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.
2
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.
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)
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 ….
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).
6
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.
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.
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.
2
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
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 ….”
3
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.
5
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.
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.
6
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3
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.
4
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.
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)
6
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.
7
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 ….
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.
8
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.
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.
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.
1
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.
2
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 …
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.
3
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).
4
If neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them. And to some extent have.
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.
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?
2
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 ….
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.
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.”
4
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.
5
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.
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.
“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.
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.
2
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.”
More from Tushnet::
There are three basic roles I suspect the closet plays in parts of our Church. First, where people greatly fear being considered gay, it will be especially hard for boys or men to report sexual assault and coercion. Regardless of whether or not they’re gay themselves, they will fear that they’ll be told they were responsible for their abuse or welcomed it, and they will fear (for example) being made to leave the seminary or being outed to their family. Similarly, even if you weren’t assaulted yourself, if an abuser knows you’re gay then he has a secret to hold over your head, which you may fear that he’ll reveal if you report his abuse (or your suspicions of him).
Second, young people struggling with their sexuality are especially vulnerable where being gay is especially stigmatized. They may confide in an older man, perhaps someone who has cultivated their trust because he senses their vulnerability. He may even have shared his own secret homosexuality with them, precisely in order to win their trust; which he will then go on to abuse. His secret creates a powerful bond between them, even a sense that the victim has a responsibility to protect the abuser. Secrets can create a false intimacy, an environment in which manipulation is especially easy.
And third, the fear and secrecy of the closet distort people’s self-understandings, their ability to surrender their lives to Christ, and therefore their ability to regulate their behavior. What you can’t even admit to yourself, you can’t surrender to God: This may be part of what’s going on with men who rail against gay people, while they themselves were abusing men for sex ….
There’s quite a lot more there. Tushnet’s bottom line is that celibate gay men who are healthy enough to come out of the closet, and who will affirm and teach all that the Church itself teaches, should be ordained, and that gay priest bans will fail spectacularly. It’s an argument I had intuited but hesitated to spell out because (obligatory caveat) it’s not my Church; I’m just affected by its woes as are all Christians in the West.
Overall, I think Tushnet — a lesbian convert to Catholicism from atheism, a celibate, and a recovering alcoholic — can see more clearly than Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic in a same-sex marriage, whose disobedience of the Church regarding chastity seems to have clouded his vision.
I especially appreciate Tushnet articulating those three ill-effects of the closet, which merit a bit more reflection, really, than I’ve given so far.
3
Jasmyn Fleik, 27, of the Madison LGBTQ Dogma Defense Alliance, rejected the bishop’s claim that homosexual priests were the problem.
“Just because 80 percent of the victims of clerical sex abuse are boys, and just because most of the abusing priests were known to be sexually active gay men, that doesn’t at all mean homosexuality has anything to do with this crisis!” Fleik insisted, to coughs and rolling of eyes from bystanders.
“I mean, like, use your brain for once,” she added.
Eric Mader at Clay Testament, mixing fact with fact (mainstream media’s disinterest, presumably because of people like the presumably fictitious Ms. Fleik).
Across North America, cities and towns are betting big on megaprojects like stadiums and shopping malls, in hopes that just one more big win will put their city back in the black.
It’s pretty tempting, right? One last gamble, then you’re out. One more risk, and you’ll be set for life (or at least until the next election cycle).
The only problem with this thinking? Cities who do it haven’t asked themselves what it really means for a city to win.
Today, my colleague Chuck Marohn is proposing something that shouldn’t be radical, but very much is: the only way that cities can “win” for their citizens is to stop putting them at enormous risk of losing it all.
That doesn’t mean risking nothing, of course. It doesn’t even mean we can’t be brave.
It means the opposite: having the courage to stand up to a dominant culture that’s bankrupting our towns and making our communities worse places to live. And having the courage to stand up for something so much better.
Not all corporate welfare comes from the Feds. Cities, Counties and States give away billions annually, bidding for the attention of corporations that will bully them further (“you need to pass this kind of law; you need to repeal that kind of law”) in the process.
