Author: D. G. Hart

In the Same Boat?

Published on by D. G. Hart415 Comments

Do Jason and the Callers concede what George Weigel admits, namely, that despite all the authority that they boast for their communion it turns out they have no episcopal oversight unless they are ordained. In comments about the media’s coverage of the sex abuse scandal, Weigel says:

Another fact that was missed is that reducing a man, an abuser, to the lay state persistently and, if you will permit me, mindlessly dubbed “defrocking,” a word which has absolutely no meaning in any known Catholic vocabulary, is often worse for both the Church and society. It’s worse for the Church because the Church has no way to control the man who has been laicized or reduced to the lay state, and it’s worse for society because that man cut loose from any possibility of institutional control by the institution in which he had spent some considerable part of his life might, therefore, pose a future risk because of what we know to be a high rate of recidivism in some of these cases.

How is this any different from a Protestant denomination or congregation except that Protestant apologists don’t go around boasting about the authority of their pastors and bishops?

In the same setting, Weigel raised yet another question about the gap between Jason and the Callers theory and Roman Catholic practice — in this case, whether the charism of apostolic succession can make up for ineptitude:

The second point that I would make is that if you are interested in doing real reporting among serious Catholics throughout the world, I think you will find something quite striking, and that is while there remains enormous, strong, emotional, and affective and personal support for priests, there are real questions about the competence of bishops throughout the Church.

No matter where I go in the world Church, North America, Europe, Latin America, the single biggest complaint I hear from engaged and intelligent Catholics is about the competence of the local bishop. Some of that is unfair, but a lot of it isn’t, and it speaks to a serious problem that the abuse crisis has brought to the fore.

Let me put that problem in historical terms. In the early 19th Century when the first Catholic bishops were being appointed in the then nascent United States of America, Pope Pius VII had a free right of appointment in perhaps 50 of the then some 600 dioceses in the world. The rest were controlled by governments, by cathedral chapters or other ecclesiastical organizations, but the Church did not have — the Church as embodied by its leadership in Rome — simply did not have control over the most crucial appointments in its ordained leadership.

One of the great untold stories of the success of Vatican diplomacy over the past 200 years has been to change that situation such that now with what is it, more than 5,000 bishops in the world —

. . . Five thousand and twelve bishops in the world, and with the sole exceptions of Vietnam and China, the Church has essentially a free right of appointment. So the Church has gathered back to itself after what some of us would consider this period of Babylonian captivity to state power in the appointment of bishops. It has regained the capacity to order its own house according to its own criteria.

And, in fact, this has been imbedded in the new code of cannon law, which says that no rights of appointment are to be given in the future to state authorities.

However, if you were going to claim the right to appoint, then you must also in my view own the right to dismiss, and this is perhaps the single biggest management problem in the Catholic Church today, is that we do not have a mechanism in place for dealing with instances of manifest incompetence or worse in the exercise of the local Episcopal office, and that problem in turn explains a large amount, I think, of the dissatisfaction of not marginal Catholics, but serious Catholics, regular Church-going Catholics, major donor Catholics, with local bishops, with the quality of the Episcopate throughout the world Church.

So here is another huge problem that has got to be addressed presumably in the next pontificate. How does the Church get the quality of leadership that the people of the Church deserve, and how does the Church deal with the problem of, frankly, failed appointments? When we get it wrong, how do we deal with this?

This has got to be addressed. I addressed it actually a bit in The Courage to be Catholic, and it’s perhaps a shining example of how little influence I have over things that none of this has had the slightest dent that I can tell on the way things are done.

But it’s a big, big problem, and it’s perhaps in the abuse crisis, if one is thinking about this over the long term, it’s the biggest problem that has come to the surface that will have real effect on the life of the Church and the life of the people of the Church for the next 50 to 100 years.

Do Jason and the Callers listen to other voices in their own communion — “we do not have a mechanism in place for dealing with instances of manifest incompetence or worse in the exercise of the local Episcopal office, and that problem in turn explains a large amount, I think, of the dissatisfaction of not marginal Catholics, but serious Catholics, regular Church-going Catholics, major donor Catholics, with local bishops, with the quality of the Episcopate throughout the world Church.”

They keep telling us they have a mechanism in place and regular Roman Catholics like Weigel say the mechanism doesn’t exist.

The fine print of Jason and the Callers’ call is that they raise the stakes of conversion. If you convert to mother church, they argue, you get so much more than a possibly subjectivized relationship with Jesus. But what happens if you don’t get all that? What happens if the church isn’t all that your theory says it is? What happens if the church isn’t the mechanism you say it is? Doesn’t that make conversion to Jesus in a setting where the church tells you that having Jesus is all you need — not worrying about whether the church’s claims for itself are audaciously true — a call that is much more compelling?

