Eric The Blue

Prayer at the 50

Someone has aptly said that so long as there are tests in math there will be prayer in schools. But prayers concerning solutions to story problems, being by nature private and silent, do not end up the subject of First Amendment litigation. The high-school football coach leading his players in prayer at the 50-yard-line is different, though as of yesterday, according to the Supreme Court, as acceptable as a cry from the depths about algebra. The one probably unusual opinion I have about the case relates to the question of "what Jesus would say." Seriously!

One side favors the decision because people have to be free to practice their religious faith. The other side condemns it because the coach is using his position to coerce students into participating in Christian prayers at the end of a school activity. Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, says:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. . . . [Matthew 6, 5-8]

Standing on the street corner babbling like a pagan seems to me a lot like kneeling at the 50-yard-line, babbling like a football coach. The conservative justices imagine they've struck a blow for religious freedom, but they've merely given their imprimatur to shallow displays of religiosity. Sorry, Jesus says, not me. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where there are still public schools, it's too bad that kids who want to play on the team will have to put up with this crap. 

 

Baptists wilding

This report of the independent commission investigating sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—"Uff da," my mom would have said. If you have time and a strong stomach, the full report is here. In a box at the top of its title page there is printed the following—

WARNING: This report contains information and descriptions related to sexual assault. This may be triggering to readers who have had similar experiences. We encourage you to care for your safety and well-being. The content of this report is not appropriate for children.

—but I'm not sure this adequately prepares readers for what's coming. Maybe the best summary is by David French, in The Atlantic, here. One way of conveying the generalized corruption, without discussing the details of any particular case, might be to describe how the Report came to be. For years, pew-sitters, ordinary members of Baptist churches, had been making complaints about sexual predators in the pulpit, at church camps for young people, on church staffs, etc. Nothing ever came of their complaints, but over time victims and their families, who knew what had happened in their own lives, spoke up enough, including with each other, so that a kind of critical mass of suspicion built up. At the denomination's 2021 national convention, delegates voted overwhelmingly to commission an investigation by an independent group. The purpose was to settle the question about what might be going on—whether there was actual trouble or just a web of mostly false whisperings. It's on the initiative of these delegates, mostly laypeople, that the Report that landed yesterday exists in the first place. 

And it's brutal. If you're an English major, the Report reads a bit like an exaggeration of a Nathaniel Hawthorne tale concerning some Puritan who, sallying forth into the woods at night for corrupt purposes, discovers that no one is at home in bed like they're supposed to be. Nothing came of all the complaints because the people who should have done something did nothing. To be more precise, they investigated enough to become informed about what needed covering up: a long list of known or suspected abusers was compiled, but nothing happened to the people on the list. They just continued about their business. Frequently the person who might have delivered consequences was himself sexually compromised—not molesting campers, but boffing the secretary on the side, say. I know I'm a bad person because the details sometimes seem to me almost comically lurid. 

Inevitably I suppose there will be comparisons to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. I should be careful, since I'm not an expert, but I think the differences might place the Baptists in an even worse light. The Catholic Church is more hierarchical, so some bad apples high up, like John Nienstedt, can create a pervasive stench. (Though the question arises: how is it that the very worst people seem to be the ones who advance up the chart?) The SBC, which has around 14 million members in the U.S., is comparatively decentralized. It follows, I think, that all these complaints coming in from church members spread across the country were dealt with independently by a local big shot, and none ever did the right thing. It's not a case of corruption seeping downward from the top. The wide base was already thoroughly rotten. Terrible crimes were committed. Nobody called the cops. They made a list, did nothing with it. 

Reading the accounts of various news organizations, another thing that seems to me sort of comical is the manner in which the supposed liberal media tiptoe around an obvious point, which is that these losers have been quite loquacious about the alleged depravity of people who mark their ballots differently from them on Election Day. Again, not an expert, but I believe their Bibles have red-lettered instructions not to worry about a speck of sawdust in their neighbor's eye when there's a plank in their own. 

Dad gets mail

I opened it and, strange to say, prayers aren't all they want. The letter is signed by David Kubal, "President and CEO of Intercessors for America," and concludes:

Please, in the next 24 hours . . .

1. Complete the enclosed PRAYER NOTE TO JUSTICE THOMAS and encourage him with your special message.

2. Include your best gift—$100, $50, $25 or whatever is pressed upon your heart to give—to mobilize more intercessors like you to fuel a movement to turn this country back to God and His will.

I thought about returning the PRAYER NOTE with a "special message" borrowed from "Hannah and her Sisters": "If Jesus Christ were to come back to Earth today and see all that is being done in His name, He would never be able to stop throwing up." But I would have had to use my own stamp. 

When you google "David Kubal," you get to some of his articles at a site called The Christian Post. He appears to have been particularly peppy in the Fall of 2017, when within a few weeks' time he authored "Harvey Weinstine: A Prophetic Glimpse of Hollywood," "Hurricane Irma: Is God Trying to Tell Us Something," and "Should Christians Give Up on President Trump?"  Who knows, Doofus, maybe you should ask Hurricane Irma. Here's Johnny Cash.

 

 

Say more about your "religious convictions"

 

Something one often hears nowadays is that American society, thanks to Obama or someone, has become antagonistic toward religion. Bigotry aimed at Christians, for example, is regarded as a grave problem requiring redress. What is the evidence for this view? I am not aware of candidates for office touting their atheism. On the contrary, someone like Trump—whose 70-some years on Earth haven't dented his ignorance of everything outside of the con & hustle, the void certainly encompassing Christianity and the Bible—is obliged suddenly to feign reverence when seeking the presidency: see above clip.

During this season of covid, there have been bans on public worship—but for good reason, since hardly  anything is more likely to result in a super-spreader event than people crowding into an indoor space where they then preach, sing, recite aloud a liturgy, share with one another "the peace of the Lord," successively receive communion in a face-to-face manner: all high-risk, from a public health perspective. After a choir practice last spring at a church outside Seattle, 45 of 60 singers became ill with covid; three were hospitalized and two died. Nevertheless, there has been a hue and cry about "closed churches," and the proof of the prejudicial intent was supposed to be the enterprises that remained open, such as big-box retailers. But the kinds of enterprises and activities that most nearly resemble public worship—concert halls, playhouses, movie theaters, comedy clubs, schools of all kinds—were shut, too. I do not perceive the animus toward religion, but there's a lot of evidence that something like the opposite is true.

Billy Ray Stutzmann was an assistant football coach at the US Naval Academy until he was fired this week after refusing to be vaccinated against covid. He put out a statement on Twitter attributing his refusal to unspecified "religious convictions" augmented, naturally, by "much thought and prayer." People say stuff like this all the time and apparently it's considered a breach of etiquette to seek more information about the "religious convictions" requiring adherents to remain unprotected against a highly contagious disease that's killed around 685,000 Americans. What is the theological principle? Is there a Biblical instruction? Something in the writings of Aquinas or Luther or in the sermon of a megachurch preacher who flies around the country in his private jet?

Attributing opinions and actions to your "religious convictions" gives them a status they may not deserve. Once invoked, further inquiry is shut down. It's forbidden to express curiosity, let alone skepticism, about convictions so vague that all one can know about them is that the subscriber deems them "religious." Violators of the code are anti-religious bigots. Generally, the highest card wins the trick, but Coach Stutzmann exercised every American's right to cry "Religion!" while playing one face down. At least in this one instance, the other players told him to leave the table. Progress!

PRRI on religious affiliation in America

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) recently released a "2020 census of American religion" breaking down, to the county level, the religious affiliation of Americans. Since election results are routinely reported at the county level, it's possible to judge how religious identification affects voting, and the answer appears to be: profoundly. Sometime within the past ten years or so, the percentage of American adults who are white Christians dropped below 50 percent. In the counties carried by Trump, however, white Christians are on average just about exactly two-thirds of the population. Meanwhile, in the Biden counties, about a third are white Christians, a third nonwhite Christians, and a third "other"—Jews and other atheists, Archie Bunker might say. (Actually, by far the biggest group within the "other" category is Americans who, asked about religious affiliation, reply "none"; these "nones," according to PRRI, are now 23 percent of all adults.)

The differences are amplified if one sifts out white evangelical Christians or looks at counties that went for one or the other candidate by a wide margin. White evangelicals, for example, were 34 percent of the population in counties that voted for Trump, but only 15 percent of the population in Biden counties. In 15 of Biden's 20 best counties, almost all in large urban areas, white Christians were less than a quarter of the population. They are about 45 percent of the national population. Trump won more than a thousand counties by at least 50 percent of the vote—by more, that is, than 75-25—and, in these, almost all small and rural, white Christians were more than 70 percent of the population. 

PRRI also breaks down religious affiliation by age. On this front, the news isn't good for Republicans. About two-thirds of Americans 65 or older are white Christians, a near match for the religious profile of Trump voters. But around two-thirds of Americans under 30 are something other than "white Christian," same as the religious profile of Democratic voters. It's not hard to tell which brand, going forward, is apt to grow its market share. Voter suppression, even when augmented by some of the rickety machinery of our 18th-century democracy, seems like quite a feeble response to demographic change in America. Put to one side the moral taint: just as a political strategy, making it harder to vote resembles a sacrifice bunt in the half inning before your bullpen faces Murderer's Row. Make America Great Again? Going to be too few dogs to hear that whistle. 

Puzzlers

The fact that I've cut down on alcohol has me wondering which neighbor is colonizing my recycling bin with the same cheap brands I prefer. 

On a less serious note, I'm also puzzled by the place opposition to abortion seems to occupy in Catholic moral teaching. I haven't heard any American bishops complaining about Catholic politicians who dare present themselves for the Eucharist even though they support capital punishment. Nevertheless the bishops want to eighty-six Biden for supporting abortion rights. Do the ancillary functions of the American church now include being an arm of the Republican party?  And where does it end? If after ten years of marriage a Catholic politician has just two kids, born eighteen months apart in the second and third years after the wedding, should she (or he) have to produce any medical certifications concerning unperformed procedures or prescriptions not written before receiving a sacrament? 

Just an outsider's opinion, but I think the bishops should be less concerned about Biden receiving communion and more concerned about making their church a laughingstock. 

ORU falls to Arkansas

Meyer/Getty Images

During an orgy of basketball watching, I discovered that my distaste for a certain brand of conservative, evangelical Christianity is so strong that I cannot find it within me to pull for Oral Roberts University, a #15 seed playing for a spot in the Elite 8. Then I liked their team so well that I began feeling conflicted. Then at halftime I read up on Oral Roberts to fortify myself. From Wikipedia:

[H]e also pioneered televangelism and laid the foundations of the prosperity gospel and abundant life teachings. . . .

Until 1947 Roberts struggled as a part-time preacher in Oklahoma, but when he was 29 Roberts said he picked up his Bible and it fell open at the Third Epistle of John, where he read verse 2: "I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as your soul prospereth." The next day, he said, he bought a Buick and God appeared, directing him to heal the sick. . . .

In 1977, Roberts claimed to have had a vision from a 900-foot-tall Jesus who told him to build City of Faith Medical and Research Center, and the hospital would be a success. . . .

In 1983 Roberts said Jesus had appeared to him in person and commissioned him to find a cure for cancer. 

