The Private Intellectual

2012-01-01T13:51:00.001-06:00

The Word Made Flesh

My Christmas Day column for The Daily:

In church on Christmas Day, Christians hear the famous passage that opens the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son.” Unfortunately, “lived” is a pretty domesticated translation of the original Greek verb, which means literally “pitched his tent.” I like to think of the verse, and of the birth of Jesus, that way: The Word pitched his tent with us. A tent, of course, is a portable dwelling. It’s for people who need to move around, people whose lives carry them from place to place. It’s not the image of a divine substance congealing in one particular home, but of the Word of God joining an itinerant humanity in our life of change and loss.

The Christmas reading is the classic text for what Christians call the doctrine of the Incarnation. In the time in which John wrote, people often speculated about a divine Word that shaped and animated the whole universe. The peculiar Christian move was to say that this Word became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This was a difficult and controversial idea at the time (as it still is today), but it’s at the heart of how I account for my faith.

2011-12-22T21:42:00.002-06:00

Whither Republican Unity?

Today John Boehner decided to follow Mitch McConnell's lead and accept a two-month extension of the payroll tax holiday. This was a very strange political debate in that everyone (or almost everyone) claimed to be in favor of the move, but yet it stalled over unrelated policy issues. That's how our institutional design works these days, I guess.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what the impact of this development is on the policy issues next year. One of the more striking, and under-discussed, features of American politics since January, 2009 has been the high degree of Republican unity. With very few exceptions, the President has had to move his agenda items with only Democratic support. This was true, interestingly enough, even on issues over which there was broad bipartisan agreement literally months earlier (Mitt Romney's health care policy, or John McCain's climate policy to name only two).

The simplest explanation for this unusual degree of Republican solidarity is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both saw thwarting the president on every issue as broadly beneficial to them both in electoral terms (and thus beneficial to the country as a whole in the medium-to-long run). And this was true, and probably remains true. But while Republican members have less diversity of ideology and individual interests than their Democratic counterparts, they don't have entirely identical interests. And for once this diversity of views and interests turned into a public rift between the House and Senate caucuses. A strategy of total obstruction has benefited both caucuses, but only because both caucuses have denied the president the "bipartisan" label on any of his measures. Once that cooperation fractures, it seems like it should be pretty hard to repair. I don't know who has the more right to feel double-crossed right now, Boehner or McConnell, which perhaps means that they both feel abused by the other, and it will be much easier for the president to play them against each other than it was only days ago. It would not surprise me if the next payroll tax holiday extension debate plays out rather differently than this one.

2011-12-22T21:37:00.002-06:00

We Didn't Know It Was You

Last Sunday's column was on Robert MacGimsey's classic "Sweet Little Jesus Boy" and Mahalia Jackson's rendition:

The songwriter Robert MacGimsey was an early and forceful white advocate for African-American music. Born in Arkansas in 1898, he grew up in an age where demeaning “coon songs” were the most popular adaptations of African-American culture by white composers. In addition to writing “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” “Shadrack” and other original gospel songs, MacGimsey transcribed many of the traditional slave songs of the Georgia Sea Islands and lectured white composers and performers on their tendency to ruin African-American vernacular music by forcing it into more European forms.

MacGimsey’s work stands out as an attempt to honor and celebrate black music and the people who made it. Inspired by the singers MacGimsey knew in the Jim Crow South of his youth, yet written with white performers and audiences in mind, “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” would eventually come full circle. It found its way into the heart of the gospel music canon alongside “authentic” classics like “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

I did some actual, in-the-library, out-of-print textual research for this one. It's got embedded video of the song, too.

2011-12-13T17:51:00.001-06:00

Confessions of a Failed Evangelist

The new issue of Let's Talk is online, and my column is about being bad at getting people to go to church:

During three years at Wicker Park Lutheran Church I was uniquely positioned to do the kinds of evangelism we are frequently encouraged to do. I had a number of good friends of long standing living in the neighborhood, all of whom had at least a glancing relationship with church in the past and who had a genuine, if intermittent, curiosity about religious matters. And they had friends with similar dispositions who knew me at least slightly and knew I was a pastor. As an evangelist I had relationships to build on and social networks to move in. I didn’t view any of these people as “targets” for evangelism, of course - I wanted their friendship more than I wanted their church attendance - but I was not without hope that my pastoral role in their neighborhood would draw them to church at least from time to time.

Needless to say, that’s not quite how things worked out.

2011-11-28T23:28:00.004-06:00

Redistributing Money is What Budgets Do

On the Tri-State today I saw a car with the popular bumper sticker "Redistribute My Work Ethic." Very clever, and expressive of a current and historically rather exaggerated right-wing opposition to "redistribution of wealth."

The implication of the sticker, and of the whole school of rhetoric it neatly summarizes, is that wealth is being redistributed from the well-off (who work hard) to the poor (who do not) by means of federal programs. But when you think about the federal budget in those terms, you might be surprised at what you find. The biggest "redistribution" that the budget engages in is from people under age 65, regardless of their health or wealth, to people over age 65, regardless of theirs (and importantly, to their doctors). Going down the list, we see that the federal budget redistributes wealth on net from non-defense contractors to defense contractors and from non-farmers to farmers. Through the tax code, it redistributes wealth from renters to homeowners, and especially to the owners of very expensive or multiple homes. It redistributes from the childless to people with children and from people who do not have group health insurance to people who do.

I mention all of these things because these are, for good or ill, very popular redistributive programs (especially among Republican voters and officeholders). If you keep going down from the big-ticket programs and tax subsidies I've mentioned, you'll eventually run into some programs that directly redistribute from the comparatively wealthy to the poor: TANF, food stamps, WIC, Medicaid (this last being, legitimately, a very large program, though very cheap in unit costs). Social Security and Medicare have some progressive distributive impacts, but they are not the purpose of the programs per se, and in any event, as I mentioned, they are very popular among very conservative voters. Apart from Medicaid, poverty programs are quite small and their impact on overall distribution of wealth is not very impressive. But more to the point, even assuming we get rid of all of these things, the federal budget would still be doing a lot of redistribution of wealth. And that's because redistributing wealth is what public budgets do. We settle on common purposes and goods--putting criminals in jail, having national parks, promoting almond exports, whatever--and then we raise tax revenue from other sources to make those things happen.

Perhaps our irritable motorist thinks that feeding people and giving them access to health care is a stupid thing to do--presumably he does--but choosing not to do those things does not mean that the nightmare of redistribution will be over. It's important to have democratic debates over what purposes are important enough to override the rather strong presumption we have in favor of letting everyone keep their money. I, for instance, am not thrilled with the mortgage interest tax deduction, which I help pay for but which I do not benefit from. But for my objection to make any sense, it has to be based on the facts that 1) I think it's bad policy and 2) it happens to be disadvantageous to me. That it's a program of redistribution is itself neither here nor there. If you object to the very notion of redistributing wealth, you object to the notion of the state.

2011-11-27T21:40:00.002-06:00

The War on Advent

My new column in The Daily is up. Liturgical seasons, consumerism, and W.H. Auden, check, check, and check:

The Bible lessons for Sundays in Advent focus on prophecy, both grave and joyous. We hear Jesus warn in the Gospel of Matthew that, in the days of Noah, people were eating and drinking and marrying until they were taken by surprise in the flood. The lesson is that trials will always come amid life’s pleasures and distractions.

While people display crèches as visible gestures of Christian identity, Isaiah laments to God, “Because you hid yourself, we transgressed” — reminding the faithful that God cannot be put on display for our own purposes.

While we ransack stores for the year’s must-have toys and games, Isaiah imagines children playing in a new world entirely: “The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp” — a poisonous snake — “and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den,” because “they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

The teachings seem meant to measure the smallness of our aspirations and the heedlessness in which we often live. Advent is not about gloom and doom, but its stories and songs give voice to the world’s radical incompleteness, its yearning, its anticipation.

2011-11-10T20:53:00.003-06:00

Blow the Whistle on that Analogy
(UPDATED)

Sullivan:

And we might as well face it: college football is a kind of religion for many. Challenging the Pope of Penn State was unthinkable.

See also.

Granting with alacrity that no one has any business feeling sorry for Joe Pa, that his actions and inactions both reasonably established and highly probable are utterly deplorable, and that the students who rioted in State College last night were drunk idiots at best: is it really at all helpful to describe Joe Pa as the "Pope of Penn State"? Do we not cheapen the metaphor and the quality of our outrage by making so careless an association? Penn State is a big school and Paterno is as big as they get in the world of college football, but come on--there are a lot of football-factory schools, a lot of state universities that have a lot of pull in their environs, and a lot of unaccountable power out there. And we may just as well remember that the cultural and theological issues that were so often blamed for the church abuse crisis are mostly absent from a state university football program. There is no onerous ethic of celibacy, of course, and no dogmatic structure in need of defense. There are no keys to the kingdom and no sacramental power.

Indeed, the only thing in common, beyond vague talk about hierarchies and authority, is the immense importance of institutional survival and well-being. But here's the thing: there are a whole lot of institutions that are scared witless by stuff like this and prioritize survival above all else. I really appreciate Sullivan's zeal in this cause, and I share it. But surely he knew about college football, surely he'd heard of Joe Paterno at some point. Did it ever occur to Sullivan or anyone else to compare a football coach to a man styled as the Vicar of Christ until this week?

As I said yesterday, the most awful thing about this revelation, apart from the suffering of the victims themselves, is precisely how it gives the lie to the idea that this is somehow a distinctively Catholic Church issue. After the fact you can identify the structures with the Catholic Church if you want, but this only serves to make the problem more distant and exotic than it in fact is. There are a lot of college football programs, a lot of college towns, a lot of pro teams, a lot of companies that anchor a local economy, a lot of institutions that have a very, very powerful interest in making stories like this go away. And a whole lot of people depend on them for their livelihood and are thus quite susceptible to pressure, and a whole lot of influence gets brought to bear in their protection. You don't need 15th-century Italian court garb or extravagant claims of spiritual and temporal authority in order to know who writes your paychecks.

This is all the more reason to be rigorous in holding people like Joe Paterno accountable for their actions and inactions, even if they fall short of breaking the law. If a career as long and remarkable as his can be ended in a matter of days because of cowardice in the matter of protecting children from rape, then it can happen to anyone, and so much the better.

And while I don't really see the case, in the instance, for abolishing Penn State football (as if that will prevent such things from happening in the future) or even for cancelling the rest of the season, I do think you should all read Whet on why the U of C ended football in 1939 and how that decision has been vindicated. It might be best for everyone, or at least a bunch of schools, to take that leap all at once (or, as I've mused in the past, to spin off their football programs as semi-pro, for-profit teams that rent the colors and the stadiums, pay players, and otherwise avoid the pretense of functioning within a university).

UPDATE: I would rather bashfully direct your attention to Joe Posnanski's post on all of this. However you'd like to bicker over the details, he's right that the reactions have snowballed much faster than the facts have been established. Anger is a poor substitute for courage or righteousness, two things we would like to feel when we hear stories like this. One wonders how long it will be before we hear a call to shutter Penn State, raze State College to the ground, and salt the earth. Pedophilia is a crime committed by a very small but apparently persistent sliver of the human population. Institutions with incentives to sweep it and other potentially damaging misdeeds under various rugs are not going anywhere, and neither is the influence they can sometimes exert on all kinds of political and cultural actors. A cathartic howl of rage won't change that.

2011-11-09T20:50:00.003-06:00

Abuse and the Elusive Virtue

The striking and horrifying revelations that have come out of Penn State and its football program this week have left people with urgent questions about how such serious abuse could have gone unreported for so long. Quite understandably, a good deal of the questioners have settled, often with hostility, on the figure of Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant and now assistant coach who claims to have seen defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky raping a ten-year-old boy in 2002. By his own account, McQueary left the scene, called his father, and then reported the incident to head coach Joe Paterno, who in turn seems to have kicked the story upstairs to the school's athletic director.

The fallout from this series of events will be severe and wide-ranging--it has already cost the University president his job and Paterno, the dean of college football coaches, his--but McQueary has drawn particular ire for failing to intervene directly in the assault he witnessed. Alan Jacobs blames this cowardice on the culture of football. Sullivan agrees and compares it to the culture of the Catholic Church hierarchy.

There may be something to those sorts of explanations, but as a general rule one should be wary of accounts that exempt the observer from the vice being explained. The unfortunate fact is that it appears to be, even at this late date, rather easy to get away with sexually abusing minors. What McQueary claims to have witnessed is more severe and frankly abusive than most cases of molestation, but it would surprise me very much if the same factors that make it feasible for the kindly neighbor, touchy-feely uncle, or beloved teacher to get away with more or less open misconduct were not at play in this case.

For one thing, we have plenty of evidence that bystanders tend toward cowardice. People really, really don't want to feel responsible or implicated and really, really want to get away from the situation. Not everyone, of course, but ask yourself if you haven't been guilty of this at some point.

For another, child sexual abuse is so foreign to people's expectations that seeing it happen creates cognitive dissonance that people seem tempted to resolve in ways that are not especially helpful to the victims. After the fact, it often turns out that people had suspicions, but they eased them one way or another: I was imagining things, I assumed it must have been innocent, etc. (again this goes for things like fondling or excessive attention rather than actual rape, which seems much harder to accommodate in those ways). And this impulse will be buttressed by strong institutional incentives toward silence, incentives that are well known even outside of churches and D-I football programs.

We have not been especially protective of children, as a society, for all that long. Old habits die hard, and we still tolerate the mistreatment of children in a variety of ways (ahem*). This is by no means to excuse the cowardice of anyone who knew about this abuse and did not take adequate steps to stop it. But courage is a difficult virtue. I hope all of us who have been appalled at the failure of Mike McQueary will bear that in mind the next time--and it will not be so long, in all likelihood--we are called on to protect someone who is vulnerable.

* Seriously, not to keep banging the drum on this, but you should check out the comments to that article. One thing I didn't end up emphasizing is that we've had a pretty smooth trip through the system, all things considered: a young, comparatively normal child, a dedicated caseworker, and medical professionals who were more or less willing to treat the girl. Check out some of the problems other foster parents have to deal with and the callous way we've chosen to treat them.

2011-11-08T21:15:00.004-06:00

Realism is Also a Genre of Christianity

How have we managed to let a circle of English faery enthusiasts define our religion? I don't know, and nothing against C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton, but I must object. In a short essay ominously entitled "Fantasy is a Genre of Christianity" (via Sullivan), Commentary's D.G. Myers explains:

Speaking as both an author and scholar of fantasy, Lewis said in a 1947 essay that “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.” No statement about the genre has ever been more definitive. The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm. Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s “wizarding world,” parallel universes of all kind are imaginative reconstructions of Christianity’s first principle: namely, that the “kingdom of heaven” is the only true world.

Oy. Granting that plenty of perfectly adequate Christians have believed in something that you might call "a spirit realm," its existence is hardly among Christianity's principles, much less its first. The existence of the Holy Spirit, and later the co-equality of this Person with the Father and the Son, is certainly a foundational point, and like other people of their age the earliest Christians believed in the reality of non-corporeal essences that could influence human life. But if Christianity has a "first principle" it would be something like the opposite of a belief in the Kingdom of God (let's use the right phrase while we're at it; "heaven" is Matthew the Evangelist's pious Jewish euphemism for God) as a disembodied and "spiritual" realm. On the contrary, it's the humanity of Christ as the bearer of the divine Word, imprint, or form (leaving aside the precise dogmatic formulae for this idea) that is most consistently stressed in the New Testament and to no small extent beyond. You could just as well argue that Christianity's most startling contribution to the world was its intense focus on the worldly, quotidian, and human. Mystery religions, as Bonhoeffer wrote, address human beings at the limits of experience, while Christ claims the whole man.

So the quotes from Lewis and Chesterton in this unfortunate essay capture only a slice of what Christianity has been about over the centuries, and perhaps not the greatest portion. I'm reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age right now, and among other things it's a reminder that the worldview of European medieval people was in many ways similar to any other pre-modern civilization. The first Saxon and German converts were, it is said, impressed by the wonder-working missionaries, whose apparent mastery of the spirit world was the sort of thing they were primed by their ancestral religions to admire. So when Lewis wrote that he felt like a converted pagan among apostate puritans, he spoke more truly than he may have intended. What is most striking to me in much of Lewis's work is not its Christianity but its paganism (and not in a pejorative sense). The same is true of Chesterton and Tolkein in their own ways. This nostalgia merged with English common sense in ways that become unbearable. Consider Lewis's bizarre statement quoted about the "only real 'other world' we know." It's the worst of rationalism and superstition put together in one statement, as if an actuary were trying to convince you that UFOs are real.

But, you know, that was just Lewis doing his thing. He liked what he liked and he wrote what he wrote and if it was a whole lot more idiosyncratic in terms of mainstream Christianity than he let on, well who can blame him? But there's more to the story than spirits and fantasy. There are whole theological schools that make no reference to parallel realities. You might try Augustine, for whom there was a single reality ordered all the way from the Trinity on down. Or Calvin, whose particular emphasis on the expression of God's providence through the material world and daily life helped foster a huge amount of our literary and artistic heritage. Or Barth or Bonhoeffer, who took a "high" view of Christ and of Biblical revelation while basically stiff-arming all the spirit-world stuff. Don't let the Englishmen tell the whole story.

(Including Sullivan himself, by the way, who at one point defined Christianity as the faith that liberates one from "the illusion of worldliness" or words to that effect. That's a fine and noble thing for a religion to do, but the religion that does it, or seeks to, is Buddhism. With all credit to the mystical traditions, what is distinctive about Christianity is the way in which it sends us more deeply into worldliness, the way in which it dignifies our struggles for love and justice as more than just the elaboration of an illusion).

2011-11-02T21:09:00.002-05:00

Lake Wobegon's Culture War

My travelogue/post-mortem on the Michele Bachmann phenomenon is online:

In 2008, the Bachmanns decamped Stillwater for a big house on a golf course in the sprawl country directly east of St. Paul. Bachmann's residence is finally aligned with her electoral fortunes: her current precinct went for her in a big way in 2010. This southeastern corner of the sixth district, on the boundary between cul-de-sacs and cornfields, was my last stop. I attended the late service at New Life Church in Woodbury.

Karl Marx called religion the heart of a heartless world—and he hadn't even visited Woodbury. Just south and east of the freeway noose encircling Minneapolis-St. Paul, Woodbury is an unfocused grid of arterial roads connecting chain stores, parking lots and crepuscular housing developments. A little over half the seats in New Life's worship space were full. It was the most ethnically diverse church I visited in the sixth district, drawing from the area's South Asian and African immigrant populations. The service featured excellent musical execution and a highly approachable worship format.

The sermon was on a very Lutheran topic: "How do you know if your faith is real?" Yet the answer proved to be anything but Lutheran. Our faith is genuine, the preacher told us, if it bears enough fruit and if we experience joy in it. Lacking any sacrament or words of pardon, the service left an impression of unrelieved striving toward a benevolently disposed but standoffish God. It was as if the cohesion and discipline of the old farm town could be regained through sheer spiritual exertion.

2011-10-30T22:11:00.003-05:00

Just as Every Cop is a Criminal, and All Your Sinners, Saints

My new column for The Daily is up, this one for All Saints' Day:

Sniffing out the flaws of the famous validates the popular prejudice that sanctity is just a cover for hypocrisy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and anti-Nazi martyr, called this suspiciousness the “revolt from below.” But this is a misunderstanding of sainthood. The concept of purity is at odds with what a saint is supposed to be. In fact, as historian David Steinmetz recently put it, “saints and not sinners” are “the real authorities on sin.” This is obvious enough when you think about it; you only notice a current, Steinmetz explains, when you begin to struggle against it.

2011-10-25T10:40:00.003-05:00

Adventures in Babysplitting

My big story on foster care and austerity politics is online at the Washington Monthly:

In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia’s broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many medical practices, his endeavored at all costs to avoid working for Medicaid’s paltry reimbursement rates. (The office went so far as to deny ever having treated her; eventually, however, they gave in.) We went through a similar amount of stress trying to put Sophia into daycare. We had to run down a pile of government paperwork, prove our employment, and then simply wait and hope that our daycare center would accept the state’s stingy pay. And yet, frustrated as we were, we couldn’t exactly blame the doctors and daycare providers for being heartless. As the state’s stinginess pushes more of the costs of caring for foster children onto them, it’s no surprise that they start to balk.

Of everything I've written for publication over the last year, I think this may be the most important in real-world terms (for whatever that distinction is worth). So please do read and share it.

2011-10-02T23:16:00.001-05:00

Monks and Rehab

My new column for The Daily is up:

In his recent memoir, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards described the rehab stints of his bandmate Ronnie Wood. “Ronnie’s idea of rehab was mainly a strategy to get away from the pressure,” Richards writes. At his favorite facility, in Ireland, the only rule was no visitors and no phone calls. Wood and his fellow residents went there “just to get the day-to-day living off their back.”

As rehab has climbed the rungs from stigma to heroism to lifestyle enhancement, it’s become a part of the resumes of a staggering array of famous people. It’s also an easy trend to disparage. Rehab, as one tabloid has put it, is now little more than a “Get out of jail free” card for people who choose “penitence over prosecution.”

But public acts of penitence and the need to escape the snares of daily living weren’t always thought of as so trivial. For me at least, a show like “Celebrity Rehab” — along with its other charms — demonstrates just how far we’ve gone to recast many of the insights of the ancient Christian and Buddhist monastic traditions into the modern, secular terms of recovery.

Read the rest here.

2011-09-27T22:28:00.004-05:00

Why Sports Matters

I'm a big believer in the Whet Moser theory of Why Sports Matter. Not big enough to get off my digital duff and find a good link, but here's the gist: the game itself is not important, so the ways we respond to it and surround it with significance are especially pure. Well, I'll let him explain it.

Anyway, as I was on my way to Messiah Lutheran Church in Wauconda this morning, I was digesting the news of Ozzie Guillen's not-unexpected departure from the White Sox with the help of morning sports talk guys Waddle and Silvie. And Tom Waddle, the former Bears player, said something very powerful about Mike Ditka's departure in 1992. He admitted to crying when he heard that Ditka had been fired. And here I'm paraphrasing:

It's not like I was sitting on the steps of Halas Hall bawling. But I got into my car after I heard the news, and I shed tears. Because that guy was the only guy who would ever give me a chance. And I get it, OK, I had a crappy career. But all he cared about was [guts? effort?] and loyalty. And he gave me a chance. We were a bad football team in 1992. But I loved that man, and if I could have run through a brick wall for him--I was too small and too slow--but if I could have, I would have.

Now the thing here is that I freaking hated Mike Ditka. These days I like him just fine, the grizzled emeritus talking tough on the radio and selling saucy-named red wine. But back in the late 80's, early 90's, I despised the sight of him. And this remembrance by Tom Waddle, about whose football career I do not especially care (just so you know: 9 touchdowns and 2,109 yards in six seasons), moved me deeply. It's easy, especially in the Moneyball era, to think about sports strictly in terms of stats, money, wins-over-replacement, and so on. And there's a lot of truth to that, just as there is in any field that has embraced the modern fascination with such tools. But behind those metrics are entirely ordinary human beings with entirely sympathetic responses to things like loyalty, respect, approbation, and (lest we forget) money. And there are fans whose own connection to the game is anything but rational in a narrow economic sense.

Those of us who were there for 2005 will always have a soft spot for Ozzie, tedious as his foul-mouthed press conferences and mediocre team performances became. You could commute this minor sense of loss into a sort of blame-shifting: the players underperformed, GM Kenny Williams' deals were a disaster, and so on, and maybe all that is true enough. A sport is a business to the brass. Ozzie, like Ditka, couldn't expect to eat out forever on one championship. Most fans seem to understand that. But they'll always have a seat at our table, whether they're the guy who gave the slow, small undrafted kid from BC a chance or the guy who brought the big prize to the Southside for the first time in 88 years.

P.S. Something I apparently left out of that old post was going to campus the next day in my Sox cap and coming across another guy on the quad in a Sox cap (the U of C, despite its location, is not a hotbed of Sox fandom), and seeing him smile this big, stupid, not-quite-open-mouthed grin at me. Triumph!

2011-09-26T22:47:00.003-05:00

Marriage-Crisis Movies

Pardon my tardiness for the link, but I wrote something for TheAtlantic.com earlier this month on movies:

Crazy Stupid Love exemplifies the growing genre of marriage-crisis movies, stories pitched between the winking optimism of the romantic comedy and the somber twilight of the divorce melodrama. In movies as varied as Hall Pass and The Kids Are All Right, as well as classics like The Grass is Greener (1960) and Two for the Road (1967), we meet the characters years or decades after ice-cream dates, meet-cute ER visits, and wedding photos have given way to domestic struggles and sexual frustration. Since these films all rely on nods of recognition from the audience, they must attempt to depict married life in realistic terms. To trace the genre's evolution over the years is to trace the evolution of American attitudes toward partnership, divorce, and adultery.

Read the whole thing (please!)

2011-09-24T14:05:00.002-05:00

More on Religion and the Death Penalty

Another problem, now that I think of it, with Hitchens' argument about American religiosity and the death penalty is one that plagues all enthusiasts of some absolute agenda. Say you wish to see nothing more than the eradication of all traces of religion in human life. If you are devoted to this project, you are going to see every good development as a sign of the progress of your cause and every stubborn ill as evidence of its incomplete triumph. The only problem is that this becomes absurd. New York has legalized same-sex marriage: score one for the secularizers. But it also restored the death penalty not so long ago: score one for the ongoing scourge of religion. But which is it? Is New York actually becoming both more and less secular?

Now I point this out despite my genuine interest in the question of how religion relates to the death penalty. Hitchens seems to conceive of religion as something like soccer fandom; change a few million minds, knock down a few dozen stadiums, and remove some pages from the back of the paper and it's gone. Religion is not something that was gratuitously added to the human experience by brilliant hucksters at some point in the past, and that may just as simply be removed now. But for the sake of simplicity, I would be interested to look at the views of self-identified regular church (or shul or mosque) goers on the death penalty relative to non-attenders in the same demographic groups. The problem with simply breaking down poll data into religious-vs.-secular categories is that it doesn't do much to isolate the effect, if any, of religion on people's views. An "evangelical/born-again" sample is going to hugely over-represent white southerners, who are really conservative in general. So I'd be interested to see how black churchgoers view capital punishment versus black non-churchgoers. It would not surprise me if either there is little correlation within groups between religiosity and support for the death penalty, or even if the correlation in some groups were negative.

But even then, I'm not sure exactly what conclusions one would draw. We may be more or less inclined to treat the human body as an object for punishment, but it's a little unusual that the "humane" alternative is to punish, in effect, the soul. "A life for a life" is not an inaccurate way to describe a life sentence without parole, especially since the prospect of recidivism goes down dramatically late in life. And we certainly abuse this punishment in America, above and beyond what you may think of the death penalty.

2011-09-23T23:10:00.002-05:00

Religiosity and the Death Penalty

Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, thinks the former explains our love of the latter:

Nobody had been bothering to argue that the rope or the firing squad, or the gas chamber, or “Old Sparky” the bristle-making chair, or the deadly catheter were a deterrent. The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye. (You might wish to look up the chapter of Exodus in which that stipulation occurs: it is as close to sheer insane ranting and wicked babble as might well be wished, and features the famous ox-goring and witch-burning code on which, one sometimes fears, too much of humanity has been staked.)

As for that last part, you can read it for yourself and decide if Hitchens speaks fairly (it contains no reference to witches, and the ox-goring passages strike me as reasonable given the circumstances of a pastoral community with no state apparatus, but you may conclude otherwise). To the larger point, perhaps Hitchens is right. Capital punishment was widespread throughout the West until the latter half of the 20th century. The divergence between the U.S. and Europe seems to me to have a lot to do with elite leadership in Europe (are ordinary Europeans so fully revolted at the idea of executions?). And if racism can't be blamed for its persistence in light of recent expansion, I don't know why religiosity can: we are not becoming more religious as a nation just as we're not becoming more racist.

I don't know how to account for it, honestly, and it appalls me. But if we're going to blame religion, we had better leave Moses out of it. The lex talionis, it seems clear in context, is meant to limit retribution. Remember that there is no state in the usual sense and no police apparatus in this time. How do you think people would be inclined to respond to a gouged eye? Or the killing of a family member? I always wonder what Moses-haters out there imagine humanity was like before the Torah. Did people take eye-gougings with equanimity until Moses said they needed to exact an eye in exchange? The point of the law is only an eye, only a tooth, and only one life for one life.

That is not by any means to defend our current practices. But it's interesting to note the other side of this proverbial coin. As Bonhoeffer points out in his letters from prison, the Torah never deprives a person of freedom. What, after all, is more cruel and barbaric: taking a man's tooth or a year of his life over a bar fight? I wonder whether we assume that prison is in fact worse than these corporal punishments, or whether we imagine that it improves the prisoner. I don't know. But there's more to the justice system than executions, and there are insanities and cruelties that fly under acknowledged flags. They don't even need the authority of Moses to continue.

