Continuing with R. J. Neuhaus's theme-pertinent recent publications in the English-speaking world:
• It’s a little thing but it pulls together so much. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), an outfit on the cutting edge of the culture of death, puts on a full-court media press touting its putative discovery of a new way of getting embryonic stem cells without killing embryos.
Nature magazine plays it up big. The
New York Times bites and runs it as the lead story, written by its chief science editor, on the front page. Knowledgeable critics immediately jump into the fray, pointing out that
the technology is not new, that in fact all the embryos used in the experiment were killed, and that the President’s Council on Bioethics had considered the ACT procedure a year earlier and unanimously rejected it as unethical.
A few days later, down on a deep inside page, the
Times has a story reporting that the Conference of Catholic Bishops brought pressure on
the editors of Nature, who then apologized for their error.
There is no acknowledgment of the Times’ error in promoting ACT’s fraudulent claims. Out of the paper’s journalistic sloppiness the editors manage to rescue the satisfaction of once again suggesting that the Church is the enemy of scientific progress. What would we do without the nation’s newspaper of record? Don’t ask.
• Elie Wiesel’s
Night, first published in this country in 1960, has been for innumerable readers their first introduction to Holocaust literature. It is a compelling narrative of human devastation seen through the eyes of a Jewish child in the death camps.
Many will recall the account of the Nazis’ hanging of a young boy. The hanging is botched and the boy slowly strangles to death as he dangles by the rope.
The question is asked, “Where is God?” And Wiesel answers, “Where is He? This is where —hanging here from this gallows.” That scene, and that answer, has had a powerful influence also in Christian thought.
Fr. Thomas Weinandy critically evaluates that influence in his splendid article “Does God Suffer?” in the November 2001 issue of
First Things.
• Christopher Leighton, a Presbyterian with long experience in Jewish-Christian relations, is worried about the message of
Night. Because the action all takes place within the death camps, he fears Christians will not be confronted by the source of evil in the society and the regime, which included many Christians, outside the camps.
But mainly Leighton is worried that Christians will appropriate the story, including the death of the young boy, in support of the Christian narrative of redemption. Francois Mauriac, the noted Catholic thinker who wrote the foreword to the French edition of
Night, did just that.
He wrote: “Did I explain to [Wiesel] that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become the cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost?”
This is precisely the wrong Christian response, Leighton contends:
"The tortured screams of those children and their parents did not mend the world. Nor was theirs a sacrificial offering that can reestablish the bonds of intimacy between God and humanity. Any effort to squeeze the Jewish community’s pain into a Christian paradigm compounds the original violence with another layer of violation.
"Indeed, the domestication of Jewish pain by means of comparison with Jesus’ execution indicates a failure on the part of Christians to understand the mystery at the heart of the crucifixion. . . . Differently stated, an encounter with the Holocaust brings Christians face to face with the limits of their own theological prowess, compelling them to reexamine the claim that new life invariably follows in the wake of death.
"If they decline the challenge, they will read and interpret Wiesel’s
Night in ways that simply reaffirm what they have always known. They will learn nothing from the encounter either about others or about themselves."
• There is considerable merit to Leighton’s argument, which appeared in a recent issue of
Commentary. Certainly, it is no part of Christian faith that “new life invariably follows in the wake of death.” That is rank sentimentalism.
And yet, the perception of Mauriac and others that God is the boy dangling at the end of the rope in analogy with God in Christ bearing the weight of all human suffering on the cross is profoundly and irrepressibly Christian.
It is not helpful to say that this is a “domestication” of Jewish suffering, or of the sufferings beyond number borne by others in the course of human history.
On the Jewish side, the esteemed Michael Wyschogrod has probed the connections between the travails of the Jews and the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering. Such matters touch on mysteries that surpass our understanding and must be explored with great precision.
Leighton is right to caution against a facile incorporation of Jewish suffering into the Christian story. Yet there is a deep sense in which that suffering is also ours and is included in the redemptive suffering of Christ.
