Category: Intrigued

Is Peggy Noonan’s ear good or not?

I look forward to Peggy Noonan’s Friday columns in the Wall Street Journal. The former Reagan speechwriter has a sharp mind and a good ear. Occasionally she fails to say something useful, in my estimation, but not often.

Today’s column is the first time I think I’ve understood the Tea Party’s motivation. Is she right, or is she wrong (and I misled by thinking she’s got it)?

Continue reading “Is Peggy Noonan’s ear good or not?” →

“Left Hand? Hello, Right Hand calling.”

“Left Hand? Hello, Right Hand calling.”

I see an interesting juxtaposition between columnists at Townhall.com today. Star Parker (who, by the way, is running for Congress) says that “[a]s the economy gets increasingly sophisticated, the penalty for lack of education gets greater. But we’re failing to deliver this needed education to lower income Americans.” Meanwhile, Michael Barone is publicizing the theory that we’re riding an “education bubble” that’s apt to burst.

Continue reading ““Left Hand? Hello, Right Hand calling.”” →

Vocations – true and fancied

“Every time I move to a new place, I’m asked by the locals, “How do you like living here?” I’m never quite sure how to answer that question, and for the longest time I didn’t know why. And then one day it dawned on me, I couldn’t answer the question because I couldn’t figure out what the difference was between one place and the next.” Continue reading “Vocations – true and fancied” →

Another blog recommendation

Mirror of Justice is “A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.” I apparently discovered it relatively late in the game, as it already is the second “stickiest” blog, trailing only the Volokh Conspiracy site (another law-oriented site). In other words, MOJ readers spend lots of time engaging what they read there.

This isn’t arcane stuff you need to be a lawyer to appreciate, although being a lawyer probably deepens the appreciation — or the opposition.

It’s sometimes philosophical (are there absolutes? more than one?), sometimes Front Porchy (are the suburbs bad?), sometimes surprisingly eclectic (does belief in interreligious unity reek of colonialism and empire?), and increasingly, one of my favorites.

New(ish) Blog Recommendation

Especially to Orthodox readers of this blog, I commend a new (to me) blog “A Vow of Conversation.” The author, Macrina Walker, says of herself:

When I first started this blog I was a Roman Catholic monastic. I am now exclaustrated from my monastery and am preparing to enter the Orthodox Church. I am South African, am presently in the Netherlands and my life is in a state of flux.

I’m looking forward gradually to reviewing her promising “Completed Series” as well as subscribing to her new postings.

Mitch Daniels vulnerable on corruption?

The Advance Indiana blog (see blogroll, right) has some obsessions, and those obsessions seem to involve the corner-cutting, corporatism and downright corruption of the Republicans in power in Indianapolis — both state and local government. That would be no surprise were not the blogger himself a Republican. (Doug Masson beat me to the punch on this, but I started before lunch and his appeared between now and then.)

The blog is relentless in criticizing the Indy Mayor Greg Ballard’s administration for its subservience to the interests of billionaire sports franchise owners (here, here, here, & here — and that’s just the recent ones; but don’t think he’s just an anti-sports sissy).

Today, he hits a higher target — the Daniels administration:

I’m telling you that Daniels has some big-time scandals brewing in his administration. The Obama Justice Department can bury any presidential ambitions he may have if they so desire to investigate these various scandals. I thought Mitch was smart enough to avoid this kind of corruption in his administration when he first got elected, but my once favorable impression of him is fading with the passage of every day. I’m not surprised by [State Rep. Eric] Turner’s obvious self-dealing, and I doubt many others who’ve watched him over at the State House over the years are either. The ACS [company hired to privatize Medicaid administration] connections run deeper than [Mitch] Roob. Barnes & Thornburg’s Bob Grand and Joe Loftus have lobbied the state and the City of Indianapolis for the firm. They firm as also lobbied the state for [Daniels insider John] Bales’ Venture Real Estate. CIB President Ann Lathrop, who replaced Grand in that role, used to work at ACS with Roob and former Mayor Steve Goldsmith, who employed both of them in his administration. Lathrop now works for Crowe Horwath, which has several contracts with the City of Indianapolis. Lathrop personally inked a contract with the Ballard administration’s budget office, which Lathrop ran during the Goldsmith administration. And I could go on but you get the point. It’s just one incestuous cesspool.

