• Here’s something else from the Barna research folk in California that we really needed to know. “Pastors Rate Themselves Highly, Especially as Teachers.” A national survey of senior pastors of Protestant congregations revealed that they think they are really good at preaching, teaching, encouraging, and pastoring, and that they think themselves least effective in raising funds. The first thought is of those international surveys showing that American students are consistently at the top of the heap in self-esteem, and often near the bottom in achievement. The second is that, if these pastors are so good at preaching, teaching, and encouraging, might not that show up in, among other things, generous giving? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not proposing anything so crass as “the bottom line” as the test of ministry. But it does seem that the justification of self-esteem should not be by faith alone.
• Alison Hornstein, a student at Yale, has this column in Newsweek about how she is sick and tired of faculty and students who, in the name of multiculturalism and other mental retardations, excuse terrorist attacks on civilization. She concludes: “Just as we should pass absolute moral judgment in the case of rape, we should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values. To me, hijacking planes and killing thousands of civilians falls into this category.” Columnist Michael Kelly is encouraged, but thinks Ms. Hornstein is not there yet. “Hurrah! A breakthrough! A moral judgment! Yes, Ms. Hornstein, murdering thousands of people in fact is bad. But wait. A lifetime of instruction is not sloughed off quite so easily as all that; Hornstein’s bold moral judgment is not quite so bold as all that. Look at her conclusion again: ‘To me,’ it begins. To me. Hijacking planes and killing thousands is not objectively bad after all. It is objectively bad only in Hornstein’s opinion. Indeed, she rushes to reassure on this point: ‘Others may disagree.’ Others may disagree . And she adds: ‘It is less important to me where people choose to draw the line than it is that they are willing to draw it at all.’ Oh, dear. It is astonishing, really. Here you have an obviously smart, obviously moral person trying nobly and painfully to think her way out of the intellectual and moral cul-de-sac in which the addled miseducation of her life has placed her”and she cannot, in the end, bear to do it. She cannot judge. Ms. Hornstein, push on. Go the last mile. Go out on the limb of judgment. Mass murder is indeed objectively bad”and not just in your opinion. Others may disagree”but they are wrong. Indeed, they are (shut the door for this part, lest the hall monitors catch us) morally wrong. Ms. Hornstein, it is not less important where people choose to draw the line as long as they will draw it somewhere; that puts you right back with your silly professors. Draw the line, Ms. Hornstein. Draw it where you know it belongs. Dare to judge.”
• Readers send in their questions to Randy Cohen who writes an advice column called “The Ethicist” in the New York Times Magazine . The column is something like “Miss Manners” with more cerebral pretensions. When it was launched some while back, I looked at the first few columns and decided that this was an item that could be skipped without fear of intellectual or moral deprivation. But then there was the unpleasantness of Mr. Cohen’s protesting my quoting here what he had written in an e”mail to a reader, so I thought I would take another look. The column at hand responds to an inquiry from a “gay teenager who only recently came out,” and he wonders whether at the gym he should be showering with naked men “who have no idea that I may see some of them in a sexual way.” Mr. Cohen assures him: “While you should not act toward others in ways that discomfort them”e.g., no making a crude aqua-pass at a stranger”you may give your imagination free rein. There are no thought crimes . . . . It is actions, not imagination, that ethics seeks to guide.” So much for lust. Mr. Cohen continues, “Each man in your shower room knows that other men are present, and those with any knowledge of life know that some of those present may be gay. What your shower mates do not know are your thoughts”nor are they entitled to.” Such are the neat resolutions provided by Mr. Cohen to New Yorkers’ moral quandaries. I expect that in one of his earlier columns he has made it clear that his expertise is in ethics, not in morality, which makes such neat resolutions easier. But even ethicists informed by “any knowledge of life” might consider whether a gay man looking at naked men”or a straight man looking at naked women”and giving his imagination free rein would be entirely in control of not letting the objects of his fantasy know his thoughts. One thinks, for instance, of Augustine in City of God : “It is right, therefore, to be ashamed of this lust, and it is right that the members which it moves or fails to move by its own right, so to speak, and not in complete conformity to our decision, should be called pudenda (parts of shame), which they were not called before man’s sin; for, as Scripture tells us, ‘they were naked, and yet they felt no embarrassment.’ This was not because they had not noticed their nakedness, but because nakedness was not yet disgraceful, because lust did not yet arouse those members independently of their decision. The flesh did not yet, in a fashion, give proof of man’s disobedience by a disobedience of its own (XIV, 17).” But then, St. Augustine, who had little patience with ethical rationalizations abstracted from moral reality, knew a lot about life.
• Play it again, Sam. Here’s another bishop warning diocesan vocation directors to be on their guard against candidates for the priesthood who may be rigid or excessively orthodox. Meaning, all too often, that they may agree with the Magisterium on the impossibility of ordaining women, or hold to the extreme view that criticism of the Pope should be tempered by a modicum of deference. The bishop’s warning was nicely anticipated by C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape: “The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under . . . . Cruel ages are put on their guard against sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against respectability, lecherous ones against puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to become either slaves or tyrants we make liberalism the prime bogey.”
• All the political buzz the week of this writing is that Democratic strategists are proposing that their party run this year on the theme that Christian conservatives are the “American Taliban” of intolerance. In response to which a Republican friend puts on his best Br’er Rabbit act, pleading, “Please, please, don’t throw me into that briar patch.” This is one conscientious outfit. Nonetheless, we get complaints, sometimes quite vehement complaints, from, for instance, people who were told that we hoped to run their letter to the editor. But then the letter got knocked out, or substantially edited, because of space limitations. Most readers are quite understanding about this. To those who aren’t: please work at it.
