MY WAR PERSONALITY: Yes, another quiz. I scored 69, which puts me in "center-right" territory (perilously close to "capitalist stooge," which should amuse my socialist comrades from my younger days). Of course, I always tend to quibble with the questions, which force you to simplify complex issues. Good thing I don't design my own quizzes or the HTML code would probably be several yards long...
DISORDERED AFFECTIONS: That is the title of a new blog by Karen Hall, an "opinionated and frequently perplexed Catholic screenwriter." Karen apparently wrote for M*A*S*H in the 1970s. She also has an inordinate fascination with the Jesuits. Check her out.
WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL:Fr. Jim Tucker has had some very good reflections this week on how to approach Catholics who may wrestle with one aspect or another of the Church's teaching (which I suspect means most of us). Speaking for himself, Fr. Jim cannot recall ever having disagreed with anything the Church teaches. He goes on to say:
I have no idea how common this mindset is, but in a number of us who have it, there is a disproportionate tendency to write off Catholics who struggle as automatically being bad Catholics and fit only for the outer darkness. Steven speaks of uncharitable apologists as being perhaps a greater danger to the Church than the silent doubters sitting in the pews, and I think I agree. I suppose what we need is a more effective strategy for addressing the doubts of the latter and increasing the charity of the former, all the while striving to preserve a unity that is a communion of brothers and sisters, rather than two armies drawn up one against the other on a battlefield.
I think that if I never heard the terms "reactionary," "ultramontaine," "dissenter," and "AmChurch weenie" again I would be a very happy man.
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER: An interesting reflection from a young man who marched at both the March for Life and the anti-war march in Washington, DC. Although supportive of both causes, he wasn't terribly happy with the speakers at either march. I suspect this may be a more common problem than is generally realized. Thanks to Kevin Miller for the link
Pentecost, it is important to note, happened to a group at a meeting, not to an individual alone in the desert. That can be helpful to keep in mind when we tire of meetings, despair of their effectiveness, or resent that they pull us away from important private endeavors. The fact that Pentecost happened at a meeting can also be helpful in keeping us focused on why we are going to all these meetings in the first place.
ORTHODOX? Sociologist James Davidson reviews Colleen Carroll's The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy in this week's Tidings. While he has no quarrel with the individual stories, Davidson argues that survey data do not bear out the claim that young people, taken as a whole, are becoming more religiously and morally conservative. My own experience with ocassional trips to the local shopping mall would seem to support Davidson's view.
UT UNUM SIT:John Allen is focusing on ecumenism this week with a number of bits and pieces on this topic. My favorite bit was a quote from Paul VI at the close of Vatican II that was directed at Protestant and Orthodox Christians who had attended the council:
We are about to separate. The council is ending. Each of you is about to take the road of return to your own home, and we shall be alone once more. Allow me to confide in you this intimate impression: your departure produces a solitude around us unknown to us before the council, and which now saddens us. We should like to see you with us always.
ADOPTION: Two reviewers at Slate are discussing a new book on adoption. Terry Eastland at the Weekly Standard talks about the demand for adoption of kids with special needs, which is larger than many believe.
POLLACK: Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall posts Part 1 of an interview with Ken Pollack, an expert on Iraq who is the author of The Threatening Storm, which I reviewed here several weeks ago. Pollack's take on the Blix report is definitely worth reading.
IT'S CATHOLIC SCHOOLS WEEK over at Amy Welborn's In Between Naps. Amy has posted so many items on this topic--personal reflections, questions to consider, stories, etc.--that I can't possibly link to them all. Just click over and start reading, and make sure to check out some of the comments too.
There is, in fact, no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous. Indeed, Christianity’s founder acknowledged his break with Jewish tradition on this matter from the very outset: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. . . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” God, Jesus argues, loves the wicked, and so must we. In disagreeing, Judaism does not deny the importance of imitating God; Jews hate the wicked because they believe that God despises the wicked as well.
To call this essay thought-provoking is an understatement. I wish I had had this handy when I was writing my reflection on the atonement a couple of weeks ago, because it goes to the heart of one of the points I was trying to make, namely that the moral "goodness" of Jesus' teachings on forgiveness, reconciliation and love of enemies is by no means self-evident. It does not confirm our expectations, it confounds them.
BORN AGAIN:Mark Shea has an interesting post about the different ways in which Catholics and Evangelicals understand the concept of being “born again.” Since Mark was an Evangelical before he converted to Catholicism, he’s in a good position to be able to explain the distinctions.
One of the things that has always impressed me about Evangelical Christianity is the way it helps people who have a nominal Christian upbringing make sense of their adult conversion experiences: “How come, if I was a Christian before, I never felt like this?” The answer that is usually given is that while raised a Christian, the person had not yet accepted Jesus Christ as their “personal” Lord and Savior.
As Mark notes, Catholics are sometimes at a disadvantage in these discussions because we stress the objective character of the Sacrament of Baptism. “The work works,” whether or not we subjectively experience it. The experience of adult conversion or deepening of faith is an unfolding of the graces received in baptism. While I believe this, I freely concede that it can seem a little esoteric.
But in my own life, I have found that the Catholic narrative also works subjectively, in that it helps me make sense of my faith journey. For me, at least, there has never been a moment in which I accepted Jesus Christ. Rather there have been a series of moments, some whose emotional impact was quite great, and others that affected me in different ways. I was once on a retreat with an Evangelical friend who said “I accepted Jesus Christ at the age of 15.” I thought (but did not say) “Well I give myself to Him every morning, but by nightfall I always seem to take myself back again!”
