Historical Analogue

I hope Philip Jenkins is right in his guarded optimism about the European capacity to retain its Christian identity. I don't know his analysis in detail (my stack of chores does not allow the luxury of a closer inspection), but what I have read of it in the press leaves the impression that his assessment is overly dependent on demographic aggregations and a naive majoritarian notion about cultural shifts. Even if this is not so for Jenkins, it is often the case with those who see cheerier prospects for the troubled heart of Western civilization. Moreover, the optimists often take some solace in the belief that European secularization can be counted on to rectify any troubling demographic asymmetry by secularizing Islam in the same manner that it secularized Christianity. That position overlooks the fact that it was Christianity's divided loyalties -- God and Caesar -- that gave rise to political secularization (not ideological secularism), whereas orthodox Islam (however problematic that term is) knows of no such division.

Be that as it may, here is a reminder that a small but committed minority, when faced with a feckless and morally confused majority, can bring about massive cultural shifts far faster than we usually think possible. It's from the historian Edward King, :

... the triumph of Bolshevism was not a triumph of the popular will over Tsarist tyranny, or of revolutionary enthusiasm over conservative order. ... [I]t was the victory of a few men who knew what they wanted and allowed nothing to stand in their way over a vast majority that was driven to and fro by the uncertainty of the politicians and the passions of the mob. It was, above all, the victory of one man -- Lenin ... [who] differed from the average Socialist leader, both among the Bolsheviks and outside the party, in his insistence on the philosophical absolutism of the Communist creed. ... Thus the Communist system, as planned and largely created by Lenin, was a kind of theocracy, a spiritual order of the most rigid and exclusive type ... The state was not an end in itself, it was an instrument, or, as Lenin himself put it, ... "a special sort of bludgeon, nothing more."

The numerical disadvantage of a minority can be more than compensated for by the ideological absolutism, theocratic zeal, and will to power of its determined exponents.

Apropos of which: It is in the nature of Islamic sharia law that it is imposed on an obstreperous humanity, whose recalcitrance can only be overcome by enforced submission. The idea that sharia would result from a democratic plebiscite is quite contrary to the premises on which the whole concept of sharia is based.

Jean Danielou

"Each of us will be eternally that which we shall have made ourselves on earth."

Now that's a truly daunting prospect. Here, however, is what saves us from it, (taken from the Eucharistic prayers):

"May He make us an everlasting gift to You."

So, praise God, it is not entirely what we make of ourselves, but what God in Christ makes of us. Our task is less to make something of ourselves than to open ourselves to Eucharistic assimilation.

Everyone has to pull his or her own weight, but God does the heavy lifting.

The European Crisis . . .

Christopher Dawson, from a book published in 1952:

The present crisis of European culture … is due not to any decline in physical or social vitality, but to the internal division of Europe by an intensive process of revolutionary criticism which affected every aspect of Western culture. This process did not consciously aim at the destruction of European unity. At each successive stage it was inspired by a belief in social progress and the hope of a new European order. … But the revolutionary ideal of a new European order was frustrated by the conflicting aims of the different revolutionary movements – liberal, socialist, and nationalist – so that revolutionary movement became destructive of European unity and hostile to European culture. In the bitter intensive struggle of parties and ideologies the deeper spiritual foundations of Western culture were forgotten or rejected until the movement which had begun with the worship of liberty and the declaration of the Rights of Man ended in the concentration camps of the totalitarian state and the mass suicide of total war.

By no means does Dawson anticipate all the events of the intervening half-century, for such perspicacity is beyond the role of the historian. Nevertheless much of what has transpired amounts to a footnote to what Dawson wrote in 1952.

Tiptoeing through the terror ...

Lee Harris has a piece in TCS Daily about the relatively genteel language Associated Press, Reuters, and the Main Stream Media generally employ in speaking of Islamic fanaticism, favoring terms like "supporters" and "militants" over terms that might actually describe the reality to which they refer.

Harris' piece includes this:

Islamic fanaticism has a historical depth in Muslim culture; it was present at the creation of these cultures, and that makes it radically distinct from the threats posed in the last century by Italian fascism, Nazism, or Soviet Communism, all of which, by their own claims, represented a new departure, a revolutionary transformation of both society and culture. The European threats demanded new prophets with a new revelation—men like Mussolini, Hitler, and Lenin; but Islamic fanaticism appeals to the same prophet and the same revelation that has held together the community of the faithful for nearly fourteen centuries. It is not an innovation, but a restoration. It is consciously seen by those who espouse it as a return to tradition, and not a bold leap into the future. Thus the threat of radical Islam is not a flimsy structure, destined to be blown away in the near future; it taps into the bedrock of Muslim culture, and has the capacity for strengthening itself immensely by spreading throughout the general public that distinguishes it from Italian fascism, Nazism, or Communism.

Unintended Consequences

Where political correctness still mistakes condescending fawning for real humility and indifference for compassion, a word of candor can seem like an inexcusable faux pas at best and an act of aggression at worst. Knowing all too well of these dangers, I chose my remarks at the open session of the Colloquium on Religion and Violence conference only after overcoming (just barely) a great deal of reluctance. I have no regrets about what I said, which I think will be vindicated by events, but my concern for their possible misconstrual would have been heightened had I been mindful of the possible presence of journalists, who naturally gravitate to controversy.

As it happened, the coverage that the conference received in the Dutch press was dominated by reference to my brief remarks. I was mentioned several times in the short article, eclipsing mention of the keynote speaker or any of the other extraordinary speakers at the conference. Indeed, René Girard’s name only appeared, as though in passing, after several excerpts from my remarks were quoted.

Embarrassed to have become the focus of the press attention, when my conference colleagues deserved much more attention for their much more substantial contributions to our deliberations, I decided to write to the editor of the Dutch newspaper. I am leaving both the letter and the decision as to whether or not to send it to the newspaper with my Dutch friends, who will translate it into Dutch if they decide to submit it.

In any case, and for what it might be worth, here is the letter:

To: Editor, NCR Handelsblad

The article in the July 8, 2007 edition of your paper about the conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion dwelt on a few remarks I made as one member of a four-person panel at the opening session of the conference at the Free University of Amsterdam. The quotations were accurate and fairly characterize the points I wanted to make. I stand by them. However, what gave my remarks their pertinence was their context within the much broader discussion which the conference was organized to foster. Taken out of that context and highlighted as they were in the piece by Maarten Huygen, my comments lose their relevance to the larger discussion of which they were a part.

The conference – co-sponsored by Pax Christi The Netherlands, the Blaise Pascal Institute, and the Free University of Amsterdam – was a rich and multifaceted exploration of the very complex challenge now facing Europe and much of the rest of the world: How to continue to honor the historic commitment to cultural openness and generosity without eviscerating the religious and moral sources of that very generosity? My rather candid remarks were made simply as a small contribution to that much larger discussion and should not be taken as emblematic of it.

Sincerely,
Gil Bailie,
President,
The Cornerstone Forum
USA

From the Amsterdam Conference

I'm reporting from the Colloquium on Violence and Religion conference in Amsterdam, where I'm happy to be seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I was asked by the organizers of the conference to serve on the panel discussing the keynote address. The panel also included Dr. Abdulkarim Soroush, an Iranian Muslim, a visiting professor at the Free University of Amsterdam; Dr. Markha Valente, an American trained professor of history now also teaching at the Free University in Amsterdam; and Dr. Monjib Maati, a Muslim professor of history at the Université de Rabat in Morocco.

Prior to my formal remarks, I made brief reference to the keynote address by Ian Buruma, author of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, and to the response to the address by my old friend Wolfgang Palaver, a professor of Catholic Social Thought at Innsbruck University. I simply expressed my general agreement with what they had to say – not complete agreement to be sure, but I was in substantial agreement with them. To which I added something extemporaneous to this effect, anticipating the need for it:

Let it be said that in what follows the historical sins of Western culture – known in great detail by every 12-year-old in the West – are hereby acknowledged and, to the extent that I can be contrite for someone else’s errors, I hereby apologize.

I daily remind myself of what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13, that love does not gloat over the wrong-doing of others but delights in the truth, but the truth can be uncomfortable, and we are here today to search for it.