• Some may find it hard to remember that on August 9 last the hottest topic in public dispute was embryonic stem cell research, that being the date and the subject of George W. Bush’s first nationwide television address. We said at the time that his compromise decision-to fund research with existing stem-cell lines where the life-or-death decision had already been made but not to fund the creation of new lines—was morally defensible in principle but gravely imprudent. The good news about that address was its marvelously articulate instruction on the facts about the beginnings of human life, and the announcement that Leon Kass of the University of Chicago would head up a new President’s Council on Bioethics. Now the other members of the council have been announced and some of the appointments are reassuring. Of the eighteen members, a number are very well known to the readers of these pages, notably Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon, Gilbert Meilaender, and, of course, Kass himself. Proponents of the technological imperative and those who are unfazed by the brave new world of manufacturing and redesigning humanity complain that the council is conservative. But the partisan meanings of conservative and liberal can be a distraction in this case. The real divide is between people who believe that technological and scientific challenges require a “new ethic,” and those who believe that the task is to apply abiding moral truths to new circumstances. Peter Singer of Princeton—who, I quickly add, is not on the President’s council—is an extreme representative of the first party. He flatly declares that the Judeo-Christian ethic is discredited, and everything must be rethought from a utilitarian square one (see “A Curious Encounter with a Philosopher from Nowhere,” February). His contribution to the necessary rethinking includes the principle that it is now necessary to say that it is not always wrong, and in some cases it is necessary, to deliberately kill innocent human beings. As I say, Singer is viewed as an extremist, but there are many “moderates” who embrace his reasoning, while cloaking their conclusions in euphemisms lest they scare off the proponents of “traditional morality” who must slowly be brought along to accepting the brave new world. One of the great challenges of the President’s council will be to reframe the ominous questions before us, putting the burden of proof on those who deny, rather than those who defend, principles such as the sanctity of human life. The language of secular liberalism presupposes an operational atheism in which scientific “progress” is held back by those who think that God, natural law, and moral philosophy—or all three combined-yield truths to which science and technology must be held accountable. It is encouraging that only a few of the council members are known as bioethicists, and they are exceptions to the debilitations common in that dubious but ambitious guild (see “The Best Ethicists That Money Can Buy” in Public Square). Most of the council appointees are people with a track record of scholarship, good sense, and moral wisdom, just the kind of people who are able to provide leadership in creating that much praised but seldom realized thing, public moral discourse. There are skeptics who say that the President’s Council on Bioethics is an exercise in futility, a matter of putting a close watch on the barn door after the technological horses have long since bolted. We have to hope they are wrong. The membership and mandate of the council give reason for a modest hope that it may yet be possible for human beings to take moral charge of what is meant by being human.
• Oh, what an erudite readership we have. From all directions, and citing sundry historians, comes the correction that the Polish forces, with an assist from the Germans, repelled the siege of Vienna on September 12, not September 11, 1683. Alright already. I said it was no big deal.
• If only. If only I had been right when, in commenting on a French “wrongful life” case, I said that such lawsuits seemed to be in decline in this country. Not at all, Richard F. Collier of the Legal Center for Defense of Life in Morristown, New Jersey, informs me. He sends along material from the New Jersey Law Journal that includes bold advertisements by law firms specializing in what they call “wrongful birth/wrongful life,” and boasting of their success in molding tort law to their advantage. Just when you thought there might be a bit of good news…. On the other hand, the French parliament has subsequently banned such suits. Watch for a more thorough treatment of all this in a forthcoming issue.
• A few years ago, immigration restriction was a hot topic in some conservative circles. It was pushed hard by National Review when John O’Sullivan was editor and Peter Brimelow, author of Alien Nation, was the point man on the subject. Under the editorship of Rich Lowry, National Review has pretty much fallen silent on immigration reform, without, however, taking the position of the Wall Street Journal that we should abolish the borders and let everybody in. What National Review dropped, the New York Review of Books may be picking up. Christopher Jencks has a long two-part essay there (“Who Should Get In?), suggesting that it may be time to reconsider a policy that brings in a million legal immigrants per year, and has resulted in an estimated ten million illegal immigrants living in the country. The Jencks article is remarkable in that it discusses the advocates of immigration reform without once using words such as “racist,” “nativist,” or “Know-Nothing.” This is, I think, a welcome development. I don’t know if it is a sign that the issue of immigration reform is moving from the right to the left. The article may be no more than a one-time thing with the New York Review. But, especially after September 11, it is inevitable that more Americans will be worrying about who all “these people” are, and whether they really intend to be part of “us.” As we know from past experience, such questions are strewn with devilish landmines. It ought to be possible to have a civil discussion of the proposal that it is time for a “moratorium” or “pause” in immigration—or just the effective enforcement of existing law-in order to encourage the more effective assimilation of immigrants who are here. It is, all in all, a good thing that the immigration question is being taken seriously by people who are not easily dismissed as (because they sometimes sound like) racists, nativists, etc., etc.