2011-09-23T13:42:00.006-05:00

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

Healther Mac Donald, writing in NRO (via Sullivan):

The Times offers several possible reasons for this recent rise in child poverty, including the high-tech, high-skills economy and the greater difficulties of going on welfare following the 1996 federal welfare-reform law. It never articulates, however, what is overwhelmingly the largest predictor of child and family poverty: The family is not a two-parent household. In 2007, single-parent families were nearly six times more likely to be poor than married-parent families; that ratio has not significantly changed. (emphasis added)

That's an interesting claim. Is Mac Donald saying that single parenthood precedes non-poor people becoming poor people? Because that's what a "predictor" would do. You see, if I point out that the Packers will open the season 2-0, that's not a prediction because it's already happened. Or if I say that winning the greatest number of games is overwhelmingly the largest predictor of NFL playoff seeding, that also is not a prediction.

Now I agree that single-income families are a problem when it comes to poverty, but it's unseemly, as well as logically incoherent, for conservatives to insist that the only policy issue here is broken homes. Believe it or not, cutting WIC and food stamps leads to beneficiaries having less food and therefore being more poor. By the same token, making the EITC more generous puts more money into the pockets of working parents and therefore makes them less poor. This is not a matter of debate. It's a matter of accounting identities. Cut transfers to poor kids = more poverty. Plain and simple. But not for the NRO crowd. Mac Donald insists:

There is a far more efficient solution to family poverty and the childhood problems associated with single-parent families: Revive the marriage norm among the poor. Public policy’s ability to restore the expectation that children be raised by both their parents is undoubtedly limited. But it is better to try than to do nothing.

Norm-revivification does not sound like an "efficient solution" to me, and in the next sentence Mac Donald basically acknowledges as much. We had eight years of "marriage promotion" as a goal of social policy, and I don't think it's too much to ask that this most elegant of all possible solutions show some results in this time. And yet here we are. And what choice is being framed by that last sentence? Surely Mac Donald is familiar with child support? The implication seems to be that all of these programs to feed, clothe, and house poor kids are just a waste of time unless we're finding a way to shackle the menfolk to their marital beds. I'm all for marriage, and when it comes to family I'm a conservative at heart, but it's not a serious statement to say that nothing else can do anything about child poverty. We have evidence to the contrary. Macroeconomic policies that promote robust demand and job growth are one; better infrastructure to facilitate employment is another; adequate subsidies for child care and education, so that people can have useful skills; and then all that tedious stuff like giving kids food, medicine, and a voucher for a freaking place to live.

Now if you're really interested in riding the marriage-promotion hobby horse, you'd look at policies like these as a complement to the ring-on-it agenda rather than as a competing approach. People are likelier to get married and form households when they have a job; topping up wages and backstopping health care costs can help reduce divorce, and so forth. This was, I take it, the idea behind "compassionate conservatism": we'll try to make the poor better people, but we'll do so without punishing them simply for being poor. The post-Bush right has decided that this was all wrong, and that giving a poor child free antibiotics is a way of rewarding her mother for having loose morals (and making someone pay for those antibiotics through progressive taxation is like slavery). This is all wrong, but it apparently has a kind of Malthusian appeal to some people.

2011-09-19T20:28:00.004-05:00

Theology That Matters

Something that landed on the cutting room floor when I was working on my Savage article for The Christian Century was a description of the poem cycle Handlyng Synne by Robert Mannyng. It's a series of stories illustrating the Ten Commandments. For the sixth, a man and his wife flee their enemies and hide out in a monastery. Housed in a room adjoining the church, the couple have sex one night. God is displeased by this, so he keeps them stuck together. After many tears of compunction, the prayers of the monks unstick them.

This is charming literature, but as ethics it's useless and as theology it's worse. Superstitious, magical, irrelevant to the actual sin, and more to the point, it doesn't even touch on the law and gospel of adultery. And yet it's not at all unrepresentative of Christian attempts to teach the unruly faithful about the proper expression of sexuality (contemporary parables about chewed gum come to mind).

That we haven't consistently learned from the futility of stories about the magic, scandalized God is part of a larger problem with Christian thought, one that I have not been able to shake since reading Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison again (more on them here and here). Bonhoeffer chartered a lot of post-war theology with those letters, good and bad, and I don't think we've come to the end of the challenges he left us. Forgive the lengthy excerpt:

Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called "God." In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God"--and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, "God" is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.

Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians agree that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be seen; and the more they claim and play off God and Christ against it, the more the development considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world that has become conscious of itself and the laws that govern its own existence has grown self-confident in what seems to us to be an uncanny way. False developments and failures do not make the world doubt the necessity of the course that it is taking, or of its development; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even and event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varied forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of "God." Even though there was been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called "ultimate questions"--death, guilt--to which only "God" can give an answer, and because of which we need God and the church and the pastor. So we live, in some degree, on these so-called ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered "without God"?...

The attack by Christian apologetic on the adulthood of the world I consider in the first place pointless, in the second place ignoble, and in the third place unchristian. Pointless, because it seems to me like an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e., to make him dependent on things on which he is, in fact, no longer dependent, and thrusting him into problems that are, in fact, no longer problems to him. Ignoble, because it amounts to an attempt to exploit man's weakness for purposes that are alien to him and to which he has not freely assented. Unchristian because it confuses Christ with one particular stage in man's religiousness, i.e., with a human law.

I don't know that I'd accept this account quite at face value--I'm reluctant to ever say that humanity has "come of age," though this is perhaps a separate question from whether the world as a system of thought and action has weaned itself from the old gods. Anyway, apart from niggling details, I still think this is a hurdle theological writing needs to clear to be of any real value. The Pope is right to diagnose western European societies with "amnesia" about the deep sources of their cherished values and institutions, but I wonder what exactly his point is in doing so. A remembered past is more like a forgotten past than it is like a living present. Even if we manage to convince Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that the cosmopolitan humanism they claim to hold dear is not the contradiction but the fruit of Europe's Christian heritage, what of it? These "values" are doing as well or as poorly on their own as they ever did under our religious tutelage, and in fact I'd see a Pyhrric victory in gaining the concession. Well done, tutor-Church; here's your watch and your pension, and we'll get on without you now.

So I've come to think that anyone peddling some ancient virtue of obedience, or a return to a more-Christian past, or God as a backstop for our preferred values or ways of life, or a cosmic "or else" enforcing our ideas of right and wrong from the margin of lived experience, is basically wasting your time.* Yes, we all enjoy using Law to mark out who's in and who's out, who's good and who's bad (the Gospel is useless for this purpose). Few of us church folk are really and totally averse to inviting God along with our argument to provide a tingle of fear in our adversaries. And I in particular am guilty of savoring the arguments of 1530 as if they bore any weight in the world today. But in light of Bonhoeffer's remarkably clear-eyed view of the place theology finds itself in, it's pretty obvious that these are unhappy substitutes for speaking to the world. They issue in power madness when we feel ourselves on top and in petulant withdrawal when we think we're losing.

On the other hand, you may as well hear out anyone--Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, "progressive," "traditionalist"--who is willing to engage with a world that does not acknowledge a God-shaped hole that we can fill with our specialized knowledge. I don't by any means imagine that I'm all that good at this. One of the things I appreciate about the Century is that it isn't trying to exercise any compulsion over the world. Maybe there isn't any future for that sort of thing--maybe, as Joe Carter enjoys imagining, we're on our way to the dustbin of history lonely and unlamented because we are not willing to condemn and judge as if the world were, in fact, listening to us. The percentages might be higher in goosing our little tribe into a stronger sense of solidarity by waving the totems. It all depends on what you imagine the purpose of invoking God to be, I suppose.

*NB: This is not to say that we shouldn't read, cherish, absorb, and learn from the old masters and the historic interpretations of Christian virtues. I in fact find Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and many others more bracing than I find much contemporary theology. But this is because they were speaking so fully to their time; they weren't engaging in the ridiculous Rip Van Winkle act that someone like C.S. Lewis engaged in during his weaker moments. And it's no knock on them that they can't speak to our age, and define it, just as they did their own.

2011-09-16T21:23:00.003-05:00

Why I Made Joe Carter Cry

Apparently my article on Dan Savage in The Christian Century came to the attention of Joe Carter, the web editor of First Things (via the Century blog):

First, what world is Dueholm living in? I don’t know a single couple for which monogamy is not the “default expectation.” Second, the reason that the church’s historic promotion of the dignity and fullness of the marriage bond might not enjoy cultural prestige for much longer is because liberal mainliners have been working furiously to undermine the church’s teachings on marriage.

Read the entire article. It’s equal parts frustrating and depressing, but it’ll give you a better understanding of why the liberal mainline churches are dying. And why few people will miss them when they’re gone.

Well, I don't know any couples for whom monogamy isn't the default setting, but I'm married, over thirty, and a pastor. However I do read stuff by and about people who aren't like me--this is occasionally worthwhile--and it turns out that not everyone's like that. My point in bringing it up is not that we should accommodate ourselves to the emerging norms for sexual ethics, but rather that an obsessive restatement of what we imagine the world was like back in our day and ought to be now is not going to cut it. Truthfully, it never did. For the better part of two millennia, the church has had to find ways to live with human stubbornness on this issue.

And while I no longer take it personally when the war-and-torture Christians over at First Things say mean stuff about us, I wonder what they'd end up with if they ever read anything we wrote as an argument rather than a symptom of decline. What would Joe Carter tell the man who found out his mother is cheating on his "abusive psycho" of a father? I'm genuinely curious. The reason I like reading Dan Savage is that he's actually answering people's questions. Joe Carter doesn't do that. The Pope doesn't do that. Hell, I don't often do that. Nowhere do I endorse adultery, but I have to admit that in some circumstances, it may be the operative alternative to divorce. What's Joe Carter's Gospel word to someone in that situation? Pray more? Get a divorce? Go and leave me alone and be a sinner? I'm not a Biblical athlete like Mr. Carter, but I don't remember Jesus saying anything of the sort to the Samaritan woman or anyone else.

No one who writes for any kind of public can get too testy about being misunderstood or read uncharitably. But just for the sake of clarity, I'll state more simply what I was trying to get at with the article: People are going to commit adultery. In many ways, it's easier to commit adultery than it ever was, and people have always committed adultery. If we don't have something smarter to say to that than "thou shalt not," people will continue to ignore us. However, our tradition gives us a way to think about adultery that upholds the commandment, accounts for its frequent transgressions, and points toward a more generous and loving understanding of it. Reading Dan Savage has helped me clarify my thinking on that, even though I often disagree with his advice. As far as I know, Catholics and white Evangelicals cheat and get divorced too. Does anyone at First Things think we can do better?

2011-09-02T21:41:00.004-05:00

Monogamy's Ghost

This week Dan Savage publishes a letter I've been expecting to see for a long time. It's a tough read, emotionally, so I don't want to excerpt:

I'm in a bad place. I have been in a monogamous marriage for 19 years and have two kids. At least I think we're still monogamous. My husband is an avid reader of your column and loves to bring up the idea that it is perfectly normal to have outside sexual relationships with other people as long as you stay committed to your spouse.

We started our marriage saying that we would always be truthful and faithful to each other. I'm GGG, he probably gets more blowjobs than most married men, and I love having sex with him. He is far less likely to initiate sex than I am (which makes me think he is spending time with someone else). If one partner decides that they need outside activity, regardless of how much sex they get at home, is it okay to go ahead and do that without informing the partner they made a monogamous commitment to? He thinks if my needs are being met, then I have nothing to complain about. My main need is for honesty, and it doesn't feel like that need is being met.

When I ask him if he is having affairs, he gets angry and accuses me of being insecure and immature. (I would like to know if I'm at risk of getting a sexually transmitted infection.) He says you agree with him that it is okay to lie if the other person has their needs met and doesn't find out. I am at my wit's end and am deeply unhappy and think about leaving him, but I don't want to end a relationship that works in so many other ways.

Dan, quite rightly, dons his armor and enters the lists on her behalf:

As you are not sick, disabled, or withholding without cause, LAH, and as your husband doesn't have a kink that he's outsourcing to spare you, please tell your husband on my behalf that I think he's a cheating piece of shit, a word-stuffing douchebag, and an emotionally abusive asshole. Mr. LAH may read my column avidly, but his behavior and lame rationalizations indicate that he's also reading it selectively. If your husband walked into my office, LAH, I would be tempted to slap him with my laptop.

True enough. And one feels a teensy bit bad for Dan, whose relatively indulgent attitudes have been interpreted to allow yet more indulgence (as sometimes happens when people get the chance). But there's more (after some boilerplate wanting-to-screw-around-is-normal):

That said, LAH, it is perfectly obnoxious to go ahead and fuck other people in violation of a monogamous commitment unless you have grounds. And while it doesn't sound like your husband has grounds, it certainly sounds like he's fucking other people. I suspect that your husband is fucking someone you know—a coworker, a neighbor, a friend, a relative (shudder)—and, realizing that it's only a matter of time before you find out, he's bullying you into retroactively giving him permission to fuck other people and unfairly dragging me into it.

In your shoes, LAH, I'd be thinking about DTMFA. Not because of the cheating—monogamy isn't important to me—but because of the lying and the bullying.

In a way, I like to think of an answer like this as the ghost of monogamy come back to haunt Dan's advice. Consider another scenario. A man promises a woman when they wed that he will jump on one foot for the rest of their lives, or that they will always live in a geodesic dome, or that he will eat ham sandwiches every single day for lunch. But after 19 years of hopping, living underground, or ham-eating, the man wearies of it and discovers the liberating knowledge that walking on two feet, living above ground, or eating salads is entirely normal, natural, and unblameworthy. He then appeals to his wife, perhaps kindly, perhaps not, for permission to violate their leg-hopping commitments so long as he stays on one leg around her. Perhaps he even starts walking normally when he's out of the dome, though she can't quite confirm the suspicion.

Would anyone on God's green earth upbraid the man for dishonesty and emotional abuse? Would anyone defend the wife's position--though living in a geodesic dome "isn't important to me"--simply because 19 years earlier they'd agreed to it? It's hard to imagine.

That Dan reacts as strongly as he does in this case could, it seems to me, be due to one of three possibilities: first, he's chagrined at being misunderstood; second, he hasn't thought through the implications of his own position very thoroughly; or third, monogamy is, in some phantom-limb kind of way, important to him. What he is proposing here is a very unstable condition in which monogamy is indifferent but the commitment to it is sacrosanct barring certain conditions that are far narrower than a lot of his detractors and, apparently, admirers seem to imagine. If you have a long and public track record of saying that monogamy is not normal, natural, or even noble, I don't quite see how you can at the same time say that an agreement to be monogamous made two decades ago can still be binding, even on someone who gets it regular at home (remember how normal and natural it is to like a little variety, folks). I mean, not all of us knew about Dan Savage and the bonobos and the randy savannah-wanderers nineteen years ago! What about those guys?

This is actually a serious question. You can't have sacred contracts over trivial things. Inasmuch as people start to agree with Dan that monogamy isn't important, normal, or an ideal that binds them, the dynamic of permission and forgiveness that still defines Dan's advice regarding sex on the side is going to be reversed. This woman, for whom one's heart bleeds, will have lots and lots of company as people come to feel, quite understandably, that decades-old contracts must come up for renegotiation, and that the spouse who is not willing to accept new terms is the one who has a problem. "We had a deal" won't cut it with the hopping, the dome, or the ham sandwich, and over time it won't cut it with sex either.

UPDATE: And just to be clear--since I'm in the habit of leaving the brackets off the end, so to say, when I'm being ironic--I obviously think monogamy is much different from hopping or ham sandwiches. Monogamy is good and true and noble, even when it's imperfectly actualized (as it always is). That's why I dread the eventual situation in which this poor woman and those like her find themselves to be considered the emotional aggressors for insisting on it. But they most likely will. Over at Jezebel they take pains to say that non-monogamy and monogamy are equally good and valid choices to make, but also that somebody who wishes to jump from one to the other--after 19 years, let's not forget--in ways that are predictably and humanly broken and selfish is history's greatest monster. But I don't see how this can be the case. Monogamy is either important and privileged enough to command some enduring respect from disgruntled, horny people, or it isn't.

2011-09-02T15:13:00.002-05:00

The Evolution of Values

One reason clerical and intellectual types become bewitched with political power when it comes, somehow, under our noses is that many of us, perhaps most, harbor the suspicion deep down that what we do doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. In fact, I wonder if some of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of priest, poet, or pedagogue aren't a wounded overreaction to this suspicion when voiced by others. Real power rests with the people who can start wars, build bridges, create social programs and so forth.

So it's heartening in its way to read Yglesias on "the primacy of values" when considering the historical context of politics. I've been engaged in a bloodless re-enactment of the Reformation with a Catholic and an Anglican friend on facebook, and it's striking that we can all inhabit the contested issues so fully without ever once contemplating the possibility that the argument might be worth fighting wars or burning heretics over. Not that we are without some understanding of the stakes back then and why a dispute among doctors of theology ended up ripping a continent in half and costing some horribly vast number of innocent lives (most of whom, it hardly needs to be said, had no interest at all in whether presbyters could only be ordained by bishops or whatever). And not that we don't think these arguments have some contemporary significance. But all the same, many, perhaps most of the assumptions that would have been shared by the warring parties of the age are ones that we seem uniformly to reject. We don't believe that the civil state is the proper guardian of religious uniformity, or that false teaching should be legally defined and punished with banishment or execution. We don't believe civil rulers are only legitimate if they accept the filioque. And so on.

One way for historically-minded Christians to look at our shared past is to lament the loss of doctrinal and visible unity as the Reformation's aftermath gradually made these assumptions impossible--not indefensible, not untenable, not categorically immoral, but merely and quite literally impossible. All these churches nowadays, all this doctrinal laxity, all these Church politics. And yet no one seems to want Arundel's Constitutions back. Most of us have to admit, in practice if not in theory, that the evolution in values since those days has been a good thing.

This is the problem with all nostalgic arguments about this or that matter of politics or policy or even worldview. Conservatives make them most often, but liberals are not immune. It's not hard to do. Find some aspect of the past that you admire and find wanting today, and then accuse the present of sucking for its absence. Oh, for the intact families of the Victorian age or the low taxes of the American 19th century. Well, do you also like debtors' prisons, mass orphanage, and a policy of expropriating land from indigenous populations? That's not to look back at the people who administered those monstrosities with moral condescension. But it's a reminder that history is not neatly divisible into noble and ignoble aspects.

So what about the thinkers and writers and preachers? Well, one could argue that people like Luther and Erasmus had their most long-lasting and beneficial impact on the world by arguing that it was foolish to burn heretics or preach rabid sermons against Jews. They did not give due honor to these convictions over the years. But perhaps as Europe exhausted itself with slaughter, those early, discarded arguments helped push the civilization's background values forward, even as the doctrinal disputes they hoped to settle for all ages managed to endure.

Which is only to say that the work of the scholar, preacher, and writer is, in part, to take a longer view than the day's partisan divisions and policy dilemmas will allow and to contribute to the humanizing of our culture in deeper, more resilient ways.

2011-08-31T10:28:00.003-05:00

Marilynne Robinson, Michele Bachmann, and Resentment

While taking a break from other things yesterday, I came across this Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson from 2008. It's well worth your time, at least if you're interested in Marilynne Robinson (and you should be!). But something about it rankled me. The interviewer keeps asking about Robinson's religion in ways that struck me as rather subtly demeaning. "Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?" "Are religion and science simply two systems that don't merge?" "Is it their disdain of religion and their championing of pure science that troubles you?" "But doesn't science address an objective notion of reality while religion addresses how we conceive of ourselves?" "Did you ever have a religious awakening?"

I don't think these questions were meant to be stupid or condescending (and they end up being good questions in that they're foils for Robinson's very fine thinking on the issues they are attempting to raise). But they are, because for some people it's simply impossible to conceive of a religious person as something other than an exotic arrival from a morally and intellectually hermetic world. As my friend Kyle likes to put it, people assume that their own very culturally-contingent secularism is a sort of default setting for humanity from which religious people have departed for strange, pathetic, or monstrous reasons.

Don't get me wrong--no one's worldview is entitled to kid-glove treatment. But when I read Matt Taibbi explain, rather naively in my opinion, that Michele Bachmann's appeal to her supporters is all about playing on their resentments and you shouldn't laugh at these stupid ridiculous people because that makes them more powerful, it gets my back up a little. I certainly don't identify with Bachmann politically, and not really religiously either. But how obtuse must you be to imagine that the question of whether to demean the deeply-held views of a whole lot of people boils down, in the end, to a matter of tactics? The highbrow cat-noises in the Paris Review differ in style from Taibbi's hyper-aggressive take, just as widely as the generous and academic Robinson differs from the demagogic and often ludicrous Bachmann. But the point is the same: to try to peek behind the mask of normalcy for a glimpse the snarling, modernity-rejecting troglodyte behind. Now we're all big kids in this playground and we're all responsible for taking it in stride when someone acts like a jerk (this goes for you, too, atheists, the next time you're inclined to complain about some televangelist saying something that hurts your feelings). But in the event that you want to learn something from or about someone who differs from you in some significant respect, you might start with the premise that they are more or less gifted and flawed in the same measure and in the same ways you are, that they do not worship shallow depressions in the ground, and that they do not act and feel as they do because they saw Jesus in a tortilla.

2011-08-25T13:35:00.002-05:00

Some Bonhoeffer for Sunday's Preachers

I have an article coming out eventually that dwells on this subject at greater length, but I wanted to share this passage from Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison for general edification and especially for anyone who's working with the Romans text for Sunday's sermon (it's from "Outline for a Book," in note form so forgive the choppiness):

Who is God? Not in the first place an abstract belief in God, in his omnipotence etc. That is not a genuine experience of God, but a partial extension of the world. Encounter with Jesus Christ. The experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that "Jesus is there only for others." His "being there for others" is the experience of transcendence. It is only this "being there for others," maintained til death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection). Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable--that is not authentic transcendence--but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others," through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation. God in human form--not, as in oriental religions, in animal form, monstrous, chaotic, remote, and terrifying, nor in the conceptual forms of the absolute, metaphysical, infinite, etc., nor yet in the Greek divine-human form of "man in himself," but as "the man for others," and therefore the Crucified, the man who lives out of the transcendent.

Letters and Papers (New York: Macmillan) 1971, pp. 380-81 (emphasis added).

Many of us do not find such language shocking (though I wonder what Bonhoeffer's new admirers among American evangelicalism think about this sort of thing), but there's something about seeing it put this way back when the church bodies in which most of us live and work had not given up on putting Humpty Dumpty together again. I find it very beautiful not so much as a repudiation of Christian theology but as a consummation of it. "We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time."

2011-08-19T22:02:00.004-05:00

In Which the Catholic Church Deserves a Break

While I'm a supporter of the Illinois civil unions law, I was disappointed to see today that it's been applied by the state so as to prevent renewing the foster care contracts with four Illinois Catholic social service agencies. Both the agency that holds our license (DCFS) and the agency associated with my denomination (Lutheran Social Services of Illinois) welcome same-sex couples to serve as foster parents, as they did before the civil unions law took effect. And while I'm no legal scholar, the judge's decision to uphold the state's action seems sound: there is no property right to a state contract. Rather, the state's original action strikes me as damaging to some important distinctions on which the whole notion of a semi-private foster care system rests.

Foster parents are not employees or clients of the state; we can be prohibited from serving for all kinds of reasons that are not prejudicial to our status as citizens. If Catholic Charities wished to exclude gay teens from their placements, for instance, that would be very problematic. If they wished to exclude divorced and remarried people, however, they should be able to do so. Private social service agencies, even with state contracts, are also not identical with the state. There is not much point in contracting out so much of this work if it is not to employ the religious and ethnic diversity of the population to recruit, train, and retain the necessary breadth of volunteers.

The danger, as I see it, is that this necessary diversity will be thinned out by an attempt to construe every divergence from state policy as a matter of discrimination. The Catholic Charities agencies that brought the suit had already offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies so that no one who wished to serve would be prevented from doing so. The state's decision rather oddly inverts the priority of interests that is supposed to guide the foster care system. Children will be moved, albeit gradually, away from the caseworkers and agencies that have managed their cases until now, and perhaps from their foster families as well. And certain populations of current and prospective foster parents--who are still very much in demand--will be unavailable to kids coming into the system. It's not even obvious to me who will benefit. Same-sex couples won't have access to the agencies that excluded them because those agencies won't exist any more. They'll end up going to the agencies that would have welcomed them even if Catholic Charities were still in business.

Private groups, including Catholic ones, have driven innovation in child welfare from the start. The state was not, and never really has been, a fully adequate guarantor of children's well-being. Things like cultural appropriateness were easily, even eagerly overlooked in the early days of foster care, when it was seen as a way to take Jewish, Catholic, or racial minority children away from their bad homes and place them in good middle-class Protestant ones. That's not to say that any particular religious bias is at work here, but only that the right to dissent from the prevailing attitudes has enriched rather than impoverished the care of children in need of a substitute home.

This is something that should be obvious to modern liberals. We object, quite rightly, to state-level laws prohibiting adoption by same-sex couples. If the welfare of children is paramount, we argue, the particular sentiments of a state legislature should not keep them out of safe, caring households. Room for disagreement is something all of us need at some point.

2011-08-11T10:49:00.002-05:00

The Law and Gospel of Adultery

My article on Dan Savage, sex, and the uses of the Law is up at the Christian Century:

Such legal and commercial metaphors are defining more and more of our lives, public and private alike. To engage with these ideas theologically, we need to return to the distinction between law and gospel. The contemporary sexual ethics that Savage represents give some degree of order to intimate life; they help manage the human disaster. But such a goal is not enough for a Christian community called to explore the depths of God's love as reflected and refracted through shared life. We also need sexual ethics to reveal our deeper needs and failings, to create space for the forgiveness of sins and to shape lives redeemed by grace.

As an instrument of familial and civil peace, the commandment against adultery needs a bottom line—something for which Savage has a sharp instinct. Counselors and pastors should expect temptation and infidelity to happen; lingering itches are likely to be scratched. Sex tends to be cloaked in superstition, and stripping this away allows us to regard sexual lapses as no less inevitable than any other sin. We tend to forgive serial monogamy more readily than deviations from stable monogamy. Perhaps this norm should be reconsidered.

2011-08-11T09:04:00.003-05:00

Alternatively, You Could Try to Win by Succeeding in Office

Ross Douthat's reaction to some blind quotes about the "Destroy Romney" strategy supposedly being hatched at the White House is something liberals (and conservatives) should probably heed:

His Mormonism, in this sense, may turn out to be a lot like Barack Obama’s connections to Bill Ayers and the Chicago left, which conservatives tried to make hay from in the waning days of the ‘08 election: In a different kind of race, it might be a serious liability, but in a campaign focused on jobs, debt and growth, trying to sow doubts about Romney’s faith will just make the Democrats look out of touch.

I'm not as confident at Ross that "weirdness" will be a stalking-horse for anti-Mormon messaging (not that I'd put it past anyone). But either way, does anyone think that Mitt Romney is actually going to be kept out of the White House because he took a road trip with the dog carrier strapped to the top of the family car? Or even, for that matter, because he used to be pro-choice and now he's not? The idea that you're going to lean meaningfully on the tiller of an election fourteen months in the future by hawking this stuff is just depressing.

My preferred approach would be to keep David Axelrod and his Blackberry in a locked room somewhere while every other person associated with the administration works on the sort of unilateral expansionary measures that are available, getting Fed vacancies filled, whatever--but stuff that has an impact on facts on the ground. Obviously the policy horizons are a lot more constrained than they were two years ago, but to concede policy defeat because of mean old John Boehner and mean old Mitch McConnell and put everything in the hands of the consultants is insane. Surely some things can be done, and even if their impact is marginal, it's a margin bigger than any messaging, optics, narrative-generating, or other diversions of the political class will make. Their apparent conviction that they can pull a unicorn out of this economic manure pile is without any basis that I can see. Ask Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush if being the adult in the room works out when the economy is in the ditch.

2011-08-08T21:19:00.002-05:00

Faust and the Undergraduate

Dan Savage answers a question from a woman who is very hung up on a co-worker, with whom she had had a very ill-advised fling some years earlier:

My quick hit: Don't do it. Enjoy the crush, continue to pour your sexual energies into your husband, and... if you can... if your history with this guy isn't too threatening to your husband... if your husband wasn't the boyfriend you cheated on with this guy... consider telling your husband what's going on. Even a husband who insists on monogamy, SOL, should be able to understand what having a crush on someone-other-than-his-spouse is like. Because, I'm thinking, at some point during your marriage, your husband has had an inappropriate crush or two himself. Tell your husband that you're still crazy into him, that you love your sex life with him, and that you plan on fucking the living shit out of him until your crazy, inappropriate, unrealizable crush on your coworker burns away. That's what's in it for him.

Having said that, SOL, I should cop to something else I've said: If you're with someone for forty or fifty years and your spouse only cheats on you two or three times, your spouse was good at monogamy, not bad at it. Just putting that out there.

It's not bad advice, but that last statement prompts a sharp response from a member of the Monogamy Policy flying squad:

Whether you cheat once a week or once in fifty years, you aren't monogamous. The definition doesn't change based on frequency. You can't say Ted Bundy was pretty good at not killing people because he didn't slaughter six million of them like Hitler.

And SOL, like all cheaters you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You have only two choices: divorce your husband so you're free to fuck office boy, or stay with your husband and forget all about office boy. Anything else and you're a CPOS.

Ugh. We're not going to keep any purchase on the culture if we talk like this, are we? I'm clearly in the bag for monogamy, but it's an ideal. Like any ideal, it is rarely, if ever, completely realized. Honesty and generosity and mutuality are ideals, but we don't say that a relationship is dishonest if one person falls short of the truth on rare occasions. Some departures from the ideal are graver than others, obviously, but deviations happen and if one is enough to get you voted off of Monogamy Island, it's going to be a very lonely, terrifying, and self-righteous place.

