Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Muslims & Roman Catholics

This link at Reuters is to a story reported yesterday: Muslims now outnumber Roman Catholics, according to the Vatican. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti "said that while the number of Catholics as a proportion of the world's population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates."

Not Your Father's Christianity--Or Anybody Else's

In a recent Christianity Today online article entitled “Not Your Father’s L’Abri," the famous ministry founded in the Swiss Alps by Francis Schaeffer was characterized as having changed from a retreat for philosophical skeptics to a haven for disaffected Evangelicals. It begins with the story of

. . . a tall brunette and the daughter of a Presbyterian Church in America minister, [who] has spent her life as ‘a poster child for the church.’ Toward the end of her four years at the University of Tennessee, however, that role proved harder to play. Her ‘Christian bubble’ dissipated as friends from church got married, and she found herself befriending people with different values: non-Christians, gay students, and pot smokers at the record store where she worked.

At university, [she] took classes on modern American religion. ‘That was eye-opening,’ she said. ‘I did a lot on Jerry Falwell, the conservative party, and the consolidating of the Christian right. It made me question everything I'd been taught. I was raised conservative, pro-life, anti-gay; I was taught that Christians should be in power. I came out thinking nothing I was taught had been right.’

I am at least as skeptical as she, but my skepticism has a great deal to do with what one does not hear from a good many characters like this, or from authors of articles who for reasons of their own elicit their readers’ sympathy for such very sad young people, victimized by excesses of--well, of Christianity in any credible form.

My guess is that she is typical of the many young Evangelicals who have also discovered, the statistics tell us, something else at college: sex without marriage, which she wishes to have, also contrary to her Christian upbringing, without guilt, repentance, or amendment of life. Experienced pastors, when faced with students who “lose their faith” at college, do not begin to argue back with them on matters philosophical or theological. They inquire into “lifestyle” issues in the attempt to ascertain whether there is a release to be gained from overthrowing the faith in which they were raised. There usually is. Real intellectual difficulties can normally be neutralized in favor of further study through reasoned discourse with educated believers who have entertained the same doubts--but only in the presence of a conscience that gains nothing from discovery that orthodox Christianity is wrong.

There is also this: If a person has come to believe, say, that Evangelicalism or conservative Presbyterians or Baptist preachers who get too mixed up with politics are wrongheaded, or that Francis and Edith Schaeffer had certain problems which detract from their credibility, a modicum of native intelligence--to which such people always profess, their difficulties, they always tell us, being the result of intellectual probing--should tell them these are not the only Christian witnesses available--only provided they are interested in any kind of Christian witness at all.

If they were, why would they repair to L’Abri to stock up on evidence of its deficiency rather than open the gates (O lover of intellectual freedom and hater of all restrictions thereto!) to wider parts of the Christian range? Schaeffer is guilty of a certain narrowness of vision? Then (O possessor of much-better-than-average intelligence!) pull down some Barth or Kierkegaard or Thomas Aquinas or Chesterton or Pelikan or Guardini or Tournier or Seraphim Rose or Calvin or Tozer or Reardon or Luther or Pascal or Wojtyla or Lewis. Why are your referents, the people to whose wisdom you are now referring in apposition to that with which you have been raised, suddenly now non-Christians, gay persons, and [!] pot-smokers--may we also add the sexually promiscuous?--and the like? It would seem that if one calls oneself a Christian it would be honest to give Christianity a chance first.

But this is not to be expected. The new-minted skeptic knows perfectly well what she shall find in these quarters: full agreement with her PCA parents, and the Schaeffers, on what are likely the real issues that trouble her, and substantive answers to whatever intellectual ones she is presenting--all with the stink of death that Christianity is to those who are selling their birthrights cheap.

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Mills on Chesterton and Lewis

Touchstone editor David Mills will be speaking at Seton Hall University on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 on "Two Ways to the Same End: Comparing G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity." A flyer for the event can be found here. It is sponsored by the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture.

No More Issues?

Issues, Etc. was a radio show on which a number of Touchstone editors and authors have appeared over the years. I was saddened, and surprised, to hear that it had been summarily cancelled. Here is the story in the Wall Street Journal on-line. Maybe it will be resumed?

Not Dead Yet

I am reminded here by Concerned Women of America that March 31 is the anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo. I had forgotten how many years (3) since she died, so googled her name, and the site of the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation gave this link to this article by Nat Hentoff, Barack Obama vs. Terri Schiavo. I can hardly believe my senator choose that as an example of vote he wanted to have back: even though he "knew better" as constitutional law professor at the time, he voted on behalf of Schiavo anyway. So now Obama is haunted by his vote for Terri.  Hentoff's article then put me on to Not Dead Yet, the office of which is less than ten miles from my office. I know of two stories about dying relatives on both sides of my family in which other family members were talking near the dying about plans after the death. In both cases the dying opened their eyes and informed their families, I am not dead yet! How many citizens think "euthanasia" and end-of-life policies are things about which to be concerned? If not, they've forgotten Terri Schiavo, three years passing.

The Gospel According to Bing

     These last couple of weeks my wife and I have watched a few of the old Biblical epic movies, and have generally enjoyed them, with some qualifications.  In the meantime, I'd been asked to do a radio interview on sentimentality in the Catholic liturgy as practiced in America and Canada.  That's brought a question to mind, or maybe an observation.  I'm convinced that much of the greatest art in the world, in all genres, is religious in nature; I'd even go so far as to say that most of it is.  That shouldn't be too much of a surprise.  What, if not longing for the ultimate truth, could inspire a Dante to craft his symphonic poem of love?  Or, if Shakespeare had not been stirred to ponder the terrible question of man's fate in a universe that sometimes seems -- I say seems -- indifferent, he would not have written King Lear, and if he had not retained his hope in a redemption that reverses the world's vision of strength and weakness, he would not have made his king, in the end, wise, childlike, and unbearably human.

     At the same time, a lot of religious art is simply dreadful.  What makes it so?  I'm thinking now about those Biblical epics.  Some of them had the good sense to steer clear of attempting to portray the Son of God directly -- fearing that they might reduce him to the banal.  Instead, they show the majesty of Christ indirectly, by his effects upon the lives of ordinary and often woodenheaded people.  The movies (and the books) Barabbas, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, and The Robe fall into this category.  It's a good choice to make, but even so, the director of a Biblical epic is constantly beset by the temptation to fall back upon a choir of pious oohs and aahs, to rely upon a religiose cheap thrill, to call from the audience a phony tear or a nervous pose of seriousness.  Not even Ben-Hur escapes that danger (and The Robe, which really is not a bad movie, despite its historical absurdities, flirts with it constantly).  You have in Ben-Hur a couple of performances that I can't figure how anyone could improve upon -- Stephen Boyd as Messala, Jack Hawkins as Judah's adoptive Roman father.  You have a terrific score, the justly famous chariot race, William Wyler's intelligent direction, and sometimes, not very often, a call for an unearned tear.

