Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Maya Blue Baptism

This story from the Chicago Tribune is about Maya blue, and the discovery of how it was made. The color of a bright cloudless Caribbean sky, Maya blue was used to paint temples, pots, jars, and so on, and even after centuries buried remains a brilliant blue. It was also used in ritual worship: some painted sacrificial "objects" were flung  into the waters of

Sacred Cenote, a natural sinkhole at the magnificent Maya complex of Chichen Itza on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The Maya thought the almost perfectly round pool, nearly 200 feet across and more than 80 feet deep, was a portal to the spirit world.

The "objects" included "ceramics,  gold, humans."

The Ugly (Incarcerated) American

Here's what Al Jazeera is saying about the Pew report about US prison populations (1 percent of the American adult population is in prison?) Certainly this will add more lustre to the image of America overseas, not that our films haven't already shown the world exactly what life is like here in the United States.

As to the report itself, as reported in the Kansas City Star:

More than one in 100 adult Americans are in jail or prison, an all-time high, according to a report released Thursday.The report by the Pew Center on the States said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier.

If what the report says is true, then this is another hard fact showing the moral bankruptcy of decisions made in education, moral education, religious education, in the last forty years. That's a lot of money to spend. (About $213 per adult American, if my math is correct: like getting "prison assessment" bill every year for that amount.)

Someone should do a study showing how much of our current GDP consists of money spent on prisons, guards, security in general, rehab, drug rehab, medical treatment from crimes and stds, r & d on drugs for them, fallout from the divorce culture, counseling for victims of crimes, post-abortion complications, in short, the cost of living in an anything-goes culture. Hey, all we still need is love.

I know there's a lot in the news about our "bad economy." Basic economy, however, should also include moral education, and a recognition that man does not live by bread alone, and that a virtuous citizenry is the only basis upon which to have a truly free society.

Of course it's not the church's job to create a virtuous and free society, but it does have to address the sin of man directly and speak the Word of sin and judgement man does not want to hear. Since so many of the "churches" have lost the desire to even speak of sin in the first place, is it any wonder that society as a whole is morally "confused"?

Thus the reed of Christianity in the west might look a bit broken in the eyes that watch Al Jezeera. Christianity, in the eyes of many, is equated with the west, the secularized, incarcerated west. Indeed, numbered among the criminals.

Life Among the Enlightened

Several months ago in a city near my home, five young men walked into a downtown public library, pulled one of its patrons away from the computer terminal at which he was working, and calmly beat him bloody while the terrified library employees called the police and huddled. The incident was probably gang related; the victim refused to identify his attackers and would not cooperate in the investigation, so while nothing came of that, at least some overdue attention is being directed to library security as a result.

A number of women who worked at that library told their supervisor they felt much safer when there were, as there had been in the past, more men working there. They felt a strong male presence was at least a partial deterrent to misbehavior on the part of its fairly numerous criminal or mentally disturbed patrons, and were upset enough by the incident to let their feelings on the subject be known. The supervisor informed them that this was the year 2008, when one can make no headway with that at all--meaning, of course, feminist ideology is so completely in control of the world of affairs that the obvious differences between male and female must be ignored in the name of Equality.

The greater height and weight of men, the significantly greater muscle mass in the upper body, and other masculine traits (not least the hero who lodges in the breast of the meekest little tailor) which might serve as a deterrent to violence or rule-flouting simply cannot be credited with existence. One suspects that if a German Shepherd were placed on duty, offering the same kind of physical deterrence in canine form, there would be no problem as long as he was friendly to the staff and in favor of diversity--as dogs with library jobs always are. The problem for feminists is men, and they are perfectly content to see other women suffer or be placed at risk as long as they can suppress them.

When I have made this observation in the presence of the ideologues, as I did on this occasion, the rhetoric of the response has always included the destruction of the rule by exception: there are small, withdrawing, ineffectual men; there are large, aggressive, and effectual women, ergo there are no sexual differences that make a woman’s desire to have more men about in an environment frequented by the criminal, the insane, the transient, and the intransigeant, reasonable or worthy of consideration. So things will remain pretty much as they are, the feminists who control the show up in their offices, the library ladies hiding under tables for as long as it takes the police to show up. (No--I take that back--things are expected to get much better because new surveillance cameras will be installed to memorialize future incidents.)

The supervisor who informed the women of the date and the exigencies under which they must work is a genial, intelligent young man, and does not lack understanding. He knows perfectly well that a certain insensibility is the order of the day, and that things will not likely go well for him if he makes any kind of fuss about the viciousness, stupidity, privilege, and perhaps above all, the unnaturalness of doctrinaire egalitarianism. Speaking what he knows to be true would not only put his livelihood at risk, but probably make him unemployable in the library world. What I find particularly interesting, though, is that he professes membership in a class of people who are the first to deplore things like slavery or McCarthyism or the stoning of the prophets as the result of willful blindness for which there is no excuse. Or at least they think that we have, in 2008, moved beyond it.

Three Men, Some Women, and a Bear

     I've just returned, with my son Davey, from several splendid days at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, in Southern California.  There we did a couple of things neither of us had ever done before.  We picked a couple of oranges from the tree (one in the mission at San Juan Capistrano) and ate them.  Rendered the same honors to a lemon from the tree in the backyard of the house we were staying in.  Walked along the beach on the Pacific.  Saw the Sierra Madre mountains in the distance.

     I must say, though, that I'm starting to grow used to a phenomenon that nobody one or two generations ago could have foreseen.  When I say that I'm getting used to it, I don't want to imply that there's anything ordinary about the Torrey Honors Institute or its students.  On the contrary -- I've visited a lot of campuses in the last few years, including Princeton and Yale, and at only one school, the much maligned Patrick Henry College in Virginia, did I encounter quite the same combination of intelligence, maturity, broad reading, and sharp analysis of current cultural diseases, as I encountered at Biola.  What I mean is that, while most schools have abandoned any notion of a coherent course of study required of all students, and while old Catholic colleges disdain Aquinas and old Protestant colleges disdain Luther and Calvin, students at Torrey -- and at a few upstart new schools, both Catholic and Protestant -- are reading several hundred pages of Thomas, combing the whole Divine Comedy several times over for Oxford-style tutorials, immersing themselves in ancient philosophy, in patristics both Latin and Greek, in Pascal, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Burke, and so on.  I am absolutely persuaded -- and to our shame let it be spoken -- that the typical undergraduate at Torrey has read more Aquinas and has studied his thought more carefully than has the typical bishop in the American church, as the typical undergraduate at Patrick Henry College knows more about Constitutional history than does many a judge warming a federal bench.

