Monday Potpourri, 8/27/18

I tend to think of the encyclical Humanae Vitae (which I’ve never finished reading) as all about the evils of artificial contraception. That’s a blind spot.

Carl Trueman points to its prediction of the moral and social chaos sexual revolution would leave in its wake, and to contemporaneous commentary by Dietrich von Hildebrand that entails “a moving account of human love and a critique of a society that reduces love to sex and sentiment.”

In this volume, von Hildebrand clearly draws upon earlier arguments from his 1927 book In Defense of Purity: Love is ecstatic and joyful, transcending rational analysis. Von Hildebrand’s key text is Song of Songs, the biblical poem that captures the mystery, power, longing, and exuberance of erotic love. Much conservative Protestant writing on marriage typically neglects the Song for a prosaic, patriarchal focus on male authority and female submission. Those tempted by such a drab view of love ought to read von Hildebrand, for whom passion, mystery, and ecstasy all play their biblical parts.

Still, the part of Humanae Vitae that leaves me leery is the insistence that every marital act instantiate both the unitive and procreative purposes of sex. I’m willing to admit mistakes in how I’ve lived my life (my blogs are not my confessional, but I’ll not deny here what I confess there), but I’m not conscience-wracked — even now, when I know so much more about the Christian tradition on contraception than I knew then — that my wife and I tooks steps to prevent pregnancy during our first year of marriage so she could complete her college degree.

Granted, the same contraceptive technologies, by Supreme Court decisions of half a century or so ago, must be available to fornicators and adulterers as well as married couples, but to put it in reductionist terms that the encyclical presumably avoids, is delaying or spacing pregnancy in marriage a slippery slope to all the evils of the sexual revolution?

Apart from the possibility that I’ve thought more about that than most people, my response lacks any authority, but here goes: that’s not my lived experience.

Alan Jacobs, who doesn’t write all that much about matters political, musing on two heads of state, the U.S. and the Vatican:

Norms are created by institutions, and we live in an age of weak and despised institutions. This is how populist leaders arise: when a great many people believe that institutions exist merely to serve themselves, they come to despise not just those institutions but also the norms associated with them, and applaud leaders who scorn and seek to tear down the whole edifice. And if those leaders make their disdain known in sufficiently charismatic ways, few will notice when they are guilty of the very sins they decry.

He’s not expecting either The Donald or Pope Francis to be “forced out” or to change course.

So why do we get the vapors so badly when news breaks?

The big social-media companies function as what I have called the Ministry of Amnesia, and the result is that we lack temporal bandwidth. Unless we work hard to cultivate that temporal bandwidth, we won’t have the “personal density” to resist the amnesia-producing forces that make us think that whatever happens today is more important than anything that has ever happened.

Increasingly, I think, the people who rule our society understand how all this works, and no one understands it better than Donald Trump …

[T]he greatest of social changes tend to happen, as Edward Gibbon put it, insensibly. Even when they seem sudden, it is almost always case that the suddenness is merely a very long gradual transformation finally bearing fruit. There’s a famous moment in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when one character asks another how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” the man replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” But the “suddenly” happened because he was previously insensible to the “gradually.” Likewise, events are always appearing to us with extreme suddenness — but only because we are so amnesiac that we have failed to discern the long slow gradual forces that made this moment inevitable.

Alan Jacobs again, elsewhere. Do read it all. There’s a payoff.

Jeffrey Bilbro, Learning to Distinguish between Demonic and Redemptive Technologies, at Front Porch Republic responds to a Christianity Today essay that tends to reduces Agribiz to “genetic seed modification and GPS-guided harvesters,” ignoring assaults with on crops and earthy by chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Bilbro’s most important contribution, it seems to me, is a not-too-vicious debunking of what the CT author seems to think is the only alternative to Agribiz in the manner Monsanto pursues, and some allusive hints we may just be cruising gradually toward sudden calamity.

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Sunday Tidbits 8/26/18

Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review takes seriously two kinds of critics of “liberalism”:

That political liberalism makes false promises, holding out the possibility of liberty and pluralism but ultimately demanding conformism.
That it’s past time to give up arguing for our claims under natural law. Instead, we should make our claims unabashedly for the social kingship of Christ.

(Paraphrased)

But he “gently suggest[s] that the integralist critics of liberalism may be focusing too much on the theory of liberalism and not enough on the condition of their Church.”

And what’s that condition?

See how the Reverend John I. Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame University, took several contradictory positions on the contraception mandate. His school became a plaintiff, arguing against it, as an infringement of religious liberty, in the highest courts in America. But, faced with dissension among professors, he reversed himself.

This level of dissension on matters of moral doctrine is everywhere in Catholic institutions, not just in universities but on the boards of Catholic health-care and charitable organizations and in diocesan secondary and primary schools. Such dissension characterizes the whole Church in America, a country where the second-largest reported religious affiliation is “ex-Catholic.” Catholic birth and divorce rates have, respectively, moved toward Protestant norms. In their catechisms, many Protestant denominations have accepted abortion and homosexuality as moral goods. And many prominent Catholic personalities — even those with imprimaturs of Catholic bishops — are urging Catholics to do likewise.

