Hospitals for sale: no Catholics need apply?

A bioethics dispute is brewing in Colorado.

The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health system is in talks to take full ownership of two non-Catholic hospitals in the Denver area, but disputes over the instatement of a Catholic code of ethics could halt the deal. CNA has a summary.

The acquisition is being challenged by both hospital staff at the two hospitals and various activists. If the Colorado Attorney General rules the acquisition would constitute a "material change of purpose" of the present hospitals, it would be prohibited.

Following an open request for input at Yourhub.com, I wrote the following letter:

At a time when many Catholic institutions and individuals follow
Christian ethics only when it is convenient, I applaud the Sisters of
Charity for adhering to a consistent ethic as they consider expanding
to take responsibility for Exempla hospitals.

It is understandable that this code of ethics will confuse or even
anger those who don't share all of the same committments.

Regrettably, news coverage rarely lessens such confusion by explaining
the logic behind controversial ethical stances.

I am sure many do not understand certain Catholic moral concerns, such
as why vasectomies or tubal ligations should be considered unethical.
Though there isn't space for a full discussion, I'll venture my
layman's understanding of that reasoning:

Suppose there became popular an elective surgery that severed the
optical nerve for those who no longer wanted to see. We can see the
principle by which medical professionals would refuse that
"treatment." Eyesight is healthy, and not a medical problem.
Deliberately to blind someone, even at their request, is a kind of
mutilation directly contrary to the art of medicine.

In a similar way, deliberately to mar healthy reproductive organs is
not consistent with medical practice. Sterility, not fertility, is
the ailment to be treated. Medicine aims to heal rather than thwart
the natural functions of the human body, which Catholics and many
others believe to be a work of God.

Centuries of considered ethical thought has helped lead to these
controverted conclusions, and I hope the skeptical will examine that
reasoning in more detail, as explained by intelligent scholars at
places like the National Catholic Bioethics Center.

Even so, some might object that a medical institution coming under
Catholic auspices has no business imposing its revised medical ethics
on its staff or patients, when those ethical principles aren't
widely-shared and seem to intrude upon individual prerogatives. But
if, to suggest an extreme example, the euthanizing of disabled
newborns(with parental consent) ever became an accepted, HMO-covered
medical procedure, I hope the principled minority would support
Catholic organizations that defy that norm and refuse accommodation.
Majority rule can't be the deciding factor in medical ethics.

The Sisters of Charity are responsible not only to God(a most
important patron), but also to their thousands of benefactors across
the years who have expected the Sisters to carry on their mission in a
manner consistent with Catholic principles and sound medical ethics.
Indeed, the principles the Sisters of Charity hold are in part
responsible for their present prominence.

If the merger goes through, millions of dollars from their endowment
will supply medical facilities that otherwise would not be available.
As a Kaiser Permanente member, that's fine by me.

Catholic ethics requires not only these presently controversial moral
stands; it also mandates care for the sick and dying. To obey that
mandate, we can all agree.

*****

One local bioethicist Dr. Lawrence Rust really does think majority rule should be the deciding factor in medical ethics. Catholic ethics can't have the final say in Catholic-run hospitals, but it deserves a "prominent voice." How nice!

The Rocky Mountain News recently ran an article with the amusing title Catholic-run Hospitals Not New. According to New Advent, Christian hospitals have been around in some form since the fourth century.

Less amusing is the article's implication that Catholic ethics is professed, but that profession never restricts actual medical practice. Exempla CEO Jeff Selberg describes how the code of ethics works in practice:

"The language is there that says we respect life and we will not accept anything that would encroach upon or impact the dignity of one's life," Selberg said. "At the same time, judgment must be used to determine what is best for the individual and what is in alignment with one's conscience."

"On first blush, you see these rules as very literal, very black and white," Selberg said. "But when you read the entirety, you find that there is latitude in terms of judgment.

"There's discretion as long as there's good faith that the directives are being carried out to the degree possible and the patient's welfare is always put first."

That kind of flexibility is shown, for instance, with end-of-life issues, Selberg said.

If a patient is in an irreversible coma or vegetative state, doctors counsel relatives. If relatives want feeding tubes or ventilators to be removed, the request goes to the ethics committee, Selberg said.

"I can't think of a case that we've had where we have denied or refused the request," he said. "It is something that is reviewed or evaluated, but it is not unreasonably withheld."

As much as I would like to think correct decisions are always made by patients and doctors, that last paragraph makes the ethics committee look like a rubber-stamp council.

The latest article, Coalition: Hospital deal violates law, further discusses the controversy.

Ed Kahn, special counsel at the Center on Law & Policy in Denver, argues that charitable donations were made to provide non-sectarian medical care at both hospitals. If the sale goes through, both hospitals would become Catholic facilities and medical care would be restricted, Kahn said. Doctors would have to follow religious directives against performing tubal ligations, vasectomies and abortions, and not remove feeding tubes from patients in a vegetative state.

Opponents, too, can cite the will of charitable benefactors.

Yet the hospitals in question are named Lutheran Medical Center and Good Samaritan Hospital. These hospitals' very names could be considered sectarian. It seems Kahn would have to argue Lutheran donors wouldn't want their facilities used by Catholics. The typical example of a sectarian hospital, I think, would be one which only permits sect members as staff or patients. Neither Lutheran nor the Sisters of Charity hospitals qualify.

Kahn's invocation of "non-sectarian" is troubling, considering its history. The only mention of non-sectarianism in public law that comes to mind is in the Colorado State Constitution, which prohibits school funding for sectarian education in its "Blaine Amendment."

This calls to mind Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion of such amendments in Mitchell v. Helms:

Opposition to aid to “sectarian” schools acquired prominence in the 1870’s with Congress’s consideration (and near passage) of the Blaine Amendment, which would have amended the Constitution to bar any aid to sectarian institutions. Consideration of the amendment arose at a time of pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general, and it was an open secret that “sectarian” was code for “Catholic.” See generally Green, The Blaine Amendment Reconsidered. Notwithstanding its history, of course, “sectarian” could, on its face, describe the school of any religious sect, but the Court eliminated this possibility of confusion when, in Hunt v. McNair, it coined the term “pervasively sectarian”–a term which, at that time, could be applied almost exclusively to Catholic parochial schools and which even today’s dissent exemplifies chiefly by reference to such schools.

The RMN article further informs us that Kahn wrote the letter on behalf of the ACLU of Colorado, the state chapters of Compassion & Choices and the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Women's Law Center and other groups. They apparently meet at the First Universalist Church of Denver.

By the standards of yellow journalism, one could write the sensationalistic headline "Jews, Universalists oppose Catholic hospital expansion."

There is another legal challenge in the article:

Opponents also contend that the seller, the Community First Foundation, would spend money from the transaction on non-health care-related operations. That would violate the general Nonprofit Corporations law and the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act, Kahn said.

I wish the article told us what the money would be spent on.

This dispute isn't an easy one. I would be quite sad if many doctors felt they had to quit because of ethical differences. But I would be even more affected if a victorious rationale prohibiting this merger means Catholic hospitals can never expand into existing facilities.

You lose, Khrushchev

Treasure Chest was a monthly comic book published by the Catholic Guild from 1946 to 1972. Each issue featured several different stories intended to inspire citizenship, morality, and patriotism. In the 1961, volume 17 number 2 issue, the story "This Godless Communism" began. It continued in the even numbered issues through number 20. The entire story is presented here.

The first comic in the series, which I spent far too much time skimming, imagines what a communist America would look like. The series then plunges into a brief illustrated history of communism.

According to another site, the comics were distributed to parochial school students.

I especially enjoyed the last pages of the series, which include counsels to pray to Our Lady of Fatima. The above panel is taken from this page, which also has a special message from J. Edgar Hoover.

via The American Scene

Tryfon Tolides makes it big

Oh dear.

The author of the laughably bad mouse poem chosen for praise by America magazine now has published a collection of his poetry. The soporific title? An Almost Pure Empty Walking.