Who Created Christmas?

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

One answer looks either to fourth-century emperors who devised December 25 to compete with pagan holidays or to popes who established Christmas as a festival for the western church. Another might point toward the tradition of Lessons and Carols which have become a Protestant (Anglican) way to observe the festivities.

But the point of the question is to wonder why people like Barry Manilow, a Jewish-American, feel so comfortable with Christmas that they can’t wait to record another holiday album. After all, many of the Christmas “standards” came from the pens and pianos of Jewish Americans who found the way that Christian Americans carried on during December so inviting that they could compose a song like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”:

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you “Be of good cheer”
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
It’s the hap -happiest season of all
With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings
When friends come to call
It’s the hap – happiest season of all

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’ll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When love ones are near
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’ll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When love ones are near
It’s The Most Wonderful Time
It’s The Most Wonderful Time
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

That song, by the way, came from Edward Pola (nee Sidney Edward Pollacsek) and George Wyle (nee Bernard Weissman). Wyle also gave us the theme music for Gilligan’s Island, a tune to which Amazing Grace, I hear, can also be sung. Talk about inter-religious synergy.

This is a wonderful song and captures much of the experience of many North Americans during the last half of December each year which finds citizens of the United States observing Christmas as a national holiday.

But can you imagine, as I attempted last night, non-Muslims writing songs to communicate a sense of Ramadan festivities. We watched two holiday movies to take advantage of the respite from a work schedule. The first was The Bells of St. Mary’s (and boy, Bing Crosby was pretty engaging; Ingrid Bergman was fetching even in a habit), a Christmas movie that was remarkably successful with all Americans at a time (1945) only four years before the most successful anti-Catholic polemic ever written, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power, a book that was a best seller and offered through the Book of the Month Club. Here was a story of a priest and a nun who disagreed over the running of a parochial school. It was, in some ways, insider Roman Catholic baseball stuff. And yet it is a very charming movie that once again underscores how congenial Christmas can be.

But imagine if the movie makers had created a film about a Muslim school which featured a conflict between a female teacher and an Imam during the observance of Ramadan. How endearing or inviting would that be? If you were part of a Protestant minority living in Quebec City during the 1940s, the parallels between the Roman Catholic observance of Advent and Christmas might be akin to the experiences that Christians (Protestant or Roman Catholic) might have in Baghdad during Ramadan. But again, Christmas invites non-Christians to join the festivities and create holiday expressions that although lacking in explicitly Christian content warm the perhaps sentimental hearts of Christians.

The other holiday movie we watched was Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football, a documentary about Dearborn, Michigan’s high school that is staffed and populated primarily by Muslim (Arab) Americans. The movie follows the coach, players, and family members as they prepare during the fasting and feasting of Ramadan for THE game against Fordson’s arch-rival, Dearborn High. It is the closest I could come to a movie made in the U.S. that featured a holiday foreign to either Christians or Jews. Well worth seeing (and only 55 minutes).

But the aspect of Christmas that most Americans find so inviting has next to nothing to do with the birth of Christ — if it did have much to do with the incarnation, I can’t imagine Barry Manilow lining up to sing those songs. It is a time for families to gather, for cooks to cook and trenchermen to eat, for givers to give and receivers to decide how to negotiate wrapping paper. In other words, it is a time to consume. Even more, it is an important cycle in the business year of many merchants. Lots of religious folk may not care for the commercialization of Christmas but that doesn’t keep the Puritanically minded from spending and eating (no drinking, of course) even if in a less than crass way.

As much as the commercialization of Christmas may seem foreign to Christianity, Protestants should be careful in getting huffy, not in the ways that Rev. Kev. suggests, but for the reason that Presbyterians like John Wanamaker, the owner of one of Philadelphia’s largest department stores, played a huge role in cultivating a holiday atmosphere that appealed to lots of people who didn’t care a wit about the baby Jesus or his reason for taking human form. (The best book on the commercialization of Christian holidays remains Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Consumer Rites.)

So once again, as I enjoy a break from responsibilities and look forward to a festive meal and time with friends, I enter yet another holiday with great ambivalence. With classes behind and grades in, Christmas is indeed one of the most wonderful times of the year. As someone who leans heavily against the liturgical calendar (other than fifty-two holy days a year), I am not all that upset by a secular Christmas. But it does give me pause that the First Advent can be so easily domesticated. It was not so with Herod who tried to snuff out the babe in the manger and all infants doomed to be born near that day. I don’t know exactly how it will happen, but the Second Advent will likely not invite such merriment (at least for those in the First Adam). So I wonder if Christians, if they are going to invest some religious energy in Christmas observance, should spend a little more time considering that the First Advent leads ultimately to That Great Day.