Roberts' fundraising was controversial. In January 1987, during a fundraising drive, Roberts announced to a television audience that unless he raised $8 million by that March, God would "call him home." However, the year before on Easter he had told a gathering at the Dallas Convention Center that God had instruced him to "raise the money "by the end of the year" or he would die. Regardless of this new March deadline and the fact that he was still $4.5 million short of his goal, some were fearful that he was referring to suicide, given the impassioned pleas and tears that accompanied his statement. Late in March 1987 while Roberts was fasting and praying in the Prayer Tower [building at the center of the ORU campus], Florida dog track owner Jerry Collins donated $1.3 million. . . .

Roberts maintained his love of finery and one obituary maintained that even when times became economically hard, "he continued to wear his Italian silk suits, diamond rings and gold bracelets—airbrushed out by his staff on publicity photos. . . .

[T]he City of Faith Hospital was forced to close in 1989 after losing money. Roberts was forced to respond with the sale of his holiday homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills as well as three of his Mercedes cars.

In my Bible, the portentous verse from the Third Epistle of John appears on page 1490 of a total of 1514. If the book "fell open," or was opened at random, it seems likely to me that it would be to a page closer to the middle. Thin to win! Since mine is off the shelf now, I just opened the Bible at random and read. See if you can pick out the sentence my eye first fell upon:

A. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

B. He set it like a willow twig, and it sprouted and became a low spreading vine, and its branches turned toward him, and its roots remained where it stood.

C. Sell your possessions, and give alms.

D. He who loves money will not be satisfied with money; nor he who loves wealth, with gain: this also is vanity.

It was B. I was hoping for something more personal. The three wrong choices just go to show that the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Arkansas held on for a 2-point win when ORU's star player had his 3-pointer skim off the rim at the buzzer. 

Wikipedia on Walker Percy

I can idle away more than a single Sunday afternoon collecting odd morsels on the Internet, but this afternoon's work of an hour or two related to the American novelist Walker Percy. If you've heard of him, it's probably because of his first novel, The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award in 1962. The introductory paragraph of the Wikipedia article about Percy concludes:

His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.

This was interesting enough so that I kept reading, and, assuming the article isn't marred by wholesale invention, Percy's life doesn't get less interesting when you descend into the details. He was born at Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. Next year, his paternal grandfather committed suicide. When Percy was 13, his father died the same way as granddad had, a self-inflicted gunshot wound at home. Two years after that, his mother died when she drove her car off a bridge: probably another suicide. Percy and his two younger brothers were then taken in by a first cousin once removed who was a bachelor, a lawyer, and a poet living in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm confused about the relationship indicated by "first cousin once removed," and am coming toward the view that this is because it can refer either to your parent's cousin or to your cousin's kid. Seems crazy, inasmuch as the former would usually be quite a bit older than you and the latter would usually be quite a bit younger. I'm thinking that William Percy, who took in Walker and his brothers, was the boys' deceased father's cousin. He might have thought he had a tidy life going there in Greenville. 

At least the eldest boy, Walker, was already 15. In a few years he was off to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he majored in chemistry and was a good enough student to then be admitted to the medical school at Columbia University. He obtained his M.D. in 1941 and accepted an internship in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital. His life then took another dramatic turn when, after working on an autopsy, he contracted tuberculosis in 1942. At the time, the only known treatment was rest. He entered the Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks. The Wikipedia article says he "spent several years recuperating" there. I have no idea how the finances of that worked. His brothers were off fighting in the war. The sanitorium, however, had a 7000 volume library and, while the world war raged, Percy read through the works of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. In 1946 he married Mary Townsend, a medical technologist, and the two of them were received into the Roman Catholic Church the next year. 

With regard to religion, Percy's family background was casual Protestant. Beware the converts! They self-select for being in earnest about it. Except for a brief stint teaching pathology at Columbia, Percy never returned to medicine. Though this is speculative, to me it seems likely that the traumas of his youth account for subsequent events—the child of two suicides going in for medicine, psychiatry in particular, and, when that didn't work out, turning to existentialist authors, a new religious faith, and literature. He made his debut as a "Catholic writer" in 1956, an essay on race in Commonweal magazine called "Stoicism in the South" that, according to Wikipedia, "condemned Southern segregation and demanded a larger role for Christian thought in Southern life." Since "southern life" is not ordinarily considered to suffer from a deficit of Christianity, I'm thinking maybe the emphasis is meant to fall on "thought"—"a larger role for Christian thought." And then his first novel, The Moviegoer, wins the National Book Award. Though I haven't read it, the impression I get, reading hither and thither about Percy, is that his characters tend to be smart and active, often young, sunk in modernity and trying to enjoy their sports cars and nice restaurants and disposable incomes, but feeling nevertheless estranged, sad, empty: thus, a quest for meaning. 

The Wikipedia article includes an enjoyable anecdote about Percy and his lifelong friend, Shelby Foote, whose face and voice became known to millions on account of Ken Burns's film on the Civil War. (Foote's life's work was a 3-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative.) Anyway, "lifelong friendship" is a slight exaggeration, for Foote grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, and they met only after Percy moved there as a teenager to live with his first cousin once removed. They graduated from Greenville High the same year and then both went to Chapel Hill for college; Wikipedia  notes that Foote, on account of a Jewish ancestor, could not join Percy's fraternity. The anecdote, however:

As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak to him. He later recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.

The Wikipedia article on Foote is pretty interesting, too. I think his rather large place in Burns's film may be explained by the desire to show all sides, and Foote is one of the comparatively few eminent historians who is sympathetic to the South. He said he would have fought for the Confederacy then, and that he'd fight for it now, the absurdity of which reminds me of my favorite exercise in alternative history: What if Lincoln had just let the South go? But enough.

Pivot

Last week, I kept forgetting to bring a face mask along when I was going someplace. It's hard to remember that old problem when you're getting earnest messages encouraging you to hide your trash bin and hook up your garden hose. The federal government seems to have forgotten about it, too. Every day, about a thousand more dead, but the administration is said to have "pivoted." I guess that explains the tweet about the 75-year-old Catholic fellow in Buffalo who, according to the first official police statement, "tripped and fell." But, unfortunately, once again, someone standing around with a cell phone, and it now develops that he's actually a bad actor who fell harder than he was pushed and, moreover, is probably an Antifa provocateur. 

Better pivot again. 

I watched a little of the Floyd funeral in Houston yesterday and, on account of all the swaying and clapping, was reminded of some lines of poetry:

The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows,
Only their children feel the holy ghost.

I was about to say I don't know why these lines are in my head, or who wrote them, but then I remembered it's 2020 and I typed into Google "The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows"—voila! Copyright 1978, when I was in college, and I wonder . . . yup, the author, Marilyn Nelson (pictured), taught English at St. Olaf College when I was a student there in the late 70s. Never had her, but that must account for my familiarity with the opening of one of her poems. It must also account for her familiarity with Lutherans. African-Americans who grew up on military bases generally aren't acquainted with the insides of Lutheran churches, but at St. Olaf it would have required an effort to maintain her innocence. 

Reading over the whole poem ("Churchgoing"), I think it must be intended as an answer to one of the same title by Philip Larkin. Larkin was a thoroughgoing atheist, but Nelson's poem concludes:

We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.

I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.

Meanwhile protesters are cleared away so that our president, fingering a Bible as if it were an item for sale on a cable-tv shopping channel, could assume his position between a church and some photographers. I think George Will's column advancing the thesis that with Trump there is no bottom was published the day before that debacle.

Imperfect pitch

HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2020

It's sort of humorous how Trump, whenever he's trying to kiss up to Christian conservatives, hits a false note. And that they love him anyway.

Two Corinthians is one of his faves! Oh, and happy Crucifixion Day! 

About those evangelicals

You know how, on the radio, there is a delay, so that if something bad happens, like an interviewee lets fly with the f-bomb, remedial action can be taken and the sensibilities of listeners are not offended? For some reason, I never wondered till today whether the same kind of precautionary steps are taken on cable news shows where controversial topics are frequently discussed and the emotions of guests can run high. I don't remember hearing any f-bombs or bleeps. I have heard people say things that they probably regretted—or at least would have regretted, if they were constrained by decency and reason. The people tend to look nice, so I think the make-up room personnel perform admirably, but I have no idea whether any airbrushing ever occurs once they are talking on air.

I wondered today for the first time because I was watching while a guest waded into tender territory, and I thought I could detect her slowing down, like she was asking herself whether it was wise to say  what she was winding up to say, but she was too far into it, so she pushed through to the end, then laughed a little nervously at herself while the more tv-experienced anchor—it was Craig Melvin—regarded her with what looked like a bemused smile. The topic was that Christianity Today editorial that I editorialized about yesterday—it's a subject of interest to me, which is why I had dried my dishwater hands and walked around the corner to watch in the first place. The guest was a young African-American woman with I think religious credentials of some kind, though I was still in the kitchen when she was first introduced. Her point was that evangelicals should worry more about being true to Jesus and less about being true to Trump, who in no way resembles Jesus. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the point she was making, and, as she warmed to her topic, she said something like: You know, Jesus, he kept company with unsavory types, including prostitutes—it was around here that she seemed to slow down a little—but he never, you know . . . paid, never like, paid for sex.

If he did, it was related in the apocrypha to the Apocrypha only. 

So that was a morning brightener. In keeping with my current obsession with this general topic, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to determine how badly Trump's prospects for reelection would suffer if his support among Christian evangelicals slipped even modestly. Of course, one key input is the percentage of Christian evangelicals in the voting population, and I don't even know what the definition of "Christian evangelical" is, let alone how many of them there are. But according to Pew Research, just over a quarter of voters are white and evangelical, and 81% of them voted for Trump. To keep the fractions round, let's assume that a fifth of voters are white evangelicals and that four-fifths of them voted for Trump, whose victory in the electoral college owes everything to narrow wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His widest margin in those three states was Wisconsin: 0.7%. There were about 2.97 million voters in Wisconsin, and Trump won by 23,000. A fifth of 2.97 million is 594,000, the approximate number of white evangelicals voting in Wisconsin. If they went for Trump by 80% to 20%, his margin within this group was 356,400 (475,200 to 118,800). Let's see what happens if everything stays the same except that he gets 75% of those voters, instead of 80%. And let's for the sake of argument say that the missing 5% do not switch their vote to the Democratic candidate—instead, they vote for someone else, maybe the Libertarian, or just don't vote at all. Trump's margin among white evangelicals in Wisconsin then slips from 356,400 to 326,700, a difference of 29,700. Remember, he carried the state by only 23,000. 

A very rough-and-ready grind of the numbers, to be sure, but I've tried to make assumptions and round numbers with an eye toward understating the effect, so I think it's safe to say that Trump's reelection chances would decline precipitously if there were even a modest exodus of white evangelicals from his base. And it does seem like a somewhat unlikely alliance that might be subject to some fraying, no? 

Christianity Today roasts Trump

Here is a link to the Christianity Today editorial, "Trump Should Be Removed From Office," that has attracted so much attention. Reading through it, I get the impression that the author, Mark Galli, who is the editor of the magazine, gave birth after quite a long period of gestation: like maybe he had formed this opinion a while ago, and had begun writing the editorial in his head, making additions and subtractions (more additions), honing the argument while at the same time, out of prudential calculations, suppressing publication until, finally, his prudence was routed by Trump's conduct and he headed for the birthing room, where he delivered the baby after a brief labor. If that's how it was, he traveled the same road as the Speaker of the House.