Mencius Moldbug at Unqualified Reservations writes the necessary critique. Mencius, too, finds the vacuity of Tolides remarkable. He connects Tolides to Universalism of the Unitarian variety, depicting him as a vehicle for Bobo aspiration like NPR or Starbucks coffee.

He informs us that Tolides has benefited considerably from his teacher, Mary Karr. Ms. Karr generously awarded her own student the first place in the National Poetry Series.

Incest creates poetic abnormalities. Who knew?

Echoing Dr. Frankenstein's rapturous description of the monster he created, Mary Karr endorses her student's poetry:

"Tryfon Tolides has followed the territory set out in his native Greece by C. P. Cavafy and later followed (in geography and sensibility) by Jack Gilbert. But Tolides trades the darkness of those poets for a more illuminated grandeur. Tolides is the shaman of epiphany. He makes for his reader keen and particular moments of revelation seized from his fierce and fleshly occupancy on the planet. In the wide-eyed consolation these poems offer up, the starlight they emit, he conjures Tomas Tranströmer and other poets of profound spiritual power. At a time when the planet is in flames, he gives being human a good name."

It's alive!

Individualistic religion dodges the anti-establishment clause

Over at the Immanent Frame, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan outlines an intriguing shift in First Amendment jurisprudence. She cites the 2006 Supreme Court case Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Nicholson in a dispute about a VA hospital chaplain service. The military chaplaincy was once categorized under non-mandatory military services and activities, such as recreation.

Yet as religion becomes part of a revised therapeutic regimen, Sullivan sees a change:

The new “clinical” chaplaincy, on the other hand, has a different role and a different purpose. The Wisconsin court states that in order “to effectively implement its clinical chaplaincy program, the VA Chaplain Service was recently reorganized under the Medicine and Surgery Strategic Healthcare Group. The purpose of this reorganization was to recognize VA’s chaplaincy as a clinical, direct patient care discipline.” No longer akin to recreation and athletics.

While VA chaplains continue to recognize an explicit duty to protect the patient’s constitutional religious free exercise rights and protect the patient “from having religion imposed on them,” they are now fully integrated into the medical team in a new way. As a patient you must opt out of religion, rather than opting in. We might call this the post-pluralist model, if you like. Religion, in the words of the complaining plaintiff, has become a “health benefit.” Every patient must be given an initial spiritual assessment upon admission and recommendations must be made concerning his spiritual care.

This shift is possible, Sullivan thinks, because once-corporate religious practice has been so individualized. It no longer appears that a religious body is being established when government agencies are merely addressing individual needs.

Sullivan's post touches on other issues, such as the judiciary's skepticism about its ability to define religion. This echoes her earlier book, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

Dostoevsky and Theodicy

The Well at the World's End examines The Brothers Karamazov:

And yet Dostoevsky reveals the complications of such a (literally) demonic utopian vision. When "The Grand Inquisitor" is contextualized within the larger narrative of The Brothers Karamazov, the shortcomings of Ivan's vision become apparent. In rejecting God, Ivan rejects the eschatological dimension to morality and earthly comfort becomes the only narrow moral standard. The grand inquisitor sees moral freedom as a burden and as long as the minimum service required to achieve comfort is paid, one is actually encouraged to sin; that is, a number of acts no longer have ethical value and are thus permitted. Similarly, in rejecting God, Ivan explicitly rejects the immortality of the soul. In doing so, he seems to jettison the only thing that grounds the enduring value of humanity. One can see quite clearly how these features of the atheist answer lead rather seamlessly to the complete evacuation of moral value and responsibility: the "everything is permitted" of a practical nihilism. "Everything is permitted" is a maxim that Ivan explicitly accepts. In this sense, the atheist position undermines itself: its attempt to deal with evil and suffering does not end with a solution to theodicy, but rather a failed attempt to minimize suffering in this life. In doing so it only succeeds in creating a world of valueless morality, one that is ultimately as indifferent to suffering as the god that it rejected in the first place."

The Pragmatists and Peirce

Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club provides a valuable introduction to a uniquely American school of philosophy. The book is an intellectual history of postbellum New England thinkers like William James, John Dewey, C.S. Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The ,amy breakthroughs of the nineteenth century, such as statistical analysis or Darwinism, when combined with the disillusionment caused by a bloody Civil War seemingly driven by abolitionist fanaticism, led to a thoroughgoing suspicion of grand ideas among some Yankee elites. Intellectual focus shifted from objects and ideas to the processes and relations that created and sustained them.

In the nineteenth century the study of society was assimilated into the mechanist paradigm. Statistical analysis of government records made human behavior seem an inevitable consequence of social conditions. Marriages increased in times when wages were high. Crimes began to seem like the mere fulfillment of an annual quota. Society as a whole began to appear responsible for the discrete activities of criminals.

Society took on the conceptual characteristics of a machine. Predictability and efficient response to social pressures became more important standards than notions of rights or public morals.

Society was an idea-producing machine. For thinkers like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., liberty of speech was not good in itself, but merely a means to provide new ideas that in aggregate would lead to better living, a more responsive government, and political stability.

Menand points out that "tolerance," among its many interpretations, also has mechanical connotations.

Though the influence of Dewey, James, and Holmes is immeasurable, the less well-known thought of Charles Sanders Peirce has always attracted me. While reading The Metaphysical Club I was particularly interested in Peirce's approach to the nominalist-realist debate. Menand summarizes:

The idea [of pragmatism] contained a doctrine, though, which Peirce was concerned to refute. This was nominalism--the belief that since concepts are generalizations about things that, taken individually, are singular and unreproducible, they do not refer to anything real Nominalism is the doctrine that reality is just one unique thing after another, and that general truths about those things are simply conventions of language, simply names. Peirce balked at this conclusion. He believed what his father had taught him to believe: that the world is made to be known by the mind--that, (in Benjamin Peirce's words) "the two are wonderfully matched." We think in generalizations; that is what inferences are--general truths drawn from the observation of particular events. Therefore, there must be things in the universe to which our generalizations correspond.

The nominalist's mistake, Peirce argued, is the definition of belief as individual belief. Of course the beliefs of individuals are flawed; no individual mind is capable of an accurate and objective knowledge of reality. But the aggregate beliefs of many individual minds is another matter; and here Peirce invoked the astronomer's law of errors. "No two observers can make the same observation," he wrote in one of the drafts of his book on logic. "The observations which I made yesterday are not the same which I make today. Nor are simultaneous observations at different observatories the same, however close together the observatories are placed. Every man's senses are his observatory." But just as a star exists independently of the observations made by individual astronomers, "reality is independent of the individual element of thought." The real star is the object around which repeated observations ineluctably converge. The purpose of all scientific investigations is therefore to push our collective opinions about the world closer and closer to agreement with each other, adn thus closer and closer to the limit represented by reality itself.

"The personal prejudices or other peculiarities of generations of men may postpone indefinitely an agreement in this opinion," Peirce wrote, "but no human will or limitation can make the final result of an investigation to be anything else than that which it is destined to be. The reality, then, must be identified with what is thought in the ultimate true opinion." "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real."

Peirce's social conception of knowledge, seeing inquiry as extended across generations, is quite amenable to a traditionalist approach. In respects it is significantly different from the realism of the scholastics, or perhaps it is only different in emphasis. Escaping the epistemological morass of Hume and supporting the methodological concerns of science were both aims of his realism.

According to Menand, Peirce also opposed nominalism because it was a philosophy in the aid of selfishness. Nominalism denies not just the social character of knowledge, but its focus on individuals denies the social altogether. Menand quotes a Peirce essay from the North American Review in 1871.

The question whether the genus homo has any existence except as individuals is the question whether there is anything of more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself...is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have the power of influence.

When countering highly atomistic habits of individualism, such a communitarian approach is commendable. But Peirce went on seemingly to endorse a most radical form of altruism, saying reasoning "inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community... He who would not sacrifice his soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle."

