Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Father Berger on Priesthood

A lecture that may be of interest to those of you living in western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio: Fr. Calinic Berger on "Priesthood: Foundations and Reflections."

Fr. Berger holds a doctorate in historical theology from the Catholic University of America and is both pastor of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, and visiting professor of theology at St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary in New York.  I heard him speak last January on St. John Chrysostom and very much enjoyed it. He had much to say and said it well.

The lecture is being held Tuesday, May 13th, at Holy Trinity Romanian Orthodox Church, 626 Wick Avenue, Youngstown, OH. The evening begins with Vespers at 6:30. The lecture is sponsored by the Youngstown chapter of the Society of St. John Chrysostom.

I hope to be there, and perhaps to bring along frequent Mere Comments respondent and book reviewer for Touchstone Rob Grano.

Do You Know Your Boys and Girls?

     While we're on the subject of students, let's see if you can guess the sexes of these students of mine, good and bad:

1. Asked about aspirations, this freshman English major, alluding to Inferno 4, without bothering to mention Dante, says, "I want to be seventh in that academy."

2. This student, hearing in lecture about the dream-vision encounter of a father and his deceased little child, lowers the head to the desk, takes out a handkerchief, and, listening intently, does not look up again for forty five minutes.

3. This student meets a friar for the first time, who begins a conversation about the faith.  "Father," laughs the student in a wholly good-natured way, "you couldn't have it more wrong.  I'm an atheist!"

4. Two students, identical twins, plagiarize their papers -- each of them copying material from a different "friend," all of them students in the same class.  Confronted with the evidence, they deny it.

5. A student is present before class when a professor tells a politically incorrect joke, followed by a an apology and a brief but serious discussion of the Million Man March.  The student waits until final grades are submitted before writing an article in the student newspaper condemning -- anonymously -- the professor.

6. A highly intelligent and likable student disappears from school on the last week of senior year, and is not heard from again for a year and more.  The same student, exceptionally good looking, once came to on the streets of Boston, having spent two days in an apartment of someone of the opposite sex -- drugged, with only the vaguest memory of what happened.

7. Student comes to the professor to complain about 4 points on one of three exams in the middle of the semester.  When the professor explains the grading scale, the student persists in complaining.  This, despite the extraordinarily high grades given out in the course.

8. Student organizes a religious retreat for fellow students, even though the student's own faith is unsure at best.  Student visits various favorite professors to ask them to pray for the young people on retreat.

9. Student reads Kafka between classes, follows no instructions, is underestimated or overlooked by almost everybody, and writes better -- is smarter -- than almost all of the faculty.

10. Student, child of a professor, required to write an essay exam for placement in freshman English, freezes; sits for two hours and does not write a single word.

Your guesses, ladies and gentlemen?

What's a Participle?

     One student out of fifteen -- mostly valedictorians, I'm told -- in my Honors seminar knew.  Our schools do not teach the systematic analysis of English semantics and syntax, what used to be called "grammar".  They do teach what now is called grammar, meaning a grab bag of rules, usually mistaken and never organized into a coherent system, which students learn to follow as docilely as they learn to write five-paragraph essays, with a vague opening, three ho-hum body shots, and a recapitulatory conclusion.  Respectively.

     Anyway, Steve's post below has made me think of the six stupidest "grammatical" things our schools teach.  Some of these slide from grammar into style, but since my students are but slenderly acquainted with either one, it hardly matters here how we characterize them:

1. Never begin a sentence with "but".   When they tell me they've been so advised, I open up the King James Bible at random, glance at the page, and read.  "If it's good enough for Almighty God," I say, "it had damned well better be good enough for a high school English teacher."  It is the preferred method in English prose of making the quick adversative shift.

2. Never begin a sentence with "because."  When our retiring linguist heard about this rule, she gaped in incomprehension.  That's what my daughter tells me, who was in the class.  What can you say about it?  It betrays an utter incapacity to understand how sentences are put together in English.  Because teachers do not know what a subordinate clause is, they do not teach their students what a subordinate clause is.  And because they have no clear way to explain what a sentence fragment is, and because immature writers will sometimes begin a fragment with "because," they say -- you get it.

3. Avoid the passive voice.  This rule would be fine, except for two things: neither the teachers nor the students know what the passive voice is; and the passive voice is often quite useful.  My students are under the impression that any verb with an "is" or an "are" in it is passive.  If ever they had to learn about the middle voice, they'd take ill.

4. Never use the pronoun "I" in an essay. 

5. Never use the informal "you," meaning "one".

6. Never use the same word more than twice in a row.  Imagine Lincoln revising the Gettysburg Address, that government of the people, for society, and by the general population, should not perish from the face of the earth.

But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name for them.  I'm still talking about the valedictorians here.  I suppose "improper predication" would do as well as any.  They use words in ways that are impossible not only in English, but sometimes in any conceivable language.  They get away with it, too, because their teachers, including college professors, do likewise. 

Some Notes on Diction

1. Enormous/Enormity. Fowler (2d edition) puts it rather nicely: “The two words have drifted so far apart that the use of either in connexion with the limited sense of the other is unadvisable. 'Enormous sin' [this use meaning, I believe, that sin and enormity are synonyms] and 'The impression of enormity produced by the building' are both etymologically possible expressions; but use of the first lays one open to the suspicion of pedantry, and of the second to the suspicion of ignorance.”

My Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th edition) includes this note: “In its earliest sense ‘enormity’ meant ‘a crime’ and some argue that it should therefore continue to be used only of contexts in which a negative moral judgment is implied. Nevertheless, in modern English 'enormity' is often simply used as a synonym for hugeness . . . and this is now broadly accepted in standard English.”

Ah yes, to be sure. This, however, does not relieve those who use it in the “broadly accepted” way from “suspicion of ignorance” of that earliest sense. As for me, I would rather not lay my hearers under the burden of that suspicion.

2. Begging the Question. Another of the same. This is very commonly used to mean “provoking” or “eliciting” a question, as in, “Her removal of his head begs the question of whether Judith might not really have been in love with Holofernes.” But the same audience that knows what “enormity” used to mean will also be apt to know that question-begging refers to the fallacy of petitio principii, that is, putting forth a conclusion that only restates the original problem--which idea, I believe, one finds far less occasion to use than the former. Question-begging is an accusation of faulty reasoning, not an evocation of curiosity. At least so far.

I am not quick to accuse people who think professional grammarians and lexicologists seem all too willing to bow before the notion that current use establishes meaning of pedantry, elitism, or nit-picking. They are very often, and very rightly I think, haunted by the moral analogy--that if enough people sin often enough, it ceases to become sin. The argument against this is that language is categorically different in this regard from moral life, and that, I think, is also correct.

