Viva Il Papa!!

Strewn Seed

As I write this, Pope Benedict XVI is officially resigning his post as Pope and entering into a hidden life of prayer and contemplation on behalf of the Church he has shepherded for these past 8 years.  And while I know that the internet is currently being flooded with a series of tributes and critiques, I cannot help but throw my hat in the ring for this man and take the opportunity to express my gratitude before God for the graced years of his pontificate, years which now seem all too short.

It seems funny to say, but the day of his election on April 19, 2005 remains one of the happiest of my life.  As soon as I heard the bells ringing outside my bedroom window on that beautiful spring day in Milwaukee, and my roommate burst the door to announce with bated breath that “We have a Pope!”…

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On Loving Sex [Part II]

Strewn Seed

In Part 1 of this post, I reflected on the hurdles that obstruct genuine conversation about sex and the body in contemporary liberal society.  Here in Part 2, I will attempt to identify the real fault-lines of the debate that need to be exposed if we hope to make any kind of progress.

If we were to finally have the discussion that we so urgently need to have about sex in this country, what would or should that conversation look like?  I think the fundamental question is really that of whether sex is good or bad.  The immediate assumption of most is that it is the ‘right’ that holds sex to be bad, and the ‘left’ that holds it to be good and very good.  Liberals love sex!  Traditionalists are afraid of it.  But appearances are deceptive here.

   

Conventional wisdom sees the cultural left as the champion of…

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On Loving Sex [Part I]

Strewn Seed

[This post will come in two parts: in the first I will treat the difficulty of discussing these issue at all in a Liberal culture; in the second I will move on to consider what is fundamentally at stake in the contemporary cultural debate.]

In my last post, I offered a truncated argument in favor of the claim that feminism, if it were truly ‘feminism’, ought to oppose abortion insofar as ‘feminism’ claims to speak for the ‘feminine’, and the intimate bond between mother and child is intrinsic to feminity.  In so doing, I admittedly opened up a whole can of cultural worms in need of disentanglement, landing us quite at the heart of contemporary political controversy.

For we must admit that, for better or for worse, sex is a driving force in our culture, and lies, more or less conspicuously, at the center of our public…

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The NCAA and Our Need for Eternity

Strewn Seed

Any devotee of college athletics will readily grant the sobering truth.  Over the past few years, once venerable institutions have warped themselves out of recognizable existence in service of the almighty dollar: the Big 10 now claims sixteen teams, extending its reach to the eastern seaboard; the Big East is in shambles and possibly on the verge of annihilation; the Pac-10, previously the Pac-8, is now the Pac-12; and as I recently discovered, the carnage extends even to the [once-thought-pristine] realm of collegiate  hockey, where the treasured rivalries of the Western Conference will next year be sacrificed to lucrative television deals.  Is nothing sacred?!

In the end, we can only face the truth: our world is marked by change.  There is no need to argue for the point.  It is an obvious fact of our existence, one that confronts us daily, and impinges upon us more than ever in this…

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Freedom and Theology

Strewn Seed

A few weeks ago I ran across an opinion piece in the New York Times on the precarious situation in Egypt. (Can God Save Egypt? – 12/12/2012)  The author, Thomas Friedman, described a billboard he saw on the way out of Cairo, plastered with the bold lettered prayer: ‘God save Egypt’.  The roadside intercession undoubtedly expressed an understandable sentiment in the suffering country now reaping the all-too-predictable fruits of revolutionary optimism, but Friedman questioned its underlying assumptions.  Is it really a matter of God that is at issue? Are there not equally devout people on both sides of Egypt’s political divide?  The real point of conflict is not one of theology but of the value of freedom. God will not save Egypt, he finally asserted, but rather believers in freedom who are willing to stand up against autocracy.

I found Mr. Friedman’s argument striking, and it has remained swimming…

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Good for Women?

Strewn Seed

This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade, which effectively legalized abortion across the United States.  This Friday, hundreds of thousands of pro-life activists will gather in Washington, D.C. for the annual March for Life in witness to the estimated 55 million unborn children who have lost their lives to abortion since 1973.  Most of the politicians, of course, will have left town, the media cameras will be closely cropped around the handful of counter-protesters, and the newspapers will ambiguously report the “thousands” in attendance.   But from noon until about 3 in the afternoon, an endless stream of peaceful, mostly young protesters will file from the central mall to the Supreme Court steps in order to raise their voice for the most voiceless in our society.

Noteworthy is the fact that leading this procession will be a group of thousands of women who…

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Christian Testimony

Strewn Seed

In today’s lectionary readings at Mass (Fri. 1/11), the Church offers us a pair of passages in which the term ‘testimony’ (marturion) makes an appearance.  In the selection from the 5^th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the leper is instructed to give ‘testimony’ of his healing to the temple priests, and in the First Letter of John, we encounter two paradoxical assertions regarding the nature of this Christian ‘testimony’.

First, we hear that the primary testimony to Christ is that of the unity of the “the spirit, the water, and the blood.”

“So there are three who testify,
the Spirit, the water and the blood,
and these three are one.”  (1 John 5:7-8)

Second, we are told that this testimony is somehow present within the Christian believer:

“Whoever believes in the Son of God
has this testimony within himself.”  (1 John 5:10)

These lines are indeed…

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On Beauty and Bethlehem

Strewn Seed

The great twentieth century theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, chose beauty as the first word with which to begin his magnum opus. And let us use this opportunity of Christmas to express our approval of this choice, for beauty is that universal human experience wherein man is forced, whether his particular ideology permit or not, to admit his connection to the infinite. In beauty, we might say, the wonder of infinity is presented to man through a finite form. Beauty requires a form that is defined (i.e. finite): a Bach concerto needs its key signature to produce its rapture; a Bernini sculpture needs its human lines to elevate the spirit. [For a negative proof of this premise, see all of post-modern art.] Nevertheless, beauty is by no means constrained by this form. Paradoxically, it is precisely through the definition of form that it exceeds finitude, it is through its…

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On Joy in Sorrow

In an attempt to re-invigorate this blog, I will be periodically re-posting some pieces from the previous year. As today is the first anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary, I thought fitting to revisit my reflections from that horrific event.

Strewn Seed

Today is ‘Gaudete’ Sunday: the day on which we are instructed to rejoice at the imminent arrival of the Son of God.  Yet we might well find ourselves asking, on this weekend following the horrific events in Connecticut, how exactly we are supposed to rejoice in the face such malignant evil.  How are we to reconcile St. Paul’s call to “Rejoice Always, I say it again,” with the heart-rending cries of the parents who fall to their knees at the news that their beloved children – those adorable little 7 year-olds who just hours ago before had run off in carefree innocence for another day of school – had been brutally murdered?  What can be said in the face of this evil?  How can it be rationalized?  We can perhaps cry out with them, “Why, God?!!”  But “Rejoice”?  That would seem a heartless and insensitive cruelty, even a sin…

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So good it must be shared

The following text is drawn from today’s (12/12) Office of Readings by St. Peter Chrysologus (d. 450):

“In all the events we have recalled, the flame of divine love enkindled human hearts and its intoxication overflowed into men’s senses.  Wounded by love, they longed to look up on God with their bodily eyes.  Yet how could our narrow human vision apprehend God, whom the whole world cannot contain?  But the law of love is not concerned with what will be, what ought to be, what can be.  Love does not reflect; it is unreasonable and knows no moderation.  Love refuses to be consoled when its goal proves impossible, despises all hindrances to he attainment of its object.  Love destroys the lover if he cannot obtain what he loves; love follows its own promptings, and does not think of right and wrong.  Love inflames desire which impels it toward things that are forbidden.  But why continue?

“It is intolerable for love not to see the object of its longing.  That is why whatever reward they merited was nothing to the saints if they could not see the Lord.  A love that desires to see God may not have reasonableness on its side, but it is the evidence of filial love.  It gave Moses the temerity to say: ‘If I have found favor in your eyes, show me your face.’  It inspired the psalmist to make the same pray: ‘Show me your face.’  Even the pagans made their images for this purpose: they wanted actually to see what they mistakenly revered.”

Pretty profound stuff, worthy of reflection:

In the encounter with God, the human heart is not satisfied with what is merely reasonable.  It wants to see God; and not in some vague spiritual sense, but literally, with the bodily eye.  It wants to touch and taste God.  The divine fire, as we read, pours into ‘the realm of the senses!’  What a rebuke this is to all attempts at a spiritualized Christianity that moves beyond the body into some angelic realm of abstractions.  What a rebuke, in the same stroke, to all attempts at a rationalized Christianity that seeks to bring revelation under the sway of universal human conceptions.  Love cares neither for system nor for law, but only for the beloved, and these others only insofar as they fit within the sway of the beloved.  Of course, we cannot interpret Peter here to be rejecting law or reason.  He is only recognizing that they are not enough to satisfy the human heart, even the pagan heart, to whom our saint ascribes the same desire as the patriarchs and psalmists.

What an absurdity is this human heart!  How disproportionate!  To what tragedy is it destined if it feels impelled to make such bold and irreverent petitions of its maker.  It is foolhardy.  Setting itself up for disappointment.  Tragedy is, after all, the great hallmark of pagan literature…

…but then, this is not so of Christian literature.  Because, the truth is, the mystery of which we remind ourselves in Advent is that God actually obliges our absurdity.  He lets himself be seen, touched, smelled, heard, even tasted.  This is our hope.  Let us train our desires on Him.  Come, Lord Jesus.

“in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.”—Job 19:25- 27.    

Mary and the Christian

In Advent, as we prepare again in expectant longing for the appearance of the Savior, the Church finds herself in a particularly Marian season, especially in this week in which she marks two important Marian feasts.  On Monday, in the Office for the Immaculate Conception, we read the words of the St. Anselm:

“Blessed Lady, sky and stars, earth and rivers, day and night – everything that is subject to the power or use of man – rejoice that through you they are in some sense restored to their lost beauty and are endowed with inexpressible new grace.”

High praise, to be sure.  But how are we to understand these words?  Are we, as the protestants claim, simply constructing a secondary mediation that fundamentally interferes with and obscures the unique mediation of Jesus Christ?  Indeed, is this not what is implied by such titles as ‘mediatrix of all grace’ or ‘co-redemptrix’.  Certainly, Mary’s ‘fiat’ was the temporal occasion for the incarnation, but this seems only very tenuously connected to broader mystery of redemption.  Once noted, it can be left behind in favor of more important realities.  What has it to do with the life of the Christian today?

We can be inhibited here, I think, by an overly abstract notion of grace.  The technical language of theology can leave with the impression that grace is some of sort of impersonal entity, a discreet unit that is zapped into the soul in packages that can be ‘lost’ or ‘restored’ or even measured.  This is a poverty of language that needs to be corrected.  As Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us: “In theology, it is not the person that is reducible to the thing, but the thing to the person.”  (Mary: the Church at its Source.  Ignatius, 1997.  p. 27)  Our language of grace needs to be re-keyed into more personal terms.  It is not abstract, but personal: a relationship to the person of Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, I would suggest that in order to properly understand the role of Mary in the Christian life of grace, we need first to return to the person of Jesus in the mystery of His Incarnation.  Christ, we profess, is the Word and Image of the Father, the eternal refulgence of His glory (Heb 1:1-3), in Whom we are made and by Whom we are held in being.  “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)   “All times and seasons obey [His] laws.” (Preface for Ordinary Time V)  As Word and Son of God, and as God, He is not just eternal but very Eternity itself: the unity and perfection of Being, in which all the fleeting moments of this world have their existence.  We have our ‘present’ only in Him.

This should give us pause when considering the implications of the revelation that this Word became flesh: the eternal entered time, the universal Image became one particular ‘imaged’ thing – it boggles the mind.  But this implies that this particular, Jesus Christ, bears a very unique relationship to all things of all places and times, be they past, present and future.  Or rather, it implies that all things bear a unique relationship to Him.  They point to him and find fulfillment in Him.  Like a magnet set amidst a field of iron shards, He draws all things to Himself.  (John 12:32)  As the Second Vatican Council states: “by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man…” (GS 22)

This is what enables Christ to represent us before the Father on the Cross.  All of our hopes, dreams, prayers, sufferings, successes, and also our failures and sins, are concentrated in His person and offered in love to the Father.  This is our redemption and source of hope: that even our broken and messed-up lives can be transfigured by divine love, taken up into the mystery of Christ, even in the dull and dreary moments of daily life, if only we freely surrender it to Him.

And this is the point: the life of grace is not some abstract quantity or spiritual tally system, but rather our concrete and personal entrance into the mysteries of Christ’s life, death and Resurrection.  Or conversely, it is His living, dying and rising in us, by which He teaches us death to self and the new life of supernatural charity.  The events of His life are not lost in the past, but remain present to us by virtue of the uniqueness of His person.

It is in this context that we can better understand the role of Mary in the Christian’s life of grace.  If her ‘fiat’ at the Incarnation and Cross played an integral role in the life of Christ (and it is hard to think otherwise), then it too is not lost to history.  It remains present within the very dynamic of grace itself.  Her ‘yes’ continues to shape and even in some sense to enable the ‘yes’ of every Christian.  Her encounter with the angel remains the essential form of our assent to God, by which the Word takes flesh likewise in us.  Thus she remains present in the Church, at every baptism, every reception of the sacraments, every act of faith, hope or charity.   With her ‘yes’, she continues to mother our many ‘yes-es’ of faith  – i.e. Christ’s birth in us.

This mediation does not interfere with the mediation of Christ, but is rather a part of it. Her ‘yes’ stands within and is it taken up into the ‘Yes’ of Christ, Who did not wish to appear out of the blue as a mere apparition, but rather as a fully enfleshed human being, in the context of a history of human mediations and cooperations.  That history of persons is not accidental to the person of Christ, but integral to His incarnation, and Mary stands at its culmination.  In this way, she is also the sign and principle of our own personal cooperation in the life of grace, which is not merely decreed ‘out of the blue’, but unfolded in the context of our own personal history.  It is thus that her Immaculate Conception is a sign of hope for us; hope in our own election by the call of God into the immaculate life of grace.

So indeed was can say with St. Anselm: all creatures “rejoice that through you they are in some sense restored to their lost beauty and are endowed with inexpressible new grace.”

Blessed Advent!

Everyday Beauty

Recently, I was blessed with the opportunity to travel abroad for some days, viewing parts of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria and Bavaria.  It is a corner of the world I had long wished to see, and my expectations were not disappointed.  The landscape was beautiful, the people delightful (in a Germanic sort of way), the Churches stunning, the history rich, and the food, beer, wine and cheese all delicious.

However, what struck me in a particularly powerful way during this trip to Europe was the myriad of little examples of everyday beauty that dotted each city, town and village that we visited: the ways in which corners of buildings were marked with intricate wood carvings of saints and courtiers, or the sides of houses with devotional stucco paintings, window sills with stylistic curves, fence gates with wrought-iron flowers, even hay-fields with hand-made crucifixes.

   

Everything about Europe, of course, is fascinating to an American: whether it’s the fact that I drank tea out of 200 year-old porcelain, or found a McDonald’s in a 300 year-old town square.  And, of course, we mustn’t assume that Europeans share this fascination or admiration for their own historical idiosyncrasies: most of the building corners built there since World War II, anyway, are as blandly utilitarian as anything in an American suburb.

But what struck me was just how foreign this former attention to little everyday beauty was to the American – and presumably also to the contemporary European – sensibility.  Sure, we may find these displays of detail pleasant, quaint and charming, but when it comes down to understanding the mindset that gave rise to them we are quite at a loss.  What’s the point?  Why go through such effort and to such great lengths for sake of mere decoration?  It doesn’t compute.  It’s disproportionate.  I mean, sure, nobody wants live surrounded by ugliness, but this doesn’t exactly require that I hire an artist to work on my front door.