Nancy Pelosi's prudential concerns related to the effect of impeachment on the 2020 election. There are signs in the editorial that Christianity Today, and Galli, were thinking about their evangelical readership, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, still overwhelmingly supports him, and probably does not subscribe to Christianity Today in order to read about politics, unless it's abortion  politics. This likely explains the lingering backward gaze at the Clinton impeachment. The argument is that Christianity Today stood against immorality then and it's time to do it again. Yes, high time, I'd say, considering that the two cases are dissimilar and the current one a hundred times worse. But, speaking as an outsider, sexual extra-curriculars seem to have a strong hold on the evangelical imagination, and Galli would know better than I how to appeal to them. It seems to me that in his brief for impeachment he quite skillfully blends the president's private sins and public corruption. The former may be intended for Christianity Today subscribers, but it's the latter for which Trump is being impeached, and Galli, when he turns his attention in that direction, says much in very few words:

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The President of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president's political opponents. This is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

That first sentence is an admirably concise statement of the impeachment article pertaining to abuse of power. In the second sentence, he doesn't say what part of the Constitution Trump violated, and I think maybe it would have been better to assert that the president violated his oath of office—he did not "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States." The clause after the semicolon shows that the author is still, as I say, blending Trump's private and public misconduct.  

I would never have expected to be so favorably impressed by an editorial in Christianity Today. If only a congressional Republican would now surprise me! It's just another Christmas season we're living through, however. Being surprised by McConnell or Graham would be a sign that the end of time was at hand.

The Lone Ranger &c

As a kid, I was a huge fan of The Lone Ranger television series starring Clayton Moore in the title role and Jay Silverheels as his faithful sidekick, Tonto. I see now that they stopped making new shows in 1957, so all my viewing pleasure in the mid 60s had to be courtesy of reruns. I'm watching reruns again in 2019, because one night, zipping around on the remote, I found a cable channel that airs several episodes in a row at off hours. Lots of air time to fill, no doubt. It's sort of fun to watch and wonder about what the attraction might have been for 6-year-old me. I haven't seen a single episode wherein the plot seemed at all familiar. Maybe that's partly because the plot lines are so similar that they would slur together in anyone's mind and then be forgotten altogether over 55 years. But I think it's more likely that they were beyond me. I do remember the opening sequence, especially the part where the Lone Ranger's horse, Silver, rears up, and the Lone Ranger, astride him, takes on the aspect of a colossus. What a man! Another thing I remember is a recurring technique, a kind of scene divider, where the camera backs away to watch Tonto and the Lone Ranger riding their faithful horses Scout and Silver, respectively, over rough terrain, in a mad sprint, like they were in the Preakness Stakes. It didn't occur to me then, but it does now, that, often as not, there is no reason supplied by the plot for them to be in such a hurry. It just looks cool, and I must have thought it looked cool, because it's familiar to me after more than 50 years.

The network that airs these shows is called WHT, channel 367 in my Direct TV lineup. Strange to say, their specialty is not old westerns but, rather, religious programming of the very battiest variety. I know this because sometimes, using Guide on the remote, I zip through their schedule for the day to see when I might be able to see "The Lone Ranger." Of course, the names of the shows come up, together with the "description." I wrote some of these down today.

At 8 this evening, you could watch "End-Time Insights" with host Steve Cochran, a show that "offers new 'Never Before Seen' Biblical End Time Revelations, one of which is called, 'The Graph' and offers a hidden timeline as seen in the Book of Revelation." I can't fill in any details, as I was watching the Ravens beat the Patriots, but something about the sentence does arouse my editorial impulses. For one thing, the capitalization is about as eccentric as in our president's tweets. Also, if the timeline is as seen in the Bible, is it, strictly speaking, accurate to say that it's hidden? I guess that's the hook: it's only hidden if you don't watch the show.

The 8:30 time slot this evening was filled by "End of the Age With Reverend Irwin Baxter." It seems WHT's Sunday night programming is devoted to the end of the world. The description for Rev. Baxter's show is bland: "The prophecies of the Bible explained." This was followed at 9 by "The Coming Apocalypse": "Understanding today's world events from a biblical perspective with Pastor Paul Begley." I'm going to guess that today's events pertaining to "the coming apocalypse" involve unrest and controversy in the Middle East. If Pastor Begley is smart, he will be "intrigued" by what is going on but not so confident about what he sees as to be able to assign a date to the apocalypse. That's a rookie mistake made by some of these clergymen. If you're wrong, you look sort of ridiculous, and there is no real pleasure in being right, because, due to the world having ended, no one can hear you say "told ya so"—not that anyone in a couple millennia has yet experienced this frustration.

At some time late at night, like maybe about now, there airs a show called "It's Supernatural" in which "investigative reporter Sid Roth verifies the supernatural," though probably not to everyone's satisfaction, since one idiosyncratic definition of supernatural is something like "that which cannot be verified." At 6 tomorrow morning, you can skip "Morning Joe" on MSNBC and watch instead "The Jim Bakker Show." I take it this is the guy who used to be married to Tammy Faye and that he's out of prison? 

No "Lone Ranger" till 2 in the afternoon. Hi-yo Silver, away!

Bill Barr takes the cake

In this article, the New Yorker's religion correspondent describes the efforts of a "Christian left" pastor to teach Democrats how to speak a foreign language known as "Evangelical." Their bumbling past efforts are humorously described: it doesn't work, for example, to memorize a few Bible verses on the day of the pitch and then, when it comes time to impress and make new friends, say something like, "And God so loved the world that he gave his only forgotten son. . . ."  

But it's a fool's errand, anyway. The speakers of "Evangelical" voted for Trump, who is obviously the biggest phony of all. After declaring that the Bible was his favorite book, he was asked which Bible verse he esteemed most. His answer was that he didn't like to talk about it—"too personal." Asked whether he preferred the Old or the New Testament, he replied that "both are great." Not sure whether this was before or after he paid Stormy Daniels $130k to keep her mouth shut.

The sorry funny sight of politicians acting like idiots in an effort to impress upon us their Christian bona fides doesn't fit very well with the claim, elaborately developed by Attorney General William Barr in a recent speech at the Notre Dame law school, that unnamed "militant secularists" have driven religion from American life. In that case, why do presidential candidates, who are essentially vying in a popularity contest, try to quote Scripture instead of the witticisms of "the new atheists," who after all are ascendant? How come, whenever Cory Booker is asked about "the partisan divide in Washington," he commences yammering about how he attends Bible study with some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate? It isn't true that religion in America is in decline. Compared to almost everywhere else in what is called the advanced world, it's positively thriving. It's possible that at this very moment my older daughter is being taught algebra in a public school recently renamed "Justice Page Middle School" (in order not to honor Governor Ramsey), while just down the street, at Annunciation School, one of her best friends is being harangued by a nun about the Virgin Mary. All as it should be, all perfectly legal. Autumn's school does not run on tax dollars because that would violate the Constitution's establishment clause. Duh!

But I'm only pretending to be confused about what Bill Barr could possibly be carping about. He's a combatant in the culture war featuring, for example, aggrieved Christian bakers who don't want to take the money of homosexual people. It's so unfair! Their complaint is the Attorney General's too, and I'm a little surprised that so many think they might have a point—"it's a hard case," we are gravely informed. No, it's not. I take it the bakers think their freedom of expression is being abridged or coerced and their religious liberty violated because they do calligraphy with cake icing. Give me a break! If they want to write a newspaper editorial—or a play or a poem or a novel or an opera—wherein they express their disapproval of homosexuals, they can. If they can't get it published, they can start a new business that promulgates such views—that's permitted, too. But I'm afraid that the logic of their argument would require my former employer to endure an employee who, on religious grounds, declined to perform the keystrokes necessary to make the public record show that by a duly recorded deed Adam and Eve had conveyed fee title in a parcel of real estate to Adam and Steve, as joint tenants, homesteaded. I have a hunch that Barr and other champions of religious liberty, if asked whether such an employee should be cashiered or receive an accommodation, would secretly like to know whether said employee is a Christian evangelical or perhaps a recent Muslim immigrant from Africa. Lady Justice trying to peek through her blindfold. 

Just bake the cake, squeeze out through that papery funnel thing the nice message the gentlemen (or women) chose, write a bigger number on your nightly deposit slip, go to your weird church on Sunday—but quit the bit about how persecuted you are (I think it's called being a "snowflake," and is disrespectful to St. Stephen, shown kneeling in the above painting by the 19-year-old Rembrandt: the face peering out from between the armpits of the two men about to stone Stephen is the artist's earliest surviving self-portrait).

When it's time to relax

Over beers in the backyard, I mention to a neighbor an article I saw about a study indicating that as few as five drinks per week can significantly reduce life expectancy.  "Praise God!" she exclaimed, and then, I guess by way of explanation, she added, "My church teaches that suicide is a mortal sin so"—she raised her drink—"this is a pleasant workaround."

We'd been in the backyard awhile (by way of even more explanation). Another neighbor observed, helpfully, that if suicide is allowed to be a sin then by definition it's a mortal one. Someone else pointed out that one of Jesus's miracles was turning water into wine at a wedding. Trying to lighten things up, I offered that the real miracle would be if the couple lived happily in holy matrimony "till death do they part." The woman enjoying her suicide workaround said that her church had some notable ideas on that topic, too.

I'm setting this down only because I suspect some are under the impression that religion is dead here in the People's Republic of South Minneapolis. 

Two investigations

Journalistic accounts of the Mueller investigation, and discussion of the degree to which the final report will be made public, has reminded me of another investigation--the one into the conduct of John Nienstedt, the former archbishop of the Twin Cities Archdiocese of the Catholic Church.  With regard to Mueller, a lot of people are saying that the good news is that the system worked, he was able without interference to pursue his investigation to its conclusion, and has now issued a report on his findings that will eventually be made public.  I hope that all turns out to be true.  It's now in the hands of the attorney general, who was selected by Trump himself, so perhaps the appropriate attitude to take is inscribed on the license plates of Missourians.

Possibly Nienstedt is a better operator than Trump, or Rome more corrupt than Washington, D.C., because what Trump might have wished for was achieved by Nienstedt: when the investigation got hot, it was called off.  The best summaries of which I'm aware, this one from MPR News, augmented here by National Catholic Reporter, are damning, months or years old, and up-to-date.  The investigation was not completed, what had been discovered before it was terminated has not been made public, and it appears there will be no further developments.  To all my boyhood friends who fascinated me with descriptions of what you'd tell priests inside the confessional: if you're still practicing, the contents of your offering envelopes hard at work!

On the other hand, you could argue that, for the cover up to succeed, at least Nienstedt had to resign.  I think I could accept similar terms for the investigation into Trump.

The best medicine (laughter)

Our president is a fraud, for sure, and dangerous, so that being a citizen is like being in the audience for some absurdist play or movie, and feeling unsure about whether laughter or horror is the more appropriate response.  I lean toward laughter.  Not for any deep reason, it's just more pleasant.  Yesterday, maybe the day before, he tweeted:

Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019

Which raised the profile of this interview he gave during the campaign:

"When I talk about the Bible, it's very personal [so I'm not going to talk about it]."  LOL!  He wouldn't be able to tell you whether "the gospels" are part of the Old Testament or New.  He probably didn't know about the two parts till John Heilemann asked his question.  But it's great that biblical literacy is making a "turn back"!

It's also sort of amusing that the other interviewer, Mark Halperin, lost his job for behavior towards women that approximated the interviewee's self-described unknightly habits in this regard.  Interviewer fired by private employer, interviewee elected president of the United States.  Hahahahaha!