     These students are taking up, with great enthusiasm, what elsewhere has been abandoned.  It's a remarkable sight.  Also remarkable, at Torrey and at other new Christian colleges and programs, is the strong presence of young people who have spent most or all of their lives around people who loved them and who gave them a clear vision of the world and man's place in it, kindling their hearts with love for truth, goodness, and beauty, because these are all one in God.  I speak, of course, of homeschoolers.  Five minutes in the company of such young people should be enough not only to dispel any nonsense about their not being "socialized," whatever that bit of techno-jargon is supposed to mean.  It is also enough to make you wish that all young people were so cheerful and good -- and sharp.  It was the students, you see, that had worked for my invitation, and the students, almost entirely, who handled all the logistics of our longish stay, arranging the publicity, the venue for the talk, the class I taught in, the house for our use, a rental car, maps for Davey and me to find our way to the beach and other places a boy might like, breakfast food and snacks in the house, lunches on campus, and people to meet.  Professional organizers could not have done it better, nor could they have made us feel half so welcome.

     They told me that Mr. Richard Dawkins, the atheist curmudgeon, was mightily offended that a place like the Bible Institute Of Los Angeles (Biola, that is), should even exist.  I do not know whether they in turn were mightily offended that Mr. Richard Dawkins should exist.  It seems they were youthfully bemused by it, knowing that they could, if he dared to meet them in debate, blast him out of the room with learned discussions of the philosophy about which he knows so little.  They also told me that their director, Dr. John Mark Reynolds (who has written for Touchstone several times; check out the Archives!), used to compare Torrey with Saint Anne's, from C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength.  It seems an apt comparison to me.  I remember that at one point in that prescient novel one of the Saint Anne's characters, I think the irascible skeptic MacPhee, urged Ransom to go on the offensive against the humanity destroying scientists and social planners at the N.I.C.E.  Ransom's response was disarmingly realistic: "We are three men, some women, and a bear."  Not much of an army, that.  But the battle is the Lord's, and in that case, three men, some women, and a bear, or a couple of fishermen and a tentmaker, or some very fine young people in the suburbs of Los Angeles, can move mountains.  May they do so in fact!

What's Not To Love?

Heresy, for one thing, and ideas with bad consequences, according to this posting at Kairos Journal. And it's not just something not to love, but this article calls for hate, in the sense of Revelation 2:6.

Christians are taught to love, but there are also things they must hate. This biblical hatred is not petty dislike or a retaliatory impulse; it is passionate antipathy toward an idea and its outworking. It means enmity with the prevailing heresies and degeneracies which plague particular cultures.

Yes, positively, we're called to think on whatsoever things are "lovely, pure" and so on.  Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, there are some things that are just, well, loathsome. Or can't I say that in the Golden Age of Tolerance?

Our New Home Page

Our graphics and web guy, Jerry Janquart, has just redesigned the home page for the Fellowship of St. James, from which you can get to Touchstone, Salvo, the Daily Devotional Guide, and our Calendar of the Christian Year--where's there's half-price closeout sale going on. Plus there are links to Mere Comments and Fr. Patrick Reardon's rich Daily Reflections on Holy Scripture.

Check it out! Great job, Jerry!

Down on Animal Harm

Weird story, this, sent in by Bobby Winters. Will such violence really deter students from going into such research positions? Perhaps. (And a red letter day for white mice?) And was the husband of the targeted researcher the one who was accosted because he was defending his wife (and children), as any man should do?

Needs of Union

David Dockery, President of Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, has issued an appeal for help with the "shocking but realistic" estimate of what will be required to return our campus to full capacity (more than $20 million). Union University was devasted by an F-4 tornado on February 5, 2008. Many buildings were completely destroyed. Even though 1,200 students were on campus when the tornado hit, no lives were lost. An official site for recovery information has been establish and donations may be made there. A slideshow on that site will give you an idea of the destruction visited on that Christian school, a school I have come to appreciate over the last several years for the strength of its commitment to Christ.

Union University
Disaster Relief Fund
1050 Union University Drive
Jackson, TN 38305

Reformation of Islam?

Turkey, no doubt concerned to be a thoroughly up-to-date secular state suitable for its membership in the European Union, seems to launching a modern-day Reformation of Islam, according to this story from the BBC. I expect this effort to revise texts from the  Hadith will be the topic of denunication from other Muslims, such denunciation taking various forms.

Siberrrrrrria!

The ice is back. Or so says this article by Lorne Gunter in Canada's National Post. (Canadians should be experts on ice, right?)

Regardless of the status of global warming, it seems that the earth's temperature might be much more influenced by that big yellow thing in the sky than by the piddling incremental increases in carbon dioxide, which upon examination don't correlate as a cause of warming. The correlations are there  between earth temperature and sunspot activity, whereas they are not there when it comes to co2. At least according to the detailed scientific data as seen in the Great Global Warming Swindle. If there's a reason that the science in this film should be dismissed, I'd like to hear about it.

One thing I didn't know: Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.038% of the Earth's atmosphere--that's just under 4 one-hundredths of one percent--or 4 parts per 10,000 (!)--while water vapor averages around 100 parts per 10,000 (One percent) (I use "parts" not literally). It would seem that variations in water vapor (clouds) at 25 times the volume as co2 would have more impact on Earth warming. (Big difference sitting on the beach on a cloudy day versus a sunny day, even if the air temperature is the same, which is not likely.) Solar activity has been directly tied to cloud formation; more clouds, less sunlight. It you look at a satellite picture of the Earth, you notice the clouds.

Background Filters

This article on the Chicago Sun-Times website will tell you something you may not have heard about the "shooter" (i.e., killer) at Northern Illinois University, who murder 5 students there on February 14. The article was written by a fellow student, Rasmieyh Abdelnabi.

Steve [Kazmierczak] and I took several classes together during my four years at NIU. ...

Our topics of choice: foreign policy and the Middle East. He would especially enjoy practicing his Arabic on me. In 2004, NIU decided to offer a year’s worth of Arabic classes. Steve took both classes without hesitation, excited as could be.

“Assalamo Alikum,” he would say to me, which means “peace be with you” in Arabic. He would proceed to ask me how I was doing and what I was up to, all in Arabic with a thick accent and a huge, excited smile.

Sometimes I was his walking dictionary and he would ask me, “What does this word mean in English?” or “What is this word in Arabic?”

We would debate on issues, sometimes argue, but he would always back his arguments with facts. It was about logic and things adding up to him.

Once we took a course called “The Politics of the Middle East.” At the beginning of the course, our instructor informed us a research paper would be due by the end of the semester. Steve decided on Hamas, which is known mainly to the world as being a Palestinian terrorist group, which was the first thing that interested Steve about the group. But he also heard Hamas funded many social services, which also interested him. How could one group be put into two completely different categories, Steve would ask.

Unlike most of us, Steve started his research from day one, reading every book he could find on Hamas. He’d give me a status report when we saw each other in class. Steve said that his perception of Hamas changed with all the research he did.