My Formal Remarks:

Believe me, it is not easy it is to say what I’m about to say, for I know it will be misunderstood. If I was confident that someone else might say it, I would happily to leave it to them to say. But I’m not confident of that, so I’m going to ask your indulgence as I put on my very best Jeremiah impersonation.

At the heart of the European crisis, as I see it, is a loss of faith – Europe’s loss of its Christian faith and then, as a predictable consequence, Europe’s loss of faith in itself. It is fundamentally a Christian problem, but today of course it has both a Muslim and a Jewish component.

THE CHRISTIAN COMPONENT:

One of the West’s greatest shortcomings is its aversion to accurately assessing its own cultural uniqueness and especially the religious sources of that uniqueness. The key to the kind of pluralistic and politically secular polity that the West rightly cherishes is the parallel cultural coexistence of a religious tradition whose faithful are taught to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s and to recognize the dignity of the person and his or her right to follow the voice of conscience.

The last time Europe lost faith in itself this profoundly was in the aftermath of World War I, and in a heartbeat the primitive gods were back, tricked out on that occasion in ideological disguises. Whatever these gods will look like next time, the European loss of self-confidence and Europe’s confusion over its historic identity will provide the occasion for their return. At issue, it’s important to remember, is the spiritual condition of the West itself: whether or to what extent it has lost its soul and in the process lost its way in history and is no longer willing to pass on its cultural inheritance to the next generation.

Nothing exemplifies Europe’s lack of faith in itself more than its reluctance to reproduce. As Mark Steyn put it: the future belongs to those who show up for it. A great number of European Muslims are going to show up, but they will be joined by only a relatively small number of European Christians and Jews and by a statistically insignificant number of European secularists. The future belongs to the fertile. Europe – radical jihadists worldwide now have reason to believe – will fall into their hands by mid-century. For many of the most radical, however, that seems too long to have to wait.

Which brings us to THE MUSLIM COMPONENT

Henri de Lubac pitied those who learned their catechism against something, and the worst way to revive the Christian spirit in the West is to do so in order to counter non-Christian influences, whatever they might be. That said, however, there is in fact a Muslim component to the present crisis, and it is rooted in a few uncomfortable but undeniable realities:

#1. Mohammad: The founder of Islam, whatever his other virtues, was a conquering warrior who spread his religious beliefs by the sword. One doesn’t have to be an expert in mimetic theory to recognize the salience of this or its contemporary relevance.

#2. Since Mohammad’s modus operandi was inscribed in the Qur’an and made normative in the sharia, the second uncomfortable but undeniable reality is that obligatory acts of violence enjoy the highest possible Islamic sanction, and are regarded by Muslims of the strict observance as unalterable and immune to more benign construals.

I am genuinely honored to share the dais with Islamic scholars who have tried to foster a more irenic understanding of Islam, and who have, no doubt, paid a personal and professional price for doing so. Unfortunately, those courageous few – they are both very courageous and very few – who have publicly and unequivocally resisted the jihadist revival have had their voices drowned out by the radicals, who cite Qur’anic authorizations the moderates appear unable to effectively refute. In any case, it is now clear that such reform efforts are better appreciated by Westerners – desperate for signs of Islamic moderation – than they are by the sea of radical Islamicists who now dominate the discourse in the Muslim world.

#3. Religious Tolerance: The first freedom is religious freedom.

How many instances are there of societies with a Muslim majority or an Islamic regime where anything remotely resembling Western religious freedom exists? As mosques sprout up like Starbucks in the West, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and native animists are being denied basic religious freedoms and/or physically intimidated and persecuted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Yemen, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Indonesia and so on. In an Islamic society, can a Muslim cease being a Muslim without endangering his life? Can a Hindu or a Mormon try to convert a Muslim without endangering his?

Finally . . . THE JEWISH COMPONENT:

It was fashionable not long ago to sagely observe that the Palestinians are the Jews of our time. The truth, of course, is that the Jews are the Jews of our time. Now as ever, the Jews are the canary in the European mineshaft, and to repeat the cliché that their predicament is reducible to “the politics of the Middle-East” is a species of the 1930s slander about Jews in the international banking system, and it is shameful.

In Europe today, Jews are once again having to be cautious and to avoid certain areas out of very legitimate fears for their safety, while imams both inside and outside Europe spew forms of anti-Semitism that would make the Nazis blush. No dialogue that ignores these matters deserves the name.

St. Peter admonished Christians to be prepared to give nonbelievers the reason for their hope, and he did so no doubt because there seemed precious little empirical evidence for it. My own hope is of that same sort. I actually am hopeful, but I can’t let on if I am to play the gloomy Jeremiah role all the way to the end. Nothing less that sober biblical hope will do. It’s the best kind anyway. There is reason to hope, wrote the historian John Lukacs, “that the New Dark Ages may not last hundreds of years; and there is reason to believe that their darkness will not be uniform.”

In the question and answer period, I was able to clarify a number of points, but I also found an opportunity to add something that was part of my formal remarks, but which was inadvertently ommited in the text I took with me to the auditorium:

The history of this century and beyond will be very largely determined by whether the West finds a way to reclaim and reaffirm its spiritual inheritance and thereby reenergize a culture that fosters the genuine flourishing of its people and to which others – whatever their race, creed, ethnicity, or background – will want to transfer their national allegiance, culturally assimilate, and contribute their part.

Philip Rieff Again:

Don't fret if this seems convoluted and abstruse. You can trust your visceral sense of it. In an effort to help, however, I've rearranged the sequence of the texts somewhat in order to make Rieff's point clearer than his posthumous editors have.

The liberal defense of these transgressions must inevitably bring liberalism itself crashing down, for in that defense, the liberals are defending the destruction of avoidance mechanisms which are necessary to the practice of liberalism itself. ...

The critical nineteenth- and early twentieth-century [anthropological] interest in taboo as a pejorative term for the interdictory structure of taboo in social organization has now resulted in a transgressive attack on all the interdicts, precisely among the educated classes. ...

... the true savagery comes after the success of the liberal and critical attack on the supposed irrationality of the laws of uncleanness and on the assumption that all prohibitions are somehow primitive and unjustifiable.

... It is the thrust against the interdicts that is giving the savage god his true opportunity.

From: Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us, p. 12-13.

I may not have a chance to post again before leaving Monday for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion conference in Amsterdam. If the opportunity arises for me to post from the conference, I will. Otherwise, I'll check in from Chicago after the conference. I'll be there meeting with a number of those helping us arrange for the Emmaus Road Initiative venue in Wheaton.

From Faith to Politics to Gnosticism

"When mystery no longer counts," then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in a 1996 speech, "politics must be converted into religion."

When the Christian mysteries are lost -- the loss measured most accurately by the decay into ritual triviality of the Eucharistic mystery -- then politics becomes religion. Politics is no longer satisfied to be just politics, and it aspires to be everything, that is, totalitarian: Bolshevism, German National Socialism, Maoism, Islamism, and assorted fanatical and murderous ideologies.

When these fail -- the year 1989 is a convenient marker for the failure of most (but not all) of them -- many of those who cling to the underlying delusions on which they were premised turned to "nature." Like political absolutism, however, the "New Age" mentality that glorifies "nature" morphed in a heartbeat into an ideology that declared that the very idea of nature was too confining. Nature was to become whatever the autonomous individual decides it is.

The flight from Christianity -- and from Judeo-Christian morality -- inevitably progresses (regresses) toward moral and cultural incoherence, leaving the culture vulnerable to whatever predatory forces -- within or without -- retain (however perversely and ominously) a conviction that they are right and that the future belongs to them.

Recycling Rhetoric this time ...

Earlier I complimented Anthony Esolen for a piece of fine rhetoric, and more recently, apologizing for having so little time to monitor the blog, I recycled a piece by Russell Moore. This morning I do both: Here's a superb piece of rhetoric from the ever-lively Diogenes from Off the Record:

"A theologian is as likely as a waitress to be an apostate.
A stable hand is as likely as a bishop to die a martyr."

Recycling Blog Posts ...

How this piece ended up in my in box I don't know. It apparently first appeared in April. But given how busy I am now with other matters, and given how striking this piece by Russell D. Moore (one of the editors at Touchstone Magazine) is, I thought I would pass it along.

