Processing down the aisle . . .

"If I hear one more person say that the slippery slope argument doesn’t apply to gay marriage, I’m gonna scream." So says Ryan Sayre Patrico at the First Things blog.

In proof thereof, Patrico links to this, a glimpse at the antinomians' next romance with the death of romance, a picture of what's to come in the (not too distant) future:

“I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship,” says Sasha Lessin. “But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.” . . .

The Lessins' advocacy group, the Maui-based World Polyamory Association, is pushing for the next frontier of less-traditional codified relationships. This community has even come up with a name for what the rest of the world generally would call a committed threesome: the "triad."

Surely it will stop at three; don't you think?

I have friends who fear a return to paganism, but I don't think those moving in this direction have the energy of the ancient pagans, who came by their paganism honestly at least. Today's neo-pagans do, however, have the kind of relentless, resentful determination, a fascimile of real vitality. Like the Paisian mobs during the French Revolution, they draw more energy from the prospect of destroying the old order than they do from any real expectation that the new one of their own creation will be happier or more satisfying.

Therein lies the imperative of the "slippery slope." Extending the revolution to new areas provides the only relief from the tedium and despair of the post-revolutionary status quo.

And don't miss this . . .

David Goldman -- formerly aka: Spengler -- has a personal reflection on his First Things blogsite, which ends in a really beautiful way. Says Goldman:

Those who oppose love and fear of God miss the point. God self-reveals through love, and we come to know God through love – but to know the passionate God, the Bridegroom of Israel, is also to fear Him. I’m plenty scared. But I’ve stopped running.

It's here.

I told you so . . .

I said that Thomas Sowell was one of the most level-headed and insightful public intellectuals writing today, and here he is proving me right:

There is a reason why Lady Justice wears a blindfold. There are things that courts are not supposed to see or recognize when making their decisions — the race you belong to, whether you are rich or poor, and other personal things that could bias decisions by judges and juries.

It is an ideal that a society strives for, even if particular judges or juries fall short of that ideal. Now, however, Pres. Barack Obama has repudiated the ideal itself by saying that he wants to appoint judges with “empathy” for particular groups.

This was not an isolated slip of the tongue. Barack Obama said the same thing during last year’s election campaign. Moreover, it is completely consistent with his behavior and associations over a period of years — and inconsistent with fundamental principles of American government and society.

Nor is this President Obama’s only attempt to remake American society. Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a president of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell bankers how to bank, control the medical system, and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor most other politicians have any expertise or experience.

The Constitution of the United States gives no president, nor the entire federal government, the authority to do such things. But spending trillions of dollars to bail out all sorts of companies buys the power to tell them how to operate.

Appointing to the federal courts — including the Supreme Court — judges who believe in expanding the powers of the federal government to make arbitrary decisions, choosing who will be winners and losers in the economy and in the society, is perfectly consistent with a vision of the world where self-confident and self-righteous elites rule according to their own notions, instead of merely governing under the restraints of the Constitution.

If all this can be washed down with pious talk about “empathy,” so much the better for those who want to remake America. Now that the Obama administration has a congressional majority that is virtually unstoppable, and media that are wholly uncritical, the chances of preventing the president from putting someone on the Supreme Court who shares his desire to turn America into a different country are slim or none.

Don't despair. Sowell offers hope. Read it all here.

A Palate Cleanser from G. K. Chesterton

My father was a convert to Catholicism. I have the same name that both my father and my grandfather had -- and as far as that goes my son has the same name as well, but I have repeated told him that as soon as we get this "Gilbert Hunt Bailie" right we can quit this nonsense.

Anyway, since my father was a convert, and despite the fact that his father was Gilbert Hunt Bailie too, I fancy the idea that one factor in his decision to continue the Bailie family assault on individuality by naming his son, yet again, GHB was that he was fond of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He (my father) got himself bombed by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, so I never got to ask him. I'm told that he (my father, who never laid eyes on me -- he was off fighting the Germans who eventually bombed him to death) had a great sense of humor, and anyone with a great sense of humor must have one of England's greatest converts, Gilbert K. Chesterton, as an unofficial patron saint.

All of which is my excuse for quoting this typically Chestertonian bon mot, which is not entirely irrelevant to this weblog's recent dust-up:

If our aunts ought to have been able to hear of immorality without fainting, surely our nephews might brace themselves to hear about morality without throwing an epileptic fit.

Other angles on the same issue

As though who know me well know, I would love to wish away this entire conversation, but those driving the agenda won't let that happen. After ever short lull in the tightening of the screws there comes the next twist. H.B. 1913 is just the most recent.

So, since it seems we're destined to talk about the issue of "hate crime" legislation a bit longer, here is a little more input. Don't give up half way through it, for it concludes with the wisdom of someone who richly deserves the last word on this issue, as on so many others, Thomas Sowell, one of the most thoughtful public intellectuals of our time.

First, this just in from WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh:

The leader of a pro-family organization says families across the nation need to contact their U.S. senators now to try to derail a legislative plan that already has passed the U.S. House and is being awaited by President Obama – after a Democrat confirmed that it would protect "all 547 forms of sexual deviancy or 'paraphilias' listed by the American Psychiatric Association." . . .

The proposal, formally called the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act after a Wyoming homosexual who was killed in a horrific robbery and beating in 1998, creates a special class for homosexuals and others with alternative sexual lifestyles and provides them protections against so-called "hate."

It specifically denies such protections to other targeted classes of citizens such as pastors, Christians, missionaries, veterans and the elderly.

WND columnist Janet Porter offered this:

"I've written extensively about how this bill would criminalize Christianity and turn those who disagree with the homosexual agenda into felons, but criminalizing Christianity is just the beginning of what this bill would do. It would also elevate pedophiles as a special protected class – since the term 'sexual orientation' which has been added to the 'hate crimes' legislation includes them in the American Psychiatric Association's definition of various 'sexual orientations."

Porter cited the amendment offering from Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, in committee that was very simple:

The term sexual orientation as used in this act or any amendments to this act does not include pedophilia.

But majority Democrats refused to accept that.

Congressman Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, then explained what that means:

If a mother hears that their child has been raped and she slaps the assailant with her purse, she is now gone after as a hate criminal because this is a protected class. There are other protected classes in here. I mean simple exhibitionism. I have female friends who have told me over the years that some guy flashed them, and their immediate reaction was to hit them with their purse. Well now, he's committed a misdemeanor, she has committed a federal hate crime because the exhibitionism is protected under sexual orientation.

Congressman Gohmert added:

And having reviewed cases as an appellate judge, I know that when the legislature has the chance to include a definition and refuses, then what we look at is the plain meaning of those words. The plain meaning of sexual orientation is anything to which someone is orientated. That could include exhibitionism, it could include necrophilia (sexual arousal/activity with a corpse) … it could include Urophilia (sexual arousal associated with urine), voyeurism. You see someone spying on you changing clothes and you hit them, they've committed a misdemeanor, you've committed a federal felony under this bill. It is so wrong.

According to Porter, Congressman King told the full U.S. House that the APA has a list of 547 different "paraphilias" that would be protected by members of Congress under the "hate crimes" plan.

U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., a "hate crimes" supporter, agreed, saying:

This bill addresses our resolve to end violence based on prejudice and to guarantee that all Americans regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability or all of these 'Philias' and fetishes and 'ism's' that were put forward need not live in fear because of who they are. I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this rule…"

Porter said families, parents, Americans, anyone interested in the future of the nation, needs to contact their members in the Senate and demand hearings, then demand a filibuster.

