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.