I would like to avoid cultural wars matters as much as possible, but -- as I have said many times from the podium -- to defend every Christian principle except the one currently under attack is to forsake one's duty to defend the faith.

I read today that the leading cause of death in Europe is abortion.

Here is where Moore's piece can be found.

My best.

Newsletter: Emmaus Road Initiative

Yesterday we sent out our periodic newsletter, this issue devoted exclusively to the Emmaus Road Initiative programs that we will begin in September.

If you didn't receive an email copy of the newsletter, there is a version of it on our website here and a printable PDF version here.

If you live in one of the eight cities where we will be holding monthly E.R.I. events, I hope you will want to join us. If you live elsewhere, you will notice that we will be helping to facilitate "virtual venues" wherever two or three (or more) are gathered. Just contact us.

The right words in the right order

The rhetorical arts can be hijacked for propagandistic purposes, but, properly deployed, rhetoric is the art of making truth memorable. An example is the recent post by Anthony Esolen on the Mere Comments blog of Touchstone Magazine. Lamenting the shriveling of the notion of reason into a narrow rationalism contemptuous of anything that cannot be easily measured or easily manipulated, Esolen writes: "This 'reason' can thus tell you how to build a Gothic cathedral, but cannot even begin to tell you why you would want to."

The Emmaus Road Initiative

We will soon be sending out an email newsletter about the monthly Emmaus Road Initiative programs that are to begin this fall in eight cities. If you are not already on our email list (or if you aren't sure), type your email address at the top of the side bar to the right. If you are already on our list, you will be notified. If not, your address will be added to our list. You can easily remove yourself from the list at any time.

Thanks.

Ayann Hirsi Ali

In my post about the Pepperdine conference on the European crisis, I neglected to mention that a surprising number of those who addressed the conference spoke glowingly of the moral leadership that Benedict XVI has exerted. As far as I could tell, none of those who heaped praise on Benedict were Catholics. They were Protestants, Jews, or, like the courageous Anyann Hirsi Ali, atheists.

In a speech to the National Press Club a couple of days ago, Ayann Hirsi Ali had this to say -- alluding to the famous quotation Benedict cited in his University of Regensberg speech:

The 21st century began with a battle of ideas, and this battle is about the values of the West versus those of Islam. Tony Blair and the Pope should not be embarrassed in saying it, and you should stop self-censoring. Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible; cultures and religions are not equal. And perhaps most important of all, Muslims are not half-wits who can respond only in violence. The Koran is not a great book; it is reactionary and full of misogyny. The Byzantine emperor's analysis of Muhammad was correct: he spread his faith by the sword.

Many of those with the responsibility for telling us the truth about this important matter spend most of their time hiding the truth from us.

John Paul II

On Tuesday, I had a meeting at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC. It was my first visit to the Center, which is in the throes of reorganization. Be that as it may, I had a most enjoyable meeting with the deputy director of the Center.

The next day, yesterday, in between two other meetings near the Catholic University campus, I took the opportunity to recollect myself in the Crypt chapel of the National Shrine, a place I love to visit. On leaving, I noticed a Pope John Paul II Cultural Center kiosk, so I wandered over. On the kiosk was this quotation from John Paul:

"... Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, is the center of human history and the key which unlocks the mystery of man and reveals his sublime calling."

Striking as this statement is, it is little more than a paraphrase of what I think is the heart and soul of the Second Vatican Council, namely paragraph #22 of Gaudium et Spes:

“Only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light ... by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, [Christ] fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

The challenge is to account for this claim. As I recently wrote in a proposed paper for a conference at Notre Dame:

At the moment this extraordinary and often quoted passage was being promulgated, René Girard was laying the groundwork for its anthropological defense. Grateful though we must be for the philosophical inheritance on which Christian theologians and philosophers have so fruitfully drawn, if this spectacularly Christocentric declaration is to be made intelligible to post-Christian post-modernity, on the one hand, and to Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and so on, on the other, it will require the kind of intellectually robust and anthropologically multicultural exposition that René Girard has provided.

Kind words about Liz

Upon my return from California I found in the mail the most recent bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. In addition to announcing the upcoming conference in Amsterdam, it included a touching remembrance of Liz by Martha and René Girard:

Double click the image to enlarge it

Liz had a very special relationship with Martha and René, and I am grateful to them and to the editors of the COV&R bulletin for remembering her in this way.

Failed States and Religious Freedom

The journal Foreign Policy has a report on the increasing problem of failed states, a problem that is the most conspicuous symptom of the worldwide crisis of culture in the midst of which we are now living. The report includes this comment and this very instructive graphic:

Freedom of worship may be a cornerstone of democracy, but it may also be a key indicator of stability. Vulnerable states display a greater degree of religious intolerance, according to scores calculated by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. Persecution of religious minorities in Bangladesh, Burma, Iran, and Uzbekistan has deprived millions of faithful of the freedom to follow their beliefs. But religious repression is often nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to muzzle the country’s civil society.

Double-click the image to see it enlarged. It says a great deal about our current situation.

Christian Uniqueness

Here is something then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in the mid-1980s, when there was widespread interest in the religious techniques and traditions of the East.

I believe that as far as religion is concerned, the present age will have to decide ultimately between the Asiatic religious worldview and the Christian faith. I have no doubt that both sides have a great deal to learn from each other. The issue may be which of the two can rescue more of the other’s authentic content. But in spite of this possibility of mutual exchange, no one will dispute the fact that the two ways are different. In a nutshell one could say that the goal of Asiatic contemplation is the escape from personality, whereas biblical prayer is essentially a relation between persons and hence ultimately the affirmation of the person.

This is a truly significant insight, and the key sentence is: "The issues may be which of the two can rescue more of the other's authentic content." That sentence is the key to understanding Christian uniqueness.

The lot marked out for me ...

I just returned from California after having to postpone my return twice in order to take care of a number of things on which Randy Coleman-Riese and I are working. I visited our San Diego hosts and returned feeling extremely good about our plans there. It looks as though we will have two venues each month in San Diego.

Because of the delayed return, I was scheduled to leave tomorrow morning (Monday) for Washington, DC, where I have several meetings this week, but I just couldn't handle only 12 hours at home. So I postponed my trip to Washington until Tuesday. There are several more trips this summer and more than I can count once the Emmaus Road Initiative series starts in September. Each month I will be going to Washington, DC; Hartford, CT; Seattle, WA; Santa Rosa, CA; San Diego, CA; Chicago/Wheaton, IL; Houston, TX; and Dallas, TX.

Driving back from the airport today, exhausted but gratified by what had happened on the trip west, a line from Psalm 16 -- the Psalm in Night Prayer for Thursdays -- was running through my head: "The lot marked out for me is my delight."

I'm grateful for the privilege of being able to do what I do and for the great good fortune of having such truly amazing friends with whom to be doing it.

Sacrificial Authority . . .

Perhaps ...

Perhaps it is the case that there are ultimately only two sources of authority:

1. One is rooted in how much pain and violence one is willing and able to inflict. It is the shimmering god-awful "authority" of the sacred executioner, the mafia don, the gang leader, the terrorist, the Führer.

2. The other is the authority that corresponds to the degree of pain and violence one is willing to endure for the sake of another, for God and God's children.

Because those who endure pain and hardship and violence have Christ as a co-sufferer, their authority will always outshine and ultimately outlast the authority that accrues to those who lord it over those in thrall to them.

What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: "For your sake we are being slain all the day; we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:35-39

The victory over evil has already been accomplished, ours is just the privilege of living in light of the victory.

From Sonoma

I am in Sonoma now working, as I said in the earlier post, on the Emmaus Road Initiative program for the fall. While here, of course, I am visiting with family and old friends, having lived in Sonoma for 35 years before moving East to be near St. Joseph's Abbey.

Last night I had dinner with some of my oldest and dearest friends, among them George Wesolek, who wears many hats, among them the director of public policy for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Apropos an earlier post in which I exhibited more frustration than irenic charity about the Church's approach to the most vociferous proponents of abortion and even partial-birth abortion, George shared with me an open letter to Speaker Pelosi in response to her reaction to the Supreme Court's upholding of the ban on partial birth abortion.