“Incenstuous cesspool” almost earned this re-blog a “damn rackets” categorization, but I’m holding off on that a bit longer.

Still, I had a lot of trouble with the Medicaid privatization debacle, which put Daniels’ willful streak on display and was so patently misguided — long before he nevertheless went ahead and did it — that only two theories came to mind for why he’d do it:

  1. He cynically wanted to screw up Medicaid — a massive and virtually uncontrollable entitlement — so badly that nobody would even want to bother applying (which in essence would move the cost of caregiving “off book” by forcing family members to skip economically productive jobs to care for aging parents even more than they already do); or
  2. He or someone he likes/owes stood to profit mightily from privatization. (This was barely on my radar, frankly.)

I want to like Mitch. I want to be proud of him. I’d like to want him to become President. But don’t bet on it — whether “it” is is me wanting him to become President or him actually becoming President. I knew nothing of his youthful pot use, divorce and, now, possible corruption (or closeness to corruption) until he became one of the frontrunners (or coy draft candidates) du jour.

Expect more dirt to be unearthed — not necessarily because Advance Indiana is right, but because that’s the way political sabotage works, and it’s hard to do all Mitch has done in his life without getting at least splashed with some ugly mud along the way.

Red family, blue family: a prequel

I discovered that the “red family, blue family” meme (which I’ve blogged on here and here) is not brand new. Indeed, it was anticipated, in those exact terms, in February 2005 by Doug Mulder, who wrote quite a thought-provoking article about it (PDF version here).

Mulder, a self-described liberal (and apparently an academic in the social sciences; and/or perhaps a Unitarian minister, as some allusions hint) starts with the 2004 Presidential election, which left coastal liberals agog:

Some large number of Bush voters told the pollsters that they based their vote on “moral values.” Well, duh. When we’d voted against Bush – the reverse Robin Hood, the warmaker, the guy who kept hinting (against all evidence) that Saddam had been about to give nuclear weapons to al Qaeda – we’d voted our moral values too.

Trying to make sense of it, he resorted to a 1996 book:

George Lakoff’s friends are probably even more liberal than mine. He’s a professor at Berkeley, a cognitive scientist who started applying his work to political cognition in the mid-nineties. His 1996 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think still stands as the most complete analysis of the polarized worldviews of the American political scene.

And indeed, Lakoff’s work, which I don’t recall encountering before, is very interesting — and, as I recognized even before I read Mulder’s critique, deeply flawed.

Both liberals and conservatives use what he calls the Nation-As-Family metaphor. Both talk about the government as if it were a parent, and citizens as if they were siblings. The government defends, educates, rewards, and punishes its citizens – like parents with children.

The difference Lakoff found between liberal and conservative thinking, however, came from the frame each put on family. In other words: What is the stereotypic ideal family that the nation should be modeled on?

From conservative rhetoric, Lakoff constructed a frame he called the Strict Father family. (The red and blue boxed text comes from the Rockridge Institute website.) Liberals, on the other hand, seem to use a frame Lakoff called the Nurturant Parent family.

One of Lakoff’s big flaws is that his outline of the “Strict Father Family” sounds utterly attavistic. Armed with awareness of James Ault’s PBS documentary Born Again, and a much later book by the producer, finding that fundamentalist lives and Churches are not actually abhorrent in practice, Mulder tries to get behind what Lakoff found behind superficially similar “government as parent” metaphors — “behind the behind” if effect.

The families Ault found at [a Worcester, Massachusetts fundamentalist church] – extended families in which multiple generations remain deeply involved in each other’s lives – aren’t supposed to exist any more, especially not in a Massachusetts edge city like Worcester.