     Still, I like all four of those movies, and think that Ben-Hur is genuinely great.  What saves them, what they absolutely cannot do without, is theological reflection.  That is, the directors have been humble enough to submit their minds to be taught by the meaning of the Christian message.  Each movie illuminates Christ, now and again, in an unusual way -- as when the Roman centurion in Ben-Hur is momentarily confounded by the brave and silent Jesus, who has just given Judah a drink of water, that element that will return in spate in the thunderstorm that washes the blood of the Crucified down into the pores of the earth.  Or when, in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, which I also like, despite its Who's Who of actors, Jesus uses the parable of the Prodigal Son to convict the dissolute dinner guests at Matthew's house, and to reconcile that tax collector with the stubborn Peter, who stands outside in the role of the petulant elder brother.

     At all events, sentimentality -- which is but a parody of deep feeling -- is deadening.  Nowadays, in mass entertainment, it comes in the really noxious form of easy, "sentimental" cynicism, when a banal remark with the form of a sniggering comback is supposed to elicit the cheap thrill of superiority, an easy confirmation of despair and meaninglessness, as of rich kids slumming in the precincts of hell.   Yet I think there are connections to be drawn between that kind of sentimentality and the cloying, smothering sort that characterizes bad religous art, including the bad religious music we've discussed here before.

     How to explain?  We also watched a couple of movies by a director who, I think, is a great deal less cynical than he appears to be, as he is instead a fantastic storyteller with a heart for human shame, absurdity, and, occasionally, love and heroism -- Billy Wilder (we watched The Apartment and Witness for the Prosecution).  There's no sentimentality in Billy Wilder, but there sure is a lot of sentimentality in what passes for Christian pop, and that sentimentality is the kissing cousin, or maybe the drippy smooching cousin, of easy cynicism.  (By the way, I want to preserve a distinction between kitsch, which retains a bit of childlike innocence to it, and the self-indulgent sentimentality of our hymn writers, who do not even bother to affect innocence.)  So when Bob Hurd writes, "What are you doing tonight?  I'd really like to spend some time with you," referring to the Son of God as if he were a very nice teenage date, he's far less honest, and far less reverent, than Wilder is when he dares to show the hollowness of a man who wears decency like a well-tailored business suit (Fred MacMurray), to be taken off when convenient.  Wilder is sharp, incisive, dogged; he wants the truth.  But bad religious art, like bad art generally, flees from the truth.  Wilder may not see what you'd like him to see, but he strives to see, and to show you what he sees.  If he ever did a Biblical epic -- and I don't think he did -- it would be nothing but odd and angular theological reflection, the drama of sinful man encountering the Holy One of Israel.  Bad religious art, like political correctness, falls back upon the vague, the automatic, the thoughtless, the manipulated and predictable response.  It pastes a happy face upon the pew and calls it joy.  Gather us in, the nice and the naughty.

The Religion of Science

The Science of Religion is the Economist's report on a new European scientific crusade to discover the materialistic (Darwinist) explanations for religious beliefs. While they're at it, could they request funding to study the areas of scientists's brains that light up when they watch for which brain areas of Christians light up when they read Psalm 23? It might go a long way in explaining the evolutionary rise of science and scientific beliefs. Although by the time it's all figured out, Christianity will be listed in the books as a mental disorder. What about atheism? Will they study areas of atheists's brain that go dim or merely blink when "God" is mentioned?

Hillary & Other Spooky Religious Stuff

Anyone know anything about something called The Fellowship? (Not the Fellowship of St. James!) Joshua Green at  Atlantic.com writes about it. Of course, it is secretive according to this report, with archives located somewhere on the campus of Wheaton College (Ill.), classified as "restricted" and kept under lock and key. I guess since the archives are just down the road 30 miles, it caught my attention. I do vaguely recall hearing something about "the Family" some years ago. The New Republic blog calls this "spooky" and makes it into plural "affiliations." Other words like shadowy and secretive appear.

This causes me to think of a few other politicians, who's names I am unable to mention, who most certainly fairly regularly stop by their churches, and spend some time talking to their pastors in secret. The pastors (or priests) won't divulge what they routinely talk about, and the politicians aren't saying. They say it is none of our business. In some cases a politician even kneels down before the priest, and in other cases the priest is passing on secret instructions to him. For what, who knows? Spooky.

Well, I don't know what the deal is with The Fellowship, but who knew that this presidential election campaign would see so much coverage of religion!

Creative Sexuality in the Context of Virginity?

Ecumenical News International, Daily News Service, 26 March 2008 (material is copyrighted; Touchstone subscribes to the ENI news service):

Rosary and virginity adverts draw flak from Polish Catholics

By Jonathan Luxmoore
Warsaw, 26 March (ENI)--Roman Catholic groups in Poland have demanded the withdrawal of billboard posters by a local clothes firm, depicting teenagers in erotic poses with rosaries.

"These peculiar adverts offend against good taste - hence the protests," said Jakub Mlost, chairperson of the Catholic Youth Association in Poland's Krakow archdiocese.

"We know there's been liberalisation in certain areas of life, but these adverts violate our values. Some young people can look at the posters and just laugh. But they degrade the advertising market, where everything has been allowed anyway and the borders are still being
constantly pushed back," Mlost said.

The youth leader was reacting to a nationwide campaign by the House clothing company, juxtaposing images of male and female teenagers praying with beads depicting rosaries, used for praying some Christians, and with them sucking their fingers in erotic poses.

However, the adverts were defended by the designer, Rafal Betlejewsk, who said they were intended to show that "virtue is sexy and awakens creativity".

"Our task was to choose a current topic for House's target group, which means people aged 19 to 25. Virginity and its loss is such a topic," Betlejewsk told the Rzeczpospolita daily newspaper on 14 March. "So many things are controversial in Poland … But I don't think there'd be any justification for banning these adverts."

The adverts, many displayed alongside churches, show a young man and young woman gazing earnestly at their rosaries with the caption, "Protect me, father." In another frame, however, the same teenagers adopt erotic poses above the slogan, "I know 69 ways to keep my virginity - do you?" A third poster, placed on buses and trams, declares "Virgins, hands up!"

