Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Targeted, Creative?

I received a one-page ad on glossy cover-stock in the mail today from the Israel Project about rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, showing this picture, with a legend across it:

How many rockets will hit your home today?

Right below the picture on the right was the postal inditia,

PAID
Targeted Creative Communications

Targeted indeed.

Conservatism & Corruption

The February issue of Vanity Fair has a scathing and gossipy article about the recent marital breakup of Richard Mellon Scaife and his wife, Margaret Ritchie Rhea Battle Scaife. Scaife, a wealthy and major backer of conservative (read: political and economic) causes, gave $1.8 million in the 1990s to The American Spectator to investigate Bill Clinton (i.e., Whitewater and all that and more). To give you an idea of the depth of Mr. Scaife pockets, in this interim period before the divorce is legally effected, a court ordered "interim support payments of $725,000" ... a month. Per month. According to the Post-Gazette's website, battles have been pitched over a "94-page itemized list of art and objets, from a million-dollar Magritte to an $1,800 set of asparagus tongs."

In 2005, Ritchie hired someone to tail her husband. In December of 2005, the detective

took pictures showing the reclusive 75-year-old billionaire [Scaife] with a woman named Tammy Vasco, a tall, blonde, 43-year-old whose criminal history includes two arrests for prostitution. The pair was photographed at Doug's Motel, a roadside establishment near Pittsburgh, where rooms rent for $49 a night, or $31 for three hours.

Michael Joseph Gross, author the article, writes that

Richard Mellon Scaife is the man who funded the movement that made "family values" a watchword of the right and badly damaged the Clinton presidency. Many would now dearly love to hang him in the gallery of hypocrites whose Dickensian comeuppance exposes the moral bankruptcy of the culture wars.

Aside from this being a bit overstated and a bit too neat (I think there's more sentiment and concern for "family values" (a weak phrase we don't like) out there in the unwashed masses than whatever can be coaxed by money poured into think tanks; and Bill Clinton helped a little in damaging his legacy), it does put a finger on our national problem: moral corruption up and down the line. Conservative (or liberal) economics or conservative governing principles and politics do not mean virtue.

I am again reminded of a passage that jumped out at me from Jeremiah two days ago, the passage assigned in FSJ's devotional reading guide. The Lord challenges Jeremiah:

Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth; that I may pardon her.

Jeremiah  admits that "they have refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock, they have refused to repent." But what comes next jumped out:

Then I said, "These are only the poor, they have no sense; for they do not know the way of the Lord, the law of their God.
I will go to the great, and will to speak; for they know the way of the Lord, the law of their God."
But they all alike had broken the yoke, they had burst the bonds. (5:4-5)

Ah, the "great" ones, those who are the elite, the cream of society. Later (6:15):

Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not ashamed; they did not know how to blush.

That last phrase says it all: No shame, no ability even to blush. But moral outrage over asparagus tongs, that's another matter. (And over adultery. Does that means there's still a glimmer of hope?)

I wouldn't bet much on the promises of our politcal and wealthy classes. We must remember the biblical examples given to us of believers in high places, places of elite access and power: Joseph in Egypt, who refused sexual favors, Daniel and the Three Youths who showed ascetical restraint and devotion to prayer and praise of the true God, even Uriah the Hittite, who honored the warrior's code and discipline while his commander in chief defrauded him of his wife and arranged for his death in battle, and John the Baptist who refused to approve of the moral corruption of his temporal lord.

Virtue cannot be purchased with all the money in the world. Conservatism that doesn't conserve virtue is not simply another variation on the Fall. The primary challenge our nation faces is not economic, it is not educational, it is moral. And our pulpits ring with hollow words telling us how to feel better about ourselves.

Under His Wings

When a pastor was called to a Congregational church in colonial America, it was said that he “settled” over it. The image was of a setting hen and carried strongly parental overtones, of maternal warmth and solicitude on one hand, and a father’s gravity and authority on the other. He was expected to stay with his congregation, apart from unusual circumstances, his whole life. One will recall from Moby Dick that its New England pastor was called “Father” Mapple by the sailors of his parish. He was no Catholic, but in Melville’s hands a Protestant concession to the desires of men’s hearts, since every Christian knows that things are best when his pastor is a father, the title not being simply a rank, or merited by ecclesiastical exercises, but a father spirit and in truth.

When a pastor stays--and is kept by his people--in one place for many years, the image of the pastor who is father and brother, the man at the head of a spiritual family, becomes more vivid and plausible. It is a sign of both authority and solicitude, an image of how things should be--a sign of the Church. For that reason I celebrate here the ministry of my brother David, who this month became the pastor of longest tenure at a church that has existed since 1841.

First Baptist Church of Baraboo, Wisconsin, now known as Walnut Hill Bible Church, has a turbulent history, having had about 45 pastors during its more than 160 years. During the pastorates of David and his predecessor, Carl Zwart, however, the hard labor of its ministers and elders brought it new life. It is a life from which my brother, who came to the church as his first call out of seminary, has profited greatly, as the church has profited from his pastorate. This month, while recuperating from heart surgery, he was told that he had surpassed the previous record tenure, having been settled over the church for eighteen years, five months, and one day.

No one except his three children, as far as I know, calls Pastor Dave father, but here, it seems to me, is a chance to celebrate publicly a fatherhood that deserves public celebration. Congratulations to Walnut Hill Bible Church and my brother David, one of the finest pastors I know. Ad multos annos.

Disputes Over Dead Bodies

Judy Warner kindly tipped me off to two articles she came across earlier this week that are related, about the rights of the state vs. the family with regard to dead bodies.

The first in the Washington Post, the second at jihadwatch.org.

Judy writes:

The first is about American families suing the state of Ohio:
The suit argues that the next of kin, not the state, should make decisions on how to dispose of organs no longer needed for testing, and that denial of such a right violates the Constitution's promise of due process. The federal lawsuit names 87 of Ohio's 88 counties; the other, Hamilton County , which encompasses Cincinnati, has already settled with families for $6 million.

Beyond that, the case has presented two separate courts with existential questions about death and burial rites, religion and grief, and the interests that loved ones have in the remains of the departed.

The second is about Muslims in Australia gathering in a large crowd and intimidating medical staff at a hospital because they didn’t want the body of a Muslim who died in a car crash tested for drugs and alcohol.

Although I’m the first to deplore the culture of lawsuits in America, when you look at the alternative it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

--Judy Warner

Death Penalty: Mohler

Here's a link to R. Albert Mohler on Walter Berns (Georgetown) recent article in the Weekly Standard on the Death Penalty.

What Did the Parting of the Red Sea Really Look Like?

To follow up on the post by Bobby Winters that referenced Google Earth, here is a post with some "recreations" of what some biblical scenes might have looked like from a Google Earth satellite.

Score One for Human Decency

     I've promised one of our faithful readers, who took me to task for the flippancy of the post on voting for Caligula's horse, that I'd write more seriously about the fascinating things occurring this year in the Democratic and Republican parties.  Truth to tell, I'm cheered by Barack Obama's victory over Mrs. Clinton.  So are a lot of people who call themselves conservatives, and that demands some explanation, given that on social issues, on taxes, and on immigration, Mr. Obama's positions are impossible to separate from Mrs. Clinton's.  What is going on here?

