Solid ground

Rod Dreyer is increasingly pessimistic about the future of Christianity in America, and this is why:

.... Three words: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. That's Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith's term to describe what he documents as the emerging mainstream religious sensibility in the U.S. MTDers are in every Christian church, and in non-Christian religions as well. The MTD god is a likeable guy who is far removed from our everyday lives, and is to be called on only when we want help. He wants us to be good, which is to say nice. The main thing in life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. ....

.... As Smith has written of MTD:

This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of sovereign divinity, of steadfastly saying one's prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God's love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, et cetera. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.

Where did young Christians get this from? Their parents' generation. ....

I'm confident that in the years to come, there will be people living in this country who still call themselves Christians. But what will that mean, anyway? If the church — by which I mean all those who identify as Christians — has lost its awareness that Christianity means something apart from the subjective impressions and whims of those who call themselves Christian, then it will dissolve in the corrosive solvent of modernity. I think this is more likely to happen than not, because we are living in a post-Christian era. Those churches that will survive and thrive will be those who have held onto the older, objective understanding of the faith — which is to say, those that still believe that small-o orthodoxy exists. But they will suffer persecution from an increasingly hostile secular culture, especially if they insist on holding on obstreperously to truths that most contradict the Zeitgeist, e.g., traditional Christian moral teaching on sexuality and family. .... [more]

In Search of a Rock on Which to Stand

"If they find a Christian mistaken..."

Via Christopher Benson at Evangel, some very good advice from long ago, "What would Augustine say about creationists and ID supporters?. Augustine:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7] (qtd. from The Literal Meaning of Genesis).

What would Augustine say about creationists and ID supporters? » Evangel | A First Things Blog

Orwell would understand

Adam Freedman thinks most of the discussion about the recent gay marriage decision misses the point. He explains what Perry v. Schwarzenegger was really about:

Consider the following points:

• This is not a case about denying legal or economic benefits to gay couples. California’s domestic partnership law affords the benefits of marriage to gay couples.
• But the plaintiffs insist that the term domestic partnership “does not have the same social and historical meaning as marriage.” This is why, according to the "findings of fact" that gay couples don't want to enter into mere domestic partnerships.
• As the judge recounts: "To Perry [the lead plaintiff], marriage would provide access to the language to describe her relationship with Stier: 'I’m a 45-year-old woman. I have been in love with a woman for 10 years and I don’t have a word to tell anybody about that.'” (emphasis added)

That’s the key. The lawsuit has nothing to do with rights – zero. Rather, it seeks to force government to change the English language in the hope that our hearts and minds will follow. And it’s an effective strategy. If you want society to view all committed relationships as morally equivalent, then start with language. Reasonable minds can differ about whether the "social and historical" meaning of marriage should evolve in the future, but does anybody want that question decided by judges?

Judge Walker: An Orwellian View - Ricochet.com

Faith matters more than feelings

Touchstone provides from its archives a 2007 essay by N.T. Wright evaluating C.S. Lewis as an apologist with particular reference to Mere Christianity:

There’s a good reason why we allow Lewis to lead us on. There is a real, not a pretend, humility about his “only-a-simple-layman” stance. For some of the time, as I shall suggest, he is a professional pretending to be an amateur; for much of the time, he’s a gifted amateur putting some of the professionals to shame; sometimes he’s an amateur straightforwardly getting things wrong....

But he constantly says, “If this doesn’t help, go on to the next bit, which may,” and he seems really to mean it. In particular, when he’s talking about the struggles and strains of trying to live as a Christian, we know we are listening to someone who has been struggling and straining. ....

There are two constant powerful refrains throughout Mere Christianity. First, faith matters more than feelings; faithfulness to the high and hard standards of Christian behavior matters more than doing what you feel like at the time. Lewis was swimming against a strong tide of popular romantic existentialism, a tide running even more strongly in our own day.

He was not, of course, opposed to feelings; but he knew, and it comes as a relief to our generation to be reminded, that if you go with the flow of feelings you will be inconsistent, unfaithful, lacking in all integrity. To realize that we don’t have to float out to sea on that strong tide, but that we can and must swim against it, is challenging but also liberating.

Second, you can understand falsehood from the standpoint of truth but not the other way around, just as someone who knows light can understand darkness but not vice versa: Thus you can understand sexual perversion once you know the norm; “good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either”; “virtue brings light; indulgence brings fog.” ....

Wright spends the bulk of the essay discussing what he considers to be weaknesses in Lewis's understanding or argument and concludes:

.... Lewis has indeed built a fine building with lots of splendid features, and many people have been properly and rightly attracted to buy up apartments in it and move in. Some parts of the building have remained in great shape, and are still well worth inhabiting. But I fear that those who move in to other parts will find that the foundations are indeed shaky, and that the roof leaks a bit.

