Category: Faith & Ideology

Hostettler for Senate

I longish essay at Front Porch Republic yesterday wonders “what if William Jennings Bryant …?” The whole thing is worth reading if you’re contrary like me, but knowing that few will, I’ll quote the very, very contemporary Indiana implications — contemporary like Tuesday, May 4:

This brings us to contemporary political application.  History can be interesting but so what?  Are there any modern-day Bryans?  Can we find any candidates who exemplify FPR values?  Yes we can.  …

John Hostettler of Indiana could be a Feingold counterpart across the aisle if he’s elected to the Senate this year.  A genuine Republican maverick, Hostettler is a former six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Like Ron Paul, Hostettler is a constitutionalist on domestic issues and a noninterventionist (anti-imperialist) in foreign affairs.  He opposed Clinton’s wars in the Balkans.  In 2002, he was one of only six Republican members of the House and one of only three conservative members to vote against the resolution endorsing Bush’s desire to preemptively wage war on Iraq.  At the time, he said the intelligence backing the claim of WMDs was “tenuous at best.”

Following his defeat for reelection, in 2006, Congressman Hostettler self-published Nothing for the Nation: Who Got What Out of Iraq.  The book is endorsed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who writes, “We waged war because the president wanted to do so for his own reasons. . . . Congress made an unconstitutional delegation of authority to the president and it was the most tragic such delegation ever made.  Had we listened to Hostettler at the time, we would not have done it.  If we listen to him now, we might save ourselves the pain, regret, and shame from doing it again. For years I have known I was wrong.  Now I know why I was wrong. I’m sorry so many had to pay such a dear price for me to learn what I should have known before I took that office.”

Hostettler is a populist who has never taken PAC money, which is quite a contrast with his main opponent in the senatorial primary, former Senator Dan Coats.  Coats left the Senate in 1999, was an ambassador for a while, and then cashed in on his “public service” by becoming a lobbyist.  He worked for Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Chrysler, and other big corporations in their successful efforts to feed at the public trough.  Now he has moved back to Indiana in an effort to regain his Senate seat.  Dan Coats is a typical corporate-centrist-establishment Republican à la Bob Dole.

John Hostettler is something quite different.  He voted for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party for president in 2008, not John McCain.  There are mavericks and then there are mavericks.  If Feingold’s blind spots on some social issues, notably his support for legalized abortion and same-sex “marriage” are too off-putting to overlook, then maybe Hostettler is your man.  He is a Bible-believing Christian who is conservative on social morality.  He supports traditional marriage and the rights of unborn children.  He was the lead sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act that passed the House in 2004 but died in the Senate.  Invoking a power of Congress granted by the Constitution, the MPA would have stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to rule on the Defense of Marriage Act.  He opposes illegal immigration.  He supports Second Amendment rights.  He has championed First Amendment religious freedom.  He voted against NCLB on federalism grounds.  These stances have earned him the support of conservatives like Bay Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, and some portions of the Tea Party movement.

The Republican senatorial primary that pits Hostettler against Coats, and a few other contenders, takes place THIS TUESDAY, May 4.  He could use some money now.  Hopefully, he will win the primary and be the odds-on favorite to win in November.

I would note that Dan Coats, the slight favorite Tuesday, is a Wheaton College graduate. The last time he ran, that meant something to me. I learned more at Wheaton with a 2.5 GPA than I learned elsewhere with a 3.5+. But evangelicalism is culturally captive, I now see, and I fear that lobbyist Coats is no exception. So come Tuesday, I’m not voting for him, or Marlin Stutzman, but John Hostettler.

In the works

I have several things going right now that are either time-consuming or interesting.

I’m reading David Bentley Hart’s book “Atheist Delusions,” which is, it seems to me, not just a deserved mocking of the inadequacies of the famous “New Atheist” authors, but a robust defense of the legacy of Christianity which, Hart would wager, none of the New Atheists would care to give up. It seems that Nietzche is just about the only atheist Hart takes seriously, because Nietzche alone dared savage Christianity for what it really is, while today’s pantywaists set up straw men, betraying either their dishonesty or their ignorance.

Not unrelated, but not by design either, I’m planning to re-listen to, and to outline, two Ancient Faith Radio “Illumined Heart” podcasts on “Living in the ruins of Christendom” that I essentially overlooked last fall when they came out. The blog post on them is begun, but not ready for prime time.