Dougherty, too, should be taken seriously.

Gallagher is implicitly rehashing here the old saw that “postmodernism brings a level playing field,” when in fact it relieves the rulers of the obligation to level that field. Under the ancien regime of liberalism people needed to come up with reasons for dismissing religious positions, and typically did so, even when the reasons were very badly formed indeed; now the reasons are unnecessary. “You’re a bigot” does the job just fine. As I once heard Richard Rorty say, “The theists can talk, but we don’t have to listen.” There may be, and indeed I think there are, good reasons to abandon fusionism, but the idea that in our current order integralist and other post-fusionism arguments will have greater purchase than fusionism did is, I fear, a fantasy.

…

There is no reason whatsoever to think that Catholic particularism will have any more “credibility” to the society at large than Catholic fusionism did. “The Catholic tradition must be prepared to speak in its own voice” not because that will be more credible or effective but because it is the Catholic tradition’s own voice. Calculations of political effectiveness are misplaced in a social environment where all substantive (and hence exclusive) religious stances are indistinguishable from the grossest bigotry. The dogma living loudly within you won’t win many friends or influence many people. But it ought to live loudly within you anyway.

Alan Jacobs, After Catholic Fusioisn, What? (hyperlink added).

In the gospels it was the devils who first recognized Christ and the evangelists didn’t censor this information. They apparently thought it was pretty good witness. It scandalizes us when we see the same thing in modern dress only because we have this defensive attitude toward the faith. (1963)

Flannery O’Connor via Eric Mador, Flannery O’Connor’s Christian Realism.

It is not homophobia in the least to point out that a heterosexual man will not have multiple sexual relationships with adult males and also pursue boys sexually when there are plenty of women around ….

Erin Manning

A new micro.blog acquaintance makes his own case, and cites another, for prayer using historic prayer books (in his case, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer).

Hello [Tipsy],

You’ve now completed at least six hours each night on sleep therapy for 21 out of the last 30 days.

Well done. You’ve earned yourself the GOLD badge!

If you log in to myAir now you can see your progress, and you might want to share your accomplishment with family and friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Sleep well!

The myAir Team

Next to my Notary Certificate, this myAir “GOLD badge!” is one of my great accomplishments in life.

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Saturday Potpourri 8/25/18

I cannot personally rule out voting for Trump in 2020, despite the fact that I believe he is a menace to the rule of law. To vote against Trump will almost certainly mean voting for a president who will turn the power of the state on people like me. That still might be the decent and correct thing to do, and if so, I hope I have the courage to do it. But it’s a hell of an ask.

Rod Dreher. His quotes from Andrew Sullivan (overlapping what I quoted) and Peter Beinart are notable, too.

Like Dreher, I don’t entirely buy the Beinart argument — did we ever really worry about dark men raping pale women, or was that just a pretext for recreational lynching? — but the general gist about competing notions of “corrupt” does seem to be on the scent of something.

I think I’d have voted for Hillary in 2016, had my state been “in play” instead of a lock for Trump, though I knew she would “turn the power of the state on people like me.” But that was because I considered Trump’s narcissism so extreme as possibly to land us in a war, not because I thought she was nicer or less venal.

By 2020, if Trump hasn’t Tweeted us into war, the attacks on the rule of law will predominate in my opposition. But it is quite conceivable that the Democrats will nominate some extremist without Hillary’s demonstrated semi-competence in actual governance. I’m not holding my breath for a return to normalcy of any sort.

What do you mean, “crisis”? We have (at least) three is an interesting, even disturbing, short blog by Chris Damian on clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Church.. The crisis/es include “abuse of minors.” This crisis is

the most understood and the most explored. Following the 2002 reporting by the Boston Globe, the US bishops commissioned a study, run independently by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

I was surprised at some of the findings Damian reported from John Jay, but he provided a link, so I’m assuming until alerted otherwise (or I have enough time on my hands to read the report) that he has not misrepresented them.

They disrupt, if taken seriously, the sense I was developing about the sources or causes of the crises. No, make that “seriously disrupt ….”

Allen Weisselberg [Trump Organization CFO] testified before a grand jury, the third confidant of Trump known to have provided information in an illegal hush-money investigation that has implicated the president.

Wall Street Journal teaser for this article. According to NPR, one might say “Longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.”

Don’t discount the depth of what this guy could be disclosing. That so many confidants are testifying to the grand jury, many with grants of immunity, is legally big, but as I think I’ve said, I’m at a loss for what any of this means politically in a country I barely still recognize.

4ts

Yesterday, an Anabaptist man from nearby came and powerwashed my house. Then some younger Anabaptist men (his kin, I suspect) washed the windows. They did wonderful work at a reasonable price. We will seek them out for return engagements.