So Mulder tries to refine Lakoff’s “Strict Family” versus “Nurturant Family” into “Given Family” versus “Chosen Family” or, just a tad deeper still, “Inherited Obligation Family” versus “Negotiated Commitment Family.”

Holy smokes! We’re back, in gussied-up garb, to the old “from status to contract” theory in the sociology of law! Not that it was discredited, mind you. That it’s still being echoed suggests quite the opposite. And I’ve known for a long time that it forms one of the deep divides between what I would call “true conservatives” (think Wendell Berry and Front Porch Republic) and both liberals and the sort of faux conservatives who can’t stop babbling the praises of “capitalism’s creative destruction” and such.

This time, though Mulder is himself liberal, it’s the liberal iteration of family — the “Negotiated Commitment Family” — that sounds repulsive, while the “Inherited Obligation Family” seems real, and human, and durable. (Or is that just my conservative bias showing?)

Mulder steps out of his not-quite-neutral role to advise liberals on how to stop scaring conservative voters who, for instance, rejected John Kerry:

The truth about liberals – that we more often than not choose to commit ourselves to marriage, children, church, and most of the other things conservatives feel obligated to, and that we stick by those commitments every bit as faithfully, if not more so – easily gets lost…

Consider, for example, liberal parents. The Negotiated Commitment model offers them very little in exchange for the effort and expense that they put into parenting. They don’t have to do it, and they can’t demand that children reciprocate after they grow up. Most liberal parents understand the situation. But they volunteer to raise children anyway. Liberals join the Peace Corps, work in soup kitchens, and stand together with unpopular oppressed peoples rather than walking away from. Why? Because liberals are serious, committed people.

Our rhetoric needs to capture the seriousness of our beliefs and commitments. We should, for example, miss no opportunity to use words like commitment and principle.  Our principles should be stated clearly and we should return to them often, rather than moving towards a nebulous center whenever we are afraid of losing.

John Kerry didn’t lose because he was a liberal. He lost because people couldn’t figure out what he was. They couldn’t recite his principles or predict where he would come down on future issues. Republican slanders stuck to him because he projected no clear image of his own.

There is a lot to promote about liberalism and the Negotiated Commitment model behind it. We take people as they are, rather than demanding that they fit themselves into an increasingly outdated set of roles…

This is very rich and evocative stuff. it ramifies in a host of specific hot issues:

  • Abortion
  • Same-sex marriage
  • Social Programs
  • Freedom
  • Taxes
  • The gushing enthusiasm of Chamber of Commerce speakers like Richard Florida, who’s really keen on strip-mining smart kids from Hicksville and planting them in yeasty, creative urban settings (okay; maybe that’s a “pet peeve” instead of a “hot issue”).

You don’t have to be an egghead to engage Mulder, but you do need a modest block of time to read this rather long article, which richly rewards the effort.

But don’t forget my contribution: that in SAT terms:

inherited obligation is to status as negotiated commitment is to contract

Status versus contract is an idea whose time may again have come — though if Mulder is right (that contract will grow as a compelling political guiding principle because more and more people are living it daily), it may not work to the advantage of conservatism until we experience a great crackup that cures our hubris.

On Christian Obedience

From Father Gregory Jensen at the Koinonia blog, a Homily on today’s Gospel (with a comment of my own at the end):

Romans 6:18-23 (Epistle)
Matthew 8:5-13 (Gospel)

Especially given the events of the 20th century, the rise of Communism, Fascism, world and regional wars and the persecution and slaughter or men, women and children because of religious or ideological differences, the virtue of obedience has–understandably–fallen into disrepute not only among non-Christians but Christians as well.  It is as if we have said, personally and collectively, “I have been betrayed by those in authority and so I will no longer trust anyone but myself.”  While not universally the case, many of us–again whether Christian or not–live not so much in willful disobedience but in helpless fear.  At its core our not wholly unreasonable suspicion of obedience reflects the scars left by love and trust abused.