Turns Out W-w Isn't Sufficient

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Matt Chandler implicitly challenges the powerful work of taking every thought captive:

The challenge with white privilege is that most white people cannot see it. We assume that the experiences and opportunities afforded to us are the same afforded to others. Sadly, this simply isn’t true. Privileged people can fall into the trap of universalizing experiences and laying them across other people’s experiences as an interpretive lens. For instance, a privileged person may not understand why anyone would mistrust a public servant simply because they have never had a viable reason to mistrust a public servant. The list goes on.

What is so deceptive about white privilege is that it is different from blatant racism or bias. A privileged person’s heart may be free from racist thoughts or biased attitudes, but may still fail to see how the very privilege afforded to him or her shapes how he or she interprets and understands the situations and circumstances of people without privilege.

Well, actually, if you’ve seen any television show in the last five decades, not to mention the beloved The Wire, you have plenty of reasons for knowing about the mistrust that some people experience when encountering a public servant. Heck, if you’ve watched a single Coen Brothers’ movie, you can’t but help encounter the mixed motives that course through most people who don’t think they have had a lobotomy just because Jesus is in their heart. Double heck, if you went to Temple University and dealt with “public servants” in the Bursar’s Office, you don’t need to be black to mistrust people who work for the state.

But I do wonder why people with white privilege need to change more than to be pitied. Maybe people with white privilege are simply under bondage and can’t change. Why don’t they receive any empathy? Or why does Chandler expect some people to overcome their blinders but not others? Is it another form of white privilege to think that whites have the capacity to change or lead it?

The Burden of Being Presbyterian

Published on by D. G. Hart38 Comments

From a recent review of Stonewall Jackson’s biography (thanks to our federal capital’s correspondent):

Though Jackson’s soldiers were in awe of him, he was a camp-and-battlefield tyrant who arrested and court-martialed subordinates for the slightest disappointment of his expectations. J. William Jones, an army chaplain and biographer of Robert E. Lee, believed that Jackson “probably put more officers under arrest than all others of our generals combined.” In August 1862, Jackson put a brigadier-general and five regimental commanders under arrest after discovering that some of their men had purloined, for firewood, a few rails from “a certain worm-fence at a little distance.”

But Jackson was also, for all his maniacal furies, a man of unusually intense Christian piety. James Power Smith, a member of Jackson’s staff, recalled that he “was that rare man . . . to whom religion was everything.” Beverley Tucker Lacy, a Presbyterian minister who served as a chaplain-at-large for Jackson’s troops, remembered that Jackson thought “every act of man’s life should be a religious act,” even “washing, clothing, eating.” Religion opened up in Jackson what amounted to a different personality. His prayers were “unlike his common quick & stern emphasis,” Lacy recorded. They were “tender, soft, pleading” and full of “confession of unworthiness.” He prayed with a self-effacement that carried “the doctrine of predestination to the borders of positive fatalism.”

One part Tim Bayly, one part John Piper.

Yowza.

Called to Answer

Published on by D. G. Hart61 Comments

Jason and the Callers don’t include the fine print in their call. We know. But I can’t imagine even the Callers have enough time to fill out all the surveys the bishops (and others) are sending.

Here’s one in preparation for the next Synod on the family:

The Socio-Cultural Context (ns. 5 – 8)

1. What initiatives are taking place and what are those planned in relation to the challenges these cultural changes pose to the family (cf. ns. 6 – 7): which initiatives are geared to reawaken an awareness of God’s presence in family life; to teaching and establishing sound interpersonal relationships; to fostering social and economic policies useful to the family; to alleviating difficulties associated with attention given to children, the elderly and family members who are ill; and to addressing more specific cultural factors present in the local Church?

2. What analytical tools are currently being used in these times of anthropological and cultural changes; what are the more significant positive or negative results? (cf. n. 5)

3. Beyond proclaiming God’s Word and pointing out extreme situations, how does the Church choose to be present “as Church” and to draw near families in extreme situations? (cf. n. 8). How does the Church seek to prevent these situations? What can be done to support and strengthen families of believers and those faithful to the bonds of marriage?

4. How does the Church respond, in her pastoral activity, to the diffusion of cultural relativism in secularized society and to the consequent rejection, on the part of many, of the model of family formed by a man and woman united in the marriage and open to life?