I want to share it with you:

I am writing this letter to ask you to reconsider your position on partial birth abortion.

What brought me to this was reading your quote in Sunday’s Chronicle about the Supreme Court’s decision on Partial Birth Abortion. You said, “This isn’t really an abortion issue.” You went on to say that this is “about a procedure that any parent would want her daughter to have access to if she needed it.”(Chronicle, April 22)

Frankly, I am horrified by that statement and the callousness that it represents. I do not know any parents that would want their grandchild to be killed in such a brutal manner. We are, after all, talking about a viable, almost full term human being, a child of God. I quote the same Chronicle article for a description of the process. “Rather than the more common practice of dismembering the fetus in the womb, the doctor partly removes the intact fetus from the uterus before aborting it, usually by puncturing its skull.”

Even these somewhat antiseptic words cannot hide the reality of what is happening. First of all, I do not know anyone who calls their unborn child or grandchild a “fetus.” It is a baby. This is just common sense. Other terminology: disarticulating a fetus (ripping the baby’s limbs off so it can more easily be suctioned out), separating the calvarium (sever the head with scissors) is meant to hide what every fourth grade elementary student knows about human biology – that this is a unique, wholly contained human being with its own genetic code and DNA, never to be replicated. Where this reality becomes very clear is in the case of late-term infants. That is why so many Americans, even those who call themselves pro-choice, are against this particular procedure.

So how can you attempt to further obfuscate the issue by saying that it isn’t about abortion but, rather, it is about the Supreme Court meddling in medical decisions because an exception was not made for the health of the mother? I quote Kathleen Parker from the Washington Post (April 23) commenting on the ruling: “The main argument from the pro-choice side, and the constitutional issue at stake, has been that the partial-birth abortion is sometimes needed to protect the health of the mother. But in no single court case were doctors able to demonstrate that it was ever a medical necessity.” (my italics) Unfortunately, this gruesome procedure is chosen for a myriad of other reasons, from the baby being an inconvenience to the indication of abnormalities. In any case, medical testimony given throughout the history of the case said that other safe methods are available.

I believe that you are out of the mainstream by supporting this particular form of abortion. By doing this you make people of good will, especially people of faith who believe in the sanctity of all life, skeptical. All of the good work that you do on the many things that are also part of our obligation to uphold life…your advocacy for the poor, the immigrant, the health and safety of born children, your work for peace, become mere footnotes to the most foundational issue of all that you continue to avoid or to speak abstractly about as if it were a mere medical procedure.

As the leader of your party, you have responsibilities far beyond this issue..do not let it define you as out of step with a civilized society.

The Pepperdine Conference

The conference at Pepperdine was remarkable, but I have very little time to remark on it at the moment. I am now in Sonoma working with Randy and other members of our board of directors on the monthly series of Emmaus Road Initiative programs which will begin in the fall.

Let me say just a word about the Pepperdine conference, however. The title of the conference was "The Collapse of Europe," and the chief concerns were: what appears to be the inability of the European political classes to recognize how imperiled their societies are by internal loss of conviction -- what several of the presenters called Europe's "civilizational exhaustion" -- and the rise of militant Islam and its genius for exploiting the equivocation with which it is being confronted.

Mark Steyn gave the opening talk, and it was a characteristically scintillating one -- immensely well-informed, witty, and sobering. Steyn is one of the most knowledgeable commentators we have, and hands-down the best writer among today's journalists. In personal conversation one feels that there is considerable moral substance beneath the sometimes hilarious and often satirical writing style.

Ayann Hirsi Ali, the courageous woman about whom you may have read, immigrated to The Netherlands from her native Somalia and within a few years was elected to the Dutch parliament. She rejected the Islam in which she was raised and spoke openly of its cruelty and violence. The fatwas were not long in being issued. She was eloquent and charming, a woman of great moral authenticity.

My friend Greg Davis spoke eloquently as well. Greg is the author of Religion of Peace? and the co-producer, along with Bryan Daly, of the remarkable film, Islam: What the West Needs to Know. He understands how central to the European dilemma is the continent's renunciation of its Christian religious heritage.

Daniel Pipes is a public intellectual and journalist, the Director of the Middle East Forum. His presentation that left an impression precisely because it was delivered with such a sense of seriousness. Pipes has been tracking on the dangers to the rest of the world associated with the rise of radical Islam, and what impressed me was that he spoke of the gravity of situation with a degree of gravitas that seemed to be demanded by it. When the issues involved are as alarming as are those related to the rise of Islamic jihad, it is often difficult to gauge the maturity and reliability of those who sound the alarm. I was reassured to realize that Pipes is as levelheaded and as thoughtful as he is well-informed.

Since I will be traveling to Amsterdam for the annual conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion on the first of July, I was particularly attentive to what Ayann Hirsi Ali and the Dutch filmmaker Leon de Winter had to say about the situation in The Netherlands.

One of the speakers was Hugh Hewitt, whom I know slightly since he did an NPR interview with René Girard and me in Los Angeles several years ago. In his presentation, he mentioned what he perceived to be in the offing, not explicitly perhaps, but tacitly: namely an offer on the part of radical Islam containing more or less the following terms: Abandon Israel to Hamas and Hezbolla and the threat to Europe will subside. The West may not accept this tacit offer in any overt way, of course, for that would make the moral horror of it all too clear. But the logic on which this bargain is based is a staple of the European political imagination. It may well be possible to make that logic politically operative without it having to rise to the level of moral thought. If out of fear and timidity and the spirit of appeasement the Europeans make that trade-off they will have repeated in the 21st century the 20th century crime which lies at the root of their cultural self-loathing.

As you can imagine, there is a great deal more on this subject, but, as I said, attention is now turned to the Emmaus Road Initiative programs for the fall.

The Power of Witness

On Friday the First Things blog posted a homily that Fr. Richard John Neuhaus delivered at the annual Memorial Mass of the Military Vicariate at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., on the Feast of the Ascension, 2007. I was struck by Fr. Neuhaus' marvelous summation of Christian realism. The following particularly rang true:

The principalities and powers still strut across the stage of history, trailing behind them the bloody carnage of their vain ambitions. So it has been through the centuries, and so it will be until Our Lord returns in glory. ...

We describe wars as just and wars as unjust, and it is necessary that we make such distinctions for clarity of mind and security of conscience. But, short of the coming Kingdom, all is provisional and approximate; all is riddled through with ambiguity, contradiction, and tragedy. That is how things are, and that is how things will be along the way of history’s long journey toward the perfect justice of Christ’s undisputed sovereignty.

Fr. Neuhaus concluded by reminding the assembled chaplains that "our only power ... is the power of witness. We should want no other. We need no other."

Amen.

From Southern California

I am unexpectedly in southern California in advance of a conference at Pepperdine University on the crisis in Europe and the rise of radical Islam. While these two themes are not of direct concern to the Cornerstone Forum, they are the two deeply interrelated world-historical events of our time. Our work in the years to come will have as its larger historical context these two profound and profoundly troubling historical developments. So I felt the opportunity to attend this conference was not one I should pass up.

In preparing for the conference, I have been thinking about the situation. Since I might have a few more thoughts in the aftermath of the conference, I thought I would take a moment tonight to share a preliminary one:

History repeats itself, but never exactly. There are parallels, however, that are glaring. The ominous and unambiguous signals accompanying the rise of German National Socialism in the 1930s failed to awaken the world to the scope of the catastrophe it signaled. As Hitler solidified his power, the horror that the Nazi commandeering of state power portended became so glaring that it took an act of will to ignore it. But ignore it many did.

Today there are thousands of hate-mongering Hitlers in the Islamic world (and in the West) spewing antisemitic venom and calling for indiscriminate murder of Jews (and others of course, but always and everywhere Jews first and foremost) with a fanaticism that would make a Nazi blush. But precisely because there are a thousand of these lunatics rather than just one, the the looming danger is diffused and more easily dismissed by those who are determined to do so.

If there are thousands of hate-mongering Imams trying to out-Hitler Hilter in the Islamic world, in the West there are thousands of Neville Chamberlain's resolved to look the other way and ready to grasp at straws.