"Pushing away an unwelcome advance of a homosexual, transgendered, cross-dresser or exhibitionist could make you a felon under this law. Speaking out against the homosexual agenda could also make you a felon if you are said to influence someone who pushes away that unwelcome advance. And pedophiles and other sexual deviants would enjoy an elevated level of protection while children, seniors, veterans, and churches would not," Porter said.

The "hate crimes" proposal not only sets up criminal charges against those whose actions or words offend homosexuals but also provides money "to improve the education and training of local officials to identify, investigate, prosecute and prevent hate crimes."

President Obama, supported strongly during his campaign by homosexual advocates, appears ready to respond to their desires.

"I urge members on both sides of the aisle to act on this important civil rights issue by passing this legislation to protect ALL of our citizens from violent acts of intolerance," he said.
Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission said the Senate proposal could be voted on in committee as early as tomorrow. (my upper case emphasis)

"You must call the Senate today and demand that they hold hearings on this bill," he wrote. "It is one of the most radical pieces of legislation to ever make its way to the Senate. If passed, it will lay the groundwork for restricting religious liberty and freedom of speech as it has in Canada and Europe."

Gohmert warned the law will be used against pastors – or anyone else – who speaks against homosexuality or other alternative sexual lifestyle choices. He said it provides that anyone who through speech "induces" commission of a violent hate crime "will be tried as a principal" alongside the active offender.

Critics say that would allow for prosecutions against pastors who preach a biblical ban on homosexuality if someone who hears such a message later is accused of any crime.
Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, said, "A pastor's sermon could be considered 'hate speech' under this legislation if heard by an individual who then acts aggressively against persons based on 'sexual orientation.' The pastor could be prosecuted for 'conspiracy to commit a hate crime'" she said.

Those who think these concerns are exaggerated have not been paying attention and remain naive about how methodically committed those driving this agenda are to imposing a thoroughly post-Christian moral order on our society -- one that implicitly declares that there is no such thing as sexual deviancy -- and to impose this worldview with the help of a pliant and empathetic judiciary.

I say "empathetic" of course in reference to President Obama's single enunciated criteria for appointing the next Supreme Court justice. And it is on that score that we need to turn to Thomas Sowell:

Justice David Souter's retirement from the Supreme Court presents President Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic or whatever, are missing the point.

That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group "representation" is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

That President Obama has made "empathy" with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much further the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.

Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with "empathy" for groups A, B and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y or Z? Nothing could be further from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States.

Appoint enough Supreme Court justices with "empathy" for particular groups and you would have, for all practical purposes, repealed the 14th Amendment, which guarantees "equal protection of the laws" for all Americans.

We would have entered a strange new world, where everybody is equal but some are more equal than others. The very idea of the rule of law would become meaningless when it is replaced by the empathies of judges.

Barack Obama solves this contradiction, as he solves so many other problems, with rhetoric. If you believe in the rule of law, he will say the words "rule of law." And if you are willing to buy it, he will keep on selling it.

Those people who just accept soothing words from politicians they like are gambling with the future of a nation. When you buy words, you had better know what you are buying. . . .

Some people say that who Barack Obama appoints to replace Justice Souter doesn't really matter, because Souter is a liberal who will probably be replaced by another liberal. But, if no one sounds the alarm now, we can end up with a series of appointees with "empathy"-- which is to say, with justices who think their job is to "relieve the distress" of particular groups, rather than to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

"Progress" . . .

Optimism is often enough the deadly enemy of hope, the theological virtue that comes into play precisely when the sobering facts of the fallen human condition intrude with all their irrefutability.

Once optimism has been replaced by hope, what exactly would the idea of "progress" look like?

Here's a thought: As shocked as our great-grandparents would have been had they lived to see the moral and social degradation of our age, hope might be measured by our ability to believe that, looking back on our age, our great-grandchildren will be even more shocked by it.

Henri de Lubac

Those who, by receiving Christ, have received all, have been raised up for the salvation of those who could not know him. Their privilege constitutes a mission. There is no other way for them to keep their riches, for in the spiritual order "only that is possessed which is given away," and so they will keep them only if they give them away.

From the sidelines . . .

There's been so much follow-up -- no surprise there -- to my admittedly rushed and impressionistic take on the upcoming "hate-crime" legislation. As always, I'm grateful to my friends -- in this case, especially Mark -- for taking up the task of clarification. I apologize for abandoning the field, but sundry other matters have taken me away. In any case, Mark seems to be handling things quite well. But so as not to leave it all on his shoulders, here's something that caught my eye today.

A Virginia congressman says the anti-Christian hatred and bigotry of homosexual blogger Perez Hilton and his supporters underscores one of the fallacies undergirding federal "hate crimes" legislation.

Congressional backers of the federal hate crimes bill that recently passed the House repeatedly claim that it will help ensure equal protection under the law for all Americans. They also argue that the bill does not threaten free speech, but merely punishes acts of violence motivated by hate.

Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Virginia) is a former ranking member of the Judiciary Crime Subcommittee, and founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus. He recently took to the House floor and provided a powerful example of how the "Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act" does not ensure equality under the law.

Randy ForbesCongressman Forbes compared the protection Miss California Carrie Prejean would receive under the bill to the special protection homosexual blogger and Miss USA judge Perez Hilton would have been afforded.

"Had [Hilton] done what he said he would do and stormed that stage and pulled that tiara off [Prejean's] head and [inflicted] bodily harm when he did it, there would not have been one ounce of protection under this piece of legislation for that young girl," Forbes stated.

"But after he did it, if she had in response made a statement back about the very sexual orientation that had led him to his hatred and dislike for her, and if she had responded by slapping him or any physical injury, she would have had the potential of a ten-year federal piece of legislation coming against her."

The Virginia Republican also argued that if beauty contestant's father had rushed onto the stage at the Miss USA pageant and responded to Hilton's hatred in a physical way, he would have been open to prosecution under the hate crimes bill as well.

From OneNewsNow

And then there is a North Carolina bill that follows a predictably similar pattern, referred to here:

North Carolina bishops warn: bullying bill could help pave way to same-sex marriage.

Bishops Peter Jugis of Charlotte and Michael Burbidge of Raleigh are urging North Carolina’s Catholics to oppose the “School Violence Protection Act” (also known as the “Bullying Bill”) because the bill lists gender identity and sexual orientation among the “specific differentiating characteristics that result in bullying or harassment.” The bishops explain:

"We agree that bullying or harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation is reprehensible and should not be tolerated. However, there is also a highly problematic consequence to the inclusion of these two specific differentiating characteristics should it become law. In three states that have a law similar to SB526, the law was used as part of a lawsuit to persuade a judge or court to mandate same-sex marriage. We believe the passage of SB526 into law could be the precursor of actions by our legislature and/or our courts to mandate same-sex marriage in our state because it has occurred already in three other states."

The point, as I said in my original post, is that legislation that regards violence -- or bullying -- against some people as more worthy of legal and prosecutorial attention than violence or bullying against other people is a dangerous precedent with serious collateral cultural implications.

Courage in a time of accommodation

If, as seems likely, the Boston Globe is the next ship in the New York Times convoy to sink, another voice in today's Pravda-media chorus will have been silenced. Who can complain? The only concern is: what will happen to Jeff Jacoby, a Globe columnist of great integrity who, in a recent column, celebrated precisely the kind of moral courage which he himself exemplifies. He wrote of the courage of the Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon and the Miss USA Pageant contestant Carrie Prejean.