The Gospel this morning, however, places obedience at the center of our attention. And it is not simply a generic obedience but the kind of obedience we have come as a culture to dread and fear I think more than any other.  It is a soldier’s obedience to his commander; a commander’s expectation of obedience from his troops.  “…I also am a man under authority, having soldiers under me. And I say to this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (v. 9).

Hearing this, the Gospel says that Jesus, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He Who is God from All-Eternity become Man, the Creator become a Creature, “marvels.”  At this moment, it is not a man who stands in awe of God, but God Who stands in awe of a man. Jesus then turns to His disciples, to His friends and those to whom He is closest and says

Assuredly, I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel! And I say to you that many will come from east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (vv. 10-12).

Neither the man’s race–he was a Gentile–nor his profession–he was a Roman solider and so responsible for enforcing the Emperor’s will–keeps him from being an exemplary, an icon if you will, of faith.  If anything, a life time of military service had taught him what it means to entrust not only his own life, but the lives of those he loved, to someone else.

When we think about obedience and its place in Christian life, we often unconsciously adopt the narrow and frankly deformed notion of obedience that is current in our culture.  As a Christian virtue, obedience is not mechanical, it does not deform or obscure what is unique in the person.  Much less does Christian obedience require that we sacrifice our freedom.

What it does require from me, however, is that I sacrifice my willful self-centeredness, my pretense, my myriad affectations and all the little ways in which I pursue the good opinions of others rather than the will of God.

So what do we mean, in a positive sense, by the Christian virtue of obedience?

First and foremost, before it is anything else, obedience is entrusting myself to the care of God.  We see this in the Gospel; the centurion has absolute confidence that Christ can heal his servant.  He say to Jesus, “only speak a word, and my servant will be healed” (v. 8).

We should linger momentarily on this verse because it contains a second characteristic of Christian obedience.  The centurion doesn’t simply trust Jesus in a general sense.  Nor is his trust limited to his own life.  No, the centurion trusts Jesus on behalf of his servant.

We see this again and again in the Gospels.  Jesus heals, for example, the paralytic let down through the roof not because of his faith, but in response to the faith of his friends (Matthew 9:1–8; Mark 2:1–12; Luke 5:17–26).  Or, to take another example (John 2:1-11), Jesus changes water into wine not at the request of the steward of the feast or of the bridegroom.  No what He does for them He does in response to the faith of His Mother the Most Holy Theotokos who is herself a model of obedience (see Luke 11:28).

Christian obedience to God is always an mutual obedience.  It isn’t simply your obedience or my obedience; it is rather always our obedience.  We are obedient to God together because Christian obedience is both a personal and a communal virtue.

Intuitively we know this.  Think how easily someone’s bad example can infect us.  My obedience is never simply mine alone.  It is dependent on yours, even as yours depends upon mine.

So what do we see?  While ultimately, obedience is always obedience to God, somewhat closer to our everyday life my obedience to God embraces the willingness of those around me to entrust themselves to God as well.  Again, we see this in the Gospel.

We also see something else in today’s Gospel and in the other passages to which I alluded.  The obedient Christian is sensitive not only to God’s will for his own life but also to the will of God for his neighbor.  Especially in an American context, this is one of the most neglected aspects of obedience.

Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov’s  in The Arena (p. 45) we are reminded that it is only “Faith in the truth saves.”   But faith in what is untrue, faith “in a lie” is the fruit of “diabolic delusion” and “is ruinous, according to the teaching of the Apostle” (see, 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12). We need to be discerning about how we live out obedience on a day to day basis.  Precisely because obedience is always shared, we ought not to be obedient to those who do not demonstrate by their own lives that (1) they are themselves obedient to God and (2) that they are obedient to God’s will for our lives.