“How will you help?” Well, I scanned my check register and found that I have not given commensurate to Small Towns’ growth and influenceit has been three years since I gave even a pittance.
Time flies. Secure websites can cure such an oversight almost instantly.
The reason Democrats seek power in 2018 is to obstruct President Trump wholly and without exception, to tie down his administration using the subpoena powers of a dozen committees, and ultimately to lay the groundwork for his impeachment.
It’s tempting to say “Yeah? You got a problem with that?”
There’s some commentary in the New York Times Sunday that requires more than just a Facebook share with an open-ended comment like “a cautionary tale.”
It’s not that I disagree with the author’s interpretation of How America’s Jews Learned to Be Liberal. It’s not that I object to America’s Jews becoming liberal, politically or religiously though I identify as conservative in both realms (guarded locution because both liberal and conservative are highly contested and equivocal, and there no doubt are some, starting with one of my nephews, who would scoff at the very notion of a Never Trump Conservative).
What merits comment is this:
Judaism became a distinctively American religion, substantially changed from what it had been for more than two millenniums.
One factor in the rise of an American Judaism was practical. To assimilate and work in their adopted land, many Jews abandoned some of their ancient practices, from observing the Sabbath to keeping kosher and wearing distinctive clothing. Discarding these practices forced Jews to turn their faith into a devotion to core beliefs, rather than customs and practices.
More broadly, Jews sought to “Americanize” their rituals, making them look more like the church ceremonies of their neighbors. The largely German immigrants of the 19th century started Sunday schools, mixed men and women in family pews and incorporated choirs, organ music and sermons in their services while rejecting or shortening some obscure prayers. These changes provoked debates, division and lawsuits. But they took hold, even among traditionalists, and continued even after the influx of two million Jews from Russia at the turn of the 20th century.
The most significant change to Judaism was its untethering from the ancient tradition of praying for an altogether human messiah to deliver the Jews back to Jerusalem, restore the ancient temple destroyed in the year A.D. 70 and re-establish the House of David to rule over Jews in their ancient land of Zion, as prophesied in the Bible. These were among the enduring 13 principles codified as central to Judaism by Maimonides in the 12th century.
(Emphasis added)
I grieve that American seduced many of its Jews to abandon their ancestral religion for what arguably is a counterfeit.
I caution those Americans whose Christian tradition has some “ancient practices,” especially in your liturgy/order of worship, not to relinquish even one of them just because it makes you odd. As Flannery O’Connor once quipped, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
Those Americans whose Christian traditions have no “ancient practices” I would caution differently: Have you already substantially changed historic Christianity into a distinctly American counterfeit? (I’m looking at you, Evangelicals who not just tolerate Trump but enthuse over him because he promises to “MAGA”.)
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Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.
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.
I attended Willow Creek Church precisely one time, probably Fall of 1992 or 1997 (class reunions at 5-year intervals put me in the neighborhood of South Barrington).
Willow Creek was the model church for Evangelicals — everyone wanted to be like them. If your church was stagnant or shrinking, an fun-filled, expense-paid trip to Willow Creek for the Church Growth Committee was de rigeur.
The show I attended that Sunday morning left me a bit conflicted. Jane Austen explains:
“I should like balls infinitely better,” she replied, “if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.”
“Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball.”
(Pride and Predudice) My skepticism, I think, was that it was all very catchy and slick (I’d have paid $5 to hear the band in particular — on Saturday night at an auditorium or bar), but not so near much like a church.
At least I assume it is felt that way, for I myself definitively left the world of Willow Creek wannabees in November of 1997.
UPDATE: Triumphalist connotations in my original ending were, it was brought to my attention privately, quite strong. My intent was offer the Orthodox Church for consideration of those burnt out on megachurches for any reason, not because I think it immune to the wiles of the Evil One vis á vis any particular sin.
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Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.
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.
UPDATE, 9/6/19: A story very recently in the news reminded me to come back to review Band-aids for boo-boos, my most definitive thoughts on homosexuality and Christian faith. In the process I discovered that I had also written what follows.