(There's nothing wrong with studying Arabic, of course. One might conceivably study Hamas innocently enough, I suppose.) But "Hamas, which is known mainly to the world as being a Palestinian terrorist group"? I guess they're doing PR badly.

It is interesting I've not picked up on this background information from local coverage until now after a reader (Judy Warner) flagged another site which quoted the Sun-Times--whereas within 24 hours of the slayings the news channels were reporting that Kazmierczak had studied law enforcement at school. While no conclusion was drawn from that, those facts were quickly offered as background, while his interest in Hamas has not been widely reported, at least not on the usual MSM outlets that I am aware of. An interest in law enforcement is reportable, but not an interest in Hamas? Of course, the media will fear people jumping to conclusions here, and are very sensitive, just as they are careful in their treatment of "right-wing Christians."

Snippet

"Every man is by nature designed to become a thinker--honor and praise to the God who created man in his own image!  God cannot be held responsible if habit, and routine, and want of passion, ruin most men, so that they become thoughtless."

S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. D. Swenson, W. Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968 (1941), p. 46.

Pilgrims or Sheep Without a Shepherd?

This article in the New York Times is about a report on the shifting religious affiliations of Americans: one-quarter of American adults have left the religion of their childhood to join another religion--or no religion. The percentage of "no- religion" adherents has grown to about 16 percent.

We at Touchstone have noted how many with the Christian faith have been on the move, changing their denominational affiliations. And many of these "pilgrims" read Touchstone because, in part, we put readers in touch with a broader spectrum of Christian history/experience than they may be accustomed to within their own narrower denomination. (If you know a pilgrim, make sure you put him on to us!)

Is it that we live in an unsettled time? Certainly there are many anxieties at work, ranging from environmental anxieties (Will the sea rise 20 feet by the time I retire?) to health anxieties (Now that I have a good chance of living well into my eighties and  maybe more, will I get Alzheimers or cancer? Will I be able to afford decent nursing care?) to geopolitcal (Will Iran get the bomb and use it? Will Osama strike again? Will Western Europe become Muslim?) to economic (Will a bad recession wipe out my investments?) to moral concerns (Will human-animal hybrids be bred? Will marriage become anything other than a minority report? Will my great-grandchildren be genetical tested and bred initially in test-tubes?).

In the midst of this season of anxiety, an American Adam has appeared on the scene, according to John B. Judis in The New Republic. He notes that my Illinois Senator, Barak Obama, in his campaign is

actually voicing a very old theme. When he speaks of change, hope, and choosing the future over the past, when he pledges to end racial divisions or attacks special interests, Obama is striking chords that resonate deeply in the American psyche. He is making a promise to voters that is as old as the country itself: to wipe clean the slate of history and begin again from scratch.

I do believe he is at least partly correct in this assessment. I am certain that especially the younger generation, though plenty of older folks, are tired of politics as usual. Note that Congress has a lower approval rating (if you can believe such polls) than George W. Bush. So change is desired.

If this desire to start over again is an American trait that rises from time to time to become the dominant theme in the culture and politics, perhaps this is reflected in the freedom with which Americans move from one denomation or even faith to another, seeking to start their religious or "spiritual" lives all over again. This does not mean that many changes, of course, aren't primarily motivated by truth concerns.

The desire for another "Adam" seems latent here, and perhaps in the hearts of many in many cultures around the world. For Christians of true faith, we've found that Adam in Jesus of Nazareth, first-born of a new creation. Each of us knows, instinctively, that as we get older, our mistakes and our sins pile up and all our only hope is in the only One who can truly wipe the slate clean. For in union with the New Adam, we become as babes. Or to return to our opening line of thought, we pilgrims arrive at last at our final home, the place for which we've longed and for which we were created.

A Beloved Physician

The late Paul Hensleigh, M.D., who was one of our Touchstone readers, is credited with a medical invention designed to save the lives of many women in poor countries around the world. Each year many thousands of women die from obstetrical hemorrhaging during childbirth.

Dr. Hensleigh, a professor OB/GYN at Stanford University Medical School. met a NASA reasearcher in the 1990s who had updated the design of a World-War-II-era pressure garment that helped pilots withstand drastic gravity force changes. Hensleigh saw the medical potential in the updated lightweight suit that "wraps a person from ankle to navel in a three-way stretch neoprene. The pressure caused by the garment "pumps the equivalent of one to two liters of blood into the upper part of the body--'like getting a a big transfusion in one minute' said Hensleigh."

After one successful use in Pakistan, Hensleigh and a UC-San Francisco "safe motherhood" expert, Suellen Miller, PhD, used a MacArthur Foundation grant to conduct clinical trials of the anti-shock garment. Since then, they have been used succesfully in Nigeria and other countries. While in Nigeria in 2001, Hensleigh was shot in the head by bandits in the lobby of his hotel. He survived the shotgun wound. Miller is continuing the work with the anti-shock garment project. The relatively inexpensive garment saves lives.

Doctor Hensleigh was openly known as a Christian believer and he used his skills to share the love of Christ with many, "the least of these." He died of cancer last fall. May his memory be eternal!

Fire the Youth Pastor

My wife told me about the FamilyLife Today radio program that was on this morning. A Houston pastor, Voddie Baucham, suggests that churches not have youth groups, or other age-specific ministry. Instead, worship should be done together as a family and discipleship should happen at home, especially through the headship of the father. He says to them,  "I double-dog dare you to go home and be the pastor of your home." A transcript of the show can be found here. Pastor Baucham will be on the program again tomorrow.

Curses on Barry Lynn

Several days ago, the Religion News Service blog noted a controversy in which a Southern Baptist pastor in California emailed his congregation encouraging them to engage in imprecatory (curses) prayers directed against (amongst others) Rev. Barry Lynn and his Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

The use of the imprecatory psalms has fallen out of favor in many circles, so this is an interesting case study in the proper use of these psalms (3, 58, 83, etc). This topic has been covered in Touchstone on more than one occasion. Most recently in the November 2006 issue in an article by John N. Day called The Pillars of Imprecation (not online yet). Also, Thomas Buchanan's Breaking Teeth in March 2004, and John Yocum's Christ in All the Scriptures in March/April 1998.

Brazilian Priests Want Sex

I found this news item interesting. Apparently, Brazilian RC priests have asked the Pope to drop the requirement for clerical celibacy. Here is a second site mentioning the requested change.

Souls on Ice

     A quick note, in case we have any readers in southern California who have some free time on Monday evening: I'll be giving a talk on Dante for the Torrey Honors Institute, a liberal arts college within Biola University, on Monday night at 8:00, in Calvary Chapel, on the Biola campus.  The public is invited -- and it's always a pleasure to meet a fellow Touchstonian.

