The foibles and flaws of Evangelical Christian subculture are hard to miss in the art it produces. Its movies are often forgettable dramas marred by trite plots, two-dimensional characters and unearned moralism. Its contemporary music is often derivative in all the wrong ways, following rather than forging musical styles while writing lyrics which depict the Savior as an object of a high school crush.
Corrupting so many of these attempts at art-making is the spirit-killing willingness of aspiring Christian artists to substitute piety for talent and solid morals for long-practiced craft.
The Christian marketing industry amplifies this failure. Its promoters trumpet how the latest album release will lift one’s soul and how the latest movie will save hundreds of marriages, if not the nation itself. D-list celebrities and almost-famous pastors are sought for endorsements, while the bad art sold deadens its patrons to true beauty and perhaps even true religion.
As Hank Hill observed, these efforts do not make Christianity better, but rather make movies and music much, much worse.
“Jesus People,” the product of Hollywood Christians, aspires to exploit this parody-ripe phenomenon.
Available in several webisodes and an upcoming full-length movie, “Jesus People” follows the Evangelical habit of aping successful moviemaking.
But in this case, “Jesus People” apes the mockumentarian spirit pioneered by “This is Spinal Tap.”
The series’ initial webisodes follow the new Christian band “Cross my Heart” and its four members: the once disgraced Christian pop music star, the self-righteous young prig, the token black singer who conceals his “impure” past, and the novice Christian woman who has cracked open more beer bottles than Bibles.
The band is produced by a portly megachurch pastor reminiscent of a goateed Rick Warren. He has already entered the culture industry with his book “The Jesus Diet.”
Even for viewers like me who are outside the borders of Evangelical subculture, the real life targets of satire are recognizable enough: the shriveled first idea of a brainstorm session being treated as divine inspiration; the friends of the pastor being allowed to inflict their ramshackle production values on the untested band and the uncaring world; the twin goals of evangelization and mass marketing fusing in a dumbfounding chimera of good intentions and crud.
Some endearing brief subtleties also make “Jesus People” worthwhile, such as the pastor’s enthusiastic admiration for U2’s Bono, a sly reference to the clichéd “wheat field at harvest time” imagery of Christian music videos and a “famous Christian” author’s desperate poorly-concealed attempt to sell her book to the camera.
While the film displays a judicious cynicism, its actors ably convey that earnestness which makes for horrible art but also powers sincere contrition, prayer and charity.
The webisodes of “Jesus People” climax with this music video. As you watch it, know that it is preceded by an enjoyable backstory:
The dance pop tune is catchy, like some of Spinal Tap’s songs. The lyrical and visual satire, I think, effectively balance absurdity and realism.
Many Hollywood efforts at religious satire try to make Christians look ridiculous by ridiculing Christianity, or rather the filmmakers’ juvenile interpretation thereof.
This tired approach often directs scorn towards God Himself, driving away the religious audience while cultivating the superficial habits of sneering atheists.
These secular efforts often fail artistically precisely because they miss the human target, and thus the joke. Their comic effect, such as it is, lies in grass-fleshed man’s presumption to stand in judgment over the Almighty.
The strength of “Jesus People” is that it knows Christians are ridiculous and therefore revels in the phenomenon, believing that even laughable failures can be redeemed.
Watch the first webisode:
The series refines itself through its short run of perhaps 50 minutes. Its professional depiction of unprofessional art bodes well for the full-length movie.
The very novelty of a well-made Christian mockumentary likely covers a few of its flaws. The judgmental band member cannot escape comparisons to The Office’s Dwight Schrute. The music video’s style appears stuck in the early nineties, though that feature may be true to life. The Rapture may even be sacrosanct for those who believe in it, undercutting any claim that the movie’s satire is salutary and not scoffing.
Inevitable comparisons with “This Is Spinal Tap” also make “Jesus People” seem opportunistic. While Rob Reiner’s movie assailed drug-addled and obliviously egoistic rock superstars, this film targets the amateurs.
In the age of blogging and YouTube, amateurism is omnipresent and entirely excusable. As the webisodes progress, the filmmakers’ professional attack on unprofessional artists appears more and more unchivalrous, like an expert theater critic sniping at a high school musical production.
Though accusations of elitism are lazily thrown about, it is hard not to sense snobbery in elements of “Jesus People.”
Every artist starts out horrid. Lacking the lucre and pride of superstardom, “Cross my Heart” is just another megachurch band. A too-critical spirit of these aspirants may actually prevent great art from emerging.
Fortunately, it appears this concerns will be alleviated in the full length movie. It reportedly will flash forward two years into the band’s career after it has achieved stardom and expert ludicrousness.
In classic dramatic theory, the comedy is about the restoration of right order. Despite the flaws of its heroes and the deviousness of its villains, at its conclusion a comedy’s characters and audience react with surprised wonder, silently asking each other “How did that happen?”
Despite having no heroes or villains, “Jesus People” will leave its audience with similar smiling questions. The first puzzle is how Christian artistic endeavors could fail so epically with such great material. The second puzzle is how Christianity could possibly succeed despite the worst efforts of Christians.
A third question is how such a promising Christian satire like “Jesus People” could have taken so long to arrive. We may hope its debut marks the progress of Evangelical culture and American moviemaking to a happy place where prayer and satire kiss.
--------
By way of Barb Nicolosi, we find that Christianity Today, always eager to flog the shortcomings of Evangelical culture, also reviews the film as The Christian Spinal Tap.
Besides YouTube, the series is available at Blip.TV. The web site of the full film, which includes a trailer, is at JesusPeopleFilm.com.
As a final comment, I doubt whether a similar satire could be done about U.S. Catholic culture. There is so much variety in American Catholicism that the common references necessary for humor are lacking.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Alt. conservatism for the front porch
The aftermath of the Bush Administration has exposed for embarrassment and grief the various problems of movement conservatism. Its substitution of fear and ideology for prudence, its facile sloganeering, and its herd-like antipathy towards self-criticism have left thousands of Americans and foreigners dead or in penurious exile.
In a different and so far lesser disaster, these failings helped bring President Obama to power.
On the national scene, both the political and pontificating efforts of conservatives have further empowered the people and forces inimical to much that they hold dear.
Those skeptical conservatives who remained aloof from Republican politics perhaps now have their chance to be heard. Anyone puzzled at the rout of Republicans should give them consideration.
These "alternative conservatives" now have a new group blog at Front Porch Republic.
Patrick Deneen, Daniel Larison, Jeremy Beer and Caleb Stegall join several other writers who are convinced that "scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend."
The economic crisis, they say,
The bi-partisan destructiveness wreaked by America's political and financial leadership would be less damaging, perhaps even impossible, were our communities not corroded by senseless individualism, consumption beyond our means, a prideful despite for natural limits, collective amnesia about our past, and a fading but potent and improvident optimism about our mock-heroic future.
Patrick Deneen helpfully summarizes front-porch republicanism:
Self-rule, as Deneen emphasizes, is a practice and not a theory. An exclusively intellectual approach will be useless in flushing out or reworking our cultural debris.
But after we have persistently followed our intellectual delusions to the brink of a minor catastrophe, these keen thinkers might just lead us back -- to the front porch.
In a different and so far lesser disaster, these failings helped bring President Obama to power.
On the national scene, both the political and pontificating efforts of conservatives have further empowered the people and forces inimical to much that they hold dear.
Those skeptical conservatives who remained aloof from Republican politics perhaps now have their chance to be heard. Anyone puzzled at the rout of Republicans should give them consideration.
These "alternative conservatives" now have a new group blog at Front Porch Republic.
Patrick Deneen, Daniel Larison, Jeremy Beer and Caleb Stegall join several other writers who are convinced that "scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend."
The economic crisis, they say,
...threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.
The bi-partisan destructiveness wreaked by America's political and financial leadership would be less damaging, perhaps even impossible, were our communities not corroded by senseless individualism, consumption beyond our means, a prideful despite for natural limits, collective amnesia about our past, and a fading but potent and improvident optimism about our mock-heroic future.
Patrick Deneen helpfully summarizes front-porch republicanism:
Our States, not to mention our localities, are ever-less a kind of “porch,” that transition from the world of the home to the public realm of community and eventually State and nation. Instead, as wholly “private citizens” - or, to invoke the preferred term, “consumers” - accustomed to houses that are places of private retreat, we see only one public entity of significance - the national State - but find it difficult to see ourselves a part of it. We regard the State as a distant and mysterious entity, occupied either by our team or their team but in either event an organization so vast, complex and dizzying that we regard it as anything but the locus of our practice of shared self-governance. We are daily less a republic because we daily perceive less of what are common or public things - res publica. Without the literal spaces where we come to know what we have in common through speech, habit and memory, we regard politics as a competitive spectator sport and government as a distant imposition - but in any event, anything but self-rule.
Self-rule, as Deneen emphasizes, is a practice and not a theory. An exclusively intellectual approach will be useless in flushing out or reworking our cultural debris.
But after we have persistently followed our intellectual delusions to the brink of a minor catastrophe, these keen thinkers might just lead us back -- to the front porch.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Übermensch or Last Man?
"There are no facts, only interpretations."
-Frederich Nietzsche, Notebooks
"There is no reality, only perception.
"Strategy: Identify the filters through which you view the world. Acknowledge your history without being controlled by it."
-Dr. Phil McGraw, Life Law #6
-Frederich Nietzsche, Notebooks
"There is no reality, only perception.
"Strategy: Identify the filters through which you view the world. Acknowledge your history without being controlled by it."
-Dr. Phil McGraw, Life Law #6
Friday, February 27, 2009
Kissing Gandalf far more shameful than quoting Leviticus
With an easy victory last November, the Second Congressional District's Jared Polis became the first openly homosexual man to be elected to Congress after spending more than $5 million of his own money on his campaign.
In CD-2, which includes Boulder and surroundings, the election came down to the Democratic primary.
One Polis primary ad featured strange displays of pixelized public nudity.
Polis' oddities now continue on Twitter.
His January 20 posting reads: "I was kissed by Sir Ian McClellan today (on the lips), and our nation has a new President!"
That "on the lips" is simply too much information.
Apparently the liplock took place at the Human Rights Campaign Inaugural Ball. (CNN didn't report the lips part.)
The Democrats' indifference to public lewdness was also in evidence at the Inaugural Parade, where the Lesbian and Gay Band Association marched. The group, which probably took the place of some hopeful and more deserving high school band, is also to march in the notoriously perverse Southern Decadence Festival in long-suffering New Orleans.
The CNA story on the LGBA's participation in the Inaugural pulled its punches. Though reporting that a pornographer would recruit at the festival, CNA did not quote the cad's appeal on the festival's web site. "We're always looking for new talent!" he said.
The unfortunate pandering to homosexual constituencies was probably a factor when the group Progress Now chose to host Sen. Michael Bennet at Hamburger Mary's, a homosexual burger bar, after President Obama appeared in Denver to sign the stimulus package.
"They have fun things like drag-queen bingo on Tuesdays," one Hamburger Mary's customer told 9News.
This shameful embrace of deviance is all the more jarring when compared to the treatment of Colorado State Rep. Scott Renfroe (R-Greeley).
The blog Right Wing Watch indignantly summarizes Rep. Renfroe's speech against a bill that would include homosexual partners of state employees in health insurance coverage.
In the Bible, he said, "homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation."
He then quoted Leviticus 18:22, "You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination,” and Leviticus 20:13, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
According to Right Wing Watch, he then rejected "laws that go against what Biblically we are supposed to stand for” and “taking sins and making them to be legally OK."
He continued:
Illiterate leftists, libertines and atheists then jumped on this statement, claiming Rep. Renfroe "compares homosexuality to murder."