All of this led me consider the question: what is the key difference between a culture that allows such a high value to be placed on everyday beauty, and our own wherein this value has apparently been so lost as to become practically unintelligible?  What did they see that we no longer see; or perhaps, what do we see now that they did not?  At one point on our journey I put this question to one of our hosts.  His answer was somewhat paradoxical: the place of the transcendent.

Our forebears had room in their lives for such attention to beauty precisely because their vision of life afforded space to the transcendent dimension.  The human being was not envisioned as ordered to an end within this life but rather as oriented to a fulfillment beyond it, and this very fact allowed for a certain degree of levity and leisure to be introduced into life.  Precisely because it was not the locus of ultimate seriousness, it had room for the ‘waste’ of beauty in the little things.  And this ‘waste’ was appropriate insofar as beauty naturally serves as a certain pointer to the higher, sacred dimension of reality, from which this world receives its significance.  In this sense, even common little things can receive a note of dignity that takes them beyond themselves and their relatively unimportant everyday functions.

Conversely, in a culture lacking this transcendent dimension, wherein the ultimate significance of life is loaded entirely onto the immanent frame, there can be no place such superfluous displays.  Here, everything must be ordered in utilitarian fashion to the end within life.  There is no time to waste!  Money must be made!  Fun must be had!  Success must be achieved!  So long as things are basically functional and not utterly repulsive, they will suffice.  There is no sense in spending extra time, energy and resources to embellish the eve-spout or the mail-box.  If you must, go and buy some cheap kitsch at Wall-mart and move on.  Anything else would be extravagant: a waste of time.

As the transcendent dimension recedes within a culture, so the place of beauty and the sensitivity to beauty recedes.  In the not so distant past, a certain aesthetic sense governed even the construction of industrial factories.  Now, however, utility is king.  The place of beauty has been relegated to well-cordoned sectors of life – to churches and museums – and even there one must look to the past if one wishes to find genuine beauty.  We seem incapable of producing any new examples in our modern institutes.

And so we Americans flock away on our European adventures, and Europeans build their bland condominiums around ancient medieval cores, and we enjoy the quaint charms of the past for a while, only to return back to our work-a-day world and continue on as cogs in the giant machine.  There is some sense that we might be witness to a renewed romanticism in our day, evidenced in part by environmentalism and in part by the Hipster movement (though I would wish for less annoying versions to emerge).  But here too we find only a vague sense of longing for something that is lost, without much sense of what that something is or how it is to be regained.  We revolt, but remain basically dominated by that which we revolt against.

The great irony of all this is that the very movement that was supposed to invest this world with greater significance and import has in fact deadened the world and robbed it of its wealth of dignity.  God and heaven were supposed to be the last impediments standing in the way of human progress; the illusions distracting us from the immanent utopia.  But, in fact, we can see that, far from demoting the dignity of the world, they preserved and safeguarded it.  Without the transcendent dimension, earth loses its charm.

This is the great claim of the Catholic tradition: that the highest dignity of a thing comes from its reference to God; that we do not promote the dignity of a thing by depriving it of this reference – changing it from an icon into an idol – but rather precisely by affirming it.  This bestows on the object a value greater than it would otherwise have on its own.  Thus the error of idolatry is not so much that it overvalues a created good, but rather that it undervalues it, depriving it of its glory by loading onto it a weight that it cannot support, such that it sinks into itself and becomes a distorted caricature of itself – like a hot-air balloon with a leaden top.

This is why the saint enjoys and values the world not less but more than the sinner, because he enjoys and values them in their reference to God as icons.  He allows them to rise to the heights, precisely by not weighing them down with a false ultimacy.

This is why the Christian vision, that orients man to heaven, invests not less but more in the world, because it sees this world as an icon of the next, higher world, and this affords a heightened dignity.  The world becomes all the more valuable and important when it is supposed to serve as a sign directing man to his transcendent destiny.

And this is the reason why a culture that has deeply interiorized this insight can afford to ‘waste time’ on beauty in the little things: because their significance is deeply intertwined with their insignificance.  Such is the paradox of created existence…

… to quote an old saying:

Why do angels fly?  Because they take themselves lightly.

The Golden Age and Political Temperment

It is no great insight today to note that we live in an age marked by ever growing political disillusionment.  And this is a fact that has not a little to do with the sneaking suspicion that, for all of the breathless debating and heated posturing that dominates our air-waves 24/7, our political leaders really have little idea of what they are talking about or why they believe what they believe.  However much we might wish to flatter ourselves as educated and empowered, we can’t quite drive away that eerie sense that, despite our rigorous formation as ‘critical thinkers’, our independent thought is really quite homogenous and we are in fact blind droves following blind guides.

In such a context, it is perhaps more fitting to talk about political temperament than political philosophy.  Few of us – this author included – have really worked out their political thought in a thorough-going manner that is really consistent down to the foundations.  Rather, most of us operate out of a temperamental disposition whose roots we do not fully understand, but which nevertheless shapes the overall pattern of our thought.  I do not claim to have plumbed the depths of those roots myself, but I suspect that they are shaped to a great extent by our attitudes toward the ‘Golden Age’ and where we position it relation to our point in history.

Much has been written about the ‘Golden Age’, of course, and generally in disparaging terms.  We don’t like to think of ourselves as much given to naïve belief in such mythological notions in our day and age.  Yet it seems we can’t shake it from our thought.  Even those who critique it display some orientation to a past or present utopia in their discourse.  It has become a fundamental category of the modern mind, shaping the way we imagine history, the political project, and what it means to be liberal or conservative.

Thus the liberal political temperament (not necessarily aligned with liberal politics) tends to locate the golden age somewhere in the future.  It recognizes the deep problems and injustices of past and present and envisions the political project as the task of working towards, if not of ushering in, a new and brighter future under the reign of peace and justice.  Its key work is progress – hence the moniker, ‘progressive’.

Conversely, the conservative political temperament (not necessarily aligned with conservative politics) tends to locate the golden age somewhere in the past.  It recognizes its ideal of justice in some bygone era – whether it be the 1950’s or 50’s, or the time of the founding, or the middle ages – from which we have fallen away and works either to attempt to regain what has been lost or to conserve what is at risk of being lost.

But neither of these temperaments is really appropriate for the Christian in his or her approach to the political order.  This is because the Christian does not seek the meaning of history from within history: there is no golden age of past or future that can adequately orient our present.  Rather, we see the meaning and fundamental orientation of history as coming to it from without, in the Incarnation, Paschal mystery, and second coming of Jesus Christ.  It is among the enduring accomplishments of Pope Benedict XVI (Josef Ratzinger) to have insisted upon this point again and again, thereby exorcizing modern Christianity of a deep temptation to idolatry.

This is an important point: the ‘Golden Age’ idol is a specifically Christian temptation, and in this respect our modern political discourse is inconceivable apart from the backdrop Christian Revelation.  As Ratzinger has frequently discussed, it is one of the great contributions of Judeo-Christian tradition to have afforded an independent status and direction to history, above and beyond the cycles of the cosmos or given political entities (e.g. the Roman empire).  Precisely by transcending both cosmos and history in the doctrines of Creation and Judgment, that tradition was able to supply an orientation to the whole sweep of human affairs by setting it in relation to an ideal beginning in Eden and an ideal consummation in the eschaton.  In this sense, both conservative and liberal temperaments owe their geneses to this revealed understanding of history as narrative arc. The ‘Golden Age’ is a Christian idea, at least as it is at play in the West.

And there is nothing necessarily problematic about this, so long as it remains basically transcendent to history.  Such is Augustine’s vision: kingdom’s rise and fall, ever embroiled in the tensions and imperfections of our fallen epoch, and the confusion of the wheats and the tares will only be settled out at history’s end.  The sense of history comes with the end of history.

The trouble enters when the ‘Golden Age’ by which sense is made of history loses its transcendent footing and becomes lodged exclusively within the immanent order.  Ratzinger wrote his second doctoral thesis in part on the medieval abbot Joachim of Fiore, whose revolutionary understanding of history, he argues, laid the groundwork for modern ideologies of progress.  Joachim identified the eschaton with a third age of history – the age of the Holy Spirit – which would succeed the age of the Son in the dissolution of the distinction between the Church and Polis, and usher in a utopian kingdom of God – which at the same time turns out to be a kingdom of Man.

It is not difficult to see how this “immanentization of the eschaton” may have laid the ground-work for some of the darker elements of the modernity.  Indeed, even some of the great workers of the medieval reform seem to have fallen prey to this utopian ideal.  It can seem so very noble and grand  to work for the coming of the future age, but the danger lies in the exaggerated degree of power entrusted to merely human authority when we load eschatological hopes upon an intra-historical project.  It begs for tyrannical abuse.  How many ‘cracked eggs’ have been justified in the name the revolutionary ‘omelet’?  How many burned heretics, chastened savages, and exiled dissidents does ‘civilization’ demand?

The trouble seems to be that we grow dissatisfied with our historical condition, with created contingency and the vagaries of human freedom, and we simultaneously grow tired of waiting on the Lord.  So we seek a better solution: a perfected system, a civilized order, a disciplined society, a rational rule, that will not have to risk dependence on grace and freedom in order to ensure human happiness.  But this move comes at high cost.

In the end it seems that modernity’s idols are ultimately derived from a sort of Christian heresy: perhaps a form of pelagianism that places salvation within the grasp of natural effort; or conversely a form of adoptionism that aims to move beyond the person of Jesus as the locus of its hopes.  Perhaps these two converge.  But the main point here is that the Christian cannot really settle for either political temperament in his political engagement with the age.  While the basic pattern I have been outlining here is progressive in nature, we have seen in the twentieth century how well it can be twisted also in a conservative direction.

The Christian’s hope must always be oriented beyond the scope of history and history’s projects, and to some extent, this means the acceptance of the tensions and imperfections of the present age.  Not that this can excuse inaction in the face of human suffering, but it is a healthy check on our political expectations.  In some sense, the Christian must be both conservative and progressive: conservative in relation to Eden, progressive in relation to the eschaton, and ultimately situated beyond both dispositions.  We are oriented in tension towards the heavenly city of whom we are the heralds and ambassadors.

This insight is not only valid in reference to our political attitudes, but also to our approach to the mission of evangelization.  The scepter of the immanent ‘Golden Age’ can lurk here too, in the ways we may speak of a “new springtime” or of “the conversion of the world.”   There is something healthy and deeply Christian in these aspirations, but we need to be careful not to load too much expectation on an intra-historical future nor too much romanticism on an intra-historical past.  This can lead both to a temptation to discouragement when we fail to see the fruits of our labors, and to a strange kind of inactivity insofar as we think we must work out the perfectly persuasive presentation before sharing the gospel.  Again, pelagianism.

Rather than speaking about the conversion of the world, or the transformation of the global order, sometimes it is more healthy to speak of planting seeds, of helping individuals, of showing the love of Jesus to persons and communities, and of placing our trust and hope not so much in our own efforts as in Jesus, and in the Jerusalem that descends from above.

The Ethic of Compassion

Compassion, I think it is safe to say, is among the predominant values of our age.  To a great extent its appeal controls our public discourse, charging our political sympathies and framing our estimations of good and evil as decisions between loving sympathy and cold calculation.  Politicians frequently relate stories of personal suffering and hardship precisely in order to arouse this sense of compassion, and the approach has proved effective.  Many political causes derive the bulk of their force and momentum through just this appeal.  We are instructed to consider the plight of the single mother, or the pregnant teen, or the gay couple, or the terminally ill – to imagine what their experience must be like, what difficulties they must encounter – and then to judge with compassion and mercy.

This appeal is obviously very powerful in our age, and before anything else, it must be said that fundamentally this is a good thing.  We ought not to take it for granted.  Past ages did not necessarily know this kind of appeal, and if they did, it was not near so likely to produce mass political effect.  Most of history, sad to say, has been controlled by the calculating interests of the powerful – heed paid to the weak and suffering has been the exception rather than the rule.

Indeed, I think it a profound sign of the influence of the Christian Gospel upon the foundations of our Western Civilization that this ethic of compassion has such play in the political landscape of our age.  We have been attuned to compassion, and whether we admit it or not, this has much to do with that first century man of Galilee who went about consorting with sinners and prostitutes, saving the lives of adulteresses, and bidding his followers to “judge not, lest you be judged”; that man who became the very embodiment of compassion by His suffering unto death.

This is a good thing, that needs to be affirmed in our culture.  The positive force of the appeal to compassion stems from a positive value, one much informed by Christian faith.  (If some should wish to quibble with this point, they should consult Nietzsche).  However, we would be naïve not to admit in the same breath that this value has been dangerously contorted in our age, and in some very problematic ways.

The problem, as the Holy Father has again reminded us in his latest encyclical, is that compassion has been severed from truth, thus frustrating its hope from within.  Here is how he puts it in Lumen Fidei:

“Love cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away from self-centeredness and towards another person, in order to build a lasting relationship; love aims at union with the beloved. Here we begin to see how love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment and be sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions and cannot stand the test of time…Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond; it cannot liberate our isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to create life and bear fruit.” (LF 27)

Compassion means literally to ‘suffer-with’ the other.  It is a special kind of love.  But if this love is to be achieved, it requires a certain ‘exodus’ from the narrow confines of the self, and a recognition of the otherness of the other existing in his or her own right.  In other words, love demands an entrance into the common sphere of truth, where I can enter into relation to the other in the integrity of her own being, an integrity that is irreducible to any subjective feeling or view point.  Lacking this dimension, there could be little hope of actually meeting someone and knowing them.

Thus, regarding the question of compassion, if I really want to ‘suffer-with’ someone and so to show them genuine compassion, I first need to be able see the truth of their suffering: its roots and bases along with its appropriate remedies.  Without this guiding light I am liable to fundamentally misdiagnose their condition, perhaps even to project my own sufferings upon my intended object of compassion, and so to misjudge the appropriate response.  In this way, a blind compassion can do more harm than good.

Let’s take a few examples of this phenomenon to illustrate what I’m getting at here.  First: I see a poor man on the street suffering from a severe, possibly life-threatening fever.  I have compassion upon him and so wish to help him.  However, I am unfortunately possessed of the false notion that the best way to help a sick person is to subject him to periodic bleedings…to get rid of the bad bile.  I do this, and so weaken his immune system that he eventually succumbs to the fever which would have otherwise passed in one week’s time.  My compassion, though well-intentioned, killed the man.

Another example:  I have a friend who is attempting to overcome a heroine addiction.  He is suffering from violent withdrawal.  He begs me for help – to give him just one hit; he can’t bear it anymore.  I have compassion.  I can’t stand to see suffer so, and so I give him what he requests, and he falls back indefinitely into the slavery of his addiction.  My compassion, though based in friendship, increases and extends the suffering of my friend, possibly indefinitely.

Another:  I know a teenage girl who comes to me complaining about her weight and how it inhibits her social life at school.  She is very depressed.  I feel for her and wish to help.  And so I prescribe for her a strict regimen of diet and exercise and encourage her to try harder to lose weight.  But it turns out that she is in the early stages of anorexia, and that my advice has just pushed over the edge into what will become a very serious disorder.  My compassion was blind.

In each of these examples, compassion is intended, but this intention fails from a deficit of truth.  Ignorance trumps my good intentions.  Either the cause of suffering is misdiagnosed, or the remedy is ill-conceived, or my good intention is soured by my inability to transcend my own emotional needs – i.e., the affections of my friend – for the sake of truth.

The point of all this is that compassion clearly needs truth in order to be itself and to achieve its own inherent ends.  It needs an honest assessment of the good that is missing, or of the good that is twisted, in order to know what good needs to be honored and restored.  Truth is not the enemy of love but its ally and necessary companion.  Calls for compassion, then, need always to be accompanied by calls for the discernment of truth, lest a blind emotional appeal lead us down alley-ways to an even darker predicament than the one with which we began.