Suffering the Little Children

I have often felt guilty at being perturbed by the noise of children during the sermon. The crying of infants, and worse, the talking of older children, makes me think unfriendly thoughts about their rude parents--rude in the sense of uninstructed, or even, in some cases, as committing a deliberate affront by way of making some kind of “statement.” I am aware of the importance of having children in God’s house, to learn its ways and to receive instruction, more than cognizant of our Lord’s instruction to allow the little children to come to him, and of his rebuke to his disciples that would prevent it.

The essential question, though, has to do with a church’s choice, not immediately related to this mandate, about how the ministry of the Word is to be carried out in the congregation. If there is to be a sermon that is a reasoned discourse of some length that requires close, meditative attention, it is also necessary to have an atmosphere relatively free of distracting noise--human noises, since they are heavy with human meaning, being the most distracting of all.

A baby cries to alert its mother to its needs, and when people hear a child in need, not only virtue, but the race’s fundamental sense of self-preservation cannot help but recognize it as a concern that needs tending to before listening to words, even good words--for the ears that are made for hearing must be preserved. Thus the terrible dissonance thrown up at an almost autonomic level by a baby crying during a sermon. I think it best resolved by having the mother take the child from the room and care for it elsewhere.

I remember a graduate school where the high admissions standards and intense competition made its library a place where much hard intellectual labor was carried on. Mind you, its patrons were members of a generation (mine) that constantly preached freedom from restraint, “doing one’s own thing,” as a fundamental human right--a clamorous, infantile, superficial generation, idiotic in the original sense of the term. Thus it was also a supremely self-centered generation, always attentive to its own best interests, so that when a library in which one could concentrate intently on difficult material was understood as having a direct connection to its users’ academic survival and professional future, no wizened nanny of a traditionalist librarian was needed to keep it quiet. The flower children enforced it all by themselves, as anyone who decided that the reading tables were good places for a conversation, even a whispered one, quickly discovered. A fortiori, one would think, in a place where what is being said is discerned by the hearers as intimately connected with the soul’s salvation.

One can solve this problem as many churches have by reducing the sermon to a brief, piddling moralism, or a long drone (or holler) of predictable, pre-approved cliches. The worth of these is not diminished by any amount of noise, and the kiddies might as well strike up dwarf-bands in the aisles. In churches that have sermons worth hearing by people of adult understanding, though, I am for bringing children into the service at certain points and dismissing them at others, telling them that cannot stay for the whole until they are old enough quietly to pay attention. This treats them as the catechumens they are, and gives them an adult privilege at which to aim.

"Jesus III"

Deepak Chopra invites you to sign up at Beliefnet:

Dear Friends, Please join me in an open-ended discussion of my latest book, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore. I invite you to ask questions and share your experiences and insights about the awakening of Christ Consciousness within.

You will excuse my absence if I decline, as I'm still working on not ignoring the first Jesus. Chopra's just too advanced for me.

Erin Go Bragh

     Thanks to Greg Laughlin for sending this article on the "dilemma" facing Irish organizations that want to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day this year on the usual feast day, March 17.  Since Easter is as early this year as it can possibly be, March 17 falls on the Monday of Holy Week, a most inopportune time for lavish celebration, as Catholics are supposed to be preparing themselves for the solemn events of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.  Indeed, at Mass on the day before, Palm Sunday, they will have heard the reading of the entire passion from one of the synoptic gospels, beginning with Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem and concluding with His burial.

     So Catholics in some of the American dioceses will be moving the celebrations forward to the Saturday before Palm Sunday.  But that's offensive to some Irish American groups.  As the leader of one organization said, it's as if the bishops were to order the NFL to change the date of the Super Bowl.  Of course it is nothing like that; there's no analogy at all.  Saint Patrick's Day is a Catholic feast day, a minor feast in most countries, but, naturally, a much-noted feast in America and Ireland.  If the feast were to fall on Good Friday (an impossibility, but suppose it could, for the sake of argument), would the organizers still insist on wearing green and parading half drunk down Main Street and singing boisterous songs?  At the least, you'd think they might show some consideration for their fellow Irishmen who take their Catholicism seriously.  They might say, "Not that it means much to me, as it's been that long since I've darkened a church door, but Paddy, now, it doesn't sit right on his stomach."  These are, after all, the Irish who used to teach their children to make the sign of the cross every time they passed by a church, in honor of the Savior who died to set them free.

     That is not even to mention the very meaning of the day, for the Irish nation.  Saint Patrick's claim on the hearts of the Irish -- if indeed it is Saint Patrick they are honoring, and not just a name or a geographical location -- is that he brought them the Christian faith, driving from the land the serpents of druidical superstitions and human sacrifice.  With that faith came Roman (and sometimes Greek; John the Scot from Ireland was almost the only Western man of his day who studied it) learning, and such evangelistic fervor from the Irish monasteries that western Europe itself was in large part saved, for the faith and for civilization itself, by those Irish outposts from beyond the seas.

     People will argue, though, that the celebration is "cultural," not religious.  There are of course a lot of things that are cultural though not, strictly speaking, religious: baseball used to be such a thing in the United States.  But I don't sense that that's the case here.  We don't have something to which the Irish consider themselves honor-bound to uphold, something whose beauty or essential meaning helps to shape their beliefs about the world and how it works and their own place in it.  You can say, "I love baseball; it's the great American sport; it unites Albert Pujols with Lou Gehrig with Dan Brouthers," and so on.  But it's hard to say, "I want to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day, but I want it to have nothing to do with Saints or Patrick or any Church."  That would represent not a demotion from religion to culture, but a demotion from both the cultural and religious to a kind of niche marketing, or niche purchasing.  The same phenomenon has occurred with self-styled "cultural" Jews.  If that is what you are -- if the Seder is just a nice family meal, and Kaddish the traditional thing you say when somebody has died -- then you are not really a Jew, and you're well on your way to having no culture, either.

     What Saint Patrick did mean to the Irish, though, is well captured in this famous hymn, whose lyrics many an Irishman could not now sing without choking on his whiskey:

All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God's faith, the sweet light of His love.
All praise to the Shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the Heart of the Saviour above.
For hundreds of years,
In smiles and in tears,
Our Saint hath been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone,
Saint Patrick alone.
He hath been to us light, when earth's lights were all set,
For the glories of faith they can never decay,
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
in the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick's day.

There is not a Saint in the bright courts of heaven,
More faithful than he to the land of his choice;
Oh well may the nation to whom he was given,
In the feast of their Sire and apostle rejoice.
In Glory above
True to his love,
He keeps the false faith from his children away.
The dark false faith
Far worse than death,
Oh he drives it far off from the green sunny shore,
Like the reptiles that fled from his curse in dismay,
And Erin when error's proud triumph is o'er,
Will still be found keeping Saint Patrick's day.