I agree entirely that if a couple manages to survive one or two episodes of infidelity over the course of fifty years together, Ross Douthat and I and all the saints in heaven will approve of their endurance. In fact I'd like to make all my pre-marital counseling couples watch the last scene of the 1960 Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr film The Grass is Greener for a quick lesson in why and how the injuries that happen in marriage (including infidelity) should be answered. "If your mistress is faithless she should be discarded," Grant's aggrieved husband tells his besotted wife. "If your wife is faithless she should be befriended." Companionate marriage is hard, and not in the way that calculus or mastering the harpsichord is hard. Patience, forbearance, and forgiveness have to be part of it.

But--and it's a very big 'but'--it's one thing for Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr to look back in the dusk of their lives with thanks that they weathered that whole unpleasantness with Robert Mitchum and to say that on the whole they've done quite well at marriage. It's another entirely to say, a few years in, that it won't be so bad if you do this only every ten or twenty years before you jump into the office broom closet for the first time. Kierkegaard notes that it's one thing for Goethe's Faust to say, in the end, that we can know nothing at all and another thing for an undergraduate to say the same thing in a philosophy seminar. There are truths that are out of season for us, or truths which are not yet true because they have to involve us. "Your marriage can survive this" is what you say when you're visiting a friend in jail on a drunk driving charge. It's not what you say to him before he gets behind the wheel.

2011-08-01T23:54:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney: The Queequeg of 2012

Like everybody else, I've been spending the last few weeks sweating the debt ceiling madness. But unlike everybody else, I've also been writing about Mitt Romney:

In a celebrated early chapter of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” the narrator, Ishmael, takes the side of a pagan companion as they go about getting hired for an expedition. “He’s a member of the First Congregational Church,” Ishmael tells the ship owners when they express skepticism about his strange-looking friend’s faith. Pressed for details, he explains: “I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church … the great everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshiping world … We all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.”

It’s a classic American scene: Ishmael, a Presbyterian, arguing with the ship owners, both Quakers, about whether the true religion forbids or requires them to welcome the outsider. It’s also a scene that is playing itself out on the stage of Mitt Romney’s long-running bid to become the nation’s first Mormon president.

2011-07-21T22:51:00.002-05:00

Appealing to the Future

There are common views about history that are not very helpful to understanding our present circumstances. One is the conservative refrain that everything sucks more and more as time goes on. The family is getting worse, the government is getting worse, men are getting worse, women are getting worse, education is getting worse, the law is getting worse; we hear a lot of this. And it's perhaps a defensible view, were it not almost invariably paired with a conviction that America is still by such a wide measure the greatest country on earth that even proposing to learn something from another country's policies or culture is tantamount to hating one's own. It's been five minutes until midnight for conservatives since at least 1933, and yet no anti-nationalist conclusions may be drawn from this fact. Despairing chauvinism has some use as a way to galvanize cultural resentment, but if you think about it rationally it leads to quietism. Everything will keep getting worse, and yet twenty years from now Republican politicians will insist that learning from the Swiss model of health insurance will lead us down the path to tyranny and destruction.

There is a left-wing version of this, too, which is equally trivial--a long history of betrayals of the Movement so comprehensive as to get one to wonder what point there is in hoping for something better. But the dominant mood on the left is something happier: the idea that the future will be much like the present, except without the stuff we don't like about it. You hear versions of this quite a lot, but it's summed up rather pithily in an unusually leaden Onion article about how schoolkids will view the same-sex marriage debate in 2083.

Now I fully expect same-sex marriage to become uncontroversial in the coming decades, and I've long made the same case myself about how strange it will seem to my kids and grandkids that it was such a big deal (or that it was so mind-blowing to elect a black president). But it's highly unlikely that any future cohort of humans will simply ratify the progressive side of this or that cultural issue while leaving the rest of our moral and philosophical furniture in place. The schoolkids of 2083 will probably also wonder why we had such hangups about genetically modifying humans in utero to create a genetic super-elite, or about android gladiators or whatever. Or perhaps a human remnant will be wondering, as they roast pigeons under the ruin of the Kennedy Expressway, why we were worrying about whether a man could share health benefits with another man when we could have been staving off the death of the oceans, the irreversible loss of arable land, or the encroachment of drug-resistant epidemics. Surely same-sex marriage is a matter of urgent need for some and a matter of justice for the rest of us, but to imagine that it will figure prominently in Future America's worldview is to be a little narcissistic, and credulous of our own apocalyptic claims about the importance of configuring ~~bourgeois~~ fundamental human rights in this way or the other.

If we're going to orient our political musings toward the future, in other words, we should probably think a little less about how it will ratify our own despair or hope and a little more about how it is likely to exist at all. It won't be just like us but worse, or better. It will be its own reality, enduring or enjoying the big and often unconsidered decisions we've made for it.

2011-07-19T21:20:00.000-05:00

The Strange Career of St. Mary Magdalene

My new column for The Daily is up:

But Mary Magdalene is perhaps most famous as an ex-prostitute: a repentant woman of lust whose seven demonic vices were cast out by Jesus; who washed his feet with her tears of contrition; and who lived a life of chaste, sorrowful contemplation — whether of skulls or of her own sins — forever after.

As a consequence, Mary’s cult has long partaken of the fevered, moralistic conventions of male fantasy. De la Tour’s treatment actually counts as one of the more restrained. Another Frenchman, Jules Joseph Lefebvre, in his painting “Mary Magdalene in the Grotto” (1876), removed the skull and hid her face behind her writhing arms, reducing the beleaguered saint to a lewd mass of hair and naked flesh. Her predominant image in Western art has been as an object of pity, arousal and judgment, a one-woman symbol of everything wrong with the religion that revered her.

Find out what happens next!

2011-07-19T20:21:00.003-05:00

Play the Game, or the Game Plays You

Sullivan responded to my gibes below:

I supported Obama in part because he swore to do what was right and necessary, rather than partisan politics and the usual Washington games. He had a chance to make the case for his current position months ago and balked. Maybe now that he is shown to have been forced into this, his own party will treat the proposal less harshly. Maybe. But he lost a key chance to cement a central proclaimed characteristic - tackling hard choices the responsible, post-partisan way - and allowed the GOP to push him into it.

Some day I'd like the chance to vote for a candidate who swears to do what's wrong and gratuitous and who commits to playing partisan politics and the most usual Washington games. There would be a refreshing honesty in that. But I think what the Obama years have shown us is that, if we didn't assume so before, everything is a rhetorical strategy. Obama's approach was politically deft in that he managed to make someone like Sullivan part of his media base and someone like me part of his activist base (really, I worked my tail off for this guy compared to what I did for Kerry in 2004). But when it comes to passing bills, all the Andrew Sullivans and all the Ben Dueholms in the world don't get you squat when you are dealing with a truculent opposition over whom pundits and door-knockers have no leverage.

In a parliamentary system, I think Andrew's case would make a lot of sense. Despite what a lot of people seem to think, a system with fewer veto points and more party discipline leads to greater democratic accountability and some strong incentives to govern responsibly. So if Bowles-Simpson is the government's policy that's one thing, if it's a partisan actor's bargaining position it's quite another. And that's the thing: Obama can't unilaterally opt-out of any partisan politics or Washington games. He needs partners, and those prospective partners will have ideological, electoral, and demographic reasons to oppose him no matter how earnest and post-partisan he tries to be. Those reasons need more attention. Partisanship and Washington games are not bad moral habits. They're inevitable when you have well-sorted, demographically distinct parties who regularly compete in elections, and especially when you have a political system like ours that builds in incentives to extreme position-taking rather than responsible governing.

UPDATE: See Ezra Klein for more on this.

2011-07-18T13:08:00.002-05:00

Obama Would Win If He Had Embraced the Unpopular Policies I Favor

Go read Sullivan make the case if you feel like it. I've heard this argument made a lot of different ways over a lot of different issues:

My own view, however, is that Obama badly bungled this by not embracing his current position in the State of the Union and pummeling the GOP with it for months. Bowles Simpson was his commission after all, and yet he dropped it like a stone and pandered to his left when he had a perfect moment to pivot to the debt question.

We'll never know what would have happened if the president had chosen to embrace steep entitlement cuts two months after having his rear end handed to him by America's seniors, so I guess this scenario is possible. But try to think it through for a moment. I don't mean to be dismissive, but anyone whose case relies on 'pummeling' one's opponents with something less than a literal pummel owes us a little more explanation of how that's likely to bring about the intended results. What if, as during the health care battle, the Republicans just refuse to respect the president's rhetorical pummeling? What if they decided to make a political issue of Bowles-Simpson's big cuts to programs old white people like? What if they took the president's offer of a center-right plan and saw validation of their extreme-right alternatives, at least as a negotiating strategy? What if they have rational motives for not wanting a debt deal at all?

You can argue about Obama's decisions on this issue until the cows come home, but I just don't see how adopting an unpopular plan as a bargaining position, thereby selling out his base before negotiating even begins, and 'pummeling' the opposition with it had any hope of getting a deal done. I am well acquainted with the temptation to say 'if only political actor X would adopt my policy preferences, the public would be on their side and they'd win.' But that's very rarely the case, especially when dealing with very difficult issues like the long-term deficit. If anything, the president took a risk by being as involved as he is. He could well have urged Congress to raise the debt limit and handle the long-term fiscal policy separately, and reiterated that position throughout the whole hostage-taking campaign. Then at least you have the objective factors--Wall Street not least--pushing your opponents toward your position and you don't expose either side to a zero-sum political game. Or he could have pushed more aggressively for revenue-side fixes. Honestly, though, it's impossible to say whether any of these approaches would have worked, however much pummeling or bipartisanship or whatever would be involved. Our institutions and our national political culture give us this sort of crisis, and it's comforting but ultimately naive to imagine that a president can rescue us from it with the right rhetorical strategy.

2011-07-18T10:41:00.002-05:00

How Should Liberals Respond to a Bad Budget Deal?

The outlines of a debt deal are coming into view, and they're awful. I don't much doubt that Democrats will go for it in the end, which should leave those of us who have been volunteers and advocates asking some hard questions about how best to engage in a political process that seems to punish the most vulnerable in fair weather or foul.

I hope to have more to say about this some time soon, but I wonder if it's not time for anti-poverty advocates to step back from coalition politics for a moment and think about how to gain some leverage. Democratic politicians tend to represent much more diverse constituencies than Republicans. Republican voters tend to be old, white, and rich, so there's relatively little in the way of balancing interests or making trade-offs for them. The one exception is abortion. It's not a huge issue for John Q. Median Voter, it's not a matter of burning personal passion for any GOP presidential nominee ever, it's not something most big-money mavens inside the party and our really care about. And yet the anti-abortion movement is so disciplined and mobilized that it can not only demand and receive the fealty of all big-time Republican politicians, it can shape the debate to a striking degree even when Democrats are in power.

How do they do this? There are many reasons. But advocates for children and the poor should heed two in particular. The first is being entirely single-issue-minded. That means being willing to let middle-class seniors, suburban environmentalists, middle-class abortion rights advocates, anti-war activists and the like fend for themselves. Coalition politics will always leave poor kids with the short end of the stick, so you have to refuse completely to bargain away their interests for anything at all.

Second, you have to be willing to say no to absolutely any politician and any deal regardless of the consequences. No money or labor for any Democrat who votes to cut Medicaid, nutrition programs, or early childhood health and education. None. And to wishy-washy liberals who complain that this will only elect more Republicans, you say that you will see every single Democrat lose every single election before you'll sell out people who can't afford to see a doctor. You don't do this individually; in order for it to work, it can't be churlishness or ideological purity. It has to be organized, and it has to be a tactic. The point is that you make it clear from the start that no deviation of any kind will go unpunished, and that you will light the world on fire if you have to in order follow through on that. This is how you get the tail to wag the dog in coalition politics. And it can work. The extreme and unyielding demands of the anti-abortion movement, while perennially unpopular with pundits, have not made the GOP uncompetitive (they haven't managed to bring down the abortion rate at all either, but that's another story).

Imagine how this debt hostage scenario would look if a coalition of anti-poverty groups, a million grassroots volunteers, and a bloc of 50 House members and 10 Senators had all signed a pledge to vote against any cuts in Medicaid, nutrition programs, Title IV, and so on. If they were willing to say, "do what you want to well-off Medicare recipients, military spending, tax expenditures, and so on, but we will not under any circumstances support cuts to the safety net for the needy," we'd have a much different debate on our hands. The Washington Post's editors would swoon, because only rich white people get to have non-negotiable demands. And 'swing voters' would be irritated for the ten daily seconds they spent thinking about national politics. Mean old Rush Limbaugh and mean old Fox News would say mean things about them. But my guess is that a willingness to take some hostages of our own would pay off.

Now this is just a sketch of a possible approach. I'm not endorsing it. But it's one alternative to the dispiriting routine of church leaders pleading for a 'circle of protection' around the most vulnerable whenever budget-cutting is in fashion. It's a toothless plea first because it's a plea and second because we're mostly middle-class with all kinds of investments in other social goods, including not having another financial meltdown. The carrot for lawmakers is feeling virtuous, the stick is nonexistent. I don't want to discount the importance of trying to form attitudes and change minds--that's what I'm doing some of the time, after all, in the absence of a real movement to protect the poor. But we owe it to ourselves and to the people we supposedly advocate for to understand why we always fail and to explore ways to stop failing.

2011-07-13T09:51:00.003-05:00

They're Not Making a Deal Because They Don't Want a Deal

Ross goes long on unicorn futures today:

Some of the same factors that make this a good time for Republicans to take the hardest possible line (a Democratic president who wants a conservative-seeming deficit package, the likelihood that future tax increases are in the offing with or without Republican concessions this time around, etc.) also make it a good moment for Republicans to go for a big deal rather than a small deal, even if the big deal is somewhat less than ideological pure.

This is all very clever, but it's just comically disconnected from the politics on the ground. The Republicans aren't making a deal, big or small, because they don't want a deal. With two to four trillion dollars in medium-term deficit reduction on the table, split perhaps 80-20 between spending cuts and revenue increases, no Republican has given any indication of having any interest in saying yes.

I hate to break it to Ross and everyone else out there, but any 'big deal,' or any deal of any kind for that matter, is by definition 'somewhat less than ideological pure.' That is what a deal is. I would like to get my falafel sandwich for free and Sultan's Market would like to charge $20 for it. But if I insist on free falafel and they insist on $20, I get no sandwich and they get no money. So I spend more than I'd like and they charge less than they'd like and we both get something, though less than what we would have if we didn't have to make a deal. And if the Republicans ever get the White House, keep the House, and get to 60 senators, they'll be able to dictate the shape of fiscal policy to their heart's content. But given the institutional set-up we have, the only way to make policy changes on contentious issues is to make deals, and the only way to make deals is to compromise on ideological purity.

So the interesting question, it seems to me, is not "what is the optimal Republican strategy for getting a deal that minimizes revenue increases relative to cutting health care for the poor and old?" but rather, "why are the Republicans insisting on free falafel?" This is not a new question. It was clear from the summer of 2009 on that Democrats in the Senate and White House were desperate to get Republicans to sign on to the Affordable Care Act. Republicans could have extracted whatever concessions they wished: stingier minimum benefits, less generous subsidies to the uninsured, more regressive revenue streams. But they didn't. They didn't make a deal because they didn't want a deal.

I suspect this is and was because they don't want to give the president a political victory. They think the country will be better off if he loses re-election and Mitt Romney is the one in the Oval Office in a year and a half. The other plausible explanation is that they are far more committed to low taxes on wealthy people than they are to deficit reduction per se. The first thing Bush did in 2001 was cut taxes in an overwhelmingly regressive way. The first thing the Republicans did after the 2010 mid-terms, even during the lame-duck session, was to insist on continuing those tax cuts for the upper brackets. If these tax cuts can be financed by cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, that's great. If they can't, they're happy to keep borrowing.

That, at least, is the expressed preference of the modern GOP. All the deficit talk falls away when it's time to make a deal, even on terms that are absurdly favorable to their stated concerns. That's why I've started to suspect that we'll end up with a 'clean' debt-limit increase, and we will over and over again as long as revenues are part of any deal that goes along with it.

2011-06-16T00:53:00.001-05:00

Wedding Season

I wrote on pastors and weddings for The Daily:

Even when the minister is not merely patched in to fulfill a legal or sacramental requirement, and the venue is not a mere backdrop, wedding ceremonies provide grist for irritation across all denominational, ideological and theological lines. The expenses often associated with weddings can’t help but feel extravagant in a world with so much need. Anxieties about status, appearance and money clump like barnacles on every aspect of the process. Couples want ever-more-narcissistic ceremonies while expressing uncertain commitments to each other and to the institution of marriage. I tell the couples I counsel that ending the vows with “as long as our love shall last” is functionally equivalent to saying “We will get divorced.”

Read the rest, including the man-bites-dog ending, here.

2011-06-09T22:04:00.003-05:00

The Foundling

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Irene Wagner, my great-grandmother. I wasn't quite two when she died, though I never met her anyway.

She was born in 1901 (though some documents list her birth as taking place 'about 1902'), perhaps in Iowa. She lived in an orphanage, probably St. Aemilian in Milwaukee, until 1906, when she was adopted by a couple from Kiel, Wisconsin. She lived there until 1920, after the birth (out of wedlock) of my grandfather. Her paramour was the nephew of her adoptive mother, and the mother objected to their plans to wed. After she delivered, the story goes, she was sent away.

Apparently she went back to Milwaukee, where a 1930 census roll shows her living at 324 Summit in a boarding house, with no occupation listed. Some time in the 1950s, when my mother was still very young, she visited her son's home to try to establish a relationship with him and his family. He refused to speak to her. When she died in Milwaukee, she had been living in a nursing home. And when her room was cleaned out, it was discovered that she had been subscribing to the newspaper from my mother's little hometown and had kept clippings of every story concerning one of her twelve unknown grandchildren.

One of my next projects will be to fill in whatever details I can find about her life, which I know only as a story of unrelieved sadness. In a better age she would have been better treated by those whose love we are accustomed to cherish and rely upon. She has thirty-six living descendants, two deceased, and one foster great-great granddaughter. She looks a lot like her only son in this picture.

2011-06-09T12:43:00.003-05:00

Liberation Goes Both Ways

There's a fine scene in An Education, when Jenny (Carey Mulligan) discovers that her older paramour David (Peter Sarsgaard) is a not especially scrupulous sort of businessman. Disgusted, she starts to leave him and his friends. He catches up and pleads with her, "Don't be so bourgeois." Jenny comes back, and eventually learns to her cost how very unconventional David is.

I'm not filing any briefs for the idea of bourgeois respectability, but the scene and its aftermath are a frank reminder that you can't escape the restrictions of bourgeois respectability without forfeiting its protections, too. I thought of that when I came across this sad, angry 'I, Anonymous' at The Stranger (seriously, Dan Savage has been tearing it up lately). Here's the opener, and you can read (or just guess) the rest:

I was totally unfamiliar with the concept of polyamory before you introduced me to it. But I was lonely, and you were gorgeous, so even though you professed to be happily married, I threw caution to the wind.

Well, and this part, which has a sting:

You were a matched set of Eastside suburbanites who wanted to feel edgy and be anything other than the child-rearing automatons that you are.

Speaking for child-rearing suburbanite automatons everywhere, let me just say that banking on getting us to be anything but child-rearing suburbanite automatons is a bad idea. We might be stupid, reckless, and selfish, but whatever else we may be, we tend to be deeply anchored in our child-rearing suburbanite automation. Most of us endure some level of dissatisfaction to stay that way, and just as many of us will think nothing of leaving others dissatisfied, too. I'm not saying that's noble or good, but it's life.

Among the many reasons for not attempting polyamory in my marriage is the thought of what it would mean to look my wife in the face after I have broken her heart, or she mine, or either of us someone else's, by our own consciously-agreed-upon choices, and to recommit to our marriage and our children. This is not me being virtuous. It's just because I lack the kind of emotional musculature that my grandchildren will probably have in spades when it comes to managing cut-throat intimate transactions. Most of the people who write in to Dan Savage or anyone else to explain why sexual exclusivity is making them crazy are doing so because they want to stay married. They are looking for 'variety,' which some people don't mind providing. But to anyone considering getting involved in this kind of situation, I would urge the unshakable assumption that this is what it will be about. However thrilling such an arrangement may be, at some point the music will stop and you're likely to be the one left out.

That's not to say that staying inside the lines of culturally-sanctioned mating rituals is any sure guide to happiness. Everyone has their heart broken, but not everyone persuades themselves that walking into the middle of a "happily married" couple's marriage-enhancement technique can work out to their benefit beforehand. That's a pretty avoidable heartbreak. I'm no expert on polyamory, but you can't read more than two stories like this one without noticing the endless refrain of 'that's not polyamory.' Polyamory, you see, is a very communication-heavy, egalitarian, and respectful thing. If so, I may as well stipulate that monogamy is awesome, and every couple who isn't awesome to each other isn't really monogamous. The unfortunate fact is that people are bastards, and any human relationship premised on the human ability to never be a bastard is going to fail its participants, and all the more cruelly because it preys upon their idealism.

2011-06-03T23:47:00.004-05:00

Passing the 'Daughter Test'

It's always fun to watch modern economists try to account for the kinds of moral judgments that some of them, like normal people, have about this or that economic activity, so when I saw that Steve Leavitt acknowledges a 'daughter test' for vice legislation, I wanted to check it out:

If the answer is that I wouldn’t want my daughter to do it, then I don’t mind the government passing a law against it. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a cocaine addict or a prostitute, so in spite of the fact that it would probably be more economically efficient to legalize drugs and prostitution subject to heavy regulation/taxation, I don’t mind those activities being illegal.

This via Douthat, who concurs in part:

The fact that I would want to be able to involve the police if my daughter became a streetwalker, but not if she became a Hari Krishna, tells me something important about what kind of legal regime I should support. (There’s a touch of Kantianism in it: One’s (legal) preferences for one’s daughter should become a universal law …)

In principle I tend to agree with Douthat here, insofar as we're talking about the intangible impulses that shape our common life.* But his particular phrasing reveals a problem with the dilemma. Douthat, of course, is assuming that his hypothetically streetwalking daughter will be rescued from her bad decisions or life circumstances by the involvement of the police. As Leavitt's own research has suggested, however, streetwalkers (as distinct from people involved in other aspects of the sex trade) are likelier to be raped by police--that is, to have sex extorted in exchange for lenience--than to be arrested by them. And as is well established by now, street-level prostitution is not driven by individual choices so much as by factors, most prominently addiction and abuse, that are quite distinct from the morality of selling sex for money. Surely Douthat would not want his daughter to suffer the kinds of pointless abuses and indignities that attend upon criminalized streetwalking. When one is accustomed to being handled with some care and deference by the institutions of law and justice, one can well imagine a criminalized vice regime coming to the rescue of one's own kith and kin. Take away that assumption and the thought experiment changes dramatically.

This, I think, is the context in which we should view the report of a blue-ribbon panel of world leaders on the failure of the drug war and the moral and practical necessity of decriminalizing the non-violent trade and consumption of drugs. I certainly don't want my children to be heroin addicts and to that end I really don't want them to dabble in that drug or any other hard substances. But if my own moral guidance and support and the social capital I hope to provide for them does not prevent it, I most definitely don't want them to be shunted into overcrowded, abuse-ridden prisons for the sake of saving them. I would want them to get treatment. America has involved itself not only in an endless, hopeless 'war' against something that no force in the world can stamp out, it has completely confused the social costs of a vice with the practice of it. No one wants to have open-air drug markets on their block (believe me, I've had them). No one wants burglaries and communities rife with junkies; no one wants murders and street shootings over drug-selling turf. But America's drug policy has tended to avoid the narrow focus on these externality costs of the drug trade in order to pursue people who sell and use behind closed doors without the mediating role of gun violence. The Supreme Court just made it much easier to do this kind of pointless knock-and-crash search in pursuit of vice that is as privately practiced as any vice can be.

Considering the 'daughter test' in this light, I'd encourage a very Quixotic Ross Douthat and Steve Leavitt to attack the culture that allows and promotes prostitution. A slightly less romantic approach would be to go after the johns, and a still more realistic approach would be to go after pimps (who, like the streetwalkers themselves, are without much standing in our society but who play a critical role in the trade). It's hard to see what good purpose is served by locking women up, when they actually do get locked up, unless the whole point is to punish and stigmatize them. That's not something I would want for my daughter, and I'm sure it's not something Douthat or Leavitt want for theirs.

[Gambling, which Leavitt also discusses, is an interesting case study. The arguments against its widespread, commercial legalization are strong--if mostly moot at this point--but the arguments in favor of busting down doors to break up private dice games or to keep people from betting in a bar over the outcome of a sporting match are not even bothered with. To take an even more extreme example, it's striking that some right-wing talker thinks that the way to shut down the pornography industry--which a lot of people don't like--is to 'pass [and] enforce laws against fornication,' which everybody does.]

* And I'd argue that the 'daughter test' should apply to much more than vice legislation. Would Ross Douthat want his daughter to go without health insurance because she lacked a job or had a pre-existing condition, as his favored politicians are currently (and always) arguing she should? My daughter (fictive though our kinship may be) is actually under threat of this sort of thing if Paul Ryan's Medicaid proposals are ever made law. If our daughters' nether regions are a fit object of moral legislation, than surely their wheezing lungs and their nutrition and their working conditions and their housing are as well. Asking 'what if a member of my family were to suffer it' is the first step toward a broad ethic of social solidarity, which I don't think Douthat would discount but which he doesn't take any trouble to square with his political positions.

2011-06-02T14:21:00.002-05:00

Credit Where Due

Savage Love this week features some of Dan's best advice, in my humble opinion. It's on the second question, in case you were wondering.

2011-05-31T15:47:00.002-05:00

The Lost May

My apologies to people who have doggedly continued to check in here as my blog-content drought continues. I've been busy with super-important intellectual tasks like writing about foster care, having facebook arguments about Paul Ryan, and changing poopy diapers. I've got a couple more pieces in the pipeline here and there, which I'll be sure to post here if and when they end up online. I'll try to catch up on the postable sermons I've preached lately, too, so don't give up on me altogether just yet. And thanks for sticking with your humble blogger.

2011-05-01T20:14:00.003-05:00

A One-Editorial Guide to Why the Tribune Must Be Mocked

The awfulness of Sunday's editorial on the Daley II era is such that I can't in good conscience consign it to the Tribune Editorial Translator. It's not funny to write with this kind of vicious obtuseness about events the Tribune has witnessed up close and even tried to influence.

First there's the way they talk about racial politics in 1989 Chicago. "The ceremony at Orchestra Hall acknowledged the race-based schism that for roughly a decade had cleaved city politics." Let's break this down a little bit. Leaving aside the not-quite-racially-neutral location of the inaugural, there is the annoying and recurring tendency of the Tribune to refer to Chicago's racial strife without any subjects. What "cleaved city politics"? Well, a "schism" (later on it's a "chasm" and "ugly tensions"). Who or what was at fault? Well, everyone and no one. It was a matter of "tribal conflict," as the penultimate sentence of the editorial says.

This has become the official story in Chicago, in large part because the Tribune has worked hard to make it so. But it is unduly vague. For one thing, city politics had been characterized by racial tension for longer than a decade before 1989. White politicians deliberately kept Chicago's black and Latino populations under-represented in the city council. The previous Mayor Daley had exerted effective control over most of the city's small black council caucus, thanks to patronage jobs. And that Mayor Daley was rather unabashedly committed to preserving the ethnic integrity of white neighborhoods, while would-be black homeowners were robbed blind by unscrupulous property brokers and penned up in unimprovable ghettos by bank redlining.

This was a grave injustice perpetrated upon black and Latino Chicago by white Chicago and its political representatives, and black and Latino Chicagoans were pissed off about it. It was a appalling state of affairs created and exacerbated by people with names and policies that were written down. It was not some impersonal "schism" that "cleaved" local politics as if by plate tectonics.

Moreover, the Tribune's lily-livered rhetoric leaves the impression that Harold Washington and his black supporters were equally culpable (as much as anyone was) for this state of affairs. But in fact Washington stumped all over white Chicago for votes and bent over backward to avoid even the appearance of favoritism to black Chicago. Black Chicagoans were willing to vote for the elder Daley, eager to vote for Jane Byrne in 1979, and content to vote for white candidates at the county, state, and federal levels. It was white Chicagoans who showed purely tribal instincts when it came to the voting booth (I mean, Bernie freaking Epton) and white aldermen who formed a racial bloc when confronted with a black mayor who wanted to divide resources more equitably around the city.

That's pretty much beyond serious dispute if not editorial obfuscation. And the absence of this history from the editorial's lead-in marks the rest of the assessment. "He was impatient to elevate public education--and angry when his team found carpenters hand-building furniture for educrats while school buildings collapsed." Daley's record as an educational reformer is interesting and deserving of its own lengthy consideration. What the Tribune chose to highlight--busting the chops of the bums nosing around at the public trough--is the sort of thing that turns their editorial crank but that has no bearing on the education received by the children, again mostly non-white, who have to deal with actual schools. How have schoolchildren fared under the Daley regime? How have his reforms distributed benefits and costs? The answers to these questions are complicated, to the point where no on can claim that this signature policy challenge has seen the kind of progress a strong mayor might be hoped to deliver.