     Well, one thing that's going on is that people are feeling the fresh breeze of justice.  The media won't talk about it, but the Lewinsky affair was one of the smaller and less vicious of the scandals of Clintonia.  My own favorite among them all was the acquisition of 900 or so FBI files on leading Republicans, and then the files' disappearance, so that every Republican who was anyone could consider himself compromised, though no one would ever know exactly who, or exactly how.  Machiavelli would have approved.  It may be, it just may be, that Americans have grown weary of the dirty tricks -- the same old pucker-faced manipulators, not sated with eight years in the White House and another eight years in the Senate, weeping on cue, "apologizing" in ways that deny any guilt and continue to cast aspersions on those they have offended, and even descending to the race-baiting we've witnessed in the last week.  And they've gotten the thumping they deserved.

     But the personalities involved fascinate me, too.  Here you have Mrs. Clinton, an economic conservative in her (early) youth, after the fashion of her Republican father: a hard-driving, ambitious, Ivy League woman, working in the wings to bring down that paranoid liberal, Richard Nixon -- a man of immense talents who, outside of the realpolitik of international relations, had no idea what was going on in the culture of his day.  One of the great ironies of our time is that Mrs. Clinton herself bears a great resemblance to Mr. Nixon, I mean in the paranoia, the destructive tendency to mistake political opposition for personal attack.  And she also has not the slightest idea on what precipice her culture stands.  (Eugene McCarthy had that slightest idea, maybe more than that.)  But Mrs. Clinton rode both the old fashioned Powerful Husband train and the newfangled Feminist train to success.  In a way that cripples her maneuverability, she is defined by that conflict, caught in the synergistic ideologies of feminism, statism, and sexual antinomianism.

     But the voters have not flocked to her.  Indeed, she is most fortunate to be alive in the race still, having won New Hampshire by a tiny percentage of the vote, and having sort-of won Nevada by an even tinier percentage.  Over against her stands a man who embodies the single group of people hurt the worst by those synergistic ideologies: black men, who in the fifties could drive the length of North Carolina and not find a decent motel to sleep in, but a third of whom, in the nineties, in the balmy days of Clintonia, found that decent motel at one time or another in places like Leavenworth and San Quentin.  Black men couldn't ride on a lot of buses then.  Nowadays they have been thrown under the bus.  Barack Obama must know this, on some level.  Or it is at least possible that he may come to see it someday, if he is no longer beholden to his party, but his party is beholden to him.  Goodness knows there are plenty of black men around who would be willing to show it to him.  And perhaps, after the recent baiting, he may gather that, after all, the Ivy League lady never has done a darned thing for him and his people; that she and her husband have condescended to them, treating them as mascots; and that, when the days in the White House were over, she did not move back to Arkansas, did not move to live among them, but fled to the whitest of white suburbs of New York.  I don't know.

     I do know that if Mr. Obama is elected president, there is a chance, the slightest of chances, that he may help return the Democratic party to its old and somewhat self-contradictory position as the party of government intervention on behalf of small communities -- and I mean real communities, with all their local and parochial values.  I am not saying that such a position is workable.  But often reform comes with a look backwards, to see what or whom you've forgotten all about.  It used to be that small town Catholics, for instance, voted for the Democrats, and the Democrats, inconsistently to be sure, favored the interests of those small towns, while a Republican secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, would appeal to Darwinian economics, and declaim, for the benefit of the small farmer, "Adapt, or die."  It used to be that Margaret Sanger, peddler of poison for the poor, received splendid welcomes from Republican women's groups -- but that was a long time ago.

     If I were a betting man, I wouldn't lay a hundred dollars on the possibility that Mr. Obama would try to reconnect his party with the localist and populist strain in it, not to mention the unabashed Christian patriotism.  I might bet ten, though.  For one reason only: no one could say him nay.  If he listened to those black ministers, and there are plenty, who point out that the most dangerous locality for a black American is his mother's womb, he would have the moral authority to put the brakes on the Democrat party's rush to approve everything and anything that Americans want to do to children, or to marriage, or to the family.  He could, admittedly from the left, begin to rediscover what a community really looks like.  I'm not saying that he would, or that he probably would.  But as for the woman who wrote that it takes a village to raise a child, and whose whole career has been about nothing other than the co-opting of the village's authority by the leviathan State, and who has spent her life fleeing the village and its healthy parochialisms, she could as soon do it as she could deny what had brought her to her throne.  Mrs. Clinton cannot look to the distant past.  Mr. Obama can.  Whether he would or not, of course, is a different matter.

Winters' "Out of Whack"

One of our regular readers and commenters, and also contributor to Touchstone, Bobby Winters, has kindlly let me post a short reflection he's just sent round to his friends. Dr. Winters is Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the pastor of the Opolis United Methodist Church.

Out of whack

By Bobby Neal Winters

I like using the program Google Earth. Like is actually not strong enough a word, but I love isn’t the right word either. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Google Earth is basically a virtual globe that has been mapped out with satellite photographs. You can spin the globe around and zero in on a particular spot anywhere in the world. Then all you have to do is click and zoom. 

Depending upon how interesting the area has been to the folks who use the satellites, you can get in pretty close. In most big US cities, you can get close enough to pick out the cars, but rural areas aren’t covered quite as well, although one of my aunts lived in the oilfield near Maud, Oklahoma, and you could make out her driveway.

My favorite thing to do is to island hop in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Google has pretty good resolution on some of the islands that are only a couple of miles across. Even some of the very small islands have towns and plantations. I like trying to imagine what life must be like when you are so far off the beaten path, so far from the beating pulse of the earth. I recognize my writing that sentence is a little ironic as I live in Pittsburg, Kansas and grew up south of Ada, Oklahoma, but there it sets.

One think that seeps through as I hop from one part of the globe to another is that man is everywhere.

As I mentioned earlier, some parts of the world are covered with higher resolution photographs than others. This afternoon, I took a notion to check out a theory of mine about some areas that might have been photographed by satellites in great detail, and I checked out the reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine.

There is remarkable coverage of Chernobyl.You can see the cooling tower and you can see the separate ruts in dirt roads running up to it. You can make out individual trees around it.  Chernobyl definitely got the attention of the folks who run the satellites. (It makes me wonder: If they let US see this, what in the world can THEY see now?)

I suppose Chernobyl was on my mind because of a History Channel special called After People. It is a speculative documentary about what would happen to the planet if humans suddenly disappeared.  According to the program, the planet would be a lot better off without us.  Most of the structures that our species has built would be obliterated by the forces of nature in short order and nature itself would benefit enormously from our absence. 

The case cited to support this latter assertion was that of Chernobyl after the nuclear accident there back in 1986. (That was the year I married my beautiful bride, by the way, though no accidents were involved there.) The accident at Chernobyl resulted in the removal of 350,000 people from the area around the plant. In spite of the death to flora and fauna caused by radiation, animal life is now flourishing there because of the mere absence of people.

While the program looked like it had promise, it because tedious after a while. It was sort of like listening to my wife talk about how she would spend all my insurance money—not that she ever does that.What I mean to say, is there was almost a sense of delight in how great things will be after humans have departed the globe.