But people who suspect the Spirit of the Age encourages loose thinking in one area to put his subjects in practice for the same in another are, I think, on to something. Those who are concerned with getting their grammar right are not necessarily obsessives or antiquarians. They may intuit that the mind in love with virtue, so willing to name sin and error, is in some way related to that which is uncomfortable with barbarism. To equate the two is a mistake--but not to relate them. The trick is in understanding the nature of the relation.

Why Touchstone is Not Really “Conservative”

Some years ago, when I was a young Congregationalist minister, I was invited to become a member of a local service organization--the one that contained, I was told, the “movers and shakers” of the town. The invitation was extended by a friend of our church who was a man of wealth and influence--something for which I should, someone made a point of telling me, be grateful. Naturally, I was pleased with this vote of confidence, and attended the next luncheon meeting, held at the club room of an upscale restaurant. Although my benefactor could not be there that day, he paid for my meal--for which I was very glad, for my salary doubtless made me the least motile and shakile person in the room.

There was a great deal of talking and a great deal of bonhomie, mostly involving higher-order primate ritual--mutual back scratching, aggression and submission displays, and the like. But two things in particular stuck in my memory. One was the piddling level of the club’s benefaction, given the wealth represented in its membership--the paltriness of which seemed to cause no embarrassment. The other was the loud presence of an old dentist who interrupted the meeting (!) four or five times to make vulgar jokes about being born again. This was one of the oddest things I had ever seen. Clearly this was a “conservative” gathering, but this ostentatiously, aggressively irreligious man was never rebuked, only met with polite but subdued laughter, even though the pastor of one of the major born again-variety churches--who was also a prosperous businessman--was a member, and was present. I found myself experiencing an uncanny and unanticipated affinity between this old infidel’s anti-Christianity and the kind of conservatism I was detecting in the membership.

The principal lesson the experience drove home to me, early in adult life, was that while Christianity and "conservatism" have certain agreements, they have very different roots and very different ends. The majority of those present at this meeting would probably be called “country club Republicans” today, although I don’t think the term was in use then. All signs pointed to the likelihood that this group was comprised almost exclusively of political conservatives, with whom I was used to identifying. I refused to go to subsequent meetings, and was told that I had insulted both the organization and my host by failing to avail myself of the opportunity. Regretting having disobliged the very decent man who had attempted to sponsor me, I nevertheless made it clear I had no interest in giving religious sanction to whatever game that bunch was playing--and so remained, to the chagrin of certain members of my church board, down among the immobile and shaken, joining, without knowing it, the local liberals, Catholics, and shabbier brands of Protestant in the estimation of the People Who Counted. In their minds I was not a conservative, and, given their lights, they were right.

The social and political operation of Christians is not based upon theorizing about what works best for the ordering of the world, but belief about what pleases the living God. The result is a way of thinking and acting that may or may not be agreeable to those whose understanding of the ordering of state and economy is based on a realistic appraisal of human nature coupled with an ideals of moderation and resistance to earthly utopias--that is, the classical tradition usually identified as “conservatism.” Christianity’s affinity with political, economic, and social conservatism is particularly pronounced in societies suffering from moral breakdowns which adversely affect all areas of life, but in Christian eyes the difference between “conservative” and “liberal” theory is still only a difference between theories, one more reasonable and more in agreement with Christianity about the nature of man than the other, but still based on a theory about human good that deals only with the achievement of happiness in this world.

Ayn Rand is one of the best examples of a conservatism that has parted company with Christianity. While she is in a certain sense right about the destructiveness of altruism, the definition of that vice put forward in her novels must also encompass much of what Christians regard as charity, of self-giving and self-abnegation that does not lead to the greater worldly happiness or comfort of the givers, but pleases God. While Christians may agree heartily with her about the stupidity and destructiveness of what illogical, morally lax, utopian liberals regard as good in this regard, they cannot follow through to the logical end of her eminently conservative theorizing because their ultimate desire is not the good of the world in its present form, or the comfort of human life here, but an Ultimate Good that involves giving up this world for the Life that lies beyond it. To the pure conservative this giving up is a giving over, and the Christian who does it a traditor.

Of this end outside the world, and its beginning in the same Place, mere conservatism can know nothing, despite a superior reason, realism, and assessment of human nature as compared to “liberalism”--the latter characterized by belief in the goodness of human nature, its forward evolution in the world, and a utopian end. Despite its practical wisdom, it will find an enemy in Christianity when the ethics of the faith overrides its pragmatics--when, for example, Christians insist that its practical reasons for limiting population growth are overridden by divine mandates concerning the conduct of family life. In such matters the conservative, who may quite reasonably believe that life on earth can be more happy and comfortable for its inhabitants when there are fewer people, especially in overpopulated areas, will make common cause with the liberal--who believes the same thing, with the admixture of progressivist and utopian notions--against the Christians.

The liberal, along with the conservative member of my unjoined club, will agree it is unwise to encourage real Christianity, the former because it is sure to condemn his view of human nature and the social theorizing that follows it, and the conservative because, once religion does its service as a stabilizing influence on society, what remains is no more than pie in the sky. The conservative believes strongly in pie, and has superior notions about how to secure it, but in his purest incarnation regards the pursuit of its celestial form as no more than a personal hobby.

Here at Touchstone we are Christians. When placed in the context of certain modern political contests we will look most dreadfully conservative for two reasons: first because we believe, with traditional Jews, Muslims, and almost all people of faith, in ancient, universal moral norms, in sexual matters in particular, against those who think that certain elements of societal or scientific progress have rendered them nugatory, and second, because we agree with conservatives that a realistic appraisal of human nature leads to skepticism about its innate goodness, militates against undisciplined progressivism, and is non-utopian.

The appearance is, however, a product of the context. It is mere Christianity when light falls on it from a certain direction. It does not look the same in all lights.

Ward at FRC

Michael Ward, of Planet Narnia fame, will be speaking at the Family Research Council in Washington DC on Tuesday, April 29. His cover story, Narnia's Secret, in the December 2007 Touchstone summarizes some of his planetary take on the Chronicles of Narnia; it has, so far, been well-received. I am sure his talk will be welcome and enjoyable to all Lewis fans.

Let's Throw Away the Key

     It's recently been reported that the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  That may not be true -- who can attest for the rates in some of the more miserable nations?  But it is certainly true that far too many of our countrymen are in prison.  I'm rushing to class now in a few minutes, but may I ask a few questions to start discussion?

1. Might we cease pummeling the family already?  Hasn't it had enough reinvention?

2. Might we return the words "unwed mother" and "illegitimate child" to popular use, as an act of clarity and charitable prudence?

3. It's said that boys are difficult to teach.  Well, a lot of things in this world are difficult to do.  If you can't do them, you don't take jobs that require it of you.  If you're a teacher and you can't reach the boys, don't you think, in fairness, you ought to go to a girls' school or look for other employment?

4. Do you think we've had enough sapping of the boys' programs that once upon a time aimed to take the most troubled kids off the street?

