the rich core tradition of the apostolic faith. This is why we publish. The Fellowship of St. James is a not-for-profit ministry comprised of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians dedicated to encouraging fidelity to the faith and witness of the early undivided Church.

Contributions can be made securely online or checks mailed to Touchstone, PO Box 410788, Chicago, IL  60641. Thanks so much.

So now you know where that title came from.....but some of you remember it from last year. Thanks to all who have already been supporting us this year. We could not publish on-line or on paper without you.

BTW I've left the original comments from last year rather than delete them.

New Sunday Schools

Bill Reichert sent me this link to R. Albert Mohler's comments on an article I saw in Time yesterday--about "atheist Sunday Schools." Do they observe a moment of silence? Or would that still be religious? Are agnostics welcome? Can public schools teach the same lessons to students as atheist Sunday Schools since they can hardly be considered religious? Aren't they already? And if so, why not, and why bother with the Sunday schools? Mohler's right about atheists not being able to stop talking about God, the one who is so non-existent that they resent him for the way the world is.

"Dictators We Love"

I find interesting things in antique stores in Michigan. Permit me an extended quotation from a find from 1963:

We are building a new society. And this society is not being built by angels but by ordinary people, many of whom are still prey to the ancient human vices of egoism, greed, and selfishness....

The Communist Party has truthfully reported to the Soviet people and the entire world on the abuses of power during the period of the personality cult [of Stalin], and the Communists themselves passed severe moral sentence on Stalin.

It is true that Stalin treated many people inhumanly, but the abuses of power which characterized the period of the Stalin personality cult did not shake the humanist foundations of our society.

We have numbers of people among us now returned from exile and with all their rights reinstated. Years of hardship have broken the health of many of them but not their spirit. Whether they were Communists or non-Party people, the preserved their faith in the humanism of Soviet power and have not betrayed it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyns' story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was recently published. Like his hero, the author was unjustly sentenced to hard labor. Despite years of exile, he retains his belief socialism and continues to serve its cause.

...We still have a long way to go before the eternal problem of humaneness is completely solved in our country. But we take heart at what has already been accomplished by socialism in these few decades to develop new relations among people....

All this makes us confident that the goal set by our society is attainable and that mankind's age-old dream of the triumph of universal humanism will come true.

Source: Articles in USSR: Soviet Life Today, June 1963 issue. "The magazine USSR is published by reciprocal agreement between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union. This agreement provides for the publication and circulatoin of the magazine USSR in the United States and the magazine Amerika in the Soviet Union."

Page 9 of this issue of USSR features an article titled, "Dictators we love." It says:

All the best things in our country's life are associated with the name Lenin. And everything we now have that makes our children's lives so beautiful can also be attributed to Lenin.... He understood that the best gift that he could leave for children would be a happy life. And he did everything possible to build that life.

Well, so much for the bright prophecy of peace from the labors of Lenin and about the invaluable service of Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet cause. (I fear some of our academics still dream on about making a "new man.")

This is all something to bear in mind when it looks like a certain ideology has taken over a society or institution. Multiply one true word about one man, say even "Ivan Denisovich," by a thousand so it becomes Gulag Archipelago, and who knows?

Lies take energy to sustain since they are not rooted in reality. The power of a word of truth against mere ideology and political rhetoric can be as a grain of mustard of faith. A mountain can be moved.

More Silence

I find this appropriate for Advent, a few paragraphs from Jim Forest's new book, The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life:

One of the hallmarks of pilgrimage is an attitude of silence and attentive listening, a state of being for which few of us are well equipped. We have been shaped by a society in which noise is normal and its absence is disorienting.

...We live in a world in which millions of people have not only acclimated themselves to noise but become sound addicts. Many of us depend on continuous noise. For almost any urban person, silence is a stunning experience. For many, it is frightening. We all know people who keep a radio, television, or music player on continually. I recall a friend in New York who lost his job as a radio announcer on a popular station for broadcasting ten seconds of silence.

This chapter on "The Other Side of Silence" begins with a quote:

We cannot find God in noise or agitation. Nature: trees, flowers, and grass grow in silence. The stars, the moon, and the sun move in silence." --Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

If we don't attend to silence this Advent, if holiday preparation is commotion and hurried anxiety without periods of recollection and quiet, a Christmas may come and go without leaving a trace on the mind and heart. Attend church more often; if you can find an open church or chapel to spend a few minutes in silence. In expectation. And think about the fact that the Lord will come and everything will be changed, and that our end is not with the things with which we surround ourselves and about which we worry so much. Our end is to be transformed, to shine with the light of the saints in glory.

The Answer in Silence

I suppose some may think I dwell on things a bit on the dark side, such as my reading Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945, this past week, as depressing a view of World War II as anyone could wish for (don't tell me, there are others, worse, I am sure!).  The armies of two demonically-inspired regimes square off and carnage and atrocities follow. Stalingrad reads like a dress rehearsal for hell.

But almost as if in answer to how to respond to such darkness comes a film of radiant peace: Into Great Silence. Set in Europe, the place of great war, this window into the life--and inspiration behind that life--of the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps stands as the best answer I can muster to the awful suffering of the world: silence and the voice uttering the words of the psalmist. A pure spiritual delight.

You'll need two and three-quarter hours--and turn off the phones. I don't think there is any rational answer at all to the "why?" of the world's evil: only a remedy, a Redeemer. Advent comes, as will He, to judge the living and the dead. Best to prepare and focus on what endures. So the monks, day in and day out.

Rudy and the Evangelicals

Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani means evangelical Christians have "grown up" to accept a social liberal with strong national security and low-tax credentials, right? Don't bet tomorrow morning's protein shake, according to two observers of social conservatives in America.

In National Review Online, Touchstone author Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia and Jon Shields of the University of Colorado argue the Robertson endorsement means little. Of the media speculation that the Robertson move means a new day for evangelical voting patterns, they write:

One problem with this view is that it assumes Robertson has a rank and file to lead. Robertson’s endorsement might have meant something ten years ago when he sat atop a thriving Christian Coalition. Today his endorsement means almost nothing because the Coalition has collapsed.

This reality dawned on Republican Party elites after the relatively poor turnout of evangelicals in 2000 caused President Bush to lose the popular vote. So in 2004, Republicans did not lean on Christian Right organizations to get out the evangelical voter. While the Democratic Party continued its longstanding practice of mobilizing voters through auxiliary organizations, such as unions and MoveOn, the Republican Party centralized its grassroots mobilization in its campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. It did so to great effect.

Wilcox and Shields conclude:

Even if Rudy wins the nomination and employs someone as talented as Karl Rove to build his campaign machinery, it is unlikely he can command the loyalty and devotion of evangelical citizens in critical battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. While Bush is a socially conservative born-again evangelical, Rudy is thrice divorced, publicly adulterous, and a social liberal to boot.