Nothing succeeds like success

Does the following scenario make any sense? 

It comes to light that the winning candidate for president committed election law felonies in order to win the election but is shielded from indictment for those crimes because . . . he is the president.  

To someone untrained in the law and Justice Department protocols, it seems an analogous case might involve an ambitious vice president who puts poison in the president's cheeseburger.  If his scheme is not discovered until after the president consumes the cheeseburger, then the former vice president, now the president, cannot be indicted for his offense until he leaves office.  He's the president and can't be troubled with defending himself in court.  Duh! 

If, however, the Secret Service learns of the plot and intercepts the cheeseburger just before the president takes a fateful bite, then sure, indict the would-be murderer, try him, send him to prison, because justice should be swift if the criminal fails to execute his plan to a successful conclusion.  

Kicker: there is a statute of limitations for the election-law offenses, so by the time the president isn't president anymore, it may no longer be possible to prosecute him for the crimes he committed in order to win the presidency.  The constitutional remedy is impeachment (we are told by senators who have never opposed the crooked president on anything and wouldn't vote to convict him in an impeachment trial unless an angel of God were to whisper, no shout, into their ears).  

Speaking of God and his angels, the above graphs show that, among white voters in 2018, such journalistically trumpeted categories as gender and collar color hardly account for anything compared to whether the voter is a 0 or 1 on the Evangelical question.  It's not that Democrats can't get white people to vote for them.  It's that they can't get white people who go to church a lot to vote for them. It's a very modest exaggeration to say that in America being nonwhite is politically determinative and, among whites, so is being evangelical.  It's the religiously casual whites who are up for grabs!

At the movies: Boy Erased

My favorite teen and I saw last night "Boy Erased," the movie adapted from a memoir about a college-aged gay man, played in the film by Lucas Hedges, who's placed in a "conversion therapy" program by his fundamentalist parents (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman).  Our vice president, to whom I gave a light-hearted pass yesterday, is to his discredit a suspected supporter of this form of child abuse.  People who see the movie probably self-select in a way that ensures that the choir will be preached to, but for those of us in that choir, the movie tends to undercut common conceptions about the alleged monsters who subject their own kids to the abuse.  The performances of Crowe and Kidman as parents, earnest and loving, though confused, are in this regard stellar--the Kidman character, who stays with her son in a hotel while he's taking the "cure," is the first to have her suspicions aroused, and, though she's accustomed to the role of submissive Christian wife, the movie suggests that her eventual willingness to put her son before her marriage contributes to her husband's more reluctant, wavering progress toward a new outlook.  

I was most interested in an economic subtheme.  Another thing the movie suggests is that the conversion therapy biz, still legal in 36 states, is beset by a toxic interplay of Christian fundamentalism and garden-variety greed.  You can give people lessons on whom to be sexually attracted to, generally or specifically, and augment the lessons with heavy doses of shame.  But it doesn't work.  So the "treatment" goes on and on.  The desperate parents keep shelling out, and a benighted religious purpose is further corrupted by a sluice of cash.  In a somewhat understated way, the movie registers something like disgust with what I'll call "straight" American values.  Toward the end, the gay son goes to his father's office at work for a hard conversation.  Their estrangement is on the verge of becoming irreversible.  The father walks behind his desk, looks out the big window, gestures at the wide scene, and announces that he had intended for "all this" to be his son's.

The "all this" is the family's Ford dealership.

Advice from an outsider

 

The nun in the youtube video I'm embedding above is a public relations success for the Catholic Church at a time when it could badly use one.  Have you ever noticed that it's the conservative old men who are digging holes into which the Church falls while Catholic women, who by the rules made by these men can't advance, tend to lift it up?  A nun about whom it could not be said she throws like a girl isn't that big a deal, I know, but any port in a storm.  Her stereotypical-looking glasses and churchy garb, accessorized with tennis shoes and a jaunty manner, make her a winner.  And it's not like she's a rare instance.  There are networks like Nuns on the Bus, and other women who are clearly overperforming in the jobs the Church permits them to perform.  It was Jennifer Hasselberger, an archdiocesan lawyer, whose disgust with Archbishop John Nienstedt here in the Twin Cities set in motion a sequence of events ending in his tardy resignation.  It's shocking that someone like Nienstedt could be promoted through the ranks; when he got his first promotion, he should have been fired instead.  To anyone who cares to notice, it's pretty clear that the upper reaches of the Church hierarchy are stained by the very worst traits one associates with "good ol' boy network."  When a non-good-ol'-boy gets her foot in the door, the stench is overpowering, and often she swings into action.  The Church needs more of that, not less.

Also, though I'm an outsider, the rule about priestly celibacy should be rescinded, because it's at the root of the problem.  There is no scriptural authority for it, as Paul himself acknowledged when, in I Corinthians, he recommends celibacy even though "I have no command of the Lord" (7:25).  That priests nevertheless can't marry has the practical effect of making the priesthood attractive to men whose sexual predilections must be secret in any event.  Meanwhile, a religious vocation is for the psychologically healthy the advertised sacrifice.  Clergy misconduct is a problem across denominations, but it seems farfetched to think that the Protestants are successfully covering up an epidemic of the sexual abuse of children by those in ministry.

And, returning to the realm of public relations, if priests could marry the world might no longer be subjected to the spectacle of panels of septuagenarian virgins issuing white papers on topics in human sexuality.  It's like they're begging for attention from late-night comedians.  

At the bank

In Buddhism, the awakening of the young prince Siddhartha is said to have been triggered by "the four sights" he took in on his sojourn outside the palace, where he had for his first 29 years led a sheltered life of ease and luxury.  The four sights were an old man, a diseased man, a corpse, and an ascetic.  He was puzzled by all these, but his charioteer patiently answered his questions, setting him straight about much that is unpleasant, and Siddhartha was thus set on his way to establishing The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path.

While doing a little banking today, I think I saw a 21st-century, western version of the first of the four sights.  The bank has one of those coin-counting machines, and as I stood in the teller line I observed an elderly, stooped man work out a transaction with it.  There was some pacing to and fro as he tried to determine what went where, but before I got to a teller, he had figured out where to pour in his coins--he carried them in a big plastic cup such as you might get a beer in at the ball game--and I could see on the machine's display that he had likely converted his cup of coins into a ten, a five, two ones, two quarters, a nickel, and three pennies.

Give me about five years.

Public service announcement for Minnesotans: if your property taxes aren't rolled into your mortgage payment, the first half is due tomorrow.  Writing out that check reminds me that the new young energetic mayor of Minneapolis has not personally repaired all the potholes in East Forty-Second Street.  

 

Sermon

Tony Perkins is the evangelical Christian leader and head of the nutty Family Research Council who has given President Trump a "mulligan" for his dalliance with porn star Stormy Daniels while Melania was home with baby Barron.  Perkins has been widely ridiculed but give him credit for drawing his metaphors from territory familiar to Trump--golf, specifically, cheating at golf.  

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson, host of The 700 Club, said the other day he's being "dominated" by homosexuals.  Imagine all my gay followers clicking on the link, expecting to find a new aid for a recreational pastime, and discovering only that their dreaded agenda is drowning out Pat's requests to send him money.  AlterNet has been inspired to compile a list of "the ten craziest things Pat Robertson has said," one of which is--no kidding--Beware of scamsters in religious garb. I think my favorite, however, is You should cast demons out of secondhand clothes you buy, lest their previous owner's evil infect you. Something about the confluence of triviality and earnest stupidity, together with a nontrivial reminder that the people sending him their money have questions about the secondhand clothes they buy.

I bet Robertson enjoys a private belly laugh when he hears politicians bragging about the small donations they're raking in from heartland Americans. 

Heartland America: is it just a home for the mentally infirm?  Christianity was once a world religion but today, at least in our country, its only vital parts function as a wing of the Republican party, which has clearly lost its way.  Trump finished second in the 2016 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses.  So did Pat Robertson, in 1988.   

Leibniz!

The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the half dozen or so eminent philosophers treated in a new book reviewed here, has I think gotten a bum rap.  For he is today known, if he is known, as the philosopher whose contribution to religious thought was famously, savagely, and effectively satirized by Voltaire in Candide.  Dr Pangloss, one of the characters in that book, held that "this is the best of all possible worlds," and he persisted in this view as Voltaire subjected him to ever more convincing proofs, in the form of awful tragedies begetting unendurable human suffering, that it's not.  Thus "Panglossian: characterized by or given to extreme optimism, especially in the face of unrelieved hardship or adversity."

The view that "this is the best of all possible worlds" was Leibniz's solution to the problem of evil.  You know the puzzle.  God, being merciful, must want to stamp out evil and suffering.  And, being omnipotent, he must be able to do it.  Yet the world is filled with both.  Therefore, this merciful and all-powerful deity doesn't exist.

Leibniz escapes this trap by allowing that God is constrained by the same kind of logical necessities to which we all are subject.  If p is true, then the opposite of p is false.  If you choose p, then the benefits of the opposite of p are lost.  This is as true for God as for everyone else.  So you end up with this picture of the Creator very palely weighing the pros and cons of the various choices before him when designing the universe.  "Human beings should be free.  That means, however, that they might make poor choices that disrupt my beneficent plan.  Okay, maybe I shouldn't let them do that.  No, the consequences of that choice are even worse.  I'll make them free."  And so he proceeds through the cost-benefit analysis of all the decisions that he is obliged to make.  At the end of the line, you are left with "the best of all possible worlds"--the key word being possible.  It is easy to see that this amounts to a denial of God's omnipotence.  It's also easy to see that it invites satire.  And boy, did Voltaire ever walk through that open door!

One of the pleasures of satire is the enjoyable sensation that someone who deserves to get smacked is getting smacked, hard.  As the effectiveness of the satire goes up, the stature of its object goes down. Candide, being highly effective, has left poor Leibniz languishing.  But he is really at the other end of the spectrum from the bumpkin that readers of Candide may suppose him to be.  I'm pretty sure that my account of his solution to the problem of evil isn't completely fair to him.  Voltaire's critique is such a rhetorical triumph that everyone, including me, unconsciously understands the debate in his terms.  When you know a little bit more about Leibniz, you are inclined to believe that anything that would occur to Voltaire would occur to him, too.  Maybe there is more to the story. 

For me, the proof of Leibniz's stature in the pantheon of the world's great geniuses is his work in mathematics.  Years ago, I took "the calculus sequence" at the University of Minnesota.  I still have the textbook.  Ten chapters.  Fall term, Calculus I, covered the first four.  In the winter, Calculus II covered chapters 5 through 7.  In the spring, Calculus III finished the book.  My outcomes, as measured by the grades I received, were (as a calculus student might phrase it) inversely proportional to the effort I put into it.  I aced Calculus I without working very hard.  Calculus II began to be hard for me, and I worked diligently at it, eventually earning a B.  Calculus III consumed my life for a couple of months, and I learned it, sort of, but it would be more true to say that things were moving too fast and I never firmly grasped the material: C.  That was the last math course I ever took.  I wasn't curious about whether the trend would continue.

