For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world. If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. Yet these people are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For while they live among his works, they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful. Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things? (Wisd. 13:1–9)

These words are prophetically relevant to those today who investigate the world but fail to find its author. Note that the evidence of the creator to which this passage points consists of phenomena that even ID proponents would agree have good scientific explanations: “fire,” “wind,” “swift air,” “the circle of the stars,” “turbulent water,” and “luminaries of heaven.” The Letter of Clement (circa a.d. 97), one of the oldest surviving Christian documents outside the New Testament, speaks of God’s “ordering of His whole creation” by pointing, again, to natural phenomena:

The heavens, as they revolve beneath His government, do so in quiet submission to Him. The day and the night run the course He has laid down for them, and neither of them interferes with the other. Sun, moon, and the starry choirs roll on in harmony at His command, none swerving from his appointed orbit. Season by season the teeming earth, obedient to His will, causes a wealth of nourishment to spring forth for man and beast and every living thing upon its surface, making no demur and no attempt to alter even the least of His decrees. Laws of the same kind sustain the fathomless deeps of the abyss and the untold regions of the netherworld. Nor does the illimitable basin of the sea, gathered by the operations of His hand into its various different centers, overflow at any time the barriers encircling it, but does as He has bidden it. . . . The impassable Ocean and all the worlds that lie beyond it are themselves ruled by the like ordinances of the Lord. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter succeed one another peaceably; the winds fulfill their punctual duties, each from its own quarter, and give no offence; the ever-flowing streams created for our well-being and enjoyment offer their breasts unfailingly for the life of man; and even the minutest of living creatures mingle together in peaceful accord. Upon all of these the great Architect and Lord of the universe has enjoined peace and harmony.

The emphasis in early Christian writings was not on complexity, irreducible or otherwise, but on the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in the world that God had made. As science advances, it brings this beautiful order ever more clearly into view. Every photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope, every picture from the ocean’s depths, every discovery in subatomic physics, shows it forth. As Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “God [has] manifested himself in the formation of every part of the world, and daily presents himself to public view, in such manner, that they cannot open their eyes without being constrained to behold him.” And, “[W]ithersoever you turn your eyes, there is not an atom of the world in which you cannot behold some brilliant sparks at least of his glory. . . . You cannot at one view take a survey of this most ample and beautiful machine [the universe] in all its vast extent, without being completely overwhelmed with its infinite splendor” [emphasis mine]. Note that “atoms of the world” are not irreducibly complex, nor is “every part of the world.” Irreducible complexity has never been the central principle of traditional natural theology.

But whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.

The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.

None of this is to say that the conclusions the ID movement draws about how life came to be and how it evolves are intrinsically unreasonable or necessarily wrong. Nor is it to deny that the ID movement has been treated atrociously and that it has been lied about by many scientists. The question I am raising is whether this quixotic attempt by a small and lightly armed band to overthrow “Darwinism” and bring about a new scientific revolution has accomplished anything good. It has had no effect on scientific thought. Its main consequence has been to strengthen the general perception that science and religion are at war.

Cui bono? Only those people whose religious doctrines entail either Young Earth creationism or a rejection of common descent. Such people already and necessarily were in a state of war with modern science and have no choice but to fight that war to the bitter end. Many of them see in the ID movement a useful ally in that war (as the Dover trial illustrated), despite the fact that the ID movement does not deny common descent or the age of the earth. Other religious people, however, have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by the ID movement’s frontal assault on well-defended redoubts of modern science—an assault that has come to resemble the Charge of the Light Brigade.

I suspect that some religious people have embraced the ID movement’s arguments because they want “scientific” answers to the scientific atheists, and they know of no others. But there are plenty of ways to make a case for the reasonableness of religious belief that can be persuasive to many in the scientific world. Such a case has been made by a growing number of research scientists who are Christian believers, such as John Polkinghorne, Owen Gingerich, Francis Collins, Peter E. Hodgson, Michal Heller, Kenneth R. Miller, and Marco Bersanelli. I have addressed many audiences myself using arguments similar to theirs and have had scientists whom I know to be of firm atheist convictions tell me that they came away with more respect for the religious position. Religion has a significant number of friends (and potential friends) in the scientific world. The ID movement is not creating new ones.

Stephen M. Barr is professor of physics at the University of Delaware and author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and A Student’s Guide to Natural Science.

On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.

And then there is the Scout Motto ("Be Prepared") and the 12 point Scout Law which includes the politically incorrect admonition to be reverent: "A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others."

Such an earnest and irony-free worldview is naturally antithetical to the South Park-style mock-the-world moronity that pervades the culture. In a society that combines libertarian Me-ism with a liberal nanny state that suckles "men without chests," it is not surprising that the ranks of Boy Scouts are dwindling (Scouting is down 11 percent over the last decade). But we should be cheerful that an institution where self-sacrifice and manly virtues are encouraged manages to survive at all.

