Closer to Home

The Art of Friendship... Anther Great Cardus Piece

2011-03-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

POINT OF VIEW
The Art of Friendship
March 18, 2011 - David Taylor

"Originally and properly within I am still alone by myself: in my freedom in relation to the whole cosmos; with my poetry and truth; with the question of my needs and desires and loves and hates; with my known and sometimes unknown likes and dislikes; with my capacities and propensities; as my own doctor, as the sovereign architect, director, general and dictator of the whole, of my own earth and heaven, my cosmos, God and fellow-men; as the incomparable inventor and sustainer of myself; in first and final solitude."
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, 231, describing here a "Nietzschean" perspective on human relationship

In 2010 Forbes magazine placed Lady Gaga at #7 on their annual list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women—just two spots behind Hilary Clinton and thirty-four spots ahead of Queen Elizabeth II.

The World of Donquixotry

I have just gotten off the phone with an artist. I can't think of a better incitement for this essay than the anecdote that he relayed. He returned yesterday from a gathering with other artists in the Northwest. He described the atmosphere that marked their gathering as the plaintive bleating of lonely, wounded sheep.

I confess to being baffled by the strange obsession with loneliness that marks much of the art world. On the one hand, artists are known for perpetuating a kind of cult of loneliness, while on the other they rue the lonely life that many of them, due to the confused circumstances of art in modern society, find themselves forced to live—even in their own homes, even in New York City.

Lady Gaga, who, as I type this sentence, has amassed a mind-boggling 28,946,681 "friends" on Facebook, offers this curriculum vitae for her artistic calling:

"We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be or rather to become, in the future. When you are lonely, I will be lonely too. And this is the fame."

Two things strike me about her statement. One, it represents the kind of donquixotry of ideas, vaguely thrilling but ultimately damaging, that I readily hear rolling out of the mouths of artists. And two, her statement reminds me of a similar epithet that Nietzsche used to describe himself: "I am no man; I am dynamite." The Swiss theologian Karl Barth noted that Nietzsche's life could be aptly summarized in the phrase "azure isolation."

Nietzsche was the man, according to Barth, who wanted to be "admired and honoured and loved," yet who also wished to live "six thousand feet above time and man." This concurrent need and repulsion for other people, this relational schizophrenia, this sense of being "special" yet also feeling intensely, insecurely ordinary describes to my mind a great number of contemporary artists. In personal conversation, I hear artists confessing their struggle with loneliness, and it grieves me. I feel often helpless. But it stirs me to ask how the church can respond.

In her splendid book, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, Jennifer Herdt offers the church the kind of help we sorely need. In it she explores (among other things) ideas about social formation. How should individuals conceive their relationship to the community? What does it mean to act in a way that is "properly and uniquely" our own, to use Charles Taylor's language, while also happily recognizing our indebtedness to others? What does it mean for an artist to have "good friends"? Why does it matter? And what are we protected against if we follow Herdt's advice? I would like to connect some of her ideas about friendship to the life of an artist.

But before Herdt, let me take a quick detour to Andy Crouch.

The Virtue of Good Friendship

In his book Culture Making, Crouch proposes the idea that all of us have three kinds of relationships in our lives: a 3, a 12, and a 120. At most, Crouch writes, I will have three close friends, folks with whom I share a tightly knit, vulnerable, loyal, and cherished relationship. I'll have 12 reasonably kindred friends. And I'll have around 120 acquaintances who comprise a loose association of like-minded people.

With whatever magical powers of observation he possesses, Andy gets it right. I do in fact have a 3, a 12 and a 120! I would like to propose that artists need three good friends in order to truly flourish in their calling. But sadly, most barely have one—which, as I have witnessed up close, is cause for considerable distress. Compelled by compassion, we must keep praying for artists to find good friends. Compelled by truth, we must keep seeking to think rightly about friendship.

As Herdt explains (and here I am adopting her general observations on human behaviour to the lives of artists), an artist's calling will find its proper orientation "in the presence of others and in response to others." In the company of good friends, an artist discovers the resources both to want to cultivate virtue—to be humble, generous, diligent or courageous, for example—as well as to persist in the practices which sustain these virtues. Good friends help us to resist the hydra of vices—sloth and jealousy and so on—that betray us against our best intentions.

In the company of good friends an artist discovers—though not without struggle—that the service of another's good is also, with the Spirit's help, a common good. Oscar Wilde remarks, "Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."

In the company of good friends, an artist discovers the need for, as well as the joy of debt to, other "exemplars." These are men and women who embody the kind of life an artist aspires to attain. That might be Herbert or Bach. That might be O'Connor. That might be Fujimura. On the one hand, then, an artist needs to see how other believer artists have embodied their imitation of Christ. On the other, an artist can welcome their influence in her life as a means of Christ's grace.

From a Christian perspective, an artist needs regular reminders that she is not self-determined. She is constituted instead by the often rag-tag group of people, whether smart or simple, cool or uncool, that God has lovingly surrounded her with. Herdt wonderfully expresses this dynamic:

"We may become aware of how our capacity to critique our own partial malformations and the malformations of our own formative exemplars has itself been made possible through our encounter with yet other exemplars. So the ardor of Christians to imitate Christ by emulating the heroic martyr was corrected by the ardor to emulate the ascetic Desert Father, and corrected in turn by the ardor to emulate the mendicant preacher, the foreign missionary, the civil rights worker, and so on."

A Few Dangers

What does the presence of good friends in an artist's life protect against? I can suggest three dangers. The first danger, appearing often enough in the art world, involves the temptation to use people but to pretend to treat them as friends (a temptation Augustine anticipated long ago). My filmmaker friend Jeffrey Travis told me a story once. He remarked that he went to an "industry party" in Hollywood, and it was the weirdest party he'd ever been to. People would approach him and ask him who he was. If they thought they had something to gain by knowing him, they would stay. Otherwise they moved on. No "pardon me." No "nice to meet you." Their departures were crassly blunt.

A second danger is the need for artists to assert self-sufficiency. Rousseau once quipped that "a truly happy being is a solitary being." It's a deeply confused opinion, but also one that persists in the world of art, where artists continually struggle against the twin need to be original ("my own") and to connect. ("with you").

A third danger involves the desire of artists to play out a bohemian persona. The bohemian persona is always "true to himself," one part "authentic," one part "autonomous." Or as Rousseau once put it: "If I am not better, at least I am different." In the art world, this danger manifests itself often enough as an attitude of anti-responsibility to society, where an artist asserts the "right" to be responsible mainly if not exclusively to himself. "I'm not a baby-sitter. I'm a performer," glam-rock musician Adam Lambert once pronounced. And it's a sentiment that many of us as believer artists find appealing, for better and for worse. Yet however useful we may find people around us, we still as ever feel the sting of loneliness.

Soul Friends

The Greek playwright Euripedes long ago remarked that "one loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives." A few centuries later, St. John Cassian (360-435 AD) called the indissoluble bond between "soul friends" as "what is broken by no chances, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part." To rephrase Augustine, God has made us for this kind of friend, and our hearts are restless until we find one. Artists, despite their push-pull feelings about people, yearn for deep friendship and while three would be ideal, many pray for just one good friend.

I spent my entire twenties living with a loneliness that I was afraid publicly to admit. It was partly my own fault. I suffered the embarrassingly pathological need to find elite, Inkling-like friendships and I would settle for nothing else. Since my search involved the quest for the impossibly ideal friend, I ended up with no close friends and a hardened, fearful heart. It took the gracious but fiercely determined love of two guys to expose my broken thinking and to re-introduce me to the fabulous world of male friendship.

When I come across the kinds of statements that Lady Gaga makes about art and loneliness, my first instinct is to dismiss them as irritatingly silly, because, well, they are, in a manner. Yet something about her views on the vocation of art-making appears to be resonating with many artists, both pop and high. So I keep listening. I don't think they're particularly helpful, but they do stir me to keep praying for artists, that they would find good friends, even one such friend. Surely Christ ceaselessly prays this prayer on our behalf, and I cannot imagine that we as the church would want to pray less.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Against Heresies: Why do they hate Aslan so? Polly Toynbee on the r...

2010-12-15T22:31:00.000-08:00

Why do they hate Aslan so? Polly Toynbee on the repugnancy of the atonement

The columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article in The Guardian on 5th December 2005 with the rather acerbic title “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.”

I will spare you the full extent of her invective against the Christian imagery found in C.S. Lewis' children's stories. But among her numerous thorny remarks the following stood out:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?

Perhaps the most obvious thing to say by way of explanation about her choice of adjective, is that it is indicative of a heart wedded to the wisdom of this passing age. It is as straightforward a statement of aversion and distaste at the very notion of a substitutionary atonement as one could wish to find. And yet, to those who hold to the presuppositions laid out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:8, it hardly comes as much of a surprise.

It stands in marked contrast to the expression of the regenerate heart that sees in the cross both the wisdom and power of God. Of all the great confessions of faith perhaps it is the Belgic Confession (Q. 26) that best verbalizes the sentiments of the regenerate mind:

If, then, we should seek for another mediator who would be favorably inclined toward us, whom could we find who loved us more than He who laid down His life for us, even while we were His enemies? And if we seek for one who has power and majesty, who is there that has so much of both as He who sits at the right hand of God and to whom hath been given all authority in heaven and on earth?

And what should we make of her question? Of course we did not ask Christ to die for us. None of us wanted him to.

This is a point underlined, as it were in thick marker pen, time and again on the pages of the Bible. From Isaiah's description of Christ as despised and rejected by men (Isaiah 53:3) all the way to Paul's retrospective description of Christian believers as being ungodly and enemies toward God (Romans 5:6, 10).

In the book of Judges there is the pattern of apostasy, oppression from enemies, and cries to God for relief from this misery. In his grace God raises up judges who save the people of God from the hands of their oppressors. Judges 13 seemingly opens with this same pattern. Israel has turned from God to their evil ways, and God has handed them over to the Philistines. But the pattern ends there. Just when we expect to hear a cry to God for relief and rescue there is nothing but silence.

When the Angel of the Lord announces the birth of Samson, who will begin to save Israel from the Philistines, it is therefore clear that this is an act of sheer grace on God's part. God sent them a Savior, even though they did not ask him to. The span of time between the book of Judges and that column in The Guardian may have spread over several millenia, but chronology cannot cover up the similarities that exist.

The very glory of the atonement is that Christ died for his enemies. We were not seeking after a Saviour from heaven, but running and hiding from the God who is really there. As Paul reminded the Colossians, it was for those who were hostile in their minds toward God that Christ hung on the cross. It was by that death that he made peace and effected reconciliation with God (Colossians 1:19-22).

Like Polly Toynbee, I never asked him to do this. That he did it at all is all to the praise of his glorious grace.

Babette's Feast in Our Digital Age

2010-12-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

December 10, 2010
The Trinity Forum-Update

Hospitality in a Digital Age

This weekend is reportedly the high-water mark for the holiday party season. Many friends are juggling multiple soirees in the course of an evening, in the attempt to see and connect with friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Most of these same revelers (including yours truly) hold accounts with and spend time on social networking sites—so it’s worth reflecting on why we still make such efforts to gather together, to prepare homes and meals and music rather than just posting a quick and cheerful holiday greeting on our social network profiles.

Our newest Trinity Forum Reading, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, may actually speak even more profoundly in our digital age than when it first appeared in 1950. Martine and Philippa, the elderly and ascetic protagonists of the tale, live a form of precursor to our disembodied online life. They have “renounced the pleasures of this world” and physically withdrawn from much of the life of their village to better focus on what they believe to be “the true reality” of the New Jerusalem.

Consider now the half-billion people who use Facebook. The site reports that its average user has 130 “friends” and can “interact” with over 900 million “objects”—pages, groups, and events—generating more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. Those of us who use the site encounter an unending stream of information about people from every stage of our lives.

But while online communities can impart a great deal of information about us, they cannot provide the space for us to be known. A person is far more than a persona; an individual cannot be known only through words and images. It is little wonder that many people find that even several hundred online “friends” do not ease their profound sense of isolation. This is one reason many services are now working hard to connect themselves with real “places,” even by attaching GPS coordinates to people’s postings.

But even as our tools become more sophisticated, we will still find that our virtual communities can only flourish when they help us form and deepen real-world relationships, when they take seriously our embodied human nature. This is why hospitality of the most tangible kind is foremost among the practices worth cultivating in a digital age. In our story, it is only when Martine and Philippa open their home to the refugee Babette that they make possible her further act of hospitality that opens them to grace and connection, and helps to transform their small community.

Like most meaningful things in life, hospitality comes with a cost, requiring the sacrifice of money, time, and attention. Inviting people into our homes is of a different order than inviting their friendship online. The practice of hospitality can be inconvenient and disruptive, just as Babette’s extensive preparations detailed in our story upset the routine of the household, as we shift our focus from our own needs to those of our guests. How can we best welcome them? What food and drink would they like? Who would they enjoy meeting?

When someone is at our table, there is no convenient link to click to terminate a conversation or a friendship. We must be open to this person, their presence, and their conversation. Practiced properly, hospitality forces us to recognize the other as someone to be known, loved, welcomed, celebrated, and served—and so as someone who can begin to know us in turn.

Sincerely,
Cherie Harder
President

Cardus - We Are the Public

2010-12-04T20:04:00.000-08:00

Cardus - We Are the Public

POINT OF VIEW
We Are the Public
December 3, 2010 - Ray Pennings

It's time to reclaim the word "public."

I don't mean to sound like a nerdy grammatical purist, as if etymological arguments are a trumping corrective to everyday conversation. In this case, discussing the development of the Greek polis might be illuminating, but current examples provide enough fodder to make my case.

My concern is quite straightforward. Notions of inclusiveness and common good that were once understood as part of the term "public" have been lost. In its common usage today, the word has morphed to mean state-funded or endorsed and devoid of any religious claim—a positive antidote to the badness of things "private."

But words are important as the conveyors of meaning, and so losing this word impairs our ability to flourish in this pluralistic environment.

Let me clarify my concerns with a few specific examples. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is on a campaign, investigating universities that require faculty to sign a statement of faith. That fact alone (goes the charge) is a denial of academic freedom.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel on this subject, and while preparing my remarks I realized how easy it was to lose the argument by conceding to the other side the word "public." My first draft included the term "public universities," which I meant as a shorthand for universities that were funded by the state. Although this language was convenient and would have accurately communicated to my audience the universities to which I referred, it would force me to use a word other than "public" for the non-public funded universities.

But public funding had nothing to do with the question we were debating. We were discussing whether the explicit commitment to certain presuppositions or first principles in academic work was fatal to academic freedom. Was scholarship that took place in one type of academy, in which these presuppositions were explicit, of a different nature than the scholarship that took place in a different kind of institution, where the scholars might hold the same convictions but were not asked to make them explicit? I wanted to make the case that scholars in both settings were carrying out a public vocation—namely, that of the academy. The academy is called to add to the body of knowledge on which our society relies and to share it with the next generation. We do not support scholarship so that academics have the space to study and reflect on the questions their curiosities create. Rather, we support scholarship to enable them to make a contribution to the public so that we can all share and benefit from their insights.

Although this is a challenge to those who hold convictions like those of CAUT (and I use this example simply to illustrate—similar things are happening in various social spheres), I suspect it is equally a challenge to those who work in faith-based universities. Sometimes it is easier to retreat from the broader academy and focus more narrowly on the students and context of your own university, as if your responsibilities were purely local (or, to use the terminology preferred by some, private.)

But to give in to this language is to concede that religion is really a private matter, and this concession has consequences for both who can participate and how they participate in society. Even the Supreme Court of Canada noted in a 2002 decision that an understanding of secularism which implied religion had no place in the public square was misguided. Secularism, properly understood, is a pluralist principle. It does not divide society into two groups: one holding a privileged non-theistic framework that gets to dominate the public square, and another with theistic beliefs who can participate only if they keep quiet about their deeply-held convictions. The public includes both theistic and non-theistic believers.

That challenges what has become conventional thinking on the part of many: the idea that only non-theistic belief can be objective. Recently, I was before a foundation-granting committee with a proposed project that involved engagement with a multi-faith group of stakeholders. My questioner was puzzled how an organization like Cardus, which has clear statements regarding its Christian convictions on its website, might be qualified to lead such a process. "We don't do religion," he reminded me, convinced, I am sure, that he had the public interest at heart. It seemed to puzzle him that a person with faith commitments could properly engage a broader community.

I tried to answer his query by pointing out that it was precisely because of my faith commitments that I could respect the beliefs of others and support democratic pluralism. But what was lost in this, and so many other conversations like it, is the implicit view of the "public" that the question presupposes. If people of faith are disqualified from engaging and leading a multi-faith dialogue because their personal faith biases them, then the only ones left to do it are those who do not have theistic faith. But non-theistic faith also has its presuppositions. We are left with a truncated view of the public square.

In using these examples, I do not mean to suggest naively that there are not valid concerns and historic abuses that have provided impetus to this changing notion of what is public. There are settings in which academic freedom is stifled in the name of religion (and those who remember Copernicus will know this is not a problem of recent invention). There are studies—although, these days, this seems more prevalent among non-theists than theistic believers—in which professional standards are compromised and supposedly public square processes are used to proselytize, rather than engage in dialogue.

But let's not allow certain abuses of the term "public" to change the meaning of the word. A civil plural society cannot survive if we marginalize the public contribution of faith. This is a challenge to those who would engage in campaigns to marginalize faith. It is also a challenge to many people of faith who are content to retreat from the public square and reduce their religion to a "God and me" arrangement that is no one else's business. Faith is personal, but it is never private. Our core beliefs shape who we are, how we live, and what we pursue. They define who we consider to be our neighbour and what it is that we owe them.

There are many dimensions to this complex issue but if the conversation is to continue, we need words that communicate what we mean. Reclaiming the appropriate use of the word "public" is important in that process. After all, we are the public.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

How long will it be just me in the world?

2010-11-27T17:53:00.001-08:00

On Artists and Community...

2010-11-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

POINT OF VIEW
The Tricky Thing Is
November 26, 2010 - Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

In 2008, two things troubled me in culture: the death of author David Foster Wallace and a YouTube clip showing youth group kids singing, "You spin me right round, Jesus, right round," and whirling their socks in the air. The worship leader had told them they were on holy ground and needed to remove their shoes and wave their socks.

If I'd seen the YouTube clip at a different time, I might have laughed or felt a moment's dismay and moved on. It was bizarre to see what the quest for relevance can inspire, and it was outrageous to consider Moses' trembling at the burning bush turned into socks wheeling through strobe lighting. But since I felt freshly hurt by the death of an author I loved, the youth group silliness actually felt painful. It felt painful because Wallace's death had made me realize the extent to which I identified with the literary community, and this YouTube clip made me squirm to identify with the church. "Forget it," I wanted to say, "I'm with the cool people."

In college, when I identified that the arts were, unquestionably, part of what made me tick, I thought the most difficult part of being a writer and artist would be discerning acceptable content. Growing up, I had sorted art and entertainment something like this:

* "Edifying"
* "Corrupting"
* "Okay if you fast-forward a scene/mute a song/skip a few pages."

Discernment about content is important. As Cormac McCarthy's protagonist tells his son in The Road, "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever." The trickiest thing, though, was going to be that finding community in the arts can be a cause of great hope or great brokenness.

We are made for community—for many communities. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a process of realizing how large one's community really is. The infant thinks life is just him and Mom. The toddler learns to embrace family and friends. The young reader picks up Anne of Green Gables and finds imaginary kindred. The adult risks intimacy. The elderly ponder the world as their community and hope they have made it better for the next generation. We are created not just for one community, but for the expanse of human community.

Art is an essential part of that. Saying that audiences love artists may conjure scenes from Trekkies or images of teeny boppers swooning over Justin Bieber. Yet, in a real, non-creepy, non-adolescent way, there is respect, admiration, and appreciation between artist and audience—and what is that, except love?

It's accurate, then, to say readers loved fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, though most didn't know him and most didn't even know the fact or the extent of the depression he suffered. His suicide, at age 46, devastated the literary community. Reading Wallace's work, one sees a brilliant mind (he won a MacArthur "genius grant") having tremendous fun on the page. One also gets the sense that he was mining postmodern experience and evaluating those aspects that made life by turns delightful and absurd. He connected with a broad community that still grieves for him, and for good reason.

What concerns me is not that art can become a community, but that it is easy for any community to go haywire. Families can become ingrown and be threatened by outsiders. Friends can seek each other's approval to a co-dependent degree. Churches can demand to fill members' every social need.

The arts, too, can become insular. Simon and Garfunkel sing, satirically, "I have no need of friendship. Friendship causes pain. It's laughter and it's loving I disdain . . . I have my books and my poetry to protect me." The listener chuckles, picturing, maybe, a clove-smoking reader holed up in his shelf-lined apartment. The song portrays one harmful use of the arts—a way of avoiding face-to-face friendships and the pain of other communities.

Living in multiple, overlapping communities gets complicated. Where our community is, there, to an extent, our loyalty and love are, and there our identity is. What we love is messy, complicated, and often our loves compete.

C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces illustrates this well. Early in the book, the king of Glome sacrifices his daughter Psyche by abandoning her in the land of the gods. Instead of dying, Psyche marries Cupid. Psyche's sister Orual is unaware of this marriage and travels to find Psyche and bring her home. When the sisters meet, Orual demands and wheedles and whines that Psyche must return. Psyche meets this with gravity and calm. "Orual—think. How can I go back? This is my home. I am a wife." Psyche's love for her sister is not lessened one jot by being married to Cupid, yet her love for him means she cannot meet Orual's demand.

Union with Christ changes everything. There will be demands from other communities that Christians cannot meet. The arts bestow an aura of "cool," of wisdom, and of knowingness on those who drop the right names. It's easy to bask in the hipness of contemporary literature. Craving this identity-validating hipness can turn the arts into Community Number One, and instead of making and enjoying art as worship to God, we can make this an object of worship, an end in itself.

The arts can be a radiant part of a flourishing identity that Christ is remaking. Nonetheless, true flourishing cannot happen if the arts become the community around which everything else orders itself. And so, I can't say "I'm with the cool people" or, borrowing from Simon and Garfunkel, "I have no need of Christians, Christians cause me pain." (Or embarrassment.)

The pressure to say this is crushing. Christian visual artist Makoto Fujimura participated in a conference in which presenters wrote open letters to North American churches, and in his, he incisively identified the uneasy relationship between churches and artists: "We are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are." Artists sit on the outskirts, perceiving. They are fantastic at deconstruction. Writers can't read a book without deconstructing how the writing works, so it's hard for them not to look at how church is put together. To artists (and to many other postmodern folk), the way church looks is as much a message as the sermon. It can be difficult for the perceptive misfit to embrace the church as home. Certainly many have decided—most recently and famously novelist Anne Rice—that finding community there is impossible. As with Rice, they say, "I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider."

It's essential for the Christian artist to know, setting out, that the artistic community will tug strongly. This false promise will ring out again and again: "If I immerse myself in the arts, I will be made new; I will be a more whole person, with respected insight into culture and truth." The Christian artist must stare down this desire and know it is Christ who makes all things new, whole, right, and bountiful.

The Christian who wants to nurture Christian artists could help greatly by addressing questions of identity and community. The person who wants to encourage Christian artists could show hospitality, making artists at home in the church, and helping them, more and more, to make Christ their home. We need each other's help. All Christians will have other communities, but we have no other true home, and what one defines as home changes everything.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

So people ask me what is everyday life like in Australia, or how does the average Aussie really spend their time...

2010-11-25T22:23:00.000-08:00

Of Providence and Squanto... Thanksgiving 2010

2010-11-25T21:07:00.000-08:00

Strangers, Saints and Indians
Squanto was 'sent of God,' wrote Pilgrim Governor William Bradford.

By JOHN A. MURRAY

There's little question that we live in a hyperpartisan country, and it might seem that only divine intervention can bring about the cooperation needed to move our nation forward. Perhaps in this light we might pause to remember it was only the cooperation of some very unlikely parties that made possible the first Thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims who set sail for the New World on the Mayflower in September 1620 embodied two groups: the Saints and the Strangers. The Saints were Christians who had fled England to Holland. Although they lived free of the religious intolerance of King James I, the Saints were still not happy with their Dutch surroundings. They sought a place where their children could be raised both Christian and English.

The Strangers, on the other hand, had no concern for religious freedom. These merchants, tradesmen and servants chiefly sought economic opportunity in the New World.

As we read from the historical accounts, the voyage was difficult and the first winter dire. At one point, only a small group of adults was strong enough to care for the others and oversee the building of the main common house. Miraculously, all 30 children survived.

When spring arrived, nearly half of the original 102 were dead from lack of food and medicine. Many of the survivors debated whether to sail back to England.

But on one early afternoon in March, as Captain Miles Standish was discussing defense plans in case of an Indian attack, a visitor appeared at the door of the common house. Surprisingly, it was an Indian.

Samoset—who had learned to speak some English from a British sea captain who'd made an earlier voyage to what is now Maine—greeted them. He told them a large, hostile tribe, the Patuxets, had cleared the land they now inhabited but had been completely wiped out by a mysterious disease four years before. As a result, no Indian tribe would settle the area.

This unusual event—and what happened next—is recounted by Pilgrim Governor William Bradford in his work "Of Plymouth Plantation":

"About the 16th of March [1621], a certain Indian came boldly amongst them and spoke to them in broken English," Bradford wrote. Samoset "told them also of another Indian whose name was Squanto, a native of this place, who had been in England and could speak better English than himself. . . . Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation."

"Sent of God?" That sounds quaint to modern ears. But consider Squanto's story. Many years before the arrival of the Pilgrims, he and several other Patuxet Indians had been kidnapped along the New England coast and transported to Spain to be sold into slavery. Providentially, Squanto was purchased by a group of Catholic friars who taught him about the Bible and Jesus Christ in preparation to send him back to America to be a missionary among his tribe.

After Squanto completed his Christian education, the friars freed him and enabled him to make his way to England. Learning English while working aboard British ships, he boarded a ship in 1619 to return to America. Upon his arrival Squanto learned of the Patuxets' untimely demise.

