Huh. I just had a thought. A Thought, if I be flamboyant enough to capitalize it. I've been unpacking after a tiring separation from my luggage for a day, resulting in me just getting it a little while ago.

In the background is Vienna Teng's oddly exultant "Augustine," which, as I mentioned earlier, had been the occasion for my and Mike's speaking to her a little after her concert in Milwaukee last month. The lyrics led me to think something about the phenomenon of undergoing a spiritual crisis – something that we do more than once in our lives. In the great saints and spiritual masters – as we see stetched out over a decade in Augustine himself, as related in his amazing Confessions – such spiritual crises end not in the defeat of faith, hope or love, but in sometimes astonishing transformations in grace. "The Dark Night of the Soul" and "the silence of God" are phenomena that one finds throughout spiritual experience, as far back as the Jewish prophets themselves.

And then here was my Thought: spiritual literature and scholarship has explored this "Dark Night" experience of feeling only an absence of God, and it is pretty sensibly understood, I think, by those wise in spiritual matters. But it just struck me that that is always dealt with in an individualistic manner: of speaking of God as interacting with an individual person for their spiritual benefit. What if, I suddenly thought, you could look at this as a social phenomenon as well? We speak of Modernity as a time of the fading of religion and highly-developed spirituality in the face of Secularistic philosophical movements like the European Enlightenment. But what if you could look this experience as a social or corporate experience of something similar to the "Dark Night" experience? I frequently speak in my Theology classes of the development of spiritual sensibilities on a corporate level: of the individual, almost childlike, spiritual encounter with God in the revelation to Abraham; of the development in Moses of the giving of the Law to the people of Israel, like a child gaining rules and chores as part of their development; and of the development after the revelation in Christ and Pentecost to young adulthood, of being sent out into the world with your own responsibilities for transforming it.

Well, I thought, what if one looked at Modernity and its challenges to faith as akin, on a societal level, to the individual experience of the "dark night of the soul" and that experience of the absence of God, with all its potential threats and benefits to spiritual growth? I've never heard an analysis of this sort. While I see obvious problems with it – it certainly indulges in generalization, of course – I still wonder whether such an exploration might be an interesting exercise in a kind of spiritual historiography. I've always found compelling the analogy that God relates to humanity through history like a parent or teacher, back since I found that argument or observation in Irenaeus of Lyon and his explanation of why God's approach to Israel or the Church or humanity seems to change and develop through history. On a personal level, the "Dark Night" experience is so critical for developing to a deeper level in faith, so why not the possibility of exploring that possibility on a wider, corporate level, too?

(Now if only it didn't take half an hour to type out an idea like that....)

Usually, I find that I'm a bit suspicious of pieces of writing that speak a little too easily or universally about cultural symbols of a generation. I tend to favour complexity over simplicity in any kind of analysis, just as a matter of course, and of trying to be realistic about anything in a given moment in history. If I'm being quick in that way, myself, I am usually painfully aware of it, although it is inevitable, especially in teaching, that one has to simplify, especially the more basic the student. One of my earliest lessons in the power of the press was a Chicago Sun-Times writer doing such an article about me and my friends my freshman year in college, which turned out to be a set-up and hatchet job, using us to fill-in-the-blanks of an essay he wanted to write about the Decline and Fall of things since his own college days.

That said, I still had to acknowledge that this writer was dead-on about the ubiquitous nature of these two symbols of my childhood. My family's copy of Thriller was one of the most-played LPs in our collection, and I can remember the central role that the poster of Farrah Fawcett took in my friend Teddy's game room, displayed like an icon for the liturgy of adolescent sexuality. These things were everywhere, and unparalleled among their kind: nothing was as big as either of them, or has been since, that I'm aware of. So as far as that goes, this article struck a nerve, although I'm not so sure that I'm ready to acknowledge some of his other sweeping statements about Generation X.

2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day
Jun 26, 4:30 AM (ET)

By TED ANTHONY

A record-shattering vinyl album and its moonwalking maestro. A paper poster of a golden-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit that was gossamer and clingy in all the right places.

It all seems so quaint now, the fragmented dream memories of a fleeting micro-era that began with words like "bicentennial" and "pet rock" and ended with MTV, Atari and absurdly thin cans of super-hold mousse.

The man-child named Michael Jackson and the luminous girl known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors jumped into our consciousness at a plastic moment in American culture - a time when the celebrity juggernaut we know today was still in diapers. When they departed Thursday, just a few hours and a few miles apart, they left an entire generation - a very strange generation indeed - without two of its defining figures.

"These people were on our lunchboxes," said Gary Giovannetti, 38, a manager at HBO who grew up on Long Island awash in Farrah and MJ iconography. "This," he said, "is the moment when Generation X realizes they're grown up."

( Read more... )

Huh. So they finally did it. I think this was originally scheduled for 2006, if I recall correctly, as it had just been announced when I was buying an old-style TV set in 1997, making me consider that I was investing in technology scheduled for obsolescence. But, given that I have cable, which I use almost exclusively for movies and perhaps three television shows I'll keep an eye on, I would have been Joe Clueless over this date, and not gotten around to getting a conversion box – I hadn't seen any advertisement indicating that this was about to happen. But I do find it simply kind of fascinating purely with regard to the history of technology to see a whole technology retired in such an organized way. Thus the jotting-down of this article here.

Friday marks final signoff for analog TV service
Jun 12, 10:59 AM (ET)

By PETER SVENSSON

NEW YORK (AP) - TV stations across the U.S. started cutting their analog signals Friday morning, ending a 60-year run for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.

The Federal Communications Commission put 4,000 operators on standby for calls from confused viewers, and set up demonstration centers in several cities. Volunteer groups and local government agencies were helping elderly viewers set up digital converter boxes that keep older TVs functioning. Any set hooked up to cable or a satellite dish is unaffected.

"When you're alone like me, that's my partner," Patricia Bruchalski, 82, said about her TV.

Bruchalski, a pianist and former opera singer who lives in Brooklyn Park, Md., got assistance Thursday from Anne Arundel County's Department of Aging and Disabilities and a community organization called Partners in Care. After her converter box was installed, Bruchalski marveled that digital broadcasts seemed clearer and gave her more channels - about 15 instead of the three she was used to.

"You're going to be up all night watching TV now," volunteer installer Rick Ebling told her.

Around 15 percent of U.S. households don't have satellite or cable, and they tend to be poorer. Nielsen Co. said minority households were less likely to be prepared for Friday's analog shutdown, as were households consisting of people under age 35.

A survey sponsored by broadcasters showed that Americans are well aware of the switch, thanks to two years of advertising about it. But many people simply procrastinated.

( Read more... )

This morning over breakfast I idly turned on the television, which I tend to leave tuned to Turner Classic Movies. I got wrapped up in The Three Comrades, which I had heard of somewhere. It's really quite striking for a 1938 movie and some of sensibilities and censorship of film at that time. The screenplay turns out to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald effort, co-written with someone named Edward E. Paramore Jr., and adapted from the Erich Maria Remarque novel of the same name, with the protagonist's name changed in honour of the author. It's set in the 1920s, and so it strikes strong chords in my imagination with the free reading I've been doing in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The final shot is somewhere between profound and Hollywood schmaltzy, indicating how anyone who loves inevitably marches through life accompanied by the ghosts of those they've lost.

My imagination and dreams have been a strange blend of that and my dissertation over the last several days: a disharmonious clash of the gracious blending of people's spiritual gifts from my writing on charisms, and a stomach-churning frustration at the unimpeded Nazi seizing of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. I've been particularly struck, over and over, by the blatant murder of truth by the Nazis, and the difficulty that comes with trying to deal with anyone – whether on a personal or a political level – who has either no commitment to dealing truthfully, or, lacking that, who has no societal pressure upon them to be truthful. Hitler murdered truth as a stepping-stone to murdering people, and the thing that has been so stomach-churning was to see how repeatedly he could have been stopped if only people had had greater access to the truth of what was going on. It's particularly tragic to see how ably he was able to manipulate the people and governments of the West because of their desperate desire for peace after their horrific experiences of the First World War. That the desire for peace should have contributed so mightily to the violence of Nazi oppression and of the world's greatest war has to be one of the chief ironies of human history. It's brought home to me over the last few days just how dependent democracy's stability is upon a free press, and just how significant are the threats we've seen in our own day to that freedom, whether Bush administration manipulation of the press through faked news stories on the political Right, or whether by the dogmatic uniformity often characteristic of a press culture dominated by the political Left. And that's to say nothing of the decline of real reporting in favour of info-tainment and the substituting of stories about current movies, or Dancing With The Stars and American Idol results in place of real news. I'm tempted to favour a law – technical violation of the First Amendment or not – that would forbid television news from reporting on current movies and actors and such as though these were truly the responsibilities of a democratic nation.

So, in contrast to what I just said, back to the movie. (The above shouldn't be construed to mean that I don't think film and art isn't important: it's just that I don't think that it's a matter for the press – who do have more significant responsibilities to America, whether or not those are actually legal.) Watching a movie from the 1930s this morning, I'm struck by how much I wish I could talk to any of my grandparents right now: to ask about the sensibilities of film in their time. For lots of us, our vision of earlier times will largely come from movies. This, of course, isn't quite accurate, given that film reflects the politics and mores of their time and place. From film, one might think that swearing in the English language, for example, was invented by Clark Gable's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." in Gone With The Wind, but really didn't catch on until the 1960s. I found myself wanting to ask one of my grandparents about what differences they were conscious of between the world of film and art back in the Thirties, and their lived reality. I suppose that some of this has been rattling around in my head since re-reading Thomas Merton's The Seven-Storey Mountain the other month, most of which was set in the 1930s, and which was significantly concerned with the arts, although this particular matter didn't come up. I can extrapolate some differences, but it's not the same as being able to ask someone who was there. And all my family that I might have asked are now dead. That's just one more variation of the tragedy of aging in generations: that there are always things we will have wished to have asked those older than us, that we never thought of at the time. Fr. Sullivan was 16 in 1938: perhaps I'll think to ask this as a sidebar when I next interview him.

Here's an interesting article I spotted on Newsweek's website. I watch curiously to see whether a moderate, democratic culture can develop within the Islamic world, or whether its own cultural and theological heritage will ultimately prove incompatible with that possibility. I'm not willing to bet the farm either way, especially as I have come to realize since the failure of American post-Soviet experience with Russia that democracy is a lot more difficult a reality than Americans think. We've been blessed to have had our own experiment in democracy take root and get settled, and now we "coast" on it. But Aaron Burr wasn't completely around the bend in thinking he could make himself into an American Napolean: our start was much shakier than we typically remember, since Americans tend to too easily accept their own mythology regarding their national origins, and to look at the rise of our government in "Manifest Destiny" terms of a sort of inevitability to the whole process. George Bush forgot even the lesson of Russia and far too glibly assumed we could transplant democracy in Iraq. So, with regard to stories like this one, I try to keep my eyes open and see what possibilities are presenting themselves around the world.

E Pluribis Islam?
The fragile promise of Muslim diversity.
Irshad Manji
Newsweek Web Exclusive

At a recent event in India, I asked Pakistan's former president, Pervez Musharraf, whether he would support his country's tireless human-rights activists. He invited me to pose a different question. I didn't.

"Sit down!" the retired Army general then ordered.

Things probably won't get that tense when Pakistan's current president, Asif Ali Zardari, visits Barack Obama next week. But maybe they should, given the Taliban's growing reach and Zardari's plunging credibility. The two presidents will be joined by a third, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a religious "moderate" who routinely barters away the rights of women and minorities to warlords and mullahs.

As a reform-minded Muslim, I admit that these guys make the notion of diversity in my faith look laughable. Their track records underscore why we have to venture beyond geopolitical hotspots to fathom the future of progressive Islam.

( Read more... )

Sunday at the Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Erynn was rather spectacular. It wasn't that either of us found him or even his period or style to be a new top-flight favourite, but simply that Erynn turned out to be a fabulous museum partner: that is, we moved at about the same speed through the exhibit and the conversation was just the right mix of really paying attention to the art and then tying it back to Everything Else. My theory is that you tend to have Fast Museum People who want to zoom through everything, eyeball it, and just get a sense of the whole, and that you have Slow Museum People, who want to look at everything, read the captions, stop and think about it as you go along, and even double back for second looks and comparisons. I knew that I was the latter, and that when I've been with the former that they find Slow Museum People to be excruciating. Erynn turned out to have pretty much the same pace and have as much to say, which makes for good company in something like this.

We headed down to the Museum in the early afternoon as she kept me alternately laughing and cringing with the story of her telling off Persistent Drunk Guy when she was out dancing the night before with friends, which, I suppose, sounded extra horrific to me just because guys generally don't have to deal with that kind of being hit-on. We stashed our coats and such in the locker room and took a few minutes to start merging into the crowd at the exhibition, with me probably being too worried about watching out whether she was going to be Fast Museum Person and get impatient with me. Once that became a non-issue, we found ourselves just getting into the paintings themselves, although I took a minute to enthuse when she mentioned that she would be taking an Art History course next semester. I mentioned both about how much that study had added to my own work, and also speculated that that more specific familiarity with the sweep of art history would give her a different eye behind the camera, empowering her in being attentive to aspects of people that you just cannot see unless you're more sensitive to how other people, elsewhere and elsewhen, have pictured people.

There seemed to be a mix of roughly chronological and thematic organizations to the whole exhibit, and it was some of his youthful stuff that got us first talking a little more intensely, where there was a bit of bawdy or moral themes. Allegory of the Five Senses got us picking up where our conversation had ended last week, on just starting to notice the different concepts of beauty in different cultures or times. Although the comments by the picture noted that this was a common motif for a moral lesson about indulging the senses, this particular painting didn't seem to be engaging in quite so stark or obvious a moralizing task. Similarly, Youth Embracing A Young Woman, with Lievens's young painter friend Rembrandt apparently acting as the male model for the work, also presented us with a similar picture of beauty and here, also, without any overt moral statement in the text. In fact, I thought there was a real tenderness in the Young Woman's hand-holding with the Youth that didn't make the picture necessarily seem one about the temptations of 17th century Dutch clubbing. We were also struck by how un-youthful these "youths" seemed to us, and that got us murmuring back and forth a bit about what might have been considered youth at the time, in contrast to our own time and culture's tendency to try to perpetuate youth, both for something useful like extended educational opportunities, but also for less attractive reasons, like the inevitably-doomed-to-fail cult of youth we have today.

Up until that point, it had been more the technical stuff that had been grabbing our attention: the way he captured like on metal, gems or buttons, or on the brocade of a rich piece of clothing, or perhaps the authentically diaphanous look to a woman's headscarf. We both got taken right back into that sort of thing and away from the question of youth or beauty by a large Still Life With Books that we both found oddly electrifying, with the both of us staring at the same corner and commenting on the same details: the light on the winecup, on the golden paten holding the bread, with its eucharistic themes. This was one of several Lievens paintings in the show that had formerly been attributed to Rembrandt, and it was strangely compelling for such an ordinary subject.

This was the best scan of the painting that I could find online, but most of these copies of the paintings don't do the delicate and precise uses of colour justice at all. In fact, in reading an Amazon review of the show's catalogue, that was one reviewer's complaint about the text: that the quality of the shots left much to be desired. This is particularly unfortunate in a show whose principle task is supposed to be the revival of the reputation of a painter who was unfairly diminished next to that of his friend and collaborator, Rembrandt. So we stood there peering at the detail work on this particular painting for a bit, while I kept an eye out for the attendants, who were awfully skittish about anyone who was getting too close to the paintings.