At first glance, Carrie Prejean and Mary Ann Glendon could hardly seem more dissimilar. Prejean is a 21-year-old California beauty queen and model; Glendon is a Harvard law professor and a former US ambassador to the Vatican. What they have in common is a greater respect for honesty than for political correctness, and for the obligations of moral witness than for their own personal prestige.

Glendon made news last week when she refused to accept the University of Notre Dame's illustrious Laetare Medal, the oldest and most distinguished honor in American Catholic life. The medal was to have been presented on May 17, when President Barack Obama will receive an honorary degree and deliver the commencement address. Notre Dame is the nation's foremost Catholic university, and its decision to honor Obama -- an ardent supporter of unrestricted abortion rights -- has been sharply criticized, especially by Catholics who share their church's deep opposition to abortion.

In a letter to Notre Dame's president, Glendon expressed dismay that the university would bestow a high honor on someone so hostile to such a fundamental Catholic principle, in flat disregard of church guidelines. Worse, it was using her expected appearance to deflect criticism, suggesting in its "talking points" that Obama's address to the graduates would be balanced by Glendon's brief acceptance remarks. Unwilling to let her presence be exploited in this way, she chose to renounce the medal.

Unlike Glendon, who had weeks to reflect before making her decision, Prejean had only seconds. In the final round of the recent Miss USA Pageant, Prejean was asked by one of the judges -- a homosexual gossip blogger who calls himself Perez Hilton -- whether she thought every state should legalize same-sex marriage. It was, she later said, the question she dreaded most -- "I prayed I would not be asked about gay marriage" -- knowing that an honest answer would hurt her chances of winning.

Nevertheless, she gave the honest answer. "I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other," Miss California replied, but "I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be -- between a man and a woman."

As she foresaw, the crown went to another contestant. What she may not have foreseen was the wave of hostility and condemnation that followed. Immediately after the pageant, the judge who had asked the question publicly berated her, snarling in an online video: "Miss California lost because she's a dumb bitch." (In an even uglier postscript, he later said that he had actually wanted to call Prejean "the C-word.") California pageant officials slammed her, too; "religious beliefs," one wrote, "have no place in politics in the Miss CA family." The Miss California USA organization even issued a statement denouncing Prejean for "her opportunistic agenda." Village Voice columnist Michael Musto went on Keith Olbermann's TV show to slander Prejean as "dumb and twisted . . . a human Klaus Barbie doll."

Throughout the uproar, Prejean has remained gracious and calm, steadfastly refusing to demonize those who have been demonizing her.

It is not always easy to have the courage of one's convictions, to turn down honor for the sake of truth, or to resist the pressure to be politically correct. A law professor and a beauty queen have just shown us how it is done.

May the kudos Jacoby so appropriately lavished on Glendon and Prejean rebound on him, and may his voice of clarity and courage continue to be heard.

The Quote of the Day

"Morality has gotten a bad rap." -- Bob Dylan

From Joe Klein’s review of Together Through Life, in the May 11 edition of Time.

Thoughts on the Lord's Day

Writes David Bentley Hart:

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catstrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities" -- spiritual and terrestial -- alien to God.

Hart is surely right to add:

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering . . . no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends.

But the alternative to this sort of cold-blooded theological optimism is not dumbfoundedness in the face of suffering, but rather something like what the British mystic and poet, Caryll Houselander, offers:

That which in our eyes seems unjust is often the extreme logic of love which is justice. It seems unjust to to us, when young men in the Maytime of their lives, and often the gentlest of them, must go to war and be slain, when the poet must die with the poem still in his heart, the lover with his love still unconsummated.

But it is Christ on the cross who dies all their deaths. In him, in the Word of God's love, all poetry is uttered; in him, the Incarnate Love, all love is consummated. On the field of Calvary, the battle between love and death is fought which restores the kingdom of heaven to the children whom Satan has despoiled.

The mystery to which the Christian bears witness may well leave non-Christians thunderstruck, but the spiritual value of being thunderstuck is undeniable.

Totalitarian Tolerance

The House has approved H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, whose chief sponsor is Congressman Barney Frank, whom, by the way, I saw holding forth with a few admirers at the Boston airport this afternoon.) The bill will now go to the Senate, where it will probably pass on a party-line vote. The bill treats violence against some people as more heinous and worthy of more punishment than violence against other people.

Robert Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary puts it this way:

Support for a “hate” bill that enshrines “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” into federal law (note that it is not yet so enshrined) does not mean merely that you oppose hateful, violent acts against persons who self-identify as homosexuals, transsexuals, and cross-dressers. Laws are already in place protecting persons who identify as homosexual or transgendered. They are the same laws that protect all of us from violent physical or verbal attacks.

Support for such a bill means, in effect, that you are in favor of the federal government taking an official, legal stance that opposition to homosexual practice and transgenderism of any sort is hatred and bigotry akin to virulent racism and liable to state prosecution. Any statement against such homosexual practice or transgenderism could be prosecuted as an “incitement” or “inducement” of others to violence, no matter how loving and rational that expression of opposition may be.

H. R. 1913 is not the end but the beginning, and the process that it inaugurates is one that will -- in due course -- intimidate, censure, and criminalize those who fail to capitulate to the post-Christian moral make-over that illiberal liberalism is now in the process of making mandatory.

As the "hate-crime" legislation to the Senate for a vote, it might be worthwhile to look a little farther down the road to where it will lead. It's really about singling out certain people or a certain class of people for special consideration in the enforcement of laws written for everyone.

This from an article in Australia entitled, appropriately, "Thought Police Muscle Up in Britain."

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government's anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: "If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings." It took him five years to clear his name.

Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!" Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offense and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: "An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form."

The Orwellian mind is at work, filled with puritanical zeal.

Eyes Wide Shut . . .

WASHINGTON--President Obama at Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, attended by Eli Wiesel, other survivors, rescuers, members of Congress and members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council:

"It is the grimmest of ironies that one of the most savage, barbaric acts of evil in history began in one of the most modernized societies of its time, where so many markers of human progress became tools of human depravity: science that can heal, used to kill; education that can enlighten, used to rationalize away basic moral impulses; the bureaucracy that sustains modern life, used as the machinery of mass death, a ruthless, chillingly efficient system where many were responsible for the killing, but few got actual blood on their hands."

Think about it.

HT: here.

Romano Guardini

On the liturgy:

The liturgy as a whole is not favorable to exuberance of feeling. Emotion glows in its depths, but it smolders merely, like the fiery heart of the volcano, whose summit stands out clear and serene against the quiet sky. The liturgy is emotion, but it is emotion under the strictest control.

Lifelong Friends . . . C. S. Lewis

In "The Problem of Pain" C. S. Lewis offers this beautiful thought:

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?

Handed Over . . .

In Caravaggio's "The Taking of Christ" there are four depictions of hands: in the upper left, the hand of panic; below and slightly to the right of that, Judas' hand clutching Christ; above and to the right, the hand of the artist himself (holding a lantern as though holding a paintbrush); and at the center of the painting at the bottom, the hands of Christ who -- as he is being "handed over" to those who will torture and kill him -- has already handed himself over to the Father in whom he has complete confidence.

As T. S. Eliot famously said: "Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good."