Edward T. Oakes cites another Peircean slam on individualism, "individualism and falsity are one." Oakes connects this disdain for individualism to Peirce's extreme and painful isolation from his peers, induced by the man's own ethical falsities but also by the hostility of the academic establishment. Oakes wrote on Peirce in his essay Discovering the American Aristotle. The essay is a concise summation of Peircean aesthetics, ethics, and logic, with special attention to his religious philosophy.

Menand's book will inspire a few more blog posts here in the near future. Watch this space.

The Neighborhood Pornucopia

An essay of mine is now posted over at Inside Catholic. The topic is pretty obvious from the title, The Neighborhood Pornucopia.

This essay was in the works when National Review's Mike Potemra was complaining about the "sex police of the blogosphere," whose chief is apparently Mark Shea. Where's my badge?

My thanks to the Inside Catholic crew, especially editor Brian St. Paul for inviting me to write. I hope this essay will be the first of many more.

Addendum:

It looks like I'm part of a local trend. On Sunday The Denver Post reported on libraries being used by child pornographers.

The local trashy alternative newspaper, Westword, also had a piece on library connoisseurs in its Oct. 11 issue. I feel dirty linking to it, but I'll happily hypocritically quote from it:

I happened to catch the reaction of a librarian, who looked over at E, frowned in disgust, then turned and began some busy work. No reprimand, no admonishments, nothing. And that librarian's silent defeat said it all: It's disgusting that this man can do this, but until porn filters catch up with the needs of earnest researchers — aka never — scenes like this are going to take place.

I think he underrates what a measured application of "chilling effects" can do to drive this behavior out of public buildings.

Editorial constraints cut a few passages from my essay. Most of this editing was for the good, but there was one passage quite relevant to the librarian's position.

In the letter from the librarian I quoted, her unease was such that she invoked some self-defense training course advice to trust her "internal radar." She lamented that library regulations required her to suppress her natural warnings when she interacted with lewd patrons.

No sane person wants to come between an onanist and his porn, but the art of public rebuke is sure in need of a revival.

Medieval Slavery Existed, Alas

The University Bookman once examined a new edition of Regine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths. While sympathetic to Pernoud's popular history written against popular legends, Glenn W. Olsen rebuts her belief that slavery had disappeared in medieval times:

Cornelius Buckley’s poorly informed and imprecise preface to this book accepts at face value what Pernoud has to say about slavery; but Pernoud has clearly been left behind by research on this subject over the last twenty-five years. Perhaps it is sufficient to refer to the work of Steven Epstein, past and forthcoming. In brief, according to Pernoud slavery disappeared over the course of the Middle Ages. (Buckley speaks of it being abolished.) This used to be a common view, and there is some truth to it. Manumission was an act of piety, and many were indeed manumitted. The ancient slave gradually became the medieval serf. But slavery never disappeared. We find internal slave markets in France itself in the early Middle Ages, and slaving on the edges of Europe in every century. In recent scholarship, the English have finally received full recognition for the slaving they practiced all through the Middle Ages in Ireland (see Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe). Slaving flourished across the frontiers between Islam and Christendom, and we are beginning to understand how common late-medieval domestic slavery was, especially in the cities of the Mediterranean.

I'm glad Irish history still preserves us from taking anglophilic mythmaking too seriously.

You'll often find this disbelief in medieval slavery in Chesterton's and Belloc's work. They depict the low state of the English commoner as a novelty introduced by the landowners' near-monopoly engendered by Henry VIII's confiscation of monastic lands.

It's really too bad the story of Christendom's free peasants is overstated. If Merrie England didn't exist, it should have.

Garry Wills Misrepresents the Pro-Life Tradition

Mirror of Justice and Gerald Augustinus have weighed in on an LA Times opinion piece by Garry Wills. The op-ed is adapted from his book Head and Heart: American Christianities.

Wills writes:

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

Mirror of Justice helpfully provides an opinion from Joseph Dellapenna, who has written a magisterial legal history called Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History( see the First Things review).

Dellapenna writes:

Why this neglect of abortion in the ancient sources? The answer, which is mostly forgotten today, is that abortion until fairly well along into the nineteenth century was tantamount to suicide. Women rarely, if ever, underwent a voluntary abortion. We in fact have a significant number of legal cases from as far back as 1200 in England and even earlier in Roman law, in all of which the abortion was forced upon an unwilling woman. This simple fact is reason enough why the Bible and most other legal and religious sources from that time treated as an abstract, a hypothetical idea. I have elaborately documented the evidence for the techniques of abortion in chapter 1 of my book. The real social problem, which was addressed in detail and repeatedly in legal and religious sources, was infanticide—a social problem that only receded in importance with the development of abortion techniques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that were safe enough for women wanting to be rid of an unwanted child to be able to choose abortion in preference to infanticide.

Furthermore, Wills' assertion that there was no practice of baptizing miscarriages looks doubtful. The Catholic Encyclopedia's article on Baptism actually has a section titled "Baptism of Unborn Infants." It states:

In case of the death of the mother, the fetus is to be immediately extracted and baptized, should there be any life in it. Infants have been taken alive from the womb well after the mother's death. After the Cæsarean incision has been performed, the fetus may be conditionally baptized before extraction if possible; if the sacrament is administered after its removal from the womb the baptism is to be absolute, provided it is certain that life remains. If after extraction it is doubtful whether it be still alive, it is to be baptized under the condition: "If thou art alive". Physicians, mothers, and midwives ought to be reminded of the grave obligation of administering baptism under these circumstances. It is to be borne in mind that according to the prevailing opinion among the learned[In 1907 -kjj], the fetus is animated by a human soul from the very beginning of its conception. In cases of delivery where the issue is a mass that is not certainly animated by human life, it is to be baptized conditionally: "If thou art a man."

I would hope these instructions are still given to Catholic doctors and nurses, though considering present indifference towards baptism, I am not sure that instruction is likely.

Commonweal Doesn't Get the Joke

Diogenes recently dolloped more cynicism upon the Jesuits' magazine America:

America Magazine is editorially enraptured by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Brown seems guided by a moral vision that sees it as the government's duty to help the less fortunate.

Translation: he's pro-abortion.

A writer at the Commonweal blog sniffs: "You'll notice that none of the editorial's 253 words endorses Brown's views on abortion." That rather misses the joke. The elevated language conceals a significant lapse in Mr. Brown's duties towards the less fortunate. The praise given to such public figures is as uniform as it is ubiquitous, which makes the "translation" all the more biting.

Commonweal blogger Grant Gallicho seems obtuse to this shade, preferring to blast Diogenes as a bitter tendentious commentator. But this little joke can function in all sorts of other contexts where diplomatic happy talk overshadows the real crimes in which prominent men are complicit. Just imagine the potential for a quote praising to the heavens some Republican, followed by the line

"Translation: he's pro-torture."

This satire blindness seems uncharacteristic of Commonweal. They like Stephen Colbert, don't they?

More discouraging is their attempts to unmask the pseudonym. They claim the CWNews scribe is Paul Mankowski, SJ. While the pseudonym can mask all sorts of unmerited asperities, of which Diogenes has sometimes been guilty, how else other than pseudonymously could a cleric talk frankly without soiling the dignity of his office and his ministry?

Iraq WMD intelligence from poor chemistry student?

If this story is true, we're already living in Mike Judge's Idiocracy.

A US TV network has revealed the name of "Curveball" - an Iraqi man whose information was central to the US government's argument to invade Iraq.

[...]

The programme says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was.

His claims of mobile bio-weapons labs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were backed until well after the 2003 invasion.

[...]

The CBS 60 Minutes programme airs on Sunday but material released on its web site says Curveball was "not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be".

"It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth"

The CIA and French intelligence had turned the Iraqi foreign minister, yet instead we relied upon somebody lying for his green card.

How the Democrats Became Secularist

Deal Hudson interviews Mark Stricherz about his new book Why the Democrats are Blue:

MS: The short answer is that ideological activists controlled the nomination process: They, rather than big city and state leaders -- who have a larger constituency -- were choosing the nominee. It used to be, in the old boss system, that the bosses wanted to pick a nominee based on his ability to win.