This is not meant to be a writ for self-will.  Rather it is to remind us that to “At the heart of leadership within the Church is the care of souls.”  For this reason, those to whom we are asked to be obedient must themselves be willing to be held “accountable for the lives and faith of those with whom [they have] been entrusted.”  A leader–a bishop, a priest, a spiritual father or a husband, a wife or parent–cannot expect obedience from others unless he or she unless “the model” of their “own life” is a clear example of “integrity of … faith and conduct” and their “oversight of others” gives to them an ever greater share of “responsibility to … fulfill” their own vocation (see, Metropolitan Jonah, “Episcopacy, Primacy, and the Mother Churches: A Monastic Perspective“).

While this is a lofty standard, it is not one alien to common sense.  We are free in Christ and real obedience in Christ is therefore freeing.  True obedience doesn’t cripple us, but liberates us from anxiety and worry and all the myriad little and great sins that hold us captive to sin and death.  But obedience is not magic but is the right exercise of my freedom in relationship to both God and my neighbor.  That I must grow in freedom, that my understanding and acceptance of freedom will (hopefully) grow and mature over time doesn’t change this.  If anything, it highlights that Christian obedience is only possible where divine grace and human freedom converge.

This brings us back, in a positive way I think, to our culture’s suspicion of obedience.  The recent history I outlined a moment ago, to say nothing our own own personal histories, provide us with ample evidence for while a mechanical and undiscerning submission to the will of another human being is unwise.  And this is just as true, maybe even more true, when the other person’s claims to speak for God.

Just as a solider must disobey an unlawful order, we must disobey those who counsel or command immorality or rebellion against God.  But, and again like the solider, when we do this we must also be willing to bear the consequences for our disobedience.  As I said a moment ago, authority and accountability travel together and I ought not to imagine that I can resist immorality without cost.

Thank God at least within the Church these situations are relatively rare (though even one instance is one too many).  In the main when conflict arises in the Church it does because we disagree on the practical, everyday details of life.  The first to realize when this happens is that honest disagreement is not the same as disobedience.  A difference of vision shouldn’t be equated with rebellion or a lack of faith.

All this being true, I think it is important that when I find myself in these kinds of practical conflicts I defer to authority.  Deference is I think the everyday form that Christian obedience takes.  In a funny way, it is easier for me to practice obedience in “big things.”  Much harder is deference in the little things of life.  And yet, what does Jesus tell us? “He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much” (Luke 16:10).

What makes Christian obedience so difficult is that it almost always demands of me fidelity in what is least.  This is hard because what I want from God is the grand vision, the master plan.  And I want this because, to be honest, it makes me feel important.

But what I get from God is typically only the next step or two down the road.  My willingness to take that step or two is, in the final analysis, the true test of my obedience.

(I particularly like that characteristic Orthodox inversion: “At this moment, it is not a man who stands in awe of God, but God Who stands in awe of a man.”)

I suspect it’s not coincidental the the epistle today (see link above) invites us to “slavery” to righteousness — a virtue that ranks right down there with obedience, in the cellar of our modern values. But the stakes couldn’t be higher: the gift of eternal life.

For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.

… But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I’m not sure I’m fit to sermonize even that much, so I’ll shut up now.

“Fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate”

A New York Times feature Saturday morning profiles Eve Tushnet, styled A Gay Catholic Voice Against Same-Sex Marriage. Eve Tushnet is a very intriguing and forthright thinker/writer who had dropped off my radar though I had admired her in the past.

I find her intriguing today because, on a general topic that remains contentious (which is why it merits careful discussion, again and again, until sanity reigns) and shrill (it often seems that the world is divided into “it’s an abomination” and “you’re a closet queen homophobe” camps), I find myself agreeing with her almost 100%. Her position lifestyle convictions — shared at least in general terms by Orthodox, Catholics, and at least a few others — are neither antinomian nor “phobic” about anything.

Read the profile and read Tushnet’s website a bit. (Here is the link to subscribe to her blog, offered because it was deucedly hard for me to locate.)