Actually, he was grouping homosexual acts among various other sins as a way of emphasizing solidarity among us sinners and our shared hopes for mercy.
It is easy for the superficial newsreader to join the initial condemnations of Renfroe without stopping to think how commonplace these remarks are.
Great rhetoric should not be expected from state representatives. In his simple appeal to Scripture, Rep. Renfroe is actually being quite representative of the many people who lack the ability or the desire to reshape themselves and their arguments into forms that would appeal to secular journalists, let alone whiny and censorious gay activists. They, too, deserve a voice in politics.
And Renfroe alludes to a deeper point that can be intellectually defended by those such as Colorado's own U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White.
Authoring the 1986 Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, Justice White referred to American law's traditional proscription of homosexual acts. He wrote:
"Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."
Chief Justice Warren Burger concurred, writing:
Of course, as Rep. Renfroe has discovered, these licentious activists and their allies precisely intend to cast aside millennia of moral teaching. State recognition of such unions, even in a seemingly minor modification to insurance coverage, is part of this revolt.
Worse, it is unlikely that this revolt will merely overthrow convention. Activists with a Dracula-like aversion to the Scriptures will actively attempt to suppress their critics and the old order they so despise.
For instance, take Canadian pastor Stephen Boisson. In 2008 the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal ordered Boisson to cease publishing "disparaging remarks" about homosexuals and to pay $5,000 in damages for "pain and suffering" to the putative human rights activist who filed the complaint.
His so-called crime?
He wrote a letter to his local paper and had it published.
Expressing his "understanding, care, compassion and tolerance" for those with an "unwanted sexual identity crisis," he then condemned "the homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s. I cannot pity you any longer and remain inactive. You have caused far too much damage."
Declaring a metaphorical "war" to "defend the precious sanctity of our innocent children and youth," he warned that children are being "strategically targeted" by ideologues and activists.
"Your children are being warped into believing that same-sex families are acceptable; that men kissing men is appropriate," he said.
In perhaps his most inflammatory comment, which still wasn't terribly extreme, Pastor Boisson called homosexual activists "perverse, self-centered and morally deprived individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives," comparing them to pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps.
He blamed these activists' success on apathy.
"How bad do things have to become before you will get involved?" he asked those who agree with him.
For this, of course, Pastor Boisson had to be destroyed.
And now people are lining up to make sure Rep. Renfroe and others join him in pariahville. Maybe you and I will be next on their hit list.
While the United States is blessed with protections for political speech stronger than Canada's, it is obvious that media and political leaders are eager to exploit any opportunity to silence their opponents with targeted social pressure.
Alas, some conservatives are playing a useful part in this strategy. Over at the blog Mount Virtus, Renfroe is mildly criticized for poorly choosing his rhetoric and context.
But this is to grant the radicals control over the terms of debate. Renfroe needs defenders more vigorous than his attackers.
At present, left-wing Democrats and cultural radicals are almost incapable of making any remarks that will generate media outrage on homosexual issues. Not because they are especially eloquent or wise, but rather because they have widened the range of discourse on the permissive side while shortening the range on the restrictive side.
The purpose of these Moments of Outrage is to trim the limits of acceptable opinion and to rope dull-witted conservatives and moderates into doing the trimming.
Then in a few more years, if the target is successfully silenced, it’s someone else’s turn to get trimmed.
"How bad do things have to get?" Pastor Boisson asked.
We now live in a nation where deviants parade for the president and Bible-quoters get berated.
That's bad enough.
In CD-2, which includes Boulder and surroundings, the election came down to the Democratic primary.
One Polis primary ad featured strange displays of pixelized public nudity.
Polis' oddities now continue on Twitter.
His January 20 posting reads: "I was kissed by Sir Ian McClellan today (on the lips), and our nation has a new President!"
That "on the lips" is simply too much information.
Apparently the liplock took place at the Human Rights Campaign Inaugural Ball. (CNN didn't report the lips part.)
The Democrats' indifference to public lewdness was also in evidence at the Inaugural Parade, where the Lesbian and Gay Band Association marched. The group, which probably took the place of some hopeful and more deserving high school band, is also to march in the notoriously perverse Southern Decadence Festival in long-suffering New Orleans.
The CNA story on the LGBA's participation in the Inaugural pulled its punches. Though reporting that a pornographer would recruit at the festival, CNA did not quote the cad's appeal on the festival's web site. "We're always looking for new talent!" he said.
The unfortunate pandering to homosexual constituencies was probably a factor when the group Progress Now chose to host Sen. Michael Bennet at Hamburger Mary's, a homosexual burger bar, after President Obama appeared in Denver to sign the stimulus package.
"They have fun things like drag-queen bingo on Tuesdays," one Hamburger Mary's customer told 9News.
This shameful embrace of deviance is all the more jarring when compared to the treatment of Colorado State Rep. Scott Renfroe (R-Greeley).
The blog Right Wing Watch indignantly summarizes Rep. Renfroe's speech against a bill that would include homosexual partners of state employees in health insurance coverage.
In the Bible, he said, "homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation."
He then quoted Leviticus 18:22, "You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination,” and Leviticus 20:13, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
According to Right Wing Watch, he then rejected "laws that go against what Biblically we are supposed to stand for” and “taking sins and making them to be legally OK."
He continued:
I’m not saying [homosexuality] is the only sin that is out there. Obviously we have sin — we have murder, we have, we have all sorts of sin, we have adultery, and we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal. But what I’m saying that for is that all sin is equal. That sin there is as equal to any other sin that’s in the Bible, to having wandering eyes, to coveting your neighbor’s things. Whatever you do, that sin is equal and it can be forgiven because of that.
Illiterate leftists, libertines and atheists then jumped on this statement, claiming Rep. Renfroe "compares homosexuality to murder."
Actually, he was grouping homosexual acts among various other sins as a way of emphasizing solidarity among us sinners and our shared hopes for mercy.
It is easy for the superficial newsreader to join the initial condemnations of Renfroe without stopping to think how commonplace these remarks are.
Great rhetoric should not be expected from state representatives. In his simple appeal to Scripture, Rep. Renfroe is actually being quite representative of the many people who lack the ability or the desire to reshape themselves and their arguments into forms that would appeal to secular journalists, let alone whiny and censorious gay activists. They, too, deserve a voice in politics.
And Renfroe alludes to a deeper point that can be intellectually defended by those such as Colorado's own U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White.
Authoring the 1986 Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, Justice White referred to American law's traditional proscription of homosexual acts. He wrote:
"Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."
Chief Justice Warren Burger concurred, writing:
As the Court notes... the proscriptions against sodomy have very "ancient roots." Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards... To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.
Of course, as Rep. Renfroe has discovered, these licentious activists and their allies precisely intend to cast aside millennia of moral teaching. State recognition of such unions, even in a seemingly minor modification to insurance coverage, is part of this revolt.
Worse, it is unlikely that this revolt will merely overthrow convention. Activists with a Dracula-like aversion to the Scriptures will actively attempt to suppress their critics and the old order they so despise.
For instance, take Canadian pastor Stephen Boisson. In 2008 the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal ordered Boisson to cease publishing "disparaging remarks" about homosexuals and to pay $5,000 in damages for "pain and suffering" to the putative human rights activist who filed the complaint.
His so-called crime?
He wrote a letter to his local paper and had it published.
Expressing his "understanding, care, compassion and tolerance" for those with an "unwanted sexual identity crisis," he then condemned "the homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s. I cannot pity you any longer and remain inactive. You have caused far too much damage."
Declaring a metaphorical "war" to "defend the precious sanctity of our innocent children and youth," he warned that children are being "strategically targeted" by ideologues and activists.
"Your children are being warped into believing that same-sex families are acceptable; that men kissing men is appropriate," he said.
In perhaps his most inflammatory comment, which still wasn't terribly extreme, Pastor Boisson called homosexual activists "perverse, self-centered and morally deprived individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives," comparing them to pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps.
He blamed these activists' success on apathy.
"How bad do things have to become before you will get involved?" he asked those who agree with him.
For this, of course, Pastor Boisson had to be destroyed.
And now people are lining up to make sure Rep. Renfroe and others join him in pariahville. Maybe you and I will be next on their hit list.
While the United States is blessed with protections for political speech stronger than Canada's, it is obvious that media and political leaders are eager to exploit any opportunity to silence their opponents with targeted social pressure.
Alas, some conservatives are playing a useful part in this strategy. Over at the blog Mount Virtus, Renfroe is mildly criticized for poorly choosing his rhetoric and context.
But this is to grant the radicals control over the terms of debate. Renfroe needs defenders more vigorous than his attackers.
At present, left-wing Democrats and cultural radicals are almost incapable of making any remarks that will generate media outrage on homosexual issues. Not because they are especially eloquent or wise, but rather because they have widened the range of discourse on the permissive side while shortening the range on the restrictive side.
The purpose of these Moments of Outrage is to trim the limits of acceptable opinion and to rope dull-witted conservatives and moderates into doing the trimming.
Then in a few more years, if the target is successfully silenced, it’s someone else’s turn to get trimmed.
"How bad do things have to get?" Pastor Boisson asked.
We now live in a nation where deviants parade for the president and Bible-quoters get berated.
That's bad enough.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
A rabbi talks sense on ‘over-the-top’ reaction to Bishop Williamson
Any news watcher has noticed the tempest that has accompanied Pope Benedict XVI’s lifting of the excommunications upon the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and the revelation that SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson made some foolish and inexcusable remarks that minimized the extent of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.
The media firestorm consistently misrepresented the Vatican’s remission of the excommunications as a “reinstatement.” The breakaway prelates are not even heads of titular dioceses, offices which even the lowliest assistant bishop holds. The SSPX bishops are not yet in full obedience to the Pope and certainly need to clarify their adherence to the Second Vatican Council.
Yet despite the preliminary nature of the Pope’s decision, we are treated to stories about a no-name dissident theologian calling for Pope Benedict to step down, Jewish leaders wringing their hands about the future of Catholic-Jewish relations and Catholic U.S. House Democrats cluelessly and shamelessly voicing their “deep concerns” with the Pope’s decision to (there’s that word again) “reinstate” the wayward bishop.
“As such, we seek clarification on this important matter,” say members of the party unapologetically opposed to Catholic teaching on abortion.
To these almost automatic responses, Rabbi Irwin Kula, President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, has written a fine rebuke of similar “over-the-top” reactions.
His Washington Post/Newsweek essay “Jewish Reaction to Pope Disproportionate” describes SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson as “the sort of crabby, crotchety, trivial, unknown sort of jerk - the ratty uncle who embarrasses you every time he is in public -- who we all recognize exists in our communities.”
Rabbi Kula continues:
Echoing Cardinal O’Malley, the rabbi also criticizes the newfound enthusiasts for excommunication.
He asks: “And isn't it possible that bringing Richard Williamson back inside the Church may actually influence him to see how wrong he is on this issue given how clear the Church is regarding the Holocaust and its commitment to Catholic -Jewish relations?”
Still noting the “very raw and very vulnerable” attitudes towards the Holocaust in the Jewish community, Rabbi Kula then calls on the most hysteric commentators to acknowledge their overreaction.
For that he deserves praise.
Some writers, like Amy Welborn, Ross Douthat, and Sandro Magister have argued the media reaction shows the Vatican’s inability to anticipate and respond to the superficial and often hostile nature of the contemporary news cycle.
Improvements are always possible. The Vatican's unawareness of Williamson's kooky sides is difficult to understand, let alone excuse.