5. What has happened to vocational-technical schools?

6. How can you pretend to "lead" people who, rather than follow you, turn to lives of crime?

That's for starters ....

Sing Song Pray

James Altena tipped me off to this article in yesterday's NYTimes about a speech therapy that retrains stroke victims who have lost their speaking ability: they sing first, which in certain cases retrains the speaking ability in the brain. I think important things that I learned as a child were often mediated through singing. I still find it that way. I am a (novice) chanter in church (Byzantine), and in the midst of our Orthodox Holy Week now I am reminded how much of a difference there can be between reading a text, speaking a text, and singing a text. What I am looking for is the effect of chanting on not only my brain, but my "self," so that over time immersion in the texts of the liturgy, especially the God-inspired Psalms, will retrain me to think on the things that St. Paul notes in Philippians. Further, that the texts of those Psalms become the words, the language and dialect through which I pray. Prayer must move from the voice and the lips into the heart, permeating the soul. Beyond human speech itself, the songs and the music that somehow transport us--where?--seem to me another clear marker of a quality of the creature made "a little lower than the angels" that sets him apart, far apart from the beasts. He may even, in fleeting snatches of time, sense that the very angels have joined him in his singing.

Its Name Was Wormwood...

Fascinating photos these, from Chernobyl, which my son John just sent me. The pictures at the end are indeed haunting. The photographer notes:

The only buildings in area that is not ruined are churches. Traveling through the whole of Chernobyl region I have yet to see any ruined church.

More photos here. Like I said, haunting. It's been 22 years since the disaster.

The Final Solution

David Klinghoffer writes about Hitler and the Jews and Darwin here. He notthat the one thing about the new film Expelled out this weekend that will draw perhaps the most fire is its connection of Darwin and the Holocaust. Darwin would have been appalled, but maybe not surprised?

Yale Art

In case you haven't seen the latest university flap over academic freedom, here's this from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

A Yale University student's art project that portrays her as inducing her own abortions has drawn a firestorm of criticism from all along the ideological spectrum, but it is protected by intellectual and artistic freedom, said officials of groups that defend academic freedom.

The details of her "art" project are rather disgusting to say the least. At one point Yale denied it was a "real" exhibit, rather fictional. The student stands by her claim that she insemminated herself and induced multiple abortions. Don't they have a counseling office at Yale? On second thought.... Without such freedom, we will fail to learn everything there is to learn under the sun. What's a university for, after all?

Top (Young) Bloggers

Something for aspiring young bloggers: The Wheatstone Academy--"a discussion-based summer conference that seeks to instill a love of learning and dialogue in Christian high school students"--is running a competitive symposium (details are here at Joe Carter's Evangelical Outpost). We are taking posted submissions and judging them, awarding a choice of one of 6 prizes for the top six entries. I say "we" because I've been asked to be one of the judges. More details are at the link above.

The Rose of the Name

David Mills, who has worked with me for years and knows what gets my goat--the getting of which sometimes results in a publishable bellow--copied to me a recent editorial from Charisma magazine, whose author suggests that churches with outdated or curious names (as most denominational names are to the public at large these days), change them to make them more attractive, meaningful and welcoming.

What, indeed, does “Baptist” or “Pentecostal,” mean to the uneducated and unchurched? And if they ever got within close enough range to become inquisitive about it, what devout and sensitive Baptist or Pentecostal would be at ease explaining the origins of the communion to the person for whom the first order of business is finding Jesus? Why not, to be sure, take a cue from the subdivision developers and name the place for whatever got knocked down or messed up to erect it: Whispering Pines? Aspen Grove? Willow Creek?

I must admit that what we have here is wisdom, but note that it can only apply to a certain segment of potential church attenders. It is a large segment, and the churches that cater to large segments normally enjoy largeness themselves. This, however, seems to be the consideration that is invariably missing from all these calculations: what if the driving force behind the potential churchgoer’s quest is the desire for truth and deliverance from his sins (these are One Thing)--the things that, as Kierkegaard so pointedly observed, make Christians instead of mere churchgoers? Where in that case would friendliness, comfort, familiarity, proximity, parking space, playlots for the kiddies, and all the Church Growth amenities rank? Might the spiritually serious rather be inclined discount these things as possible diversions from the business at hand--examples of things that could be found in greater quality and quantity elsewhere?

As for me, if I were “unchurched” I would at least know that Christianity claims to deal in truth and forgiveness, and would think these things, and these things alone, were its unique offering in a world very competent to deliver me all the rest. I would know myself well enough, and have had sufficient experience in the world to know, that impressiveness and appeal to worldly tastes, instincts, and my comfort was not what I was looking for. Rather, what would seem important was hearing the truth, which I would expect to hurt, and the offer of salvation from the sins that burdened me--and I would want it to be the real thing, since I had enough of living in a world surrounded by falsehood and illusion.

Just as I would require hard evidence of good faith and proven past performance in organizations I did business with (here is where the business analogy comes back around to bite the editorialist, for while successful businesses keep up with the times, they also check references), I would ask for your church’s credentials.

Now, Mr. Pentecostal, or Mr. Aspen Grove, here is where you run into trouble with me whatever you name your church. I am no fool: I want to know where you came from, and by what authority you preach what you do. If the gospel is self-authenticating, your version and delivery of it is not, this being part of the connection with truth and forgiveness that is foremost in my mind. And here you lose. A few minutes in Church history will tell me that you came from Methodists who came from the Anglicans who came from the Catholics, whose claim to proximity to the apostolic root looks better than yours. I’m off to the local Catholic parish, which is the most credibly ancient and definitive church within my reach (even though it may in fact be--although I don't know it yet--liberal Protestant).

If it is a real catholic church, and I hear the truth for which I have hungered there, I’m also going to assume that its way of getting forgiveness is the right one. If I come back to a church like yours, the only reason I’m returning to put up with all your distasteful Gemütlichkeit is I simply cannot live in the Catholic (or in other circumstances the Orthodox) Church. If, for example, one of those churches says that to be in its communion I must confess to believe something I don't--something that in confessing my conscience could not stand before God--then I would have to leave, and with the deepest of regret, become some kind of “Protestant.” But believe me, if I did, I wouldn’t think your church was the answer to my problems, or feel guilty in leaving you alone with your questions about what you should name it. Hell, name it "Bob's Church" after your perpetually grinning preacher. What could be more welcoming? Or have more of the common touch for which you are aiming? Or be easier to change unapologetically when time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears Bob away, and brings his equally rictal and gregarious successor?

Touchstone Editor in Colorado

Touchstone contributing editor Allan Carlson will be speaking this evening in Colorado Springs as part of the year-long John Jay Institute lecture series entitled, Cities of God: A Vision for Re-building Good Cities. Dr. Carlson's contribution is called Family-Centered Neighborhoods: The Building Blocks of Vibrant Towns and Cities.