I add this update for the sole purpose of saying that what follows is embarrasingly rambling. If you stumble upon it at this late date, you might just want to skip to the embedded video near the end, which I viewed again and still heartily endorse. If you choose to wade through the rest to get there, thank you in advance for your patience at my stammering efforts to describe what was going on in my head 13 months ago.
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It was more recent than I recalled that I, inspired by a minor epiphany, felt competent at last to write something about homosexuality beyond that same-sex attraction is a spiritual affliction and that acting on it is sin.
I stand by the substance, with a couple of expansions and one update.
First, the locution “same-sex attraction” was probably coming into disfavor when I wrote. Now, it is derided (among those whose testimonies I trust) as “Christianese,” opaque to the world, and to be shunned in favor of “being gay.” I’m still digesting that argument and unready to change just yet, but neither is it a hill I’m willing to die on.
Second, I would double-down on my skepticism about orientation change, if only because I’ve learned that there are a lot of people still selling and buying that snake oil. I wouldn’t bet my life against orientation change, but I’d bet a lot.
I now think that some of the “ex-gay” gurus are conscious frauds — fraudulent in the same way that guys like Benny Hinn are fraudulent. (Others may be letting others’ expectations of holiness determine what they’ll profess to have attained. And there are many other possibilities from this crooked timber of humanity, from which so few straight things are made.)
Third, I feel a need to say that almost everything positive I write about gay Christians is about those committed to celibacy — “Side B” in the argot of these Christians themselves. I have never encountered anything I thought a credible argument for the Christian licitness of gay sex (and if I did, it would have a well-nigh insurmountable hill to climb — 2000 years of Christian teaching — to convince me.
Finally, the update. Back then I wrote:
I’m not sure why they might feel a need to be publicly open and transparent about the sexual particulars of their sickness (versus open with a select few for purposes of support); I feel no need to be publicly open and transparent about the temptations I’m not going to name here.
That was literally true when written: I wasn’t sure. But I actually meant “when they talk about it so much, it starts creeping me out.”
I now have a better idea why they may need to talk about it so much, and why I need to listen (yes, and maybe push back some times) more patiently than I was ready for a few years ago. (I’m not going to try putting the reasons in words because I have something better than that. Stay tuned.)
But I’ve also had some other little epiphanies, converging, whence this current offering.
For one thing, I’ve always sensed the force of this apocryphal Martin Luther quote:
If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him.
It is clear to me that the world and the devil at this moment (and for the last 50 years or so of accumulated moments) are attacking in the area of sexuality:
Conservative Christians are fond of using this [Luther] quote to insist that we must stand up for the truth of the historic Christian sexual ethic even as it is being attacked in contemporary Western cultures, and that to fail to do so is to fail to be orthodox, faithful, biblical. And, in a mainline Protestant church like the one I belong to, I feel the force of this. These days it can seem easy to preach Christ in every way but the way that He challenges progressive sexual mores.
(Wesley Hill) That is a partial answer to why I have read a lot, thought a lot and written a lot about these issues, and naming that motivation was an epiphany of sorts, though a very minor one. Before that, I had been reflexively “trimming.”
A bigger epiphany is expressed, but not exhausted, by a continuation of Wesley Hill’s comment on the Luther quote:
And yet “the world” that “Luther” mentions in that quote is not always the world of progressive secularism/liberalism. Sometimes “the world” attacks the truth of Christ on the second point that Fr. White mentions — by tempting Christians to demean, disdain, ignore, overburden, or otherwise harm LGBTQ people. “The world” and “the devil” can manifest themselves in so-called “progressivism,” yes—and they can manifest themselves just as easily whenever a Christian heaps shame on LGBTQ people (“There’s something more askew in your life than there is in that of heterosexuals,” is what a pastor once told me), or offers a quick solution to their complex dilemmas (“Just get married!” is literally the advice I saw from a conservative Christian last week, as if I haven’t ever considered that possibility), or caricatures their sex lives (“Gay culture is inherently promiscuous”), or damages their faith (“If you want healing from same-sex attraction, it is available, and you have only to say yes,” I have been promised by Christians numerous times), or in any number of other ways attacks their dignity. If you are in a so-called conservative church and you are loudly proclaiming the truth about homosexuality at every point but at the point where that truth insists on the worth and lovability of LGBTQ people — if you are binding up heavy burdens on them and not lifting a finger to help (cf. Matthew 23:4) — then you are not proclaiming Christian truth, no matter how much you may seize the high ground and claim otherwise.