This question came in for rough headline treatment some years ago in the controversy over the Carmelite monastery at the edge of Auschwitz. Some Jews protested that the Church was trying to “Christianize the Holocaust.”
Yet Christians cannot help but say that the redemptive suffering of Christ is universal and comprehensive. Jewish suffering is indeed different, in that Jews and Judaism have a most particular and intimate connection with the Christian narrative of salvation.
For Christians, the Jewish experience is not entirely “other.”
It is not too much to say that there are two Judaisms; the one is called Judaism and the other is called Christianity. Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are the two forms assumed by Judaism following the destruction of the Second Temple.
The dispute that divides us, the dispute that may not be definitively resolved until the End Time, is over the question “Who is the Christ?” So Leighton is right in cautioning Christians against viewing the Holocaust “in ways that simply reaffirm what they have always known.” As Mauriac is also right in seeing that Wiesel’s stumbling block is, for Christians, the cornerstone.
• The
Wall Street Journal takes a sympathetic view of Rep. Walter Jones’ proposal that the IRS permit churches and religious leaders to endorse political candidates without imperiling their tax exemption. Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice and the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance write to take strong exception.
Kissling’s is a letterhead organization with the sole purpose of countering the Church’s teaching on abortion and related life issues. It is more aptly described as anti-Catholic rather than Catholic.
Interfaith Alliance is part of a Democratic alliance trying to counter the influence of the nefarious “religious right.” So to suggest that they are nonpartisan is more than a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, consider the argument on its merits.
The Rev. Gaddy writes, “If the Jones bill is enacted into law, congregations all over America will be torn apart over partisan politics. Please let us continue to choose our houses of worship based on theology, not on party politics.”
Congregations will be torn apart only if their leaders are foolish enough to make party politics a condition of religious participation. Nothing in the Jones bill would require them to do that, but the constitutionally guaranteed free exercise of religion allows churches to do very foolish things.
The government has no competence — as in authority or wisdom —to regulate religion. In the words of the First Amendment, Congress shall “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
IRS rules, which are regulatory law under the authority of the Congress, clearly prohibit the free exercise of religion by tax-exempt churches that believe — wrongly, in my view — that their religious mission includes the endorsement of political candidates. I’m somewhat ambivalent about the Jones bill.
Existing IRS rules — despite the fuzzy line between endorsement and exercising other forms of political influence — serve as a modest check on the corruption of religion by political partisanship. But then, protecting religion from its own corruption is no part of the legitimate business of this government.
• “Defining deviancy down,” a fine phrase coined by the late Pat Moynihan, takes many forms. We increasingly witness the process of defining moderation down.
Ian Markham, dean of Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, takes me to task in
The Tablet for being so concerned about Muslim Jihadists whose purpose — repeatedly declared and lethally demonstrated — is to destroy the West.
He acknowledges that there are also extreme views on, as it were, the other side, noting the book by David Ray Griffin of Claremont Graduate School, published by John Knox Press,
Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11.
Griffin is in the company of radical revisionists who contend that the Twin Towers were destroyed by the United States in a conspiracy organized by the dark forces controlling George W. Bush. Markham writes, “Thousands of people in leftist organizations are being persuaded of this — in my view —implausible conspiracy theory.”
Markham, being a very moderate fellow, thinks the theory implausible, but wants it understood that that is only his personal view. He thus positions himself as a spokesman for the “serious center.”
He deplores my writings on Jihadism as “deeply insensitive pastorally” and declares, “I stand alongside my Muslim colleagues and students and challenge this culture of misunderstanding and suspicion.”
As it happens, Osama bin Laden and his colleagues are not in my pastoral charge, and when they say they are out to destroy the civilization to which I am devoted — and convincingly demonstrate that they mean it — the appropriate response is not pastoral sensitivity but prudent defense.