The lecture is at 7 in the Great Hall of Grace Church in downtown Colorado Springs. There is no charge to attend, but you need to RSVP. Details are here. I will be there and I hope other Mere Comments readers will join me.

Welcome, Life, Sort Of, Pope Benedict

The Senate apparently doesn't want to value whatever they veiw as every human life. From the Crypt:

While Pope Benedict XVI's historic visit to Washington received wall to wall coverage, Sen. Barbara Boxer briefly held up a Senate resolution welcoming the pontiff because she objected to language about how the pope values "each and every human life."

The measure later cleared the Senate Thursday afternoon after the sponsor of the resolution, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), dropped the reference to "human life" because some Democrats saw it as a reference to abortion.

I fail to see why the phrase should have been dropped: if some Democrats admit that an abortion takes a human life, and they support abortion, then I guess they would object. But if they think a human life is something that appears at birth, then they should be able to comfort themselves that their statement to the Pope is not about anything in utero. Of course it's hard to maintain such ignorance in the face of all the facts. I'm sure the Holy Father will frame the Pelosi version for his office.

Shipment Today

Since we're past April 15 now, we've under two and half months in which to raise about another $200,000 for expenses related to publishing Touchstone, Mere Comments, the Daily Devotional Guide, the FSJ Calendar, Fr. Pat's Daily Reflections, Salvo, and Signs of the Times. I estimate somewhere beteween 25,000 and 30,000 readers all told. We've raised over $500,000 so far. Truthfully, all gifts large and small help. Obviously some large gifts at this time would help us out greatly. Perhaps you've not donated before. There are several ways to help on-line: one-time gifts and also our increasingly popular automatic monthly contributions. And today, April 17, we are expecting a large shipment of our Creed and Culture Touchstone Reader from a warehouse on the south side of Chicago. I'd like to move as many of these back out the front door as soon as possible, so as an incentive for donations, I will offer you a copy of Creed and Culture this time for gifts over $125, or for signing up for a regular monthly contribution of $25 or more. We've now nearly 1700 supporters over the last year and a half. Gifts have ranged from $5 to over $50,000! Thanks to one and all. We need your help today.

Texas LDS, Kids & Waco

One of our regulars writes:

Has any of the editors considered a post on MC regarding the current situation with the “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” compound raid in Texas, with its resonances to the Waco compound (government raid) Elian Gonzalez (the government taking children away from parents into protective custody)?  I have very divided feelings about the entire matter, and think a very lively discussion would be generated.

My own thoughts are not settled on this matter, and I do worry about more "religion is bad for people" fallout. Well, bad religion is bad for people..... I am happy to provide the opportunity for some discussion here. As usual, please stay on topic and be civil!

Heritage on Religious Freedom

Those in the DC area will be interested in this event on Diplomacy in an Age of Faith at the Heritage Foundation tomorrow Friday, April 18 at noon. The speaker will be Thomas Farr, Visiting Professor of Religion and Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University. From the publicity:

While Americans are a highly religious people, U.S. foreign policy practitioners have not taken religion very seriously, argues Tom Farr in a recent Foreign Affairs article.  The problem is rooted in a kind of secularism that fails to understand religion's continued relevance in America's constitutional order and the relationship between religion and liberty abroad.  Rather than being inimical to the advance of freedom, religious ideas and actors can promote and strengthen ordered liberty.  The U.S. foreign policy community, supported by civil society resources, must overcome a lack of vocabulary and imagination to fashion remedies that recognize the significant role of religion.  U.S. policy must continue to advance religious liberty as a universal, fundamental freedom.  It must also present a positive vision for religion's contribution to a liberal order, addressing the balance between the overlapping authorities of religion and state, and in particular how religiously grounded norms can legitimately influence public policy.

In a very similar vein, William Saunders of the Family Research Center in DC has the cover story in the April issue of Touchstone on Religious Liberty as the First Freedom.

Science & Washington

The Wall Street Journal's Opinion article about the reluctance of presidential candidates to debate science reminds me that many of the questions I care about have to do with science: will we clone humans and grow them into adults and create hybrids and farm and harvest organs and practice all sorts of genetic manipulations and so on--will we embrace Dr. Frankenstein (or, will we un-embrace him)? Of course there is the problem of what goes on in the other laborities as well, I mean those beyond our borders. The medical ethical questions, related to scientific and medical technologies as well, are not really being discussed. It seems the moral train wreck gets closer and closer while some candidates debate tax rates, timetables, insurance and carbon footprints.

A bit more: Chris Mooney at the New Republic writes about Hard Science, the interface between scientists and politicians and lobbyists. (I also note that former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's district in Congress was recently won by a Democrat, Bill Foster, who campaigned as a scientist, running against Republican dairy-store magnate Jim Oberweis. We endured months of political ads of both candidates. Now we have "a scientist" Congressman just down the road in the Western suburbs of Chicago.)

Growing Up or Out?

A slogan I have heard, particularly in the business world, goes something to the effect that if you are not growing, you are shrinking--if you are not moving ahead, you are falling behind.

Considered in absolute terms there is one sense in which this is true and another in which it is not. The former relates to the grace of God which has been visited in Christ upon all men: if we do not respond to this as a plant that receives them responds to the ministrations of soil, sun, moisture, and all that is given it to live and come into its full fruit, then we have thwarted the just expectations of our Maker and our “end is to be burned.” This is the case whether one describes it in terms of sanctification, justification, or deification: the intended end of all is the same.

I received some junk mail today, however, that caused me to consider the sense in which it is not true. It was from an immensely wealthy Christian organization whose activities over the last twenty or thirty years make me suspect it operates on the principle of indeterminate growth, the result of which is that it apparently has far too much money. It spends vast sums on projects and properties that seem to me at best indirectly related to the mission for which it still has a name and still takes contributions. I did a little research and found that its principals are given princely salaries--much less, to be sure, than the royal ones executives of large corporations customarily receive, but which nevertheless allow them to live very, very far above the level of their average contributor. Despite the admitted reasonableness of every argument I have heard for this practice, and the unquestioned worthiness of the ox who grinds the corn, there is still something about it that looks a little deceitful, and more than a little unchristian. Given the indelible examples left by the apostles, the lifestyle of the Christian leader, to be clearly recognizable as such, should be notably modest at the least, humbly, unostentatiously, and happily abstemious at best.

I wonder whether such organizations are capable of seeing the danger of becoming like the empty womb, the dry earth, the grave, and the fire of Proverbs 30, which can never say, “Enough.” This means not recognizing the hubris in thinking, “God needs us,” or the desolation awaiting those who join house to house and field to field, or even the mere temptations of wealth and power (which tend to creep up gradually on the well-meaning).