A Culture (Tug-of) War on the Religious Left

While the United Church of Christ is handing out condoms at church on Sunday, confident that "condoms are a sign that people of faith take sexuality seriously," certain well-placed Episcopalians -- eager not to let their liberal preeminence be eclipsed by low-church congregationalists -- have responded.

The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts has announced the appointment of Katherine Hancock Ragsdale as the school's sixth president and dean.

In one of her sermons -- which in the meantime appears to have been taken down from her weblog -- the new EDS president said this:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion – there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember – abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You’re engaged in holy work.

God help us.

We've Come a Long Way . . .

In case you missed it.

Until the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930, there was an unbroken and unanimous Christian opposition to artificial birth control. That year the Lambeth Conference declared artificial birth control methods licit in limited situations. We've come a long way in a very short period of time.

The United Church of Christ HIV and AIDS Network announced that it is encouraging condom distribution IN CHURCHES:

Making condoms available at houses of worship and faith-based educational settings provides opportunities to open conversations that can save lives. In this context, condoms become educational tools. Their presence encourages questions and discussions with individuals who are prepared to respond with factual and up-to-date information. Condoms are a sign that people of faith take sexuality seriously as a part of human life and that we endorse all options for preventing HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Let me quote:

"Condoms are a sign that people of faith take sexuality seriously . . ."

Think about that.

The Pope as a political philosopher . . .

Benedict XVI -- "a profound political thinker"

Apropos of the previous post, this from Thomas Rourke, professor of political science at Clarion University in Pennsylvania, from his article in Communio: International Catholic Review (Fall, 2008).

Describing Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) as "a most profound political thinker," Professor Rourke writes:

. . . a central feature of the pope's fundamental politics is to show how the state's openness to God, far from leading to theocracy, is actually the only thing that enables the state to distinguish itself properly from the Church, and thus to resist the twin temptations of utopianism and totalitarianism.

Now there is a thought: a deracinated and ideologically secularized state -- unable to properly distinguish itself from "Church" -- flirting with a utopian ideal and slowly (or not so slowly) proposing totalitarian means for achieving it.

Following Europe into Crisis

You are probably already among the over one million people who have viewed this video. In case you missed it, however, here it is, a voice of sanity on the other side of the Atlantic. Below the video are the remarks of Victor Davis Hanson on a topic of related interest.


Apropos of which, this from Victor Davis Hanson:

I don’t know quite what the allure of Europe is for the American Left. But it seems to be that more of us will soon all be working for the government, habitually striking, hunting out that rare capitalist in hiding for a shake-down, and bitching over our weary 35 hr. work week.

Yet without hardship, challenge, and hope, the individual dies daily. Once the government ensures that all your needs will be taken care of, from your teeth and joints to job and retirement, ennui sets in, and with it the cargo we see in Europe—pacifism, cynicism, the loss of transcendence marked by atheism and childlessness, and worry about what others have rather than what you aspire to. . . .

So strange (or not so strange, after all?) that the liberal impulse in postwar Europe led to millions living in nearly identical houses and apartments, driving the same sort of cars, thinking about the same (their parties are like the feuds and squabbles among the Democratic Party here at home), and exuding the identical teen-age petulance when events belie the gospel.

We can see what Europeanization leads to: you worship at the altar of the goddess Pax, but hate the United States for still having a military that saves postmodern you from premodern others. You praise diversity, but are terrified of unassimilated Middle East Muslims thriving in your midst, who unlike you, really do believe in something and it’s not Western liberalism. You praise openness and tolerance, but demonize anyone who questions orthodoxy, whether it be global warming or the efficacy of state redistribution. . . .

Europeanization is so at odds with human nature that it bifurcates it—a false public face, a cynical private one. (I used to love living in Greece, going to the beach in the summer as a student and seeing all these socialist public power, phone, water, bank, etc., vans parked as their left-wing employees “got away” for some downtime around 2 PM—or being told I could hire a public worker after hours for cash for a phone installation rather than wait 9 months on “the list”.) Marxist at the day-job, conniving entrepreneur in the night hours.

It seems that in just 60 days we are heading that way—fast. These gargantuan deficits will require the most insidious taxes (on everything, as in the age of Augustus) we have yet witnessed, to make up the soon to be $20 trillion national debt. Universal health care, college for everyone, government jobs will mean a vast array of technocrati and less-skilled overseers and guardians. Less defense, higher taxes, more social spending, bigger government will expand the public sector to such a degree that to dismantle it will result in the sort of European mass protests and strikes we see daily in Greece or France when a poor fool like Sarkozy thinks it could be1950 again, and wants to head-off pension insolvency, or bring back a 40 hour work week to the subway drivers.

Hanson's full remarks are here.

A Christocentric Trinitarian Anthropology

Tracy Rowland is Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Melbourne, Australia. She is, in my estimation, one of the most gifted theologians writing today. Here is something from her essay "Natural Law: From Neo-Thomism to Nuptial Mysticism," in the Fall 2008 edition of Communio: International Catholic Review:

. . . the Church's scholars should not waste their energies performing all manner of linguistic gymnastics, transposing her teachings into the idioms of hostile traditions, in order to entice neo-pagan elites to buy their intellectual package.

The movement from a neo-Thomist account of natural law to one that explicitly acknowledges its trinitarian context is unlikely to make the notions of natural law any less acceptable to such elites. If they oppose a more Liberal-sounding version of it, then one might as well drop this project and concentrate on making the teaching more comprehennsible and attractive to the Catholic faithful and plain persons of good will, especially Protestants.

In a footnote, she adds a comment which I can affirm from my own experience: "There is much potential for successful diplomatic work with members of the Protestant communnities who have been encouraged by the christocentric accent of the moral theology of the current and previous pontificates."

She then concludes with a comment which is apropos of the work of the Cornerstone Forum:

Further work also needs to be done in recovering lost ground with those who are nominally Catholic and have never been presented with a comprehensive account of morality as filian participation in the life and love of the Trinity.

Democracy and Its Essential Limits

Edmund Burke from his Orations and Essays:

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have a great weight with him, their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs, and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.

But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, no nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

This is quoted on a website dedicated to the memory of Representative John E. Moss, a Democratic Congressman who died in 1997. The quote from Burke was Moss' own summation of his guiding principle. This is the kind of principled politician that we so desperately need today.

American Mob Rule

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece today in National Review Online that those interested in René Girard's work should find interesting. Hanson writes:

In the last three months, we’ve been reduced to something like the ancient Athenian mob — with opportunistic politicians sometimes inciting, sometimes catering to an already-angry public.

The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes once described how screaming politicians — posing as men of the people — would sway Athenian citizens by offering them all sort of perks and goodies that the government had no idea of how to pay for.

The historian Thucydides offers even more frightening accounts of bloodthirsty voters after they were aroused by demagogues (“leaders or drivers of the people”). One day, in bloodthirsty rage, voters demanded the death of the rebellious men of the subject island city of Mytilene; yet on the very next, in sudden remorse, they rescinded that blanket death sentence.

Lately we’ve allowed our government to forget its calmer republican roots. We’ve gone Athenian whole hog.

Read it all here.

Opposition to Artificial Equivocation . . .

The success of the Obama revolution depends on the elimination -- by the time-honored method of divide-and-conquer -- of the Catholic opposition to his radical abortion, embryo-cannibalizing, and marriage-eviscerating agenda. The president of Notre Dame University has allowed the use of the most famous -- in many respects, and from this day forward, infamous -- American Catholic educational institution to be exploited for precisely this purpose.