Worse yet, they devote one sentence to noting and praising the "demolition of public housing high-rises that warehoused families in concentrations of poverty." When the story of Chicago's public housing is finally and definitively told, I hope it is noted that the rationale by which Daley and the city's power brokers, white and black, rolled tens of thousands of black families out of the city and the only neighborhoods and social connections they had--and turned their former homes over to developers--were always phrased in terms of the best interests of the displaced people. What happened to these people? Where did they go? How are they faring? The Tribune doesn't know and the Tribune doesn't care. I remember well the fear and guilt that the Stateway, Robert Taylor, and Cabrini complexes provoked (I even wrote about it). I don't walk around the new South Side wondering how this big experiment has worked out for the people who were there. But that's what newspapers are supposed to be for.

Lastly, they settle on clout hiring as the big sore point in Daley's tenure (along with generous union contracts, of course). Not that this isn't a really bad thing. But if you want to find corruption in Chicago politics, follow the contracts, not the payrolls. There's a lot to say about this, but the Tribune ain't saying it. "He spent too much money fulfilling proud ambitions for his city," they say, but they don't name these vanities because the Trib mostly backed him on them.

There's a lot of focus on the consequences of things mayors can't control: national economic trends, long-term demographic changes that drive things like crime rates. But what about those things that a mayor can do? How did the schools fare under Daley? Or the CTA? Is city government run more fairly and professionally than it was in 1989? What about all the TIFs and the leasing of public assets? Whoever wrote this editorial should be embarrassed at its vagueness and triviality. I don't presume to have all the answers on these questions, which is why every now and then I bother to read a paper--to learn something I might not have heard a thousand times before. The well-heeled, insulated, and influential in Chicago have the luxury of expecting too much of a mayor, and thereby end up expecting too little.

2011-04-21T22:08:00.004-05:00

So Rational I Can Hardly Stand It

And another thing, regarding my rant below: it's remarkable how language can be abused by modern thinkers in the process of their self-flattering depictions of history. Take this dissent on Yglesias' aforementioned reference to Kant as a "Christian pietist":

In fact, Kant was no kind of Christian at all — let alone a fanatical Pietist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it like this in his biography of Kant (the provocatively titled Kant: A biography), “…Kant himself was not religious and was opposed to any form of external religious worship… [p. 250]"

Kuehn also observes that, according to Kant, “Only moral service will make us pleasing to a moral God. Prayer, liturgy, pilgrimages, and confessions are worthless. [p. 371.] \It is true that God — the philosophical God, not the Christian God — has an important place in Kant’s moral system. (It’s also true that his parents were Pietists.) But if we think of Kant as a fanatic — like, say, Swedenborg — it’s hard to understand why he would have insisted on the absolute rationality of moral action.

Let's try to apply this supposed rationality to another sphere of life. I love my wife. But my love is so chaste, so moral, so pure, that I refuse to put it into words, to praise her to others, to mark our anniversary, to make her dinner, to go anywhere with her, or to tell her I love her. Is this "rational"? Or is it insane? Obviously the analogy has limits, but the limits would all argue in favor of a more extravagant expression of devotion in religion than the one called for by marriage. To insist that religion, or any other attachment, have no "external" form is the true fanaticism here. Creating an idol of emptiness and then calling your perverse worship of that void 'rational' doesn't make it so. I don't know enough about Kant to agree that this is what he in fact did, but it's telling that anyone should be able to persuade themselves that this is a splendid philosophical move.

And then, while I typically don't make points based on something some guy says in comments, I thought this response to the original post was interesting:

If you don't have to worry about heaven or hell why shouldn't you just do the best that you can within societal expectations?

"Do the best that you can" is today's version of Gabriel Biel's facere quod in se est, the seemingly realistic command to "do what is within you." Of course even Biel wasn't so godless as to imagine that this alone constituted moral sanctity, but only that in return God would not fail to extend the grace that empowered truly good works. But who, really, can claim to have done the best that he or she can? Maybe when it comes to MarioKart or ice-fishing. But in relations that have a moral dimension, is anyone ever persuaded that there was literally nothing more they could do in a given case? Rarely, I would imagine. What seems like an accommodating standard can either be shorthand for general moral shlumpiness ("I tried!") or, for those who actually take it seriously, it can be a genuine torment whether or not there's a God involved.

And consider the second half of the formula, "within societal expectations." I might be inclined to call Strom Thurmond a racial demagogue, but no--he did the best he could within societal expectations!

The most charitable way to read things like this is to imagine that their writers haven't given them much thought. But examining our ways of thinking without fear or apology is exactly what abolishing religion is supposed to allow us to do. Right?

2011-04-21T11:31:00.003-05:00

The Central Message of Buddhism is not "Every Man for Himself"

A provocative but sharply limited mathematical model has predicted the 'extinction' of religion in nine Western countries. This should be interesting news to New Atheists, ideologues of skepticism, and anyone else scurrying to find a place in the Triumph of Secularism. I wonder how they'll take the suggestion that atheism will grow dominant through network effects--that is, through social convention and peer pressure. These forces are the most odious things in the world when they bolster religion. One wonders if they'll be so objectionable when they are wielded against the faithful. In any case, it rarely occurs to ideologues of any stripe that the unconscious and unnamed dynamics they critique in other people are usually just as much at work in their own arguments.

Whether the model has any merit to it or not, I do not doubt that secularism in some form is becoming a social, cultural, and ideological bond that is every bit as powerful as Christianity ever was. Many Christian conservatives have indulged the "free-thinkers" until now by arguing that religion of some kind, especially the kind your grandparents practiced, is necessary to society's good order. Secularism will lead to moral, philosophical, and political chaos, this story goes. Leaving aside the dire difficulties this argument causes for Christianity in particular, it also happens to just be false. Secularism, rationalism, Enlightenment, and (my favorite) "science" are fast becoming totemic figures in thoroughly de-churched cultures. They are handy tools for promoting chauvinism and even racism over retrograde peoples and places. And anyone who thinks that Christianity and Christians have been the main stumbling block to a new and more humane social order is bound to be very disappointed once we're gone or totally marginalized. Secular ideologies will prove entirely adequate to the task of upholding the warfare state and staggering economic inequality. If anything, they'll be better at this than any religion. The war-and-capitalism idol created and worshiped by the likes of David Barton has always been dogged by the real Christ. I wish the utilitarian consequentialists all the luck in the world, because they'll need it.

To a considerable degree we can see this process at work in our own public discourse. Watch a brilliant, Harvard-educated guy like Matt Yglesias completely beclown himself while trying to talk about something he has persuaded himself is Christian moral philosophy (or the "Bible-obsessed Puritans," whose radical endeavor of school-founding took place simply "so kids could learn to read the word of God.") Or Andrew Stuttaford chuckle over the Bible's tolerable moments. Even James Wood can't wade into the early modern period's religious disputes without mangling them beyond all recognition. These people write from an ignorance that would be embarrassing, even scandalous, if it concerned different people than European Christians (or Jews, or Muslims) before the modern age. Think about it for a moment: a curious, smart, non-specialist reader can pick up a nice-looking book like The Broken Estate, graced by the imprimatur of The New Yorker, and can read as factual truth the incisive judgments of someone who has apparently never read a word by one of his main subjects.

Now (I hope) this is more than the venting of someone resentful at seeing his life's work turned into fodder for a bad parody of Victorian anthropology. This is consequential ignorance because each false memory of our cultural past hides a critique of our own time and our own thought. The Puritans would scorn Yglesias's pallid technocratic ideals. The prophets would rage against Stuttaford's tax-cuts-and-godlessness "secular right" politics. Which is not to say that the old God-haunted voices of our past are right and Yglesias is wrong, but only that we lose the ability to think about ourselves when we lose the thoughts of the past.

So perhaps Christianity, where it is in decline, will a fortiori shift into a subversive role in modern society. If we're going to be thought of by decent folk as stupid, obsessed, and retrograde, after all, why not engage in a little deep social critique? This will take generations to happen fully; there's no point expecting people who've grown up thinking of themselves as bulwarks of civilization to realize that they are now the scum of the earth. But it's an intriguing possibility all the same.

2011-04-06T21:01:00.001-05:00

Shorter Andrew Sullivan

In every particular, the Ryan budget plan is dreadful, but it's brilliant and courageous altogether.

2011-03-21T01:30:00.004-05:00

A Little Less Than Kin, A Little More Than Kind*
Chicago Diarist

The optometrist was very generous in praising our motives, but came back to the question so many people end up asking. "It must be so hard to get attached."

I had decided to start being more upfront about being a foster parent. The system is in pretty poor shape and in need of volunteers, and who knows who might discover an interest in helping out if you give them the chance? And one has already, by this point, hopefully mastered the charitable reaction to the highly stereotyped responses one gets. No, we're not adopting, at least not yet; no, we don't know how long she'll be with us; yes, it will be hard to let her go. There might be anxiety or surprise or incomprehension behind these questions, but never any ill will.

I had already disclosed the proximate cause for my visit: a pair of glasses, the only one in my current prescription, being broken by our foster daughter. I opted not to share that a morning with the kids had made the prospect of an eye exam in their absence sound positively delightful. It would have been counterproductive, not to mention selfish, to have grumbled that the hardest part is actually doing all the parenting stuff. People--and this is to their credit, I suppose--leap over all the bad things about parenting and seize on the thing that makes it worthwhile.

"Well, that's life," I shrugged, as I typically do. When I feel like laying the existentialism on a little more heavily, I add that we're always having to say goodbye to people before we're ready. I don't know what I'll say after we've been through such a transition; perhaps whatever it is will have more weight.

It was a pleasant proto-spring kind of day, and we'd already been outside once (in a busted attempt to get the kids into the car to scour a suburban Borders for last-minute deals). Soren liberated the sandbox from its long winter obscurity and the girl dove right in. They play together and help each other almost instinctively now, which is a joy (not to mention a relief). Attachment, I can assure you, is a blessing.

Ear infections, on the other hand, are a problem. Sleepless nights are a problem. Driving out to West Chicago at 2 a.m. to get the girl to sleep is a problem. Albuterol treatments and temper tantrums and teething. These things are hard enough with one's biological children, but at least with them you have a baseline of hormonal irrationality that helps pull you through. I can as yet only anticipate the pain of parting, but I'd rather experience it a dozen times over than feel as I do when a jagged, alien cry breaks my sleep for the fifth night in a row.

The experience of being a foster parent has made me think a lot about the idea of fictive kinship. It's a big theme in Christianity, of course--I open every sermon with the blessing 'Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.' By 'fictive' I don't mean what we might think of when we hear a related word like 'fictional.' It's not in any way false or bogus. It is, however, made rather than born. The theologians have long argued for the familial relationship of all humanity, but that was typically an insight owed to grace: to the image of God granted in creation and restored in the incarnation. To make this relationship real for us is another matter, one at which Christians have shown only intermittent, though truly inspiring, success.

Not that religion in general or Christianity in particular is the only way to find this notion of fictive kinship. There are after all sororities and fraternities, military service, labor unions, and Deep Springs College. And however you experience it, to the extent that you take your fictive kinship to another seriously you tend to experience the downsides of both the kinship and the fictive-ness. Fostering a child, like bearing with a co-religionist, entails more duties than privileges. We must love her as if she were our own, to the best of our ability, and yet she is not our own, and she may be sent elsewhere without our input or consent. We knew this, of course, and we did not and do not object. It's hard to imagine it being any other way.

After my eye exam, I thought back to T.S. Eliot:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives--unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation--not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and the places with the self, which, as it could, loved them
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

The idea of love expanding beyond desire, and this--call it disinterested love--being the key to liberation from both future and past, is something I've never quite gotten over. I think by the end of the Quartets Eliot was working out the sense in which even a defective love has this shadow of the eternal, in that it suspends both regret and anxiety for the sake of the timeless moment. Everything hurtles away, we ourselves and whom we love, as best we can, and that love is what makes this never-ending flux bearable.

A few lines down he echoes Hamlet:

When I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But some of peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius...

And thus brings the poem cycle back where it began, with a fragment of Heraclitus: "Although the logos is common, people act as though they had a mind of their own." I'm no expert on Heraclitus and I'm rusty on Eliot, but I take his meaning to be that the individuality of the mind is to some degree an illusion; that, kin or not, we are always and most certainly of a kind with one another. This is no sweet insight to swallow. The narcissism of small differences rages even in biological families, and to see a strange parent's mannerism in the events of a ruined day is alienating indeed.

Yet here we are, eating and drinking, crying and sulking, anguished and craving comfort. Attached we already are, and denying of fleeing it will only lead us into graver sorrow. It is better to embrace the offered blessing and its attendant grief. It is Horatio, or I do forget myself.

2011-03-18T14:13:00.003-05:00

The Four Last Things Ever to be Remembered

"It is by living," Martin Luther famously wrote, "no--more--by dying and being damned to hell that one becomes a theologian, not by knowing, reading or speculating." This proposal seems especially apt as the American evangelical industry armors up against Rob Bell and his argument about the finitude of post-mortem suffering. Now there's no point in trying to draft Luther into a perditionless doctrine. He believed in hell, damnation, demons, and the divine hardening of Pharaoh's heart. His deity was no technocrat and his hell was no minor oath. But look at this immensely powerful and vivid claim, that one becomes a theologian by dying and being damned to hell, and consider how it comes by its power. We believe in Hell (to the extent that we do) because we experience it in this life, and we color our experiences in this life with our belief--actual, hypothetical, or only remembered in our cultural inheritance--in their final and eternal amplification. Luther did not play games with hell. We may assume that he meant this as literally as can be imagined, that one may be cast into and drawn out of hell in this life.

One would not get a sense, from the shocked and furious responses to Bell's book, that there is a major nuclear catastrophe in process, or a civil war in North Africa into which our country bids fair to be drawn, or that the health care system of the Ivory Coast is in collapse as turmoil rages there. If any useful talk of hell is to be undertaken, it needs to begin with the data of this life, of the hells we create for ourselves and each other with our godlike delusions, our moral vanity, our complacency, and our infinite desires. Yet the hell of America's evangelical traditionalists is a closed circuit, a strictly end-of-history reality with (it must needs be conceded) an only hypothetical existence. It is anticipated, of course, by the wrath-bearing actions and dispositions of the reprobate in this life. But it is fundamentally something Other, a vengeance for the heedlessness of those who live for this world and its many, tantalizing gods. Kevin DeYoung's review is probably the best example one could hope for of a traditional Calvinist critique of Bell's book (via One Eternal Day). DeYoung has recourse to the doctrine of double predestination (though he does not name it), which pretty much makes Bell's objections to hell disappear (at the cost, of course, of shifting them onto the nature of God himself, but that's another matter). Not to dismiss his response, which is learned and faithful to the historic Christian witness. It should be read, especially by mainliners whose antibodies don't react too promptly to confessional fundamentalism of DeYoung's sort.

But I continue to wonder where hell on earth fits into all of this. I do not dismiss the notion of hell because hell is incontestably real. Children suffer, lives are taken without a thought, worlds of beauty and reflection are destroyed in moments. And of all these things, fundamentalists likewise assure us, God is the proximate and righteous Cause. Innocent suffering is to fundamentalism what altruism is to neo-Darwinism, in Marilynne Robinson's analogy: a bad penny that is liable to turn up anywhere, in need of anxious explanation and extermination-by-redefinition. But that won't wash. Hell is the suffering of children. Hell is mindless death and destruction. Hell is poverty imprinting itself in the molecular biology of its victims. Do you need ghasts and ghouls more than these? Have you walked into the depths of human suffering and hungered to see yet more added in the name of God's justice? Then you are truly an athlete in theology. If you have not, then you'd probably better keep your speculations, however richly attested in the words of the New Testament, to yourself.

In a letter from Tegel prison, Bonhoeffer recalls his fear for his family during a bombing of Berlin:

It is remarkable how we think at such times about the people we should not like to live without, and almost or entirely forget about ourselves. It is only then that we feel how closely our own lives are bound up with other people's and in fact how the center of our own life is outside ourselves, and how little we are separate entities.

This is truly a great mystery Bonhoeffer has named. The experience of such self-forgetfulness is perhaps the most 'religious' experience of all, and it is by no means confined to Christians. What Christian faith does, in the midst of such a man-made hell, is to extend that experience of being bound up with others beyond those we know and love to those we know and do not love and finally to those we do not know at all--to rejoice with those who rejoice, to weep with those who weep, and to embrace, as Calvin argued with unusual rhetorical force, all humanity as bearing the image of the God who made them. That is the sense in which faith is saving, I would argue, or the sense in which we truly experience salvation. Not coincidentally, it is the sense in which faith drives us to mend and protect the world from its continuing hellward lunge. "It’s as if Bell wants every earthly father to love every child in the world in the exact same way," DeYoung says, and I don't think I've quite gotten the point. I love my son more than anything, and though I punish him for the sake of correction I would not under any circumstances see him come to final and irremediable harm. Is God's fatherhood of humanity less literal than mine of Soren? Is my love defective, blinded by insufficient loathing of unholiness? Or is the Fatherhood of God a single-use metaphor, good for his blessing upon human patriarchy and his affection for the elect, but not for his relationship to the reprobate? I wouldn't mind the accusation of insufficiency in my own paternal love, or in my thinking on this matter. I hope I am still open to correction. But I confess that I sometimes find it difficult to think in more transcendent terms than these (though I am at least in good company; Bonhoeffer, after all, gave Christianity's intense worldliness a renewed dignity).

Finally, I look forward to seeing whether Bell's move away from the world to come as the creature of an individual judgment rendered finally and eternally against those who fail to adhere to the Christian gospel--however that adherence is understood, and it is understood in a dizzying variety of ways--prompts any new thinking about the role of the Church. If God's judgment looks more like Matthew 25--in which the nations (not the individuals) of the world are judged on their works of mercy (not their faith); or if Bell is right to any degree, it won't do to say "Everything we've always said is true, except there's no eternal individual torment." If this is so, the Church has largely misunderstood her role in salvation. We were not meant to be a factory for the making of new Christians, or a vendor of insurance against the wrath to come. We are rather to be a saving and not a saved remnant, an ark enduring against the powers of hell within this life and witnessing to the grace of God less through industrial expansion than through sacrificial love. Perhaps this is so and perhaps not, or perhaps it is both so and not so. Unlike a lot of my colleagues, I don't think of myself as a universalist, because I am not interested in plans of salvation other than the Cross ("I resolved to know nothing among you but Christ crucified" strikes me as excluding secret unrevealed designs). But it must be conceded that the alternatives are unappealing, and not just because the thought of anyone enduring suffering forever is unappealing. For Protestants, at least, a belief in hell tends to entail immense sorrow at human destiny when it is taken seriously. Luther's awesome doctrine of grace ran into the hard reality that, in Luther's own eyes, so much of Europe continued to be deprived of the gospel, and in those places where the true faith was taught, it was ignored and despised. For those serious about this question, the world appears to be swimming in error, lukewarm faith, backsliding, hypocrisy, and slackness in good works--and that before considering those who claim another Christian confession or religion altogether. It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that Christ's great triumph carries pitifully few in its train. If human nature, even fallen human nature, is so slightly to be restored and preserved in the world to come, one wonders why he bothered at all.

2011-03-09T23:44:00.002-06:00

Tribune Editorial Translator
No Some New Taxes Edition

Ah, Tribune editorials, how I have missed you.

What they said:

John Cullerton, president of the Illinois Senate, committed a dreadful sin Monday. During a speech that could have been titled "State Finance 101," the Chicago Democrat briefly mentioned that if Illinois taxed retirement income, Springfield would collect some $1.6 billion a year.

Can you believe that? A politician dared to mention taxing a powerful voting bloc!

What it meant: Pencils down, everyone--we've found the answer to the state's budget woes. Replace 'income' with 'voting bloc' and you can tax away. I don't know why we didn't think of this sooner, frankly. Taxing all the voters was bad, but if you tax some of the voters, it's a bloc and so taxing them is good.

What they said:

We have disagreed with Cullerton when he has been a prime mover in the tax-and-spend Springfield agenda that we've described as "Splurge. Borrow. Repeat."

What it meant: Well, I thought that was clever.

What they said:

But to the extent that his intent Monday was to say Illinois needs to cull its herd of sacred cows, then we applaud his beginning a difficult discussion with the citizens of this state.

What it meant: Do we still get to use the phrase 'sacred cows'? Check with legal. Also, what are sacred cows doing when they're not being culled? A question for the sabbatical.

What they said:

He noted that broadening the tax base in this fashion could allow the state to lower the income tax rate — which he just helped to raise to 5 percent. If Cullerton wants to talk about a broader tax base, revenue neutrality, lower rates and more fairness for all citizens, then we want to hear what he has to say.

What it meant: Time to cull the sacred bloc of cow voters and distribute their precious sweetbreads to the rest of the herd. Hey, who let 'revenue neutrality' in here? This was supposed to be about raising cash for the budget and now we're lowering rates, because more taxes on blocs can mean less taxes on everyone.

What they said:

Cullerton has indicated that he would exempt low-income seniors, and those with "modest pensions," and those who rely only on Social Security, and those over 65. Who's left? Cullerton said he might want to tax retirees with pensions of more than $100,000.

Trouble is, there aren't enough of those wealthy pensioners to make much of a difference: Taxing pension income above the $100,000 level would raise $70 million a year.

What it meant: Repeat: more fairness for all citizens.

What they said:

Sen. Cullerton, you have a good point. Illinois needs a talk about revising tax policies and rethinking exemptions. Not to grab more from taxpayers,

What it meant: Blocs. Always blocs.

What they said:

but to broaden the tax base as a matter of fairness

What it meant: Our state's creditors will surely accept fairness in payment.

2011-03-09T21:59:00.004-06:00

The Dialectic of Liberation

If you haven't read my article on Dan Savage for the Washington Monthly, you should probably do that. And if you have and figure that was enough time from this vain life to spend considering the implications of Dan Savage's work, you should probably skip this post.

I do, however, want to address some of the more interesting criticisms. Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon was not pleased:

I knew Dueholm was definitely going to fly off the rails when, after he describes these sound ethical principles, drops this bullshit:

Underlying all of Savage’s principles, abbreviations, and maxims is a pragmatism that strives for stable, livable, and reasonably happy relationships in a world where the old constraints that were meant to facilitate these ends are gone.

This is a blatantly false characterization of the old constraints. Time to get feminist, y’all, but I would say that the old constraints were not meant to create livability or happiness so much as to reinstate patriarchal power structures.

I probably did not phrase this as precisely as I'd have liked to, since it's certainly not the case that I think everyone was happier back when women were treated like chattel and so on. But I think culture is a pretty multifarious thing and that customs and rituals ('constraints') do useful work even when they are in some sense oppressive. Marcotte's reaction relies on a cartoonish view of our collective past, in which every structure of courtship and marriage was aimed solely at the oppression of women and gay people (and, I'd add, women and gay people were mute and passive in the face of their own imposed limitations). I don't agree, but there you go--I'm a geek for culture. The only thing Marcotte's feminism and the pop Darwinism Savage likes to cite, which are entirely contradictory ideologies, happen to have in common is a rejection of the whole of culture as a crime against human authenticity. Not that this is the only way to be feminist; some of the most badass feminists I know put on the ancient vestments of patriarchy and expound upon a 2,000-year-old book on Sundays because they've found in these things something very empowering and ennobling.

Anyway:

You can criticize Savage for being wrong or being sexist at times, but generally speaking, he’s trying to create an ethical system that’s anti-patriarchal not to fill a void, but because he believes that the old patriarchy was evil and unethical.

Point taken. But on the ground level, filling a void is what Savage is perpetually doing. A man who is living with a woman he doesn't love because he likes the free rent is living in an ethical void. A woman so obtuse as to be surprised that a married man on a business trip might lie about the openness of his marriage is living in an ethical void (not to mention a grasping-the-freaking-obvious void). A hundred years ago, both of these people would be risking major social stigma or even breaking laws before they'd get to the point of asking Dan Savage how to do the right thing. So would the compulsive porn consumers, the polyamorists, and probably about everyone I know at some point or other in their lives. I'm certainly not dismayed that cohabitation and pornography aren't illegal any more, but each rolled-back law or canceled stigma left behind desires and behaviors that still need some kind of social organization. Hence the role of people like Dan Savage in crafting norms.

And here my main analogy seems not to have been as well understood as I'd hoped. Here's me:

As it happens, this vision fits rather well in a society built around consumption. If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.

Marcotte calls foul:

And then blah blah blah the market is crass blah blah blah. We’re liberals, right? We don’t like “the market”, right? Treating sex like “the market” is bad, right?

The problem with this is that he’s conflating the rules of ethics that govern a truly fair and free market with objections to capitalist ethos like “greed is good”. In fact, free market ethics are in direct contrast to capitalism, and are used to restrain it. Laws against false advertising, selling lemons, and full disclosure are not, as Dueholm suggests, the “deregulated marketplace”, but the opposite: a regulated marketplace.

Well, I wasn't trying to bait liberal readers with market-talk, because I like markets. I like buying things from firms competing with each other on price and quality. Markets are a tremendous force for human welfare and at the same time a seriously limiting influence on human moral imagination. It's a fine thing that what I'm analogizing as regulations--strict laws against divorce, criminalization of porn, etc.--are over and done with. But in the absence of laws, you need norms, which is what I see Savage as trying in his fascinating and ad-hoc way to provide. That's why he's the Better Business Bureau: his judgments, which are many, obviously have no legal force but in some cases have already become a sort of shorthand for good sexual practice. Analogies are limiting, so you could say that his norms are really regulations of a sort--lemon laws are laws, after all--but they're the minimal kinds of regulations required only for the proper functioning of a market, that is, corrections of distortions to an ideal market model. The point, whether you want to think of this as "deregulated" or "minimally regulated" or whatever is that there is nothing more than refereeing going on here. There is neither the will nor the language with which one might try to re-imagine the outcomes of all these random transactions, no substantive idea of a good life that animates (and thus limits) the market.

My point in making this analogy is not to rile up liberals into betraying the Sexual Revolution or anything like that. It's rather to suggest that liberation can be a complicated matter. What looks and feels like freedom can also be the encroachment of metaphors that prove to be oppressive in new and exciting ways. The very, very modest endorsement of monogamy at the end of the article has drawn a lot of irritation, but the point is that now that the market is totally free, perhaps commitments of that sort can be radical, subversive, can contradict the logic of transactions that is colonizing every other aspect of American life. Moreover, monogamy can do this even when people fall short of their commitments. In response to Lindsay Beyerstein's criticism of my article on this score, Dan calls his own marriage 'monogamish.' And, you know, great. He's obviously a family man and that's splendid and I agree with him that compromises to monogamy that keep a family intact are to be, if not necessarily welcomed, at least tolerated. But in his advice-giving, he has rather less to say about why you'd want the 'mono' than the 'ish.' "Children and other sexually transmitted diseases" is the only argument I remember him making for why people might make monogamous commitments, and that came in a parenthesis. So why bother? If a little bit of action on the side can allow a marriage to thrive, why not a lot? If it's unnatural and unrealistic to be totally monogamous (whatever that means), then why expend the slightly less effort involved in being mostly monogamous? I was a little surprised and dismayed that Beyerstein called monogamy an "arbitrary social ideal," as if it were something other than radically altruistic in contrast to some of the environments where it has taken root. Surely if this almost-monogamy is so successful, the ideal has to be doing something?

Lastly, a commenter to Marcotte's post mentioned in passing, "the topic is some pastor’s issues with non-biblical mating." This was in the context of the Dan Savage Oppression Derby that breaks out any time he does anything, or anyone talks about him, and it's a fascinating thing to experience.* Dan is called trans-phobic, bi-phobic, fat-phobic, and he hates Christians and AIDS educators. Man, if there's a trans, bi, overweight, Christian AIDS educator out there, I bet they have a real beef with Dan Savage. Dan, to his credit, doesn't seem to care, since he encounters the same reaction no matter what adult he's telling to grow up and take responsibility for themselves (the only people he is sentimental about are children, which is good). Anyway, I doubt this commenter clicked through to my article, but it left me asking, do I indeed have issues with 'non-biblical mating'?

Now if non-biblical mating means any sex ever between anyone but a man and a woman married for life and they love Jesus, then no--I don't have issues with it. But if non-biblical mating means having relationships that don't aspire to the ideals of justice, fidelity, loving-kindness, self-giving, and the forgiveness of sins to which the Bible calls all human communities, then yes, I certainly do have issues with non-biblical mating.

*In my first posting I called it 'a delight,' which has a ring of cruelty. I retract it.

2011-03-08T15:08:00.002-06:00

Christians and the Bible

We don't know it very well. This is old news, and to Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right, it's good news:

Ignorance is never to be celebrated, but in this case it beats the most likely alternative for many of the Bible’s would-be readers; the dreary and obsessive rote-learning, study and purported follow-to-the letter of sacred text that is a characteristic of, say, much of Islam and certain strains of Judaism. The Bible certainly has its moments, but the West has benefited immensely from the way that Christianity has broken free from its ancient founding text into something infinitely more fluid, flexible and syncretic.

I get tired of saying things like this, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Andrew Stuttaford hasn't made a very thorough study of people like Maimonides, Averroes, or St. Augustine. Close readers of Scripture, these gentlemen, and profoundly influenced by Aristotle and (for Augustine) Platonism.