I like nature as well as the next guy. I’ve seen steam rise from geysers and off elk urine in Yellowstone in the month of October. I went there in October to avoid the crowds, because I am not overly fond of the hustle and bustle. I yearn to see places where man has not yet been.

But yearning for the disappearance of the human species so the planet will be more beautiful is rather contradictory. More beautiful for whom? I’ve not seen a koala bear setting up an easel to paint a still life.

My religion tells me that Man is out of whack and he caused the world to get out of whack. Yet, in spite of that, we have a special place in creation. We can think and we can plan in a way no other animal can. We can manipulate the world, but we are still part of the world.

Our misuse of our abilities has put us out of harmony with creation, and while there is no finding our way back to that harmony, finding our way to some sort of harmony is an eternal struggle. Nobody said it would be easy.

Google Earth gives us sort of a God’s-eye-view of the planet. There is one species capable of both great beauty and great ugliness and that species is us. I don’t wish us gone.

Archbishop Elias Zoghby, R.I.P.

A reader writes to note the death on January 1th of Melkite Catholic Archbishop Elias Zoghby, and sent the links to this description of his ecumenical work and this Wikipedia biography. The first includes links to a description of his "Zoghby Initiative" and two of his articles.

Last Patriarch End Game?

Charlotte Allen has written an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the precarious situation of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in "Istanbul." And the Patriarch's, Bartholomew I's, dealings with the EU and the Turkish government. There has been "talk"--rumblings, rumors, all that unsubstantiated sort of thing--about up and moving the Patriarchate to someplace such as New York City, or Washington or Geneva, Switzerland.

I will mention, in passing, a book related to this part of her article:

Today, Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.

"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviño. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings, population transfers, massacres and pogroms in Turkey, such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955.

The book is Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, which movingly tells the story of the population exhanges between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s. The author, Bruce Clark, an Orthodox Christians and an editor at the Economist (and friend) tracked down and interviewed survivors on both sides of that exchange of Christians in Turkey for Muslims in Greece, an exchange the sort of which undercuts any notions of pluralism, ethnic, religious, or otherwise. One nation, one language, one religion, one ethnicity. Or else.

Turkey has successfully rid itself, by various means, of just about all of its Orthodox Christians. When the British and the French had control of Constaninople after World War I, there were hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christians there. And now, we may be looking at the Last Patriarch of Constantinople. Well, the city and kingdom that endures is the heavenly Jersualem.

Voting for Caligula's Horse

     That's what a friend of mine says he's going to be doing this year.  Unfortunately, Incitatus will not be in the ballot.  I suppose he intends to write him in.

     Which leads me to think that there might be some durned good reasons for voting for Incitatus.  He's probably a better stud than Mr. Giuliani.  He knows just when to turn left or right, exactly like Mr. Romney, except that he won't be so hesitant about it.  He's better looking than Mrs. Clinton -- from either end, my wife says.  Incitatus won't try to subject the nation's health care system to centralized, unitary control, making vassals of everyone who suspects that someday he will be sick.  Just rub a little liniment on Incitatus' withers (easily located on an equine map) and he's happy.  Incitatus has no interest in miseducating children, leaving none of them behind, but he will give them a ride once in a while if they're well-behaved.  Incitatus won't declare war on poverty, drugs, breast cancer, boys, or Iraq.  And once Incitatus is put out to pasture, he won't set up his mare in his place.  He has no interest in turning his country into a banana republic.  He doesn't even like bananas.

     As you probably know, Caligula had the effrontery of elevating Incitatus to the Senate.  It's an interesting precedent.  It did dispense with a lot of campaigning.  So would the repeal of a couple of turn-of-the-last-century amendments, namely those mandating the direct election of senators, and allowing the federal government to tax incomes.  Take that first one away, and there's not much point even trying to establish some minimal residency in a state you don't care about, flood it with money from people far away, plaster your image all over television screens and billboards, and essentially make carpetbagging the wave of the future.  You'd have to be elected indirectly, by the legislators, and they'll want one of their own, over whom they can exercise some salutary influence.  (And if that Honorable Senator wants to keep his job, he'll find some way to work with both parties back in his Native State, or he'll find himself pitching hay again the next time the minority party picks up enough seats.)  Take the second one away, and Big Nanny might daydream of dominion over all things, all the time, in all places, all at once, but she probably wouldn't have enough money to accomplish it (although Nanada of the North is certainly giving it a good try).

     Would Incitatus be "presidential"?  Well, I do think so.  He's not ambitious, in the old sense of the word, meaning that he doesn't make a nuisance of himself, running around trying to scramble up votes.  William McKinley had that old Roman suspicion of the vice in mind when he refused to campaign for his re-election, appearing once in a while to give speeches from his porch, and that's all.  He believed that electioneering was beneath the dignity of a sitting president.  But in this regard we may be wiser than McKinley.  If Bill Clinton did nothing else, he taught us that precious little is beneath the dignity of a sitting president.

     But Incitatus doesn't stand a chance.  Sic transit, and all that.

Leviathans Make Nice Pets, Don't They?

     From Romano Guardini, Power and Responsibility (1956):

     We cannot escape the impression that nature as well as man himself is becoming ever more vulnerable to the domination -- economic, technical, political, organizational -- of power.  Ever more distinctly our condition reveals itself as one in which man progressively controls nature, yes; but also men; the state controls its citizens; and an autonomous technical-economic-political system holds all life in thrall.
     This growing defenselessness against the inroads of power is furthered by the fact that ethical norms have lost much of their influence, hence their ability to curb abuses of power is weakened . . .

     Father Guardini, despite the Italian name, was a German philosopher, and sometimes writes like one.  But he has that rare combination of farsightedness, both backward and forward, and attention to the particulars of the day.  And in his day, the particulars were terrible enough. Guardini always writes under the burden of the evil that his native land vomited forth upon the earth, made manifest in that strutting artist named Adolf, but not slain with Adolf in the bunker in Berlin.  He sees, too, that Nazism was but one manifestation of the modern age gone deranged.  Nazism died, but the will to power did not.  Guardini argues that the whole of modernity, from the late Renaissance to the bombing of Hiroshima, can be characterized by the naive trust in power -- with the magnificent achievements in the natural sciences that we all know of, and the destruction of cultural variety and community that we also know of, but do not want to think about. 

     But the concentration camps and gulags gave the lie to that pleasant view of inexorably accumulating power inexorably turning out happiness, as on a vast evolving assembly line, with products always different from what came before, and better, and, most important, inexorable -- divine providence having been rejected in favor of a superstitious trust in novelty and superficial complexity.  The modern age is dead, says Guardini.  The age to come, the age that we are in now, at its inception, is one wherein man must (and shall) learn to restrain power.  That is because power, once released from nature, does not remain neutral.  Man must use it, or suffer it.  As soon as he begins to consider it as something outside his domain, a "force," an historical arrow, he abdicates his responsibility; and then the power devolves into other hands.  It becomes, he says, demonic -- and he's not speaking metaphorically.