Then what shall we do for the heaven sent father?
What shall the proof of our loyalty be?
By all that is dear to our hearts we would rather
Be martyred, sweet Saint, than bring shame upon thee.
But oh, he will take
The promise we make,
So to live that our lives by God's help, may display
The light that he bore
To Erin's shore.
Oh, Father of Ireland! no son wilt thou own
Whose life is not lighted by grace on its way;
For they are true Irish, ah yes, they alone,
Whose hearts are all true on Saint Patrick's day.

A Net Gain for Mankind?

This article in the New York Times, another in a series of articles that are popping up every where (e.g., the Sunday magazine cover story of the Chicago Tribune) that espouse an evolutionary worldview. This article, What People Owe Fish: A Lot by Natalie Angier, discusses Neil Shubin's "brisk" new book, Your Inner Fish, and what our evolutionary past tells us about ourselves.

You like having a big, centralized brain encased in a protective bony skull, with all the sensory organs conveniently attached? Fish invented the head.

You like having pairs of those sense organs, two eyes for binocular vision, two ears to localize sounds and twinned nostrils so you can follow your nose to freshly baked bread or the nape of a lover’s irresistibly immunocompatible neck? Fish were the first to wear their senses in sets.

They premiered the pairing of appendages, too, through fins on either side of the body that would someday flesh out into biceps, triceps, rotating wrists and opposable thumbs.

Or how about that animated mouth of yours, with its hinged and muscular jaws; its enameled, innervated teeth; and a tongue that dares to taste a peach or, if it must, get up and give a speech? Fish founded the whole modern buss we now ride.

Fish "founded"? Fish "invented"? The language of "design" and "intelligence" keeps popping up, even though I am sure the author doesn't view the development of life this way. The fins randomly fleshed out into biceps, triceps, rotating wrists, and opposable thumbs. The fish had no idea what was happening to them, let alone inventing it.

Well, so what do we learn from our long "ancestry"? I am not sure I would learn anything particularly useful if I knew the details of the lives of my ancestors who were alive in, say, AD 563. What would it tell me about myself today that generations ago a forebearer was five foot four and had red hair? That he was a tenor? That he had several bouts of swimmer's ear?

Now, we all obviously share a lot in common with animals: we're carbon-based life. There's flesh. Bones. Skulls. We eat. Reproduce. Breathe oxygen. The ancients knew a few of these details. Even speculation about evolution from primates was mentioned by a character in Johnson and Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides, before Darwin was born.

But wait, I remember now there may be more to the fish connection than I thought. Linguistic evidence for a picastory lineage is right there in some of the names of saints I've been reading about from my part of the world: for example, Finbar, Finlaggen, Fintan, Finnan, and there's a couple of Gilberts. And maybe I do know an ancestor from around AD 563 after all. He might be that missing link between the salt-water men and me: he was born c. 500 very near my maternal hometown on the Clyde (in Scotland), which links the ocean and the inland fresh watered land: Gildas Sapiens.

Anyway, the next time you find yourself drawn to "the nape of a lover’s irresistibly immunocompatible neck," and you're tempted to gently touch it with your lips, just remember, that urge is just fish kisses rising up from the deep sea of your inner fish.

The Book on Hooking Up

Kathleen A. Bogle, author of a new book, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating , and Relationships on Campus, was interviewed here for InsideHigherEd about her book. She is an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice. An excerpt from the interview:

Q: Can traditional dating survive alongside “hooking up"? Should the two paradigms coexist, or are they merging into a single overall “script” that students follow?

A: I think traditional dating is surviving alongside of hooking up in the larger culture, but on campus hooking up has replaced dating as the primary means for students to meet and form sexual and romantic relationships. This does not mean that students never go out for dinner and a movie. The “date” still exists among college students, but it is couples who are already in an exclusive relationship who do it. In other words, the pathway to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship where a couple might go on a date begins with hooking up. In the dating era, students would go on a date, which might lead to something sexual happening; in the hookup era, students hook up, which might lead to dating. This is a reversal of the traditional order of things. The problem is that many college men are pleased with the status quo; they can hook up and if they want to pursue an ongoing relationship they can, but they are under no obligation to do so. Women, on the other hand, get increasingly frustrated after freshman year with how often it seems that hooking up leads to “nothing.”

Some of this reminds of points made about sex and dating and the path to marriage made by Dawn Eden in her book  The Thrill of the Chaste.

Sex first, then dating? Is some of this due to years of teaching little kids in elementary school about sex first, but not about dating? Who are their role models? She also notes in the interview that guys who are active in the hooking up scene are known as players but girls who can easily end up being termed sluts. And then there is the "walk of shame." I thought we were past all this stuff when we got liberated by the sexual revolution. More education is needed, a federally-funded program to quash sexual relationship hate speech.

EPPC on Election '08

The Ethics and Public Policy Center offers several thought-provoking essays on election 2008. Yuval Levin writes a piece, originally published in National Review, on Sen. John McCain as an "honor politician," a breed of politico not quite "conservative" in a traditional sense but that's not necessarilly, in Levin's view, an entirely bad thing. Levin concludes: "Conservatives should view McCain not as a hostile force, but as a foreign and unfamiliar presence, bearing real potential as well as real risk."]

Even more interesting is Christine Rosen's article on gender politics and the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton. Clinton offers the worst of American feminism, without its more positive claims. Rosen writes:

The political has always been personal for Hillary. It is this eerily seamless merging of the two that leaves some voters unsettled and others impressed with her discipline. In the final primary debate in Los Angeles, she avoided answering a question about her husband's role in the campaign by saying, "I have made it very clear that I want the campaign to stay focused on the issues that I'm concerned about, the kind of future that I want for our country, the work that I have done for all of these years. And that is what the campaign is about." Hillary's choice of language is noteworthy: she talks about "the kind of future I want for our country" rather than what the country needs. This is the language of paternalism, and just as "paternalistic" has become a pejorative term in political parlance, so too, might Hillary's unique brand of maternalism - a stern and instrumental, mommy-knows-best progressivism that has at least had the effect of irrevocably undermining the tenets of difference feminism.

Finally, James Bowman, in an article written for the American Spectator, looks at the utopianism at the core of enthusiasms for the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama.

However much or little one thinks of any (or all) of these politicians, these essays speak to some of the more important underlying issues for Christians, issues neglected entirely by the horserace coverage of MSNBC, Fox News, Air America, and Rush Limbaugh.