Another painting that caused us to pause and talk for a time was Samson and Delilah, which was near another Old Testament femme fatale in a painting of Bathsheba Receiving David's Letter, and which brought us back to the cultural concept of beauty. Too look at a 17th Century blonde, Dutch Bathsheba, well-fed and well-off in the vision of that culture was to reimagine the story in a way that I never had. This got us talking a bit, too, about re-conceiving the stories of the Bible in your own ethnic and cultural vision. You sometimes hear people giving paintings like this a lot of flack nowadays, reading back 20th century racism into older art at the sight of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus, while at the same time glowing with approval should they observe a red-cloaked Masai warrior Jesus. The first is racism, the second, cultural appropriation. I find this more than a bit irritating in that it's simply bad history to export more recent history and to superimpose it upon the past, although I would be the first one to raise an eyebrow at that blonde, blue-eyed Jesus in a piece of art from our post-20th Century context. Now, particularly with contemporary concern to portray Jesus's historical and Jewish context accurately, and in light of Modern racism, such a European cultural appropriation of the Incarnation just simply has too many political hurdles to overcome, and would likely lose whatever honest artistic attempt might be being made into suspicion. So to look at this 17th Century Dutch appropriation and adaptation of an Old Testament story, innocent of at least our later Modern issues, was a bit of a mind-stretching moment. Erynn got to talking here about working on both sides of the camera, both in trying to take advantage of certain particular characteristics in someone, and having capitalized on her own look, which has been taken for virtually everything on the planet. I finally conceded some of the last, not having seen earlier how she could be taken to be Asian, for example, but seeing how, in presentation or context, she really had a distinct ability to look like our whole world. In light of Rembrandt posing for a number of paintings thus far, we got to talking about how a conscientious model can really be a collaborative artist working with a painter or a photographer, although she admitted that that was probably a minority concept among models in our contemporary modeling industry. I hadn't really thought of it in that way before. Knowing my own experiences in the recording studio, and what a creative process making a recording of a song is, and how it's an experience shared with the writer, the band, and the engineers and even the crew, gave me a window into imagining how much of the art we were surrounded by – and all the rest I'd ever seen – might have a creative part of so many other people's stories, beyond whoever's name was on the work.

We stepped into the next room and I was flabbergasted. This section was devoted to portraiture, and I could scarcely believe that these pieces were done by the same man whose work I had been examining up to this point. As we went on, we found in the commentary that this was something that had been noted about Lievens's work, and maybe even been a complaint: that there did not seem to be one particular style that was his. Instead, he adopted a variety of styles, depending upon his intent. The living realism of his portraits took me by surprise.



As we looked at these, Erynn and I talked some of the differences between "raw" photography and the ability to "Photoshop" pictures, debating quietly which of these two that the art of painting was more like, even with the obvious and more Photoshop-like control that a painter exercises over the execution of their image. Nevertheless, despite that control, there was still the need in painting to "capture" the person, to somehow bring together that combination of technique and vision that in some way makes the difference between a great portrait and just an ordinary picture of someone. She was just as much at a loss to try to explain that difference as I was, though I certainly can tell when I've captured something of that sort: more rare, precise and exciting as it is.

The next section of the exhibition had more pictures of a sacred or moral sort, illustrative instead of portraiture. Nothing here much grabbed my attention or imagination. The Lamentation of Christ was more interesting to me in simply layout and execution than really grabbing me for its ability to capture the mood after the crucifixion of Jesus. It nowhere near affected me as much as Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà that I saw with Erik in Florence in 2006, or as much as Michelangelo's St. Peter's Pietà. Somewhat more interesting was Lievens's Christ on the Cross, painted, if I recall correctly, in competition with a similar piece by Rembrandt for a commission. Erynn picked up on something Lievens was doing with the light in this piece that I hadn't noticed, drawing my attention to the light in the upper left of the painting. She speculated on this for a moment before asking me what I thought it might mean. Once she got my attention on it, I thought that it was more likely that this was a fairly standard convention for such a scene – that this was Lievens's attempt at symbolizing the presence of God The Father in the crucifixion: a light "from above" that was mirrored by the light around Jesus's head, as sort of a more naturalistic "halo" in the scene, where this light in both locations indicated the shared divinity of Father and Son. I compared it to that striking shot in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ where, after Jesus's death, the camera suddenly shifts to an angle unprecedented and surprising in the film, that "God's eye" view looking downward upon the scene of the crucifixion, where a first drop of rain falls, tear-like, from that viewpoint onto the scene below.

With this painting, as with many others throughout the exhibition, there was next to the Lievens piece a small print of a similar Rembrandt piece, often done in competition with one another over commissions, or simply just riffing off of one another's ideas. Unlike this Lievens crucifixion scene, where Jesus has already died and been stabbed in the side, Rembrandt's painting shows Jesus still with his eyes open, and his face animated by the pains of the Passion. Erynn put her finger on a commonality running through all these comparisons which I hadn't noticed: the Rembrandt pieces were all more animated. Their emotions and actions were all more overt, which might be a better way of saying what she was noticing than just to call them more "animated." Once they were placed side-by-side, she consistently found the Rembrandts less appealing because of their comparative lack of subtlety. There was a greater sense of "playing to the crowd" in them, of a drama slipping toward melodrama, and I found myself agreeing with her. I made the comparison to the difference between Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's novel itself (which, to my dismay, she had never read). Wherever Tolkien is subtle and builds tension or meaning slowly or delicately, Jackson is content to shout BOO! Some of those adaptation decisions might have to do with the limits and pacing of film compared to that of a novel, but oftentimes it's just a cheapening. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that Rembrandt was consciously "pandering to the crowd," but once Erynn made her case, it became harder not to make such comparisons in favour of Lievens as we went along.

A little later we found ourselves sitting for some time in front of the nearly eight-foot high canvas of The Sacrifice of Issac. I think that this was another fairly recent discovery or identification as Lievens's work. I believe it sold in 1996 for just under $22,000, so it is strange to think of an Old Master that I could have conceivably purchased, though I have to wonder how I would arrange my living room around it had I done so. This small copy of the painting is the only online image that I could find that reasonably came close to the colours as we saw them sitting there, and to the crispness of the image. Larger images online were strangely dull, amounting to a horrible distortion of the painting. The first thing that we found ourselves commenting upon or drawn to was simply the colour of Abraham's robe: a rich burgundy that we both found attractive.

I razzed her briefly when she asked for a reminder of the story – "That was in one of the first lessons in my class!" – forgetting, for the moment, that that was true of my Intro course and not of the Theology Through The Centuries course she took with me last spring. Mercifully, however, she didn't pick up on that, either, as I moved on to the story itself, or otherwise I would have been very thoroughly double-razzed in retaliation. But once I refreshed her memory about the story of the so-called sacrifice of Isaac, since it never actually happened, we spun off from the story itself, getting all intertextual. I talked about the symmetry that Christians get from the story, of how Abraham's faith and willingness to even offer on the Mountains of Moriah his only son to the mysterious God who spoke to him would be answered in turn by God's offering of Jesus for humanity on those same mountains centuries later when the city of Jerusalem now occupied them. I also mentioned the seeming barbarousness of the Jewish story, of how that had been highlighted for me when I was an undergraduate, reading a short story included with Goodbye, Columbus in a collection by Phillip Roth, and the impact this vision of Abraham through secularizing Jewish-American eyes had on me, in the way that it brought to the fore the need to read the biblical text with sympathetic, historically-informed eyes, and not to subject it to my own contemporary prejudices. We stared into the painting, finding ourselves taken with the sharp, dynamic character of his face, and the surprising – virtually unprecedented, from what we had seen – splash of colour in this one, with rare blues as part of a rainbow sunset or sunrise on the horizon in the background, wondering if this could be an allusion to the covenant with Noah. Again we looked at a print of a parallel Rembrandt text, and Erynn firmed up her thesis in comparing the two.

We began to speed up a bit toward the end. My Mom and aunts and uncle had warned me the night before that the exhibition was a long one, and it was even longer than I had thought from looking ahead, as there was more rooms to it than I had been able to see from earlier vantage points. As we got toward the end, I asked her what had been the piece that had stood out or grabbed her the most. She got a thoughtful, weighing sort of look on her face and lead me back through the exhibit, musing on The Sacrifice of Isaac and Samson and Delilah briefly, but pretty quickly settling on, and leading me straight to the Still Life With Books. I was surprised, in seeing that her choice was such a technical-seeming one, while we were mostly surrounded by narrative and portraiture, but I certainly sympathized insofar as something in the work had leapt out at me, too. Naturally, she turned the question or challenge right back at me, as I knew she would, though I slightly dreaded it, because I wasn't sure how I was going to answer. As I said, I too had loved something about the Still Life With Books, but I went back deeper into the show, eyeballing some of the portraits, and thinking through a few of the ones we had especially talked about, but I settled on The Penitent Magdalene as my choice, though in way I'm not even sure if I chose correctly. But that one had had us stop for a while, as I was so struck by such a different take on Magdalene. With the long history of how Mary Magdalene had been conflated with other figures in the New Testament, particularly the unnamed penitent woman who anointed Jesus or the woman caught in adultery, Magdalene has gained an importance in the history of Christian art – and presumably in Christian devotion – that is quite distinct from her historical significance. I mentioned this to Erynn when we had originally looked at the painting, for which I could only find this tiny copy online, and spoke of the way she is usually portrayed in art, with something of the flamboyance of one flaunting her beauty, so as to identify the character with this conflated/fictional past. Oftentimes she's stunning (as she is in The Lamentation of Christ, which we saw just a little farther on, presuming that the dazzling blonde woman is supposed to be her), and I first brought up Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in this context, with its full use of this tradition of so treating Mary Magdalene, with Monica Bellucci cast in the role. What so struck me here was to see such a different version of this Magdalene: elderly, weathered, worn and poor – a sort of vision of her as one living a monastic discipline in later life. Here she is, as an image, unaffected and lacking the usual accoutrements of the temptress, utterly human, with a life no visibly different than anyone else's, other than that which we know to be hers by virtue of her story. It was a new vision of her, making me look at the story – both historical and otherwise – with new eyes and imagination, and that, I figured, made it in some ways the work that had hit me the hardest. It might be technically or visually one of the more unremarkable, but it certainly grabbed me as an exercise of the painter's spiritual imagination.

One thing we noticed in the last few rooms, even though we were moving at a faster pace was this portrait, identified as another self-portrait of Lievens, but here showing him in his 40s, less fleshy and youthful than the striking self-portrait that, in my set of portraits above, is the middle one in the bottom row of three, in glowing browns. Here is where Erynn and I made our significant contribution to art history, should anyone ever know of it: comparing this self-portrait to the one above (which we had in the brochures in our hands), we noticed that in this mid-life self-portrait, not only has Lievens lost some of the youthful roundness to his face, but he has also lost the deep brown of his eyes in his 20s, as in this portrait they were now a deep blue. So, the experts may have identified these two paintings as self-portraits by the painter, but Erynn and I spotted this oddity, exchanged a wry glance, and quietly concluded that something in that story has got to give.

We headed out the door as they were shutting the place down, laughing about some story one of us had told the other, and decided as we crossed the footbridge over to Wisconsin Avenue to go ahead and grab dinner. I made a few suggestions, and she opted for Hotel Metro, seeming to be most intrigued by my enthusiastic descriptions of the apple pie and cinnamon ice cream dessert I favour there, though neither of us ended up opting for that. I had never seen the place so quiet as it was, though I was usually there when there was a lot of resting there by the clubbing crowd on late nights and not at a little after 5pm on a Sunday. She grabbed some kind of gumbo they were offering with alligator, apparently, and slipped me a bite of that so that I could add another strange and odd item on my list of things eaten. I settled into a pork tenderloin, and took my time through that, declining dessert while she grabbed their tiramisu.

And so we just had a lot of random dinner conversation, starting with the discovery that she had no idea where we were. I have pretty much concluded that there's two kinds of people: people who get directions and always know where they are, and people who do not. My Mom is the former, and my Dad the latter, and mercifully I inherited my Mom's talent here. Erynn was the other sort, and so I was amazed by the fact that she was completely lost after we had walked all of one block of north of Wisconsin Avenue, which is the straight drag directly from campus to the Art Museum. That got us talking about personality traits, I think, about things like Meiers-Briggs exams in the such, and we discovered when she was talking about how much she had enjoyed some down time when her roommates were out of the apartment that we were both extroverts who needed a lot of time to themselves, and how it had been a bit of a surprise to even discover that that was a category that made sense. I had always thought of myself as an introvert until I first took the MB for a class and had my results explained to me. Her upcoming competition at the Duke Invitational got us talking about a variety of schools and the huge choice of picking just one: I think Duke had been one of the schools that had sent her recruitment letters for undergrad – along with Harvard, Notre Dame and other impressive names – and I talked about how I'd almost gone to Duke for my Master's, and then opted for Notre Dame, and why I wish she could have experienced what makes ND distinct, although I had to say I was happy to have met her at Marquette. It's utterly unpredictable, the chain of consequences, of meetings and friendships and opportunities that come from picking one school instead of another. And it's really almost beside the point to worry about that decision in that all of those particulars are utterly beyond our foresight and calculation. My sibs wouldn't have met their spouses had they not gone to the University of Illinois, either meeting there like Leslie and Jim, or having their lives start on a particular course, like Joe then meeting Daniele. All the kids – their sheer existence and chance for it – are consequent to that. So that sort of conversation is always a bit head-spinning. But that was the kind of thing that made the whole afternoon fun: the combination in conversation of her offering comments that completely made sense for her to say, from what I knew of her, and the completely surprising insights that took me unprepared and made me look at the art, or at a story, differently than I would have on my own. Good times.

A few of the last minutes of conversation over at Dan and Amy's has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. I don't remember how either point came up, whether they actually flowed from the conversation at that point, or whether they were the sort of things that came from some new thought or free association that popped into someone's head. Amy mentioned praying the office to me, which surprised me as I didn't know that she or Dan had ever done, or even heard of, the Liturgy of the Hours. I was probably thinking of it a lot more of late just from my reading in Thomas Merton, which very well might have been how the subject came up. Praying that liturgy throughout the day is a context to all of Merton's thinking that a number of people fail to recognize, or at least give sufficient weight to its effect, which is easy if you've never sunk into that rhythm at a monastery.

Lent this year has, for me, been an occasion of some meager recollection of that spirituality, with a greater recognition – or admission – of how much better I do with that kind of structure. I would once have bristled about a lack of spontaneity in such a format, but that is starting to look more and more to me like a function of age, of a certain sort of youthful enthusiasm, like that which would see "self-expression" as a key part of art, but which is coming to appear more and more like a substitution of mere energy for real vision. Prayer seems more like art in that way to me, I think, where there is certainly something to be said for sincerity, of course, but where that is revealed to be pretty thin beer the longer you sit with it.

Then somewhere near the end of the evening Mike said something to me about being weak in art history, particularly as regards its tie to theology and theological history: a thought that he had expressed earlier in the evening's conversation. Something recently had gotten me thinking about how I started picking up that interest, myself, back in the summer of 1991 in Madison. Perhaps that had come up in the "spirituality and autobiography" conversation with Meg last week, as we also talked about her work in, and thoughts about, theatre. So I found myself making a bit a strange recommendation to Mike in suggesting that he might want to start reading in that direction the same way that I did: through the Protestant Fundamentalist theologian Francis Schaeffer. I call this a bit of a strange recommendation in that quite disagree with Schaeffer on a great many things, now, finding him guilty of trying to squeeze too much into the formula he was describing as he attempted to diagnose the shift of Western culture from its Christian philosophical, theological and spiritual roots to a new Secularist paradigm, basing far too much of the latter on Existentialism. The phenomenon he is trying to describe is a real one, it was just that he oversimplified the mechanism of how that shift was occurring, resulting in a number of problematic descriptions and assessments in support of his overall argument.