     If Guardini is right, it sure has not occurred to our statesmen yet.  No one seems concerned with the need, for the sake of humanity, to restrain our power.  Whatever we can do, we're told, we will do, and that's that.  Even conservatives sigh and shrug and confess not only that we are not strong enough to leash the leviathan, but that we should even trouble to make the attempt, or to point out that it must be done.  The result is that with every increase in our power -- to deface a countryside, to expunge the local, to consign tradition and learning to oblivion, to violate the very bodies we are given, turning them too into factory products, even suggesting that we "design" our children -- we fall victim to it in the very act of using it.  We can, if we like, make human beings on an assembly line, but we cannot do so without making human beings, ourselves too, into things.  In that sense the owner of such a factory is its first victim and product.  He makes man, and abolishes himself and his humanity in the process.

     These things have been on my mind this week, with my daughter just returning from the pro-life rally in Washington.  It's a strange power, isn't it, that subjects the body to the pharmacy, not to kill off an infection, or to help the knee bend as easily as it should, but to thwart the body, to make it barren for a while, for the pleasure of the moment.  And then, soon, the decision to become one flesh moves from the category of choice to that of the inexorable, too.  The license of our day provides only the illusion of "control".  And when the temporary sterilization fails, when the weedkiller doesn't work, and the sprout comes up anyway through the cracks in the concrete, then comes the time for the forceps and the vacuum.  All of this, in the name of empowerment.  A fit way not to bear a child, in towns that are not towns, in a culture that is not a culture; working among friends that are not friends, eventually living with a husband or a wife that will not be a husband or a wife, but rather that one, a temporary source of solace and companionship, one that happens to be equipped with the requisite parts.  The new age had better be one of the restraint of power; or it never can be an age of humanity and love.

    

What's your pro-life IQ?

Our friends at Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America have developed a 20-question test to see how much you know about Roe v Wade and abortion myths. You can take the test here: http://www.roeiqtest.com/ui/

Lutheran Missio Apostolica

A journal you may want to know about: Missio Apostolica , the journal of the Lutheran Society for Missiology. The site includes links to five sample articles, though the second link doesn't work.

Christ, Creed, Culture

I am revising this appeal from Saturday (not the best day to post such things, I'm told). Thanks to those who've already responded!

I mentioned the "bad economy" or the news reports about it in a previous post. We've been told that non-profit organizations such as ours should expect to feel the pinch, if they haven't already. One opportunity for support that we would very much like to encourage is monthly support. This gives a regular base of support upon which to build, especially through some of the leaner months (such as summer).

January is a good time to assess what you might be able to contribute on a monthly basis to support the work of the Fellowship, publishing Touchstone, our Calendar, Devotional Guide, & Salvo, all aimed in their own way ultimately to help Christians think straight and stay focused on the rich, vital, enduring common tradition of our faith going back more than 2,000 years, appealing to that great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, in other words we try to keep our eyes on Christ, Creed, and Culture.

The culture has been greatly desacralized, with materialism and appetite touted, the engines of an economy that is largely indifferent if not hostile at times to virtue, grace, mercy, joy, love, and peace. Our Christian culture, however, is timeless: The saints live in Christ; we live in Christ; our community spans the centuries, embraces all races, languages, and tribes, united at the foot of the Cross. We aim, by God's grace, to keep our eye on Christ and His mission, and help you do so too.

Please consider signing up today as a monthly supporter of the Fellowship of St. James. Even a small monthly contribution really adds up over the course of year!

Fasting for Carthage

Worse than Carthage, says Robert Hart, of our abortion culture. Perhaps Roe v. Wade's anniversary should be officially designated by churches as a day of fasting and mourning.

Values, Voters, Views

This Barna Group report may be of interest. It begins:

Americans Describe Their Moral and Social Concerns, Including Abortion and Homosexuality

January 21, 2008 (Ventura, CA) - The 2008 presidential election is engaging more people than any recent presidential election. With voters having already spoken in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina, one topic is already generating significant coverage and commentary: the role moral and social issues will play among voters this November. What are the most pressing problems, according to Americans? What are the moral and social issues that concern Christian voters the most?

A new study from The Barna Group provides a data-driven snapshot of the U.S. population, providing a dose of objectivity to some much-debated, often-misunderstood issues. The Barna research explores matters beyond "who-will-Christians-vote-for" questions - for now - in favor of examining the perceived importance of 10 diverse issues. Those include a pair of elements (abortion and homosexuality) often linked to so-called values voters, as well as other issues that relate to morality, justice, and social concern.

The Source & Aim of Every Good Deed

From one of the saints yesterday:

"Always make sure that sincere love--the bond of all perfection--is the source and aim of every good deed. Every virtue grows in strength through love and humility, with the aid of experience, of time and of grace. But love prevails over humility, for it was through love that the Word of God humbled Himself by making Himself equal to us."

--Euthymius the Great, d. January 20, 473, Palestine

The Helpful Discovery of Dirt in Potter's Field

I recently read yet another Christian complaint about Harry Potter. The critic’s thesis was that Joanna Rowling is a “contemporary transgressive artist par excellence,” who holds lightly to the canons of Judeo-Christian morality and of traditional children’s literature in the west, the Potter tales being a catalog of rule-breaking, disobedience, lying, vengeance-taking, and whatnot, its final installation containing the revelation of the Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact that insinuates euthanasia into the minds of children--not to mention that all of this is done in a pagan context by witches and wizards, no less.

My reaction was--yes--but did he miss something? Like the Point of it All?

One wonders just what kind of literature a person like this can read.  Must everything be reduced to black and white, not only with unwelcome details smoothed over, but with tools that, by neutralizing elements the critic prefers not to see in his desire to define the work by the ones he finds obnoxious, guts it and renders invisible the message of the whole?

The Rowling fantasy, for those who are able to see it, is a very typical moral tale of the Judeo-Christian west: it is the story (I have said elsewhere that this is the only real Story there is) of the hidden prince born in troubled obscurity, who finds it in himself to love good and oppose evil, and who, aided by a rather motley lot of companions, destroys at the forfeit of his life the kingdom of the Evil One, finally coming into his own and living happily ever after. It is the story of the Gospel; it is our story. To love it is to love the story of Christ and his church. Harry Potter is an imperfect Christ, to be sure, but what reasonable person would confuse the thing itself with its image?

Here, however, was someone who thinks that since the principal characters are in many ways flawed, the piece should be kept away from Christian children instead of given them for edification. Christians are apparently supposed to be people for whom everything is a monochromatic moral tale, and who operate on the maxim that people are what they read.  But this is only true of fools, and one cannot account for the actions or opinions of fools.

Christian children who are old enough to read Harry Potter are old enough to understand the imperfections of heroes, and judge the flaws of literary characters, if they have been given the standards by which to render the judgments. Shall we train their instincts to flee imperfect human beings rather than love and embrace them--not for the imperfection, but in spite of it--in hope of redemption, both of their imperfect selves and those they embrace? If we train them to flee, those who castigate our faith for making people who hate first themselves, and then by extension, others, are quite correct about our faith, but wrong in thinking it Christian.