I’ve had similar “nice bearded men” in black straw skimmers doing our home remodeling and upgrades. They, too, did wonderful work, though a bit “saltier” on price.

They’re all from a group akin to the Old Order Amish (who congregate further North in Indiana), but they drive cars and trucks, use cell phones, tend to be in construction and things like power washing, concrete leveling and repair. They’re well represented behind the tables of our Farmer’s Market. The fanciest career I’ve noticed any of them undertaking is accountant (uncertified). I grew up hearing them called “German Baptist.”

Their grammar isn’t perfect. Their affect is generally a bit laconic. But they make themselves useful to their fellow men and women, support their families, and seem (from an unplugged family life, I strongly suspect) to avoid a lot of the nonsense that exercises most of their countrymen, present company not excluded. I suspect they’re not too exercised about Special Counsel grand jury proceedings, grants of immunity, and what it all means politically.

That’s not nothing. Starting fresh, I might prefer the via media of a Matthew Crawford, but somehow our Exceptionally American desk jobs and 401k’s have left us among the unhappier of the world’s peoples. Yet we seem to think that spreading our ways is an apt response to the categorical imperative.

I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods, though I can’t decide how much of it was deliberate (“if we do this, we can induce people into doing that“) versus such a state of affairs coming about by inexorable cosmic logic once we start off thinking filthy lucre is the summum bonum that can buy us whatever else we want. I could elaborate a few reasons for thinking that we were deliberately manipulated, but “deliberate” doesn’t necessarily mean “malicious” or “consciously exploitative.” The human capacity for self-deception is really deep.

Thus began the Beloved Festival, at which some 2,500 people pitched tents or splurged for a luxury “glamping” yurt for four days of “sacred” activities that ended on August 13th. These included kundalini and “galactivated” yoga, Sufi soul singing, crystal-bowl sound healing, medicinal poetry, Thai massage, Latino storytelling, native-American shamanism, gong meditation inspired by NASA data from deep space, grief rituals from Burkina Faso’s Dagara tribe and rave-like takes on Oriental ecstatic dance.

… Moss Kane, a Beloved visitor who works at Two-Spirit Shamanic Healing, a practice in Portland, Oregon, reckons that the boom in transformational festivals has already begun to chip away at the “crumbling power” of bad capitalism through the emergence of more people with older, wiser souls.

… Beloved hosts workshops on diversity, gender equality and using empathy to fight “divisive entitlement”. Marji Marlowe, who ran Beloved’s Care Circle Sanctuary this year, says a big part of her job is alerting visitors to the privilege whites enjoy but did not earn. Beloved also offers education on the misstep of “appropriating” cultures by, for example, donning feather headdresses, says its community manager, Dez Ramirez. Given the cultural mishmash of Beloved’s programme, this approach may perplex some, but other transformational festivals do the same.

Economist, Sex, crystals and compost toilets.

I’m betting on the German Baptist version of “older souls” in a head-to-head match with Beloved Festival and others of that ilk. At long odds, too.

I’m becoming a fan of professional soccer, especially European (Premier League, Bundesliga, and such). I’m still learning the rules to become a discerning viewer, but I have no favorite teams yet besides the default “home town” Indy Eleven (sort of as every Hoosier is supposed to be a Colts fan).

It’s probably worth mentioning that this is not really a protest or boycott of NFL. I’ve genuinely lost interest in NFL for a number of reasons

the hype (e.g., military flyovers)
the mostly-Sunday games
the hootchie-kootchie cheerleaders (who are abused about like bar bands are abused — underpaid because of huge supply, limited demand — and sexualized to boot) and
the evidence of chronic traumatic brain injury.

That last one’s why I don’t watch boxing or MMA, though I have a great-nephew who’s a professional MMA fighter.

Colin Kaepernick offends me less than Trump’s response and the owners’ capitulation, but that controversy was the only thing in recent years that made me want to watch at all. I’m even pretty indifferent to the Super Bowl any more.

Recommendation: If you want to give soccer a try, tune into Premier League or Bundesliga. They have NFL-size stadiums, packed with enthusiasts, the gentlemen spectators dressed like gentlemen and not visibly intoxicated. What’s not to like?

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

We always knew this would happen

There was a sense among some this week that we had at last reached that golden “inflection point” when all of Trump’s lies, scams, cons, and crimes finally sink in with Republicans, and the cult begins to crack.

I tend to think something else is happening: that we are entering the most dangerous phase of Donald Trump’s presidency. We always knew this would happen — that the rule of law and Trump would at some point be unable to coexist — but we had no idea how it would specifically play out. Now we see the lay of the land a little more clearly.

…

He is still incensed at his attorney general Jeff Sessions … The entire notion that one of his appointees actually swears loyalty to the Constitution, rather than personal fealty to Trump, is incomprehensible — no, infuriating — to him.