The Importance of Affectivity in Life (ns. 9 – 10)

5. How do Christian families bear witness, for succeeding generations, to the development and growth of a life of sentiment? (cf. ns. 9 – 10). In this regard, how might the formation of ordained ministers be improved? What qualified persons are urgently needed in this pastoral activity?

Pastoral Challenges (n. 11)

6. To what extent and by what means is the ordinary pastoral care of families addressed to those on the periphery? (cf. n. 11). What are the operational guidelines available to foster and appreciate the “desire to form a family” planted by the Creator in the heart of every person, especially among young people, including those in family situations which do not correspond to the Christian vision? How do they respond to the Church’s efforts in her mission to them? How prevalent is natural marriage among the non-baptized, also in relation to the desire to form a family among the young?

Part II
Looking at Christ: The Gospel of the Family . . .

7. A fixed gaze on Christ opens up new possibilities. “Indeed, every time we return to the source of the Christian experience, new paths and undreamed of possibilities open up” (n. 12). How is the teaching from Sacred Scripture utilized in pastoral activity on behalf of families. To what extent does “fixing our gaze on Christ” nourish a pastoral care of the family which is courageous and faithful?

8. What marriage and family values can be seen to be realized in the life of young people and married couples? What form do they take? Are there values which can be highlighted? (cf. n. 13) What sinful aspects are to be avoided and overcome?

9. What human pedagogy needs to be taken into account — in keeping with divine pedagogy — so as better to understand what is required in the Church’s pastoral activity in light of the maturation of a couple’s life together which would lead to marriage in the future? (cf. n. 13)

10. What is being done to demonstrate the greatness and beauty of the gift of indissolubility so as to prompt a desire to live it and strengthen it more and more? (cf. n. 14)

11. How can people be helped to understand that a relationship with God can assist couples in overcoming the inherent weaknesses in marital relations? (cf. n. 14) How do people bear witness to the fact that divine blessings accompany every true marriage? How do people manifest that the grace of the Sacrament sustains married couples throughout their life together?

That is only the first eleven of FORTY-SIX!!!! sets of questions.

And then we have a survey on Pope Francis:

1. My view of Pope Francis is:
Favorable
Mostly Favorable
Mostly Unfavorable
Unfavorable
2. Since Pope Francis was elected, I am more interested in the Catholic faith.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

3. Since Pope Francis was elected, I have attended Mass more often.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

4. Pope Francis represents a major change in the direction of the church.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

5. By now, I expected that Pope Francis would have made more concrete changes in the church.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

6. The widespread media coverage of Pope Francis has been:
A big help in reforming the image of the Catholic Church.
Irrelevant to the life of the church.
Harmful because the media often misrepresents what Francis says.
Other
Other

7. The comments Pope Francis has made on controversial topics often distort church teaching.
Agree
Disagree
Other
Other

8. The area where I would most like to see more action from Pope Francis is:
Holding bishops accountable for not dealing properly with abusers in their dioceses.
Creating more leadership roles for women in the church.
Reforming the Curia.
Cleaning up the Vatican Bank.
Stopping the Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Enforcing better global standards for dealing with priest sexual abuse.
Other
Other

9. I think Pope Francis’ frequent off-the-cuff interviews and informal approach have:
Made the papacy much more appealing to the average Catholic.
Robbed the papacy of much of its grandeur.
Not made much difference to how the pope is viewed.
Other
Other

10. I have found myself paying closer attention to Catholic news since Pope Francis was elected.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

11. I have been inspired by Pope Francis’ humble and simple lifestyle.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

12. Laypeople are getting more of a role and voice in the church under Pope Francis.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

13. I believe that Francis will make major reforms in the Vatican during his papacy.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

14. Pope Francis doesn’t speak enough about abortion.
Agree
Disagree
Don’t have an opinion
Comments

15. I find Pope Francis’ comments on homosexuality and same-sex relationships troubling.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

16. I think Pope Francis is causing too much division within the church.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

17. The best pope in the last 50 years has been:
Francis
Benedict XVI
John Paul II
John Paul I
Paul VI
Comments

18. The most memorable thing Francis has done so far in his papacy is…

19. One thing about Pope Francis that has been a disappointment to me is…

20. If I could meet Pope Francis, I’d tell him…

21. If I had to grade Francis as pope so far, I’d give him a _____, because…

22. The quality that I like most about Pope Francis is…

23. The biggest surprise from Pope Francis has been…

24. One area in which Pope Francis is challenging me to become a better Catholic is…

25. My greatest hope for the remainder of Pope Francis’ papacy is…

Did ever a hierarchical church look more Babdist?

