Category Archives: church

snakes may safely graze

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No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.

Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:

in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.

All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”

not your ordinary waether [sic]

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Here’s a wonderful piece of fun. I stole it from Fr. Mark Harris, who, in turn, stole it from TitusOneNine. To non-Anglicans, this is Anglican chant (actually sung rather well) complete with affected pronun-ci-a-ti-ons of a kind one sometimes hears from high-class British choirs.

The joke might have been better (nah, it wouldn’t), if “The Weather Report” had been sung in the manner of American congregations from the bad old days when Morning Prayer was the standard low-church Sunday service. Imagine every cadence thumped to death as congregation and choir rendered the canticles and the psalms in a manner undeviating from established parish norms, week in and week out, so that parishioners who were inclined to sleep through the service need not be disturbed by anything untoward. The chanting here is a positive delight in comparison. Give it a listen.

It turns out that “The Weather Report” was cooked up by a group of British schoolteachers who called themselves the Master Singers for a while. It was first recorded in 1966 and produced by George Martin, the producer of the Beatles. Here are links to two accounts of the whole thing from the same blog, that don’t entirely agree; and here’s another to “The Highway Code,” an earlier similar spoof, also recorded by George Martin. Both recordings “hit the British charts” in 1966, according to my source.

Anglican chant is serious, of course. It would hardly be worth parody otherwise. A Wikipedia acount, which isn’t bad, is here. In addition, here’s the best serious Anglican chanting I could find on the web. It’s the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, chanting Psalm 50. Such chanting may be accompanied or not. The Kings College video is accompanied, of course. It is also heard as sung in a big reverberant gothic building, not up close and personal to the microphone, like “The Weather Report.”

catching up on some things

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Just when I think I might start to like George Will a little, he tells the world on ABC’s Sunday Morning that Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama will have “some impact” because “this country is so eager, a) to feel good about itself by doing this [electing an African American president?], but more than that to put paid to the whole Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson game of political rhetoric.” Partial translation: Powell has endorsed Obama (and Obama supporters are happy about the endorsement) because Obama is black.

Elsewhere, Will has claimed that Obama will get three votes because he’s black for every vote he’ll lose. So, of course, Powell (also being black and not being a true conservative) has gone with the herd who are supporting Obama as an afirmative action candidate.

Writing on the same subject, Robert Novak seems by his title theme, “Powell’s Predictable Endorsement,” to drift into the same territory of circumstantial ad hominem that has claimed Will. But Novak’s point turns out to be that Powell has always been a liberal. I thought Powell’s endorsement prettty much summed up the campaign as I see it it right now; and that being the case, I’m hard put to disagree with Novak.

Then there’s Will’s most recent Washington Post column characterizing deposed Episcopal Bishop Robert Duncan as a hero of the faith, a regular Martin Luther, if you will.

The Rev. Robert Duncan, 60, is not a Lutheran, but he is a Luther, of sorts. The former Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh has, in effect, said the words with which Martin Luther shattered Christendom and asserted the primacy of individual judgment and conscience that defines the modern temperament: ” Ich kann nicht anders” — I cannot do otherwise.

As every Episcopalian knows, Robert Duncan could have done otherwise. He has pursued a course towards establishing a separatist Anglican province in the United States (with himself as principal) for many years now. He has collected a relatively small group of followers who are dissatisfied with the 1979 Prayerbook, the feminization of the church (so called — read ordination of women to the priesthood), and most recently by pressures within the church for full inclusion of gays, lesbians, and transgendered persons, symbolized for many by the consecration of the church’s first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. But, as Will protests (too much, I think), echoing a theme Duncan has sounded again and again:

It is not the secessionists such as Duncan who are, as critics charge, obsessed with homosexuality. The Episcopal Church’s leadership is latitudinarian — tolerant to the point of incoherence, Duncan and kindred spirits think — about clergy who deviate from traditional church teachings concerning such core doctrines as the divinity of Christ, the authority of Scripture and the path to salvation. But the national church insists on the ordination of openly gay clergy and on blessing same-sex unions.

It is for this reason, the putative apostasy of church leadership, that the Episcopal Church has declined in membership and influence, as Will sees it:

The Episcopal Church once was America’s upper crust at prayer. Today it is “progressive” politics cloaked — very thinly — in piety. Episcopalians’ discontents tell a cautionary tale for political as well as religious associations. As the church’s doctrines have become more elastic, the church has contracted. It celebrates an “inclusiveness” that includes fewer and fewer members.