But nevertheless, like Merton said about Tertullian, "he's worth reading even when he's wrong." The genius of Schaeffer was that he tried to do a very necessary work that it us utter anathema in today's academic culture: he tried to be a generalist. The generalist tries to master a great many fields so that their interaction can be described. For all the noise we make today about being "interdisciplinary," it's all too easy to find fault with someone who tries to do this, because no one today can possibly master all major fields of human knowledge. I just found fault with him, above, although I might argue that I was speaking as a specialist somewhat closer to the heart of his program. But it's not his ambition or his intention with which I am finding fault, nor am I trying simply to be an academic nit-picker. I think that those attempts at speaking in a more "generalist" way are important, and that is a work that particularly falls to theology among the sciences. (See the "definition" of theology I have on my profile page, to see more of that idea.)

So, why the recommendation to Mike? Schaeffer seriously attempts to incorporate art history into his survey of the shape of how our culture is and has been shifting, integrating it into his philosophical, theological, historical and political argument as a serious voice and influence in the cultural conversation. So: music, art, film – all these were major fields for a Christian to know, which was a rather novel position in American fundamentalism in the 1960s or 70s. As a model, or a starting-point in trying to get a sketch of an integrated view of art and the history of ideas, Schaeffer still strikes me as a useful starting point, in just the way a lot of theological educators might use Justo Gonzalez's survey histories of theology for undergraduate or Master's students who are trying to learn their way "around the map" of history, even though you will tell them later on to toss out a lot of the generalizations that Gonzalez makes as they grow more competent. Mike is more than competent enough in the general history of thought, and in Christian thought in particular, that he could read Schaeffer without swallowing it all whole, as I did as a beginner in such things, where I had to continue to work just to see how much more there was to learn than his direct summations. So for the first time in 15 years I find myself hefting the one-volume work How Should We Then Live? The Decline of Western Thought and Culture, which became Schaeffer's major entry into public conversation on the cultural impact of the anti-Christian shift in Secularism, both as a book and even more as a documentary series. (Which is an interesting story in itself, given that this documentary series was produced in many ways as an answer to the more-or-less uniform Secularist vision given in many PBS documentaries of the time, with PBS protesting – in all sincerity – that they couldn't show something that was so one-sided in its perspective.)

It'll be interesting to revisit this just for intellectual autobiographical reasons in seeing whether it does indeed work for Mike in the way I suspect. I figured that the Protestant orientation would be familiar, and that its direct and popular nature would make for a far easier starting-point than something like the vast (and very Catholic) theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however much better Von Balthasar's work might be in a more final sense. Bob Foster is going to be in town tomorrow and we're gathering to enjoy his company – "Thursday is the new Friday," quipped Amy – and it'll be interesting to see whether he agrees with my thought that this could still be a useful starting-point for Mike in trying to integrate art history into his theological work.

There have been a number of good moments with friends over the last several days. Thursday night I headed up to the Oriental Theatre with Barnes to see Watchmen after we finished up a session of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Christian Mysticism where Fr. Golitzin winged his way through a review of a text I had never heard of before, in a presentation called "The Vision of Dorotheos: An Early Chrisitan Example of Heavenly Journey." That isn't me being critical: he was explicit that he was moving fast and loose on this one, having apparently been volunteered without his knowledge for a talk on the text at SBL by Bogdan, which was really funny to hear. (Of late, Professor Golitzin so frequently publicly gives me crap for not doing a Patristics doctorate that I've become terribly regretful of never having had him for an actual course: everybody speaks highly of the work done in his classes.) I wasn't sure that the text wasn't meant to be fictional in antiquity, it seemed so silly on some levels, like the bad novels of the saints from the 3rd or 4th century. Looking around a bit, I found that Chrysogonus Waddell had actually written an introduction to an edition of the text that Cistercian Publications put out, so that's now on the to-buy/to-read list.

So Watchmen seemed a pretty fabulous adaptation of the text. I'd never seen a direct adaptation before (I've never read or seen the graphic novels and movie adaptations of 300 or Sin City) but this seemed about as good as could be imagined in a single short movie. Barnes and I headed over to Pizza Man after the movie let out, talking about the changes for the movie – which we both thought worked and were sensible – and in one major case, even tightened up the plot considerably. From there the conversation moved on to matters theological, where I augmented a comment from some weeks earlier that he had noted and talked with his wife about, when I had called Thomas Merton somewhat "dated" over dinner at the Lloyds. I certainly didn't mean that to be dismissive. While there are a few areas or moments in which there is that sort of cultural, historical or technological datedness to Merton's work, mostly he's "dated" in the same sense that Augustine is: he is clearly a man fully engaged in his moment in history. This says nothing about his ability to be adapted to another set of circumstances: in fact, I find that much of what he says that is specific to his immediate time has that ability to be extrapolated-from which is necessary to guarantee a writer's long-term usefulness. I think this is particularly so for a spiritual writer like Merton. That got me talking some more about my own recent conversations and thoughts about the topic of "religion and autobiography," which led to some questions on his part for some more detailed explanation of how it was I ended up doing a Systematics doctorate instead of a Patristics one, and I went into some detail explaining the story of that shift, from early comments from Catherine LaCugna and Brian Daley, through my changing perspectives as I taught high school Theology, and then some of the shifts occurring after I actually began at Marquette. Barnes's own influence in being a Patristics scholar trained as a Systematician also featured in the conversation, given the way he has challenged me over these years regarding some of the ways in which Systematic Theology is taught today, as well as giving me a springboard for using historical figures like Augustine as dialogue-partners for contemporary Systematics. I heard more, too, about the development of his own doctoral work and of his historical project with Lewis Ayres, and how it was that he pulled together this particular education of his own. Good stuff.

Battlestar Galactica concluded on Friday with a two-hour final episode, as many of you well know, as did the four years of Friday night dinner and viewing parties we've been having, mostly at the Lloyds's. (I'm sure the gatherings will continue, without the show, although they won't have that same strange flavour of us intensely jabbering away at the breaks and conclusions.) I've never before experienced a television show as such a social phenomenon before, gathering together to watch a 100-hour nail-biter of a movie. I know lots of others around the country have watched it socially as much as (or more than) privately, and I've never seen a show that so demanded to be discussed, argued and debated, both as drama and as a jumping-off point for its themes. It really gave a different sense of what television drama could be (and of the staggering amount that is produced to lesser effect).

Amy's Mom is staying with them for some time now, and I think was bouncing somewhere between amused and bemused so see us all discussing and arguing, both during the breaks and then for a good hour afterwards, trying to judge whether we thought the conclusion worthy of the whole (Dan and I on the positive of that, Mike on the negative). Complicating matters, she had never watched an episode of it before, so, rather like I said above, coming in on the last two hours of a hundred hour movie is certainly less than ideal. So I tried to explain a bit to her about why it was we were so invested in it. I wonder what kind of impression it would make of her daughter's and son-in-law's friends that they come over to fixate on the television and over-excitedly debate a piece of fiction.

There's not much else I can say here that isn't full of spoilers and there are people who may read this who I very much want to enjoy the thing on DVD. I has been great, though, that I could enjoy this thing (which I might dare to call the single greatest piece of television ever, with the possible exception – or tie – of the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited, although that's a very different kind of beastie) all with such a group of friends as this: some of them theologians, all thoughtful and passionate people fully invested in the art of living, and who then would take an epic drama of this sort as a jumping-off point into a few hundred hours of fabulous and real exchange with one another. I realize that, spread over the years though it was, this piece of drama will one day be one of the most significant artistic Events in my life as I look back over it, just because I could share so many hours of it with the same group of friends, as it became an occasion for drawing each of us out – both in talking about it and in leading to lots more talk beyond it once we had exhausted the night's episode. I suppose anything can serve for bringing friends together, even just the simple decision to gather for a regular meal. But I have to give this show kudos for being so frequently exciting and compelling in itself as to rile us up for lots of different sorts of thoughts, conversations and stories.

Last night I enjoyed relaxed talk over a late dessert at Starbucks with Erynn, after having to reschedule for a number of days due to her ever-changing school schedule. She came in kind of glowing over her first place finish at the weekend's meet at the University of Georgia where she qualified for NCAA regionals in the very first meet of the outdoor season. I actually hadn't seen her since she tied the school record in the high jump (5'9.25"/1.76m) the other week, although she was almost dismissive of that when I congratulated her on it. She had an air of being on the hunt: clearly not satisfied with sharing that title, she was stalking the record already – determined to beat that mark and hold the title alone. It was fun to see that quiet determination just instantly burn in her eyes. So I got caught up in talking technique with her for a while, since jumping is such a different kind of training than I did as a distance runner, and since I wasn't sure what it was, exactly, that one did in trying to improve one's heights, once you knew what you were doing. She explained to me that there were kind of two ways or styles of high jumping: those whose jumps were particularly powered by speed and by their approach to the jump, and those whose power came out of their spring itself. She was of this latter sort, she said, and so while she can improve that power through weight work and building muscle mass, for her there was perhaps greater growth to be found in working on the speed and technique of her approach to the jump, and that this was a lot of what she was doing.

Then it was my turn to try to catch her up on some of my news, suddenly recalling that I'd been holding back on the details of my news for a few weeks, until we could sit down face-to-face. Plenty of randomness through and after that: some of her internship/summer possibilities, bad break-ups and awkward first-dating-someone-older stories, high heels, the character of our anger when we get angry, with me talking about getting into fights as a kid and with her description of being "black angry," and that leading to comparisons between African-American and Irish-American styles of verbal abuse as affection; dealing with other people's ethnic perceptions and constructions – a roommate of hers who cannot be "Assyrian/Italian" but is just told that she is "white"; my classroom discoveries about my Irish upbringing and sense of humour, particularly as experienced by German-American students – and I think ending on the breadth of concepts of beauty around the world that are threatened with being overwhelmed by our media culture, at which point we were thrown out of the place because it had closed. Good talk. Not only is it fun to have a newish friend who is a track athlete and who can talk that sort of thing, but it's also cool that she has her art wing to her: so we're going to hit the Jan Lievens exhibition at the Art Museum on Sunday, as she has a rare meet-free weekend and for which I'm totally jazzed.

Two interesting, or even compelling, pieces on the current state of Europe. The first piece, "While Europe Slept," by Jean Bethke Elshtain, who is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, is a really striking piece about what the implications are of Europe going "post-Christian," with some intersections with the dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger recently released as The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, which I've just started reading. I also include a recent column by John Allen, modified from a lecture he gave in Dublin recently, on the current state of European Catholicism that dealt with some parallel themes. I was particularly appreciative of how he related some of what is happening in Europe to things the United States has already experienced, having been in this case a few steps ahead in the creation of an Enlightenment state that still made room for religion.

The hope of preserving the human rights tradition of Enlightenment democracy is far more tied into Jewish/Christian heritage than contemporary anti-religious dogmatic Secularism has recognized, and it is particularly compelling to hear such insights coming from atheists like Habermas or Marcello Pela in Italy as well as from Christian thinkers like Ratzinger. It is one of the most curious ironies in political philosophy that the absolutizing of an ideology of "freedom" in the mode of the New Left since the 1960s seems to actually end up destroying political freedom, reminding us once again that "freedom" is no simple reality in itself but in democratic society is in fact a difficult and complicated balance between a number of competing forces and interests.

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An essay by Prof. Stanley Fish on the future of classic university education. By "classic" I mean the university education as a humane formation. What is generally called a university education today has in fact become something much less: it's a job training program. I don't think that that's snobbishness saying so. I don't think it's a holdover of some old cultural ideal that amounts no more today than some conservative impulse on my part. I believe it to be a simple fact of intent. There is a point to educating toward an economic outcome. But there is also a point toward education toward a philosophical and humanist one, particularly one in the Christian humanist mode of what university education had been. To simply mandate the new form, for the powerful to simply create workers for their economy? That's a kind of conquest that violates the spirit and intent of America.

Still, I think there are a few avenues around the bleak diagnosis Fish offers here. Some of us simply do the true mode of education no matter the shape and intent of the university system in which we find ourselves. We seek out the right teachers, we ask the right questions, we do the work. There are also a few schools, most of them newly created, that try to explicitly address this trend, offering themselves as an alternative to the dominant university paradigm. Most of these schools are Catholic, drawing on historical components of Catholic education, and I've been interested to watch them. But a lot of them import quite a bit of conservative culture or what's called conservative or traditionalist Catholicism into their program, which I don't think are necessarily components of that classical form of education, nor, for that matter, necessarily traditional in their Catholicism. Still, it's interesting to see what kinds of ideological trends are frequently part of creating such schools. It is particularly astonishing in the face of how politically Left university educators tend to lean that education should have become so utilitarian. I wonder whether the New Left, 1960s-70s ideology of unqualified "freedom" with regard to everything – including "liberation" from the claims of any truths beyond individual desire or preference – have rendered the Left unable to resist, or even recognize, an all-consuming pragmatism or utilitarianism in university education.

The Last Professor
Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009, 10:00 pm

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

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Yesterday afternoon and evening, part of my 3+ hour long conversation with my former boss, the 16th-century scholar Mickey Mattox,, lead us away from more predictable elements like Martin Luther and to the recent death of Richard John Neuhaus, the publisher of First Things, that journal of American public life in religion, culture and politics. While Neuhaus on more than one occasion drove me bananas with some glib remark, I had to always acknowledge the depth of what he regularly achieved in the pages of his journal. It is frequently referred to as a conservative or neo-conservative journal. There's some truth to that. But I'd also have to say that it's also a journal of 1960 liberalism. 1960 was so different than what "the Sixties" produced: its ecumenical union of "Protestant, Catholic, Jew" was a far cry from the anti-religious furor released by the New Left by the end of the sixties, and which continues unabated today as one of the strongest anti-intellectual bigotries characteristic of that portion of American society (the Right has its own, I know). Martin Luther King, Jr., while invoked as an icon today by the Left, would never be tolerated as he was: the Niebuhrian public Christian intellectual and preacher of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King, were he still alive, would either have had to change his tune entirely, betraying what he earlier stood for, or would have become anathema to today's Left by holding on to the core of his Christian commitments and therefore "become a conservative," even if he hadn't changed at all. More in that older mode, Neuhaus created a public space for serious discussion by writers of numerous perspectives, united in taking their subject seriously, and deeming it worth serious discussion. For all its hits and misses, that's something I have to credit to Neuhaus. And as Mickey pointed out, the personal loyalty and friendship so many people felt toward him – including people who loathed his conclusions – speaks strongly to a truly tolerant and generous human being, who didn't invoke "tolerance" simply as a tool to silence other perspectives. I had to bow to that loyalty, having never met the man himself, but recognizing what kind of person inspires such reactions.

George Weigel published a fine obituary on Neuhaus, and I thought I would jot that down in my journal for memory's sake. A great many more obituaries are linked on First Things's website.

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Wow: this is unexpected. First Things is one of the best journals of its kind, though I tended to find Neuhaus's own contributions the most maddening things in its pages. Nevertheless, you had to admire him for creating such an ecumenical forum.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus dead at age 72
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff
Published: Jan. 8, 2009

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading voice of Catholic conservatism in America, and one of those rare theologians and spiritual leaders whose influence vastly exceeded the boundaries of their religious community, has died at 72.

Neuhaus slipped away Jan. 8, shortly before 10 o’clock Eastern time. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering.

A priest of the New York archdiocese and a former Lutheran minister, Neuhaus was best known to society at large as an intellectual guru of what came to be known as the “religious right.”