Someone who converted to the Christian faith through reading Mere Christianity, and who never moved on or grew up theologically or historically, would be in a dangerous position when faced even with proper, non-skeptical historical investigation, let alone the regular improper, skeptical sort. Lewis didn’t give such a person sufficient grounding in who Jesus really was. ....

.... Lewis himself would have been the first to say that of course his book was neither perfect nor complete, and that what mattered was that, if it brought people into the company, and under the influence (or “infection”) of Jesus Christ, Jesus himself would happily take over—indeed, that Jesus had been operating through the process all along, albeit through the imperfect medium of the apologist. .... (more)

Touchstone Archives: Simply Lewis

1939-1943

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

Great color pictures from an America largely gone: Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

On the anniversary of Hiroshima

On the anniversary of Hiroshima Richard Fernandez reminds us that there were greater losses of civilian life in World War II — a war in which the just war injunctions about non-combatants were largely ignored. Hiroshima wasn't the Japanese city that suffered the largest number of civilian casualties, but it was where a nuclear weapon was dropped.

As the New York Times remembers Hiroshima, try this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.

Casualties:
Hiroshima 70,000–80,000
Battle of Manila 100,000
Nanjing 300,000

Historical memory can be selective. And the selectivity can serve a political purpose. Fernandez:

Hiroshima, Manila and Nanjing are tragic in their own ways. But one tragedy that continues even to this day is the selective memory in the capitals of nations who the inhabitants of Manila and Nanjing once called their Allies. Bravery and sacrifice is fine; but politics is finer. Hiroshima is remembered not only because of the suffering and loss that took place there but because it renews an ongoing narrative, and those Japanese dead can still march in its cause. ....

Belmont Club » The Foundations of Our World

Entertaining drama

Andrew Klavan reconsidered The Tudors and decided that it was a very good series after all:

.... I found myself discussing the events of the age as if they were happening now, rooting for one set of torturing and burning religious “reformers” over another and even sympathizing at times with the tyrannical Henry and his borderline insane demands that reality be what he wanted it to be. Plus I found myself looking a lot of stuff up, which is always a good thing.

This actually turned out to be a top-notch show in an age of great TV shows. Not quite up to the all-time classic I, Claudius. But certainly well worth watching. And better than any movie I’ve seen in forever. ....

I, too, enjoyed The Tudors but have no particular desire to watch it again. But Klavan reminded me of I, Claudius, which I own (the DVDs), and inspired me to get it out and start watching. It is exceptional and looks very good (not great) upgraded on a Blu-ray player. I, Claudius is one of those BBC productions made in the 1970s that,  when shown in the US on Masterpiece Theater, contributed greatly to that program's popularity. It is about the history of the Roman imperial family from Augustus Caesar to Nero through the eyes and by narration of the Emperor Claudius (Derek Jacobi). The story is driven by character and dialogue (and intrigue and murder) rather than action but that is quite enough — and it, too, is better than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Andrew Klavan: Tudors Revisited

Politicized religion

James Bowman notes an interesting juxtaposition.

On the same day that The New York Times reports on, analyzes and strongly editorializes ("Marriage Is a Constitutional Right") in favor of a U.S. district judge’s decision that a democratically-passed (state) constitutional amendment in favor of traditional marriage is (federally) unconstitutional, the paper is also running an op ed column by one Amy Greene, a novelist, lamenting the politicization of religion. I wonder if it occurred to anybody at the Times that there might be some connection between these two things? Somehow I doubt it. ....

Ms Greene’s piece is by-lined "Russellville, Tennessee," and is designed to establish her bona fides as a church-going Southern lady.

As the daughter and granddaughter of preachers, and as someone who has lived in the hills of East Tennessee all my life, I know what a driving force faith is here, as necessary as food and water. Appalachia, don’t forget, is a land where homes were once miles apart and church was the only gathering place. Some of my first memories are of sitting in my grandfather’s church, a little cinder-block building tucked in a thicket, listening to his voice ringing in the rafters. After my grandfather died, my dad took over as pastor. I never heard either of them mention politics from the pulpit, even though at home, in a family that has been divided between Democrats and Republicans going all the way back to the Civil War, there were some heated discussions. My dad always said that it was biblical to pray for our leaders, but not to campaign for them in a house of worship.

Those were the days! I wonder what happened to them? ....

One is inclined to wonder whether those marvelously apolitical Southern pastors ever had anything to say about the morality of racism or the legitimacy of legal segregation. Bowman again:

Gee, Amy, can you think of any reason why things might have changed since the days of your father and grandfather? If they never mentioned politics from the pulpit, could that have been connected in any way with the fact that political leaders of the day and the judges they appointed never tried to tell them that the moral and religious teachings that they proclaimed from the pulpit every Sunday were unconstitutional? .... Judge Walker’s airy dismissal of "moral disapproval alone," said the Times editorial "could someday help change history." But history has already changed in ways that require traditional moralists who are under political and legal assault to fight back with the same weapons. If religion has been politicized, it’s the politicians — nearly all of them Democrats, by the way — who have done it.