Will’s views echo those of schismatics but do not reflect the political reality. Duncan’s splinter group has affiliated with Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, but the schismatic Dioceses of San Joachin and (soon to be) Fort Worth have affiliated with Bishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone, since their primary complaint is women’s ordination. Schism does not breed unity, but breeds more schism.

Meanwhile the Episcopal Church continues. It is true that the church lost members between 1965 and 2002, but the reasons for that loss are complex and by no means as Duncan and his followers maintain. Those who think the Episcopal Church is incoherent, as Duncan alleges, might wish to read a bit at the site of The Episcopal Majority, now closed because its work is done, or spend some time with Fr. Mark Harris.

All churches are political. That the Episcopal Church’s politics have moved somewhat left of center is no different a case than those of the United Methodist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, which have moved right of center (the Baptists further than the Methodists), no different indeed from the case of Mr. Will’s church, which in this essay I will not call Catholic but Roman, and which has been wrenched sharply to the political right by its current Pope, a move that is causing a good deal of discomfort to liberal Catholics.

The goal of schism in the Anglican Communion is not merely to destabilize communion, but to destroy it and replace it with something else. The Communion has, as Fr. Harris points out, never been a church. It is rather a “fellowship of churches.” What Duncan wants is to create an Anglican Church, broad enough perhaps to include the various schismatics with their differences, but not broad enough to include the Episcopal Church.

And in spite of a recent press conference in which he protests some remaining loyalty to Canterbury, I don’t think Duncan cares much whether the empty chair in his imagined cathedral is reserved for the ABC. As matters stand now it will be reserved for the Archbishop of Nigeria, who dreams of rule in the United States on the order of that which Muslim fundamentalists have enforced in parts of the Islamic world.

I wish the church had some law-enforcement agency we could encourage to arrest the arrestable, to jail the jailable, to banish the banishable; but it doesn’t. . . . [T]hings are going haywire….Don’t just let – ‘freedom, freedom, freedom!’ Your child begins to grow up and do all sorts of things, you cannot even cane him, you cannot even reprimand him, you cannot do anything, they say it’s illegal, because all sorts of laws have removed parents’ control over their children. All this must change.

Far from being a Lutheran hero and asserting “the primacy of individual judgment and conscience,” Robert Duncan has sworn fealty to a would-be tyrant. I can’t believe Mr. Will would support such a thing if he thought about it; though the Will/Duncan Luther is a false Luther, as just a casual perusal of Christian Liberty will show, but’s that’s a subject for another day.

Uncertainty, aporia, and Benedict

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Nicholas Knisely has kindly noted my reaction to his blog about relativism, science, and Pope Benedict.

. . . Julian is asking a basic question of any one who tries to connect the insights of modern physics and theology (and/or philosophy); “Should an understanding of the nature of reality in one field have to be accepted in another?”

The short is answer is that I believe they need to be.

I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t mean that I agree entirely. I don’t know of any requirement that one field’s insights be accepted by another. Moreover, it’s been almost an article of faith in the humanities and social sciences, since the so-called linguistic turn, that academic discourses, like cultures, are incommensurable.1 I’ve mostly thought incommensurability a wrong-headed notion, but there are cases that argue otherwise. If there weren’t, epistemology might be reducible to psychology or vice versa. On the other hand, postmodern literary criticism has owed much to Marx (especially as understood by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Herbert Marcuse, et al.), to Freud (especially as understood by Lacan), to Heidegger (especially as understood by Derrida, Sartre, Gadamer . . .).

I also said I think uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have different bases. They come together in Kuhn’s critique and in the spate of theorists who have followed Kuhn, but one is grounded in a famous series of experiments with light and the other is grounded in a discourse that includes Kant and Hume but goes back to the beginnings of philosophy. These thoughts leave me with the partially unsatisfying observation that it is sometimes useful and possible to think across disciplines and sometimes not. Sometimes différance is not only inevitable but desirable.