From the early 1970s forward, Neuhaus was a key architect of two alliances with profound consequences for American politics, both of which overcame histories of mutual antagonism: one between conservative Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals, and the other between free market neo-conservatives and “faith and values” social conservatives.

In 2005, Time magazine took the unusual step of including the Catholic Neuhaus on a list of America’s 25 most influential Evangelicals, noting that in a 2004 session with journalists from religious publications, President George W. Bush cited Neuhaus more often than any other living authority.

“Father Richard,” the president said then, “helps me articulate these [religious] things.”

To Catholic insiders, however, it was Neuhaus’ writing rather than his political activism that made him a celebrity. From the pages of First Things, the unapologetically high-brow journal he founded in 1990, Neuhaus kept up a steady stream of commentary on matters both sacred and secular.

In broad strokes, Neuhaus was an unabashed supporter of the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and his commentary was prized in Rome. John Paul, for example, named Neuhaus as a delegate to the 1997 Synod for America. Yet he was no lapdog for ecclesiastical authority; he lamented the Vatican’s opposition to the Iraq war in 2003, and early in Benedict’s papacy Neuhaus voiced “palpable uneasiness” that the new pontiff was not clamping down on what Neuhaus saw as dissent from church teaching.

Over the years, even people who disagreed with Neuhaus’ politics or theology would devour his monthly essay in First Things, titled “The Public Square,” for sheer literary pleasure. His combination of epigrammatic formulae and occasionally biting satire often reminded fans of English-language Catholic luminaries of earlier eras, such as G.K. Chesterton or Cardinal John Henry Newman.

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I went to bed before midnight last night and slept for 14 1/2 hours, which is now why I'm up at 3:30am. I do one thing right and get screwed up another way. So back to being nocturnal. Still feeling better, mostly just weak now, with the headache not nearly so bad and fever mostly gone. It's been a movie kind of day. Got sucked in this evening by Turner Classic Movies, which happened to be what my TV was still tuned to when I turned it on, originally intending to watch a DVD over a meal. And then, boom: an interesting interview with Mickey Rooney, an old movie short on Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out the medical need for hand-washing by doctors and was ridiculed by the medical establishment for it, Lawrence of Arabia (which I had just been toying with the idea of watching as I perused my DVD collection), and then the 1952 Ivanhoe (while reading a bit in The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History for reference), bringing me to now, just short of 1am.

Since then I've been reading some essays in The Church and Galileo, a volume I picked up a few years ago at Notre Dame, from their series Studies in Science and the Humanities from the Reilly Center for Science Technology and Values, and edited by Ernan McMullin, a professor there. Notre Dame is where I first got turned onto the distinct field of the History of Science, and that news story I saw the other day got me looking a little more closely at some of this research. As I mentioned I've been increasingly interested in the way that the story of the Church's mistaken judgment of Galileo four hundred years ago is employed by people today. The embarrassing incident at La Sapienza University in January, where a group of professors began raving about Galileo as proving there was an utter wall between faith and reason – so as to silence, in the name of academic freedom, the planned address by Benedict XVI who has been a constant champion of the power of reason – is a classic example of the dangers of educated people acting beyond their competence. (Which I'm sure that I do all the time, too, and, of course, should justly be corrected and aided from doing such things more.) The treatment in later years of the incident with Dr. Semmelweis, mentioned above, is much more realistic an example of how such affairs as the Galileo Affair ought to be judged and remembered: the recognition of a dreadful error made because of the establishment of a certain kind of scientific perspective, but not made as an incident into an ideological dogma for all time.

I have to say, the Mickey Rooney interview was fascinating. As I've had a few – very basic, of course – historical conversations with my niece Grace, I've been amazed to watch those moments of awareness dawning in her eyes, as she excitedly learns something new about the context of the world into which she was born. The recentness of things like cell phones and computers was astounding to her, and moreso that electricity itself was only a few generations old. Suddenly, she had to imagine a world utterly different than anything she knew. So I'm hoping that she'll coax stories out of her grandparents with the same pleasure that I did from mine, and try to get a handle on just how much has changed in such a short time. So. Mickey Rooney. While the interview was from 1997, the fact that Rooney is still alive and is working (Night At The Museum, anyone?) makes him the last great voice of the Golden Age of movies, and that's another way in which I hope Grace and the rest of my nieces get to know something of how their land has changed. Despite all the mistakes one can take from film (Did everyone in the 1930s spontaneously break into song and tap-dance in the street?) there's so much you can pick up from the history of film. I didn't know who Mickey Rooney was when I first saw him in The Black Stallion, I just knew that I kind of liked him.

To hear him talking not just about being a child star in the Golden Age of film, but to talk about his time in silent film before the "talkies" came along, and about his experience of vaudeville just made me realize once more How Fast It's All Been. That's still living memory. Oral tradition. He was a vaudeville performer, a silent movie star, a Golden Age movie star, who Cary Grant unhesitatingly described the most talented figure in the industry. He now maintains a website. As I think of the nieces and nephews coming to understand the story of the land and the world they have been born into, it struck me while listening to the interview that it would be amazing for them to hear the thing themselves, especially while he was still alive, and to realize just how dizzying it all is, this last century and the change it has seen. If there's anything movies do well, it's let you see something: that's the whole medium. And while movies can be shady or downright awful in trying to represent history, as an historian I swear by movies' ability to always convey their own period's sensibilities.

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Not being "in love," whether in fiction or (alas!) in fact, and not in any of the usual ways in which we speak about love. There was a conference notice I was mailed a few months ago that quite caught my imagination, and I've not been able to get it out of my head. Syracuse University is sponsoring their third "Postmodernism, Culture and Religion" conference on the topic of love as a political notion. As a Christian, a Catholic, and in particular as a Catholic Christian theologian, I realize that I must believe that something of a "politics of love" must be possible. Certainly we see it at some level in the politics of the Church: the social justice ethics, the care for displaced populations and for our own poor and sick, for human rights of every sort, of those promoted or despised by the political left and right. But a "politics" of Love? Love as a political notion? The suspicion, of course, is that that is just being sentimental. How can you have a politics of love? Over dinner I was watching the grim realpolitik of Steven Spielburg's film Munich, and the seeming impossibility of conceiving of a politics of love in such situations brought the question back to my head.

Christian ethics flow from a notion of Who and What God is, though. Three divine "Persons" constituting One God, interpenetrating, perfect knowing and acceptance of one another, utter union of being: if this is what God is, this is what is then most fundamental about all of reality – relationship. Christian ethics of personhood, dignity and rights, all flow from that vision, as do the more secular ethics of the West today, if more by momentum than from the logic of secular presuppositions about what human beings are or what reality is. So if relationship and love are most fundamental to reality, why not to politics as well? But then, the need for politics as we understand it often has to do with human evil, with the failure of love. Is such, then, still potentially to be conceived as a politics of love?

Is this all just a lead-in to a sentimental, theological way of talking about politics? Or can we in fact use "love" as such an organizing category in a way that makes it just as "real," having just as much "teeth," as other ways of conceiving a political theory or language?

The notice, at least, is rather striking:

The Politics of Love

A constellation of internationally prominent theorists–philosophers, theologians and psychoanalysts–will gather to discuss the question of whether the concept of love can be redescribed as a political concept. Is love necessarily a private matter or does it also have a public meaning? Can love become part of a political project? In addition to an ethics or religion of love, can there be a politics of love?

[Big names in the academy headlining the conference here]

The topic of the conference was inspired by the following passage:

"People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept...The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude...There is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic love of God: both God's love of humanity and humanity's love of God are expressed and incarnated in the common material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing."

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 351-52.

Shades of Aragorn!

Imagine having a royal who didn't see their position as merely a license to party and make their life meaningless! A constitutional monarchy that has the stones to take a moral stance and to slow down modernity's endless rush to fixate on their immediate desires as the chief of goods – I kinda gotta dig that. Case in point: he takes one stand, which is entirely his right by his legal position, and rather than slow down and take the matter as worth waiting on and thinking through as a nation and culture, his political opponent immediately moves toward altering the constitution and stripping the Grand Duke of his last political power. There's another reason to be thankful that our Founding Fathers recognized that even too much democracy wasn't necessarily a good thing, and that it's so difficult for us to alter our constitution: despite all the times such changes are proposed, it really doesn't lend itself to too many quick and fashionable changes. If our own constitution were a victim of our own last few decades of political polarization... yuck.

Der Spiegel reports on a conflict that caught my eye for both reasons of ethics and of constitutional law, as well as characterizing a cultural flaw in Modernity where ethics are simply reduced to questions of power. The fact that Der Spiegel doesn't even notice the latter problem – to which its own reporting seems to contribute – strikes me as characteristic of why the Grand Duke's veto – the power to slow down a process and provoke even more conversation – is especially important for democracy. Too bad.

Euthanasia Controversy: Grand Duke of Luxembourg Will Lose His Veto
Luxembourg's parliament looks ready to strip the Grand Duke of his last lawmaking power as a controversy over euthanasia comes to a head. One of Europe's last royals with political sway may lose his formal veto by taking a stand against a law legalizing euthanasia.

The Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who has said he would interfere with a decision by parliament, will likely be stripped of his veto in a historic decision after a heated showdown over a bill to legalize euthanasia.

Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg protested the bill and threatened to kill it next week by refusing to sign it into law.

Since parliament is expected to pass the bill, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the Grande Duke has overstepped his role. Juncker personally opposes the euthanasia bill but says he will propose a change to the constitution to deny the Grand Duke his veto. His role by the end of 2008 could be reduced to rubber-stamping parliamentary decisions, instead of deciding whether to approve them.

"That means he will only technically enact laws," Juncker said, according to Reuters.

The euthanasia bill passed a first vote by parliament in February. It looks set to pass a second and final vote next week, but the Catholic Grand Duke announced on Tuesday -- in a closed-door meeting with leaders of Juncker's ruling Christian Socialists -- that he would refuse to enact the law.

His position tipped the tiny nation into the worst constitutional crisis in its history. The Luxembourg royal house has tried to block a decision by parliament only once before, when the Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide refused to sign an education bill in 1912.

"I understand the Grand Duke's problems of conscience," said Juncker, "but I believe that if the parliament votes in a law, it must be brought into force."

The euthanasia bill has been controversial since 2001. It would let patients with "grave and incurable" conditions die at the hands of a doctor if they ask repeatedly to be euthanized and earn the consent of two doctors and a panel of experts. Medical and physician groups have opposed the bill, though, and so have many citizens of this traditionally Catholic nation.

It follows similar laws in the Netherlands and Belgium, where King Baudouin -- Henri's uncle -- abdicated for a day in 1990 to avoid signing a Belgian abortion law. The current Belgian king, Albert II, has signed Belgium's recent euthanasia and homosexual-marriage laws over his private Catholic beliefs.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a constitutional monarchy, and the Grand Duke is its head of state. He has indicated that he won't stand in the way of any change to the constitution.

Sociologists, Media Studies, and American Studies people, take note: tonight one of the more consistently odd perceptual dynamics I've noted in my life in Milwaukee continued in its inexplicable reliability. Stopping in for a tuna salad sandwich for dinner at Cousins Subs, I made it to the head of the line when the cashier said, "You look like a superstar. But I can't think of who." I said, sure that this would be rejected, "Well, I often get Adrien Brody...." But she shook her head, "No, that's not it." I didn't think so. For I've noticed a pattern I cannot explain. White women think Adrien Brody, whenever this happens, but every black woman in Milwaukee – and lots of them stop me to say this, and the young woman speaking to me was black – always go with... "Well, then otherwise I get Nicholas Cage." "That's it!" she exclaimed, leaving me to wonder about the differences in race perception of males by women and other such arcane subjects. It's bizarre how perfectly consistent this pattern is. Maybe there's a Master's thesis out there for someone....

Was this the most alarmist headline that the Times could come up with this morning? No noting that the other major world religions have demonstrated no intrinsic initiative on their own to participate in hip and cool dialogue? No mentioning that Pela, while "center-right" and therefore suspect, is an atheist philosopher who has seen the intellectual dependence of European freedoms – even the secular ones – upon Christian presuppositions, and that undermining the latter threatens the former, as has another of the Pope's conversation partners, atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas?

The article text, mercifully, isn't that bad, but I gotta wonder if Donadio's article got slapped with this headline by some editor who wanted to make sure that we all understood, whatever the article said, that Benedict was a reactionary nitwit.

Pope Questions Interfaith Dialogue
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: November 23, 2008

ROME — In comments on Sunday that could have broad implications in a period of intense religious conflict, Pope Benedict XVI cast doubt on the possibility of interfaith dialogue but called for more discussion of the practical consequences of religious differences.

The pope’s comments came in a letter he wrote to Marcello Pera, an Italian center-right politician and scholar whose forthcoming book, “Why We Must Call Ourselves Christian,” argues that Europe should stay true to its Christian roots. A central theme of Benedict’s papacy has been to focus attention on the Christian roots of an increasingly secular Europe.

In quotations from the letter that appeared on Sunday in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

But Benedict added that “intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas” was important. He called for confronting “in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions.”

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope’s comments seemed intended to draw interest to Mr. Pera’s book, not to cast doubt on the Vatican’s many continuing interreligious dialogues.

“He has a papacy known for religious dialogue; he went to a mosque, he’s been to synagogues,” Father Lombardi said. “This means that he thinks we can meet and talk to the others and have a positive relationship.”

To some scholars, the pope’s remarks seemed aimed at pushing more theoretical interreligious conversations into the practical realm.

“He’s trying to get the Catholic-Islamic dialogue out of the clouds of theory and down to brass tacks: how can we know the truth about how we ought to live together justly, despite basic creedal differences?” said George Weigel, a Catholic scholar and biographer of Pope John Paul II.

This month, the Vatican held a conference with Muslim religious leaders and scholars aimed at improving ties. The conference participants agreed to condemn terrorism and protect religious freedom, but they did not address issues of conversion and of the rights of Christians in majority Muslim countries to worship.

The church is also engaged in dialogue with Muslims organized by the king of Saudi Arabia, a country where non-Muslims are forbidden from worshiping in public.

( The AP story 'Pope: Dialogue among religions should be pursued' manages to be more clear, noting Jewish and Muslim praise for his remarks. AND a translation of the Pope's letter to Pera, in full. )

Today's the Feast of Lewis, being the 45th anniversary of his death, as well as those of Kennedy and Huxley.

My birth certificate showed up in the mail, which was a relief. My identity remains my own for another day. So all my paperwork is in order, and my files can be put away for another decade. The day was spent digging back into Chapter 1 of the dissertation, refreshing myself with what I had done there so that I could clarify in my mind what remained to do in this next chapter. I had a headache through most of Friday, though, which was discouraging. Still, over meals I watched a few episodes of the 1965 season of The Avengers, which I had found on sale the other day for a mere dollar. I hadn't seen these since I was in junior high, when they were my first exposure to quirky British television and intrinsic British coolness, as well as the more fundamental fascinations of Mrs. Emma Peel in a leather catsuit. The music, the camerawork, the locations: it was all great fun to watch now as an adult, and to remember 1965's contradictions from a 2008 perspective – of people who moved between upscale London buildings with their modern amenities and open-fire village pubs and houses, as both being "normal." The countryside village conditions, from my eye, though, were hardly removed from what I grew up considering "camping," they were so basic. Ireland was the last of the European nations to so modernize, with a lot of folks describing to me in 1997 how different things had been just a few years earlier, and how much more prosperous everyone was feeling in that "Celtic Tiger" economy as it made fundamental changes in the popular standard of living. So watching these were both fun "spy-fi" in themselves, as well as interesting historical documents in indirect ways.