NYT Opinions on Goldman Sachs (and why I won’t boycott Arizona)

David Brooks, the New York Times’ genial sorta-conservative columnist, views the financial reform debate roughly as I do, which makes me tentatively pleased that the GOP turned the lemmings back from the cliff yesterday:

The premise of the current financial regulatory reform is that the establishment missed the last bubble and, therefore, more power should be vested in the establishment to foresee and prevent the next one.

If you take this as your premise, the Democratic bill is fine and reasonable. It would force derivative trading out into the open. It would create a structure so the government could break down failing firms in an orderly manner. But the bill doesn’t solve the basic epistemic problem, which is that members of the establishment herd are always the last to know when something unexpected happens.

Kudos to Brooks for nicely stating what is obvious to me. Cries and lamentations that it is unknown to most of Congress, whose centralizing impulse continues because it so nicely fits a good guy/bad guy mythology. As Brooks says:

If this were a Hollywood movie, the prescient outsiders would be good-looking, just and true, and we could all root for them as they outfoxed the smug establishment. But this is real life, so things are more complicated …

In this drama … the establishment was pleasant, respectable and stupid, while the contrarians were smart but hard to love, and sometimes sleazy.

However, Congress is mostly ignoring the outsiders, vying for the white hat role itself.

Elsewhere on the Grey Lady’s editorial page, Linda Greenhouse, who usually functions as a Supreme Court reporter with supposed neutrality, gives free rein to her fury at Arizona for its new immigration bill:

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

…

[T]he phrase “lawful contact” makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, [but] another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. “A person is guilty of trespassing,” the law provides, by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented.

I don’t think the “police state” label is a good fit, even if the new law is ugly. Most Arizonans are walking around without fear of police hassles, after all, while everyone cowers in a police state.

I’ll not make it a point of principle to follow Greehouse’s lead (and in fairness, she’s not explicitly calling for a boycott), if only because I want to return to St. Anthony in the Desert Monastery. But if you want to get an eerie police state feeling, drive down to the Monastery from Phoenix to the north. You’ll pass through Florence, whose dominant industry is prisons. Several of them. Public and private prisons (e.g., Corrections Corporation of America), large and forbidding, lining both sides of the road on the drive through town. It’s like stumbling onto something that was deliberately moved out of the way because of its brutal ugliness. One almost wants to divert one’s eyes, the better to say, if challenged for straying onto a scene the public wasn’t meant to see, “I didn’t see nuthin’, and I won’t tell nobody! Please, Officer, let me go!”

It oddly makes the Monastery seem particularly apart from the (seedy) world, coming and going from a day visit or pilgrimage.

Honk if you love irony

I started a month and a half ago to try to write a very trenchant post taking this music video as its point of departure.

Maybe someday I’ll get around to it, but to say what I wrote wasn’t ready for prime time would be a great understatement.

So just enjoy the video, chuckle at human folly, and then say a few “Lord have mercies” for us all.

Franklin Graham

There is a kerfuffle about Franklin Graham being excluded from some upcoming government-sponsored events because of his criticism of Islam as “evil” (not my scare quotes; I unequivocally believe in evil). For instance, testosterone-crazed Doug Giles rails here against the political correctness of it all.

I doubt not that Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse is a reputable enough charity, but the younger generation Graham, like the younger generation Frank Schaeffer, far surpasses his father in delusions that he has been given a prophet’s mantle, rather than the more modest platform of an evangelist. His mouth too frequently shoots off about matters of which he is ignorant.

He has, for instance, gently calumniated Orthodox Christianity, as in his 2007 Ukraine crusade, with charges of which it is entirely innocent. The gist was that the Orthodox Church, despite its antiquity and grandeur, doesn’t teach a personal relationship with Christ. (I believe, but cannot track down, that he has said much worse of Orthodoxy in the past.)

His comments about Islam are certainly undiplomatic. I’ll leave it to others to debate whether Islam is evil – the kinds of people who get suckered into other debates where the key terms are too equivocal to invite anything more than a shouting match. But on Orthodoxy, Graham is deeply wrong.  As is so often the case, Father Stephen Freeman says it better than I:

The salvation into which we are Baptized is a new life – no longer defined by the mere existence of myself as an individual – but rather by the radical freedom of love within the Body of Christ. To accept Christ as our “personal” savior, thus can be translated into its traditional Orthodox form: “Do you unite yourself to Christ?” And this question is more fully expounded when we understand that the Christ to whom we unite ourself is a many-membered body.