I teach a course these days in which students read a variety of modern and postmodern classics in an exercise I hope will enable them to make connections between ideas they have encountered in separate domains. Recently we discussed Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, wherein the author tells how an ethnographer, traveling in the Balkans in the 1930s, discovered a story to the effect that a particular young man had been enticed off the face of a cliff by a jealous mountain fairy. Shepherds found his body and returned it to his village, whereupon his human intended, the source of the fairy’s jealousy, uttered a formal lament in verse, “full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty,” which was quoted as part of the tale.

When the ethnographer discovered that the intended was still alive, though now elderly, he visited her. She gave a prosaic account of the tragedy that differed materially from the tale the ethnographer had heard and most particularly did not include the mountain fairy, though she did say that she and other women of the village “had repeated the customary ritual lamentations” at the funeral. When the ethnographer confronted the villagers with the intended’s account of the death as an ordinary accident, “they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind.”

I asked my students to suppose that the ethnographer had tried to interpret this tale of the unfortunate young man and the jealous fairy princess to the villagers who told it by reference to Eliade’s theory of myth. Suppose he said to them something to this effect: “Here’s what you’re doing. You’re defending yourself against the novelty and irreversibility of history and the finality of death by preserving a memory of this young man not as a particular, personal, historical being, but as the mystical, transpersonal hero of a tragedy, fusing the individual with an archetypal category.” If the ethnographer had said this to the villagers, don’t you suppose they would have thought him strange, perhaps a little crazy, just as they thought the elderly intended senile?

I’m arguing that there is a common sense that belongs to positivist ethnographers and a common sense that belongs to Balkan villagers and that they are not the same, though both seem in this case to employ a category we might call matter of fact. But I don’t mean this story as an illustration of incommensurability. I see it rather as an illustration of the perils of translation. I have no doubt that ethnographer and villagers could have sat down and smoked, shared draughts of the local brew, and found commonality. Doubtless there would have been stories for them to share (tales for them to swap), and at some point the conversation could have become like that reported by a Greek folklorist I heard speak years ago as he was traveling in Oklahoma looking for correspondences between native American music and his own native folk ballads. He described a meeting with an elderly Choctaw chief in which he (the folklorist) drummed and sang a song (which he also sang for us). Upon hearing the song, the old chief’s face broke into a thousand smiles, and he exclaimed “Indian song!” “No, Greek song!” countered the scholar. Nevertheless, there had been a meeting across incommensurability. The old chief had found that a foreign song was not Greek to him.

But there’s another lesson. In rejecting our hypothetical ethnographer’s theorizing of their story, the Balkan villagers would have been more right than wrong. It has been a dream of the geisteswissenschaften to construct a metalanguage into which the languages of common sense can be translated, a dictionary of culture like the key to all mythologies that George Eliot parodies in Middlemarch. I personally think this idea is a hangover from the culture of Latin learning, but whether it is or not an English double negative is reducible neither to Latin grammar nor to simple algebra. Resort to the dictionary produces what translators call a trot. Real translation calls upon the same sometimes tedious negotiation required by other human attempts at understanding across cultural boundaries, carried out for the most part at the level of common sense (translation is theoretically impossible, but we translate).

Which brings me to Benedict.

In the essay on relativism to which Dean Knisely refers, the Pope argues against positivist reductionism in much the same way I have here. Reductionist science naively substitutes its own categories for the categories of discourses and phenomena it rediscribes. But Benedict, in this essay, unfortunately does something very similar in claiming that a naive relativism must of necessity be the philosophical foundation of democracy. American democracy is pluralist, not relativist.

However, Benedict’s real target is relativism with respect to religion and ethics. Here, tolerance and freedom are to be mistrusted as the enemies of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, and a distinction between relativism and pluralism is meaningless. Moreover:

In the relativist meaning, to dialogue means to put one’s own position, i.e., one’s faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of the others. Only if I suppose in principle that the other can be as right, or more right than I, can an authentic dialogue take place.

Thus, the very practice of democratic discourse becomes what Benedict calls “[t]he relativist dissolution of Christology, and even more of ecclesiology.”

I almost wish I could take Benedict’s point that reason and faith must inform one another to be the primary argument of this essay, but I can’t. I rather think the point is to defend a traditional understanding of the church, that is the Roman church, against its competitors in modern life: Kantian skepticism, secular democracy, eastern religion, new age philosophy, pragmatism, protestantism (Benedict’s chief exemplar of bad theology is Presbyterian), modernism (as exemplified by Bultman, Barth, et al.), and most particularly liberation theology. He argues in order to confound those whom he takes to be his opponents, but with respect to his own position Benedict does not argue. Rather, he proclaims.