Fortunately, Scouts and their handbook remain what good conservative institutions should be: deeply, irredeemably, and unapologetically anachronistic.

Joe Carter is the web editor for First Things

***

All this journeying to, studying about, teaching, observing, listening to, learning from, writing, and speaking about our nation’s black ancestors pushed me, in urgent ways, toward being a voting contributor to and celebrator of the special Barack Obama moment that has made him the first African American to hold our nation’s highest office. By email early on the morning after our historic election, I received a beautiful note from a beautiful former student. It included these words: “I never dreamed in my lifetime that this could have happened. . . . All the pioneers who sacrificed for our cause are no doubt rejoicing tonight. . . . I wish I could be in your class to see if your students realize just what occurred tonight. Realizing what a giant step we made as a nation tonight. Now we must pray that Obama will be able to do some of the things that he has promised. That this trust and belief that we have given to him, he will not let us down.”

The problem, for me, is that my education included something that, apparently, my students’ doesn’t. I appear to have been taught something, in the deepest of ways, that seems no longer operative in our political life, where we cut and trim and compromise and rationalize in what we think are our own best interests, and that seems increasingly less operative in the education we give to our children. I was told, in so many ways across my bringing-up years, that under all circumstances I should hold human life to be a sacred gift from God—that our bodies are (how quaint and odd a thing to say today) the “Temples of the Holy Ghost.” Respect for human life is the fundamental law that brooks no compromise. It is the line never to cross.

Looking back at when the joy and sureness of youth protected me from worrisome musings, I was less sure, in specific terms, than I am today about what that “fundamental, no crossing the line” respect for human life might mean. As I measure things now, in the approaching twilight of my years, I have come to see in those youthful lessons that the teaching that life is a sacred gift from God is where my love of life today—in all of its wonder and craziness and, yes, even awfulness—has it base, its roots, its grounding.

“Treasure life!” is what I hear and feel from deep down inside of me. Celebrate life in birthdays, in dazzling sunsets and sunrises, in the beautiful colors of fall—and in the hugs and kisses with the lady I love, the children we have reared together, and the grand grands those children have given us. Oh, yes—and in good conversations, and talk about baseball and history, and long, wonderful, hazy, crazy days of summer on the beach—and in the wonderfulness of walking a golf course with good friends.

All that affirmation—and so much more—will always be there because its roots go deep into a childhood and a “good” education that warns me, if I dare consider thinking otherwise, that I can never be a part of denying that love and that life-affirming possibility to anyone else, no matter how hard I (or you, or anyone) might think that person will have it—or how hard you might think that person’s addition to the “Temple of the Holy Ghost” ranks might make it for you.

A persistent voice sounds a warning that demands to be heeded: Never side with those who do cross the line. That “never side” warning was deepened as I studied and read and taught and wrote about so many places in history where an awful price was paid by those who were categorized and denied—and by those who did the categorizing and denying.

***

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, to candidate Barack Obama, at the Democratic Candidates Compassion Forum, April 13, 2008: “Senator, do you personally believe that life begins at conception? And if not, when does it begin?”

Senator Obama: “This is something that I have not, I think, come to a firm resolution on. I think it’s very hard to know what that means, when life begins. Is it when a cell separates? Is it when the soul stirs? So I don’t presume to know the answer to that question. What I know, as I’ve said before, is that there is something extraordinarily powerful about potential life and that that has a moral weight to it that we take into consideration when we’re having these debates.”

***

But, Mr. President, your “potential” is our “real.” And wasn’t that “real” true on the most personal levels for you, too? Were you only “potential” in your mother’s womb, becoming “real” only after your ninth month, outside the womb, when you were as dependent on the support of your mother as you were through your first nine months of life inside her womb? If your potential could be aborted inside the womb, why not outside as well?

All I could do at the moment when it became clear who had won the presidency, and all I can do now, in this month of listening to ancestors, is to shake my head and wonder over the surprises life holds for us and pray that our president will not be able to do all the things he has promised—that, instead, what his model of a president, Abraham Lincoln, referred to as “the better angels” of our shared, flawed, and limited human nature will prevail.

Among those better angels are our Black History Month ancestors, “all the pioneers who have sacrificed for our cause.” And so, like my beautiful student, I, too, now turn to her ancestors, who are our president’s, too—and who I think I have the right to say are mine, as well—to find the sustenance I need in what, for me, are troubled waters.