Indeed, Giuliani’s reported glee over Robertson’s endorsement reflects a profound failure to appreciate the new realities of Republican-party politics. Old-line leaders like Robertson now have little sway among ordinary social conservatives, many of whom have become disillusioned with a party that seems largely indifferent to their deepest concerns. So, even if Giuliani succeeds in getting most leaders on the religious right to support him in a general election match-up with Hillary Clinton, his candidacy is not likely to ignite the social conservative base in ways that enabled Bush to triumph in 2004. After all, churchgoing Americans are not likely to pound the pavement next fall on behalf of a candidate whose personal conduct while holding elected office, is reminiscent of Bill Clinton. For this reason, the foot soldiers associated with the unions and MoveOn could very well win the turnout wars and help propel another Clinton to the White House.

My own thoughts on the "maturing" of evangelicalism on the abortion issue can be found here.

Regardless of whether Giuliani, Clinton, Romney, or anyone else is the next President of the United States, it is true that evangelicals have some "maturing" to do when it comes to political action. But maybe maturity means something quite different than flexibility on justice for the unborn. The next year or so may show us where we're headed for some time come. 

Charity Begins with Freedom

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I was informed by family members about charitable giving, company style. One worker at a large manufacturing plant year after year gave to United Way the bare minimum expected of employees. After the first year, that wasn't enough. He was called in by his foreman and talked to about giving more. He wouldn't. So he was sent to the supervisor and talked to. Nothing doing. So off to the manager for more arm twisting. No way. And so it went, company bosses twisting the arm of an otherwise cheerful giver, to no avail.

Another one told me the same thing happened to him in the Navy. From one commander up the line to the next: You'd better give, it's charity. He didn't care for the organizations benefited by United Way's charity machine. No cheerful giver here.

What was surprising was the reluctance one the part of one to ever donate to the Red Cross. Why not? During the war, just outside any battle zone, they allegedly sold donated goods to soldiers for a price. Folks making donations thought these were simply to be given to the troops. That was some time ago, but the image of misrepresentation or minimally miscommunication or mishandling remains.

The heavy hand and the outstretched hand for payoff or payment is hardly what a charity ought to be all about. As dependent as we are on charitable contributions, we've avoided following the "tactics" you're supposed to use to manipulate gifts. No thanks. I will simply and straightforwardly ask here between now and the end of the year for your financial support, but only so you may help us continue to provide something you think worthy of your support. We're very much in need of charitable gifts, large or small. Every bit helps. Our budget requires $365,000 in support by then; so far we've received $187,000, so we've made good progress. Donations have ranged from $70,000 to $5. We run a tight operation, but costs continue to climb. After a recent postage hike in May, we're now told paper is going up 8 percent. Whatever you can give will be gratefully received. Thank you.

Nikon's Word

One of the saints for today, November 26, listed in our calendar, is Nikon Metanoite, that is to say, Nikon "Repent Ye". He was known for always beginning his sermons with a call to repentance. An itinerant preacher, he died in Sparta in AD 1000.

Are there any "repent ye" preachers around today? And is our day different from other days? Yes, and, no, really. This: "Young men and young women are continually 'on the go.' And this 'go' is a nervous, unsteady rush to 'keep up with the times.' ... The number of unmarried people is increasing. And there are some married people who say: 'We do not want children, because we want to have as much pleasure as possible.'" (From "The Condition of Society," by Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, in the book, Preaching in the Russian Church, San Francisco, 1899. [Not a typo.] From The Orthodox Word.)

Newsweek last week did a cover story on 1968 and how it gave us all our "identity". Really? Well, whatever it did, or didn't do, we have only the moment, and the moment always requires the word that never changes: Repent ye. Nikon didn't make that up.

Christ Jesus Victor

     Today, in the new Roman calendar, is the last Sunday of ordinary time, the feast of Christ the King.  Pius XI instituted the feast during the dark years between the world wars, when the faithful were flanked right and left by the forces of tyranny.  On one side were those who aimed to raise the State to its old place as object of cultic worship.  On the other were those who so deified the individual will that it was hard to see how they could make half-decent citizens of any earthly city, let alone the heavenly Jerusalem.  Pius affirmed both man's longing for freedom and his need to submit to authority.  Against those who preached a radical autonomy he declared that Christ is King; against the Communists and socialists of Russia and Germany and fascists in Italy and Spain, he declared that our King is Christ.

     So then, we celebrate the feast -- or we do at my parish; elsewhere it's an uncomfortable reminder that we do not ultimately govern ourselves (I once heard a sermon that demoted Christ from King to Guide, maybe a Faithful Palestinian Guide, really fine at reading tracks in the desert and finding the nearest challah).  The reading today, too, was perfect, and richly ironic.  It was the account in Luke of the conversion of the "good" thief.  And that choice invites some attention.

     There on a cross hung the savior of the world, scourged to an inch of his life, a plaited crown of thorns streaming the blood down his brow.  He was struggling to raise his body a little against the spike that nailed his feet to the wood, so that he could expand his chest to take a short breath.  His heart was growing enlarged, the pericardium filling with fluid.  He was dying.  Above his head, in three languages so that all the world below would enjoy the executioner's wit, was fastened the mocking sign, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

     Christians will readily note the most obvious irony, that the sign that was meant as mockery, or as a threat against any other would-be messiahs among the Jews, in fact told the truth: Jesus was the King.  But there's another irony here.  It isn't simply that the Romans and Jews mistook the King.  They mistook kingship itself. They could not grasp that Jesus showed himself most truly a King, and showed kingship for what it most truly is, not despite the cross, but through it.  It's the same mistake made by Adam and Eve, who wanted to be as gods, supposing that to be a god means to have your untrammelled will, regardless of good or evil, a will beyond love.  Had they wanted to be like God, they would have obeyed His command, intended in love for their good; but they wanted to be like god, like little false gods of self-empowerment and license.

     Then what a flash of enlightenment must have been shed upon the heart of the thief crucified beside Jesus, who ceases in his jeering, and recognizes that Jesus is the King, and that this is what it is to be a King, to give oneself utterly for one's people, that is, for one's enemies.  So he does not say, "I am sorry for you, fellow," or "Don't listen to them below."  He does not speak to Jesus man to man.  He speaks to him as subject to King: "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom."  That can make sense only if he understands, somehow, without any theological sophistication, that Jesus is both Lord and God.  He's asking Jesus not only to remember him, but to forget -- because he knows well what kind of life he has led.  Only God's memory conquers the grave; only God's forgetting cancels out our wickedness.  The thief's prayer is granted, and he enjoys a privilege unique in history: the only Christian to die next to Christ.  "This day," says Jesus, "you shall be with me in Paradise."