The terminally ill, the pregnant teen, the same-sex attracted, the single mother: Amen!  They need and deserve our compassion.  But that compassion mustn’t be blind.  It needs to be educated in the light of truth and being in order to truly achieve the demands of love.  The fear of truth, or the denial of truth as a mere pretext for tyranny, bigotry or intolerance, is precisely a recipe for the frustration or even the preclusion of genuine compassion.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that conservatism is truth without pity, and liberalism pity without truth.  That is a bit of a caricature of both sides, but it is nevertheless an accurate summary of the tendencies of modern politics.  Neither is what we need today.  Rather, what we need is the union of pity and truth, of truth and love.

Again from the enclycial:

“Truth nowadays is often reduced to the subjective authenticity of the individual, valid only for the life of the individual. A common truth intimidates us, for we identify it with the intransigent demands of totalitarian systems. But if truth is a truth of love, if it is a truth disclosed in personal encounter with the Other and with others, then it can be set free from its enclosure in individuals and become part of the common good.” (LF 34)

The State Philosophy

‘Government cannot impose morality!’, we are often told.

Indeed.  And in the name of this lofty ethical principle  (‘Thou shalt not impose’ – ‘respect equal rights of all parties’) we now find the stage set for the state recognition of gay marriage across our land.  With the DOMA strike-down today, granting federal recognition to all same-sex marriages contracted in states where such unions are legalized, we are but one well-tailored lawsuit away from a further decision denying states the right to deny equal marriage rights to all their citizens.  The fulcrum is in place; the lever is set.  All that is needed is some pressure and time.

And then, we are told, the wicked reign of imposed morality – oh, the tyranny! – will finally be at an end, and in its place freedom, sweet freedom, will reign.  No longer will states have the ‘right’ to grant preference to some relationships over others, implying that one is ‘better’ than the other, or that there is something ‘wrong’ with one in comparison to the other.  No more will such lame excuses as ‘the welfare of children’ be able to stand in the way of couples’ rights!  Love is love!  The equality of all must be recognized!

… Let’s unpack that, a bit, shall we?  For the recognition of this ‘equality’ carries with it some implications that ‘must’ be upheld by all if such equality is indeed to reign. Namely, as earlier posts have argued, it implies that states must now officially deny any significance to the objective-bodily-biological facts of human sexuality: e.g. the orientation of male body to female and female body to male, or the orientation of their union to procreation, or the orientation of these to a life-long union as the stable locus of family and child-rearing.  Such objective orientations must now be ignored in the name of the all-important subjective Orientation of sexual preference, before which all others must bow.  In other words, the public sphere must assume a more or less instrumental stance to the body and its sexuality, whose basic structures are to be placed willy-nilly at the disposal of the emotional subject.

The ‘person’  or ‘subject’ to whom rights are accounted in this vision has, at best, an ambiguous relationship with his or her (or its ?) body.  Indeed, the demands of this (spiritual?) subject may well contradict that person’s body.  But what is important is that, whatever their relation to the body, the desires of this mysterious subject be afforded equal legitimacy and freedom in the public sphere.  Nothing else will do.  Any limitation would amount to an illegitimate imposition.

We won’t call this vision a ‘morality’ – that would simply be too ironic.  Instead, let’s just call it a philosophy – an official state philosophy – to which all must eventually comply if they wish to partake in political life.  If, for some absurd backwards reasons, you might take exception to this new philosophy; if by some strange intellectual contortions you have convinced yourself that the body and its sexuality have some positive value for human life, and that the public sphere ought to recognize said ‘value’ in order to promote the “natural” conditions for raising a children in the family setting… Well!  Too bad!  It will not be long before you and your kind will be officially recognized for what you are: bigots!

Good day!

Imposing Neutrality

I would like to conclude the course of reflection which I’ve pursued through the last few posts by returning to the concrete example from which I took my departure.  In the marriage debate, as with the debates surrounding abortion and euthanasia, et.al., it is commonplace to hear appeals to government neutrality and tolerance of divergent viewpoints.  Since the point at issue, it is said, cannot be resolved vis-à-vis scientific inquiry, it must reduce to a matter of private belief, about which public government can have no say.  No party has the right to ‘impose its belief’ on any other party.

A few days ago I heard a radio conversation to this exact effect.  The on-air guest argued his point precisely from the grounds of neutrality and non-imposition: “We just ask that no one’s views be imposed on others.  If you don’t want to have an abortion, you don’t have to.  If you don’t want to use Euthanasia, you don’t have to.  If you don’t want to be married to some one of the same sex, you don’t have to.  If you disagree with us, that’s fine, just don’t expect to impose your views on us.”

So it goes…  What gets neglected here is the public dimension of truth which serves as the necessary foundation for any society, including our own.  The argument assumes the philosophy of Liberal Individualism – whose weaknesses I have been exploring – wherein each individual is granted his or her private truths in a public order that affords each ‘belief’ its fair play.

But this framework is illusory.  Government may well be neutral with regard to certain insignificant matters – i.e.  the spin of electrons, or the planetary status of Pluto – but when it comes to the crucial questions of human existence there is no neutral position.  To be ‘neutral’ to the question of God, or to that of the sanctity of human life, or to that of the genuine value of human sexuality and family life, is really to choose in favor of one side over the other.  It means to speak and act as though God doesn’t exist, or to act as though life were not sacred, or to live as though the biological conditions of human sexuality were really indifferent and insignificant.

Thus to the radio guest’s argument I must respond:  “Not so.  In fact, by seeking to expand the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, you are moving to impose a radically different vision of human life and love on the whole of the society in which we all live, which is a concern to all of us.  We do not merely hold our beliefs in private.  We hold them in community, in public, and our ability to do so genuinely is duly affected by the conditions of the public culture.  To normalize same-sex relations as effectively identical to the sexual marriage relationship is to normalize a peculiar vision of human sexuality according to whose rules we all must now play.  Our children must now to be educated in gender-neutral categories, business owners must check their consciences’ at the doors of their shops, and anyone who takes exception to these measures must accept the labels of ‘irrational’ and ‘bigot’.

“In short, in order to live in the public square, we need to speak and act according a ‘gay’ anthropology: an anthropology wherein the body is ultimately severed from and set against the mind, wherein the biological structures of human sexuality are judged to be practically meaningless, freely to be applied according the taste of the individual subject.  It is an anthropology, moreover, which will tend to further undermine in public consciousness any inherent connection between sex, procreation and marriage, and thus in the long run to the further dissolution of marriage and family culture.”

For any who might doubt these prognoses, they would do well to note that they have already come to pass.  Children in Massachusetts are being taught about homosexuality early in elementary school; adoption agencies, inns, and photographers have been sued or forced out of business for their conscientious objections; and, of course, objectors are incessantly bullied with name-calling for holding the wrong beliefs.  We might add that younger generations, influenced more and more by the above-mentioned anthropology in schools and public culture, have grown more and more promiscuous, less likely to marry, and more instrumental in their attitudes toward sex and the human body.

It has already become clear that traditional values – which have proven so valuable in building a prosperous and vibrant society in the past – will no longer be permitted once this anthropology is adopted.  In the earlier debate posted on these pages, one of the interlocutors refused even to grant the value of the connection between parents and their biological children.  Make no mistake: once gay marriage is legalized, even a value so basic as this will be necessarily denied by the public society in which we live.

This concerns all of us.  The claim to tolerant ‘non-imposition’ is a false front against which it is very difficult to argue in a Liberal society.  In fact, what we have here is a stealthy imposition whose calls for ‘tolerance’ nicely silence any opposition from those who might wish to appeal to the truth.  Such is the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ about which Pope Benedict has so eloquently spoken: a truce is called, but only one side lays downs its guns.

‘We the people’ have the duty and the right to recognize and uphold the basic values upon which our society and governance are based.  This need not mean a ‘theocracy’ or ‘thought police’ or an ‘inquisition’, but simply a decision – founded on an honest and rational public conversation – about the truth of matters that must be decided.

The Nihilist Slide

We need to call the game, not only because it serves to conceal the covert imposition of truth-claims posing as neutralities, but also because it condemns mass society to ever greater meaninglessness and banality.  As the common stock of inherited truths is gradually eroded by progressive calls to ‘tolerance’, ultimate questions are necessarily relegated to increasingly more ‘private’ spheres, where truth can only attain to a mere ‘theoretical’ certainty in opposition to the ‘factual’ knowledge of universal science.

Alasdair MacIntyre has famously questioned the validity of these ‘private truths’ – i.e. ‘truths’ we don’t really believe in – claiming that, if they are to carry moral weight, truth-claims must be ensconced within a mode of communal living.  In other words, we only really and effectively believe in a truth insofar as it is embodied in our lived, social reality.  To the extent, then, that social existence fails to manifest a given truth, that truth will begin to lose its hold and its moral relevance to persons.  The eternal value of athletic excellence, for instance, is far more ‘believed in’ today than any doctrine of God or salvation.    

Granted, of course, that social existence is multi-faceted, and that micro-communities can and often do supply for the deficiencies of the macro-community.  At the same time, however, so long as the micro-community is not totally insular, the perceived tension between macro and micro will tend in the long run to undermine the authority of the micro in an individual’s life.  Thus children coming of age in a largely secular and sexually permissive culture are relatively unlikely to retain commitments either to church communities or to the institution of the nuclear family, as is manifestly evident in our current millennial generation.

The end result of trend this is a widespread disillusionment and skepticism.  As public culture cedes more and more ground to the specter of neutrality, the convictions that offer meaning and purpose to life are increasingly privatized and hence relativized.  ‘Meaning’ has become an essentially ‘private’ affair: more a matter of personal hobby than something of real importance, not something to put much stock into.  And accordingly, with each succeeding generation we are confronted with a greater and greater sense of listless disillusionment: young people floating through life with no clear sense of direction, adults lamely clinging to their high school years, exhausted idealists resigning themselves to bitterness, tentative ‘emergents’ struggling to find motivation to move out of their parents’ homes.

The sociological facts have grown too obvious to ignore.  Suicide now kills more people than traffic accidents in the United States.  In April the New York Times reported a 30% rise in middle aged suicides over the last decade. In explanation of this troubling development, of course, the Times writer could consider no more profound factors than unemployment and the down economy.  To delve any deeper would rock the boat of liberal self-security – it would break the rules, introduce dangerous questions.  Never mind the fact that millions of effectively unemployed people in sub-Saharan Africa endure real poverty every day and yet remain quite happy to go on living without resorting to thoughts of suicide.  Never mind the fact that these would think it quite strange that the mere loss of a job would lead someone to consider taking their own life.  Never mind the possibility that it really is rather strange, and that it might indicate something seriously wrong with our society.  These are not questions we are allowed to pursue in public.

This is where the game leaves us: in a crisis that we are unable to diagnose because we are no longer able to think outside of technical and scientific categories.  The explanation simply must be economic because that is only kind of explanation there is.  What else is there?  We have lost the depth dimension of human existence, and so have reduced ourselves to technological and economic units, incapable of transcending such things as market forces and ‘quality of life’ indicators.  Even if young age is able to furnish people with hopes and dreams and intimations of purpose, these are quickly dashed by the ‘real world’ in which we are forced to live and ‘get by’ without causing too much trouble.

Hence we live in a world marked by banality and boredom.  Even the human capacity for beauty is being eclipsed in our technocratic age.  Beauty requires sacrifice, and sacrifice requires meaning, and conviction about meaning is no longer available.  This is true both for the appreciation of beauty and for its production.  To recognize something as beautiful involves a judgement of meaning and value that bears genuine moral implication, just as the production of truly beautiful art depends on a sacrificial labor that is only possible in virtue of deeply held convictions of purpose.  But the moral stock that enables such convictions is running dry.  And so we have Victorian homes flanked by Wall-marts and strip malls, generations preferring Nicki Manaj to Mozart, and galleries filled with empty canvases, crucifixes in urine, and other essay-worthy displays of sacrilege from artists straining after profundity.

The game is false; it has constrained us for too long.  It’s gag-rules are leading us  down the road to a suicidal nihilism in which we are no longer able to discern any objective meaning to life, nor for that matter any compelling reason to live.  It needs to be called. Life cannot be centered on a silence or a neutrality, but always on a Word of Truth which must be constantly sought-after and affirmed rather than disallowed.  When we pretend it doesn’t or needn’t exist, we undermine the noble purposes for which democracy rightly fights.

Phantom Teleology and the Relativist Hypocrisy

Of course, the rules (per my previous post) are there for a reason: lofty truth-claims can be dangerous and over-wrought things.  They can lead to wars and bigotry and intolerance, and all sorts of human ugliness.  In many ways, our modern context takes its departure from the religious wars that tore apart Northern Europe in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries.  After witnessing the brutal depths to which men can sink in defense of their transcendent truths, many began to search for an alternative basis on which to build society.

Such are the roots of our contemporary allergy to truth, and it cannot be too lightly dismissed.  A recent BBC article on religious violence sums up the concern nicely:

“If you have a strong sense of the overriding moral superiority of your worldview, then the need to protect and advance it can seem the most important duty of all.  Christian crusaders, Islamist militants, or the leaders of ‘freedom-loving nations’, all justify what they see as necessary violence in the name of a higher good.”  

If we believe in something too strongly, we are wont to exact a bloody sacrifice in its name.  If society is built around a sacred truth, then a threat to that truth threatens everything, and must be punished with the utmost severity.  Such a society may sound strange to us today, but we would do well to keep in mind that it was in fact the norm through most of the course of history.  Only with the dawn of modern Liberalism do we first encounter a radically different model: a society build on a supposed neutrality, on a pact of peace that refuses to be divided by divergent truth-claims.

In the wake of the religious rampage of the Reformation, and the ensuing skepticism with regard to religious/philosophical claims, Locke first sought to formulate this new model by devising a governmental structure ordered solely around the principles of autonomy and the protection of individual rights.  No ‘ultimate truths’ or theories of ‘the good’ were necessary here; all that was needed was a feasible social contract on terms to which everyone could agree.  His move here corresponded to the earlier project of Descartes to ground knowledge on demonstrable first principles that could merit the assent of all parties.  In this sense, the quest is for a more ‘scientific’ and universal foundation by which to replace the much contested claims of earlier religious and metaphysical traditions.

This sounds sane enough, and it does much to explain our current political situation.  There is a reason for our rules: our public peace is guarded by an official neutrality – and so every point of political controversy needs to be reduced to the terms of that neutrality in the service of individual rights.  Thus, at the highest level of discourse at least, no unscientific truth-claim can be countenanced.  The terms of political unity demand either incontrovertible demonstrability or official neutrality.

There are just two problems with this theory, however.  The first is that ‘scientific truths’ are able to achieve universal demonstrability precisely because they are not really that important.  They may be very useful, but they bear no existential relevance to human beings.  As I related in my last post, scientific rationality defines itself by its intentional bracketing of all teleological considerations of good and evil.  Its measure of the quantitative relies on its blindness to the qualitative.   This is the reason for its universal persuasive appeal – it does not address man’s moral character – but it is also the reason for its profound inability to found the political order.  Political discourse will always involve truth-claims that address man on a moral level, and which accordingly cannot hope to enjoy the same degree of demonstrability as that enjoyed by empirical science.  It will inevitably rely upon some implicit notion of good and evil, and thus on some notion of teleology.