With Squanto's help, the Pilgrims were able to survive their first year. He taught them agriculture and fishing. As an interpreter, he also helped the Pilgrims establish a peace with the local Indian tribes that would last for close to 50 years.

In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims reaped a bountiful harvest. To thank God for their deliverance and the help they had received from the Indians, Bradford held a three-day Thanksgiving feast inviting the Indians to join them in their celebration.

Squanto remained friendly with the Pilgrims until he succumbed to an unknown fever and died in 1622. Amazingly, he bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims, as Bradford would document, "as remembrances of his love."

Considering the trials of his own life, it would have been understandable for Squanto to sow bitterness and seek war against the Pilgrims. Instead, his generosity and forgiveness enabled their survival.

Exemplifying St. Paul's challenge to "not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," Squanto's cooperation would not be forgotten by the Pilgrims. Nor should it today.

Mr. Murray is headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.

getting the puritans right... thanksgiving 2010

2010-11-25T19:14:00.000-08:00

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Peace, Love and Puritanism
By DAVID D. HALL
Published: November 23, 2010

Arlington, Mass.

THANKSGIVING 1971, the 350th anniversary of the “first” of the harvest celebrations in Plymouth, Mass. Invited to speak to a local historical society about that long-ago event, I described the ritual significance of food to the colonists and the Native Americans who attended. Afterward, someone asked, “Did they serve turkey?”

This was no idle question, for it captured the uneasiness many of us feel about the threads that connect past and present. Are our present-day values and practices aligned with the historical record, or have they been remade by our consumer culture? Is anything authentic in our own celebrations of Thanksgiving? And isn’t the deeper issue what the people who came here were like, not what they ate in 1621?

To return to the first of these harvest feasts is to return to the puzzling figure of the Puritan, the name borne by most of the English people who came to New England in the early 17th century. What did they hope to gain by coming to the New World, and what values did they seek to practice?

The easy answers simplify and distort. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who came along a couple of centuries later, bears some of the blame for the most repeated of the answers: that Puritans were self-righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them. The colonists Hawthorne depicted in “The Scarlet Letter” lacked the human sympathies or “heart” he valued so highly. Over the years, Americans have added to Hawthorne’s unfriendly portrait with references to witch-hunting and harsh treatment of Native Americans.

But in Hawthorne’s day, some people realized that he had things wrong. Notably, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer who visited the United States in 1831. Tocqueville may not have realized that the colonists had installed participatory governance in the towns they were founding by the dozens. Yet he did credit them for the political system he admired in 19th-century America.

After all, it was the Puritans who had introduced similar practices in colony governments — mandating annual elections, insisting that legislatures could meet even if a governor refused to summon a new session and declaring that no law was valid unless the people or their representatives had consented to it. Well aware of how English kings abused their powers of office, the colonists wanted to keep their new leaders on a short leash.

Tocqueville did not cite the churches that the colonists had organized, but he should have. Like most of their fellow Puritans in England, the colonists turned away from all forms of hierarchy. Out went bishops, out went any centralized governance; in came Congregationalism, which gave lay church members the power to elect and dismiss ministers and decide other major matters of policy. As many observed at the time, the Congregational system did much to transfer authority from the clergy to the people.

Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.

For this reason, no Puritan would have agreed with the ethic of “self-reliance” advanced by Hawthorne’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, people should agree on what was right, and make it happen. Wanting social peace, the colonists experienced plenty of conflict among themselves. It was upsetting when this happened, but among the liberties they carefully guarded was the right to petition any government and to plead any grievance, a liberty that women as well as men acted on.

The most far-reaching of these Puritan reforms concerned the civil law and the workings of justice. In 1648, Massachusetts became the first place in the Anglo-American world to publish a code of laws — and make it accessible to everyone. Believing that the rule of law protected against arbitrary or unjust authority, the civil courts practiced speedy justice, empowered local juries and encouraged reconciliation and restitution. Overnight, most of the cruelties of the English justice system vanished. Marriage became secularized, divorce a possibility, meetinghouses (churches) town property.

And although it’s tempting to envision the ministers as manipulating a “theocracy,” the opposite is true: they played no role in the distribution of land and were not allowed to hold political office. Nor could local congregations impose civil penalties on anyone who violated secular law. In these rules and values lay one root of the separation of church and state that eventually emerged in our society.

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

•

Oh, and what did they eat? Although the menu in 1621 is nowhere specified, it certainly included venison, Indian corn, fish and “wild turkeys,” one species of the fowl that the Pilgrim Edward Winslow reported were accumulated in abundance just before the celebration.

David D. Hall, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the forthcoming history “A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 24, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.

PEOPLE ARE AWESOME

2010-11-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

The Hitchens Bros on Can Civilization Survive without God?

2010-10-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

Can Civilization Survive Without God?

A Conversation with Christopher and Peter Hitchens

EVENT TRANSCRIPT October 12, 2010

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life invited brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens to address the question of whether civilization needs God.

Christopher is the author of more than 10 books, including his recent memoir Hitch-22 and the best-selling manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and a columnist for Vanity Fair. He has written prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek International, The Times Literary Supplement and The Washington Post. In 2007, he received a National Magazine Award for his work for Vanity Fair.

Peter is the author of four books including The Abolition of Britain, a major seller in that country, and the recently published The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, which he wrote to counter Christopher’s book, God Is Not Great. A British journalist, author and broadcaster, he currently writes for The Mail on Sunday, where he is a columnist and occasional foreign correspondent, and is a contributor to (among others) The Spectator, Prospect, Standpoint, The Guardian, The New Statesman and the American Conservative. Once an atheist, he attributes his return to faith largely to his experience of socialism in practice, which he witnessed during his many years reporting in Eastern Europe and his nearly three years as a resident correspondent in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. This year, he won the Orwell prize for journalism for foreign reporting.

Speakers:
Christopher Hitchens, Author, Contributing Editor to The Atlantic, Columnist for Vanity Fair
Peter Hitchens, Author, Columnist for The Mail on Sunday

Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center

Luis Lugo
LUIS LUGO, PEW FORUM ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE: Good afternoon and thank you all for coming. And a special thanks to Christopher and Peter Hitchens for being with us today. I’m Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. We are a project of the Pew Research Center, which is a nonpartisan organization that does not take positions on issues or policy debates — not even on the question of the existence of the Almighty. This event is part of the Pew Forum luncheon series in which we bring together journalists and important public figures for serious discussions on topics at the intersection of religion and public affairs.

Our format at these events is really very, very simple. We ask our guests to speak for about 10 minutes or so. Then we invite the rest of you to join in the conversation. I should point out that this event is on the record and we are taping it. And our friends at CNN, as you can see, are also videoing it. So just be aware of that.

At this time, I would like to introduce Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who is an advisor to the Pew Forum. Mike did all the heavy lifting in pulling the panel together, and so for that, he gets the privilege of moderating this event.

We have a few out-of-town journalists listening in via conference call, and I would like to welcome them as well. Those of you on the call who would like to take part in the discussion — and we encourage that — please e-mail your questions. We’ll make sure to work your questions into the queue.

Again, it’s great to have all of you here and via phone with us. We welcome you to the Pew Research Center. Mike, over to you.

MICHAEL CROMARTIE, ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER: Thank you, Luis, and welcome ladies and gentlemen. If you have a bio right in front of you, which I know you do, I am not one of those moderators who then turns around and reads that bio to you. I think that you know why you’re here. You know both these men by reputation, and their biographies are in front of you. What I would like to do, though, is just give an anecdote or two about our speakers.

Christopher, as many of you all know, has a new book out now called, Hitch-22: A Memoir. I went back and looked at some reviews of the book, and I thought I would try to find something in the reviews about Christopher. In The New York Times, the reviewer highlights Christopher’s great capacity for friendship. He’s very moved by the fact that in this autobiography Christopher has such wonderful things to say about his lifelong friends. In fact, the reviewer says, “He is also devoted to friendship. Hitch-22 is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one’s friends … I’ve ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens’s personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet.”

Then in another review in The New York Times, the reviewer says this: “The truth is, by Hitchens’s standards, his examination of how he and the left parted company is surprisingly unstrident and nonpolemical. It is, in fact, almost melancholic. He’s not claiming with his typical adamantine force that the balance sheets work out. And perhaps the strongest theme in Hitch-22 is just this — that sometimes the balance sheets are an unholy mess.

“By the time he got to Oxford, he was quite accustomed to ‘keeping two sets of books,’ passing out leaflets at car plants by day and racing off in fancier dress to the Gridiron Club by night. Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it’s touching in Hitch-22 to see how often he’ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve, which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he’s so hard to dislike.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you someone who, even when you disagree with him politically or religiously, is so very hard to dislike. Christopher?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Oh, is it my turn already?

CROMARTIE: You’re on.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I want to say that I was very impressed while reading Peter’s latest book — to which I commend your attention — to see that he had written a particular — (audio break) — long before he can have read a book I hope you will also all be reading, which is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s extraordinary history of Christianity. I don’t know how many people here have tried it yet. But it’s really an admirable, beautifully written book.

It’s argued from the viewpoint of a fairly faithful Anglican, whatever that may turn out to be. It’s written, anyway, from a Christian perspective and with an absolutely extraordinary control of scholarship and prose. One of the things it says — very sobering for a Christian reader, I would suppose, to read is this:

There used to be a word which could be used unironically, and it was used, really, until not much more than a century, a century-and-a-half ago. People could say, and mean what they said when they said the word, Christendom. There was a Christian world. It had been partly evolved, partly carved out by the sword, partly defended by the sword, at some points giving way, at other times expanding. But it was a meaningful name for a community of belief and value that endured for many, many centuries — and has many splendors to its name.

And it’s all gone; no one could use that term now without either great nostalgia or some degree of irony. It’s all gone for the reason — MacCulloch gives exactly the reason Peter gives in his book. It destroyed itself, Christendom, and it destroyed itself by the tremendous criminal act of urging its members to kill each other in the outbreak of the great war — as it was then known, but it wasn’t known that it would lead to a huge and even worse part two — in 1914, where the king-emperor of the British empire, who was also the head of the Church of England, and the Russian czar, who was also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and you follow the road —

There’s a partial exemption to be made here for the French empire, which didn’t precisely go to war in the name of its religion. But all the others did, and they leveled Christian civilization, European civilization, to a point where we still have no idea how much we’ve lost and how greatly our development as a species and as a society has been retarded. Out of the ruins of it, and striding across those poisoned ruins, came the great totalitarianisms that very nearly put an end to what remained of what could be called, by then certainly not Christendom, but of European and Russian civilization.

So this discussion that we’re having is by no means a new one and doesn’t involve such a new thought. We’ve had to wrestle for a very long time with the idea, what will we do about civilization; what will we do about values, ethics, morals; how will we teach them; how will we learn to live with one another in the absence of any real religious authority, any credible one, any one that’s worthy of the name, worthy of respect? This absence has been felt for a very, very long time, long before I was able to start writing about it.

I would just add, because I think it’s of extraordinary interest, that most of those empires have since passed away. Some of them won the war, nominally, and some of them lost it, nominally. They’ve more or less accepted the implied defeat in the long run, but two of them are in a rather sinister way, in my judgment, in the process of recrudescing — the Ottoman Empire, the caliphate, which very ill-advisedly went to war on the side of Wilhelmine German and Austro-Hungarian imperialism, throwing its own empire into the ring and declaring a world jihad from the throne of the caliph himself in Constantinople, making it obligatory on all the faithful to kill at least two non-believers as long as those non-believers were not German, Austrian or Hungarian, since it was the German, Austrian and Hungarian treasuries that were actually paying for the promulgation of this jihad.

Not only did the caliphate lose the war, but it lost its caliphate; it was dissolved by Mustapha Kemal [Ataturk]. But it’s interesting, it’s one of the two that’s trying to come back. Now you can go to a meeting in Kensington in London, if you wish, or on the Left Bank, or in the Kreuzberg in Berlin, and you can go to the caliphate club. It’ll be quite well attended; there’ll be quite a lot of people who say that the only salvation of humanity, the only true morality, the only real faith will come when all the Muslim umma is once again united — in fact, somewhat expanded, to take in, for example, Spain and other territories lost in previous combats.

It’s a real movement, and we’re going to be living with it for the rest of our lives. And those who think that faith-based is the prefix to something positive have a lot of argument, I think, ahead of them when they confront people who really mean it like that.

The second of the two empires that took part in this hecatomb of civilization in the name of their own religion, I mean the Russian one, shows real signs also of imperial nostalgia. No one here, I suppose, will have forgotten the moment when George Bush first met Vladimir Putin, who had chosen for the day to decorate his chest with his grandmother’s ornate Russian Orthodox crucifix, enough for the president to be convinced and to say that just to look into those beautiful limpid eyes was enough to see that he was a person of deep spirituality and sensitivity.

I think, by the way, in a fairly strong field, that’s one of the stupidest things any president has ever said. But now you don’t have to use much of your imagination when you see at the inauguration — when Putin wants to make someone prime minister, and when he says, how can he make himself czar again down the road — all these inaugural ceremonies are attended by black-cowled patriarchs swinging their incenses, demanding and getting in return privileges over other churches and other religions in Russia, restoring the same political and clerical balance, roughly, that did underpin Russian absolutism and autocracy until the great catastrophe of 1914.

And that’s coming back, too, and I think we don’t pay anything like enough attention to this fusion of traditional great Russian chauvinism and police regime with the clerical bodyguard and prop and stay and ally that it’s appointed for itself. But now it goes without saying that I’m speaking to the question of, how compatible is civilization with religion?

But so far, those are the only two empires that do show this sign of religious revival. It’s equally true to say that in huge parts of what we might call the industrialized modern world, tens of millions of people, in effect, live in a post-religious society. It’s hard to argue, I think, that they lead conspicuously less-civilized lives than their predecessor generations, than the ones of 1914 or 1939.

We haven’t yet conquered the problem of alienation or of anomie or of spiritual waste or of the fear of death. That has to be worked on. And we have a problem with moral relativism, that religion in its — inaudible — supremacy equally failed to solve. But I don’t think it’s really true to say that we live less-civilized a life than those of our predecessors who felt that there was a genuine religious authority that spoke with power.

It’s actually more than half a century since George Orwell wrote that the problem of civilization would be exactly this. He said, how will we now inculcate ethics, teach morality, to the people, to the majority, in the absence of a spiritual authority that commands respect and that has innate presence, that has the respect? With this decline in the authority of religion, how shall we teach ethics and morals?

It remains a very, very good question. I’d pause to mention that George Orwell himself, a very convinced atheist with a very strong and rooted respect for liturgy and for scripture and for tradition, made quite a good shot, in living his own life and evolving his own writing, in showing how, in fact, it is possible to lead an ethical existence without supernatural support or any appeal to it. But that might be choosing a rather too-favorable example to my own argument.

The truth is that if we just look at our own society, what do we really find? I was very interested to see the recent findings of our hosts today about how much Americans really know about their own religion — how few Catholics really know what the sacrament is, for example, how very few Protestants know who Martin Luther was, how very few — I was very surprised by this — how very few Jews appear to know that Maimonides was one of them — a Jew, as you will — and so forth.

But it shouldn’t really have surprised me, I don’t think. Thomas Jefferson said in what I used to think of as a disastrously non-prescient letter — I think it was to his nephew, Peter Carr — that there isn’t a young American born today who will not die a Unitarian.

Well, that’s one of the things T.J. didn’t get exactly right. But if you go around the public halls and the provincial theaters, as I do whenever I can, and engage with belief and the believers, you’ll find to an extraordinary extent that a kind of ethical humanism with a vague spiritual content is extremely commonplace. I can take 10 bucks off most Catholics by asking them the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. I’ve known all about how to do that long before Pew alerted me to the opportunity — (laughter).

There are people who combine a sort of Anglicism with a kind of Buddhism — it’s not at all uncommon — or Hinduism. I would say that the American Jewish population is in its majority effectively post-religious. It has, I would prefer to say, transcended its monotheism and become an ethical humanism. Certainly in the Reform, and to a great degree the Conservative congregations, that’s already the case, and everybody knows that on non-scriptural but, as it were, moral matters the American Catholic community has what is called by them a cafeteria Catholic, or an à la carte manner to it. In other words, it picks and chooses what might or might not be convenient to believe.

This is shallow, to be certain, and it’s thin, but I’m not sure if it isn’t preferable to a more decided, enforced orthodoxy, in connection with which, because I know I’m trespassing on your time, I’ll try and put it in the form of a question. It’s a thought experiment, if you like, which I’ll leave you with. Notice how in your daily newspaper intake, media intake, the much-maligned word secular has acquired on some pages of the newspaper, namely the international ones, almost the character of a positive. It has lost its pejorative character almost entirely.

In other words, suppose you were to read today that the new prime minister of Iraq was the leader of a secular force that didn’t have any religious allegiance. Would you be, A, terribly upset, B, enormously relieved or, three, thrilled beyond measure? (Laughter.) Ought you to be thinking this, those of you of faith?

What if someone was to say, a leader would emerge in Iran, an opposition leader, with genuine support among the intellectuals and — inaudible — and the downtrodden workers and peasants, who was to say, you know what? I’ve never believed a word of this story about the upcoming 12th imam and his reappearance and his bringing of a reign of peace and redemption to the whole human race. I think that’s an absolute fairy story, I think that’s got about as much chance of being true as Santa Claus. Would you not be rather relieved to hear that there was such a person? I submit that you most certainly would.

If you heard today that Bibi Netanyahu on yet another of his fraudulent trips to Washington to humiliate our president and our Congress had dispensed with the services of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the religious partnership in his coalition, who calls for God to smite the Palestinians with a plague, for example — that this man no longer appointed the person who is in charge of housing and settlements, which a matter of fact, he does. Would you not think that was a step in the right direction? I submit that you would.

So it may be rude to leave you with a question rather than proposing an answer, but I think you’ll see why I have done so, and I now make way for a younger and more principled generation.

CROMARTIE: Thank you, Christopher. A biography of Peter is in front of you, but I would just call your attention to something that he wrote in his new book, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. In April 2008, they had a debate in Grand Rapids, Mich., on the existence of God — Christopher and Peter did — and he wrote this:

“Somehow on that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, our old quarrels were, as far as I am concerned, finished for good. Just at the point where many might have expected — and some might have hoped — that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not. At the end I concluded that while the audience perhaps had not noticed, we had ended the evening on better terms than either of us might have expected. This was, and remains, more important to me than the debate itself.

“Something far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when Christopher and I had met in his Washington, D.C. apartment. If he despised and loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasn’t showing it. To my astonishment, Christopher cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it.”

Edward Lucas of The Economist described Peter as “a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. Readers with long memories may remember his extraordinary coverage of the revolution in Romania in 1989, or more recently his intrepid travels to places such as North Korea. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behavior at home and abroad.”

I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Hitchens.

PETER HITCHENS: Thank you. The question, first of all, is what civilization might be. I doubt whether we can agree on that very quickly, since we probably can’t even agree on how to spell it on either side of the Atlantic. I would really like to start by explaining what it isn’t and to recount some experiences of mine in places where it had ceased to be

The first one, picture me, if you will, in a blue suit and polished leather shoes sitting on top of a pile of cargo in a retired Soviet aircraft — rather, Soviet aircraft which ought to have been retired — landing at Mogadishu Airport one winter’s afternoon shortly before sunset. I won’t explain quite how stupid I had been to get myself into this position, but I was working at that time for a daily newspaper which had accepted a suggestion of mine, unexpectedly, that I should go to Mogadishu just before the U.S. Marines arrived, as they thought, to rescue the Somalis from famine and chaos.

Arriving at Mogadishu Airport is an experience some of you may have had and some of you may not. What I can tell you is this: There is no passport control. There is no baggage reclaim. In fact, as you land, sitting on top of the baggage, it slides the length of the aircraft as the brakes go on, which has made me take aircraft safety precautions with a total lack of seriousness ever since. It’s rather enjoyable, actually, when the baggage slides down the whole length of the plane.

You’re met at the end of the runway by a man from The Associated Press who is collecting all the water and supplies for his bureau, and by about 15 young men with AK-47s, who approach you and say, do you want a bodyguard? And you turn to the man from The Associated Press and you say, do I want a bodyguard? And he says, yes you do. If you don’t have a bodyguard, you’ll be dead and stripped by morning.

So we hire, myself and my colleague, John Downing, we hire one of these — in fact, two of these bodyguards — and a car with no upholstery, and we drive into Mogadishu just in time to see the departing ranks of the gangs and tribal formations which are supposed to be driven away by the arrival of the U.S. Marines. They are, in fact, going. They’re going into the sunset with their machine guns and their bandannas — they look like heavily armed rock stars — because they know that there is no point in being there when the Marines arrive, and they intend to come back later and do whatever it is they do.

We circle around, looking for some time for somewhere to spend the night. And only by great good fortune, because departing around a corner, my colleague sees somebody he knows from Sarajevo, do we find anywhere to spend the night. We are allowed into a compound which has been rented by some German television people, who share with us their camel stew and allow us to sleep on their concrete floor. I go to sleep listening that evening to the cries of dying people and the chatter of gunfire outside and hearing, in effect, what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found my way into the German compound.

The following day I find people to take me round; we’re nearly murdered on one occasion because my interpreter is from the wrong tribe. I see a scene of complete desolation. Every building has bullet holes, or indeed, shell holes in it. The main street is completely stripped bare of every feature of modern civilization. It’s just a stretch of mud with potholes in it with loping persons on it carrying weapons and no guarantee that they won’t use them on you. All the physical features of civilization and all the, as it were, intangible features of civilization — civility, safety, the ability to rely on your neighbor, the passing person, for any kind of kindness or consideration — have gone.

Eventually, with great relief, I got out of Mogadishu and I got home and was shown a few weeks afterwards a photograph of the same street which I had seen on that evening and on the following morning. Mogadishu having been an Italian colony, the street scene was actually rather Roman: pleasantly dressed people strolling along well-kept sidewalks, expensive cars gliding up and down a smooth road, telephone kiosks, pavement cafes.

The distance between that and what I saw was approximately 20 years, and it came to me and it has stayed with me ever since, whenever I walk down a pleasant street in Oxford, where I live, or indeed roam around Dupont Circle here or any major civilized city, this is not permanent. This is not here automatically. It is not as the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is as a result of certain unusual conditions which do not always exist and which have come about only for a very short period of time in a very limited number of places, and which even having been established, can come to an end.

This experience came on top of two years living in what, when I arrived, was the capital city of the Soviet Union and what, when I left, was the capital city of the Russian Federation. And there I also saw a very curious civilization which was not a civilization. That is to say, there was very little civility on the street between people. I was always struck by this. I would go down into what we’re always told in the tourist manuals is the magnificent Moscow Metro.

Because of the horrendously ruthless climate, the stations are guarded by very heavy wooden swing doors, or were in those days, and I would hold them open for people as they came into the stations behind me, and they would step back with a look of mistrust on their faces, as if I was playing a sort of joke on them. They were completely unused to the idea that anyone might do this. There wasn’t even that level of consideration. Nobody in any kind of public dealing would trust you. Almost everything had to be obtained through whispered threats and bribes.

By contrast, if you were invited into the homes of Russians, you were immediately led into a warm and entirely civilized circumstance of complete mutual obligation and trust in that very, very narrow and very, very small society. It was the family and the immediate friends where people knew whom they could trust and to whom they could show obligation and from whom they could expect it.

Now, you may say that this has to do with the climate or the economic conditions. I don’t happen to believe this, and if any of you would be kind enough to take a look at my book, I hope I have explained to some extent how this had come about. These two experiences, one on top of the other, persuaded me that it was worthwhile to think of what it was in our civilization that we ought to value.

There was one other thing, and Christopher will be slightly familiar with part of this. When we were growing up in the early 1960s and late 1950s, we lived for a short while in a very pleasant suburb of what was then the British naval base at Portsmouth. Now that we no longer have a navy, it is no longer that but it was then, and it was a very secluded, soft, comfortable, safe place in which we could wander about unsupervised for hours. Our parents could send us off and not worry about what would become of us. I can’t imagine, actually, anywhere more typical of English suburbia at the time.

While I was in Moscow, I had access to an immensely elaborate precursor of the Internet, the wire services that my newspaper received, one of them being the Press Association, the domestic one. And I was astonished one evening to be reading the wire services and to see the name of this suburb, Alverstoke, come up in a story. In that story what had happened was that somebody had been involved in an altercation with a group of people going past his front yard who had been kicking his garden fence in. As a result of trying to tell them to stop doing this, he had been kicked to death. And I thought: Alverstoke — kicked to death — what has happened to the country that I grew up in?

When I got back, I found that there was more and more of this sort of thing going on. Any of you who are interested, I urge — I haven’t got time to go into the cases now — to Google the cases of two people, one, Fiona Pilkington and her daughter, strangely named Francecca, and the other, a man called Garry Newlove, Garry with two R’s, and you will see that in large parts of England, particularly in the poorer parts, the behavior of individual human beings towards one another has sunk to levels not far distant from the Stone Age.

Mr. Newlove did very much as the person in Alverstoke did. There were people misbehaving in the street outside, and he went and remonstrated with them, and they beat him to the ground — and this phrase occurs very often in newspaper reports in Britain — they then kicked his head as if it were a football until he died.

In the case of Fiona Pilkington, her daughter was disabled and not very well-favored to look at, and as a result, they were ceaselessly persecuted by their neighbors. Their house was pelted with eggs and flour, they were shouted at and screamed at until their lives became a total misery. Mrs. Pilkington eventually snapped under this pressure, took her daughter with her out into the country, set fire to the car and burned them both to death in a hideous murder and suicide of a type which I hope is unimaginable to any of you but which seemed to be a reasonable conclusion to her troubles.

In both cases, they found it almost impossible to get the attention of the authorities, though, of course, after the events became highly public, the authorities began to take some interest and notice. But in fact, this kind of thing is so common at a low level in the grimmer suburbs of English cities that it is actually normal for a lot of people.

This was not the case until quite recently. How has this decline in civilization come about? Well, I think it has come about at least partly — and I’m not a single-cause person — but at least partly because there is no longer in the hearts of the English people the restraint of the Christian religion, which used to prevent this sort of behavior.