A House director, Rafal Sajewicz, insisted the number 69 was purely coincidental and dismissed the adverts' erotic associations as an "unauthorised simplification". He said the objects in the images had too few beads to qualify as Catholic rosaries. "Our campaign isn't aimed at offending anyone's feelings, least of all religious ones," Sajewicz told Rzeczpospolita. "We're promoting creative sexuality in the context of virtue and virginity as an important aspect of the life of the young generation, who make up most of our clients."

However, the adverts were deplored by Agnieszka Wos, a staff writer at the Catholic monthly publication, Fronde. She said they "ridiculed Catholic attitudes to pre-marital chastity."

The Catholic Church's chief cleric for journalism, Andrzej Luter, told the Gazeta Krakowska daily newspaper on 13 March the advertisements showed "a lack of elementary sensitivity and culture."

Through a Sea of Reds

On the Feast of the Annunciation (today, March 25 on the traditional calendar), in 1925, Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, fell asleep in the Lord, after suffering imprisonment and persecution at the hands of the godless Bolsheviks. He is a canonized saint of the Orthodox church. He was elected Patriarch of Moscow months before the October revolution, by clergy and laity of Moscow, the first patriarch of Moscow in 200 years (the office had been suppressed by Peter the Great).

A humble pastor, Tikhon boldly resisted the Bolsheviks, yet not politically. He imposed excommunications and pointed out the spiritual death into which Russia was falling headlong. In one appeal, he preached that Christians must resist the temptation offered our Lord in the desert by Satan, to remake the world into a paradise on earth in human terms. Christians were to be devoted to the "one thing needful," for man does not live by bread alone but by the Word of God. Tens of thousands of Christians were murdered by the Bolsheviks. From an Orthodox hymn honoring St. Tikhon:

Lord, since Thou sawest Moses's meekness in Tikhon, Thou gavest to him the Rod of God to lead Thy much-suffering people though that Red Sea of ungodliness, and as is meet, he became the namesake of Thy faithful Church, which scorned the flesh-pots and the fear of Pharaoh, and went boldly to the Promised Land.

I suppose in part I am inspired to write about Tikhon bacause I have a photograph of him on the wall by my desk, given to me, indirectly, by a Russian friend who lives in Moscow. It was delievered to me by a mutual friend while I was visiting Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago, where Tikhon himself visited one hundred years ago while a pastor in the United States before his return to Russia.

And speaking of Russia and communists, has another man passed through the "Red" Sea? Mikhail Gorbachev? In the Telegraph he [reportedly] admits he is a Christian. Ronald Reagan reportedly told aides he thought Gorbachev was a closet Christian.

Paradises on earth--they are all watered with blood. There is one only Blood that is needful, only one Red Sea through which the Promised Land lies. Gorbachev at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi? Tikhon of Moscow would only rejoice to see the successor  of Lenin on his knees before the Lord of all. .... [But this update, from a commentor, indicates Gorbachev still hasn't made his submission, after all.]

Materialistic atheism is alive and with us. But so is the Son of Man, risen from the dead!

Earnest Thanks, Again

Many thanks to the generous donors last week who responded to my "earnest request to help us at this time with the most generous contribution you can make," a request that I will be repeating here from time to time, especially since we are trying to reach our goal, needed by June 30, 2008. Your gift to us can be made securely, on-line here.

I also repeat our offer of a signed copy of our wonderful and edifying book, Creed & Culture: A Touchstone Reader, for any gifts over $75. The Weekly Standard says of Creed and Culture: "Readers who like their coffee strong (and who are interested in literature,   theology, ecclesiology, and ecumenism) will love Creed & Culture."

If you'd prefer one of our Touchstone Caffeinated Christianity Coffee Mugs, I can do that too (we'll send you an e-mail asking your preference.)

As you can see from our donation information box at the top of our MC web page, we've a ways to go to acheive our necessary goal by June 30 this year. We are making progress! (Clicking on that box will also get you to our donation page.) Every bit helps! Thank you!

Grace's Great Raid

Why is there evil in the world? This is the question that often becomes a defense against any possible good God. But, as others have suggested, another hard question to answer, without a good God, is how there can arise goodness in the midst of great suffering and in response to great cuelty? This story, or obituary, from the New York Times (thank you, James Altena) contains two stories of grace, one for an American veteran who recently died and the other for a Japanese veteran of World War II.  The American, Jacob DeShazer, was a bombadier on the Dolittle raid.

After bombing Tokyo in the Dolittle raid, Corporal DeShazer landed in Japanese-occupied China. He and other surviving crewmen "were starved, beaten and tortured at prisons in Japan and China — spending most of their time in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945."

"Amid his misery, Corporal DeShazer had one source of solace." He begged a guard to get him a Bible.

"I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity. I realized that these people did not know anything about my Savior and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”

Corporal DeShazer decided to preach the gospel to his former enemies. After college, in 1949 he preached his first sermon in Japan.

In 1950, he gained a remarkable convert.

Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, came upon the DeShazer tract.

“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal savior,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the attack. He had become an evangelist and had made several trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking immigrants.

The two men met several times before Fuchida's death in 1976. Great enmity, but one Cross overcame it. Two missionaries of the reconciling Cross. Amazing.

Easter

Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen.  Sing his praise
          Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
          With him mayst rise,
That as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
          With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name
          Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
          Pleasant and long;
Or since all music is but three parts vied
          And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to strew thy way,
I got me boughs off many a tree,
But thou wast up by break of day
And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, and the East, perfume,
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavor?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

                         George Herbert, 1639

The Thanksgiving

Oh King of grief!  (a title strange, yet true,
   To thee of all kings only due)
Oh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee,
   Who in all grief preventest me?
Shall I weep blood?  Why, thou hast wept such store
   That all thy body was one door.
Shall I be scourged, flouted, boxed, sold?
   'Tis but to tell the tale is told.
My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?
   Was such a grief as cannot be.
Shall I then sing, skipping thy doleful story,
   And side with thy triumphant glory?
Shall thy strokes be my stroking? thorns, my flower?
   Thy rod, my posy? cross, my bower?
But how then shall I imitate thee, and
   Copy thy fair, though bloody, hand?
Surely I will revenge me on thy love,
   And try who shall victorious prove.
If thou dost give me wealth, I will restore
   All back unto thee by the poor.
If thou dost give me honor, men shall see
   The honor doth belong to thee.
I will not marry, or, if she be mine,
   She and her children shall be thine.
My bosom friend, if he blaspheme thy name,
   I will tear thence his love and fame.
One half of me being gone, the rest I give
   Unto some chapel, die or live.
As for thy passion -- but of that anon,
   When with the other I have done.
For thy predestination, I'll contrive
   That three years hence, if I survive,
I'll build a spital, or mend common ways,
   But mend mine own without delays.
Then I will use the works of thy creation
   As if I used them but for fashion.
The world and I will quarrel, and the years
   Shall not perceive that I am here.
My music shall find thee, and every string
   Shall have his attribute to sing,
That all together may accord in thee,
   And prove one God, one harmony.
If thou shalt give me wit, it shall appear,
   If thou hast given it me, 'tis here.
Nay, I will read thy book and never move
   Till I have found therein thy love,
Thy art of love, which I'll turn back on thee,
   O my dear Savior -- Victory!
Then for thy passion -- I will do for that --
   Alas, my God, I know not what.