The activists were looking for a nominee who could win, sure. But they also had ideological preferences. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the folks who were true believers tended to be feminists and anti-war types. It was a totally different constituency from the old Democratic Party of Catholics, blacks, union members, etc.

DH: Were the old party bosses that were replaced by these activists Catholic? Is this the ethnic Catholic group that was replaced?

MS: Yes, they were almost all Catholic. It's shocking today to look back at some of the old newspapers of the time, but in 1968 the chairman of the DNC, John Bailey; the chairman of the platform committee, Hale Boggs from Louisiana; the chairman of the credentials committee, Richard Hughes from New Jersey; the kingmaker at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Richard Dailey, were all Roman Catholics. And that had been true since 1948, when Catholics took over the machinery. They were in charge; Southerners had played a large role in party affairs before 1948, but the party from 1948 to 1968 was controlled by white Catholics, especially Irish Catholics.

I wonder if the Democrats look on the old Catholic dominance in the same way they look at the old Southern dominance of the party. "Sure," they might say, "we lost a bunch of close-minded bigots, but now we can go down to a principled defeat in our presidential campaigns!"

Of course there are plenty of Catholics in the Democratic leadership, but they are particularly domesticated and servile on the issues that would conflict with the party ideologues. I hope Stricherz' book will provide a how-to guide to reverse the Democrats' decline into the party of the obscene Amanda Marcotte.

Army Anthropologists Mainstreaming Pederasty?

Now I'm sympathetic to the WWII US Army Iraq Guide's advice for soldiers not to make moral reforms part of their job:

Differences? Sure there are differences. Difference of costume, Difference of food. Differences of manner and custom and religious belief. Different attitudes towards women. Differences galore.

What of it? You aren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of “live and let live.” Maybe that sounded like a lot of words to you at home. Now you have a chance to prove it to yourself and others. If you can, it’s going to be a better world to live in for all of us.

But then there's this essay from the NY Times about anthropologists assisting the US Army in Afghanistan:

Nevertheless the military voices on the show had their winning moments, sounding like old-fashioned relativists, whose basic mission in life was to counter ethnocentrism and disarm those possessed by a strident sense of group superiority. Ms. McFate stressed her success at getting American soldiers to stop making moral judgments about a local Afghan cultural practice in which older men go off with younger boys on “love Thursdays” and do some “hanky-panky.” “Stop imposing your values on others,” was the message for the American soldiers. She was way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and I found it heartwarming.
Richard A. Schweder, A True Culture War

Out of all the differences between Afghan culture and American ethics, Schweder just had to highlight this reprehensible practice for his NY Times readers' approval. Even if soldiers' moral judgments were interfering with their mission, stopping such judgment is a violation of sound ethics. There are appropriate ways of keeping one's disgust private, and I'm sure many soldiers are quite capable of doing so. I pray the writer is overstating what looks like indoctrination of our soldiery.

Schweder invokes stupid relativist slogans. He calls the nonjudgemental acceptance of pederasty "Heartwarming." He speaks in an ironic tone of "Love Thursdays" and "hanky-panky." This is degenerate camp at its worst.

Examining the "Catholic Ghetto"

One hears all the time that American Catholics were stuck in an introverted ghetto until they grew up and joined the larger culture. It's a common self-aggrandizing story told by more than a few baby boomers.

Note how this essay explodes that liberation story with the gunpowder of multi-culturalism.

The history of the ghetto image in Catholic usage tells much about the changes of mood in Catholic life during the past quarter century. When apologists for Catholic behavior and critics of the encircling WASP cultures wanted to reinforce and legitimate Catholic group-bonding, they accented the ways in which ghetto life was imposed on minorities. This Ellis did only briefly, when he said that the “aloof and unfriendly” American intellectual climate had discouraged Catholics, led them to slacken their efforts, and prompted this “minority to withdraw into itself and to assume the attitude of defenders of a besieged fortress.”

At other times during the domestic aggiornamento that followed the Second Vatican Council, however, a self-deprecating, indeed sometimes almost masochistic view of the tradition prevailed. Then the ghetto was seen not as imposed from without but self-imposed from within. Angry James Colaianni typically wrote that “Ghettoism suffocates. It is just another jail man builds for himself to keep from becoming free.” Some such critics were romantic about the surrounding glories of the secular city, naive in their neglect of the role of intimate community in human life, and scornful of ancestors whose ways they could never understand or emulate.

[...]

My thesis is that while Catholicism often did nurture ghetto existence, it was by no means unique in its relative isolation from a putative Protestant-secular world which I shall henceforth call "The Culture." Surrounding the Catholic version were so many other religious, national, and ideological ghettos that they cast the Catholic ghetto in a less distinctive light. Their presence forces us to reconsider whether the The Culture was not in many ways a larger and more expansive ghetto itself.

[...]

Historians of intergroup relations who have concentrated on the anti-Semitism of some Populists or Henry Adams, or on the anti-Catholicism of the nativist American Protective Association at the turn of the century, do have virulent and potent topics on their hands. But they often miss the dynamics of ghetto existence. One sees more vitriol and hears more vituperation, for example, in conflicts between Catholic Americanists and anti-Americanists, Ukrainian Uniates and Ukrainian Orthodox, Czech Catholics and Czech freethinkers, Catholic traditionalists and Catholic modernists, within their ghettos, than between any and all of them, say, the American Protective Association. Sociologist Georg Simmel seems to have been right, at least in the American historical instance; “People who have many common features often do one another worse or ‘worser’ wrong then complete strangers do.”
Martin E. Marty, Locations: At Home in the Ghettos

I was surprised to discover the noted scholar of American religion Martin Marty was the essay's author. It was his 1981 presidential address to the American Catholic Historical Association.

Sponsored by the Raphael Hythloday Foundation for Imaginary Think Tanks

It is easy to ignore the silly self-important descriptions think tanks and activist groups use to name themselves. It is almost as easy to make up hilarious names for such creations.

I got on a roll and couldn't stop, so I offer my inventions below:

Samuel Johnson Center for a Cant-free Future

Scientists for Unethical Research

Foundation for an Opportunistic Punditry

Students for a Reactionary Tomorrow

The William O. Douglas Center for Emanated Penumbras

Office of Convenient Statistics

Coalition of Subtle Panderers

People for a Progressive Yesterday

The Evelyn Waugh Foundation for Nostalgic Bitching

Students for Transient Enthusiasms

The Irresponsible Policy Foundation

Future Senior Citizens of America

Center for Incoherent Studies

Citizens for Improvident Government

Librarians for a Surreal Future

The Office of Abnormal Development

Center for Satirical Studies

Citizens Ignorant of Logic

Federation for Comical Legislation

Alliance for the Advancement of Minor Idiocies

The Institute for Poorly-worded Phrases

Taxpayers for Improvident Government

Students for an Unspecified Cause

Citizens for Bipartisan Sleaze

Technologists for Automated Folly

Dentists Against Saccharine Appeals

Academics for Regrettable Policy

Americans United for Random Emoting

The Department of Sensual Bureaucracy

Students for Faddish Posturing

The Office of Indescribable Horror

Center for Unlikely Legislation

Federation of Labored Analogies

Union of Phantastickal Accountants

The Center for Useless Distinctions

Americans for Aromatic Sewage

Foundation for Casual Diplomacy

Alliance for Shiny Objects

Coalition for Dubious Honors

The Bureau of Predictable Appearances

Students for Diversity in Failure

Office of Snide Dismissals

The Center for Centralized Mismanagement

Foundation for Anachronistic Analysis

Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

Nicolosi on the Hero, Nicolosi on Bella

Barb Nicolosi makes a nice examination of heroism in story, film, and real life and the qualities of the hero. Though it is only in note form, her advice seems more practical and substantive than what I've seen of Joseph Campbell's writings.

Here's a sample:

Things that are not heroic:

To have an illness. To be a victim. To have a bad hand dealt to you. HEROISM is in still serving others with an illness or bad thing.

To survive your own iniquity. (In the Bill Clinton sense. I heard a lady on TV say that she admired Clinton because he was "a survivor." Well, by that standard, you could admire roaches.)