This leads us to the second problem with the abovementioned theory: namely, that it was never really true in the first place.  The Liberal political order was never actually built on a neutrality.  Insofar as it was built at all, it was always founded on some truth-claim.  The American republic was built on the presumably self-evident claim that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” just as the French Revolution based itself on the ideals of fraternite, liberte, and egalite.  But these are not merely the products of neutrality.  They are truth-claims through and through; claims that can be and have been contested; claims inherited from the very traditions against which modernity tends to define itself.

Moreover, they are claims involving an implicit teleology.  A ‘right’, for instance, carries with it the notion of some ‘good’, which can only make sense against the backdrop of some basic ‘ordering’ in man.  Man has a ‘right’ to be free, because it is ‘good’ for him to be free, because he is ‘ordered’ (naturally?) to freedom.  The syllogism is, of course, never explicitly worked out, but it is ultimately operative nonetheless.  No claim to the good can avoid invoking some implicit teleology, however deeply it may be buried.

Thus, while Liberalism may appear to eschew teleological truth-claims for the sake of government imposed neutrality, in fact it relies essentially upon teleology just as much as any system before it.  The problem is that it is a phantom teleology, a secret never fully admitted, paraded around in the form of a pseudo-neutrality that in fact subtly imposes a basic vision of the world upon its adherents.  That vision may be good or bad in various ways, but the point here is the basic dishonesty – or perhaps the naïveté – of Liberalism’s claims to neutrality, carrying with it the attendant risks of a soft tyranny on the one hand, and a gradual dissolution on the other.

This point bears great relevance for our contemporary political discourse.  For very often we find that one side’s appeals to nature, or truth, or goodness are discredited as illegitimate, while the other side’s are upheld as ‘tolerant’ or ‘scientific’ or ‘neutral’.  But this is all smoke and mirrors.  The claims of the same-sex couples to ‘fulfillment’, of the feminists to ‘choice’, and of the pornographers to ‘expression’ are just as teleological as any contrary claims to family, to life, or to dignity.  There are truth-claims on both sides, and we play games when we pretend that we can dance around these issues without deciding them one way or the other.  ‘Neutrality’ with regard to religion equals a practical atheism in our schools and towns.  ‘Neutrality’ with regard to sex equals the imposition of a libertine anthropology upon the public square.  ‘Neutrality’ with regard to abortion equals the blood of children.

Such is the hypocrisy of relativism.  It pretends to be neutral before the face of truth, claiming to remain undecided about what cannot be known, all while it subtly imposes its phantom teleology, its quiet decision.  Neutrality might be fine when we’re talking about the spin of electrons or the properties of dark matter, but it will not fly when we come to discuss matters of life and death, of good and evil.  Here decision is called for; a decision in the light of truth.  As a people, to be a people, we must decide.

It’s time to call the game for what it is.

‘Studies’ and the Eclipse of Thought

Studies!  All the time, it seems, we are told that these “show” us things.  Indeed it is curious just how many things they show us.  “Studies show” us that children do best when their parents are married, and also that it doesn’t really matter what kind of ‘family’ they grow up in.  They “show” us that post-abortive women are healthy and happy, and also that they tend to be severely depressed.  They “show” us that scientists are divided on the question of global warming, and that they are mostly in agreement; that Americans are racist, and that they hate racism.  Amazing things, these studies! There are even studies of studies that tell us how reliable they are, and studies of people reading studies. Chances are that if you have a question, there is a study to provide you with an answer, and that if you don’t care for this answer, there is another study to provide you with a more palatable one.

But what is most incredible about ‘studies’ is the unquestioned authority they enjoy in our nation’s political discourse.  If one wishes to assert a controversial point, all one need do is cite the appropriate “study” and the case is settled.  There is nothing more to say.  It has been studied; and this is the conclusion.  You must be ignorant or bigoted even to question the matter.  The only trouble is that the other side also has its “studies” to which they lay an equally valid claim, studies which contradict the “showings” of the those cited by the first side.  Hence the current mad state of our political discourse: an enraged mud-slinging fiasco in which we incessantly hurl opposing “studies” past one another, with the only effect being that in the end we are angry, out of breath, and in need of a shower.

This is not to say, of course, that there are no objective criteria by which to compare the relative validity of different studies to one another.  But even when these tests are applied, the difficulty remains.  Many equally ‘scientific’ and ‘peer reviewed’ studies come to contradictory conclusions, so that each party has its choice as to which study to give credence.  According to the needs of a given argument, there is always some data by which back your claims.

So why, then, do we continue put such confidence in these supposedly solid claims?  As I mentioned in my previous post, when an issue becomes politicized, it is difficult to discern the validity of claims even in the hard sciences; all the more so those of the ‘human sciences’, which attempt to measure such vague notions as ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’.  Science will be hard-pressed to furnish objective criteria for the measurement of these categories.  Inevitably, the measure itself will be covertly determined by the prior convictions of the scientists.   A study of the well-being of children, for instance, will depend to great extent on the conception of human flourishing that is assumed in setting the criteria for measuring ‘well-being’.  But divergent conceptions human flourishing are precisely what is at issue in the contemporary cultural debate.  There is no such thing as neutrality here.  Hence, the citation of ‘studies’ becomes little more than a veiled form of circular argument in contemporary political discourse.

If we are to resolve these controversies, there is need to ask deeper questions than ‘scientific studies’ are able to address.  The question of ‘human flourishing’ is one that lies essentially beyond the scope of the sciences.  Science intentionally brackets all consideration of teleology for the sake of a sharper focus on material and efficient causes.  That focus has no doubt served its purposes in terms of providing a deeper insight into the material structures of reality, but can it be expected to furnish a comprehensive vision of the human reality?  Is the human person really reducible to the material and mechanical?  Not so long ago, such phenomena as beauty, knowledge and love were widely recognized to transcend these rubrics.  Today, it is fashionable to explain Mozart and Michelangelo entirely from the premises of evolutionary biology, because these are the only premises that exist.

In truth, however, science cannot even ask the most important questions.  It simply refuses to acknowledge them, and this becomes problematic when science reaches beyond its limits to become an all-encompassing philosophy.  This can only leave us with a groundless existence.  By its own resources, science cannot even ground itself.  Why care?  Why bother?  At best it can only attempt a genetic explanation as to why humans are inclined to such exercise, but this is not really sufficient to justify the time, effort and expense of the scientific enterprise.  In the end, whenever we ask the ‘Why?’ question a sufficient number of times, we arrive at properly philosophical questions to which science cannot provide an answer.  We need to ask these deeper questions.  It is necessary, at least, if we are actually to have a thoughtful and genuine conversation about the most controversial issues facing us today.

Unfortunately, though, these questions are no longer allowed in our society.  They are against the rules.  Our skeptical age has lost all confidence in the competence of the human mind to penetrate into questions of truth, meaning and purpose.  So we’re no longer allowed to argue that men and women are ordered to one another for the objective purpose of procreation, or that the monogamous union of mother and father constitutes the ideal context for raising a child, or that an unborn baby is a living human being who shouldn’t really be killed.  Such claims are ‘unscientific’ opinions, and so are out of bounds.

So, whatever you do, don’t think!  Or if you must think, be sure to obey the rules.  Don’t go out of bounds by asking too many pesky questions.  Just keep citing your “studies”, and let the loudest (i.e. most powerful) voice win.

Nietzsche was truly a prophet!

A Dialogue

Generally, I try to avoid facebook debates, but I got into an interesting one last week at a friend’s request, and thought I would share it here to get others’ thoughts or comments. The matter, again, was the question of marriage, spurred by the posting of the image which I share below.  It was intentionally provocative, and, sure enough, scored three attacks in short order, to which I saw fit to respond…and it goes from there.  

Please give it read and let me know what you think.  Hopefully you will find some helpful points.

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[Names have been changed to respect privacy]

• Interlocutor 1:   Actually despite the legal challenges those families face, studies still show that most kids raised by same-sex partners are as psychologically and well-adjusted as kids raised by heterosexual parents.

• Interlocutor 2: Also, if this is the argument to deny same sex marriage, why isn’t the same level of effort being put into banning all divorces once a child is born (even abusive ones), and taking kids away from widowers and widows? If single-parents, or the lacking of both genders as current parents is so horrible that an entire group of people should be banned marriage over it, shouldn’t it be an issue that is also strong enough to warrant those other actions? If the issue is not strong enough to warrant removing children from widows, widowers, and all divorcees (regardless of reason for the divorce), then it isn’t strong enough to deny equal rights over.

• Interlocutor 3:  http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/12990/20121105/teens-raised-lesbian-parents-tend-smarter-happier.htm

  It may not merit the same kind of certainty that a peer-reviewed chemistry article warrants, but the evidence is nonetheless strong. even stronger, I think, are arguments citing children brought up by single parents.
• Interlocutor 2:  Additionally, it is hard to get a statistically significant amount of data when it is banned in many states for them to raise children, and difficult in many others. Either way, the point still stands, if it is so important that it merits banning an entire group from marriage, it must be important enough to take the children away from divorcees, widows, and widowers… right? If it isn’t important enough to do take the children away from a single gender parent, then how can it be enough to deny marriage, which is not in any way biologically connected to parenting? In fact, as same gender couples, they biologically can’t have kids, so they would already have to be parents (which we aren’t taking the kids away from to being with), or they will have to adopt (which doesn’t necessarily require being married in the first place).
• Me:   “Studies show!” How many instances of contradiction and bias do we need to encounter before that claim loses its credibility. Even in the hard sciences, if the subject is politically charged, claims to ’empirical objectivity’ are difficult to assess. All the more dubious are such claims in the human sciences, which attempt to measure such vague notions as ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’, the standards of which will inevitably be shaped by philosophical preferences.  Above we see deductions confidently drawn from a small pool of ‘self-selecting’ adolescents, without controls. Yet Regnerus’ far more thorough study is held to the highest standards of scientific scrutiny and dismissed as ideologically biased. “Studies show.” The more I see it, the more I begin to believe it is an excuse for not actually thinking.
• Interlocutor 3: even an imperfect study is better than mere speculation, which is the essence of the argument sarcastically implied by the bus ad.
• Me: Is it really just ‘speculation’ to suggest that the ideal (if not always possible) context in which to raise a child is that of the loving union of his/her biological parents, and that, for this reason, said context warrants privileges not extended to others? Is that claim really so controversial? It’s been obvious to human common sense for millenia, until today. If we’ve now lost sight of so basic a truth, I might rather trust the millenia.

   
• Interlocutor 3: yes it is, since you cited no tangible evidence or studies,  whereas your opponent cited concrete examples. Of course it is controversial–some of these special privileges have significant negative effects on those for whom they are denied, esp in matters pertaining to inheritance, default power of attorney, insurance, taxes, and hospital visitation.
• Interlocutor 2:: Also, the procreation argument fails on three fronts. First, those arguing that homosexuals should be denied marriage because they cannot have kids are making no attempt to ban infertile people (medically or simply unwilling) from getting married, despite the claim that marriage is only for parents. Second, those arguing that homosexuals should be denied marriage because they cannot have kids are making no attempt to ban people from being able to have children outside of marriage. Third, those arguing that homosexuals should be denied marriage because they cannot have kids are making no attempt to remove kids from the custody of their single parents after divorce or the death of the other parent. If the two conditions that actually affect kids are not worthy of action, and the condition that has the same child outcome is not worthy of action, then the argument that it is worth denying rights to an entire group of people over something that you are unwilling to act upon when it may actually have impact falls flat on its face.

  
  Also, there is zero validity to the argument of, “It’s been obvious to human common sense for millenia, until today.” That was an argument used to justify slavery, to justify denying rights to women, to deny equal rights to all of the non-caucasian races, to justify burning people on the stake for having differing Christian viewpoints, and generally to justify every bad thing that humanity had done for centuries and millennia past. Just because humanity has believed it for thousands of yours does not make it correct.

   
• Me:  @ [Interlocutor 2] –  While I do not think it is quite fair to place the perennial recognition of the connection between parents and children on the same level as the more variable prejudices of different ages, you are right to point out that my argument from human conviction was incomplete and inadequate. I intended it to lead into the question of the rationality of that conviction. Various ages can, of course, err quite gravely in their convictions, but the only way to move safely beyond those errors without falling into others is through a resolute quest for the truths of human nature.  Less this, we have nothing on which to base our conversation. This why I suggest it is important to move beyond “studies”, and on to genuinely philosophical reasoning.  The questions of ‘nature’ and its ‘truths’ are not accessible to scientific rationality, which deliberately brackets these for sake of its specific focus. Indeed, it systematically disregards questions of meaning, purpose and dignity. But rationality is not exhausted by scientific rationality.

  
  The matter will depend on what we admit as ‘tangible evidence’. I consider the observable structures of the human body, of sexuality, and of life itself to be pretty tangible bits of evidence, from which it is reasonable to infer that the sexual (i.e. male-female) relationship is intrinsically ordered to procreation. This fact remains true in principle even if there are occasional exceptions (infertility, etc), and law necessarily deals in principles rather than in particulars.
  
  It is true that the connection between sex and children has been greatly weakened in recent decades, and you are right to point out that, to be consistent, proponents of limiting the definition of marriage to the male-female relationship should at the same time be calling for a profound reconsideration of divorce laws, as well as of general attitudes towards sex and marriage among heterosexuals. We have come a long way to get where we are, and there is reason to question whether all of those steps have been good ones.

  
  Finally, to your second point, [Interlocutor 3], the public privileges of marriage are granted primarily for the sake of potential offspring, and only secondarily for the married individuals. Private relationships are not a public concern, but the well-being of children is. With regard to those privileges that attach more closely to the individuals (i.e. visitation rights, attorney, etc) these can be secured by other adjustments to law, without altering the definition of marriage.
  
  I recognize that my above appeals to nature and truth are not fashionable in our skeptical age, but I am convinced that they remain necessary categories if we are to be able to have a rational discussion of these matters in democratic fashion. Without an orientation to truth, power becomes arbitrary, and it is but a short step to tyranny…which, I think, none of us wants.

   
• Interlocutor 3: Primary or secondary– it matters not. when one group gets protections from the law that another is denied, the 14th amendment is violated. In this case, the marginalized group greatly suffers for lack of these rights, all for the sake of appeals to a law of nature (homosexuality exists in nature too by the way). Even if it were wholly natural to withold rights to homosexual couples, why should it matter? Murder, incest, deception, and every other kind of evilare found in nature as well.  All things considered it’s a very poor standard to which one can appeal.
• Me:

  1) Primary and secondary are precisely what is at issue: the question in adjudicating conflicting rights claims is that of to which values to give priority.

  
  2) By ‘nature’ I did not mean ‘PBS nature special’ nature, but nature as the intrinsic ordering inhering in a thing, by which we are able to determine what is good or bad for that thing. In this sense, we can identify murder, incest, and deception as evil because they contradict something good in human nature. Also, to be clear, in this conversation the question has been one of the natural goodness of the connection between children and biological parents, not of the natural goodness or badness of homosexuality as such, (which falls beyond the scope of politics).

  
  3) Finally, we should be clear about exactly what is claimed in the ‘right to marriage’. I would argue that the fundamental claim here regards the right of relationships to public recognition. The public, however, has no competence by which to judge the status of purely private relationships as such; it only recognizes those that carry public relevance. If, then, the above-mentioned claim is to find grounding, same-sex couples will have to demonstrate why their relationships are matters of public interest.
• Interlocutor 3:  You’ve casually ignored a fundamental part of my argument–the illegality (violation of the equal protection clause) and the needless suffering by the marginalized group. Primary and secondary intentions are just that, intentions–regardless of what they are, the consequence is the same, and its at the very heart of the argument that opposes yours.

  
  Alleging that a predisposition to heterosexuality is an “intrinsic ordering” in humanity itself is a tall claim that warrants supporting arguments.  Many humans, after all, are ordered by something other than heterosexuality.  
  