What the Notre Dame president and others at the university have done -- whether wittingly or not -- is to allow themselves to be used to create the impression either that the Church's position on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and the univocal meaning of marriage as the covenant between a man and a woman is unsettled and amenable to "evolution" or that one can disagree with what the Church has for two thousand years opposed and in recent years declared to be the preeminent moral issue of our age (the intentional killing of innocent human beings in the womb or in their embryonic stage) and still be a faithful Catholic in good standing.

As Ralph McInerny -- nearing his retirement after 54 years as a Notre Dame faculty member -- put it in a recent column for TheCatholicThing weblog:

By inviting Barack Obama as commencement speaker, Notre Dame is telling the nation that the teaching of the Catholic church on this fundamental matter can be ignored. Lip service may be paid to the teaching on abortion, but it is no impediment to upward mobility, to the truly vulgar lust to be welcomed into secular society, whether on the part of individuals or institutions.

Stephen Barr, writing for the FIRST THINGS On the Square weblog, put it this way:

Abortion is a defining issue of our time, in the way that slavery was in the mid-nineteenth century and segregation and racial discrimination were in the mid-twentieth century. Overlooking the pro-abortion views of a politician now would be analogous to overlooking pro-slavery or segregationist views in those eras. Would Notre Dame have invited a champion of segregation to be a commencement speaker in the 1960s, however brilliant or talented, however well-meaning in other ways and on other issues he or she may have been?

Some will say that there is no comparison between the issues of racial discrimination and abortion. From a Christian point of view, however, they are at root the same issue: the respect due to our fellow human beings simply as human beings. The lives of fifty million innocent human beings have been snuffed out in the United States since 1973, so it would be absurd to suggest that abortion is less serious an issue than racial discrimination. The difference between the two issues lies not in their intrinsic moral gravity, but in the way that society views them. Virtually everyone agrees that racial discrimination is morally repugnant. There is a strong social consensus on that issue, whereas on abortion at present there is not. The social elites of this country are largely pro-choice, and being pro-choice is regarded by many as a mark of enlightenment. This, I think, has everything to do with why an institution like Notre Dame would never honor a champion of segregation, but would honor a champion of so-called abortion rights. What governs the moral reflexes of institutions like Notre Dame is not how things appear in the light of the gospel, but how they appear in the eyes of the social elites—or to use more biblical language, how they appear to the world. St. Paul told us not be “conformed to this world”, but to put on the “mind of Christ.” It seems that the University of Notre Dame is conforming itself to the world.

What can those of us who deeply regret this latest sign of capitulation do in response? It's very difficult to say. Here is what I wrote to my bishop yesterday:

I realize that there are probably limited courses of action with regard to the shameful decision of Notre Dame University to invite the most anti-life politician in America to deliver this spring’s commencement address, but I hope and pray that you and your fellow bishops will do something equally dramatic to send a message of reassurance to the faithful Catholics in this country who have endured this kind of shamelessness for far too long.

I have no doubt that your heart is in the right place, and I have no advice as to what might be done, but if there is something, it would be greeted with a great sigh of relief from the faithful.

From the point of view of the increasing number of post-modern relativists who realize that the Catholic Church is the chief obstacle to the accomplishment of the moral and cultural revolution to which they have committed themselves, the next best thing to silencing the Church -- which even they realize is impossible -- is to drown its voice of moral clarity in a cacophony of opinions expressed by self-proclaimed "faithful Catholics."

Jeff Hendrix Update

Jeff just notified me that the results of his medical tests were encouraging. He thanks us for our prayers.

Jeff Hendrix

Please keep Jeff in your prayers today as he is tested to determine the effectiveness of the treatments he is undergoing for cancer.

The Inexorable Logic

“If they are going to be terminated, it is a shame to waste their organs,” says an adviser to the Royal Society and the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority at a conference at the Oxford International Biomedical Center.

More here.

5-day-olds vs. 50-year-olds

On the First Things Blog, Nathaniel Peters reviews an article on Slate by William Saletan, and he concludes it with a comment and a quotation from Saletan's article that sums up beautifully the embryonic stem-cell issue. Here's Peters' comment, followed by Saletan's.

At one time, liberal principles claimed to defend the weaker party against the interests of the strong. Not so today. As Saletan concludes,

The stem-cell fight wasn’t a fight between ideology and science. It was a fight between 5-day-olds and 50-year-olds. The 50-year-olds won. The question now is what to do with our 5-day-olds, our 5-week-olds, and our increasingly useful parts.

The New Cannibalism

As surely as night follows day, the Obama administration is now poised to lift the ban on the federal funding of research on human embryos, meaning that we are moving along the path down which the white-coated Nazi scientists were the first to tread. If what made the the wanton use of human life for medical research so horrendous in the 1930s and 1940s was the blatant barbarity of the experiments, what makes the embryonic version of it so horrendous is the sheer numbers of tiny innocent human lives that will be used as so much raw material. The old and growing ever older will now begin to live off the young. Such a civilization neither deserves to survive, nor will it.

While we have breath, we must not let this become the status quo.

More on the End of Tolerance . . .

Tomorrow is a travel day, and with it begins a whirlwind schedule. So I'm posting again today, not knowing when I might be able to do so for the next while.

This from David Stevens of the Christian Medical Association, on the news that the Obama administration is moving to rescind a regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in healthcare:

The move to rescind the healthcare provider conscience regulation imperils women's healthcare access, threatens healthcare professionals' freedom to practice medicine according to ethical standards, and exposes the myth of moderation in Obama's abortion policy.

The Obama administration claims, without offering a shred of statistical evidence, that the regulation has 'created confusion' and will somehow hinder access to healthcare. What can be clearer than not using federal funds to force healthcare professionals to violate longstanding principles of medical ethics like the Hippocratic Oath, which guided medicine for over two millennia? The real threat to healthcare access is driving out every healthcare professional who conscientiously practices medicine according to life-affirming ethical standards.

Perhaps those who, despite glaring evidence to the contrary, were sanguine about Mr. Obama's reputed moderation on the abortion issue might want to come forward to tell us how they assess these developments.

The whole CMA statement is here.

The Angel of Death . . .

This from today's New York Times:

According to the documents released today, Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz death camp doctor known as the "Angel of Death" for his experiments on inmates, practiced medicine in Buenos Aires for several years in the 1950's. He "had a reputation as a specialist in abortions," which were illegal.

Wouldn't you know.

Hat tip: my friend Dan Florio.

The whole story is here.

That rarest of rarities . . .

The vast majority of cases in which someone changes his or her position on abortion involve a move from a pro-choice to pro-life position. But the exception proves the rule.

In the recent issue of -- you guessed it -- The National Catholic Reporter, Kate Childs Graham chronicles her moral shift in the opposite direction. You can read it here, discovering at the end, to no one's great surprise, that she "serves on the Women’s Ordination Conference board of directors and the Call to Action Next Generation Leadership Team."

The "next generation," pray God, will continue to move in the opposite direction.

Hat tip: Carl Olson: Ignatius Insight Scoop.

The Tolerance Vigilante-in-Chief

President Obama must have gotten a pay-raise. He no longer seems to have any doubts about when the child in the womb deserves legal protection. The answer is, when he or she takes his or her first breath, and not a minutes sooner.