The Oprah Club

Whenever Oprah Winfrey comes out with a new book club selection, we at the public library know it within twenty seconds. This is no exaggeration. The Oprah books are, of course, favored almost exclusively by women. Middle-aged white women comprise the largest group of fiction readers. I expect them to be reading the kind of stuff she recommends, even without her recommendation. What happens when Oprah selects is that the huge number of them who are currently reading Danielle Steel or Sue Grafton or Nora Roberts are alerted to another woman-type fiction book and all crowd over to the lee rail of that particular literary ship to get sight of something they might otherwise have passed over, since the Oprah books are typically not mere entertainment, but entertainment salted with cracker-barrel philosophy that helps them feel, well, whatever it is that Oprahites need to feel.

Her audience (as I can see it from where I sit) is interesting in that she seems to range considerably outside this group of typical fiction readers to younger women, non-whites, and the less-educated. If mere literacy is a societal value, then Oprah certainly encourages it, and deserves every bit of lionessization that American Library Association types can lavish on her.

Mere literacy has no value in itself. It is worthy only as the servant of virtue. The virtues of Oprahism, however, appear to be subordinate to, and ordered by, the prime virtue of self-realization and self-actualization rather than that of finding the self by losing it in sacrificial service to others, subject to the will of God. Its heroes tend to be Prometheans injured by, and in defiance of, the Traditional Moral Order (let us all weep for them a bit), lap-christs for the entertainment of silly women. Oprahism, to be sure, is chock-full of "virtues," but the order in which they are placed relative to one another in the scheme of the whole makes the phenomenon a veil of evil.

Bright Line of the Embryo

William Saletan, author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, reviews Embryo: A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen in the New York Times. In it, he writes:

The authors think a clear line can be drawn between eggs, which are parts of organisms, and embryos, which are wholes. Eggs must combine with sperm or die, they write, and an organism “was never itself a sperm cell or an ovum.” But science tells another story. In some 70 vertebrate species, unfertilized eggs have developed into offspring. A United States government report documents dozens of mature turkeys that were never fathered. This, too, is part of life’s program. Scientists call it “reproductive plasticity.” In some species, they theorize, it’s designed to pass on genes when no mates are available. If the egg-embryo distinction gets in the way, nature suspends it.

Technology further muddles the embryo’s boundaries. In vitro fertilization separates the internal and external portions of the embryonic program. Cloning turns adult body cells into embryos. Direct reprogramming turns body cells into embryonic stem cells. Aggregation turns embryonic mouse stem cells into mice.

It seems to me that his counters have flaws. George and Tollefsen are writing about human beings as a species, and not turkeys or other animals. Second, it is man's technology that is muddling the picture, which would otherwise not be muddled. So that's a strike against some of the technological "advances"--the monkeying around we're doing. Couldn't you just as well argue that sex isn't so clearly defined as we think if you start genetically altering men and women to confuse the matter? I mean, you could theoretically use techology to do all sorts of things, but would that mean there is no longer a given nature or pattern to be respected? Well, apparently it would, by these lights, because the underlying premise of many of our secular modern scientists is that there is no such things as a given human nature and we can darn well do whatever we want, if we can just figure out how. Hence, human-animal hybrids.

Saletan does say that the book, Embryo, has an

essential and timely message. Of all the lines we could draw in human development to mark the onset of moral worth, conception is the brightest. But that line is no more absolute in ethics than in science. We should never create or destroy embryos lightly.

It takes imagination to grasp the moral value of a tiny dot of cells. A moral imagination. But it's the moral imagination that human beings have that makes us of a higher order, higher than beasts. But that's the idea contested: We are beasts and our imaginations are simply the product of biological evolution? No moral purpose can be presuppsosed.

It is imagination that helps drive science and human achievement (and degradation). Why place it to the side when it comes to upholding the sanctity of all human life?

Eurabia, part 2

In Holland, some have rebranded Lent as a "Christian Ramadan." Because Ramadan is more familiar to the youth, you see. And who's fault is that? While we're it, isn't canon law simply "Christian sharia"? And a church building a "Christiain mosque"? The Bible a "Christian Koran"?

Weigel & Jenkins on: Eurabia?

Here's an event in DC at the Ethics & Public Policy Center on February 29, worth checking out, if you can get there:

Islam and the Fate of Europe: Eurabia or Islamic Assimilation?
A Conversation with George Weigel and Philip Jenkins.
It starts at Noon and ends at 2:30PM.
Kindly RSVP before Friday, February 15 to events@eppc.org or 202.715.3515.

You Must Hire an Active Gay to Work with Youth

This is a prequel coming to an American theatre near you (you can catch a preview over in Canada, if you like).

Abraham & Charles

A Happy Darwin Day to those observing it, and Happy Lincoln's Birthday to those observing it. There is an official website for Darwin Day, which notes concerning February 12, 1809:

On this date, two great men were born — Abraham Lincoln, Emancipator of American Slaves and Charles Darwin, Emancipator of the Human Mind Their Positive Legacies Still Endure

Ironically, Darwin's theory about the survival of the fittest did inspire eugenics, which Hitler seemed to love, as well as various racial theories, such as the one in the biology textbook that figured in the Scopes trial, a theory about the superiority of the white race over the black race (which Hitler refined down to the Aryan Race). I wouldn't blame anyone celebrating Black History Month wanting to take a pass on Darwin Day, though Abraham Lincoln's Birthday should be fine.

On the Darwin Day website you can find this file for Understanding Darwinian Evolution, which explains it:

1) Common Descent—All of life on earth emerged from a few common ancestors. This controversial claim put humans on a level plane with other living species.

2) Gradualism--The change of a species takes more than several generations (the notion of evolution put forth by Jean Baptiste Lamarck).  This controversial claim suggested that the earth was much older than initially suspected. 

3) Population Speciation--Change in a species is fragmented and not ubiquitous to that species.  While Lamarck claimed that all giraffes living under tall trees would develop long necks-Darwin suggested that only some giraffes would randomly be born with these traits. 

4) Natural selection—Certain randomly acquired traits are beneficial.  Giraffes with longer necks can reach more food, and are therefore more well-nourished and healthy. These giraffes are better equipped to survive, and thus are more likely to mate, and to pass the long neck trait on to their offspring.

While two three and four are not all that remarkable (didn't dog breeders already know most of this--not about giraffes, I mean, but about improving traits for various advantages, over generations?), I still have to salute Darwin as an accomplished naturalist: his 5-year Beagle voyage and collections and notes are an impressive acheivement.

But as to item number 1 above, I see it says "several common ancestors," plural, when I thought there was supposed to be a Universal Common Ancestor. And it says humans and animals are "on a level playing field." (Does that mean the New England Patriots could have used an 800-pound gorilla for nose tackle?)

Darwin also knew diddly about the construction of the simplest living cell. That wasn't his fault; but the "simple" cell turns out to be more pre-packaged with software programming than any computer you can take home from your super-computer store. Where did all that programming come from?