Give Me That Old-Time Religion by James Bowman - The New Criterion

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape, and the Simpsons?!

An interesting C.S. Lewis site, currently serving up snippits from The Screwtape Letters [with Homer - not the Greek poet]: Mere C.S. Lewis.

Dissenter, novelist and spy

Ian Clary reviews a biography, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures, about someone of whom I knew little beyond Robinson Crusoe.

Posterity is inclined to think of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) primarily as one of the great authors of the so-called "Western Canon." Indeed, Defoe's fame for such works of fiction such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Roxana is justly bestowed upon him. For instance, he is considered the creator of the first, modern novel.

However, Defoe also finds himself in the company of the greats of church history as an important Dissenter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century. A Presbyterian of Puritan conviction, Defoe was just as well-known for his works on religious and political matters. ....

Defoe was originally born Daniel Foe, likely in the autumn of 1660 during the reign of Charles II, who after the Restoration of the monarchy was antagonistic to Protestant Nonconformity. On April 24, 1731 Defoe died in hiding. His life spanned the reigns of four monarchs—Charles II, William III, Anne and George I—the middle two regents with whom Defoe was intimately acquainted. ....

During much of this period of his life Defoe was engaged as a spy for the administration of William of Orange, spending much time collecting intelligence on High Church Tories and Jacobite rebels in Scotland.

The work that was likely his most famous in his lifetime was The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), an anonymous satirical piece that argued for the total annihilation of the Dissenters. After his authorship was made public, resulting in the realization that The Shortest Way was a satire that poked fun at many leading Church of England leaders and politicians, Defoe was thrown in the pillory and the infamous and brutal Newgate Prison, the latter a common place for Dissenters. This did not prevent Defoe from writing in defense of Nonconformity and religious toleration, though he often had to be more adept and subversive in order to dodge subsequent prison sentences. .... [more]

Discerning Reader: Review of Daniel Defoe by Richard West

Judicial arrogance

John Yoo, who opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment and who would support a California law permitting gay marriage, explains why Judge Walker's decision invalidating California's constitutional provision restricting marriage to a man and a woman is not good for democracy:

It is a sweeping decision, not just on gay marriage, but for its elevation of the federal judges into arbiters of social norms and private morality. Judge Walker sees it as the job of the courts to test whether laws passed by a majority of the people, or a legislature, advance the public good as defined by expert testimony by social scientists. I'm more than happy if the government required that its own laws produce more benefits than costs. But do we want this job done by a single judge, or a small group of judges, relying on social science (in this case, the work of sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists produced to the court by the litigating parties) of a recent phenomenon? ....

Why is this troubling? First, social science — as anyone who reads these studies — is far from a perfect science. There are so many variables and alternative explanations involved in understanding human interaction. I am dubious whether sociologists and psychologists can tell us the real causes and effects of gay marriage — it has only been legal in the United States for a few years, and only in a few states. That is why my preferred solution of relying on federalism makes sense — if states can choose different policies, we can learn from the information generated and understand the costs and benefits.

Second, what does this portend for other legislation built on moral intuitions? If gay marriage goes by the wayside because it is hard to measure a ban's effects, what about similar laws. Will Judge Walker invalidate the ban on adultery next? How about bigamy? Why not allow group marriages? What about the age limitations on marriage or sex? ....

Later, in the comments, Yoo again:

.... Federalism allows for two things. It allows for experimentation, so we can learn what the effects of gay marriage are. But it also allows people to vote with their feet. States are like a market: they offer packages of policies. People can move to states with gay marriage or not, if that is their wish.

R.R. Reno, having read the decision, points out another ominous consequence, citing a section from Judge Walker's "Findings of Fact":

“Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.”

The implication is chilling. One of the jobs of government is to protect citizens from unjust harm. If, as Judge Walker seems to believe, as do many others, traditional views of sexual morality unjustly harm gays and lesbians, then the next step is clear. We’ve got to stop the harm, which means putting an end to the religious beliefs that homosexual sexual acts are immoral.

Perversely, in the testimony Walker cites, one of the clear signs of harm inflicted on gays and lesbians can be found in this fact: 84% of regular church-goers voted for Prop 8. In other words, what’s so bad about traditional views of sexual morality is that they are . . . opposed to progressive views about sexual liberation. And that’s an injustice that Judge Walker simply won’t allow.

The opinion goes on to cite a official documents from a number of different Christian churches and organizations: a hit list of sorts.

And here [read it all], is a secular case for the unique legal status of heterosexual marriage. Near the conclusion:

.... Insofar as I care for my homosexual friend as a friend, I am required to say to him that, if a lifelong monogamous relationship is what you want, I wish you that felicity, just as I hope you would wish me the same. But insofar as our lives as citizens are concerned, or even as human beings, your monogamy and the durability of your relationship are, to be blunt about it, matters of complete indifference. They are of as little concern to our collective life as if you were to smoke cigars or build model railroads in your basement or hang-glide, and of less concern to society than the safety of your property when you leave your house or your right not to be overcharged by the phone company.