… the criminality has now become text rather than subtext …

Who else … do you know has spent four decades of his life “watching” the intricacies of mob round-ups? Yes, I know Trump made his fortune in part through the mob. They were regulars at his Taj Mahal casino, which was found to have “willfully violated” the money-laundering rules of the Bank Secrecy Act, was the subject of four separate IRS investigations for “repeated and significant” deviations from money-laundering laws, and was forced to pay what was then an industry record for the largest money-laundering fine. The Russian mob was critical to buying his real estate in secret as well. This is a president who has surrounded himself with criminals, especially Russian criminals, for decades. But still: the man who took an oath to enforce the laws of the land is openly touting the logic of mobsters in their battle with law enforcement. Before this presidency, that would have been inconceivable.

…

A republic cannot be governed by a man who acts like a mafia boss, following mafia rules. The minute that happens, the corrosion begins. Every day such a crook holds the highest office in the land represents yet another crack in the law of the land. If this figure decides to wage an actual war on the rule of law, and retains the solid support of his own party, all bets are off. And it is a staggering fact that in the wake of this week’s verdicts and Trump’s responses, no Republican leaders have yet decisively called their president out, and no right-wing media outlet has sounded any kind of alarm. It has fallen to Jeff Sessions to issue a statement defending the DOJ.

Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added), who struck a few false or hackneyed notes but got the basic story arc right.

J. Budziszewski explained in 2015, before a “President Donald Trump” was even a patently absurd publicity stunt (we thought), and again this week (contra Walter Williams), why a bad man cannot be a “good President.” The 2015 item reads like prophecy.

Budziszewski nods toward the possibility of voting for a lesser evil, but you must never, ever call evil “good.”

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Friday Potpourri 8/24/18

Do you support religious liberty or LGBT individuals? It needn’t be an either–or proposition. Just as many who identify as LGBT hold conservative values, so many religious social conservatives count LGBT individuals among their beloved friends, family, and colleagues. This allows conservatives to take a compassionate, solution-oriented approach to addressing the problems faced by LGBT individuals. Such an approach can negate the need to treat sexual orientation and gender identity as a protected class.

…

Andrew Koppelman, an LGBT advocate [and Northwestern University Law professor], admits that blanket denial of service for LGBT people is rare:

Hardly any of these cases have occurred: a handful in a country of 300 million people. In all of them, the people who objected to the law were asked directly to facilitate same-sex relationships, by providing wedding, adoption, or artificial insemination services, counseling, or rental of bedrooms. There have been no claims of a right to simply refuse to deal with gay people.

Our society is already fairly tolerant, with next to no cases of people flat-out denying service to LGBT individuals solely on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. What the Left often fails to realize is that true tolerance cuts both ways. Existing SOGI policies should be narrowly interpreted so that they act as shields against truly discriminatory practices, not as swords to punish religious beliefs. This approach promotes mutual tolerance and penalizes no persons for either their identity or their beliefs.

Monica Burke and Jared Eckert, Don’t Typecast Conservatives: They, Too, Respect the Dignity of LGBT Persons, at National Review online.

Writing of the Colorado Civil Right Commission, which is pursuing Jack Phillips again at the behest of Transgender Troll, Esq.:

[T]he governor makes all appointments to the commission unilaterally and the commissioners don’t have to be attorneys or have virtually any other qualifications except that a majority must be from a traditionally discriminated class, which as of 2008 included sexual orientation and transgender status.

But there is also no requirement for diversity of class, thus, the governor could appoint a majority or even all commissioners who openly identify as LGBT and seek a seat on the commission specifically because of that identification. Religion is also a traditionally protected class, so I’d love to see a future governor appoint a majority of commissioners who are specifically Christian and watch how fast the Democrats would try to shut down the Commission then.

Jenna Ellis. Or we could, maybe, try that better way.

Will we try the way of coercion or of civil society?

Unlike some of my fellow conservatives, I resist the idea that SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) anti-discrimination laws are part of a conspiracy to eradicate authentic Christianity. I say that even though the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was quite explicitly bigoted against Jack Phillips and so blinded by ideology as to be incapable of acknowledging that they were not punishing a homophobe but trying to coerce a conscientious artist into creating a work of art to celebrate what his conscience could not celebrate.

No, the impetus for SOGI laws lies in the felt need of “sexual minorities” for explicit affirmation — and some outrage, real or confected, when they get toleration instead of whole-hearted affirmation in every corner of civil society they choose to visit.

It’s heartening to me that some progressives of good will are starting to see, if not exactly what I see, at least that the stick of anti-discrimination laws is producing some real injustices.

We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

Screwtape, to Wormwood, via Shane Morris.

A Catholic priest who had finished morning prayers inside an Indiana church earlier this week said he was attacked by a man who told him, “This is for all the little kids.”

Then, he said, he blacked out.

The priest, Rev. Basil John Hutsko, was knocked unconscious by an unknown person about 9 a.m. Monday at St. Michael Byzantine Catholic Church in Merrillville, Indiana, police told the Chicago Tribune.

Hutsko, who was taken to a hospital, was left with bruises on his face and body.