Yet we should remember it is not obvious which stories will produce hostility before the fact. Who could have predicted that the Pope's reference to a Byzantine emperor in a university speech would cause journalistic schadenfreude and Muslim outrage? Or that his brief pre-Christmas discussion of the created order and “gender ideology” would become the central grievance in a homosexualist media crusade?
The dullard’s opportunism in the press, especially concerning Catholicism, is perhaps too capricious even for an expert media relations firm. How can curia bureaucrats be expected to cope?
The media firestorm consistently misrepresented the Vatican’s remission of the excommunications as a “reinstatement.” The breakaway prelates are not even heads of titular dioceses, offices which even the lowliest assistant bishop holds. The SSPX bishops are not yet in full obedience to the Pope and certainly need to clarify their adherence to the Second Vatican Council.
Yet despite the preliminary nature of the Pope’s decision, we are treated to stories about a no-name dissident theologian calling for Pope Benedict to step down, Jewish leaders wringing their hands about the future of Catholic-Jewish relations and Catholic U.S. House Democrats cluelessly and shamelessly voicing their “deep concerns” with the Pope’s decision to (there’s that word again) “reinstate” the wayward bishop.
“As such, we seek clarification on this important matter,” say members of the party unapologetically opposed to Catholic teaching on abortion.
To these almost automatic responses, Rabbi Irwin Kula, President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, has written a fine rebuke of similar “over-the-top” reactions.
His Washington Post/Newsweek essay “Jewish Reaction to Pope Disproportionate” describes SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson as “the sort of crabby, crotchety, trivial, unknown sort of jerk - the ratty uncle who embarrasses you every time he is in public -- who we all recognize exists in our communities.”
Rabbi Kula continues:
How is it that the view of some cranky bishop who has no power evokes calls of a crisis in Catholic - Jewish relations despite the revolutionary changes in Church teachings regarding Jews since Vatican II? Where is the "proportionality", where is the giving the benefit of the doubt - a central religious and spiritual imperative - in response to something that is admittedly upsetting but in the scheme of things is less than trivial especially given this Pope's historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way "repented" for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt?
Something is off-kilter here. Is it possible that the leadership of Jewish defense agencies, people with the best of motivation who have historically done critical work in fighting anti-Semitism, have become so possessed by their roles as monitors of anti-Semitism, so haunted by unresolved fears, guilt, and even shame regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps so unconsciously driven by how these issues literally keep their institutions afloat, that they have become incapable of distinguishing between a bishop's ridiculous, loopy, discredited views about the Holocaust and a Church from the Pope down which has clearly and repeatedly recognized the evil done to Jews in the Holocaust and called for that evil to never be forgotten?
Echoing Cardinal O’Malley, the rabbi also criticizes the newfound enthusiasts for excommunication.
He asks: “And isn't it possible that bringing Richard Williamson back inside the Church may actually influence him to see how wrong he is on this issue given how clear the Church is regarding the Holocaust and its commitment to Catholic -Jewish relations?”
Still noting the “very raw and very vulnerable” attitudes towards the Holocaust in the Jewish community, Rabbi Kula then calls on the most hysteric commentators to acknowledge their overreaction.
For that he deserves praise.
Some writers, like Amy Welborn, Ross Douthat, and Sandro Magister have argued the media reaction shows the Vatican’s inability to anticipate and respond to the superficial and often hostile nature of the contemporary news cycle.
Improvements are always possible. The Vatican's unawareness of Williamson's kooky sides is difficult to understand, let alone excuse.
Yet we should remember it is not obvious which stories will produce hostility before the fact. Who could have predicted that the Pope's reference to a Byzantine emperor in a university speech would cause journalistic schadenfreude and Muslim outrage? Or that his brief pre-Christmas discussion of the created order and “gender ideology” would become the central grievance in a homosexualist media crusade?
The dullard’s opportunism in the press, especially concerning Catholicism, is perhaps too capricious even for an expert media relations firm. How can curia bureaucrats be expected to cope?
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Next Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference: March 2009
After a hiatus of one year, the Denver Hopkins Conference returns to Regis University this March 27 – 29.
The conference schedule is here while More information here, while the poet's collected works are reproduced here.
His vivid "Pied Beauty" is a favorite I've committed to memory:
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
The conference schedule is here while More information here, while the poet's collected works are reproduced here.
His vivid "Pied Beauty" is a favorite I've committed to memory:
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
D'Souza vs. Hitchens: The not-that-great debate
Monday’s Religion vs Atheism debate by Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens, summarized at Catholic News Agency, was generally uneventful. Few old arguments were punctured and few new debating points were posed.
While Hitchens brought greater charisma to the stage, neither disputant was a clear winner. By comparison, D’Souza roundly trounced evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett’s pathetic performance in their Tufts meeting.
D’Souza’s approach attempted to open minds of students. Rather than propose a full defense of Christianity, impossible in a short presentation, it merely urged “give Christianity a chance.”
While this method gives D’Souza less to defend, it also leaves him less to explain. His show of arguing only “on secular ground” was an unfortunate limit on the range of debate and discussion, but this limit may be the most realistic approach for addressing an unsympathetic audience.
D’Souza based too much of his argument on ethical appeal. He argued that Christianity brought to Western civilization concern about the individual and the equal dignity of women while laying the foundations necessary for scientific inquiry and the abolition of slavery.
But it is a distortion of Christianity to present it only as an ethical system or a worldview generator. D’Souza rarely mentioned the person of Jesus and his references to sin and salvation were oblique. While ethical excellence and sound worldviews are to be praised, D’Souza presented little for sinners.
Against D’Souza, Hitchens argued religion should by no means be given a chance. The prominent atheist made vigorous mention of the woes of human life, asking why God had apparently not intervened in the some hundred thousand years of pre-historic human misery.
Rather than acknowledge the problem of evil, D’Souza ventured the strange claim that Hitchens faces the difficulty of explaining why human civilization mushroomed in recent millennia, as if it were inspired by “some creature.” He mentioned the sudden sprouting of pyramids and cathedrals and iPhones.
While perhaps he was trying to indicate man’s oddness in relation to the rest of the universe, he did not elaborate this point in an enlightening way.
Conceivably, for D’Souza and many other Christians a technologically primitive but Christian society would be preferable to a technologically advanced but irreligious one. The world of early Scripture is pastoral, where cities are dubious locales and technological marvels, like the Tower of Babel, are a severe temptation to arrogance.
Christianity itself begins not with triumph, but with death and crucifixion followed by supernatural Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. D’Souza and Hitchens both focused more on the effects of Christianity rather than its content and its founder, though D’Souza tended to be worst in his priorities.
One of D’Souza’s bright spots came when explaining why Christianity should be preferred to Islam. The chasm between humanity and the divine, according to D’Souza’s one-minute sally, is attempted to be bridged in Islam or Judaism by building a “ladder” based on religious rules.
In Christian belief, this chasm is resolved by God entering the world through Jesus Christ. This Anselmian brief is exactly what many undergraduates need to hear.
Yet at this point Hitchens made an uncomprehending attempt to equate Mohammed and Jesus simply because they are both sent by God in their believers’ creeds.
Several times Hitchens tried to depict his own strawman misunderstandings of Christian theology as the fault of inconsistencies in Christianity itself. His awkward attempt to attribute to Pope Benedict XVI a strict interpretation of the doctrine “outside the Church no one is saved” met with loud objections from the audience, many of whom were less eager to damn than the Christian caricatures of primetime television are.
Other inconsistencies in Hitchens’ remarks are clear in retrospect. He loudly objected about totalitarianism being an inherent danger posed by religion and characterized divine order as the “celestial dictatorship.” Yet he also complained that the state of the universe meant a “very incompetent, very cruel” God was neglecting to intervene.
He also fretted that religion removes man’s responsibility for himself, but then complained that God did not take the place of someone sick or someone headed to jail.
While such objections are worthy of comment on their own, they easily contradict each other when presented in unison. The atheist can argue that God does too much, or that God does too little, but not both. A God more obviously active in the universe would likely draw Hitchens’ censure as an even more “dictatorial” deity.
Further, if human responsibility is so important, then God’s respect for human autonomy may be active even if it results in death and injustice across generations. The Christian doctrine of original sin, however controverted it is today, insists that our misery results from an ancestral act of sinful autonomy whose consequences are still visited upon us. Adam preferred disobedience to Paradise, and thus shattered our world.
Hitchens in various comments proposed a romantic individualism in which a person must strive to figure out morals and religion for himself. This position provides several practical problems, such as the lack of individual time, the lack of individual wisdom, and the necessity for a moral foundation on which to build. If each person must deduce morals on his own, then the overworked and the dull-witted are doomed to possess only a minimal ethic.
Some forms of individualism praise mountain-climbing while demanding each climber must invent his own tools, cobble his own boots, and discover his own mountain range. (The individualist often was born at high altitude, but acts like he is a native of the lowlands.)
Moral and intellectual dependence upon others cannot be a vice when they are such commonsense necessities.
At one point Hitchens betrayed a clear misunderstanding of narrative voice in Shakespeare. When D’Souza claimed Shakespeare’s moral universe was formed by Christianity, Hitchens recited one of the Bard’s despondent sonnets and asserted it as representative of the man himself.
During the debate D’Souza appealed to the reliability of the early Christian witnesses, arguing they would not have died for a falsehood. Hitchens mentioned Joseph Smith and Mohammed as obvious counterexamples where people died on behalf of liars or delusions.
However, pressed in the question and answer period, he clearly dodged the specifics of early Christianity, preferring to dismiss Christian reports that most of the apostles died in martyrdom. There is a notable difference between those willing to die because they trust a man who claims to be a prophet and those willing to die because they have witnessed in person the resurrected life of a man so obviously dead.
D’Souza closed by noting that he had first met Hitchens after the latter’s essay against abortion appeared in the left-wing magazine The Nation. Hitchens then explained it was “extraordinarily objectionable” to ignore our duties towards the unborn.
This small act of pro-life solidarity was a gift to observers who would otherwise never imagine anti-abortion sentiment among the non-religious.
The best part of the not-so-great debate was visible in the energy of the audience. Over 2,000 people watched the debate from the sold-out seats of CU-Boulder’s massive Macky Auditorium and they were often liberal with their laughter and applause.
Father Kevin Augustyn, pastor of the university parish St. Thomas Aquinas, provided a capable welcome to the audience and gave an overview of the Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. At the event’s close, he also noted that the campus ministry would hold three follow-up Q&A sessions on campus to continue discussion of the debate. (While the first was held Tuesday, the second will be held in Hellems 255 on Wednesday from 7-9 pm, while the third will be held in Hellems 253 on Thursday from 5-7 pm.)
Whoever proposed this follow-up program deserves much praise. So many people need an outlet for their concerns and questions after such an event.
Further speakers in the St. Thomas Aquinas Center’s Spring Lecture Series include Robert Louis Wilken who will lecture on St. Augustine on Feb. 20. Prof. Christopher Tollefsen, co-author of Embyro: a Defense of Human Life, will speak on embryo-destructive research and abortion on April 23.
The most telling phenomenon of the evening was its aftermath. Perhaps two hundred people were gathered in the auditorium’s lobby engaged in lively conversation about the event. After twenty minutes, security had to shoo the crowd into the cold winter night. While there may be a decline of intellectualism, it was not evident that night.
(As every non-profit leader must, Fr. Augustyn has appealed for financial partners and others to assist St. Thomas Aquinas Parish’s ministry to the campus. I repeat his appeal here, giving the program my full endorsement.)
(See also: Eugene McCarraher's review of Hitchens' God is Not Great: This book is not good)
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The weakness of eugenics
With Gov. Sarah Palin’s entry on the national scene came increased national attention those with Down syndrome. Her infant son Trig, a human interest story in his own right, prompted several columnists to use his fame as an opportunity to reflect upon the place of the disabled in U.S. society.