What to do about this crisis? I cannot claim to know. But I do know that pretending that it is the resentment of the poor and oppressed, or that it is a response to American foreign policy, or an expression of the hatred of George Bush in the Arab world is sheer nonsense. (Today, an Al-Qaeda operation in Kashmir circulated a message calling for a jihad against India, for instance.)

These days I am preoccupied with a wide range of efforts we are making to insure that the Emmaus Road Initiative beginning in the fall will bear fruit. I do not intend to let what I learn at this conference distract me from that primary objective. But I do expect to learn things that will serve to underscore the urgency of the re-evangelization efforts we are trying to make.

Winding things up in San Diego

"Hell is other people." -- Jean-Paul Sartre

"Heaven is other people." -- Benedict XVI

I'm in San Diego meeting with our local collaborators here about a San Diego venue for the Emmaus Road Initiative beginning in September. Our meetings have been very, very encouraging.
I will be on the road for the next week. Postings to the blog will slow, as they have of late due to numerous other demands.

In the meantime, I thought you might be interested in the slight difference of opinion between Sartre and Benedict.

My best,

Gil

Alas ....

My computer is AGAIN malfunctioning. I leave tomorrow for meetings on the west coast. I had wanted to post something before I left, but all I can do (using Liz's old laptop) is to ask your forbearance.

We are very fortunate to have some wonderful friends in San Diego who are gathering at the University of San Diego this Thursday to discuss the possibility of an Emmaus Road Initiative in San Diego. I join my old friends for the Girard seminar at Stanford on Friday, attend a conference at Pepperdine on Sunday, and return to Northern California on Monday to work with Randy and visit my children and grandchildren.

If my computer holds up, I'll post something along the way.

Outside the Box

The British historian Paul Johnson is one of those priceless intellectuals whose erudition is such, and whose depth of understanding is such, that he helps liberate the rest of us from mental habits of which we are otherwise hardly aware -- habits which subtly confine our thinking and cloud our judgment about the human predicament, past and future.

In a recent piece in the London Spectator (reprinted by Catholic Education Resources Center), Johnson said this:

One of the great errors of political taxonomy is to classify Hitler as right-wing. He, and still more his closest colleague, Goebbels, were socialists, and the fact they were nationalists first did not orient them more to the right. There are six indispensable hallmarks of a conservative. First, firm belief in one, beneficent and omnipotent God. Second, absolute morality as the basis of public law. Third, strict limits on the size of the state. Fourth, respect for a multiplicity of traditional power centres. Fifth, restraint and self-restraint in all things. Sixth, search for the right balance between the individual and the traditional units of society. Hitler broke all these rules: he was an atheistic pagan, a moral relativist, a totalitarian, an ultra-centralist, an uninhibited exhibitionist and a collectivist. In many ways Stalin was to the right of him. There is a seventh point. A conservative is not afraid of force, or of using it thoroughly. But always as a last resort. With Hitler it was the first.

This brings me to another puzzle of ideological classification. The phrase is often used by thoughtless people, TV interviewers, tabloid columnists, etc. ‘He is even to the right of Genghis Khan.’ The implication is that Genghis Khan is on the extreme right of the political spectrum. What is the origin of this belief? And when did the phrase come into use? I believe it is hardly more than half a century old. Hitler, again, is to blame. He is seen, falsely, as the epitome of ‘the Right’. He is also seen, more accurately, as a mass killer on an unprecedented scale. Before the 20th century, the classical perpetrator of terrorist massacre, pillage and the destruction of cities was Genghis Khan. He was not, however, seen as a political figure of either left or right — just as a savage barbarian. Hitler, however, was linked with him as a mass killer, and therefore Genghis took on Hitler’s political colouration. In fact, Stalin killed more people than Hitler, and Mao twice as many again, 70 million at the latest count. So logically, Genghis should have taken on this political colouration, and the phrase should run, ‘He’s even to the left of Genghis Khan.’

We are today facing a new resurgence of barbarism potentially as lethal and catastrophic as that over which Hitler, Stalin and Mao presided. By conveniently locating those past horrors on a political grid with which we feel comfortable, we dull our wits and betray our responsibilities. Thank goodness we have people like Johnson, people who know the depths to which we can sink if and when we shirk our responsibilities.

The Turbulent Tiber

Professor Francis Beckwith, president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), was recently received into the Roman Catholic Church. Dr. Beckwith's prominence in Evangelical circles (and beyond them as well) assured that the decision that he and his wife made would attract a good deal of attention, from both Catholics and Evangelicals. As a Roman Catholic who daily grows more grateful for the unearned and unmerited gift of faith and membership in the Mother Church, I am happy for Dr. Beckwith and his wife.

But I do not think that we Catholics should do an end-zone dance about this.

I have had the great good fortune to have had ongoing conversations with Evangelicals whose faith I admire greatly and whose contributions on the subject of faith and culture have been informative and inspiring. In general I feel that Catholics could use an evangelical nudge at least as much as Evangelicals could use a catholic one. (I myself am in constant need of both.)

"I find it almost uncanny that theology is so often engaged in banal and egoistic frictions today," wrote then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger 20 years ago, "when the waters have risen to humanity’s very neck and the death knell of theology may actually have sounded."

Here's a suggestion: why don't we Catholics and Evangelicals (and anyone else who wants in on the process) treat ourselves to a little good-humored holy competition: While remaining in serious dialogue with one another, let's see how well each of our traditions can accomplish the task before is: namely, to give a credible -- which is to say, existentially edifying -- account of the truth of Christianity. I might add, just to make the contest a little more interesting: the whole truth.

Here's something that might balance things a bit. Let's call it, well ... works righteousness. It's from something then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote 20 years ago.

Recently, I entertained two South American bishops, with whom I discussed both their social projects and their pastoral experiences and efforts. They told me of the intensive proselytizing with which the hundred or so Christian denominations of the reformed churches have encroached upon the traditional Catholicism of the land and are changing its religious face. In the course of the conversation, they spoke of a remarkable event that they considered symptomatic and that had forced them to examine their conscience as to the course taken by the Catholic Church of South America since the end of Vatican Council II. They reported that representatives of several [largely “indigenous”] villages had come to the Catholic bishop to tell him that they had now joined a Protestant community. They took the opportunity to thank the bishop for all the social undertakings by which he had accomplished many fine things for them through the years and which they greatly appreciated. “But we need a religion, too,” they said, “and that is why we have become Protestants.”

This was the result, then-Cardinal Ratzinger observed, of the decision of the postconciliar Church in Latin America “that these countries should first be developed and then evangelized,” an inversion of the Church’s purpose that the Protestant evangelists did not make. “But men really do not live by bread alone,” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, “and cannot wait to have their other needs fulfilled until bread is no longer a problem.”

Those who undertake this task will likely be appreciative of parallel or converging efforts of others.

As a professor (whose name I cannot recall) at Wheaton College said to me several years ago on my first visit to Wheaton: "When Christ comes next time, he'll be looking for bride and not a harem."

It won't hurt to keep that in mind.

More on the Epistemology of Faith . . .

During his 40 days in the desert, Jesus was tempted to do things that would make the truth of his claims and the meaning of his existence irrefutable. He declined. His followers down through the centuries have sometimes tried to do what Jesus refused to do.

But irrefutability is overrated. Christian faith appeals to freedom and to love, both of which require the absence of irrefutability, what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls "the purely worldly power of persuasion." The truth of Christianity is simply Christ -- the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- the Truth that will set you free.

Balthasar:

The kind of evidential power with which God manifests himself must be of the highest kind, precisely in virtue of the fact that it allows freedom because it makes men free. And it wants to overpower a lover that answers in freedom only in its own way -- by the evidential power of love ...

Balthasar cites Blaise Pascal as the thinker who best understood this, quoting this from Pascal's Pensées: "Perfect clarity would please reason but harm the will. The proud man must be humbled."

Balthasar goes so far as to say the "only that person can truly recognize the Messiah who knows how to keep his secret."

This is not of course to ignore the command to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Rather it is to realize that the value of that preaching will depend primarily on how faithfully the lives of those who preach it have been conformed to Christ and only secondarily on how objectively persuasive their argumentation might be.