Although one might fault her for writing and talking so much about her own sexuality (there’s too little privacy about private things in our exhibitionist age), I believe I understand her decision. In a world where opinion on homosexuality is as polarized as I described, a still-recent convert to a humbler, more historic Christian tradition may be excused for saying repeatedly that “the Gospel is good news for everybody” (as Fr. Thomoas Hopko put it) and “I’ve got credibility because I’m joyously living what I say.” So she’s not hiding her little light under a bushel.

I claim no exalted expertise or credibility on homosexuality. I have watched, read and thought a lot about it as one of the contentious “culture wars” issues of the day, and I’ve pushed back against the gay rights cause where I thought it was going beyond a demand for human dignity and impinging on the rights of others (in general, see my discussion of Chai Feldblum here). When I pushed back, I regretted the wounded and uncomprehending looks from some “out” acquaintances and friends, and accordingly triple-checked and recalibrated my Golden Rule Empathyometer. (I wasn’t off by much if at all. Whew!)

Here’s where I may disagree with Tushnet:

  • “Fervently Catholic” — “She could do better than that,” says this still-recent Orthodox convert from Protestantism. ‘Nuff said about that. 😉
  • “Proudly gay” — these aren’t her words, and perhaps she wouldn’t use them. I simply don’t know what they mean. Pride about anything is dangerous. Pride about unchosen homosexuality seems as silly as being “proudly straight.” And “gay” is also problematic: I thought “gay” connoted non-celibacy; I’ve even had televised debates where my adversary scornfully dismissed the possibility of celibacy with some catty crack like “what do you think ‘gay’ means!?” “Matter-of-fact about her homosexual orientation” seems apt. “Convinced that sexual orientation cannot be changed” is plausible as well, as the falls of several high profile evangelical “reparative therapy” fans attest. But “proud.” Nah.
  • “She does not see herself as disordered” — this passing characterization, in case you’re unaware, represents a gentle repudiation of the Roman Catholic position that homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered.” I’m inclined, in contrast to Tushnet, to agree with that characterization — while quickly adding that there’s something(s) “objectively disordered” about a lot of things in this world. For that reason, I have not taken “objectively disordered” as a put-down, or particularly applied it to persons as opposed to inclinations and practices.
  • “Sin ‘means you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved,’ she says” — While it is true that “sin” doesn’t mean “you’re bad,” neither does it mean you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved. Sin (Greek amartia) means missing the mark (from which miss you indeed can repent etc.).

Somehow, though, it seems inadequate simply to say I agree with the rest of Tushnet’s “positions” in the profile. Instead, I especially appreciate her courage in advocating and modeling celibacy and passionate friendships, including same sex friendships, as the profile alludes to Tushnet’s “theology of friendship, as articulated in books like St. Aelred’s ‘On Spiritual Friendship.’”

I know some decent people who think that anything like “passionate friendships” are just too dangerous (or some such thing) for people with homosexual inclinations, but were there no other problems with that view, there is the very real danger in of any self-imposed, or socially-imposed, isolation. My attitude (to put it in terms of one of my own besetting sins) basically is “The world’s a dangerous place. I can’t stop eating just because I have an inclination to gluttony. I must eat – and risk loss of control – or die. And by analogy ….” I’ll bet you can fill in the rest (which presumes a universal human need for deep friendship). We’re “persons” only in relationship, and an isolated “individual” isn’t much to brag about.

Tushnet is refreshingly realistic about temptation, too: “‘It turns out I happen to be very good at sublimating,’ she says, while acknowledging that that is a lot to ask of others.” Perhaps a lot to ask especially of people trying to become fully human persons in close relation to others.

But in the world, as in the monastery, when a Christian falls, he/she gets back up. And if you fall again, you get up again. Maybe you ask yourself at some point “Am I exposing myself to too much temptation? Should I flee like Joseph from Potiphar’s wife?,” but that’s not my call to make for anyone other than myself.

Eve Tushnet: I’m putting you on my blogroll. Keep up the good work.