(USA Today, 8/24/18)

Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to New York governor Andrew Cuomo nudges the thinking adult toward that least conservative of all political sentiments: “Couldn’t be any worse.”

Things can always be worse.

But it is not obvious how or why Nixon, a celebrity neophyte, would be worse than Cuomo, a corrupt and incompetent heir to a half-assed political legacy. Nixon at least can boast of being an excellent actress — what exactly is it Andrew Cuomo is good at? Choosing his parents?

…

Of course she’s a naïf, and a borderline jackass. She’s new to this. But clearing the bar of “preferable to Andrew Cuomo” is not that difficult.

…

This is a new day in politics, and nobody is quite sure how it will shake out.

Kevin D. Williamson, who’s fun to read even when writing of matters of no immediate personal concern.

Last Thursday, hundreds of newspapers nationwide simultaneously published editorials attacking Mr. Trump in the guise of promoting a free press. The president regularly accuses news outlets of biased coverage ….

Jason Riley, WSJ (emphasis added).

Trump calls the press “Enemies of the People” and purveyors of “fake news.” His followers curse, flip-off and menace the press. Riley’s bland version is the sort of “nothing to see here; move along now” spin that makes me say the Wall Street Journal, no less than the New York Times, is a bit unhinged.

The Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, in his wonderful little book For the Life of the World, defines secularism as the negation of man as a “worshipping being”. He correctly points out that many secularists “believe in God” (heck, as I often tell my students, “even Satan believes in God”), and that they may even have a sense of the spiritual and a semblance of a prayer life. Overt, full-blown, ideological atheism is still a minority position in America. But what makes these believers in God “secular” is their denial of the important of man as “homo adorans”. They deny that the very essence of what it means to be human involves giving “true worship” to God or that such worship constitutes the very perfection of who we are. Liturgy is thus robbed of any divine meaning or significance (for good reason do we call it “the Divine Liturgy”) and it is reduced in stature to a mere ritualized projection of our own subjective “tastes” in matters religious, on an equal footing with my preferences for Bourbon over Scotch, and Quarter Pounders over Big Macs: de gustibus non est disputandum.

…

And the secular ethos cuts across all ideological spectrums in the Church and deep into her soul ….

Larry Chapp in a letter to Rod Dreher. Right about now, I’m feeling pretty good about “homo adorans” in the header of this blog.

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Thursday Potpourri, 8/23/18

An interesting and unexpected twist on St. Clive the New Academic:

When C.S. Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, he admitted that he did so in large part because Christianity answered the pagan longings he had experienced in his love of mythology and of all things northern …

Epigram to a Brad Birzer article on C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis: Man of Faith or Warmed-Over Pagan?. After some tart words about Evangelical and fundamentalist worship of Lewis, and his own frustration with Lewis at times, this:

[S]uch Pagan lingerings should not really surprise the modern reader. When Lewis converted to Christianity in late 1931, he admitted that he did so in large part because Christianity answered the pagan longings he had experienced in his love of mythology and of all things northern. Christianity, he claimed, then and later, did not overturn the past; it baptized it. Christianity did not kill the magic, it sanctified it, making it holy and good. In ways Lewis could not understand but knew to be true, dryads remained, but they could no longer wield their power in the way they had before the coming of Christ. Further, Lewis wrote openly about the Pagan powers as real and tangible, such as when Venus, the goddess (or angelic power) of love, descends upon the wedding cottage of Jane and Mark Studduck in the finale of That Hideous Strength. And, if this is not enough proof, one need only read (or reread) what many regard to be his greatest work, Till We Have Faces, a novel so openly pagan at times as to shock.

Yet, within many Evangelical and Protestant Christian circles, Tolkien remains suspect as a pagan because of his stories of wizards, magic, necromancers, orcs, and elves.

To be sure, these are double standards. What Lewis and Tolkien each understand—and with piety and intelligence—is that the world God created still holds profound mysteries that are at once sacramental and perilous, open to the deepest longings and imaginings of the soul.

The next time you hear a bustle under the hedgerow, pause, wonder, and move on.

As someone who experienced major changes in my Christian tradition twice in life, and who recognizes (1) that my rationales may not have exhausted my reasons and (2) that I have “baggage,” acknowledged and undiscerned, I sympathize with Lewis and appreciate Birzer’s perceptive comments.

Now I think I understand why, deficient as I am in knowledge of mythology, I never could finish Till We Have Faces. But I’m not dead yet. I may give it another try, without looking for the hidden Gospel in it this time.

The Left is wrong, the Right is wrong, but there’s still legitimate asymmetry between sides of any racial divide:

For the left, their perspective is that historical injustice has created such a degree of unfairness that it is not right to treat oppressed groups exactly the same as privileged groups. For the right, their perspective is that we have to ignore the past and treat everyone the same.