There must be a place where sober reflection on the mission of the organization would bring it to the place of understanding which every active believer must eventually face in contemplating death: that we are well-engaged in doing what we were called to do, that we are receiving enough to do it, and (even) that it is time to give over the work to others, and so increase by decreasing--eminently Christian ideas all, which I have never seen any of these Advertising Christian Organizations risk considering. (There seems to me an unrecognized but nevertheless bottomless chasm between an offering and a contribution.) Allow me to observe that the only body of this kind upon which the Mandate of Heaven rests is the Church itself. All of its offspring must submit to, and make intelligent provision for, decline and death.

To be sure, we are always called upon to improve our selves and our work, for it is this in which the confidence of our election is to be sought. Only a lean body can be truly healthy, though, and this is a body that has learned to know its calling, to be satisfied with the competence required for its labors, and to say “enough” at the proper time.

D'Souza v. Singer

God: Yes or No? will be a debate between Dinesh D'Souza and Peter Singer on the evening of April 25, 2008 at Biola University. The cost is only $10. Be there!

Cougar Killing

Yesterday a mountain lion, that is, a cougar, possibly from the Black Hills of South Dakota, was shot to death in Chicago's Roscoe Village by police. What he was doing in Roscoe Village, besides terrorizing residents, no one knows for sure, yet. From the Tribune's story:

The unexpected visit fascinated researchers and put police officers in the unusual dilemma of balancing public safety with the beauty of an animal not seen in Chicago since the city's founding in the 19th Century.

Well, not seen, shall we note outside of Lincoln Park Zoo. The police balanced everything by the act of shooting the beauty like any wild beast that is capable of mauling or killing a human. There were immediate questions and explanations given by officials and news anchors to the obvious default question: did the police use excessive force? Apparently not, as the cougars are not easy to tranquilize to begin with, and the beast was capable of mauling a human within seconds given the opportunity. The police had a hard enough time keeping track of the nimble beast running all over the neighborhood. Our police apparently didn't have the time or wherewithal to find the right prescription for tranquilizing a threat rarely encountered by most patrolmen and getting off a shot and waiting to see if it worked. Had police or animal control personnel attempted this and failed, and someone got hurt afterwards, you can just see the lawyers lining up for the lawsuits. I wouldn't blame them. But there was complaining or second-guessing all the same.

David Publisher vs Goliath Author?

J K Rowling, multi-billionaire of Harry Potter famed, testified in court today in a lawsuit she has launched against a tiny Michigan publisher, RDR Books, in order to stop owner Steve Vander Ark from publishing his Harry Potter Lexicon. Rowling claims he is stealing. I don't know the ins and outs of copyright/book publishing laws, but I am wondering if lexicons and dictionaries and reference guides to massive works like, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, haven't been fair game for authors or publishers looking to capitalize on an audience's interest. I have a copy of The Tolkien Companion by J E A Tyler, published by St. Martin's Press in 1975, which is alphabetical guide to various proper names and events in the books. He received  permission from Tolkien's publisher and estate for places in which he quotes directly, but I don't know if permission would have been needed for everything. Rowlling complains that she is planning a guidebook to HP, but that it won't be out for 2-3 years and that Vander Ark's is "not a quality work." That may or may not be true, but the quality of the work wouldn't be a factor, I would guess. (If people want to buy a poor book, so what? When Rowling's own book comes out, it will outshine the other.

Disclosure: I've know about this pending lawsuit for some months. You see, while RDR is very small, I've been aware of it since it is the publisher of one of the most enjoyable books I read in the last couple of years, my friend Steven Faulkner's Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts. The publicity may help the publisher (as long as he doesn't lose the case), and maybe that will help Faulkner sell a few more copies.

In the meantime, I will watch and see whether the courts decide Vander Ark is a thief or one smart publisher who saw a golden opportunity.

I Confess

     All right, time for an admission.  My wife and I have signed up for one of those services that drop movies off in your mailbox, for a small fee each month.  We watch old films about once a week in the evening, usually black-and-white films that we've never heard of before.  I've had to look them up in the service's database, and that has led to some very nice discoveries.

     Before I give out my recommendation of the month, though, I'd like to mention a peculiar thing I've noticed under "user comments" in the database.  It's that a lot of intelligent and well-read people talk in precise ways about the aesthetic quality of movies.  That is, they will tell you whose acting was terrific, and whose was only fair; whose directorial hand was deft, and whose was predictable or clumsy; whose screenplay concentrated deep thought and feeling into a single ordinary line, and whose fell back upon the trite or the corny.  These are all aesthetic judgments, often blurring into quite defensible moral judgments -- because the writers sense that what makes a movie a "good" movie is only partly distinguishable from what makes anything good at all.  More than that, in the greatest of all movies you will find a powerful striving after The Good, or at least What Is True, not "My Personal Opinion of What is Good" or "The Socially Constructed" or "The Maybe It's Not So Bad."

     So what, you ask?  Well, we don't find much of this sort of criticism in literary studies today.  The old presumption regarding literature was that, like the music that Plato recommends in his imaginary Republic, it was meant to form a young person's soul.  Yesterday I read a nineteenth century introduction to Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and was struck by how similar it was, in aesthetic intelligence, to the comments by the savvy users on the movie database, and how very different it was from anything you'll find in a modern introduction.  I read it and knew no more about Hawthorne's politics than when I began -- but I was alerted to all kinds of canny ways in which Hawthorne's potent imagination would challenge me.  In other words, The Marble Faun was introduced to me as a great book, whose greatness in part was due to its intelligent structure and deft dialogue, and in part due to the attention it gives to truths greater or broader than the temporary concerns of the day.  To read the typical introduction to a literary work nowadays is to wonder why anyone would ever struggle through the archaisms of Shakespeare, when the payoff at the end is not exaltation, or even a tear, but a political bumper sticker.  I read this sentence from a new edition of Othello: "In opposition to a Cahtolic view that celibacy was the highest good for both sexes, Protestant authorities advocated conjugal or married love over celibacy and began to focus on the married couple as an independent unit."  Now there are plenty of things that are just dead wrong in that sentence -- the author does not know the difference between "chastity," "celibacy," and "virginity," for one -- but the first thing to ask is, "How, by great Caesar's ghost, when you have a play of such surpassing beauty and power to write about, do you pen a sentence as ugly and tin-eared as that?"  Well, you write such a thing because a sense of beauty is not part of your repertoire -- not the beauty of the Protestant praise of marriage, nor the beauty of the Catholic admiration for virginity, nor the beauty of Othello.

     In any case, it's interesting that the ordinary reviewers of the movies do not write like that, and that's healthy; it's always healthy, when people make natural distinctions between what is good and better and best.  I may disagree with the high rating for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I am delighted that people would commonly agree that the rating itself is a fine thing, and that we can more or less agree on the aesthetic criteria we would use.  (My mind returns to an incident years ago at school, when a friend and I were jesting about which language would win the award for Best Literature of the Century; if I remember, it went France (13th), Italy (14th and 15th), England (16th), France (17th; a close call), England (18th), Russia (19th; a very close call with Germany second), United States (20th); then a professor accused us, seriously, of being fascists, and put a stop to it.)  I guess it is because we take movies more seriously than professors take great works of literature.