It isn’t heroic to have a great talent or skill. To be able to run fast or sing well.

Nicolosi, a professional screenwriter, also isn't impressed by Bella, the new movie some pro-lifers are rallying around. I worry Nicolosi's standards can be too artistic and elite-oriented. Surely there is a craft to making popular mediocrities. I suspect the aspiring artist must first know mediocrity before he can know excellence.

Then again, I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to. When the film's own publicity highlights the fact it is made by "first-time filmmakers," I'm not inspired to open my wallet.

Charles Taylor Gets a Blog

A new academic blog called The Immanent Frame is dedicated to Charles Taylor's and others' interpretations of secularism.

On the shelves for only a handful of weeks, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is already receiving at least some of the attention it well deserves. The book has been reviewed in the pages of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, and two short excerpts were recently published in Commonweal. Taylor's massive tome--it's just shy of 880 pages long--was even held aloft and glossed earlier this month by a young denizen of youtube.

Although it won't be supporting video, The Immanent Frame--a new SSRC blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere--will provide a venue for sustained dialogue and critical exchange on the work of Charles Taylor and other scholars of "the secular." And we're kicking things off with a series of posts on Taylor's big book.

(via James Poulos)

The Nadir of the Jack Bauer Mentality

By way of Mark Shea, a story of a man suspected of terrorism for possessing an airline pilot radio in his hotel room.

...the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

The legal documents were apparently withdrawn from the internet for redaction.

Historical Fiction, with Space Aliens

After reading the reviews at Curt Jester and Darwin Catholic, I picked up a copy of Michael Flynn's novel Eifelheim. It's the first science fiction I've read in years, and better than I expected.

The premise is simple: space aliens make first contact with Earth after shipwrecking near a remote German village. In the fourteenth century.

Flynn depicts with talent the political, religious, and intellectual ferment of the times. The main character is an intellectual parish priest named Father Dietrich. He is in hiding, having been a member of the fraticelli, the radical and violent Franciscan sect that strived for the abolition of property. Educated at the University of Paris, he is well-attuned to the philosophical thought that became foundational for the natural sciences.

Enter the extraterrestrials.

The Krenken are an insect-like race the German villagers compare to grasshoppers. Shipwrecked after some unrevealed technical malfunction in their ship, their appearance provokes fears they are demonic visitors. Father Dietrich, though as confused as anyone else, uses a bit of scholastic logic to deduce they are in fact natural creatures comparable to the dog-headed men and headless anthropoids reputed to live in the antipodes. In a wry inversion of sci-fi standbys, the limitations of medieval knowledge of the world provide grounds for acceptance instead of mob violence. It recalls the irony of Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which monks become the only custodians of scientific knowledge after a nuclear catastrophe incites anti-intellectual obscurantism.

Michael Flynn shows an immense capacity for intellectual sympathy through his priest character's attempts to fit advanced scientific knowledge into the categories familiar to him. Flynn makes the medieval mind come alive, while suggesting the strangeness of our own times. The aliens strain to make their knowledge intelligible as Father Dietrich suggests Latinate or Greek neologisms to describe concepts well-familiar to the modern reader. Scientific concepts we take for granted, like protein, bacteria, and gravity, take on a marvelous appearance when seen through the eyes of an intelligent man living in a less advanced age. The priest's arguments with the aliens are amusing in their defense of fourteenth-century cosmology, but too honest and sophisticated to disdain.

While considerably hindered in scientific argument, Father Dietrich actually wins some of the religious disputes. His Christian faith, though explained through a poorly translating computer, gains a few adherents among the stranded aliens. The society of the Krenken is never elucidated, but it seems to be a hierarchical culture based on violent strength and a brutally Darwinian survival of the fittest. The lowest-ranked Krenken find Christian love and self-sacrifice convincing. Despite its alienness, Christianity provides them a welcome relief from their overbearing superiors.

Of course Michael Flynn must take poetic liberties with history. For the most part, they work to the good. However, he makes a few stumbles. At one point he references the ad orientem orientation of the Christian liturgy as a new phenomenon replacing the versus populum, which certainly doesn't correspond to what liturgical history I know. Further, he presents William of Ockham as a proponent of a proto-Lockean revolutionary natural rights theory that I don't think came into its own until the sixteenth century. Though some anachronisms are necessary to such a work, these two instances in particular bothered me.

Flynn's work is in many ways a defense of the medieval against contemporary caricatures. Most of the time this defense is well-done and subtle. I think it superior to Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose, which rested on the comical premise that a monk would hate laughter and comedy.

However, one crude apologetic for the Inquisition struck me as crude and not particularly relevant to its context.(It took place in one of the "present day" scenes that occasionally interrupts the historical fiction. In these scenes an historian seeks the reason Eifelheim remained abandoned through the centuries. As other reviewers note, these scenes don't gel well with the rest of the work.)

I have previously noted Michael Flynn's depiction of the excitement of scientific discovery in his fictionalized account of medieval science. If Eifelheim's imaginative sympathy and historical awareness are now typical of science fiction, I will have to look twice at the genre novels I happen upon.

William James' Religion

Tolstoy’s conversion account appealed to James on many levels, not least because churches and clergy played no role in it. Though James sometimes self-identified with Protestant Christianity, that label was accurate only in the narrowest cultural sense. Theologically, he was as heterodox as he was unsystematic—he theorized, for example, that there might be multiple deities. But if he was at most a marginal Christian, James was enthusiastically a Protestant. In Varieties, he pointedly reduced religion to its minimalist essence. “As I now ask you arbitrarily to take it,” he wrote, religion “shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” This was unmediated Protestantism in its purest, most unfettered form.
Theo Anderson, One Hundred Years of Pragmatism

One can't help but wonder how much the Jamesian approach to religion has influenced First Amendment jurisprudence. Out of respect for Protestantism(respect I didn't even know I had), I must protest Anderson's characterization of Protestantism in terms of its most individualistic liberal form. It's not always that bad.

Nevertheless, Anderson's essay is an excellent complement to my current read, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, a history of the American pragmatists with a talent for depicting the zeitgeist of late nineteenth-century New England.

Note that Anderson also intimates in James the beginnings of so-called therapeutic deism:

James’s writings contain glimmerings of the spirituality industry that would burgeon in the later 20th century. He posited other realms of consciousness and higher energies as agents of human “empowerment,” themes that have become ubiquitous among self-help authors. James likely would have deplored much of this genre, yet it is in some ways a logical outgrowth of his emphasis on the pragmatic consequences of faith. The ecumenism of the ­self-­help genre is also quintessentially Jamesian: Spirituality is presented as an unmediated relationship between the individual and the divine. Institutions only get in the ­way.

The Internet Kills

"During a dark time in her life, a troubled girl wandered into a room filled with people who were eager to love and support her, to validate and accept her, and to encourage her to kill herself."

Jeff Harrell's story of Suzanne Gonzales makes me want to set off a worldwide technology-killing EMP. Despairing of her life but mistrustful of her loved ones, she took her suicidal obsessions to a dingy corner of the internet where their power could only be magnified. The demonic advice on display in that Usenet group is more chilling than any mere horror novel.

Addendum:

Jeff Harrell is reporting the progress of the Suzanne Gonzales Suicide Prevention Act at Suzy's Law, which will make it a crime to encourage someone to commit suicide over the internet. I doubt that the law can survive First Amendment scrutiny, but it has obvious consequences for euthanasia and so-called assisted suicide activism.

Steve Sailer on Divisions of Intellect and Class

A big problem for modern class warriors like Pat Buchanan on the right or Jim Hightower on the left is that over the years the number of blue collar workers with the verbal talent needed to articulate their class interests has plummeted. Where'd the smart ones go? To college and then into white-collar jobs. In the past, unions and other working class institutions had leaders and spokesmen who were both highly intelligent and authentically representative of the rank and file.
How to help the left half of the bell curve

This same kind of brain drain is evident in regional migrations. The smart kids move to the big cities and local leadership becomes ever more stultified.