     But we don't know the King, and don't know what a King even is.  We preach self-actualization; read Self magazine; wrap our legs in a lotus to get in touch with our inner self; refer all matters of good and evil to the vote of our unholy trinity, me, myself, and I.  On our way from church to Sunday breakfast we passed a car with a purple sticker, reading "I Am a Goddess."  Undoubtedly.  Every man a king, every woman a goddess.  No thief, looking upon his life in sorrow and resignation; no sense that even our good deeds are so shot through with selfishness and pride that they would damn an angel who thought to do them; no inkling of a suspicion that we might be the cause of despair in others, that we have added our petty share of the ice of wickedness crushing the earth over the centuries.  No sense either of the transcendent holiness of God; or the terrible beauty of goodness; or the immaculate purity of the truth.  Not even a sane self-interest, enough prudence to cast your lot with the King, a bulwark against tyrants without and within.

     But he who has himself for a king has a slave for a subject; and she who has herself for a goddess has a devil for a devotee.

    

Prophet Sharing

Pop quiz: What was Lyndon Johnson's religious affiliation? Don't know? Don't care? Neither did the voters in 1964 (in 1960, it mattered that he was Protestant, generically, just to balance out the ticket with John F. Kennedy). So what changed? That's the question posed by Peggy Noonan in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

Noonan laments the heightened attention to candidate religion in the 2008 presidential election. Noting the lack of attention to George Romney's Mormonism in 1968, compared to his son's religion in 2008, Noonan writes:

No one cared, really, that Richard Nixon was a Quaker. They may have been confused by it, but they weren't upset. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, was not Greek Orthodox but Episcopalian. Nobody much noticed. Nelson Rockefeller of New York was not an Episcopalian but a Baptist. Do you know what Lyndon Johnson's religion was? He was a member of the Disciples of Christ, but in what appeared to be the same way he was a member of the American Legion: You're in politics, you join things. Hubert Humphrey was born Lutheran, attended Methodist churches and was rumored to be a Congregationalist. This didn't quite reach the level of mystery because nobody cared.

Noonan pleads with the American populace to get over the religion question, whether it is asking Gov. Romney whether he really believes the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, or whether it is expecting Sen. Clinton to prove how her Methodist upbringing leads her to reform the managed care health system. She writes:

We should lighten up on demanding access to their hearts. It is impossible for us to know their hearts. It's barely possible to know your own. Faith is important, but it's also personal. When we force political figures to tell us their deepest thoughts on it, they'll be tempted to act, to pretend. Do politicians tend to give in to temptation? Most people do. Are politicians better than most people? Quick, a show of hands. I don't think so either.

Your Favorite Chronicle

Today our youngest and I read almost all of The Last Battle, the last of the Narnia Chronicles. It is my favorite of the set, perhaps because it so well mixes melancholy and hope, or better, transcends melancholy with hope. I find the last chapter almost unbearably moving.

So today's question is: which of the set is your favorite, and for that matter which is your least favorite, and why, if you care to say. (For some of you "least favorite" may mean in some cases "one you most dislike.") My least favorite is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because it is the most didactic of the series and the analogies too straightforward and obvious.

Please stick to the subject and don't bring up other works you like, or other works you like better, or other works you like less, though what you really like or dislike about the Narnia Chronicles would be interesting. If you have any similar question you'd like to ask Mere Comments readers, don't ask it in a response but write me at < editor little "at" sign touchstonemag.com >.

Death Works Culture War

Here is a link to a feature article at Provocations at the Trinity Forum Website, written by John Seel. It should provoke. He references Philip Rieff's book Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks a work of “tragic sociology.” "This book might best be compared with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Seel later writes:

Consequently, the culture war we face today is not like that of the past. Past conflicts were between competing sacred symbolic systems. They were in effect family feuds. Not so today. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, in his introduction to Rieff’s book, writes, “What makes the contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a movement of negation against all sacred orders and directed, in its particulars, against the verticals in authority that mediate sacred order to social order.” The third world cultural elites are insistent on instructing society in this “higher illiteracy.” This world, anticipated by Nietzsche, Rieff calls a “deathwork.” “Deathworks are battles in the war against second culture and are themselves tests of highest authority.”

Rieff’s “deathwork” is Lewis’s “abolition of man.”

I've not had the time to carefully read his essay, but knowing Seel a bit, and skimming this, I'm sure it's worth reading.

Goodbye Dolly

A reader, Gene Godbold, sent me this link this morning to the coverage in the Washington Post about a new breakthrough in stem cell research: using adult skin cells. No human embryos or human eggs are required. At one point the article said that

Until now only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought that "adult" stem cells have been used and developed from adult cells, and that some successful therapies have resulted. So to say that it was not possible to develop "stem cells" from anything other than embryos and eggs seems misleading. If so, then it's more of the same journalistic coverage that simply repeats party line.

That said, I hope the drive to use human beings for body parts will peter out. In a related story from a few days ago,

The Scottish scientist who created Dolly the sheep more than a decade ago said he is abandoning the cloning technique that he pioneered, according to an interview published Saturday.

Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly in 1996, told The Daily Telegraph that he is abandoning cloning to pursue a new technique that can create stem cells without an embryo.

Wilmut's announcement could mark the end of therapeutic cloning, in which DNA is inserted into an unfertilized egg, an embryo is produced and stem cells are harvested, the newspaper said. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent worldwide on therapeutic cloning research in the past decade, but nobody has made it work in humans.

One can hope also that support for [embryonic] "stem cell" research won't be featured in the upcoming political ads I dread.

Double Money for Salvo

Our sister publication, Salvo, has been given a $20,000 matching gift grant by a generous donor. Any gifts for Salvo received by December 15, 2007 will be matched dollar for dollar up to $20,000 total. If you'd like to help out with a gift, it would have double the effect at this time. On-line donations may be given here. By the way, we've received $3,600 so far, closing in on 20 percent of our goal.

An Ex-Con, a Girl, and 2 Films

While the movie Bella has received some mixed reviews, I am happy to see that over a period of five weekends it has moved up in the "box office" game: it initially played on 165 screens and last weekend played on 456 screens. This is because it is doing well per screen and theatre owners like that, outpacing per screen big Hollywood-backed films like Lions for Lambs and others that are playing on two or three thousand screens.

I give a solid recommend to another film that this past weekend was playing on only one screen that I know of, mine. I had not known of this film version of Les Miserables previously. At around five hours (how else can you even come close to the book?), on two discs, this French-language 1933 version is quite good, and Harry Baur is superb as Jean Valjean. Baur was veteran actor, appearing in 79 films, his first in 1909.