     By the way, check out The Browning Version (1951; Michael Redgrave; Anthony Asquith, dir.)

The Church of NASCAR

     I've been watching with no great pleasure as the two principal candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency try to outdo one another in ineptitude.  It's pathetic.  Mrs. Clinton is like someone desperately trying not to scratch that poison ivy rash, but can't help herself, so she tells easily traceable lies, slanders the whole Air Force without even understanding that it is a slander, and then pretends to a degree of amnesia which, if she indeed suffered, would disqualify her for orderly in a nursing home, let alone president of the United States.  Meanwhile, Mr. Obama says that people in Podunk, Pennsylvania are embittered because of their economic sludge, so they turn to guns, religion, hatred of illegal immigrants, and so forth.  Mrs. Clinton gleefully defends the good white folks among whom she did not really grow up, and whom she also despises.  Nobody will say that Obama breathed out loud the very same things that Mrs. Clinton herself, resident of Chappequa (not Hot Springs, not Peoria, not Utica) believes, because the whole academic and political left believes them, too.  That unbearable condescension of academics and bureaucratic elites towards small town people who watch sports and hunt and sometimes darken church doors -- I've been hearing strains of that all my life long.

     A recent example: a candidate for a job in my department said she wanted to leave her tenure track position at a certain major college in the south because she had underestimated how hard it would be to live among people who still want the Confederate flag to be hung at the State Capitol.  She said so, without the slightest awareness that the snide comment dismissed, as stupid or bigoted, a whole class of human beings about whom she did not know very much.  My department didn't care.  As we did not care some years ago, when a candidate discussed the "humor" and metaphoric wit plied by leaders of the Black Panthers.  Her example?  The shouted slogan, "Off the Pigs!", referring to killing policemen.  My department tittered with delight.  That candidate won the vote overwhelmingly, and only the veto of the college president spared us.  It never occurred to anybody, among the 22 of us at the table, that somebody there might have a father or uncle or brother who could have been shot.  No, academics and their ilk are protected from bigotry.  That's why they teach Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a work that from start to finish slanders evangelicals whom the author does not understand and in whose company she has clearly never broken bread.

     Mrs. Clinton, though, believes the same things, and believes them with an ardor (not a smug attempt at sadness) and an anger that makes her more than inept.  But give her an hour or two.  That rash is irritating, isn't it, madam?

Richard Pipes on Russia & the West

Richard Pipes of Harvard University, Polish-born, WWII veteran and expert on Russian (and "Soviet" affairs), spoke at a recent meeting in Virginia about the "bad news" about Russia. While Russians, when asked, will say they are Europeans, which is true enough racially, culturally they are not. They are sui generis. They do not look to the West for much of anything and are truly isolated. After the fall of Constantinople, the only nation that was Orthodox for a few hundred years was Russia, so Russians identified themselves, or at least most peasants would, as "Orthodox" before "Russian."

Russia increasingly feels encircled, especially because NATO is now trying to move into territory that was formerly part of the old Soviet Union (Ukraine, Georgia). Pipes said that Gorbachev was promised (not formally per se), when he dissolved the Warsaw Pact and pulled out of Eastern Europe, that NATO would not move east. Pipes said on the NATO issue he understands the threat felt by Russians. NATO, after all, was designed as a military alliance against the Soviet Union. It's still the same organization and may move into Ukraine. (Russian statements, uncorrected, have indictated a willingness to take military action against Ukrain in that case.)

As to history, a recent video documentary, backed by Putin's father confessor, is called Destruction of an Empire, and it attributes the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine as a whole (to the Turks) to its adoption of Western ways.

Russians hands down prefer order over freedom if you have to choose, so Western-style democracy isn't a top priority. Putin said the stronger the government is, the more freedom for people. Russians assume force is to be a necessary evil (which St. Paul would agree with, but the question is how much of it do you really need?) They associate democracy with anarchy and crime.

Interesting and provocative stuff from high-caliber scholar, Richard Pipes, who advised Ronald Reagan during the years leading up to the fall of Sovietism. These are all things to bear in mind in talks between Orthodox and Catholics, and the role of the Russian Orthodox in that mix. It looks like a long road towards unity......

Tempted by LUST Tax Link

James Altena sent me this link to an on-line page at the IRS, documenting the existence of a LUST tax, and refund. He noted some bureaucrat had fun with naming it. He also sent it to me, I am certain, to see if I would give in to the temptation to post it. You see the results. I say: abolish the tax codes. I realize many people make their living off of April 15, but millions of citizens would be happier if they could somehow, simply, pay as they go, and pay for no pork, just what is needed. I fully trust our elected officials to come up with something simple, elegant, efficient, and painless.

The Lonely Libertarian

     A few days ago I was kept awake by some rather odd sounds from a patio nearby the trailer where I was trying to sleep.  Some boys were outside in the cool California night, smoking cigars, fencing each other with hockey sticks, and indulging in that far-carrying masculine laughter, at nothing in particular.  One of them was splashing about (with bathing suit) in a tub.  They didn't seem to be ready to turn in anytime soon, so I went outside, well after midnight, to ask for some ibuprofen and to get in on the conversation.  Some good raucous jokes were told, including one involving Hillary Clinton, an Amana freezer, and the advice from the old army VD filmstrips: "Don't let this happen to you."

     It was at Thomas Aquinas College, where I was scheduled to talk about Dante the next evening.  That I did, on forty hours of sleeplessness, to a crowd of about 300 or so, basically all the professors and three quarters of the student body.  It was quite an experience, there in the mountains above Los Angeles.  Not just for the natural beauty of orange trees, acorn woodpeckers, and honeysuckle, but for that rarer natural beauty of a genuine community, wherein everybody knows who you are, the stupid things you do, what great writers you love, what other ones you loathe, and what on earth you might be doing in a tub outside at one in the morning.  It's a place where people smile at you because they don't know who you are.  The boys, it seems, do all the groundskeeping; I saw a truck with three of them riding the back, among rakes and shovels and heaps of sod.  Young ladies serve as secretaries -- so it seems; and people take turns cooking, and are pretty darned good at it, too.

     Everyone at Thomas Aquinas takes the same curriculum, without electives.  There's an odd principle at work here.  To the extent that you can choose whatever you like, you set yourself apart from your fellows.  That's not a bad thing, necessarily.  On the other hand, there are certain choices that are really daring, because they cast choice away, committing the chooser to a way of life, temporarily or forever.  Marriage is like that.  So is Thomas Aquinas: you don't have to go there, but if you do, you enter a community.  I don't imagine that even shy people can be lost sight of in that case.  After all, everybody, athletes, skinny people, boys, girls, lawyer's kids, janitor's kids, people who like the Red Sox and people who can't tell an infield fly from a mosquito, will all take the same courses, get to know the same professors, and worship together on Sunday.