…

We should be clear about the content of some of [Sarah] Jeong’s tweets. She tweeted about the joy of being cruel to old white men, that whites should become extinct and compared whites to dogs. A reasonable person does not respond to specific trolls with such dehumanizing comments about groups of individuals. It is wrong plain and simple …

Not only are such comments wrong, but they also coarsen our discourse and make it harder for us to find solutions that we can all accept. How do we expect whites to react to such comments? Do we really think that they will have some type of Kumbaya moment and realize their privileged position? Or is it most likely that those who already do not experience white guilt will merely harden their resistance to any suggestion by people of color since they will link those suggestions to anti-white bigotry? I think to ask these questions is to answer them.

I know that some progressives will say that we should not care what white people think. They are the oppressors right? We merely need to impose whatever “woke” solution of the day is out there as a matter of justice. Makes sense to me. Telling whites that their opinions do not matter has worked wonders in achieving an awareness of racial privilege. In fact, it has worked so well that we now have President Trump. Truly insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

George Yancey, Lessons from the Sarah Jeong affair. There’s quite a bit more.

Then what about some of the traits among those in TDW [Theological Dark Web]? If you go back to the sorts of things you might hear around IDWers, you might arrive at certain theological equivalents:

There are fundamental biological differences between men and women.

There are fundamental differences between evangelicalism and Protestantism of the Reformation.

Free speech is under siege.

Having theological disagreements is mean.

Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.

Dietrich Bonhoffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. may not have been the most orthodox of theologians.

Then if you want an analogous set of principles, it might look like this:

Willingness to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness.

Willingness to disagree about baptism, the Lord’s Supper, ordination, limited atonement, small group Bible studies and small group prayer.

Determination to resist parroting what’s politically convenient.

Determination to resist what’s popular on the conference circuit.

Purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

Working outside moderate evangelical institutions and finding receptive audiences in Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Anglican settings.

In fact, what may identify TDW more than anything else is an identification with a communion or denomination first, with parachurch institutions functioning on the periphery.

I think it’s time for a Theological Dark Web.

D. G. Hart

Bobby Jindal, the former promising policy wonk, now a failed former governor, is back to wonkery, and makes one very good point: the GOP could end up inadvertently spurring single-payer.

This may deserve more prominent mention, but I’m not yet ready for abject “mea culpas: From down under comes word of moderate success in “sexual orientation change efforts,” with few reported ill-effects, for “men who have a religious motivation to change.”

As implied, I pass it on because I’ve expressed skepticism about sexual orientation change efforts (though not about the possibility of chastity).

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Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

The n-word

I understand Omarosa, a con woman, playing around with an allegation that Donald Trump used the n-word and she has a recording to prove it. It keeps her in the limelight and sells books. But I have no idea how Trump used it which, heaven help me, seems relevant even when the user is Donald Trump.

I couldn’t recall any account of how “Papa John” of pizza fame used it, so I Googled it and found this report, in which the journalist won’t spell out the word (but which reveals a use for which firing, return of millions of dollars of charitable donations, and erasure of the donor’s name from endowed buildings seems a bit hysterical — but admittedly the broader context of the narrower context is missing).

A black sociologist argues that “the n-word” is more toxic than “honky,” but he won’t spell out “the n-word” as he discusses it (and the legitimate reasons why sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for the gander when it comes to hateful language hurled across racial lines).

I “get it” that it is uniquely toxic as an epithet directed at another human being, especially when a pale (or orange) person hurls it at a dark person, in person or even in absentia. (Heck, it’s even worse than “dog“!)

But not all uses are epithets. Some people use it as a negative example, to criticize it and forbid its use as epithet. It seems to me that journalists could legitimately use it in the context of reporting on a controversy over its use as an epithet.

Should a law ever be written to criminalize it, describing it as “the n-word” would be, I think, an independent, void-for-vagueness constitutional infirmity.

But no. Not done. Can’t go there. Can’t go anywhere.

I’m half expecting some playwright or novelist to go coy on us in dialog.

It’s as if the very mention of it, howsoever legitimate and non-epithetic, threatens (social) death.

I may be a little bit Aspie, but I just don’t get it.

If it’s just a crazy fad, I have a suggestion for a much more sensible fad. The metaphorical use of “impact” and its derivatives as verbs by any journalist or other professional shall result in immediate termination for malpractice and, where applicable, license revocation. “Impactful” shall be a capital offense.

One may, however, use those words in drafting appropriate legislation or advocating its passage.

UPDATE: I deleted a rambling introduction, venting about something happening to a friend of mine that, in cool light of day, looked terribly out of place.

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Potpourri 2, 8/22/18

Second potpourri of the day. We live in interesting times and some tendinitis in my ankle leaves me with extra time to think and write about it.

I’ve reluctantly come to acknowledge that I’ve lost touch with my country. I don’t understand at any visceral level, for the most conspicuous example, how Donald Trump attracted enough votes in key places to become President.