I think it would be completely idle to imagine that the two things were unconnected. I haven’t come here to say that civilization’s impossible without religion or indeed without Christianity. There are non-Christian civilizations. There are civilized countries which aren’t really based upon religion at all, such as Japan, which I think any visitor there will agree is an intensely civilized place.

But the extraordinary combination, which you in this country and I in mine used to enjoy and may for some time continue to, of liberty and order seems to me only to occur where people take into their hearts the very, very powerful messages of self-restraint without mutual advantage, which is central to the Christian religion.

Without that, you reach a kind of, what I term, practical atheism, which is not a term which would be used by the people who actually engage in it because they probably could neither spell nor pronounce atheism, but which does seem to me to be a fair summary of the way in which people behave. If we can agree even to begin to agree here that there might be some truth in any of that, then some discussion can take place.

What I’ve found objectionable about a great deal of the attack upon religion that’s been taking place on both sides of the Atlantic in the English-speaking world in the past few years has been the dismissal and the contempt and the scorn and even what seems to me to be the dislike expressed over and over again for the Christian faith and for the good things that religion does and the unwillingness to accept that there are any of those good things, that the turning of the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just is something which could conceivably be obtained together with liberty by some other method.

I don’t think that’s true, and I think in a serious argument about it, then the atheists would need to concede that it wasn’t entirely true, and in conceding that, might be willing to hold the argument on a slightly narrower field from the one where they currently hold it. I’ll leave it at that.

CROMARTIE: Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Christopher, well, we’ll get you in, in a minute. Peter David?

PETER DAVID, THE ECONOMIST: Peter, if I could respond to what you just said. You gave two very telling examples of societies or places where there has been an utter loss of moral compass. One was Mogadishu and the other was your former suburb in Portsmouth. But what struck me is that in the Portsmouth case you seem to argue that it is secular values or at least the loss of religious values that is at least partly to account for what had happened, whereas I would have thought that Somalia was quite a pious country, albeit not a Christian country.

PETER HITCHENS: The point I make about Somalia is, actually, here is a place where civilization was and is not. To go into the history of the foreign interventions in Somalia which largely led to that is a different issue. The only point I was making here was that civilization can cease to exist when forces either from inside or from outside can bring it to an end.

I think almost certainly in the case of a country such as Britain or even possibly the United States the threat is much more likely to be internal. But the questions which really arise here are: What is the source of authority? Why should people behave better than they need to? Why should there ever be a situation in which the strong should be under the control of law? Why should law ever, ever trump power in any system? And why should that restraint exist?

Why should people be brought up to have manners and to show restraint and civility to others? How is it going to happen that they will do so? And if it ceases to happen, how quickly will you reach the stage where it will be wiser to stay inside your house at night than to go out, which is pretty much the state that we were in, in the 13th or 14th century?

What I often get in response from people when I say that things are getting pretty bad in Britain is, well, if you look at the records of Oxford in the 14th century, it was just as bad as it is now. I say, yeah, absolutely. But we have had an interval between now and the 14th century when we thought we were making progress, and now we’re traveling rather rapidly backwards.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Just — only on the Hitchensian stuff, if I may, because otherwise that precious fragment might get lost. Say, of course, that law is being reestablished in parts of Mogadishu. Already, the law is called shari’a; the people enforcing it are called the al-Shabab. They know exactly how much people want government rather than anarchy, and they’ve had a plan for this for a long time. Anarchy is originally part of that plan, by the way. Create the anarchy first, then people will call for your law. That’s how the Taliban took power. This is just another way of rephrasing the problem of the faith-based.

As to my memories of Alverstoke, I have to say I’m shocked to hear that story, even at this remove. Even in those days, we knew we were lucky. Our parents would not have said you can go into Portsmouth and hang around the railway station or the docks any old time of day or night. No, in fact, we were constantly being enjoined to beware of the rough and the lumpen element that was noticeable in English life.

Then there were cities where you couldn’t even imagine, where everyone — your school friends — would talk about, do you know what happens in Glasgow on the housing estates? This is in exactly the ’50s and ’60s when the authority of the Church of England was much greater than it is now. Glasgow, you’d get your eyes cut out with a broken bottle if — inaudible —particular students looked at you. It was partly true. Glasgow, the most religious city in the country, where people would kill you over what kind of Christian you were, as a matter of fact.

We hadn’t then realized how bad the situation was in Northern Ireland, where constant violence, incivility, sadism, combined with all the things that go with clerical rule and politics — backwardness, stupidity, unemployment, low standards of education and hygiene. The place was a complete slum. And what distinguished it from the rest of the United Kingdom? The fact that the priests had authority there and people were willing to swing a boot or a bottle in the name of faith. That’s what made the difference.

PETER HITCHENS: May I make a brief riposte? Part of the problem that we had with the rough parts of town was — I’m afraid that our mother, particularly, was a bit of a snob. I do remember one occasion. We had the groceries delivered and in the box which had come from the grocers was a jar of peanut butter, which I seized on and began to eat before — my mother was out when the delivery came. When she came back, she said, what’s this? Peanut butter? We don’t have that in this house! And she rang the grocers and demanded they come and take it back and forbade me to eat any more because it was not the kind of thing that the children of a naval officer ought to eat.

When we lived in an even more salubrious part of the country, on the edge of Dartmoor, there was a small estate of prefabs inhabited by people who were known as the rough boys, with whom we were not allowed to associate. I don’t think the danger from them was actually very great. The main danger was we might have picked up their accents.

I do think that the other thing Christopher does tend to do is to surge off into the wider and more political side of this matter. Yes, of course, the Northern Irish problem and indeed in Glasgow a similar problem of Protestant and Catholic sectarianism is, was and, I fear, for many years will be great. But in terms of the lives which people led, the way in which they behaved towards their neighbors, the way in which children were brought up, the manners which people displayed, I don’t think you will find that the effect of Christian upbringing was small in the 1950s or 1960s.

What’s happened to Northern Ireland and indeed to Scotland and indeed the whole of Britain in that period is the invasion of trash culture and the collapse of all that kind of teaching. And there’s an enormous amount of protection racket, gangster-ish thuggery there carried on in the name of religious factionalism, but not, I think, generally by people who are enthusiastic churchgoers or ever were.

There is this problem with the utopian view of the world, which I don’t share, that you do like to concentrate on the big things. Can we bring democracy or civilization to X? Can we defeat such and such all around the world rather than can we actually construct, in the square mile around where we live, a civil society in which people can live in freedom and order? Which seems to me to be, actually, just as important if not more so and often rather harder in execution than launching missiles or sending armies to the other side of the world with dubious consequences.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: I’m going to turn this to the personal, if I might. I was listening to a BBC — a Radio 4 — interview with both of you back from 2007, and it appeared to be fairly acrimonious between the two of you. Do you remember that one?

PETER HITCHENS: If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it was very brief.

BRADLEY HAGERTY: Well, not by NPR standards.

PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, but with the BBC, unlike your own wonderful organization, if you’re me and you’re interviewed by it, you know you’ve got 15 seconds before they interrupt you. So you’ve got to be quick.

BRADLEY HAGERTY: What was interesting about listening to this kind of three-way, as we would call it at NPR, is that it was really fairly acrimonious. I didn’t hear a lot of brotherly love in that. It was hard to detect that. I’m just wondering if there has been a change in the way you all view each other, view your arguments about, say, the existence of God or life after death, that kind of thing, the necessity of religion to have a moral civilization. Has any of that tenor changed since, Christopher, you have been diagnosed?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I don’t think my own tenor has changed. The relationship I have with Peter is very well encapsulated in the fragment of his book that Michael read at the beginning. I mean, if you want to know, if anything, my contempt for the forced consolation of religion has increased since I became aware that I probably don’t have very long to live. But it’s not a thing I want to make a particular point on in this argument.

BRADLEY HAGERTY: If I could just follow up with one thing. There’s been a fairly public discussion of the fact that you have sometimes been offended but sometimes warmed by the fact that people are praying for you or thinking of you. I’d like to ask you to elaborate on that last statement about your contempt because in my reading of what you’ve said recently, it seemed as if perhaps you were cheered a little bit or warmed by some expressions of belief.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, you have the floor and you’re insisting, so in spite of my reluctance — obviously, expressions of solidarity are very welcome and very touching to me in whatever form they take. I do resent, always have resented, the idea that it should in some way be assumed that now that you may be terrified, say, or miserable or, as it might be, depressed, surely now would be a perfect time for you to abandon the principles of a lifetime.

I’ve always thought this to be rather a repulsive mode of approach, and there’s a disgusting history of people either attempting to inflict deathbed conversions on people like Thomas Paine in their extremity or making up lies about it afterwards, as they did about Charles Darwin and many others. That I find wholly contemptible.

But it’s only vestigially applied in my case; surely, I ought to think more about these things now than I would anyway. No, not at all. I’ve already thought about them a great deal. Thanks all the same. An interesting point I’ll make — well, you be the judge of whether it’s interesting or not. (Laughter.)

A point of it is this: I read a long time ago, when I was still, as far as I knew, in good health, a study of intercessory prayer, the most comprehensive one that’s ever been done. And it showed, not at all to my surprise, that there’s no correlation to be found between intercessory prayer and the thriving or otherwise of those for whom the prayers are designed or offered.

Except it was found that among some people who knew they were being prayed for by groups of colleagues and friends, there was a slight negative result in point of morale. If they didn’t get better, they felt bad about not getting better after all the trouble that had been taken. I thought, that’s interesting. And now, I realize how true it might be because I get a lot of secular encouragement.

People say, cancer picked the wrong foe in you. You can beat this if anyone can. Lots of that kind of thing, and it actually does have the effect of slightly giving me the blues because I don’t want to let people down. For whatever interest that may be, I think it shows that the psychological makeup of this is roughly the same whether you assume a supernatural dimension or not.

PETER HITCHENS: Speaking for the religious side of the argument, I also think it would be quite grotesque to imagine that someone would have to get cancer to see the merits of religion. It’s an absurd idea. I don’t know why anyone imagines that it should be so.

CROMARTIE: But Barbara, you had something more, I think, in your question about their relationship. And so Peter, can you address any of that.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I thought we’d done that.

CROMARTIE: Well, Christopher did. I didn’t know if Peter wanted to comment.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I was quoting Peter.

CROMARTIE: I was quoting him, actually. (Laughter.) Yeah, I actually quoted you — I did it for you.

PETER HITCHENS: Look, one of the things that I remember discovering with the most happiness in my life, round about the age of 11 or 12, was that it was possible to disagree without anger or rancor. And in fact, it’s actually more pleasant to do so. I’ve always thought that, and I really don’t see the point in spoiling a good argument by getting angry with your opponent. And he has been my opponent for most of my life. I certainly have in the past been angry with him, but I would say that that is over.

MICHAEL GERSON, THE WASHINGTON POST: Let me ask a little more philosophical question. I’d really like to hear both brothers respond to what might be called the challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche, which assumes a large place in Christian apologetics, which is the idea that in the absence of transcendence, all you’re left with is a ferocious human will. So I just would love to hear the perspective of whether he was a crank or a prophet in these areas from both brothers.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I can rephrase the question in addressing it.

GERSON: Yeah, please do.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Nietzsche famously said that in the absence of the divine, all that there is, is the human will to power. That would be all you were left with. That’s why Nietzscheism is so often used as almost a substitute among some people I know for the work of Ayn Rand, for example. And implied in that is also that that can be admirable. I must just tell you that I was once asked by an evangelical radio station a lot of very, very polite questions about my book against God. Then at the end, they said, was I an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche? I said, actually, I wasn’t really much of one at all.

They were clearly disappointed with this, but they went on and said, well, did I know that he’d written most of his antireligious books in a state of — inaudible — syphilitic paralysis? And I said, yes, I was aware of that, or certainly had heard it plausibly alleged. They said they just wondered if that would explain my own — (laughter) — more recent — I thought, well, no, but thanks for the compassion.

Look, it might be that all of these questions are replacement questions. Is it not equally true to say that the religious impulse is an expression of the will to power? Who could deny it? Someone who says, I not only know how you should live, but I have a divine warrant here revealed to me, in some cases exclusively, that gives me permission to do so. What is that but the will to power, may I inquire? I think it’s a very, very strong instance of it.

If I don’t get asked the Nietzsche question, which I quite often do, if it isn’t that, it’s usually The Brothers Karamazov instead. I forget which brother it is, or maybe it’s Smerdyakov. It doesn’t matter. It says, if there’s no God, then surely everything is possible — thinkable.

Everyone understands the question when it’s put like that. But is it not also the case that with God, or with the belief in it, permission can be given by anyone to do anything to anybody and has been and still is? Unfortunately, these questions are not decidable according to your attitude toward the supernatural. These are problems of human society and the human psyche — you might say, soul — whatever attitude we take to the humanness or the transcendent.

PETER HITCHENS: First of all, just a small objection to that. It seems to me that the Christian Gospels are read any way you like, and especially the final few days are one of the most powerful denunciations of the exercise of power, of the behavior of mobs, of show trials, all the many activities of which governments and politicians get up to.

There is even in the jibe against Judas that the ‘The Poor ye have always with you’ — the first skeptical remark about socialist idealism ever made in human history. So I think that you would be hard put to claim that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship is someone who is indeed tortured to death by the powerful.

But leaving that one aside, I think atheists should pay more attention to Nietzsche because I think that he does actually encapsulate quite a lot of what they very, very seldom say they desire. Now, in my book I quote at length from a passage in Somerset Maugham’s book, Of Human Bondage, in which the hero decides — and this is an Edwardian person brought up in detail in the Christian faith in an English vicarage — decides that he no longer believes in God and says quite clearly, ‘This is a moment of enormous liberation. I no longer need to worry about things which worried me before, and I am no longer tied by obligations which used to tie me down. I’m free.’

What else is the point of being an atheist? But yet, when you actually put this to atheists, they tend to say, oh no, no, not me. I’m just as capable of following moral rules as you are, even if they are Christian moral rules. This constantly comes up and immediately swirls down the circle of the atheists’ refusal to accept that there is actually no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that therefore, they are liberated.

Why aren’t they more pleased they’re liberated and why don’t they exult more about it? Perhaps because they don’t want to spread the idea too widely and have too many people joining in.

DAVID AIKMAN, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: This is a question primarily for Christopher. I think everybody around the table would agree that the presence of Taliban-type regimes or shari’a-oriented regimes in places like Mogadishu are absolutely horrible examples of what could go wrong when people of certain kind of beliefs take power. And I don’t exclude the history of Christendom from having moments like that. Nevertheless, I want to ask, can you think of any historical period — any civilization — in which a regime that has basically eschewed the divine in all its forms has fostered a degree of civilization among human beings? And Peter, of course, you can answer that, too.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Eschew would mean to forebear from practicing or praising the teaching of religion. That’s not the sort of thing a regime can actually do. What regimes usually do typically is either coexist with religion — try to co-opt it — or, in some very extreme cases, try to do away with and/or nationalize it, as in the case of the French and Russian Revolutions, for example. You make it part of the state while repudiating much of its doctrine. We haven’t been able to run a fair test yet, it seems to me.

I mean, if there was to be a society that taught the principles of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Baruch Spinoza — Benedict Spinoza, as he later was — Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell — taught the children to learn and understand those teachings and ethics and the other things that go with them, I don’t think it would be a bad thing.

I think the United States comes the closest to any society that we know about that decides that religious pluralism — because civilization is impossible without freedom of conscience, and therefore, it goes without saying that there has to be freedom of worship, that that’s best guaranteed by a state that takes no notice of — eschews, as you might put it, any role at all in determining religious matters.

AIKMAN: But if I may respond to that, Christopher, I think, again, it doesn’t take much looking at the founders of the United States to see that the vast majority of them believed in the practice of Christian ethics and indeed were actually believers in some sort of divinity, even if they weren’t orthodox Christians. Certainly, they were either deists or some form of Christian churchgoers. And yet, it’s clear, if you look at them, that very few of them seemed to believe that it was possible to hold together a society unless people were inspired by ethical traditions, basically, under the guise of believing in divine right and wrong.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I just disagree with you. It’s certainly not true of the two who matter most to me, or matter most to this argument, namely Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison, who together offered the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which is almost exactly, really, the basis of the First Amendment to our Constitution, which is the relevant one.

Jefferson most certainly was not a Christian. He seemed to me to have had great dislike for it. I can’t prove he was an atheist, though I could point you to letters that he wrote that strongly suggest to me that he privately was one. It doesn’t matter. It’s interesting, but it’s not decisive.

James Madison, though he didn’t dare say so in his lifetime, didn’t think there should be chaplains in the armed forces. He didn’t think that Congress’ proceedings should even be opened by a man of God. He was an absolutist on the separation point. And therefore, in some sense, it wouldn’t matter even if he was a devout believer. The point would be the same. The separation is the important thing. And surely, I appeal to those of you who do regard yourselves as believers, it’s just as important to prevent the church being tainted by the state as the state being run by the church.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The pope is still fornicating with the emperor, as Dante puts it. Bad for both, one imagines.

PETER HITCHENS: The thing which strikes me about societies which are preferable and the societies which I wouldn’t want to stay in for any longer than I absolutely have to is that the ones which are preferable do have the rule of law. This seems to me to be the distinction between a tolerable free society and one which is not, which is the most decisive.

And I’m fascinated by the origin of the idea of the rule of law, that you could have a circumstance in which a person with physical power, with enormous wealth, was compelled by forces which he could not challenge to abide by the law, which is a thing without substance and which, in theory, he could overcome.

I think the origin of that has to be and must be the idea of an unalterable truth at the heart of the law. English judges and English laws are always seeking in the common law — I think the same tradition exists here — to discover what the law is, and what they’re trying to discover seems to me to be based on an assumption that there is an ultimate truth about what the law should be about.

Without that, in the end, you have nothing except the variable needs of human power. It does seem to me, again, to be idle of the atheist cause to turn their backs so completely on their friends in the Russian Social Democratic Party, brackets, B for Bolshevik, which was so very much their ally to the extent that one of its earliest decrees, the Lenin-Trotsky Decree, was for the prevention of the teaching of religion in schools, and indeed outside schools. It even decreed that the word “God,” which is “Бог” in Russian, should no longer be spelled with a capital letter. It was devoted to the extirpation of religion.

In my book, which I do commend to you because you probably haven’t read it, there is probably the most thorough, concise description of the stamping out of religion by the Soviet authorities that exists in English. It took me quite a long time to compile, and I wouldn’t want it to be wasted. It completely devastates the idea that the Soviet Union was itself some kind of religious society. There were indeed toadies, remnants of the Orthodox Church and indeed among the Jews, who went to the Soviet authorities and offered their assistance. They ended up — all of them — in prison and eventually murdered. Their assistance was not welcome because the whole basis of this regime was an absolute rejection of the idea there was anything beyond the material.

This is the thing which, in the days before the Soviet Union became unfashionable, in the days when it was admired, as Cuba is still madly admired by many people in the Western left, and as China was admired for a long time in the 1950s and 1960s, in the time when it was admired by the very people who always admire that sort of thing, whether it be the Sandinistas or whoever it happens to be, at that stage, that was one of the things they admired most about it. It’s still the same; utopians always hate God.

CROMARTIE: Christopher, you had a very nice comment to say about that section of Peter’s book, and I think the publisher would like to hear that quote for a future blurb advertisement. What did you just say?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: It’s a very fine and muscular piece of prose, and it taught me — I thought I knew a lot about the anticlerical campaigns of the Bolshevik Party, but there’s a great deal in there that I’d never read before and that I commend to you. It would be cheap to add, but I can’t not do it.

PETER HITCHENS: Oh, go on.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Every country that wants to emancipate itself, develop in any way at all, eventually has to come into a confrontation with the alliance of church and state and break it. There’s usually some correlation with how bad and rotten that alliance is and how oppressive and how bad the rupture is.

In America, the rupture was almost painless. It just involved disestablishing the Church of England and forbidding by law the reestablishment of another church. Hardly anyone had to suffer much more than confiscation or deportation for that.

In France, where the church was part of the whole criminal racket of feudalism and monarchy, of course, it was much more cruel and violent. In Spain, during the civil war, especially in Catalonia, people felt strongly enough actually to burn the churches. It’s one of the great confrontations between my two favorite writers of the 1930s, W.H. Auden and George Orwell.

Orwell, to my surprise, didn’t much mind the churches being burned. He thought they deserved it. Auden said, I couldn’t live in a country where there were no churches. I just couldn’t. And I realized, if it’s of any interest, I would be the same. I couldn’t do it, myself.

But the Russian Orthodox Church, comrades, brothers, sisters, don’t forget — this is the church of serfdom and slavery and autocracy. It’s the church that brought us the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If the clerical and white side had won the civil war in Russia, our word for fascism would be a Russian word, not an Italian word.

The power of that church and its wealth had to be broken and confiscated. I don’t quarrel with that. And I don’t think religion should be taught in school, and I don’t care whether people have enough confidence in God or not to see his name without a capital letter, as I think you can do in Hebrew.

PETER HITCHENS: But to have that decreed by the state?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Decreed by the state is another way of saying it’s the law, as it is in the United States. You cannot teach religion in schools.

PETER HITCHENS: To have it decreed by the state that the word God could not be used with a capital letter?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: No. That’s a bit Russian. (Laughter.)

PETER HITCHENS: When you say that you don’t think religion should be taught in schools, do you think religion should be not taught in schools, which is more to the point? Do you think it should be prevented by law from being taught in schools, as these people most certainly did, and indeed taught in the home?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I think the home is exactly the right place for it, as long as it doesn’t come accompanied with things like genital mutilation or being told that your neighbors of another faction are going to go to hell, or other antisocial things of that kind. Savage beatings and torturings and so on — or plural marriage or the selling of children in dowry to goat-like old uncles in Utah. The home, yes, but no further than that. I don’t want to have to know what your religion is. I enjoy the study of religion. I’ve taken it up because I want to. I don’t want to have to know what anyone else thinks. Keep it to yourself.

Shouldn’t it make you happy? You have a redeemer. You have someone who offers you perfect bliss and happiness if you make the right prostrations and the right — (inaudible) —. Why isn’t that enough for you? Why do I have to know what it is? Why do you have to try and spread it? I don’t want to have to know.

MICHAEL BARONE, THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:I will refrain from describing my own religious views, if any. I just want to add to what Barbara asked Christopher about intercessory prayer and so forth. Christopher, I just think what we’re seeing is just an enormous surge of affection for you from your fellow citizens of all kinds of different beliefs and things that are grateful to have you as a fellow citizen and wish you well.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, thank you so much, Michael.

BARONE: It’s quite extraordinary. In your opening remarks, you sort of sketched a world, the post-1914 world, in which there is a secular and a nonbelieving Europe and a Muslim world where there is much oppression in the name of religion. But haven’t we also seen, looking over other large parts of the world, places where, in effect, we’ve broken the alliance of church and state in generally positive respects — North America, Latin America, even India.

They still burn mosques occasionally and slaughter people, but not very much by their historic standards. We’re talking about half the population of the world, something like that, where we really have societies where you have people of these different, often strong faiths, sometimes naïve and ignorant of fine points of dogma, as you make clear, but also managing to live pretty peaceably with one another.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Just to take the Muslim world for example, I would say it’s almost a graph. You could do it practically as a function: How secular is this Muslim country and how prosperous, how open, how democratic is it, and how happy are its people?

It’s like a function. Indonesia, yes. Partly, I think, because Indonesia was more converted than conquered by Islam. Some of it was conquered; mainly it was spread by conversion. But Turkey, because Ataturk, in my opinion, was an atheist. He didn’t have to be to be a secularist, but it helped.

I believe he was one. He really was prepared to shoot and hang mullahs if they got in his way of modernizing the country. And he managed to do for Turkey in a few years what it might have taken centuries to do. We’re now worried it might be undone or be in the process of being undone, but Turkey’s an exemplary country, given that its majority population believe what they say they do in private.

Tunisia would be another example of one, the least religiously dominated — the religious party’s under very careful control, not to say oppression. A society nearly as qualified as Turkey to join the European Union. It works pretty much all the time.

Jimmy Carter, in his book on the Camp David process, says that the reason Israel is in trouble is because it strayed from the path of the prophets. So you have to imagine that there are people who think that if only Israel was more religious, the Camp David process would be more —

I only say that because sometimes I read things I can’t imagine why people believe them. Surely the only chance for a settlement in the region is the triumph of secularism. And though countries like Holland may be unexciting in certain ways, the prosperity and happiness of the Dutch surely has a great deal to do with the fact that it’s been a refuge from Christian religious intolerance since the 17th century. The work of Spinoza and Descartes wouldn’t be possible without that kind of secularism.

So I rest what I think is a fairly persuasive case.

SALLY QUINN, THE WASHINGTON POST: This seems to be my month for atheists. I spent a lot of time interviewing Christopher earlier, and then a week before last, Richard Dawkins and today, Sam Harris. Sam has just written a book called The Moral Landscape, and I’m fascinated by the issue of morality because there is this notion that you can’t be a moral person unless you are a religious person —

PETER HITCHENS: No, there isn’t. You keep saying that; that’s not the point. Where do you derive your morals from?

QUINN: No, I didn’t say you —

PETER HITCHENS: It’s not — of course you can be a moral person, but where are the morals from that you’ve actually recognized as morals?

QUINN: Where are the morals from? Well, actually, I didn’t say that you said that. I said, there seems to be this notion. Both Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris — and Sam is as neuroscientist, so he’s talking about the science of the brain — talk about how they feel that morality is evolving and that we are becoming more moral as humans as we evolve. Originally, when Confucius first came up with the notion of the Golden Rule, it was seen more as an idea of practicality or pragmatism, that society was not functioning and you needed some idea that would bring people together in a community in order to keep them safe and in order to have a functional society.

As religion has taken over that role, morality has become sort of the province of religion. And now that religion seems to be questioned often these days, people are looking at morality from a different point of view and saying that religion really is not as important in terms of basing your moral positions and your values and your ethics on. But the idea is simply evolving into an idea that morality is there because it’s part of the human brain — we’re hardwired to be moral — and that we are becoming more so every day.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I owe a reply to what Peter said earlier about law, which could serve for this as well. I don’t know about every day, by the way, Sally, that we’re getting better and better. I’m not sure. I think there are peaks and troughs. I think we’re doomed to fluctuation in this regard.