These children are also old enough to understand that murder/suicide pacts are the sort of things that can be entered by pagans with noble and admirable ends in mind, but which Christians know are sinful--they are old enough to understand what is splendid even in the virtutes paganorum, and to think of Dumbledore and Snape accordingly. If Dumbledore’s creator thinks of him as a man of homosexual orientation, why does that mean Christians are obliged to belittle his excellences--particularly if he lives, as he is depicted, a chaste and celibate life? In that case might homosexuals be justified in saying we train our children to hate the sinner along with what we allege to be the sin? If we did, and they did, they would be right about our faith, but wrong in thinking it Christian.

One wonders what critics like this do with Odysseus, with David or Solomon, with Simon Peter, with Hamlet, Lear, or, Bunyan’s Christian, for that matter. Or the Bible. The Christian literary tradition, because it is grounded in the perfection of God, the primordial goodness of creation, and a redemptive teleology, does not require perfection of its heroes, only perfectibility, and--this is critical--the ability to represent Christ, whether by authorial intention or not.

Given what we are shown of our Lord in the Gospels, I strongly suspect if he were accurately depicted by friendly and sympathetic eyes in accounts that did not have the status of holy scripture, and without the overlay of piety, we would see a good, but flawed, perhaps deeply and fatally flawed, man. He would not in fact have the imperfections we would lay to his account, but he would be far from measuring up to our expectations for a perfect man. He would not be prudent enough, respectful enough, humble enough, patient enough, pious enough, obedient enough, considerate enough, or kind enough to be God Incarnate (and only rarely are we visited by the capacity to admit that we secretly attribute the same flaws to God himself).

Even though we would notice prodigies of all these virtues in him, we would also see evidence of their lack in certain instances--of inconsistency. We would see his tragic end on the cross as heroic, perhaps, but it would not surprise us, given certain qualities we had observed--connected, perhaps, with persisting questions about the moral uprightness of his parentage. It is for this reason he can be represented to us, while imperfectly, in stories of imperfect heroes; it is why these stories lead back to him. It is because we are what we are, and Almighty God has regarded our low estate.

The Evangel, in fact, is always mediated to us through imperfect heroes, or heroes we may easily assume share our imperfections, handsome princes though they may be. It is no coincidence the keys to the Kingdom were delivered to the most robustly flawed of all Christ’s disciples. This is why we are uncomfortable with the attempt to create perfect heroes. For one thing, we can’t do it, so the attempt makes for bad literature, and for another, for some reason characters sanitized to our standards never look like the Lord.

From the Inbox 19 January 2008

A few things of possible interest.

From The Revealer, Huck's Old Wine, asking if Huckabee's positions are signs of the often-predicted (and much hoped for) "gentler, kinder evangelicalism" or political calculation.

Salon.com hauls out the new demon figure for clued-in liberals, Reconstructionism, in Huckabee's radical religous friends. The appalled cry of "Reconstructionist!", meaning extremist authoritarian fruit cake, is a useful way to tar any Christian who proposes making America more Christian (by his definition), but it's about as accurate as calling any support for home schooling racist.

All you need do is transpose the rhetoric and the subjects of the alleged "Reconstructionists" into the language and hopes of leftist activists to see how an ideological critique is being dishonestly presented as an expose of the influence of an objectively sinister political movement. The same kind of talk from people on the left would not be similarly analyzed as "Communist," though the passion, the clear principles, and the desire to move America to live by those principles are all exactly the same.

From The New Yorker (thanks to The Revealer for the link), an entertaining report on Scientology's real estate holdings, particularly in Hollywood, Dana Goodyear's Chateau Scientology. Part of the lesson seems to be that rich cults with a taste for pursuing celebrities are good for urban renewal.

Also from Salon.com, a curious article on lunatic claims to own the moon, Who owns the moon? by Elizabeth Svoboda. Something I didn't know:

Lunar soil is rife with platinum group metals, which are exceedingly rare on Earth and are key to helping hydrogen fuel cells operate efficiently. Then there's the real golden ticket: helium-3, deposited on the moon's surface by radioactive solar winds. When combined with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, helium-3 can initiate fusion reactions so potent that scientists estimate a single space-shuttle load of the stuff could power all the homes and businesses in the United States for a year.

From the Daily Telegraph, an article on children's books, If children are to become readers for life, they must first love stories, by a writer named Michael Murpurgo. The article also includes links to a list of 100 books "every child should read."

An interesting weblog Mike Aquilina put me on to: Maior autem his est caritas, written by a convert to Christianity from Hinduism.  Of interest may be two posts on Bobby Jindal's conversion: Free to believe and India's Burning Issue.  The author writes in the first:

The kind of intellectual conversion an individual upper-caste person (such as Jindal, or, for that matter, myself) might undergo, is one thing. It doesn't really violate caste boundaries. When I'm back in India, I just automatically fit right back into an upper-caste and upper-class niche.

. . . [But] When conversion challenges the sociopolitcal status quo -- so, when Dalits en-masse embrace Christianity, or Christian missionary activity is seen as giving Dalits a sense of human self-worth and therefore, awareness of their political rights as well, well, then things get interesting. Conversion then becomes "spiritual violence" and an imposition of "alien values" and so on.

From Christianity Today, an article giving a more positive view of the Middle East's Christians, The Middle East's Faithful are Breathing Fine, by Mike Parker, the Middle East Director of MECO (Middle East Christian Outreach). He urges Western Christians to

look beyond the statistics. True, there has been numerical decline, and emigration is a constant temptation for Christians here. Life is tough and uncertain, and it would be safer somewhere else. At the same time, some of the churches we work with are growing, engaging their cultures, and sending significant numbers of Arabic-speaking Christians out into the region and the wider world. The largest Protestant church here claims a membership of 8,000, and there are Coptic churches in the 10,000-member bracket. Still, most churches are small — look beyond the numbers to the movements.

Also from CT, Everything hasn't changed, John Wilson's critique of "emergent" guru Brian McLaren's latest book. I think he nicely and quickly skewers the kind of high-minded and almost completely useless abstractions this kind of writer offers.

For Shakespeare and theatre lovers, Much Ado About Nothing: 'We didn't sleep together, did we?' from the DT., in which Zoë Wanamaker and Simon Russell Beale talk about playing Beatrice and Benedicke.

Also from the DT, a profile of the English writer Rumer Godden, born 100 years ago this year, Rumer Godden's life is a story in itself. She's a writer I have never read, though you see her books in used booksellers a lot (and several are apparently still in print) and see her name mentioned in books, but at the least she lived an interesting life. For example, after her divorce in 1942 she moved into a cottage in Kashmir.

"I am calling it Dove Cottage, because it is like a little brown and white dove sitting in the green," she wrote. The dove would reveal a surprisingly sharp beak in the form of a cook who one day laced lunch with powdered glass, the culmination of a summer's surreptitious spiking of the family's food with opium and marijuana.

There were policemen, arrests and recriminations. A scandal broke. Stool samples proved the presence of ground glass. No motive was discovered and nothing was proven about drugging. Kashmiris and British locals were unsympathetic

She used this story in Kingfishers Catch Fire. Two of her novels, Black Narcissus and The River, were made into still well known (among film buffs, at least) movies.

Finally, one last article from Salon.com, Glenn Glenwald on The noxious fruits of hate speech laws.