Articles like Jonathan Rausch’s Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not provide a just-so framework for “understanding,” but ultimately leave me frustrated that the Real Question remains, transposed to a different key:

… all happiness is relative. Although moral philosophers may wish Homo sapiens were wired more rationally, we humans are walking, talking status meters, constantly judging our worth and social standing by comparing ourselves with others today and with our own prior selves.
… the witticism (frequently attributed to Gore Vidal) that “it is not enough for me to succeed; others must fail” is uncomfortably accurate …
Inequality, in short, is immiserating …

Yes, but why —other than The Fall, which is its own “Just So Story” in the sense that it cannot predict just how cussedness will break out next — are we irrational, status-metering mutterers?

Other countries, including some culturally similar to ours (think Scandinavia), experience much higher reported levels of happiness. As we see another economic downturn (if not outright collapse), we may find ourselves choosing between spitefully settling for the second half of Vidal’s witticism (“well, at least we’re making others fail worse”) or something like a Distributist or Social Democrat modus vivendi at lower absolute wealth levels.

When Jove Meyer, a wedding and event planner in Brooklyn, is working with a same-sex couple, he sometimes finds himself cringing when he hears a guest use the term “gay wedding.”

“It’s not with bad intention, but people like to label things because it’s easier to discuss,” said Mr. Meyer, who runs Jove Meyer Events. “But the couple is not getting ‘gay’ married. They are getting married. They’re not having a ‘gay wedding.’ They’re having a wedding. You don’t go to a straight wedding and say, ‘I’m so happy to be at this straight wedding.’”

…

Mr. Meyer, who also advocates for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and identifies as a gay man, explained that labeling same-sex couples as different from any other wedding is the root of the cause …

Stephanie Cain, New York Times.

Yes, that’s the theory, isn’t it? The institution of marriage is as howsoever malleable we want it to be.

I will not be surprised, though, if the language we use continues for a good long time to reflect the correct instinct that it’s not really true — and that phrases like “labeling same-sex couples as different from any other wedding is the root of the cause” are gibberish on an obfuscatory mission.

The medieval Jewish sage Maimonides counted 613 commandments, or mitzvot, in the Law that God gave his people, Israel. The 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who escaped the Nazis’ genocidal clutches and devoted part of his scholarly life to pondering the moral meaning of the Holocaust, formulated what he called the 614th commandment: Give Hitler no posthumous victories. And how would Jews violate that “commandment?” By religious Jews denying the providential role of Israel’s God in Jewish life; by secular Jews abandoning the notion of Israel as a unique people with a distinctive historical destiny; by Jews acting toward other Jews in ways that tore at the spiritual and moral bonds that bound the people of Israel together.

George Weigel, whose concern is not with the Jews but with his Roman Catholic Church. Count me a skeptic, as I usually am toward Weigel these days.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher gives Weigel’s argument the derision it deserves, and gives it good and hard (while nodding toward the importance of “institutionalists” like Weigel and the late Richard John Neuhaus, who I respected more than I would have had I known of his fecklessness on “the long lent” about which he wrote so plausibly).

If neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them. And to some extent have.

Holman Jenkins

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Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Potpourri 8/22/18

As a means of exposing those who insist of seeing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a reincarnation of Josef Stalin, it would be good to look at Putin’s relationship with the great Soviet dissident and anti-communist hero, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose centenary we celebrate this year.

…

Discussing the cooling of relations between Russia and the West, Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the history of the previous fifteen years highlighted the sharpness with which he viewed contemporary events. When he had returned to Russia he discovered that the West was “practically being worshipped.” This was caused “not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.” The positive view of many Russians towards the West began to sour following “the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia”: “It’s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings.” The situation worsened as NATO sought to widen its influence to the former Soviet republics. “So, the perception of the West as mostly a ‘knight of democracy’ has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusionment, a crushing of ideals.”

As for the West, it was “enjoying its victory after the exhausting Cold War” and was observing the anarchy in Russian under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It seemed as though Russia was becoming “almost a Third World country and would remain so forever.” In consequence, the re-emergence of Russia as a political power caused unease in the West, a panic “based on erstwhile fears.” It was “too bad” that the West was unable to distinguish between Russia and the Soviet Union.

…

What more need be said? In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the greatest classic of anti-communist literature is now compulsory reading in all high schools. If the same could be said of the high schools of the United States, we would not have the endemic historical and political ignorance that has led to the widespread sympathy for communism among young Americans. In light of this, and in light of Mr. Putin’s evident admiration for Solzhenitsyn, let’s not try to pretend that Russia is a communist nation. We don’t need to like Vladimir Putin. We don’t need to admire him. But we do need to acknowledge that Russia has moved on from evils of socialism, even as we are in danger of embracing those very same evils.

Joseph Pearce. Can there be any doubt that Putin 2018 is an improvement over Stalin 1948, or the whole sorry history of Russian Communism from the Revolution until collapse?

The great flaw in anti-sacramental thinking is its abstracted notion of “spiritual.” It is presumed that for something to be “spiritual,” it must have nothing to do with the material world. That “talking to Jesus” only consists in words spoken in our heads. In truth, it is a preference for the imaginary over the real. The Word did not become flesh only to get our attention so that we would no longer have anything to do with the material world. It is the Word who became flesh Who gives us His Body and His Blood, the waters of Baptism, the marriage bed, the Apostolic ministry, the oil of healing, the laying on of hands, the lifting of the voice and all such things.