The secret that must be kept is an open secret, but it will elude those who try to discover it solely on the basis of a "purely worldly power of persuasion."

Remembering with gratitude . . .

Today we remember those who have given their lives in an effort to make the world a safer and freer and more peaceful place. Among these I count my father, who was killed in World War II, and Tim Shea, the son of two of my oldest and dearest friends, who was killed in Iraq in 2005.

But we might also remember today, not only all who have died in battle, but all who continue to step into harm's way in order to make our lives safer. I think not only of those in military uniform, but also of those serving in police and fire departments, those in public safety. We don't often stop to realize how the relatively peaceful lives we live are made possible by their courage. I think as well of my own daughter Aña, a paramedic who works the night shift on a rescue crew in an inner city.

We who live in such relative safety owe a great debt to those who make the world a safer place.

Science of Facts & Epistemology of Truth

A number of very smart people have made very conspicuous fools of themselves lately by not recognizing a truth expressed with such lapidary economy by Benedict XVI in his marvelous new book, Jesus of Nazareth:

The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality.

For an extended meditation on this insight, see Leon Kass' essay in the April edition of Commentary, "Science, Religion, and the Human Future" (subscription required). Two of my most trusted friends, Ron Austin and Tom Olp, recommended Dr. Kass' article to me within 30 minutes of each other yesterday. Benedict gets the nod for succinctness, but Leon Kass draws out the implications of the Pope's remark.

Leon Kass:

The substantive limits of science follow from certain fundamental aspects of scientific knowledge and from science’s assumptions about what sorts of things are scientifically knowable. They stem from science’s own self-proclaimed conceptual limitations — limitations to which neither religious nor philosophical thought is subject. This is not because, science being rational, it is incapable of dealing with the passionate or sub-rational or spiritual or supernatural aspects of being. It is, on the contrary, because the rationality of science is but a partial and highly specialized rationality, concocted for the purpose of gaining only that kind of knowledge for which it was devised, and applied to only those aspects of the world that can be captured by such rationalized notions. The peculiar reason of science is not the natural reason of everyday life captured in ordinary speech, and it is also not the reason of philosophy or religious thought, both of which are tied to—even as they seek to take us beyond — the world as we experience it.

Or as Hans Urs von Balthasar put it half a century ago:

To an epoch in which anthropology has been recognized as the key to philosophy, it is self-contradictory to foster an intelligence that approaches things from a merely rationalistic and technical point of view, indeed it completely misunderstands its own being. ... In the anthropological period the highest objectivity can be attained only by the highest personal risk of man himself.

Balthasar comes close to matching Benedict in succinctness when he writes:

A theory of knowledge that resolutely starts from the case that sets the norm of all knowledge, i.e. the meeting between persons, saves itself a good many problems.

Be not conformed to the spirit of this age ...

Here's then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reflecting on the turmoil -- in the world and in the Church -- which threw so many of the moral, religious and cultural structures into confusion.

That all-too-guileless progressivism of the first postconciliar years [years just after the Second Vatican Council - 1962-1965], which happily proclaimed its solidarity with everything modern, with everything that promised progress, and strove with the self-conscious zeal of a model schoolboy to prove the compatibility of what is Christian with all that is modern, to demonstrate the loyalty of Christians to the trends of contemporary life -- that progressivism has today come under suspicion of being merely the apotheosis of the late-capitalistic bourgeoisie, on which, instead of attacking it critically, it sheds a kind of religious glow. Granted, a relatively harmless little demon has thereby been surreptitiously replaced by seven increasingly harmful ones, but the disillusionment can be salutary. For it becomes more and more clear, in the harsh lightning of the storm aroused by such criticism, that man's existence and his world are not so pleasantly peaceful in their pursuit of progress that one would readily choose to be converted to such a world -- if one is to serve it, one must criticize it, one must change it. A Christianity that believes it has no other function than to be completely in tune with the spirit of the times has nothing to say and no meaning to offer. It can abdicate without more ado.

The Tolerance Vigilantes . . .

AND "THE DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM"

I wrote most of the following blog post almost three weeks ago. In the meantime, my computer crashed, requiring a long and laborious process of restoration, from which I was distracted by trips to Houston, Dallas, Chicago and San Diego (where I am at the moment). But the most substantial reason for the delay of this blog post is my reluctance about being drawn into the culture war trenches. For years I opted as best I could for the easy way out: declaring myself above the fray, but in the end the “neither liberal nor conservative” position is just a leaf out of Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” handbook on post-moral post-modernity.

In the defense of faith – and, secondarily, the defense of the cultural civilities that faith fostered – one has to take a stand, especially when the enemies of these things begin to turn the screws, as they are doing now.

A newspaper here in San Diego carried a story today that convinced me to post this blog entry. At the risk of making it the longest blog entry I have probably ever posted, here are excerpts from the California Catholic Daily story, headlined: Sex Carnival at UC Davis:

"Students looking for a good time should stop by the Quad, where Sex Fest '07 will be pleasuring participants with all kinds of sexual carnival games," said Richard Procter, writing in the University of California, Davis newspaper, California Aggie.

Activities at the May 22 event are to include condom relay races, a condom balloon toss, condom jewelry, the opportunity for photographs with Captain Condom, and an event to see who can put a condom on a wooden penis model the fastest.

"Condom jewelry is really fun,” said Sexual Health Program coordinator Arielle Fleischer. Students will be provided with unlubricated condoms, "so your hands don't get all gross!" quipped Fleischer. Students will be provided with craft materials, including sequins and glitter, with which to fashion condom earrings, bracelets, and other kitsch.

The idea isn’t being packaged as sexual infantilization -- despite the Kiddie Adventure Day Camp ambiance -- but as an initiative to promote “safe sex.” Fleischer expressed the hope that "all the games in which students interact with condoms make them more comfortable with them; we'd like to decrease the stigma associated with condoms."

Youthful idealism: Righting wrongs, and so on. Where are the list of urgent matters to be addressed on today's college campuses would you put decreasing the stigma associated with condoms? Stigma?

Among the information UC Davis students are virtually guaranteed not to receive are the findings of Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at UCLA Student Psychological Services. Her professional work has convinced her that the casual sexual "hook up" culture on campus is leading to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and a crippling of the ability to love, trust, or translate sexual energy into a lasting personal commitment.

"Women students especially are suffering emotional disorientation as a result of using, or being used by others in shallow relationships. This is damaging to students' self-respect, even if the sexual 'using' is agreed-upon and mutual," Grossman explained in a recent talk show on Chicago’s WGN Radio. Despite all the “fun,” she says, "we are losing the war on depression on campus.”

Item:

The Connecticut state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill on April 25th that requires all hospitals — including the state's four Catholic facilities — to provide rape victims with the abortifacient drug also known as the morning after pill. The drug prevents the implantation of living embryos, and is therefore simply a chemical abortion, ending the life of a biological human being. Catholic moral theology forbids this or any other form of abortion, but the state of Connecticut has decided, based on the now normative fiction that abortion is "a woman's right," that when the choice is between the "right" to an abortion and religious freedom, religious freedom loses.

Item:

Once upon a time there was a handsome young prince. When he grew up, he began searching for a wife, but could not find a princess he wanted to marry. One day, he met another prince—and fell in love. The two men married and lived happily ever after. ... When the fairy tale—which ended with the newly married “couple” kissing—was read to Massachusetts first graders, Christian parents were outraged.

The parents sued the Lexington school district for allowing their 6-year-olds to be taught sexual morality that not only flatly contradicts the moral teaching of the parents, but that flies in the face of Judeo-Christian moral norms universally recognized just a few short years ago. Predictably, however, the federal judge in the case, Mark Wolf, dismissed the lawsuit.

So, who gets to be the arbiter of morality for 6-year-olds in Massachusetts? And to what does this moral revolution appeal for its authority? Has there been a plebiscite?

Item:

A couple doors down the hall from Mr. Johnson's classroom at Westview High School in Rancho Peñasquitos, a suburb of San Diego, a teacher has a picture of the grunge rock band Nirvana on her door. Other teachers have slogans from sports celebrities and cartoon characters. Teacher Brad Johnson has decorated his assigned homeroom with pictures of families and nature, and banners relating to American history, such as God Bless America.