My experience isn't unique.  It's hard for most people to learn the calculus.  If you know it a little bit, and were impressed by the effort it cost you, you're in position to esteem whoever first invented it--or discovered it, or developed it, or whatever is the proper term for bringing into use new mathematical techniques of considerable scope and utility.  This achievement belongs to Newton and Leibniz, who, each working without knowledge of the other, invented ("discovered"; "developed") calculus.  Newton's achievement may be credited to genius applied to certain problems that arose from his effort to comprehend physical reality--a new tool for a working scientist.  Leibniz, however, was more or less a mathematical hobbyist.   It's as if the calculus just fell out of his mind, the work product of pure thought undertaken for recreational purposes.  That he should be known as the guy Voltaire beat up is an injustice that it seems a merciful and powerful overseer might have avoided.

John Nienstedt's legacy

John Nienstedt having resigned, there are a spate of "legacy" articles in the local press, all quite somber, perhaps appropriately so since there is nothing terribly funny about pedophilia and obstruction of justice.  But on the principle that it's always good to laugh, I'd like to memorialize two of the former archbishop's unintentionally funny misadventures.  After all, one candidate for his "legacy" would be that he helped to make his church and the Catholic clergy the butt of a million jokes.

"Do you trust me?" asks my octogenarian dad, when I call to ask whether he can babysit.  "Of course," I  say.  "It's not like you're a priest or something--and, anyway, we only have girls."  He laughs. Catholic Church, big  joke:  everyone's in on it.

I loved almost as much as anything the 400,000 DVDs that Nienstedt arranged to have mailed to Catholic households urging a Yes vote on Minnesota's marriage amendment a couple years ago.  Four hundred thousand!  Fewer than 3 million voted on the amendment, and the archdiocese sent out 400,000 DVDs.  It's the layers of ineptitude and miscalculation that are humorous to contemplate.  Big bucks, no bang.  Maybe the recipients should also have received, Oprah-style, a DVD player!  No, no, they might use it to watch Brokeback Mountain!

That is what composition teachers call a smooth transition into Nienstedt's work as an archdiocesan movie reviewer, which I consider to be his finest hour.  This was back  when he was archbishop of New Ulm.  Ang Lee's epic was up for a zillion Golden Globes and Oscars, but the vigilant Nienstedt took to the pages of the archdiocesan newsletter to express a contrary opinion.  His review is notable for the concision with which he summarizes the plot:

The story is about two lonely cowboys herding sheep on a mountain range.  One night after a drinking binge, one man makes a pass at the other and within seconds the latter mounts the former in an act of wanton anal sex.

If memory serves, the newsletters of the Lutherans are less colorful.  The affidavits collected by the Greene Espel law firm shed retrospective light on the evident gusto with which the reviewer sets the scene.

 

The Nienstedt investigation

Last September, in this editorial, National Catholic Reporter called on the Archdiocese of the Twin Cities to disclose the results of a local law firm's investigation of its archbishop, John Nienstedt, who is suspected of having "inappropriate" sexual relations with adult men.  I think that is a fair way to characterize the suspicions.  Nienstedt, in his denials, has stated that the allegations against him do not concern minors, or lay people, or behavior that violates any criminal laws.  It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that he has pursued consensual frolics with men who, like him, have taken a vow of chastity.  All these guys should've been hanging with me when I was in early middle age.  I could've shown them how to keep their promise.  Hang out in coffee shops with your nose in a book.  Go to the movies late at night by yourself.  Watch a lot of sports on tv in your apartment.  Go golfing with your friends, old married heterosexual fellows.  It is possible to avoid interactions, let alone intercourse, with the subset of people who might be willing.

Anyway, the Archdiocese isn't listening. Four more months have now passed and we still don't know what the law firm found.  As the editorial points out, the investigation was paid for with archdiocesan money contributed by local Catholic parishioners, so it seems that they should see the fruit of what they bankrolled.  Was the investigation conducted so that only other church officials would be up to date on the archbishop's sex life?  Another thing that seems reasonable to assume is that we'd know what the investigation had found if it had found nothing.

Jennifer Haselberger, the former archdiocesan lawyer who resigned in disgust, has a theory.  Plenty of people in the local Catholic community, some well placed, understand that Nienstedt is a disgrace.  They want him gone, but of course he regards them in the same way he regards the editorialists at National Catholic Reporter.  The idea of the investigation was to augment their quiet calls for his resignation with some upturned dirt.  The problem is that the investigators, a couple of litigators at a firm specializing in white-collar criminal defense, over-performed at what lawyers call "discovery."  In other words, Haselberger thinks the results of the investigation likely go well beyond being embarrassing in a tidy, useful sort of way.  In her career as a whistle-blower, she hasn't yet been shown to be wrong about anything.

The archbishop talks to the press

With the  help of an archdiocesan handler, Archbishop John Nienstedt attempts, in the above interview, to parry a pretty tough line of questioning from a Twin Cities television reporter.  It's obvious he had some talking points prepared for the first question, concerning whether or not he should resign, but as the interview wears on . . . well, you can judge for yourself.  Two things that seem particularly striking to me:

1. The archbishop is unable to make anything resembling a coherent case against same-sex marriage.  He says that sex is for marriage, that marriage is for heterosexuals, and that therefore homosexuals must be chaste.  The reporter, who is gay, asks: "But why should I have to live the life of a priest?"  The response involves redrawing the circle of illogic.  It is so, because it is what the church teaches.  If it is indeed  "what the church teaches," it seems there should be some underlying reasons, but, if there are, they must be beyond the archbishop's ken.  The reporter seems surprised that Nienstedt doesn't have a better answer.  "Anything you'd like to clarify?" he asks.  Time for another circle.

2. The question about whether Jennifer Hasselberger wouldn't be a good candidate for serving as the archdiocesan "point person" on clergy misconduct is close to a taunt.  "She certainly seems to know where the files are!" chortles the reporter.  Nienstedt, looking wan, agrees that she does.  The video raises, however indirectly, the question of the role of women in the church.  On a couple of occasions, when Nienstedt is floundering badly, his handler, a woman, interrupts to throw him a lifeline.  It isn't apparent that, were the roles reversed, she would have needed, or could have received, any help from him. 

But, of course, the roles can't be reversed.  She doesn't look enough like Jesus.

***********************************************************************************************************************

As long as I'm pasting in videos, here's Robin Williams on the same general topic.  His laugh line--"it's not just a sin, it's a felony"--reminds us that the church could learn some things from the dreaded secularists who work for the government in law enforcement. 

 

 

John Nienstedt: the beat goes on

A reverie of private grief was interrupted Tuesday when I switched on the radio and heard that John Nienstedt, the archbishop of the Twin Cities archdiocese and rabid opponent of "the homosexual agenda," is being investigated for improper sexual relations with seminarians and priests. The sun rises and sets, the rivers run to the sea, and the Catholic Church is embarrassed by the lax pompous incompetents who occupy the upper reaches of its hierarchy. 

Nienstedt has put out a statement in which he declares in the first paragraph that the allegations against him "are absolutely and entirely false."  But that is followed by:

The allegations do not involve minors or lay members of the faithful, and they do not implicate any kind of illegal or criminal behavior. The allegations involve events alleged to have occurred at least a decade ago, before I began serving in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The less slippery version goes like this:  "I'm not going to admit to anything.  But, if it turns out that they have the goods on me, at least my sexual partners were of age--old enough to have become well-versed in the theology that I have always said teaches that what I've done is an abomination to God, even though--thanks to those I've criticized--it's not against the law.  Also, I've been a lot less sexually active now that I'm in the seventh decade of my life."

And is there no one in the archdiocesan offices who can help him with the meaning of "implicate"?  Who is a bigger embarrassment, Nienstedt or the men--and, whatever their names, they are all men--who have promoted instead of firing him?

Home thoughts

What might euphemistically be called a "stomach bug" is touring our household.  I am the most recent victim and so am home from work today gingerly partaking of the BRAT diet.  I had a cold when the more disabling illness struck, and find today as I recover that it did not go away while I was on hands and knees in the bathroom.  Being an English major, this reminds me of one of Dr Johnson's finest moments.  Some pious churchman had composed a treatise arguing that the sufferings of the poor innoculate them against other grievances and are therefore to be deemed an aid to human happiness, another of the Lord's tender mercies.  In his review, Johnson wrote (it is almost my favorite thing in English literature):

The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich.  They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.

In other news, today's Roman churchmen are exhibiting a certain testiness over a U.N. report that says little more than what everyone already knows about how the Catholic Church has coddled and enabled its criminally abusive priests.  From a report in the LA Times:

The Vatican, which signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, has “consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above children’s best interests,” said the report, accusing the Vatican of transferring abusive priests to new parishes where many have continued to abuse children, and of “humiliating” the families of victims into silence.

In a sharply worded response, the Holy See’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, attacked the report, calling it “surprising” and full of “incorrect” statements, and alleging that the U.N. had ignored steps taken by the Vatican in recent years to root out abuse.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, Tomasi also suggested that nongovernmental organizations that oppose the Vatican’s positions on homosexuality and gay marriage had influenced the U.N. report, giving it an “ideological” slant.

Addressing the U.N. committee last month, Tomasi said the Vatican had no responsibility for abusers because "priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country."

Everyone knows the famous illustration of chutzpah--you murder your parents, then, on the ground that you are an orphan, beg the court's mercy.  Is the archbishop's defense any less ridiculous?  When made aware of abusive priests, the Church does not call the cops; no, it quietly moves the offender to a new parish, where he persists in his criminality.  Later, when this comes to light, times twenty thousand, the Church's spokesmen say, "Well, you know, priests are citizens of their own states and it's not our place to prosecute them."  You do everything possible to shield criminals and then blame all the local Dogberries for not penetrating the shield.  Plus, you suggest your critics are just a bunch of gay-loving haters of religious freedom.

One of the Church's biggerst problems may be that the only men--and they are all men--who have risen high enough in the hierarchy to speak for it have, naturally, been the ones so devoted to its rituals and claims of authority that they can't see what things look like to normal, healthy people. 

Wherein I come to a sweeping conclusion after observing who uses public transportation

 

Over at the New Yorker blog, you can view photographs of Pope Francis "through the years"; my favorite, which shows him commuting on the Buenos Aires subway in 2008, when he was a Cardinal and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, is above.  The current pope appears to have more in common with the "nuns on the bus" than with, say, the Archbishop of the Twin Cities Diocese, who ought to be arrested and prosecuted for obstruction of justice.

I like a big shot who uses public transportation, and I'm not the only one.  Richard Feynman, about whom I wrote here, reported in one of the autobiographical vignettes collected in What Do You Care What Other People Think? that he knew a certain general and fellow member of the commission investigating the Challenger disaster was a good fellow when he (the general) broke away from the first meeting to catch a train back to the Pentagon. 

My advice:

When someone arrives in a limo, take everything they say with half a salt shaker.  But pay attention to the speech acts of anyone who takes the bus.

 

 

Kind of liking the new pope

Were I determined to detest the pope--and cathedral-loads of my loyal readers know I have tendencies in that direction--I would say that his PR triumphs don't change the essential facts about his wrongness.  Wrong on gay rights.  Wrong on women's rights.  On contraception, absurd. But what do I expect?  That he would breeze into the Vatican and three blinks later declare the Church's teaching on these questions a large, long error?  Probably he's said as much as he can.  For example:

We cannot insist on issues relating only to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods.  This is not possible.  I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that.  But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context.  The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

Sounds like what you'd say if you never wanted to talk about them--maybe because you're embarrassed by what you're expected to say.  I'm beginning to like the guy.  It's not just the funny boys and girls with whom he seems interested in making nice.  It's people like me, too.  Plus, I'm attracted to big shots who take the bus.  Not very long ago the "nuns on the bus," always travelling in pairs, usually in poor neighborhoods, were an implicit criticism of the fur-trimmed Vatican boys, including the one at the top of the heap.  Is it possible that those nuns now have on their side someone who's large and in charge?