Sailer's essay scores some other points. When human equality of capacity is presumed as a matter of fact, the moral imperative to use one's special talents for the good of the less fortunate becomes obscured. Everybody's equal, so people who aren't successful must have some culpable personal failing that kept them from success.

My New Favorite News Agency

Though many bloggers hope to parlay their writing into a paid position, I never considered myself one of them. But thanks to the fortuitous recommendation of a certain Kevin Knight, I am now a part-time staff writer at the Catholic News Agency.

Here's the lead to one of my reports, this one discussing Archbishop Burke's analysis of the worthy reception of Communion:

In an essay certain to have an impact on American politics, Archbishop Raymond Burke of the Archdiocese of St. Louis has criticized lax attitudes concerning the reception of the Holy Eucharist. His words continue a long-standing debate about whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should receive communion.

The archbishop's full paper is here.

It feels so very good to be working again after nearly four years of disability. Though my health is still not optimal, and probably never will be again, I think I can now aspire to forge a career in something or other. Journalism seems as likely a field as any other, and I am most thankful for this opportunity.

Internet Roundup I

I originally intended this blog to be a record of sites, essays, and articles I thought noteworthy.

Lately I have been using StumbleUpon to record more easily the good work others have done. This has led me to neglect posting here at Philokalia Republic.

So I have decided to post here every few weeks a roundup section of items recorded in my StumbleUpon blog. I hope this division of labor will prompt me to create more original content here without foregoing news of worthy stories elsewhere.

Here we go:

varenius contrasts a classic Christian carol with its neo-pagan ripoff:

"Good King Wenceslas", Christian version: The King and his page bring gifts to a poor man.

"Good King Wenceslas", Neo-Pagan version: The King and his page bring gifts to the woodland creatures.

Varenius also imagines some conversations from a biotech future.

*****

How statutory rapists eliminate evidence:

"In "Jane Roe" vs. Planned Parenthood, a 13-year-old was sexually abused by her soccer coach. The coach, 21, posed as a "stepbrother" and paid for the abortion in 2004, using an I.D. that did not match the girl's name. It was not reported.

The girl's parents sued, saying Planned Parenthood did not notify them and helped the abuser conceal his crime. They say records will prove the abortion clinic fails to report rape as required by law."
Ruling Against Teen Looks Like 'Abortion Distortion'

Abortuary protesters sometimes note with gravity the repeated phenomenon of an older man escorting an obviously un-related, very young woman into the facility.

*****

Jennifer Rorback Morse uncovers some statistical manipulation in sex education:

These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The "overall failure rates" are simply not relevant to this target population.

That the young and fertile are more immune to the effects of such methods is not surprising. That we expect them to use such methods effectively in irresponsible relationships and alcohol-fueled hook-ups is very surprising.

*****

Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex on the anti-HPV vaccine being in some jurisdictions mandatory for young teen girls:

Just to put the massive but deceptive marketing of Gardasil into perspective, an inoculated child may be protected from 4 (70% of cancer causing) out of the possible 200 strains of the virus for a yet to be determined amount of time (4 years?) from a type of cancer which make up about 0.007 % of new cancer cases and 0.006 % of cancer deaths that occur annually in the U.S. In return for these modest benefits of Gardasil in 2007, there have been (1) 5 deaths, (2) 31 life-threatening adverse events, (3) 1,385 required visits to the emergency room with (4) 451 of the girls not having recovered as of July 2007 , (5) with 51 of the girls resulting with a disability

Though these warnings may originate from anti-vaccine activists merely finding another arrow for their quiver, Peter Hitchens explains why their objections deserve accommodation.

*****

Euthanasia by a doctor in a New Orleans Hospital during Katrina.

*****

Islam and Christianity blog by an Anglican missionary in the Middle East. I met the author at a ROFTERS meeting.

*****

Corruption in the Legionaires of Christ aided by illicit and self-serving regulations:

Recently, Fr. Alvaro Corcuera, Director General of the Legion of Christ, has been discreetly visiting different legionary houses to explain to his religious the repeal "apparently ordered by higher authorities" of the secret vows, also known as the private vows.

There are two such vows. The first prevents a religious from criticizing any personal aspect of a superior, including his moral character. It also prevents him from listening to conversations in which a superior is being criticized.

*****

Mark Stricherz explains Why the Democrats are Blue:

In this exceptional book, Stricherz shows why -- even today -- the Democrats are blue. He reveals how a group of secular professionals seized control of the Democratic Party, driving away Catholics and blue-collar workers. He shows how these secular liberals did nothing less than hijack a commission created at the 1968 Democratic convention, toppled the party bosses, created an activist-dominated nomination system, and built an affluent, secular base of support.

Georgetown's Flight from Judgement

Georgetown's quest to refuse funding for student internships at immoral organizations recently gave up the ghost. Georgetown political theorist Patrick Deneen ties this failure to our society's diffident habits of thought and action:

Judgment succumbs to those forces that Tocqueville rightly diagnosed as being at the heart of modern democracies: the rejection of distinctions and forms, the revulsion against discrimination and boundaries, the abolition of mediation and the eschewal of divisions. What can begin as the righteous opposition to unjust discrimination easily becomes indignation of all forms of distinction. Thus, the rightful rejection of laws against miscegenation becomes the rejection of laws that defend marriage of one man and one woman. The justified fight against racial discrimination becomes the crusade against any judgments that threaten our self-esteem, leading to a culture in which every child receives a trophy after the season and grade inflation is rampant (and these are hardly the most pernicious forms that this impulse takes). Tocqueville rightly predicted history would become the story of forces, rejecting the idea that history was made by great men and women; poetry would become populated by ordinary people, not heroes or models, an anticipation of the poetry of Whitman; and religion would become pantheistic, collapsing the divide between heaven and earth so that the sacred and the profane became one. He also told us that all political problems would become judicial problems, in the main because we would reject the messy realm of politics for the winner-take-all universalism of the courts.
There's More

The Fires of Savonarola's Florence

The ferocious energy of the Renaissance republic and its most famous preacher is expertly captured in Lauro Martines' Fire in the City. With patient understanding of his subject Martines describes to a modern audience the triumphs and travails of the Dominican monk Savonarola and the political energies which he channeled--energies which, in the end, destroyed him.

In Martines' sympathetic telling, Savonarola was a fierce patriot who in 1495 helped expel the Medici from power and strengthen the new republic formed in their wake. Though a lover of liberty, he nonetheless preached clemency for the allies of the exiled rulers when tyrant-hating vengeance waxed. He also countered oligarchic tendencies among the city's elite in favor of wider citizen participation. In foreign policy he embraced the invasion of the French King Charles VIII as the scourge of Florence's enemies and Italy's flaccid believers. He even did all this without holding formal political office.

Yet first in his priorities was church reform, universal in scope but with Florence at its center. Reform was much needed, to say the least. The Great Schism had weakened religious authority. The papacy was held by the simonious decadent Alexander VI. Bishoprics were collected like so many choice financial properties and ruled in absentia, badly.

Against this established venality the righteous Savonarola spoke. Two lines from his sermons display his driven power: "I want men to be illuminated by truth. I want to fight the whole world and win."

He had no tolerance for corrupt clerics. His early polemical poems were written long before his days in Florence. Titled De Ruina Mundi and De Ruina Ecclesiae, they will appeal to those tired of laxity in the Catholic scene who will find in Savonarola the under-represented rigorist flavor of anti-clericalism. He could be writing of present-day episcopal malfeasance when he declares:

Ah, look at that catamite and at the pimp,
Dressed in purple, frauds looked up to
By the common people and adored by the blind world.

Later he advises:

Avoid all those who put on purple.
Flee from palaces and ostentatious loggias,
Speaking to the few alone,
For you will be the enemy of all the world.

What enjoyment one finds in these passages should be tempered by the observation of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: "After two hundred years of cheerful and ironic anti-clericalism the Reformation came after all, and destroyed the fabric of the Church in a number of nations."