But I think that we’re probably doomed to some kind of relativism, or perhaps better to say approximation. Who is going to tell me, here is a law that is absolutely true and will hold good for all time and has been proclaimed scripturally? We might say, thou shalt not kill. It would be probably inevitable we would have to start with that. But it doesn’t say, thou shalt not kill. It says, thou shall do no murder, and everybody knows that there is a real difficulty in deciding when killing is murder and that the situational ethics of this are very complicated but are common to all times and places.

Different standards prevail at different times, but that argument is an open-ended one and will remain so. I’m rather glad, as a matter of fact, from the point of both moral and intellectual and ethical exercise, that you can’t just tell someone one thing that that’s right and that’s true for all time, and there’s nothing to argue about. That’s why I object to the idea of commandments in the first place. Morality is not learned by orders. It’s acquired by experience, by moral suasion, and by comparing and contrasting different ways of resolving these questions.

There are thought crimes in the Ten Commandments. You are told you shouldn’t even envy someone else’s prosperity or property. Well, from a Socialist point of view, that says you’ve got to just lump it if people are better off than you, and from a capitalist and free-enterprise point of view, it says, it’s basically a crime to emulate — this whole spur of emulation and innovation is possibly a sin.

And anyway, it’s in the same list as murder as a crime — something you’re thinking. I don’t think that’s an absolute moral truth at all. To the contrary, I think we’d be better off without it. So where do we get it? It’s perfectly obvious that we happen to be, as other primates are, capable of and needing to make decisions about our common welfare, as well as about our own ambition. We happen to be stuck with that.

PETER HITCHENS: The question of conscience, or what Sally referred to as the hardwiring of the brain, seems to me to be one of the most fascinating, unexplored subjects in this matter, and it seems to me to be very, very hard to come up with an atheistic explanation of conscience, any more than you could have a compass without a magnetic north.

If morality evolves, then morality changes. Then the things of which we most strongly disapprove now could be things which are permitted later, in which case it’s not really morality, as far as I’m concerned. And who’s evolving it? I love that advertisement — maybe it didn’t happen here — Microsoft Office has evolved, by which they meant, we’ve gone back and tried to make it a bit better than it was and a bit more like what Apple does.

That doesn’t seem to me to be evolution as generally understood, but the word does seem to have a remarkable number of meanings. But if it evolves, then it alters, and if it alters, it’s not morality, and therefore, we can’t rely upon it. If the magnetic north kept shifting, then it would be very difficult to steer your boat or your plane across the Atlantic.

QUINN: Well then, do you need religion to be moral?

PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, absolutely. Morality is what you do when you think nobody is looking. And there’s a lot of things I would do if I didn’t believe in God.

CROMARTIE: I think both of our authors have spoken to this in their books, and so I would call your attention to their books.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, THE GUARDIAN: I actually wanted to follow up exactly where you left off. I think the question on the exam paper has been answered by Hitchens, P. entirely satisfactorily: Can civilization survive without God? Answer: clearly yes. You mentioned Japan; one could also say China. If the question is, can civilization survive without an ethical or moral order, the answer is, clearly no — almost definitionally. So the question is, can you have a strong, durable ethical or moral order without some transcendent or supernatural basis? That seems to me the question we’re posing here.

Interestingly, Tony Judt, shortly before he died, in the Charlie Rose interview was asked this question. He was an absolute nonbeliever, and he said, I find people, when they say they believe something, when they have a stand of principle, quite like an absolute or transcendent justification of it. It makes it easier for them to stand strongly for it.

I think the question to Christopher here is, you mentioned that we’re doomed to some sort of a relativism. You’re getting very close to someone you often criticized, Isaiah Berlin, who famously said at the end of his four essays on liberty, the challenge we face is to recognize the relativity of our beliefs and yet to stand for them absolutely.

That’s quite a difficult thing to do. How do we do that, and do you think we really can get that without what we’re going on with at the moment in Western Europe or in England, which is actually a sort of secularized Christianity, or secularized post-Christianity? I mean, your heroes, the Jeffersons, the Madisons, the Tom Paines, the Orwells. It was a sort of secularized post-Christianity.

CROMARTIE: Why don’t we gather up these final questions, and then we’ll let you all answer all of them, so take notes.

PETER WEHNER, COMMENTARY MAGAZINE: I’d like to return to the metaphor of tennis and ask Christopher and Peter to return their own serves, in a sense. To you, Christopher, what do you think is the greatest contribution of Christianity, either writ large in terms of society or writ small in terms of individual lives? And for you, Peter, what do you find is the most compelling argument that the atheists make and the strongest argument against Christianity, the ones that trouble you the most, whether science or the existence of evil?

TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE, PATHEOS.COM: This is related to what Pete just asked. It strikes me that as individuals become champions for particular philosophies, it becomes difficult to project anything that might conflict with the public persona or might conflict with an image of immaculate certainty in your own point of view. I know that heroes of faith can find it difficult to confess doubts, and I’m wondering if the same follows for heroes of nonfaith. So the question is, are there moments in which — this is for both brothers — moments in which you doubt the philosophies you have come to represent in the public mind, and if so, what brings those moments about?

SUSAN GLASSER, FOREIGN POLICY: I was interested in your discussion about Russia and the campaign to stamp out orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, especially because of the famous moment at which Stalin backed away from his crusade against religion, which was, of course, in World War II when the threat from Germany was proving to be existential. Immediately, Stalin, in the defense of Moscow, put the Orthodox priests, such as remained, front and center once again in the effort to reorient Soviet rhetoric away from ideology and return it to nationalism.

So my question to you is, how does that cause you to look, perhaps in a different way, at your question between the connection to ideology and nationalism? This is not about personal morality as much, this question, but to both of you, I would be curious as to your answers as to where you see the connection between religion and nationalism to be.

CROMARTIE: OK, we have four questions on the table — more than four, but Christopher, will you go first?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I used to ask a question. I’ve now asked it in public, on the radio, in print, in TV debates with quite a lot of leading religious figures and thinkers. It’s simply this: You ought to be able to tell me of a moral action performed or an ethical statement made by a believer that I couldn’t make because I’m a nonbeliever. You ought to be able. Given what you think, it must be very easy for you to say, here’s something you couldn’t say or do that would be morally right or morally true. No takers; I haven’t found a single example. I’ve tried everyone now — and by the way, there’s a prize. And I’ve even entered myself for it, as I’ll tell you in a second.

But if I was to say to someone, now can you name me please a hideous immoral act undertaken or an immoral remark made by someone because of their faith — not in its name, but because of it — you’ve already thought of one. Now you’ve thought of another one, and you’ll keep on thinking of them. So I think that pretty much disposes of the question, with its implied insult, that without faith one would have no ground for, say, acting rightly when no one else was looking or answering the promptings of conscience.

Here is my attempt to win my own prize. When Lech Wałęsa was starting his work in the Polish shipyards and the Polish militia, the outer ring of the Polish army were closing in on Gdansk, he was interviewed with his then-fairly small group, and he was asked, aren’t you frightened, aren’t you afraid? You’ve taken on a whole all-powerful state and army — aren’t you scared? And he said, I’m not frightened of anything but God or anyone but God.

This came back to me, I thought, well, this meets my two criteria. It’s certainly a noble thing to have said, a distinguished thing to have said, and I certainly couldn’t have said it. So it does meet both my criteria. But it was also the slogan of Gen. Edwin Walker of the John Birch Society in a different situation — the man whom Lee Harvey Oswald took target practice on, right-wing, paranoid Crusade for Christ nutbag in the ’50s. Doesn’t sound so good when it’s said by him and it’s a summons to think of nuclear war as not too bad, for example. It’s not quite the same.

So there, I’ve partly answered the question. I hope I partly asked one. Christianity’s greatest contribution. I haven’t been asked that in those terms before, but I find it strangely easy to say what it would be from the prayers I used to intone and the hymns and psalms I used to sing and the lessons I used to read and hear. The greatest contribution of Christianity in my life is the reminder of the complete ephemerality of human power, and indeed of human existence — the transience of all states, empires, heroes, grandiose claims, and so forth. That’s always with me, and I daresay I could have got that from Einstein — I would have — and from Darwin, too. But the way I got it and the way it’s implanted in me is certainly by Christianity.

(Audio break.)

In what moments do I think, what if I’m wrong? I always think it’s probably a weakness in me because I always like to think that in any argument I can return my own serve. If I was appointed to speak on the other side of a debate, I could do it. I could make the case, say, for leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq, and you wouldn’t know that I didn’t believe it. But I couldn’t do it for religion. I am one of those people whom Pascal has in mind in his Pensées, which he addresses, if you remember, to those who are so made that they cannot believe. Under no persuasion could I be made to believe that a human sacrifice several thousand years ago vicariously redeems me from sin. Nothing could persuade me that that was true — or moral, by the way. Just — I can’t — it’s — (audio break) — predisposition to faith.

And then finally, yes, of course. One of the great disfigurements of Christianity, and not just in Russia, has been where I began, with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s account of the self-destruction, self-immolation, of Christendom, its identification with Rome or Byzantium. Remember, the Crusaders first destroyed Byzantine Christianity, having more or less polished off the Jews on their way over to Constantinople before they even started murdering any Muslims.

The identification of it with kingship, with throne and alter, the absolute negation of what it teachers about the ephemerality of power. Its enslavement, in fact, to secular power is a very noticeable thing about it, and it’s very — Eastern Orthodoxy used to be Eastern Orthodoxy. Now there’s a Macedonian Orthodox Church, Bulgarian Orthodox, Russian — all of them uniquely fitted to the needs of local sectarian requirements.

If anything could prove what I so much believe, which is that we are not made by God and never were and could not have been, but that many, many gods have been made by men and women and it is precisely the other way around, the basic claim of materialism — if nothing else could persuade me of that obvious truth, the behavior of religion itself would be enough.

PETER HITCHENS: First of all, in response to Tim Garton Ash. I made this concession quite deliberately about civilizations being able to exist without God. But examine Chinese civilization, a shameless police state. And examine Japanese civilization, a tremendously conformist and actually very unfree society, and compare that — W.H. Auden used to say when the Church of England destroyed the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, why spit on your luck? And I say the same to the beneficiaries of Protestant Christianity in the Anglosphere.

This tremendous civilization in which we live, which has been bequeathed to us and which in my country we’re determined not to bequeath to our own children, is the most extraordinary piece of good fortune, if nothing else. And it does seem to me derived — as I say, this combination of order and liberty almost unique in human history and unique on the face of the planet — does arise, actually, from Protestant Christianity. And it does not exist in Japan, and it never would exist in China because that force of thought does not exist there. So yes, you can have civilization, but be careful what sort of civilization it is.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Better than when their emperor was a god.

PETER HITCHENS: I’ve no doubt. But that’s not the kind of God that I worship, and I think we should be clear very much here when we discuss this that in defending Christianity one is not necessarily defending the Koran, Hinduism or many other available faiths with which I would frankly say that I disagree, and I could give you reasons for doing so.

When are my greatest moments of doubt? Often when I’m reading the Old Testament or indeed the Epistles of St. Paul. I do find them rather provoking towards feelings of, oh, no, do I really have to put up with this? But then, as you will see, I’m not terribly Orthodox in my belief. I doubt all the time — endless, incessant doubt. I think that both the atheist and the Christian fear that there is a God, but the Christian also hopes that there is one.

And it was Edmund Burke, I think, who said first of all that the man who truly fears God will fear nothing else. The difficulty in the saying is the truly and getting yourself to actually believe strongly enough in the idea that you are able to put off your fear of the Polish United Workers’ Party, the secret police and the Red Army and all the rest of it, or whatever else happens to be coming down the road towards you that you’re supposed to resist and you would much rather run away from, which we all, I think — well, I certainly would. The experience is when I’ve had the chance to run away from something, I’ve always taken it.

On the question of Stalin, yes, it is absolutely true that at that moment, when the mummy of Lenin had been dispatched, I think, to Kuybyshev and the Soviet government somewhere else, and the whole thing was in headlong, total retreat and Stalin’s pact with Hitler, which Stalin had believed in long after Hitler had ceased to do so, had been shown to be wrong, but to such an extent that Stalin would not actually order his own troops into the defense of the motherland because he believed the pact was still in existence for some days.

In the case of that, yes, he did call on the church. He also called on Russian patriotism, and statues of Mikhail Kutuzov began to appear in the streets. All this was dragged out because it was a matter of total desperation. What people should observe is that as soon as the danger was over, the persecution was redoubled, and particularly under Nikita Khrushchev. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a very severe persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union. It was purely opportunist, and it was the only moment at which they made that gesture at all.

So I don’t think it undermined — one small point I do want to come back to, by the way — Christopher was praising Kemal Ataturk for his treatment of the mullahs. And I often wonder how he views Stalin’s exactly parallel treatment of the same people in Soviet Central Asia at the same time, almost identical — ceremonies in which veils were burned in the public square, mullahs were indeed shot. Now, because that was done by Stalin —

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Only language they understood.

PETER HITCHENS: — was that bad, or was it OK?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Fine.

PETER HITCHENS: Right, OK. I’d like to have that settled. You’re never asked anything like enough about your attitude towards the Soviet Revolution, but —

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Fine, I’m long overdue. People will be nostalgic for it before long.

PETER HITCHENS: I’ll bear that in mind.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yeah, they will. Wait and see

PETER HITCHENS: I won’t. Was there anything else? I know it hasn’t been done for this reason, but it happened in Britain when Mr. Blair became prime minister that no one was ever able to ask him a question again, it was always three questions at once, and when he answered them, he always ignored the difficult one. So is there anything I haven’t answered that anyone feels — (inaudible, cross talk).

CROMARTIE: No, I wanted to say to the audience that Peter Hitchens came all the way from Oxford just to do this lunch, and Christopher came to us in between doctor’s appointments, which we’re extremely grateful for. We were afraid that this might not happen in light of the fact that we had one person in Oxford and the other person going through treatments, and so I think you should join me in thanking both of these brothers for joining us for this very special lunch. (Applause.)

This written transcript has been edited by Amy Stern for clarity, grammar and accuracy.

Cardus - Prosperity as a Dead End in Itself

2010-09-30T23:54:00.000-07:00

POINT OF VIEW
Prosperity as a Dead End in Itself
October 1, 2010 - Graham Scharf

The U.S. Census Bureau poverty statistics released in mid-September paint a painful picture of the nation's reality: The official poverty rate in 2009 was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008. According to the statistics, 43.6 million people live in poverty in the United States, the largest number in the 51 years for which poverty estimates are available.

Quite naturally, government officials in the United States are frantically asking, "What is the path to economic recovery?" One promising answer comes from a coalition of economists, policy experts, and business leaders called Partnership for America's Economic Success (PAES). Recognizing that economic vitality depends significantly on the quality of the workforce, PAES lobbies for policy investment in young children to develop human capital in the United States. They stand on the shoulders of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has done considerable research in the "technology of skill formation." Heckman has demonstrated that money spent on promoting early nurture has a rate of return of 6-10% per annum—returning up to $10 per $1 invested in children aged 0-3—by reducing social costs (educational remediation, welfare, Medicaid, incarceration, public housing, and so on) and by cultivating an individual's capacity to participate productively and positively in society.

This is Heckman's pithy expression: Skills beget skills; motivation begets motivation. Early advantages accumulate; so do early disadvantages. Lifelong cognitive and non-cognitive skills (such as perseverance, attentiveness, and motivation) are profoundly influenced by early experiences. It would be difficult to overstate how much a young child's experiences impact their future social and economic situation. The existing achievement gaps (which could aptly be called the parenting gap) are considerable by age 3, and "impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession—one substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing," according to a 2009 McKinsey & Company report.

There is no question that the earliest years of life are critical to human development, and that intervention in the most disadvantaged children yields returns on investment that exceed the average post-war equity rate of return of 5.8%. But the pressing question is this: To what end are we to make this investment and intervention? Is prosperity a worthy end in itself? Is it, for example, a more worthy aim than a just society? Could pursuing prosperity for its own sake undermine justice? Or could the pursuit of justice for its own sake be the most solid foundation of social and economic vitality?

Early education is critical not primarily because of the "technology of skill formation," but because of the dynamics of character formation. Discipline, perseverance, and integrity, for example, are critical catalysts for learning. In C.S. Lewis's words, "Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil." Indeed, early education, if not in the service of human virtue and public justice, will only make us more adept in devising our own personal and societal undoing. It will, for example, influence a child's future decision to become a consumer of the sex trafficking industry through pornography, or to have not only the honour to abstain from consumption, but also the courage, creativity, and tenacity to dismantle its evil networks.

Here I have implicitly assumed that there are such realities as virtue and vice, justice and injustice, and that these are something more than the creation of my mind or the constructs of other human beings. Indeed, every ethical claim is rooted in assumptions about the way things really are, whether or not we are aware of these assumptions. Lesslie Newbigin expresses it thus:

No state [or individual or organization] can be completely secular in the sense that those who exercise power have no beliefs about what is true and no commitment to what they believe to be right. It is the duty of the church to ask what those beliefs and commitments are and to expose them in the light of the gospel.

To make ethical claims and abjure assumptions is to stand on a dock without legs in the Florida Keys while alligators swim hungrily beneath you. It simply can't be done—or, more accurately, to do so is to invite one's own imminent demise.

We who believe in the saving and defining work of Jesus Christ are commanded to seek first His Kingdom and righteousness in the public life of our communities and nations—that is to say, to announce and pursue His reign and justice in human affairs, which can have no meaning except in reference to the One who is just, and the justifier of the wicked through faith in Christ. It is tempting to seek a "least common denominator" with those who hold radically different assumptions about the nature and destiny of humanity in order to seek the common good. However, if we abjure our gospel assumptions about what is good, we join those who stand, for a very short time, inches above alligators.

Christians ought to be on the leading edge of early nurture for the sake of virtue and justice in our own homes as well as our churches, communities and schools, and to support prudent advocacy and wise public policy. The most powerful levers are not big, but small (the family); and not fast, but slow (as children grow). They produce returns more valuable than any reflected on a balance sheets. It is our duty and calling to testify that the pursuit of prosperity is a dead end in itself, and to humbly and boldly set forth the good news which imputes virtue to the vicious and transforms individuals and communities. To treat this good news as merely the religious story of Christians, and not the foundation of human virtue and public justice, is a denial of the central Biblical claim that "Jesus is Lord of all."

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Cardus - Prosperity as a Dead End in Itself

Communism's Nuremberg by Guy Sorman, City Journal 26 September 2010

2010-09-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

GUY SORMAN
Communism’s Nuremberg
The crimes of the Khmer Rouge are inextricable from Marxist/Leninist ideology.

26 September 2010

The four surviving leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, including the former head of state, Khieu Samphan, have been imprisoned in Phnom Penh since 2007 and will be brought to justice in their own country. On September 16, a United Nations-backed Cambodian tribunal indicted them for genocide, crimes against humanity, and other crimes. The tribunal has already established its credibility with its first trial: this past July 26, it sentenced Kaing Guek Eav (better known as Duch), a cog in the Khmer Rouge’s extermination machine, to 35 years in prison. Duch ran a torture center from 1975 to 1979 that produced 15,000 victims. Unlike the Nuremberg tribunal that judged Nazi leaders in 1945, the Phnom Penh tribunal is not run by the victorious powers; it functions within the Cambodian justice system, sustained by Cambodian public opinion, though the U.N. provides financing. The tribunal’s legitimacy and objectivity are beyond reproach. Still, the Cambodian public did not see Duch’s sentence as sufficient in view of his crimes. The defendant apparently persuaded the court that he was obeying his superior’s orders—the same excuse Nazi leaders made at Nuremberg.

In the Western and Asian press, as well as in statements by various governments, a distinct effort has been made to reduce the crimes of Duch and of Khieu Samphan to matters of local circumstance. It is as if an unfortunate catastrophe had fallen on Cambodia in 1975 called the “Khmer Rouge,” killing 1.5 million Khmers. But who or what was behind what the tribunal has called the genocide of Khmers by other Khmers? Might this be the fault of the United States? Was it not the Americans who, by setting up a regime in Cambodia to their liking, brought about a nationalist reaction? Or, might this genocide not be a cultural legacy, distinctive of Khmer civilization? Archeologists are digging through the past in vain to find a historical precedent. The true explanation, the meaning of the crime, can be found in the declarations of the Khmer Rouge themselves: just as Hitler described his crimes in advance, Pol Pot (who died in 1998) had explained early on that he would destroy his people, so as to create a new one. Pol Pot called himself a Communist; he became one in the 1960s as a student in Paris, then a cradle of Marxism. Since Pol Pot and leaders of the regime that he forced on his people referred to themselves as Communists—and in no way claimed to be heirs of some Cambodian dynasty—we must acknowledge that they were, in fact, Communists.

What the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia was in fact real Communism. There was no radical distinction, either conceptually or concretely, between the rule of the Khmer Rouge and that of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, or the North Korean regime. All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity. In every case, the “rich,” intellectuals, and skeptics wind up exterminated. The Khmer Rouge rounded up urban and rural populations in agricultural communities based on precedents both Russian (the Kolkhozy) and Chinese (the popular communes), and they acted for the same ideological reasons and with the same result: famine. There is no such thing as real Communism without massacre, torture, concentration camps, gulags, or laogai. And if there has never been any such thing, then we must conclude that there could be no other outcome: Communist ideology leads necessarily to mass violence, because the masses do not want real Communism. This is as true in the rice fields of Cambodia as in the plains of Ukraine or under Cuban palms.

The trial of Duch and the eventual trial of the Band of Four are thus the first trials, on human rights grounds, of responsible Marxist officials from an officially Marxist, Leninist, or Maoist regime. Nazism’s trial took place in Nuremberg beginning in late 1945, and Japanese fascism’s in Tokyo the following year. But until now, we have had no trial for Communism, though real Communism killed or mutilated more victims than Nazism and Fascism combined. Communism’s trial has never taken place, outside the intellectual sphere, for two reasons. First, Communism enjoys a kind of ideological immunity because it claims to be on the side of progress. Second, Communists remain in power in Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Havana. And in areas where they’ve lost power—as in the former Soviet Union—the Communists arranged their own immunity by converting themselves into social democrats, businessmen, or nationalist leaders.

The only currently possible and effective trial of Communism must therefore take place in Cambodia. But make no mistake: this is no mere trial of Cambodians by other Cambodians. In the Phnom Penh trial, real Communism is confronted with its victims. The trial reveals not only how useful Marxism is for claiming, seizing, and exercising power in absolute fashion, but also a strange characteristic of real Communism. No one seems willing to claim the mantle of Marxism, not even former leaders. The Khmer Rouge killed in Marx’s, Lenin’s, and Mao’s names, but they prefer to die as traitors to their own cause or to run away. This cowardice shows Marxism in a new light: Marxism is real, but it isn’t true, since no one believes in it.

Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century and other books. This article was translated by Alexis Cornel.

Communism's Nuremberg by Guy Sorman, City Journal 26 September 2010

Cardus - The Ecumenical Social Justice Ship: Full Steam Ahead or Teetering Titanic?

2010-09-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

POINT OF VIEW
The Ecumenical Social Justice Ship: Full Steam Ahead or Teetering Titanic?
September 24, 2010 - Robert Joustra

Review: Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church's Social Witness by Jordan Ballor (Christian's Library Press, 2010). ISBN 978-1880595701.

Saying that Christ claims every square inch is not the same as saying that your church tradition has authority to pronounce on all those inches. Protestant social thought, James Gustafson has famously said, is "only a little short of chaos," and if Jordan Ballor is to be believed in Ecumenical Babel, its ecclesiology is probably in worse shape. According to Ballor, our attempt to shore up Protestant social thought with ecumenical pronouncements on social justice is mucking up an already swampy terrain, putting the ecumenical movement in danger of compromising its prophetic role in relation to secular economic and political ideology.

This accusation is very serious. Ballor's argument has at least two key components. His first and most original argument is against what he calls the ecumenical industrial complex. Ballor dedicates chapters specifically to the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC), and the World Council of Churches (WCC). In these associations, he finds a "fundamental flaw endemic to ecumenical activism," arguing that "ineffectual ethical pronouncements by the ecumenical movement are grounded in faulty economic assumptions" (4).

This suggests Ballor's second criticism, which is about the nature of the economic and political assumptions made by the ecumenical movement. Whether or not these are correct is a debate for the wonks. The first order debate on ecclesiology is where Ballor's most innovative work is done: are churches competent, technically and ontologically, to make policy prescriptions?

But first, pause and consider why churches and their ecumenical superstructures feel compelled to make otherwise technical prescriptions. Global events have saturated the public imagination for decades now, with the advent of ever-globalizing relationships and instant information. Christians in churches have also experienced this expansion. The conscious awareness of social justice issues must surely be greater now than at any moment in history.

So we can certainly sympathetically see Christians latch onto the first institution they know and trust to speak into the apocalyptic captions on the evening news. For most of us, the church is the most immediate, accessible, and organized institution we know. With Ballor, we might agree the church as institution is not the best platform—but it is at least an understandable one.

I might argue that this recognition should inspire us to ecclesial charity, because while globalization raises awareness broadly, it does not educate deeply. Simplistic call and response on complex economic and political issues may be inadequate, but at least it's a conversation on justice. And I can get into that.

For these reasons, in the midst of Ballor's critique, we must simply state that the ecumenical industrial complex, for all its murky and controversial pronouncements, is not out to get anyone. When well-intentioned church leaders say they're out for justice, I believe them. That's not an insignificant starting point. In fact, I take great encouragement from it, even while I may agree with Ballor's critique of their falsely presumed authority in the midst of it. There are far worse dangers in this world than the shadow of neo-marxism in the hearts and minds of social justice-minded ecumenical activists.