Audacious indeed.

How Times Have Changed

Published on by D. G. Hart126 Comments

As Robbie George explains it, from one THE-ROCK star:

I grew up in West Virginia as a Catholic in a Protestant culture, the kind we would today describe as evangelical. We Catholics had the pope — but he was a distant and, to be blunt, foreign figure. Our Protestant neighbors had Billy Graham, the friend of presidents, business magnates and celebrities, who through the magic of television was a frequent, familiar guest in the homes of ordinary people; and he was as American as apple pie.

We didn’t admit it in those days, but we Appalachian Catholics — like, I suspect, many of our coreligionists throughout the land — envied those Protestants. We figured that Billy Graham made being a Protestant in America something like what it was to be a Catholic in Italy. And while we weren’t quite sure it wasn’t a little bit disloyal to watch, listen to and even like and admire a Protestant preacher, watch and listen many of us did — sometimes against the warnings of our parish priests or the nuns who taught us in parochial schools.

It was hard not to watch and listen to Graham. He was mesmerizing: movie star looks; a strong, compelling voice; a charmingly soft Southern accent; stage presence. His message was as simple as it was powerful: Our lives on earth are short. Soon enough each of us will die. Do you want to go to heaven? Then you must give your life to Christ. You must accept him as your Lord and Savior and enter into a personal relationship with him. He is even now lovingly extending his hand to you. Will you not take it? Quoting Scripture, he would say, “ ‘Now is the accepted time; today is the day of salvation.’ This is the hour of decision.”

Then would come the altar call: As Graham’s superb musical team played and sang the moving old hymn “Just as I Am,” the acclaimed evangelist would invite — encourage — those attending his “crusades,” or listening to his “Hour of Decision” program, first on radio, then television, to stand up and give their lives to Christ. Watching from home, even we Catholics felt the impulse to get out of our seats, though we believed that we already belonged to Christ sacramentally, through baptism.

To another:

I suspect that Graham’s only real competitor for the title of most influential Christian evangelist of the 20th century is Pope John Paul II. And the comparison is apt. A John Paul II event, whether in Paris, New York, Los Angeles or Manila, resembled nothing so much as one of Graham’s crusades — a vast crowd in an allegedly postreligious age, and often in an allegedly post-Christian city, drawn to a larger-than-life figure preaching a demanding message of repentance and reform, but doing it with the accent on God’s mercy and the liberating joy of the Christian life.

Wacker reports that Graham and John Paul II met three times, and that Graham’s admiration for John Paul was “manifest.” Did the pope reciprocate that admiration? At one of their meetings, he grasped the Protestant preacher by the thumb — yes, the thumb — and said, “We are brothers.” John Paul II was not a glad-hander or a flatterer. He didn’t say what he didn’t mean. In Graham he clearly saw a fellow Christian, a fellow evangelist and, no doubt, a fellow pioneer in the effort to heal the divisions that had fractured Christianity. Graham, who earlier in his life had been suspicious of Catholics, took great satisfaction in the pope’s regard for him.

All of which confirms my hunch: without a celebrity pope, Roman Catholicism would not have picked up the Protestant following that it has. The irony of course is that after Vatican 2 Protestants didn’t need to convert. Even the pope recognized Protestants as saved.

Turns Out this Liturgical Calendar Thingy Is Complicated

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

First — hello — Advent is not Christmas:

There’s a segment of evangelicalism that’s increasingly drawn to liturgy, especially the Anglican tradition, said Larry Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. But he thinks that’s a part of the Advent boom. “There’s also undoubtedly a commercial element as well,” he said. “As the popularity of the practice grew among an influential segment of the evangelical community, that popularity was cashed in by the Christian publishing, manufacturing, and retailing industries. The visibility of Advent wreaths, candles, banners, books, tracts, etc., undoubtedly had a major impact on a lot of folks’ awareness, tolerance, and embrace of the practice.”

I see the modern adaptation of Advent as a wonderful entry point to the riches of ancient Christian tradition: the church year, sacraments, and liturgy. Indeed, I’m one of those new Anglicans Eskridge refers to—but I got there via a hip Baptist church that introduced me to the seasons of the church year (and cofounded Advent Conspiracy).

But sometimes I find myself befuddled by a particularity of this movement. As a season of the church year, Advent is intended to prepare us for Christmas—a 12-day celebration, a season in itself. Advent is traditionally the fast before the feast. But I see few recent adopters of Advent keeping the feast. Thirty days of waiting, anticipation, preparation—and then when the person on whom you’ve waited arrives, Alright, we’re done here. Pack up the Christmas tree. What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

Fast between Thanksgiving and Christmas? You have to be kidding.