Non-sacramental Christianity has a long history of delusional teaching and practices. If the encounter with God is primarily the stuff going on in my head, then the strange results are fairly predictable. Nothing is more subject to manipulation and delusion than our subjectivity ….

Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Mediated Presence – Thank God.

I was away from home this afternoon, but caught All Things Considered breaking the news that Michael Cohen would plead guilty and the jury had a Paul Manafort verdict.

(Fade to modest restaurant dinner.)

The silent TV is playing talking heads, claiming (via close captioning) that Cohen fingered Trump in his guilty plea.

Home again at 9:45 pm. Wall Street Journal (Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty, Says Trump Told Him to Pay Off Women) and New York Times (Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction) agree that Cohen fingered Trump. Meaning no respect to news on TV — no, actually, I do mean disrespect — only now do I believe the fact or the interpretation.

This should be huge, possibly leading to impeachment. But I have given up political prognosticating because I don’t understand the Vichy Republicans. And I’m not convinced that the cure of impeachment wouldn’t be worse than the disease of Trump anyway.

That’s all I have to say for now. If a gypsy cursed me with “May you live in interesting times,” I do believe the curse “took.”

On a brighter and unexpected note, Congress apparently is forgoing August recess to take up budget matters, passing non-controversial spending piecemeal, and doing so in bipartisan fashion.

It’s almost as if someone exercised forethought: “What if Trump ‘shut down’ government because we can’t agree on ‘the wall,’ but the shutdown was entirely harmless mostly because all the no-brainers were passed in August, before the President’s confected crisis of September?”

One cheer out of three.

Data point: Reader Matt in VA, a Rod Dreher reader who is non-celibate gay, agrees in substance with Daniel Mattson that, as Mattson put it, “men with homosexual tendencies find it particularly difficult to live out the demands of chastity.” Reader Matt’s version is:

I think it’s absolutely to be expected that a clergy full of gay men will find chastity harder than a clergy full of straight men. Again, it’s so much easier to have quick, furtive sex with another man than it is with a woman.

We’re still in a state of denial that make this controversial enough that only a gay man can say it with minimal blow-back. (Well, gay men and Camille Paglia.)

I shouldn’t say it even apart from political correctness because I can’t back it up except by citing Reader Matt, Mr. Mattson (which I have now done), and Ms. Paglia (who surely has said this somewhere or other). I have neither personal experience nor data nor scholarly literature.

I’m not sure how this relates to Eve Tushnet’s focus on the closet versus the orientation, but it seems to undermine her.

* * * * *

Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Potpourri, 8/21/18

“Scared stiff,” “weak,” not a “real attorney general”? He has been called worse in his time. It would seem to be the case that he has intuited something that most of his colleagues — to say nothing of the American people — have not: namely, that it is sometimes, indeed frequently, a good idea not to take the president seriously.

…

Sessions is the most devoted of our emperor’s servants precisely because he has nothing in common with the rest of them. He is neither a scheming amoral hanger-on like so many members of this administration, current and former, or a stolidly disinterested public servant like James Mattis, the defense secretary whom one could imagine resigning in the face of serious policy disagreements — to say nothing of insults to his personal honor along the lines of those to which Sessions has been repeatedly subjected. The attorney general is a true believer.

As long as he is at liberty to wage a renewed drug war and implement the schemes for restricting immigration of which he and his former deputy Stephen Miller have so long dreamed, Sessions will remain in this White House, brushing the dirt from his shoulders without so much as a smirk.

Matthew Walther on Jeff Sessions.

I’m reflexively suspicious of Sessions because, unlike with Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Harrison Scott Key and other southern writers, I can actually hear his drawl, and it triggers my own micro-version of PTSD from my discordant sojourn of three semesters in a third-tier southern Christianish educational institution (which I was invited to leave for the sin of being an “out” conscientious objector in the Vietnam era — an invitation that made too much sense to refuse).

But there is something about stoic Sessions, starting with his trail-blazingly early support of Trump, that sets him apart from both (a) the cynical climbers and (b) the kenotic, clenched-teeth-reluctant patriots in the Trump White House.

Before I talk about the ways in which the closet may have contributed to a culture of cover-up and abuse, let me say that most talk of “root causes” is premature and comes across as using other people’s rape as a weapon in a culture war.

This is the only part of Eve Tushet’s column, A Closeted Subculture, with which I’m pretty sure I disagree, almost vehemently. There have been plenty of people thinking about this abuse scandal for at least 16 years, since the “long lent,” and complaining that the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church refused to identify the pervasive (not universal) homosexual nexus in abuse cases.

“Please, God! Not another study!”, I can hear faithful Catholics saying if they’ve not had blinders on since 2002 — but yet another study (or other stalling tactic) is the eventuality of the position that it’s premature to identify “root causes.”