On the other hand, Ballor's challenge is still very serious. When controversial social science infiltrates ecclesial confessions, twin dangers emerge: compromising the integrity of the Gospel, and splitting the church on political and economic issues. Ecumenical superstructures claiming to speak with ecclesial authority on technical matters worry me, even when technical experts are enlisted. The point is not just that expertise can be limited in these cases—it's that different institutions have differing spheres of authority and competency.

How, then, should the church speak? Ballor provides good signposts by talking about churches preaching justice, rather than prescribing policy. The environment, for example, must be stewarded and protected, certainly. But does that specifically mean cap and trade or renewable energy investment? Should the church as denomination really have an opinion on these particularly issues? Wouldn't such an opinion violate its own sphere of authority and uncomfortably blur lines with the task of government and public policy? Accountability on principles is one thing; policy advocacy is quite another.

The church is not just another activist NGO for socially-minded Millennials. True: It does mission. It has a concern for justice, absolutely. But the church is not a think tank, a policy shop, or a political party. Where critical advocacy should be done, Christian citizens are called together for the common good to present their arguments in the public square—not as denominational representatives, but as Christian citizens formed in the liturgies and practices of the church.

Ballor is right that ecumenical political and economic activism clambering for theological license properly belongs in the public square. But I do not mean by this to delegitimize it. In fact, ecumenical activists may well have trenchant critiques, precisely for the times in which we live. But those critiques, insofar as they are economically and politically technical, would be far better if brought to newspaper op-eds and parliamentary committee hearings, rather Sunday pulpits and denominational magazines.

This does not mean that churches have no place in the political process. They can be critical institutions that provide a principled ballast in the fast and easy world of politics. And policy prescription is certainly not outside Christian competence! Christians, as citizens, should and must be doing the range of economic and political work.

We must simply be cautious that when we take to the streets, or to our congressmen and parliamentarians, on specific issues, we do not do so naively—as though the Scripture has uncomplicatedly compelled us on this or that matter. The Gospel, it seems, can clearly compel a great deal. There is necessary room here for ambiguity, disagreement, and principled pluralism, even among well-intentioned justice-minded Christians. A tyrannizing ecumenical agenda fashioned from all-too-controversial political and economic assumptions stands to do more harm than good. As Ballor writes, "economic and political opinions should not be turned into articles of faith" (119).

I can resonate with his final recommendations. First, Ballor recommends that the ecumenical movement abandon its claims to institutional church authority on matters that are not specifically ecclesial; second, he says they ought therefore to refrain from making specific policy prescriptions, so to safe guard legitimate Christian disagreement in the public domain. Even papal encyclicals do not bear the mark of infallibility.

Third—and on this Ballor and I can agree to disagree—he insists that these economic and political assumptions ought themselves be abandoned as untenable. That is debate for another day and another set of experts. But I simply add that while Ballor might be passionately convicted that left-of-centre activism has at its root idolatrous assumptions, it is too simple and controversial to label ecumenical social justice advocates as marxist idolaters and call them to repentance. Ballor's normally careful analysis is simply too broad and dismissive here, especially for someone who so roundly indicts ecumenical activists for their simple-minded caricature of neo-liberalism. A similarly reductive tit-for-tat on neo-marxism may prove cathartic, but it's not particularly illuminating. The neo-marxists are hardly more prone to uncritical idolatry than the free marketers.

Ballor is spot-on when worrying that narrowly framing the debate this way can obscure the fact that globalization is about a great deal more than economics or politics. Isn't it ironic that the ecclesial conversation is essentially a thinly-baptized version of exactly the same disagreements in the secular world, but with less technical capacity and more theological abstraction? This is Ballor's most important point.

Conclusively, then, I think we can resonate most with Ballor's final remarks:

Let our confession be not "I follow Marx," or "I follow Hayek," "I follow Rand," or "I follow Keynes," but rather, together, "We follow Christ."

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Cardus - The Ecumenical Social Justice Ship: Full Steam Ahead or Teetering Titanic?

Get Low and the Gospel

2010-09-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

“Get Low” and the Gospel, by Russell Moore

— MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13TH, 2010 —

On Sunday afternoons, typically, the adrenaline of the morning’s activity crashes in, and I’m left with the stillness of a week’s worth of exhaustion. This past Sunday the house was especially quiet, with everyone else napping (something I can’t do well). Without the energy to read or write, I slipped off to my neighborhood movie theater to, like Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling, just to “be” for a while. As the closing credits of Get Low filed by, I realized I hadn’t expected a near encounter with the gospel.

Get Low is the story of a mysterious hermit (played with brilliance by Robert Duvall) who hires a funeral director (Bill Murray) and his associate to carry out a “funeral party” for him. The catch is that this memorial service is to be held before the hermit is actually dead, in order that he would be there to hear all the stories folks would tell about him.

I was first struck by the fact that this was one of the very few contemporary films I’ve seen that portrays positively either the clergy (two of them, in this movie) or funeral directors (well, at least one of the two). But that was not the most impressive part of the movie. I was jarred by the guilt that throbbed through the whole of it.

I’ll try not to spoil the plot for you, except to say that the hermit turns out to be a hermit for a reason. There is something wicked back there in his past. And that’s what the funeral party is about. He wants to hear the stories others have of him (knowing they’ll be awful) because he is fearful of telling the story that only he knows about himself.

Get Low is not a “Christian movie.” The point of view is decidedly non-Christian, as is most of the mode of discourse. And that’s just the point. The film portrays something the Christian Scriptures insist to be true. Guilt isn’t something society foists upon us. There’s something primal, something real, in the guilty conscience.

The apostolic preaching confirms what human experience already affirms, a moral law is embedded in the human conscience. The conscience is not simply a kind of internal prompt for good behavior. It is instead a foretaste of judgment, of the Day when every secret is unearthed.

“For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Rome. “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom. 2:14-16).

Get Low portrays where we all are, apart from Christ. Our conscience shows us who we really are, cut off from our only source of life and unable to get back to it past the watching angel’s fiery sword. That kind of guilt is enslaving. Like the protagonist in the film, we want somehow to explain our actions, or to assemble a cloud of witnesses who can explain it for us, without admitting our culpability. We want to live through judgment (which is, after all, what a living funeral is) so that we can reassure ourselves that the end result of our choices isn’t quite the horror we fear it to be.

Get Low ought to prompt us to sympathy for those around us, in our neighborhoods and sometimes in our own homes. They are in captivity, the gospel tells us, to “lifelong slavery” to the one who by his accusation has the power of death, the devil (Heb. 2:14-15).

In the movie, the hermit exiles himself. In his forty year (forty years? Was this accidental?) isolation, he sought to make up for his past. He sacrificed family and friends; he did thankless good deeds, even constructing a church. But, through it all, he denies himself what the Christian preachers tell him he needs: confession of sin before God. In fact, in a chilling scene, the hermit denies that he has wronged God at all.

That’s where Get Low leaves us just this side of Golgotha. The hermit confesses his sin, but his confession is, it seems, just short of repentance. His sin is unveiled. The context is explained. Through forgiveness, human relationships are restored. And then, finally, there’s what the film portrays as the (atoning?) release of death.

But the conscience won’t leave us alone that easily. We know that our death can’t wipe away our sin. Our exile doesn’t end there. It’s only just begun. Without the shedding of blood, of a blood we cannot draw from our own guilty veins, there is no remission of sin. We need more than explanation, confession, restoration. We need crucifixion, burial, resurrection. We need to be born all over again.

Get Low isn’t Christian, but it’s Christ-haunted. In an often animalistic culture, it reminds us that even the Gentiles know that guilt is real, and that it burns. It also reminds us that, no matter how deep the exile, where there is still a conscience there is still the God who put it there.

That’s not the good news, but its a step toward acknowledging the bad. It’s not the whole truth, but it’s the truth, the (almost) gospel truth.

(Russell Moore)

Cardus - Civil Religion: Caution is Advised

2010-09-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

Cardus - Civil Religion: Caution is Advised

POINT OF VIEW
Civil Religion: Caution is Advised
September 17, 2010 - John Seel with Ray Pennings

Henry Van Til observes that "culture is religion externalized." By this, he meant that the culture of a people reflects their true religious priorities. So the existence of civil religion is not ultimately surprising. Like so many things, it's a mixed bag, so discernment is needed.

But understanding the proper role of civil religion is complex. It is a normal symptom of national stress. It is about finding national meaning and purpose grounded in the transcendent. Philip Rieff argues in his provocative book, Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks (University of Virginia Press, 2006), that "cultures give readings of sacred order and ourselves somewhere in it . . . Culture and sacred order are inseparable, the former the registration of the latter as a systemic expression of the practical relation between humans and the shadow aspects of reality as it is lived."

"No culture has ever preserved itself," he concludes, "where it is not a registration of sacred order." Our age is unprecedented because unlike all societies in the past, we do not publicly ground our social order in the sacred. As a result, for many, today's appeals to civil religion sound odd or even alarming. What was once common is no longer as widely accepted in public discourse.

Some have suggested other alternatives. In Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge, 2007), New York University sociologist Craig Calhoun proposes cosmopolitanism, liberalism's proposed universalistic alternative, as a substitute. But even as he offers cosmopolitanism as a viable alternative to civil religion, he acknowledges that it does not ultimately satisfy—it "does not provide the proximate solidarities on the basis of which better institutions and greater democracy can be built." So for better or worse, we're going to be left with some form of civil religion.

This is why those who hold religion in high regard and are most inclined to appeal to civil religion in public discourse need clear-eyed discernment.

At times of national stress, civil religion resurfaces. It did after September 11 and it has again today in the midst of our current economic struggles and growing frustration with the direction of the Obama White House. It was evidenced this summer at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally held at the Lincoln Memorial on the U.S. National Mall. Timothy Dalrymple asked whether Americans have squandered their cultural inheritance. Many feel that the current financial woes are connected to a longstanding moral decline, as Dr. Alveda King posited at the rally: "Our material gains seem to be going the way of our moral losses."

Societies need myths, stories, and images. Few would deny the role religion has played in America's past or its continuing relevance to vast numbers of its population. Even as modernity squeezes religion to the margins in most areas of public life, it continues to have great resonance as our social cement. Even in the midst of fragmenting pluralism, God-talk and notions that America has a distinct divine destiny are the natural recourse when Americans somehow feel attacked—physically, economically, or psychologically. Civil religion is understandable, and in many cases, it serves a valuable civic purpose.

But civil religion also has its dangers, and these dangers are best kept in mind, particularly when we feel under stress. For civil religion can dilute genuine religious belief and eventually lead to idolatry. Idolatry is not a term common to civic discourse, but it's appropriate here.

Civil religion insists on providing a faith that is inclusive of all religious views and all citizens. It eschews exclusivity. So the civil religion's pattern is to water down religious doctrine by deemphasizing belief over symbolic practices that usually cost one nothing. It reinforces the tendency to accommodate one's faith to fits one's social surroundings. It is an ecumenism of the lowest common denominator, where the citizenship in the City of Man is blurred with that in the City of God. And while we are to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, in the final analysis, a Christian believer's "citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20). This fact trumps all other commitments and loyalties. And herein is the fundamental danger of civil religion.

Civil religion changes religion from being an end to being a means. It uses religion as social glue, thereby making social solidarity the final end. Variants of this tendency were in Germany's national socialism and Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. To confuse an end with a means is to change one's relationship to the thing itself. When one gets married in order to gain the inherited wealth of one's future spouse, so-called marital love has become merely a means to an end. So too with civil religion: When religion is used to support the state, the state become the end, and not religion. God is not mocked, and those who would post the Ten Commandments on courthouse walls should well remember the first of those commandments: He tolerates no other God before Him. He is to be worshipped on his own terms—no God but God.

Civil religion also tends to emphasize the symbolic over the substantive. It is difficult to see how allowing vocalized prayer in public schools would substantively improve education or fundamentally change the direction of American culture. But simplistic pyrrhic victories, particularly if mediagenic and populist in nature, are to be sought at all cost. The amount of dust and rhetoric over matters that don't really matter is astounding. We major on minors—and then wonder why nothing changes.

And finally, because it is socially accepted and religiously justified, civil religion can easily turn into idolatry, with all the consequences of pride and self-deception associated with it, when good things—like patriotism—are loved too much. When the cross is conflated with the flag and patriotic appreciation becomes over-attachment and reliance, civil religion crosses a line. But good things often become the worse things, because their inherent goodness blinds us to the danger of loving it too much. Parochialism, nationalism, and jingoism are the inevitable results of idolatrous civic religion. Civic self-righteousness is more dangerous than its purely religious cousin, because the state has the power of the military to back up its sense of being aggrieved. As Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, we should be careful in assuming that God is uniquely on our side.

Separation of church and state will not stop civil religion. The separation is a legal institutional arrangement, while civil religion is a public search for meaning in times of stress. So civil religion's head will rise again and again, even in the midst of increasing secularity. And though it may be a balm to those who chafe against the godlessness of civil society, it demands increasing discernment, particularly by those most inclined to its appeal.

Ironically, political conservatives, who most frequently use civil religion to bolster their desire to return America to its founding values, are not only putting a sacred patina on government, but they are diluting faith. The state is given a religious sanction and the church a secular justification—and yet, when all the rhetoric ends and the TV cameras stop rolling, nothing fundamental has been done or changed. Some may feel better about themselves, but it is at the expense of the body politic and theological integrity. It's a bad bargain that is easily made—which is why caution is advised.

Corruptio optimi pessima: "The corruption of the best things are the worst things."

NB: What follows is a piece of reflection on the same topic with specific focus on Canadian context

Resisting melting-pot
Ray Pennings

The substance of John Seel's four-fold caution regarding civil religion is equally applicable north of the forty-ninth parallel, although a bit of translation into Canadianese seems apt. Unlike our American friends—for whom debating exactly what the principle of separation of church and state means seems foundational in these debates—Canadian history does not include any such principle. (Even our Supreme Court declared in a 1985 decision that "recourse to categories from American jurisprudence is not particularly helpful" in relation to these matters.)

While we have our own historical contentions, our founding involved a "pact" between French Catholics and English Protestants, in which various commitments that look very much like "establishment" clauses were constitutionally guaranteed. The public role of religion was so deeply embedded that as recently as the patriation of the constitution and passage of the Canadian Rights and Freedoms in 1982, religious language was preserved. "Whereas Canada is founded on principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law . . . " is the Canadian counterpart to "life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness."

In practice, however, the cosmopolitan alternative to civil religion has been more aggressively propagated in Canada than the United States. Our official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism have combined to resist melting-pot strategies, so the Canadian public square is one in which theistic language are not welcomed. Combined with our self-image of being "nice" and "tolerant," this means that where public religious engagement can be framed as welcoming particular ethnic or minority interests, such activity is tolerated, whereas majority religious expressions of civil religion are frowned upon. In very practical terms, this meant that Canada's post-9/11 service was multi-faith in character, although it did not include a Christian prayer.

That this is unsustainable is increasingly self-evident and civil religionists—of both the cosmopolitan and Christian persuasion—are increasingly engaging in public discussion on these matters. I suspect both sides of the border need to recognize that if we are to live together in peace, we must have some conception of what constitutes the "public good" that transcends the simple majority opinion of the day. At the same time, we need to recognize that the public square is not equipped to sort through competing truth claims of various faith perspectives, be they religious or secular truth claims: A new sort of civil discourse is required.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

An Interview with Anthony Bradley

2010-09-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Anthony Bradley

Fleabytes - Hawkings Haverings

2010-09-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

HeeSun Lee's New Music Video "Open Your Eyes" feat. Shanelle Gabriel

2010-08-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

Islamophobia... and the stifling of debate

2010-08-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

by ANDREW KLAVAN

Name-Calling
“Islamophobia”: the latest charge to try to stifle legitimate debate

27 August 2010

One of the cleverest tricks of the cultural Left is demonizing perfectly reasonable actions and opinions by giving them sinister names. It is the logical go-to technique for those whose ideas have failed in every practical application but who nonetheless still dominate the media by which ideas are spread.

A favorite example of mine is the old feminist declaration that men “objectify” women when they respond to female beauty as nature decrees. This particular reframing was not successful over the long term for the same reason that health scares involving coffee have never caught on: no one was willing to give up the stimulant. A more tenacious variation of the same approach is the accusation that law enforcement officers practice “racial profiling,” which sounds as though police center their suspicions on one race over another out of simple bigotry or meanness. In fact, if criminals of a certain type or in a certain neighborhood tend to be of a specific race, then the proper term for “racial profiling” would be “good police work.” And though, fortunately for liberals and conservatives alike, police continue to do that good work, the evil-sounding sobriquet has forced them to waste a lot of time, effort, and money pretending they don’t.

Recently, in defending an imam’s proposal to build a triumphalist “Muslim Cultural Center” near Manhattan’s Ground Zero—where, we may remember, so many innocents were slaughtered in the name of Allah—the Left has outdone itself. Rather than engage in serious debate with the vast majority of New Yorkers and Americans who oppose the project, the mosque’s defenders have simply dubbed the opposing viewpoint “Islamophobia.” As ever when this naming device is used, the left-wing media seem to rally as one. Within the space of a single week, Time put the word on its cover, Maureen Dowd accused the entire nation of it in her column, and CBS News trotted out the charge in reporting on mosque opposition.

For anyone born with the gift of laughter, the term is absurd to the point of hilarity. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. Given that Islam is cancerous with violence in virtually every corner of the globe, given the oppressive and exclusionary nature of many Islamic governments, given the insidious Islamist inroads against long-held freedoms in western Europe, and given those aspects of sharia that seem, to an outsider at least, to prohibit democracy, free speech, and the fair treatment of the female half of our species, those who love peace and liberty would, in fact, be irrational not to harbor at least a measure of concern.

A religion is only a system of beliefs, and to say that all beliefs deserve equal respect or acceptance is to say that ideas have no moral weight, a patent absurdity. Because the human soul thirsts so for God, the sacred principle of individual liberty demands that religion be given wide latitude when it comes to internal mind-states, modes of worship, and the description of the metaphysical. But when it comes to the practical affairs of humankind, humankind may judge—and Islam, as the world stands now, has a lot to answer for. Whether radical Islamic violence, sexism, religious bigotry, and triumphalism are the natural outgrowths of its dogma or a series of aberrations is a perfectly valid question. Likewise the question of Islamic intentions toward Western culture in general and, by extension, the intentions of those behind the Ground Zero Mosque proposal. By what outlandish moral logic does Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf call America an “accomplice to the crime” of 9/11? From whom will he acquire the $100 million required to build his center, and what will they receive in return? None of these questions will be answered by simply condemning as phobic those who bring them to the fore.

With a hostility toward Christianity second only to Dracula’s, the Left has no credibility on the subject of freedom of religion. In a representative moment in February 2006, liberalism’s flagship paper, the New York Times, refused to publish the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed in order to “refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols.” The next day, it famously illustrated a story on the cartoons with an offensive image of the Virgin Mary smeared with dung. One wonders, therefore: Does the Left really cherish the rights of Islam, or is theirs but a short-sighted alliance with the enemy of their enemies?

Which is to say that perhaps opponents of the mosque should question the motives of those who question their motives. In any case, they should greet the designation of Islamophobia with the derision that it deserves.

Andrew Klavan is a contributing editor to City Journal.

Necessary for Life

2010-08-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

POINT OF VIEW
Necessary for Life
August 27, 2010 - Ray Pennings

In public conversation, death is usually a "no-go zone." Dealing with this subject flippantly is irreverent and disrespectful. Dealing with it respectfully exposes profound and deeply held differences. Talking about a world without "me" in it requires some skill in mental gymnastics—like imagining attending your own funeral. Yet the effort is deserved, since talking about death also changes our life priorities.

Last year, the British think tank Theos issued a report which suggested that discussing death more would decrease people's fear of death. The Humanist Association cried foul, suggesting the study was a ruse that "invented a cultural problem which only religion could solve" in order to advance a religious agenda. Sociologist Reginald Bibby has been asking young Canadians their views on various matters, including death, since 1975. In Restless Gods, he observes that "it may well be that people are not taking the time to reflect on 'life's big questions' to the extent they did three decades ago."

Although fear of death can hardly be a recently-invented cultural problem, measuring how different people deal with this fear seems to be subjective. My nineteen-year-old son has attended one funeral: an aged great-grandparent. When I was his age, I had been to five funerals, two of them after sudden and tragic deaths. We recently talked about our first direct exposures to death and we each had vivid, emotional memories. I asked my father about his teenaged memories of dealing with death. He recalls attending half a dozen or so funerals, mostly of older folk but also one of a teenaged neighbour. Interestingly, however, it was the much more involved engagement in the grieving process which distinguished his experience from ours. In the rural Dutch village where he was raised, what we typically contract to professionals was cared for by the entire community. The deceased's closest neighbour was responsible for overseeing the funeral arrangements, which included constructing a casket. The wake was held in the home with defined roles for neighbours, family members, and clergy. The town bells tolled during the entire funeral procession, and most of the community walked behind the horse-drawn cortege as it made its way from the home of the deceased to the cemetery. It was a communal event.

Thinking about our own death is obviously a very personal and spiritual matter and grieving the death of someone close to us is clearly experienced differently by those who knew the deceased in an intimate and personal way. As often as not, I attend a viewing or funeral today to express condolences and show support for people I know who are related to the deceased. My time and presence are all that is required. Increasingly of late, it seems that this communal participation in the funeral process is being separated from reality of death as funeral services have transformed into memorial services celebrating life and a private service is held for the internment or cremation. The community involvement in customary grieving processes generally requires much less direct exposure to the realty of death than it once did.

We deal with death less directly, but also less frequently. The advances of medicine have increased the average life expectancy, and the distance many of us live from our families means that we attend fewer funerals. A card or phone call becomes our expression of grief for the passing of an uncle, schoolmate, or former colleague. Unless we were close, no one expects us to purchase an airplane ticket to attend a wake or funeral.

I wonder what the impact of this less frequent and direct brush with death might be. Personally, I feel the pain of sin more than at any other time when I stand by an open grave. My theology teaches me that the wages of sin is death. I hate death. Never is it more real to me than when a casket is laid on a grave and the mourners have to turn to leave it behind. I see its coldness and cruelty in the faces and tears of those most intimately affected and I intensely realize just how serious sin really is.

Thankfully, my Christian theology provides me more. Services conducted in a Christian tradition provide a message of hope and triumph in the face of sin and death. Even as we prepare to leave the body behind, we recite the Apostles Creed, in which we declare that "Christ was crucified dead and buried. He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead . . . I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." Christ rose from the grave—a miraculous historical truth, which if not affirmed as such renders our faith as vanity (I Corinthians 15.17).

I know these things to be true. My faith is tested when I try to understand how dust and ashes will be raised into a glorious body, just as I don't fully understand how an acorn becomes an oak. But I know it does, and that gives me hope and reason to live on.

The impact of this truth is more than personal. What we think about death also shapes how we approach life. If there is no life beyond the grave, then whatever meaning one ascribes to life on earth is, by definition, limited. Logic dictates that we should live for the moment and enjoy life. Saving for the future, having concern for a legacy, participating in projects that are multi-generational in nature—few compelling arguments can really be mustered to support these activities. By the time the impacts of these activities are realized, we are not even there to observe. If it makes you feel good to give something to future generations, or if you want to be remembered, then do it; but beyond that, why bother?

Short-term horizons affect everything from our bank accounts to our construction projects. When things break down and decay, it will be someone else's problem. We stand and marvel at the cathedrals that took centuries and generations to build, but we hardly stop to reflect on what it says about us that we cannot muster the vision to undertake these sorts of projects. Most fundamentally, not thinking beyond ourselves deprives us of our sense of purpose and hope.

I have no embarrassment in admitting to the humanists that encouraging people to think about death will encourage them to think about spiritual questions. In fact, that is a good thing, even if it causes discomfort. But, I would argue, it impacts more than spiritual questions. It will shape their priorities and attitudes about what is good and true and beautiful, what is worth saving for, and how much they are prepared to sacrifice for social goods that they may not participate in. It gives my work a purpose beyond my own satisfaction and short-term benefit, and provides a perspective that will define my citizenship and neighbourliness.

I don't enjoy discussing death. It evokes uncomfortable emotions and painful memories. But I recognize its importance. It is part of the process of creation-fall-redemption-restoration, and puts what I do and who I am into a perspective beyond what I can touch and measure. That in turn gives what I can touch and measure greater texture and value. Ultimately, it helps me to truly live.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Cardus - Necessary for Life

The "Oppressiveness" of Civil Society

2010-08-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

The "Oppressiveness" of Civil Society
August 20, 2010 - David T. Koyzis

In 1962, Soviet authorities permitted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to publish his first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. More than two decades before Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was attempting to loosen the oppressive machinery that had systematically persecuted artists and writers who were not obviously toeing the party line.

Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking novel told of an ordinary prisoner's single day in one of Stalin's oppressive forced labour camps, a story that grew out of the author's own dehumanizing experience in the Soviet Gulag. Here prisoners worked without pay for meager rations, living under harsh and hazardous conditions with inadequate clothing and shelter. The inmates were sent here for activities that would scarcely be regarded as criminal elsewhere. Ivan was unjustly imprisoned as a spy because the authorities refused to believe he had escaped from a German concentration camp.

The tales of oppression during the last century are countless, with the litany of oppressors familiar to most of us: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Pinochet, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin. Some were motivated by sheer hatred of others—perhaps a visible minority group. Others sought to implement a grand historical vision that would liberate their people—and perhaps all people everywhere—from the oppressions of the past. The sad irony, of course, is that many efforts to end oppression engendered even greater oppression on a larger scale and with more efficient means. During their heyday hundreds of millions lived under genuine oppression at the hands of the followers of totalitarian ideologies.

What is oppression? Thus far I have used this word (or a derivative) nine times, assuming readers know its meaning. According to the OED, to oppress means to "govern tyrannically, keep under by coercion, subject to continual cruelty or injustice." There is general agreement, at least in the English-speaking world, that it is unjust for a government to infringe on such fundamental freedoms as speech, press, assembly, and religion. If Aung San Suu Kyi is kept under house arrest by the Burmese government for expressing opposing political views, we properly conclude that she and her followers are being oppressed. When the former National Party government in South Africa deliberately followed a policy of systematic discrimination against the majority of its citizens, the rest of the world correctly identified this as oppression. And, in the case of the fictional Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, unjust incarceration, coupled with severity of treatment, definitely amounts to oppression.