Michael Gerson, for instance, produced Trig’s Breakthrough, a sympathetic piece lamenting the “eugenic abortion” of those sharing the child's genetic disorder. He argued our private decisions end “imperfect” lives in order to “remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence.”
“And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities,” he continued.
Gerson praised Sen. Ted Kennedy’s co-sponsorship of a bill that would have required medical professionals to provide more information on the lives of those with Down syndrome.
But he then turned critical:
These are strong words that no self-described liberal can honestly avoid.
A similarly polemical 2007 Gerson column notes that James Watson was also happy to claim the Down’s syndrome child “has no future.”
Gerson rebukes this sentiment driving eugenic selection: “This kind of ‘choice’ is actually a form of absolute power of one generation over the next -- the power to forever define what is ‘normal,’ ‘straight’ and ‘beautiful’.”
His concern for the disabled and the otherwise abnormal is noble, but his analysis exaggerates the power of a single generation of mortals.
We find no exaggeration in Gerson’s belief that the advancement of eugenics “creates an inevitable tension within liberalism” because “the left in America positions itself as both the defender of egalitarianism and of unrestricted science.”
Gerson exhorts the left to “choose human equality over the pursuit of human perfection” and reject the Eugenics temptation.
But here his use of the language of liberalism misleads. Clearly perfection or its approximation should be preferred to equality much of the time. Accomplished performers in art, athletics, or science are to be applauded. Eugenicists exploit with ease this egalitarian unwillingness to make distinctions.
Gerson’s case would be complemented by the argument that spiritual perfection is preferable to so-called biological perfection. Better souls and better societies are formed through accommodating, and not eradicating, the weakest among us. The shunning of the disabled not only violates another person’s integrity; it mistakes physical flaws for moral flaws.
Such moral flaws were displayed in the writings of another Trig Palin commentator, Robert Tracinski, who profiled Gov. Palin at RealClearPolitics.com.
“The one clear indication we have as to the degree of [Palin’s] religious commitment is the fact that she is opposed to abortion in all cases,” he wrote. “…we know she means it because she chose to give birth to her youngest child even though she knew from genetic testing that it would have Down Syndrome, a severe form of mental retardation.”
From there Tracinski quickly descended into monstrosity. He added:
Intelligent children often go through a phase in which they rage against the stupidity of humanity. Barring some mutation in conscience, they abandon this pose by late adolescence. By adulthood, they should realize it is not the innately dull-witted who deserve criticism and even contempt; rather, those most dangerous to the world are they who pride themselves on their own overestimated intelligence.
In other words, those like Tracinski.
In this case, Tracinski does not represent some declension of Democratic liberalism. He is the editor of the “Objectivist” Intellectual Activist.
His September 22 column on Sarah and Trig Palin marks his last appearance on RealClearPolitics.com. We may hope this is not a coincidence.
How will such a man react when he is robbed of clear thought by some disease or when he recognizes in himself the first signs of senility? With enraged mock-stoic suicide, perhaps, thus taking his distortion of man’s “essential characteristic” to one of its many fatal conclusions.
Let this be a memento mori: disdain for the weak ultimately results in self-hatred.
Michael Gerson, for instance, produced Trig’s Breakthrough, a sympathetic piece lamenting the “eugenic abortion” of those sharing the child's genetic disorder. He argued our private decisions end “imperfect” lives in order to “remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence.”
“And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities,” he continued.
“By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption – ‘Didn't you get an amnio?’ -- and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.
Gerson praised Sen. Ted Kennedy’s co-sponsorship of a bill that would have required medical professionals to provide more information on the lives of those with Down syndrome.
But he then turned critical:
Yet the pro-choice radicalism held by Kennedy and many others -- the absolute elevation of individual autonomy over the rights of the weak -- has enabled the new eugenics. It has also created a moral conflict at the heart of the Democratic Party. If traditional Democratic ideology means anything, it is the assertion that America is a single moral community that includes everyone. How can this vision possibly be reconciled with the elimination of children with Down syndrome from American society? Are pro-choice Democrats really comfortable with this choice?
These are strong words that no self-described liberal can honestly avoid.
A similarly polemical 2007 Gerson column notes that James Watson was also happy to claim the Down’s syndrome child “has no future.”
Gerson rebukes this sentiment driving eugenic selection: “This kind of ‘choice’ is actually a form of absolute power of one generation over the next -- the power to forever define what is ‘normal,’ ‘straight’ and ‘beautiful’.”
His concern for the disabled and the otherwise abnormal is noble, but his analysis exaggerates the power of a single generation of mortals.
We find no exaggeration in Gerson’s belief that the advancement of eugenics “creates an inevitable tension within liberalism” because “the left in America positions itself as both the defender of egalitarianism and of unrestricted science.”
Gerson exhorts the left to “choose human equality over the pursuit of human perfection” and reject the Eugenics temptation.
But here his use of the language of liberalism misleads. Clearly perfection or its approximation should be preferred to equality much of the time. Accomplished performers in art, athletics, or science are to be applauded. Eugenicists exploit with ease this egalitarian unwillingness to make distinctions.
Gerson’s case would be complemented by the argument that spiritual perfection is preferable to so-called biological perfection. Better souls and better societies are formed through accommodating, and not eradicating, the weakest among us. The shunning of the disabled not only violates another person’s integrity; it mistakes physical flaws for moral flaws.
Such moral flaws were displayed in the writings of another Trig Palin commentator, Robert Tracinski, who profiled Gov. Palin at RealClearPolitics.com.
“The one clear indication we have as to the degree of [Palin’s] religious commitment is the fact that she is opposed to abortion in all cases,” he wrote. “…we know she means it because she chose to give birth to her youngest child even though she knew from genetic testing that it would have Down Syndrome, a severe form of mental retardation.”
From there Tracinski quickly descended into monstrosity. He added:
“This fact does reveal a profoundly faith-driven outlook, because it illuminates Palin's implicit attitude toward reason and the intellect. The joy of having a child is watching it grow and develop on its way to becoming an independent adult capable of enjoying a full human life. This is why parents rejoice in every new discovery the child makes along the way--his first steps, his first words, the first time he figures out how to open up and rifle through your filing cabinets while you're trying to work (but I digress). The tragedy of giving birth to a mentally disabled child is that he will never complete this journey. He will never become an independent adult or develop a full use of the faculty that is man's essential characteristic: his reasoning mind. To knowingly choose to bring such a child into the world is evidence that the precepts of her faith take precedence over the value of the mind in Palin's view of the world.”
Intelligent children often go through a phase in which they rage against the stupidity of humanity. Barring some mutation in conscience, they abandon this pose by late adolescence. By adulthood, they should realize it is not the innately dull-witted who deserve criticism and even contempt; rather, those most dangerous to the world are they who pride themselves on their own overestimated intelligence.
In other words, those like Tracinski.
In this case, Tracinski does not represent some declension of Democratic liberalism. He is the editor of the “Objectivist” Intellectual Activist.
His September 22 column on Sarah and Trig Palin marks his last appearance on RealClearPolitics.com. We may hope this is not a coincidence.
How will such a man react when he is robbed of clear thought by some disease or when he recognizes in himself the first signs of senility? With enraged mock-stoic suicide, perhaps, thus taking his distortion of man’s “essential characteristic” to one of its many fatal conclusions.
Let this be a memento mori: disdain for the weak ultimately results in self-hatred.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Hitchens and D'Souza to debate religion at CU-Boulder
CNA reports:
Tickets are required and are available at Tickets West. For more information, see the sponsoring St. Thomas Aquinas Center, which hopes to fill CU-Boulder's massive Macky Auditorium.
"Atheism vs. Religion" isn't a promising subtitle. The varieties of religion are such that defining, let alone defending, the category is difficult.
These kinds of debates are best focused on specific religious traditions.
(To read my reaction to the debate, Click Here)
Two influential speakers will face off at the University of Colorado in a debate titled: "What’s so Great About God? – Atheism vs. Religion." The debate, organized by the school’s Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, will feature Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens presenting their cases for and against organized religion, its influence on world history and impact on current events.
The debate is scheduled to take place on Monday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Organizers are expecting a crowd of 2,000 to hear Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; and Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity to debate the impact of religion on society.
Tickets are required and are available at Tickets West. For more information, see the sponsoring St. Thomas Aquinas Center, which hopes to fill CU-Boulder's massive Macky Auditorium.
"Atheism vs. Religion" isn't a promising subtitle. The varieties of religion are such that defining, let alone defending, the category is difficult.
These kinds of debates are best focused on specific religious traditions.
(To read my reaction to the debate, Click Here)
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Apollo 8's 1968 Christmas Message
Forty years ago, broadcasting from lunar orbit, the astronauts William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman read the first ten lines of Genesis in a live television broadcast.
Writing from the good Earth, forty years later, I too wish a Merry Christmas to you all!
Writing from the good Earth, forty years later, I too wish a Merry Christmas to you all!
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Happy days ahead
Looking at my posting statistics, I was surprised to find that 2008 marks the least active year for Philokalia Republic since its first year in 2002. There are perhaps a dozen half-finished posts in the queue and perhaps five dozen blog comment debates I’ve started but never completed.
I thank my long-time readers for continuing to patronize this blog, and I assure newcomers that more productive days lay ahead.
For friends, acquaintances, and strangers curious about my situation, I offer the following explanation in a spirit more of bewildered amusement than of self-pity.
My surprise healing two years ago was followed by an intense ear infection, a bruised facial nerve from a foolish attempt at pain relief, a jaw cramp, and later a full body cramp following an unwise decision to ignore my stiff body’s warnings and push a stalled car.
Adequate attention from medical professionals probably would have addressed this problem. Unfortunately, my complaints were ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed.
One year ago I was quite optimistic. This was in part because even minor advances made me feel like normality was in reach.
Feeling like a character in a Far Side cartoon, I fear my guardian angel has been baiting the Almighty into pressing the Smite button.
As it is, I have been stretching to the point of distraction with little benefit for the past year. I have only received competent expert attention in the past two months.
However, the immense improvement in recent weeks has left me cursed with the hope that 2009 will be my year of return to full-time work. Yes, right when the economy has tanked.
So I ask for your prayers for the New Year, that I may be free from spite and from stiffness, and that a redemption may result from this persistent, if minor, cross.
And again, I thank you for reading.
I thank my long-time readers for continuing to patronize this blog, and I assure newcomers that more productive days lay ahead.
For friends, acquaintances, and strangers curious about my situation, I offer the following explanation in a spirit more of bewildered amusement than of self-pity.
My surprise healing two years ago was followed by an intense ear infection, a bruised facial nerve from a foolish attempt at pain relief, a jaw cramp, and later a full body cramp following an unwise decision to ignore my stiff body’s warnings and push a stalled car.
Adequate attention from medical professionals probably would have addressed this problem. Unfortunately, my complaints were ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed.
One year ago I was quite optimistic. This was in part because even minor advances made me feel like normality was in reach.
Feeling like a character in a Far Side cartoon, I fear my guardian angel has been baiting the Almighty into pressing the Smite button.
As it is, I have been stretching to the point of distraction with little benefit for the past year. I have only received competent expert attention in the past two months.
However, the immense improvement in recent weeks has left me cursed with the hope that 2009 will be my year of return to full-time work. Yes, right when the economy has tanked.
So I ask for your prayers for the New Year, that I may be free from spite and from stiffness, and that a redemption may result from this persistent, if minor, cross.
And again, I thank you for reading.
Friday, December 19, 2008
'Critical Thinking' is making us stupid II
Perhaps R.R. Reno and Patrick Deneen have been reading each other.