In May of 1857—in the aftermath of the awful Dred Scott decision that distorted the Constitution by finding legal justification for the institution of slavery—one of the most notable and revered of the ancestors took to the public platform to take issue with the recent Supreme Court decision. In a powerful philippic, Frederick Douglass asserted that “not what Moses allowed for the hardness of heart, but what God requires, ought to be the rule.” The Constitution, he went on to say, “knows all the human inhabitants of this country as ‘the people.’ It makes . . . no discrimination in favor of, or against, any class of the people, but is fitted to protect and preserve the rights of all, without reference to color, size, or any physical peculiarities [emphasis added]. . . . When this is done, . . . liberty, the glorious birthright of our common humanity, will become the inheritance of all the inhabitants [emphasis added] of this highly favored country.”

A half-century and a bit more after Frederick Douglass’ demanding words were realized in the highest law of the land, in the constitutional revolution of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to our governing document, another strong ancestor voice told us that she was her “mother’s daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.” The great educator Mary McLeod Bethune did her best, through a long lifetime of providing opportunity to her boys and girls, to make that statement a reality in far more ways than anyone could have imagined when she issued it as a sacred promise.

I wonder what Mary Bethune would say today about the incidence of African-American women having abortions. A recent estimate reports that of the 40 million abortions in the United States since 1973, some 30 percent are of African Americans, even though blacks are only 12 percent of the population. One of every three abortions in the United States is performed on a black woman. Three of every five African-American women will abort a child. More than 1,400 African-American babies are killed each day in abortions. Statistics show that between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched in the United States. Every three days that number is passed by the number of “Ma Bethune’s Negro boys and girls” who are denied the chance for life. Had the 13 million black babies aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973 been allowed to live, today’s African-American population of 37 million could reasonably be projected to exceed 50 million. In other words, today’s potential African-American population has been reduced 25 percent by abortions.

***

So what are we are left with as we watch our president take us into uncharted waters, steering the ship of state in directions that some of us can only recoil at? Ours is a faith tradition that says, “Argue against the wrong act itself, especially so deep a wrong as happens when one champions the abortion option—a wounding wrong for the baby killed, and a wounding wrong for the mother who chooses death rather than life.” This is the kind of “religious” thinking that once was labeled as the “opiate of the masses.” Today it has been replaced by an opiate that says, “Do whatever you think you need to do for yourself and for the little one you carry in your womb, even if it means killing that little one whom you couldn’t possibly support in the way you should support him or her. Because, you see, there is nothing more than this life, and certainly no final judgment to be made about the doing we do here. Our destination is simply a hole in the ground—or ashes scattered to the winds.”

But we are also left with the ancestors—with the great Frederick, and the indomitable “Ma” Bethune, and the angry Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, who, in 1889, a time when despair easily could have been embraced, told us “to wait and pray, and look for a better day, for God still lives and the Lord of Hosts Reigns.”

And so, finally, we can only sing—especially in this month of celebrating the struggle through bleak times to today’s promise on our nation’s racial front of “thank God Almighty, free at last”—as our ancestors would have wanted us to sing and as our brother Martin and our sisters Fannie Lou and Rosa told us to sing. We can only sing that deep in our hearts, we do believe; and that we all—those who stand where we stand on what, for us, is the central civil rights issue of our day, and those, as well, whom we dearly love but who stand someplace else—that we all, someday, in spite of all our differences, will stand together where our common destination lies, and where love, indeed, will prevail. On that day, pray God, we, all together, shall have overcome and finally shall be “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, . . . free at last.”

Dr. Lawrence D. Hogan is senior professor of history at Union County College, Cranford, New Jersey. He is the author of A Black National News Service: Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press, and Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball.

Advisers to the bishops’ conference identified problems with the Equality Bill at an early stage. They saw it as loosening the exemption in 2003’s Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, granted to religious organisations and entitling them to exclude individuals from certain posts on the grounds of sexual orientation. The exemption was inserted “so as to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion’s followers.” According to the National Secular Society, which sent a complaint to the European Commission’s Equal Opportunities Commissioner, it licensed discrimination by organised religion on the grounds of sexual orientation.

The Government had also heard reports that religious groups were using the exemption to exclude people from “non-religious” jobs such as finance directors and cleaners. It introduced an amendment to the Equality Bill stating that individuals could be excluded on the grounds of sexual orientation when “the employment wholly or mainly involves (a) leading or assisting in the observation of liturgical or ritualistic practices of the religion, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others).” The Churches insisted this new wording significantly narrowed the scope of the exemption. Peers agreed last week when they voted down the amendment.

Advocates for the Equality Bill went predictably ballistic when the amendment was voted down, denounced the pope for his interference in the affairs of another state, and promised demonstrations during the papal visit next September. But as Jonathan Chaplin, a professor at Cambridge University, points out in a recent riposte in the perhaps unlikely venue of the secular-liberal Guardian, the objections are absurd:

All British citizens properly possess the prima facie individual right not to be discriminated against – in matters like employment, housing and social services – on grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation. This is because these involuntary markers of identity are completely irrelevant to such matters. I said “prima facie” because even here there exist widely recognised and uncontroversial exceptions, often arising from the rights of organisations. A rape crisis centre surely has the right to discriminate against men when hiring its counselling staff (perhaps any staff). An African-Caribbean community centre obviously can't be compelled by law to hire a white guy like me as its director. The Labour party is evidently entitled to discriminate on ideological grounds in hiring its research staff.