     And that brings to my mind the libertarian conundrum.  A good libertarian should champion heterogeneity, I think -- why should all communities be exactly the same?  And that's another way of saying that there should be communities, associations of free people who live together according to their best lights.  But the only way to build a community is to put skin around it, so to speak, distinguishing inside from outside, and ruling certain activities out of bounds.  These needn't even be immoral activities.... I think that at Thomas Aquinas, television is pretty strictly limited to a lounge here or there.  I could be wrong about that, but the principle remains whether or no.  I am writing this message here on a computer, I know, while listening, alone, to the Cardinals on the radio (they are losing, alas, 4-0 in the seventh).  But I also know that if there were no television, people would not smuggle themselves away in their corners, never getting to know one another.  They would make their own entertainment.  They might begin by asking one another their names.

    I don't mean to turn this post into a harangue against technology.  That's not the point.  I do mean that we are now rich enough to do as we please without depending on anybody, even for our entertainment, hollow as that often is.  But the result is homogeneity: everyone prone to the marketers.  It makes me wonder what it might be like to join a thousand or so other Christians in an experiment.  We'd live in a small local place, with a few streets planned out for human beings, not machines.  We'd have cars, sure, because we do have to eat, but we'd have no television, and no internet.  What would that be like, for a couple of years?  Or, to put it differently: will we ever have vibrant communities again, unless they engage in something analogous to the exclusion I've suggested -- the tossing of choice away?

From O'Hare to DC

On the plane this morning to DC, I read in the Chicago Tribune about a new Indiana law requiring bookstore owners that sell pornography, any sexually explict materials, to register with the state and pay a $250 licensing fee. The fee should be much higher, but you take what you can get, I suppose. I mean, in Chicago you can get a $300 ticket for various infractions having to do with motor vehicles. Purveyors of porn are can do their dirty work for a token.

Also this morning at O"Hare before I left, I peeked inside a copy of Eckhart Tolle's bestseller (what's the name? "A New Earth"? I don't care), hyped by Archbishop Oprah. The last line went something like: "A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it."

Do I discern plagiarism? "We are the one's we've been waiting for." But I don't know who said it first. Somebody back in the fourth century before Christ, perhaps?

Finally, I'm sure you've all seen the ad in Time recently (or elsewhere) from the Unitarian Universalist Association? "When in Doubt, Pray. When in Prayer, Doubt." "Many of us yearn for a loving, spiritual community that is guided, not be a set creed or dogma...." and so on. The Church We've Been Waiting For? Maybe Indiana should charge Time $250 for running that ad.

Eve of Deconstruction

Dawn Eden writes here about "The Eve of Deconstruction: Feminism and John Paul II." She notes that it references not only John Paul II, but also G.K. Chesterton and Inigo Montoya (as well as making a headline pun on a P.F. Sloan song). But it's a serious article.

David Mills at Seton Hall

Touchstone's David Mills will be speaking on Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 7 PM in the Chapel of the Good Shepeherd at the Immaculate Conception Seminary, Seton Hall University, on "Two Ways to the Same End: Comparing G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity." Here is a link to the flyer. If you're within driving distance, be there!

The Unremembered Dead

     In the days of the Roman republic, a child grew up under the watchful eyes of his elders.  Not only those who happened to be alive at the time: looking down upon him from the lintel above the hearth would be the images of his ancestors, made from waxen castings of their faces at their death.  They became the household gods, whose example you had to live up to.  They gave the Roman a sense that his life stretched back into the misty past, and would extend into the time to come, when his own descendants in turn would revere him, in gratitude for the long heritage he had faithfully passed down to them.

     I think that that reflects a natural human longing, whether or not we have been given the revelation of eternal life in Christ.  Imagine what it might be like, not to be forgotten, but to know, as you are growing old, that you will soon be forgotten -- that, in a few short years after your death, no one will care for you, or will preserve your wisdom, or uphold what you stood for, or honor your grave.  Would that not be like dying before dying?  Isn't there a pathetic rootlessness of time as well as of place?  Maybe we can define modern life as that truncated and diminished state of having no home to call your own, no country to serve, no family tradition, maybe no family at all, no piously tended grave, no past, and no future.

     If that's the case, then our educators do a very fine job preparing children for modern life.  They too sever them from home, country, family, the past, and the future.  In the April Touchstone there's a brief report of a study done by a Stanford professor of education, who asked 2000 high school students to name the ten most famous Americans from the time Columbus stepped foot on the continent to the present.  The choices are telling.

     Washington, the only man of his time who could have kept together his ragged and miserable army at Valley Forge, to whose patience and determination and sheer audacity we owe our victory over England, did not make the list.  Jefferson, the planter and scientist and political thinker, the writer of the Declaration, did not make the list.  The great minds of Madison and Hamilton, who hammered out our federalist constitution, do not impress our scholars now; those two did not make the list.  Adams, a more acute thinker than all of them, is forgotten.  Lincoln did not make the list.  Indeed, no President at all made it, from the political left or right.  Neither of the Roosevelts, nor Wilson, nor Reagan, made the list.

     No soldier made the list.  All you who serve your nation by putting your lives on the line, you will not be remembered.  MacArthur, Doolittle, Patton, Grant, Lee, Stonewall Jackson -- no chance.  All you others who risked your lives in exploration, you too can sit down.  Lewis and Clark do not make the list, nor do Daniel Boone, Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong.  Industrialists, we know, are just bad people, so all those whose efforts made the effete left of our day even possible, can take the ingratitude and lump it.  J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford do not make the list.  One inventor makes the list -- the only one whose name a student will recognize, without, however, knowing just how many hundreds of things he invented, and how great was the perspiration that brought his fruition to genius.  No other inventor makes the list: no Whitney, McCormack, Morse, Graham Bell (half Canadian), Goodyear, Fulton.

     People in the old days wrote in funny long boring sentences, so none of them make the list: no Emerson or Thoreau or Hawthorne or Irving.  Herman Melville may have written the greatest of all novels, if you can call Moby-Dick a novel and not a prose poem of many hundreds of pages; but Melville does not make the list.  Emily Dickinson may be the greatest woman poet ever; too bad for Emily Dickinson.  Walt Whitman, for the worse I think, revolutionized modern poetry and has been regarded as the quintessential poet of democracy.  Too bad for Walt; he is forgotten.  In fact, no men of letters make the list: no Faulkner, Hemingway, O'Neill, Frost, not even the boilerplate-writing Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Religion is boring and reminds us of our duties to those who have come before us, so no religious figure makes the list: no Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theological mind America has produced, no Billy Graham, no Fulton Sheen.