But if you can mix politics into whether or not to observe the Christ Mass, you might be on to something:

. . . when we look to the seventeenth century, we see some evidence of the Kirk making progress in convincing even lay persons that celebrating Christmas really was naughty. One significant factor working in the Kirk’s favor was, somewhat ironically, King James’s new-found conviction that Scottish Christians really should celebrate Christmas. James put significant pressure on the General Assembly of the Kirk meeting in Perth in 1618 to adopt, among a variety of liturgical/practical reforms, a religious calendar consisting of at least a handful of religious days, one of which was Christmas. For James, getting the Scots to celebrate Christmas was one small step towards creating uniformity of religious practice in his lands, which as of 1603 had come to include England. In any case, so far as the common people and their proclivity to celebrate Christmas went, it turned out that telling them they must celebrate Christmas was the surest way to keep some of them at least from doing so.

But if you are a neo-Calvinist, it’s easy peasy:

But let’s think about this for a second. As Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’” That includes Christmas. It is, and always will be, his. It is as possible to remove Jesus from Christmas as it is to remove him from the church.

What Would Jesus Do?

Published on by D. G. Hart28 Comments

Don’t bake those remains. Bury them.

. . . my postmortem body continues to embody memories of who I am. Let’s say that death has come calling for me. What will my wife and children, my parents and sister, see when they see me? They’ll see the man whom they still love. They will not see a shell, an empty husk. My wife will see the face of the man who stood before her and vowed, “I do.” My children will see the hands that held them on the day they were born, and that wiped away their tears when they hurt themselves. My parents will see a scar on my right wrist that I got when barely out of kindergarten. Much of my biography is inscribed upon my body; it is part of who I am, my story, my personality. It is not peripheral to my personhood. A body is not some thing but some one. As such, I want my family to treat my body not as an object I sloughed off upon leaving this world, but as the continuing, meaningful icon of my identity as son, father, and husband. To treat my body with respect, love, and honor is to treat me with respect, love, and honor, for my body continues to be an essential part of who I am.

If this were the sole reason for us to care what happens to our corpses, it would be sufficient. But for those who hold to a theistic worldview, who believe that God created our bodies, there are many more reasons to care. Jews and Christians alike confess that the Creator makes and shapes our bodies from the moment of conception onward. In the words of Psalm 139, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Our very existence is a divine gift; and part of that gift are eyes of a certain color, legs of a certain length, a nose of a certain size—each tiny part of us uniquely fashioned as our own. Our body is a gift while also a continued possession of the Giver. It is not ours to do with as we please.

What we do with these gifts should reflect that they are from God. And what applies when those bodies are alive applies equally when they are not alive. Death does not disown God from our bodies. They continue to be his possession, his gift to us, part of that divine bestowal that marks who we are as created people formed in God’s image and likeness. Thus, even when I’m dead, my corpse matters, because God’s gifts matter. I want my body to be treated not as a piece of meat, or fuel for the fire, but as a blessing from heaven.

The New Republic Is Dead. . .

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Long live the New New Republic.

I remember where I was when I heard that Mike Schmidt was retiring from playing third base for the Phillies. I was in the bedroom of our Wheaton, Illinois high rise apartment. I still remember also where I was when Phil Hendrie announced he was leaving the airwaves (only to return and then leave for podcasting). I was battling a nasty cold that turned into walking pneumonia from the comfort of the Mayflower Park Hotel in downtown Seattle. More recently, I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Rob da Bank was leaving BBC 1 to be an irregular stand-in at the BBC 6 Mix.

So when the New Republic blew up a month or so ago, I again experienced that feeling of being deprived of one of those aspects of personal identity that had marked (all about) me since I started graduate school in Baltimore thirty years ago (when Omar Little was crawling around in diapers). Several bloggers have commented on the events that led long-time editors and staff to abandon the Ship New Republic. Among those comments were several reflections about how important the magazine had been in forming an intellectual outlook.

I first caught wind of the change from Michael Sean Winters who may be excessively self-referential:

The New Republic is dead, or at least it is now brain dead. Yesterday, editor Frank Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier resigned as the changes undertaken by owner and Facebook zillionaire Chris Hughes became so oppressively obnoxious, Foer and Wieseltier could no longer stay. Even as I write those words this morning, it is difficult to believe. Needless to say, this is also personal for me. Frank is a friend and Leon is a very good friend.