Jean Valjean, remembering the example of the saintly bishop who saved him, pours out his life for others, and his devotion to Cosette is powerfully moving. Having the movie yesterday (it is divided into three parts), and then thinking about Bella, there was something they have in common, the one perhaps a film classic of a classic novel, the other simply a small independent film: both center on ex-convicts, a baby girl born out of wedlock, saving the girls, and a sense of redemption. Better than most of what's on offer at the box office.

I have to add, though, I don't know where to put this, except here, that I just found out in looking up Baur on-line (at the link above) that he died in Paris on April 8, 1943, tortured to death by the Gestapo. I don't know more than that. Anyway, Les Miserables, 1934, is a fine movie.

That Was Then

     Am I alone in this feeling, or has political discourse even in the last ten years gone from juvenile to infantile, as if we were overgrown babies clapping our hands for shiny rattles while the big people say, "Sweetums wantum cookie, sweetums wantum health care"?  It's strange, because at the same time we seem bent upon making little Tammy and Joey into political operatives, putting them in front of cameras and making them pull long faces, as if somebody had just yanked the head off their Kirsten-doll or smashed their Tonka truck, and saying, "Please tell Congress to save social security."  And I'll wager that not one child in ten of them can even spell "Ponzi scheme."

     To turn school into politics -- or, once the kids are mature enough, say at age ten, pornopolitics, for the modern pornopolis -- doesn't simply infantilize political discourse and waste years of a child's time.  It stunts the imagination.  It betrays the heart of what people used to think a liberal education was all about.  Reading -- especially for young people -- was supposed to sweep the mind into realms far away or long ago, or wholly out of our own world, to sweep their hearts the more swiftly and boldly into the world, I mean the only real world there is, the one wherein there are such things as good and evil, and brave and handsome men, and lovely and steadfast women, and mischievous Tom Sawyers who have bigger hearts than the tame and sly brother Sid, and hobbits that dig their snug homes in the side of a hill.

     But why not let a liberal of old tell us what the imagination needs and loves?  I have at home a collection called The Young Folks' Shelf of Books, first published by Collier's in 1938, though evidently it was popular enough to go to at least a fourth printing, in 1959.  It's not that long ago, but one of the introducers, William Allan Nielson, former president of Smith College, writes of the fairy tales, adventure stories, inventors' lives, and so forth, in a language that almost seems itself to come from Middle Earth, so far it is from our gabble.  "Still other selections," he says, after mentioning the classic children's stories and a few choice stories from contemporary writers, "belong to the great simple things which because they deal with certain permanent and fundamental elements in our common nature are the exclusive possession of no age, but appeal to young and old alike."

     It's clear that Neilson does have a moral aim, but it is one that is blissfully free of politicking.  He wishes rather to develop the imagination, believing -- I think a tad optimistically, but with this kind of liberalism I have great sympathy -- that a desire for justice and a willingness to show mercy depend upon our ability to put ourselves in someone else's place.  "It is fundamental," he says, "for ethical as well as aesthetic development that the imagination should be given wide scope in youth and kept free and flexible as long as possible."

     Note that word "aesthetic" -- a word you don't hear much of these days, in the battles over the curriculum.  It reveals where Neilson's heart lies.  He can afford to be a little bit of a moralist, because he knows that "the fact that should be uppermost when we read these things with our children is that they are delightful; the important thing is that we should enjoy them together."  In other words, Neilson wants for children the finest writing that can be gathered.  He wants them to hear the subtle rhythms of language and timeless story.

     In this regard he's at one with the other introducer, Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard.  Not a single one of Eliot's sentences could now be written honestly by the compilers of children's readers and textbooks.  Does it make no difference what a child reads, so long as he reads?  Eliot knows better:

     "Thoughtful parents and teachers, who realize the evils of indiscriminate reading on the part of children, will appreciate the value of such a collection.  A child's taste in reading is formed, as a rule, in the first ten or twelve years of his life, and experience has shown that the childish mind will prefer good literature to any other, if access to it is made easy, and will develop far better on literature of proved merit than on trivial or transitory material."  (italics mine)

     Eliot too is an educational liberal -- what counted for liberal then; he decries the simplistic force-feeding of facts, and praises instead "committing to memory beautiful pieces of literature, either prose or poetry, for recitation before a friendly audience."  Nor does he make the home subordinate to the school.  "From the home training during childhood," he says, "there should result in the child a taste for interesting and improving reading which will direct and inspire his subsequent intellectual life."  No matter how "unsystematic or eccentric" such reading may have been (methods and schedules be damned), it will have achieved "one principal aim of education," and any school or home training which fails to instill this permanent tase "has failed in a very important respect."  If Southern Regions Educational Center (schools are "centers" now, and never "eccenters," alas) graduates hundreds of students who have no taste whatsoever for Twain or Milton or Chaucer or Tolstoy or Willa Cather, then that school is, by Eliot's standards, a failure. 

     The books themselves, by the way, are fantastic, filled with fine stories from all over the world, most of them pretty substantial and written for both children and adults.  The language is probably a tad more complex than the typical college freshman would find comfortable, but a child of ten or so who has never gone to school would feel quite at home.  I'll leave you with the conclusion of one of the linguistically simpler selections, a story about how Daniel Boone rescued the hostages taken by the Indians in their raid of Boonesborough.  The old lady has just recounted the events to her grandson Andy and a kid he's just met and gotten into a scrap with.  It turns out she was an eyewitness to the raid: she was one of the hostages, and her husband-to-be was with Boone when they were rescued:

     "Not another word out of you!"  The grandmother checked his eager questions.  "It's too fine a day to sit within, listening to an old woman's chatter.  I am tired.  Take him away, Andy.  Get along, both of you.  Try your skill at the rifle.  Show him how your grandfather taught you the knife should be thrown.  Off with you, now!"
     She would have no more of them; fairly bundled them out of the room with the dynamics of her energy, though physically she did not stir from her chair.  Only at the door she stopped them with a word.
     "I like your young man, Andrew," she observed.  "Tell him to come see me again.  I have often heard Colonel Boone say that there is nought like a good honest fight to begin friendship."  She smiled faintly at their confusion; and deliberately closed her eyes.  They hesitated a moment, and stole out.

     A question: in how many ways is it now impossible that such a passage should appear in a children's reader?

    

Conversions & Therapy

The "conversions" of Anthony Flew, C. S. Lewis, and Chuck Colson are all referenced in this article by Christine Rosen in the Wall Street Journal. She writes:

Perhaps now more than ever, converts must combat a pervasive cultural cynicism that views conversions--particularly those made during moments of crisis--with suspicion. It was only his decades-long devotion to his Prison Fellowship ministry that eventually silenced those who doubted Mr. Colson's sincerity. Mr. Flew's claims have prompted many to wonder if his rejection of atheism and embrace of a deity is driven less by genuine faith than by the normal fears of old age.

This is where therapeutic Christianity, however popular, has failed to extend the legacy of converts like Mr. Lewis.