 

Flannery O'Connor and her prayers

The current New Yorker includes a selection of prayers (behind a subscriber wall) by Flannery O'Connor, best known as the author of A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, two story collections that she completed before dying, at age 39, on August 3, 1964.  After graduating college, she spent a year at the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, where she kept a ruled notebook in which she addressed handwritten entries to God. 

They're sort of crazy.  Her stories have a hard kick--someone said, I think aptly, that you laugh and laugh and then finally may wonder what it is that you are laughing at.  But these prayers, or diary letters to God, aren't funny at all.   She's relieved to have the peace that comes from having banished sexual desire, but then it comes calling again, and she's full of self-reproach.  She's serious about heaven and hell.  She disparages science.  Regarding her fiction, she analogously credits God for whatever is meritorious in it: God is to her as she is to typewriter.  Perhaps you, as I, think this might all be more interesting if you knew more about abnormal psychology.  Predictably, abnormal psychology is another subject for which she has nothing but disdain.  Ha, ha!

When I was in college, I had a short story course for which we were required to buy The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  It came in at around 1500 pages and included 109 stories by 87 authors.  O'Connor was represented by three stories.  In one, a family is going on a car trip.  The grandma is chatty, full of what barely qualifies as conventional wisdom.  She keeps up a running commentary, part of which involves current events--a notorious criminal known as the Misfit is on the loose.  Then there is car trouble.  Sure enough, the Misfit and his men come upon the scene. The whole family is murdered.  One of the Misfit's men makes a joke while sliding down a ditch with a body, and the story ends when the Misfit rebukes him: 

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," the Misfit said.  "It's no real pleasure in life."

In another, the main character decides to have a likeness of Christ tattooed on his back.  The tattoo artist gives him a book of Christian art to look through for possible models.  He flips past the familiar ones--"The Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus, Jesus the Physician's Friend."  Finally he chooses, to have tattooed on his back, "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."

Hers is an unusual sensibility.  She's really popular at Catholic universities but I wonder what she'd think of her most enthusiastic admirers.  Probably more than she thinks of us Sunday morning sippers of Bloody Marys.  There's enough of her disdain to go around.  Regarding the savage grotesqueries in her stories, she commented: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures."

 

Netflix: Jesus Camp

Christian fundamentalism as child abuse.  A question, not explicitly raised in the movie, is how Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, the directors, gained access to the scenes at the camp and megachurches and home schools that are the heart of this documentary.  It seems they must have misrepresented themselves and their project.  On the other hand, the film's subjects are manifestly pleased with themselves, so maybe not.  A harsh critic of Jesus Camp, Ron Reno of Focus on the Family, is subconsciously stumped by the puzzle:

The directors' claim that they were simply trying to create an "objective" film about children and faith ring hollow.  I don't question the motives of the Christians shown in the film.  Indeed, the earnestness and zeal with which the young people pictured attempt to live out their faith are admirable.  Unfortunately, however, it appears that they were unknowingly being manipulated by the directors in their effort to cast evangelical Christianity in an unflattering light.

If what the film shows is "admirable," how can it be that the directors "manipulated" the subjects so that they appear "in an unflattering light"?  Admirable or unflattering--which is it?  The straightforward solution to this problem is that what the film shows is not admirable and that even the spokesman for Focus on the Family understands in his bones that there is something repulsive about children being robbed of . . . their childhood, the chance to be children.  Turns out that watching very young kids preach and proselytize and speak in tongues and endure what look like epileptic fits of religious ecstasy is a lot like watching them compete in beauty pageants: grotesque, creepy, sickening. 

Re-re-googling the clergy

I went to St. Olaf College, which according to its web page has "a vibrant faith tradition," and perhaps mainly for that reason I was once acquainted with a lot of people who are now clergymen.  Sometimes I google the name of one of them and end up reading about how gay people are an abomination to God and that those who disagree are "holy blasphemers," et cetera, et cetera.  I mean this kind of thing.  In the interest of balance, I should report that a recent exercise in "googling the clergy" revealed that not all are wholly crazy.

Bill Gafkjen was a year ahead of me in high school and the best pitcher on our baseball team.  The second best pitcher was our all-around best player, so when Bill couldn't pitch, it usually meant there was an opening in our infield, which I got to fill.  We would have been a better team with two Gafkjens.  He is now the bishop of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and it appears to me that the Lutherans would be better off with another one of him, too.  You can tell he is a decent fellow by the spite he elicits from people who aren't.  Bill, apparently, is one of those whose general outlook on homosexual people is "liberal, not Biblical."  As far as I know, Jesus never breathed a syllable on the question, and he also seems on occasion a little light in the loafers himself--never marrying, never gobbing spit on the poor, never exhibiting an ounce of interest in NASCAR.  But I should let the fighting Lutherans duke it out.  I just want to say hooray for Bill for not being on the spittle-soaked, foam-flecked side.

When I was about twelve or thirteen, I played on a town baseball team coached by an older teen-ager, Cooper Wiggen.  Coop is now the pastor at a Methodist Church a couple miles from my home in south Minneapolis.  Googling his name, I discover that he is married to another Methodist minister, Elizabeth Macaulay, and that both of them have, at some risk to their careers, loudly supported same-sex marriage.  You can see them interviewed about their views here.

I don't know why ballplayers seem to make the sanest churchmen.

 

Two saints

In religion news, the current pope is beatifying--awkward verb meaning: to make a saint--two of his predecessors, John Paul II and John XXIII.  The latter, who was pope in the early 1960s, convened the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Church, kicking and screaming, into the nineteenth century.  If the last fifty years of reactionary pronouncements and policies are an indication, it was too much too fast.  Masses performed in the living language of the congregants!  The backlash was inevitable, and today you need not know Latin to be at least dimly aware of the Church's catholic benightedness, an expanse that blankets all matters sexual.  The Church of Rome and America's Republican party may be the last two institutions for which contraception is controversial.

Edmund Wilson, who in his journals expresses exasperation with Christian theology, was an unlikely admirer of Pope John.  Beset by geriatric complaints, and feeling that death was near, his journal for the 1960s includes this:

The knowledge that death is not far away, that I shall soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble.  It is harder to take human life seriously, including one's own passions and achievements and efforts.  In my tendency toward this state of mind, I have found Pope John fortifying.  When over 80 and knowing he is doomed [by cancer], he gives all the energy left him to his council which will modernize the Church.

If Pope Francis and Edmund Wilson agree, it must be true.  The case of John Paul, however, made me read closely the news articles detailing the prerequisites for becoming a saint.  It seems you have to be credited, from beyond the grave, with not one but two miracles.  In the case of John Paul, a French nun  was cured of Parkinson's disease after praying to John Paul.  The required second miracle occurred when, having prayed for relief to John Paul, a Costa Rican woman inexplicably recovered from a serious brain injury.  I know it would be indelicate to speculate about the number of people who prayed for relief to John Paul only to have their diseases follow the normal course predicted by medical science.  People love miracles and do not want to make it too hard to believe in them.  Anyway, it most certainly is not the case that, with sainthood on the line, the Vatican accepts hearsay testimony.  According to a CNN account,

Patrick Kelly, executive director of the Blessed John Paul II Shrine in Washington, explained the church's process for investigating reported miracles.

"A team of doctors first examine the miracle.  Secondly, the team of theologians look at the miracles, and then they discuss amongst themselves the legitimacy and all the facts surrounding the miracles," he said.

With all that teamwork, a snafu must be quite a remote possibility. 

What the H

Hendrik Hertzberg has put to one side his analyses of the modern Republican party, the fillibuster, and governmental gridlock in order to meditate upon Hell.  I'm going to pretend to refrain from making the obvious joke concerning how actually all these subjects are of a piece.  Since I'm not so willing as he to extend the benefit of the doubt to the pope and his Church, I have to wonder why Hertzberg, a forthright unbeliever, seems so--what's the word?  congenial?--when the topic of popery is at hand.  My theory of the case is that his wife, New Yorker colleague Virginia Cannon, is, as this post suggests, a Catholic, and that to preserve domestic tranquility he is obliged to adopt an accommodating stance toward the Church of Rome, just as I am obliged to keep to myself my opinion about the programming on Bravo.  (I am fond of Andy Cohen, however.)

Anyway, I should think that Hell is a topic, or destination, that the pope might want to avoid.  Assuming that he is not a moron, it must be embarrassing to defend this crazy notion that people survive death and, on account of heretical, or nonexistent, theological views, spend eternity in a Lake of Fire.  Who really believes that?  Hertzberg jokes about whether he is in or out but let us put his case to one side in order to consider some others.  Socrates: in or out?  Spinoza?  Gandhi?  Bertrand Russell?  (Yeah, I know, he's in the lake, obviously, but I assume all the popes are sitting in the vicinity of the Right Hand, and, compared to Russell, you might say of most of them:  "God made him, therefore let him pass for a man.")  I think I remember reading that, according to Thomas Aquinas, one of the perks of paradise is the excellent view it affords of Hell, which allows the saints to indulge themselves neverendingly in the pleasures of Schadenfreude.  Were I a responsible blogger, I'd research this claim to make sure it's true.  But that would involve dipping into the works of Thomas Aquinas, an activity for which earthly life is too short. 

If Hell's proprietor is accepting friendly advice, mine would be to do away with the hot weather.  Instead, imprison the damned in a comfortable library filled only with theological treatises by approved Catholic authors. 

Cardinal Keith O'Brien: the beat goes on

Keith O'Brien, the recently retired head of the Roman Catholic Church's Britain Division, said in a statement today: "I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal."  Some comments.

1. The language, which presumably was labored over by people with Catholic educations, is more stilted than that of teen-aged confessors to "impure thoughts."  Everyone knows there aren't standards, just a standard, and that it forbids everything that falls under the heading, "sexual conduct." You'd think these clods could do better.

2. But they had been doing even worse before today.  O'Brien at first denied the allegations against him and indicated, through spokesmen, that he was considering legal remedies against the newspaper that reported them.  A few days later he admits it's all true.  These guys can carry around staffs and dress up in funny clothes and hats but one recognizes a pattern that applies to those who don't claim any special expertise in the field of morals.  Deny, deny, deny.  Then, if it turns out that they've got the goods on you, issue a "frank" apology to those who "may be offended." 

3. The Church's high officials are unable to see what this all looks like to people who aren't blinded by their devotion to a bureaucracy that has had the great good sense to promote them into its upper echelons. It's not that there are some bad peaches.  The orchard's soil is rotten.  The only people who don't understand this have read Augustine's Confessions in the original Latin.

4. The celibacy requirement for priests should be abolished.  In theory, it's a sacrifice, but in practice it has the effect of screening out healthy people.  The priesthood has become a hideaway for cripples whose sexual predilictions have to be secret in any case.  This is another thing understood by virtually eveyone who hasn't studied Catholic theology.

5. O'Brien himself seems to have understood. Just a couple of days before the allegations surfaced in news reports, he said in a BBC interview that priests should be able to be husbands and fathers.  He had a reputation for "liberal" views and was therefore required to swear an oath of fealty to Catholic orthodoxy before becoming a cardinal in 2003.  He then appears to have toed the line in public while continuing in private his double life.  It's evident he wanted to be a cardinal.  But what does he think about his Church's teachings?