Several converging articles, podcasts, YouTubes and such drove that home to me as never before, and several of them centered on the recently-completed Revoice18 conference, a gathering of celibate gay Christians under the umbrella of SpiritualFriendship, in a conservative Calvinist (PCA) Church in St. Louis.
Some of what I read, heard or saw critiqued or defended the whole idea of celibate gay Christians, with the criticisms tending to niggle over the adjective “gay.” It came from self-styled Calvinists (“Reformed”) and certifiable Southern Baptists. Their critiques were well familiar to the conferees, to the point of murmurs of approval at refutations. I’ll not try to summarize it because although I was in that critics’ general camp by instinct a few years ago, I’m moving away from it now by conviction.
Another epiphany was confirmation that my intuition, which I had barely dared to utter aloud, was true: a lot of people who think themselves “transgender” are dealing with unresolved conflict over homosexual urges. I no longer need to intuit about that, or worry that I’m naïvely grabbing a third rail that will kill me. Many teenagers who think they’re trangender ultimately desist from that, but they’re generally homosexual at that point. Others who went far into “transitioning” and then de-transitioned report the same drive.
Apparently, life as a homosexual person can be so humiliating and frightening that a non-trivial number of people respond by attempting to become the sex appropriate to their erotic urges. I guess I’ve led too sheltered a life. (I’m resisting a temptation to digress here; let me just summarize that I’m still not sure that public accommodations laws are efficiacious at relieving unaffected humiliation and fright.)
It’s even bad in the Church (bracketing the question of whether it’s even worse):
“It was easier for me, as a convert from atheism, to trust that God loved me, than for a gay kid who grew up in the church. Shouldn’t that shock us?” (Eve Tushnet).
For many celibate gay Christians, there’s a feeling of being “harassed by our Churches, and seen as utter fools by the world,” to paraphrase Johanna Finegan.
Part of that harassment is a pernicious persistence of belief in reparative therapy, converting gay Christians into straight Christians, consonant with the metanarrative that gays are broken heterosexuals.
If the Church harasses, beats up, distrusts and otherwise abuses someone, it can break them, and they may not find their way home again.
Don’t we need at least to think harder about what to do to make it less humiliating and frightening in the Church which, after all, is chock full of sundry sinners with manifold temptations?
Yet another epiphany that still boggles my mind (though that epiphany has been around a while; it’s not new) is that these pictures are not “gay.” They depict an easy and un-selfconscious friendship that we’ve lost in the U.S., perhaps throughout the West.
That says more about us than about these guys. There is so much more that could be said, but someone else will need to do it or you’ll have to wait until I’m ready. As they say, “I. Just. Can’t. Even.”
The folks at the Revoice conference are trying to recover something like such friendships, while their critics are echoing Sigmund Freud in sexualizing the very idea. “Flee! Run as far and fast as you can!” is the gist of it, and what comes across is “learn to live life without any emotional intimacy, because the opposite sex doesn’t have time for you and you might get a rise in your Levis if you attempt same-sex friendship.”
Call all that an epic (or at least self-indulgent) introduction.
I had imagined writing a blog that went into some detail about what I’ve learned. But I don’t think anything I could write would top the 43 minute, 17 second pre-conference Revoice18 talk of Johanna Finegan.
A man at her church, concerned about her upcoming attendance and presentation at Revoice18 said “It sounds like these people think it’s okay to be gay as long as you don’t act on it.” She responded “Well, yes. What’s the alternative? Not getting out of bed in the morning?”