That is not because you are gay. It is because, in choosing to conduct your life as you have every right to do, you have stepped out of the area of shared social concern—in the same sense as has anyone, of whatever sexuality, who chooses not to marry. There are millions of lonely people, of whom it is safe to say that the majority are in heterosexual marriages. But marriage, though it may help meet the needs of the lonely, does not exist because it is an answer to those needs; it is an arrangement that has to do with empowering women to avoid even greater unhappiness, and with sustaining the future history of the species.

Marriage, to say it for the last time, is what connects us with our nature and with our animal origins, with how all of us, heterosexual and homosexual alike, came to be. It exists not because of custom, or because of a conspiracy (whether patriarchal or matriarchal), but because, through marriage, the world exists. Marriage is how we are connected backward in time, through the generations, to our Creator (or, if you insist, to the primal soup), and forward to the future beyond the scope of our own lifespan. It is, to say the least, bigger than two hearts beating as one. ....

Gay Marriage Case — All Hail the Federal Judiciary - Ricochet.com, Here Come The Thought Police » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog, Sam Shulman — Gay Marriage — and Marriage

Rejecting dogmatism?

Those of us who are Christians of an orthodox bent and who have similarly convicted friends in secular colleges have heard stories like this before. The orthodoxy of most college campuses is quite different and very pervasive, resulting in genuine intolerance on the part of the stupid and/or unreflective. Those students who wish to survive academically often respond with self-censorship. From Timothy Larsen, "No Christianity Please, We’re Academics":

John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an “opinion” piece and the required theme was “traditional marriage.” John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, “Which Bible would that be?” On the very same page, John’s phrase, “Christians who read the Bible,” provoked the same retort, “Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?” (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a “sermon,” and given an F, with the words, “I reject your dogmatism,” written at the bottom by way of explanation.

Thereafter, John could never get better than a C for papers without any marked errors or corrections. When he asked for a reason why yet another grade was so poor he was told that it was inappropriate to quote C.S. Lewis in work for an English class because he was “a pastor.” (Lewis, of course, was actually an English professor at Cambridge University. Perhaps it was wrong to quote Lewis simply because he had said something recognizably Christian.) Eventually John complained to the department chair, who said curtly that he could do nothing until the course was over. John took this to mean that the chair would do nothing and just accepted the bad grade.

I suspect that many readers are already generating “maybe .... ” scenarios that fill out this story so that John was actually treated fairly. Blaming the victim is a familiar response to reports of discrimination. Maybe John is just one of those uppity believers who don’t know their place. .... (more, including how T.S. Eliot has fallen out of favor in some exalted academic precincts)

Views: No Christianity Please, We’re Academics - Inside Higher Ed

Too free

Reviewing In Defence of the Enlightenment by Tzvetan Todorov, Tim Black reminds us of certain principles liberals [and most conservatives] once held dear:

...[I]n the hands of the neo-Enlightened, from the zealously anti-religious to the zealously pro-science, something strange has happened. Principles that were central – albeit contested – to the Enlightenment have been reversed, turned in on themselves. Secularism, as we have seen recently in the French government’s decision to ban the burqa, has been transformed from state toleration of religious beliefs into their selective persecution; scientific knowledge, having been emancipated from theology, has now become the politician’s article of faith; even freedom itself, that integral Enlightenment impulse, has been reconceived as the enemy of the people. As the Enlightened critics of Enlightenment naivete would have it, in the symbolic shapes of our ever distending guts and CO2-belching cars, we may be a little too free. ....

...[W]hen taking militant secularism to task, despite its claims to lie within the Enlightenment tradition, Todorov points out that the attacks launched against religion by thinkers like John Locke or Voltaire were not targeted at its content – they were targeted at its form as part of the state. For such fundamentally liberal thinkers, temporal and spiritual authority made for an unholy alliance. That the enemies of the secular ideal, the would-be enslavers of the individual’s conscience, were indeed religious does not invalidate this assertion. The problem was not faith itself, but the assumption of state power by a particular faith in order to persecute those with different beliefs. What may have taken a Catholic form in seventeenth-century Spain too often possesses a secular guise today.