Taking another step into the abortion debate, the Obama administration today will move to rescind a controversial rule that allows healthcare workers to deny abortion counseling or other family planning services if doing so would violate their moral beliefs, according to administration officials. . . .

Last month without official ceremony, Obama overturned a controversial ban on U.S. funding for international aid groups that provide abortion services.

The move by the Department of Health and Human Services to throw out the conscience rule is being made equally quietly as most of Washington focuses on the president's blockbuster budget plan.

As predicted here and in many other places, abortion (and same-sex "marriage") will now begin to trump religious freedom, a catastrophe not only for the children who will be killed in the womb and the children who will be indoctrinated by in the absurd belief that sex between members of the same sex is indistinguishable from the marriage of a man and a woman -- but it will be a catastrophe for the American political experiment, for which religious freedom is a fundamental bedrock.

Read the L.A. Times story here, tame, even tepid, though it is.

More on Dunstan Morrissey, O.S.B.

Dunstan at the house of silence and prayer that he founded.
He called it "Sky Farm."

Father Dunstan Morrissey

Here is the obituary of this most extraordinary man:

Fr. Dunstan Morrissey, O.S.B., died on Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at the age of 85. He was the son of Robert and Joy Buchanan Morrissey and graduated magna cum laude from University of Notre Dame. He also attended L'Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva, and Sandeepany Sadhanalaya, Bombay. He served as a U.S. Vice Consul at Alexandria, Egypt before entering monastic life at St. Bede Abbey, Peru, Illinois where he taught and was ordained a priest. Fr. Dunstan devoted the rest of his life to his vocation as a hermit monk, in silence, solitude, and solidarity with the world.

His was a life of solitude, silence and prayer lived with such integrity that the lives of those fortunate enough to discover it were changed by his witness.

Fr. Dunstan Morrissey

Father Dunstan Morrissey, a dear friend of many, many years; a man of God; a monk to the marrow of his bones -- laid his life in the Lord's hands this morning just before dawn, his life-long Lenten journey at an end just as we begin our annual one.

Fr. Dunstan Morrissey
May he rest in the peace of Christ.

Enough said

Women in Afghanistan

Martin Luther King's Spirit Lives . . .

In Oakland, California:

In a courtroom jammed to capacity with spectators, a judge yesterday sentenced a Baptist pastor from Berkeley to 30 days in jail, fined him $1,130 and placed him on probation for three years for violating Oakland’s restrictive ‘bubble law,’ crafted to keep pro-life sidewalk counselors away from women entering abortion centers.

Observers said as many as 150 people were outside the courtroom, which seats only about 60, before the 1:30 p.m. hearing began. Some of the standing-room-only crowd were there to support the embattled pro-lifer, while others showed up to back the abortion clinic.

Alameda Superior Court Judge Stuart Hing sentenced the Rev. Walter Hoye amidst what one attorney close to the case called “total chaos, procedurally speaking” after Hoye refused to accept as a condition of probation an order that he stay away from the Oakland abortion clinic where he was arrested. . . .

Rev. Walter Hoye

Hoye had initially been charged with four counts of violating the ordinance – two counts of “unlawful approach” and two counts of using “force, threat of force or physical obstruction” against ‘escorts’ at Family Planning Specialists Clinic in Oakland. The charges stemmed from two separate incidents – one on April 29, 2008 and one on May 13, 2008. Hoye was arrested on May 13 after a clinic staff member called police. He was carrying a 40-inch sign that read, "Jesus Loves You & Your Baby. Let Us Help You," and attempting to hand out pro-life literature. . . .

Hoye, who has no previous criminal record, rejected a plea bargain offered by the district attorney before trial. The deal guaranteed no jail time if Hoye pleaded guilty to one count in exchange for dismissal of the other three. “The threat of four years in jail is a potent one, but my client is more interested in getting the truth out, both on the sidewalk and in the courtroom,” commented Mike Millen, another Life Legal Defense Foundation attorney working on Hoye’s case, when the offer was turned down.

More of the story here.

If you're happy, inform your face.

That was the subtitle to a talk that Anna Scally gave at the Galveston-Houston Catechetical Conference where I spoke last Saturday.

Lovely thought.

Patience, and Trust . . .

This from Hans Urs von Balthasar, speaking of Jesus:

He is an Israelite, and it is part of his maturation process that the fate of Israel occupies first place in his heart – to assemble the straying flock, to lead the lost sheep back to the center of the Covenant. Yet from the very beginning he knows in the far reaches of his consciousness that Israel does not exist for herself but rather for all of mankind – ever since Abraham, and, with special clarity, since the Servant of God arrived.

The universal is made concrete in the particular. What von Balthasar says of the relationship in Jesus' consciousness between his concern for Israel and his universal mission applies, mutatis mutandis, to the responsibility we have for the spiritual and moral integrity of Western civilization. Civilizations come and go, and we must not turn any of them into idols, but neither should we ignore our responsibility to our children and grandchildren. The demise of Western civilization – if it occurs – will be an unmitigated disaster for those who will stagger among its ruins. All the more so will this be the case – especially for women and girls – if, as seems possible, the resulting vacuum is filled by a revived and unapologetic Islam.

But . . . then we must also remember something else that von Balthasar says in the same context, something about Jesus' own openness to the mystery of God's unpredictability. Of Jesus, von Balthasar writes:

He does not want to know in advance, and he sets out no personal plans – the Father takes care of all that. Like a man he permits the Father’s will to advance toward him from the future.

At this point in my life, I find this enormously inspiring. It is not a recipe for passivity, for it coincides, in Christ, with the most resolute determination to remain faithful to his mission of proclaiming the truth. So may it be with us.

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day in the Islamic world brings out the religious police.

Associated Press files this:

As Feb. 14 approaches, the police begin inspecting gift shops for items that are red or are intended as gifts to mark the holiday — a celebration of St. Valentine, a 3rd century Christian martyr — which is banned in Saudi Arabia. Such items are legal at other times of the year, but as Valentine's Day nears they become contraband.

At best, shops caught selling Valentine's gifts are ordered to get rid of them. Some salesmen have been detained for days.

The Valentine's Day prohibition is in line with the ascetic Wahhabi school of Islam that the kingdom follows. Marking Christian holidays is banned in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and a country where non-Muslims are banned from openly practicing their religion.

Celebrating any holidays but the two most important for Muslims — Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr — is taboo . . .

"My colleague spent a night in jail last year because of the color red," said one salesman, who insisted on anonymity, fearing his colleague's fate.

It is a challenge for courting Saudi couples to be together at any time of the year because of strict gender segregation. Unmarried men and women cannot take a drive together, have a meal or even talk on the street unless they are close relatives. Dating consists of long phone conversations and the rare tryst. Infractions are punished by detention.

Now in John's Gospel there is the famous story of the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. It's a serious story, a story of the Good Shepherd reaching out to save a lost sheep. But, is it just me, or can one detect in this sometimes playful repartee something suspiciously like flirting?

I'm susceptible to this sort of speculation inasmuch as I fear that flirting — like so many other aspects of the man-woman relationship — has been damaged by the decline of the sexual morality that is its underlying secret. I may well be too old and sad for more advanced expressions of the attraction between men and women, but the inverse of that sad possibility is that I'm all the more easily and readily charmed by genuine femininity, of which our world is in far too short a supply.