  Same sex couples have public interest in precisely the same ways that hetero couples do, minus the ability to personally produce offspring.  Matters pertaining to insurance sharing, hospital visitation, taxation, inheritance, et al top the list.

   
  
• Me:  Sorry, bro. Thanks for the dialogue.

  ——————————————————————————————————

  And that is that.  If you made it this far, I hope you found it worthwhile.  There are some interesting points which I would like to cover in greater detail in a post to come. Please feel free to share your thoughts (in a tasteful manner); I am interested to hear.

  Peace!

  

For What It’s Worth…

This much is certain: marriage, and the question of who has a ‘right’ to it, is the topic of the hour.  And while I admit that this horse has been well-nigh beaten ad mortem by the host of internet luminaries who have contributed miles of text to the controversy, I cannot help but hurl yet two more cents into the overflowing coffer.  A while back, I posted a two-part reflection on the deeper philosophical questions of sex and sexuality that underlie the contemporary debate.  Here I wish simply to provide a straightforward political argument as to why marriage ought to be limited to sexual (i.e. male-female) relationships, the kind of argument that despite best efforts has been notoriously difficult to come by, yet which is so necessary if the cause of marriage is to re-gain traction in our society.

Back in 2003, journalist Michael Kinsley penned a provocative essay in Slate entitled “Abolish Marriage: Let’s Really Get the Government out of Our Bedrooms”,  wherein he argued that the government should obviate the controversy over marriage by privatizing the institution.  If the state simply ceased recognizing marriages altogether and entrusted the matter to the competence of private or religious commitment, then the debate would be diffused and we could move on to more important matters. What business does government have in determining the status of personal relationships, anyway?

Obviously Kinsley misses something crucial here, but he is nevertheless asking an important question.  Namely that of why government recognizes the marital relationship in the first place?  This shouldn’t be taken for granted.  After all, the state doesn’t recognize any other private relationships.  Public relationship, yes.  (Employee-employer, contractual obligations, etc.)  But not private relationships.  There are no registration for friends, enemies, classmates, neighbors, or short-term love interests.  Why, then, should government bother to recognize – with paper-work and tax breaks – the private commitments of individuals wishing to give expression to their subjective love?  This would seem to be a gross confusion of private and public spheres.  Why not leave the matter to the individuals, and let them handle the tricky details with hospitals and banks?

The answer, of course, is that marriage is not simply a ‘private‘ relationship expressing merely ‘subjective’ bond.   It certainly includes these elements, but it also moves beyond them into the public and the objective spheres, and this insofar as the sexual relationship is intrinsically ordered to the procreation of children.  (N.B., this remains true even given cases of the infertility or of couples beyond child-bearing age.  The unicity of the sexual relationship lies in its objective ordering to procreation, and for this reason to commitment.  This belongs to the very nature of sex itself as a biological and hence objectively recognizable phenomenon).   Only for this reason does the sexual relationship enter into the realm of public concern; it is not merely a matter of personal expression, but also of new life and of providing the best possible setting for that new life to flourish.  As is becoming increasingly evident, the ideal setting for the upbringing of children is one of continuous connection to the biological parents, united in a committed, monogamous relationship. Obviously, there will be plenty of cases in which this setting cannot be provided, and plenty of examples of heroic individuals providing the best for children in a disadvantaged situations.  But the ideal still remains the ideal, rooted in the basics of human nature, and it remains the business of the government to encourage this ideal through the public recognition of the unique relationship of marriage.  It is a public concern.

[These are not politically correct things to say these days, but I challenge anyone who would doubt my claims here go to any city jail or juvenile detention center and question the residents to see what percentage knew their fathers growing up.   There is a strong correlation between fatherlessness, social disorder, and generational poverty.  We have eyes to see, but we do not see.]

Note that the above argument says nothing about the moral status of  ‘homosexual’ relationships, nor does it involve any ‘condemnation’ or ‘bigotry’.  It simply indicates the reasons for the public recognition of marriage as such.  Same-sex relationships, because they lack any objective ordering to procreation, remain entirely within the private sphere, beyond the purview of government interference.

But why does this matter?  What is the harm in extending legal recognition of marriage to same sex couples who wish for the seal of a life-long commitment?   Simply put, the risk is that the content of the term ‘marriage‘ will become so nebulous as to undermine its original function and purpose.  Students of logic will remember that the wider the extension of a term becomes, the less defined its intension will be.  In other words, as a term includes more, the less it specifically means.  ‘Agate‘ means more than ‘rock‘.  But if I start using ‘agate‘ to describe every rock I see, while the term ‘agate‘ will certainly become more inclusive, it will also lose its proper meaning.   The same principle applies in the case of the term ‘marriage‘.   If we begin to apply it to denote merely subjective and private relationships, apart from any objective ordering to procreation, it can longer serve to carry the intensive meaning that demarcates the unicity of the sexual relationship as objectively so ordered.  As such, it will be emptied of its symbolic force as an ordering principle in society.  ‘Marriage‘ will be yet further disassociated from sex and procreation, perhaps definitively so, yielding the long term consequence of heightened societal disarray and greater rates of entrenched generational poverty.

Of course, the reason we are where we are in the cultural debate is that we’ve been on this train for many decades already.  The notion of marriage as a public institution, and of sex as intrinsically ordering to children, while obvious to almost every generation of human history, has come to sound strange to contemporary ears.   We have long since begun the dissociations that lead to to this point.   For the most part, the genuine meaning of marriage has already been lost.  Therefore, we cannot expect such arguments as the one offered here to furnish victory in the public square.   We need to make them, of course, and I offer this one in hopes of galvanizing and clarifying the thought of those who wish to stem the tide of cultural dissolution as much as possible.  But the ultimate answer is not here.   Something much more profound is needed.

What is needed in our times is a radical call to our contemporaries to reconsider the meaning of sex itself, and with it the meaning of love, of life and of freedom.  Only this and nothing less will be fruitful in our age.  Only a deep consideration of the meaning of the body and the call to love will suffice.  Natural reason can indeed penetrate into the proximate intelligibility of nature, but a reason that has been artificially amputated from the horizon of faith cannot be called natural by any stretch.  We have tried and failed to convince our interlocutors with arguments from natural law, but in doing so we have neglected to account for the influence of sin in its remarkable capacity to cloud the intellect.  Reason needs faith in order to see clearly.  Beyond natural law, what is needed a renewed presentation of the gospel.  Beyond legal definitions, there is needed a renewed appeal to the beauty of Jesus Christ.

  

Evangelization and Human Development (Part III)

In the last two posts I have been considering the relationship between these two, often divided components of the Church’s mission (E and D), focusing in the last on the contribution of modern secularism to this division.  Here I will conclude the discussion with a brief of treatment of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, their fallout over the past 50 years, and the way forward proposed to us by our Popes.

…

Along with De Lubac, the aim of the Second Vatican Council was to heal the modern divide and to restore of an authentic Christian anthropology, both through a deeper re-integration of our understandings of grace and nature and through a call to the modern world to find the fulfillment of its desires in the person of Jesus Christ:

“If it is asked how this unhappy state of affairs can be set right, Christians state their belief that all human activity, in daily jeopardy through pride an inordinate self-love, is to find its purification and its perfection in the cross and resurrection of Christ.”  — GS 37

The move here was to attempt to ‘re-christify‘ the world by re-proposing the faith as directly relevant to human concerns.  Jesus Christ is presented as the answer to the deepest yearnings of the human heart – the true term of human development and the fulfillment of modernity’s hopes.  In many quarters of the Church this move was received with great enthusiasm and optimism.  It seemed that the Church had turned a corner in its rapport with the modern world.  No longer was this relationship one of competition and antagonism, but rather one of hope, dialogue and collaboration.  A new program had been articulated, a new attitude set forth, a grand new synthesis seemed available that could overcome the alienation between the Church and modernity.

The difficulty was that in attempting to re-integrate the concerns of faith and the concerns of modern humanism, many in the Church failed to adequately adjust their anthropology to accord with the thoroughly Christocentric vision of the Council.  Instead, they typically (albeit unintentionally) assumed the secularized anthropology of their cultural surroundings, with the result that the attempt to integrate the evangelical and the humanitarian concerns netted a reduction of the evangelical goal to the humanitarian.  In extreme cases, the preaching of the forgiveness of sins was abandoned in favor of political activism, and the administration of the sacraments in favor of advocation for structural change.  The sense of history remained that of a secular Marxism, which was too quickly identified with salvation history itself.  Basically, a synthesis was attempted, but the requisite step of re-conceiving the terms of the antithesis was neglected, yielding only a distorted conflation.  Thus, instead of Christifying the world, we ended up secularizing the Gospel, substituting its supernatural goals for those of an entirely immanent notion of human development.

This left a rather sour taste in the mouths of those who read the lines from the Gospel: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.  he who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16), who saw the world slipping more and more away from the saving faith and into the sickness of sin, who witnessed a secular politic blinded to the destructive evils of abortion and sexual libertinism, who saw the supernatural import of Gospel and remained convinced of the urgent need to preach Jesus Christ for the salvation of souls.  These bemoaned the secularization and banalization of the ancient faith, and so tended to reject the concern for social justice and human development as an element of the mission of the Church, preferring instead to speak of works of charity as necessary complements to proclamation.

All of this lands us in the place we see the Church today: divided between two camps with two divergent understandings of the mission.   And it seems that, more and more today, members of both camps are coming to recognize the inadequacy of their divergence.  The last five pope’s have been insistent on this score, and perhaps our new pontiff can drive the point home.  In his first homily as Pope, just a few days ago, Francis shared the following words:

“We can journey as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, the thing does not work. We will become a pitiful NGO but not the Church, the Bride of Christ.”

In a similar vein, we find the following passage in Benedict’s Lenten message :

“It is clear that we can never separate, let alone oppose, faith and charity.  These two theological virtues are intimately linked, and it is misleading to posit a contrast or ‘dialectic’ between them.  On the one hand, it would be too one-sided to place a strong emphasis on the priority and decisiveness of faith and to undervalue and almost despise concrete works of charity, reducing them to a vague humanitarianism.  On the other hand, though, it is equally unhelpful to overstate the primacy of charity and the activity it generates, as if works could take the place of faith.”

Again what is needed here is a deeper reception of the teachings of the Vatican Council, with its revolutionary proposal of an integral Christian humanism.  It is true that, so long as we conceive of education as oriented to purely secular goals, or of poverty solely in terms of food, material well-being and economic power, there can be no question of an integration of evangelization and human development.  This could only result in a mean reduction.  But if the human person is re-envisioned in such a way that education is seen to culminate in the encounter with the person of Truth incarnate, that poverty is admitted not only in its material but also in its spiritual dimensions, and that Jesus Christ is recognized as the true standard against which all cultures need be judged, then we can begin to see a unity emerging between evangelization and human development.  We can begin to see how the less secularized cultures of Africa can transcend our western divisions.  We can begin to understand the vision of the popes:

“Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce the term “charity” to solidarity or simply humanitarian aid.  It is important, however, to remember that the greatest work of charity is evangelization, which is the “ministry of the word”.  There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God: evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human person.  As the Servant of God Pope Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio, the proclamation of Christ is the first and principal contributor to development (cf. n. 16). It is the primordial truth of the love of God for us, lived and proclaimed, that opens our lives to receive this love and makes possible the integral development of humanity and of every man.”  – Benedict’s Lenten Message

What is evident here is the call for a broadened understanding of both evangelization and development, even as these are more rigorously oriented to the person of Christ.  Clearly, much remains to be done in terms of articulating the vision.  But I believe this to be the task that lies before the Church in the twenty-first century, bequeathed to us by our forebears in the century past: namely to re-formulate anthropology in a consistently Christocentric manner, and to confidently propose this to the (post)modern world as its best path forward, indeed as the way to salvation in the person of Jesus Christ.  And in the person of Pope Francis, it seems that God has provided just the man to lead us on the way.

Viva il Papa!  Deo Gratias!

Evangelization and Human Development (part II)

I’ll take it as a providential sign that my writing of this post was interrupted by the election of a man who seems so clearly to embody the synthesis at which I’m driving.  Praise God!  Viva Pope Francis!

That synthesis, again, at which I drive is one between the concern for evangelization (i.e. the salvation of souls) and the concern for human development (i.e. the liberation of the poor).  It is a synthesis that is apparently possible, as the witness of the Popes and of the African Church seem to demonstrate.  Yet, for whatever reason(s), it is also one that has been notoriously difficult for the Western Church to achieve.  Rather than a true unity of the two concerns, we find in her a division between those devoted to the one and those devoted to the other.   In part, this situation is no doubt due to the overwhelming scope of both concerns:  the world appears so spiritually lost, and poverty so intransigently egregious, that an adequate devotion to both causes seems impossible.  Each is too all-encompassing to admit a rival.  How can we possibly hope to attend to both?  We must either assume that poverty is “not that big of deal” and attend to the salvation of souls, or assume that “most everybody will be saved” and attend to the liberation of the poor.

That is a bit of an oversimplification, but I think it encapsulates pretty well where we find ourselves today in the American/Western Church.  Clearly, the dichotomy is inadequate. But we must realize that it is not going to be healed by simply asserting that ‘Faith and Justice go together’, and that ‘Catholicism is a religion of Both – And.’   True as that refrain may be, no realization of unity will come about without a simultaneous transformation in our understanding of the relevant concepts and their relationships.  Whenever the Church confronts the paradoxes of Revelation, she finds herself forced again and again to re-conceive as directly proportional those relationships previously thought to be inversely proportional.   Relationships of competition must be reframed as relationships of correspondence, and this necessarily involves a dramatic re-thinking of the related terms.   Overcoming the crisis between Faith and Justice (E and D) will thus require a profound re-imagination of the problem and its terms: a deep revolution of the understanding of what we mean by Development (Justice), and of what we mean by Evangelization.

I would suggest that the key to this transformation lies in a much needed return to the authentic teachings of the Second Vatican Council.   There, the Church clearly sought to bridge these modern divides by positing a revolutionary Christocentric anthropology, a teaching that, despite best intentions, has yet to be fully received into the life of the Church.

The mentioned divide between ‘humanitarian’ and ‘evangelical’ concerns was already much bemoaned in the first half of the twentieth century leading up to the Council, first by the Church’s enemies, and eventually also by those within her bounds.  Henri de Lubac, among others, complained of an overly individualistic understanding of salvation, cut off from any sense of duty toward the human community.   Individual piety and personal sanctification had been unnaturally sequestered from the natural human values of equality and justice, supplying leverage to the Marxist critique that Christianity’s supernatural hope left it uninterested in the welfare of the present world.  However, De Lubac argued that this critique was based on a skewed conception of the Christianity, one rooted at once in the secularization of the human community on the one hand, and in an ‘extrinsic’ conception of the relationship between nature and grace on the other.

What needs to be recognized, he argued, is that the ‘humanitarian concern’ was, in fact, originally bequeathed to the world by Christianity.  It is not as though such notions as ‘the universal fraternity of man’, ‘the equality of persons’, and ‘human dignity’ were widespread in the classical world before the advent of the Faith.  They must rather be recognized as the mutual fruits of Christian doctrines: of Creation in the imago dei, of the universal Redemption in the blood of Christ, and of the destiny of mankind to union with God.  In the first millennium of Christianity and in the Middle Ages, these ‘humanitarian concepts’ are deeply interwoven into the central tenets of the faith: human history and the human community are understood in terms of the arch of salvation history that flows from Creation and culminates in the eschatological return of Christ.  There is no separation between evangelical and human concerns.  Everything is united in a comprehensive vision of faith.

It is only with the modern period that we begin to see the secularization of the above-mentioned concepts.  Dignity, equality, fraternity, and liberty are no longer set within an eschatological hope or a soteriological framework; they become the sole prerogatives of the secular state, quite independent of any question of an individual beliefs.  Faith is here relegated to the realm of the private conscience, bearing little or no relevance to questions of justice in human society.