As for Mr. Markham’s colleagues and students, I have never said a word about them, assuming, as I do, that they are not Jihadists plotting to kill us. It is well known that Hartford Seminary is a center of moderation where one is perfectly free to believe that the Bush administration did not direct the attack of September 11.
• I once got into a lot of trouble when, writing on the judicial usurpation of politics in these pages, I said we should be concerned about the possibility that many Americans might one day conclude that the motto “God and country” has been changed to the question “God or country.”
Now comes an alarming finding from a poll by the Pew Research Center. At least it greatly alarms David Van Biema who, writing in
Time magazine, senses theocracy on the march.
Pew asked 820 self-identified Christians, “Do you think of yourself first as American or as Christian?” Forty-two percent answered “Christian first” and 48 percent answered “America first”; 7 percent didn’t answer.
Now “self-identified Christian” is not a terribly useful category, since that includes close to 90 percent of the population. One would like to know a little more about the level of their Christian belief and practice.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that 62 percent of those who described themselves as evangelicals said “Christian first,” while Catholics and oldline Protestants went 62 and 65 percent, respectively, for “American first.”
This might suggest that evangelicals are less prone to the idolatry of nationalism than are Catholics and oldline Protestants. Or, to put it differently, that evangelicals better understand that, in the long tradition of Christian fidelity, including martyrdom, allegiance to Christ of course takes priority over any other allegiance. But that, too, might be misleading.
The term evangelical, as it has come to be used in recent decades, denotes a specific faith commitment and, increasingly, a positioning of oneself in the ongoing culture wars.
By contrast, Catholic and Protestant (even if one specifies mainline Protestant) is often a religio-cultural identifier including many people who are just happen-to-be-by-background members.
In other words, if someone says he is an evangelical, he is probably saying what he himself believes and practices. If someone says he is a Catholic or a Presbyterian, he may simply be indicating the religious community into which he was born. (If evangelicalism is around in its present form fifty or a hundred years from now, there will no doubt be a lot of happen-to-be evangelicals.)
The pity in all this is that only 42 percent of those who identify themselves as Christian seem to understand the priority of a Christian’s allegiance to Christ and his Church. But, as I say, Mr. Van Biema finds that 42 percent figure cause for alarm.
He asks us to engage in a “thought experiment.” Would we not be alarmed if 42 percent of 820 Muslim-Americans, when asked, “Do you think of yourself first as American or as Muslim?” responded that they are “Muslims first.”
Well yes, some people would be alarmed because they know very little about Muslims and Islam and do not understand that of course a Muslim’s first allegiance is to Allah. But the symmetry Mr. Van Biema suggests in his thought experiment is profoundly misleading.
Muslims in this country are a small minority of no more than 2 percent, most of them relatively recent arrivals, and are associated with a religion in whose name, however illegitimately, war has been declared against America.
Quite understandably, many, if not most, Americans think that Muslim allegiance to America is at least a fair question.
Christians, on the other hand, are the overwhelming majority who share a Christian tradition, broadly defined, with those who settled the country, who devised its constitutional order, and who have over almost three centuries given definition to what it means to be an American.
It is perfectly understandable that Christians may think that they know what it means to be an American in a way that many or most Muslims may not know.
What Mr. Van Biema does not know, at least to judge by his essay in
Time, is the political, cultural, and religious reality of America, both past and present. He is clear enough, however, about the ordering of his own allegiances. He says he’s going to get himself an “American First” bumper sticker.
One may reasonably suppose that that means he is not a Christian or, if he happens to be a Christian, not a very serious Christian. Or perhaps he is just terribly confused.
• When, a little more than year ago, Brother Roger Schutz of the Taizé community was, at age 90, fatally stabbed, news stories appeared saying that he had years earlier surreptitiously “converted” to Catholicism from the Reformed Protestant communion to which he belonged.
Now Taizé has officially responded to those stories in a press release. “From a Protestant background, Brother Roger undertook a step that was without precedent since the Reformation: entering progressively into a full communion with the faith of the Catholic Church without a ‘conversion’ that would imply a break with his origins.”