• Admittedly, it is a cultivated taste (unless you happen to be born that way, but I have come in recent years to have a great interest in things Polish, even agreeing to try to learn the language as soon as they restore those four lost vowels. My interest, of course, has everything to do with those Krakow seminars on Catholic social doctrine that we run each summer. But the reason for this item is to mention the Polish Studies Newsletter edited by Albin S. Wozniak (3433 Gregg Road, Brookeville, Maryland 20833), which is available for $30 per year and provides a very useful update on books, articles, debates, and cultural events dealing with things Polish. If, by inheritance or cultivation or both, such is your taste, the newsletter is definitely worth a look.
• In science, as in every other purely human endeavor, new insights take a battering from the established orthodoxies that they threaten. Certainly that is true of Darwinism as it is challenged by alternative explanations that go under the general heading of Intelligent Design. The December 21 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education provides a balanced report from the front, “Darwinism Under Attack.” The Darwinist establishment is increasingly on the defensive, as is also evident in a series of near-hysterical attacks on Intelligent Design theory in the New York Review of Books. A hero in all this is Phillip E. Johnson, who is not a scientist but a law professor with a razor-sharp ability to expose logical and philosophical sleight of hand. We are pleased to have published his arguments in these pages, along with those of mathematician William Dembski and biochemist Michael Behe. These are the three names most prominently associated with Intelligent Design, although others are coming over to their side and, as Chronicle reports, many others are acknowledging the inadequacies of Darwinist explanations. Recently, in response to a PBS series that toed the conventional Darwinist line, more than a hundred scientists signed a full-page advertisement, published in the New Republic and elsewhere, declaring that they are “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” We will continue to publish Johnson, Behe, Dembski, et alia, although I know it makes some readers nervous. In the minds of many, the brightest of bright lines that distinguish the intellectually sophisticated from the great unwashed was drawn at the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. When it comes to cultural and academic respectability, Christians who are insecure about what they view as their newly won “place at the table” are terrified that they might be suspected of harboring “creationist” sympathies. They should get over it. The long overdue scientific and philosophical challenge to Darwinism is not in the defense of a literal reading of Genesis; it is in the service of clear thinking. With respect to the origin and complex development of life forms, clear thinking begins with recognizing what we do not know. Dembski puts it nicely: “An argument from ignorance is still better than a pipe dream in which you’re deluding yourself. I’m at least admitting to ignorance as opposed to pretending that you’ve solved the problem when you haven’t.” The Darwinist theory of the survival of the fittest is sheer tautology. Why did a life form survive? Because it was the fittest. And how do we know it was the fittest? Because it survived. It is after-the-fact rationalization. Any theory claiming that both rape and kindness, both genocide and generosity, are survival techniques is somewhat lacking in explanatory power. Then there is not so little matter of philosophical materialism and its attendant atheism. Some Darwinists say they are only methodologically materialist and atheist, but the method is the message. In asking how the complexity of life came about, why would one begin from a philosophical premise of materialism and atheism that, on the basis of clear reason, one believes is false? Unless, of course, one believes the premise is true, in which case the premise and any possible conclusion are neatly conflated. In the name of science, a good many Darwinists have for a long time been promoting a particular philosophy, and a depressingly third-rate philosophy at that. The Chronicle article quotes Scott Minnich, a professor of microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Idaho: “Is it wrong to ask students to stop and think, given time and what we know of biochemistry and molecular genetics, whether blind chance and necessity can build machines that dwarf our creative ability? Is that a legitimate question? I think it is.” Exactly: It’s among the questions to which these pages will continue to be open. Evolutionary dogmatists and those intimidated by them can read the New York Review of Books.
• The “mission statement” of the Simi Valley United Church of Christ declares: For us the Bible is a record of faith journeys to be taken seriously but not always literally. … Our church seeks to be multicultural, respecting and learning from traditions which differ from our own.” So much for the Bible, but aren’t we great? The mission in the statement is apparently flagging, according to the Los Angeles Times, since two churches were merged to make up the present congregation that counts a hundred members. But the very positive note struck in the story is that the church is so “open-minded” that it has an atheist teaching Sunday school. “Stuart,” says the pastor, the Rev. Bill Greene, “is a caring, bright, perceptive, inclusive kind of person who has a strong sense of justice…. Here is this incredibly fine man, with honesty and passion for justice, who is in our church. And that’s a blessing for us, and for all our kids.” Of course, Stuart denies the existence of God, but that’s what inclusiveness is all about. The story is mildly, albeit sadly, amusing. What is worth remarking is that the Los Angeles Times thinks this is some kind of breakthrough, apparently unaware of the thousands of liberal churches across the country for whom it is a taken-for-granted assumption that Christianity proposes, not the way, the truth, and the life,” but a narrow viewpoint that must be corrected by “traditions which differ from our own.” Even if that means affirming atheism. Inclusiveness is a jealous god.
• In 1996 we published a famous-some say notorious—symposium on the judicial usurpation of politics under the deliberately interest-piquing title “The End of Democracy?” Most of the numerous critics overlooked the question mark, and charges flew hot and heavy that we were despairing of our constitutional order, advocating violent revolution, and generally indulging in dangerously reckless behavior. The fury of the debate went on for some time, much of it collected in two books by the same title and published by Spence Publishing. Now comes a very long article (169 pages) in the Harvard Law Review by Prof. Larry D. Kramer of New York University on, yes, the judicial usurpation of politics. Perhaps as a ticket of admission to that distinguished review, Kramer is at least as hard on conservatives, such as Justice Antonin Scalia, as he is on the many liberals who have acted over the years as though the American people are not capable of self-government. The motor force of the judicial usurpation of politics is the assumption that the people and their representatives cannot be trusted with making political decisions, and certainly not when it comes to really important questions such as what lives are and what lives are not to be protected in law (see, for the most glaring instance, Roev. Wade, 1973). Kramer concludes with this: “History may not tell us what to do. But it can tell us who we were and in this way help us understand who we have become. Legend has it that, as he left the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman who asked him, What have you given us, Dr. Franklin?” “A republic,’ he replied, ‘if you can keep it.’ Have we? For all the disagreement about what we mean by republic,’ no one has ever doubted that self-government is its essence and a constitution the purest distillate. What kind of republic removes its constitution from the process of self-governing? Certainly not the one our Founders gave us. Is it one we prefer? The choice, after all, is ours. The Supreme Court has made its grab for power. The question is: Will we let them get away with it?” Had he written that for our 1996 symposium, I might have asked him to tone it down just a little. After all, we don’t want to be associated with incendiary publications such as the Harvard Law Review.