Despite all this youthful talk of contra mundum, the monk avoided exclusive elitism in his Florentine ministry. At points, his thirst for justice and freedom and his significantly genuine patriotic piety captivated a vast portion of the city. His charisma shines through his recorded sermons. In one oft-used rhetorical device he converses with a fictional interlocutor:

-Oh, friar.... they say you are a heretic.
-Throw any low insult at me, but don't call me a heretic.
-They say you're crazy.
-Oh, now there you've said something beautiful. [As sinners] we're all a bit mad.
-Ah, but you've said the Church is a whore. O father, the Holy Church? What have you said?
-You're a fool ... go and do some more studying.

The pre-lenten Florentine carnival traditionally involved deadly rock fights among youths and debauchery among their elders. The monk's famous bonfires of the vanities attempted to subvert and redirect these energies towards spiritual renewal. Savonarola, believing their elders to be incorrigible, would send out groups of teenage boys and young men to collect "vanities" from the people. These collections, with few exceptions, were entirely voluntary. The collected dirty books, games, and luxurious clothes were then set ablaze in a vivid symbol of Lenten sacrifice.(This suggests a cheerful and productive activity for modern-day parish youth groups.)

Savonarola's popularity was not total. His efforts at moral reform provoked a backlash from among its targets. Street gamblers started accosting and threatening the zealous youths who had once driven them indoors. The wealthy hated the Savonarolan fashion police who would publicly deride and humiliate luxurious dressers. But his political and ecclesiastical opponents were the most potent of the friar's adversaries.

In June of 1497 his enemies finally secured an excommunication from the papacy. For months they had reported trumped up charges of heresy and misconduct, but they also merely repeated the man's heated attacks on papal corruption. Earlier the pope had wished Savonarola to defend his positions in person. Though a worldly man, Alexander VI seemed to fear the monk really was the prophet he claimed to be. Savonarola, who needed the protection of an armed guard in his home city, feared assassination if he were to leave his home turf. In an effort to reign in the recalcitrant frair, his monastery at San Marco was ordered to submit itself to the authority of another, more diplomatic, Dominican congregation.
This order was simply ignored, and it was only a matter of time before the papacy bowed to the anti-Savonarolan factions.

Yet even the excommunication did not end Savonarola. He denied the legitimacy of the punishment on the grounds it was based on fraudulent accusations. He began preaching again with even more anti-papal vehemence.

But his position weakened. Florence feared worsening tensions with the papacy and other Italian powers and severe domestic factionalism strained political comity. Savonarola was challenged by a Franciscan opponent to undergo a trial by fire in a city square. Though one of Savonarola's disciples had accepted the challenge and a great crowd gathered and prepared the site for the event, the great test of fire never took place. This abortive trial in some minds confirmed Savonarola as a false prophet. An angry mob beseiged San Marco, captured the monk, and turned him over to hostile elements in the city government. Accused of fraud and heresy, he was tortured. Savonarola, very intolerant of pain, soon accused himself of being a megalomaniacal fraud. He abjured all his extraordinary efforts as exercises in vanity. He and two fellow monks were hanged in May of 1498, and what vanities of their bodies remained were themselves immolated by fire.

See also: Daniel Larison's review

Experiments in Virtual Living: Law and Justice in Second Life

Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Labs and a few hundred thousand users, makes for a living laboratory in political science. One nice essay examines the politics of Second Life, tracing its subsidized and well-regulated beginnings to its quasi-anarchic present:

There are no central regulatory authorities. You cannot file abuse reports for fraud. You have no way to know if someone is a known fraud or a reputable businessperson. Although word-of-mouth helps to spread the reputation, that’s all there is. There are also no taxes. And until very recently, there was no control on the kind of content that you could sell.

Some communities established, locally, a way to deal with frauds and abuse from either producers or consumers. On a mall, for instance, it’s customary to kick out a fraudulent merchant; but they’ll simply move to the mall next door, defame the previous mall owner, and business goes on as usual. There is no way to file a suit against someone. Consumers have no rights and no way to enforce them, even if they managed to band together to protest (which they do, but are mostly ignored); producers can be ripped off using several techniques, and they have no way to legitimately claim for justice.

If the technology and economy supported the effort, this situation would be a nice test case for the Libertarian dream of private law and justice committees.

"The Jeweler's Shop" On Stage

The Theophany Theater Company was recently in town to perform The Jeweler's Shop, a play written by Pope John Paul II when he was still Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow. The play explores love and marriage as experienced by three couples: one ends by a death, another by separation, and later the third begins with the betrothal of two children of these unions. All three couples visit a mysterious jeweler's shop whose magical rings and vatic instructions bracket these couples' experiences of engagement and marriage.

The Jeweler's Shop, I am told, is representative of the Polish nationalist movement which tried to preserve and extend Polish culture despite foreign domination. Originally meant for performance in small homes, the intimacy of the play can be adapted to larger venues only with difficulty. Theophany's performance did not transfer well. The actors were difficult to distinguish at a distance. Costumed in uniform black dress, their appearance evoked distracting comparisons to avant garde productions. Their delivery lacked significant dramatic energy, being over-reliant on the script and its author to carry the production.

The writing itself is often provocative. At times the imagery flourishes into self-interpretation. In one scene an affianced couple stands outside a shop, contemplating each other in the store window:

[the shop window] became, however, a mirror reflecting us both-Teresa and myself. Moreover, it was not an ordinary flat mirror, but a lens absorbing its object. We were not only reflected but absorbed.

A lover's gaze upon himself and his beloved suggests the iconic nature of holy matrimony, which segues into iconographic theology. Rarely has such interrelated symbolism so echoed off a stage.

The soliloquy has but a small place in American film or theater but it frequents The Jeweler's Shop. Indeed the soliloquies are so many that at times the characters seem to have talked themselves into isolation from one another. On occasion this serves dramatic purpose, as when an abandoned wife futiley seeks comfort in a crowded village street, but at other places attentive staging must channel the solitude which was too prominent in Theophany's performance.

The speeches themselves often turn into philosophical asides. Observing two immature lovers, the everyman Adam states:

love carries people away like an absolute, although it lacks absolute dimensions. But acting under an illusion, they do not try to connect that love with the Love that has such a dimension. They do not even feel the need, blinded as they are not so much by the force of their emotion as by lack of humility. They lack humility toward what love must be in its true essence. The more aware they are of it, the smaller the danger. Otherwise the danger is great: love will not stand the pressure of reality.

Poetic imagery is lacking, to say the least. How is it that a play can tolerate such analytical ventures?

I suspect the oppresive state of 1960s Poland is one reason. Communist suppression of unofficial cultural events required that distinguishable artistic goals be concentrated into the power of one work. Archbishop Karol Wojtyla lacked the time and the flexibility of the free artist to explain and expand upon his vision. The playwright must do the work of criticism because few others will.

The play's confluence of aesthetic goals also includes the moral. The specialization of American society shuns the combination of education and entertainment. Such a union suggests the brightly-colored monstrosities of children's television. But didacticism is not necessarily an artistic sin. It is certainly a failure when a work of art teaches us something shallow or something wrong, so it is good for moviegoers that Hollywood usually shuns the didactic in favor of pure entertainment. Didacticism is also a risky tactic when advancing something the audience would rather not want to learn. The market pressures for mass appeal cannot afford any resentful patrons.

The effort to teach goes awry worst when one teaches something badly, and here performances of The Jeweler's Shop risk the most danger. The play is inescapably foreign. Its design for the house theater, its numerous soliloquies, its dramatic choruses, and its philosophic interludes have little appeal to action-loving American audiences. There are even a few rhetorical clunkers, as when one Chorus begins to speak of a wedding:

"The occasion is most beautiful, it evokes so many associations. We are looking only at what is!"

One hopes this is a fault of the translator.(*)

As much as a fifth of the audience at Theophany's performance ducked out at intermission. While one can excuse the players or the playwright by blaming the average American's taste, I think it is instead a sign that The Jeweler's Shop is a play fit only for the more academic or more adulatory sectors of American Catholicism. Written to compete with the bland socialist realism and the quasi-rationalistic Communist ideologies of its age, it can hardly challenge today's multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that stirs appetites for the spectacle and the sarcastic one-liner.