Read the whole article.

Singing in the Flame

The Orthodox Church regularly remembers important Biblical people and events that other traditions may overlook. This goes beyond following a prescribed cycle of scripture readings in the liturgy and other services of the Church. It’s even built into the prescribed hymn texts. And in some cases, Protestant Bibles omit whole, wholesome passages.

One example is the Myrrhbearing Women, who figure much more prominently in Orthodoxy than even in “high Church” Protestantism.

Another is the three holy youths in the furnace. At the Vigil of Great and Holy Saturday, we read the account of their praying and singing from the “fiery furnace.”

This passage is sadly omitted from Protestant 66-book Bibles. It is included, if at all, only in the disparagingly-misnamed “Apocrypha,” which in fact are part of Christian Scripture, recognized by Rome and Orthodoxy alike. So until I became Orthodox, I was completely unfamiliar with this treasure. Continue reading “Singing in the Flame” →

The high cost of living “simply”

There’s a provocative column and thoughtful responses shaping up at In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues, about living simply.

We have been here and done this before:

  • Weekend hippies
  • Limousine liberals
  • Bobos in Paradise

Ah, the human capacity for self-delusion! I do not exempt myself by any means.

In the Orthodox “Trisagion Prayers” we ask:

All-holy Trinity have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy God, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

I think of this not just as repetition, of which Orthodox piety has abundant supply, but of subtle distinctions among sin, iniquity and infirmity.

Our delusional lapses like consumerist simplicity strike me more as sinful (Greek amartia, “missing the mark”) or infirm than as iniquitous. Still, for those we implore cleansing and healing, respectively.

Nature and Humanity in Orthodox Christianity

Father Stephen this time mediates a YouTube video (okay, it’s two still photos, some text, and some appropriate background music) frame for one of the Twentieth Century’s great Saints’ poetic reflections on the nexus between (1) humankind’s various sins, transgressions and iniquities and (2) natural calamity:

I don’t think Saint Nikolai is saying “God is doing this stuff to punish us” or even “God is doing this stuff to get our attention so we’ll straighten out” (i.e., to chasten us). He says in conclusion, after all, that the Lord will come and set things right.

Nor is he drawing a cause and effect line between sin X and natural calamity Y, a la Pat Robertson.

I think, having now spent some 12+ years Orthodox, that he’s talking about a mystical connection between us and nature, consistent with Biblical anthropology that sees us as part of nature and yet apart from it as well, bearing the image of God and appointed as steward and priest over creation.

Others might fault this from Orthodox Wiki, but I personally couldn’t describe in prose the tradition I’m describing better that this, from Orthodoxwiki:

The Relationship between Man and Material Creation

Man as a microcosm

The idea of man as a microcosm is most commonly associated with St. Maximos the Confessor. In his Mystagogia he speaks of an indissoluble relationship and unity between man and world: “[St. Paul] put forward another suggestion, along the lines of the same imagery, that the whole world of visible and invisible things can be thought of as a man; and man, made up of body and soul, as a world” (Mystagogia, Chapter 7). Lars Thunberg, in his “Man and the Cosmos” describes St. Maximos’ understanding of man as a microcosm by virtue of his constitution and for the purpose of mediation. Being both material and spiritual, all things in the world are reflected in man, who then has the vocation to bring together mortal and immortal creatures, rational and non-rational beings. However, St. Maximos does not view this vocation of man in separation from God. Rather, he states that it is Christ who achieved this unity. Again Thunberg, analyzing the Ambigua, says that man needs to leave the sphere of creation behind and be united with God beyond his own nature. Thus, man’s mission in relation to creation can only be fulfilled in and through Christ: “Man created in the image of God is thus, according to Maximus, a key to understanding creation not only in order that he may understand it as it is, but also that by actively understanding it in his process of divinization he may elevate it to the supreme level of its full soteriological comprehension (Ambigua 10).” (Thunberg, “Man and the Cosmos, p.76)