                    George Herbert (1639)

     For me he sweat blood in the garden, awaiting the friend who would betray him with a kiss.  For me and the likes of me he was convicted by hardhearted men, by liars, cowards, and fools, and sentenced to death.  For the likes of me he was mocked and scourged, and in an hour shed more drops of blood for my sins than I have shed tears for them all my life.  For ungrateful man he carried the bitter cross up to the place of the skull, to crush the head of the enemies, sin and death.  He heard the jeers of those whom he came to save, who understood nothing.  He strained against the spike in his foot to take the briefest gasp of air, to stave off suffocation, he who had breathed the breath of life into Adam and made him a living soul.  With his last words he cancelled our debt and commended himself to the Father, to whom we owed our very souls, and whom we had rejected.  And I in return give him -- what?  Grumbling, temporizing, deal-making, impatience, slackness, rebuffs, and, by the power of his own grace, a little gratitude.

Labors of Occupation

We Touchstone editors have found ourselves welcome as preachers or teachers at churches and schools representing many “denominations.” One could say the common denominator, what has made us welcome, is a host that is “conservative,” but that would be fairly unilluminating. That we share small-o orthodoxy, or that we all believe the Creed, are somewhat better ways to put it, but the phenomenon is best explained, perhaps, in the observation that we share a faith in whose greater matters we have positive and urgent agreement, which perception forms and tempers our preaching and teaching both within and without the walls of our maternal congregations. What is of the highest concern to us in our own churches is also what we, and those who invite us to speak to them, think is of the highest concern in theirs as well. It has been convenient to call it "mere Christianity.”

Looking back over years of my own teaching and preaching, I find myself not without conviction on controversial matters, issues which divide Christians from one another, but with pressing first concern for fundamental Christianity as understood by all Christians at all times, contrasted to doctrines and practices entertained by my listeners that oppose it. There has been time for little else. There is still no time.

I was a pastor for about four years in a marginally Christian mainline Protestant church. My sermons from those years had little if anything to do with its denominational peculiarities, nor did I expatiate on the truth or untruth of what other churches taught. They had everything to do with teaching its people the content of the New Testament and putting the question time and again as to whether we believed these things or not, whether we rightly called ourselves Christians. This of itself enraged the denominationalists, who got the message quite clearly: if the New Testament was true, they weren’t Christians, since while they, standing in a right line from their denominational ancestors (they wrongly thought), firmly believed in the truth of Whatchamacallism, the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, they ain’t necessarily so--especially if we don’t like ‘em. Still, that was the main question, and smaller ones, the kind Whatchamacallians liked to hear about, had to give way before it.

The first time I spoke at a Catholic church was at a wedding. One of our boys was marrying a Catholic girl, and the pastor invited me to deliver the homily. The mother of the groom told me afterwards that the priest was smiling and nodding while I gave a simple exposition of New Testament teaching on marriage--which no doubt he had been trying to impress on his people for years. What I saw from the ambo, however, was the stoney faces of people who didn’t like it. They no doubt wanted to think all this stuff was a preoccupation of their Church and its unmarried priests. Along comes a married Protestant minister telling them the very same thing. I would have given them the Protestant version, but time was short, and I had to stick to the main lines.

Now admittedly this is a bit facetious, but only a little bit. The fact is that deeper venture into the doctrines of the Faith, provided one stays very close to the scriptures, avoiding speculation and looking for the common Faith and its teaching, rarely bring one onto disputed ground, and when it does, the dispute can almost always be subordinated in charity--if the will to do so is present--to the common teaching in a way that not only satisfies the conscience, but brings both illumination and fraternal unity to both the speaker and his hearers, properly serving both Truth and Love, and preparing the way for correction and reconciliation. This is an expression of the power of God that we don't have within us otherwise, a strength of humility which can be experienced only in the will to receive and exercise it. It is more usual, and satisfying, to take a draught of party spirit instead, justifying ourselves in the condemnation of our brethren.

To be sure, the disagreements do not go quickly away; neither does the knowledge that no part of Christian doctrine and its practice can be divorced from any other another. What arises, though, in the experience of years, both in myself and many of my fellows, has been what Lewis in Screwtape called a vision of the Church--fearsome to the devils and their kin--spread down through history, terrible as an army with banners, a fundamental unity of Christian doctrine and experience in which all that is distant shall converge and from which all that is erroneous will be cast. At present it is not so, but at present we have also been forced by attacks of the enemy along our main lines (and to anticipate response: yes, the egalitarian heresy is one of these) to join forces in their defense. There hasn't been time to do much else.

Approaching Death

A Christian friend for whom life in the body is becoming more difficult and tenuous has been thinking on death’s uncongeniality. What disturbs him is not simply that there is so much sweetness in a life he is loathe to leave--he has a wonderful wife, a large and loving family, and the high respect of many friends and colleagues--but (for he is a penetrating man) the impenetrability of the veil through which we must pass. It is not the depth or speed of the River at the World's End that troubles him so much as the mists that obscure the other side.

The thickest of these is the incommensurability of that new world with ours, something the Lord spoke of when he taught that there will be no marrying or giving in marriage, but we will be like the angels in heaven. What will be the use of the organs of procreation in a world where we no longer procreate? Or for that matter any organ--the eyes that see, the ears that hear, and the mind into which thoughts enter--but not of what the Lord has prepared for those who love him. Will all that we have here, as it survives resurrection and judgment, have no more than something like “symbolic” value sub specie aeternitatis?

Life in the womb also was acclimating, but similarly devoid of understanding. Not that the sounds of what was outside weren’t dimly heard in the secret place where consciousness was being founded, but all externalities were delivered to us under the beat of our mother's heart, and when we heard her songs or our father's voice, we heard them truly, but did not know yet what they were. It was perceived as "through a mirror, obscurely." We were alive, but only partly awake; the differentiated “I” was there but could not see itself clearly.