My blessed mother, God rest her, lost her husband (my father) when she was 30 years old. She never took off her wedding ring, and she died at age 86, living alone most of her life. She was, however, a consummate flirt. There was never any hint that her flirting was preliminary to anything else, and she was the soul of Catholic moral rectitude. But she was a flirt.

My wife Liz, God rest her, was the most modest woman I've ever known, but flirting was a regular source of levity and tenderness in our relationship, strictly limited though it was (I'm happy to say) to our private moments together.

So flirting is not something that should be restricted to the courting stage. (Does anyone remember courting? A quaint ritual the natives once practiced.) Except for that between spouses themselves, however, to be morally proper and in good taste, flirting should be limited to the unmarried. It's a token of my mother's genius for the art, however, that she would occasionally flirt with married men, but only in the presence of their wives and only in order to have a good laugh, for which she also had a renowned gift.

I can't claim either to have my mother's natural gift for flirting or to have achieved any great competence, but I do think it's underrated and misunderstood by both the moralizers and the meretricious.

In this month's Emmaus Road Initiative sessions, I have been talking about Euripides' The Bacchae. Donald Sutherland is one of the translators of the play, and in his commentary he says that "the everyday pleasures, if you are lucky enough to have them every day, are the best.”

Flirting is not, alas, an everyday pleasure, but it seems to me to be a kind of natural grace, one of the unofficial gifts of the Holy Spirit. For like the Spirit, it is elusive and unpredictable and a reminder that the nuptial mystery is the human analogue of the Trinitarian mystery. As my sainted mother beautifully demonstrated, and as I have experienced now and again, one is never too old or too sad to enjoy it. If I'm not mistaken, Jesus didn't pass up the occasional opportunity. He was, after all, like us in all things but sin.

Destroying the Civilization from Within

In Virgil's Aeneid, as the Greeks assault the walls Troy, the Trojans panic and begin to dismantle their own citadel and hurl fragments of it at the advancing Greeks. It's a grim metaphor for what can happen to an exhausted and panicked civilization.

The episode came vividly to mind on reading about yet another example of Western loss of confidence, especially as that loss of confidence has to do with the Christian patrimony of western civilization. Here's the latest disheartening example.

Wiley-Blackwell, a major academic press, was set to release its four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization this month. According to the encyclopedia’s editor, George Thomas Kurian, the set had been copy-edited, fact-checked, proofread, publisher-approved, printed, bound, and formally launched (to high praise) at the recent American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference. But protests from a small group of scholars associated with the project have led the press to postpone publication, recall all copies already distributed, and destroy the existing print run. The scholars’ complaint? The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, they have reportedly argued, is “too Christian.” “They also object to historical references to the persecution and massacres of Christians by Muslims,” Kurian says, “but at the same time want references favorable to Islam.”

Weep for such craven cowardice, described (again) so lucidly by Victor David Hanson, whom I quoted in the blog-post just prior to this.

European postmodern man offers mostly platitudes that he thinks please those who might be dangerous to him, and finds psychological recompense and solace by gratuitously trashing those who aren't.

Read Edward Feser's commentary on ‘Too Christian’ for Academia? here.

Extremism and Displaced Anxiety

A number of stories have appeared in recent weeks about the steep rise in antisemitism in Europe, among them some focusing the rise in Britain, especially London. According to an column in the Boston Globe -- which puts so many moral equivalences into play that the column loses all relevance -- the biggest employer in London is the London Police Department (ponder the implications of that!), and it's response to the rise of "extremism" is for the Police Department to hire more Muslims. Antisemitism swallowed by the generic "extremism," the response to which is to increase the social and cultural influence of those who are -- statistically -- the most likely to espouse antisemitism.

Meanwhile, BBC is airing a documentary by British comedian Stephen Fry which, according to reports (I have not seen it) takes the Brits to task for their reflex anti-Americanism.

In an interview in Good Housekeeping, [Fry] said: "When they mock America for its supposed lack of knowledge, irony or sophistication, they are revealing nothing but the pathetic inadequacy and inferiority complex of the British.

All of which makes this salient comment by Victor David Hanson all the more salient:

European postmodern man offers mostly platitudes that he thinks please those who might be dangerous to him, and finds psychological recompense and solace by gratuitously trashing those who aren't.

Read Hanson's piece here.

Integrating the tools we use . . .

As many of you know, we are developing various new technologies in an effort to both use our diminished resources wisely and expand the community of those with whom we are in conversation. These include a more robust use of our website and this weblog, as well as adding streaming audio and streaming video to the CDs that can be ordered from our website and the free downloadable MP3 files that can be downloaded from our website.

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Thanks as always for all your many kindnesses.

Another Outtake from the January session

Just back from the Emmaus Road Initiative session here in Wheaton, Illinois.

In my continuing effort to keep the plate spinning on this particular stick even while I'm shuffling from city to city, here is another outtake from the January session.
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This from an article “How Catholic is France?” by Steven Englund, a professor of History at the American University in Paris, which appeared in the November 7, 2008 edition of Commonweal:

What France’s Catholic renewal makes clear is that Christianity’s offer of meaning consists … [of] … a personal and existential choice: the choice to live the old faith. . . .
If Christianity appears to be exhausted . . . , its rivals and critics are in far worse shape. The great difference is this: Unlike, say, the Communists or the Greens, Catholicism is not desperately looking for renewal from without; instead it is finding it within – not effortlessly and not always serenely, but surely and confidently. [French] Catholics here have no doubt that ressourcement is always at hand, as near as the parish church and the Sunday Mass, and so they aren’t blindly feeding like mako sharks on every idea that floats by, as others do.

Hope for a cheerful outcome in Europe is a bruised reed one doesn’t want to break and a smoldering wick one is loathed to quench, but among Christianity’s European competitors Englund mentions only Communists and Greens. But there are others. Communists and Greens may be feeding on every piece of ideological flotsam and jetsam they can choke down, but radical European Islam is today feeding on a very staple diet, prepared strictly according to the Quranic recipe: Namely conversion by the violence and intimidation.

Compared with this challenge, communism and eco-spirituality are little more than Christian heresies enjoying their 15 minutes of fame and leaving their disciples in a spiritual wasteland. But what Belloc saw in a glass darkly early in the 20th century was the looming potential of a "great heresy." In a book entitled, The Great Heresies, he wrote that even though Islam “happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it – whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.”

I don’t concur in this assessment, but it contains enough truth to be worth quoting, which is why I just did. For the emergence of degenerate and secular facsimiles and fragments of Christianity like communism and the eco-religiosity is evidence to which a Belloc could point in confirmation of his assessment of the West’s religious emaciation.
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If you would like to listen in on any of the E. R. I. sessions -- including the January one -- on our website we have CDs and free downloadable mp3 files and (within a few days) we will also have a streaming audio version of the January session.

The Thought for the Day:

From Lucy Beckett:

"Either everything means something, or nothing means anything. But the first requires belief in God, while the second is perhaps too frightening to be faced by those (and that is almost everyone) without Nietzsche's desperate courage."

Freedom of Speech on the way out . . .

I'm still trying to wrap up (and interrelate) the subject of the last two posts, but there seems no end to the stories dealing with the encroachments on freedom of speech in Europe (and here) on the part of Islamic activists, on one hand, and homosexual activists, on the other.

This is from Soeren Kern, Senior Analyst for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group.