Or take the current fetishisation of The Science, or as Todorov calls it, ‘scientism’, ‘a distortion of the Enlightenment, its enemy not its avatar’. We experience this most often, although far from exclusively, through environmentalist discourse. Here, science supplants politics. Competing visions of the good are ruled out in favour of that which the science demands, be it reduced energy consumption or a massive wind-power project. This, as Todorov sees it, involves a conflation of two types of reasoning, the moral (or the promotion of the good) and the scientific (or the discovery of truth). In effect, the values by which one ought to live arise, as if by magic, from the existence of facts. In the hands of politicians this becomes authoritarian: ‘Values seem to proceed from knowledge and political choices are passed off as scientific deduction.’ There need be no debate, no reasoned argument, because the science tells us what to do. .... [more]

sp!ked review of books | Rescuing the Enlightenment from its exploiters

Potter

Although S.M. Hutchens agrees that there are objectionable things in the Harry Potter books, he argues that they are more likely to do good for pagan readers than harm for Christian ones:

Michael D. O’Brien believes the Harry Potter books will paganize Christian children; I believe they are more likely to Christianize pagan ones—and can be read profitably, meaningfully, and harmlessly through young Christian eyes. This judgment is based in part on the probability that far more non-Christians, or Christians who are practically ignorant of their professed religion, will read these books (translated now into about 70 languages, including simplified Chinese) than knowledgeable Christians, in places where Harry is likely to do more in service to the gospel than against it.

In Touchstone articles I have elaborated on Harry as a Christ-figure, given them to love where Christianity is dimmed, and in whom by grace it is possible to see and love the unknown Christ—one of those evangelical “pictures” of which Lewis spoke in Pilgrim’s Regress, smuggled by God into places where active evil has made a more explicit evangel unavailable or unintelligible. Harry is the elect prince, born in hostile obscurity, about whom gathers an awkward and unlikely group of friends and allies, and who, in the willing sacrifice of his native powers and finally his life, delivers his world from one who would rule it by evil power. ....

.... Discretion and good sense are always required of their guardians, but spiritually healthy children of normal sensibilities need take no harm from these books.

As it is with the body, so it is, or should be, be with the imagination. By the time a Christian child can read Harry Potter, its immunities, supplied and developed by his parents and church, should be sufficient to handle whatever challenges are posed by the books.... [more]

Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Harry Potter Coda

Erotic obsessions

Newman's Unquiet Grave by John Cornwell, about the soon-to-be-beatified John Henry Newman, reviewed by Anthony Kenny, describes one way Victorian society was saner than ours, although it would have been much better if the doctrinal position had been combined with legal toleration.

The title of the book alludes to the attempt made in October 2008 to translate Newman’s mortal remains from his Worcestershire grave to a place where they could be publicly venerated. The excavation recovered fragments of a coffin and an inscribed brass plate, but no trace of any bodily remains – either of Newman himself, or of the close friend beside whom he had been buried, Fr Ambrose St John. The upshot of the attempted exhumation was not to provide a shrine for a relic, but to trigger a media debate about whether Newman was gay.

The question is anachronistic. Nineteenth-century Anglicans and Catholics did not classify themselves in accordance with forms of sexual orientation. According to the Christian moral code, sexual activity, whether solitary, homosexual or heterosexual, was sinful except in marriage. For men, therefore, who had given up matrimony and obliged themselves to celibacy, sexual activity with either male or female was forbidden, and sexual attraction whether to male or female could be nothing but a temptation. No doubt different people would find themselves beset by different kinds of temptation, but they did not see these temptations as in any way defining their personality.

I do not know whether those who wish to set up Newman as a gay icon believe that he was homosexually active, but any suggestion that he was is absurd. A man so devout and conscientious would have recoiled from what his Church condemned as one of the worst of sins. Well into the twentieth century, the Catholic Catechism listed “the sin of Sodom” – along with willful murder, and defrauding the poor of their wages – as a “sin crying out to heaven for vengeance.”

Partly because of this rigorous prohibition of homosexual activity, Victorian Christians felt free to express to members of the same sex affection in language which in our very different climate would appear ambiguous. Cornwell deals sensitively and temperately with this issue, comparing Newman’s attachments with the earlier literary intimacies between Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. He goes on to show, by listing parallels, that the burial of friends side by side need have no erotic significance. .... (more)

NEWMAN’S UNQUIET GRAVE by John Cornwell, reviewed by Anthony Kenny

Politics

Those of my readers interested in politics, and particularly those who share my particular take on the relationship between faith and politics, may find the following interesting:

Aaron Menikoff reviews Francis J. Beckwith's Politics for Christians: Statecraft As Soulcraft, providing this summary of its contents:

...Beckwith argues that because morality is at the heart of society, explicitly Christian arguments should be made and welcomed in the public sphere. After an introductory chapter examining what it means to study politics, Beckwith gets to the meat of the book. First, he argues that Christians are obligated to work for the common good. In that sense, they should be Christian citizens. Second, he argues that the First Amendment is in place to protect religious liberty, which includes granting Christians the freedom to make a religious case for their policy views. Third, Beckwith argues that there is no such thing as a neutral state. Advocates of secular liberalism are, in reality, sectarian since secular liberalism “presupposes and entails its own understanding of liberty and the human good that answer precisely the same philosophical questions that the so-called sectarian views answer” (143). This is a great chapter—clear, concise, helpful for someone tempted to leave faith out of policy decisions. Finally, he argues that the very existence of the “common good” is overwhelming evidence for the existence of God.