My indebtedness to Leon is enormous. In 1993, he approached me about writing a book review for him. I did not hold an academic position: I was the manager of the café at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café. But, I had gotten to know Leon over the years, he liked the way my mind worked, and he asked me to review a biography of Jose Maria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. It was my first real foray into publishing. Leon was not an easy editor, which is one of the reasons he is a great editor. He re-worked my draft from top-to-bottom, demanded more analysis here, less verbosity there, and the end result, much improved from his editing, made it into his pages. It was, of course, a thrill to be published in the pages of the venerable TNR. Walter Lippmann had helped start TNR! All the great liberal icons of the twentieth century had been published in its pages. How many of the writers we all turn to – Chait, Hertzberg, Kinsley, Cohn, Berkowitz, Scheiber, Judis, Wolfe – had gotten their start at TNR or been introduced to a wider audience in its pages. But, the real thrill was not being associated with such luminaries. The real thrill was being published by Leon.

At National Review, Carl Eric Scott acknowledged his own intellectual debt to TNR:

A once-great institution, killed by a pair of lofo-pandering facebook-enriched millennial jerks. I here voice my gratitude to all of those who made the magazine central to my political education in the 1990s. I wouldn’t be who I am today were it not for TNR.

I stopped my subscription sometime in 2008, and had stopped eagerly reading the magazine around 2005 or so. And not too long ago, when I had thought about re-subscribing, I found myself dissuaded by articles like the one that stooped to smearing Scott Walker as a racist on the basis of no evidence related to the man himself. But a couple weeks ago, when I saw the magazine’s 100th anniversary issue, well, I just had to pick it up. It is worth getting, incidentally—there’s some interesting stuff about the early Herbert Croly years, an undoubtedly softened account of the conflicts between owner Marty Peretz and the more-regular liberals at TNR during the 80s through early aughts, and in any case, the issue’s now worth owning simply as a memento of a lost age.

I agree about the feel of the magazine for the last five years or so, but the 100th anniversary issue was worth the wait (even though I suspected the issue would be too self-congratulatory; the piece by Hanna Rosin on Stephen Glass was riveting).

Noah Millman (who is almost always on a roll) chimed in:

I would like to say that I’m shaken by the dramatic shake-up just announced at The New Republic, which sees Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier leaving the – well, I was going to say the magazine, but it isn’t a magazine anymore apparently, but rather a “digital media company,” whatever that is. TNR, after all, was the magazine that introduced me to public intellectual life. I read it in the school library in high school – no, actually, I devoured it. It was clever, but also serious – political, but also literary. And, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was hard to imagine a magazine having more influence on the shape of debate. The first iteration of my politics were substantially shaped by its sensibility.

For me TNR was liveliest when Andrew Sullivan was editor, but even running up to Andrew, the magazine was always provocative and sharp. If I am too snarky or sputten, I owe it in part to TNR where being argumentative was a virtue. Maybe Christians are not supposed to be that way. Of late, after bingeing on Portlandia, I wonder if certain sensibilities really are impossible for believers, say, coming up with a lesbian couple co-owning a feminist bookstore. If so, TNR transformed me in a less than sanctified way.

On the positive side, the so-called back of the book, the books and arts section was always worth reading in its entirety. Not only did the editor of that section, Leon Wieseltier, attract writers such as John Updike (to review painting exhibitions), or historians like Gordon Wood, or literary critics, James Wood and Louis Menand, but his coverage of the fine and popular arts and reviews of books was so well done that it made other magazines superfluous. One of the reasons I gave up on Books and Culture, for instance, was that in one year’s worth of TNR Wieseltier and company would cover twice (maybe three times) as much as Christianity Today’s venture into a publication dedicated to books.

I will continue with another year of TNR just to see what becomes of it. Chances are, though, that the glory days of TNR are behind not simply because of a change in editorial personnel but also because the entire landscape of magazine publishing has changed. In that regard, Noah Milman should have the last word:

Which brings me to the realm of culture, and the fabled back of the book. I should caveat right up front that TNR and Wieseltier did a wonderful job of covering a wide array of subjects, of finding talented young critics and promoting them, and engaging in intellectual debate across the landscape of culture and academia. But I still have two bones to pick with the encomia.

The first and easiest bone to pick is that there is a wild, robust and in many cases very high quality discussion going on right now across a multitude of outlets and covering any cultural topic you like. What is relatively absent in the internet era are two things: widely-recognized gate-keepers to curate that discussion, and any kind of revenue model to sustain it. These are not problems that Leon Wieseltier had any idea of how to solve. (Nor does anyone else – something Andrew Sullivan acknowledges in his own lament for passing of the “sugar daddies of yore.”)