In another article, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about religious voters' interests in foreign policy. One area of interest not dealt with is in foreign policy that helps religious ministries operate overseas in doing charitable work.

Pick Up and Read!

The top headline today in the Chicago Tribune, my local newspaper, proclaimed that "Catholic bishops say voters' souls at stake." It worked and I picked up a copy (yes, despite being able to read it on-line. I was looking for hard news.) Having recently given a talk, entitled for me by the organizers, "Voting for Pontius Pilate: Washing Our Hands of Abortion," I wondered what the news was all about. From the (on-line!) story:

... the nation's Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday issued instructions to Catholic voters that their eternal salvation could be at stake when they cast ballots.

Bishops emphasized that voters must consider the church's teachings on abortion and other moral issues when they select a candidate for the White House or any other office. If they don't, bishops said, it's not clergy who will judge them but God.

The question for me was any guidance given about the issues? The story says that
voters are implored not to support abortion-rights political candidates but also advised that views on abortion should not be the sole factor. Catholics should also weigh church teaching on such moral issues as immigration, just war and poverty, bishops said. That's not new.

If the Church can teach about immigration, I ask, then might it not also be capable of teaching about How to prioritize moral issues as a voting citizen, especially if our souls are at stake? Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn. said:

What we did provide for the first time in this document is some concrete guidance in how a voter goes about making prudential judgments.

That's good news (since we've written about the lack of such guidance among Christians generally and the muddying of the waters). Still, I am wondering, since I don't have the text of the statement at the moment (and must move on to other things), how clear or what the guidance is. I say this because Karl Maurer, a director of Catholic Citizens of Illinois, said,

"If the statement had been more stern and clear" it would impact the behavior of voters as well as the politicians

If he's right, and it doesn't change anyone's behavior, then the headline worked despite the non-importance of the story: I bought the paper. It's all about "selling copy," isn't it?

Nova Tonight, Johnson's Interview

PBS's Nova, a program I have often enjoyed, is covering the intelligent design controversy apparently by focusing on the recent Dover court trial: "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial." Phillip E. Johnson was interviewed for the program. He is not sure how much of the interview will be used, or which portions, but in case you are interested to know what was left out, PBS has provided a full transcript of the Johnson interview for NOVA here.

In the words of PBS:

In this interview, hear why [Johnson] feels that such evidence is "somewhere between weak and nonexistent," why he feels intelligent design is a testable science, and why he thought the Dover trial was a train wreck waiting to happen.

I would replace the first two "feels" with "thinks," for Johnson's thought is what I've always encountered in his writings and in personal conversation, not his feelings.
Now "thought" in the last sentence perhaps could also be replaced--with "feared."

Killing with Relevance

This week David Mills forwarded an article from the British journal The Telegraph titled "Women Priests and their Continuing Battle." Obviously written by someone in favor of the institution, it celebrates the godly patience of ordained women in the face of the frequently rude, always backward, opposition of people who don't seem to realize that their advent is an essential part of the revitalization of a national church where attendance has fallen radically in the past several generations. Since women bring so many vital qualities to the role that were absent when only men could be priests, obviously ordaining them can only be a step in the right direction, a step toward greater wholeness, and therefore toward what people are seeking.

I remember hearing pretty much the same thing in the sixties from the Bishop of Woolwich, who also insisted the Church of England could only survive by adopting a far more open stance to the new ideas and practices it had a reputation for resisting. His Church took much of his advice, women's ordination eventually coming along as one of its responses to the continuing call of its leadership for relevance. Of course, there is no recognition, much less acknowledgment, from people like this that the radical decline of their churches corresponds chronologically to their success in a search for relevance that began several hundred years ago, that there might possibly be some connection between decline and relevance, especially when the best-attended churches in their realms are almost invariably those where people looking for irrelevance go, and the more relevant a church is, the fewer people are likely to attend.

A good many polls show there are enough people in the secularized West who consider themselves believers--at least in the Christian God, generally speaking, and the moral law, generally speaking--so that if they actually attended church services regularly it would be difficult to say that Christianity in their respective countries is in serious difficulty. To be sure, with churches, especially nationalized churches, bottoming out, secularization and non-Christian religions are naturally on the increase, but the principal problem long before the crisis stage was reached had to do with people who professed to be Christians who did not attend church. My fairly well educated guess is that if they were asked why they did not, most of them would have complaints in one of two general areas: (1) the church isn't relevant, or (2) changes are happening there that I don't like.

Their own desire to stray--blaming the church for irrelevance, for example, when the real problem is that they, living companionably with the Spirit of the Age, are in transgression of its moral laws--would naturally be placed at a discount, but the fact is that during the last several hundred years many churches have imposed radical changes, first in doctrine, then in practice, that have robbed them of much of the interest of those who seek less from them rather than more. The relevance of the Church to modern society depends on continuation in preaching and teaching its old Message, that is, on what modernists, who are by definition not Christians, and whose relevancies are continually disrupted by the teachings of the Church, condemn as irrelevant. The attraction of the Church rests in its reliability, its deportment of itself in every way as though it believed that Truth does not change, and that one will find it here.

Yet everywhere we are seeing the death of relevance-seeking churches that profess above all things the desire of speaking to modern people in idioms they understand. The apology for this is, of course, How will they understand the Gospel message if we don't speak it in their language? But behind most of this talk is a lie. I have come to believe that church leaders who say this may be presumed, lacking evidence to the contrary, not to have an evangelical bone in their bodies. Behind it is, in fact, the question, How can I maintain the advantages Christianity has brought me and, at the same time, have the world reward me for playing its game? How can I be at the same time in the pay of God and the King of Sodom?

The Lord's answer to this is clear: one cannot serve two masters. The test of which master is being served is easy: Is the person who professes the desire to speak to the world in a language it understands willing not only to comfort, but offend those who hear him with the ancient faith, as the real Gospel, the old Gospel, always does? This is the Relevance of the Church, and the churches will never know if "religion" is actually on the decline until they test the waters by preaching and teaching the Eternal Gospel that calls men not simply to believe what the demons believe, but also to repent--which is part of believing--with all this implies about opposition to the world, the flesh, and the devil, and about the personal beliefs and behavior of the faithful.

One cannot really say that Christianity is on the decline if the churches by which one takes its measure have been in active opposition to the faith for generations, casting out the stronger of the flock for crimes against relevance, and dispiriting the weaker members by becoming an inferior example of what the world already offers them. The first cannot attend for reasons of conscience, the second sees no reason to bother.