But what if my church community disapproves of a choice I make? If my chosen course of action was perfectly legal, is my church's expression of disapproval oppressive? Under the reigning liberal worldview, North Americans increasingly tend to assume that the law should prohibit only that which obviously harms another and that individuals must be legally free to do as they please provided no one else is hurt in the process. If government, or any other community, sees fit to depart from this principle for whatever reason, it acts oppressively. If it officially favours some personal choices over others, it is guilty of oppressing those who choose differently. If it favours (heterosexual) marriage over other sexual or nonsexual relationships, it oppresses the unmarried or the polyamorous in so doing. More significantly, if some communities impose standards on their members that go beyond the public law of the state, some will argue that the individuals penalized for breaking these standards are being deprived of their rights and are thus oppressed.

Every so often we hear of a university refusing to approve a Christian student group because the latter requires its members to be believing Christians who support the group's mission. In a misguided effort to encourage inclusivity, such universities—or their student governments—effectively discriminate against overtly confessional groups. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has decided, in the case of the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, that Hastings School of Law at the University of California may refuse to recognize any student group imposing standards of belief and conduct on its leaders. So who is oppressing whom? Is Hastings, backed by the U.S. judiciary, oppressing the CLS, or is the CLS oppressing aspiring leaders of the group?

In his defence of human rights, Michael Ignatieff, current leader of Canada's federal Liberal Party, goes so far as to argue that rights must always belong to individuals and not to groups. The very language of rights "cannot be translated into a nonindividualistic, communitarian framework. It presumes moral individualism and is nonsensical outside that assumption." Rights have meaning "only if they can be enforced against institutions like the family, the state, and the church." They function furthermore to defend the autonomy of the individual "against the oppression of religion, state, family, and group" (emphasis mine).

Of course, no one denies that members of a group can indeed suffer mistreatment at its hands. Nevertheless, there is more to Ignatieff's approach than meets the eye, as his use of the word oppression already indicates. Individuals must constantly be vigilant against the pretensions of the groups of which they are part, jealously guarding their personal freedom. Yet the word enforced necessarily implies an agent who can protect and advance this freedom over against threatened encroachment—and the only agent with this capacity is the state itself.

McGill University's Douglas Farrow notes the libertarian preference for John Stuart Mill's harm principle: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Of course, no flesh-and-blood society has ever existed for which this harm principle forms the primary (much less the sole) basis for freedom. A mature, differentiated society includes multiple non-state communities, each of which has its own identity and standards for membership. These standards necessarily impose constraints on those subject to them. To belong to an Orthodox Jewish community requires one to follow Torah and, more specifically, centuries of rabbinic interpretation of its precepts. If one violates these, one can expect to face sanctions from the community.

Is there something intrinsically oppressive in communities imposing standards on individual members? Though few would go so far as to assert this overtly, the logic of the harm principle must eventually give a positive answer to this question. If so, the state must intervene to "protect" these individuals from having to submit to standards unrelated to this principle. As Farrow correctly understands, this formulation must cut out "the oppressive middle term between the individual and the state," that is, the nonstate communities that command the loyalties of ordinary persons, thereby narrowing the range of our legitimate obligations to only two: those owed to ourselves as individuals and those owed to the state. Farrow continues: "This begs the question, however, as to what does or does not harm another, and who will decide that." Again, the state must take on this role of liberating the individual from the supposed oppression of those institutions that have come collectively to be called civil society.

Although Mill's writings strongly appeal to libertarians, Farrow perceptively concludes that "Mill's ideas aren't really very libertarian after all." Although liberalism has claimed to expand the sphere of individual competence, it has done so by reducing the multiple communities of which we are part to mere voluntary associations, which, ironically, threatens the wellbeing of the individual herself. If every constraint on the individual is potentially oppressive, and if every community is a voluntary collection of individuals, those communities not obviously contractual in character, such as marriage, family, institutional church, and state, must be viewed with deep suspicion—indeed as downright oppressive. Yet we cannot live without them.

Solzhenitsyn once wrote that "a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either." Indeed, a genuinely human society is characterized by a plurality of social forms and obligations, the most crucial of which cannot be reduced to the individual will. Not only is such a pluriform society necessary for human flourishing, but it is a potent bulwark against genuine oppression by a totalistic individualism backed by a potentially expansive state.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Cardus - The "Oppressiveness" of Civil Society

A Theology of Jiggly Thighs

2010-08-18T13:20:00.000-07:00

A Theology of Jiggly Thighs
What a graying supermodel can teach Jesus' female followers.

Margot Starbuck, guest blogger

Splattered across the media this week is Kristen McMenamy, a supermodel and mother of three who was featured on the August cover of Italian Vogue. She appears inside in a striking (some say offensive) photo spread, lying on her back against jagged rocks, wearing a black feathered dress, in a way designed to mimic the aesthetic of the Gulf oil spill images. But I was more intrigued by the model’s hair: The 45-year-old boldly flaunts her naturally long gray locks, telling Vogue Daily, “You can get older and still be rock-’n’-roll. I thought all that gray hair would make a beautiful picture.

I’m a fan of embracing the way God made us, but I have to confess feeling a little conflicted about the hoopla. I suspect my reticence is not unrelated to the fact that McMenamy still has the body of a Barbie.

At age 41, I have most of my cranial pigment, but I see where things are headed. If I live enough years, if you live enough years, the physical downhill slide is inevitable. The pigment fails. Once-toned arms get flabby. Other things start to jiggle, sag, wrinkle. If all this weren’t insulting enough, physical losses give way to social losses as we lose the ability to turn heads with our beauty.

As is my way, I like to make issues like sagging breasts and jiggly thighs theological. Specifically, I’m dying to get a handle on the divine logic behind the aging situation. What holy madness drives wrinkles and age spots?

I humbly invite you to join me in considering one weird possibility: I wonder if this process that is clearly happening against our wills — as the volume of beauty products that promise to reverse aging’s attests — isn’t what Jesus has been inviting us to embrace, all along, with our wills.

“Hold on, Margot. Jesus never said anything about crows’ feet or yellowing teeth or declining breast altitude.” Not in so many words. But to those who want to gain their lives — and maybe the attention of others — Jesus instructs us to lose our lives. Those who want to be first — say, in the high-school homecoming court — should aim for last place. Those who want to increase — possibly in attractiveness — should decrease. Jesus even taught his friends that those who want to attract God’s good favor should give themselves in ways that don’t attract the good favor of others. Downward social mobility is exactly what Jesus has been inviting us to embrace, all along. Though the apostle Paul wasn’t thinking about eye circles or thinning scalps, he confirms, “We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:11).
According to this kingdom logic, if we want to be seen, we should purpose to really see others. If we want to be heard, we should listen, really listen, to those whose voices haven’t been heard. If we want to be loved, we should knock ourselves out loving the unlovable. Though Jesus placed no particular value on garnering the admiring eye of others, with our shimmering lips or blinding teeth or bouncy locks, he really did knock himself out reminding us to turn our young and middle-aged and old faces toward those whom his Father loves, especially those on the world’s so-called margins.
In the end, the reality of the aging situation effectively dissolves any illusion that this life — or the next one, for that matter — is all about us. As we die to ourselves, whether purposefully or kicking and screaming, we relinquish whatever power we might have had to attract attention with our appearances. When we do it willingly, we live into Jesus’ good will for us. We make more room for others to be seen and heard and known and loved.

If you are young and gorgeous, and maybe have aspirations to be America’s Next Top Model, I completely understand that this whole set up seems unsavory. For those of us who want to age with grace, though, there’s real promise as we choose this Jesus-way. As we begin to embrace the inevitable losses inherent in aging we’re freed up, in a particular way, for the kind of self-giving love for which we were made.

As for Kristen McMenamy, even with the Barbie body she might have something important to teach Christian women.

Margot Starbuck is the author most recently of Unsqueezed: Springing Free from Skinny Jeans, Nose Jobs, Highlights and Stilettos (InterVarsity Press). Alicia Cohn has interviewed her for the women's blog.

Her.meneutics: A Theology of Jiggly Thighs

The 'Low'-Down on Robert Duvall

2010-07-27T19:31:00.000-07:00

INTERVIEW
The 'Low'-Down on Robert Duvall

The veteran actor discusses his new film Get Low, a folk tale about an eccentric recluse—and gets a little feisty about The Apostle.

Mark Moring | posted 7/27/2010 04:17AM

Ever wonder what people will say at your funeral? That's pretty much the premise of Get Low, a new film releasing this week and starring Robert Duvall as an eccentric recluse living in the hills—while all the townsfolk share wild (and mostly untrue) stories about him.

A Southern folk tale based in the 1930s—and based on a true story of a Tennessee man who lived at that time—the film features Duvall as Felix Bush, a loner who decides to hold a "living funeral" so he can hear what the people are really saying about him. It's a stellar film, with themes of forgiveness and redemption, and features a dazzling cast, including Oscar winners Duvall and Sissy Spacek and Oscar nominee Bill Murray.

Duvall, who will be 80 in January, tells CT that Get Low is one of his favorite movies that he's made. He compares the story with the Horton Foote-written films in which he's starred, including and Tender Mercies (for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor).

Duvall, who likes to play flawed men because they bring more "drama" to the story, also talked about his role in 1997's The Apostle, a tale rife with moral complexity in which he plays a feisty Southern preacher in need of some anger management. The actor got a little feisty himself when we asked him whether that movie was subtly mocking Pentecostals and charismatics.

You have a history of playing flawed, complicated, broken men. What attracts you to these roles?

Well, they present themselves to me, and those characters make good drama. If people don't have conflicts, contradictions, and faults, then there is no drama there. My favorite part of all time was probably Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove; I also played Josef Stalin in a TV movie. I also always try to find the vulnerable side and the positive side of the character.

Are you attracted to stories that depict faith and spiritual things?

I could be, but I don't go looking for something with a "message," so to speak. If it's there, it's there. When I did The Apostle, that was a personal kind of thing for me to do that.

You wrote, directed, acted in, and financed The Apostle. Why was it so important to you to make that movie?

Years ago [in the 1960s], I was in a little town in Hughes, Arkansas, to do some research on a play. I wandered out one night and I saw this little Pentecostal church, and a woman preacher. I said, "I gotta put this on film someday. I've never seen this." It was a part of Americana—spiritual but also a cultural thing. It took me years and years to get it done, all with my own money and everything.

You observed a lot of preachers while doing your research, didn't you?

All over America. And mostly in black churches. I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher! He'd make Mahatma Gandhi look like a Nazi. He was so spiritual, this man. A wonderful man.

Some people thought The Apostle was mocking Southern holiness or Pentecostal preachers …

Who said that?

Oh, some Christians wished it had been a more positive portrayal of a preacher rather than a man with all these …

Let me straighten these people out. And you can put it in print. My guy [Rev. Euliss "Sonny" Dewey, the title character] killed a guy out of anger, right? But he wasn't one half as bad as King David in the Psalms, who sent a man off to be killed so he could be with his wife. Every time I read the Psalms I think of that. But on the other hand, I heard that Billy Graham liked the movie, and many, many preachers did. Rev. James Robison of Fort Worth said I could use anything from any of his services to put in the film. So I'm not mocking.

If Hollywood had done this, they would have mocked these people. No, I did not mock these people. I didn't patronize these people. I've been in many, many churches, Pentecostal churches. I could have made these people look bad if I wanted to. So you can tell these people I did not mock these people or condescend at all. Had I done it in a Hollywood movie, we would have patronized these people. That's why I had to do the movie myself.

Why do you think Hollywood has a tendency to mock Christians and preachers?

Well, it's not just Christians. I mean, I'm a Christian. But they mock the interior of the United States of America, the heartland. They don't go out of their way to understand what's really there.

Let's talk about Get Low. I really enjoyed the movie. A fascinating character study. How would you describe the film to someone?

You can look at it from different angles. Some people see it as a love story, about a man who loved one woman his whole life. But there are other things about the movie that make it a very important movie. My wife (Luciana Pedraza, his spouse since 2004) says it's her favorite film that I've done in 15 years, since The Apostle. There are many wonderful things in it, but it's a love story with a lot of basic humanity in it too. It's kind of a southern folk tale, a fictionalized based-on-fact story of a man who had set up and gone to his own funeral.

How would you describe your character, Felix Bush, and do you have anything in common with him?

Well, I suppose I have something in common with him. He's very individualistic, [but] if he hadn't gone into this kind of isolation as a hermit, to do a certain kind of penance, I think he could have been a lawyer, a school teacher, a world traveler, a merchant marine—he could have been many things. I don't know if I am like him, but I could certainly identify with him.

Are you anything like him in regards to keeping to yourself and out of the public eye? You're not in the tabloids a lot …

Well, I can't live without a woman. I have to have a woman, have to have a wife. And Felix decided not to have that, for all those years. But it was a beautiful project to work on for a number of reasons, like the sense of humanity with Felix looking for personal redemption, looking to find peace with himself. It's a beautifully written story.

I hear the script reminded you of the great script writer—and your good friend—Horton Foote.

Yes. The writing and the movie is somewhat like Horton, the great playwright. I did several of his films—Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird and several others [The Chase, Tomorrow, and Convicts in film, and The Midnight Caller on stage]. Horton died last year at the age of 93, and still had wonderful plays off Broadway in recent years. He was one of our great playwrights who was great until his final years. I told him I was going do this movie, and I wish he could've seen it. But he passed away—and there's a story there. As I was giving the final speech to the whole crowd [in the film's penultimate scene], my wife's cell phone rings off camera—and it's a message from Horton's son-in-law that he had just died.

That very day?

Yes. It was like full circle, like he was there or something. It was like we'd gone from To Kill a Mockingbird to that time, because I wanted him to see this movie because it is very much like his writing. So it was very ironic that it happened on that particular day as the camera rolled.

What's the best thing you learned from Horton Foote?

We had a good working relationship. I always said if I only had done his films, and the films of Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Godfather II, Apocalypse Now, The Rain People), I would have had a wonderful career. But I learned from Horton how to have friendship and still be able to work together, through thick and thin and still stay friends. How many friends do you have after 50 years? Not many.

Most of us wonder what people will say at our funerals. What do you think people will say at yours?

I don't know. I always figure from the cradle to the grave, we all have our individual journeys, and maybe my journey was a positive one and I accomplished certain things without stepping on too many toes. I hope I left behind a legacy that people will enjoy. But whatever they want to say, I can't predict.

Do you ever plan to retire?

Not until they wipe the drool! No sir! Michael Caine told me, "You don't retire from the movie business; they retire you." So right now, if they can raise the money, there are several [upcoming film projects] that are as good as anything I've ever done.

Like what?

Well, to play Don Quixote in a movie. I'm also looking at The Hatfields and the McCoys, which is a brilliant script, and one called A Night in Old Mexico. So there's three wonderful projects if we can get the money.

We've got less than a minute left. Any last words about Get Low that we didn't cover?

Yeah. Get Low is one of my favorite films in a long time and a wonderful character. "Get low"—I don't even know what that means. I guess it means to get low for Jesus before it's time. Keep above the ground before you go below the ground.

Huh?

You'll probably get a different definition from the producers but that's kind of the way that I look at it. And it's a film that we're real proud of.

Well, I'm looking forward to letting our readers know about …

You tell your readers there is no way that I wanted to make fun of the Pentecostal people! If I had wanted to make them look like bad people, I could have, believe me.

OK, I'll do that! Thanks for your time.

© 2010 Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

The 'Low'-Down on Robert Duvall | Movies & TV | Christianity Today

Yes and and again, Yes -- Materially supporting our Artists

2010-07-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

Will paint for food
July 16, 2010 - Dayton Castleman

This article is about materially supporting and compensating artists for their work. As an artist, writing on the subject in such a compressed form feels a bit like taking a quick jog across a live minefield. What the subject deserves is a long, close, careful treatment, and anything less than that feels a bit precarious. There is the question of conflict of interest, the necessary un-nuanced generalizations, and the danger of sounding bitter or cynical. I am not sure whether that makes me courageous or foolish, but I think it is important enough to address regardless.

I had a professor in my first year of college tell us fresh-faced art majors that if there was anything in the entire world that we could imagine doing besides art, we should do that other thing, because art was just too difficult to pursue without an unwavering dedication. He was right, and those of us that stuck with it knew we had been duly warned about what we were getting into. In a sense, the moment we decided not to change majors, we relinquished our right to whine about being underappreciated or undercompensated. What we did receive, however, was a new responsibility regarding stewardship of the discipline into which we had been adopted.

Making, teaching, and thinking about art is my vocation. It is also the reason why I find myself braving aisles of silk flowers, rubber stamps, and seasonal decorations at a store called "Hobby Lobby" on a somewhat regular basis. I brave the store because they sell things I need to do my job, in spite of their less than completely accurate name. I want to highlight this because very real obstacles—regarding knowing when or how to compensate artists—arise when pivotal distinctions between making art as one's hobby and making art as one's dedicated work are misunderstood.

Crafting images and objects can legitimately operate as both a form of recreation and a means of cultural reorganization and critique. Making things in order to enjoyably pass a Sunday afternoon, and making things in order to operate as lenses for interpreting the meaning of the world, are both justified endeavours—but they are not the same endeavour. The problem is that distinguishing between the two is complicated by an insidiously ordinary similarity in material and posture. If we imagine two people standing before two blank canvasses with brushes and paints at the ready, how are we to know which one is trying to unwind after a long week, and which one is trying to change the world? If we assume that every person who stands before a blank canvas finds the process of painting fun and relaxing rather than disciplined and difficult work, or an exercise in releasing tension as opposed to an exercise in embracing and highlighting tensions, then we may easily treat every artist as a person pursuing a sort of hobby. And I'll be the first to agree that we ought not reimburse one another's hobbies.

The work of the artist is often toilsome and, contrary to popular opinion, it is not always enjoyable. It can be difficult and even boring like any other type of work. It is the fleshing out of hard-fought, hard-won wisdom, experience, and skill that comes from years of dedicated, diligent, often uncompensated formal study of a discipline, and the world of ideas that undergirds it. It is art done in order to help others see things in a slightly different way. It is work that eschews self-indulgent "personal expression" in favour of images, objects, installations, performances, presentations, and writings that engage the world around us, and which are intended to enrich, unify, and challenge communities of people. Doing this well generally takes a great deal of time, and it certainly isn't free.

I want to be clear that service and generosity within the church and civic structures are an essential part of good citizenship. Artists are rarely asked to donate their work or time to projects that would not in some way enrich the lives of others. The application of one's calling toward the greater good of other people is, and will always be, an essential part of being human. When we give of ourselves out of the surplus that has been given to us, it beautifully echoes the sacrificial generosity that has been shown to us by our God in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. A person's membership in a particular church or relationship to the Church at large should not be understood as a transactional arrangement. To be a part of the Kingdom of God is to be a servant, and that mandates giving freely, without remuneration, for the sake of the Gospel, and the incarnation of God's presence in the world.

But held in simultaneous tension with our responsibility to be generous is the fundamental challenge to artists in our culture (Christian or not) concerning how to continue actually doing this work of making images while fulfilling the responsibility of supporting one's self, or one's family. An important and wonderful shift within the Church in the last thirty years or so (precipitated by writing and thought that has preceded it by decades) has been a move toward a deeper appreciation of what artists may uniquely contribute to the body of Christ. This growing awareness should not go unnoticed or unappreciated, as it is an essential step toward a richer picture of God's Kingdom within the Church. Yet still lacking in a broad sense within the Church, both among artists and non-artists alike, is an awareness of how very critical a robust and responsible patronage is in enabling artists to perform this role. We cannot grow in our appreciation and utilization of the work of artists without a willingness to grow in providing the resources that will enable and sustain that work.

Ultimately, it is an issue of responsible stewardship both on the part of the artist and the Church, and, frankly, artists seldom help their own cause. One thing every artist desires is to have his or her work seen and its purpose appreciated. Yet this desire, unbridled by a resolute conviction of the intrinsic value of the artist's work, creates an unhealthy cultural dynamic. If an artist understands their work as inessential to healthy cultures, then they are less likely to assume compensation for that work as normative. As it plays out, local congregations (and parachurch organizations) are typically more than willing to ask artists to donate their time and work, and too many artists tend to be more than willing to work without compensation (or to simply ask about it), even in those situations where they ought to be compensated.

As I've tried to clarify, generosity is mandated, but it is essential that artists' generosity be met with the church's willingness to materially support the artist. And it is imperative that both should happen from within a fundamental understanding of the artist's unique and skilled work within the Church being as worthy of financial compensation as rewiring the sanctuary, or auditing the books—and just as important.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Ohh its so bright. Ohh its so vivid

2010-07-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

Wonder Woman Gets Pants!

2010-06-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

By Albert Ching, Newsarama.com / June 30, 2010

Wonder Woman has a bold new look, one of the most dramatic changes of her 70-year history.

Designed by DC Comics co-publisher Jim Lee, Wonder Woman's new costume retains the bracelets and tiara, but is considerably less revealing.

Criticized for years for fighting crime in effectively a one-piece swimsuit — often considered either sexist or simply impractical — the DC Comics icon has a new costume as of this week's Wonder Woman #600, and it's one considerably less revealing, complete with long pants and a jacket. Signature elements such as the character's bracelets, tiara and magic lasso remain. The costume was designed by acclaimed penciler and DC Comics co-publisher Jim Lee.

DC Comics announced the change Tuesday evening.

"It’s a look designed to be taken seriously as a warrior, in partial answer to the many female fans over the years who’ve asked, 'how does she fight in that thing without all her parts falling out?'" said incoming series writer J. Michael Straczynski.

"It reflects her origins in both the outside world and the world of Amazons: tough, elegant...a street-fighter’s look which also incorporates elements of her classic design," Straczynski said. "It reflects the two sides warring for ultimate victory, and underscores the path she must take."

It's also a versatile outfit, according to Straczynski.

"She can close it up to pass unnoticed ... open it for the freedom to fight ... lose the jacket or keep it on ... it has pockets (the other fan question, “where does she carry anything in that outfit?”), it can be accessorized," Straczynski wrote in DC's official release. "it’s a Wonder Woman look designed for the 21st century."

Straczynski also commented on some of the classic elements that were retained.

"The bracelets are still there, but made more colorful, tied on the inside and over the hand, with a script W on each of them that form WW when she holds them side by side...and if you get hit by one of them, it leaves a W mark. This is a Wonder Woman who signs her work ... letting her enemies know that she’s getting closer."

Straczynski noted to DC Comics that the new outfit is Wonder Woman's "first significant change in her appearance since the character debuted in 1941," with the notable exception of a mod bodysuit briefly sported in the '60s.

With the new costume comes a new direction for the title: Thanks to some time-shifting by the Olympian gods who created Wonder Woman, the superheroine's history has been changed so she grew up in a modern, urban environment, with little memory or conection to her mythical origins.

"The Gods, for reasons of their own but which may have something to with their survival and perhaps the survival of Earth itself, have changed the timeline. In the new timeline, years ago the Gods removed their protection from Paradise Island, and left it vulnerable to attack," Straczynski shared in the press release. "And attacked it was. Led by a dark figure, a veritable army descended upon the Island, equipped with weapons that could kill even the Amazons. Outgunned, doomed, Hippolyta gave over her three-year-old daughter to a handful of guardians who spirited her away as Hippolyta led one last desperate battle against the forces that had come to destroy all she had created. In that final battle, she and most of the Amazons were killed, though some managed to escape."

This new direction will also bring Wonder Woman into opposition with new enemies.

"It’s now nearly twenty years later. Diana has been raised in an urban setting, but with a foot in both worlds. She has little or no memory of the other timeline. She knows only what she’s been told by those who raised her On the run, hunted, she must try to survive, help the other refugee Amazons escape the army that is still after them, discover who destroyed Paradise Island and why ... and if the timeline can be corrected or not," Straczynski wrote in DC's official materials. "She also does not yet have access to her full powers, but will be gaining them as she goes. Along the way, she will face a range of enemies — human and otherwise — who we have not seen before."

Essentially, both the new look and new direction amount to a rebirth, wrote Straczynski.

"This is Wonder Woman reborn, literally and metaphorically: fast, elegant, tough, smart ... the savior of her people, their guardian and protector ... avenging the fall of Paradise Island, searching to discover why Paradise Island was abandoned by the gods," Straczynski told to the publisher. "In the end, what she discovers will change her life and the world forever...and she will come face to face with a decision that will mean life or death for the entire human race."

#600 comes out in stores this Wednesday, June 30, written by Straczynski and drawn by Don Kramer and Michael Babinski.

think thickly, speak thinly

2010-06-25T12:10:00.001-07:00

Neighbourhood Grace
June 25, 2010 - Eric O. Jacobsen

"My biggest frustration is that I can't seem to get many of the members to put any of their time or effort towards our shared mission."

I listened to his words, but also was aware that I must have had this conversation over a hundred times during my 15 years in ministry. But this time, it wasn't a church member complaining to me about the rampant individualism or consumerism within the church body. This was the District Manager of the Stadium Historic Business District Association (SHBDA) complaining about the lack of involvement with the broader goals of the district among business owners.

I had recently been elected the President of SHBDA and the District Manager was looking to me for support and help in his plight. In some ways, my involvement in the SHBDA was a natural fit, since the church at which I serve as the Senior Pastor is embedded in the heart of the neighbourhood and serves as a visual anchor for the district. On the other hand, the church is not technically a business and the source of my authority at church (the Word of God) is not a recognized authority outside of her walls. So far in my tenure, the awkwardness of this fit had not really crossed my mind, but the framing of the District Manager's concern was familiar enough to cause a momentary lapse in clarity between my two roles.

Had this been one of my lay leaders at church, and had the complaint been about church members, I would have had a better sense for how to frame my response. Perhaps I would have used 1 Peter 4:10 or Ephesians 4:11-13 to help us think about ways to remind our members that they have been given gifts of the Spirit in order to serve one another and build up Christ's kingdom. Not only would this language most likely fall flat on the District Manager, but the truth articulated in those verses would probably not apply to many of the business owners who are not followers of Christ.