That there was a world outside could be no more than an intuition which we hadn’t yet sufficient knowledge to desire. We had mouths, but knew nothing of eating; we had lungs but did not breathe. We had organs of digestion and reproduction, but they were not used as such, and had we the ability to wonder about them, we could only question what use they could be in any future eventuality. We were fully supported in our mother's life, its organ of transmission central to our existence, life without it inconceivable. Her womb formed the horizon of our world, beyond which all was no more than the merest adumbration of myth. As restrictive as it may have become near the end of our residency, we had no desire to leave it.

What we now see retrospectively as birth was death to that child--a sudden and horrific upheaval in which we were forced unwilling through a narrow place and made to take the air of the new world because there was no choice. In terrible light and the new presence of vivid sound the placenta was torn away--all that had carried our former life was now gone, organs once dormant now sustained life: the mouth took in nourishment, the viscera digested and expelled. We were no longer what we had been, but were in a position to come to the knowledge of what it would have meant if we had been told that in this resurrection there was no longer life as we knew it in the womb, but we would be like men on the earth, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage--all beyond our understanding while we were still resting in our mothers’ bodies.

We should not believe that when the Lord said one must become as a little child if he would enter the Kingdom of God he meant only that childlike trust in him was necessary. He meant that, to be sure, but a great deal more. We note that he did not respond to Nicodemus’ question about entering his mother’s womb a second time with a simple negative, rather with an explanation of the phenomenon of birth that comprehended the whole. The rabbi’s metaphor was apt, but only as metaphor. We could say his mistake was in misapprehending the mother in whom the man of the spirit is gestated, for the second birth, the second coming to the light, is that of a new man to Another Light, by which we will--and only when we can see by it--understand what can now be to us no more than the faintest of glimmerings. This should not dismay us; it is what God intends.

Good Friday

For all observing Good Friday today, I offer this selection of various texts from the Lention Triodion of the Orthodox Church:

Let us praise Him who was crucified upon the Tree between the thieves, and whose life-giving side was pierced by the lance: and let us bless and exalt Him about all for ever.

How great is Thy compassion! For Thou hast endured the Cross, the nails, the lance, O Lord, for my sake, who am condemned to corruption. Therefore I sing Thy praises, O Christ.

Knowing that Thy power is infinite and Thy Crucifixion voluntary, the hosts of angels were amazed. How wast Thou, upon whom none may look, scourged in the flesh, in Thy desire to redeem man from corruption? Therefore we cry unto Thee as Giver of Life: Glory to Thy Kingdom, O Christ.

The Cross was set up on the earth, and touched the heaven; not because the wood would reach so high, but because Thou who wast crucified upon it fillest all things: Glory be to Thee.

Thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the law by Thy precious Blood; nailed to the Cross and pierced by the spear, Thou has poured forth immortality upon mankind. O our Savior, glory be to Thee!

The Agony

     Philosophers have measured mountains,
Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walked with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains:
     But there are two vast, spacious things
The which to measure it doth more behoove:
Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and Love.

     Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains that all his hair,
     His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, that forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through every vein.

     Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
     If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

          George Herbert (1639)

Worship Wars

A new article has been posted on the Treaders site for discussion: Stuck on New by Bobby Neal Winters, from the December 2007 issue of Touchstone.

The previous article for discussion was Evangelicalism Today, the symposium that Touchstone convened to look at the current state of the Evangelical movement in the United States.

Please join the discussions.

No Dull Passion

Kairos Journal today posts an article on Empty Churches and the Dull Dogma of Christianity?, quoting from Dorothy Sayers' Letters to a Diminished Church, including this:

It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that man might be glad to believe.

Speaking of drama, I had the pleasure of viewing this past Palm Sunday the 1927 silent film King of Kings, at a spacious movie theatre, with live musical accompaniment. It was beautiful, dramatic, terrifying, and it's what I believe with all my heart, God help me. It wasn't enterntainment, so no popcorm for me. The Passion in this film is about the powerful sacrifice of Christ and glorious resurrection. No symbols, please. How dull. "Suffered under Pontius, was crucified in the flesh, and rose again in the flesh." It's bad enought give a child a stone instead of bread, but the liturgical equivalent of  an Easter bunny instead of the Risen Lord?

More from Sayers here at Kairos. A blessed Easter this week to all (except the Orthodox, like me, who wait this year until April 27!)

Slow to Anger, Slow to Ask?

I know we're supposed to be slow to anger, which is a good and wise (not to mention inspired) instruction, but there are some things we perhaps should not be slow about. One of them is "ask and you shall receive" and to make our needs known. The staff here prays at the beginning of each day for wisdom and the Lord's guidance in our work, and regularly for the financial resources that we need to carry on the work.

Word now is rumbling through various non-profit ministries about a sharp downturn in donations this year.

So, perhaps I've not been keeping on my toes, but the time has come, since our income is clearly down, and if this current trend continues at all we will be hurting, that I approach all of our readers with a earnest request to help us at this time with the most generous contribution you can make, securely, on-line here.

I do have one resource on hand that I do not have to spend money for at this point, so I can gladly share with you a signed copy of our wonderful and edifying book, Creed & Culture: A Touchstone Reader, for any gifts over $75. We have copies on hand.

I quote The   Weekly Standard on Creed and Culture: "Readers who like their coffee strong (and  who are interested in literature,   theology, ecclesiology, and ecumenism) will  love Creed & Culture."

If you'd prefer one of our Touchstone Caffeinated Christianity Coffee Mugs, I can do that too (we'll send you an e-mail asking your preference.)

I wouldn't write this now if I weren't increasingly concerned about our ability to continue paying our bills and publishing, that maybe I've waited too long. As you can see from our donation information box at the top of our MC web page, we've a ways to go to acheive our necessary goal. (Clicking on that box will also get you to our donation page.) Every bit helps! Thank you!

 

Narnia & Lewis, D'Souza & Shermer

The C. S. Lewis Society of California shares a number of items of interest to Narnia and CSL fans in their latest Logos Update (sent via e-mail), including these:

Rankings of the top 50 children's books in a British poll shows The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe places first (and Harry Potter sixth). Four thousand parents were polled.

Narnia fans are gathering June 20-22 in Southern California at the LionCon.

And the CS Lewis Foundation's 2008 Oxbridge conference, The Self and the Search for Meaning, is being held this summer in the UK.