     If you're thinking of popular culture, some figures do make the list.  No first-rate actors, though, no directors, no musicians, no composers, no star athletes.  Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, sit down.  Who's Jim Thorpe?  George Gershwin might as well have been from Mongolia.  No Glenn Miller, no Charlie Parker, not even Bob Dylan.

     Here then are the ten most famous Americans, according to our high school students.  The first three are in order; the next seven are only as I remember them.  A few (1, 8, and 9) are good choices, and another (10) would be, if he had spent his prime in America:

1. Martin Luther King
2. Harriet Tubman
3. Rosa Parks
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Amelia Earhart
6. Oprah Winfrey
7. Marilyn Monroe
8. Benjamin Franklin
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein

     Now before you defend the kids for choosing according to fame rather than merit, I'd note that hardly anybody outside of America would even have heard of 2, 3, and 4, and perhaps 5.  I don't wish to cast aspersions on any of the ten people up there -- if you're as fine and brave a human being as Harriet Tubman was, you're rare indeed.  But political correctness, which is not founded in any deep feeling of gratitude, determines half the choices, and celebrity the others.  I also doubt that most of the students would even have recognized the names of half of the people I mentioned. 

     Your own top ten, ladies and gentlemen, for deserved renown, not celebrity?

The Whale, the Churchman & the Crisis

We're essentially finished with our electronic archive of old Touchstone issues. The latest batch to "go live" include:

Patrick Henry Reardon's The Beached Whale
H. Wayne Martindale's C. S. Lewis: Reluctant Churchman
S. M. Hutchens The Crisis of Evangelical Preaching included in CTi's 1990 book, Best in Theology, Volume 4, edited by J. I. Packer.)

It was a pity these weren't read by more people way back in 1989. Now, they can be read by many more.

And you can also keep on top of the latest Touchstone articles by subscribing today to the print edition, rather than waiting up to two years for articles to go on-line. Your paid subscription helps support Mere Comments and the Archives. Do you subscribe? Gift subscriptions help support this ministry, too! There are people out there who should be reading Touchstone but aren't. If you know any of them, get them a subscription!

Losing Faith

Beginning sometime around my college years I lost my faith--not in Christ, to be sure, but the form of faith in which I had been raised. This had nothing to do with the pettish atheisms encountered on the university campus, which could be seen-through in a minute, but with the conviction bred by increasing exposure to people of real accomplishment that any religion which encouraged mediocrity--which did not help us to discover the gifts God had placed within and then drive us past our natural sloth to develop them--could not be of God or lead back to him.

At the base of the religion of mediocrity, I came to believe, was our church’s doctrine of “security” in which the admonition, found in numerous forms in the New Testament, to “be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall . . . .” was so heavily discounted. We did not, in fact, believe in striving or zealotry in confirming one’s call or election, for these things were assured once we had prayed to accept Jesus. Along with this came the option of doodling away one’s life in the belief that hard-won accomplishment among Christians was presumptive evidence of infidelity.

We left the striving to the Catholics, who thought their works saved them, or to the stricter sort of Calvinist, who believed in election but had to prove he was among the elect, or to Methodists, who could lose their salvation--although they could get it back, and even secure it permanently if they got sanctified enough. No, we had a firm contract with God, written indelibly in sawdust, so any biblical admonitions that involved “falling” had only to do with the habitual commission of what Catholics called venial sins. While one could “backslide” in his Christian life, this was cause for revival but not alarm. Eternal happiness on some level was assured. The converted were the saved, so that the Parable of the Sower or the tenth chapter of I Corinthans or the sixth of Hebrews contained nothing to drive, discipline, or frighten us. No one, once he had a salvation experience, could fall any sense that involved his eternal security, and striving that had anything to do with the validation of our election--that is, striving of the most profound and serious and world-altering kind, was in fact regarded as sin.

The accidentally accomplished (accidentally among us) were so not because they were laboring to secure an already secure call and election, but because they had talents so large they were insuppressible, or the superadded gift of energy and concentration--or they weren’t really firm believers in salvation by grace alone and, Catholic-like, were trying to “merit” something. This easy attitude toward any kind of spiritual striving--except that generated by guilt for failure to evangelize, which was due a terrible scolding by Christ, but not soul-threatening--I early came to believe, carried over into other areas of life, producing intolerable measures of stupidity, drabness, and isolation, thus generating wholly justified feelings of inferiority, which in turn produced the bitter fruit of envy, strengthening the security doctrine and confirming its holders in their alienation from segments of the Church that took the dominical teaching and its apostolic reiteration seriously.

While it is doubtless true that much human accomplishment in the secular realm results from displacement of energies that might be better spent in upbuilding the spirit, an incarnational faith cannot avoid leaving heavy traces in the dust of the world. Believers who live in the fear of God, and who, according to his command, strive to make their vocations and election sure, will be people of accomplishment--the lack whereof I now regard as presumptive evidence of unbelief. I am not silly enough to think this must mean accomplishment in things for which the world has respect--although frequently enough it will--but it does mean real labor, real striving to confirm and perfect what God has placed in us “so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Virginia Churches Divided

Julia Duin at  the Washington Times reports on the Virginia circuit-court decision today that recognizes the right of eleven Episcopal parishes in that state to retain their church properties even though they have left the Episcopal Church and are now under the jurisdiction of Anglican bishops in Africa. They are in effect extension of African dioceses and the Virginia court finds that the Episcopal Church USA has no right to their local church buildings because a "religious division" has occurred. White Episcopal parishes in a former Confederate state now under the jurisdiction of Africans--that has to mean something big changed, enough to be called a religious division.

Isidore of Seville

There's a story told about Isidore, 7th-century bishop of Seville (who is commemorated today in the calendars of the Eastern and Western churches), looking down a well as a youth. He had been placed under the tutelage of his older brother Leander, and one day had run away from his lessons and his brother's strict discipline. A woman at the well saw young Isidore puzzling over furrows worn in the stone walls of the well near the top. She explained that the furrows were worn into the rock by the ropes let down into the well, daily, many times, year upon year. Isidore realize that repeated discipline and hard work over time could reshape his own heart and character into the Christian image he knew was his calling.

Isidore went on to succeed his brother as bishop of Seville and was widely-known for his kindness and wisdom. He also studied well and wrote much: his Etymologies survive, he wrote histories and introduced Aristotle to his countrymen. He also taught that the earth was a globe (so much for all the Flat Earthers).  He died in 636. In 2003 he was proposed as a patron saint for the internet! (For bloggers, too?)

Virtues can arise from practiced habits, with prayer for mercy and grace, recognizing that the virtues arises from the very character of the Son in whose image we have been born anew. Isidore's story is a good one--of the well, of daily drawing up water from the wells of salvation, with the ropes we have at our dispospal--prayer, reading, acts of charity, disciplines--slowly over time refashioning us into His image.

Evil in the Ordinary: Mouchette

While I am, with the rest of the Orthodox world, lagging "behind" the West in observ