The other morning I attended Fortunate's dissertation defense with Mike and Ellen, which was quite fun because this was one defense where I already knew the material in great depth, which is not often the case in our diverse and specialized dissertations. But Fortunate is an Augustine scholar, among other Early Christianity interests, who dissertated under Barnes, and did an historical project that he nevertheless tied in interesting ways to struggles today in divisions among African Christians, offering his work as a model of an historical pattern worth trying to avoid. The rest of the committee – Zemler-Cizewski, Dempsey, Johnson and Carey – all asked potent and interesting questions from their various specialties and perspectives. Mine was the only "public" question. In my own work, touching on the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, I had been struck by the fact that, as with many Church councils, no one had ever attended a council before, since there had been none in their lifetimes. So they sort of had to make up their own way of having a council. Since Fortunate's dissertation, and the faculty conversation regarding it, was more explicit about the African cultural elements Augustine and the other African council leaders were trying to rein in or modify, I asked about any particularly African characteristics in their councils themselves that Fortunate might have noticed. Most of that conversation seemed to stay in the moral mode, as well as mentioning the African concern with universal perspective or function in the Church, which one can see back to Cyprian in particular.

"Broken Nets": Augustine, Schisms, and Rejuvenating Councils in North Africa
Fortunate Ojiako, B.A., B.Th., M.A., M.A.
Marquette University, 2008.

This dissertation studies the schisms ("broken nets" according to Augustine) [he was using the image of the story of Jesus instructing disciples where to fish, with one casting of their nets resulting in a catch that burst the nets] that bedeviled the North African Church, as well as its moral conditions during the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This study equally shows the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils. These councils sought to regenerate debased and erroneous aspects of North African customs. The sanative nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils is not only buttressed from Augustine's Letter 22, but also from the content of the conciliar decrees emanating from the North African councils. These reforms were liturgical, moral, as well as disciplinary in nature. In correcting the African Church customs, Augustine sought to align them with those of the universal church.

The trademark moral rigorism of the African Church that had dire consequence for her is likewise highlighted in this work. Rigorist views were espoused by Tertullian, Cyprian, the Donatists, and even Augustine's Catholic Church. Rigorism is also present in the consuetudo or the so-called African theology that sought exclusion for apostates and also rebaptized former heretics and schismatics. This work adumbrates that nets and broken nets were products of the time. While the Decian persecution of 251 AD gave rise to the lapsi, (and in extension Novatianism) the Diocletian persecution of 312 produced the traditores, which in turn aided the Donatist schism.

Part two of this work explores the state of the North African Church that Augustine and his cohorts sought through councils to reform. This section also examines the Cyprianic councils and the impact of customs and scriptural interpretations on the controversy in the North African Church.

The result of this dissertation will not only show the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian and Augustinian councils, but also adds its voice to those among Augustinian scholarship that see a greater need and importance of studying Augustine more from his African environment. This is not in any way an attempt to discountenance the importance of other paradigms that go a long way toward a better understanding of Augustine.

This was the piece that most caught my eye in today's Chicago Tribune as I came to my last day of taking care of the nieces. The fact that I was spending the weekend with the three girls whose education and character formation probably outweigh the combined total of the mental energy I spend on all my official students no doubt added to this article hitting me hard.

In some ways, what's written here isn't news. What strikes me as new, or newer, though, is the sheer multiplication of industries driving this trend. I might wonder which came first, chicken-or-the-egg-style, anxiety about appearance or someone trying to sell you something that might calm your anxiety about your appearance. The fact that sheer age itself is now no longer acceptable, except – possibly – for a brief window of 20 to 24 or thereabouts is alarming. Whatever came first, there are now arrayed several armies of specialists in product manufacture, image editing, manipulation, and agenda-setting, and advertising that are all arrayed against anyone being content with their age and appearance. After all, if you are content, you aren't going to consume the required consumer products, no?

As a specialist in spirituality among other things, reading this made me cringe at the thought of generations of people, especially women, never getting a chance to be let alone enough to find out what it is to be who and what you are in the present moment. It's not that men escape this – I remember a number of us talking here the other year about a First Things article "Against Eternal Youth" by Frederica Mathewes-Green about Hollywood no longer producing men, but instead only boy-men as the male ideal – but it seems far more epidemic a problem for women. Anyway, I needn't say more: the implications seem more obvious than I can add to. It just goes back to the biggest problem I've seen in an image/entertainment/movie culture: we don't know how to make joy, peace, contentment, simplicity, happiness, et al into a good story in itself. The best stories to be in, but the worst to hear, as I think Sam Gamgee put it. And all the worse when people want to make money off of creating, manipulating and magnifying your discontent. How do you become a woman or man able to rise above such a tide?

Desperately seeking the female ideal
Tweens and teens are trying to look older. Women are trying to look younger. All the self-modifying leaves little time for learning or doing.
By Anne K. Ream
November 16, 2008

Remember your 6th-grade class picture?

I'm sorry to take you back there. I know this is awkward for all of us but think about it for a moment. You might have been many things at 12: bucktoothed, regrettably sporting a bowl cut or, in my case, plagued by a gap-toothed smile.

What you probably weren't was professionally improved upon. But an unfortunate school photo is, according to trend watchers, fast becoming a remnant of another time.

A plethora of photo agencies and Web sites now offer retouching services that wipe out pesky adolescent imperfections, making for a more gorgeous (and grown-up) school picture. One such site offers a "Total Makeover Age Progression," a retouching package for young girls that includes new hair, skin, makeup, eyebrows, facial expressions and even arm reshaping.

Tween and teen girls are the new grown-ups, participating in our image-conscious culture in unprecedented ways.

Spas and salons report increased demands for facials, full makeovers and bikini waxes for girls who have yet to reach puberty.

Abercrombie & Fitch has marketed thong underwear with slogans such as "wink wink" and "eye candy" to girls age 7 to 14. Gary Rudman, author of gTrend Report, a nationwide study on tweens and teens, says "There isn't a real teen on television. Dramas such as 'Smallville,' 'The O.C.,' 'One Tree Hill' and 'Laguna Beach' feature teens whose vocabulary, complexion, fashion sense, wisecracking and comedy skills well-exceed their supposed years. This places a great deal of social pressure on ordinary teens to act with life experiences they don't possess.

"The combined efforts of magazines, television programs, MTV and models in teen stores have fabricated an image of what teens should be and look like," Rudman said. The only problem is, it's impossible for real teens to live up to the [media-hyped] expectation."

The sexualization and "adultification" of girls is a troubling enough trend. But it's bookended with an equally disturbing phenomenon: the extreme "youthification" of older women.

Thanks to Pilates, supplements, salmon-only diets, $500 face creams and a breathtaking array of surgical and dermatological fixes, 50 is the new 30. Or 20. Or something like that.

( Read more... )

Did many folks catch this? One of the refreshing pieces of babysitting the nieces is just the pleasure of sitting with a morning paper during part of breakfast (after the getting-the-girls-fed part). So this caught my eye in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, and its follow-up today.

As an undergraduate History major, I had quickly learned the lesson that the Left is correct about everything in our society, and it was only the long study of history that eventually pushed me over to hard-core political independence and the determination to try to think through issues on a case-by-case basis. As I wait in hope to see if an Obama administration fulfills any reasonable proportion of people's hopes for it, a big part of my hope rests in whether Obama will transcend the sillier side of hard-core American liberalism, which somehow never seems to realize that by "tolerance" it means "agreeing with us," and that to embrace diversity means to be Just Like Them. These very well-meaning people – perhaps illustrating the danger of "a little education," even if Ivy League – have long decried that white, male, European culture has been an all-conquering phenomenon in world affairs. The greatest ideological irony of all time is that these same people can then turn around and push onto the whole world the most all-conquering form of that culture ever, which is today's Western European/American secularist liberalism, and to then hail that as diversity.

I'm very bad for saying this, I know, and you might think I'm a conservative for not going after them with equal fervour here, but really, going after conservative inconsistencies seems beside the point since election day.

Which brings me to this article I caught in the Chicago Tribune. Had this girl been one of my high school students, she'd be riding a helluva college recommendation from me for her creativity and guts. And perhaps most of all for her class: for her willingness to not name names, and to turn what could be a sneering "aren't they all dumb?" moment instead into what teachers like to call a "teachable moment." It's no big credit to you if you simply point out someone else's failures, as I do in the generalization I make about some ideologues, above. It's great credit to you when you can actually look at yourself and get others to do so, and to admit that maybe we aren't as far along as we think we are....

Tolerance fails T-shirt test
John Kass
November 13, 2008

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

"In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain," Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

"Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said," Catherine said.

( Read more... )

John Cavadini, the early church scholar who was my mentor at Notre Dame, once told me that my talent as an historian was that I made creative connections, seeing how people or events influenced one another in ways that others didn't pick up on. Monday, my last day in Chicago, it wasn't so hard to make such a connection as I went walking in Grant Park during the afternoon after the last of my job interviews. The preparations were underway for the crowd expected to gather to cheer Barack Obama's projected victory in the next day's presidential election, and it was easy to imagine and foresee the sights we saw on the television last night of the victory celebration, as not just another political cycle coming to its natural conclusion, but as the hailing of a symbolic turn in the ongoing story of the American Experiment. It was astonishingly warm out, as I'd mentioned earlier, an extended weekend from Haloween to the election getting up around 70ºF, but not the October "Indian summer" we grew up with; I'll not be surprised if such record-setting early November bursts of comfortable weather will in Chicago be remembered as "Obama summers" instead, it seemed so timely for such a gathering.

I eyed the preparation of the grounds and staging itself after coming out of the Chicago Hilton and then wandered north through the park, musing on the last Presidents from my home state of Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant, for whom the park as a whole was named, and Abraham Lincoln, who sat immortalized on the north end of the park, in an elevated statue that had him gazing south toward where Tuesday night's gathering would take place. Lincoln and Grant, of course, were figures of the American Civil War, that early first climax of our national disaster of racial slavery. Inevitably, Obama will be seen, like the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as another point on that journey toward a truly multicultural society. I liked what one commentator said last night – I think on CNN, but I'm not sure: I was flipping up and down the dial of the 24-hour news stations and listening to the commentary – about in the story of civil rights in America, there was in this election a kind of turning point. He pointed to the outpouring of rage by some when Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House on 16 October 1901, or the resistance by some to Jackie Robinson's joining baseball's Major Leagues in 1947, that these events provoked the racial anxiety of some because they were "ahead of the curve." The commentator went on to say, "... but this – this IS the curve." I grew up in an extended family that was multi-racial, and had the great blessing of seeing that as normal from earliest memory, though for me that was from a step removed, while my mixed-race cousins had to deal with a certain amount of crap in their early school years. Now my family is more beautifully diverse than ever before, and I could only hope that the commentator's words were true: that the arrival of a mixed-race American to the White House is the turning of that curve that so normalizes this reality that it puts the vast bulk of race-based fears behind us in history. Standing before the Lincoln statue and looking south across Grant Park, it was easy to imagine that someday a matching figure of Obama might gaze north back at Lincoln, a reversal of Dickens' line, capturing between them the worst of times and the best of times.

Obama riffed on Dickens' "the best of times" in his speech last night in Grant Park, along with moments of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and King's "I have been to the mountaintop" sermon, fully aware, I hope, that this is his moment to succeed or fail. The symbolism mentioned above is, in many ways, the easiest part of his election to the presidency. He has a Democratic Congress, and cannot blame partisan opposition so easily for problems in at least the next two years: it just remains to be seen whether his election becomes the shift to a new national unity that he kept invoking throughout his campaign, or whether it settles into a familiar Democratic pattern of the 1968-1973 American New Left that has so dominated Democratic party ideology in the last generation, with the deep irony of having birthed and driven the subsequent neo-Conservative reaction that the New Left so loathed. The Politics of Left-Right Division are easy to maintain, especially in a two-party system, and it is far more ingrained than anything else in our social or political habits. It's easy for people to say, like me, that they want to move past the paradigm; it's hard to see exactly how to do that, and if there's a better paradigm to offer that isn't just the effective conquest of either the "right-thinking" Left or Right perspectives.

I left the Lincoln statue and headed further north, feeling my way around the Art Institute and stopping to look at my hometown giant Lorado Taft's Fountain of the Great Lakes, now sort of hidden behind trees and neglected. I kinda love the thing, but it made me think about American visions left behind: that like the move to new multi-ethnic and multi-racial consciousnesses in the United States, the regional visions of America have been increasingly left behind in American self-identity. Whether this is from the experience of national news, national advertising, and national entertainment because of our telecommunications, I realized I never really thought about myself as part of "Great Lakes States" group. More as a "Midwesterner" in geography and habits of friendliness, but hardly in such a way that separated me in any fundamental way from making friends from either coast. And this seemed to be part of the same movement as the ethnically-oriented ones: a constant widening of perspectives, driven perhaps more by technology and transportation than by philosophy to begin with, and then a resulting shift in conceptions of identity. I looked at The Great Lakes as I'd been looking at the Magnificent Mile's skyline from the park, taking in the architecture and pulse of the city. I'd never been downtown over a period of several days like this, I realized: all of my experience of Chicago had been high school and college day trips and later overnights, but never any chance to just get used to a stetch of the city, like I had just started to get used to the stretch between the Hilton and the Palmer House. It was hardly a full vision of the city, but it was a timely one, in seeing the city and the park get to take its deep breath before stepping onto history's stage for one night.

Been on a roll for hours now, reading on communion ecclesiology, in one of those delicious moods where I'm able to absorb reading and information at great length without losing concentration or ability. I don't know quite what it is that makes that easier at some times than others, but it's a good feeling. It certain helps, though, to have good texts to read. Dennis M. Doyle's Communion Ecclesiology: Vision & Versions, which I got out of the library the other day, is a marvelous example of a well-ordered and instantly-accessible book, and has been helpful for an overview of a number of different communion ecclesiologies and their developmental courses. I've been using the CDF's 1992 letter Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, which is a central text, and bouncing around both the very useful The Gift of the Church: A Textbook on Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B., which Professor Fahey had us use in my seminar with him when I arrived at Marquette, and Cardinal Dulles' classic Models of the Church. So all this will lead into the final-stretch writing spurt to finish off this chapter over the next week.

Yet another job post was advertised yesterday and was forwarded to students by our new Chair, Professor Wood. This would be a delicious posting, though strangely undergrad-free in a theological graduate school, plopping me not only in the heart of a huge theological network, but also having me live in Erik's neighbourhood, which would be a ton of fun for that old friendship. I let him know about that in a note last night, and told him that if anyone asked about me, he still owed me for breaking my rib back during his graduation celebration at Notre Dame, when weaklingrecords packed a very respectable bar into his backpack and set up shop on Stonehenge at midnight after graduation. I got a funny note back from him and the whole exchange made laugh:

Here's a bit of a surprise new job ad that I just got today and for which I am now just finishing my application. If anyone asks you about me, remember: you still owe me for breaking my rib. Bastard.

Mike


That would be awesome, brother. Let me know if/when you get to come out for an interview. Your rib story reference is very timely. I was at ND this weekend for an ACE gathering and I told someone the rib story as we were passing by Stonehenge. I thought to myself, "The sad prick deserved it." ;-)

Truly,
Dr. Bastard!!!!

I do hope he remembered what I thought the funniest part of the story: when I was sitting stunned in the water and gasped out, "You broke my rib!" Bongo Bob, who had helped himself to quite a bit of the drink by this point, slurred "You wuss!" As though my rib had popped by some lack of character. Soaking wet and in some pain, I still instantly thought it was hysterical.

And lastly, a little article caught my eye, given the way I've always thought the Tao in Confucius' Analects lined up so stunningly with Jewish-Christian Logos theology – a point I've used in my Intro classes when I get to the Gospel of John.