The Rise of the Pornogogue, III

     Here in the Ocean State we've recently had a small parental uprising.  A ninth-grade teacher at Cumberland High School assigned a collection of short stories and essays called My Life as a Loser, edited by Will Clarke and John McNally, Ph.D.  I've searched three of our local libraries for a copy of the book, with no luck.  From what I can gather, reading the Amazon reviews, the stories on the controversy in the Woonsocket Call, and the defense of the book by Clarke and McNally, it's a book meant to elicit empathy for the loners and losers in high school, and is supposed to appeal to the teenagers because they know the difficulties the characters are going through: bad hair, a clumsy attempt to put on a rubber for the first time, and being unpopular yet running for student government.  Casual obscenities and crudities abound.  There's also the obligatory snort of contempt for the "Christian" girl who uses her religion as a cloak for sleeping around.  And there's a reference to a woman having sex with a dog.  This, then, is what at least one teacher thought would be just the thing to open the minds of ninth graders at Cumberland High School.

     Well, one of the parents objected; she didn't want her daughter reading obscenities in English class, and she didn't think it was absolutely necessary that a fifteen year old should find out that some people are nasty with animals.  What interested me most about the controversy was the absolute contempt to which the authors subjected the mother and her child.  They pointed out -- with a gleeful malice -- that the daughter had had to repeat a grade, so that should tell you all you need to know about the intellectual capacity of the mother.  They accused her of being too stupid to see that the students, apparently all of them, no exceptions, were exposed to graphic obscenities every day already, on the net, in their music, in their magazines, and in their talk in the locker room.  Finally, without the slightest consciousness that their own argument might as easily be used against them, they argued that if the schools gave way on this book, they'd put themselves on that slippery slope that leads to the banning of all "objectionable" books.  Why, there's sex and violence in Romeo and Juliet!  There's salty language in Huckleberry Finn!  To which one might reply, "Mr. Clarke, Dr. McNally, on the day when you write one tenth as well as Shakespeare or Mark Twain, then you can come talk to us."  Or, "Sirs, nobody is banning your book.  You can sell it wherever you find buyers.  We are arguing here about whether it's suitable for a high school English class."  Or, "On the other hand, if we allow your twaddle, what will be next?"

     But there's more to it all than the argument over the merits of the book.  Let's suppose that you invited me to stay a week at your house.  Let's suppose that you have young teenage children.  Suppose then that, without your knowledge, I described for them the really funny thing that happened the first time my cousin Vinny put on a rubber.  Or suppose I told them about a girl I knew who liked dogs -- a lot.  Or suppose I went for the literary heights and read for them certain passages out of the Marquis de Sade, or The Memoirs of Fanny Hill.  Or, to leave that truly awful literature behind and grasp for something genuinely great, suppose I described for them the stage accoutrements for Aristophanes' Lysistrata.  These are high school kids, not adults in college, and I am in your house under conditions of trust.  Wouldn't you ask me kindly to leave?  Wouldn't you forget to invite me ever to return?

     Where do these teachers -- and, apparently, Mr. Clarke and Dr. McNally -- get the idea that they have a right to talk dirty to kids?  For there wasn't any apology, there was no attempt to understand the mother's concern.  Why not?  I'm guessing that beneath it all lies the notion that the children don't really belong to the parents.  We -- teachers, principals, authors -- know better than you do.  We'd like you to be involved in your child's education, sure, on our terms.  Here, take these raffle tickets and hit the road.

     For all that, what's going on in Cumberland can't touch what's going on in a high school in Illinois, where, according to a Mere Comments reader, students will be required to read Tony Kushner's Angels in America.  You've never heard of it?  It won a Pulitzer Prize.  It's linguistically clever gay propaganda.  Every cliche you can think of finds its way into the drama.  The main character is dying of AIDS.  That disease of the immune system (caused by some of the same things that give you hepatitis) is compared to the Black Plague, caused by fleabites -- the disease that killed about 25% of the people in Europe in its first run.  Another character is a Mormon -- who is married, but attracted to men.  He leaves his wife to have an affair with the lover of the man who's dying of AIDS.  His wife is sex-starved and bored -- housewives are bored.  She sees visions.  She worries about the hole in the ozone layer (yes, you have to have an ozone layer with a hole in it).  The Mormon is a lawyer whose boss, Roy Cohn -- yes, the Roy Cohn from the McCarthy years -- is, as he defines himself, a heterosexual who sleeps with men, since power is all that sex is about for him, power, and to be a weakling and a patsy is to be homosexual.  Roy too is dying of AIDS, but he calls it cancer.  He wants the Mormon to take a job in Washington where he'll break the law on behalf of -- wait, it can't be, but sure enough it is -- the evil Ed Meese, attorney general for the Reagan administration!  Meanwhile poor Roy also has bad dreams.  He's visited by the Ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (she doesn't say she'll meet him on the field at Philippi, though).  Other ghosts visit the main character, but these are contented and now sexually liberated ghosts, going all the way back to William the Conqueror and the Bayeux Tapestry.  Oh, and there's a black drag queen nurse from the Caribbean.  And, naturally, puerile fascination with various bodily functions, and crudity and obscenity.

     For this, we're paying all those property taxes?  Couldn't we just get some dirty old man down the street to do it for free?

    

Touchstone on Facebook

If you have a profile on Facebook, then you will want to check out the new Touchstone group there. Here is another way to interact with Touchstone readers online.

Aleph Beth Gimel

     A few weeks ago I asked Touchstone's redoubtable Biblical scholar, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, if he could recommend a good Hebrew grammar for me.  Generous as always, he not only recommended one, he sent one in the mail.  So now my wife has to overhear, among other things, my awkward attempts at "a gulping sound made in the back of the throat," for the consonant 'Ayin, a consonant which my Jewish friend at school assures me is now merely silent, and besides, he says, we don't really know how it must have been pronounced anyway.  Still, I try.  The book also distinguishes between a "dull t" and a regular t, and a "dull s" and a "hissing s," making me wonder how you can pronounce an s without hissing.  Then there are the vowel "pointings," provided in medieval texts but missing in the ancient texts -- so that unless you're talking about long a, long u/o, and long e/i, you have no signs for vowels at all, and what signs you do have do double duty as semivowel consonants.  'Ts s f yw hd sntnc wrttn lk ths, nd hd tw fgwr wt wht t mnt.

     By way of compensation, I suppose, the grammar is really beautifully simple.  There aren't any case endings.  You don't have to memorize six principal parts for the verb.  Once you know the pronominal suffixes, you know how to conjugate the verb, because they just get tacked on at the end: so "my Lord," 'el + i, and "I say" is (if I remember!) 'amar + i.  Hebrew doesn't have any true tenses, either (and in this regard is closer to Old English than to Greek), but rather aspects, or ways in which the action described by the verb is carried out.