In 1980, during a meeting in Rome in the presence of Pope John Paul II, Brother Roger said, “I have found my own identity as a Christian by reconciling within myself the faith of my origins with the mystery of the Catholic faith, without breaking fellowship with anyone.”
The Taizé statement ends with this: “Those who at all costs want the Christian denominations each to find their own identity in opposition to the others can naturally not grasp Brother Roger’s aims. He was a man of communion, and that is perhaps the most difficult thing for some people to understand.”
John Paul II apparently considered Brother Roger to be in full communion with the Catholic Church, and the pope is the final authority on such matters. It is not unprecedented, but it is very unusual, that one is received into full communion without a formal rite of reception.
One may reasonably assume that Brother Roger abjured, at least in his own mind, those parts of the Reformed tradition that preclude being in full communion with Rome.
When I was received into full communion, I said of my earlier Lutheranism, “Nothing that was good is rejected; all is fulfilled.” I expect that that is the way in which we ought to understand the case of Brother Roger. Most Catholics and others will continue to describe this as “conversion,” and that should not be a big problem.
The whole of the Christian life is, or should be, a continuing conversion to the fullness of Christ and his Church.
• Nobody would want to deny the charms of Barbados, although it is not the Institute for Regenerative Medicine (IRM) that usually comes to mind in that connection. IRM claims that it is making Barbados the “Embryonic Stem Cell Capital of the World.”
The institute imports parts of babies, mainly from Ukraine, who were aborted at six to twelve weeks, liquefies them into a baby puree, and injects the mix into customers, who pay $25,000 per shot. The procedure takes no more than an hour or two, and the website of IRM (www.regenmd.com) includes glowing testimonials of clients who claim relief from everything from arthritis to troubled bowels and poor skin texture. Erectile dysfunction, too.
Of course the morally scrupulous may be made uneasy by the procedure, but what’s the point of letting all those human body parts go to waste? The answer to that has never been self-evident to everyone. I note that Webster’s says that the word cannibalism is of Caribbean origin.
• “Few would argue there are direct parallels between the current assaults on liberals in academe and McCarthyism. Unlike the McCarthy era, most threats to academic freedom — real or perceived — do not, yet, involve the state.” Not yet.
A long special report in Britain’s leftward
Guardian depicts a grim picture in which American professors, and even grade school teachers, are being challenged for, among other things, comparing George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler and excoriating the Jewish lobby for its control of U.S. foreign policy. Some of these teachers have even received threatening emails!
Toward the end of the story, it is allowed that the American academy is liberal and that protests against liberal excesses come from only a handful of individuals. But the account concludes by quoting a professor who says, “There’s a pre-written script you have to follow and if you choose not to follow it, then there are consequences, so you become very self-conscious about what you say. . . . Everybody is looking over their shoulders.”
It sounds like McCarthyism to me. Although there is something to be said for professors being self-conscious about what they say.
• I have written before about R.S. Thomas, but Anthony Daniels writes about him better than I. This is from the New Criterion:
"But the tutelary literary spirit of modern North Wales is the great poet R.S. Thomas, who died aged eighty-seven in 2000. He was a strange figure, an Anglican priest who was a Welsh nationalist, fierce to the point of condoning violence and even murder, an angry man who half-believed in God without appearing to like Him very much, a lyric poet who had few illusions about the harshness of nature, a man who wrote his poetry in his mother-tongue, English, but sometimes refused to speak it to visitors who knew no Welsh (the great majority of them, after all), to pay them back for the persecution, or rather petty humiliations, that Welsh-speakers had suffered over the years, even though it was highly unlikely that any of them were personally responsible for those humiliations.
"He made generalizations about the English that, if he had made them about practically any other group, would have landed him in court on a charge of incitement to racial hatred, while he berated the Welsh for their insufficiently militant nationalism, supinely preferring their own individual material advancement and comfort to the cause. He was like an Old Testament prophet, who waxed exceedingly, though somewhat indiscriminately, wrathful. Humanity didn’t please him."