As I reflected further on his dilemma, I began to frame a more helpful approach—at least in my own mind. Richard Mouw taught me that in public settings, we are often called to "think thickly and speak thinly." This gave me permission to ground my thinking in scripture and theology, even though my conversation partner may not share these foundations with me. Later, as a second step, I could think about ways to communicate the conclusions I had drawn.

I began with the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:27, in which God instructs humanity to fill the earth. The neocalvinist tradition holds that this reference to "filling" means the development of cultural goods. This mandate is one part of the larger creation mandate that is given before the covenant with Abraham, and so pertinent to all of humanity. I share it not just with the Christian community, but with all people, including the business owners and employees in the Stadium District. It is, first and foremost, an affirmation of their vocation to repair cars, clean teeth, hem pants, lend money, and prepare and serve food. Before we ask them to "do more to support the district," we can begin by affirming what they are already doing.

Then I began thinking about the great biblical notion of shalom. I have come to love the idea of shalom as human wholeness and flourishing in the context of loving relationships. Shalom is a word for God's intent for the good of humanity, and I believe it is attractive to people whether they have a relationship to God or not. According to Jeremiah 29:7, shalom is something we can seek for our unbelieving neighbours and with their cooperation. My favourite image of shalom, from Zechariah 8:4-5, is a picture of intergenerational life on the streets that I can easily picture taking place right in the middle of our Stadium District. I believe that fleshing out this picture may provide a key for getting the District Manager and the business owners to work together to bring about this attractive vision.

This led me to think about common grace. As I considered the plausibility of this vision in this place, I realized that there were other districts in our area that had managed to increase shalom through the collective voluntary efforts of business owners in the area—many of whom were not Christian. The immediate agents for this shalom increase were the business owners; however, we can also claim that God was the cause of this shalom through the blessing of common grace, the non-salvific blessing that God can give to any person. Common grace comes in many forms (natural blessings, the restraint of evil, and so on) but the pertinent form for this discussion is identified as "acts of civic righteousness."

This mental journey helped me reframe the District Manager's question in my mind. Although he didn't know it, he was asking me whether I could help the business owners in the district fulfill their God-given mandate to increase shalom in this place by affirming the goodness of their primary vocation and relying on the blessing of God to help them overcome their self-absorbed disposition in order to serve the greater good.

This thick reframing of his question helped me respond to his dilemma in a way that employed thinner language. I first tried to really listen to his concern and not brush it off. Shalom is meant to be a shared vision for the community, and it is distressing to feel alone in our pursuit of this ideal. He may feel blown off by the other business owners, but I wanted him to know that he had my full attention. I also affirmed his frustration. His picture of what this neighbourhood could be was more than just a projection of his ideal community setting or that which brought him comfort: it was, at some level, inspired by God's expectation for community life. And it is not just frustrating, but wrong when we fail to achieve it or even care about it.

As much as I felt that I needed to validate his frustration, I also recognized that I needed to be careful of indulging it. After all, much what the business owners were doing was simply living out the cultural mandate. He also spoke fairly sharply about the business owners' self-absorption and wanted to make them pay (by subtle censure) for their failure to contribute to the district. Part of his frustration grew from the gap between what the district could be and the effort that each was willing to put towards getting there. But perhaps the greater part of his frustration was the disappointment of discovering how pervasive a self-oriented perspective is within the members of our district.

I was less frustrated because I was less surprised. One of the great advantages of a Christian worldview is that we are not surprised by sin in either its egregious or milder forms. I encouraged the District Manager to have a bit more patience with the business owners, because the idea of putting the needs and desires of others above their own was alien to them. If it was going to be different, it was going to need to be taught and modeled. No amount of scolding was going to bring about shalom. We needed to revise our expectations and to take things a bit more slowly. What we need—what we all need at some point—is to be graciously invited to enjoy the fruits of shalom as we are being asked to contribute to it.

I knew that behind our efforts was a God who is even more interested in bringing about shalom in our neighbourhood than either of us could ever be. I never used the words shalom, sin, or even vocation in expressing this conviction. But I believe that our conversation that day honoured God, and hopefully helped us take one more step towards helping out neighbourhood to be God honouring as well.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Tight Pants Ban... 20,000 Long Skirts Distributed

2010-05-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

Authorities distribute 20,000 long skirts to enforce tight pants ban in Indonesia's West Aceh
Published May 27, 2010 | Associated Press

MEULABOH, Indonesia (AP) — Authorities in a devoutly Islamic district of Indonesia's Aceh province have distributed 20,000 long skirts and prohibited shops from selling tight dresses as a regulation banning Muslim women from wearing revealing clothing took effect Thursday.

The long skirts are to be given to Muslim women caught violating the dress code during a two-month campaign to enforce the regulation, said Ramli Mansur, head of West Aceh district.

Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code, he said.

During raids Thursday, Islamic police caught 18 women traveling on motorbikes who were wearing traditional headscarves but were also dressed in jeans. Each woman was given a long skirt and her pants were confiscated. They were released from police custody after giving their identities and receiving advice from Islamic preachers.

"I am not wearing sexy outfits, but they caught me like a terrorist only because of my jeans," said Imma, a 40-year-old housewife who uses only one name. She argued that wearing jeans is more comfortable when she travels by motorbike.

Motorbikes are commonly used by both men and women in Indonesia.

"The rule applies only to Muslim residents in West Aceh," Mansur told The Associated Press. "We don't enforce it for non-Muslims, but are asking them to respect us."

He said any shopkeepers caught violating restrictions on selling short skirts and jeans would face a revocation of their business licenses.

No merchants have been seen displaying jeans or tight clothing in stores in West Aceh district in recent weeks.

The regulation is the latest effort to promote strict moral values in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, where most of the roughly 200 million Muslims practice a moderate form of the faith.

It does not set out a specific punishment for violators, but says "moral sanctions" will be imposed by local leaders.

Mansur said women caught violating the ban more than three times could face two weeks in detention.

Rights groups say the regulation violates international treaties and the Indonesian constitution.

Aceh, a semiautonomous region, made news last year when its provincial parliament passed an Islamic, or Shariah, law making adultery punishable by stoning to death. It also has imposed prison sentences and public lashings for homosexuals and pedophiles.

Islamic law is not enforced across the vast island nation. But bans on drinking alcohol, gambling and kissing in public, among other activities, have been enforced by some more conservative local governments in recent years.

Opinion polls show that a majority of Indonesians oppose the restrictions on dress and behavior, which are being pushed by hard-liners in the secular democracy.

The Wake for Printed Books...

2010-05-21T10:25:00.001-07:00

POINT OF VIEW
The Wake for Printed Books
May 21, 2010 - J. Mark Bertrand

Surely the most naive of Sumerian writers must have understood that cuneiform was a doomed writing system anyway, and that anybody still pressing wedges into soft clay was a fool. It must have made for a sour panel at the Euphrates Writers Conference when the participants showed up for 'The Death of Clay Tablets.' Technological advances were threatening the writing arts, with clay itself soon to be replaced by papyrus and then paper and then satellite dishes for high-definition television. How would the written word survive?

—Robert Clark Young in "The Death of the Death of the Author" (The Southern Review, Winter 2008)

I went to the same graduate school as Robert Clark Young, though our terms didn't quite overlap, and after reading his piece in The Southern Review, I ended up in touch with him. We spent an afternoon in San Francisco chatting about all things book-related, after which I very nearly got him run over—but that's another story. Since I'm prone to cynicism (in the same essay, Young quotes Sidney J. Harris to the tune that a cynic "is prematurely disappointed in the future"), I've kept his essay handy as a vade mecum, invoking the sentiment wherever applicable, sometimes to my detriment.

When Ken Myers interviewed me for Mars Hill Audio Volume 90, for example, he kept asking about the decline of literacy, only to have me scoff at the pessimism. Little did I know that the flipside of Volume 90 would feature an extended chat with Dana Gioia about the NEA's depressing literacy study. Fortunately that part of my interview was excised from the final version, sparing me the indignity of appearing unsuitably optimistic and glib. Ever since, I've kept what little optimism I possess to myself.

The Euphrates Writers Conference and the biennial Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing would seem to have little in common, but the most recent festival featured a panel called "The Case for Printed Books." Five minutes into the proceedings, I had to double-check my program to make sure it wasn't titled "The Wake for Printed Books." The book was doomed and anyone still pressing ink onto paper (albeit metaphorically in our digital age) was a fool. The only difference? The gathered assembly consisted of self-professed fools, book lovers determined to rage against the dying of the light. Our friend the Book was terminally ill, practically dead, but we weren't going to let the ones who did him in get off scot-free.

There were booksellers forced to close up shop, printers retrenching in the face of lowered demand, even all-powerful editors forced to justify their very existence. I'm now accustomed to the lament of independent booksellers. Once a Meg Ryan movie is made about the dilemma, it's safe to say the concern has gone mainstream. But to see editors stumbling over their words, making a defensive case for their continued relevance in a world of e-books where a generation of authors have been told they have to market themselves or not be marketed at all . . . that was new. Publishers have gone from sneering at self-publishing to getting in on the act. Strange new world. Even the publishers' role as "risk aggregators" (to borrow OK Go singer Damian Kulash's term for the record labels) might not guarantee them a bright future.

Naturally the iPad came up. Some panelists seemed delighted by the device and how it might change our perception of what a book is. Most were wary. A fun toy, yes, but with the potential to destroy the world as we know it. The Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a printed book on demand, met with more enthusiasm, perhaps because it seems to reverse the trend of disembodiment: instead of turning hard copies into ether, it pulls forgotten books from the ether and turns them back into hard copies. [Ed: watch Cardus publications being produced on a local Espresso machine.]

The End of Civilisation

Speaking of machines, in the 1960 film version of The Time Machine, Roy Taylor finds himself among the blond-haired Eloi. The time-traveling representative of the Scottish Enlightenment is at first delighted by the leisure society, assuming that freedom from toil must translate into full-time study and experimentation. He fires off one question after another, but the Eloi remain indifferent until he mentions books. They have books, they tell him, much to his relief. The books will answer his questions, he says. They'll tell him everything he needs to know.

His blond-haired, blue-eyed guide conducts him to the shelves, where a screening curtain promptly falls at the touch. Opening a dusty volume, the time traveler smiles. Then he turns a page and it crumbles in his hand. More pages dissolve.

"Yes," he says, "they do tell me all about you."

He sweeps his hand through a row of shelved books, creating a cloud of dust.

Until now, the End of the Book has been a symbol of the End of Civilization. The anaesthetized drones of the leisure society have no time to read. More to the point, they have no interest in the process. They are too busy being entertained.

When I returned from the Calvin Festival, one of the friends I'd re-connected with there forwarded a link from Richard Mouw's piece in April's Books & Culture, a reassessment of "Calvinist suspicion of fiction and poetry," specifically eighteenth century Scottish Presbyterian skepticism:

The reasons for this widespread suspicion of novels and poems were different than I would have guessed, though. The concerns were due . . . not so much to "ignorance or philistinism" as to a "stridently Calvinist view of labor." For one thing, folks worried that imaginative writing was the kind of thing that drew on "solitude and isolation" rather than social engagement—they were thinking here of the British Romanticists. The kind of person who spent considerable time imagining and constructing fictional and poetic scenarios was like to be someone who disdained the ordinary rhythms of work and sociability, thus fostering a sense of self-importance and a pattern of excessive introspection.

It might seem that the Eloi have little in common with eighteenth century readers of fiction—books are certainly not the cause of their self-absorption, and they don't lack for a sense of community—but the time traveler's problem with their society sounds very similar to the Presbyterian's problem with novel readers: they lack work. The only thing that's changed is that by the late nineteenth century, literature can be seen as a kind of work: the work of civilization.

Ironically, I read Mouw's piece via my iPhone while attending a presbytery meeting. During the examination of a new minister, a question from the floor asked what "non-theological" reading he'd recently undertaken. The answer was Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and it was given without any self-consciousness. None of the Presbyterian elders in attendance expressed concern at the amount of leisure and "excessive introspection" the completion of a Russian novel requires. At least one of them, the iPhone-wielding novelist, was in no position to throw stones.

The critique Mouw cites of fiction hasn't exactly gone away over time. Only the target has shifted. Reading novels is a virtuous activity, assuming they're the right kind of novels. Today's bogeyman is social networking. Blogging and Facebook and Twitter, virtual substitutes for embodied social engagement. Substitute a few terms and the diatribes could be republished today. As e-books, no doubt.

Is the Book the Body or the Soul?

What's at stake in the End of Books? The sense of embodiment. Obviously the content will survive. The question is, in what form?

Book is a shifty word, denoting both the physical object and the content within. As an author, I think of myself as having "written books," when in fact I've typed hundreds of pages of fiction and nonfiction into various word processing files, e-mailed them to my editors, and only much later seen them take physical form. To say all that, however, seems pedantic. To describe myself as, say, a "content provider," however fitting the term might seem, strikes me as something akin to insult. I write books.

And I'm a lover of books, too, unaccustomed to making a body/soul distinction where the printed word is concerned. The book is the object and its contents, inseparable in my mind. I dwell in a house lined with shelves, most of them bowed by the weight of their printed content. Beautiful books and ugly ones. Read and unread. Objects of comfort, outrage, derision, admiration. Some pristine and others scarred. Some bound in leather, some in paper (at least one in shagreen). Prized and cheap side by side. Tangible things, each with a history. I can tell you where they came from, where they've been. The ones I sought out and the ones I discovered unexpectedly. The ones kept under glass in dark bookstores and, all too often, the ones overnighted from the clean, well-lit warehouses of Amazon. All of that will disappear when the book's body does.

Perhaps nothing can stop the change. Perhaps nothing should. As at the wake for the dead friend, that's not the point. Sure, he was sick. Sure, we all saw it coming. In a way, we're even relieved that his suffering is finally over. But don't expect us not to miss him. And don't expect us not to pity you for never having the chance to know him. Those of us who did will never forget.

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Article of the week #2: Culture's Fallow Ground: The Shame of Biblical Illiteracy

2010-05-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

POINT OF VIEW
Culture's Fallow Ground: The Shame of Biblical Illiteracy
May 7, 2010 - Joe Carter

"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my pistol," said the Nazi playwright Hans Johst. I suspect that if our paths had ever crossed, Johst would have shot me on sight. For I am what he would have despised most: a culturist.

I love culture. I love high culture, low culture, and middlebrow culture. I love pop culture, folk culture, and church culture. I love Texas culture, American culture, and the culture of Western civilization. I worry about culture wars and wars on culture. I despise cultural relativism and fret about the decline of culture. I read about the theology of culture and how to transform, redeem, and restore culture. I think about culture. A lot.

And through all this thinking about culture, I've concluded that the single most important activity we could undertake to change and improve culture is to read the Bible.

One of the most significant cultural disasters in the West is the loss of Biblical literacy. From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the Bible was the bedrock for our culture's shared heritage. The term culture comes from the Latin cultura, meaning "to plow" or "to till," and for centuries, the Bible was the rich loam our civilization would plow. The Old and New Testament provided the fertile soil in which the Western literary imagination took root, and from the scriptural terra firma grew the metaphors, allusions, narratives, and archetypes that fed the soul of our civilization.

But like the story of the Tower of Babel (remember that one?) we have lost our shared language. As Adam Nicolson argues in an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Up until, say, 100 years ago, biblical literacy would have been practically mandatory. If you didn't know what "the powers that be" originally referred to, or where "the writing on the wall" was first seen, or what was meant by "the patience of Job," "Jacob's ladder" or "the salt of the earth"—if you didn't know what an exodus was or a genesis, a fatted or a golden calf—you would have been excluded from the culture. It might be said that a civilization consists, at its core, of these easily transmitted packages of implication. They are one of the mechanisms by which cultures can be both efficient and rich. You don't have to return to first principles every time you wish to communicate. You can play your present tune on a received instrument, knowing that your listener hears not only your own music but the subtle melodies of those who played it before you. There is a common wisdom in common knowledge. But does this Bible-informed world still exist? I would guess that on the whole, and outside committed Christian groups, biblical literacy is a thing of the past. That long moment of Christian civilization is over. The idiom of modern, English-speaking people is not dense with scriptural allusion, just as the conversation of educated people no longer makes reference to classical civilizations. If you dropped the names nowadays of Nestor, Agamemnon or Pericles—every one of which would have come trailing clouds of glory up to a century ago—you would, I think, draw a near total blank from even educated listeners.

The most lamentable aspect of this loss is that the "committed Christian groups" Nicolson refers to are often as illiterate as the unchurched. I have been a Christian for over thirty years, and yet my knowledge of the Bible is shamefully lacking. This point was illuminated for me several years ago when I was invited to join an Internet discussion group on Biblical inerrancy. The moderator of the list was Farrell Till, an elderly retired English teacher and editor of Skeptical Review. Till was indisputably one of the most surly, churlish, and impolite men I've ever had the misfortune to meet. But he also possessed more knowledge about the Bible than a pew full of Baptists.

In our debates I was able to siphon from my memory some of the basic stories that I had learned in Sunday School, while Till was able to draw from a deep well of familiarity with Scripture. His disdain for the Bible was palpable—but he thoroughly knew the text he despised. Till's scholarship was as shallow as his reasoning, so he was never able to prove Scripture to be "errant." But he was a masterful spelunker who showed me the cavernous depths of my own Biblical illiteracy.

I wish I could say that I was an unrepresentative example of an evangelical. But I suspect that most of my fellow classically orthodox Christians—from the KJV-only crowd to the emerging church conversationists, and not forgetting those who dwell across the Tiber—are equally illiterate. We may possess enough basic knowledge to best a common or garden agnostic at Bible Trivia; we may even be able to hold our own in a proof-texting duel with the village atheist. But we are rarely as saturated in the Bible as we are in pop cultures. We can recite more lyrics from Beatles than we can from the Psalms, and quote more lines from Monty Python movies than from the letters of the Apostle Paul.

Imagine what might happen, though, if we took a different approach. Imagine if we treated the Bible as if it were an actual book that we read from beginning to end. Imagine that instead of reading a chapter a day (as proscribed in our devotionals) that we hunkered down and read large chunks, the way we would read Melville, Dostoevsky, or Stephen King. Imagine if we stopped treating it solely as a reference work, to be pulled off the shelf when we need some advice, but as a coherent narrative, a work of literary art co-produced by the very Creator Himself. Imagine if the names Onesimus, Naaman, and Mordecai were as familiar—and as meaningful—to us as the names Ross, Rachel, and Chandler. Imagine how we might be able to speak with those from the distant past and pass on this cultural vernacular to future generations.

Ironically, Camille Paglia, an art critic and self-avowed atheist, seems to have a sounder grasp of the importance of the Bible for culture than most believers:

[T]he Bible is a masterpiece. The Bible is one of the greatest works produced in the world. The people who all they have is the Bible actually are set up for life. Not only do they have a spiritual vision given to them but artistic fulfillment. They don't even recognize just the pleasure of dealing with this epic poetry and drama. Everything is in the Bible.

Can you imagine what could happen if Christians thought like that? Can you imagine the thinkers, artists, and saints that we could produce if we had that attitude about Scripture?

If you can imagine any of these things, then ask yourself this: Why you don't you spend more time with the Bible?

Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.

Article of the week: Loving Faithful Institutions

2010-05-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

Loving Faithful Institutions: Building Blocks of a Just Global Society
by Jonathan Chaplin
2010-04-14 23:58:50

Institutions and organizations are out, networks and relationships are in. Or so goes conventional “postmodern” wisdom on how to transform society—at least among those who still hold out any hope that societal transformation is still possible at all and who resist the despair implied in a consistent logic of deconstruction.

Yet I want to propose that a credible twenty-first-century Christian voice on the theme of economy and hope needs to affirm loving institutions as key building blocks in any constructive response to our current economic and political malaise.1 To complicate this thesis, I also propose that Christians needs to reckon with the fact that all institutions are in some sense faith-based and that Christians should be unapologetic both about working to shape existing institutions from within according to their own vision of hope or, where necessary, founding their own institutions.

The current narrative favored by many Christian progressives isn’t very congenial toward these proposals. “Institutions,” so the story goes, are the classic instruments of social control generated by “modernity.” Shaped according to the imperatives of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic efficiency, they serve the interests of oppressive global capital, entrenching economic inequality, stifling human creativity, and suppressing dissent. They march toward their hegemonic goals regardless of the welfare of the people they purportedly exist to serve—those whom they promised to liberate from the supposed bondage, ignorance, and squalor of pre-industrial society.

But many critics now observe that modernity and its leading institutional bridgeheads are beginning to teeter. They point to deep fault lines appearing on the smooth surface of institutional bureaucracies and to new social formations emerging in the wings. To many people, the cumulative and interconnected failures of modernity—economic, political, environmental, and spiritual—seem to herald the decline of institutions and the arrival of new models of social interaction rooted in open, dynamic relational networks. These networks, it is said, are flexible enough to adapt to ever-changing contexts and spacious enough to allow human beings to continually redefine their identities and projects and to realize greater freedom and authenticity.

It is also claimed—by, for example, heralds of the emergent church movement or by neo-Anabaptists—that the appearance of a network model of social change provides new openings for Christians to bear public witness. Breaking free from the constraints of mainstream institutions, Christians can join the “subaltern” flux on the margins of society, generate their own relational networks, and inject messages of hope (justice, peace, community, etc.) in the interstices of the current system. They can “speak truth to power” from a position of institutional powerlessness. The language of “bringing institutions under the Lordship of Christ” seems to such postmodern Christians like the controlling language of a dying Christendom.

That is, to say the least, an abridgement of a much more complex story (actually a set of stories), but I hope it’s not a complete caricature. And let me add at the outset that I actually share much of the critical analysis it implies toward the modernist characteristics of some of the institutions that have come to dominate the modern West, notably many transnational corporations, larger professional organizations, universities, and governmental bureaucracies—what even Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (hardly postmodern progressives) dubbed thirty years ago the “megastructures” of society.2

Because this piece is intended as a polemic, and in order to get something on the radar screens of Christian postmoderns, let me get my central beef off my chest right away: many Christians who have been understandably, and often rightly, drawn to postmodern ways of thinking (there may be one or two among the readership of TOJ—and I’d welcome their responses) need to learn to love institutions again, and they won’t get very far in transforming society unless they do. And such Christians also need to see that existing institutions, especially the larger ones, are already “faith-based.” Contrary to the ruling secularist mindset, institutions like corporations, universities, government bureaucracies, and professional bodies are not devoid of faith-based influences; they merely deny their presence. The key questions, then, are: which faith (or faiths) drive these institutions? And how can a biblically inspired faith make any impact on them in a secular, plural society?

I’m obviously not saying that Christians must love modernist institutions as I’ve just depicted them: those kinds of institutions need to be resisted and reshaped in ways I’ll gesture toward shortly. But if my sketch of a postmodern view of social formations is anywhere near on target, then Christians, I’ll suggest, have to move beyond a model of mere ”dynamic relational networks” if they are to exercise the kind of cultural influence that actually advances justice and peace.

Consider some illustrations (they are only that) of why I think the relational networks model alone, useful corrective though it is, won’t cut it. I’ll start with the church itself. Christians drawn to postmodern thinking are also often attracted to new, “emergent” models of doing church. For the sake of the gospel, they claim, we must leave behind—or at least work around—mainstream denominational institutions with their hierarchical authority structures, inflexible mission strategies, and lifeless antiquated liturgies.

I happen to agree with much of that diagnosis. Yet history suggests that every authentic renewal movement in the church, if its unique gifts are to be passed on to succeeding generations and not die out with the first, will need to take on some durable institutional form at some point. Even the radical sixteenth-century Swiss Anabaptists emerging in reaction to the compromises of the “magisterial” reformer Zwingli would not have bequeathed their remarkable gifts of peaceableness and toleration to the world had Anabaptism not assumed denominational forms like that which became the Mennonite church.

One immediate implication of this suggestion is that ecclesial emergentists should exploit every opportunity to transform existing defective denominational practices from within before launching out on a course that, however successful and intoxicating in the short run, may eventuate in yet another deficient denominational structure appearing just around the corner. Many Christians, I realize, are already busy with precisely that work of internal transformation.

My point, however, is that we can’t “do church” in a long-term, transformative way unless we begin to crystallize and codify new mission initiatives within institutional structures, however much these structures may be leaner and fitter than previous ones (they’ll certainly need to be). This kind of institutionalization is what happened in the early church, before its leadership started to go off the rails in a corrupting alliance with Roman imperial structures. I doubt we will be able to improve on their act today.

My main interest here, however, is how Christians can contribute to the generation of “loving, faithful” institutions outside the church, and to unpack that, I’ll develop another illustration at greater length and use it as a platform for some broader remarks.

Consider what has been happening in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. There we have witnessed, at least in certain sectors, a notable paradigm shift away from the traditional modernist model of bureaucratic, hierarchical, vertical-line management toward a model of horizontal, decentralized, participatory decision-making processes in which employees are situated within networks and ceded much greater autonomy and flexibility.

All to the good. This may have led to increased worker satisfaction and perhaps even to greater productivity. But as far as I can tell, this internal shift in management style has not made much difference to the way corporations conduct themselves outside the factory gates (if you’ll forgive a lapse into old-fashioned modernist language—but actually, lots of “factories” still exist; in fact, most of our stuff is still made in them. You might try visiting one sometime—they are much cleaner than they used to be).

For example, I don’t see much evidence that this shift has pushed corporations toward a change in their investment or growth priorities, modified their commitment to maximizing “shareholder value” as the overriding corporate goal, caused them to redesign their manipulative marketing strategies, or inspired them to redefine the reductionist indicators of efficiency and productivity on which they have hitherto relied. In other words, a network model of management hasn’t been able to challenge the dominant “faith” in the corporate world, which is essentially a secular, utilitarian, and materialistic one.

