- Valorizing Gandhi
- The Hobby Lobby Moment
- Two Conservatisms
- Pope Francis catches Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease
- What’s a “successful parish,” anyway?
We in the West have valorized Gandhi. Indian Left Icon Arundhati Roy, in The Scourge of Caste, begs to differ.
What Gandhi said was that he believed in caste. He believed in hereditary occupation. But he believed that everybody should be treated equally and loved by god. This was the essence of the debate …
When the anxiety about representation began, it was accompanied by an anxiety about demography. Until then, for centuries, untouchable people had been converting to Islam, to Christianity, to Sikhism to escape the scourge of caste. But suddenly, these 44 million people became a constituency and privileged caste reformers began to proselytize against untouchability, hoping to keep them under the head of Hinduism. The idea was not to question the caste system, but to bring them into the big house and keep them in the servants’ quarters. So you had organizations of reformers who actually proselytized quite rigorously against untouchability. Gandhi was the legacy of that, whereas Ambedker was the legacy of the genuinely anti-caste movement that believed in the destruction of the whole idea of caste …
It’s an incredible thing that while other horrors like apartheid, racism, sexism, and modern slavery have been maybe not defeated but certainly discussed by the international community, caste never is. One of the reasons is that it’s not color-coded; it’s hard to see. The other reason is that people just associate it with Hinduism and “your God”, The Beatles, vegetarianism, or some sort of euphemism. The third reason is that a lot of the better-known intellectuals in India belong to the Left, and traditionally Indian communists have been unable to deal with caste. They just sort of invisibilize it by saying that caste is class. And sometimes people are so privileged that they don’t stumble upon it, even in the dark.
…
In India, if you go to any hospital, all the nurses will be Christians, because doctors in other communities don’t want to touch people. If you go to a hospital and you watch a doctor doing a post-mortem, they’ll get the sweepers who are Balmiki to actually do the post-mortem. The doctors won’t touch the body.
Caste is everywhere. It’s the engine that runs India. How is that system maintained? How do you make sure that a caste is never entitled to own land? That they will always be there when the seed needs to be sown, or the crop needs to be harvested? It’s a system that can only be maintained through the egregious application of violence. Everybody knows about the 2012 gang rape and murder in Dehli where people were mobilized. And certainly, it’s good they were mobilized, and good things happened in terms of re-writing the law. But no one will talk about the fact that 1,500 Dalit women were raped, and that means actually more like 15,000 women because only 1 in 10 cases get reported. 651 Dalit men were killed in a year. This past October there was a Dalit family murdered, their limbs chopped off and distributed on the fields and thrown into wells, because the killing of a Dalit has to be ritual slaughter. It’s a punishment that serves as a warning to those who might think of straying, who might think of improving their lot ….
(H/T The Browser) I don’t believe that Arundhati Roy is a Christian, and many of her Western fans certainly are not, but there’s nevertheless a casual honesty about the role of Christianity in India. My selections capture most of them.
The escalation of marketplace conflict is related to the emergence of sexuality as the political issue of the day, combined with a psychologized (and thus subjective and selective) view of oppression. The result is that traditional relationships between personal beliefs and life in the public square are rapidly breaking down. The marketplace is not simply becoming more contested, as Horwitz rightly argues; it is also expanding its prerogatives into every sphere of life. Thus, when personal religious convictions collide with the morality of this expanding marketplace, then so much the worse for religious convictions.
This expanding marketplace has not become a field of combat through government overreach so much as through the pervasive influence of the entertainment industry and social media. Twitter and sitcoms have the ability to construct the impression of overwhelming moral consensus on whatever is the issue of the day. This manufactured moral consensus then becomes a necessary precondition for participation in any aspect of the marketplace, from entertainment to education. That is why celebrity speakers feel the need to withdraw from speaking for Catholic organizations upon making the shocking discovery that they are (mirabile dictu) committed to Catholic moral teaching.
(Carl R. Trueman, commenting on “The Hobby Lobby Moment,” a Paul Horwitz article in the Harvard Law Review)
The Horwitz article is excellent, as Trueman said (but I refused to echo until I had read it). Ignore the legalese citations of the footnotes and you’ll find a readable and troubling account of how sexual liberation, and gay rights in particular, were in the immediate background of Hobby Lobby and are already making religious accommodation claims seem not axiomatic, but discriminatory and legally dubious.
That provides an occasion for my favorite candid admission by a sexual revolutionary versed in the law, Chai Feldblum, formerly of Georgetown Law. In a symposium paper what effect “marriage equality” will have on the rights of employers, landlords and others whose religion teaches them that same-sex sexual conduct is sinful for the individual and harmful to society:
Let me be very clear … [I]n almost all the situations (not perhaps in every one, but in almost every one), I believe the burden on religious people that will be caused by granting gay people full equality will be justified …. That is because I believe granting liberty to gay people advances a compelling government interest, that such an interest cannot be adequately advanced if “pockets of resistance” to a societal statement of equality are permitted to flourish, and hence that a law that permits no individual exceptions based on religious beliefs will be the least restrictive means of achieving the goal of liberty for gay people.