• Thomas could be affirmative, as they say, about life. There is this:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
But mainly, writes Daniels, there is the vulgarity and waste that enraged Thomas. “In a time of the deepest superficiality, if I may put it thus, he comes like a prophet crying in the wilderness.” He may well put it thus.
• Catherine de Hueck Doherty was a most remarkable woman who founded a community of laypeople and priests known as Madonna House. Their main place is in Combermere, Ontario, close to my childhood home, so I feel a special connection with them.
Fr. Robert Wild, who is postulator for Catherine’s cause (meaning he’s leading the effort to have her declared a saint), sends me an entry from her journal, dated May 3, 1939: “Off to Times Square to meet Dorothy Day for lunch. Went to Child’s. Had a lovely visit with her. Always consider her wonderful, more convinced than ever that she is a saint. What a joy to be with her. She shines with an inward light that no one can suppress. Her difficulties are as mine — mostly with the human beings and their blindness and self-love — and ability to put second things first.”
I confess that my difficulties as well are mostly with human beings. And especially with those who don’t put first things first.
• Gordon Wood again, this time in the
New York Review of Books, where he discusses recent literature on religion and the American founding, including Jon Meacham’s
American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.
Despite the current chatter about the threat of theocracy, Wood writes, “There is no religious establishment here and not much formal connection between religion and government; in fact, over the past generation there has been an almost obsessive concern to keep religion apart from the public culture and affairs of the state.”
Wood debunks — as so many others have, to limited effect in our public discourse — the notion that the First Amendment was intended to separate religion from public life.
Established religions continued in the states well into the nineteenth century. Religious tolerance was forced by religious pluralism. “The presence of many different sects within the same community slowly and begrudgingly compelled people into toleration.”
Wood takes sharp issue with the gist of Meacham’s argument that we can end our present confusions and conflicts by “recovering the sense and spirit of the Founding era.” The founding era, Wood contends, was very unlike our own.
He is also impatient with the constant appeals to “the separation of church and state,” the famous phrase in Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, which received secular sacralization, so to speak, in the Supreme Court’s Everson decision of 1947.
That decision “set in motion a series of ever more confusing decisions over the next sixty years as the Supreme Court struggled to maintain this wall of separation. The Court has labored to define what is permissible and what is impermissible in what has become an increasingly capricious relationship between church and state.”
The wall of separation was not the main point of Jefferson’s letter, and he intended it only as a temporary disposition until the realization of his hope that, as he wrote in 1822, “there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”
The separation of church and state, if one must use that phrase, is not the product of constitutional law or Jeffersonian deism but of the religious situation itself.
“The principal source of our separation of church and state was never enlightened rationalism, important as that is to us today, but rather growing realization by the various competing religious groups that it was better to neutralize the state in matters of religion than run the risk of one of their opponents gaining control of the government.”
As we must never tire of explaining, the “no establishment” provision of the First Amendment is entirely in the service of the “free exercise of religion.”
Wood’s instructive essay only indirectly addresses the very different circumstance today in which the lines of suspicion and hostility are less and less between competing religious groups and more and more between publicly assertive religion in response to publicly assertive secularism. But that is for another time.
• A while back I chided the Augustinians of Villanova University for insisting that people stand rather than kneel during the Mass.
A distinguished theologian writes to take me to task for not recognizing that the fathers there are the true traditionalists. He notes that in the patristic era and still today in the Orthodox Church, the practice is to stand, not kneel. “I bring this to your attention only to point out that it is kneeling and not standing which is a liturgical innovation in the West,” he writes.
True enough, and one might well wish that the Eucharist in the West were typically celebrated with the majesty and solemnity of the Divine Liturgy found among many Orthodox. For well over a millennium, however, liturgical reverence in the West has been associated with kneeling. Generations of piety, devotion, and catechesis have been significantly formed by that bodily gesture of adoration and prayer.