At the same time, and in complementary fashion, the faith begins to be articulated by theologians in such a way that the supernatural gratuity of grace was set in contrast to the immanent structures of ‘pure nature’, resulting in a rather stark stratification between the worlds of the natural and the supernatural.  Faith and salvation are accordingly conceived as bearing, at best, a tangential relation to the ‘natural’ desires of human society for peace, unity, equality, justice, etc.  The light of faith is certainly necessary to purify natural reason in their regard, but they are understood to possess their own immanent structures independent of any reference to Christ.  Thus these concerns, once thoroughly Christological and ecclesial, are more or less ceded to the competence of the secular state.

In short, what we see emerging in the modern period is a fully secularized anthropology, an understanding of the good of man that is entirely divorced from faith in Christ, and which nonetheless retains a number of ultimately Christian values, along with a sense of history that is derived from Christianity’s eschatological hope.  Thus, while rejecting the transcendent dimensions of that hope, modernity continues to envision itself as progressing towards the perfect human society of liberty, fraternity and equality.  This drive culminates ultimately in Marxism’s final immanentization of eschatology:  the desire for heaven is translated into the desire for a human utopia; human development is supplied with a purely ‘this-worldly’ term.

However, the appeal of this utopia depends on the prior divergence between faith and the ‘humanitarian concern’… to the healing of which divergence I hope to return in the next installment. Enough for now.  In the next post I will to discuss the response of De Lubac and the Second Vatican Council to this modern crisis, with the hope of shedding light upon our current situation.  Peace!

Evangelization and Human Development (Part I)

The Popes have been pretty clear about it: these two (E and D) are supposed to go together.  In his final Lenten message as Pope, Benedict XVI stressed again the inseparability of faith and charity, and emphasized the union of evangelization and development as expressions of that charity.  And yet, for whatever reason, the sad situation is that the western Church continues to find herself divided between two camps: those who characterize her mission primarily in terms of evangelization, and those who do so primarily in terms of Justice, Solidarity, and Human Development.

This state of affairs has, of course, been repeatedly bemoaned by both camps over the past 50 years, all to little effect.  Typically, the discussion has been hindered by a host of ambiguities and false assumptions. The distinction between justice and charity, for instance, has frequently been overlooked or left insufficiently clarified.  This, in turn, has led to the accusation by some that those who do not subscribe to a given notion of justice are deficient in their ‘love for the poor’ or beholden to an unhealthy and individualistic conception of piety.  Conversely, those so accused have not infrequently responded by calling into question the genuine concern of their accusers for the spiritual well-being of the people they serve, noting an apparent indifference to matters of faith and a sometimes strong association with secular political agenda.

The impasse is lamentable.  Faith (and its concern) cannot be reduced to justice (and its concern), nor justice to faith, and yet this is generally where we find ourselves today:  caught between two inadequate paradigms.  I had recent cause to return to these considerations in a trip to Africa wherein I was witness to some of the great work done by CRS (Catholic Relief Services) in the country of Burkina Fasso.  It was an incredibly powerful journey on many fronts, but what struck me most was the life of the Church there and the fact that it was apparently unmarked by the divisions mentioned above.  Those concerned for evangelization were equally concerned for the progress of human development, and those working in human development were for the most part equally concerned for the work of evangelization.  Indeed, it seemed that they were living the unity about which the Popes have written.

The experience of that lived synthesis provided me with much food for thought, especially as I returned to consider the divisions that wrack the American and European Church.  What is it that allows for such a unity to be obtained in the African context?  And what is it about the Western context that keeps us mired in division, holding us back from achieving a synthesis?

…  More Later…  WE HAVE A POPE !!!!!

Was Wittgenstein Right? … I Hope Not!

I found an article today in the New York Times summarizing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) self-destructive blow to philosophy.  You can read it here.  Basically, the author, Paul Horwich, praises Wittgenstein for having liberated human thought from the self-deluded snarls of philosophy, which discipline he unveiled as the cancerous out-growth of empirical science, whose generalizing tendencies had been applied beyond their legitimate bounds into the foggy realms of ‘truth’, ‘goodness’, etc.  Those famous questions had long since proven themselves interminably unproductive by Wittgenstein’s time, and the professor should be thanked for having cleared the intellectual air of such silly games, allowing human thought to re-occupy itself with more important business.

(Horwich is not quite so caviler as this – he shows some restraint – but his tone is generally positive, suggesting that Wittgenstein’s thesis is a good thing for us to consider.)

So, was Wittgenstein Right? …

I thought I would share my response below:

Before getting too giddy about Wittgenstein’s liberating acid, it might be wise to apply the test of ‘good old’ American pragmatism.

If no theoretic generalizations can be granted outside those discoverable by the empirical sciences, then there can be no legitimate path by which to arrive at the “natures” of state, person, human being, or justice.  Such an impasse may flatter our liberal sensibilities, but it would also bar any kind of rational discussion regarding the fundamental values according to which a democracy necessarily strives to organize its public life. Rational discussion requires at least the possibility of a truth more robust than Wittgenstein’s.

But if that discussion itself turns out to be impossible, what else remains as the instrument by which to resolve the controversies that today tear at the fabric of our society?  What else but force and political power, tyranny of the majority or perhaps of a smaller group, the imposition of one arbitrary will over another?

I am no pragmatist, and so I suppose Wittgenstein’s thesis could still be ‘true’.  However, I would suggest that if it is correct, then democracy is ultimately doomed to fail.  You will forgive me, then, if I am not so eager to embrace this self-deprecating philosopher as my mind’s savior, and find myself more prone to consider philosophy as the father of science than as the misbegotten child of science.  Her debates may be interminable, but I would much prefer that debate to any irrational submission to the ruler’s will.

Viva Il Papa!!

As I write this, Pope Benedict XVI is officially resigning his post as Pope and entering into a hidden life of prayer and contemplation on behalf of the Church he has shepherded for these past 8 years.  And while I know that the internet is currently being flooded with a series of tributes and critiques, I cannot help but throw my hat in the ring for this man and take the opportunity to express my gratitude before God for the graced years of his pontificate, years which now seem all too short.

It seems funny to say, but the day of his election on April 19, 2005 remains one of the happiest of my life.  As soon as I heard the bells ringing outside my bedroom window on that beautiful spring day in Milwaukee, and my roommate burst the door to announce with bated breath that “We have a Pope!”, I knew there was no way my Shakespeare paper was going to be completed on time.  I flew down the stairs to delve into the drama and tension of papal ceremony.  And when I heard that familiar ‘Josephum’ break from the announcing cardinal’s lips, I could not conceal my euphoria.  The emotions were more intense than any sporting event in my experience before or since.  I leapt from my couch, dawned my newly minted Cardinal Ratzinger Fanclub tee-shirt (which had providentially arrived just the day before – already outdated by its first wear) and went to tour campus and city with joyful cries of ‘Habemus Papam!’ and ‘Viva Il Papa!’

Okay, I’ll admit it: I was already a Catholic dork.  And I can understand how my exuberant reaction to the news of Ratzinger’s election might seem incomprehensible to some.  This Pope has, of course, been woefully mischaracterized by the media on almost every possible occasion.  Upon his election we heard of nothing but his dark past as the Vatican’s doctrinal “watch-dog” and of the impending reign of a merciless, dogmatic “Panzer-Pope”.   And throughout his papacy he has been continually impugned as insensitive, out of touch, irresponsible, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, reactionary, even as an international criminal responsible for a global cover-up of child sex-abuse.  Those who knew the man, however, or who took the time to actually read his writings as theologian and Pope, were quickly able to see through the mists of such bombastic reports.

In truth, the chief characteristics of this pope have been gentleness, sensitivity, wisdom, humility, and joy.  His lack of guile at times got him into trouble, but this had more to do with his straight-forward simplicity than with any purported naïveté’ or clumsy ineptness in public relations.  I have never ceased to be amazed by the combination of depth and simplicity in his reflections, and by the facility (on display to the very end) with which he communicates the beauty and joy of the life of faith, the life of the Church, the life of friendship with Jesus Christ.  He has been a Pope who has pointed the Church back to the basics, both by his own unassuming personality, and by his consistent Christocentric focus.

There is, of course, entirely too much to say.  But I would like to highlight one characteristic of Benedict that has always impressed me, and from which I believe the Church has much to learn in its continuing mission of evangelization: namely, his intellectual charity.  Despite the many caricatures of him as a rigid reactionary, in fact his intellectual life has been typified by a profound capacity and willingness to take his opponents’ arguments seriously and sympathetically.  Consistently, when engaging in some point of controversy, he would begin from the starting-point of his ideological ‘enemies’, recognizing their legitimate concerns and granting their strongest arguments, before moving to argue for his position on their terms.

His ability in this regard was quite frequently breathtaking, and I would argue that it provides a model for the Church in at least three respects.  First, in its positivity.  Benedict consistently began by emphasizing the positive elements in his adversaries positions, and closed by presenting his or the Church’s position as something positive in relation to his adversaries concerns.  Quite in contrast to the typical depiction, Benedict was not ‘confrontational’.  He was a man of genuine dialogue.

Nevertheless, and this is the second point, as a man of dialogue he was always realistic in admitting the presence of genuine conflict.  His adversaries, while always respected, remained adversaries.  He refused to gloss-over important difficulties with sweet-sounding platitudes.  Indeed, he rejected such language games as destructive of any genuine dialogue, and more significantly, of any genuine human communion. In a manner no-doubt paradoxical to many, he recognized the admission of difference as a critical pre-requisite on the road to unity.

This leads to the third point, that the goal of Benedict’s dialogue was always unity.  He was wary of the false-synthesis, and of the cheap peace of politicians who grit their teeth as they shake hands; but the point of this suspicion was never division for its own sake.  He was not a ‘divisive’ pope.  He simply sought a genuine unity, i.e. a unity in truth.  Of course, he was always prepared for the very real possibility that human freedom might reject the terms of that unity.  But unity remained the goal nevertheless, even as he saw through the chimera of a peace built on relativism.

Positive, genuine, unifying.  These facets of Benedict’s intellectual charity are not merely admirable qualities for an academic.  Ultimately, they manifest the deeper dynamic of Christian charity, mirroring the love of Christ, who was (so to speak) God’s definitive attempt to re-unite us to himself by speaking our language.  As such, I would argue that they provide a way forward for the Church: not defensive but confident; positive; seeking the unity for which Christ came without being afraid of the real possibility of rejection and division.  In an age when we can be tempted towards pessimism, negativity, and isolation, Benedict offers a positive model for the Church as she continues to engage in the effort of the new evangelization.

Of course, Benedict would never assent to holding himself up as a model for the Church.  His ministry has always been marked by an evident and profound humility.  In some ways there is a great fittingness to his departure now, and his recession into the grandfatherly role of intercession and contemplation, mirroring as it does the modesty of his papacy’s  beginnings.  It is bittersweet: a re-affirmation of the virtues for which this Pope was so well loved, mixed with the sorrow of departure.  Yet already hope wells up in anticipation of the Holy Spirit’s next move in this drama of the history of the Church.  Again and again we see manifested in her life the Paschal mystery: the death and the resurrection of  her Lord.

——————————————————————————–

Here are his words of farewell from Thursday at Castel Gondolgfo:

Thank you!
Thank you all!

Dear friends, I am happy to be with you, surrounded by the beauty of Creation and your affection that does me much good. Thank you for your friendship, your love, [applause] …

You know that this day for me is different from previous ones: I am no longer the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church: until eight in the evening I will be still, and then no longer. I am simply a pilgrim who begins the last leg of his pilgrimage on this earth.

But I wish still [applause – thank you!] … but I wish still with my heart, my love, my prayer, my reflection, with all my inner strength, to work for the common good and the good of the Church and of humanity. And I feel very much supported by your affection.

Let’s go forward with the Lord for the good of the Church and the world.

Thank you, I give you now [applause] … with all my heart, my blessing.

[Blessing]

Thank you, good night! Thank you all!

On Loving Sex [Part II]

In Part 1 of this post, I reflected on the hurdles that obstruct genuine conversation about sex and the body in contemporary liberal society.  Here in Part 2, I will attempt to identify the real fault-lines of the debate that need to be exposed if we hope to make any kind of progress.

If we were to finally have the discussion that we so urgently need to have about sex in this country, what would or should that conversation look like?  I think the fundamental question is really that of whether sex is good or bad.  The immediate assumption of most is that it is the ‘right’ that holds sex to be bad, and the ‘left’ that holds it to be good and very good.  Liberals love sex!  Traditionalists are afraid of it.  But appearances are deceptive here.

   

Conventional wisdom sees the cultural left as the champion of sex.  “Free Love!”  “Yes to pleasure!”  “Off with the shackles of the Victorian prudes who cringe in fear at the vital passions of the human body!”  It would seem to be clear who embraces the value of the body and who does not.  But a closer look reveals a different story.  Because the brand of freedom forwarded by the sexual revolution is one of a directionless sort, unfettered by any of the biological or human facts that actually constitute the basis of human sexuality in the first place.  Its only criteria are emotional expression and pleasure, whose urges must be followed regardless of whether they contradict the fundamental structures of the very human body that the prudes so shun and the libertines so embrace.

Let’s take a look what sex actually is.  In common parlance, that word is usually taken to refer to the act of intercourse, or to some derivative thereof.  But, in fact, let us remind ourselves that the term actually refers to a much more primordial fact: namely, that we belong to a species that is differentiated between male and female for the sake of procreation.   In other words, as human beings we are either males – whose bodies are ordered to the female body in the mode of generous self-gift for the sake of the generation, protection, and rearing of children – or females – whose bodies are ordered to the generous reception of the gift of life and to the continued nurturing of that life.  These  are objective and biological facts; and, as facts, they are either good, bad, or neutral in value.

[For the sake of brevity, I will suppose that relatively few people consider sex to be of neutral value.]

If sex and body are considered truly to be good, then it follows that it is a good thing for sex to be ordered:
             a) in a genuinely sexual way – i.e. male to female and female to male –
             b) essentially to the procreation of children,
             c) to the raising of children according to the specific roles of mother and father, and according to the specific demands of the human child (rational, moral, spiritual — implying an extended commitment), and
             d)  to the specific love demanded by a human spouse, who as a person ought never to be used simply as a means to an extraneous end.

Thus, if sex is indeed good, it is a good thing to be a man or a woman, and it is good to enter into a loving covenant with one another for the noble purpose of raising a family.  Any action that uses sexuality in contradiction to these norms is a degradation of sex itself. [Much more could be said here in terms of what this implies for the very meaning of masculinity and femininity, which are indeed positive.  Feminism is in crisis with itself precisely insofar as it implicitly denies the goodness of sexual difference and complementarity (i.e. sex itself), and by extension the very femininity it purportedly seeks to promote.]

If, however, these norms – derived from the very nature of sex itself – are derided as restrictions to liberty, then we must conclude that sex itself is not a good thing.  Indeed it is a bad thing insofar as it places limits on our self-expression and our quest for pleasure.  This puts us in an awkward position; because the very satisfaction we so devoutly praise and earnestly seek is parasitic upon the body that we secretly deride.  Thus we are left with an anthropology that is, frankly, odd.  The body is bad, and the ‘spirit’ is good.  I call it odd, but it is certainly not new.  In fact, it is very ancient.  It was a known in older times by the names of various heresies, and has been hidden in the seedbed of the western thought since the time of Descartes.

Funny.  We always hear that it is that nasty, conservative Church that thinks the body is bad and the spirit good.  But, in fact, that is just the implicit position of her most virulent opponents.  And, in fact, the Church is the great defender of the body.