I share your skepticism about polls and polling. They do not even, as one pollster friend claims, give us a “snapshot” of a specific population at a specific time. If one wanted to know about, for instance, the state of Catholicism in America, I expect more pertinent truth could be derived from a really good history of the O’Reilly family in my parish than from a nationwide poll conducted by the most competent research institute. That having been said, polls are not without their uses. They can tell us what percentage of people in a specific cohort at a specific time answered what questions in what way. And, since polls are used and misused for all kinds of purposes, it is worth having the data at hand. So the following is just for the record. A national poll of 1,508 U.S. Catholics found that 46 percent attend Mass at least once a week, 8 percent attend Mass daily, and 11 percent said they go almost every week. Fifty-eight percent said their Catholic identity is very important and 31 percent called it somewhat important. Seventy-five percent agreed with the statement, “There is something special about being Catholic that you cannot find in other religions.” Sixty-eight percent of those said they participated in the sacrament of reconciliation at least once in the last year. The results, released November 16, 2001, are the first of a planned biannual poll of contemporary. Catholic trends conducted by Zogby International in conjunction with LeMoyne College, a Jesuit school in Syracuse, New York. Those surveyed by the Zogby poll overwhelmingly agreed with a number of basic faith statements such as: “God has the power to answer prayers” (97 percent); “Jesus is both fully divine and fully human” (94 percent). Majorities agreed with church positions opposing the use of human embryos in stem-cell research (61 percent), on euthanasia and abortion (66 percent and 68 percent, respectively), and that the pope is infallible in faith and morals (64 percent). Fifty-three percent disagreed with the Church’s ban on women priests, and 54 percent said they disagreed that priests must be celibate. Sixty-one percent disagreed with the church teaching against artificial birth control, and 64 percent disagreed with the prohibition on reception of communion by Catholics who have divorced and remarried without an annulment. Eighty percent of those polled said they often have felt God has taken care of them in times of need. As I say, all polling data should be taken with a shot of Old Skeptic. I expect these might serve to reinforce both the more bleak and more hopeful readings of the state of Catholicism in America. If, on the other hand, we really had the story of the four generations of the family O Reilly. …
• You may recall the piece on Father Alexander Schmemann, with the extended excerpts from his Journals, published by St. Vladimir Press (see “Alexander Schmemann: A Man in Full,” FT, January 2001). Fr: Michael Plekon’s Living Icons, recently published by the University of Notre Dame Press, has a chapter on Schmemann which includes this remembrance by his journalist son, Serge Schmemann. It is from an interview in the Moscow Times, published on the tenth anniversary of Fr Schmemann’s death. “At home Fr. Alexander never told us to ‘go to church, or that you must fast,’ or ‘do it this way, never. Simply, he did what he had to and we found ourselves drawn to those things which were important to him. I can’t say we spent as much time in church as he did, but our joy in the services came entirely from him. In our house the guiding principle of churchly life was the example of my father. My father is fasting quietly, without insisting that anyone do so, and instinctively we begin fasting as well; after all, we can’t let him fast alone! It was important for him, and thus it became important for us…. With him everything was cozy, he was always extremely joyous. If we arose in the morning in foul spirits and saw that he was happy and energetic-with him each day began this way—then his attitude infected us all… He always fought against the reduction of Christianity simply to forms and rules. It, in fact, liberates man from the narrowness of forms and rules and Fr. Alexander saw in Christianity the freedom of the person and love, and in his lectures, writings, sermons, always sought to reveal the deeper meaning of all things occurring in the Church. He never oversimplified, seeing in each person the very complex arena of struggle between good and evil…. [H]is theology was marked above all by the element of freedom. His Christianity is that of Christ, for precisely he gave us freedom. All church rules, after all, can acquire a certain independent life of their own, totally detached from God. Fr. Alexander knew this all too well, which is why he never began from rules. For him all things begin with faith in God, which leads to an order of life, and not the other way around.” Reading that, I thought, What a happy son who can thus remember his father, and what a happy father to be thus remembered.