Cardinal: Traditional Chinese wisdom contains seeds of word of God

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- For the good of Chinese society and the defense of people, the Catholic Church must engage in dialogue and work with those who defend the traditional values found in Confucianism, said Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong.

Cardinal Zen told the world Synod of Bishops on the Bible Oct. 15 that, before being written as the Scriptures and incarnated in the person of Jesus, the word of God was the force that created beauty, the universe and the human person.

And, he said, the traditional Chinese wisdom founded in and fostered by Confucianism contains the "seeds of the word" of God that the Second Vatican Council said are present in religions and cultures.

Cardinal Zen said the church in Hong Kong has developed a healthy dialogue with followers of Confucianism, aimed particularly at "trying to preserve the precious heritage of Chinese wisdom."

"If, moved by charity, we are able to instill in the younger generation the Chinese virtues of fidelity, honesty and shame, we will have helped them take a big step toward holiness," the cardinal said.

In too many instances, he said, the Chinese people are losing contact with their traditional values, as is seen in instances of corruption and attacks on human life, marriage and the family.

( Read more... )

The latest issue of First Things and of America arrived yesterday, but First Things won the "open me first" contest with a minor article blurb at the bottom of the cover announcing "Sally Thomas on why iPhones have consequences." Now, as I've blithered elsewhere, I've been putting off joining the cell phone masses because I've been waiting for the iPhone to make it to its next generation, memory-wise, before I do the cell phone/iPod/internet device thing in one fell swoop. So this title grabbed my attention, for fear that I'd learn some aspect of the moral significance of this Apple device that would make me second-guess my intentions.

The essay is actually about the educational impact of the internet revolution on our next generation of students. And the research seems universally bad. The essayist builds off of Emory Professor Mark Bauerlein's new book, which features the catchy title The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30. The point is that, for all the noise about "the world at our fingertips" online, most students are talking about nothing on Facebook or playing games, and not looking at the collections of art museums on the other side of the world, or reading their way through libraries of world literature. I use the net for an awful lot of fun, too, but I'm also constantly using it as that research tool it's rumoured to be, and in awe of it, even after more than a decade of use.

While yes, this could sound like just another "older generation says the sky is falling and kids today are so much dumber than they used to be" story, it would be the sheer specificity and consensus of the research that seems most worrying (some of the reviews on Amazon challenge this, of course, but some of the terms of the challenges make me wonder), and I've had my own suspicions in seeing hints of this sort thing among my high school students. Back at Saint Joe, P.J. and I were appalled at the universal faith put into computer access by the state, which sent around some demands to us about using computers in our educational process, while we were much more concerned that the high school students grasped and applied the Principle of Non-Contradiction. And, of course, I wonder about the impact on my nieces and soon-to-be-born nephew, though my sister is being very conscious and cautious about the girls' computer use, as well as pro-active about their education and book reading at home. For some reason, the First Things website doesn't have the latest issue online and linked yet, so I can't link that here, but the whole 3-page text was striking.

Contrary to claims that computer use enhances functional literacy, Bauerlein cites research suggesting that screen time actually inhibits language acquisition by limiting exposure to complex or unfamiliar words. Even "software god" Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, dismisses the world of blogs and gaming as "encapsulated entertainment" – adding, "If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I'm competing with spending their time on this kind of crap." So muxh for "digital intelligence," says Baurerlein, if even technophiles recognize time spent at this generation's idiot machines as largely wasted time.

Apparently, I've been partially "saved by the bell" in not just being highly-educated by inclination but by the public access to the internet beginning when I was in grad school, when I consciously decided the summer of 1994 to go over to the computer lab at Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame and to teach myself "how to use the internet" so as to see if I could find my way into the NASA picture files of the Levy-Shumaker Comet. My free access to the internet came well after the need for parental oversight, and so I didn't have the opportunity to fail to develop complex reading habits in the way I see among students who try to write academic papers in the shorthand of Instant Message-speak.

And hmmm... as I glanced at my old AOL homepage to verify my links, I see that AOL is shutting those features down. Part of my life now qualifies as a digital museum-piece.

The rolling thunder of the 105th Anniversary parade is proceeding outside my window. The bikes are moving down Wisconsin Avenue from their starting point at Miller Park toward their destination at the Summerfest grounds down by the Lake. There's a crowd of a few hundreds at the intersection of 16th and Wisconsin, mostly in the shade of the south side of the street, cheering the riders on, and with a colour guard of what I presume to be ROTC students standing at the NE corner by the bus stop. It's considerably less than the crowd of thousands I seem to remember from the 100th anniversary, in my early days at Marquette, but just as zesty for this distinctly Milwaukee piece of Americana.

I see that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing tonight, which I hadn't heard at all, since I've been more staying out of the way of the festivities than diving into them. I'd have sought out tickets to that, though, had I been more aware of what was planned, instead of being content to continue my dissertation work and more interesting in gathering with friends away from the crowds of visitors to the city. Springsteen is the hands-down perfect choice to climax the weekend's musical line-up: a far cry from the disaster at the 100th anniversary's epic crowds of bikers who discovered that the closely-guarded secret of the "mystery headliner" turned out to be... Elton John. I don't think you could have asked for more cognitive dissonance than for all the Harley riders in 2003, even be they doctors and lawyers in "real life," than to give them Elton John, who was probably the greatest rock musician in the world who nevertheless managed to seem to be diametrically opposed with the self-created imagery and mythology of the bikers. The rumours then had been that the "mystery band" would turn out to be The Rolling Stones or perhaps U2, whose drummer, Larry Mullen, is an avid Harley rider himself. People just started walking away as soon as John was introduced and started playing, or within the first few songs, and Elton (a friend of a friend of a friend of mine here in town) was apparently rather devastated by his reception. Myself, I cannot imagine what the fool who arranged that concert was thinking. I thought the people who afterward cried "homophobia!" were wrong and overstating (and that term itself, so easily ascribing mental disorder to anyone who even disagrees on a thought, has always been too Soviet for my comfort), and that it couldn't have been that hard to figure out that what was called for was a particular image: a band or musician of the classic, hard-rocking, leather-wearing, "rebel" imagery of the biker mythos. So summoning Springsteen is perfect for today, but certainly ought to have been more obvious five years ago as well. (Even the side-stage bands are classic: today's line-up includes Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Blue Oyster Cult, and Peter Frampton! Heh.) Presuming the tickets are all gone, and even though I kind of hate going to a concert by myself, I'm tempted to drift down near the Summerfest grounds around 8pm when The Boss takes the stage and see if I can just find some spot to hear the music decently enough. Actually, had I known, this would have been a great show to invite me dear Mum to: she's a huge Springsteen fan, and would enjoy going to see him even more than she would have enjoyed The Saw Doctors the other week at IrishFest.

So now, forty minutes after I started writing this, which was ten minutes, maybe, since the first wave rolled through behind police sirens, the bikes still file past: less whooping and cheering from the folks on the street now, as more of them are sitting on the curbs, but they are still coming, with occasional explosions of drilled-muffler roars. The colour guard has retired, but Old Glory is still represented on bikes whose riders wield full-sized flags like lances. When the engines rev, the crowds still manage more cries. I was first hit over the head with the way bikers had evolved from "social menace" to pure American when Kevin and I ended up in the 60th anniversary Sturgis Rally on the famed Road Trip. This still has that same spirit, and it's a fun one: the same spirit which inspired me during the noise at 3am five years ago to write my only pure "classic rock" song, "Made In The U.S.A.," which is something of an uncharacteristic (for me) anthem for biker chicks, or the wannabe biker chick then on display in the Marquette undergraduate women. This year's gathering may be smaller than the unfathomably huge crowds of bikers that made up the 100th anniversary – or maybe not that much smaller at all, for all I know – but it's distinctly Milwaukee, and one of the many things I've come to love about this town.

A few news stories that caught my eye over the last few days that are related, for better or worse, to religion in America....:

Optimism in Evolution
Obama’s View on Abortion May Divide Catholics
McCain and Obama face questions about their faith

( Read more... )

And the world loses one of its great voices again.

While I don't claim to have avidly read everything of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, his was one of the voices that most grabbed my attention when I was an undergraduate, both in studying Soviet history and in literature. When I was at Notre Dame, I can remember Bob and I reading and talking intently about his Harvard address of 1978, which seemed, in an edition with early responses and later reflections, to be a text much used there among undergraduatesat the time. I just went back and grabbed a copy in the last year or so, actually, when I was out in Wyoming in October, when thinking of such things again.

The apparent bafflement by Western commentators, both of the liberal and conservative camps, that he wasn't just a tamed voice of criticism of the Soviet enemy but an equally-thorough critic of the West was probably one of the earlier "complicators" of my thinking, and perhaps an early inspiration to not get caught up in the constant pressure to enter into simple dualisms in thinking – in believe that that the world actually broken into "liberal" and "conservative" realities, and that all I had to do was pick the team that was right about everything and condemn the one that was (conveniently) wrong about everything. His was, with Mother Teresa and John Paul II, perhaps the voice I most recognized as prophetic within my lifetime. At the same time, and perhaps as he would have insisted himself, his voice became less pertinent to me as he returned to the new Russia and became less international and focused on speaking to a land and culture that was not, in the end, mine.

( AP, BBC, and Irish Times obituaries )

Continued From Below

On Saturday, Chad and I ended up talking books a great deal over breakfast, particularly about a Western culture text assessing shifts over the last half-millennium by Jacques Barzun entitled From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. He took me through some of the thesis of that while I dutifully added it to my mental "must buy and someday read" list. A little while later I was floored when I looked through one of Chad's architectural books, this one called Lost Chicago by David Garrard Lowe, which showed me the gems of Chicago that both had been lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and also that had been built and senselessly destroyed within a few decades to make room for a newer idea. In particular, I got my first glimpse at photographs of what had been standing in Chicago during the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, which I couldn't believe had been torn down. I had mentioned this in my conversation with him the night before: about having been told of the great classical architecture put up along the lakefront, of which (I had been told) the only remnants were the Field Museum and the Science and Industry Museum, and that all the land in-between and been filled with such classical treasures. This wasn't entirely accurate, I now discovered (the survivors are now in fact the Science and Industry Museum and the Art Institute), but I could see why the friend who had told me the story had also mentioned that a friend of his, a scuba diver, said that if you went diving off the coast of the city, where the rubble from the demolished pavilions had been dumped, it looked the ruins of Atlantis. How accurate that is, I'm no longer sure, having had Chad tell me and the book confirm that most of the buildings were not intended to be permanent and were not build of the marble they appear to be, but rather of a stucco of some sort. Plans to finish them in marble later were abandoned when much of the pavilions burned in a fire in 1894. So, anyway, I had to grab Chad and gabble about the photographs and the book with him for a few minutes. And then add that one, too, to the must-buy list. This also proved the occasion for Chad to enthuse about a book called The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson, which I had not heard of, but which sounded great fun. I sat down and strained my brain for a bit to come up with a list of books Chad might like as gifts, which made me remember us talking about books the same way years ago, with me pushing Julian of Norwich upon them with great gusto, and their questions about the types of things I was reading inspiring me (on top of a run of similar requests) to start keeping an ongoing Reading List on my old website. I suppose you'd have to go back through the journal here, and add up all the books tags to get the same thing, though that sounds like an awful lot of work.

Saturday afternoon the whole family headed over to the Lakeview Museum of Arts & Science, to take the kids to an appropriately kid-titled exhibition called "Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body" which was a wonderland of cartoonish displays of digestion, burping, mucus and zits. This was in addition to the hands-on and fun science of their Discovery Center. I was a bit more interested, along with Chad, in a display called "Within the Emperor's Garden: The Ten Thousand Springs Pavilion," which I tried and failed to photograph surreptitiously from my hip, under the suspicious stare of the little old lady who had told me that photographs were not allowed. The model of the Pavilion from the Forbidden City was interesting in its own right, but what especially captured my interest was the diagram and side display of how the fitted wood beams of their architecture allowed for such ornate and grand construction without the use of any sort of nails. I suggested to Chad that, in lieu of turning his yard into an English-style garden, he might at least construct a gazebo in their backyard on these principles. But when I mentioned that alone putting their home on the local tourist route, I could suddenly see why that might be unattractive.

On the way over to the Museum, Chad had taken me on a roundabout route through Peoria, past a contract his company was working on for a new ministry center for the Diocese (now headed by Bishop Dan Jenkins, who had been the Rector at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart during most of my time at Notre Dame and with the Folk Choir), through the West Bluff Historic District down West Moss Avenue, an older neighbourhood of wonderfully-restored or -maintained homes of interest, including a pair of Wright or student-of-Wright designs that were as tasteful as ever. Older homes under the shade of older trees. Just the way everyone should be able to live. From the Museum, Chad took me on a route that let me eyeball the magnificent homes on Grandview Drive, which I'd seen one night when Darcie Short drove some of us from LOMC around the sites of Peoria. Here on the high bluff above the Illinois River, I was particularly taken with some of the 1930s-style manors which you could easily imagine Cary Grant stepping out from in old Beverly Hills grandeur. Chad told the kids and me stories of taking drives along here with with mother on Sundays after church as a kid, zooming down the hairpin turns. We ended up near the equally-interesting look of the old Peoria Water Works Company down by the river before Eva hit her maximum tolerance of Dad's architectural enthusiasm and lecture, and I thanked Chad contentedly as we raced home before the looming four year-old meltdown.

Angie and Chad wanted to have an adults-only dinner with me (or at least used my presence as an excuse for an adults-only dinner, themselves) and they took me out to a very cool Italian restaurant down near the waterfront district of Peoria called Rizzi's on State that I liked a lot, and hope to return to someday. There I tackled their Pork Chops Siciliana (Thick cut pork chops sautéed with mushrooms, cherry peppers and onions with a touch of marinara.) with a glass of a Chianti whose name escapes me now, and which Chad tried as well. This is where I discovered, as we talked a bit of wine, that Angie – who, when I first had gotten to be friends with her, had been a teetotaler like me, out of caution – had since discovered that alcohol tended to make her quiet, if not sullen, of all things, whereas for me it makes me more lighthearted, talkative and giggly. ("As if you need that," said Dan to me when I told him this story.)

A block behind us, a photographer was shooting a bride and her party against the background of one of the old brick factories of the Peoria waterfront, and we talked about how that sort of visual juxtaposition had become fashionable lately, while I mentioned beyondthewell and wondered if it was her and her husband taking the shots. I suppressed the urge to go over and find out, though I thought it would be funny to just trip by and surprise her, if so. Their studio is just over in Bloomington, and after describing their business, we then got to talking about paying for serious portraiture and for art in general, and what that was worth to us. Karen herself had written to me about her and Nate taking up Over The Rhine favourite Michael Wilson's availability to do his "Daylight Portrait", and that had gotten me thinking about the value of such things, particularly given that I have an irrational impulse in my head that denies that there could possibly be anything in this world – houses, cars, books – that one ought to pay more than, say, twenty dollars for. [And instantly, Angie's recent citation jumps into my head: From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Sir Winston Churchill]

I asked them a theoretical question about their sense of contemporary attitudes in Evangelicalism on the question of "certainty" in faith that they completely shot down, though I suppose that it might have more to do with my specific observations of Evangelicals who convert to Catholicism than with Evangelicalism in general. But I abandoned that tack of making them speak for all of Evangelicalism in America before I became utterly annoying.