In his November entry Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking Deneen echoes Reno's concerns about that educational buzzword and its admirers.
Likewise lamenting critical thinking's self-exemption from critique, he delivers a reflection on the "Canon Wars" of the 1980s:
As I see it, both Deneen and Reno suggest critical thinking is the preferred educational method of a simplifying globalist or careerist ideology:
Deneen, a professor of political science at Georgetown, goes on to examine the effects of "critical thinking" on Catholic higher education and its relevance to debates on academic freedom.
He also suggests how the concept can be redeemed through its self-application in, and not against, the context of a vigorous Catholic education.
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For a less intellectual, more conspiracy-minded attack on critical thinking, there is Dealing with Resisters.
It is notable for its attacks on Rev. Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Church:
In the selective portrayal of this site, Warren is a "change agent" who has traded Christianity for managerial techniques.
This critic has a point. What kind of preacher gives this kind of advice:
Church growth advocates are indeed paralleling the personal growth advocates we see in education schools and daytime talk shows, not to mention the financial advice columns.
Behind all this "critical thinking" does there lurk the malign influence of the MBA?
In his November entry Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking Deneen echoes Reno's concerns about that educational buzzword and its admirers.
Likewise lamenting critical thinking's self-exemption from critique, he delivers a reflection on the "Canon Wars" of the 1980s:
...those debates have been decidedly won by the party that was ultimately devoted not to an alternative curriculum, but to its absence. What was sought was not the abandonment of certain books in favor of certain other books, but the abandonment of the idea that there were normative standards or moral lessons that could be drawn from books at all. What was sought was the defeat of the idea of education that involved moral formation based upon an inherited tradition discoverable by inquiry and reflection encouraged by the reading of great books, and instead its replacement by an ideal of a free-floating liberated “subject” who was capable of “thinking critically” about any and all subjects except the basic presuppositions of what constituted “critical thinking” and associated substantive commitments.
As I see it, both Deneen and Reno suggest critical thinking is the preferred educational method of a simplifying globalist or careerist ideology:
“Critical thinking” is a form of intentional deracination and displacement. Its basic assumption is that students enter college or university with a set of under-explored moral commitments that they have inherited from the broader culture...
The implicit opposite of “critical thinking” is faith, understood as an unreflective set of commitments to pre- or anti-rational beliefs. An education in critical thinking takes on the appearance of contentless inquiry, but is in fact deeply informed by a considerable set of Enlightenment beliefs, including the effort to inculcate deracinated reason, a conception of the individual as a monadic “self,” antipathy to culture and religion, philosophical skepticism, a deep-seated materialism, and a devotion to a cosmopolitan outlook that permits one to be comfortable everywhere and nowhere in particular.
[...]
The charge to engage in limitless and even promiscuous forms of critical thinking runs up against a basic feature and aim of Catholic teaching: that there is a limit on what can be critically regarded.
Deneen, a professor of political science at Georgetown, goes on to examine the effects of "critical thinking" on Catholic higher education and its relevance to debates on academic freedom.
He also suggests how the concept can be redeemed through its self-application in, and not against, the context of a vigorous Catholic education.
-------
For a less intellectual, more conspiracy-minded attack on critical thinking, there is Dealing with Resisters.
It is notable for its attacks on Rev. Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Church:
Don’t minimize the significant parallel between the school [of critical thinking] and the purpose-driven church. The words and phrases used by the two systems may differ at times, but the manipulative management methods and change processes are the same. Both fit into the “seamless” structure of the global management system. Both would agree that it’s okay to criticize and tear down the old ways of thinking and believing. But it’s not okay to criticize the global vision for a utopian future or the march toward solidarity in a new world order.
In the selective portrayal of this site, Warren is a "change agent" who has traded Christianity for managerial techniques.
This critic has a point. What kind of preacher gives this kind of advice:
When a human body is out of balance we call that disease... Likewise, when the body of Christ becomes unbalanced, disease occurs... Health will occur only when everything is brought back into balance. The task of church leadership is to discover and remove growth-restricting diseases and barriers so that natural, normal growth can occur.
Church growth advocates are indeed paralleling the personal growth advocates we see in education schools and daytime talk shows, not to mention the financial advice columns.
Behind all this "critical thinking" does there lurk the malign influence of the MBA?
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
'Critical Thinking' is making us stupid
Back in September, Creighton University’s Prof. R.R. Reno lectured at the University of Colorado at Boulder, discussing how “critical thinking” can actually corrupt intellectual life.
Of course, this is counterintuitive on its face. What intelligent person doesn’t want to be a critic in some area of expertise?
But Reno, with depth and insight, subjected critical thinking itself to criticism.
He began his lecture by asking whether relativism is truly an affliction of academic life. Obviously not all standards are rejected. Excellence in sports and a modicum of ethical standards are widely acknowledged among all. The faculty judge and rank both students and peers by the standards of their specialty.
Yet these standards are not shared between disciplines. In part, this is because few generalists are capable of truly inter-disciplinary work. Further, the standards of one field of inquiry by nature cannot be the same in another.
This lack of communication helps to fracture intellectual life. This sometimes results in relativism, and other times in scientism.
In Reno’s telling, scientism is the order of the day. While the methods of science are fantastically powerful within its own domain, mistaken efforts at duplicating its success in other fields results in the decline of wisdom and any other integrating intellectual force.
One specialty of scientific reasoning is analysis—which we should remember literally means “breaking-up.” In applied science, nature is analyzed in order to be manipulated for the advancement of both research and economic profit.
“Critical thinking,” in Reno’s understanding, treats societies, persons and artistic works also as something to be analyzed and understood in terms of cultural, psychological, economic, and even biological processes. This places the student in a position of being a critical “master” of all cultures, rather than a participant in and beneficiary of a culture.
This position dovetails with globalist or careerist goals of emancipating people from economic poverty and common social restrictions by displacing indigenous cultures, including our own.
As Reno wrote in an earlier essay on the First Things web site:
(Worrisomely, this sounds like descriptions of President-elect Obama and many another politician: while appearing considerate towards an interlocutor’s objections, he will size her up and make conciliatory comments meant to please but also to silence, after which he will proceed to do what he already had planned.)
In his remarks at CU-Boulder, Reno said the poor state of critical thinking is a result of rejecting or twisting the virtue of docility, that is, the virtue of being easily taught.
If Reno’s critique is accurate, our system of education actually hinders people from being touched and enlightened by people, cultures, and works they wrongly presume already to understand.
While Churchill and Lincoln, to take two examples, are overly revered, too many students arrogantly act like the great men’s intellectual and political superiors simply because they can tell a story in which both figures are products of processes and biases beyond their own control.
This presumption extends to whole fields of academic study.
Under a malign form of critical thinking, ethics is re-envisioned as merely an evolutionary survival strategy, religion is discarded as a psychological eruption, and great art is sidelined as a product of oppressive, pre-critical societies.
For “critical thinking,” reverence is an obstacle to thinking. (Note the renaming of theology departments as departments of religious studies.)
Students of such a method, which is better called a style, find themselves sealed off from wisdom.
“Nearly two centuries ago, John Henry Newman saw that it was a conceit of the modern age that truth may be approached without homage,” Reno writes at First Things. “The mechanisms of critique destroy piety and in so doing diminish our capacity to love and obey truth once found. Moreover, as John Paul II pointed out again and again, responsible human freedom is not possible outside a more basic loyalty to the commands that can come to us only in and through culture.”
Can critical thinking be saved from itself? Perhaps not.
But the best form of inquiry begins with taking reality as a given, that is, as a gift. And as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, one never receives a gift in a critical spirit.
Such an intellectual life is perhaps not an exercise in critical thinking, but so much the worse for critical thinking.
Docility in studies is far more compatible with thanksgiving, a word which some Christians will recognize in its Greek form: Eucharist.
In this confluence, we see how religion does not oppose but assists intellectual inquiry. Rightly practiced, the worshiper’s docile openness to God can reveal self, man and the world to him.
Recall Jesus’ words in John 8: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”
---------
While Reno’s advocacy for reviving the virtue of docility is certainly necessary, there are a few curricular changes which may better instill and nourish rational capabilities in students than our present system does.
First, students should be educated in grammar and language to increase their ability to express themselves and to understand others. Second, they ought to be educated both in recognizing logical fallacies and in correcting or rejecting bad logic. Third, they should be schooled in making and analyzing arguments, instead of learning how to dissect societies which they cannot yet understand.
Students must abdicate any presumptive position as a “master of culture” and become students of an actual tradition, rather than devotees of a cultural analysis of that tradition.
By an unintended coincidence, these curricular recommendations mirror the Trivium of the early European university. But this allows us happy clarity about in which actual tradition students ought to receive their education.
-------
Reno’s CU-Boulder lecture was followed by some memorable interactions with the audience, a largely Catholic one which had gathered under the auspices of the Thomas Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought.
One young co-ed, self-professedly ill-equipped to wrestle with the content of his speech, asked Reno a general question about how students might bring passion to their indifferent campus.
“I think there is far too much passion as it is,” was the wry gist of Reno’s reply. “Aren’t you sick of people being in your face about everything?”
Another student question depicted the local Catholic parish as being a welcome outpost of certitude in the wilderness of college confusion. With gentle and sympathetic mockery, Reno rebuked this sentiment for its pretense.
Ridiculing the image of The Lone Torchbearer of Truth in a Cave of Darkness (while also confessing his desire to be such a torchbearer himself) Reno reminded the student questioner that he should acknowledge his own inner doubts and be wary of false certitude.
Reno brought students and others in the audience to recognize some flaws in the modern university while also guiding the youngest to shed their more naïve opinions. For an inaugural lecture, it is hard to ask more.
Of course, this is counterintuitive on its face. What intelligent person doesn’t want to be a critic in some area of expertise?
But Reno, with depth and insight, subjected critical thinking itself to criticism.
He began his lecture by asking whether relativism is truly an affliction of academic life. Obviously not all standards are rejected. Excellence in sports and a modicum of ethical standards are widely acknowledged among all. The faculty judge and rank both students and peers by the standards of their specialty.
Yet these standards are not shared between disciplines. In part, this is because few generalists are capable of truly inter-disciplinary work. Further, the standards of one field of inquiry by nature cannot be the same in another.
This lack of communication helps to fracture intellectual life. This sometimes results in relativism, and other times in scientism.
In Reno’s telling, scientism is the order of the day. While the methods of science are fantastically powerful within its own domain, mistaken efforts at duplicating its success in other fields results in the decline of wisdom and any other integrating intellectual force.
One specialty of scientific reasoning is analysis—which we should remember literally means “breaking-up.” In applied science, nature is analyzed in order to be manipulated for the advancement of both research and economic profit.
“Critical thinking,” in Reno’s understanding, treats societies, persons and artistic works also as something to be analyzed and understood in terms of cultural, psychological, economic, and even biological processes. This places the student in a position of being a critical “master” of all cultures, rather than a participant in and beneficiary of a culture.
This position dovetails with globalist or careerist goals of emancipating people from economic poverty and common social restrictions by displacing indigenous cultures, including our own.
As Reno wrote in an earlier essay on the First Things web site:
"The basic existential thrust of postmodern cultural study is to relax the power of any particular culture over the minds of students. The goal is obvious. A Harvard man or woman is not to be a member of a culture. He or she navigates cultures. With a critical grasp of the factory of meaning, he or she sets about to oversee production...
“Will a person in a position of power who ‘reads’ his fellow man, rather than listening to what he actually says, end up manipulating rather than serving?"