That last item, the school district told Johnson in January of this year, is banned and must be removed from the classroom. Why? Because the Poway Unified School District is under the impression that any reference to "Creator," "Creation," or "God" is prohibited by law.

The following phrases struck the school board as objectionable: “In God We Trust,” the official motto of the United States; “One Nation Under God,” from the Pledge of Allegiance; “God Bless America,” a patriotic song considered to be the unofficial national anthem of the United States; “God Shed His Grace On Thee,” a line from America the Beautiful; and “All Men Are Created Equal, They Are Endowed By Their Creator,” an excerpt from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

... Johnson points out that seven different principals, approximately 4,000 students in grades 9 - 12, and 1,000 parents have seen these banners in his classroom since 1982 with never a single complaint.

Item:

A piece of legislation that seems as wholesome as motherhood and apple pie, entitled -- Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 (LLEHCPA) -- passed the House of Representatives on May 3rd. The bill affords "sexual orientation" -- homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, cross-dressing, and so on -- special legal protection. It's sponsors argue as though, and the bill makes it seem as though, all that the bill will do is prevent unfair treatment.

In fact, however, the bill will silence those who object to homosexual acts or the moral and anthropological absurdities of transsexuality. It will criminalize the public expression of moral principles on which Christians and Jews and just about every other religion and every other culture in the history of the world have always agreed. Here is what Robert Gagnon, an acknowledged expert in this area, predicts:

Any public words against homosexual practice will be treated legally as words that incite others to violence and/or discrimination against homosexual persons, and thus subject to criminal prosecution.

The bill is supported overwhelmingly by House Democrats, and when a amendment was proposed by a Republican member declaring that nothing in the bill should be construed as an abridgment of the religious freedom of any person or group, the amendment was rejected by the majority. This is what the progressive erosion of religious liberty looks like, and those who believe it will go no further than this have not been paying attention.

Robert Gagnon:

Numerous outcomes, some that will be manifested in the very short-term and others in the long-term, will arise from giving special federal protections to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” These include:

Large fines if one owns a business and does not allow GLBT (“gay,” lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) activists to make use of the business’s services to advance the GLBT agenda; moreover, having to pay the court costs of the government agency that prosecutes the case.

Forced indoctrination of children as young as kindergarten in the public school systems into the acceptability of homosexual and transgendered behavior and the labeling of their parents’ contrary religious views as “bigotry” and “hatred,” through required readings, “GLBT studies,” and mandatory attendance at special diversity convocations or diversity workshops; also, mandatory “sensitivity training” for all teachers on the value of sexual orientation diversity.

Home-schooled children not being allowed to receive certification if their parents do not teach a curriculum that incorporates appreciation for "sexual diversity."

Loss of federal funds, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds for student loans, for any Christian college or seminary that does not hire homosexually active teachers, or that forbids students to engage in homosexual practice, or that allows a teacher at its institution to speak against homosexual practice; ultimately, the threat of loss of accreditation for Christian colleges that do not condone homosexual behavior and transgenderism; likewise, loss of tax-exempt status for any church that promotes such teaching.

Students and employees required to get counseling for the alleged mental health condition of “homophobia” or risk expulsion.

Imposition of national gay marriage by the courts, through appeal to this newly formed federal civil liberties category of “sexual orientation.”

Lest you think Gagnon an alarmist, we have solid historical experience with this sort of legislation. For several years the California Penal Code has treated "sexual orientation" as if it were as inalterable as granite and as malleable as puddy, defining "sexual orientation" as including "bisexuality" and "gender," and defining gender this way: "a person's gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth."

Gender stereotypes begin, by this definition, when the delivery nurse arbitrarily "assigns" the newborn a gender, relying on nothing more substantial than a quick glance at the child's genitals. How, exactly, has such foresighted legislation advanced the cause of civilization?

"California first put transsexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality into the 'hate crimes' section of the state's Penal Code, then applied this strange definition of 'gender' to every other part of the law," said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), a leading California-based pro-family organization. "Today, California has transsexual kindergarten teachers and laws threatening $150,000 in government fines against anyone who refuses to hire a man wearing women's clothing. It's all because of 'hate crimes' laws that include the phrases 'gender identity' and 'sexual orientation,' which have morphed California law into an intolerant hammer against moral citizens.

What Melanie Phillips said about European capitulation to radical Islam is true -- mutatis mutandis -- of the moral capitulation in Western society to a sexual anthropology as absurd and as sure to prove culturally fatal in the long run as jihadist fanaticism: "That noise you hear is the rumbling of an agenda that drives all before it. It is not a pretty sound."

For a sane and sober reflection on these matters, see Roger Scruton's recent piece in the London Telegraph.

Philip Rieff

"The lies are grandiose, for they can never be lived modestly, as the truths can be lived."

More anon.

What once separated might now unite

My computer problems persist, but there is hope that much of the data lost in my computer crash can be recovered. My travel schedule is another thing keeping me from more regular blog posts. I leave for the West coast again on Monday. In the meantime, here is something I thought you might find interesting. I certainly did.

As it was with his pontifical predecessor, the need to move toward the restoration of Christian unity is central to how Benedict XVI sees his pontificate. Writing in the 1980s, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger argued that an important part of that work will be the renewed attention to the Church Fathers, representing as they do the common ancestors of the Eastern Church (which is most especially devoted to the Church Fathers) as well as the Catholic, Protestant and Reformed Churches of West.

When, Cardinal Ratzinger asked, did the patristic age end? Put slightly differently, the question is: what is the decisive date of the division between the Eastern and Western Churches? In trying to answer this question, he made a most remarkable observation:

… the end of Fourth Ecumenical Council does indeed represent a certain watershed. Nevertheless, the era of Church councils approved by both East and West persisted; the unity of faith and communio continued to express itself in the unity of common theological thought. The year 1054, on the other hand, is too peripheral and incidental a date to be meaningful as a reference point; the event of that year only made clear outwardly what had long existed in fact: that East and West spoke different languages, thought in different theologies – that, in other words, there still existed particular theologies but no “ecumenical theology” such as had existed in the time of the Fathers. We would have to say, then, that the patristic age ended with the changed intellectual climate marked by the Migrations and by the hostile spread of Islam; as an outward sign of the latter, we can point to the pope’s turning to the Carolingian Empire, by which the old ecumenism was finally destroyed and – together with the creation of the church-state – the new self-understanding of the West, the fundamental constellation of the Middle Ages, was created.

Only lately have we begun to reckon with the persistent historical impact on Christianity and the cultures it nourished of “the hostile spread of Islam.” That Islamic hostility might have contributed to the most significant division within Christianity is quite remarkable. Perhaps we can hope, however, that the current manifestation of this hostility will contribute to the cause of Christian unity.

Chicago / Wheaton

I am in the Chicago area for meetings. My computer problems remain. Meetings in Houston, Dallas and here have gone extremely well, far beyond my expectations. Our Emmaus Road Initiative will have a lively venues in these places: One large venue in Houston, two in Dallas, three in Wheaton.

I will return to my office midweek, and turn to the computer problems. I hope soon afterward to begin putting the pieces back together and be back to more regularly blogging as soon as possible.

Thanks for continuing to check in.

Doing the best I can ...

Friends,

I just returned from Hartford, Connecticut. It looks good for a monthly Emmaus Road Initiative series there beginning in September. Tomorrow morning early, I leave for Houston, Dallas, and Chicago to meet with a number of people there to plan monthly E.R.I. sessions in those places as well.

The bad news is that I'm reeling from a catastrophic computer crash, one that took out the backup drive as well. It may have, shall we say, life-altering consequences. Little can be done in any event until I return from the trip. If there are no posts for a while, that's why.

If you're full of compassion and in the mood for prayer, keep me and my hard-drive woes in your prayers. If, like me, you need a little comic relief to keep things like this in perspective, here's a photo of one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century -- Hans Urs von Balthasar -- at Disneyland:

"One less thing ..."