2008 Schemann Symposium

Free and open to the public is this year's Fr Alexander Schmemann Lecture and Symposium, being held January 29 and 30 at St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary outside New York City.

The event begins with Vespers at 6:30 on Tuesday night and a Hierarchical Divine Liturgy at 9:00 Wednesday morning. This is followed by a symposium on St. John Chrysostom, featuring Margaret Mitchell of the University of Chicago's divinity school, Hieromonk Gregory Woolfenden, who teaches liturgy at St. Sophia Institute and Yale's divinity school, and the Very Reverend Josiah Trenham, author of the upcoming book Marriage and Virginity according to St John Chrysostom. The Schmemann lecture will be given that evening at 7:30 by the Bishop of Wichita and Mid-America, Basil.

For information, contact < info@svots.edu >.

Per Aspera ad Astra

     Thanks to Judy Warner for sending along this article from today's Washington Post, about eleven boys from a single Boy Scout troop who have all made Eagle Scout together, a feat that Scout leaders think may be unprecedented in the organization's history.  The boys, who called themselves the Viking Patrol, were initially a bunch of whiners and losers, "ninnies" as one of the leaders called them, lying down in the middle of the trail along one of their first hikes, a gentle three-miler.

     The article doesn't give too many details about what transformed them.  A couple of things do stand out, though.  The leaders seem to have responded to the boys' sissiness by making things more difficult for them, not easier.  The turning point came when, on a hike in Alaska, the boys didn't want to pitch their tents, didn't want to hang their food up so as not to attract bears, didn't want to set up their latrines, and so on.  So the leaders left them to themselves.  The result was that they did organize themselves after all; they formed a team, and got the jobs done.  After that, they were on their way.

     The article mentions, without delving into it, that a couple of the leaders were ex-military men; and it does seem that the leaders had especial fondness for pretty rugged hikes, hunting, mechanics, and suchlike.  They didn't have the boys do macrame.  And yet, because the boys were amongst themselves, and didn't have to care what anybody looking over their shoulder would think, they seem to have grown interested in things gentler than shooting moose: planting butterfly bushes, for example, or talking about Bergman films. 

     It's pleasant to see that the Post did not sniff in contempt at any of this, though there was the requisite (and discouraging) allusion to the precipitous fall in Boy Scout membership, from 4.3 million about 35 years ago to 2.9 million in 2006, a drop that is only partly explained by demographics.  And the article does allude to the only press the Boy Scouts now get, namely when the organization has to divert many millions of its dollars from hikes, canoe trips, table saws, and chartered buses, to lawyers to help them fend off plaintiffs of various sorts who really do detest what the organization is about, because they are not fond of the creatures whom the organization is dedicated to help.

     But there's a lot to read between the lines here.  It's clear, even from this pretty sketchy story, that the boys developed both personally and intellectually; and I don't think that the development is attributable to a couple of years of growing taller.  I teach nineteen-year-olds for a living, remember.  You can hardly say it without inviting a chorus of jeers, but the history of the human race simply does not show that boys, after a certain age, develop their full intellectual potential, or anything close to it, under the primary tutelage of women.  That doesn't mean that they can't have some women as teachers -- as I've written many times.  I know plenty of women who are excellent teachers of young men.  What these women all have in common, though, is a deep appreciation for them as young men, and not just as generically young people.  And they'd also be the last women to claim that the young men could get everything they needed from them.

     Another politically incorrect truth that the account illustrates is that, for the male, difficulty, whether intellectual or physical, brings hope; there are bruises that feel good, because they are the bruises of a real life, a real struggle.  I'm not making any claim about young women here, except that I don't think that they die inside without some kind of arena, some agon, where you can win or lose, but at least lose fighting.  There's a bitterness in the easy, the silly, the pointless, and it's all the more dispiriting when it is combined, as it is in a lot of the school assignments I see, with imbecilic drudgery.  A boy is that odd creature who, if he can't clear the low bar, needs to have it raised higher.  But that counterintuitive challenge can only be issued under certain circumstances, by people who are motivated by love, and who know what they are doing.  Usually that means you need a gang of boys, not just one, and a leader who knows more about them than he can even articulate, because he was once one of them.  There are all kinds of lessons here, too, for attracting more young men to the ordained ministry.

     One more point.  I'm thinking of Burke's comment that there is nothing colder than the heart of a confirmed "metaphysical" politician, wickeder than the passions of men because it is closer to that unmixed intellectual evil below.  What if a man like Mr. Obama could set aside the metaphysics of the Left, and notice, as a plain matter of fact, that the Boy Scouts work.  Such a man could then say, to those who would harry the organization out of existence, "Leave it alone.  I don't agree with some of their principles, but I don't see anything else on the horizon that works as well as they do.  By executive order, I will funnel as much money as I can to cities and counties to work with the Scouts, because I care about one thing and that alone: to save as many boys as I can from the gangs, the gutters, and the grave.  I want results."

Monthly Support

I mentioned the "bad economy" or the news reports about it in the previous post. We've been told that non-profit organizations such as ours should expect to feel the pinch, if they haven't already. One opportunity for support that we would very much like to encourage is monthly support. This gives a regular base of support upon which to build, especially through some of the leaner months (such as summer).

January is a good time to assess what you might be able to contribute on a monthly basis to support the work of the Fellowship, publishing Touchstone, our Calendar, Devotional Guide, & Salvo, all aimed in their own way ultimately to help Christians think straight and stay focused on the rich, vital, enduring common tradition of our faith going back more than 2,000 years, appealing to that great cloud of witnesses surrounding us.

The culture has been greatly desacralized, with materialism and appetite touted, the engines of an economy that is largely indifferent to virtue, grace, mercy, joy, love, and peace. The saints live in Christ; we live in Christ; our community spans the centuries, embraces all races, languages, and tribes, united at the foot of the Cross. We aim, by God's grace, to keep our eye on the Cross, and help you do so too. Please consider signing up today as a monthly supporter of the Fellowship of St. James. Even a small monthly contribution really adds up over the course of year!

Brave Roe World

The media is telling us now that the economy is bad and going to get worse. Who knows? Confidence or lack of confidence itself can effect the overall economy, and these factors can be effect by media hype. I am not claiming media hype at the moment, but I do not generally trust the media (surprise) and for all the objectivity and independence of the media, it's amazing how often the same stories with the same spins appear.

As important as the economy is, I think it pales in importance to the life issues facing our civilization, and I don't mean "just" abortion. I mean human cloning, chimeras, human-animal hybrids, fetal and embryo experimentation, euthanasia, genetic engineering, cyborgs, bio-medical science doing whatever can be done because it can be done. "Let's see what happens when we cross a human with a snake." We know we are in an ethical free-fall generally, (just look at our politicians and businessmen, in general, not all, of course); why should I trust "science" backed by billions of dollars to respect human dignity and the sanctity of life? I would favor a tough ban on a host of items--I don't know enough to list every one in detail, but I believe most of us thinnk that the "frankenstein" factor is not well regulated.

The 35th anniversary of Roe v Wade is upon us. Not long after that immoral ruling by our highest court, it became routine for many "doctors" to ask expecting mothers "do you want to keep 'it'?" We were assured that man's search-and-destroy mission in the womb would lead to a society in which children would be better off, always wanted, and women would be happier and healthier. The media loved it, promoted it. They lied, children died.