Nor are Muslims the only ones trying to restrict free speech in Europe. In Britain, for example, the government is facing pressure from homosexual rights activists to overturn a [20] free speech protection amendment added to a controversial “gay hate” law. The free speech protection clause, which states that criticizing homosexual practice or urging people to refrain from such conduct will not, in itself, be a crime, was added to the new offense of “incitement to homophobic hatred.” But now the government wants to remove that protection. The crime of inciting homophobic hatred includes any words or behavior which is threatening and intended to stir up hatred. It carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

At the European level, meanwhile, government ministers from the 27 member states of the European Union are debating a draft [21] EU directive that aims to outlaw discrimination and “harassment” in the provision of goods and services. The new legislation would, for example, shut down Christian adoption agencies if they refuse to provide same-sex couples with children. Indeed, the definition of “harassment” is so broad that even moderate explanations of Christian beliefs on sexual conduct or other religions could be considered a crime.

Europe’s war on free speech is the result of a profound identity crisis, one that is being generated by the blanket abandonment of traditional Judeo-Christian values coupled with mass immigration from Muslim countries. But in their zeal to criminalize free thought and free speech, the leftwing guardians of Orwellian political correctness are systematically destroying European democracy.

It's all here.

Britain, a "moral slum" says Hitchens

Not that the rest of the once vibrant "West" is far behind.

Like Peter Hitchens in the quotation below, I'm more than eager to get back to matters of a more wholesome and edifying nature. But the first task of those who would preserve some vestige of western civilization is to prevent our moral vocabulary and our anthropological realism (call it "commonsense") from being commandeered and corrupted by ideologues.

Compare what the British comedian, Pat Condell, says about the capitulation to radical Islam (in the blog post below) to what the British journalist, Peter Hitchens, says about the perfectly parallel capitulation to the "Lesbian-Gay-Bi-sexual-Trans-sexual" agenda. (The hyper-hyphenated quote is taken from the Obama White House website, where the new administration pledges to strictly enforce that agenda.)

Compare Condell's concern with Hitchens' and you get an idea of what is actually happening to what was once Western Civilization.

Here's Hitchens:

If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don’t want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve. No longer are we allowed to keep our thoughts to ourselves, while being polite and kind.

We are forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples. Most emphatically, we are compelled to agree that homosexual couples are just as good at bringing up children as the children’s own grandparents. Better, in fact.

Many people who believe nothing of the kind now know that their careers in politics, the media, the Armed Services, the police or schools will be ruined if they ever let their true opinions show. I am sure that many of them regularly lie about their views, to avoid such trouble.

We cringe to the new Thought Police, like the subjects of some insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state, compelled to wave our little rainbow flags as the ‘Gay Pride’ parade passes by.

And that’s another thing. We can’t even call homosexuals ‘homosexuals’ any more. This neutral word is not considered enthusiastic enough. We have to say ‘gay’. Which is exactly why I don’t, apart from in inverted commas.

You think I exaggerate the power and fury of these forces? The totalitarian rage on this subject is quite astonishing.

I have had several brushes with it, and been called rude names by its militants.

Well, I can live with that. It’s my job. But what about a powerless pair of grandparents in Edinburgh, their grandchildren’s lives shipwrecked by the multiple horrors of our ‘liberated’ society?

First, their daughter ends up as a drug abuser, like so many others in a country which permits the endless promotion of drug use by rock stars and refuses to punish the possession of narcotics, the only measure that would work.

Then, when they seek to look after her children, they are first insultingly informed that they are too old, and that their minor illnesses disqualify them from the task. Heaven help any employer who dared ‘discriminate’ in this fashion. But the new Thought Police are oddly exempt from their own rules.

Next, the grandparents are informed that the children are to be put into the care of a homosexual couple. And – this is the crucial moment – they are warned in the most terrifying terms that if they object to this arrangement they will never see their grandchildren again.
Leave aside the rest of it. It is this demand, that they mouth approval of the new regime like the defendants at some show trial, which is the bit that ought to make your flesh creep.

This is the action of a tyranny in operation, especially the use of children to blackmail their parents and grandparents. People who can do this can do anything.

Isn’t it amazing to reflect that this campaign began in the name of tolerance?

The original is here.

European multiculturalism is a brief interlude on the way to a European monoculture. The only question is whether this rigorously enforced monoculture will be doctrinaire metro-sexual secularism or Sharia Islam. (Care to guess which is more likely to stand its ground when push comes to shove?) As we speak, members of the European political class are carefully placing their bets and acting accordingly. It is conceivable that these two antagonists will forestall their final clash by turning their mutual contempt for Christians and Jews into a common cause, but that will only postpone the final showdown.

"Pre-emptive Capitulation"

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism," wrote Vaclav Havel. "It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." In accepting the Nobel Prize, he said: "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."

This short YouTube cry of frustration by Pat Condell may sound a little too like a pistol shot for many, but one has to factor in the level of frustration felt by people like Condell, who obviously sense that they are living in an asylum run by the inmates. It's easy for those of use not faced with this sort of irresponsible lunacy to tut-tut the exaggerated rhetoric of those who are, but we should not overlook the message they are desperately and sometimes shrilly trying to send.

Outtake: January E. R. I.

Another short outtake from the January session of the Emmaus Road Initiative:

Precisely because the content of the Christian revelation is the mystery of unimpeded giving and receiving of love within the Trinity, its transmission necessarily depends on a relationship of unguarded trust on the part of the recipient – which, of course, places a special onus on the transmitter, for if the recipient is docile to the transmission and the transmitter betrays the heightened responsibilities that this docility requires, he or she stands under the judgment of Jesus’ words: “If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6)

More to follow when there's time. When the CDs, free downloadable audio files and streaming audio versions of the January session are available we will send an email notice to those on our email list. To receive an email, type your email address in the box at the top of the right-hand column.

Lift up your hearts . . .

Outtakes from the January Emmaus Road Initiative session:

What is hidden from the proud and the haughty is revealed to the humble and contrite hearts of the spiritually childlike, and if people can be made to believe that deference, humility and the penitential spirit are signs of slavishness unworthy of serious adults, they can be effectively prevented from knowing God.

In addition to its doctrinal, intellectual and apologetic functions, catechesis has what one might call “liturgical” functions. It should not only spell out the Christian Truth but “put us in the mood for it.” It should inspire us to “drop our guard”: to approach Christian truth in a childlike spirit.

There is risk that our catechetical efforts will be too doctrinal and propositional, as was the rote Thomism of the Manuals well into the 20th century. In such cases, we may become intellectually fortified, adroit at marshaling “muscular” arguments and “equipped” for giving an account of Christian truth but lacking in the grace that Ronald Knox said is necessary to turn the water of conviction into the wine of faith.

Those on our email newsletter list will receive an email when the CDs, streaming audio and (maybe) streaming video of the January session are available on our website, probably within the week.

If you are not on the list and would like to be, just type in your email address in the box at the top of the right-hand column.

Gilbert Hunt Bailie IV

Enjoying the Wine Country

I indulge myself. My son wears several hats, and one of them is a helmet which he wears leading Segway tours in Sonoma (my old hometown) where he manages Murphy's Irish Pub, and where Hunt and his wife Yuni operate Sonoma Segway, leading Segway tours in the wine country.

Here is story about a tour that appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here's Gilbert Hunt Bailie III
on a Segway tour last year.

If you find yourself in Sonoma someday, look up Hunt. You'll be glad you did; he's a great fellow.