Plus, not Lewisian or Narnian but of interest: April 18 at Fresno State University Dinesh D'Souza debates Michael Shermer (Skeptical Inquirer) about God. A conference is being held the next day with D'Souza as well.

Render Unto the Family

     By now, most of the folks who patrol this site are aware of the recent court decision in California, which, if broadly applied, would shut down homeschooling for all but those very few parents who have opened their wallets and held their noses for the courses they need to be certified as teachers.  It is not yet clear how many parents will be burdened by the decision, and, thankfully, the Governator has promised a remedy, whether by changes to the law or by executive policy.

     The controversy brings me back to the encyclicals of Leo XIII, a pope so conservative in his views on the nature of man and the common good that he often appears to be at enmity against soulless capitalism, which indeed he is, or against bowing down before the Dagon of the Popular Will, which he also is.  As, likewise, he saw through to the heart of socialism, materialism, and nihilism, and opposed them with the same fervor with which he upheld the family, the village, the guild, and the Church.  As for the family, Leo affirms that it is anterior to all other societies, and in fact is a society in itself, with its own rights and privileges, which state laws must not infringe upon or attempt to nullify.  In doing so, the Pope was applying the wisdom of St. Thomas to the question of the right ordering of institutions. 

     For Thomas, as opposed to Augustine, the state is not simply a necessary evil, something we have to endure because we are sinners who would otherwise pitch ourselves into bloodshed and riot.  When man uses right reason to order his affairs on earth, he is actually participating in God's providential governing of the world.  Now that, I think, is a fruitful position to take.  It does render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, granting to the secular powers a legitimate sphere of action, while subordinating that action to the common good.  And, since the common good is a human good, it cannot be conceived apart from what makes man good in himself; so the ultimate object of the lawgiver, says Thomas, is to make his subjects good.  That does not mean blessed; he cannot take one tiny step towards accomplishing that.  But he can encourage them, by law and example and custom, to become more temperate, braver, wiser, and more just.  It is a noble calling, which the lawgiver cannot fulfill unless he acknowledges the limits of his rights.  That is, Caesar receives what is Caesar's due, when Caesar acknowledges that God must receive God's due.  The same principle applies to societies and institutions within the state.  A lawgiver cannot, with reason, enjoy his own sphere of autonomy without granting to others beneath him a due regard for what is theirs.  To put it differently, a full-scale theocracy is as alien to Thomas's legal philosophy as is a full-scale secularism.  It is just as illicit for the state to be absorbed into the Church, as for the family, the village, and the guild to be absorbed into the state.

     Them's fighting words now -- or I wish they were.  But what do you do when the state does not know what it is and what it is for, and flattens the legitimate societies beneath it, including the family?  Well, Thomas gives us two ways in which laws may be unjust.  The first way is divided, as is typical of the medieval summa, into three subordinate ways: the law may be unjust because the wrong authority has enacted it (which may be the case in California, though I have heard arguments defending the judge's interpretation of the foolish law), because it was enacted with no thought for the common good (for instance, as when a tyrant or a tyrannical faction uses public means for private ends), or because it distributes rewards and burdens inequitably (as when the publican takes half of the middle class contractor's next dollar).  The second way a law may be unjust is if it commands what is malum in se, evil in itself.  For instance, a law that overrides the natural right of parents to educate their children is demanding, of its enforcers, actions that are evil in themselves.  Or a law that would require all citizens to expose their children to pornography -- say, the popular bit of pornoganda, Angels in America, now returning to public schools in Illinois; that too would be evil in itself.  Such laws, says Thomas, are not laws at all; they do not have the character of lex -- meaning that which justly binds the conscience.  They are violences, he says.

     What do you do then?  It depends -- I'm deriving this analysis from the natural law theorist Russell Hittinger, in his book The First Grace -- upon the way in which the law is unjust.  If we are talking about the first way, then we have to consider whether our disobedience would cause scandal or chaos or other harm to the common good.  We are overtaxed by the IRS, but we comply with the law anyway, because we do not want to plunge the nation into chaos, nor do we wish to shunt the burden over upon our neighbors.  Note that in this case we do not genuinely obey the law; that is, we do not, as rational beings, participate in rightful governance.  We do not take the law, or rather the violence, into our consciences, except insofar as we must consider in prudence what action to take in the face of the violence.  We do not obey, but we comply.  Nor are we required to be always eager in complying.

     But when the law demands what is evil in itself, says Thomas, we may neither obey nor comply.  Now this surely places a great burden upon us -- but it is the burden of responsibility that we bear as rational creatures, capable of creating families and villages and states.  In the California controversy, then, no official may act to enforce the unjust law.  The options include working to undo the law, or resigning, or refraining to act; they do not include compliance.  The same reasoning holds for parents whose children are going to be shown pornography in school -- and for the teachers and principals, too.  Compliance is no option here.  Unless, I suppose, we want to bow to what in effect is a secular shari'a -- deferring to no distinction between nation and town, town and school, school and family.

The Nature of Nature at MIT

If you know bright students studying science, let them know about  The Institute for the Study of Nature's second annual Summer Seminar and Conference to be held June 9-14 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The theme this year is “Who Won the Scientific Revolution?”

This will give you some idea of the underlying views:

Who Won the Scientific Revolution?

I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world—the world of quantity, of reified geometry, a world in which, though there is place for everything, there is no place for man.
— Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies

The Scientific Revolution marks a watershed in the history of human thought and action. It divided knowledge from common sense and severed practice from received mores. This transition has led to tremendous progress in our understanding and control of the natural world as manifested through technology. But in every struggle there are losers as well as winners. Humanity has gained enormous benefits by means of modern science, but has it lost something in the process? Far less obvious than the victories are the real losses—losses that reveal themselves when one contrasts natural science’s brilliance at manipulating nature with its inability to speak to the questions that should be central to any study of the material world: What exactly is nature? And what is the place of humankind within it?

The Revolution swept away the vibrant world of form and meaning and replaced it with a plastic but desiccated world of mathematical abstractions. Value and meaning were banished from the material, “real” world of “extended things” to the shadowy world of “thinking things.” Soon enough the ephemeral world of res cogitans was put under interdict, since it was in principle inaccessible to the power of the method. Now modern neuroscience is making the final assault on the “ghost in the machine,” hoping at last to retire our final questions by a fully adequate mechanistic explanation of self-awareness in us “meat machines.”

