Category: Faith & Ideology

Sunday, 11/9/14

Much bullshit is spoken about things we do “for the children.”

This is not bullshit. It is the author at his white-hot best:

It will be said that the one—the unrepentant or semi-repentant sinner, the one who wants to have the faith on his own terms—is “marginalized,” a word I detest, but which may serve my purposes this once. If adults in immoral sexual relationships are “marginalized,” Lord, let me speak up now for people who do not even make it to the margins, for the poorest of the poor, for people who have no advocate at all.

Let me speak for the children of divorce …

Let me speak for the children thrust into confusion, to justify the confusion of their parents or of people in authority over them …

Let me speak for the children exposed to unutterable evils on all sides. Here is a girl at age twelve who has seen things on a screen that her grandmother could never have imagined. She is taking pictures of herself already, and making “friends” among the sons and daughters of Belial …

Let me speak up for the young people who see the beauty of the moral law and the teachings of the Church, and who are blessed with noble aspirations, but who are given no help, none, from their listless parents, their listless churches, their crude and cynical classmates, their corrupted schools …

Let me speak up for the young people who do in fact follow the moral law and the teachings of the Church. Many of these are suffering intense loneliness. Have you bothered to notice? Have you considered all those young people who want to be married, who should be married, but who, because they will not play evil’s game, can find no one to marry? …

(Anthony Esolen, Who Will Rescue the Lost Sheep of the Lonely Revolution?)

See also the Update from the 31-year old former “prototypical ‘good Christian girl'” at Rod Dreher’s blog here.)

* * * * *

Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers responds to a deservedly controversial piece floated by a Priest on the Orthodox Church in America’s “Wonder” site. The OCA version is down but the priest’s parish hosts a copy.

The priest author is just fine with some sorts of unrepentant or semi-repentant sinners who want to have the faith on their own terms, less hospitable toward convert “fundamentalists.” They don’t count. They don’t make it to his margins. They are stock figure bad guys. Maybe the poor Padre doesn’t have any of them in his parish, but only unrepentant or semi-repentant who heard that he’s especially friendly toward their sort and who hope to lead Orthodoxy into the promised land by the leading of “the spirit.”

[C]hanging the Tradition in response to American secularism paradoxically seems OK. This often involves a kind of cultural American phyletism–on the one hand criticizing the influence of American Orthodox converts, while on the other emphasizing the need to engage an imaginary homogenous American culture and to be less “old world.” Ironically, the “old world” element in American Orthodoxy often can be pluralistic and cosmopolitan by comparison.

(Dr. Siewers, emphasis added.)

* * * * *

“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)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Saturday, 11/8/14

  1. Polls: The Reverse Lie Detector
  2. Progressive clobber passages
  3. Malum prohibitum, Malum in se
  4. Defining and Discovering
  5. Follow the bouncing Zeitgeist

Continue reading “Saturday, 11/8/14” →

Sunday, 10/25/14

I’m convinced that the perfectly logical, Star Trek Spock figure doesn’t exist, and if he did, he’d miss part of what it means to be human.

What prompts that musing (“I write to see what I think,” someone wrote) is my consternation over the box the Catholic Church is in over divorce and remarriage and my own mixed and less than pristinely logical feelings about them getting out of the box. (I’m totally setting aside the question of pastoral ministry to GLBTetcetera people.

I’m Orthodox Christian. I believe all that that Orthodox Church teaches and that what it has practiced for a millennium or more is sound practice. When the Roman Catholic Church assembled in the Council of Trent in the 16th Century and pondered (perhaps among other things) divorce, it was aware of and acknowledged the practice of the Orthodox, from whom they’d been in uneasy schism for 500 years or so (yes, they would reverse that), on divorce and remarriage:

  1. Divorce was seen as a grave sin. This is important. It’s not a throw-away line.
  2. Remarriage was not categorically forbidden. It has been good to see rigorist Roman Catholic writers describe Rome’s categorical ban as “rooted in the very words of Christ himself,” because they don’t inexorably follow from Christ’s words.
  3. Remarriage ceremonies were, for lack of a better term, penitential in comparison to the crowning service for first marriages.

This, I believe, is sound practice, that handled pastorally can contribute to the salvation of people. Without trying to speculate too wildly, the Roman Catholic practice seems likely to drive wounded people from the Church and, if they are weak sexually, to make serial fornicators or adulterer of them.

I am all but certain that Rome would have a very plausible answer to the preceding sentence. It might even be perfectly logical, but that may bespeak a real limit of logic more than an error in Orthodox practice.

But for the Roman Catholic Church to become like the Orthodox Church on divorce and remarriage at this historic juncture would be seen as a vindication of a different, thoroughly modern, practice on divorce and remarriage:

  1. Divorce is no big deal.
  2. Remarriage, if you want to bother (and it’s totally optional; shacking up is just fine if that’s better for your “family” financially), is your basic human right so long as your intended is a consenting adult.
  3. Marriage ceremonies are a bunch of hocus pocus; do it however you like.

Ross Douthat (H/T Rod Dreher) really believes the current Catholic dogma (from whence flows its practice) and paints an apocalyptic picture of what contradiction and reversal would bring. He urges the Catholic faithful to oppose the Pope if necessary to prevent reversal.

I think the Roman Catholic Church really should abandon that dogma, not in favor of the sexual liberationist superstition, but in favor of the older Orthodox practice. But I can’t begin to imagine how it can actually do that without the consequence of which Douthat warns – and more.

* * * * *

“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)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.