Octogenarian retires

I haven't relieved myself on the subject of the pope's early retirement.  What's surprising to me is that so many people seem to care.  It reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad on the occasion of John Lennon's death.  I thought it was "important," he did not, and, sensing that he was getting the better of the argument, I resorted to a dubious strategy: the querulous appeal to public opinion.  I said that if enough people think it's an important event, then it is necessarily an important event.  He's a physicist and his answer to that was that you cannot decide the truth of a question by putting it to a vote.

Anyway.  Octogenarian calls it a career!  Big deal.  Apparently he has stacked the college of cardinals, or whatever you call that school of elderly bachelors who dress up in robes and funny hats and use smoke signals to alert the waiting world that they've selected the next pope, with like-minded reactionaries, so there is little chance of anything changing. 

I find, however, that I agree with some people who appear to care rather a lot.  Here is Jane Kramer, an evident Catholic, on "what the pope can pray for."  (In retirement, he plans to live a life of prayer.)  She hopes he will gain enlightenment on the meaning of "deviant," a word that he seems to have become fond of in his former role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a part of the Church bureaucracy for which Kramer provides this helpful gloss:  "formerly known as the Inquisition."  The pope has applied the term to nuns who want to serve the poor and a liberation theologian who declared himself "Marxist as Luke."  Kramer suggests the term should be reserved for Holocaust-denying cardinals and bishops who don't call the cops when priests are buggering young children. 

I only wish she had worked into her essay how his artificial pacemaker has permitted him, in the ninth decade of life, to carry on about the evils of technology.

Michael Gerson's long words: a short interpretation

In a column published in the Star Tribune last Tuesday, Michael Gerson describes the controversy regarding the Affordable Care Act and "religious freedom" in the following terms:

At issue is whether Obamacare's broad mandate of insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacients should apply to institutions with moral objections.  For more than a year, the administration has struggled to clarify a set of regulations, while provoking 44 legal challenges.

Well, it must be a pretty bad policy if it has provoked 44 legal challenges, right?  But what if there are 44 crazy fanatics who can afford lawyers and the court filing fees? 

Then there are "abortifacients" and "sterilization" to consider.  These may be known to you as the morning after pill and vasectomies, respectively.  But calling things by their familiar names will not advance the cause.  People may then notice that what you call "moral objections" is more like nostalgia for the days when the church was preeminent and human life was more plausibly described as nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.

Coffeeshop reading and its dangers

I got a kick out of this over at 3 Quarks Daily. As one who has done a lot of reading in coffeeshops, I have some experience of my own with the unsolicited literary criticism of fellow customers.  If you're reading a "great book," such as a "classic novel," you tend to attract cult followers of the particular author, or cultural bag ladies who are all agog over a man reading [fill in the name of famous author], and you end up having an embarrassing conversation that sounds sort of like what I imagine is said at a book club formed by some over-earnest ladies whose husbands had the good sense to major in Business Administration.

This general subject has been on my mind, because I've been thinking of doing some Bible-reading, but I don't want to do it in a public place.  I meet enough crackpots without using bait.  So I thought I'd use technology to disguise my Bible, a formerly impossible task, and, it turns out, currently still a difficult one, as the only e-Bibles I could find are clearly intended for enthusiasts.  I do not want the King James version with the words of Jesus in bold script, and I do not want any jazzy or hip-hop versions, either.  I want a decent study Bible, such as The Oxford Annotated Bible, that I can read on my Nook in a coffeeshop. That there doesn't seem to be much of a market for what I want suggests to me that my reason for undertaking a little Bible study is on target.  Regarding commentary on the Bible, there are oceans of devotional pap and continents of manifest balderdash, also considerable ridicule, much of it smug and uninformed.  I thought I'd open a new blog category, the Books of the Bible, and give a straight account of what I think people should know about them.  I'd have to dodge around plenty--I want more than three entries before stalling out, and Numbers is not my favorite--but maybe, if I could attain a certain critical mass, I'd persevere to the end and compile sixty-six entries in the category: a mini-commentary on the Bible.

The world will be deprived of this contribution to scholarship if I cannot find a decent e-Bible to read on my coffeebreaks.

Regoogling the clergy

I googled the clergy again, an exercise that unfailingly raises my hackles.  The article I came upon, having entered the name of a classmate (Steve Paulson) whom I know to be a professor of systematic theology at a Lutheran seminary, is entitled "Against the Holy Blasphemers."  For those disinclined to click on the link, trust me: the pugnacious title is characteristic of the whole.  Who are "the holy blasphemers"?  Lutherans whose view of homosexuals is more, shall we say, moderate than those of the author, Dr Steven Paulson.  Of course his view is the Lutheran, biblical one sporting the imprimatur of St Paul, that fount of wisdom on all matters sexual.  

Dr Paulson gives the impression of a man who, standing at the lectern before thirty mild and admiring theological students, is not accustomed to being contradicted, and has as a result lost any inclination to self-edit.  "Blasphemers!"  "Fanatics!"  To me, it seems over the top, but then you can imagine how annoying it is to be outvoted by a bunch of know-nothing laypeople.

It's a wonder that the article is so long, since the author has nothing more than the familiar bible-says argument, but on a second reading the mystery lifts.  It's not that the reasoning is subtle, it's that the wind is strong.  Who really is the fanatic?  "They know," writes Dr Paulson (his emphasis), "even though they have no word from God to stand on."  As opposed to: "I know, and I have the word from God to stand on."  Here is the last sentence of "the word from God" that he chooses to cite:

Though they know God's decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them (Romans 1:32).

You can see why he's against ordaining homosexuals.  They don't even deserve to live.  Disagree?  Fanatic!  Blasphemer!

Reading Leviticus

Judith Thurman says she reads the Bible--"especially Leviticus"--to prepare herself for election-year arguments. Since she's chary with the details, here's some of what she will have found.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (18:22)

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. (21:10)

The Lord said to Moses, "Say to the people of Israel, If a woman conceives, and bears a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as at the time of her menstruation, she shall be unclean.  And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.  Then she shall continue for thirty-three days in the blood of her purifying; she shall  not touch any hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying are completed." (12:1-5)

These are the living things which you may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.  Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven-footed and chews the cud, among the animals, you may eat. . . .  the swine, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew its cud, is unclean to you.  Of their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you. (11: 2-3, 7-8)

You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (19:18)

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (19:33-34) 

Republicans will notice that I've skipped around in order to arrange the items in descending order of import.

On a spring day

A beautiful spring day in Minneapolis, the first one this year in which the hum of lawn mowers in  neighborhoods seems a correlative of summer. 

I'm home from work after attending, this morning, the funeral of a work colleague of many years, someone I liked a lot.  He was a Catholic, and after the service it was a relief to walk out of the church into the sun and past the school next door where uniformed children shouted on the playground.  Inside, the median age, boosted somewhat by the two officiants, was probably 60-something.  The homily was boilerplate:  he'd said it a thousand times, and then the censer and incense--to me, not inured by frequent exposures, it seems creepy, repugnant.  In the entryway, on shelving to the side of the casket, there were pamphlets, including "What Does the Church Teach About Evolution?"  No one should care.  There were prayers for the pope and Archbishop John Nienstedt, who are not favorites of mine.  It would be easier to feel some sympathy for these guys if they ever seemed honestly perplexed about something.  But perplexity is for the fallible. They know, for it is written, and the Church teaches.

My friend was just one of countless decent and devout Roman Catholics.  I'm sure, for example, that Garry Wills is right about the nuns he has known.  But he's right about the old guys in the funny hats, too.  Here are some cartoons they wouldn't like.  Same-sex marriage and humor--two things they can't stand.  And, speaking of Wills, here is more of his good sense.

The archbishop writes

On the editorial page of today's Star Tribune newspaper, John Nienstedt, head of the Catholic Church's local subsidiary, criticizes this editorial cartoon in a letter:

I respect and appreciate the role the Star Tribune plays in fostering dialogue on the important issues of our day. While we've not always held the same opinions or seen these issues through the same lens, I know that the publishers and editors of the paper are good people who, like me, work hard to fulfill their mission with dedication and integrity.

So it's with a heavy heart that I write to express my sadness at the depiction of the Catholic Church in Steve Sack's April 30 editorial cartoon. We welcome the dialogue about these important issues, but the depiction crossed the line. Let us address our differences with courtesy, care and compassion. It's only then that we may find some common ground and understanding.

That's the whole letter.  Did the editors edit out Nienstedt's argument?  Since Jesus was silent about homosexuality and same-sex marriage, the crossed line is not the one dividing truth from falsehood.  What line was crossed?  And why is the archbishop so coy about naming it in a letter that purports to complain about it?

Here is a theory.  There is a line separating the robed old men at the top of the Catholic Church hierarchy from the rest of the human race.  Criticism may cross this line, but only if it's headed in one direction--from them, at the rest of us.  The cartoonist was headed north on a south-bound one-way. 

The invaluable Garry Wills has more on the general topic.

Christopher Hitchens is dead; Ross Douthat comments

Christopher Hitchens is dead and every journalist who ever had a drink with him wants us to know it.  Ross Douthat, for example.  I wish this column wasn't a representative specimen of the work product of a regular New York Times op-ed columnist.  Let us take a look at some more or less randomly chosen passages and see whether it is possible to extract sense from the wheedling tone, the wordy self-regard.

• "Intellectually minded Christians, in particular, had a habit of talking about Hitchens as though he were one of them already--a convert in the making, whose furious broadsides against God were just the prelude to an inevitable reconciliation."  The wordiness starts with the first three words.  Why not "Christian intellectuals"?  Possible explanation: somehow the more dissolute expression is less apt to cause the reader to demand of the remote author, "Name one."  The gambit here is the cousin of that editorial cliche, "Thoughtful people believe. . . ."  It's as if the author, sensing the lameness of his argument, is obliged to make it impressive by invoking deep-thinking phantoms.  When Douthat says "Intellectually minded Christians," he means: I, Ross Douthat, smart Christian.  He's the intellectually minded one who, overcome by the force of Hitchens's arguments, simply says, x = y: really, deep-down, he's one of us.  (No, he isn't.)
• "American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens--by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis to W.H. Auden and Eveyln Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism."  Why not Bertrand Russell and David Hume, a couple of Brits "with a gift for argument" whom Hitchens was in general agreement with on the topic under discussion?  Also, does the author realize that it is not an advertisement for the vibrancy of American Christian intellectual life to allow that nowadays it is sustained, "to a large extent," by a handful of dead Englishmen? 
• "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin's poem 'Aubade'--that 'death is no different whined at than withstood.'"  Oh, spare us.  Is it Douthat's point that there is a God, because he'd be depressed if there weren't?  Or that he majored in English? 
• "Officially, Hitchens's creed was one with Larkin's.  But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair."  What exactly is meant by "giving in to despair"?  It's not as if Larkin committed suicide, and the aforementioned Russell and Hume were somewhat ruddier than, say, Kierkegaard.  But so what?  The question is about what's true, not who's cheerful. 
• "My hope--for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead--is that now he finally knows why [it's wrong to give in to despair]."  Only the rhetorical flourishes of unbelievers earn the epithet "happy talk." 