(Worrisomely, this sounds like descriptions of President-elect Obama and many another politician: while appearing considerate towards an interlocutor’s objections, he will size her up and make conciliatory comments meant to please but also to silence, after which he will proceed to do what he already had planned.)
In his remarks at CU-Boulder, Reno said the poor state of critical thinking is a result of rejecting or twisting the virtue of docility, that is, the virtue of being easily taught.
If Reno’s critique is accurate, our system of education actually hinders people from being touched and enlightened by people, cultures, and works they wrongly presume already to understand.
While Churchill and Lincoln, to take two examples, are overly revered, too many students arrogantly act like the great men’s intellectual and political superiors simply because they can tell a story in which both figures are products of processes and biases beyond their own control.
This presumption extends to whole fields of academic study.
Under a malign form of critical thinking, ethics is re-envisioned as merely an evolutionary survival strategy, religion is discarded as a psychological eruption, and great art is sidelined as a product of oppressive, pre-critical societies.
For “critical thinking,” reverence is an obstacle to thinking. (Note the renaming of theology departments as departments of religious studies.)
Students of such a method, which is better called a style, find themselves sealed off from wisdom.
“Nearly two centuries ago, John Henry Newman saw that it was a conceit of the modern age that truth may be approached without homage,” Reno writes at First Things. “The mechanisms of critique destroy piety and in so doing diminish our capacity to love and obey truth once found. Moreover, as John Paul II pointed out again and again, responsible human freedom is not possible outside a more basic loyalty to the commands that can come to us only in and through culture.”
Can critical thinking be saved from itself? Perhaps not.
But the best form of inquiry begins with taking reality as a given, that is, as a gift. And as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, one never receives a gift in a critical spirit.
Such an intellectual life is perhaps not an exercise in critical thinking, but so much the worse for critical thinking.
Docility in studies is far more compatible with thanksgiving, a word which some Christians will recognize in its Greek form: Eucharist.
In this confluence, we see how religion does not oppose but assists intellectual inquiry. Rightly practiced, the worshiper’s docile openness to God can reveal self, man and the world to him.
Recall Jesus’ words in John 8: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”
---------
While Reno’s advocacy for reviving the virtue of docility is certainly necessary, there are a few curricular changes which may better instill and nourish rational capabilities in students than our present system does.
First, students should be educated in grammar and language to increase their ability to express themselves and to understand others. Second, they ought to be educated both in recognizing logical fallacies and in correcting or rejecting bad logic. Third, they should be schooled in making and analyzing arguments, instead of learning how to dissect societies which they cannot yet understand.
Students must abdicate any presumptive position as a “master of culture” and become students of an actual tradition, rather than devotees of a cultural analysis of that tradition.
By an unintended coincidence, these curricular recommendations mirror the Trivium of the early European university. But this allows us happy clarity about in which actual tradition students ought to receive their education.
-------
Reno’s CU-Boulder lecture was followed by some memorable interactions with the audience, a largely Catholic one which had gathered under the auspices of the Thomas Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought.
One young co-ed, self-professedly ill-equipped to wrestle with the content of his speech, asked Reno a general question about how students might bring passion to their indifferent campus.
“I think there is far too much passion as it is,” was the wry gist of Reno’s reply. “Aren’t you sick of people being in your face about everything?”
Another student question depicted the local Catholic parish as being a welcome outpost of certitude in the wilderness of college confusion. With gentle and sympathetic mockery, Reno rebuked this sentiment for its pretense.
Ridiculing the image of The Lone Torchbearer of Truth in a Cave of Darkness (while also confessing his desire to be such a torchbearer himself) Reno reminded the student questioner that he should acknowledge his own inner doubts and be wary of false certitude.
Reno brought students and others in the audience to recognize some flaws in the modern university while also guiding the youngest to shed their more naïve opinions. For an inaugural lecture, it is hard to ask more.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Newsweek embarrasses itself with 'biblical' gay marriage essay
Lisa Miller’s amateurish Newsweek opinion piece arguing for a Biblical basis for same-sex “marriage” has deservedly attracted much criticism. Miller’s essay, Our Mutual Joy was an easy takedown.
Representative of the quality of her argument is this passage: “It probably goes without saying that the phrase ‘gay marriage’ does not appear in the Bible at all.”
That “probably” is an unintentional, comical touch. The ancient Hebrews were more advanced than we are in this respect: they didn’t waste time tiresomely pondering whether a man and a man or a woman and a woman could marry each other.
GetReligion.org’s Mollie Hemingway penned two capable critiques, Sola scriptura minus the scriptura and What’s the Standard?
The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison also weighed in concerning Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s vacuous remarks expressing his poor theology.
Courtesy of Baylor University’s Prof. Francis Beckwith, who notes other good responses, we find Rob Bowman’s solid critique at Religious Researcher.
Bowman particularly responds to Miller’s dismissive remarks about Leviticus.
Gay activists cite Leviticus with frequency and stupidity. Using analysis fit only for a bumper sticker, they cite the only passage they know: one which forbids shellfish.
Miller follows their shallow example, writing: “Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?”
Bowman responds:
He charges that the main problem with Miller’s “stock objection" to Leviticus' teaching about homosexual conduct "is not that it pays attention to their context but that it does not pay sufficient, close attention to their context.”
Miller's appeal to the "length" of biblical passages as a measure of their authority is also sophomoric. The gravity of the acts under discussion was so obvious to their audience that the biblical authors would have had no need to go into the obscene details.
The journalistic take on Miller’s essay is also devastating.
“It is no exaggeration to say the piece was an embarrassment,” remarked GetReligion.org’s Mollie Hemingway. She said pieces like Miller’s essay have helped make Newsweek “more or less the laughingstock of the journalism world.”
Referencing Miller’s essay, she accused Newsweek editor Jon Meacham of “trading journalism for hackery and propaganda."
"There was precisely no one provoked to think in any meaningful sense by that last cover story. People were simply provoked to drop subscriptions or otherwise think less of Newsweek. It didn’t engage the Scriptural arguments in favor of traditional marriage fairly or honestly. The only people who would even remotely enjoy that story or find it thoughtful are people who were already inclined to believe it.”
While Newsweek has acknowledged its critics, it remains to be seen whether it will provide a platform for a competent advocate of marriage as a union between man and woman.
As evidence this platform might not be forthcoming, we note comments made at the annual conference of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, held in Washington, D.C. in August.
There David Waters, editor of the “On Faith” blog which appears on the Newsweek web site, urged reporters to avoid prominent Christian leaders and focus only on “real people.”
According to the Culture and Media Institute, at the conference “the discussion quickly degenerated into a seminar on how journalists can ‘conquer’ the religion debate to advance the homosexual political agenda.”
Waters remarked:
People who are “struggling with this issue” are people of no clear opinion. Waters advocates shutting out those clearly opposed to his agenda, a plausible but wicked strategy. He would make the muddle-headed out to be moderates and reserve clarity only for his political allies in advocacy, who could then define the range of acceptable debate.
Another speaker at the conference, defrocked United Methodist minister Jimmy Creech, advised that journalists not make themselves “complicit” in popularizing the comments of religious leaders Creech considers to be “fringe” and “radical.”
Newsweek is quickly learning that there are real people who are not “struggling with this issue” and who don’t want to pay for predictable and poorly-argued religious opinions (which blogs provide for free).
Its future does not look bright.
Last year, the magazine cut its subscriber number guarantees to advertisers from 3.1 million to 2.6 million. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Newsweek “could subtract anywhere from 500,000 to one million copies from its current guarantee of 2.6 million.”
They say money follows quality. Judging from recent events, Newsweek is missing both.
Addendum:
Newsweek's website has posted a response, awkwardly titled
No Case for Homosexuality in Bible, written by Joseph Bottum, John Mark Reynolds, and Bruce D. Porter. Will Newsweek publish this in its print edition?
Representative of the quality of her argument is this passage: “It probably goes without saying that the phrase ‘gay marriage’ does not appear in the Bible at all.”
That “probably” is an unintentional, comical touch. The ancient Hebrews were more advanced than we are in this respect: they didn’t waste time tiresomely pondering whether a man and a man or a woman and a woman could marry each other.
GetReligion.org’s Mollie Hemingway penned two capable critiques, Sola scriptura minus the scriptura and What’s the Standard?
The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison also weighed in concerning Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s vacuous remarks expressing his poor theology.
Courtesy of Baylor University’s Prof. Francis Beckwith, who notes other good responses, we find Rob Bowman’s solid critique at Religious Researcher.
Bowman particularly responds to Miller’s dismissive remarks about Leviticus.
Gay activists cite Leviticus with frequency and stupidity. Using analysis fit only for a bumper sticker, they cite the only passage they know: one which forbids shellfish.
Miller follows their shallow example, writing: “Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?”
Bowman responds:
In the very chapters condemning homosexual acts (in 18:22 and 20:13), Leviticus also condemns incest (18:6-18; 20:11-12, 14, 17, 19-21), adultery (18:20; 20:10), child-sacrifice (18:21; 20:2-5), and bestiality (18:23; 20:15-16). The texts condemning homosexual acts are sandwiched immediately between texts condemning child-sacrifice and bestiality in chapter 18 (18:21-23) and between texts condemning different types of incest in chapter 20 (20:12-14).
In the intervening chapter, Leviticus contains what used to be its most famous injunction: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18), quoted by Jesus as the second of the two greatest commandments (Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:31, 33; cf. Luke 10:27).
He charges that the main problem with Miller’s “stock objection" to Leviticus' teaching about homosexual conduct "is not that it pays attention to their context but that it does not pay sufficient, close attention to their context.”
Miller's appeal to the "length" of biblical passages as a measure of their authority is also sophomoric. The gravity of the acts under discussion was so obvious to their audience that the biblical authors would have had no need to go into the obscene details.
The journalistic take on Miller’s essay is also devastating.
“It is no exaggeration to say the piece was an embarrassment,” remarked GetReligion.org’s Mollie Hemingway. She said pieces like Miller’s essay have helped make Newsweek “more or less the laughingstock of the journalism world.”
Referencing Miller’s essay, she accused Newsweek editor Jon Meacham of “trading journalism for hackery and propaganda."
"There was precisely no one provoked to think in any meaningful sense by that last cover story. People were simply provoked to drop subscriptions or otherwise think less of Newsweek. It didn’t engage the Scriptural arguments in favor of traditional marriage fairly or honestly. The only people who would even remotely enjoy that story or find it thoughtful are people who were already inclined to believe it.”
While Newsweek has acknowledged its critics, it remains to be seen whether it will provide a platform for a competent advocate of marriage as a union between man and woman.
As evidence this platform might not be forthcoming, we note comments made at the annual conference of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, held in Washington, D.C. in August.
There David Waters, editor of the “On Faith” blog which appears on the Newsweek web site, urged reporters to avoid prominent Christian leaders and focus only on “real people.”
According to the Culture and Media Institute, at the conference “the discussion quickly degenerated into a seminar on how journalists can ‘conquer’ the religion debate to advance the homosexual political agenda.”
Waters remarked:
I think, as journalists, our No. 1 obligation is obviously to the truth, and if we’re going to be about the truth then we have to fight and we have to fight for space and for time to tell the right story and to tell the real story, and I think the best way to go about that, at least I’ve found in my experience with my own reporting and with other reporters, is to take time and not go to the Pat Robertsons and the James Dobsons of the world but to find the real people who are really struggling with this issue.
People who are “struggling with this issue” are people of no clear opinion. Waters advocates shutting out those clearly opposed to his agenda, a plausible but wicked strategy. He would make the muddle-headed out to be moderates and reserve clarity only for his political allies in advocacy, who could then define the range of acceptable debate.