But can our fundamental questions truly be answered by reducing everything—including the questioner—to particles and proteins, efficient causes and mathematical laws? Or are the principles and methods of the Revolution such that the knowledge they provide always falls short of knowledge of the full truth of things? Predicting and manipulating is not the same as understanding, no matter how convenient it may be to believe so. The problem is not so much the hostility of the Revolution and resulting scientific worldview to traditional conceptions of the cosmos and of human nature, but rather the possibility that the scientific worldview has produced a radical misunderstanding of the very thing it seeks to explain: the material world and what it contains, including in the end the act of human understanding itself. In every struggle there are winners and losers, but when humanity itself is absorbed into the reductive and closed causal system of modern science, who is left to win?

We must begin to ask the fundamental questions again. Does the knowledge we have gained by modern science truly exclude qualities, forms, ends, and meaning from the natural world? Or have we allowed a set of useful methodological choices artificially to restrict our range of reasoning about nature? Might it be possible to recover a rational grasp of the qualitative depth and beauty in nature while retaining the manifold achievements of the Revolution? Are we willing to open ourselves to the risk of discovering that the pre-modern understanding of nature is not only reasonable and defensible, but consistent with the best scientific evidence? Above all: regardless of its convenience or inconvenience to humans, what is the full truth about the natural world?

The Institute for the Study of Nature invites you to join us in a Summer Seminar the week of June 9th-13th, 2008, on the campus of MIT to begin considering these questions with the care they deserve.

Abortion & Mental Illness

"Royal College warns abortions can lead to mental illness"? Someone, apparently, is dealing with evidence, not burying it.
Repentance, in an age defined by "never having to say you're sorry," comes painfully, one person at a time, with regrets and painful memories buried, even hidden, underneath a studied, culturally-created layer of lies about freedom, choices, and the liberation of modern man from the dark and oppressive moral orthodoxies of our medieval, Victorian, or whatever label you want to use, predecessors. At some point, "wise prodigals" will admit that they're living in squalor, and have lost a great inheritance.

Is Easter Too Scary for Preschoolers?

Jesus was dead, and I mean really dead, on a cross, but he's not anymore.

That's how my son Timothy, a few years ago when he was three, explained to neighbors why he was so excited about Easter. No one referred me to a therapist, or to a cognitive development seminar. Those around me didn't see the horror of what I was doing to my children. Neither did I.

We didn't know that the Gospel, like Ginsu knives and blood pressure medicine, ought to be kept out of the reach of small children. 

At least that's what one church was told recently, by a publisher of children's Sunday school curricula, according to Two Institutions, a blog about family and church matters.

The pastors at this church in Raleigh, North Carolina, were perplexed when they saw the Holy Week Sunday school lessons for preschoolers from "First Look," the publisher of the one to five year-old Sunday school class materials. There wasn't a mention of the resurrection of Jesus. Naturally, the pastors inquired about the oversight. It turns out it was no oversight.

The letter sent from the publishing company is up on the Two Institutions blog website. I had to read it three times to make sure I wasn't falling for a Lark News parody. It turns out this publisher has decided that the Gospel is too scary for preschoolers.

"Easter is a special time in churches," the letter from the publisher says. "It's a time of celebration and thankfulness. But because of the graphic nature of the Easter story and the crucifixion specifically, we need to be careful as we choose what we tell preschoolers about Easter."

The letter continues:

"In order to be sensitive to the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of preschoolers, First Look has chosen not to include the Easter story in our curriculum. Instead, we are focusing on the Last Supper, when Jesus shared a meal and spent time with the people He loved. We have made this choice because the crucifixion is simply too violent for preschoolers. And if we were to skip the crucifixion and go straight to the resurrection, then preschoolers would be confused."

The curriculum marketers must know how bad this sounds, so they reassure the church they believe that the Gospel is for all people. Leaving out the cross and the resurrection is actually to help children come to Christ. They write, "We're using these formative preschool years to build a foundation for that eventual decision by focusing on God's love and telling preschoolers that 'Jesus wants to be my friend forever.'"

The publishers note that there is an  "alternate ending" to the kindergarten lesson that "tells a simple version of the Easter story" for older preschoolers, for those churches that want it. What kind of evangelical world do we find ourselves in when the Easter story is an "alternate ending" to the story of Jesus, at Eastertime?

Jesus wants to my friend forever? Who is this Jesus? And where is He? Apparently, He's a Christ without a cross, without an empty tomb. He spends time with His friends, and loves us. Does knowing this, apart from the Gospel, actually prepare preschoolers to see themselves as sinners in need of a Mediator before a Holy God?

No, a Jesus who is not crucified, buried, and resurrected, does not save, and doesn't help ease the way to salvation. Jesus as moral teacher, inspirational rabbi, or "forever friend" apart from the Gospel only prepares one for old-fashioned Protestant liberalism, the notion that what matters is that I'm civilized, ethical, and enculturated as a Christian. That's not Christianity.

At Pentecost, the apostle Peter delivered a Gospel proclamation that cut the heart of his hearers to the quick of repentance by preaching that the dead body of Jesus was no longer in the tomb, but had been raised by the power of the Spirit. Peter thundered: "Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36 ESV, emphasis mine). When the people cried out for direction as to how to be saved, Peter continued: "For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself" (Acts 2:39, emphasis mine).

The apostolic preaching included raising up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, a nurture and admonition that is nowhere in the Scripture abstracted from the Gospel. Indeed, the very idea of an ethical system, or a love of Jesus, that is not rooted and founded in Christ crucified and resurrected is something far different than the message of Christianity... no matter to whom, and for how long, it is given.

If this were just a Sunday school publisher, we could ignore it. If this were one isolated incident, it would not be worth mentioning. But it is not. The temptation that comes to all of us, in every era of the church, is to have Jesus, without seeing ourselves in the gore of his bloody cross and the glory of his empty grave. In the way that we speak of Him to our children, or to skeptics, or to seekers, we sometimes believe we'll gain more of a hearing if we present Him as teacher but not as a former corpse. It is too disturbing, we think to ourselves, too weird.

Peter thought that way too. Not the bold preacher of Pentecost, mind you, but the Peter of just a short time before that, the Peter of Caesarea Philippi. Peter certainly knew Jesus as friend, and he had just confessed that He was Messiah and Son of the living God. But when Jesus began to teach that He must "suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed, and on the third day be raised," Peter was outraged (Matt 16:21).

Peter was no preschooler, but he was disturbed. Matthew tells us that he began to rebuke Jesus. His cognitive development was not yet to the point where he could understand such things. This will never happen, Peter said. He loved Jesus. He wanted to be with Jesus. He wanted to stand with Jesus. He just didn't want the Jesus of the cross or the empty tomb. Jesus didn't call this shallow theology. He didn't call it inadequate teaching. He called it Satan (Matt 16:23).