Indeed much is at stake in this debate.  But in this battle, the Church can take solace and strength in knowing that it is on the side of the body.  The body is good; sex is good; life is good.

On Loving Sex [Part I]

[This post will come in two parts: in the first I will treat the difficulty of discussing these issue at all in a Liberal culture; in the second I will move on to consider what is fundamentally at stake in the contemporary cultural debate.]

In my last post, I offered a truncated argument in favor of the claim that feminism, if it were truly ‘feminism’, ought to oppose abortion insofar as ‘feminism’ claims to speak for the ‘feminine’, and the intimate bond between mother and child is intrinsic to feminity.  In so doing, I admittedly opened up a whole can of cultural worms in need of disentanglement, landing us quite at the heart of contemporary political controversy.

For we must admit that, for better or for worse, sex is a driving force in our culture, and lies, more or less conspicuously, at the center of our public discourse.  About a year ago, in his failed bid for the Republican nomination, Senator Rick Santorum famously asserted that the liberal agenda in this country was “all about sex”, a charge which democrats countered by citing the senator’s attack as evidence with his own obsession with sex.  I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which attack is more telling.  Suffice to say that sex (and our understanding of that term) is a critically important issue underlying today’s politic, and one about which we must learn to speak in a rational and intelligent manner.

Unfortunately, this discourse has been sorely lacking.  The gist of Sen. Santorum’s argument was that the sexual revolution of the late 1960’s carried with it an anthropological revolution to which the democratic party in this country has been radically wedded ever since, spurring the culture war that rages on to this day.  In that ensuing battle, however, the revolutionaries have deprived the ‘conservatives’ of any political traction by calling a procedural foul: claiming that their advancement of traditional sexual mores represents an illicit imposition of one group’s ideological views upon another.  A wise bit of political stratagem that, insofar as it exempts the left from the necessity of engaging in rational discourse, much to the consternation of the right who see society gradually drifting away from the traditional values that serve as the bedrock of prosperity and social stability.

The difficulty here may lie in the nature of liberalism itself, which was founded precisely as an alternative to an agreement on ultimate truths which had often proved costly.  Instead of arduous and often bloody debates over religious truths, liberalism instead sought to found society on a commonly agreed upon set of individual rights guaranteed by a government that was strictly limited by procedural rules.  While this approach involved a certain sacrifice in terms of cultural identity, it served well so long as sufficient space was allowed to people’s enduring religious and moral convictions such that the necessary public agreement in terms of moral truth could be supplied for the sustenance of an ordered liberty.  The problem was that, as soon as any long-presumed moral truth was seriously called into question in political discourse, there were no political means to preserve that truth.  The overarching neutrality on ultimate questions necessary limited public discourse (at least at its highest level) to questions of rights and individual liberties, such that contradictory truth claims must in the end be tolerated in society.  In this way, ground could only be ceded to truth, precipitating a gradual slide away from the very truths and values upon which liberalism itself was initially grounded.

This is exactly the frustrating situation in which we find ourselves today: a gradually growing segment of the population clamoring for the respect of its rights, and any effort at a public conversation about important human truths countered by the political red cards of “intolerance” and “bigotry”.  And the trouble is that it is difficult to find a leg on which to stand here.  If our political unity is built ultimately upon a neutrality, then we must yield space to our opponents contradicting truth-claims, just as we claim the right to our own.   That is not to say that we ought not to exercise our rights by seeking to enter into a vigorous conversation and to place people in public office who support of views; it is just that this effort is extraordinarily difficult in a public discourse wherein the need for agreement on certain agreed upon truths is not formally recognized.  Any claim to truth is countered by pretended claims to false neutrality, and so we gradually slip towards Pope Benedict’s “dictatorship of relativism.”

Needless to say, it is extraordinarily difficult to have the conversation we need to have about sex in our day and age.  But if we were to finally have that discussion, what might it look like?  For that question, we will wait for part two.

Good for Women?

This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade, which effectively legalized abortion across the United States.  This Friday, hundreds of thousands of pro-life activists will gather in Washington, D.C. for the annual March for Life in witness to the estimated 55 million unborn children who have lost their lives to abortion since 1973.  Most of the politicians, of course, will have left town, the media cameras will be closely cropped around the handful of counter-protesters, and the newspapers will ambiguously report the “thousands” in attendance.   But from noon until about 3 in the afternoon, an endless stream of peaceful, mostly young protesters will file from the central mall to the Supreme Court steps in order to raise their voice for the most voiceless in our society.

Noteworthy is the fact that leading this procession will be a group of thousands of women who have had abortions, and who are now speaking out against the longstanding cultural myth that abortion is somehow “good for women”; that supporters of abortion are simply “standing up for the rights of women.”  The tears I’ve witnessed on the faces several of these women call that line into question.  Their stories of isolation, pain, regret, psychological distress, and suffocating silence tell a very different story.  Their organization, Silent No More, poses a radical challenge to the standard political tropes about ‘equality’ and ‘compassion’.  Anyone who is truly concerned for the welfare of women in relation to the abortion question should do them the service of hearing their stories.

We need not delude ourselves about the noble intentions of all those who identify themselves as pro-choice in this country.  While it is commonplace to hear concern for the rights of women cited as a rational, it is safe to assume that a sizable percentage of abortion supporters do so more out of convenience than out of moral conviction.  It is always easier in a rights-based society to err on the side of tolerance (“Who am I to tell…) or relativism (“Who am I to say…”) than on the side of staking a claim against the status quo.  Moreover, for young men in particular, support for abortion carries with it the added benefit of supplying a consequence-free context for sexual relations, all while appearing chivalrous.

Still, it is unlikely that such attitudes represent the majority of the pro-choice movement.  Most probably see themselves as defending the rights and equality of women, and it is this claim that constitutes the single greatest challenge to the pro-life movement.  Indeed, because this supposed concern for women largely blinds pro-abortion advocates to the biological and ethical claims of their opponents, it is to the claim that pro-lifers should primarily direct their efforts.

Is abortion truly good for women, so good that it ought to constitute a central platform of any legitimate feminism?  What kind of equality is procured by these means?  The standard formulation claims that in order for a woman to enjoy the requisite autonomy needed for a fulfilled and happy existence on par with that of men (i.e., a life typified by the freedom to pursue political, economic, artistic, academic modes of expression etc.), she needs to have authority over her reproductive life.  An unexpected baby might forcibly sideline her career and condemn her to a life of poverty, struggling to support her offspring.  Women bear a disproportionate degree of the burden in child-bearing, and so ought to be granted the right to determine whether to carry a child to term when such an act might be deemed inconvenient or even impossible.  To deny her such a right might force her into a self-destructive situation, including the possibility of the unsafe, illegal abortion.

The formulation is, of course, loaded with assumptions that demand careful analysis: assumptions about life, about happiness, about the individual, about the role of the father, about the relationship between sex and procreation, about the safety of legal abortion, and of course, about the nature of the act of ‘terminating’ a pregnancy.  But, within the limits of this post, allow me to focus on just one such underlying assumption: namely, that about the nature and value of femininity.

The fact is that, according to the above account, femininity doesn’t count for much at all.  Women are considered purely as individuals whose dignity and worth are to be evaluated  according to the norms pre-existing in society as it is.  No attention is given to what belongs specifically to the feminine as such (i.e. that which feminism claims to champion).  But if society is ‘male’ dominated, and overladen with exclusively ‘male’ terms of evaluation, shouldn’t we expect feminism to call for a genuine re-evaluation of terms before seeking an equality on men’s terms.  Otherwise it may risk sacrificing that which is genuinely feminine for the sake of a pseudo-equality.

I’ll cut to chase: all psycho-babble aside, a person is feminine insofar as she is a woman; a woman is a woman insofar as her body is female; a body is female insofar as it is ordered motherhood – to the reception and bearing of life.  (N.B. obviously, the same applies to masculinity, men, male bodies and fatherhood, and no one is exhaustively defined in terms of their sexuality).  What then is this ‘equality’ that comes at the price of the intimate, psycho-somatic bond between mother and child; that grants women access to men’s playing-field so long as they play by men’s rules?  It is no equality at all.  It is a ruse, to the disadvantage not only of the child in the womb, but also to that of women and of the culture at large.

Is abortion good for women?  The thousands of post-abortive women leading the ranks of the March for Life will suggest otherwise.  They recognize that they too are the victims of culture that forces women in the pigeon-whole of such a horrendous ‘choice’.  In truth, any feminism that espouses abortion-rights as a condition of its success is in deep contradiction with itself.  The world stands in need of a revolution far more radical than that of 1973.

The NCAA and Our Need for Eternity

Any devotee of college athletics will readily grant the sobering truth.  Over the past few years, once venerable institutions have warped themselves out of recognizable existence in service of the almighty dollar: the Big 10 now claims sixteen teams, extending its reach to the eastern seaboard; the Big East is in shambles and possibly on the verge of annihilation; the Pac-10, previously the Pac-8, is now the Pac-12; and as I recently discovered, the carnage extends even to the [once-thought-pristine] realm of collegiate  hockey, where the treasured rivalries of the Western Conference will next year be sacrificed to lucrative television deals.  Is nothing sacred?!

In the end, we can only face the truth: our world is marked by change.  There is no need to argue for the point.  It is an obvious fact of our existence, one that confronts us daily, and impinges upon us more than ever in this modern age.  Technology continues to transform our interactions at an ever-increasing rate; globalized markets reshape the geo-political and economic landscape; fossil-fuels thaw our winters; scientific discoveries force our over-taxed minds with new stretches of the imagination.  Newton is replaced by Einstein is replaced by Bohr; Russia by the USSR by Russia again; Twinkies by despair.  Is nothing safe?

Yet the more important truth, one at risk of being forgotten, is that we as human beings cannot live without that which doesn’t change.  We need the eternal!  No matter how much we may idealize change, we depend on the stable and unchanging for our very existence.

This is evident on a very practical level.  We cannot manage daily life without a certain modicum of consistency.  I need to know what channel on which to find ESPN, and I need to know I can depend on Sportscenter to begin again every hour, on the hour, fourteen hours a day.  I need to know when and I where I can roll into McDonald’s to get a double cheeseburger for $1.07.  Even more significantly, I need to know what I can expect of my fellow human beings in my given culture, what patterns and rhythms of life I can count on to secure our life together.  A certain level of social stability is requisite for the maintenance of a cohesive (or at least manageable) society.

That stability may not quite qualify as ‘eternal’, but we can also see the need for the changeless on deeper levels.  We need the unchanging in order to know.  Teachers cannot teach unless something remains the same,  nor can we make sense of anything in the world without setting it in relation to some constant; mathematics deals of its essence with invariable logical relations; scientists make a living by postulating unchanging laws by which to understand the universe.  This is what knowledge is: the discovery of the unvarying truth behind the changing and varying realities of life.  Change itself is only intelligible in virtue of some term of consistency.

This epistemological necessity points to a still deeper level of need: on the existential level, we need some constant by which to make sense of ourselves.  Human beings are unique in the fact that we necessarily understand ourselves in relation to the unchanging and eternal.  Even the noble chimp (of whose dignity CNN never tires to remind us) fails to achieve this level of reflection.  Yet it is inseparable from the human being.  Whether explicitly or implicitly, accurately or inaccurately, man cannot but set himself in relation to some ultimate principle of stability.  To know himself, he must know the eternal.  This explains the central place given alternatively to myth, philosophy, religion or science in all the cultures in history.  It explains why we are helpless producers of ‘–isms’ (i.e., materialism, idealism, nihilism, theism etc); why, even in an anti-traditionalist age, we are obsessed with traditions, and demand sufficient justification before consenting to any change to our sacred institutions (i.e. sporting mascots).

Our understanding of ourselves will depend upon what we determine to be the final, unchanging ground of the universe.  Are we matter or spirit, meaningful or accidental, pleasure-seekers or moral agents, worshipers or sports fans?  Alternatively, if we claim no such ground, both the universe and the human being will be absurd, and man doubly so for seeking a ground in a groundless void.   To the extent that we find meaning in our lives – and we generally do –  we do so by staking a claim in some enduring value.  Hence the severe disillusionment that emerges when we discover ourselves to have staked the wrong claim.

Even a culture (such as our own) which seems to place a premium on change, only does so in the hope of progress, and so by presupposing some unchanging measure or term of that progress.  We accept change to the extent that we can see progress in it, that we see it as moving toward some perfected state.  But as soon as that game is up, as soon as the changes of life are revealed to be meaninglessly repetitive, or deleterious, or subject to some extrinsic or utilitarian aim, then do we fall into the cynicism of the old man who has seen too much of the word.  So the supposed purity and nostalgia of college vis-à-vis professional sports is dead to me.  It’s a game, and the game is about money.  Nothing is sacred!

The great risk of our age is that we will lose, once and for all, an eternal reference point by which to secure a humane existence; that we will become so disillusioned as to cease valuing life altogether and slide into the above-mentioned nihilism.  In succession we have come to reject a whole series of proposals: God, religion, Marxist utopias, human dignity, scientific progress, hedonism.  Each of these, of course, retain their adherents today, but none supplies the basis for a society, and each finds itself under an array of serious attacks.  The great threat is that we will find ourselves in a world where nothing is eternal any longer, and so nothing valued.  Nothing worthy of knowledge.  Nothing stable on which to build our common life.  No foundation for man.  Nothing sacred!  Nothing safe!

Such a dire condition is not inevitable, even if we can see its beginnings already.  Its prevention, however, will depend on the ability of the men and women of our age to rediscover the value of the eternal, and indeed truly to seek it in an intelligible source – a task at once intellectual and moral.  Of course, I would suggest that only one such source is really sufficient for the resolution of our crisis, one somewhat more reliable than the ideals of collegiate athletics.

Christian Testimony

In today’s lectionary readings at Mass (Fri. 1/11), the Church offers us a pair of passages in which the term ‘testimony’ (marturion) makes an appearance.  In the selection from the 5^th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the leper is instructed to give ‘testimony’ of his healing to the temple priests, and in the First Letter of John, we encounter two paradoxical assertions regarding the nature of this Christian ‘testimony’.

First, we hear that the primary testimony to Christ is that of the unity of the “the spirit, the water, and the blood.”

“So there are three who testify,
the Spirit, the water and the blood,
and these three are one.”  (1 John 5:7-8)

Second, we are told that this testimony is somehow present within the Christian believer:

“Whoever believes in the Son of God
has this testimony within himself.”  (1 John 5:10)

These lines are indeed paradoxical.  Spirit, water and blood are odd bedfellows, especially when considered as providers of testimony, and we don’t typically think of belief as a source of testimony within the one believing.  What are we to make of these statements?  How exactly are Spirit, water, and blood ‘one’ in their testimony, and what does it mean to say that this testimony is ‘within’ the believer?  Surely, there is no easy answer to these questions, but I think their paradoxes are linked, and we can perhaps better penetrate the mystery here by holding them in light of one another.

To begin with the earlier passage, that of the spirit, the water, and the blood, it is probably safe to note that ‘one of these things is not like the others.’  Any person familiar with biblical history could immediately understand how the Spirit offers testimony.  The Spirit fell on Samson and he ripped a lion in half and proceeded to kill 1,000 Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass; it fell on David and he slew Goliath, and forcibly circumcised 10,000 of Israel’s enemies; it covered Mt. Sinai with a fiery cloud, and illuminated Jesus with divine approval at his baptism and Transfiguration.  Mighty signs indeed!

Water, too, evokes images of God’s saving action for his people, as when He parted the Red Sea to save them from the hands of the Egyptians, or halted the flow of the Jordan as they entered the promised land, or called his people to repentance through the prophecy of Elijah and the baptism of John.