Moreover, it's hard to imagine that this view--which is perfectly conventional among a large group of people who fancy themselves modern and sophisticated--could co-exist with any deep knowledge of either the Bible or of the history of the West. You'd be hard pressed to find a penal code more restrained in its use of capital punishment than the Torah is before the 19th century. You'd be hard-pressed to find an impulse toward humane reform that didn't have serious grounding in the Bible and the church. The traditions of interpretation, going back to the New Testament and the earliest post-canonical writings of the Christian Church, are profoundly rich and creative (this practice is even older in Judaism, of course). The tedious literary fundamentalism Stuttaford and so many others imagine to be the true nature of Western religion is to a startling degree a creature of modernity, not of the ancients.

2011-03-08T02:16:00.004-06:00

Dan Savage, Newspaper Man

My big Washington Monthly article on Dan Savage's ethical worldview has gone online and seems likely to be received with an emphasis on its critical rather than its appreciative side. That's fair, since the critique is what makes the drama. We could only briefly touch on an interesting part of Savage's biography, which is that he grew up steeped in the world of Chicago daily newspapers. His admiration for Ann Landers is widely noted, and her style has echoes in his. But he's just as reminiscent, to me anyway, of a columnist like Mike Royko--prolific, hard-edged, with a gift for a phrase that jumps off the page and sticks with the reader.

With a few exceptions (at least one of which I was glad to include in the article), Savage's style does not exactly touch the sublime. But I can remember where I was sitting when I read some of his columns, even many years later. Riding the #6 bus in Hyde Park while reading a column rebutting Nader voters in 2000; sitting at the now defunct Cafe Florian to read his September 11th column; reading the 'How'd That Happen' column in at the Memorial Union in Madison. That's what good writing--really good writing--does, and looking back on my examples it's striking to me that the topic of sex isn't necessarily what made these columns memorable.

In fact, the seed of my take on Savage's ethical worldview was probably planted at Steep 'n Brew on State Street in late 1999, when I read his answer to the young immigrant who was living with a woman in San Francisco under false pretenses. “This sounds more like a question for The Ethicist, a charming new advice column in The New York Times Magazine, but since you asked, I’ll give it a go. You are an asshole." I didn't realize at the time that such questions and answers would become his mainstay, but the question and the answer, down to the offhanded use of a word like 'charming,' stuck with me. Writing for a newspaper, even an alt-weekly, needs sharpness and charisma and an intuitive movement in order to work. At his best, Dan Savage's writing has these qualities in as good a measure as anyone I've read.

2011-02-24T14:40:00.002-06:00

Why You Should Be Reading Daniel Larison

The next line is quite amusing: “Take the spirit of freedom blowing through Cairo’s squares and bring it to Tehran’s squares.” If the spirit of freedom is abroad in the region, it is not something that can be directed or controlled. That’s why it’s the spirit of freedom.

Larison has made stating what ought to be obvious into an art form, a rhetorical return of the obvious that can be as refreshing as stating something more seemingly original and is almost always far more necessary.

2011-02-23T22:28:00.004-06:00

The Irony of Wisconsin

There's a lot of beneath-the-headlines stuff to dislike about new governor Scott Walker's budget proposal for Wisconsin. Leaving the procedural quibbles aside--politics being something other than beanbag and so on--it is a document striking in its variety of offenses. There is the provision to allow the no-bid sale of the state's energy plants without any demonstrated respect to the public interest. Really, it's there. The bill kicks thousands of limited-term employees off of health insurance and into an individual market that few of them will be able to afford. And it allows the state Department of Human Services to change the state's health care programs for children and the poor without respect to the requirements of current state law, subject only to the "passive approval" of the Joint Finance committee. This means that programs like BadgerCare that help cover all the state's children will be on the block for potentially radical changes. Yes, it does that.

All of this, of course, has been engulfed in the debate over collective bargaining for public employees. Suddenly every major paper and every conservative brain-stem tank is stocked with self-taught experts on the perfidy of public-employee unions (some of them even daring to contrast them unfavorably with private sector unions, hoping we'll forget that they also despise those). There is tremendous--ungodly--zeal for making teachers and nurses and police officers and wage earners pay for the sins of the global financial markets and the lackluster policy response by Washington, as if pension vesting rules had plunged otherwise-healthy state budgets into crisis. It's just unimaginably stupid and beastly, and yet among a substantial swathe of the American commentariat, it's become conventional wisdom.

And to give the devil, or at least his very, very gullible henchmen, their due, you may as well grant that an organization of public employees will have interests that are hardly identical with the public as such or with the goals enshrined in the concept of the public sector. I'm as sentimental about labor as the next liberal, but the whole point of the movement was that labor has specific interests that need defending, not a redemptive role for the whole society. Public-sector compensation is structured in some problematic ways (ways that the specific proposals here do nothing to change, but whatever*), incentives are not well-aligned, and so on.

But ask yourself for a moment what this process would have looked like had Scott Walker just left the unions alone and decided to focus on handing the state's energy infrastructure over to whichever firms he pleased and on stripping low-paid workers and poor kids of their health plans? There would have been objections, and people like me who've read too much of the Old Testament to sleep soundly at night would raise the usual complaints about offending God by taking needed things away from children in order to give tax breaks to big businesses and wealthy people. But these objections would have had exactly as much relevance as they always have when a governor sets his mind to screwing the poor and the vulnerable: none. The only reason this process has taken long enough for people to learn about the offenses contained in this document is that the governor decided to add all of them together with a frontal assault on the one constituency still organized in a way that can thwart his will.

And that, friends, is why we are obligated to go into the last ditch for the union.

* There is a sort of pundit's law that any argument against a disfavored program or group may be used to defend any attack on it, whether or not it's germane. We see daily a version of this with respect to the 2005 Social Security privatization plan, in which worries about the program's long-term solvency are applied in defense of a proposal that would have radically undermined its solvency.

2011-01-24T03:58:00.005-06:00

Why Preachers Should Read Dan Savage

I've had plenty of critical things to say about Dan Savage's writing over the years, and I'm sure to have some more. But I keep reading him because he takes on questions that I and my colleagues often manage to avoid, and because I have a professional fascination with church substitutes. A pair of his blog posts this week reminded me why I continue to admire his writing even though I don't share his worldview and why I think it's good practice for pastors to keep an inquisitive, appreciative eye on what he does.

One concerns a matter of general principle, namely, under what circumstances is cheating in a relationship permissible. A reader took issue with his claim that cheating amounts to the least-worst option when one partner is incapacitated. "It is selfish to cheat on someone in a circumstance such as this," writes the indignant correspondent. "If you really feel the need to cheat on your dying husband or wife, you should have thought about that before you got married." Savage responds:

If a little discreet cheating makes it possible for someone to be there for a sick or disabled partner—if it makes it possible for that person to remain faithful in the most meaningful sense of the term—no one outside that relationship has a right to judge. And, again, I'm not saying that people in monogamous relationships have a right to cheat on their partners at the first sign of sniffles or if their partners are bedridden for a few months with a broken leg. I'm talking about the grind of years and years of caring for a sick or dying partner.

Circumstances change, IHTB, and sometimes allowances have to made. It's neither helpful nor realistic to demand that others go without physical intimacy for years or decades because you can't wrap your head around a situation where a person might need to sneak out and do a small wrong in order to stay put and do a much larger right.

Now I'm going to be one to praise the power of a relationship that goes all the way into incapacity with as much mutual sacrifice as possible. But to take a deep breath and face the prospect of a life without sexual intimacy because the person with whom you've promised to share it is still living but not sexually functional is a matter of tremendous gravity. And I wonder how people in my line of work deal with it, either implicitly or explicitly. The person arguing with Dan makes a rather harsh legalistic case--you committed, and hedging on that commitment even in extremity is selfish. I would venture that it's not an uncommon opinion. What have we had to say about it?

On this point the idea of the uses of the law has something to say. For those of you with better things to do than learn about the Reformation, the idea that the law of God--whether the commandments, or just the body of legitimate ethical wisdom available to us--has different uses can be surprisingly useful. Today I'll summarize them thus:

First use: Managing the Human Disaster
Second use: Revealing the Human Disaster for what it is and throwing us on the grace of God
(the Gospel goes here, but that's another topic)
Third use: Subverting and resisting the Human Disaster through works of heroic charity

Ask me tomorrow and I'll probably put it differently. This isn't the only way to think about the relationship between Law and Gospel, or between ideal and actual in human affairs. But it's a way, and I think every Christian teacher and preacher needs a way to think about these things. Renouncing sexual intimacy in solidarity with a disabled partner is third use stuff--i.e., heroic, a daring attempt to transcend the awfulness of a given situation. It's an act of faith, not a work of the law that can justify (forgive my foray into the weeds here). Where Savage's advice is quite useful, I think, is on first-use grounds. A spouse who takes good and faithful care of the other spouse while taking some joy in an outside relationship is not a cruel or selfish failure. Indeed, in a lot of cases that would constitute a kind of success in enduring the human disaster.

The second example concerns a particular case:

I've written before, but didn't hear back from you. Probably because my email didn't contain flogging or santorium or whatever. But I won't be IGNORED, Dan.

The wounded tone itself is kind of interesting. But anyway:

I'm a 32-year-old female. Second marriage, two kids. One with my ex and one with the man I cheated on him with and my current husband. My problem: a year ago I found my "first love" on a social network. I'd been looking for him off and on for more than sixteen years. This person was a jerk who left me for one of my friends back in high school. But he was and still the love of my life. Always has been. Always will be.He is not married and never has been married and has no children. We began an affair about seven months after finding each other. My marriage, my second marriage, had been rocky before this. My second husband, of three years, stopped having sex with me after I became pregnant and this continued after our child was born. We tried counseling. It didn't help. In no way am I using this as an excuse. I know what I've done is wrong. But I also have a pretty bad track record and I've cheated on every man I've ever been with except for my "first love."...Every man who that has come into my life AFTER him knew about him and knew that if he ever came back for me, I was gone. This includes my current husband. Dan, pull out all the stops on this one, as you famously do, and please tell me what to do.

Read the whole thing. Savage may be forgiven a somewhat brusque opening to his answer:

I didn't respond to your earlier pleas for help, SCIL, because I didn't have much to say to you. I still don't. I had the same reaction reading your email today that I had reading all the other emails you've sent me about your situation. My reaction is a little selfish and I'm a little embarrassed to share it with you. But you keep pressing me, SCIL, and so here it is:

THIS BITCH CAN GET LEGALLY MARRIED AND I CAN'T?!?!

But the heart of the matter is more serious:

You say you've cheated on every man you've ever been with the exception of your "first love," SCIL. You seem to be operating under the assumption that you never cheated on him because he's the love of your life and that he's the love of your life because you never cheated on him. No. You never cheated on him, SCIL, because you never got around to it. You two broke up when you were fifteen. If you'd been with him a little longer, you would've cheated on him like you've cheated on everybody else. And if you leave your current husband and break up your first child's second home and your second child's first, it won't be long before you're cheating on the love of your life too. Because you're a cheater, SCIL, you're the kind of person who couldn't and shouldn't make monogamous commitments.

Or get married. Or have children.

Don't know that I'd go that far. Her children probably don't agree, at least if we're talking about a particular case and not a "kind of person." But it's hard to doubt the soundness of the impression.

So what should you do. Stay? Go? Frankly, SCIL, I don't give a f*** what you do. And, stay or go, it's not going to make f*** of a lot of difference. Your personal life is a mess, SCIL, and always be. Because, you see, wherever you go, there you are.

That said: If your current husband doesn't mind being cheated on, if he can put up with your affairs, I think you should stay with him for the sake of your kids. They deserve whatever stability and continuity you scrounge up between infidelities. And, again, if you leave your current husband for the love of your life, SCIL, it won't be long before you're cheating on your third husband and preparing to uproot your kids a third/second time again. I know it, you know it, everyone reading this knows it.

So just stay put, okay?

People like SCIL are in our pews. And I wonder what we're saying to them about their emotions, the way they relate their emotional needs to the interests of their children, their prospects for being either as good or as happy as they want (and apparently expect) to be. Probably not much, at least that we're aware of. But surely the person who bothers to look for truth in what we say, rather than harassing Dan Savage, is learning something about themselves from what they hear.

My hunch is that someone like SCIL is probably not going to hear much that persuades her that she is who she is, that she's kind of a disaster, and that managing that disaster in the interests of her children is the most important thing she can do. Some hay has been made about the role of Christianity of the prosperity-gospel variety in inflating housing bubbles and so forth. I wonder if we don't encourage a moral version of the same thing, a false hope that we can just be good, happy, and somehow harmless all at the same time. That's entirely speculative on my part, and it's certainly no part of anyone's intention. But as someone who hasn't preached about sex and relationships at any length in a year and a half, I can say that SCIL learned more by harassing Dan Savage than she would have sitting in church while I was preaching.

2011-01-14T22:08:00.002-06:00

Getting Beyond It

People have been getting beyond Christianity for a long time. "In our time," Søren Kierkegaard wrote in 1843, "nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further."

It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be … going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows … except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.

"Going further" is the continual preoccupation of the human mind. People who advocate it seem to think themselves bold and original when in fact it comes quite naturally. A colleague of mine made an appeal in this direction back in November, urging the church to get out of the "salvation business."

In short, humanity has been growing up but religion, including Christianity, hasn’t been keeping up. In fact, it often has been resisting that development. It has been to the church’s advantage to keep its members in a child-like, dependent relationship. Over the past century or two, however, people throughout the modern Western world have been maturing and leaving the church by the millions.

Either I have long misread Kierkegaard on this point and he was not, in fact, being ironic, or else he was terribly mistaken and the world truly is full of people who can get beyond faith and doubt with the greatest of ease. I do not discount that possibility. All the same, I must confess that I am not among them. It would not help to belabor the point that I hear relatively few of my own contemporaries expressing the idea that humanity has "grown up" in any sense, awakened from any great darkness, and that whatever else good or bad we may have taken from progressive Christianity it is not that particular myth. And I don't suppose it would be terribly persuasive to note that Christianity was viewed as retrograde and barbaric from the beginning and that it hasn't had anything to lose on that score.

Rather, I have deep roots in those who left the church over these recent centuries of Promethean enlightenment. But I must have undergone some kind of hideous neoteny, because for me sin and death are absolutely real and terrifying things. I do not close my eyes and imagine pitchforks and brimstone, but neither do I have to stretch very hard to see what all the prophets and Jesus alike understood as the wrath of God. And yes, if there is any means at all to be saved from these things I would very much wish for it.

Interestingly, Michael Chabon offers a perspective on this that I see as coming from a much profounder skepticism. In his rueful reflection on the Tuscon memorial service, Chabon is unpleasantly startled by the president's invocation of heaven:

Having struggled all the way through to make my own sense of sorrow and confusion congruent with what I saw happening in Tucson, having found that point of tangency at the rueful and admonitory heart, the father's heart, of the speech, I fell all the way out again, right at the end. "If there are rain puddles in heaven," the president said, evoking the words of an unnamed contributor to an album of photos of babies born on 9/11, "Christina is jumping in them today."

This seems, as it often does, like an easy way out.

I tried to imagine how I would feel if, having, God forbid, lost my precious daughter, born three months and ten days before Christina Taylor-Green, somebody offered this charming, tidy, corny vignette to me by way of consolation. I mean, come on! There is no heaven, man. The brunt, the ache and the truth of a child's death is that he or she will never jump in rain puddles again. That joy was taken from her, and along with it ours in the pleasure of all that splashing. Heaven is pure wishfulness, an imaginary solution to the insoluble problem of the contingency and injustice of life.

Fair enough. There is doubt trained where it ought to be--at the idea of a moral core to this life.

But I've been chewing these words over since last night, and I've decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

When faced with an insoluble problem--and the problem of the suffering of children and the grief of parents is, to the best of my knowledge, pretty damned insoluble--an imaginary solution might be just what is called for. Getting beyond it is not a humane option, not a possibility that is faithful to the life cut short. If the idea of salvation means, in the end, nothing more than the measure of what we cannot bear and of our refusal to bow under it, it will be an idea worth upholding.

2011-01-11T14:04:00.003-06:00

A Priestly People

Back when I was just getting started in ministry, early in my seminary career, Christmas was a high point of the year. There is a strange thrill in doing something, as it were, from the inside out--in knowing the alleys that connect the gleaming storefronts, in working while others sleep or recreate. The church, glowing and burnished, fills twice over with families stopping for their obeisances before dinner and presents and we take the stage. My old pastor at Luther Memorial used to take me out to dinner at the Thai place between the early and the evening services. One night my future wife and I enjoyed a Christmas Eve feast at the Golden Nugget at midnight, right there in the pupil of Chicago's unblinking eye.

Parenthood finished all of that. By last year, Advent found me bedraggled, and this year was harder still. It was fun and exciting to try to be a good pastor at Christmastime. To try to do that as well as be a good dad and husband and an even minimally functioning son, sibling, and the rest appears to me to be a hopeless cause. Case in point: I was derelict in doing anything Christmas-like with the kids and struck on the brilliant notion of riding the train downtown and taking them around the Christkindlemarkt at Daley Plaza. Brilliant. Two children under three, and they're just going to love German pastries and sumptuous displays of handblown glass. At least the girl's howls of boredom and despair cleared a path through the crowds, as I handed over miserable crumbling pieces of stollen to Soren. We were just about to leave, having seen and done nothing that either child enjoyed, when we happened upon the wooden train booth. Both kids demanded a hoist and a look. Not a sustainable arrangement, but as it gently collapsed back into the stroller-and-handholding formation the protests began in earnest. I desperately promised a return trip to Soren. It is now January 11th. I will give you one guess as to whether that trip was ever made.

Eventually Christmas happens and then the king's progress to Kansas and later Wisconsin begins. Bright and early for our flight from Kansas City back to Chicago, I diverted Soren by conversing about the planes on the tarmac. "Safe travels, airplane!" I would say as another one took off. "Safe travels, airplane!" Soren would echo, eventually administering the benediction all on his own. On the plane, Soren--who is about as nervous a flyer now as his old man--and I prayed, which we long-hand as "saying amen." Dear God, I started, "thank you for the airplane," Soren offered, not waiting for any prompting. And may we have safe travels. "And maybe have safe travels" (one sweats the wording of prayers until one internalizes the truth that God is not a court reporter). And please protect everyone who travels today, especially Ava and Uncle Alex and Aunt Lindsay. Amen.

When we returned to O'Hare, the traveling mercies again came in quick succession. "Safe travels, airplane!" Soren was saying every 60-90 seconds as we walked from the airport train to the car. One took off right over our heads as I tried to buckle him in; in a panic he strained to get out--"I have to say safe travels, airplane!" OK, one more. The airplane, of course, is a creature of physics and it operates by the same rules as everything else in the world. It takes the human mind and the human voice to look at the whole thing, the lives sheltered within, the atmosphere through which it flies, and to return these things to the world in the form of a blessing, however feeble and inefficacious.

The next day, Soren fell in the snow on his way to the car to go up to Wisconsin. Crying and cold, he looked up. "The trees make me feel better." There it is again, the warp of nature and the woof of the human mind crossing to create something new, not entirely of either and vanished in a moment.

How early we may be initiated into the occult priesthood of human nature. Sure, the boy knows a few words of prayer and wants to hear 'Abide with Me' every night at bedtime. But he's miles off from a conscious experience of redeeming grace, of what we Christians call salvation history. He is, however, already fast at work in the sanctuary of created grace, where whether we know it and accept it or not, every flight of the imagination offers the world up to something beyond it--to render the world to its primal gods in the form of intention, wish, thanksgiving, or prayer.

2010-12-16T10:46:00.007-06:00

I Am Just a Monkey, Man

I don't care what anybody says, I'll always love Mick Jagger:

It seems a little quaint for a 67-year-old to refer to his girlfriend of nearly a decade as someone he is “kind of dating.” But Jagger is disinclined to articulate any greater commitment. “I don’t really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be,” he says. “I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don’t really think much of marriage. I’m not saying it’s not a wonderful thing and people shouldn’t do it, but it’s not for me. And not for quite a few other people too, it would appear.” He laughs. “I just think it’s perhaps not quite what it’s cracked up to be. I know it’s an elaborate fantasy.”

So far, good enough for me. Marriage is an elaborate fantasy, which I think is kind of awesome, and I've got no interest in critiquing Mick Jagger's personal life anyway. You can't really blame someone for taking what the world freely gives, and I can hardly promise that given his resume I'd be a paragon of domestic virtue either. But here's where it gets kind of interesting:

He goes on to talk, in a rather rambling way, about the animal kingdom and how human mores regarding marriage and fidelity correspond to what we know of primate behavior. “If you have studied or have even a passing knowledge of animal behavior, it’s hard to see how our rules and regulation fit in,” he says at one point.

There are swans, he is reminded.

“Oh, yeah, I love it when women say that,” he replies. “I always have a joke with L’Wren about that. Women tend to say these things more than men do, don’t they?” He affects a sentimental whisper: “ ‘They mate for life, you know.’ ” He chortles heartily at this piece of feminine nonsense. “Yeah,” he muses, when his laughter dies away, “it’s swans and there’s one other. What is it? Albatross, or something.”

Modern biology, at least at the popular level, has always been driven by human narcissism. People talk, usually disparagingly, about 'social Darwinism' as if there's ever been any other kind. "Oh, I'm not a Social Darwinist," the modern-day Darwinian ideologue says; "I just think human society is totally explained by ant colonies." Now there are plenty of biologists who are truly fascinated by the variety and wonder of life, but very few of them opine on the relationship between bonobo mores and human ones.

In context, Jagger's comment--which is an entirely ordinary and increasingly conventional view--becomes rather comical. Check out the other pastimes of this mammalian enthusiast:

We are sitting in the Carlyle hotel’s Royal Suite, Jagger’s regular residence when he is in New York. A grand piano sits in the corner of the cathedral-like living room. A couple of guitars — an acoustic and a Gibson electric — are leaning against the sofa. Lying on the coffee table, alongside a bottle of Bobbi Brown Hydrating Face Tonic, is a copy of the new Diaghilev biography that Jagger has just purchased.

...

“I got a powerful sense of his mastery of every detail of every aspect of the production,” says Martin Scorsese, who collaborated with Jagger on the Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light.” “And by that, I don’t just mean the music; he also has a sharp sense of cinema.”

...

When he is on the road, he has been known to keep a map in his dressing room, indicating the city at which the tour will go into profit.

...

Marianne Faithfull once claimed that of all Jagger’s relationships, the one with Richards was “the only one that really means anything to him.”

...

He would rather be distinguished by the renaissance breadth of his interests. He speaks excellent French. He is an ardent cricket fan. He acts. He produces movies. He reads widely in fiction and nonfiction....On the morning of his interview, he missed his usual 40 minutes of every-other-day exercise in Central Park in order to attend a lecture on “wave and sand formations.”

All of this is terrific, as far as I'm concerned. And you know, Jagger is right that primates aren't so interested in monogamy. But you know what else they're not interested in? Living intercontinentally, playing guitars and pianos, reading (much less writing) books, designing camera angles, spending hundreds of hours in a studio making a record, plotting break-even points, concerning themselves with decades-long creative partnerships, and exercising. And anyone who has studied, or even has a passing knowledge of animal behavior, knows that the chimp is no damned good at sitting still through lectures on "wave and sand formations." Just think about the massive cultural effort that goes into creating even one of these enjoyments. Consider the endless, orgasm-less hours that went into creating the simple electric guitar and the social milieu in which it can be played and heard. Your wearier voices of modernity spent their lives trying to answer the question of just how the blundering meatsacks that we humans are have managed to channel our effort into such apparently useless things as grand pianos and scientific lectures. And as unsatisfying as the work of a Freud or a Marx might ultimately be, they at least felt the need to account for the vast difference between humanity as we know it and the primitive state in which they imagined our true selves to have been forged.

Not so with the practitioners of evolutionary astrology. Why do we like to screw around? Bonobos. Why do we like to mate? Swans. Our true self, the key to our correct and rational conduct, is buried in our genetic history and that's all there is to it. Whereas once we danced on strings held by the stars, now we are the dysfunctional captives of some primitive human prototype. The terrifying thought that we might truly be conscious and truly free is banished either way.

Even the form of the argument, such as it is, is self-defeating. Yes, it is true that bonobos have a varied and fascinating sex life. But it's not like they go around explaining it by making reference to some nearly-related species. Only humans do that. We are not alone in wanting to get it all kinds of ways and all kinds of places. But we are alone in feeling the need to explain it to ourselves and to each other--not to mention in fashioning methods for satisfaction that can manage to overwhelm even our insatiate longings.

However small the genomic difference between the human and the great ape, as phenomena the differences are vast, approaching infinity. The massed neurons of all the world's animals could not write nor read this blog post, much less design the computer on which it is being typed. Our animal brethren are not our true selves. The stars are not interested in our fates. We are alone with our bursting consciousness in this complacent universe, shaped for a complicated kind of freedom to do things that serve no evolutionary purpose--whether these things are grave, tedious, delightful, moving, or frivolous. The man who played at the devil and insisted that "you'll never make a saint of me" has every reason to know that.

2010-12-07T23:14:00.002-06:00

Into Your Hands
New York Diarist

Four long years had passed since I last visited New York, and it seemed at times as though my once-frequent trips out there had become a thing of the past. But a friend of long duration, with whom I had walked and talked through the interminable ELCA ordination process, was going to be ordained in Floral Park on Long Island, and it was imperative that I go. Never mind that it was winter, never mind that the ordination was at 2 p.m. on a Saturday and I was set to preach and preside at communion on Sunday. I am no ordination junkie, but this one could not be missed if I could at all help it.

So I left Midway at 7:55 a.m. on Friday, red stole and iPad in tow. Sleep beckoned, but John the Baptist beckoned more insistently, and I got a good deal of drafting done over America's industrial heartland. It had been eight years since I last passed through LaGuardia, but the M60 was still right there to take me toward the subway. It's such a quick trip at this point that I no longer begrudge Robert Moses for not extending the N/Q line all the way to the airport, however much wiser Chicago has been in linking its airports to the city.

On the train, I checked the map and saw that it entered Manhattan at 59th and Lexington. I remembered St. Peter's Lutheran Church being near there, so I alighted onto a busy and church-less Lexington Avenue for the daily noon mass. A few blocks south I ran into it. The pastor noted that he and I would constitute quorum. As it happened, we were abundant with mid-day worshipers. Three of us heard a proper sermon (on the relationship between disappointment and promise) and we all gathered to share the elements, the body and blood of the Lord, in the midst of the bustle of an oblivious city. Intimate daily gatherings of this sort were a big part of my piety in years past. I miss them. They both signify and enact the image of the church as a saving remnant, a holy mystery that deifies a dying world through unending praise and self-giving service. As I left, I introduced myself and my business. The pastor celebrating the service said that he was a supervisor for one of the ordinands at the next day's ceremony. The small world of urban Lutheranism is delightful.

Shortly thereafter I met my brother near Penn Station. We wandered south toward an overcrowded McSorley's, ending up at a place I'd never been called Jimmy's No. 43. Anyone reading this who drinks beer and has reasonable access to 7th Street in Manhattan should really go there. A passing herd asked if there was a sports bar nearby, which neither of us could answer. But really, why? I love sports as much as the next guy, but splendid American pale ales are better by far.

We ended up at the Met as guests of the Belgian American Education Foundation, a wonderful institution and a testament to Herbert Hoover's heroic pre-presidential career. The curator of European painting talked us through the highlights of the exhibit of the work of Jan Gossart, a 16th c. luminary. The detail was fascinating and minute. What, one wonders, would the long-dead magister have thought of seeing a hand he painted represented on a digital screen in a metropolis yet unborn at the time of his death? Fortunate, and bewildered, one hopes. As the crowd went upstairs for the Gossart exhibit, I pulled my brother aside for a look at Brueghel's The Harvesters--Polk County made heroic! And the great Caravaggio Denial of St. Peter, containing such immense psychological insight in a furrowed brow, downcast eyes, and in-turned hands.

The next day found us back at Penn Station, boarding a Long Island Railroad train for Floral Park. A too-leisurely lunch and a too-brisk walk later, we were at St. Paul's International Lutheran Church. I greeted my friend, heaved on a borrowed alb, put on my own red stole, and got in the procession. Whether it was negligence or just hazing the out-of-towner, I was put at the head of the clergy. I'm pretty sure I screwed it up, which might well have heartened my somewhat pietistically-inclined friend if he'd known.

The Metropolitan New York Synod is headed by Bishop Robert Rimbo, who preached a very good sermon on the texts for the following day (a mercy to those of us who had to preach, though I resisted the temptation to quote at length). My friend was presented for ordination by his father, a Lutheran pastor, and is the descendant on his mother's side of a very long line of Lutheran pastors. He knelt alongside another Caucasian man, an African-American woman, and a Latino man. The clergy present crowded the chancel for the laying-on of hands. It was a big enough crowd that I had to settle for being one or two degrees removed from the ordinands, but when the bishop came to John, I wedged in and got a hand on his shoulder as the gifts of the Spirit were prayed down on him for his particular tasks.

There is undoubtedly an element of the superstitious in this. I am a relatively catholic Lutheran, and I still don't have a good idea of why we borrow a sign from the age of magic to set apart a minister of the Gospel. Did the bishop's hand, or mine, or all the others, convey the Holy Spirit to my friend? Is there anything in me that passed into him? I would be hesitant to say so. But I have handled the holy things, I have baptized (though only in the last month), I have given pardon and blessing through the imposition of my hands. Truly, it is the greatest of privileges to do so. But bakers and mechanics use their hands each day, and we don't make new bakers or mechanics by placing them under the hands of older practitioners.