Our children need to hear the Gospel. They need to see Jesus. That's graphic, sure. It's confusing, of course. And not just for kids. But it is the only message that saves. It's the only message that prepares one for salvation. It is, as Paul says, that which is "of first importance," the message he received from Jesus Himself (1 Cor 15:3-4).

The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is the Gospel. That's the first word. If we cannot speak of that, we would be better off not speaking of Jesus at all, rather than presenting another Christ, one who meditates but does not mediate, who counsels but is not crucified, who is accessible but not triumphant over sin and death.

The apostle Paul told us the word of the cross would be folly to those who are perishing (1 Cor 1:18). He didn't warn us that it would sometimes also be folly to those who are publishing. No matter. It is still the power of God

This Easter, preach the Gospel... to the senior citizens, to the middle-aged, to the young adults, to the teenagers, to the seekers, to the hardened unbelievers, to the whole world. And, yes, preach the Gospel to the preschoolers.

I'm not saying it won't be scary. The Gospel will disturb the children. And, if you understand it, it will disturb you too.

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

                                  -- G. K. Chesteron, The Donkey

A Gift for Now

Please consider making an on-line donation today to FSJ to support Mere Comments and Touchstone. We're very much in need of increased funding this year, with a postage hike in place last summer, paper costs going up (again), and even medical costs for staff (a 16% hike in insurance premiums). Some of our anticipated grants were not increased as expected (it's the economy?), so we're scrambling, praying, trusting, looking at everything we do with a prayer for wisdom and fortitude. Thanks to so many--now over a thousand--each year who truly make everything we do possible. Just take a look at our archives, and you'll see what wonderful writers we've been privileged to publish, and hope to continue publishing for you. Share the wealth, also, with a gift subscription, or just get your own if you don't have one, yet. Thanks.

Tough Act With the Pastor

Here's where things can get dicey when it comes to the views of your pastor and your own. From the Wall Street Journal's Opinion: Is Obama supposed to agree with all the views of his pastor? Is Mitt Romney supposed to explain or agree with all the views of his Mormon pastor? Does George Bush agree with everything said by his pastor (whoever that is)? Bush is United Methodist; does he support all the views of the UMC? There are, of course, offensive things here to many constituencies, and the views aren't politically correct in a broad sense and wouldn't be tolerated from a "white bread version" of them. The views of this pastor on the south side of my city aren't really all that surprising, nor that Obama happens to belong to this church. Nor that he distances himself from these views, to the extent that he can.

Leftovers

We have posted David Mills's review of Christianity for the Rest of Us by Diana Butler Bass from the December 2007 issue of Touchstone. Bass is something of a rising star among mainline progressive Protestants. Read it here.

Controlling Facts

Someone, rightly, I think, wrote me regarding my earlier post about self-control, or actually regarding one "fact" from a recent report that I cited, a "fact" that doesn't effect the point of my post, but still should be qualified or challenged:

This "factoid" derives from one study of a small  population sample, and therefore is tendentious at best.  It would require you to believe that something like 2/3-3/4 of all teenage girls who have sex ALSO have a sexually transmitted disease, and I'm just not buying into that.  Furthermore, though such factoids, full of truthiness as they are, can be rich fodder for the moralist looking for material, they should be avoided since, at some point, someone will take a closer look at the data and skillfully debunk it. It happened to the Feminists who tried to claim that one out of four women in America were raped, and that incidents of wifebeating double on Superbowl Sunday.  If it can happen to them, it can happen to you.

In the case of Super Bowl, I don't think the CDC issued that claim, but still the point is well taken. It's too early to assume the one-in-four number is true. I shouldn't trust media reports without a waiting period, perhaps, to see who debunks what. Is it possible the STDs are so contagious that among more or less promiscuous and incautious teens they could spread to the point that two of every three sexually active teens has come down with an STD? I will leave that to the experts, but in the meantime I won't repeat the one in four number until I hear more evidence.

Snippet (Helmut Schoeck)

The common denominator for this discontent [of place in society among American anthropologists and sociologists], this unrest, is the egalitarian impulse; most of the problems experienced or imagined by such minds would theoretically be solved in a society of absolute equals. Hence the constant and strangely tenacious preoccupation of Anglo-Saxon social science with models and programmes for a society of absolute equals. The utopian desire for an egalitarian society cannot, however, have sprung from any other motive than that of an inability to come to terms with one’s own envy, and/or with the supposed envy of one’s less well-off fellow men. It must be obvious how such a man, even if only prompted by his unconscious, would carefully evade the phenomenon of envy or try to belittle it. . . . Practically never has envy as a hypothesis been raised in order to be refuted or subjected to criticism; instead, it has been ignored as too embarrassing.

Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969, p. 127.

Manly Action of Self-Control (Lent)

From the many lines of the penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, usually a few jump out at me each Lent. This year, from Tuesday's service:

Thou hast heard, wretched soul, of the midwives who once killed in its infancy the manly action of self-control: like great Moses, then, be suckled on wisdom.

The "manly-action of self-control"--teach that as a concept today, somewhere, anywhere. That is, teach young boys who are growing into manhood that becoming a man means learning to control oneself and the passions, that that is a manly thing to learn. Our society teaches the opposite: express your passions and indulge your lusts, just as soon as you can feel them.

Otherwise, would we have a society in which one in four teenage girls has an STD? I'd like to think that most fathers would prefer their daughters to date young men who have self-control.

When self-control isn't nurtured by the sort of parental discipline that it takes to help little boys behave, then self-control is killed in infancy, so to speak, and the child, despite growing biologically, will remain an adolescent, children in adult male bodies, able to "have sex" but unable to truly father and raise children

Another interesting thing about the Lenten text above is that "wisdom" obviously teaches self-control and learning this begins at an early stage, Moses was "suckled," even an infant when launched on that path. A very young child can be taught to begin to control his passions.

Also, the Book of Proverbs is the selection for Lenten readings during this time, which is mostly a book of wisdom about how a young man should become a good man, a wise man, a man with self-control.

Are many men these days complimented for having self-control? There are many men who do have self-control, but to say that of someone is hardly a compliment today, is it? Real manly-action heroes control themselves.

Touchstone Website

The Touchstone website is back up and running after a few days of technical difficulties as we moved to a new server. This includes the new content from the (current) March 2008 issue. We apologize for any inconvenience while the site was partially down.

Touchstone April 2008

The April issue of Touchstone is in the final editing stages. It will contain features by William Saunders on why universal religious freedom will make more