Just so.
There’s some refinement needed about what it means to “not act on it,” but I’ll step aside now:
This in particular (38:15) challenges me:
“Maybe we can see it as a gift to the world — a beautiful, confounding witness … We declare that something is more valuable than the sex and the romantic love we naturally long for. We declare that genuine Christianity changes and shapes your whole life … We declare that Jesus Christ is sublimely and absolutely worthy and worth it. And maybe we can see it as a gift to the Church. Our lives could be illustrations of what it looks like to faithfully follow Jesus that can help our straight brothers and sisters. Our lives can depict what it’s like to follow God, we know not where ….
Some of what the Spiritual Friendship/Revoice18 people are saying, and what I’m now inclined to believe, probably has a “sell-by date.” Remember that I’m a “trimmer.” Maybe — heck, almost certainly — we risk overcorrection, but correct we must, in what another blogger calls “the present cultural moment.”
So it seems to me.
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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
By modernity, I mean the project to create social orders that would make it possible for each person living in such orders “to have no story except the story they choose when they have no story.”
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.
Is is possible to separate creedal orthodoxy (whole-hearted assent to the Nicene Creed — or possibly the Apostle’s Creed for those Christian traditions that use it) from particular standards of ethics and morality?
That has been under some discussion among smarter people than me, as I watched and listened. It strikes me as relevant if not crucial to the compass of the umbrella of communion — the question of when it’s necessary to excommunicate someone, for instance, or when one must no longer “agree to disagree” within the same ecclesial body. (Sometimes, it seems to me, it may even require a conscientious believer to leave a body that refuses to draw the proper line, despite the seriousness of schismatic behavior. I’ll leave it at that, because I know good people who remain in denominations that both I and they know have failed in key areas.)
I cannot recall anyone raising the creed/morality relationship earlier than Calvin College philosopher James K.A. Smith, and he’s been on my “I’m not sure I can trust him” list ever since he did; not because the question is illicit, but because the answer he seemed to give struck me as wrong-headed.
Today, I came across an answer which I think much better, that of Alastair Roberts via the Davenant Institute (if that link does not work, retrieve it from this page, where it’s titled “Does Creedal Orthodoxy Require Traditional Sexual Ethics?,” sexual ethics being the major if not exclusive battle ground today).
Roberts points out how “liberals” formerly emphasized good, ethical deeds over creeds, whereas now “conservatives” may use “orthodoxy” in polemics as synonymous with traditional sexual ethics. He then discusses five possible configurations of the relation between creed and deed, with his preference apparently being the fifth.
I can call it “much better” because, as I read it, that fifth alternative rejects the premise that ethics are outside the creed. The creed incorporates ethics when it professes “I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church.” Belief in the church entails belief in the church’s ethical teaching.
I agree with that, but that lands us on the contested turf of ecclesiology (a word of which, tellingly, the WordPress spell-checker knows nothing; it is the doctrine of the Church).
I believe I’ve found the one holy, catholic and apostolic church, but I’m aware that other bodies (including one prominent and very upper-crusty one that can lay plausible claim to apostolicity), permit things I think absolutely illicit. Getting the “church” question right is crucial.
Even then, shepherds may fail the sheep, fearing or otherwise failing to communicate the whole counsel of God on matters ethical or, as is far too timely in August 2018, making mockery of it in their own lives. I’ve heard horror stories about failures of Christian formation so abysmal that Christians have no idea that, for instance, the Church forbids fornication, or even that it forbids the current version of promiscuously “hooking up.”
You can’t “church shop” on the superficial basis of whether the clergy are hammering home your personal pet subjects, but you probably can’t rely on clergy for 100% of your own Christian formation, either.
Finally, Roberts illustrates how the creedal affirmations of the Church ramify ethically by briefly scrutinizing the Apostle Paul’s condemnation of sexual sin in the Church at Corinth.
So if you’ve wondered about the opening question, check out Roberts’ answer.
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Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.
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.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 