St. Gregory of Nyssa also uses the image of man as microcosm, though his use of the expression is rather less uniform than for St. Maximus. In his conception, the parallelism seems to be limited to a common praise of God: “as the cosmos continuously lifts up a hymn of praise to God, so it is the duty of man to engage in continual psalmody and hymnody.” Metr. Paulos Gregorios postulates that St. Gregory’s reservation regarding a more in-depth parallelism stemmed from a concern that man’s high standing within creation not be attributed to his similarity to the universe (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man”). However, St. Gregory also views man as a mediator between creation and God whose mediation is made possible by the incarnation: “in Christ, Man, and through Man the whole creation, directly and without intermediaries participates in the creative energies of God Himself” (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man, p.103).

Fr. Stanley Harakas summarizes the Orthodox position thus far: “[t]he creation exists for the use of humanity; but humanity exists as a microcosm to sanctify creation and to draw it into the fullness of the life of the kingdom of God, to bring it into communion with its maker.” (The Integrity of Creation: Ethical Issues, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation,” p.73)

While both St. Maximus and St. Gregory note that the mediation of man is directly related to Christ’s incarnation, the details of that mediation are filled in by modern day theologians.

Man as Priest of Creation

The Genesis passage which started this article is open to other interpretations. An interpretation which gives man a certain responsibility towards the environment, presents the commission which was given to man as a stewardship. K.M. George in his essay “Towards a Eucharistic Ecology” points out that good stewardship, in the sense of the Greek ‘oikonomos:’—manager or administrator of a house,—requires trustworthiness, dependability, and wisdom. He goes on to add: “[w]e offer the creation as a thank-offering to God in liturgy” (George, Towards a Eucharistic Theology, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrily of Creation”, p.46) This statement contains within it the seed for the idea of that several contemporary theologians, among them Vigen Guroian, Metr. Paulos Gregorios, and Metr. John_(Zizioulas)_of_Pergamon, consider as the most important in defining man’s relationship to creation: man as ‘priest of creation.’

Metr. Paulos Gregorios of the Orthodox Syrian Church of the East, who was one of the most ardent advocates of Christian ecology wrote, “Nature, man, and God are not three disjunct realities on the stage with a space-interval between their respective boundaries. […] Christ has become part of creation, and in his created body he lifted up the creation to God, and humankind must participate in this eternal priesthood of Christ” (Gregorios, “The Human Presence”) Metr. John Zizioulas adds: “The priest is the one who takes in his hands the world to refer it to God and who, in return brings God’s blessing to what he refers to God. Through this act creation is brought into communion with God himself. […] This role of the human being as the priest of creation, is absolutely necessary for creation itself, because without this reference of creation to God the whole created universe will die.” He goes on to argue that ethics, as commonly understood, cannot provide a solution for the environmental problem; this is the place of the Church. Metr. John argues that the solution to the environmental problem cannot be based on a set of impersonal principles. What is needed, rather is a particular way of life based on relationships with one another, with the material world, and with God. Specifically, the Metropolitan mentions fasting, respect for the material world and acknowledgement (within the Liturgy) that creation belongs to God, as specific means by which the Church can effect change (Zizioulas, Man the Priest of Creation: A Response to the Ecological Problem, in “Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World”).

The exercise of this priesthood encompasses both our lives within the church temple (the Liturgy) and outside of it (the liturgy before/after the liturgy).

This is the sort of thing, in the end, that may be better said poetically, as Saint Nikolai say it, than in dry propositions like my introduction or like Orthodoxwiki.

Do you know, my child, why the earth overturns restlessly
and why it spews forth into the sky?
Because men have overturned the voice of conscience
Calling evil good, and good evil
and have spewed forth hatred toward those who still speak truth.

UPDATE:

Bryan Graf, a photographer, meditates differently on the relationship of humankind and nature, presumably on the occasion of Earth Day (that’s today, isn’t it?).

Ahem! I prefer St. Nikolai’s version.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Catholic Church gets extra scrutiny because it’s not 100% cool with modern prejudices and vices.

The Orthodox Church will get the same treatment as we grow and become better known. Orthodoxen: get used to it.

Yes, I just “compared” today’s sexual revolutionaries — i.e., about 90% now (or so it seems sometimes) — to Nazis, if you’re looking for merde to throw. No, I don’t think sexual revolution is Nazi or Nazi-inspired.