To speak of kneeling as an “innovation” is a clever academic point but, if I may be permitted to say so, suggests a certain contempt for the lived spiritual experience of Catholics beyond numbering over the centuries and still today.
As far as I know, the Augustinians of Villanova are of the Latin Rite. Kneeling, in the West, is now the tradition, and the insistence of some liturgists and pastors that everybody must stand is the innovation. The much-publicized battles over this question in some parishes and dioceses is a pastoral scandal created by an authoritarian clericalism that reflects a fundamental lack of respect for the lived experience and piety of the People of God — the very thing that, in other contexts, the innovators claim to champion.
• The socialist journal
New Politics has a special issue on religion. Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School is hopeful about the possibility of forming an alliance between religion and the left. While the religious right is dominant in this country, and the left can no longer count on Jews and Blacks, he sees promising developments in Asia and is heartened by the peace activism of a Buddhist group called Soka Gakkai.
In this country, he looks to organized labor and is encouraged by the Chicago-based Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. (Apart from government employees, about 7 percent of American workers belong to labor unions.)
Other contributors to the special issue of
New Politics are more skeptical about an alliance with religion, and some think it is as unlikely as it is bad. In his article, French philosopher Michael Onfray calls for a revival of the work of the seventeenth century atheist priest and philosopher Jean Meslier, who, like Onfray, was militantly anti-Christian.
The concluding essay by Chris Rhoades Dykema says religion is “essentially male-dominant, ascetic, misogynist, and anti-democratic.” He places his hope in “changing family structure” that leads inevitably to further secularization and makes religion a nonissue. I don’t know whether
New Politics is read by the folks at the religion outreach office of the Democratic National Committee.
• It is a year since Rome’s Congregation for Education issued the instruction that men with “deep-seated” homosexual tendencies should not be admitted to seminary or ordained to priesthood.
In “Homosexuality and Religious Life,” James Arbor, who has been a professed religious for forty years, makes a vigorous argument that the same rule should apply to religious communities.
Writing in
The Priest, which is published by Our Sunday Visitor, he says, “Although there are celibate and chaste homosexuals in almost every congregation who have served the Church in a variety of ways, I believe that it is unjust to invite a man who is sexually attracted to men into an all-male environment or a woman who is sexually attracted to women into an all-female environment.
"It is unjust to the individual and to the religious community. It puts the individual in grave danger of personal moral and spiritual collapse and it risks profoundly corrupting the dynamics and life of the religious community.”
He goes on to detail the ways in which homosexual attractions lead to cliques, patterns of favoritism, and deep-seated resentments that undermine community life. His final line is this: “Once the laity becomes convinced that a community is simply a gay commune, the effective evangelical witness of that community comes to an end.”
Arbor’s argument deserves careful reading. As for the instruction of last November 29, it is not easy to assess its influence. Some influential commentators, with Jesuits conspicuous among them, have publicly and explicitly rejected the instruction. With few exceptions, bishops have been silent. It is possible that Rome will address the question again when the Congregation for Education has finished working through the reports from the recent visitation of U.S. seminaries.
• Entertainment worship is big business. There is, unsurprisingly, even a slick publication called Church Production Magazine. A big advertiser is “EasyWorship Multimedia Software.” Happy are they who are at ease in Zion, as the prophet did not say. And an article on “The Fundamentals of Prosumer Video Camera Operation.”
One can imagine what the early-twentieth-century authors of The Fundamentals might think. The lead piece is on Hope Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. “If we expect to reach our culture we must keep up with them technically. Our neighbors and friends who are far from God are used to surround-sound movies in HD and state of the art lighting at live concerts and shows they attend.
"We want our congregation to bring their friends and not have them turned off because we seem antiquated in our methodology. I would beg the leadership not to skimp in the area of A/V equipment.” One can just hear a friend or neighbor saying, “Almost I would be a Christian, but that A/V equipment is so 2004.”