On miracles

The Star Tribune had an article the other day about a sullied but possibly miraculous communion wafer at a Catholic church in South St. Paul.  The wafer fell to the floor during a mass and, as it had presumably been consecrated, was placed in a chalice with water so that it would dissolve.  It seems that, having touched the floor, the wafer no longer qualifies as the body of Christ.  Nevertheless, you can't just toss it in the scrap, either.  There are rules covering these cases. Well, the wafer did not dissolve, as expected, but sank to the bottom and turned "a blood-red color," causing some to think they were in the presence of a miracle.  The Star Tribune article continues:

The church's pastor turned it over to the archdiocese for examination.

The archdiocese sent the host to an unnamed laboratory to be tested and released the results Wednesday in a statement from archdiocese spokesman Dennis McGrath.

"Exhaustive biological analysis by an independent scientific laboratory has determined that the reddish coloration on the Holy Communion host that was kept in a water solution after it was discovered on the floor of St. Augustine Church . . . was caused by fungus.  The host in question has been disposed of in a manner prescribed by church law.

"While the Catholic Church fully recognizes the possibility of miracles and remains open to their possibility, it does so with extreme scrutiny, investigation and care. This incident was the result of natural biological causes and should not be considered in any other way."

You have to love the tone of breathless stupidity in the church statement.  The analysis was exhaustive.  The laboratory was independent.  The situation called for scrutiny, investigation and care.  Oh, my! If you're worried about the manner in which the fungus-infested host was discarded (and who isn't?), rest easy: it was accomplished "in a manner prescribed by church law."  Whew! 

It's also good to know that "the Catholic Church fully recognizes the possibility of miracles and remains open to their possibility."  On the question of "miracles," the key word is evidently possibility.  There's a lot to love about this little story.  I think my favorite aspect concerns the wafer's ascent up the chain of command.  The parish priest turned it over to the archdiocese "for examination."  The archdiocese in turn called in the scientists.  That's why the archdiocese boys have been promoted--they know who is most apt to be able to explain the mystery, which in the end must be attributed to "natural biological causes," or, more colloquially, fungus.

 

 

A professorial oracle: I demur

In yesterday's Star Tribune, Stephen J Heaney, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of St Thomas, argues that a rule mandating "that nearly every insurance plan cover sterilization procedures and contraceptives" amounts to "an indefensible assault on freedom of conscience, of association and of religion" for Roman Catholics.  He purports to "explain the situation." 

Perhaps the first thing to notice is the words Professor Heaney chooses to deploy.  He speaks, for example, of "sterilization procedures," which in ordinary speech refers to a surgery imposed upon an unwilling subject by court order or the fiat of a tyrannical power.  But what the professor means by "sterilization" presumably includes one of  the most common, elected surgeries performed in the United States--the one most of us refer to as a "vasectomy."

No one is saying that Catholic hospitals must perform vasectomies, or abortions.  Insurance policies, however, should cover them.  And medical professionals should tell patients about their options, including those that are not available at Catholic hospitals.  People can get the services they conclude are best for them at some less benighted institution. 

When Professor Heaney isn't indulging himself in fanciful metaphors concerning "pork stores," he manages to make some straightforward pronouncements that are pretty bizarre.  Here he is "refuting" the claims of a previous writer, State Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL-Minneapolis):

Medicine is about restoring people to health.  Abortion destroys a living human being.  Contraception, when it works, prevents pregnancy. . . .  Deliberately frustrating healthy functions and destroying human beings is the opposite of health care.

This conception of the practice of medicine appears to ignore the entire realm of preventative care.  Is the professor against doctors telling patients they should quit smoking, or lose weight, or be screened for colon cancer?  Does he deny that for many women another pregnancy is medically undesirable, even dangerous?  The professor seems to think it is never a bad idea for a woman to become pregnant.  How many women concur?  And who should decide whether or not it is a good idea for her to have a baby?

The main thing the professor's article explains is why so many people, including most American Catholics, think the Church's teachings on matters touching upon sexuality are completely bonkers.  "Contraception, when it works, prevents pregnancy."  Yes, professor.  Now I understand why the Church is okay with the rhythm method.  It isn't on the insurance menu--and, better yet, it doesn't work.

I'm against it

Sometimes--frequently--I get so annoyed by stuff I hear or read that I can hardly think of anything else till I've expressed my annoyance, thereby achieving a sort of exorcism.  Thus a blog.  It doesn't even matter if anyone reads it.  I doubt the therapeutic effect could be any greater if my posts were published on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Yesterday the Star Tribune newspaper printed on its editorial page a long, pompous editorial by Mitch Pearlstein, the director of a local conservative think tank.  He really annoys me.  Yesterday's piece was about family breakdown.  Oh woe! woe! woe!  Nobody wants to acknowledge that family breakdown is a leading cause of the gap between "haves" and "have nots."  But he will trod where only big thinkers dare go.  Oh woe! woe! woe!  The sociologists all concur it's terrible!  Oh woe! woe! woe!  We must permit vouchers for private school education.  And so on.

Here's a typical Pearlstein gambit.  Having appealed to reasonable people by fussily charging "liberals" and "conservatives" of different sins on the issue of wealth inequality, he writes:

Might I respectfully add here that it is impossible for me to imagine how liberal friends could not be at least as concerned as I am from the conservative side of the aisle about the thinning of marriage and its straight line to social class rupture.

Emphasis in original.  He is so concerned.  He can't imagine why his "liberal friends" aren't.  Permit him to respectfully point out that he's better than they are.  His actual meaning would be clearer if the italics came two words later. 

You might think that the need for private school education does not necessarily follow from data about wealth inequality and family disintegration.  But Pearlstein has decided that vouchers would be a good thing and consequently every possible social observation attests to the necessity of adopting his view.  Here he is performing the pivot:

I asked [the] principal of a Catholic elementary school in the Twin Cities what her institution's mission was.  "To manifest God's love in every child," she said, or words close to that.  As educational mission statements go, this was one of the briefiest yet meatiest ever drafted.

No, it's tied with a million others for the most meaningless.  "To manifest God's love in every child" is just the empty cant of a dull nun.  It doesn't mean anything.  I hate the way we are all expected to bow down and pay obeisance soon as anyone suggests that their view is supported by religion.  I guess if you disagree with Mitch Pearlstein, then you must be against making God's love manifest in children.

Well, count me among that small group.  No tax dollars should support religious schools.  No God's love manifest in young children.  No taking time out from math and reading for lessons concerning the Virgin Mary.  I'm against it, and I'm feeling better.

London calling Katherine Kersten

Writing yesterday in the Star Tribune newspaper, Katherine Kersten explains the recent rioting in London to puzzled auditors here in the Upper Midwest.  It is all to be attributed to a falling away from religion.  Here is the evidence:

• The pope says so.
• The chief rabbi of Great Britain says so.
• Though they come from different religious traditions, their diagnoses are "strikingly similar,"  and it would be a miracle if a Jew and a Catholic were both wrong.

The details are not very much more coherent.  According to the rabbi, anarchy has been brewing in the UK for half a century.  In the 1960s, you see, the West "abandoned its traditional ethic of self-restraint."  Having "tossed the Judeo-Christian moral code out the window," you could count on rioting in another fifty years. 

It had indeed been brewing for a long while.  The effect follows so tardily upon the cause that those not predisposed to accept the argument will never be persuaded.  For the argument is rooted not in logic but in the psychology of those who advance it.  They think morality depends upon religion and do not want to make it too hard on themselves to prove it.  Why now?  And, since they keep talking about "the West," why London?  Perhaps in another thirty years there will be a riot in Paris and this, too, will be attributed to the "moral vacuum" following upon Europe's rejection of religious values.

Kersten proceeds to the similarly turbid views of the pope before closing with a call for the "remoralization" of society.  In general, beware of arguments that lean upon made-up words.  And beware of those eager to perform sociology whenever some big event occurs.  This tendency to detect in Everything That Happens more evidence for one's own most cherished beliefs is a sign of a mind having fallen off a hinge.

My last post?

I was going to live blog today's Rapture, but the 8-year-old had a swimming lesson at 10:00 a.m., and having gotten off to a slow start I decided to bag it.  The Huffington Post is on the job, anyway. 

For those inclined to consider the earth-bound consequences of our epochal time, Hendrik Hertzberg points out that it does not bode well for Republicans.  Sure, a disproportionate number of them will be swept to their reward, but a necessary corollary is that those left behind trend Democratic.  Not that it  matters, but the Republican side of the presidential race will be transformed:

The Rapture will usefully thin out the Republican field, which . . . has already been culled by the departure of Trump and Huckabee.  As of tomorrow, Palin, Bachmann, Santorum, and possibly Pawlenty (a Lutheran who attends an evangelical megachurch) will be out of the picture, having been bodily swooped up to Heaven (along with, redundantly, Huckabee).

I'm not sure about Pawlenty, either.  Here in Minnesota, where we have the advantage of daily close-ups (except for when he's traveling in Iowa or New Hampshire), the matter of Pawlenty's religion is sort of murky.  He was raised a Catholic, then switched over to megachurch Lutheranism, his wife's brand, without exhibiting any signs of soulful struggle.  He didn't talk much about God and Faith and All Of That as a state legislator, or as a candidate for governor, or as governor.  Now, of course, he's running for president, and his favorite conversational topics have changed somewhat.  I do not pretend to be able to look into another man's heart, but God can, and I'm not sure He'll deem Pawlenty Rapture-ready.  If he is left behind, he'll move toward the top of the thinned field, although it is of course possible that Trump will get back into the race. 

One advantage of being--how to say?--religiously casual is that you can laugh about this stuff.  Beats hell out of being all overwrought with expectation, and then on the morning after feeling obliged to work up alternative explanations.  It's an old drill.  The gospel narratives all predict an imminent end to human history.  For example, Matthew 16:27-28, reads (Revised Standard Version):

For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done.  Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Concerning this passage, Krister Stendahl, contributor to Peake's Commentary on the Bible and Professor of New Testament Studies at Harvard Divinity School, writes:

. . . the allusion to Psalms 62:13 ('he shall repay every man according to his deed') is used as in the Psalter referring only to God's steadfast love towards the righteous.  This good connotation is intensified in [verse] 28 where the coming of the Kingdom is expected within a generation.  But coming in what sense?

The educated ones have the good sense to ask questions, not answer them.   

 

 

 

And another thing

The Katherine Kersten column I criticized here includes the following:

Today, American democracy's Judeo-Christian roots are no longer well-understood or appreciated.  In fact, we're accustomed to hear religious faith abused by influential voices intent on driving it to the margins of our public square.

Possibly these "influential voices" would be more influential if their larynxes had names.  Anyway, it is evident that, despite their best efforts, religion has not been driven "to the margins of our public square."  Not even close.  While Kersten was composing her column, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, hard at work on the problems of The Lone Star State, signed a Proclamation reading, in its entirety:

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; and

WHEREAS, a combination of higher than normal temperatures, low precipitation and low relative humidity has caused an extreme fire danger over most of the State, sparking more than 8,000 wildfires which have cost several lives, engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of land and destroyed almost 400 homes, causing me to issue an ongoing disaster declaration since December of last year; and

WHEREAS, these dire conditions have caused agricultural crops to fail, lake and reservoir levels to fall and cattle and livestock to struggle under intense stress, imposing a tremendous financial and emotional toll on our land and our people; and

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto signed my name and have officially caused the Seal of State to be affixed at my Office in the City of Austin, Texas, this the 21st day of April, 2011.

RICK PERRY
Governor of Texas

Our founding fathers would not have been capable of creating such a document.  Bless them.