Introducing a relational networks model may be a good thing as far as it goes, but it won’t be enough to move large corporations closer toward a genuine commitment to economic justice and solidarity. A much broader structural transformation is required, and this will involve asking a very basic question that is hardly ever asked in mainstream debate, and the answer to this question will be inescapably shaped by one faith-perspective or another: what unique human purposes can business corporations properly serve, and how can they be (re)designed to serve them better? A Christian vision of economic life will have some distinctive things to say about that.3

Fleshing this out further will require that we imagine models of what normative business corporations within a globalizing twenty-first century would actually look like. And we won’t get such models if we only continue to indulge in perpetual deconstructive critique. Instead, we need to take up (again, we won’t be the first) the difficult, slow, unflamboyant—and often unremarked on—task of constructive institutional thinking and institution-(re)building.

Nor will we get normative business corporations if we suppose that the only suitable models are dusted down medieval guilds or small-scale workers’ cooperatives. Both of these have exemplary virtues, and I certainly wish there were more of the latter. But if greater economic justice and solidarity are to be achieved against the constraints of the mega-structural architecture of our globalizing society, we will need bigger players than that.

I’d add, however, that some big players started out as very small players indeed. The amazing Grameen Bank began its work in rural Bangladesh providing low-interest microfinancing to groups of poor women, boasting repayment rates rivaling the biggest banks in the world. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.4 And while Grameen is not officially religious, it undoubtedly operates out of a very different economic faith than the mega-banks whose naive faith in mathematically sophisticated, short-term, profit-driven, risk-management investment strategies led the global financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008.

To transform the institutions that are shaping our globalized world, then, involves not only the deconstructive task of exposing their dehumanizing characteristics, but also the much more demanding constructive task of identifying their normative purposes and fleshing out how to advance these more adequately through specific and attainable institutional changes—tasks which will be decisively shaped (inevitably) by one faith or other.

Let me state my general point from a rather different angle by invoking some biblical terms: those who want to be prophets had better first immerse themselves in law and wisdom. This, of course, is what biblical prophets actually had to do before any of their fellow prophets would let them loose denouncing the idols of their time: most prophets weren’t lone-rangers (the progressive equivalents of “one-man ministries”) but tended to hang out in “schools.” So, for example, everyone’s all-time-favorite prophet Isaiah wouldn’t have been able to come up with a denunciation like “woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room” (5:8), unless he’d spent a lot of time “meditating on the law of the Lord”—from which he’d have learned (from sources like Leviticus 25) that economic activity Yahweh-style involves a legal guarantee of an equitable distribution of productive resources (i.e., land) for every Israelite family. Without the law of Jubilee—a cardinal component of the Covenant—how would any prophet have had the right to denounce the rich for the injustice of unlimited capital accumulation?

Prophecy is calling people back to covenant obedience, and the content of that obedience is laid out in the rich array of norms (or pathways) governing the social, economic, family, political, and religious life of Israel—norms that called for institutional embodiment and that pointed the way toward a common life of justice and solidarity (shalom). And while the people of God in the New Testament are no longer bound by the specific rules of ancient Israel, they are indeed bound by the “law of love,” which, as Jesus and Paul both make clear, is the fulfillment not the abrogation of the law.

This, I hope, begins to sharpen the sense of what I mean by “loving institutions.” I mean institutions that, even in limited ways, can embody the central norm of love, a norm which in turn needs to be fleshed out in more specific directives about justice, solidarity, peaceableness, stewardship, and so on. Our challenge is to work toward developing institutions that can serve as conduits of this kind of love, with all its differentiated concrete applications on the ground. Such institutions we should indeed learn to love. But they will be loving institutions only if they are directed by a faith that is responsive to the Creator’s pathways for flourishing.

One illustration of this task, I’ve been suggesting, is to develop faith-guided models of normative business corporations (rather than just lambasting the shortcomings of existing ones). This won’t come easy. It will require a combination of extensive practical experience of the business world at many levels and extensive knowledge of the traditions of Christian-inspired social and economic reflection. Without the resources of business entrepreneurs, theologians, philosophers, or ethicists can fulminate against “oppressive global capitalism” until the cows come home (if you’ll now forgive a lapse into pre-industrial language), but Christian business practitioners will not give them the time of day.

Yet without the resources of the traditions of Christian social thought, the result will be similar to what I have all too often encountered from business students at (even) Christian colleges. From their accounts, it becomes clear that their business professors often have neither the training nor the inclination to take any real critical distance from the reigning secular, utilitarian, liberal economic paradigms in their field. And the result of that deficiency is that generations of young Christian businesspeople will be sent out into the world of work thinking that the currently dominant structure of the business corporation is already normative from a Christian point of view. Some of these young businesspeople may turn out to be generous benefactors to Christian causes, but few will be transformers of the corporate sector in the direction of an economy of hope, justice, and solidarity.

I’ve dwelt on just one example of a large social institution that needs to be reckoned with and transformed if we are to nurture hope of greater justice and solidarity. But my point applies to all types and sizes of institutions.

One could, for example, run the analysis through political institutions; let me briefly hint at how it could go. The conclusion would be similar: we need to develop creative models of what normative governmental structures might look like. Equally, such models need to be forged out of dialogue between seasoned political practitioners—public officials, elected politicians, but also civil society leaders and grassroots campaigners—and Christian political theorists or political theologians.

Such discussions would need to ask some tough questions: not only, what is the normative purpose of the state in classical Christian thought?—the kind of question theorists like me love to spend lots of time on—but also, how can our existing labyrinthine, lumbering, bureaucratic administrative structures be incrementally restructured to enhance citizen participation rather than kill it off?—the kind of question theorists like me would love other people to spend lots of time on. Proposals for such incremental changes at the margins of our current systems probably won’t sound very prophetic; they’ll be more sapiential in tone. It’s certainly a lot more fun to declare to a sympathetic academic audience that “our dehumanizing modernist bureaucracies must be replaced by human-sized communities of reciprocity,” than to propose to a skeptical audience of government officials that “health care cost centers should devolve control of budgets to local stakeholder boards.”

Sometimes I sit in those academic gatherings and I think they have some value. But lasting institutional transformation will only emerge out of piecemeal, normally below-the-radar moves by principled practitioners advancing ideas like the one I mentioned, but who yet are guided by a larger, faith-inspired vision of justice and solidarity.

I am encouraged to see that there are many more budding sapiential institution-transformers active in British political life than there were a generation ago. I think of a prominent politician, John Battle, who, drawing deeply on the legacy of Catholic social teaching, works tirelessly as a passionate and articulate champion for many disadvantaged people living in his parliamentary constituency in Leeds, England. Such institution-transformers also exist in the corporate sector. I think of my friend Cal Bailey, the marketing and sustainability director of a medium-sized construction company (also in Leeds), who, inspired by a robust Christian vision, is doing his level best on a daily basis to edge this most wasteful of industries toward greater environmental responsibility.5 Such people do not receive enough honor within our churches, and they are not helped by theologians who simply demonize the modern state or capitalism and all their works without pointing toward attainable alternatives. Notwithstanding the brilliance and originality of theologian John Milbank, this is a charge that can be leveled against his own writing—though it is encouraging that some writers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement (for example, Phillip Blond6) are beginning to take up the challenge of devising constructive alternatives.

Let me conclude, first by calling attention to the rich historical resources Christians have at their disposal as they take up this challenge, and second, by recognizing the contexts of secularism and pluralism within which they do so.

Christians who aspire to transform institutions will certainly require great gifts of courage, imagination, and innovation. Yet at the same time, they will also need to rediscover the deep veins of traditional Christian insight into the nature and purposes of institutions,7 in order then to critically reappropriate and rearticulate such insight for the radically new challenges of globalizing twenty-first-century societies. As the Brazos Press strapline puts it, they’ll need to find ways of bringing “the tradition alive.” And “the tradition” must be read to include not just the intellectual tradition but also the legacy of the practical witness of the saints. Here I mean not just those whom the church has officially venerated as such, but all faithful believers from all walks of life and all ages who have left behind durable, concrete institutional embodiments of love—schools, hospitals, political movements, and yes, business enterprises—that can still speak to and inspire us today as we seek to be faithful witnesses to the gospel in the challenging context of a globalizing but fragile twenty-first-century world.8

But what are the prospects for developing “faith-based” institutional proposals or models in a context so deeply penetrated by, on the one hand, secularist modes of thought (such as economic utilitarianism) and, on the other, a deepening pluralism of faiths? One of the striking—and at the same time disorienting—features of our current situation is that the latter is actually opening up spaces to resist the former: pluralism is undermining secularism. The growing recognition that no single faith perspective is able any longer to dominate public institutional life isn’t only corroding what’s left of Christian triumphalism, it’s also problematizing the two-centuries-old secularist presumption of a sole entitlement to shape the terms of modern institutional life. Combined with the creeping erosion of the modernist project that is driving our larger institutions, the experience of pluralism is now beginning to crack open the door through which we can glimpse the possibility of a new, post-secular institutional settlement.

In such a settlement, the classic institutions of modernity—corporations, universities, governments—will no longer be able to get away with presenting themselves, unchallenged, as guided exclusively by secular, objective, universal standards of rationality and as reliable guarantors of progress. The influence of contestable and contested faiths on their mode of operation will be increasingly evident, leaving space for alternative faith perspectives to make their distinctive contributions. These contributions could either be made from within existing institutions, formerly marginalized voices now acknowledged as worthy of a hearing. They’d appear as, for example, courses on Christian or Buddhist perspectives on health care in mainstream public universities or as so-called “sharia-compliant” financial instruments offered by leading banks (these already exist—but why are there no Torah-compliant ones yet?). Or they could be mounted from the platform of distinct institutions: openly faith-based social investment companies, credit unions, environmentally-friendly mining enterprises, property developers committed to social housing, fair-traded food coops,9 and so on.

These faith-based contributions should not, however, speak in tribal theological languages unintelligible to the wider publics whom they must perforce address and engage. Yet nor will they merely mimic the dated secular Esperanto that liberal secularists would still like to impose on the rest of us. In striking the right tone and content, they will be guided by communicative guidelines such as the following.

First, a great deal of faith-inspired language, especially Christian language spoken in Western or Western-influenced societies, is already perfectly intelligible to secular-minded people, and sometimes we need to call secularists’ bluff when they feign deafness in the presence of religiously inflected language. When Desmond Tutu called for the end of apartheid because “every human being is made in the image of God,” he didn’t have secularists scratching their head in puzzlement. In this sense, faith-inspired language can be “public” if the audience has already been historically shaped by the relevant faith.

Second, to secure support in a mixed public audience for a proposal to reform a particular institution (e.g., a corporation, university, or government), it is normally prudent, to say the least, to couch the proposal in terms of the subject matter of that institution (e.g., production, knowledge, or law) rather than to lead with one’s explicit faith language (e.g., blessing, revelation, or judgment). Such language will certainly be “public” because the subject matter in question is public. Yet it will not thereby have become “secular” or “neutral,” at least so long as its content remains continually fed by its deeper faith-based sources. There may be Desmond Tutu moments when our faith inspiration has to rise to the surface, but they’ll probably be the exception. The norm is more likely to be the principled practitioner I cited earlier, working below the radar in government and speaking in a sapiential register but guided by a larger vision of faith.

Finally, Christians will seek to be those, on the one hand, who stand ready to declare the “reasons for the hope that is within them” when the opportunity arises or the occasion demands, and those, on the other hand, whose words are “seasoned with salt”—committed to truth, winsome in tone, inviting of dialogue, hopeful of agreement.

And the prospects for success? That’s a modernist question.

____________________

Notes:

1. I will be using the term institution very broadly to include all types and sizes of social organization, association, corporation, et cetera, though I’ll focus explicitly on the larger ones.

2. The term megastructures comes from Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus’s linfluential essay of 1977, To Empower People, reprinted in a twentieth-anniversary edition, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, ed. Michael Novak (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1996), 157-208.

3. See Bob Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979).

4. See http://www.grameen-info.org/.

5. Cal Bailey, “Building God’s Empire or Ours? The Purpose of Work in Business,” Ethics in Brief 13.4 (Winter 2008), http://klice.co.uk/uploads/EiB/Bailey%20v13.4%20pub.pdf.

6. See his new think tank, ResPublica: http://www.respublica.org.uk/.

7. See, for example, Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, ed., Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008); Gordon Graham, ed., The Kuyper Center Review, vol. 1 of Politics, Religion, and Sphere Sovereignty (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).

8. For various Christian readings of globalization, see, for example Michael W. Goheen and Erin G. Glanville, eds., The Gospel and Globalization: Exploring the Religious Roots of a Globalized World (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing/Geneva Society, 2009); Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002); James K. A. Smith, ed., After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World (Waco, TX: Baylor Universty Press, 2008).

9. Here’s my local one: http://www.dailybread.co.uk/.

SEPTEMBER!!! by Pomplamoose

2010-04-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

This is great! Nothing more need be said.

Article of the week: Rethinking Twilight (and friendly, sexy vampires)

2010-04-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Problem with Twilight
By Josh Cacopardo
Published on April 9, 2010
http://www.curatormagazine.com/joshcacopardo/the-problem-with-twilight/

Before they became all the rage amongst sixth-graders, I wanted to write a story about vampires. I rode a wave of inspiration for about fifteen minutes before abandoning my project to the towering junk pile of books I never finished writing.

A few short years later, Stephanie Meyer would lead a parade of the tragically postmodern faux-undead in what is perhaps the most disappointing resurrection of an otherwise timeless monster. Now people ask me if I regret not finishing, that maybe I could have had some stake in the recent vampirical pay day. My answer is always no, which is typically met with accusations of jealousy. Don’t I wish I’d written a story like Twilight, they ask.

Now if a person has to ask me that question, they obviously don’t know me very well, because the answer is unequivocally no. But the Kool-Aid being served on the Twilight bandwagon is potent, and so I don’t take offense at such sentiments, misguided as they may be. In fact, I’ll even do you the favor of offering up my justifications for, up until now, ignoring everything that has ever spilled forth from the Twilight series.

First and foremost, Stephanie Meyer didn’t actually write a story about vampires. Instead, her version of the undead takes the fearsome mythological demons and turns them into emasculated prairie dogs, simultaneously delivering them up on an implied sexual platter to the freshly-excited hormones of the prepubescent and the perverted longings of the hopelessly romantic.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with fictional creatures evolving – I take very little issue with the Twilight vampires being able to wander around in the sun – but disregarding the root truth of vampires, which is that they are demonic and evil, and depicting any of the lot of them as capable of love for humans is irresponsible, and at the very least, ludicrous. As such, Meyer not only successfully bastardized the nature of vampires, but worse, she also encouraged (though I’d imagine unwittingly) a shamefully false sense of truth about that which is wholly good and that which is wholly evil.

Fantastical stories of romance have always been big sellers. From the Bible to Shakespeare to Danielle Steele, the tales that makes women swoon and men snicker (while swooning secretly so you’ll think we’re big and tough like the guys in those stories) continue to rank as The Most Read Stuff On The Planet. Trashy romance does exceptionally well; in fact, it makes up for the bulk of fiction novels sold. And granted, the rippling biceps described by the likes of Nora Roberts rarely, in reality, belong to men with a romantic sense of equal potency, but we tend to accept that on the premise that it is still within the potential of a man’s nature to behave as they do in those novels.

Meyer’s world, on the other hand, immediately breaks down in the consideration of nature because it is, by no means, natural for a vampire to fall in love with a human. And before the naysayers have a chance to play devil’s advocate here, let’s remember that one of the most defining characteristics of the undead is that they eat people. A vampire falling in love with a beautiful woman would be tantamount to me falling in love with a well-bred cow, and while you can argue that such a thing is disturbingly still within the realm of possibility, you should also admit that you wouldn’t want anything to do with me if that’s how it went down.

Such is not the case with dear Edward, whose warm tenderness manages to capture the hearts of women both fictional and otherwise as he insists that eating people makes him feel like a monster, although he seems to have accepted drinking animal blood as harmless enough.

And therein lies the rub: conflicted or not, Edward is a monster, not a man, and the consequence of Meyer’s fiction is that we are no longer able to see that through the trees. Not only that, but with his charming good looks and fairy-tale sensitivity, Meyer has made the monster into one of the Good Guys.

This is problematic because – whether we realize it or not – what we see, hear, read, and otherwise assimilate affects the way we see the world around us. For adults, perhaps this is permissible; we all need a little reality break from time to time. But Meyer’s base audience is not adults, but young adults who remain as easily-influenced as children while simultaneously being slammed by the same desires as their elders amidst the first inklings of developing a world view and morality – a dangerous recipe when it comes to stories as seductive as Twilight. In quiet suburbia, where no one understands poor Bella in a new and unfamiliar world, she finds solace in the mysterious bad boy with the intoxicating eyes, a wild smile, and an unclear sense of rebelliousness. After a flirtatious dance in a circle of mounting sexual tension, the bad boy sweeps the innocent girl from her feet and shows her what life (or is it death in this case?) is all about.

Still, the story of the good girl and the bad boy is as old as any story involving human nature, and I’ll even concede that vampire stories are often, if not always, sexualized in some way or another. Indeed, sexuality is part of the seductive nature of vampires, and arguably what makes them so dangerous in the first place (if you believe in mythological creatures, that is).

The problem with Edward and Bella – and most other surfacing stories of the undead – is that the seductiveness of the vampire is glorified, not condemned. Even in Bram Stoker’s original masterpiece, Mina feels nothing but wretchedness after being taken by Dracula; she dedicates herself to his destruction after the fact. Bella, on the other hand, takes a taste of damnation and decides to roll it around on her tongue for the rest of eternity. (An unfortunate irony, no doubt driven by the success of such stories, is that one of Bram’s descendents recently tarnished the revered name Stoker by publishing a sequel to Dracula which consists mostly of bloody lesbian sex, glorified alcoholism and morphine addiction, and, like Twilight, the choice to turn to the darkness for the sake of love.)

What’s worse is that both the Dracula sequel and Twilight are only extreme examples of a phenomenon happening to the modern vampire – indeed, even the modern monster – the world over. In our consumerist culture of sex and excess, fear has taken a backseat to desire. Monsters suddenly have feelings. Where feelings remain neglected, gore, sexuality, and general debauchery act as the springboards for tainted stories of torture and abuse, while other tales of misplaced redemption impair our ability to recognize evil for what it really is.

Whether rooted in mismanaged eroticism or flat out perversion, we have over-humanized creatures which, despite their appearances, have very little else in common with mankind. If the creatures themselves were the ones redeemed, then there might not be much to complain about; almost every decent work of literature relies on symbolism to convey a message.

But when the symbolism suggests that we humans can somehow safely cross to the dark side through a heart of erotic love, thereby finding some sense of eternal happiness, we jade ourselves and misguide our youths, thus further perpetuating the merciless consumerism which drives the majority of people and cultures. There’s nothing wrong with Eros and there’s nothing wrong with redemption. But the conveyance and use of such themes, like any other, bears a sense of responsibility which stories like Twilight disregard, while the people who read them continue to empower authors to propagate gross sublimation within the consumerism of a deprived race – namely, mankind.

Ultimately, this is the challenge and the curse for all artists: to commit to a responsible delivery and depiction of the stories and symbolism we use to better understand our world. A created world entirely devoid of evil wouldn’t do much good in helping us to better comprehend our own reality, but neither does a world where the evil is glorified – not only as desirable, but also as the thing which ends up being chosen. We will always have a choice between good and evil, but the idea that evil might ever be permissible as the right choice is both a tragically naïve idealism and a detriment to society as a whole.

If I ever do write my vampire story, I think I’ll make Bella and Edward part of its beginning. Five hundred years after Twilight, when the vampire couple is spending a romantic evening on a country hillside with a eclectic assortment of barnyard animals, innards spilled out on a picnic blanket in the worst distortion of prix fixe since Manhattan’s West Village, they’ll be seduced by Qumran, the vampire evangelist who convinces them that people are, after all, the finest of cuisines. Emotional and psychological chaos ensures, driving the Twilight twins to embark on a raging killing spree, numbing whatever human sympathy is left in them.

Then vampire-hunter extraordinaire, Abraham Van Helsing, ninety-seven years old but hell-bent on ridding the world of demons, will swoop down from the time machine he was secretly building with Jack Seward after the death of Count Dracula, single-handedly drop-kicking the heads off of all the world’s remaining undead, starting with Bella and Edward. Having put stakes in their hearts and garlic in their mouths, Van Helsing retires back to nineteenth-century England where, faced with the decision to properly publish his successful sojourn through time and his second victory over the damned, he decides instead to settle down in the isolation of a quaint villa in Messina, quietly passing from this life to the next without a single mention of the undead lovers he so valiantly slew. After all, some things are better left in the dusty, crooked confines of our imaginations.

Article of the week: Why hasn't Obama appointed a religious-freedom ambassador yet? - By Thomas F. Farr | Foreign Policy

2010-04-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

Why hasn't Obama appointed a religious-freedom ambassador yet? - By Thomas F. Farr | Foreign Policy

Movie (Review) in a Moment: Avatar

2009-12-29T07:49:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I had opportunity to see the new James Cameron film, Avatar. Judging by the astounding box office sales (75+ million over 3 days), I was not alone. Courtesy of the Galleria 6 and not a few contractual obligations relating to screening Avatar, I was also among the many who had a very pleasant 3D experience. As to the film itself, well...

Visually, Avatar is stunning. Cameron's dedication to producing film technology in order to produce film has ensured that the world of Pandora and its people, the Na'Vi, are quite compelling to watch. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Cameron is to note that the world he has created is the best I have seen since Star Wars. (In addition, Cameron's inhabitants engender far more sympathy than Lucas' Jar Jar Binks who later came to Tatooine). Because this is a 'movie in a moment' I will neither gush nor go into great detail about the mimetic world of Pandora. I will simply repeat that visually, Avatar is stunning. Undoubtedly this is one of those films that will redefine cinema.

In terms of story, Avatar holds its own (at least for two out of three acts) but it is definitely a visual feast first. This is not to suggest, however, that Avatar is without something to say. On the contrary, costing between 300 and 500 million Avatar is one of Hollywood's most expensive sermons. It's three points seem to be a critique of Bush doctrine ('winning hearts and minds," alongside a campaign of "shock and awe"); an expose of human greed and rapaciousness (primarily practiced by economically developed and militarily capable cultures); and an apologetic for pantheism (in which 'god' is identified with a monistic universe and the Gaia hypothesis is championed).

This sermonic element is not new, indeed we have heard Avatar's message before in films like Dances With Wolves. Broadly summarized: Military man pushes forward into new territory, trusting in the military hierarchy and its doctrine. Military man becomes detached from the military and its vision as he sees afresh the flora and fauna of an area untouched by developed or dominant culture. Contact with native peoples moves from suspicion and fear through curiosity, to appreciation, to deeper understanding, all the way to acceptance and finally identifying and belonging. The military man is now no longer. He has become -showing himself to be truly cultured and properly fulfilled- one with nature and with those who live in harmony with nature; even to the point of siding with his new family and tribe against dominant culture and its agenda. I am not sure that Dances With Wolves was terribly subtle in its critique and criticisms, but Avatar has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a plate glass window. The almost 3 hour long sermon that Avatar preaches was, to my ears, simply shrill.

To be fair, there are some good things that could be said. From a biblical-theistic point of view there are 'echoes of Eden' that can be discerned in Avatar. There are also instances of critique that would resonate with those of the biblical prophets. And so my advice is not to shun this film. But overall I left my seat in the cinema relieved that this sermon had ended. The imprint on my nose from my 3D glasses helped to remind me that I had seen something amazing. But the Na'Vi's psychic/sexual(?) bonding with their creatures, their orgiastic worship at the Tree of Souls, their trust in and communing with an impersonal deity (Eywa), who promises little more than to 'maintain balance of life,' all left me concerned at the promotion of the fatally flawed worldview that animates the Avatar story. More positively, it also left me thankful for the infinite-personal God of the Bible.

In the biblical tradition, God, infinite in his being, power and goodness, made this world and all in it. Although distinct from the created order yet he is nonetheless personally acquainted with the world and personally active within it. Moreover, because He is a person, we can cry out to Him and expect to be heard and helped. (In this regard, one wonders how the impersonal Eywa can actually answer the prayers of the Na'Vi and of Jake Sully? At this point, James Cameron is borrowing from the Christian tradition to bolster his pantheism). Certainly this God does call us, his image-bearers, to steward and to manage the created order, but with compassion, with wisdom, and with the knowledge that we as creatures are in many ways quite dependent upon our earthly environment. That Cameron draws attention to our serious failures in this regard ought to rest heavy with us. Rather than becoming defensive about the source of this barb, let us instead confess our ecological sin, repent of our arrogance toward nature, and keep a beneficent relationship with all that God has created and given us to care for and live amid. Psalm 8 comes flooding to mind. Read it prior to heading off to the theatre. Read it again post-Avatar and employ it as a rubric for thinking through what you heard.

Surely much more could be said, but as this is intended to be just a 'movie (review) in a moment' I will sign off here. For fuller reviews, see:

Ty Burr: http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/12/17/avatar_is_an_out_of_body_experience/?page=full

Roger Ebert: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091211/REVIEWS/912119998

Ross Douthart: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-douthat_1224edi.State.Edition1.244baae.html

Blogging. A Marathon and not a Sprint.

2009-11-27T14:20:00.000-08:00

It might be imagined that I have been too busy to blog. Not so. True enough, my last entry was almost a whole year ago, but that has more to do with pacing than with being too busy. Sure enough, there are some who desire more--you know who you are--but the pillars of my blogging philosophy remain in tact. Give folk just enough that they want more. Commit to honesty over hurriedness, vulnerability over volume. Recognize that blogging is a marathon and not a sprint.

Why Blog?

2008-12-03T12:45:00.000-08:00

Why blog? For me, it is essentially a mix of personal curiosity and peer pressure. On the one hand I am just plain curious. Will my blog be of interest to anyone? Am I actually capable of blogging well? What might blogging well even look like? How long will I keep up this blog for? And so personal curiosity propels me forward. On the other hand, there is some peer pressure. My friends blog. My colleagues blog. Make no mistake, my kids will blog. Maybe not now, but soon to be sure. And last month a total stranger asked me, "Hey, do you blog?" and then appeared genuinely disappointed when I replied, "Me... blog? ...No". I confess, I still feel somewhat poorly that I let this guy down. So peer pressure is a factor too. That's me, but why do YOU blog?