But blood?!  That simply does not fit the picture.  Blood is not glorious, unless perhaps we are talking about the blood of Israel’s enemies.  But here the reference is inescapably to the Cross.  The conjunction of water and blood on which John insists (“he came not in water only, but in water and blood”) hearkens back the crucifixion scene in the same John’s Gospel, where said author describes the water and blood flowing from the side of Christ after he is pierced with a lance, and again the word ‘testimony’ appears. (John 19:34ff)

What is this strange testimony, then, that consists in the juxtaposition of spirit, water and blood, of power and weakness, victory and defeat, glory and utter humiliation?  It seems utterly contradictory, yet John insists that we do not understand the spirit and the water without the blood.

Here, perhaps, we can begin to understand how the believer must bear this testimony in himself, because the revelation of this uncanny glory must necessarily turn his world, and consequently his whole person, upside down.  To see Christ’s glory requires a simultaneous inversion of values, a translation of terms, such that the Christian can look at the weak, humiliated, abandoned one on the Cross, and see the power, grandeur and victory of God.  It requires the learning of a new of logic, by which God is able to reveal his power in weakness, his richness in poverty, his victory in defeat, his bliss in suffering, his life in death, and his glory in humiliation.  It requires, in other words, a total revolution that is only intelligible if God Himself is Love.

The adoption of this new vision, this new ‘Christian aesthetic’, does not simply turn the believer’s world upside down, by the same stroke it turns his whole life upside down.  We desire happiness, and so we seek pleasure, honor, wealth and power.  The gospel does not negate these values; it simply re-translates the terms.  If you want honor, seek humiliation in company with the naked and the sick.  If you want pleasure, seek the bliss of self-sacrificing gift.  If you want riches, seek the poverty of Christ.  If you want power, seek the omnipotence of self-emptying love.  It turns the values upside down.

The Christian life, then, consists in a gradual process wherein the believer’s vision, world, and very self are radically transformed, indeed upended and thereby healed.  Just as the leper is healed and so enabled to become himself the testimony of his healing, so the believer in the Son of God is enabled to become the testimony he has received.  Precisely because it is only to the extent that one’s life is transformed that one is able to see and perceive the testimony of the spirit, the water, and the blood, so much does the believer contain within himself the testimony to which he gives his assent.  Vision transforms; the believer himself embodies the logic and glory of the Cross.

Such is the duty and challenge set before the believer in Christ: to give testimony so that the world may see and believe.  But this testimony is only possible to the extent that we are truly transformed and so truly see.  If we claim to have faith, the world has the right to ask if we are transformed, if we have the testimony within ourselves.

Freedom and Theology

A few weeks ago I ran across an opinion piece in the New York Times on the precarious situation in Egypt. (Can God Save Egypt? – 12/12/2012)  The author, Thomas Friedman, described a billboard he saw on the way out of Cairo, plastered with the bold lettered prayer: ‘God save Egypt’.  The roadside intercession undoubtedly expressed an understandable sentiment in the suffering country now reaping the all-too-predictable fruits of revolutionary optimism, but Friedman questioned its underlying assumptions.  Is it really a matter of God that is at issue? Are there not equally devout people on both sides of Egypt’s political divide?  The real point of conflict is not one of theology but of the value of freedom. God will not save Egypt, he finally asserted, but rather believers in freedom who are willing to stand up against autocracy.

I found Mr. Friedman’s argument striking, and it has remained swimming in my mind ever since.  Can God save Egypt?  On the one hand, there is a certain validity to the author’s point: equally god-fearing people can align themselves to opposite sides of a political argument, and indeed, the debate in Egypt has more to do with freedom than with devotion.  But, on the other hand, Friedman’s strict opposition between freedom and theology is questionable at best.  As difficult as it is for us – as twenty-first century Americans – to see, the two are more deeply interconnected than they appear, and this is a point that bears relevance well beyond the borders of Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s lack of appreciation for human freedom is deeply related to a theological perspective.  As Pope Benedict has pointed out, the voluntaristic conception of God that is prevalent in much of Islamic philosophy, wherein an emphasis on transcendence elevates the divine will beyond any relation to human reason, necessarily severs any positive correlation between human freedom and the divine command.  This is so because freedom in man is intimately related to his exercise of reason, by which he is able to identify what is true and good and so worthy of pursuit, above and beyond the directives of mere instinct.   But if God is conceived as so absolute as to defy any restriction by such ‘regulatory concepts’ as good or true or rational, then any organization of human society under obedience to divine law can only come at the expense of human freedom.  The value of that freedom must be negated in the face of the God’s decree, which determines its own goodness.

This theocratic schema is obviously distasteful to most westerners, and an obvious alternative is that of secularism, which swaps the notion of an authoritarian God for a regime whose supreme value is autonomous human freedom.  This also involves, however, contains an implicit theology of its own, and while it may appear an immediately attractive solution, it soon reveals its own inadequacies.  When freedom is conceived as absolutely autonomous, as a value unto itself without any intrinsic reference beyond itself, then it cannot but be arbitrary and voluntaristic.  There can be no criterion of truth, no higher value according to which it can be ordered and judged.  Such a directionless freedom, left unrestricted, can only yield anarchy on the political scale.  Thus if societal order is desired, this can only be achieved by the submission of free autonomous subjects to the inevitably arbitrary will of a ruler or ruling class.  Less a transcendent point of reference, social order can only be secured by means of power, leading ultimately to tyranny.

Now neither of these options is very appealing.  The choice between God and freedom can only leave us in a pickle.  Either we have a tyranny of arbitrary divine will, or a tyranny of arbitrary human will, neither of which finally secures the value of human freedom.  If we truly wish to safeguard that value, we need to seek a third option, involving a different conception of freedom that corresponds to a different theology.   What is needed is a vision of freedom that ordered beyond itself and a vision of God that does not negate the rational principles according to which freedom operates.

Such an alternative was indicated by Pope Benedict in his much noted (and misrepresented) Regensburg address.  There he emphasized that God need not be understood as unfettered, utterly transcendent Will.  He is certainly transcendent and free, but in the Christian conception He is also Logos – Word, and so Truth and Goodness-itself, standing in analogy to human reason and to human words.  In this sense, God’s command need not be seen as utterly external and negative in relation to human freedom, but rather as internal and positive, indeed as the very principle from which man’s freedom derives its direction and purpose.  Freedom is not arbitrarily for itself, but rather rationally ordered beyond itself to the true and the good.  Thus its orientation to the goodness and truth of God can only be seen as positive.

This theological vision furnishes a framework according to which political order can be achieved by appeal to transcendent principles without compromising the inviolability of human freedom.  Indeed, we might argue that the ideal of freedom is impossible without such a theology.  Political freedom requires at least the category of Truth, and Truth requires its ground in God.

Can God save Egypt?  Well, of course, He can; and in many ways more than by political or theological debate.  But that theological debate has much more relevance for the case of human freedom than Friedman suspects.  And this is something important to keep in mind in the fight for freedom in our own land.

On Beauty and Bethlehem

The great twentieth century theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, chose beauty as the first word with which to begin his magnum opus. And let us use this opportunity of Christmas to express our approval of this choice, for beauty is that universal human experience wherein man is forced, whether his particular ideology permit or not, to admit his connection to the infinite. In beauty, we might say, the wonder of infinity is presented to man through a finite form. Beauty requires a form that is defined (i.e. finite): a Bach concerto needs its key signature to produce its rapture; a Bernini sculpture needs its human lines to elevate the spirit. [For a negative proof of this premise, see all of post-modern art.] Nevertheless, beauty is by no means constrained by this form. Paradoxically, it is precisely through the definition of form that it exceeds finitude, it is through its specificity that infinity is communicated.

We can see then the intrinsic connection between beauty and the celebration of Christmas. For in Christ, the infinite depths of the godhead are communicated to us through the very finite, scandalously specific, form of a tender babe, born on insignificant date, in an insignificant village on the outer edge of the Roman empire. Scarcely conceivable, we find here the ultimate and final instance of beauty, indeed that original instance on which all beauty is based, revealed here at last in the fullness of time.

Here, that perennial mystery of beauty is finally explained in God’s will to communicate Himself to mankind in an accessible form. Jesus Christ is the primal beauty from which the gospel derives that persuasive power more effective than any rational argument. God has shown us a love scarcely imaginable, and so God is Love, the Love that every human heart desires.

Yet it is so beyond imagination, so seemingly beyond reason, that its compelling power relies on Christians, those whose eyes have been opened to perceive the primal beauty, to allow its infinity to be shown through the finitude of their lives. It falls to us then, Christians of the twenty-first century, to render Christ intelligible again to the men and women of our age by conforming our lives to the supernatural, Trinitarian love revealed and offered to the human race, two thousand years ago in Jesus of Nazareth.

Let us strive, then, to let his incomprehensible love be revealed again in our lives, so that the world might find an accessible way to God the Father this Christmas.

On Joy in Sorrow

Today is ‘Gaudete’ Sunday: the day on which we are instructed to rejoice at the imminent arrival of the Son of God.  Yet we might well find ourselves asking, on this weekend following the horrific events in Connecticut, how exactly we are supposed to rejoice in the face such malignant evil.  How are we to reconcile St. Paul’s call to “Rejoice Always, I say it again,” with the heart-rending cries of the parents who fall to their knees at the news that their beloved children – those adorable little 7 year-olds who just hours ago before had run off in carefree innocence for another day of school – had been brutally murdered?  What can be said in the face of this evil?  How can it be rationalized?  We can perhaps cry out with them, “Why, God?!!”  But “Rejoice”?  That would seem a heartless and insensitive cruelty, even a sin against humanity.  How could anyone call for joy in such a circumstance without belittling its gravity; without being blind to it?

What are we to say then as Christians on this “Gaudete” Sunday.  Atheists are, no doubt, keen on the contradictory nature of our position.   “If God is so good,” they say, “how do you explain this?”  Rather than reply directly to this challenge, it is first important to point out the unique position in which these confrontations with evil place all of us; for they force us to face ultimate questions, and ultimate decisions.   All of us, even the most doctrinaire moral relativists, are painfully aware of the contradiction, the disorder, the violence done to justice in these situations.  No human worthy of the name would seek to justify them to the mother mourning the loss of her daughter.  Our hearts revolt against the crime, and they are left cry out in protest:  “How is this possible?“, “Why did this happen?“, and ultimately “Why God?”  This is true, regardless of how quickly we tend to divert ourselves from such existential questions by recourse to routine talking points or ideological catch-phrases. 

Why God: that is the heart of the matter.  Even the ‘new’ atheist, in all of is puffy rhetoric, seems to ask this same question in his ceaseless ranting.  Why God?  Justify Yourself to us!  And here we are confronted with the ultimate decision.  We must decide whether to go on believing in spite of inexplicable evil, or whether to abandon that hope as a half-baked fantasy and to set off on a path of uncluttered realism.

I do not, by any means, wish to make light of that decision nor of the serious questions involved.  Undoubtedly, we are dealing here with one of the strongest critique’s of atheism, and it is no easy matter to determine which of the two options is the most adequate response to the reality at hand.  But the difficulty with the latter option, though it may seem at first to be the more rational one, is that it undercuts the very basis of the human revolt against evil.  The great Why questions indicate a demand for justification, which demand can only make sense if we recognize some innate injustice that has occurred, some intrinsic evil, some objective disorder in violation of the good order that we all implicitly recognize and desire.  But this, in turn, implies some objective standard of value, independent of the whims and calculations of men and women.

We don’t cry out against God and man for the crimes against children because we have merely agreed by social contract that children are to be protected, or because we determined it to be more conducive to our pleasure.  We do so because the crime is just plain evil, because no child should ever, under any circumstance be forced to suffer this way.  This requires some source of value that is above human beings.  To make a long argument short: it implies God. 

To deny God, then, undercuts the very basis of man’s revolt against evil.  In effect it is to say to those parents: “This crime gives the lie to the notion of some ultimate moral order to the universe.  There is no ultimate goodness or value to existence.  We are all but brute facts, lost for a brief span in the cosmos, searching for a meaning that the universe cannot give.  Your emotions are understandable, but content yourselves to realize that your child possessed no objective value beyond those instinctual feelings.  In this sense, it isn’t really correct to call what happened here ‘’crime’ at all, much less an ‘evil’.  There is no ‘good’ or ‘evil’.  It just is.  Resign yourselves to the nothingness of reality and move on.”  Now, obviously, no atheist would ever say this to those parents, but I leave it to them to rationalize their position if they want to maintain some sort of objective meaning or value to life without recourse to an objective and transcendent source of said value.

Suffice to say, then, that we might question the atheist’s claim to do greater justice to reality than religious theism.  Call such belief naïve if you like, at the very least it has the wherewithal to account for and affirm the revolt of the human heart against atrocious evil.  If it struggles sometimes to address man’s why, at least it can justify the heart that asks ‘why’.  Nor is it really adequate to call this belief naïve.  At least as far as biblical theism goes, we do not here find a faith that shirks confrontation with evil and suffering.  We find rather one of the deepest penetrations of the problem of evil in the history of literature.  We find a faith that confronts evil head-on, in all of its horror; one that proclaims salvation in the God who enters into his creatures’ suffering and redeems it.

This is the good news of the Christianity.  God does not respond to our questioning with an argument, or a rationalization, or a defense.  He responds rather by sending his Son in person to meet us in our groaning, to be one with us, to live with us, to suffer and die with us, to cry out on his Cross: Eli, Eli, Lama Sabbachthani? – My God, My God, Why Have you forsaken me?

We have a God who cries out with us: Why God?  This is the whole profundity of the gospel.  He is with us in our god-forsakenness; with us all the way through cross and grave.  And the wondrous fact is that his Love proved stronger than that darkness; in his resurrection from the dead his Love is victorious over death, and sin, and evil, and suffering, and abandonment and despair.  Love is strong as death.  This is the basis of our hope that our cries are not in vain, and of our confidences that nothing, neither trial or distress, or nakedness or danger or the sword, … will be able to separate us from the love God has for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Rom 8:35ff) Indeed, it is a basis for a deep joy even in the midst of unspeakable suffering.

In this season of Advent longing, perhaps we can take solace in the classic hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel.  The song is set in the minor key so appropriate this valley of tears, where we groan and sigh for relief, for salvation from the bondage of sin, evil and death.  And yet at the end of each verse we are reminded of hope toward which our yearnings are ultimately directed, which alone can do justice to the human heart:

Rejoice, Rejoice, Emanuel shall come to thee O Israel.     

Yet Another A New Blog!

Greetings hypothetical internet friends,

Welcome to my new blog.

It is, admittedly, a mostly unfortunate side-effect of the blogosphere that your average joe, would-be philosopher is suddenly possessed of the strange notion that his thoughts and opinions are worthy of universal public attention.  This blog’s existence should not be taken to indicate any special claim on the part of its author to the hypothetical reader’s attention. It is first and foremost an attempt to practice and sharpen a potential skill for public writing.  Any benefit reaped by the reader or any development of fruitful conversation…that’s just extra gravy!

I call this site a ‘Catholic attempt to engage the culture’, because I am convinced that the christian gospel is uniquely endowed with the resources necessary for just such an engagement. The Church has nothing to fear from the world; the heighth and breadth revealed in the cross is adequate to address any challenge, any critique, any fruit of honest human reflection.  But this adequacy will only be manifest if we are willing to meet our opponents on their best grounds, recognizing their legitimate insights, and the positive values to which they aspire.  That is the courage required of the Christian in our age, a courage manifested in many great figures in this century and the last, and the courage to which this author will haltingly aspire.

So welcome to my new venture in internet superfluity.  I hope that you may find something of merit in it, and see fit to join me for the journey as I cast the seeds to see where they fall.  I welcome any partner in honest dialogue.

Blessings!