• The unselfconscious ethnocentricity of the New York Times is sometimes charming. Especially charming is Judith Shulevitz, a regular in the Times book review section. Writing in praise of the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season, she says, “In less than a century and a half, we have turned the American Christmas into an adoration less of a divine Christ than of the quasi-divine in us—our homes, children, families, and communities.” The “We” in that sentence calls to mind Tonto’s well known question to the Lone Ranger. Ms. Shulevitz is all for the “spending and drinking and eating too much.” “If there is such a thing as an authentic Christmas tradition it would have to be overdoing it.” One gathers that devotion to Jesus the Christ, God incarnate born of the Blessed Virgin, is not very strong in the Shulevitz family. Sure enough, that turns out to be the case. “Others, like me, observe Hanukkah, a minor Jewish holiday blown wildly out of proportion to offer an alternative to our nation’s irresistible winter solstice festival.” No, and as Ms. Shulevitz surely knows, it is blown wildly out of proportion to offer Jews, and especially Jewish children, an alternative to a religious feast celebrated by all but Jews and relatively few others. She concludes, “But if dreaming of invented traditions is what we’re doing, at least we’re doing it together and that strikes me as the point.” The point of what? The pseudo-inclusiveness of her ethnocentric “we” succeeds in trivializing both Christianity and Judaism. And that, unhappily, seems to be the point.
• Much more to an important point is this reflection by Anne Roiphe in the New York Observer: “Hanukkah was once a minor holiday, a playful reminder of miracles that cast a warming light against the winter darkness. The game of dreidel was an innocent sort of gambling pleasure: an easy way to teach children that chance is beyond cajoling, that you win or lose, double or nothing, depending on the breath of the draft, the knot in the wooden floor, the unseen, the unaccounted for, the ever unpredictable. The game reveals to all that miracles may happen, but they may not, so steel your heart for disappointments. Hanukkah was not designed for its contemporary American fate. Here, it goes nose to nose, Maccabee to Jesus, against the Christmas glory. It has become a kind of echo of the Other, a comfort to the Jewish child who does not share in the red and green and tinsel of the rival holiday. This making much of Hanukkah is a wise adaptation, a bending like the willow in the wind, as a small minority fights to hold the hearts of its children in the overwhelming and most enticing surrounding culture of Santa Claus and Rudolph and the Grinch, as well as Silent Night’ and “Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘All through the house, not a creature was stirring…? No matter what one does with the brave freedom fighters of old Jerusalem, they do not quite equal the pageantry of mangers and little drummer boys as God’s own son is born to save the world from death. There is no contest here, because the story of Hanukkah is not the central story of Jewish belief or life, while the story of Christmas is the most basic matter of Christian belief. You could remove Hanukkah from the Jewish calendar and Judaism would barely notice. Do the same for Christmas and the entire religious structure would collapse. These holidays are simply not symmetrical. No amount of chocolate coins and electric menorahs illuminating the lobbies of Manhattan apartment buildings will make it so. Yes, they are both winter tales meant to promise the return of spring. Yes, they are both about the intervention of God in human affairs. But they are not equal, and pretending so will not wash.”
• The (London) Daily Telegraph has this story on Father Rodger Charles and his book Pope’s Men: The Jesuits Yesterday and Today. Don’t try to get a copy. His Jesuit superiors have forbidden him to publish it or, for that matter, anything else. I know at least four priests in religious orders who are under orders not to publish. All are respected scholars, established authors, and men of impeccable orthodoxy. It follows from the last factor that they are critical of left-liberal factions in the Church, which is why they are under the ban. I respect their obedience to authority. As Flannery O’Connor observed, we are sometimes required to suffer much more from the Church than for the Church. What cannot be respected are the publications of the left that express outrage at any official criticism of their favored authors while remaining silent about the ban imposed on those with whom they disagree. They claim to be devoted to an “open dialogue.” Don’t believe it.
• According to a poll done by Zogby International, a highly respected organization, 79 percent of Muslims in this country say that U.S. foreign policy is to blame for the September 11 terrorist attacks, and 67 percent say that the best way to counter terrorism is to change U.S. policy in the Middle East. Nonetheless, 50 percent back the U.S. war against terrorism, compared with 80 to 90 percent of the general population.
• Over the last several years, there has been increased discussion, and some little controversy, about the connections between religion and health. A recent issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings includes an article by Dr. Paul S. Mueller and his colleagues that leans toward the skeptical. Covering all their bases, they conclude that any medical benefits of religion are due to “complex psychosocial-behavioral and biological processes that are incompletely understood.” The same issue of the Proceedings carries a more confident report on a randomized controlled trial of the connections between intercessory prayer and cardiovascular disease. Then there is an editorial by Dr. Harold G. Koenig of Duke University Medical Center. He writes, “A long historical tradition connects religion, medicine, and health care. Religious groups built the first hospitals in Western civilization during the fourth century for care of the sick unable to afford private medical care. For the next thousand years until the Reformation and to a lesser extent until the French Revolution, it was the religious establishment that built hospitals, provided medical training, and licensed physicians to practice medicine. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the scientific profession of medicine had nearly completely separated away from its religious beginnings. Likewise, the profession of nursing emerged directly from religious orders that until the early 1900s staffed the majority of hospitals both in the United States and her Western countries” Today, he notes, the “wall of separation” between medicine and religion seems to be collapsing. So what is a physician to do? Here is Koenig’s advice: “As Mueller and colleagues point out, the research is not good enough (and may never be good enough to justily physicians’ prescribing religion to nonreligious patients. If the patient is not religious or does not want physician involvement in this area, then questioning should quickly move away from religion and toward what helps the patient cope and gives life meaning. In the majority of cases, the physician should not attempt to address complex spiritual needs of patients. However, when the patient is reluctant to talk with clergy and prefers to discuss spiritual matters with a trusted physician, taking a little extra time to listen and be supportive is usually all that is required. Providing support for religious beliefs and practices that do not conflict with medical care is appropriate. When beliefs conflict with medical care, however, it is important not to criticize the belief, but rather to listen, gather information, enter into the patient’s worldview, and maintain open lines of communication, perhaps enlisting the help of the patient’s clergy. Religious beliefs may have a powerful influence on the health of our patients, and we need to know about them.” This new discussion is, in my judgment, all to the good. Readers of my just published As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning know that I am more than open to the dimensions of mystery and miracle, also in connection with medicine and health. There are also theological problems, however, in measuring the “effectiveness” of, for instance, intercessory prayer. For instance, to whom are such prayers addressed, with what urgency and submissiveness to God’s will, and what is the spiritual state of those who are praying? Such questions can be multiplied. Then there is always the temptation of a purely utilitarian approach to religion, and to prayer in particular, not to mention the dangers in “putting God to the test.” But it is, all in all, a good thing that medicine is increasingly opening itself to dimensions of reality that cannot be contained within a philosophy of scientific materialism. A very good thing.