Like Richard John Neuhaus in The Naked Public Square, Beckwith helpfully strips away the misguided notion that religious motivations ruin the intellectual credibility of political and legal arguments. .... [more]

10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor. One of the commenters provides the following list of the ten and the others [I might suggest that other versions of Scripture would serve]. I hope the ringer is obvious. Apart from that one, it looks like a pretty good list to me:

Aristotle's Politics
Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
The New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin
The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Federalist Papers
The Anti-Federalists
The Servile State, by Hilaire Belloc
The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek

And the four not to be missed (and one impostor) are:
The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Jerusalem Bible
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

On the broad question of what social science can tell us that is relevant to public policy, Jim Manzi in "What Social Science Does—and Doesn't—Know" explains why social science's contribution is bound to be limited:

.... Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

The missing ingredient is controlled experimentation, which is what allows science positively to settle certain kinds of debates. How do we know that our physical theories concerning the wing are true? In the end, not because of equations on blackboards or compelling speeches by famous physicists but because airplanes stay up. Social scientists may make claims as fascinating and counterintuitive as the proposition that a heavy piece of machinery can fly, but these claims are frequently untested by experiment....

Over many decades, social science has groped toward the goal of applying the experimental method to evaluate its theories for social improvement. Recent developments have made this much more practical, and the experimental revolution is finally reaching social science. The most fundamental lesson that emerges from such experimentation to date is that our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound. Despite confidently asserted empirical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, and claims to expertise, very few social-program interventions can be shown in controlled experiments to create real improvement in outcomes of interest. ....

It is tempting to argue that we are at the beginning of an experimental revolution in social science that will ultimately lead to unimaginable discoveries. But we should be skeptical of that argument. The experimental revolution is like a huge wave that has lost power as it has moved through topics of increasing complexity. Physics was entirely transformed. Therapeutic biology had higher causal density, but it could often rely on the assumption of uniform biological response to generalize findings reliably from randomized trials. The even higher causal densities in social sciences make generalization from even properly randomized experiments hazardous. It would likely require the reduction of social science to biology to accomplish a true revolution in our understanding of human society—and that remains, as yet, beyond the grasp of science.

At the moment, it is certain that we do not have anything remotely approaching a scientific understanding of human society. And the methods of experimental social science are not close to providing one within the foreseeable future. Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably. Until then, we need to keep stumbling forward with trial-and-error learning as best we can. [more]

Politics for Christians - TGC Reviews, What Social Science Does--and Doesn't--Know by Jim Manzi, City Journal Summer 2010

Contented doubt?

Ron Rosenbaum writes about "The rise of the new agnostics" at Slate and S.M. Hutchens responds at "Mere Comments":

...Ron Rosenbaum identifies agnosticism as the reasonable option for those who do not know whether there is a God, finding it impossible in all honesty to commit themselves either to theism or atheism. He notes that the latter demands the same kind of belief, and can be accompanied by the same levels of intolerance as the most belligerent religious fundamentalism. It is gratifying to hear him observe,

Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.) Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

From a Christian perspective, and I also believe from that of the believing Jew, there is no such thing as an atheist or agnostic. All men are endowed with what has been called a natural knowledge of God which it takes an act of the will to deny, for “ever since the creation of the world God’s invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, so [the ungodly are] without excuse.” “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth shows forth his handiwork.”

Nor am I sure Mr. Rosenbaum (and on this he stands with many believers) understands the nature of theism, for the “knowing” that believers in God profess—or should profess—is not of the kind many imagine it to be. While believers believe it is true knowledge, it is also partial and analogical, the product of sight, citing St. Paul once again here, “through a mirror, imperfectly.” The knowing paradoxically stands alongside unknowing, both of which are equally valid and true, so that more than a little of the offense caused by Hoffer's True Believer comes from mistaken enthusiasms rather than the knowledge of God. (Which is not to deny that by the same token much offense comes, as Christ indicated it would, from knowledge of God and obedience to him.)

But these things aside, I doubt whether agnosticism, or a least the fixed neutral attitude on God implied by the idea of agnosticism, can exist comfortably on the logic of its own grounds, either. .... [more]

The rise of the new agnostics. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine, Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: The Moral Dilemma of Agnosticism

Speaking your mind

Hugo Rifkind, commenting on a certain prime minister, makes a very good general observation:

I am always wary of people who say "I speak my mind," as though that was a good thing to begin with. It's a better strategy, surely, to think your mind, pick out some edited highlights, and speak those. Otherwise, what's the point of having a mind at all? You might as well just have your mouth wired up directly to somewhere else entirely.