Another speaker at the conference, defrocked United Methodist minister Jimmy Creech, advised that journalists not make themselves “complicit” in popularizing the comments of religious leaders Creech considers to be “fringe” and “radical.”
Newsweek is quickly learning that there are real people who are not “struggling with this issue” and who don’t want to pay for predictable and poorly-argued religious opinions (which blogs provide for free).
Its future does not look bright.
Last year, the magazine cut its subscriber number guarantees to advertisers from 3.1 million to 2.6 million. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Newsweek “could subtract anywhere from 500,000 to one million copies from its current guarantee of 2.6 million.”
They say money follows quality. Judging from recent events, Newsweek is missing both.
Addendum:
Newsweek's website has posted a response, awkwardly titled
No Case for Homosexuality in Bible, written by Joseph Bottum, John Mark Reynolds, and Bruce D. Porter. Will Newsweek publish this in its print edition?
Monday, December 08, 2008
Counting hate crimes, one year after the shooting stopped
This Tuesday marks the anniversary of the attacks on the Youth with a Mission dormitory (not three miles from my Arvada home) and New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Had Matthew Murray not been stopped by a security guard’s bullet, the number of victims slain could have reached the double digits.
Some of us went to church that Sunday evening wondering if the violence was over. “Could an unknown accomplice of the shooter be prepared to add Christian blood to Christian worship?” we thought to ourselves.
In the attacks’ aftermath, the killer’s self-pitying laments and his and Christian-hating rants posted to the internet attracted considerable media attention.
The media narrative soon focused upon his strict upbringing, too often granting prima facie credibility to Murray’s self-serving claims to have been warped in childhood by his Pentecostal parents.
A former roommate’s comments also helped media dismiss the gunman as mentally disturbed.
Last December I intuited that Murray’s reported claim to hear voices was meant to entertain himself and shock his peers. Reports that he claimed to have committed a sexual assault for “shock value” only confirm me in that opinion.
For those of us unable to ignore the attack as a mere psychological eruption, Murray’s own words linger.
“You Christians brought this on yourselves!” read one of his messages posted between attacks. Another declared “Christian America… this is YOUR Columbine!”
There is no question of his malice, and there is no question about whom it targets.
Thus it is disturbing to discover that Murray’s crimes were never classified as hate crimes in the reports of both the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. This despite the FBI’s definition of a hate crime as one that is motivated “in whole or in part” by bias against a religion or other protected categories.
Catholic News Agency quotes a sergeant at the Colorado Springs Police Department who said “I think that the general feeling [at the department] was that it was not so much bias but retaliation.”
It is easy to criticize police officials for not checking the right boxes on a report after they’ve explored the mind of an aspiring mass murderer. However, had an ex-Muslim shot up a mosque while ranting about the evils of Islam, it is hard to believe his murders would not be classified as hate crimes.
In my view, hate crimes should not stand in their own legal category. Difficulties in establishing motive are obvious, while any necessary penalties may be assessed in sentencing based upon prosecutorial or judicial discretion.
But state and national statistics concerning bias crimes are used to understand good and bad trends in society. If we must have such statistics, we should at least insist they be minimally consistent. That’s the whole purpose of the FBI’s Unified Crime Report.
Minority groups such as Jews are understandably very vigilant about bias crimes. This vigilance is perhaps not shared by people from more popular denominations, who are more likely to dismiss various crimes as outliers rather than consider them a portent of something worse.
Local officers too might think with such habits. Are bias crimes against well-populated religious denominations more likely to be underreported because they are not “vulnerable” minorities? That’s a story in itself.
New Life Church has a national profile, but that doesn’t render it impervious to hate crimes. In fact, the prominence and the criminal antics of its disgraced former pastor Ted Haggard probably made the attacks more likely.
But Haggard should not distract us from those who died.
Murray attacked strangers who had nothing more than a religious affiliation in common. If Murray’s murders do not qualify as hate crimes, it is hard for the lay observer to say what would.
Some of us went to church that Sunday evening wondering if the violence was over. “Could an unknown accomplice of the shooter be prepared to add Christian blood to Christian worship?” we thought to ourselves.
In the attacks’ aftermath, the killer’s self-pitying laments and his and Christian-hating rants posted to the internet attracted considerable media attention.
The media narrative soon focused upon his strict upbringing, too often granting prima facie credibility to Murray’s self-serving claims to have been warped in childhood by his Pentecostal parents.
A former roommate’s comments also helped media dismiss the gunman as mentally disturbed.
Last December I intuited that Murray’s reported claim to hear voices was meant to entertain himself and shock his peers. Reports that he claimed to have committed a sexual assault for “shock value” only confirm me in that opinion.
For those of us unable to ignore the attack as a mere psychological eruption, Murray’s own words linger.
“You Christians brought this on yourselves!” read one of his messages posted between attacks. Another declared “Christian America… this is YOUR Columbine!”
There is no question of his malice, and there is no question about whom it targets.
Thus it is disturbing to discover that Murray’s crimes were never classified as hate crimes in the reports of both the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. This despite the FBI’s definition of a hate crime as one that is motivated “in whole or in part” by bias against a religion or other protected categories.
Catholic News Agency quotes a sergeant at the Colorado Springs Police Department who said “I think that the general feeling [at the department] was that it was not so much bias but retaliation.”
It is easy to criticize police officials for not checking the right boxes on a report after they’ve explored the mind of an aspiring mass murderer. However, had an ex-Muslim shot up a mosque while ranting about the evils of Islam, it is hard to believe his murders would not be classified as hate crimes.
In my view, hate crimes should not stand in their own legal category. Difficulties in establishing motive are obvious, while any necessary penalties may be assessed in sentencing based upon prosecutorial or judicial discretion.
But state and national statistics concerning bias crimes are used to understand good and bad trends in society. If we must have such statistics, we should at least insist they be minimally consistent. That’s the whole purpose of the FBI’s Unified Crime Report.
Minority groups such as Jews are understandably very vigilant about bias crimes. This vigilance is perhaps not shared by people from more popular denominations, who are more likely to dismiss various crimes as outliers rather than consider them a portent of something worse.
Local officers too might think with such habits. Are bias crimes against well-populated religious denominations more likely to be underreported because they are not “vulnerable” minorities? That’s a story in itself.
New Life Church has a national profile, but that doesn’t render it impervious to hate crimes. In fact, the prominence and the criminal antics of its disgraced former pastor Ted Haggard probably made the attacks more likely.
But Haggard should not distract us from those who died.
Murray attacked strangers who had nothing more than a religious affiliation in common. If Murray’s murders do not qualify as hate crimes, it is hard for the lay observer to say what would.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Scottish philosopher offers advice for U.S. social conservatives
A letter of advice to U.S. social conservatives comes to us from Prof. John Haldane, an analytic Thomist from the University of St Andrews. In his Letter to America on the Future of Social Conservatism, published at The Public Discourse, he warns social conservatives not to deceive themselves that Republican failures were not a cause behind their recent defeat in the election. Counseling social conservatives to work within both parties, his letter suggests weaknesses in the political manifestations of American social conservatism but is lamentably weak on specifics.
Haldane writes:
The war in Iraq is one area where Haldane sees conservatives as having supported a bad policy to the detriment of both the common good and their own political success.
He also strikes against the partisan habits of American politics:
He proposes as a model of complex political engagement the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who criticized capitalism and opposed war crimes and usury while being steadfastly pro-life.
“While it would be wrong to abandon the political parties, it would be equally mistaken to side with one of them,” Haldane continues, adding “Those within a chosen party whose primary interest is pursuing electoral victory may prove fiercer enemies of one’s moral position than political opponents in other parties.”
All well and good. Republican social conservatives must account for, and correct, the ways in which the GOP near-monopoly on their issues has damaged their cause. What’s more, non-partisan social conservatism is necessary for its success.
However, as is common in essays against partisanship, there are considerable structural obstacles to Haldane’s recommended tactics.
There is a definite tendency towards monoculture within U.S. political parties particularly. Advancing within a party requires advancing the causes of fellow partisans on other issues. The American manner of coalition-building has helped produce a situation where most political pro-lifers are military hawks and proponents of the free market while economic progressives reliably preach moral liberalism, if not radicalism.
( An American pro-lifer can only with surprise observe the considerable intra-party debate in the UK Parliament in response to the proposed Human Embryology and Fertilization Bill. Even though its opponents were utterly defeated, they certainly made their voices heard. )
Perhaps as a reflection of coalition monoculture, American pro-life organizations are reliably partisan. Worse, these ill effects are repeated in the media. Aside from Nat Hentoff, has the United States any other pro-life left-wing columnist?
As Ross Douthat has argued, the thorough radicalism of Roe v. Wade removed the possibility of compromise on abortion in the United States, a compromise which under a different legal regime could be reached both between and within parties. Ideological activists filter out any liberal-minded social conservatives in the Democratic Party, while the remote possibility of overturning Roe has spared pro-life Republicans from the hard work of persuasion and practical action.
The situation is even worse on gay rights, where socially conservative Democrats face the wrath of those with the free time and the disposable income for political influence.
What essays like Haldane's require are plausible recommendations suggesting how these obstacles are to be overcome and how social conservatism can be advanced in the Democrats without weakening it in the Republicans, especially in the face of an elite and mass culture largely hostile to their cause.
Haldane offers other criticisms, both suggesting that Republicans’ prosecution of Bill Clinton for perjury helped degrade standards of public discourse and counseling Republicans from engaging in personal attacks on Obama.
Perplexingly, he claims opponents of Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin did not tend to depict them as bad people. It is obvious that he missed the many frivolous and debasing rumors spread by Democratic partisans targeting Palin, to the point that more reasonable criticisms of the vice-presidential pick were crowded out.
While it is likely that Haldane’s misunderstanding of Palin’s candidacy makes for his undue optimism about bi-partisan social conservative efforts, his letter deserves to be read by any concerned social conservative.
(Found via Patrick Deneen, who writes his own thoughtful comments)
Haldane writes:
Some American conservative commentators have been eager to press the idea that rather than the Democrats winning the White House election on the strength of their candidates and policies, the Republicans lost the contest because of the defects of the McCain-Palin campaign. While this view has the comforting advantage of simply requiring a better communicator of unchanged positions in order to win the next election, such an idea is distorted to the point of self-deception. Viewed from afar, and I would think that viewed from nearby through a clear glass in broad daylight, it is apparent that voters chose the Democratic ticket on the basis of preferred policies. Voters were tired of what they regarded as a discredited administration led by a confused and ineffective executive that had drawn them into an unnecessary and costly war while yet neglecting domestic needs.
The war in Iraq is one area where Haldane sees conservatives as having supported a bad policy to the detriment of both the common good and their own political success.
He also strikes against the partisan habits of American politics:
Today we face a danger of oversimplifying the structure of political thought to the point of dividing policies between left and right, and then associating these positions with particular political parties. In truth, one may be a social welfarist or socialist and a moral conservative, or equally a free-marketeer or classical liberal and a moral radical: pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and aggressively secular.
He proposes as a model of complex political engagement the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who criticized capitalism and opposed war crimes and usury while being steadfastly pro-life.
“While it would be wrong to abandon the political parties, it would be equally mistaken to side with one of them,” Haldane continues, adding “Those within a chosen party whose primary interest is pursuing electoral victory may prove fiercer enemies of one’s moral position than political opponents in other parties.”
All well and good. Republican social conservatives must account for, and correct, the ways in which the GOP near-monopoly on their issues has damaged their cause. What’s more, non-partisan social conservatism is necessary for its success.
However, as is common in essays against partisanship, there are considerable structural obstacles to Haldane’s recommended tactics.