• That gimlet-eyed law professor, Ronald Rychlak of the University of Mississippi, picks up on what he takes to be my implication (“The American Mind,” FT, December 2001) that among Thomas Jefferson’s dubious contributions was the introduction of the government-sponsored lottery. The gambling industry––or, as they prefer; the gaming industry––is one of Rychlak’s specialties, and he notes that lotteries go back to the early eighteenth century. He writes,
“Governor John Hancock opposed them, arguing that they were calculated to trap the unwary into the vice of gambling. The Old Farmer’s Almanack took a similar approach, arguing that lotteries were the ‘path [which] leads down to the gloomy pits of ruin. However, when Harvard needed a lottery to raise funds, Massachusetts authorized it.” As for Jefferson, he did need to sell his property to pay off debts and offered this defense of the lottery: “An article of property, insusceptible of division at all, or not without great diminution of its worth, is sometimes so large a value as that no purchaser can be found while the owner owes debts, has no other means of payment, and his creditors no chance of obtaining it but by its sale at a full and fair price. The lottery is here a salutary instrument for disposing of it, where men run small risks for the chance of obtaining a high prize.” As I noted, the states dragged their feet in authorizing the lottery until after Jefferson died, and it failed of its purpose, leaving his daughter in poverty until, in tribute to her father, two states provided her a pension. I’m with the Old Farmer’s Almanack when it comes to state-sponsored lotteries, but will make it clear in the future that we should not blame Jefferson for starting them.
• In March 1998, the Vatican released We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, a document that has occasioned considerable controversy. It is the stated purpose of David I. Kertzer to refute the document in his book, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (see FT review, February). Writing in the Journal of the Historical Society, Professor Russell Hittinger of the University of Tulsa examines Kertzer’s scholarship and finds it gravely deficient. Kertzer says he intends to “stick as close to the popes as I can get…. IfI fail to bring their worldview to life, I will have failed to fully accomplish my task.” First off, Hittinger notes, Kertzer shows no familiarity with the writings of the popes in question, not even with their most public documents. Between 1775 and 1939, the period under discussion, ten popes issued some 277 encyclicals and other teaching documents, with at least 158 dealing with issues of political and social order. “Remarkably,” writes Hittinger, “there is no indication that Kertzer has laid eyes on any of these documents.” Kertzer does quote the 1937 encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, to complain that it contains “no direct attack on anti-Semitism.” In fact, the encyclical’s attack on Nazism asserts that Scripture and the Incarnation itself forbid any racial derogation of the “chosen people.” Nobody at the time had any trouble understanding who was meant by the “chosen people.” More remarkable yet, Kertzer’s notes show that the six words he quotes from the encyclical are lifted from John Cornwell’s thoroughly discredited screed, Hitle’s Pope. This is historical scholarship? Hittinger: “Since his judgments are scurrilous, one must wonder whether his publisher looked at the notes carefully enough to detect that Kertzer relies on second and third hand material.” And there are major historical developments of which Kertzer seems to be sublimely ignorant. “Kertzer also completely overlooks what is surely the most important and interesting right-wing movement in the Catholic world at the time, Charles Maurras’ Action française. Founded in 1899 during the Dreyfus affair, Adion française represents better than any other movement the passage of the monarchical party to the ideology of extreme nationalism. Maurras distinguished between the legal nation (pays légal) and the authentic nation (pays réel). For Maurras, the authentic nation must be recovered from the Protestants, revolutionaries, freemasons, and Jews who control the legal nation. Pius X accused the movement of “hatred.’ In 1914 seven of Maurras’ publications were put on the Index. His supporters were excommunicated by Pius XI in 1927, and the Jesuit Cardinal Billot was forced to resign because of his support for the movement. The history of Adion française can help us understand just how the older Christian nativism had become colored with secularism and nationalism. Some of the most important Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century-Charles Péguy and Jacques Maritain, to name but two—were formed in the crucible of this dispute. Indeed, its effect can be detected in many of Pius XI’s encyclicals. What is certain, however, is that there can be no credible history of papal ideas about the political right wing without careful study of this movement and Rome’s thirty-year effort to stifle it. It is certainly necessary for someone like Kertzer, who is in search of incriminating ideas, and who asserts, without evidence or citation, that for the Vatican Fascist regimes were ’embraced as a God-given bulwark against the great socialist evil. Instead of the public documents and history, Kertzer purports to give a secret history consisting of diplomatic cables, private audiences with popes, and form letters from papal secretaries conveying papal benedictions to priests and laymen who had an anti-Semitic agenda. From these, Kertzer does not merely charge that the popes were not doing enough to resist and correct antiSemitism in countries like France and Austria (not to mention the anti-Semitism expressed in ecclesiastical newspapers sponsored by the Vatican); he also implies that popes supported or found nothing untoward in these developments. Throughout the book, the popes are depicted as omniscient and omnipotent figures, capable of putting Austria and France, the Roman Curia, bishops, monsignors, and journalists into line by a snap of a papal finger; their silence about a particular renegade priest or political movement is interpreted as another instance of papal causality in world affairs.” In sum, Hittinger writes, “The Popes Against the Jews pursues an important subject—in recent literature, one that has been obscured by artless polemic. Whatever might be the author’s sincerity (there can be no doubt about his moral passion), this work does not rise to the level of history. He has no control over the meta-historical criteria to which the data are supposed to conform. His research into the material data is slipshod, his inferences are rarely sound, and often drawn irresponsibly. The book does not throw light on a history already obscured by legend and witch hunt.”