So I don't really know what happens, if that's even the right word, in the laying-on of hands. But I did it, as I once received it, with full and devout reverence. Someone full of prayer and experience and charity and hope for me and my ministry laid their hands on me, and on them many hands bearing so many more prayers and so much more experience laid their hands. By degrees the whole beating heart of the world is represented, dead hands upon dead hands upon dead hands, time out of mind, carrying their fervent prayers, hours of dread, and puzzled perseverance down to our own hands in our own time. That, my friends, is awesome.

In my anxiety I had requested a cab for ten minutes after the scheduled end of the service. Before 'Go in peace,' I had thrown off the borrowed alb, stuffed the stole back into my bag, waved vainly at John and family, embraced my dear brother and headed back to LaGuardia and Chicago. Saturday's snow was done falling when I landed, full of words for my own little cell in this heaving, changing, ever-reborn Body.

2010-11-30T18:20:00.002-06:00

A Move in the Right Direction

TPI on 10/15/2010:

Since the Senate is so ridiculous and dysfunctional, I'd probably be urging the president to use the ruling as leverage to get the orderly transition back on track. "One way or another, this unjust policy is going to end. If the Senate won't take up the Pentagon's own timetable for ending it, I will direct Attorney General Holder to refrain from appealing or staying this ruling. That's not how we wanted to do it, but I have a sacred obligation to the brave men and women who put themselves in harm's way to protect us" etc flagtroops.

David Kurtz in Talking Points Memo, today:

Bob Gates' abilities as a masterful bureaucrat and Washington shapeshifter have rarely been on more public display than in his just-completed press conference. He was expected to unveil a Pentagon review of Don't Ask Don't Tell that would clear the way for repeal, but Gates took it a step further with a clarion call to Congress to repeal DADT before the end of the year or else the federal courts might do it by what he called "judicial fiat."

It was classic Gates: a combination of finesse and sharp elbows. He framed the issue starkly: repeal DADT in an orderly way with enough time for me to implement it, and I can pull this off without jeopardizing our military readiness -- or you can leave it to the courts which is "my greatest fear" and which guarantees a disruptive transition that could damage the military.

Obviously not what I'd have said, but a big step in the right direction for an administration that has struggled to find its footing on this issue.

2010-11-12T09:17:00.003-06:00

Deep Thought

A deficit commission run by at least one person who wasn't white, male, and already enjoying a very secure retirement would be kind of nice.

Seriously though, I don't know what the administration was thinking here. You propose a bipartisan Congressional blue-ribbon what have you, and the Republicans won't play ball. So then you just make up your own bipartisan commission that has no legitimacy in the eyes of the other party. It's like negotiating with yourself.

That, and no one actually cares about the deficit, so even as political theater this was a bad idea.

2010-11-12T00:43:00.003-06:00

A Beautiful Day in Chicago
Suburban Diarist

My maternal grandfather was a World War II veteran. There's nothing unusual in that for a person of my generation. I've known plenty of veterans, of various wars and roles. But when the year rolls around to our ritual remembrance of those who have served and sacrificed, his is the face that floats before my eyes.

He was shot down twice, once over the Aleutians where he fell broken into the sea. The crewmate he stuffed into a chute was the only other survivor from that B-17 and his own chute was too big for him. "Everything went black," I remember him saying about the deployment. He woke up in a Navy hospital. After a long recovery, he was sent west, only to be shot down again on his forty-seventh mission. He flew with a bombardier from Chicago on that mission (or perhaps another), and I remember him saying that the bombardier said over the radio, "It's a beautiful day in..." as his life was ended by a piece of flak. "He was going to say 'Chicago,'" my grandfather said. He fell in Austria and was taken prisoner in the Stalag Luft IV camp. "For you, the war is over," his German captor had been coached to say. The joke--if that's the right word--was on him, as my grandfather was a fluent German speaker and thus marked for an early escape attempt. Which he made in due time in the bottom of a garbage truck.

The months that followed saw cold, hunger, narrow escapes, dangerous special operations, and finally a terrifying reunion with suspicious Allied forces in April 1945. It was those months that left him with nightmares that never went away. When he prepared his own obituary in 2002, he left out any mention of his escape and his operations behind enemy lines.

I was always proud of my grandfather for his service and his Purple Hearts. I only grew to love him, however, at the end of his life. He was, to put it gently, a difficult man. In fact, I've never known anyone so angry. It took some years and some understanding of what he'd been through to see that his wounds had not all healed. My late grandmother is reported to have said that he was not the same man after the war.

I miss the grandfather I knew far, far more than my sixteen-year-old self could have anticipated--who then knew only his war record and his familial failings. But my heart breaks for that man I never knew, the man who went off to the Good War and never really came back.

Tonight I saw and ad for a video game that showed people in their everyday work clothes fighting a pitched battle, complete with RPGs and helicopters and machine guns. "There's a soldier inside all of us," the ad said. I've seen it once before, and both times I've felt a visceral disgust at it. There is, indeed, a soldier inside all of us. I hope I would be one if it were required of me, and beyond that it is well attested that combat is thrilling and even addictive. But video games don't leave players with nightmares. Real-life bullets tear through real-life flesh and end real lives in real places. And to take life--and see lives taken around you, the lives of people you care about--is something that stays with you. And it reverberates through every life you touch from that day forward.

It's a good thing that America deeply and unreservedly admires those we ask to kill and die on our behalf. But every Veterans' Day should be an opportunity not merely to celebrate and mourn, but to ask ourselves what price we are willing to have our countrymen pay for the things we tell them to accomplish. And more importantly, to ask ourselves how this price may reasonably be avoided both now and in the future. For the rest of my lifetime there will be men and women waking up in the middle of the night and walking among us with the wounds of the wars we authorize. The costs, psychological and fiscal, of whatever it is that we're doing in Afghanistan will be paid for a long, long time to come.

My grandfather saw a whole lot of beautiful days after that fateful one over Austria ("I'm still looking at green grass," he used to tell me; "a lot of my friends are looking at roots"). If France and the UK had not been so punitive at Versailles, perhaps he would have enjoyed them more. And perhaps that young man would have lived long enough to enjoy today's lovely Chicago autumn, in which we who have benefited from their trials and sacrifice wander so heedlessly.

2010-11-09T18:50:00.002-06:00

Busy

I'm afraid the blog is taking a back seat to all kinds of other work right now, as you've probably figured out. Hopefully something worthwhile will result. I'll try to post my sermons but not much else for a little while.

And yeah, I deleted the previous post because it was unedifying. Losing is like winning in that it just calls for more hard work.

2010-11-03T09:41:00.002-05:00

Tribune Editorial Translator: Morning After Edition

They're feeling buoyant at the Tower today.

What they said: The waves that pounded Democrats on Tuesday resembled waves that crushed Republicans four and two years ago — and could crush them in 2012 if they don't satisfy the public's demands for less spending and more job creation.

What they meant: The public demands more spending on them and less spending on everyone else. Go back and read our Brady endorsement if you're still unclear on this critical perception of public opinion. Have we mentioned recently that we pay Jonah Goldberg actual legal tender for doing something other than picking up dog waste?

What they said: With Democratic place-holder Roland Burris about to turn into a pumpkin, Republican Mark Kirk quickly will be seated to serve out the final weeks of another senator's term. That fellow's name is Obama. He was elected to the Senate in 2004 but left to take a better job. In the short run, then, Kirk can help Republicans block any egregious taxing or spending moves by a lame-duck Senate between now and the arrival of other new senators in January.

What they meant: We loves us some Mark Kirk, so let's just be clear on what this is about. Not egregious: Bush tax cuts, wars without end, Medicare Part D, estate tax repeal, more tax cuts for high incomes. Egregious: other stuff.

What they said: One word of advice, Sen.-elect Kirk: Don't go native. You're a senator from Illinois, not a senator from the Senate. What does that mean? Republican Chuck Percy, a similarly talented man, grew steadily out of touch with his home state, and gradually more a creature of the Club of 100. To Illinoisans he became a museum piece, the senatorial-looking guy on network television who used to be Chuck Percy.

What they meant: You can take this advice to the bank, buddy. Stay in touch with us reg'lar folks on North Michigan.

What they said: Mr. Kirk, we wish you every success guiding foreign policy and national security, areas at which you excel. But your state very much needs what it hasn't had: a powerful voice for less federal spending and for tax policies that will create more jobs in ravaged states such as Illinois.

What they meant: Be sure to keep voting for wars, but not for taxes that pay for them. You've got this down already, but we want to be sure to stiffen your spine a bit.

What they said: Voters inexplicably handed the key to Joseph Berrios at the expense of independent candidate Forrest Claypool. File this one under: There is much in life that we as mortals cannot comprehend.

What they meant: People like us all voted for him, both yesterday and when he lost to the guy in the coma. Claypool's Daley-sponsored resume may be termed 'independent' at our sole and unreviewable discretion.

Again, guys, I kid because I love. This stuff doesn't have to suck.

2010-11-03T01:46:00.002-05:00

A Little Bit More

Not a lot of silver linings tonight for liberals, but there's something to be said for Bill Brady appearing to lose the governor's race. His totally dishonorable hand-waving approach to the state budget was theoretically defensible on political terms, but it's very nice to see it fail. Throw in his view that children should only get the health care their parents can pay for and women should only get the contraception their pharmacist cares to dispense, and there's just no downside to seeing this guy lose. Like any reasonable person, I've been less than thrilled with Pat Quinn's tenure as governor, but this was a stark choice.

2010-11-02T23:57:00.000-05:00

Deep Thought

Some of you look a little more Asian to me.

2010-11-02T23:54:00.001-05:00

Deep Thought

Who could have predicted that being against access to birth control would hurt a candidate with women?

2010-11-02T22:47:00.004-05:00

Muscles for Russell, 1992-2010

There will be plenty of disappointments for liberals to sift through tomorrow and in the days to come, and I hope not to spend undue time weeping in my beer over most of them. Politics is a tough, unpredictable, and unlovely business, and getting too sentimental about it is dangerous both to one's sanity and one's effectiveness as a political actor, however trivial. I am going to take a moment, however, to note with genuine sadness the end of a remarkable Senate career tonight.

Early on in the 1992 primary campaign, I remember reading a newspaper poll that had Russ Feingold running a distant third against two other candidates, one a well-known congressman and the other a self-funding millionaire. I didn't know anything about the guy, but I seem to remember one of my parents saying he was a good guy with no chance to pull it out. Yet pull it out he did, in one of those races that is a textbook example of the political-science concept of campaign effects. He went on to vanquish two-term chair-warmer Bob Kasten, whose only notable achievement in his political career was knocking off the great Gaylord Nelson. When we saw Russ take the stage at the county Democrats' victory party on November 8, 1992, it was if possible a greater thrill than Clinton's win.

Russ went on to be a truly rare bird in the Senate, a solid progressive with a proud and often difficult independent streak. Truth be told, while he had passionate admirers among Wisconsin liberals (I was insanely proud to cast my first general election ballot, absentee, for him in 1998), he was not a notably effective legislator when it came to big issues. His time to shine, and the age of his career that will be remembered as long as anyone cares about the decrepit history of the U.S. Senate, came only during the Bush years. From his lonely, redeeming vote against the USA PATRIOT Act (remember, it was an acronym, as if to trumpet its awfulness) to his hard, brutally knowledgeable grilling of appointees to the Supreme Court, he was the only serious and consistent friend of civil liberties in the Senate. Like a lot of liberals, I had my gripes with Russ over his mugwumpery and his self-damaging sanctimoniousness, but on that front he was worth more than a row of Dick Durbins and Chuck Schumers. The last decade of his career was a testament to the idea that a single voice, disciplined, intelligent, and enduring, could mean more than all the flipped vote switches in the world.

And like Nelson before him, he was beaten by a nonentity, who will be remembered only by virtue of the man he replaced. Ron Johnson seems to have given as much thought to the business of being a senator as I give to ordering a cheeseburger, his only platform a lot of hand-waving about spending cuts to be named later. Yet this hardly makes him an embarrassment by the standards of the body he is about to enter (Tom Coburn, the unlamented Evan Bayh) or even the state he is about to represent (Joe McCarthy). Russ has always known, like every successful progressive in American political history, that the folks back home aren't voting for membership in the history books. There's a median voter in every race, and the politician's job is to go after that voter, not disdain them. Winning isn't everything, but you have to do it. It's our loss that he, and we, didn't.

2010-11-02T08:44:00.002-05:00

Teach us to care, and not to care

After you've voted, made your calls, and done your doors today, all of you partisans out there should read Will Wilkinson on the limited impact of election outcomes. Lest this sound like preemptive sour grapes, I'd like to point out to friend and foe alike that the landmark achievement following two consecutive big Democratic wins was the passage of Mitt Romney's health care plan at the national level. And anyway, Wilkinson's argument isn't just a "what can you do?" appeal to resignation. It's an argument that I wish were made more often alongside the endless and inane patter about the Tea Party as a movement of 'small government,' and it's worth quoting at some length:

Democratic politics is to a great extent a war of coalitions over what the great political economist James M. Buchanan called "the fiscal commons". Think of government as a huge pool of money. Control of government means control over that pool of money. Parties gain control by putting together winning coalitions of interest groups. When a party has control, its coalition's interest groups get more from the pool and the losing coalition's interest groups get less. So, yeah, it matters who wins. When Democrats are in charge, that's great news for public-employees unions and General Electric's alternative energy division. When the Republicans are in charge, that's great news for rich people and Raytheon.

...The money in the pool has to come from somewhere, so the battle is waged just as much over who is forced to pay into the pool and under what circumstances. The middle class doesn't like to get welfare checks, so instead it gets tax credits and deductions for doing things middle-class people generally do anyway. It's six one way, half-a-dozen the other. Regulatory policy is even more indirect, but regulation often amounts to little more than welfare checks for some interest groups and taxes for others. Monetary policy has distributional consequences, too, by changing the real value of money. Other things equal, inflation erases both debt and savings; good for debtors, bad for creditors. I think you'll find that political parties tend to reliably support policies that have nice distributional consequences for the interest groups that support them. And I think you'll find politicians and court intellectuals brilliant at framing pay-offs to party stalwarts as policies absolutely necessary to the common weal.

But I think you'll also find that policy doesn't swing very wildly when government changes hands. Parties do what they can to reward supporters, but they can't do too much.

I think this is right as far as it goes. The big, number-one, can't fail reason that the Tea Party/GOP incoming class won't seriously tackle the deficit is that doing so would be costly to the biggest pillars of their electoral coalition--the old and the rich. In politics, demographics is destiny. Politicians elected with the support of old, rich, white people who don't jealously guard the interests of old, rich, white people relative to the young, poor, and non-white will find themselves out of a job.

But that's where Wilkinson's clear-eyed realism starts to fail him. There are distributional impacts to the policy choices made at the margins, and not just of the horizontal GE-vs.-Raytheon type. There are some fairly predictable consequences of a shift in power toward the GOP, as has been the case in every election since at least 1980.

1) Economic inequality will accelerate. The one die-in-the-ditch principle of the Republican Party since 1990 is that taxes must never be raised on the wealthy. If there's a runner up, it's that the financial sector should be able to do whatever it wants. So the rich will get richer at a much faster rate than anyone else.

2) Public services for the young and poor will suffer. The Republicans may have become the Party of Medicare, but they will never ever be the Party of Medicaid. While promising to insulate people 55 and older from huge cuts to Medicare and Social Security--in effect trying to force my generation to pay both for our parents' retirement and our own--they will cut Medicaid and nutrition support across the board and without notice. This means less access to doctors and more reliance on emergency rooms for the one-in-five American children who live in poverty. At both the state and federal levels, most of the line items that can actually be cut are things of this sort: nutrition programs, substance abuse counseling, and the like. Republicans always, always cut these things when they have any access to power.

3) In public infrastructure, cities lose out relative to exurbs and rural areas. Republicans lost the cities a generation ago and are dropping to parity at best in the older, inner-ring suburbs. Therefore cities get hosed at appropriation time whenever Republicans are in power. You are likelier to see a dozen bridges to nowhere for every one mass-transit upgrade in the average Republican Congress.

I don't want to claim too much here. Democratic majorities, too, are less than solicitous of the interests of the poor and near-poor, children, and urban residents. But at least these constituencies have a seat the table. They are part of the coalition--junior partners, maybe, the first to be thrown over when budgeting gets tough, but still at the table. For Republicans, these groups do not exist, fiscally speaking.

At the risk of sounding self-righteous, then, I'll just point out that what for Will Wilkinson is the marginal give-and-take of two robust electoral coalitions centered on the middle class is a rather more dire matter for a kid who gets his breakfast from school, a bus-dependent service worker, a 40-year-old with chronic health problems, or the parents of a teenager with severe disabilities. Since I'm well under 55 and way under $250,000 in annual taxable income, the Republicans have basically nothing to offer me. But I'm also close enough to the middle to be at least somewhat insulated from the micro effects of these policy trends. Our foster child isn't, however, nor are most of the kids I've worked with in Chicago churches. They really will get screwed, and I'm not prepared to take the long view about that just yet.

2010-11-01T23:46:00.002-05:00

Tribune Editorial Translator: Run for the Hills! Edition

Few things in life are as bracing in their capacity for repulsion as the Chicago Tribune editorials. Sure, the WSJ is doing its level best to make the old Pravda seem reasoned and independent. The New York Times is stuffy and arrogant and the Washington Post is relentlessly pointless, but the Trib has captured an editorial style all its own. Call it Establishment Punk. Or whatever. Anyway, we've had some fun with them in the past. And now in my capacity as informed citizen, I'm reading their endorsements. Check out their tongue-tied nod for Bill Brady. It's almost all trashing Quinn, which I get, and Illinois generally, which is fair enough but not exactly the kind of thing you litigate in one election. So here's what they say about the man they want to turn the keys over to for the next four years.

What they said: We have knocked Brady for offering no detailed plan to fix Illinois' finances.

What they meant: It's only fair of us to note this unfortunate fact, since fixing the state's finances is the whole shooting match and since we're about to endorse this guy. But, you know, plans aren't everything. Stalin had five-year plans, and those were really bad.

What they said: Quinn keeps offering plans, many of them reliant on still higher taxation.

What they meant: Because detailed plans or no, we just hate paying for stuff. I'm not kidding. We compulsively stuff our pockets with condiment packets and napkins when our big brother takes us out for lunch.

What they said: The AP said Quinn "hopes 'investing in people' will help the Illinois economy grow and fill the budget hole when coupled with unspecified spending cuts and the possibility of more federal aid."

What they meant: Bill Brady's plan to create a moronic, highly pliant state full of troglodytes will surely appeal to employers. Unspecified spending cuts are a little bit more bad when proposed by a Democrat.

What they said: This is the governor who told our editorial board, "You can't have a fairy-tale world."

What they meant: We will keep saying this over and over again if we have to. Only one candidate in this race can have a fairy-tale world, and it ain't Pat Quinn.

What they said: We guarantee that if Brady is elected, we will demand from him a reinvented Illinois — streamlined and with lower overhead — before anyone in power whispers "tax increase." We think he'll be a receptive audience.

What they meant: In our heads, state politics works this way. We set out big, bold principles--reinvention, streamlining, overhead-lowering--and politicians listen, or they don't. Pat Quinn won't talk specifics, because he doesn't have the cojones to stand up to Mike Madigan and demand that stuff get streamlined. All sorts of stuff could benefit from a little of that. Not to mention the huge parts of the budget dedicated to overhead.

What they said: As he told us eye-to-eye, we cannot continue to have public sector unions bankrupting Illinois.

What they meant: We continue to be impressed that a Republican is hostile to unions. Who needs a bunch of stupid detailed plans for this and that when you've got the kind of eye-to-eye rapport we have with Brady about the unions?

What they said: Brady's success or failure depends on the team he assembles and, most of all, on whether he has the spine for this job.

What it means: You can't blame us if he totally hoses it up, because it will hinge on teams and spines and that sort of thing. We can't know about those things in advance any more than we can know detailed plans and the tedious legal niceties of pension funding. We're on visual here, folks. Work with us.

What they said: As Quinn has taught us, that one criterion means more than all the plans and promises combined.

What it means: The Teamspine (tm) criterion has not been met, that's for sure.

What they said: Does Brady have what it takes? We don't know, but we think he does.

What it means: This was part of the raw roundtable transcript that somehow got left in here. But seriously, we're all screwed.

2010-10-22T00:35:00.002-05:00

Juan Williams

There's just no denying that Juan Williams is a pretty lousy pundit. This was my personal favorite Williams moment, but every regular NPR listener surely has their own. Like most other tenured pundits, Williams served as a conventional wisdom recycler, adding little or no value on any given subject that I can recall. There must have been redeeming moments, but they don't stick out in my memory the way the inspidities do.

That being said, he was probably a little less dreadful than Cokie Roberts, and only marginally more dreadful than Mara Liasson when it comes to shedding actual light on subjects. In a world where quality commentary from across the ideological spectrum is easily available to almost every single NPR listener, he added no value. But by the rock-bottom standards of DC chatter, he was not so bad.

So given the rather tame nature of his supposed gaffe, I agree with Josh Marshall that his abrupt dismissal was disproportionate. Worse than that, it sent a bad message--don't voice ordinary if casually bigoted feelings about Muslims--that would have been nullified if NPR had just not renewed his contract, which might have suggested that saying empty and pointless things was the real problem. This is all far too meta to merit much commentary, but it's unfortunate that the firing of an objectively unworthy pundit has to be turned into a huge political and media distraction when there is real stuff going on.

2010-10-21T23:34:00.003-05:00

Deep Thoughts

If David Hoffman had won the nomination, he'd be consistently 5 points ahead of Mark Kirk. And if the primary had been a month later, he'd have won it.

If Dan Hynes had won the gubernatorial nomination, he'd be ahead of Bill Brady by a similar margin, and if the primary had been a month later, he'd probably have won it.

If Kirk Dillard had rustled up a few hundred more votes, he'd be ahead of Quinn by ten points. If he'd ended up facing Hynes, it would probably be a dead heat.

If the primary had been four or five months later, Mark Kirk would have lost the nomination.

Deeper thought: if Daley had announced his retirement last year, Toni Preckwinkle would have sat out the County Board race and run for mayor.

Deeper thought: if Giannoulias and Quinn lose by smaller margins than the Green Party vote in their respective races, it will end the GP's relevance in state politics.

2010-10-15T09:35:00.002-05:00

The Waning Days of DADT?

Contrary to early impressions, it may not be the case that the president has decided how to handle the recent judicial decision against the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Marc Ambinder reports:

One group of advisers thinks that he needs to appeal the ruling because he can't get rid of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" without the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is liable to gum up the works if it thinks the administration wants to dispense with the previously agreed upon timetable, which includes the completion of a major Department of Defense study about integration. A corollary argument here is that the National Security Staff is acutely aware of how difficult the military and Pentagon civilians can make life for the president in many unrelated endeavors. This group believes that if Democrats are successful in the Illinois, Delaware, and West Virginia Senate races -- not an impossible scenario by any means -- that Senate could very well schedule a clean and clear vote in a rump session.

Other groups of advisers believe that Obama should appeal the ruling, but concurrently ask -- or order -- the Department of Defense to take interim steps to halt all current investigations and not to initiate any new ones until the legal proceedings have been completed, or until the Senate authorizes the change in law. Within the Department of Defense, some senior officials are thinking about ways this might work. Others oppose any change to the timetable.

And then there's a group of advisers who appear to be as fed up with the maneuvering as Rachel Maddow is, and who want the president to make a public statement effectively saying, "Enough is enough. We've done this as orderly as we can. We can't control everything. But the policy is dead, as of today." Even under this scenario, gay soldiers wouldn't have access to spousal benefits just yet -- the DoD does need time to figure out how it would all work.

According to the item, Obama is angry about being heckled by anti-DADT protesters, which is the sort of thing that sets the Microscopic Violin Ensemble to tuning up. But dang it if the cautious caucus doesn't have a point here. The September Senate blow-up was a real disaster and not one that can be blamed on the president. All the same, he's got to lay down a marker on this. Since the Senate is so ridiculous and dysfunctional, I'd probably be urging the president to use the ruling as leverage to get the orderly transition back on track. "One way or another, this unjust policy is going to end. If the Senate won't take up the Pentagon's own timetable for ending it, I will direct Attorney General Holder to refrain from appealing or staying this ruling. That's not how we wanted to do it, but I have a sacred obligation to the brave men and women who put themselves in harm's way to protect us" etc flagtroops. Might not work, would certainly leave lots of people not quite satisfied, but at least it would suggest a tickle of passion on this issue, which the president could really use.

2010-10-14T22:29:00.003-05:00

We Have Met the Bigots, and...

I'm almost done with this topic, but I need to add a few words on the conflation of conservative Christianity with anti-gay bigotry and in turn with anti-gay school bullying. As I mentioned, I haven't seen the conflation between the first term and the third to be backed by any evidence. And let me stress, I haven't seen any evidence. Maybe it's out there and I have yet to be informed. That is entirely possible.

But in any case, stochastically variable events are not always liable to meaningful generalizations or policy responses. The bigger fish is the conflation of conservative views on homosexuality--specifically, gay marriage--with bigotry. Is this accurate? Most Christians in America are against gay marriage. Does this by itself qualify one as a bigot?

Again relying on my personal experience, I'd have to say no. I don't voluntarily associate with people I think are bigots, so I guess the reasoning here is somewhat circular. Are these conservative Christians not necessarily cognizant of the privilege that law and culture presently grant them, nor profoundly empathetic with the experiences of people they don't know or understand, nor quick enough to denounce extremism on their own side of the fence? Probably. But if that qualifies as bigotry, I think most of us would have to accept the label at some point or other. Maybe that means we should actually fling it around more often rather than less, that we all may be chastened by the sting. Or maybe it means we should be more nuanced in how we describe disagreement, even over fairly big-ticket items.

Perhaps more to the point, does even peaceful and non-bigoted opposition to gay marriage foster an environment conducive to anti-gay bullying? Savage himself sometimes skips over the very question, referring to "bullying at the ballot box" (someone should tell him that elections customarily have at least two alternatives; anyway he's right about the White House in that particular post). It's probably not a question that can be answered in any rigorous way. Does opposition to American foreign policy among American Muslims foster an environment conducive to acts of terror? Did the sexual revolution foster an environment conducive to priestly abuse of minors? Well, I don't know. It's easy to insinuate just about anything; associations will ring true to audiences disposed to dislike or distrust certain groups. But the conduciveness of environments to anything is not measurable as far as I know, and in any event people and not environments have to own actions. What we are left with, typically, is the difficult imperative to accept good faith where we find it, to argue against explicit statements and actions rather than hidden (and often fantasized) motives, and to refrain from attributing to an individual what we know (or think we know) about a group, and vice versa.

Nobody I read on a regular basis is all that good at this. But the more someone is capable of doing it--especially someone I disagree with--the more skeptical people are likely to listen.

2010-10-12T20:24:00.002-05:00

Greetings

Since I've unintentionally link-baited Andrew Sullivan with unusual success this week, I'd like to welcome any new readers who drop in and point out that I do more than write about prominent gay public intellectuals. I also deliver sermons (here's a pretty good one and here's another) and have done some proper writing as well on religion in general and Islam in America. I also write longer essays on stuff like love, food, memory, death, and so on. Here's a pretty good one.

You might also check out the Abstracted Engineer, who does totally different stuff (and is, full disclosure, my brother in law. But also a real engineer).

2010-10-10T23:00:00.002-05:00

Tip of the Hat

So Andrew Sullivan is celebrating ten years of blogging, and cheers and jeers are evidently in order. In the unlikely event that you're interested, you can peruse mine. Sullivan is the kind of figure that a lot of us have spent good chunks of time agreeing with, disagreeing with, and ridiculing. His retrospective, linked above, is unsurprisingly self-involved. Not just unsurprising because Sullivan has always been kind of solipsistic, but because anyone with a lot of archives (as it happens I do) will learn more about themselves than about the events of the past by reading through them.

I don't read Sullivan like I used to, partly because my politics and his have diverged, partly because I'm interested in different things, and partly because it's a much more diverse media landscape than it was in 2000-2001. He was and remains a quick trigger finger on impressions, suspicions, and judgments, which whether to his credit or not is unlikely to look like a wise strategy over time. But that's not what a blog is or was for. It's more about documenting a moment and the debate around it than putting down something for the ages. It's merely a technological irony that makes the medium more easily preserved than any newspaper or book. Moreover, Sullivan's blog was and is a collective project to a considerable degree. I don't email him any more, but I have fond memories of tossing him a quote from T.S. Eliot or C.S. Lewis in those early weeks after 9/11 and getting a response and a post (and during a Reihan residency, that blog gave me my biggest link evar). And to his great credit, his work today is heavily driven by feedback, both positive and negative. He says as much:

I'm a Catholic, so let me start with the things I am sorry for and even, in some cases, ashamed of. When you blog in real time, day by day, hour by hour, emotions can get the better of you. The blogosphere is awash in examples of invective, abuse, cruelty, accusations of bad faith, or just bluster - in part because blogging is so much more like speaking than writing and also because it addresses people in the abstract, not face to face. I am not innocent in this, and wish I could take back a few barbs, especially in the early days, when we were all discovering what this medium could do. As a pioneer - and in 2000, there was Mickey and me, basically, in the political blogosphere - I have been, for better or worse, an early adopter of the best and the worst. My only defense is that I have tried to learn from this as I have gone along, to improve on these moments of weakness and rhetorical excess by a more stringent tone, and by constantly and increasingly publishing real dissents, corrections and a much wider diversity of views than just my own, for balance, for fairness.