That’s legalese – of a high order, by the way – for “religious liberty will be restricted in the world I’m working for.” She’s now working for it within Team Obama’s White House, and as Prof. Horwitz shows, her side is now affirmatively trying to block “mini-RFRA” state laws modeled on a bill that passed Congress almost unanimously a scant twenty-or-so years ago.
Years ago, when my wife and I first committed to homeschooling our kids, we caught hell from my sister, a public schoolteacher. Most of her objections were familiar to us, and we had answers for them. One we didn’t see coming, though: her utter lack of sympathy for our interest in a pedagogy that focused on the classics of the Western tradition.
This surprised me because my sister was a conservative, like most people in my hometown. My conservatism is primarily cultural, social, and intellectual. Hers was also cultural and social, but it was more temperamental than intellectual. In fact, though my sister was a math instructor, and a good one, she had a reflexive disdain for intellectualism. She saw it as an effete indulgence at best, at worst a rationale for exploiting the common man. For her, the culture war was really class warfare—and her brother was on the other side of the trenches.
It didn’t matter that I had forgotten more political theory than she ever knew. What mattered was that I was a city dweller who shopped at Whole Foods and didn’t care for Sarah Palin’s style of politics. That marked me out as a traitor to the tribe.
From my side, frustration with this anti-intellectual attitude thrust me into a love-hate dynamic with my home and the conservative base. When I lived in Dallas, my fellow middle-aged high-culture conservative friends and I lamented how our parents’ devotion to the Fox News Channel made political conversations impossible because our folks couldn’t believe anybody who didn’t love Fox could be a real conservative.
We weren’t liberals, and in fact many of us were from small towns and longed for the good things those towns had to offer. But how could we live in a place where the art, the books, the music, and the food we loved would be seen by fellow conservatives as a sign of our inauthenticity?
(Rod Dreher, Duck Dynasty vs. Dante, a full-length article, not a blog item) These first five paragraphs nicely set up Dreher’s reflection on the subtitle: “Masscult drives a wedge between grassroots and elite conservatives.”
As Dreher says, “Culture is hard; culture war is much easier and more emotionally gratifying.” But culture isn’t as hard as you might think, and when you’ve really had it will mass culture’s toxins, you may find that the primary sources are “classics” precisely because they’re easier to apprehend than much of the turgid secondary commentary on them.
“May” find. I’m not getting from The Divine Comedy the delight Rod found.
I’m starting to think that Pope Francis has whatever nervous verbal tic keeps comically afflicting Joe Biden:
Catholics should not be like rabbits, Pope Francis stated in a recent papal interview. The comment is at once obviously true and ill-advised. The Church has never taught that Catholics are to have as many children as possible. They can use abstinence, including the selective abstinence of “Natural Family Planning,” to limit the number of children they bear.
Yet such nuance is bound to be lost on the Pope’s secular audience. Just as his comments saying that Catholics should not be “obsessed” with abortion have been used as cudgels against political candidates who oppose abortion and gay marriage, Francis’s rabbit comment is likely to be used as yet another weapon against Catholics faithful to church teaching.
(Matthew Schmitz, who hit that nail on the head)
At some point in my past, there was a survey used in parishes that was all the rage. It was a “gifts and talents” survey, designed to make everyone in the parish find their true ministry and to work together in fulfillment of St. Paul’s description of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians. The key in these surveys was to determine precisely what gifts and talents someone had, match them with the right ministry, and fit them all together. The end product would be more effective ministry for the parish and happier parishioners. What priest wouldn’t want such a thing?
…
Another problem can be found in the notion of an effective parish. What does this mean? In Evangelical and mainline Protestant circles, where the surveys originated and flourished, the effective parish was often measured in numbers – parish growth and greater stewardship. A happy parish, a growing parish was a prosperous parish, and a prosperous parish was a successful parish. But these are just cultural notions – standards that would apply just as well to a business. They are not appropriate ways of looking at the Body of Christ.
The successful parish is an American invention …
“Everyone has a ministry,” I was taught. People in many congregations strained to discern what their unique ministry was. Suddenly everyone in every congregation had a vocation. “Equipping the saints for ministry” (from Ephesians 4) became a slogan for an American vision of the business of the parish Church. But what is the business of the Church?
Never has any writing of an Apostle been more abused and misused than the contemporary treatment of St. Paul’s writings on the Church. A letter to a deeply troubled Corinthian community, a plea for a vision of unity in a community that was fragmenting, has become the blueprint for parish management, an excuse for the importation of American managerial science (and gifts and talents surveys are nothing more).
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 