The Catholic narrative understands the life of faith as a journey, a struggle, an adventure, in which there are setbacks and reversals, but in which the Leader of our party is always working to get us back on the right road. There are times when we seem to make no progress at all, and others when we come across stunning vistas that awe us and bring us to tears. We work out our salvation in fear and trembling, but also in joy and excitement.
What my baptism has done for me is in some ways quite mysterious, but at least in one way quite obvious: It has given me a set of traveling companions, a great cloud of witnesses both living and dead who walk with me on the road. There was a time in my life when I had fallen so far behind the party that I had forgotten I was part of it. But the Leader of the party had not forgotten. Looking back, I can see now that He was with me all the time, encouraging me, cajoling me, and also giving me one or two well deserved kicks in the posterior!
To disparage the faith of our youth because it did not yield a “peak” experience is like disparaging the road to Yosemite Valley because it is not Yosemite itself. In this life, at least, we cannot live in Yosemite all the time. For that, we must wait for the end of the journey.
WHERE ARE WE? I think that blogger Joshua Micah Marshall (a.k.a. Talking Points memo) has been one of the most thoughtful commentators on the Iraq situation. He does a great job today summing up where he thinks we are right now. Here's my favorite graf:
We signed on to inspections. Like it or not, we did. It's very hard for us to say the process has run its course. Hard to say primarily since it's not true. That just raises a problem of consistency for the US. The point of going this route is to push the process hard enough that -- in concert with good data from US intelligence agencies -- the inspectors either find something or we get to some point where the Iraqis stand in the doorway of some factory or building and don't let them do their work. Then the process has broken down. There are reasons I've noted above that weigh heavily against waiting. But for the moment I think it leaves us with a problem of logic if not of policy. If we've got evidence from our intelligence sources that will advance the ball and prove our contentions -- and I'm sure we do -- we need to go as far as we can to make it public.
WE SHOULD GIVE A LITTLE MORE, ASK A LITTLE LESS:John Allen recounts some stories of Fr. Diego Lorenzi, an Italian priest who, for 33 days, held one of the most important posts in the Catholic Church, that of secretary to Pope John Paul I. After the pope's death, Lorenzi returned to pastoral work and eventually ended up as the pastor of a parish in Payatas, an extremely poor part the Phillipines. Now living in Venice, Lorenzi is working on an initiative to reduce the incidence of tuberculosis among the people of Payatas. You can find more information (including instructions for sending donations) by clicking on the link above.
THE BIBLE AFTER THE SHOAH:Edward Kessler, Director of director of the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge, offers some reflections about how Jews and Christians can read the scriptures together in the light of the Holocaust.
PARANOID? In this week's Tablet, Clifford Longley tells how his friend recently resigned from the honorary post of Father Christmas in his local Rotary Club. Over the years, the man had been subject to an increasingly intrusive set of measures designed to protect children from pedophiles, including a requirement that a child receiving a gift must stand a short distance away, rather than sitting on Santa's lap in the traditional manner. This year, the man was told that in addition to the existing rules, he would now have to be subject to a background check. This was the last straw. Longley wonders whether panic over pedophilia in the U.K. is rising to the level of paranoia.
Longley's comments cannot be dismissed out of hand. I remember a few years ago there were a rash of reports of ritual sexual abuse occurring at day care centers, which included lurid accusations of Satan worship. Upon further investigation, many of these cases turned out to be the product of the overactive imagination of children combined with aggressive questioning by "therapists" with agendas of their own. Children are still more likely to be sexually or physically abused by a family member or close friend than they are by a stranger.
Longley also cites the recent cases in the U.K. of police prosecution of individuals who have downloaded child pornography, and wonders whether "it is right for the police to search out every aged pop-star or similar public person who may once have paid to look at child porn images, in order to disgrace and shame them for ever." Here, I must disagree with Longley. Passive internet surfing is one thing. Pulling out one's credit card is another thing entirely. The internet has given a terrible impetus to the worldwide child pornography industry which, by its very nature, requires the sexual exploitation of children. Choking off the industry's revenue is an important part of the law enforcement strategy, and this implies that some sanctions need to be in place to deter consumers. But I do agree with Longely that the police need to exercise a certain prudence in these cases, with one-time viewers perhaps treated differently from those who have made it a habit.
We can oust Saddam Hussein all by ourselves. But we cannot successfully rebuild Iraq all by ourselves. And the real prize here is a new Iraq that would be a progressive model for the whole region. That, for me, is the only morally and strategically justifiable reason to support this war. The Bush team dare not invade Iraq simply to install a more friendly dictator to pump us oil. And it dare not simply disarm Iraq and then walk away from the nation-building task.
WITH AUTHORITY:Fr. Ron Rolheiser has an interesting reflection this week on ministering with authority. He notes that one of the things that people said about Jesus was that he spoke "with authority." But we often misunderstand the idea of authority, linking it either with ecclesiastical governance or the ability to write or speak, as Rolheiser puts it, "with brilliance, scholarship, or doctrinal accuracy." But real authority lies deeper than this:
People will recognize us as speaking with authority only when they sense that, like Jesus, we are under divine authority ourselves, that our message is not our own, that our actual lives stand behind the message, that our words are meant to reveal God and not ourselves, that we love others enough to give up protecting ourselves, that our real concern is God's kingdom and not how we impress others, that we consider the community bigger than ourselves, and that we are willing to sweat blood rather than get bitter or walk away.
NO HOAX: Conservative writer Michael Fumento takes issue with some of his fellow conservatives who dismiss Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as some kind of epiphenomenon of cultural liberalism. Fumento marshals the considerable medical evidence that shows the disorder is real and treatable.