This he really has done. Sullivan has kept himself relevant by avoiding an obvious shtick. If for no other reasons than he chases any bouncing ball, publishes any well-phrased and relevant dissent, and links to any charismatic blogger or off-beat news item, he's never let himself be pigeonholed. He's been accused of ideological wandering and triviality and so forth, but that's far beside the point given the nature of his work. Many people who score better on those scales--of ideological consistency, gravitas, and whatever else--contribute a good deal less to a thinking person's self-education in the world of ideas and events simply by virtue of being predictable and boring.

So cheers, and jeers, to you, Mr. Sullivan, for helping to keep us sputtering and nodding and emailing all these years, and for breaking much of the ground that we narcissistic bloggers/twitterers/facebook denizens plow with such studied ease. Would that we all did it as frankly and humbly as you.

2010-10-10T21:41:00.002-05:00

Quick, Somebody Tell Ross Douthat!

Nevada's Angle recasts views on public benefits

As one tires of saying, this is all perfectly ordinary and predictable. There is no small government movement, no fiscal purism on display anywhere.

2010-10-07T15:17:00.002-05:00

Keep Imagining

Ross:

It’s nice for the institutional G.O.P. that now, after the most significant series of liberal legislative victories since the Great Society, and with federal spending up over 25 percent of G.D.P., a strict “less government!” message is suddenly resonating again. (Well, to a point …) ... Hence my recent arguments for a kind of libertarian populism, and hence my preference for Tea Partier “extremism” over the budget-busting business-as-usual of the party’s Washington establishment. The Tea Party obviously isn’t the fulfillment of the “Grand New Party” vision, but then again the “Grand New Party” vision didn’t quite anticipate the depth of the fiscal ditch we’ve driven ourselves into — and I can imagine the Tea Party’s small-government purism playing an important role in pulling us out of that ditch.

Since I don't think Ross Douthat is stupid or dishonest, I'm just going to chalk this one up to massive self-delusion. To be clear, there is no such thing as "the Tea Party's small-government purism." Doesn't exist. I have never seen it identified in any robustly objective way. Every scrap of statistical data I've ever seen concerning the Tea Party, and every maneuver by every Tea Party candidate in a competitive race, suggests that the movement is just another white populist backlash, this time with three cornered hats. Douthat's item even gestures in this direction, by pointing (via link) out that Rand Paul--who thought the federal government had no role in dismantling Jim Crow--has now embraced Medicare and even argued to keep its payments to providers high. Marco Rubio, another early darling of the movement, is also running ads demagoguing Medicare. Even Paul Ryan, the policy godfather of the "small government" agenda, only wants to cut Medicare and Social Security for people under 55--ensuring, in effect, that I will pay for both my own retirement and that of the generation above mine. Not to mention the Tea Parties' general fondness for the massive sweep of the security state. John Yoo rallied the small government purists in Marin County--John Yoo, of course, being the man whose small government scruples are so vanishingly small that he argued that the President has the inherent authority to order the genital torture of child hostages.

What the Tea Party stands for, in spades, is the sense that federal spending on somebody else needs to be cut. The catch, of course, is that the big money in the budget already goes to old, white, rural-state people, that is, the demographic core of the Tea Party. You could cut everything that isn't defense, farm subsidies, Medicare, and Social Security--no FBI, no national parks, no food inspectors, no interstate highway maintenance, etc.--and not come close to bringing the budget into long-term balance. There aren't enough undeserving others to punish with our constitutional purism, and the one group the Tea Party considers inviolate in budgetary matters is itself.

The thing is that I don't really blame Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and the rest for playing everyone like rubes because, after all, voters are mostly rubes. People are very willing to believe that there is some painless-to-them way to have what they want--some undeserving welfare mooches to be tossed out on their ears, some sliver of super fat-cats in dire need of a soaking--and the job of a canny politician is to let them believe that. Virtue may be invoked, but only in a rhetorical sense. Marco Rubio is running like an unprincipled demagogue because he wants to be the next senator from Florida. That's how it works.

But I don't know why Douthat and other people who read stuff for a living need to be taken in by this. Ross is familiar with the evidence--he links to it!--but won't let go of this fantasy that there is a real, honest-to-goodness constituency for a radical down-sizing of the federal government. There just isn't. What we are seeing right now is what we always see, which is a battle over how to divide the pie. Relatively wealthy, white, and rural voters are highly energized this year to keep theirs at the expense of someone else's. If that's something you want to endorse, that's fine, but don't have any illusions about what it is.

2010-10-04T22:29:00.004-05:00

Dan Savage: Proving the Other Side's Point

NB: I have made a few stylistic edits to avoid giving unnecessary offense. For one urging a little patience and charity in discourse, I need to be more scrupulous about those things myself.

Dan Savage has developed a curious punditocratic specialty. When mainstream advocates for gay marriage or anti-bullying laws are claiming that they won't start us down a slippery slope of officially-sanctioned polyamory or restrictions on free speech, Savage is busy strapping on the Rossignols. Here he is going after a politely disagreeing Christian correspondent:

The children of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or at your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. You may only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, but your children have the option of attacking actual real gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.
...
The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies that spew forth from the pulpit of the churches "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your straight children a license to verbally abuse, humiliate and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your straight children—having listened to mom and dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to the family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry himself to sleep—feel justified in physically attacking the gay and lesbian children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" gay kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we can see the fruits of it.

The wild free-associating Savage is doing here--between traditional views of marriage and Christian sexual ethics, children's attitudes, bullying, and suicide--surely sounds plausible to his apparently quite credulous readership. But plug in just about any other religion or group and see how it sounds to you. Would you want to see some evidence for the bolded statements above? Are the bullies who cause so much high school trauma devout and practicing Christians? Are average churches writing licenses to abuse gay kids? If so, I'd sure like to know. They may well be! For all I know, Savage is merely describing statistically robust correlations between youth church attendance and high school bullying. But when you claim that defining marriage as a heterosexual institution = bullying = gay teen suicide, one would like to see the facts of the case.

Needless to say, any church, however "traditional" its theology, that gives aid and comfort to the bullying of gay students (or adults) is sinning gravely. I am not, however, persuaded that there are enough such churches to account for the prevalence of bullying. Unlike Dan Savage, I know some conservative Christians socially, and I can no more imagine them taunting a gay kid than defecating, Diogenes-style, on the courthouse lawn. Mainstream Christian teenagers (including white evangelicals of only ordinary kookiness), in my limited experience, are indoctrinated as fiercely into niceness as into any ideas about dancing and erections. Savage's calumny is something I could only have learned from the papers and the Armani-clad charlatans who populate them, not from my actual experience with American Christians.

Now that's not to say that there aren't plenty of exceptions. Maybe I'm even wrong, and the people I know are the exceptions and the Joel's Army black-belt level haters are ruling the hallways of America's secondary education institutions. In any event, notice how the whole point of Savage's polemic is to lump a respectful, if wayward correspondent together with the most vitriolic people who share his religious identity and, as if that weren't bad enough, pour all the blame for gay teen suicides on this person's head. It would be trite (and most certainly wrong) to say that the savvy of this approach is reflected in gay marriage's stunning lack of success at the ballot box, but it most certainly does not help. Here Savage has a quarter- or even half-ally in the struggle to de-legitimate the vicious bullying of gay kids, and rather than hold them to their stated commitment--as in, encouraging this person to think critically about what they hear and hold negative Christian voices accountable*--Savage demands nothing short of complete surrender, throwing in some insulting language about Christianity for good measure. At the end he expresses the hope that he's hurt the writer, who gives no indication of writing in bad faith, because Savage imagines this person to be responsible for all the gay teenage suffering anywhere ever.

This slakes the hate-lust of Savage's commenters, but it's hard to see what other purpose this sort of thing can serve. And in fact it's worse than useless, because Savage has illustrated with striking clarity the only meaningful argument anyone has against anti-bullying laws: that they will be used to limit the freedom of speech. It is not a very liberal, democratic attitude that makes no distinction between casting a ballot and giving a beating, or between holding (and expressing) a peaceful opinion in respectful language and hurling a cruel epithet. And yet Savage argues just so, that we need anti-bullying laws to stamp out certain opinions and their expression.

Now I get that this is very personal for Dan and that his It Gets Better project is a more constructive approach to a serious issue. But giving a verbal thrashing to a good-faith correspondent is a dangerous form of therapy. And the thing is that we see this so clearly when the other side does it. Like Matt Taibbi, we get huffy when porcine Medicare-scootering Tea Partiers call us Communists because we don't think food stamps should be cut. Not only are we not convinced by all the hate, we're usually energized by it. Why, do you think, would those on the other side be any different? Do we think that they, unlike us, only speak the language of rhetorical force or that we need to make examples of them online to rally our own troops?

If so, we're just obnoxious. And worse than that, we'll be losers.

*For what it's worth, I have clean hands here. I've been holding my fellow Christians, bigoted and non-bigoted alike, to account for explicit or implicit tolerance of verbal and physical abuse of GLBT people for many years now. See here, here, here, here, and lots of other places if you get through those.

2010-09-30T17:16:00.002-05:00

Fruit of the Earth and Work of Human Hands
California Diarist

It had been eleven years since I’d last seen Tom. At the end of a premature and ill-advised visit to Deep Springs not three months after I had graduated, I sat out where the college’s access road meets the state highway that splits the valley. It was early, perhaps 6:30, as I hoped to thumb a ride from one of the rare passing cars before the day was old and hot. And I saw Tom drive up toward me, a sight that bathed me suddenly with warmth and goodwill. Tom, the chef, the man who had turned me into a passable cook a year previous, was going to give me a lift over the White Mountains to Big Pine.

He pulled up and rolled down the window: “Hey Ben...where is that biscuit recipe you always used to use?” Buttermilk Soda Biscuits, made curiously--and fatally, I’d now argue--with melted butter. Sigh.

“It’s in that Time-Life Mid-Atlantic States cookbook,” I offered.

“Okay, thanks. Now, leave Deep Springs!” Tom replied. He, of course, had to cook breakfast. An hour’s round-trip drive to Big Pine could hardly be accomplished when the 7:15 breakfast warning bell was only forty-five minutes off and there was presumably still bacon to fry, eggs to scramble, and melons to slice up.

I spent three seven-week terms as a student cook at Deep Springs, two during my first year under the supervision of Jack and one my second year with Tom. The college even then had a pretty solid kitchen, though it was not as clean nor as orderly as one would like. There was fresh milk every day and rich, earthy cream. The ranch’s grass-fed beef was delicious and overabundant. We added some goats and pigs later. The hens were too stringy to eat but they produced fine eggs. There was a bee colony and a garden profuse with zucchini, onions, garlic, potatoes, and cucumbers. A little greenhouse gave us lettuce. Expeditions into the mountains could yield trash bags full of pine nuts.

The this was added all the usual staples and the glorious produce of central California--orchard fruits, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, and anything else that might be needed for a robust menu. At the beginning of my first cooking stint, the senior student cook had gotten a $2,000 appropriation for fish and seafood from the markets in Seattle. That whole spring and summer we gorged on albacore and salmon, staying ahead of freezer burn and using the butcher’s band saw as well as we could. We tried things we couldn’t really do, like a candle-lit boardinghouse dinner of shrimp marinara and a disfigured risotto, and a few things we just managed to pull off, including an outdoor feast of stuffed squid and homemade pasta. There were ribeye steaks fried in beef tallow for breakfast once, meatloaf made with sausage grind orphaned by a shortage of casing, lasagna with fourteen homemade layers, beef stew braised overnight in rich sauce. And there were of course lots and lots of meals that just got the job done, more or less well, more or less on time.

It was an education within an education for me. When Tom was there, he and the students shared all the different meals. He introduced me to porcini mushrooms, champagne vinegar (steeped with citrons and blood oranges), and much else besides. Menu planning, cost, managing work flow all became part of the daily work for student cooks.

While I was in the Valley, Tom started a collection that he called The Deep Springs Cookbook. I still have my individually-inscribed, hand-bound first edition, which I used in my subsequent job at Chicago’s Disciples Divinity House, at home, and for parties. Over the following years Tom added to it, and I was thrilled a few months ago to see that it was being published by Chronicle as The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes plus Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life. Reading through it is like a culinary ‘This is Your Life.’ There are recipes for favorably disposing the members of a new church to one’s preaching (Butter pie crust, p. 443); for finding a wife (Mayonnaise chocolate cake, p. 487; it sounds awful and the batter doesn’t look so good but it’s fantastic); for earning the regard of your future wife’s protective best friend (Reatha’s mac and cheese, p. 153); for giving your parents a hard-earned night off from cooking (Roast beef, p. 313); for teaching your toddler to love baking (Pear-lemon-ginger crisp, p. 469). Since Tom now lives in Marin County, and since I was traveling to Oakland for an August wedding, an author-inscribed copy seemed like both a perfect wedding present and a perfect excuse for an overdue reunion, one uncomplicated by breakfast bells or hitchhiking. We met on a Thursday over a couple pints at Berkeley’s Triple Rock. Stories were told and re-told and signatures affixed (small groups like Deep Springs alumni being plagued by the uncanny, it happened that a guy on the stool next to mine pointed out a line he was reading in a book that mentioned William T. Vollman and Deep Springs at the very moment we started talking about the college by name).

Cooking is, however we tart it up, among the most elemental acts of human labor and the most primal expression of human ingenuity. For reasons and by means I do not understand, our species came to confront a recalcitrant world that we needed to shape. The application of heat to animal flesh is a splendid way to start shaping it. I don’t hope to have to earn a living by cooking again, but I am grateful that I feel at home in a kitchen. Cooking well for yourself is not just a way to eat a little better and more cheaply. It’s a way to create a little society around your own work, whether it’s a leisurely dinner after the kids are in bed, making a pie with backyard rhubarb and your son’s help, executing an ambitious dish for first-time guests in your home, or easing the domestic burden on an aging grandmother.

As we soldiered through a wonderful but exhaustingly elaborate wedding day--a glorious, auburn-hilly Bay-Area Saturday--it occurred to me that a wedding, too, is a kind of labor. The priest actually helped me with this, announcing the sacrament as “the work we are about to begin.” There is all the obvious stuff, the preparation and activity, but beyond that, the joining of two families and the creation of a new family is a deliberate and laborious process. Love is easy, love is natural. Pouring, kneading, and stretching that love into the form of a committed daily life is hard. You might even call it ingenious. I wonder a little at the depressing anti-humanism of today’s evolutionary enthusiasts for polyamory, arguing as they do that nature can’t be improved with artifice.

 The members of the groom’s party--including me--arrived early at the home of the bride’s family to bring gifts, ask for the bride’s hand, introduce the families to one another, and invoke the memory of departed ancestors, all in a way formalized and customary in Vietnamese culture. I had never seen anything like it. Then we ate roasted pig and shrimp rolls with peanut sauce.

After the tea ceremony, as the betrothal is called, it was time for the sacrament and the Mass. Promises were made, songs were sung, last-minute lectionary substitutions were smilingly endured, blessings were invoked. The Catholic bride gave the groom’s ring in the name of the Trinity, and the Jewish groom made the heavily Vietnamese church ring out with mozel tov! when he obliterated the wine glass. The priest had married the bride’s parents and baptized the family’s daughters. Perhaps in a sign of the esteem in which the family was held, four additional priests vested and participated in the Eucharistic celebration.

Photographs and scene changes followed almost until the reception began in Oakland. The crowd, eventually totaling some 480, trickled in, stopping first for photos with the beleaguered but still buoyant couple. The band warmed up with “Blue Bossa.” “Hava Nagila” was downloaded to the groom’s iPhone just in case.

Then the food came. First a plate of antipasti-style squid, jellyfish, and crisp-roasted pieces of pork, then fish maw and crab soup, and more pork. There was lobster, honey-walnut prawns, fried rice, and finally creamy, savory, whole-steamed fish of some kind. I am no expert on Vietnamese cuisine, but should you ever find yourself hungry in Oakland, I can recommend the Restaurant Peony without reservation.

Better yet, you should arrange to get yourself invited to a Vietnamese wedding. I saw, as I never had before, that in a truly traditional wedding the bride and groom are highly honored but ultimately minor players in the community’s re-creation of itself. People who have no real experience of community might find this an unappealing prospect, but it’s really very moving. It is tempting to spend a wedding day indulging in the pretense that a bride and groom are the center of the universe, but where we all are a day and a year and ten years later, and what we are willing and able to do for them then, matters a good deal more.

At last the time for “Hava Nagila” arrived. This was strictly a groomsmen’s project, and we were not abundantly confident of success. Excessive preparations were taken. But at last the moment came and the massively goyische crowd joined hands into dancing circles with marvelous felicity. We all gathered into the center and then back out, dancing first one way and then another. The bride and groom were seated and lifted aloft on a stout surge of well-wishers. Up and down they went as the music sped up (“find me a chair with arms,” the bride pleaded with us. We failed). Then the father and stepmother of the groom took a turn, and the parents of the bride, and the groom’s stepfather. People loved “Hava Nagila” with hand-clapping, foot-kicking abandon. If we’d kept the song going, every man, woman and child in the place would have taken a spin in those chairs.

Eventually every party has to end, however, and the hands that hold a pair of newlyweds aloft, if present at all, become less visible. Food is love, my mother has long told me. Love is also food. We lift, fold, press, rotate, and repeat to work love’s leavening power subtly but fully into the whole of life. It’s the warm smell that wakes a tired household, the early bell that calls weary hands around pitchers of milk and laconic togetherness, the motion of blessing that may be received when speech is of no avail. It is that most astonishing and simple of human tasks, to turn the earth’s raw increase, the thrilling impulse in our blood, into the bread by which we live.

2010-09-21T14:48:00.004-05:00

Good Night, Ann B., Wherever You Are
Hudson Diarist

The siding industry should be alerted to the existence of Hudson, Wisconsin. I had occasion to pass through my old hometown last weekend, and I was struck by how little my neighborhood had changed, architecturally, since we moved away in 1990. It is a river town, your last stop under the purview of Wisconsin's relatively liberal alcohol laws before crossing the St. Croix into Minnesota. The shady, sleepy downtown residential area boasts some 19th-century lumber baron mansions and a whole lot of stately inter-war frame houses. The changes over these twenty years are evident, but mostly superficial. Our old house has been turned into a spot in a garden, lovely but ill-suited to bruising games of pick-up football. The present owner was walking the dog and puttering in the yard as I went by, but I decided not to inform her of this fact. New coats of paint have been applied up and down the streets that linked the old downtown to the newer neighborhood "on the hill," the grid in which my early life played out--bounded, roughly, by St. Croix Street on the north, Vine Street on the south, Second Street toward the river, and Ninth street to the east, where Zeb lived and we played baseball after we outgrew the tee-ball games down at the Cinder Lot.

So almost twenty years of a booming housing market produced some nice upkeep but no tear-downs. This must have something to do with the preserving and renewing power of siding, I decided. The house where Bobby K. and his grandmother--the only Koreans we knew back then--lived is stalwart in its mint-green sheath a quarter century after they moved away. Meanwhile, the white-sided childhood home of my best friend Ben Z. is now a mellow shade of brown. I was a little sad to see a high fence around the yard, which in days of yore offered such brisk access to the aforementioned Cinder Lot and its artificial slope of granite rocks, perfect for perching on in the days before lawsuits (though the city fathers evidently sealed up our kid-sized gap in the fence at that corner anyway). I would have walked right by our first house on Sixth Street, from whence we moved when I was still very young, if I did not know with something like muscle memory that it was the second-to-last house on the block. I stopped for a moment to contemplate the transforming power of a new color of siding from the sidewalk over which we jostled and bumped on our childhood rides in a dad-powered Radio Flyer down to Mickleson's. The present occupants are not notably ambitious gardeners, which cheers me some. One doesn't wish to be showed up by everyone who follows you to an address.

Some changes go deeper, however. My old elementary school is gone, replaced by a basketball court for the torment of new un-athletic children. The kids are educated next door, at what used to be the middle school--in my day, an impossible rabbit warren of seemingly pointless rooms and hallways, perfect for evading all the people who disliked you on your way to the talented-and-gifted classroom in the butt-end of the building. The town library is now a law office. Plenty of businesses have changed hands and upgraded their menus. And naturally it feels smaller than it did back then, even after bikes shrank it considerably. It actually felt quite spacious, a landscape broken up with lilac hedges, alleyways, backyard slides and swingsets, and the romantic built geography of a river town. It was, in other words, an excellent terrain through which to chase and be chased by Redcoats, Confederates, and/or Storm Troopers, stopping only to pilfer some rhubarb or take a nap. As far as I can tell, it still is, if children nowadays still do such things. I was there on a damp school day, so it's hard to tell.

Children are instinctive keepers. They are the most conservative people around. At least I was. A friend moving away, even a short distance, felt like a Homeric parting. The closure of our favorite burger-and-malt joint on Lake Mallalieu, where the Willow River swells before joining the St. Croix, was like a death in the family. I remember asking my dad to pay a little extra for our lunches together at the A&W as they neared closing. The givenness of a child's world--at least a child reared in a relatively stable environment--is immense and any alterations are a shock to the system. Leaving was a painful rupture for me, but it was well-timed in a sense: after 6th grade, things start changing anyway and the town of your youth becomes something else for you whether you are there or not. As it was, I said goodbye to my friends in Hudson before the deluge, before the onset of electric guitars and rock and roll and kissing and booze and cigarettes. Back when girls had just become terrifying (an Ann was my constant companion for a year or so, before we knew that this was supposed to be fraught with consequence; I narrowed her house down to one of two possibilities on Third Street and her last name down to any that begin with 'B.' Anyway, she moved at some point and I suspect her house of having been re-sided).

Eventually I wended my way up to Ninth Street, where Lois, our long-time babysitter, had lived in a house built by her late husband. It had been either five or seven years since I'd last seen her. She was our daily companion for several years and a grandmotherly figure of cinematic perfection. Nobody in my family had any current information on her, so I walked toward the front door just to ask. On my way up the driveway, I got a glimpse of the kitchen, where we had happily devoured cinnamon toast, venison in various states and arrangements, and the powdered mac and cheese that we adored but that my mother would not countenance. In that kitchen was a baby dangling his little baby feet, and it suddenly struck me that if Lois were living anywhere on this earth, it was not here.

All of a sudden I turned back to the car and got on the road back home. I am an inveterate visitor of old haunts--I have been to Deep Springs three times in the last decade, and in those early years away I visited Hudson at every opportunity--but as soon as the conversation runs its course, as the agenda is concluded, or as the landmarks have been glimpsed and the old hands clasped, I need to leave. There is no point in trespassing on one's own past, especially since it is now someone else's present. No young mother needs to see a long-ungrateful child, come back too late to make some small gesture of affection and memory. No new family needs to hear just how many days of my early life slow-leaked out within their walls. "These things have served their purpose; let them be." So back you all go, Bobby K., Ben Z., Zeb, Ann B., into our common past and your individual presents. May your homes old and new never lack for warmth, good memories, and high-quality exterior finishing.

2010-09-16T15:26:00.002-05:00

Sermon: Losing Yourself and Being Found
Luke 15:1-10
Rev. Ben Dueholm
Wicker Park Lutheran Church
September 12, 2010

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sometimes in the Gospels we hear Jesus saying things that are hard to understand and even harder to live by. And sometimes we hear Jesus saying things that sound immediately familiar or even intuitive to us. Today’s Gospel lesson is one of those. Few images in Jesus’s teaching are as moving as the parable of the man who leaves ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness to find one lost, and carries it home on his shoulders, and throws a party out of his joy. It’s a powerful and enduring idea. No doubt everyone here remembers Star Trek III: The Search for Spock as well as I do. Mr. Spock asks how it can be that the good of the one outweighs the good of the many. And, we are given to understand, this is just his crazy Vulcan-logic talking, because our heart breaks for the one, not for the many; for the lost, not for the ones who are safe.

As a society, we seem to have over-learned Jesus’s lesson about leaving the ninety-nine to find one who is lost. Or maybe it sounds more familiar than it really is. The stories that attract the heaviest tears and the loudest applause in our society are not stories of steadfast virtue. They are stories of ruin and redemption, of being lost and found. Think about it: would anyone have watched VH1’s series ‘Behind the Music’ if it featured a musician who stayed true to his wife, drank iced tea, and read books while he was on the road? Probably not. Rather, we desire stories of addiction and fragile recovery; of the husband who strays and yet makes amends; the hard-charging executive who comes to learn about the things that really matter in life; the young adult who parties too hard and makes bad decisions because she was “going through some stuff.”. And isn’t this what Jesus tells us today--that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over 99 righteous? Does he really mean by this that it is somehow better to be a sinner who comes home than to just resist temptation and live a good life in the first place?

We’ll come back to that question in a bit. As I mentioned, our world has learned Jesus’s teaching in today’s lesson too well. We are fascinated with the idea of being lost. At the same time, we are fascinated with the idea of finding ourselves. Today this is a lengthy, often expensive and self-involved process. Perhaps you are lost in boredom, depression, compulsive behavior, but there is a way out. It may involve specially-formulated smoothies, or radical changes to your diet. It may require daily yoga or an international vacation or yet more drastic steps, but the solution is out there somewhere. With enough work and the right spending habits, you can find yourself. This is the message we learn from so much self-help literature and so many self-improvement gurus. In our world’s stories of being lost and finding ourselves, we are invited to be not only the lost sheep. We are also the shepherd who goes off to find the lost sheep. We are the angels in heaven who rejoice over the fact that we have found ourselves. And we are the Pharisees and scribes who must be reminded to be patient and indulgent as we work at being lost and finding ourselves. And lastly we are Jesus, spreading the good news that the lost sheep may be found and the lost coin returned, and we are invited to express our own experience as evidence of this truth. This is a lot of work! And people think that Christianity is demanding.

What Jesus is talking about in today’s lesson is rather different. First of all, Jesus is talking to the righteous people in this parable. He is not saying to the sinners, “How splendid that you’re lost! That makes God search all the harder for you!” He is rather trying to teach a lesson to people who want to exclude the sinners and the lost from fellowship. Second, Jesus is not talking about people who are suffering from anxiety, depression, or addiction. Sinners and tax collectors were not groups who suffered from spiritual malaise. They were people who were cut off from God and their community because of the way they made their living or because of the way they worshipped or didn’t worship. Being lost for them was not a state of mind. Being lost for them was a state of total nakedness before God. It was having no status, no nothing to protect us from God’s judgment and human scorn.

Likewise they had no means to find themselves. They could not afford to unplug and go on a journey of spiritual self-discovery. They would not have known what those words even meant. These lost, naked souls do not find themselves. Rather, they are found by Jesus Christ and laid open to the grace of God which he bears. Jesus does not mend their broken families or heal their childhood traumas. He does not tell them how they can earn closure or balance or enlightenment. He only invites these lost, naked souls into his fellowship, into a new community where both the sinner and the righteous may break bread together, share in the forgiveness of sins togeher, and look together with hope for the world to come.

Does this mean that it’s better to be lost and found than never to be lost at all? Probably not. To be well and truly lost, to be cut off from your world by your own actions or your social status, is a dreadful thing. If you’ve lived your life so far without cutting yourself off from your friends and family and making yourself a pariah, good for you. Keep it up. Don’t develop an addiction or become homeless or go to prison or emigrate to a country where people will hate you just so the Good Shepherd will come out to the wilderness to search for you. To be lost is no fun. And to repent of your sin is an excruciating experience. Don’t do something terrible so that the rejoicing will be extra loud when you mend your ways. All the same, to be found against all odds is the most wonderful thing. Someone here today, I imagine, is needing badly to be found--not to find yourself through lots of advice and lots of work and lots of money, but to be found by the grace of God in the midst of your own existence. If so, consider this your invitation to the new community of grace. Somebody, perhaps many people here today, are anxious or depressed or struggling, not sure whether they are the one lost or the ninety-nine others. You are invited forward to the meal as well. And some of you perhaps have never lost yourself, never ruined your own life or someone else’s with cruel or stupid behavior. Maybe you wonder whether there is blessing in this story for you, too, and there is. You are welcome to the feast just like everyone else. That is the true blessing, not to walk our own road of self-discovery--however important that may be--but to be found by grace, to be taught by grace, to be carried on the shoulders of God’s grace thus far and to the end. To share this grace with everyone who wants it, righteous or not, anxious, depressed, compuslive or not. And to rejoice together, both lost and found--the sinners without shame, the righteous without pride--to rejoice over every precious coin and every member of the flock. Amen.

2010-08-18T00:13:00.005-05:00

The Divided Self

A couple weeks back Christopher Hitchens gave an interview to Anderson Cooper about his cancer diagnosis. Eventually I got around to watching the extended version, which I recommend. Christopher Hitchens has no idea who I am, but I've written some sharp words about him over the years and I'm sure he'd return the favor if, like Humphrey Bogart, he gave me any thought. But the interview is a good example of why, should his illness run its course before something sudden takes me, I will miss the man. He has a rhetorical charisma that, love it or hate it, has a rare aptitude for holding one's gaze. It doesn't hurt that he's generally sober, austere, and realistic in discussing his illness. He is not given, publicly at least, to self-pity. He's even more generous to some people than one might expect.