So, Darwin liberator? Kinsey the pervert sex-researcher, by the way, was quite taken with Darwinism, too. More of that level playing field with animals, see. One man's fetish is just another specie's advantage? Why, I've even read that rape has an evolutionary explanation. Clarence Darrow, behind-the-scenes hero of "Inherit the Wind," defend the imfamous Leopold and Loeb murderers as unfortunate victims of their long evolutionary history.

I've been to Lincoln's tomb. He's buried there, too. I wish they'd leave Charles Darwin buried, as well, in the sense of giving him credit for what he did as a naturalist for Victorian-era science, but not bringing out his corpse, like Lenin in a labcoat, as the one who has liberated us from tyrannical notions about human uniqueness and ultimately the sanctity of human life. That level playing field is simply a broad way that leads back to a form of slavery for many under the bright supervision of superior intellects.

Two men, one birthday, both liberators?

The World that Has No Music in its Soul

     One of my favorite journals is The Intercollegiate Review, a superb compendium of conservative thought -- not partisan or Republican thought, nor laissez-faire economic thought (as is found in Reason or The Independent Review), but that strain of philosophy we inherit from Burke and Dr. Johnson, Tocqueville and Paul Elmer More, that remembers that man is fundamentally a spiritual creature.  You can buy him all the bread and wine he can consume, but if the satisfaction of appetite is all his life is going to be about, he'll prowl like an animal in a cage.  Even the sky will be a ceiling too low for his aspirations.

     This spring's issue of The Intercollegiate Review, though, is terrific from front to back; I could (and might) post a blog on each of the articles in it.  But I thought I'd start with one that I know will set the typewriter keys clicking, as it resumes a discussion we've been having here for a long time.  Composer and writer Webster Young, in a piece called "Can There Be Great Composers Anymore?," argues that we are seeing, finally, a turn away from the Viennese school of atonality and arbitrarily imposed restrictions (a strange combination, those two) that characterize the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and their followers.  He also claims that minimalism, that movement that swept through all the arts but took up special residence in music and architecture, may also have spent its meager self.  If so, we may see composers returning to classicism -- by which he means something a little bit different from the colonnades of Palladio and the Greco-Roman lintels of Leon Battista Alberti.  Young is calling for a return to the language of the music of the past, as the foundation upon which to build anew.  In other words, he rejects the modernist cult of novelty and self-styled "originality":

     "One of the advantages of a common practice is that it allows a succession of composers to improve upon the works of their predecessors -- just as in science, researchers build upon previous research.  Mozart could take the work of Gluck, Haydn, or the composers of the Mannheim school, and improve upon it, having the advantage of objectivity and the energy of youth.  The resulting music of Mozart is not, therefore, a quantum leap over and beyond Haydn and Gluck: it is just enough of a refinement of form to make Mozart the high point of his era."

     Without a "common practice" or a "language" to work from, it is hard to see how any really first rate art can be produced.  Without, for example, the centuries of songs of the Trojan War, passed down by memory from singer to singer, we have no Iliad, no Odyssey, which may (we don't know for certain) be as superior to those old songs in beauty, in intellectual subtlety, and in thematic complexity as Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV is to the early Tudor morality plays or the Corpus Christi cycles.  But without the Corpus Christi plays we have no Shakespeare.  Without almost three centuries of love poetry in Italian and Provencal to precede him, and without the same three centuries of theological disputations in monastic schools and then in the new universities, we do not have Dante and the Divine Comedy.  So I think Young is quite correct to note that "modernism has been about revolution, individualism, and novelty," and to conclude from those mistaken aims that modernism must inevitably have undone itself.  It so estranged its audiences that many critics, taking modernism for granted, argued that western classical music had been exhausted -- when actually, as Young says, it was only modernism that was exhausted:

     "The methods and ideals of the avant-garde have produced very little of lasting value in music in the last fifty years.  The now century-old, superannuated avant-garde (a contradiction in terms) has, in the process, alienated audiences and ruined the economics for new music.  As the modernist fog clears, a common practice in music -- like that of the New Tonality now developing -- will be reborn and recognized.  If a neoclassical criticism can now also emerge, composers will once again build upon the past and upon each other's work, creating beautiful new melodies and nobly redefined forms.  Eventually, a genius will appear who, like Mozart, will owe almost everything to those who went before him."

     Three cheers for that new genius.  But I have one nagging doubt.  It's this: the "common language" Young is talking about must transcend the boundaries of the music workshops and studios.  Palladio built his churches and palaces for a people who believed in the nobility of the ancient world, and who wished to emulate its virtues of restraint and balance.  You could have a Palladio in the days of Alexander Pope.  You cannot have Palladio now.  When Palestrina wrote his Masses, he was inspired by prayers that washerwomen and plowboys had heard every week of their lives; it was part of their common, lived experience.  Without that inspiration from something beyond Renaissance Italy, and something the composer shared with all kinds of people who were not composers or singers, you do not get the exalted music and theology of the Credo of the Mass for Pope Marcellus.  When Puccini wrote his lush and schmaltzy and eminently enjoyable operas, he wasn't just giving the folk singers and mandolin players something to emulate as from on high; he was himself inspired by that music.  He lived in a culture -- and that culture happened to sing of love, constantly, and had been doing so since long before Dante.  You can't really separate Nessun dorma from Torni a Surriento, nor either one of them from Dante and Tasso and Titian and Raphael and Manzoni and Verga.

     But what happens when you don't have a culture?  I've argued this before, but it bears repeating.  I'm taking the word literally.  You have a culture when you cultivate those beliefs, customs, celebrations, and virtues you hold most dear; and in this sense culture is by nature conservative and often proudly local.  That's why totalitarian systems despise it; it stands in the way of the flattening of variety that the modern state demands.  But this consumer society of ours despises it, too.  It stands in the way of the itch for the new-and-improved, for novelty for the sake of vanity.  The last hundred years, in part through no consciously evil plan, has seen the gradual replacement of culture with mass entertainment.  One of my professors, when he was a boy long ago in the prairies of Saskatchewan, had a neighbor who recited Paradise Lost as he worked the plow.  I have to believe that such memories -- though maybe not of an entire twelve-book poem -- were not so uncommon then; old hymnals, for instance, often do not bother to print the music, even though congregations sang in four-part harmony.  What do we have, now, in our minds?  What is the language of our collective memory?  This haunting lyric comes to mind:

          Rice-a-Roni, it's flavor can't be beat!
          Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.

Or this:

          Sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
          A tale of a fateful trip,
          That started from this tropic port
          Aboard this tiny ship.

     That's not culture.  It's the object of nobody's devotion.  It expresses no great yearning.  It's common, sure.  I don't think it's any foundation for art.  Among us now, I don't know what is.