Something for the Lord's Day:

Writing in the 1980s, Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) quoted a humorous couplet from the German poet, Wilhelm Busch. I don't read German, and I don't have the German original, but the English translation I have doesn't quite work. So I have "translated" it, retaining I'm quite sure its essence:

Once your worldly reputation is in tatters,
You'll have more time for what really matters.

Cardinal Ratzinger quoted the Wilhelm Busch version of this couplet during those years when he was widely and falsely accused of being an ecclesiastical Neanderthal. It's quite clear to those who bother to read what he wrote during those years that he used his extra time wisely.

Surrendering Europe

I assure you that it is with a heavy heart that I follow-up the last blog post with this one. Please understand that I share such things, not just to bemoan the ways things are going. There is too much whining going on as is. The purpose is to convince those who are still sleepwalking through this crisis that it is a real crisis, a civilizational crisis of the first order of magnitude, and that everything we hold dear hangs in the balance.

Yesterday my attention was called to a comment posted on the Gates of Vienna weblog, one of the several weblogs dedicated to alerting Europeans (and others) to the mounting threat posed by the radicalization of Islam. Responding to a blog entry about the British "brain-drain," a British blogger who goes by the name of Alien Anthropologist had this to say:

Almost every friend who has a high-paid job and useful skills is looking at emigrating from Britain, waiting for their visa, or has already gone, and I’ll be off across the Atlantic myself in a couple of months. I’d add that includes skilled and integrated Muslim friends who have no more desire to stay here than I do; many saw the writing on the wall with the London bombings and I’d hate to see them getting hurt in a backlash against Muslim extremists.

Someone mentioned that one reason people aren’t willing to fight for Britain is because it doesn’t exist anymore, and I’d agree with that; the Britain of 2007 bears little resemblance to the country where I grew up, and almost anything a Briton of 1907 might recognize here has been destroyed by a few decades of ‘progressive’ policies which deliberately set out to do exactly that. Britons fifty years ago were happy to fight for King and Country — as I would have been myself — but few people today are going to fight for Tony Blair and the EU.

So, as I see it, the future for Britain is either Islamic rule or civil war, with the latter more likely. Since I don’t fancy either of those options, I’d rather make a stand in a country that still has more options ...

This is a footnote to yesterday's blog post. A sad one, to be sure. If it helps to stir us awake, however; if it makes us more aware of the social, political, and cultural consequences of the loss of our religious tradition, then it will have served a useful purpose.

"The question is, not how we can establish a trouble-free existence," wrote then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "but what is worth the trouble and what is not."

Passing along a couple of items:

This from Christopher Orlet:

Behind multiculturalism was the conceit that various tribes, races, and sects embracing radically different or opposing values -- indeed encouraged to embrace different values -- might live together in peace and harmony. What's more, one and all would be richer for the association. And since we are all reasonable modern people ancient grudges and historical injustices would be as forgotten as, say, Walter Mondale's running mate. Under multiculturalism the Earth would be a peaceable kingdom once more, an Eden before the fall.

Only it didn't quite work out that way. It seems tribes, races, and sects do hold grudges. Sometimes for a thousand years. And as for sharing different values, many Muslim immigrants and their Saudi and Egyptian spiritual advisors were not as big on multiculturalism as were the West's intellectuals and politicos. The former's secular European neighbors were not regarded as distinct cultural groups with equal cultural and political status, but godless infidels and Zionist apes and swine.

Yes, that's Big Ben in the background,
for many the symbol of the United Kingdom and London its capitol.
The foreground is London citizens hoisting a Hezbollah flag.

And this from Roger Kimball:

Western democratic society is rooted in a particular vision of what Aristotle called "the good for man." The question is: Do we, as a society, still have confidence in the animating values of the vision? Do we possess the requisite will to defend them? Or was François Revel right when he said that "Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it"? The jury is still out on those questions.

Message in a Bottle

To Whom It May Concern:

[To European culture today -- while it can still be spoken of in the singular -- and to North American culture in the near future]:

From Philip Rieff:

A multiculture is an anti-culture. ... the historical task of a culture is always and everywhere the same: the creation of a world in which its inhabitants may find themselves at home and yet accommodate the stranger without yielding their habitus to him.

T. S. Eliot's "where there is no temple, there shall be no homes" finds its perfect echo in Rieff's "Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing."


Lest the word "sacred" trigger in my fellow Girardians a needless knee-jerk reaction, what both Eliot and Rieff are saying is simply that all culture is rooted in cult, and that without reference to transcendence made vibrant and materially manifest in the culture, the culture will succumb to the iron law of both human affairs and physics, namely, that nature abhors a vacuum.

So, finally, Philip Rieff: "As teaching agents of sacred order, and inescapably within it, the moral demands we must teach, if we are teachers, are those eternal truths by which all social orders endure."

Tradition

The word "tradition" and the word "treason" come from the same root.

The very name "modernity" self-consciously used to describe the period of the last several centuries in Western cultural history clearly exemplifies the spirit that has dominated these centuries, and the "postmodernism" that has lately been offered as its sequel -- as it's name makes obvious -- is nothing more than the same spirit, in Shakespeare's words, having eaten everything else in sight, at last eating up itself.

The spirit that animates both these phases of our cultural history is an anti-traditional spirit, rooted in the assumption that liberation from the past is the key to happiness and progress. This "liberationist" spirit has fostered a remarkable degree of economic and political improvements, but it must be said that the most impressive of these are due more to the residual presence of a Judeo-Christian ethos than to the forces that have insisted on its irrelevance.

Slowly but surely, however, the underlying presuppositions of the modern and postmodern eras have led to a loss of cohesion and cultural integrity, resulting in a situation today in the West which is little more than licensed autonomy enforced with increasingly draconian methods, all aimed at neutralizing or penalizing the public presence of traditional religious or moral judgments: what Pope Benedict called "the dictatorship of relativism."

All of this plays out as the culture war, which, however reluctant one is to enter its lists, can no more be avoided than can other kinds of war. The bumper sticker which reads: Stop the War, for instance, seems to presuppose that this can be done by simply laying down one's arms. Which, in a way, is true, for it would simply concede the contest to those who have not laid down their arms, thus bringing the war between them to an end. One doesn't have to be a political philosopher, much less a member of some neo-con cabal, to realize that war ended on those terms might lead to a very unhappy state of affairs.

So ... the unavoidability of the culture war. The passions aroused by that war, however, should not blind us to our responsibility to our descendants. I am even tempted to describe the belligerents in today's culture war as those who are primarily concerned with making the culture more congenial to their own impulses, desires, aptitudes, and preoccupations, on one hand, and, on the other, those primarily concerned with the cultural, moral, and spiritual needs of those who will come after them. I know howls of protest will be forthcoming about that; but I must say this is exactly how it seems to me.

The precise point I want to make is about the very nature of both tradition and culture. Both are received from the distant past, not concocted in the present or in the recent past. That is why we must try to resolve any differences between ourselves, our contemporaries, our ancestors, and our descendants in favor of our ancestors. Paradoxically, that is the only way we can resolve them in favor of our descendants. For what our descendants will most desperately need is an inheritance, a tradition, a moral, religious, and cultural patrimony that has the weight of centuries of affirmation, reflection, scrutiny, and living experience. Anything less ballasted than that will surely be washed away in the cultural tsunamis which are doubtless coming in the decades just ahead.

To hand on to the next generation a culture cobbled together out of the fashions and ideological enthusiasms of the last few decades is to betray them in the most irresponsible way, for such a culture is no culture at all, and it will do them no good. This is why the New Testament warns against the "spirit of this age," not because of the peculiar toxins at work in the late-first century Greco-Roman culture when the New Testament was being written, but precisely because every age produces its own unique myths and rituals for warding off the truth that Christians are charged with announcing to the world, and Christians are warned to be wary of them, in season and out.

What makes a tradition a living tradition is not that it has been recently updated to conform to the latest fashions, but quite the contrary, that it brings into play longstandng moral and spiritual realities to which the world will forever be hostile and for lack of which it will become mad and murderous. If such a tradition is to remain alive, it will do so, not by customizing itself to the point of being indistinguishable from its surrounding society, but by delving ever deeper into its reservoir of truth and bringing forth fresh new ways of understanding these truths.

We owe our children and our children's children nothing less.