Help of the Helpless

Sometimes a picture can be breathtakingly theological. This one is for me, at least, showing Fr. Patrick Reardon of All Saints Orthodox Church lifting a newly-baptized infant above the altar, as is the custom, while the congregation sings Simeon's Nunc Dimittis. The icon, of course, shows Christus Victor trampling down the gates of hell and grasping the hand of Adam, raising him up from the dead. Notice the baby's raised arm! Helpless Adam, helpless Man, helpless infant: but now our "eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples; a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel." Alleluia.

Roman Irony

At the Wall Street Journal is this brief article about a cancelled speech that was going to be given by Benedict XVI, cancelled because students and 67 faculty of Sapienza University in Rome threatened to disrupt the speech. Faculty. Grown adults. The crime: some tiff over Galileo. As the article puts it, The protesters "argued that it was inappropriate for a religious figure to speak at their university." Sapienza U is a university that was founded by a .... religious figure ... and not just any religious figure, but a ... Pope.

Market Niches

A recent article in the New York Times about baby boomers and marketing tells us that there are now four types of boomers: Ageless Explorers, Comfortable Contents, Live for Todays, and Sick and Tireds. The latter would be sort of the Grumpy Old Men (and Women), while the other three, in order, might be something like X-Treme Boomers, Stayed Boomers, and Party-On Boomers. While I don't put a great deal of stock in such labels,  given the variety of reasons that people read Touchstone, I wonder if we have any specific niches that we could label, just for fun, of course. One that I hear occasionally is of the "Homeless, Need Food" or the "Restless Pilgrim" variety. Others are looking for orthodox Christian friends.

East Meets Spiegel

Kevin Offner sends me this link to a testy interview in Der Spiegel of Metropolitan Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. Speigel wants to know, among other things, why Kirill thinks homosexuality is wrong.

SPIEGEL: What troubles you, for example, about homosexuals marching through the streets of Moscow in a parade, just as they do in Berlin or Amsterdam?

Kyrill: It distorts the boundary between good and evil, between sin and sanctity. Even adultery is apparently no longer considered a sin, despite the fact that every adulterer senses that he has done something wrong. But human beings have a conscience. That's something even the Marxists were unable to eliminate. They had an explanation for everything, a self-contained philosophy in which being determined consciousness -- just as your philosophers in Germany say, the conscience is the result of cultural development. But whether you are in Papua New Guinea, Munich or Novosibirsk in Siberia, the principles are the same everywhere: Thou shall not steal, though shall not kill...

SPIEGEL: ... but not everyone says: Thou shall not be gay. Why should people have to conceal their homosexuality?

Kyrill: The Bible calls it a sin. But we do not condemn these people. The church is opposed to these people being persecuted or offended. But why should sin be propagated? The gay parade is a blatant display of sodomy. In that case, we might as well promote other sins, as has long been the case on television. This degenerates public morality. It is the church's job to call a sin a sin. Otherwise it no longer serves a purpose. Unfortunately, the tendency in today's world is to champion the freedom of choice, while freedom from evil is virtually forgotten.

SPIEGEL: It's human for a person to be homosexual. How can something that is human be a sin?

Kyrill: And what, in your opinion, is adultery -- something good or something bad?

SPIEGEL: This decision lies within the conscience of every individual.

And about the matter of the schism between East and West:

Kyrill: The division is a consequence of human sin. In this respect it resembles a divorce. The Christian West and the Christian East parted ways because they believed that they didn't need each other anymore. Reunification can only be achieved through spiritual rapprochement. It doesn't matter how many documents we sign. Unless we have the feeling that we love each other, that we are one family, and that each member needs the other, it will not materialize.

Now there's a thought....

HOJ Brown's Touchstone Obituary

I have been told that posting links on the Touchstone home page to items that appear in Quodlibet is inconvenient for staff, so for those who have requested it, I am making Harold O. J. Brown's obituary from the November issue available here:

HAROLD 0. J. BROWN, R.I.P.

At a gathering of Harold 0. J. Brown's friends after the memorial service in his honor, William D. Delahoyde, a Raleigh attorney and protege from his Deerfield days, rose to state what I am sure was a consensus: While it was doubtful his passing would be noted by the general media, most of us there thought that in knowing him we had a brush with greatness.

In that company the observation bore a peculiar taste and weight, for the people with whom I had been conversing at the obsequies, especially the older ones who had known him for many years, were not the sort for whom the attribution would pass easily. Many of them were, after all, members of America's nobility, old Harvard grads who knew, and often were on familiar terms with, people whom most of us have only read about. Listening to them reminisce was like an evening spent in a well-marked part of my library, but there the books were alive.

All of us knew Joe as a brilliant intellect: the valedictorian of a Jesuit high school who took his degree in Germanic Languages and Literature from Harvard College magna cum laude, who absent-mindedly forgot that he had been accepted at the Medical School, instead studying theology on the continent on Fulbright and Danforth fellowships, returning to Harvard after an Evangelical conversion in Germany to take his doctorate in Reformation history under George Hunston Williams. He lectured or conversed in German, French, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Hindi, and several other languages. Like Max Weber, who taught himself Russian to pass the time during a week of convalescence, Joe's talent for language and the breadth of his literary knowledge were legendary among those who knew him.

Conspicuous at the gathering were many members of his Harvard rowing crews, whom he had coached to notable victories, including first-place cups at the Henley Royal Regatta. Most of us there had met him later than the Harvard days, and heard of all this as the prelude to a distinguished pastoral, teaching, and journalistic career with InterVarsity in Europe, Park Street Church in Boston, Yeotmal Seminary in India, Christianity Today, Trinity-Deerfield, the Religion and Society Report, and finally Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.

A strong Protestant, Joe was a friend of Christians wherever he found them, including us at Touchstone. He was a particularly bold (sometimes to the point of folly) mountain climber, ran, or if he had to, walked, marathons, despite being plagued with the congenital lower-spine deformity that caused his distinctive posture and gait. He was a loving and attentive husband to Grace--a redoubtable counterpart, fully remarkable in her way as he was in his--and father to Cynthia and Peter. While perhaps most widely known for his political and intellectual leadership in the pro-life movement, he was in scores of individual lives a paraclete who by dint of his gentle attention and concern became Kierkegaard's pinch of spice that made all the difference.

But this suffices to represent his phenomenal accomplishment. Joe was embarrassed by such notice, and on his deathbed, Bill Delahoyde told us, he emphatically said--or rather wrote, for he could no longer speak--that he did not see in himself the man that others saw in him.

His childhood and early family life, of which he spoke little, was odd and less than satisfactory, and what he became cannot be explained except through the glass of redemption. Here, to be sure, was great native ability and desire to achieve, energized by a strong sense of noblesse oblige, and a desire to love so that he might be loved in return.