Hugo Rifkind: The British Prime Minister's Gaffe-Prone Start - WSJ.com

Albert Campion

From the diaries of W.H. Lewis (C.S. Lewis's older brother):

This afternoon I got a Margery Allingham Omnibus from the library, with a foreword by her husband Youngman Carter from which I learnt with regret that the poor woman died of "a sudden and devouring cancer" on June 30, 1966. Pax cineribus. She'll be a great loss in the field of 'teccie [detective] writers. Why, I wonder, does the 'teccie provide a medium for so many women writers, most of them too at the top of the field in this genre—Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Patricia Wentworth—and all of them outstanding. [Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, 6 May 1969]

Somewhere [I no longer remember where] I read that Margery Allingham was a friend of C.S. Lewis and his wife, Helen Davidman. I have been an Allingham reader since I was a teenager. A friend returned from the wilds of northern Minnesota with an Albert Campion book which he lent me after which I read them all and acquired most of them. It is very pleasant to learn that an author you enjoy was known to one you admire.

Margery Allingham was one of those "Golden Age" detective writers, along with Sayers and others "Warnie" mentions whose detectives provide enduring entertainment without any of the moral concerns contemporary thriller writers often elicit. If you haven't read them, the Margery Allingham books provide an innocent form of entertainment. The Campion DVDs were also entertaining. I just started re-reading some of the early ones, The Crime at Black Dudley [1929], and Mystery Mile [1930] (the map), and continue to be entertained.

H.R.F. Keating included one of her Campion books in his Crimes and Mystery: The 100 Best Books and wrote:

Each time I read More Work for the Undertaker—and I am inclined to re-read it quite frequently—I find myself thinking 'surely there can't be a crime story more burstingly alive.' Margery Allingham had, supremely, the gift of energy. It infuses all her books giving them, in the cookbook expression, a rich consistency. Her best stories, and More Work for the Undertaker is certainly one of those, give us worlds stamped with her particular outlook, richly romantic yet springing undeniably from the actual world in which she lived.

She had energy of observation. She takes, time and again, simple, ordinary objects and transforms them almost into living people. 'On the desk,' we read here, the telephone squatted patiently'; or we have the police detective, the tough, vivid Charlie Luke, ringing for the landlady in the private room of a pub, thumping 'the hump-backed bell on the table.'

She had energy of characterisation. Here is the local doctor, seen through Charlie Luke's eyes: 'A tallish old boy—well, not so very old, fifty-five—married to a shrew. Overworked. Over-conscientious. Comes out of his flat nagged to a rag in the mornings and goes down to his surgery room with a shop front like a laundry...stooping. Back like a camel. Loose trousers, poking at the seat as if God were holding him up by the centre buttons. Head stuck out like a tortoise, waving slightly. Worried eyes. Good chap. Kind. Not as bright as some (no time for it) but professional. Professional gent.'

She had moral energy. Her earliest books [Note: the ones I'm reading now] were simply detective yarns, swingeingly told. But with the years she began to see that this sort of thing could be used—cried out to be used—to convey her deepest thoughts about the world and the people in it. World War II, during which her crime muse fell silent, advanced this belief by a great bound, as this, her second post-war book, shows. ....

Some links

I've just returned from my denomination's annual conference and found I had accumulated quite a few posts to which I probably would have linked if I had been attending to the blog. Some of them:

Ayn Rand’s Superman: A Serial Killer and Rapist," by Joe Carter, who links to a review of Ayn Rand biographies:

Whenever I doubt my own powers of naivete and rationalization, I remind myself that I once considered Ayn Rand to be an admirable and important philosopher. Somehow I was able to justify her atheistic nihilism with my views of Christianity by telling myself that she really didn’t mean what she said.

For instance, since no moral person could truly be against altruism, her frequent rants against the behavior must be referring to something else, something much more nefarious than caring for the welfare of other people.

Similarly, when the hero of her novel The Fountainhead raped a woman I used Whoopi Goldberg’s moral reasoning: It can’t be “rape-rape”, can it, if the victim consents after the fact?

Eventually, I could not longer dismiss the evidence that Rand was an apologist for wickedness. .... (more)

Instapundit explains how politically correct environmentalist banning of DDT is not only annoying Manhattanites but killing Africans:

Growing infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers have New Yorkers annoyed, angry about officialdom’s inadequate responses — and “itching” for answers. . . . Frustration over absurd bedbug programs? Imagine the reaction Africans must have to “malaria no more” campaigns that claim they’ll (eventually) eradicate the disease solely with insecticide-treated bed nets, drugs, “capacity building,” education and (maybe someday) mosquitoes genetically engineered not to carry malaria parasites. As for insecticide spraying, especially DDT, forget it.

DDT is the most powerful, effective, long-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Spraying the eaves and inside walls of mud huts and cinderblock homes every six months keeps 80 percent of the flying killers from entering. It irritates most that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land.