     It's a stunningly melodious language, too, though it's hard for me to rattle off several words at a time.  For one thing, my eyes aren't used to the letters yet, and a lot of them still look alike, so I find myself like a great big kindergartener, sounding them out, "C-c-c aaa tuh.  Ca aa t.  Cat!"  That provides a lot of pleasant surprises.  In the glossary, under "salvation," comes the word y + sh + w + ah, as my eyes see the letters.  Y + sh + w + ah.  Yshwh.  Yeshu'ah.  Pause to slap myself upside the head.  Now I wonder how many bilingual puns there must be all through the New Testament, when somebody who knows Hebrew is writing in Greek for people who don't know Hebrew and people who know some Hebrew and people who not only know Hebrew but have the words of Scripture ringing in their memories.  "Salvation comes from the Jews," said Saint Paul.  He wasn't kidding.

     Another unexpected pleasure is suddenly to be able to figure out all those Hebrew names.  Tobiah = Tob + jah, "God is good."  Jonathan = Jah + nathan, "God has given."  Nathaniel = Nathan + el, "The Lord has given."  Elimelech = El + melek, "The Lord is king."  Raphael = r'pha + el, "The Lord heals."  Joel and Elijah are the same name, "The Lord is God," with the components reversed.  It's remarkable, too, how many of those names refer to God.  There's nothing at all like it in Greece or Rome -- but then, the Greeks and Romans never believed themselves to be b'nai b'rith, or "sons of the covenant."

     In one regard the simplicity of the grammar has led to what looks at first glance like a complication.  Because there are no markers for case, and because Hebrew sentences typically begin with the verb, you sometimes risk not being sure which of the nouns that follow is the subject and which is the object.  One of the ways they countered that risk was to place a marker for gender on every verb in the second and third person singular and plural.  In other words, in Hebrew the word "walks" in "Joe walks" is different from the word "walks" in "Susan walks."  Since there is no neuter gender, the whole world of objects and persons and ideas is considered as divided into masculine and feminine, and this division is immediately present in the very verbs you use to talk about them.  In a way, "he" and "she" are written all over the Hebrew linguistic universe.  Even ha 'adam, which the linguistic revisionists among us say is only the generic word for "human being," is masculine, and if it's the subject of a verb, that verb will have "he" in it.  So Hebrew developed a feminine for that word too: ha 'adamah.  So far from being ambiguous about their references to God as "he," the Hebrews could hardly utter a sentence with God in it without a "he," even when they were addressing God directly -- since the second person is also marked for masculine and feminine.  I had heard this about Hebrew, but it's still striking to see it for yourself.

     I suspect that since the language is not of Indo-European structure, it's harder for the translator to capture the subtleties than it would be if it were Greek or Sanskrit.  So too I suppose there's more leeway for mischief.  Meanwhile, I'm trying to do an hour or so of my ABC's every night.  Baruch attah Adonai Elohenu.

Secret of Narnia Revealed

Coming in the December 2007 issue of Touchstone, Michael Ward reveals the organizing structure that C. S. Lewis used when writing The Chronicles of Narnia. It has been said

that Lewis had carelessly assembled figures from incompatible mythological traditions: children fresh from E. Nesbit, a Snow Queen out of Hans Andersen, dryads and naiads from classical tradition, and--forsooth!--Santa Claus from popularized hagiography.

But, Ward says, "I had never been satisfied by the notion that the Chronicles were a mish-mash, and I think I have stumbled upon their secret, governing, imaginative scheme."

If you would like to be let in on the secret, make sure that your subscription is entered by Friday, November 9, and you will be sure to receive this issue.

Monthly Friends & Choice Gifts

We are looking to substantially increase the circulation of Touchstone over the next several years (it's at 11,000 copies now--17,000 readers), and perhaps get to a place where we can resume holding conferences and more local lectures. We believe strongly that we have something vital to offer Christians today, and we're determined to get Touchstone into the hands of as many readers as possible. We've been greatly blessed this past year with ongoing support and with much good advice from many good friends and professionals, including a good deal of pro bono consultation.

So, it's November, and we're looking at the end of the calendar year. We always see our largest number of donations in this quarter, and we're hoping that will be the case again this year. Last year, as some of you know, we faced a very difficult challenge, and many readers responded quite generously. I've told many people since then how our subscribers really stepped up "big time" last year.

This year, thanks to all of you, we're doing better. This doesn't mean we don't very much need support: still, 60 percent of our revenue comes from donations. This has to continue, and we will need, for various reasons, $70,000 more than last year. Costs of paper, postage, inflation, etc. mean that each year we will need more.

One of the areas where you can help is in regular scheduled support: this is very convenient for supporters who can spare a few dollars each month. So I would especially like to highlight our new on-line link where you can support us on a monthly basis. When I first started back in the early 90s, I depended on several dozen monthly supporters to get Touchstone through several challenging years. Then we grew. We still have a number of such monthly contributors, but we need many more. You can make a real, dependable difference by contributing just $20 or more a month--or even the cost of two cups of your favorite Starbucks each month! It will add up!

And as a thank you to anyone signing up here as a new monthly contributor--in any amount--may I send you a copy of our Creed and Culture Touchstone reader or a Caffeinated Christianity Coffee Mug or a 2008 Calendar of the Christian Year? (You'll get an e-mail asking for your choice.)

And you can still give a one-time gift here. Thanks to all of you. Your support will help spread the Word.

The Pittsburgh Exit

From the November 2 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Members of the Pittsburgh Episcopal Diocese have voted overwhelmingly to break away from the denomination in the United States and align with an Anglican province in another country.

In today's vote at the 142nd diocesan convention, the laity approved the measure 118-58 with one abstention. The clergy vote was 109-24 in favor of breaking away.

For the break to occur, the diocese must pass the same measure next year and select which Anglican province to join.

In a letter Wednesday to Pittsburgh Episcopal Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr., U.S. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori warned that such a move could result in declaring the Pittsburgh Diocese vacant and ordering Bishop Duncan's removal.

Seems like Bishop Duncan is in the process of removing himself, regardless.

FSJ Website Down

Our apologies: our main website server has been down since Saturday. And is still down. Only Mere Comments is accessible. It's not our fault.

Indoctrinate U

Yes, that's the name of a new documentary movie about campus PC, and here's an example of it in Delaware, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the end, they give the following example of what's been going on, something that not all students and faculty are happy about:

One-on-One Sample Questions
The University of Delaware's student diversity training required freshmen to meet one on one with dorm resident advisers to answer these questions and others. The university says the program was voluntary, but students in some dorms were told it was mandatory.

1. When were you first made aware of your race?

2. When did you discover your sexual identity?

3. Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awareness? What was that lesson?

4. When was a time when you confronted someone regarding an issue of diversity? What was the confrontation about? If haven't, why not?

5. When was a time you felt oppressed? Who was oppressing you? How did you feel?

6. Can you think of a time when someone was offended by what you said? How did that make you feel? How do you think it made them feel? How did his/her behavior change toward you?