This may become the stuff of greatness, but on reflection I think this is perhaps not really what we are speaking of here. The proper word is "glory," in which Joe's observation about what he could not see in himself merges into what he did see in Another, and which we beheld in him. This glory was manifest in a humility that dispersed its gifts, which in others would have gone into the construction of a world-historical character, among his friends as the animating force behind a task to complete. His kenosis was not carried out simply in consent to a divine mission to the world, but in befriending us--making himself of minor repute principally by concentration on the cultivation of others. Thus we beheld his glory, but in its very revelation it was hidden, and so it is with the best of his servants, who, taught in his school and following his example, tend to spend their lives giving away what "great" men have so often learned to keep for themselves.

Harold 0. J. Brown, whose view of his work at the end of his life echoed that of Thomas Aquinas, saw no greatness in himself because he had lived long in the shadow of his Master, simply doing for others what had been done for him. But he will be happy, I think, when his friends rise up to say that they saw in this the reflected glory of the Lord.

S. M. HUTCHENS

TOUCHSTONE, NOVEMBER 2007

A Dominican on Summorium pontificium

On Tuesday evening at 7:00, the Domincan theologian Father Giles Dimock will be speaking on Pope Benedict's Summorium pontificium, which expanded permission for priests to celebrate the Latin Mass. The talk is being sponsored by the Youngstown, Ohio, chapter of the Society of St. John Chrysostom, a society dedicated to improving the fellowship of Catholics and Orthodox, and being given at St. Dominic Catholic Church in Youngstown.

I hope to be there. Subscribers may recognize the SSJC chapter as the source of the original version of Mike Aquilina's "One Flesh of Purest Gold," on St. John's teaching on marriage, from the January/February issue.

Writing Like a Child

     My colleague Steve Hutchens made a really splendid point on my last posting, saying that Heaven isn't the only kingdom you have to become a child again to enter.  "Elfland" is another -- that subcreated land of wonder, peopled by a pudgy old fellow named Pickwick,or a goodhearted and half crazy Parson Adams snapping his fingers for glee.  What I do for maybe a dozen students every year -- and I hope it is that many -- is to strip away the pretenses of reading for learnedness and career-building and intellectual pomp, so they can read again like children.  If they don't need the exercise, I sure do.  We all do.

     That made me want to share with you a couple of letters written by a man who seems to have encountered everything in his life with the jolly good mischief of a child:

     Dear Kermit:

     Thursday and Friday there was a great deal of snow on the ground, and the weather was cold, so that Mother and I had two delightful rides up Rock Creek.  The horses were clipped and fresh, and we were able to let them go along at a gallop, while the country was wonderfully beautiful.

     To-day, after lunch, Mother took Ethel, Archie, and Quentin, each with a friend, to see some most wonderful juggling and sleight of hand tricks by Kellar.  I went along and was as much interested as any of the children, though I had to come back to my work in the office before it was half through.  At one period Ethel gave up her ring for one of the tricks.  It was mixed up with the rings of five other little girls, and then all six rings were apparently pounded up and put into a pistol and shot into a collection of boxes, where five of them were subsequently found, each tied around a rose.  Ethel's, however, had disappeared, and he made believe that it had vanished, but at the end of the next trick a remarkable bottle, out of which many different liquids had been poured, suddenly developed a delightful white guinea pig, squirming and kicking and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey, with around its neck Ethel's ring, tied by a pink ribbon.  Then it was wrapped up in a paper, handed to Ethel; and when Ethel opened it, behold, there was no guinea pig, but a bunch of roses with a ring . . .

Or take a look at this one:

. . . Quentin is really too funny for anything.  He got his legs fearfully sunburned the other day, and they blistered, became inflamed, and ever-faithful Mother had to hold a clinic on him.  Eyeing his blistered and scarlet legs, he remarked, "They look like a Turner sunset, don't they?"  And then, after a pause, "I won't be caught again this way! quoth the raven, 'Nevermore!'"  I was not surprised at his quoting Poe, but I would like to know where the ten-year-old scamp picked up any knowledge of Turner's sunsets . . .

Letter after letter, like those two, about hikes, funny people at official functions, Archie's pet lizard Bill, Archie's pet badger, Kermit's reading Dickens and discussing the novels with his father by mail, Quentin's holding his own among his football eleven.  All direct, simple, yet full of quirky anecdotes, little amusing turns of phrase, a wink and a nudge.  "Behold!" he says, in that last sentence about the magic show.  He says it because the music of the Bible and of old literature is in his head, and he tosses the note in there just as if he'd been describing what happened to the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night.  And he's not snide or cynical about it, either.  I can imagine Teddy the Shepherd on that blessed night, coming back to the hovels with his mates.  "A bully bit that was!  By George, I had to weep, it was that wonderful!"

     Set aside whether the man was a great president.  He sure did write like a child; and that counts for much in my book.  The letters, by the way, come from a newly published collection called A Bully Father.  Which he was, too.

The Disenchantment of the World

Reading Pascal Bruckner’s fascinating Temptation of Innocence (La Tentation de l’Innocence), a kind of neo-Stoic work full of horse-sense--and so useful, but as horse-sense not quite human--I once again came upon the observation, frequently made in the form of a truism, that the modern world has become disenchanted. This means that man has emerged through a series of revolutions--interpreted as growing up from a racial childhood where the world was charged with wonders and full of unseen spirits which included God or the gods--to the place where he knows, or can clearly see his potential to know in a scientific way, what things are, how they work, and so how to work them: mastery defeating wonder as familiarity breeds contempt.

Many who acknowledge this emergence seem to regret it, wishing they could rest again in the comforts of childhood. They see the nonage of mankind as a kind of golden age to which they are forbidden to return, the path back into this Eden guarded by giants from Zeitgeistheim in flaming lab coats. Perhaps for every person for whom the disenchantment is evidence of a triumph of the human spirit (so to speak), there is another, no less informed about the world, to whom it brings a despair for which self-immolation on the altar of mysticism is not too small a price to pay for release from the resulting misery: for every Freud a Jung; for every Sagan a Leary.

But either state of consciousness seems to me to involve pride and ignorance on a massive scale. The ignorance is ignorance of history (which frequently masks itself as analysis of history), of one particular fact of history which modernism in its pride--as though its own reductive qualities could disenchant rather than simply open the floodgates to mysticism--will not acknowlege: that the Great Disenchantment has been with us from the beginning in the form of monotheism (or henotheism, to which monotheists also hold, when allowed to define terms). Where it appears, the little gods, now understood as wholly subordinate to an all-powerful Creator who hears and considers the prayers of men, desiring their good, no longer has the place in the world that full enchantment--not of the romantic sort, but enchantment as it has actually been known by men--demands. Indeed, modernist disenchantment seems good for nothing but bringing back the Baals and the Ashtoreths, not with just their bounties but their demands--for reanimating the pixies and wood sprites as our pagan ancestors knew them when the missionaries came, named them as demons, and delivered us. How easily, and with what terrible ingratitude, we forget that the old gods not only demanded a saucer of milk on the stoop, but the baby's blood. Only ignorance, vicious ignorance in the learned, thinks them "enchanting."

True enchantment, and breaking the spells of every evil enchanter, is found only loving God, the fathomless depth of creative power, tremendum et fascinans. Men were made to behold and enjoy him, to stand as knowers and understanders on the threshold of what cannot be known or understood, to acknowledge with real pleasure that however far they advance into kno