I've not made a point of praying for him as some are, though he's included and will now no doubt be remembered in my general prayers for the sick and terminally ill. I'm not interested in trying, rather oddly it seems to me, to talk God into getting off His duff and provoking a conversion in Hitchens as he endures what may be his fatal illness. That smacks of praying to win an argument rather than a soul. I do, however, pray as Father Zossima tells his monks to do, for all who appear before the throne of God that day, that they may be dealt with mercifully. In that department I will need nothing less. I certainly wish him well in his treatments and I hope I have him around to pop off on for a long time to come.

Anyway, here was something that stood out to me:

To my [inaudible] surprise, because I'm by no means tearproof, I haven't wept, at least to this point. Perhaps that's to come. But I become moist when I think about my children, for whom it's a nasty shock. Incidentally, whatever god is punishing me, according to the other [hostile] prayer faction, is punishing them, too. I don't know if they think about that.

I wouldn't care to guess, since I don't keep much company with people who believe that cancer is a punishment for vocal atheism. Were I a potent but trifling deity, I would probably find something more redolent of divine intervention to punish a heavy-drinking long-term smoker than esophogeal cancer. But that's God for you--hiding somewhere in the causes, giving just enough to provoke our best and worst impulses but withholding too much to let either one triumph.

Anyway, I mention this point not to take up the question of how and whether God acts through such things. I mention it because it clashes rather oddly against something Hitchens says elsewhere in the interview: that his life-long habits contributed in a fairly straightforward and predictable way to his illness. Here is how he puts it in his fine column on the topic for Vanity Fair:

In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

I don't quite know if there's a contradiction here, but there's something odd. Hitchens raises the idea that a god is punishing his children vicariously by his cancer, only to dismiss it with the brevity such a thought deserves. But likewise he accepts that his own actions substantially endangered his life. So--and I enter this minefield hesitantly, since I have no intention to judge or criticize and yet words have a life of their own--is the idea that a god is punishing one's children beyond the moral pale, but the thought that one is punishing one's own children--that is, the whole host of selves who repeatedly do unsafe and unwise things, spurning the rare chances afforded by life to change course--may be, albeit in a sidelong fashion, admitted? Willing cancer to come about is not the same thing as consciously increasing one's risk, but it's not a totally different thing either.

What concerns me here is not Hitchens' own worldview but a curious, and very widespread, dissonance in the human heart. On one hand, we are ferociously committed to our children. We are rightly afraid to leave them young and at the mercy of the world, anxious to see them reach the milestones of adulthood, and offended at the thought that there might be a lesson for ourselves or anyone else in their suffering. Greed for time with one's children is the species of greed that may come closest to righteousness. Yet many people, endowed as fully as anyone else with this parental yearning, still consciously and repeatedly endanger their health and safety while their children are young enough to be sore grieved at a parting.

Again, I am not making any judgments here. I have felt the same yearning collide with the same impulse to do stupid and short-sighted things. What kind of creature experiences this internal division? How is it that we may, as it were, act as several different selves--the one who drank too much and smoked in the heady prime of youth, the one who had children and can't easily bear the thought of leaving them prematurely, the one who persists in dangerous behavior all the same, the one who looks back on it from the standpoint of grave illness--and yet own it all as coherent parts of the same life and the same mind?

The evolutionary psychologists no doubt have an answer of sorts--probably many answers in mutual contradiction. The hypertrophy of parental attachment is obvious enough, once quaint desires for evidence are dismissed. And the brain's receptiveness to addiction is well studied at this point, as are the magnificently subtle rationalizations it creates. Maybe the whole notion of a divine agency that inflicts suffering on us for our willful departure from our best impulses arises from this internal contradiction. "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate....Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" That, anyway, would be one way of putting it.

Even granting the evolutionary explanations for this utterly curious state of of affairs, it doesn't cease to be a problem short of finally nullifying our own consciousness (which, come to think of it, is how so many of us get into this sort of problem in the first place). And I don't think the curious case of the divided self has a solution in any human terms. Some may pray. Hitchens acknowledges with perhaps unexpected grace that he is moved by the prayers of his sometime antagonists, moved, that is, by the notion that "they think that in some way, some bits of me may be worth saving." Some may write, as Hitchens himself does quite masterfully even on this unmasterable topic, finding something worth saying out of a dull and grueling experience. Either way we are striving, at the end of all things, to hold up those few bits of ourselves or others that we would have remembered, unyoked (if never separated) from all those things done to obscure or minimize them.

2010-08-17T23:11:00.004-05:00

Putting the "Ill" Back in "Illiberal"

Fresh off a good run of kicking up the blogospheric chalk by arguing that American elite universities don't adequately represent the country's less liberal elements, and then arguing that liberal conceptions of rights were not adequate to capturing the special thick meaning of heterosexual unions and thus must be limited so as to exclude gay people, we all waited with bated breath to see what argument Ross Douthat would make for his inevitable, if soberly even-handed, endorsement of the Mosque Exclusion Zone.

Envelope please:

Too often, American Muslim institutions have turned out to be entangled with ideas and groups that most Americans rightly consider beyond the pale. Too often, American Muslim leaders strike ambiguous notes when asked to disassociate themselves completely from illiberal causes.

And the Rossie goes to "illiberal causes!" Or more specifically, to "ambiguous notes" in reference to "illiberal causes." I am honestly surprised that a writer with Ross's passing capacity for self-examination was able to put these words down. The American Right in its modern form is nothing but a parade of illiberal causes. From celebrating torture, indefinite detention, and extrajudicial killings to trashing human rights groups to trying to keep women from getting legal medicine, the whole movement of which Ross is a part--and from which he dissents in no substantive point that I have seen--is devoted to the idea that liberal principles and freedoms must be rolled back. Ross's great contribution to our national discourse--and I mean this with at least a jigger of seriousness--is to introduce "ambiguous notes" into this wearying national argument for less moral sensitivity and humanitarian scruple. But to say that Ross has disassociated himself at all, much less completely, from any of the swirling illiberalisms of this squalid little period in our national life would be a gross exaggeration.

And yet even this very, very bad argument could have been elevated by any articulation of what precisely Feisal Abdul Rauf, or any other Muslim or group of Muslims, must do in order to earn the protections of the Constitution. Here are Douthat's diagnoses:

The second [liberal? or illiberal? anyway, the nativist one] America begs to differ. It sees the project as an affront to the memory of 9/11, and a sign of disrespect for the values of a country where Islam has only recently become part of the public consciousness.

See, Muslims, you must be part of the public consciousness for a while longer before your rights are granted. How much longer? We don't know, but longer than you have been so far.

But the second America is right to press for something more from Muslim Americans — particularly from figures like Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the mosque — than simple protestations of good faith.

How about helping the FBI with counterterrorism? Putting Christians and Jews on the project board? Nope. More needed. How much more? We'll tell you when you get there.

For Muslim Americans to integrate fully into our national life, they’ll need leaders who don’t describe America as “an accessory to the crime” of 9/11 (as Rauf did shortly after the 2001 attacks), or duck questions about whether groups like Hamas count as terrorist organizations (as Rauf did in a radio interview in June).

The first requirement above is that, in order to have any rights, Muslims must--in the past!--avoid voicing any politically incorrect interpretations of the September 11 attacks. This is unfortunately a common sentiment in our national life, but it is not one used to interfere with the rights of any other group. As for the second, perhaps Douthat could provide a list of approved opinions and terminology for Muslims to use when they're on the radio.

And they’ll need leaders whose antennas are sensitive enough to recognize that the quest for inter-religious dialogue is ill served by throwing up a high-profile mosque two blocks from the site of a mass murder committed in the name of Islam.

One is genuinely curious to hear a full list of which people and words and opinions must be repudiated, and exactly how far a Muslim-use building must be from the WTC site. But of course Ross won't provide such things, and there will always be more repudiations to exact and more radii to debate. You condemn terrorism, but not with enough self-criticism. You are not violent nor do you condone violence, but you do not repudiate non-violent people who don't always repudiate violent people. How, after all, does one disprove accusations of secret motives? How can any of us establish not only past and present but future innocence, as Charles Krauthammer would like to see?

Throughout our nation's history, marginalized groups have asked in earnest, "What must we do to be counted Americans?" And throughout our nation's history, there have been people like Douthat to say not "This or that," but always "More." This is not a cost-free delinquency, even for us white folks who can be as illiberal as we want to be and still have national cable shows, much less community centers on land we have purchased. America's cities burned for years--decades, really--because white America would not give black America a straight answer to that question. We are really without excuse when people, tired of always hearing "we'll tell you when you get there," decide to stop asking in earnest. That's when trouble really starts.

I wonder if Ross, and the other ambiguously illiberal-liberals, have really thought through the implications of encouraging this horrifying bill of attainder-by-mob-rule. If a firestorm of idiocy and demagoguery--comparing a mosque to Nazi shrines and demands for Saudi-style restrictions on mosques--kills this project, how likely is a new leader to arise aiming to meet Douthat's unstated but obviously very exacting standards for Muslim liberalism? What lesson would a reasonable American Muslim be likely to draw from this episode? Will this--yes, even the words of the reasonable conservative at the paper of record--cultivate faith in the grandeur and impartiality of our laws? Will this show forth our commitment to religious liberty, or expose it as a sham invoked to protect the powerful and popular? Will this give evidence that America is a place where Islam may peacefully flourish, or that we are a country deeply and implacably hostile to it?

I am hardly in a position to say. Perhaps Ross, tribune of those alienated by America's all-devouring liberalism, might have had some perspective that we as a country very sorely need.

2010-08-17T23:01:00.001-05:00

The God of the Center
Rev. Ben Dueholm
The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Our Lord (August 15, 2010)
Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

On Friday the great film critic and now equally great blogger Roger Ebert offered some thoughts on the probably terminal illness of Christopher Hitchens. You may know of Hitchens; he is, among many other things, a very vocal and militant atheist writer.

Reflecting on the approach of death, and the question of God, Ebert writes:

“I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names”--I imagine here he has in mind God, YHWH, Allah, Christ, and the rest--”is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.”

I should say before I go on that I love Roger Ebert and don’t mean to bag on him. You could do a lot worse than to read everything he writes. And he’s more than entitled to his opinion. He has spent more time on the edge of the final unknown than most of us will. His words are eloquent and the sentiment is common. It is even, in a way, noble. Lots and lots of people look for God--forgive my use of a simplistic name--at the edge of life. We look for God at the edge of consciousness, at the edge of scientific knowledge, at the moment of death. The idea being, perhaps, that we get by just fine with our knowledge and experience most of the time. How many of us pray for a safe trip on the Metra or give thanks for the regular arrival of our paychecks? We don’t need to consider God until the point where these things fail us. There--at the edge of life--we encounter the sublime mystery that us simplistic types are tempted to call God.

This is a very different claim about God than we hear in the famous song of the Blessed Virgin Mary in today’s Gospel. Mary’s God is at the center of life, not at the edge of it. Mary’s God is magnified by her very soul, by her mind. She does not place God in a void at the outer limits of her mind’s journey. She unabashedly accepts that God has done great things, not just in general but for her. Her God is not an unanswerable mystery, but a God who inspires fear and grants mercy. God sets the proud wandering the their own futile thoughts; breaks the thrones of the mighty, feeds the hungry, spurns the rich, and makes and remembers promises to the people of Israel.

This God is known by many names, perhaps all of them simplistic, but Mary blesses God’s proper Name as holy. There is nothing in Mary’s witness of faith that reduces the mystery of God. Rather she celebrates it, magnifies it, worships it.

And this is not, we must assume, because Mary was a foolish little girl. She knew well that the world’s thrones are still occupied, that the hungry and lowly suffer while the rich typically have what they need. Yet Mary’s God is not at the margin, watching and waiting for our awe, intervening now and then. Her God is at the center of life, and at this moment the center of life is her. Jesus is growing in her womb, conceived in mystery. She has heard the awful charge from the angel to bear this wondrous child despite her own fears and her own frailty--she was just a girl and the pregnancy was potentially scandalous, after all. The mystery was not out there past the limit of her knowledge; it was what she knew, what she felt every day as it quickened and took flesh within her. And in doing that, God truly is thwarting the mighty and lifting up the lowly. God indeed is scattering the thoughts of those too proud to find God in such a humble place, who take God’s silence for God’s absence, who make God in their own majestic, glorious, noble image.

This is the God not of the void or of the beyond, but the God of the center, the God of Jesus Christ. God is not distant but near. God is not where we give up. God is where we start--in our homes, our work, our knowledge, here in our gifts of bread and wine. God is also where we end--in wonder, in fear, in the void, at the hour of our death. And God is present in between, as we are born, as we struggle, as we serve, and as we learn and change.

I can’t say for sure, but I highly doubt that Mary ever got beyond knowledge of the world. Even by the standards of the day she probably knew rather little about how the world works. She lived and died in a world where what we might call the “unknown” or the mystery or the void occupied a lot more real estate than it does today. And that’s no knock against Mary. For her, surely God was still in the sunset and in the change of seasons. God’s hand was on the rising and falling of nations and kingdoms. But most particularly, God was in and with and through her, God who would see the world through our own dim eyes and walk the earth with our own feeble bones, and redeem the world with his own human body. And not only that, but Mary was bearing all of us, too, who bear Christ’s name and who are being formed into his image in the world. Truly this is a mystery--and I mean absolutely no insult to it or to you--but it is the very real and present mystery by which we live and die, and see the lowly lifted up, and by which we magnify and rejoice in our God. Amen.

2010-08-10T09:24:00.004-05:00

The Salt and the Salt Mine

Rod Dreher is depressed about the future of American Christianity (via One Eternal Day):

We are assured that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church, but if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the church in the Global South and even in China doing better this century than believers in America. Why so glum, chum? Three words: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism...The MTD god is a likeable guy who is far removed from our everyday lives, and is to be called on only when we want help. He wants us to be good, which is to say nice. The main thing in life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. That's it. There is no real doctrine, or understanding for why doctrine matters.

And G. Jeffrey MacDonald has a theory about why American clergy are so depressed, drunk, and overweight:

The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.
...
In this transformation, clergy have seen their job descriptions rewritten. They’re no longer expected to offer moral counsel in pastoral care sessions or to deliver sermons that make the comfortable uneasy. Church leaders who continue such ministerial traditions pay dearly.
...
Clergy need parishioners who understand that the church exists, as it always has, to save souls by elevating people’s values and desires. They need churchgoers to ask for personal challenges, in areas like daily devotions and outreach ministries.

When such an ethic takes root, as it has in generations past, then pastors will cease to feel like the spiritual equivalents of concierges. They’ll again know joy in ministering among people who share their sense of purpose.

American Christianity sure is an odious little thing, isn't it? It's all about golf jokes and hooking up nowadays, not about radical discipleship and a proper understanding of the filioque. Deploring the condition of American Christianity is the ancient and enduring pastime of American Christians. Too conventional, too out of touch, too stodgy, too progressive, too accommodated to culture, too estranged from it, too moralistic, too kerygmatic, too scholarly, too demotic--there are balancing criticisms for every age and temperament. And all of them have had and continue to have some truth to them. Dreher is not wrong to be dismayed at the cultural hegemony of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and MacDonald is not wrong to see trouble for our vocation in the desire of the faithful to be entertained rather than edified.

Yet I find these arguments--and they are made by people all over the theological spectrum, over and over again each day--exhausting and depressing quite apart from the trends they describe. For one thing, they are simply fruitless. We only have--or ever have had, or will have--the American culture we have. Pundits and pastors can't fire all the Christians and find new ones more eager to be lectured about driving big cars and masturbating. In other words, maybe we should all just stop complaining about how uncongenial our circumstances are and do our best to preach and teach at the margin between the Word and the world that runs through all of our parishes and all of our lives, pressing the boundaries outward as God gives us the ability rather than absorbing ourselves into the culture or pridefully spurning those of diluted or wayward or attenuated faith.

More to the point, there are unstated, perhaps unconscious, and problematic assumptions behind these arguments. One of these assumptions is Constantinism: the idea that Christianity is the semi-official religion of the United States and that it constitutes a sort of endogenous norm by which we are judged. Everybody, on this account, ought to be a Christian (unless they're Jews, which is OK now), and insofar as people aren't Christians, there's something wrong with our society and our church. Thoughtful and realistic proponents of Christendom are usually content with a minimal definition of a Christian society. People will believe and act as they please, so long as they do their part to maintain public respect and piety for the religion that underlies and sustains the society. Dreher, MacDonald, and others making these arguments are not satisfied with this conventional Christianity but require their brothers and sisters to be the right kind of Christians. Once this essential similarity is grasped, it matters little that Dreher and MacDonald are likely touting different moralisms.

Such a desire, for a Christendom that is not only formally unified but doctrinally and behaviorally orthodox, only escapes absurdity because both Dreher and MacDonald rely on another assumption, or myth: Platonism. Once the American church dwelt in the presence of the Truth but we have fallen away from it. Only through the application of discipline and right understanding will we have any chance to return to this unity with the One. MacDonald pins his hopes for this reunion on the cultivation of an altruistic ethic evident "in generations past" and Dreher finds it in the global South and in China, where a person totally ignorant of those Christianities might imagine a purer version of the faith surviving. However one imagines this primal unity with God, it ends in a worldview bereft of grace and eventually of any room for divine agency, for the power of a God who gathers and scatters in his own time and for his own purposes.

Obviously I don't buy this. American churches were never full of people who liked being scolded for their lifestyles or indoctrinated on the finer points of Chalcedonian Christology. In the olden times, Dreher insists, Christians cared about theological disputes and believed they mattered. This is a common belief and a common lament, but I have never seen any evidence for its truth. That is, we have the record of these disputes, but if we have been educated in this record we have only small glimpses of how they trickled down. No one can outdo Martin Luther in pessimism over the state of the evangelical churches, and he took doctrinal disputes as seriously as any Christian ever has:

Mercy! Good God! what manifold misery I beheld! The common people, especially in the villages, have no knowledge whatever of Christian doctrine, and, alas! many pastors are altogether incapable and incompetent to teach [so much so, that one is ashamed to speak of it]. Nevertheless, all maintain that they are Christians, have been baptized and receive the [common] holy Sacraments. Yet they [do not understand and] cannot [even] recite either the Lord's Prayer, or the Creed, or the Ten Commandments; they live like dumb brutes and irrational hogs; and yet, now that the Gospel has come, they have nicely learned to abuse all liberty like experts.

Luther's response to this state of affairs, however adequate or inadequate, was at least useful. He drew up the Small and Large Catechisms to provide a simple introduction to the faith for pastors and parents to use in giving instruction. He didn't muse about the evolution of a better sort of Christian, nor did he cast his hopes on some other place where an unadulterated faith might live on.

This can be cheerless work, but it is better and more easily undertaken once we jettison all this meta-Christian hand-wringing. First, we Christian intellectuals are not the guardians of an American Christian culture. We are not chaplains to an unruly civilization, we are preachers and teachers for the Church. Second, there was no heroic age of the Church from which we have declined into our present squalor. Not the mid-century American church, not Luther's or Augustine's church, not even St. Paul's church. What is to be wondered at is not that pearls are so often cast before swine, that so many houses are built on sand, that the Word is so often spoken and so little heeded, but rather that we are here staggering along as the Church at all after so many centuries.

Consider Jesus's fragile depiction of the Church in the Sermon on the Mount. Blesssed are the meek, the poor, the mourners. Blessed are you when you are reviled and persecuted (and, as Luke's account has it, woe to you people speak well of you, for that is what they did to the false prophets). You, Jesus says to his disciples, are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

I can't say for sure, but I don't think Jesus had in mind a world consisting entirely of meek, poor, weeping people, all of them reviled and persecuted (by whom?). He calls us to be salt of the earth, not, as Krister Stendahl said, to turn the earth into a salt mine. Similarly the call at the end of Matthew's Gospel to make disciples of all nations does not imply a project of baptizing every last person, but rather of establishing a presence among every people everywhere on the face of God's earth, that the world may be lit, as it were, from within by the life of faith, forgiveness of sins, and works of charity. You might call this a "remnant ecclesiology" if you wanted to get technical, but it is not aimed at a remnant in any bitter, hostile, or sectarian sense. The salt does not hate nor spurn the earth, the light does not reject what it illuminates, the leaven does not seek to separate itself from the lump of dough. Rather the salt exists for the earth, the light for the room, the leaven for the lump. The Word and the world exist in a continual opposition, as Christ makes clear over and over again, but it is an opposition without hostility on our part. Indeed, the world and church coexist and always bleed into each other.

This morning on the Metra I sat in front of two young people talking about the stuff young people talk about. The woman mentioned having her Bible with her, and the man said he was relying on his smart phone edition. They talked about relationships, ex-boy and girlfriends, church shopping at home and college. One cited a verse from 2 Timothy to help illuminate the difficulty and duty of remaining friends with an ex. That is to say, they were a walking, talking blog post on the decline and fall of American Christianity, if one were to look at it that way (and in fact I was a little irritated at having to overhear their conversation as I was trying to focus on Augustine; as I mentioned, Christianity would be a lot more satisfying without all the Christians). But of course the reverse is also true: they were a little testament to the endurance of a faith through all manner of changes and upheavals not anticipated by Paul or Augustine or Luther. Not for them, or for me, is any anxiety over what the Church will look like at the end of another century. The morrow will take thought for the things of itself. It is for them, and for me, to keep the lamps lit wherever we go, however few of us there be and however feeble our own understanding.

2010-07-31T09:01:00.002-05:00

Shorter ADL

We reject bigoted reasons to exclude an Islamic center from lower Manhattan, but we embrace reasons springing from "strong passions and keen sensitivities," which are totally different. And our opposition to bigotry in general is not to be understood as an opposition to the agenda of bigots in this particular case. Talk to us next time.

2010-07-28T22:55:00.004-05:00

Time Present

Last week I went to a local establishment to watch some baseball and read Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. In retrospect it was a comical choice. On the screen I watch the momentary heroics of a trivial pastime. On the page I read about archaeological digs and millions of lives come and gone and the conquering expanse of space and time. Why do individual lives matter, Dillard asks, against this infinite backdrop?

Of Allah, the Qu'ran says, "not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth escapes from him." That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.

Indeed. That's why such precepts are recorded--the straining would seem to be the point. I have, coincidentally, ruined the task of ant-killing by trying to awake some wonder at the world in Soren by referring to a passing ant as "Mr. Ant." Squashing an ant is one thing, but something my son consistently and affectionately personifies as Mr. Ant cannot be done away with so easily. Mr. Ant is just trying to find food and maintain the colony and do whatever else it is that ants do all day--oversee their little bailiwick of creation, not inherently more trivial than mine. To be fair, I don't shoot sparrows either.

And so the second baseman of a doomed team makes a brilliant toss to feed a highlight-reel double play, a sparkling moment for the assembled fans that sinks back into the ether before the vain day turns again. Sports is important because it's a chance to occupy yourself with something that obviously doesn't matter. What I haven't figured out is whether this should help us care more about our other vain occupations, or whether to worry less. So I don't share the common contempt for athletes who cross themselves at each at-bat or pray before games or engage in other such godly obeisances in the course of their trade. I wish more people commended their work to God. Either it all matters or none of it does. A girl in the spare room needs eye drops. The Sox need a clutch hit with two out. The war funding authorization needs to pass. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, none of it will be remembered if it is not remembered by God--who sees in secret, counts the tears, and forgets nothing.

Dillard's book is very fine in its bone-jarring way. It is a modern monument to the kind of problem we should not take for granted--the problem of doubt. More specifically, it concerns the problem of evil, which like the problem of doubt is only a problem for people who are tempted by the problem of goodness, or faith. These inseparable problems may only be leveled as accusations at God from within God's own party, as it were. If evil is actually a meaningful concept, it only presents itself as a philosophical problem to those who have imagined a world without it. A random and ungoverned cosmos has no room for such trifling.

So it may be that if the atheist triumphalists are correct and the lights of faith really do go out in a generation or ten, Dillard's book will become incomprehensible. What kind of people, one imagines the intellectual descendants of Richard Dawkins asking, speculated about the moral significance of 180,000 people drowning in Bangladesh in 1991? To quote a sturdy rhetorician of the death-of-God era, "Stuff happens."

Or put another way, why didn't the world's ragtag array of saints and fools for God just take the obvious step and pledge fealty to the heavy reality of the ordinary rather than the fleeting ecstasy of the divine? After all, the godliest people in all history never spent less than ninety-eight percent of their waking lives walking in darkness, not seeing the bright light. Even the Bible portrays it thus--a few chats in the desert sprinkled over forty years of wandering and toil; a howl of despair from a Roman cross. Turn a pressure washer toward the legend-globbed lives of St. Francis or the Baal Shem Tov and I bet you'd find the same thing.

Dillard:

Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. "Later on," a Hasid master said, "you don't see these things anymore." (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn--for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable--to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor).

Why do people vex themselves thus? Why do we fret about rims and marveling and gifts and why they diminish over the course of a life of faith? Why not accept such things for what they most likely are--momentarily lovely synaptic snapping lost in a void--and cast our lot with things as they happen to be? Does this not make faith itself into a confidence game of the highest order? Is not then faith founded only on rapidly-spinning doubt, as matter is said (by people I don't understand) to be an avatar of whirring nothingness--rims and marvels and gifts as figures of absence rather than presence? That such experiences are real in their fashion changes nothing; they may be temporarily uncomprehended by our ways of knowing the world, but they're still inside the sphere of life--a sphere that, apart from the convinced but confused witness of some Galilean fishermen, we have no reason to imagine has any trap doors or open tombs.

I have no answer to these questions. To the person who is beyond faith and doubt, beyond good and evil, I have no case to make. Go thy ways, eat thy bread with a glad heart. But for my own part, I find this possibility--that faith is, for the very best of us, a minority report; that there is no one whose faith has ever been qualitatively greater than mine or yours--to be one of the loveliest things to be imagined. I once had a conversation with a Divinity School colleague on how joyous it will be to hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant." We had been to Jimmy's for a longer stretch than physicians or philosophers would commend. I do not feel such things most of the time. That no one apart from drunks and children and the severely diminished should awake in the presence of God without total and complete shock is a thought one ought to entertain from time to time for the sheer pleasure of it. The saints were always content with what they had been given up until now; they had seen the eternal in the temporal and rendered their lives fully rewarded. Arguably more heroic still are those unepiphanied faithful who have done their utmost to divinize this world without ever having "known" or "accepted" Jesus "in(to) their hearts." There is perhaps nothing greater and nothing more stupid.

For us, for them, we have to look forward to (with suitable irony) the moment when, as Ivan's demon recounts, we have walked our quadrillion miles and our shouts of joy at paradise cause the residents to think us reactionary--they who were unsurprised, we who had no other choice in the matter.

2010-07-21T22:28:00.002-05:00

Easy Marks

Not to chase the shiny object of the moment, but this Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod fiasco has been revealing and depressing in about equal measure. We're used to the set-up:

1) Unscrupulous activist/journalist figure gins up bogus controversy
2) Bogus controversy is amplified by ideologically friendly media
3) Anticipating a political headache, the administration cashiers the innocent but hopelessly smeared target

But in this case there was something of a surprise finish:

4) Smear job is exposed as such and its architects are semi-forced to semi-recant.

And yet there has been and will be no actual price paid by the very bad actors who made this happen. Indeed, even their failure stumbled blindly into success, as today's NPR coverage of this hit job led with Robert Gibbs apologizing to Shirley Sherrod. Which, to be fair, he and his boss needed to do--hanging her out to dry was shameful. But they weren't the ones who assassinated her character. Somebody else did that.

But for NPR, it was all about the political headaches this has/would/will cause for the president. It penetrated no one's thinking that this was a bogus story. The patient is dead and everyone is sitting around talking about what he's going to eat for breakfast. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Of course somebody made a high-minded pivot to race. Does this speak to unresolved racial issues in America? And maybe a closer approximation to a useful question, does race help explain why this kind of story has legs?

Unfortunately their talking head, Jonathan Alter, didn't have anything to say about that. He talked about the political instincts of the White House, again as if this were a real thing that required a real response and conveyed real meaning, rather than a bush-league Nixonian ripoff. At some point hands were wrung over whether Andrew Breitbart raises issues by blurring the line between journalism and activism.

So let's put our thinking caps on here for a minute, shall we?

This incident was not about race or racism, at least not in its presenting issue. It is not about the president's political skills or his savvy in negotiating race matters. It is not about combining journalism and activism, which no reasonable person objects to. It's about maliciously misrepresenting a person's comments in order to assassinate their character. And secondarily, it's about the speed with which so many would-be respectable people decided to leap down that puke funnel after the odious Breitbart (a process no doubt accelerated by the Spidey sense some people have for the supposedly omnipresent force of anti-white racism).* That's the story--how a third-rate hatchet job became a folk legend overnight. Between all the whining about liberals and the NAACP, people ought to ask themselves how they fell for this in the first place, how they will view those who are responsible given that even NPR won't try to hold them accountable, and what they will do the next time a perfect piece of moron-bait falls into their laps.

* though now that we're on the subject, I really wonder why conservatives think it's a good idea to hype every sliver of evidence that somebody somewhere doesn't like white people while simultaneously having nothing at all to say about anti-black, anti-Latino, and anti-Asian racism. It is not the posture of a movement or a party that is trying to indicate that it takes the experiences, perspectives, and interests of non-white voters at all seriously.