We went walking then, after dinner, along the restored and lively waterfront, which seemed shockingly different from the Rust Belt ruin I remember from college days. It was a delight to see something have come to life again like that. I looked at this piece of now-fading painting along one of an old series of railway supports, from a line that once crossed the river here to descend into the city. We people-watched the other strollers, talked about weird Asian fish that had been disastrously transplanted into the Illinois River, wondered about a WWII submarine memorial that apparently stood there for no reason other than these subs having passed through Peoria, eyed the Segway rentals, listened to a bit of what sounded like a Dead cover-band, and talked.


I tried taking a decent portrait shot of them, which Chad was too amused to take seriously, flashing me a maniacal Joker smile when I tried. Angie had told me that they had shown the girls the shots I had taken when I'd last visited, before the girls had come along, which the girls found quite funny, perhaps because of Angie's unusually short haircut from the time. Myself, I was still having trouble getting used to Chad's short and business-like hair today, as he had then expressed his own preference for wearing his longer, and had wondered, if I recall correctly, whether he could get away with letting it grow even longer than it was then.


As we left the waterfront, I had Chad take me a bit further down the district so that we could go up the climb on Persimmon Street where I then told (or for Angie, re-told) the story of my grand misadventure the night of Darcie's wedding, with her Maid of Honour December Saucedo, Rich Alms, and Todd Peterson. The run back up to the downtown area is no longer the gauntlet of crackhouses, shooting ranges, brothels and clubs disguised as the above (and a police precinct squatting innocently in their midst) that it used to be. Chad regaled us with similar memories of sitting with his Dad in the window of the old brick place where he worked, eating sandwiches and watching police raids like they were quality entertainment.

Back at the house, with the babysitter returned to her family (and after a talk on the virtues of jr. high school girls versus high school girls for babysitting), we three just kicked back and talked the rest of the night. Angie was now having a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which managed not to cause the withdrawn effect we had discussed earlier, and perhaps aided in the talk. A bit more architecture. A long conversation on dreams, particularly dreams of flying, with the discovery that Chad and I experienced dreams of flying in exactly the same way, giving rise to my curiosity as to whether this would be a more common male trait, if we could survey the question broadly. For us, flight in our dreams takes an absolutely stillness of mind, a state of perfect confidence or faith in one's ability to fly, any wavering of which becomes a wavering of flight itself, with the threat of disaster. Furthermore, we discovered that we never remember launching into flight in our dreams: we always enter a flight dream in the midst of flying. Angie, on the other hand, described an actual "take off" process in her flight dreams of running down the street with arms stretched out, airplane-style, which had Chad and I howling at the image, to Angie's mild annoyance.

The next day, I simply got ready after waking and headed out to the Bloomington Amtrak station with Angie. We were listening to the soundtrack from Elizabethtown in the car as we began talking, and memories of the movie struck a certain chord with me at that moment. The film had come up during a long train of our Friday night conversation about movies. Waiting for Chad, I was tempted to foist a digital download of Before Sunrise on her when I found out that she had never seen the film, and I talked about why Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset duology had had such an impact on me over the last few years, acknowledging that I might have to push my other top favourites (Never Cry Wolf, A Man For All Seasons, The Man Without A Face) aside for them. She had given me a long list of favourite films, most of which I had never even heard of, which was kind of interesting in itself, to find that her taste had gotten so broad and independent-oriented. But Elizabethtown had popped up in the talk, one of the few mainstream movies to do so on her part, which I had just seen for the first time maybe a month or two earlier, and that got me thinking. I thought it was a flawed film (we both pointed to things like Susan Sarandon's dance sequence), but it somehow felt stronger to me for the flaws, if that makes any sense. While certainly the small town feel appealed to me given my roots, I think it was the theme of remaining open to the unexpected turns ahead of us in life that had struck me most strongly, and certainly that kind of openness was something for which Angie was ready to take me to task, as I had described the last few years to her. And so the parallels between themes in the film and themes in the weekend's conversations suddenly appeared in my mind as we set out on the highway to the road-trip music of the soundtrack. Go figure. She had time to get me to the train station and return easily before meeting Chad and the girls at church, and now the talk was pretty light, of odds and ends, and the occasional thought about this chance to catch up as a whole.

We sat there on the cement slab that serves as the "platform" of Bloomington's train station. We talked occasionally about this and that, but mostly I just found myself looking at her, mostly in a kind of quiet amusement and wonder that she was there. Or that I was there. I remembered the day I met her, noticing her red car pulling onto the gravel road leading back to LOMC after mine, a few days before training started, just after the end of the school year, and being introduced to her as one of the Coordinators for that summer. Along with discovering that she was one of my bosses, there was a bit of recognition that there was something about her that I already liked. Now, sitting on the ground this summer morning, I knew that maybe I was being a bit sentimental: it's a job hazard for me as an historian, paying as much attention as I try to to the past. "Did you ever think that we would still be friends after all this time?" I asked her, shortly before we realized it was already ten and that my train had not yet showed up. I continued thinking along these lines after we said goodbye, and while I sat the extra 40-odd minutes for the train to arrive. So many of these other rich, rich friendships from that amazing summer had blurred and faded with distance, but here we were, still talking as intensely and as curiously after all this time, as much as we ever had, late after the campers had gone to bed, sitting out on the Meadows' Deck, underneath the stars. Like everyone else who has ever lived before us, we had laughed about how it really does seem like just a year or two ago. That we would still be friends might be beyond expectations, but that certainly didn't matter: just the fact that it still seemed perfectly natural to be friends was the only thing that counted. Even though it was my own, there was a sense of realizing that I didn't know that the story would be this good.

With the train about 45 minutes late, I still ended up only missing my connection to Milwaukee at Union Station by two minutes. Declining to take part in the mild riot brewing by those who wanted those last two minutes to run down the track to the nigh-departing train, I took the opportunity to withdraw, grab some food, and go sit on a bench looking out across the water at the city, just a bit south of the Adams Street Bridge. I wished I had Chad handy as my personal architecture enthusiast as I looked at the different buildings, and I mused on the last week, at seeing and catching up with Jenny and Angie within a few days, thinking that I only lacked Sunshine strolling down the riverwalk with her husband to round out the sequence nicely. If anything, the last few weeks had both indicated that there was something in my life that was so much bigger than me, if that makes any sense: a sense of symmetry or narrative structure that didn't seem a conscious creation of my own, but also not quite something I'd want to give the grade school theology tag of God "writing my story:" I do believe that God gives us and our universe too much freedom for such a deterministic understanding of events, and yet... there was a kind of grace going on. Perhaps it really means that I've frequently done things right. I hoped so. I hoped that I've really been given a gift for friendship and for love that I've succeeded in using, and in healing where I've putzed it up. Whatever exactly it all is or was, as I sat there with just the two of us – me and Chicago – it seemed to give my presence in space and time a bit of meaning that defied the obvious fact that I was barely in this city long enough to cast an afternoon shadow. And though there were so many things that told me not to be – right then, I was content with that.

Something led me to looking up something about Pittsburgh favourite Mr. Rogers yesterday before getting together with Andrea and Patrick, and I found myself really struck by this story where, according to Wikipedia,

In 1969, Rogers appeared before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications. His goal was to support funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in response to significant proposed cuts. In about six minutes of testimony, Rogers spoke of the need for social and emotional education that public television provided. He passionately argued that alternative television programming like his Neighborhood helped encourage children to become happy and productive citizens, sometimes opposing less positive messages in media and in popular culture. He even recited the lyrics to one of his songs.

The chairman of the subcommittee, John O. Pastore, was not previously familiar with Rogers' work, and was sometimes described as gruff and impatient. However, he reported that the testimony had given him goosebumps, and declared, "Looks like you just earned the $20 million." The subsequent congressional appropriation, for 1971, increased PBS funding from $9 million to $22 million.

Then, thanks to that occasional Wonder of Information Access that is YouTube and its cousins, I was able to watch his actual congressional testimony, which was oddly compelling. I'm wondering now about showering the nieces with Mr. Rogers DVDs....

I saw this article Tuesday night and grabbed the book from Raynor Library's browsing collection on Wednesday. So far it's compelling reading, but also kind of heartbreaking as an attempt to look at the currents of campus culture for my students: this is neither the respect for or empowering of women that I seem to remember being the goal of the feminisms of my student years nor the inheritance from any forms of chivalry. Eek: I'm starting to talk as a member of a different generation! Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses isn't bleak or hand-wringing, though, just honest. I can immediately think of half a dozen friends I'd like to read it with, though, who would have some professional interest in the topic, whether pedagogical, psychological or cultural.

Myself, seeing how the book itself arose out of a Spring 2005 course by the author at Saint Michael's College, this book has really got me thinking in terms of designing either a similar course on "Sex, Dating, and Spirituality," or perhaps having it as one major component of a "Faith and Contemporary Culture" course. I couldn't help but notice how my students last semester, while enjoying all or parts of my "Theology Through the Centuries" course, and reading the classic texts that made the bulk of that syllabus, were particularly involved in, or just plain excited by the reading of Joseph Ratzinger's/Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. The reason for this seemed to be because of the immediate, even practical, nature of the theological questions being discussed: suddenly they saw all the stuff we had been reading suddenly becoming important and useful in the shaping of contemporary culture, politics, worldviews, economics, and the like. So maybe a whole course that addressed contemporary issues of different sorts, or from different angles, but all rooted in theological discourse. It would have to be a course where the students had already been exposed to some of the Tradition and its sources, and had begun to learn to reason in such ways. But anyway, I'm thinkin'....

Author sees wide gap between college students' faith, campus culture

By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Author Donna Freitas held her breath when her book, "Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses," was published this spring.

She was nervous that the book's frank discussion of the pervasiveness of casual sex on today's school campuses, Catholic colleges included, would not be warmly received by college leaders.

But while she was bracing herself "for the worst," as she put it, Freitas said she received an unexpected "outpouring of positive response" from people "who care deeply" about today's college students and who want to help them, including professors at Catholic colleges.

Freitas, a Catholic theologian and assistant professor of religion at Boston University, said she was encouraged not only by how "open and supportive people have been" but also by their willingness to "engage in positive conversation rather than run away" from an issue many might not want to discuss.

While Freitas was attending the Catholic Theological Society of America meeting June 5-8 in Miami, she said, several theology professors told her they plan to discuss her book in courses they are teaching this fall.

The author also has been contacted by countless parents asking her to recommend a college campus where the frequency of casual sex, or as she terms it, "hookup culture," is less prevalent.

In a recent telephone interview with Catholic News Service from her home in New York, Freitas said it's important for parents to talk to their children "way before college" about the type of school environment they might encounter.

Freitas started talking with college students about their views of sexual behavior and how these ideas or practices connected, or not, with their faith during a course she taught on dating several years ago at St. Michael's College, a Catholic college in Colchester, Vt.

In discussions with students she realized that many of them did not see how their faith had much to say about the issues they faced.

Freitas was determined to find out if this small group of students reflected a larger trend and that became the impetus for "Sex & the Soul," published by Oxford University Press.

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Another waking in the middle of the night. (Heh. Just found your note. Thanks, Em.) Took a few hours out to finally catch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this past evening with Mike and Donna, over at the glamourous Oriental Theatre, though not, unfortunately, in the main theatre, as it would have been if I'd seen it in the first week or so. That was just pure popcorn fun, as expected, with Spielberg enjoying himself playing with all sorts of 1950s cultural motifs.

Pulled down my copy of Jordan's A Crown of Swords for fun reading during meals, sleepless interludes, and such. My copy of Lord of Chaos is now fallen into three large chunks still hanging together in its hardcover: the rush to printing always made me feel that these were not the best-bound books in the world. But this read-through has had a bit of a nostalgic feel to me. I always remember reading the first blazing sentence of Lord of Chaos from my brother Joe's new copy, sitting cross-legged on a table in a hallway waiting on him while he was in his Portuguese class at the U of I, coincidentally as a classmate of one of my favourite L.O.M.C. campers, Dana Ingman. A Crown of Swords was the first volume of The Wheel of Time that I'd made a point of buying on the day of release, and the first one to make promotional use of that newfangled "internet," posting the Prologue for free on Tor Book's webpage, before they figured out how to charge for that, too. Reading the prologue always makes me remember walking up to Holy Cross House on a sunny day, reading a copy of the Prologue I'd printed out at the library, and of handing it around to Brett Boessen and Kate Keating, sharing the excitement of the coming story with them. I can't think of many books that have so many memories attached to the reading of it in this way, but it certainly reinforces the fact that it's fun to find friends who share our fandoms.

Miscellanea from the web that I wanted to jot down in my journal: Two news stories about Tim Russert's funeral,

Political leaders pay tribute to TV's Russert
Obama, McCain among mourners at Washington funeral Mass for Russert

and an interesting cultural essay that caught my eye reposted in crookedfingers' journal:

1958: The War of the Intellectuals
By RACHEL DONADIO

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A sudden impulse the other day had me looking around for my Bloom County books. No luck. Moderate panic. I could hardly misplace my bookcases, and the books were clearly not there. It took me 24 hours of searching (well, searching conducted sporadically over 24 hours) before they turned up in a milk crate stuck in a corner, surrounded by course files.

Read a bit of Toons For Our Times before going to bed that night, enjoying the flashbacks to old political and cultural situations. It's funny and weird and wonderful, all rolled up in one, to revisit something like that after a long time and to realize or remember what a huge role it had in creating my sense of humour, possibly more than another of the other stuff I paid attention to, like Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Young Ones, or Mom. It certainly reinforced my willingness to say something daring or inappropriate, but that went right to the heart of the matter, if only people would admit it: I think Bloom County was the 1980s version of Socrates in our society, in that way. Certainly the hold it had over my circle of friends was incalculable. Anyway, looking back and trying to understand myself or my education, it was interesting to realize that I'd made a huge mistake in leaving this out of the equation....

Today was my niece Grace's sixth birthday. She has, in the last few months, finally come to be reasonably comfortable in talking on the phone, but when I called her before dinner to wish her a happy birthday, she barely made a sound. Leslie said that she had been so excited last night about today and the plans for the day (a lunchtime gathering of her friends at Chuck E. Cheese's) that she woke up last night at 10pm, 2am and 4am, if I recall correctly, each time ready to start the day. So when I called she was more-or-less in a coma. Maybe I'll call again in a day or two.

I was out last night at Dan's when my brother called to let me know that he and Daniele had had an ultrasound of their first child and now knew what they were expecting, but we played phone tag through the rest of today and this evening, so I still don't know that news.

Dan and I took advantage of Amy's absence on a business trip to watch the documentary that came with my more recent DVD set of Brideshead Revisited. (This after a London Broil, a very good Cabernet whose name I've lost, toasting my man Columcille, whose feast day it was, and his putting Owen and Anna down for the night.) That turned into about as intense a discussion as we've ever had on the masterpiece (by which I mostly mean the novel, though the beauty of the miniseries is that it is a purist's filming of the novel and not really much of an "adaptation" in the way that the forthcoming 2008 monstrosity looks to be). I remember two points of particular interest. The first was our disbelief at the lack of imagination of many of the critics commenting in the documentary. They seemed to uniformly assume that Charles and Sebastian's relationship was a homosexual one, which I don't think there's any evidence of at all in the text. Where that theme does pop up, Waugh is pretty frank about it, as he would be from his own experience. But the seeming incomprehension that there can be any sort of love between men that isn't sexual – and this seemed the real issue: the reduction of all love to sex – was amazing to me. For all that one hopes that one's literary critics are liberal in the sense of having a wide experience of life, these seemed the most conservative lot – even if a "left" conservatism – that I'd ever heard.