There is a definite tendency towards monoculture within U.S. political parties particularly. Advancing within a party requires advancing the causes of fellow partisans on other issues. The American manner of coalition-building has helped produce a situation where most political pro-lifers are military hawks and proponents of the free market while economic progressives reliably preach moral liberalism, if not radicalism.
( An American pro-lifer can only with surprise observe the considerable intra-party debate in the UK Parliament in response to the proposed Human Embryology and Fertilization Bill. Even though its opponents were utterly defeated, they certainly made their voices heard. )
Perhaps as a reflection of coalition monoculture, American pro-life organizations are reliably partisan. Worse, these ill effects are repeated in the media. Aside from Nat Hentoff, has the United States any other pro-life left-wing columnist?
As Ross Douthat has argued, the thorough radicalism of Roe v. Wade removed the possibility of compromise on abortion in the United States, a compromise which under a different legal regime could be reached both between and within parties. Ideological activists filter out any liberal-minded social conservatives in the Democratic Party, while the remote possibility of overturning Roe has spared pro-life Republicans from the hard work of persuasion and practical action.
The situation is even worse on gay rights, where socially conservative Democrats face the wrath of those with the free time and the disposable income for political influence.
What essays like Haldane's require are plausible recommendations suggesting how these obstacles are to be overcome and how social conservatism can be advanced in the Democrats without weakening it in the Republicans, especially in the face of an elite and mass culture largely hostile to their cause.
Haldane offers other criticisms, both suggesting that Republicans’ prosecution of Bill Clinton for perjury helped degrade standards of public discourse and counseling Republicans from engaging in personal attacks on Obama.
Perplexingly, he claims opponents of Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin did not tend to depict them as bad people. It is obvious that he missed the many frivolous and debasing rumors spread by Democratic partisans targeting Palin, to the point that more reasonable criticisms of the vice-presidential pick were crowded out.
While it is likely that Haldane’s misunderstanding of Palin’s candidacy makes for his undue optimism about bi-partisan social conservative efforts, his letter deserves to be read by any concerned social conservative.
(Found via Patrick Deneen, who writes his own thoughtful comments)
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Stanley Hauerwas to lecture in Denver
For Denver locals:
Professor-Author Stanley Hauerwas will deliver his lecture “Discipleship as a Craft: the Church as Disciplined Community” at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 17 at Bonfils Hall at the John Paul II Center, 1300 S. Steele St.
Tim Gray, president of Denver ’s Augustine Institute, says:
“This is a rare opportunity to listen to one today’s most influential Christian thinkers!
"There is no Christian speaker more exciting, in my mind, than Stanley Hauerwas.
You won’t be disappointed!”
Professor-Author Stanley Hauerwas will deliver his lecture “Discipleship as a Craft: the Church as Disciplined Community” at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 17 at Bonfils Hall at the John Paul II Center, 1300 S. Steele St.
Tim Gray, president of Denver ’s Augustine Institute, says:
“This is a rare opportunity to listen to one today’s most influential Christian thinkers!
"There is no Christian speaker more exciting, in my mind, than Stanley Hauerwas.
You won’t be disappointed!”
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Open learning courtesy of Yale
Yale, putting a fraction of its endowment to good use, has launched the Open Yale Courses web site.
Containing free video and audio files of professors' lectures, the site is the answer to a technologist's dream of cheap, high-quality education for everyone with an internet connection.
Right now I am working my way through Prof. Stephen B. Smith's Introduction to Political Philosophy. Like my PoliSci professor at CU-Boulder Thad Tecza, Smith earned his doctorate at Chicago University and displays all sorts of crypto-Straussian habits.
Other promising offerings in the Liberal Arts include Prof. Donald Kagan's Introduction to Ancient Greek History and Prof. Amy Hungerford's The American Novel Since 1945, which presents two lectures on Flannery O'Connor's disturbing novel Wise Blood.
Unfortunately the science classes are of more limited availability.
But it's ungrateful to complain now that anyone can audit a semester of Ivy League courses.
Addendum:
OnlineUniversities.com provides links to 100 other open lectures at Harvard, MIT, and other prominent universities.
Containing free video and audio files of professors' lectures, the site is the answer to a technologist's dream of cheap, high-quality education for everyone with an internet connection.
Right now I am working my way through Prof. Stephen B. Smith's Introduction to Political Philosophy. Like my PoliSci professor at CU-Boulder Thad Tecza, Smith earned his doctorate at Chicago University and displays all sorts of crypto-Straussian habits.
Other promising offerings in the Liberal Arts include Prof. Donald Kagan's Introduction to Ancient Greek History and Prof. Amy Hungerford's The American Novel Since 1945, which presents two lectures on Flannery O'Connor's disturbing novel Wise Blood.
Unfortunately the science classes are of more limited availability.
But it's ungrateful to complain now that anyone can audit a semester of Ivy League courses.
Addendum:
OnlineUniversities.com provides links to 100 other open lectures at Harvard, MIT, and other prominent universities.
Is the embryo one of us?
The rapid march of technology has outpaced our ethical judgment. We have blundered into a confusing world of in-vitro fertilization, human cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. We ask ourselves: what is the human embryo, and how should we treat it?
Into this disputed realm strides Colorado's Amendment 48, which would grant legal personhood to every human being from the moment of fertilization. Whatever the merits and flaws of the proposal, it certainly presents us with an occasion to look at the ethical problems our society has ignored in its pursuit of worthy goals like increasing knowledge and inventing new medical treatments.
Who counts as a person in our society? This isn't some egghead's question above our pay grade; it's a vital topic of political life.
People have the bad habit of denying other people's personhood, ignoring their moral status as creatures whom we should respect. Different societies across time have refused legal protection to people based on criteria like race, sex, or disability.
Proving that somebody who is excluded should instead be included in society can be a difficult task, especially in the case of early human life.
Many people defend the personhood of each human being from the moment of conception by appealing to religion, often Christianity specifically.
This religious argument is nothing to be ashamed of, as religion is perhaps the best way to communicate to all men the content and the gravity of our complicated moral world. However, this kind of argument leaves out people who lack the same kind or the same level of religious commitments.
Fortunately a non-religious case can be made for the ethical worth of the human embryo. Professors Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen have made that weighty case both in their many magazine columns and in their 2008 book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life
. (See this excerpt in the Jan. 26 Denver Post)
While the promises of science ask us to look forward, we must not forget to look backward as well -- backward, that is, to the point at which we each came into being.
In Embryo, Professors George and Tollefsen begin with the story of Noah, who was saved from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when rescuers retrieved the container that contained his embryonic self from a flooded New Orleans hospital. His embryo was later implanted into his mother's womb, and Noah was born sixteen months after his rescue.
Noah's continuous existence since his laboratory conception is proven in a chapter which rivals a biology textbook in detail, ably recounting the conception and the intricate development of the human embryo.
From conception, the embryo acts in a way quite different from the sperm and egg whose union created it, but quite similar to the organism's behavior later in life. Studies of the embryo show its self-directed growth and its continuous bodily unity as it matures. In George and Tollefsen's view, this is evidence that the embryo is itself a human being, who is a human person.
An obvious reply to this claim states that the capacity for, say, consciousness, only begins with the formation of brain structures weeks into an embryo's development. Since only conscious organisms can be persons, a critic might argue, the embryo can't be a person.
But this argument raises objections. For instance, people who are asleep or in comas lack consciousness, but we don't deny that they are persons. The consciousness of infants is in some ways more limited than that of animals, but obviously we consider infants to be persons too.
The authors of Embryo also claim such critiques about consciousness and personhood untenably split the body from the person, in a theory they call "person-body dualism."
In ordinary life we sense that the person and the body are intimately united. When we cut a finger, we say "I am hurt," not "my body is hurt." If we claim that the person somehow enters the human body at a time after its conception, we have to think in that latter, counterintuitive way.
Instead of accidental characteristics like possessing a state of consciousness, the authors argue that a human being has a set of essential "capacities" that are in development at the embryonic stage but still merit calling that being a "person."
As law professor Richard Stith suggests, imagine taking a priceless picture with an old Polaroid camera. Its photo produces a full image after minutes of waiting, but that image is present within the developing photograph since the click of the camera shutter. Destroying such a photograph still destroys that worthy image, even though we can't yet perceive its full nature.
In a similar way, the human embryo is a person even at its beginning, which is our beginning. As George and Tollefsen write, embryos aren't "potential lives," they're "lives with potential."
(Cross-posted to YourHub.com)
Into this disputed realm strides Colorado's Amendment 48, which would grant legal personhood to every human being from the moment of fertilization. Whatever the merits and flaws of the proposal, it certainly presents us with an occasion to look at the ethical problems our society has ignored in its pursuit of worthy goals like increasing knowledge and inventing new medical treatments.
Who counts as a person in our society? This isn't some egghead's question above our pay grade; it's a vital topic of political life.
People have the bad habit of denying other people's personhood, ignoring their moral status as creatures whom we should respect. Different societies across time have refused legal protection to people based on criteria like race, sex, or disability.
Proving that somebody who is excluded should instead be included in society can be a difficult task, especially in the case of early human life.
Many people defend the personhood of each human being from the moment of conception by appealing to religion, often Christianity specifically.
This religious argument is nothing to be ashamed of, as religion is perhaps the best way to communicate to all men the content and the gravity of our complicated moral world. However, this kind of argument leaves out people who lack the same kind or the same level of religious commitments.
Fortunately a non-religious case can be made for the ethical worth of the human embryo. Professors Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen have made that weighty case both in their many magazine columns and in their 2008 book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life
. (See this excerpt in the Jan. 26 Denver Post)While the promises of science ask us to look forward, we must not forget to look backward as well -- backward, that is, to the point at which we each came into being.
In Embryo, Professors George and Tollefsen begin with the story of Noah, who was saved from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when rescuers retrieved the container that contained his embryonic self from a flooded New Orleans hospital. His embryo was later implanted into his mother's womb, and Noah was born sixteen months after his rescue.
Noah's continuous existence since his laboratory conception is proven in a chapter which rivals a biology textbook in detail, ably recounting the conception and the intricate development of the human embryo.
From conception, the embryo acts in a way quite different from the sperm and egg whose union created it, but quite similar to the organism's behavior later in life. Studies of the embryo show its self-directed growth and its continuous bodily unity as it matures. In George and Tollefsen's view, this is evidence that the embryo is itself a human being, who is a human person.
An obvious reply to this claim states that the capacity for, say, consciousness, only begins with the formation of brain structures weeks into an embryo's development. Since only conscious organisms can be persons, a critic might argue, the embryo can't be a person.
But this argument raises objections. For instance, people who are asleep or in comas lack consciousness, but we don't deny that they are persons. The consciousness of infants is in some ways more limited than that of animals, but obviously we consider infants to be persons too.
The authors of Embryo also claim such critiques about consciousness and personhood untenably split the body from the person, in a theory they call "person-body dualism."
In ordinary life we sense that the person and the body are intimately united. When we cut a finger, we say "I am hurt," not "my body is hurt." If we claim that the person somehow enters the human body at a time after its conception, we have to think in that latter, counterintuitive way.
Instead of accidental characteristics like possessing a state of consciousness, the authors argue that a human being has a set of essential "capacities" that are in development at the embryonic stage but still merit calling that being a "person."
As law professor Richard Stith suggests, imagine taking a priceless picture with an old Polaroid camera. Its photo produces a full image after minutes of waiting, but that image is present within the developing photograph since the click of the camera shutter. Destroying such a photograph still destroys that worthy image, even though we can't yet perceive its full nature.
In a similar way, the human embryo is a person even at its beginning, which is our beginning. As George and Tollefsen write, embryos aren't "potential lives," they're "lives with potential."
(Cross-posted to YourHub.com)
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