Newman’s Rules for Writing

Having been exercised in recent months in review of E. O. Wilson’s pungent little book Creation, which proposes cooperation between Christians and secular humanists in the sphere of ecology, my thoughts have turned to the more fundamental matter of the differences between theists and atheists (whether the atheism is of the functional variety called agnosticism, or a matter of positive philosophical conviction) on what counts as knowledge upon which human volitional action can be based. Thus interested I returned to John Henry Newman’s classic The Idea of a University to review what the great man had to say about “theology as a branch of knowledge,” for it is precisely at that point, I believe, in Christian perception, where agreement between theists and non-theists must begin to break down. More on that, perhaps, and several other of Newman’s points on university education anon, when my own thoughts congeal a bit more, and I find time to write them down.

For now though, before I forget and omit to do it, I wish to pass on from my 1927 Loyola Press edition Fr. O’Connell’s transmission (p. xv) of Newman’s “Rules for Writing,” which the editor observes “seem to me to give the caution most needed by young writers, a guard against any form of verbosity.”
____________________

1. A man should be in earnest--by which I mean he should write, not for the sake of writing, but to bring out his thoughts.

2. He should never aim to be eloquent.

3. He should keep his idea in view, and should write sentences over and over again till he has expressed his meaning accurately, forcibly, and in few words.

4. He should aim at being understood by his hearers or readers.

5. He should use words which are likely to be understood. Ornament and amplification will come spontaneously in due time, but he should never seek them.

6. He must creep before he can fly--by which I mean that humility, which is a great Christian virtue, has a place in literary composition.

7. He who is ambitious will never write well; but he who tries to say simply what he feels and thinks, what religion demands, what faith teaches, what the Gospel promises, will be eloquent without intending it, and will write better English than if he made a study of English literature.

___________________

I will venture to add to this that I take Cardinal Newman to include in his caution against attempts at eloquence not reference simply to the florid effusion typical of his own age (I would put James Fennimore Cooper and Charles Grandison Finney forward as fine examples), but every age’s conceit of its gilding as art, its cliché as thought.

Lesson for Evolution Sunday

In case you missed it in your church's bulletin last Sunday, it's now Evolution Weekend. At least according to 11,000 clergy and 803 "congregations" who are celebrating. (Darwin Day is February 12, by the way.) A clergy letter states:

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.

A list of observing congregations (such as some of them are) is here, in case you're looking for the nearest celebration.

My counter-proposal, however, is for Creation Sunday, and the Psalm reading should include:

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide, which teems with things innumerable, living things, both small and great....These all look to thee, to give them their food in due season. When thou givest to the, they gather it up; when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things. When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed; when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground. (104:27-30)

Regardless of what you think of Genesis 1 and the timing of things and how exactly species arose, there is something here in this Psalm that a Christian cannot discard and has to be the main way of looking at the world, life, and ourselves. It's how Jesus understood the world, even when a piddly sparrow falls in sight of the Father. And we are, by the way, of more value than sparrows, as well. Or do we think that He got all this wrong?

Robbing AIDS Relief to Pay for Abortion?

Concerned Women of America have posted audio files from this event:

(Feb. 7) Members of Congress and community leaders gathered at the Cannon House Office Building to decry the hijacking of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) by the abortion lobby. Under the current rewrite of the bill, as much as $50 billion dollars in HIV/AIDS relief could be diverted from the faith-based groups providing healthcare in Africa to the coffers of those providing abortion.

Chuck Colson is among the speakers on audio.

Rowan Williams' Sharia Plea

The Arch-Bishop of England, I mean Canterbury, thinks his fellow Brits need to accept the need for British Muslims (or Islamic Brits?) to have Sharia law put into place because they don't relate to the British legal system. Excuse me? Can I just come right out and say that I don't relate to the IRS tax-code? And furthermore, that a bunch of Right Wing Christians in this country (i.e., US of A) can't relate to things like "gay marriages"? Can we have our own divorce courts, maybe? Could Judge Judy preside? And seriously, Rowan Cantuar, suggested

that Sharia should be introduced as an officially sanctioned legal alternative in the UK when it came to issues such as marriage and divorce.

“It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system,” he said.

“The whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways the law of the land pays respect to custom and community, that’s already there.”

The Anglican leader cited the dispute over allowing Catholic adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples as an example of where a universal secular law was not accepted by everybody.

This sounds familiar, doesn't it? Some have advocated a separate ("covenantal") marital contract, reocognized by the state, which cannot be dissolved under the state's usual divorce laws. Maybe after a hearing by a "church court"? Strange things afoot, here, and abroad.

A Wholly Unauthorized Appeal

Today, in a rush of inspiration, this letter soliciting contributions to Touchstone came to me. I assure you, dear readers, it has NOT approved by senior management, but issued, I am sure, from a higher source, by the light of two things I encountered today.

The first was a solicitation from a school I once attended, so dripping with piety that when I was through with it I was left with the unmistakable impression that this kind of stuff, in the end, is an elaborate exercise in taking the Lord’s name in vain. It made me want to write a letter for Touchstone that didn’t make any claims whatever to being a direct tool of the Holy Spirit, indispensable for the work of God in this generation. Nope. We’re not. He can do perfectly well without us. He did just fine before we were here, and he will continue to do just fine when we’re gone. But if we’re going to stick around, we need a steady supply of money--lots of it. (Many thanks to you who contribute!)

The other inspiration came from a visit to a website that ranked charities, giving them higher or lower grades corresponding to the ranking organization’s criteria for the use of donated funds. Among the interesting figures for some of the Christian groups were the salaries given to their founders and officers. Clearly a number of these are robust advocates of the biblical principle that one should not muzzle the ox that grinds the corn.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I don’t begrudge my fellow non-profiteers the fruits of their no doubt prodigious labors in the Lord’s vineyard. My brief time in perusing this site, however, brought me under strong, I could almost say, religious, conviction, that if Touchstone really wants to play with the big guys, we need to be in the business not only of sending people long letters with lots of underlining (along with the machine-produced signature of some important person that looks like he really wrote it) but of of saving somebody. Even briefer reflection on the lives of my fellow senior editors brought me to the conclusion that they in particular need to be rescued and set on the path to Better Things.

With a generous contribution, you can save a Touchstone editor from numerous kinds of degradation. I am thinking in particular of:

--THE FILTHY HABIT OF SMOKING CHEAP CIGARS

--THE UNSPEAKABLE VICE OF DRINKING BLENDED WHISKY

--OR UNNAMABLE THINGS LABELED MISE EN BOUTEILLE EN KALAMAZOO

--LIVING IN MERELY ADEQUATE HOUSING

--DRIVING VEHICLES THAT ARE POOR TESTIMONIES TO DIVINE BENEFICENCE

And I hate very much to say this, but even though all my fellow senior editors live with handsome women they call t