The writer admits that the best in A/V and lighting is costly, even extravagant. “It is as extravagant as the perfume that was poured on our Lord’s feet and Jesus said of her, ‘Wherever the Good News is preached throughout the world, this woman’s deed will be talked about in her memory’ (Matthew 26:13). Don’t be frivolous, but why not be extravagant for God? He deserves our best.”
Keeping God happy “technically” cannot be done on the cheap. ZFX is big in the entertainment worship industry and “has proudly assisted in the awe-inspiring finale of many passion plays with the ascension of Jesus to Heaven. We have also added flying angels to numerous Living Christmas Trees. . . . Let us assist you in retelling the greatest story ever told.”
You say these people are sincere, and I regret to say you’re right. But it’s impressive. Consider what ZFX did for Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. “We added two flying angels that descended from the ceiling high above. . . . The angels needed 30 feet of lift to travel the full length of the flying tracks. This was not possible with the flying equipment provided by their previous vendor.”
For the Annunciation, the director “wanted Gabriel to continually face Mary as he sang to her and moved around the stage. ZFX custom built a radio controlled apparatus that allowed him to rotate and face any direction during his flight.” The audience cheered. And the angels wept.
• Is neoconservatism Jewish? There is no doubt that the movement, if that is what it is, is largely composed of Jewish liberals who were, in Irving Kristol’s phrase, mugged by reality.
In any event, that is the focus of Murray Friedman’s
The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, reviewed by Wilfred McClay in
Commentary. Becoming a neoconservative meant revolting against tribal norms.
McClay writes: “There is nothing exclusively Jewish about this experience, either. But for individual Jews, especially those still likely to perceive themselves as marginal in American culture, such a revolt could not help being especially daunting.
"It meant challenging not only the status quo within the safe havens of academia, where many had congregated, but also the near-universal assumptions of American Jewish life itself, assumptions that had come to be seen, however wrongly, as the essence of Jewish identity.
"Even the espousal of anticommunism, not to mention an openly favorable view of capitalism, carried a special price for Jews, given the intensity with which the socialist ideal was exalted in American Jewish thought. So, too, given the strong American Jewish identification with the cause of civil rights, did the willingness to break from liberal ranks on issues of race.
"And so did the willingness to make common cause with conservative Christians in promoting a post-secular, post-separationist ethos that to secular liberal Jews has seemed nothing short of madness.
"Such conclusions have not been arrived at easily, and the existential weight entailed in acting on one’s ‘second thoughts’ is a crucial part of the story. If there is anything Friedman’s book demonstrates conclusively, it is the impossibility at this point of writing a definitive history of the neoconservative disposition. That is, in part, because it is still so visibly in motion.
"But as is true of so many characteristically American phenomena, it also defies simple categories of cultural analysis. Indeed, the difficulty of either completely affirming or completely denying the specifically Jewish character of neoconservatism may turn out to be one of its greatest assets —and another sign of its thoroughgoing Americanness.”
• A while back I commented with great appreciation on a Christmas card depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary comforting Eve. I mentioned that it was a marvelous and beautifully orthodox novum in the tradition of Christian art and poetry. Readers have been writing here and also to the sisters who produced the card wanting to buy copies.
The picture on the card is by the youngest and the poem by the oldest sister of the community. The Abbess, Mother Gail Fitzpatrick, tells me they don’t sell the card. But here’s an idea (not suggested by Mother Gail): Make a generous donation and you might get on their Christmas card list. The address is Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, 8400 Abbey Hill Road, Dubuque, Iowa 52003.
• We all have to cope with people who are eager to let you know how very accomplished or influential they are. This is occasioned by nobody in particular, but egregious claims to importance, and displays of self-importance, regularly bring to mind what is perhaps my favorite Chesterton poem, “The Donkey.” (It is also a needed reminder for each of us in particular.)
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/10/2006 18.34]