I am very, very eager to find a solution to that particular problem. Here at TAC, I am a tireless advocate for more cultural coverage for its own sake. I produce a bunch of it myself on this blog, and some of it for the magazine. But I recognize that the prevailing structure of the internet makes it not only very difficult to justify from a revenue perspective, but very difficult to justify from a curatorial perspective – because it’s not clear that a magazine like TAC could achieve the status of a trusted curator of this kind of discourse even if it wanted to.

So, again, the nostalgia for Wieseltier’s back-of-the-book is, to some extent, a nostalgia for an information market structure that no longer exists rather than for something TNR was uniquely and selflessly committed to. Another way of putting this is: back when TNR was TNR, The New York Review of Books was still The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker was still The New Yorker.

We’re not in the hard-copy age any more, Toto.

Missing Logic

Published on by D. G. Hart40 Comments

A couple of items that all apologists might want to chew over, especially the homers we know as Jason and the Callers.

First, notice the absence of logic in Russ Saltzman’s tu quoque-like decision to become a Roman Catholic:

While certainly Neuhaus was – crap, still is – a tremendous influence on me, Dianne’s announcement set me to examining my Lutheran life, and in some ways it’s not as Lutheran as it once was. I write regularly for a Catholic magazine. Everybody senior on the staff at First Things is Catholic. I know as many priests as I do pastors, people I hang out with on email and the like, and I point out not a few of those priests were once Lutheran pastors. Not to slight you or anyone you know, it has just happened in my life that my intellectual and best theological compatriots these days are largely Roman Catholic.

What I have always sought – since seminary on – is to be in a church that finally gives expression to the catholicity of the Augsburg Confession. There is no Lutheran expression doing that. Most of my 17 years as editor of Forum Letter was spent, so it seems, showing Lutherans how far we have fallen from the practice of parish life described in our own confession.

There are evangelically catholic centers of Lutheran congregational life, and some that are deeply so, And there are evangelically catholic-minded pastors seeking parish renewal by Creed, Catechism, Confession, and praise God for it. The Church must continually struggle “against forces that always strike the Church and gospel: the fashions and fads of Gnosticisms ancient and new . . . the devaluation of the sacraments through neglect, the socially accommodating spirit of Church Growth excitements, and the gross appetite of a politicized bureaucracy.” (Forum Letter 19:9, September 1990). It may be, I’ll find out, the best field for the contestation in that struggle is with Rome.

5) By the time I reasoned all that out, Step 5 was, like, why the hell not?

Yet, this is not for ease nor is it out of mere unhappiness with the state of Lutheranism. It rises from true conviction that has grown in strength since Richard’s death, that the essence – more like fullness – of the Church of Christ is in found communion with churches in communion with the bishop of Rome. It is not safe to deny one’s conscience or renege on conviction.

Notice especially the lack of urgency as in what must I be do to be saved? You can be saved in the ELCA or the RCC. But in which do you receive a fuller bang for your assent? (If all my friends are Detroit Tigers’ fans, do I abandon the Phillies? These days, hell yes of course.)

And then comes word of the importance of the imagination, as opposed to logic, in the appeal of Roman Catholicism:

The literary shortcomings of Catholics in this era, he suggests, were due to an often combative and excessively didactic posture, which obscured human and artistic engagement with religious questions. “Religious function,” Ryan suggests, following Marcel Gauchet’s analysis in The Disenchantment of the World, needed to leave behind its role as a heavy-handed instrument of conversion and be “metabolized,” or drawn into an “aesthetic repertoire” infused with “Catholic ways of knowing and habits of being,” before Catholic authors could have a serious impact on American literature.

Orestes Brownson and Fr. Isaac Hecker, for example, both saw the potential of Catholic literature as a tool for combating anti-Catholic prejudice and educating the rapidly growing population of American Catholics. They imagined enormous possibilities for evangelization in the burgeoning printing industry, calling for a Catholic literature that would provide an education in the doctrines of Catholicism while instilling moral values, hoping to counter the influence of the wildly popular sentimental novels and scurrilous romances of the era.

While neither Brownson nor Hecker was successful in reaching a large audience, the novels of Jedidiah Huntington and Anna Hanson Dorsey, and the devotional writings of Cardinal James Gibbons, did become somewhat popular, even on par with the sentimental-didactic fiction of their Protestant contemporaries. Ryan points out that all three of these authors can attribute their relative success in part to their willingness to integrate into their fiction the literary themes and conventions to which readers of such fiction were accustomed.

So maybe the website should be called, “Imagine Communion.”