Yet many aid agencies refuse to encourage, endorse or fund spraying. Many don’t even want to monitor mosquito and malaria outbreaks or determine success in reducing disease and death rates. That’s more difficult and costly than counting the number of bed nets distributed and underscores the embarrassing reality that their “comprehensive” (and politically correct) programs achieve only 20 to 40 percent reductions in morbidity and mortality. By contrast, as South Africa and other countries have shown, adding insecticides and DDT can bring 95 percent success. (more)

Russell Moore considers a question from someone who wonders whether he should keep a picture of Robert E. Lee on his wall:

.... When it comes to Robert E. Lee, I can’t agree with those who would equate this picture with one of Adolf Hitler. Virtually every biography, by his contemporaries and future historians, would commend the General for his personal character and his sacrificial leadership. As biographer Roy Blount Jr. demonstrates Lee’s views on race were, in some ways, much more progressive than those of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and other Northerners. ....

The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That hardly needs to be said these days, thankfully, but we ought to remember just what was at stake. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over created things but he is not given dominion over his fellow image-bearing humans (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor, the destroying of family ties, and on and on and on.

In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism mostly of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the spurious “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). The abolitionists were right. ...

...[I]f you keep it up on the wall, let it be, like every historical portrait, a warning.

I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1841 Mississippi instead of 1971 Mississippi that I’d have been leading slave escapes. I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1941 Mississippi that I’d have been singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington. And maybe I would have.

But a gentleman as devoted to character as Robert E. Lee, who had thought long and hard about the evils of slavery, was so conditioned by his time that he couldn’t see past his blind spot. So what makes me think that I could have escaped a similar blind spot? And what is so common in our culture right now that we can’t even see it, as we think we’re serving the Lord?

Jesus addresses something of this when he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrite! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matt. 23:29). Those are chilling words for one whose bloodline has come down from the slave-holding South through the Jim Crow oppression to the present day. .... (more)

Phil at Brandywine Books on "You Can't Clean Yourself Up Before You Go to God"

I heard something of a radio show tonight.... The show was discussing a Christian response to homosexuality, and I believe both guests had struggled with same-sex attraction over the years. A woman called in to ask if they believed people could be born gay and told her painful story of being rejected by churches repeatedly. She was 66 years old now, did not want to have homosexual feelings, but was beginning to believe God made her this way.

What burned me up was when she said churches had alienated her when they learned she struggled with homosexuality. Some churches wanted her to embrace the perversion; others wanted her to clean herself up before she could come to God with them. Naturally, I believe the first group is not practicing biblical morality, but the second group? Who do they think they are?! Are they in church to do God a favor? Does the Almighty need them to do his work? Did they clean up themselves before God redeemed them? .... (more)

Ross Douthat explains why so many on the Right have been skeptical about global warming and why the decline of the cause isn't such a bad thing:

.... The Seventies were a great decade for apocalyptic enthusiasms, and none was more potent than the fear that human population growth had outstripped the earth’s carrying capacity. According to a chorus of credentialed alarmists, the world was entering an age of sweeping famines, crippling energy shortages, and looming civilizational collapse.

It was not lost on conservatives that this analysis led inexorably to left-wing policy prescriptions — a government-run energy sector at home, and population control for the teeming masses overseas.

Social conservatives and libertarians, the two wings of the American right, found common ground resisting these prescriptions. And time was unkind to the alarmists. The catastrophes never materialized, and global living standards soared. By the turn of the millennium, the developed world was worrying about a birth dearth.

This is the lens through which most conservatives view the global warming debate. Again, a doomsday scenario has generated a crisis atmosphere, which is being invoked to justify taxes and regulations that many left-wingers would support anyway. (Some of the players have even been recycled. John Holdren, Barack Obama’s science adviser, was a friend and ally of Paul Ehrlich, whose tract “The Population Bomb” helped kick off the overpopulation panic.)

History, however, rarely repeats itself exactly — and conservatives who treat global warming as just another scare story are almost certainly mistaken.

Rising temperatures won’t “destroy” the planet, as fearmongers and celebrities like to say. But the evidence that carbon emissions are altering the planet’s ecology is too convincing to ignore. Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.

But this doesn’t mean that we should mourn the death of cap-and-trade. It’s possible that the best thing to do about a warming earth — for now, at least — is relatively little. This is the view advanced by famous global-warming heretics like Bjorn Lomborg and Freeman Dyson; in recent online debates, it has been championed by Jim Manzi, the American right’s most persuasive critic of climate-change legislation.

Their perspective is grounded, in part, on the assumption that a warmer world will also be a richer world — and that economic development is likely to do more for the wretched of the earth than a growth-slowing regulatory regime. .... (more)

Ayn Rand’s Superman: A Serial Killer and Rapist » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog, Instapundit » Blog Archive » RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN: Growing infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers have New…, Moore to the Point by Russell D. Moore, Brandywine Books: You Can't Clean Yourself Up Before You Go to God , Op-Ed Columnist - The Right and the Climate - NYTimes.com