I was further annoyed with the simple-minded Marxist or republican tendency to see all consciousness of class as reducible to the hostility to the very idea of any possible value to an upper class. Speaking as a poor kid myself, that kind of glib assumption still fell short of any open-minded experience of reality. To see Charles Ryder (or maybe more importantly Evelyn Waugh as the author) as purely engaged in a kind of envious social climbing (see again the forthcoming disaster of a movie – at least going by the trailer) is to have a very shallow view of the possibilities, even if its the most generally rewarded one. Charles sees the decline coming in the post-war years as the time of the "Hoopers": of the egalitarianism of the coming democratic republic of the United Kingdom, but an egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator. Of the mundane, or of the crude. Is that merely elitism? Hooper cannot see any sense in one family owning a place like Brideshead. Am I turning a blind eye to the miseries the rich have contributed to over the centuries? Of course not. But it's still not so simple. While the benefits of being upper class – the conveniences of wealth, the ability to acquire wider ranges of experiences through use of that wealth, or to contribute to the artistic production and collection that the wealthy sometimes do – are true benefits, they do not necessarily turn into moral excellences. They do not automatically make you a better human being. But I do think that they can make you a richer kind of better human being than being a morally excellent and wise uncultured and unlearned person. Charles, in his youthful paintings in the house, contributed to the house's beauty and began a kind of artistic nurturing of beauty in himself that could be an avenue for a spiritual experience of God later on. The Hoopers of the army scrawled pornographic graffiti onto his paintings. That's what Charles fears from the Hoopers gaining control of the world. And I don't think it's mere snobbery to say so. The cultivation of culture, like the cultivation of wealth or of power, is in itself neither a moral good or evil – but it has the potential to become either, and we shouldn't forget the former simply because we love the self-righteous feelings of denouncing the latter.

There is something to art and culture that is deeper than simply being fashion or style. There is a unity between Truth, Goodness, and Beauty – between Metaphysics, Ethics and Aesthetics. I'm not denying that these are complicated by their incarnation in human beings, nor that there aren't lesser realities that I'm here calling mere fashion or style, that are economically-driven more than anything else. But I cannot look at my culture today and insist that we don't reap what we sow when we spread out the seeds of crudity and shallowness. And again, I'm not denying the complexity of these situations in an American-conservatism "back-to-the-1950s" way, which I know is what some people would immediately try to reduce what I've said to being. There is a point to an artistic moment in the verbal crudity of a Lenny Bruce, or the artistic randomness of a Jackson Pollack. But a world full of copies of Lenny Bruce and Jackson Pollack? That's no longer making anything like the same points. I don't know: I think I was more precise when I was trying to articulate all of this to Dan last night.

Three other notes: we came to the conclusion, from seeing him discuss his part of Anthony Blanche, that Nickolas Grace is a superlative actor.

We were astounded, looking at the whole, on the makeup job done on Jeremy Irons, who truly looked like he'd aged twenty years over the series, and not like he was made up to look like he'd aged twenty years.

And then there was Diana Quick's (who played Julia Marchmain) explanation that, in trying to understand the Catholic themes of the novel, she came to the conclusion that it was fundamentally about "original sin." Not sure what this was, she got her hands on some books on the subject, written, she said, for readers who were about the age of 7. They explained everything to her, she assured the interviewer. My thought on putting an ad in Variety offering myself as a theological consultant for films came back to me.

I've been impressed with this past week's May 5th edition of America, the Jesuit journal of opinion that I've praised in these pages more than once. While the cover understandably featured a fairly standard picture of Benedict XVI on his then-current tour of the eastern United States, the real meat of the issue was a five-article series of reflections upon "The New Atheism" by a panel of serious scholars – a series that deserved far wider circulation than America unfortunately would be able to guarantee. The popular buzz given to the authors called "the New Atheists" over the last year or two is more than balanced by the considered treatment of these writers, but these are less likely to be found in the pages of The New York Times, I fear.

The collection consists of:

The Madman And the Crowd
For the new atheists, God is not worth a decent argument.
By Michael J. Buckley

Called to Love
Christian witness can be the best response to atheist polemics.
By Stephen J. Pope

True Believers
Have the new atheists adopted a faith of their own?
By John F. Haught

An Evangelical Moment?
To combat the rise of atheism, Christians must first look to themselves.
By Richard J. Mouw

Catholicism and The New Atheism
By Richard R. Gaillardetz

It is a further misfortune that you cannot access all of these articles (or that I cannot post them without getting into trouble again), especially the one by Michael Buckley, S.J., author of the magisterial At the Origins of Modern Atheism, who was in the midst his academic specialty in his response to the New Atheists. His critique of the method of the New Atheists goes directly to their principle flaw, which is their evasion of rational examination while all the while dressing up in the clothes of "reason" and "science" so as to gain the rhetorical advantage of such associations:

Serious inquiry, by contrast, moves in the opposite direction: it begins with the question and then looks for the evidence or arguments that can resolve it. Concern about question and method in the discussion of the existence of God is not a pedantic nicety. It is required if one is to think carefully through the great issues raised by contemporary atheism, and it urges the directive primacy of the question and its care. The central challenge is not that someone has denied the existence of God. In one form or another that denial has been with us for millennia. The central challenge is that much of the eristic manner of interchange has so corrupted the question and the method as to make discussion impossible.

Dawkins transmutes the question of God into the question of religion, but seems to think the question of religion comprises not the beginning of universities and hospitals, nor the cathedral of Florence and the music of Palestrina, nor a pervasive care for the poor and the suffering, but instead an index of evil events and stupid choices throughout history. His selection of “examples,” however overstated, instantiates what the history of rhetoric has asserted over thousands of years: that the choice and marshaling of examples is the induction of the sophist. A thesis can be asserted, or a list constructed and examples selected to prove anything.

The whole of the article is an able demonstration of what I think is the most interesting phenomenon of the past century, and which the New Atheists demonstrate against all their intentions: that the banner of Reason seems to have entirely transfered from the Enlightenment atheists to the camp of the theists. Never since the critique of the Enlightenment shook loose much of the lazy thinking that had attached itself to Christianity has it been so easy to make a powerful intellectual case for Christianity. This seems true across the fields: from history and archaeology to philosophy and logic to the physical sciences and cosmology, much less the much-maligned science of theology, there is a stronger cumulative case for Christian faith to be made than perhaps at any point since the Resurrection of Jesus was a living memory. And I wish the full article by Buckley was available so that the simple pleasure of it could be had by all readers. Still, the publicly-available Richard R. Gaillardetz article makes for some interesting reading, as one would expect from that gifted author.

If you can find America at a newstand or a local library, I recommend making the trip to pick up this issue.

The new year will start with a bang this year – I think of the new year beginning halfway through August on August 16th, if you don't know that one – as the good news has come that The Saw Doctors (The Saw Doctors) will be over from Tuam and playing Irish Fest for two nights this year! I'm already wired in excitement. Y'all should do yourselves a favour and show up for one of these shows. I've seen them at Summerfest, and over at the casino, but I've been aghast that they haven't played the festival the whole time I've been here. Short of U2 showing up for it, this is the best news possible. Now we just need Janet Harbison, Fionnuala Rooney or her brother Michael Rooney to be in the Harp Tent and all will be as good as it can be. (Although I'm sure that there are many more great harpists beyond these few I've heard.)

Slate articles I read in the last few days, brought to my attention by friede and kesil.

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I'm curious to see such a major political voice as his has been venturing into these academic areas....

In Westminster lecture, Blair says faith can transform humanity
By Simon Caldwell
Catholic News Service

LONDON (CNS) -- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has spoken of his "passionate" conviction that religious faith can transform humanity for the better.

Blair, 54, a former Anglican who was received into the Catholic Church just days before Christmas, said he wanted to promote the "idea of faith itself as something dynamic, modern and full of present relevance."

He told 1,600 people gathered in London's Westminster Cathedral April 3 that faith had a "major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world and can and should be a force for progress."

"But it has to be rescued on the one hand from the extremist and exclusionary tendency within religion today and on the other from the danger that religious faith is seen as an interesting part of history and tradition, but with nothing to say about the contemporary human condition," he said. "I see faith and reason, faith and progress, as in alliance, not contention."

His remarks came in a lecture on the subject of "Faith and Globalization," the first in a series of six speeches hosted by the Archdiocese of Westminster on "Faith and Life in Britain."

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Ill. Univ. Top Cop: 'I Lost 5 People'
Muslims More Numerous Than Catholics
‘With a Few More Brains ...’ By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Students of Virginity

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As I'm curious to see how the very public conversion of Magdi Cristiano Allam to Catholicism plays out, particularly given the international media coverage of the event, I tossed a bunch of news stories related to it (and a few that really weren't, but sort of thematically caught my eye as I thought about these things) into the journal for keeping. Please excuse the mess.

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Bryan Massingale is the professor whose assistant I was during the 2004-2005 school year. An ethicist trained in Rome, this was probably the biggest professional stretch I had to make in my time at Marquette, as I'm no ethicist by training and have comparatively little interest in ethics on a professional level, despite its being what most people would think of as the most "concrete" part of Theology. (I would say that's only an appearance, myself.) While it was also a challenge to match biological rhythms – Bryan being a morning person and me not – the biggest stretch I made topically was when I got a real opportunity in being able to observe him teach an undergraduate course in his speciality, the course he mentions in the following article which just appeared in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I reproduce it here for any general interest. Being able to then retire to his office and talk faith and race for an hour each day at a more graduate level was a fabulous bonus in my graduate education.

How we move beyond race
By BRYAN N. MASSINGALE
Posted: March 23, 2008

At Marquette University, where I am a theology professor, I teach the course "Christian Faith and Racial Justice." Over the course of the semester, I pause and ask students, "What are you feeling?" I have realized that discussions of race cause deep emotions to well up which, if not acknowledged, impede an intellectual engagement of the material we are learning. I note each emotion as it called out: fear, anger, confusion, resentment, guilt, helplessness, powerlessness, outrage, despair, resignation.

I then give them the following reassurance and challenge: "What you are feeling is perfectly normal. We are dealing with difficult stuff. These emotions are to be expected. But we don't have to be controlled by them. Acknowledge what you are feeling. But remember, you don't have to act out of what you are feeling." That reassurance and clearing the air is often what is needed for us to engage again in the tasks at hand.

My point is simple but often overlooked: Discussions of race and racism engage us viscerally, at a gut level, stirring up fears and anxieties of which we are often unaware. And unless these are acknowledged in some way, no reasonable discussion of race and racial injustice is possible.

Racism cannot be resolved by rational evidence or intellectual debates alone. We also have to contend with what the Rev. Martin Luther King called the "nonrational barriers" that hinder racial unity.

This insight gives a perspective for understanding the widespread angst and continuing concern caused by some incendiary remarks made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of the church attended by Sen. Barack Obama. Rationally, one would think that Obama's repeated denunciations of this pastor's rhetoric would have been enough to quash the issue, and we would have moved on.

The fact that many seem unable to move on is a signal that something more is fueling this ongoing discussion. And until we name it, we won't be able to move beyond it.

I suspect that an underlying issue is this: Obama's association with Wright raises in many whites an unarticulated fear that Obama may be an "angry black man." They dread he may be a closet Al Sharpton, a secret Louis Farrakhan, a stealth advocate of racial hostility, an undercover agent for racial "payback."

This sounds foolish, even preposterous, when put so directly. But race-based anxieties are not rational, and this would not be the first time that racial foolishness has affected the public discourse of Obama's candidacy.

How else would one characterize discussions such as "Is Obama black enough?" or "Is he too black?" or "Why are all the blacks voting for him?"

Because many whites know few (if any) black men in any depth, the Wright controversy makes them view Obama through the lens of "black men" that has been constructed for them. They see him through the filter of what they have heard - and perhaps fear - about black men. Obama becomes not a black individual but an entity based upon a composite of the few political black men whom whites "know" through the media - such as Sharpton, Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson. This is not rational, but it is real.

What is happening to Obama is a common experience for many black men. He has become a walking "ink blot," a living Rorschach test, upon which is projected white fears, fantasies and anxieties.

As a black man who is also a Catholic priest, I am familiar with this dynamic. Over the years, many well-intentioned white parishioners have told me that I remind them of Denzel Washington (though I wish I were that handsome), Clarence Thomas (though I am a polar opposite of his political views) and Jackson (though I could never match his rhetorical riffs). I am seen through the prism of the only black men that they "know."

I also have been told by well-meaning whites that I am "too soft on race" (i.e., not black enough) while others have written that I am nothing more than a "politically correct race hustler" (i.e., too black). I have had a white co-worker, a good friend, run from me in fear as I approached her at dusk, wearing a baseball cap and without my identifying collar. I have come to realize that for many, without their conscious awareness, I am a living "ink blot" upon which they read their own unexamined concerns, fears and anxieties.

This is one of the deepest tragedies of racism or any social prejudice: It robs one of the freedom to be an individual, to be "me" rather than a "category."

Whatever shortcomings Obama may have or whatever our political disagreements with him, at least let us understand that he is not a stealth agent for black supremacy. He couldn't be for a simple reason: He has been intimately shaped, influenced and loved by his mother, grandfather and grandmother, all of whom are white. Interracial love is a cure, not a recipe, for racial domination.

In the New Testament, it is written, "There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear." In my classroom, I have witnessed the transformative power of love. My experience teaching about racial justice shows that when people are able to confront their fears and anxieties, with understanding and without condemnation, they can move beyond them. We can't help how we feel, but we can decide not to be controlled by our feelings.

Love is what gives Obama the hope that America can move beyond our fears to end what he calls our racial "stalemate." It is up to us to demonstrate if we are worthy of such trust.

The Rev. Bryan N. Massingale is an associate professor of theology at Marquette University.

This Holy Saturday finds me tripping through notes from the noted German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a self-described “methodological atheist,” who Pope Benedict had engaged in very public conversation a few years ago before he was elected Pope. It was a funny moment in that lots of dogmatic atheists in the public sphere were crowing ahead of time about the beating that their "team" was going to give the clearly-inferior (after all, he's Catholic) Ratzinger on the question of Christianity's role in the public future of Europe, and what he had and has been arguing is the importance of acknowledging that in the Preamble to the European Constitution, along with the contributions of the Greeks and of the Enlightenment.

Then, to their surprise, the two of them engaged in very polite and accommodating conversation and Habermas did nothing of the sort, and instead very much supported Ratzinger on this point. Denying it is easy thanks to a determined effort to avoid the hard work of examining the question, he criticizes, and presents a potential threat to the foundations of our free public order. In an essay published in Italy right around that time as “A Time of Transition,” Habermas argues that Christianity, and Christianity alone, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy.

To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Some other samples:

I don’t resent it at all when I am accused of having inherited theological concepts. I am convinced that religious discourse contains within itself potentialities that have not yet been sufficiently explored by philosophy, insofar as they have not yet been translated into the language of public reason, which is presumed to be able to persuade anyone. Naturally, I am not talking about the neopagan project of those who want to ‘build upon mythology.’ Today, in the field of antirational postmodern criticism, these neopagan conceptual figures are back in fashion: a broad anti-Platonism carelessly spread by fashions inspired by the late Heidegger and late Wittgenstein, in the sense of a definitive repudiation of the universalism that characterizes the premises of unconditional truth. I rebel against this regressive tendency of post-metaphysical thought.

In the dialogical dispute among competing religious visions there is a need for that ‘culture of recognition’ which draws its principles from the secularized world of the universalism of reason and law. In this matter, it is thus the philosophical spirit which provides the concepts instrumental in the political clarification of theology. But the political philosophy capable of making this contribution bears the stamp of the idea of the Covenant no less than that of the Polis. Therefore this philosophy also hearkens back to a biblical heritage.

In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community’s practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete.

I also found a West Coast graduate student's paper posted online entitled, Jurgen Habermas: A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind on Religion in the Public Sphere that was engaging reading on this point.