There is great potential for some budding playwright to remix this play for an American audience, as Christopher West distilled the pope's Theology of the Body for ease of understanding. Such a writer must unite the contemplative self-reflection of Wojtyla to an accessible story with characters and style more common to American performances. This effort will require considerable talent, but without it the best points of The Jeweler's Shop will remain trapped in a diamond uncut for its setting.

* On second thought, this line would work well when whispered in a home setting.

What Does John Milbank Know About Eric Gill?

Scott Carson examines Radical Orthodoxy and its rather conventional denial of traditional Christian sexual ethics. One selection from John Milbank caught my eye:

In just what way can there be a sexual path that is also a spiritual path? In a sense, this is a debate about human ecology, and it is notable that today, as earlier in the twentieth century, those who are "conservatively" critical of over-technologization and the exploitation of nature also tend to be in favor of a more positive attitude toward sex (D.H. Lawrence, J.C. Powys and Eric Gill, for example). Inversely, those who are more conservative, puritanical and legalistic about sex are often those who fully embrace technological modernity, the ruthless exploitation of nature and economic liberalism.

Daniel Mitsui expands on just how positive Eric Gill's sexual attitudes were. Those wishing to preserve what remains of innocence should not read it. Suffice to say, Gill obtained gratification from his dog and frequently violated his own daughters. He matter-of-factly records these events in his diaries. One does not become more exploitative than that.

One is left wondering if Milbank is simply ignorant of Gill's perversions, which were not revealed until 1989. He could even believe the contorted thesis that Gill's artistry is utterly disconnected from his personal debaucheries. An admirer's powers of self-deception are legion.

Another possibility is far worse: he really is so satanic that he approves.

Francis Beckwith on Secular Reason

Francis Beckwith, professor and Right Reason blogger, lectured at CU-Boulder to a surprisingly large Friday night audience. His speech, "Bioethics and the Pluralist Game," examined the failings of some of the commonplace arguments used to shut down ethical and legal objections to secular liberal policies. Though his inaugurating speech was more academic than the typical undergradate could handle, it bodes well for the new lecture series sponsored by the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute.

Beckwith's arguments were solid, and I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the oft-claimed need for political reasoning to be secular:

[Robert] Audi offers another principle that may be employed, the "secular reason requirement." It goes like this: one has a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or public policy that restricts conduct unless one has and is willing to offer adequate secular reasons for advocacy or support.

...this principle requires, without argument, that the citizen's reason be secular. But "secular" is not a relevant property of a reason that is offered in support of a conclusion that an advocate is advancing. For instance, the terms "true, false, plausible, implausible" are adjectives that we apply to reasons to test the property relevant to its purpose as part of an argument. A property is characteristic had by something. So for example one can say "the dog is brown," which means the dog has the property of brownness. However, if one were to say "the set of all even numbers is brown," one would be saying nonsense. Numerical sense cannot have the property of color.

But reasons, like dogs or numerical sets, are things that can only have certain types of properties. Just as a dog cannot have the property of a rational number, and a numerical set cannot have the property of "blue," "valid," or "tall," a reason cannot be secular. For "secular," like "tall," "fast," "stinky," or "sexy," has no bearing on the quality of the reason one may offer in an argument to advance a particular public policy or point of view.

Suppose one believes the conclusion that unjust killing is morally wrong, and offers two reasons for it. The first reason is "the Bible prohibits unjust killing," and the second reason is "the philosopher Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative prohibits unjust killing." Most people would call the first a religious reason and the second a secular reason, because the first contains the name of a religious book, the Bible, and the second contains a non-religious principle, the Categorical Imperative. But how do the terms religious and secular add or subtract to our assessment of the quality of the reasoning?

If one, for example, has good reason to reject the authority of the Bible, then that good reason about the nature of the Bible is the good reason for rejecting that reason. On the other hand, if one has good reasons to believe the Bible is a better guide to moral philosophy than Kant's Categorical Imperative, in that case one ought to conclude that the first is a better reason than the second.

But again, how do the properties of "religious" and "secular" affect such a judgement? At the end of the day, reasons are weak, strong, true, or false, but "religious" and "secular" are not relevant properties when assessing the qualities of reasons a person may offer as part of her argument.

In practice, this requirement of secular reason functions as a hindrance for properly understanding the bioethical issues addressed and the positions held by Christian citizens.

To label an argument "religious" or "secular" is not to speak the language of logic but the language of anthropology or sociology. This tactic, widespread and often unconscious in use, tries to change the topic of the discussion from the argument itself to the category of person who is making the argument.

When this rhetorical shift takes place in jurisprudence, it suggests an implicit assumption that a certain type of people is in charge. Arguments are judged not on their merits but on whether they cater to this ruling type. The need to justify the rule of the secular tribe doubtless partially motivates the fervid insistence that the United States is a secular state.

The Demise of the Constitution

The last time the left tried legitimately to amend the Constitution was with the ERA. It failed, but it didn't matter because the courts read it into the 14th Amendment in rulings such as the VMI decision. No one is bothering to propose an amendment to guarantee a right to same sex "marriage." Instead, it's taken as a given that the courts will eventually add this amendment by fiat. Instead, conservatives are trying to amend the Constitution to stop it. So we've come full circle from what our Founders intended. Instead of requiring super-majorities to change the Constitution, it's now expected that it will change automatically in a liberal direction unless conservatives can get super-majorities to keep it the same.
Tim W. at View from the Right

Though there is a list of largely symbolic proposed federal constitutional amendments, only conservatives and libertarians appear to care enough about such things to make amendments part of a unified campaign platform. That appearance is itself dubious. Any serious amendment fight would be protracted and a career-ender for many politicians from divided districts and so would never happen.

The Constitution continues to be a figurehead.

Alasdair MacIntyre on Video

The video archives at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture is another fine resource. I was happy to see MacIntyre lecture, especially since he is a better speaker than he is a prose stylist. He discusses the compartmentalization of life required by so-called pluralism, wherein standards of action in one area of life simply do not translate into other areas of life.

Other videos look very promising.

A Pocket Deity for Ethical Living and Self-Esteem

"Moralistic-therapeutic deism" is a mouthful. It is a habit of thought which exploits the typically American impulse towards self-improvement and revises traditional religious thought and practice to that end. Its god is distant, invoked only to solve some personal problem. Its heaven is well-populated and its hell, if it exists at all, is vague and only for Hitlerian levels of evildoers. This mindset reduces religious ethics to being nice and happy while living a safe and productive life spent thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about self and universe.

It's also apparently a major religious influence among youth today, no matter what their denomination.

Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton spent time with American teenagers, collecting their reflections and opinions about religion and God. It is hardly surprising that the teens were unsophisticated. However, the language they used was that of therapy and self-help. Truth, sanctity, and sacrifice were of little importance. Rather, religion was for most of these youths an instrument of personal self-realization.

Christian Smith sums up his work in the twelve-page essay On "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith(PDF).

The Revealer also provides an overview:

Smith and Denton’s most significant contribution to our understanding of American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives begins when the authors attempt to explain why teens believe what they believe -- in a sense, why they are so conventional. The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that "powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States." Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings." And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.

It is to be hoped against experience that this attitude is a passing phase of unstudied youths. The loss of religious vocabularies must result in an impoverishment of religious thought itself.

Cardinal Arinze to visit Arvada Parish

To my surprise, he will be speaking at a conference at my home parish. From the Denver Catholic Register:

Cardinal Francis Arinze is coming to Denver. The cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in Vatican City, will celebrate Mass and deliver the keynote address at a stewardship conference next month.

Spirit of Christ Church in Arvada will host the Sept. 20 conference titled, “Eucharist, Nourishment for the Christian Steward.” In addition to Mass and the cardinal’s keynote address, the conference will include breakout sessions and a roundtable discussion. Opening remarks to the conference will be delivered by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.