In short, in the revelation of God, he, the living and true One, bursts into our world and also opens the prison of our theories, with whose nets we want to protect ourselves against God’s coming into our lives.

He doesn’t proclaim more than this in the essay on relativism, but he hints at the rest of the proclamation by reference to the dissolution of ecclesiology, and in one of his American homilies, he spells it out entire.

In the exercise of my ministry as the Successor of Peter, I have come to America to confirm you, my brothers and sisters, in the faith of the Apostles (cf. Lk 22:32). I have come to proclaim anew, as Peter proclaimed on the day of Pentecost, that Jesus Christ is Lord and Messiah, risen from the dead, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father, and established as judge of the living and the dead (cf. Acts 2:14ff.). I have come to repeat the Apostle’s urgent call to conversion and the forgiveness of sins, and to implore from the Lord a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church in this country.

This is traditional Papal rhetoric, expressive of solidarity with the ages,2 and the claim to be Peter’s successor is neither accidental nor without special significance for contemporary Americans who for whatever reason do not share the Roman faith. I am remembering a Catholic funeral I attended here in St. Louis recently, in which the priest, just before the offertory, explained that non-Catholics were not welcome at the altar and advised us to remain in our pews and pray for the eventual restoration of God’s church.

Americans lionize celebrities. Benedict has come and gone, having more or less poked his finger in the eye of American public life which just gave him more visibility as a public figure than he is likely to encounter anywhere else in the world. He has articulated a view of the church that recognizes neither my baptism nor Dean Knisely’s ordination. And he has proclaimed again the historic claim of the Roman church uniquely to hold the keys to the kingdom of God. His absolutism is not Kantian, but an absolutist he is; and though he seems to be trying to reinvent himself as Pope by distancing himself from the role he played as John Paul II’s grand inquisitor, he is chiefly concerned, I believe, to proclaim and maintain the authority of the church and particularly the authority of the priesthood, in a time of scandal and other stresses. His apologies to victims of sexual abuse did not criticize any bishop. Indeed, he seemed primarily to be bent upon shaping and refining a theory of American life that gives special prominence to the Roman church.

The readings of today’s Mass invite us to consider the growth of the Church in America as one chapter in the greater story of the Church’s expansion following the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And with respect to the future:

Young people need to be helped to discern the path that leads to true freedom: . . . The challenges confronting us require a comprehensive and sound instruction in the truths of the faith. But they also call for cultivating a mindset, an intellectual “culture”, which is genuinely Catholic, confident in the profound harmony of faith and reason, and prepared to bring the richness of faith’s vision to bear on the urgent issues which affect the future of American society.

In another homily, Benedict decries the diminishment of the church’s authority in American society, “which rightly places a high value on personal freedom.” Personal freedom, that took literally ages to acomplish for ordinary persons like me and even longer for other citizens of my country, a condition whose absence continues to signal death and destruction in the world, one of the chief accomplishments of the Christian west, Benedict dismisses as paltry, even while he seems to praise it, contrasting it with real freedom, “God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free.”

One might dismiss this last claim as conventional sermonizing but for it’s context. Here is a Pope, standing on an American stage yet speaking for the ages; but the message sounds a lot like Richard Neuhaus. It’s impossible to hear it without being aware of the political baggage it carries. I live in a Catholic Archdiocese whose Archbishop has excommunicated two women for having the effrontery to be ordained Roman catholic womenpriests, who has excomunicated the board of a local Polish congregation in a property dispute, who forced a local high school to cancel a scheduled commencement speech by Claire McCaskill, whose daughter was to be in the audience as a graduate, who has threatened to deny communion to John Kerry and other politicians whose views conflict with Catholic teaching. I expect him to be elevated to the college of cardinals any day now.

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1The best single defense of incommensurability I know is Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Renato Rosaldo and Paul Feyerabend have argued persuasively on the other side. See Feyerabend’s review of Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth (Boston, 1993), in Common Knowledge 3 (Fall 1994) 16-22.
2Kathleen Hall Jamieson has written a good deal about Papal rhetoric. Her analysis of the language of Paul VI is especially useful to me here. See “The Metaphoric Cluster in the Rhetoric of Pope Paul VI and Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,” (The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980) 51-72.