• I corresponded with Oscar Cullmann but never met him personally. As was the case with most theology students of the last half century, he had a great influence on my thinking. His New Testament studies on the meaning of time and the nature of the State were especially formative back when the school of thought dubbed “biblical theology” was riding high. Like that other Swiss Protestant Karl Barth, Cullmann did pioneering work in the rapprochement with Catholics following Vatican Council II. Ted Dorman, author of The Hermeneutics of Oscar Cullmann and professor of Bible and theology at Taylor University in Indiana, brings to my attention that February 25 is the hundredth anniversary of Cullmann’s birth. (He died in 1999.) This May the Fondation Oecumenique Oscar Cullmann is holding at the University of Basel an international conference to mark the centennial. Prof. Dorman also suggests that a revival of “biblical theology”-based on “the unity of the Bible” and “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte)—may be underway. He writes, “Somewhere, I believe, Cullmann must be pleased.” We will find out when, pray God, we meet up again in that Somewhere.
• Andrew Sullivan has been going on again about what’s wrong with conservatism, its chief fault being that it refuses to conform to Andrew Sullivan’s definition of conservatism. Writing in the New Republic, he is again exercised by the “theocons” (including, as usual, your scribe) who don’t understand “the separation of church and state” and are in their motivation, if not their policy prescriptions, very much like the Taliban of Afghanistan. I think Jonah Goldberg of National Review got Mr. Sullivan’s number. “In a nutshell, this is my problem with Andrew Sullivan’s conservatism. He’s a brilliant and charming guy. But he seems to reject or critique all forms of conservatism that don’t dovetail with his own personal priorities. I’m not referring solely, or even primarily, to his homosexuality or advocacy of gay rights. From what I can tell, Sullivan’s conservatism is informed not just by his sexuality but by his Catholicism, his blue-collar British roots, his serious hang-ups about British authoritarian culture, and––not least––by the fact that he’s a follower of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott (ifI were smarter and more patient, I think I’d be an Oakeshottian too and a protégé of the classical conservative Harvey Mansfield. Moreover, Sullivan’s conservatism isn’t just informed by these things, it’s informed by the perhaps insurmountable contradictions between these things. These sometimes competing, sometimes complementary impulses make Sullivan a joy to read (and talk to). But the extrapolation of one’s personal beliefs––or, more accurately, one’s personality—to a broad universal philosophy is at minimum a form of arrogance, and at maximum a recipe for disaster.” Goldberg is among the most artful ramblers in the business, and somehow he gets from Sullivan to what he calls our “Chinese-menu culture.” Cultural liberalism is a big enough problem, Goldberg says, but liberals mainly cultivate cultural perversities as entertainment; they take every measure to make sure that their own children turn out to be successful in pretty conventional ways of defining success. Cultural libertarians are much more worrying. Goldberg has in mind the father of John Walker, who said he was glad that his son had found something to believe in, even if it was fighting with the Taliban against his country. So what is cultural libertarianism? Let Jonah Goldberg answer that: “Cultural libertarianism basically says that whatever ideology, religion, cult, belief, creed, fad, hobby, or personal fantasy you like is just fine so long as you don’t impose it on anybody else, especially with the government. You want to be a Klingon? Great! Attend the Church of Satan? Hey man, if that does it for ya, go for it. You want to be a ‘Buddhist for Jesus’? Sure, mix and match, man; we don’t care. Hell, you can even be an observant Jew, a devout Catholic or a faithful Baptist, or a lifelong heroin addict––they’re all the same, in the eyes of a cultural libertarian. Just remember: keep it to yourself if you can. Don’t claim that being a Lutheran is any better than being a member of the Hale-Bopp cult, and never use the government to advance your view. If you can do that, then––whatever floats your boat.”