Will they offer a questionnaire asking students who are indoctrinated by 'diversity training' "how did it make you feel?"

Slavery without Slavery

     "It is cheap and false to condemn the medieval use of authority as 'slavery.'  Modern man makes this judgment not merely because he enjoys the discovery of autonomous investigation but because he resents the Middle Ages.  His resentment is born of the realization that his own age has made revolution a perpetual institution.  But authority is needed not only by the childish but also in the life of every man, even the most mature.  Integral to the full grandeur of human dignity, authority is not merely the refuge of the weak; its destruction always breeds its burlesque -- force.
     "As long as medieval man was gripped by his own vision of existence, as long as he heard its music sounding in the depths of his heart, he never experienced authority as shackling.  It was a bridge leading to the absolute; it was the flag of the world.  Authority provided medieval man with the opportunity to construct an order whose magnificence of form, intensity of manner and richness of life were such that he would have judged our world as paltry."
                                               Romano Guardini, from The End of the Modern World (1956)

     That's a rich passage.  I've been claiming here for a long time now that people share in authority by means of the virtue of obedience -- which only a spoiled child will see as simple capitulation.  Robert Frost too argued that submitting yourself to the contours of meter and poetic structure was not an obstacle to creativity, but its precondition.  You can play tennis with the net down, but it's dull.  I can found a Church of What's Happening Now, and interpret Scripture to my own up-to-date tastes, usually to justify my own up-to-date desires, and maybe a few people will find it exciting for a while, like a first cigarette or a first skin flick.  Soon it too grows dull.  It has no roots.  It does not exalt the soul by humility.  It's as interesting as bellbottoms or mutton-chop sideburns.  It's old and stupid -- as the world is. 

     Guardini's insight also explains a peculiarity of recent American history.  The people who preached Flower Power, and killing the "establishment," are themselves the establishment now, and, in their speech codes and their scorn for freedom of association and their usurping of parental rights and their free hands with other people's money (whether they are CEO's or senators), they make pretty good would-be tyrants.  One presidential candidate recently acknowledged a desire to "take ten billion dollars" from the HMO's, to do something with -- said it as cavalierly as I might say, "I think I'll take a thousand dollars from my savings account and put it into checking."  Teachers in school won't submit to the authority of the great writers of our heritage, but just try crossing one of them by complaining about the fitness of an assignment to children, and then you'll see the credentials a-flashing. 

     Man is homo oboediens.  He obeys.  The only question is whom.  He can obey the Creator of the world, who made him free, and in whose freedom he shares when he obeys, or he can obey the slick talker who preaches freedom in order to enslave him.  And all the while he's fooled into thinking that he is his own authority, that he makes his own choices.  "I've got no strings on me," he says -- and becomes a tyrant, or the prey of a tyrant.

Treaders

Just a reminder that on our Treaders page, several recent Touchstone articles are being discussed. The two most recent discussions are of Paul Kjoss Helseth's piece on racial reconciliation and Russell Moore's piece on apologetics and pop culture. Both articles are from the September 2007 issue of Touchstone.

Gumpism

Presumably people send me books to review, unsolicited, on the theory that no publicity is bad publicity, since there’s always a decided risk I won’t like the thing and can get excited enough to warn others about it in print. Most often, however, what is sent me is somewhere in the “OK” range, but nothing I want to spend much time with. It won’t get reviewed, at least by me, because I never review a book, or recommend it, without reading it carefully at least once.

Senders of books, however, need to be warned that most reviewers, myself included, often decide whether they are going look between the covers by skimming over what’s outside them, and one of the things they’re looking for is telltale evidence of Gumpism, which, if detected, usually means the sampling is over.

“Gumpism,” a phenomenon known of old to Touchstone editors, is named for The Very Most Reverend Doctor Horace M. Gump, Ph.D., Ll.D., M.D., Litt.D., D.D.S., Th.D., D.D., who ran a diploma mill in southern Florida (certified as an Educational Institution by the State of Florida Department of Education), which he advertised in Pulpit Aides, a newsprint publication sent free (and unsolicited) to every minister in America. From time to time he would submit an article to us on something like, oh, pistemography or megaphysics. We’d just forward them to Tom Buchanan, since they were too tough for the rest of us. Gump, of course, awarded all those diplomas to himself, and would be glad to send them to anyone else who could demonstrate he deserved them by dint of life experience and a few hundred dollars. Advertising that he had himself “been to Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard,” when one saw his semisimian visage in the newsprint, one could hardly doubt that those locales in Michigan, Iowa, and Illinois had been graced with his pilgrim presence.

Experienced reviewers, anxious for a good reason to throw your book away, are likely to look it over quickly for evidence of Gumpism (that is, puffery), for Gumpism without is a predictor of wasted time within--not a perfect indication, to be sure, but good perhaps 85% percent of the time. Accordingly, these rules:

(1) Make sure the publicist who writes the letter of introduction writes it very well indeed. You do not want something beginning, “Bill O. Harvey, here writes a book that has been hailed as very important in its field by some of the most distinguished people in his field in America and the rest of the world.” (A tad exaggerated, perhaps, but you get the idea.)

(2) Don’t pretend you’re important if you’re not. Remember that the best Spinoza could probably do was “lens grinder from Amsterdam,” Kierkegaard, “Copenhagen dandy living off his father’s estate,” and Marx, “unemployed.” If the legend on the dust jacket identifies you as “a lifelong associate of Thomas C. Oden” because you’re a Methodist, or “a member of several presidential commissions” when the president in view is in charge of your local parade committee, experienced readers have antennae that will detect it, and know what you’re up to. (Touchstone has received material from a chap who claims to have regular conversations with the Blessed Virgin and the devil, but this is not, technically speaking, a manifestation of Gumpism.)

(3) Blurbs from famous people might not have the desired effect. They can, in fact, backfire. Smart blurb writers can write laudatory prose which the knowledgeable will know really means, “Who the hell is Bill O. Harvey? I’m doing a favor here for my cousin, who bowls with him.” Or, “Bill was a good baby-sitter for my kids, but I really hope you don’t think I had anything to do with this book.” Other blurb writers are famous in the trade for saying wonderful things about any book they get free. (And the blurb should show evidence that its writer has read the book. Some don’t.)

(4) Occasionally a potential reviewer will actually get past all this to have a look at your introduction or skim your book. Be sure that it is proof-read by someone who knows what he is doing. I have gone through a score of books in the last several years that have not been, some from major publishers. Some readers, myself included, regard the sort of errors proof reading should catch as a kind of insult--such as is given by a cook who doesn’t take care to wash the sand out of the vegetables.

From time to time, a really good book will display all these presentation faults. But usually they come with books that aren’t worth his time, so the busy reviewer never gets past them. Gumpism in the publishing business is the equivalent of el