• The Congress still dithers over a ban on human cloning, despite the fact that there is a growing scientific consensus that embryonic stem cells––whether cloned or not—are not necessary for research. Equal and better results are obtained from stem cells obtained from umbilical cords, bone marrow, and even adult fat cells. J. Bottum writes in Canada’s National Post that the only thing human cloning is likely to produce in the short run is cloned human beings––just as the only medical advance animal cloning has produced in the four years since Dolly is the ability to create cloned animals. Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and
H. G. Wells, says Bottum, anticipated what is happening now. Most European countries have already passed laws banning so-called reproductive cloning while allowing what they call therapeutic cloning. These laws will prove pointless. We will be unable to maintain a situation in which scientists are encouraged to create cloned embryos and then barred from the end toward which their creations naturally aim: the insertion of those embryos into a womb and the live birth of a human clone. Besides, such laws are unethical on their face, since they attempt to define a class of embryos that it is illegal not to destroy. Even more to the point, they are unenforceable, since only court-ordered abortions could eliminate the result of violating them. A ban solely on reproductive cloning is simply a license for scientists to get their techniques right until the pressure to bring a clone to birth becomes overwhelming. At that point, our problems really begin-from the extraordinarily high rate of deformity among clones, to the end of the family in the confusion of reproducing oneself as one’s own child, to the likely psychological damage for the person created by cloning. Along the way, we will have moved from the begetting of our children to the manufacture of our descendants and changed forever what it means to be human. Shouldn’t we try to stop this? I worry about people who reach into the stuff of life and twist it to their will. I worry about the people who act simply because they can. If they lived in crumbling castles— their hair standing up on end and their voices howling in maniacal laughter—we’d know them for mad scientists. But they wear nice white lab coats, and their chief executive brings his pleasant face on television to reassure us they are really acting for the best of medical motives, and, besides, there is a great deal of money to be made in biotech and pharmaceutical stocks. And so Victor Frankenstein’s chamber begins to seem merely a modern laboratory. The Brave New World, merely a green and pleasant land. Dr. Jekyll’s dark study, merely a clean, well-lighted place. The island of Dr. Moreau, merely a health resort. But in their precincts, nothing human can survive.”
• Members of the Jewish Defense League in Los Angeles were arrested for planning to issue a “wake up call” by blowing up a local mosque. The consistently, if caustically, on-target James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal remarks: “Watch for the root-cause crowd to come forward with the usual explanations: the poverty and oppression under which L.A. Jews live makes this sort of thing understandable, if not inevitable; they did it as a protest against U.S. foreign policy; their alleged targets need to ask themselves: Why do they hate us?”
• Ah, for the resistance movements of our youth! The very “progressive” city council of Berkeley, California, voted that the city’s general information phone answerers should supply material about the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. The Associated Press reports, “The idea is to have information available so staff can refer anyone who calls asking about how to avoid military combat.” The council defeated an amendment that would also make available information about military recruitment. Berkeley’s refugees from radicalisms past apparently have not been told that the draft expired decades ago. The advice to those with conscientious objections to enlisting is very simple: don’t enlist.
• Christianity Today takes note of the dueling headlines of stories reporting on John Paul II’s World Day of Peace message:
- Pope: Anti-terror fight is moral (Associated Press)
- Pope, not mentioning U.S., urges military restraint (New York Times)
- Pope says forgiveness leads to peace (Chicago Tribune)
- Pope ambiguous on U.S. campaign (Los Angeles Times)
- Blunt force wrong, pontiff says ([Toronto] Globe and Mail)
- Pope calls for an end to Iraqi sanctions (CNN)
- Plight of innocents worries pontiff (Reuters/ Toronto Star)
Actually, the Pope said that terrorism must be unequivocally condemned, that military action against terrorism is justified, that such action should be discriminate and proportionate, and that whatever measure of justice is achieved must be secured by forgiveness if there is to be lasting peace. Now you might want to try writing your own headline
• The late Erwin Glikes, legendary founder of the Free Press, wanted me to do a book with his house. I mentioned another publisher who had made a generous offer. “They print books,” Erwin snorted, “We publish books.” By that he meant that, for Free Press, each book was viewed as a special project, given personal editorial attention, and assigned to someone whose job depended upon helping it to find its readership. For reasons that I forget, I did not do that book with Free Press, but I have remembered Erwin’s words about the difference between printing and publishing books. In addition to publishing As ILay Dying, Basic Books has done a fine job in another and commonly neglected aspect of the book business, book designing. It is a physically beautiful book. Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to buy the book just because it is good looking. (Although in this instance it is at least partly true that you can tell a book by its cover.) I do think you might be interested in the story it tells, a story that I told in part in “Born Toward Dying” (FT, February 2000). It is a very personal, and sometimes painful, story about cancer, about friendship in times of illness, about lingering at death’s door and, to my considerable surprise, discovering why I was not afraid. As I Lay Dying: Meditations upon Returning. It is just out and should be in your bookstore now. I very much hope you will like it, and will tell all your friends about it.
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Sources: On ethicists for sale, Christianity Today, October 1, 2001; U.S. News & World Report, July 30, 2001; ZENIT, August 8, 2001. On Dominus lesus, Ecumenical Trends, December 2001. On Anthony Lewis, New York Times, December 15, 2001.
WHILE WE’RE AT IT: Pastor ratings, Barna Research, January 7, 2002. Michael Kelly on Alison Hornstein, Washington Post, December 19, 2001. Randy Cohen and pudenda, New York Times Magazine, November 18, 2001. Simi Valley United Church of Christ, Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2001. Larry D. Kramer on judicial politics, Harvard Law Review, November 2001. Judith Shulevitz’s ethnocentricity, New York Times, December 2, 2001. Anne Roiphe on Hanukkah and Christmas, New York Observer, December 17, 2001. On Fr. Rodger Charles, (London) Daily Telegraph, December 15, 2001. Muslim poll numbers, Religion News Service,
December 20, David 2001. Russell Hittinger on Kertzer, Journal of the Historical Society, Spring/Summer 2002. Jonah Goldberg on Andrew Sullivan, National Review Online, December 12, 2001. Berkeley’s conscientious objectors, Associated Press, December 13, 2001. The Pope’s headlines, Christianity Today, December 14, 2001.