These are all examples of what the law calls a “genuine occupational requirement” (GOR). The idea is simple and compelling: every independent civil society organisation has a prima facie right to maintain its identity and mission by hiring staff who will support the distinctive purposes of the organisation and uphold its raison d'être. This isn't a “privilege,” as is often tendentiously suggested, but merely a condition of meaningful self-government. Why then cry foul when religious organisations exercise their right to invoke the GOR provision? Why single them out and deny them the same rights enjoyed by others? Yet when they claim such a right, critics … routinely accuse them of seeking to claim “the right to discriminate.” But this is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy concealing a conceptual sleight of hand. Of course churches are defending their right to discriminate in hiring, but this is nothing other than the right [any] own organisation would claim.

Professor Chaplin’s remarks are obviously true, so obvious that they should, as the expression says, “go without saying.” Unfortunately, though, they need to be said; and that fact alone only goes to show how tenacious all religious bodies must be if they are to succeed in fighting off the real aim of such legislation—which is nothing other than legalized discrimination (in the invidious sense) against the free exercise of religion.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, the seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

The would-be censors are on the wrong track. Instead of trying to silence an opponent, advocates for allowing women to make their own decisions about whether to have a child should be using the Super Bowl spotlight to convey what their movement is all about: protecting the right of women like Pam Tebow to make their private reproductive choices.

Curiously, perhaps the most thoughtful treatment of the topic appeared in the sports pages of the Washington Post, where sports columnist Sally Jenkins takes a baseball bat and whacks around the old-line feminist organizations who’ve attacked the ad. Jenkins herself, she says, is no supporter of the pro-life cause, but she’s irritated that the ostensible defenders of choice are determined to tell her what to think:

Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

NOW and NARAL purportedly protect women from those who would tell them what they can and cannot do with their bodies—and all along, these organizations tell those women what thoughts they can and cannot consider. Talk about invasive. No wonder Jenkins balks:

Tebow himself is an inescapable fact: Abortion doesn’t just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives, Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors, Little Leaguers—who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term. And their stories are every bit as real and valid as the stories preferred by NOW. . . . If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.

Meghan Duke is a junior fellow at First Things.

This coarsening follows a trajectory that started with the 1982 Broadway show that took a slender thread of Fellini’s narrative (in which Italian filmmaker Guido Contini—Fellini’s alter ego—retreats to a spa to escape his hectic life while plotting out his next movie) and wove it into a narcissistic showbiz tapestry. It became a playboy’s revue displaying the comical, demanding women who populate Guido’s life more than a personal, remorseful confession.

Broadway emphasized the heaving breasts and leggy contortions of Guido’s harem, and the movie repeats the same grind-house choreography with its cast of current minor celebrities: Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Fergie (the film’s only true singer, from the pop group Black Eyed Peas), and a ghastly waxwork legend, Sophia Loren. Few of them really sing or dance, and none are box-office stars; their presence merely flashes the distractions of sex. It’s a big-screen striptease, while Fellini’s original went into the complexities of eroticism and how sexuality revealed Guido’s convoluted psyche—from mother-fixated boy to compulsive womanizer.

Yet Fellini’s masterpiece, one of the seminal movies of the second half of the twentieth century, explored the primary moral predicaments of the age. Right after his 1961 international sensation La Dolce Vita identified the modern decadent elite (giving the world the word paparazzi), Fellini ventured into a more personal assessment through 8½’s introspective concept. This furthered the consideration of malaise after the Second World War—a subject that preoccupied the era’s art films: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, and Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.

Guido, memorably embodied by Marcello Mastroianni, became the conduit for that period’s assorted peccadilloes and insecurities. Fellini, a former newspaper caricaturist and Catholic manqué, combined satire with a brooding, serious undercurrent. This distinguished his vision from those other high-art, left-leaning critiques. But Nine makes light of Guido’s private agonies about faith, inspiration, guilt, and domestic fidelity. Day-Lewis dons Fellini’s iconic fedora and Marcello’s rakish shades, but Nine only goes through the motions. Nine traipses through Guido’s turmoil with a blithe disregard for the protagonist’s natural, recognizable misgivings and ambivalence. Its brazenness and superficiality manifest a changed—trivialized—social mood.

8½ reflected the moral disorientation that loomed over the world’s conscience after Hiroshima; Nine’s concept derives from the sexual revolution that occurred after Fellini’s film premiered—including the subsequent women’s movement, which is perversely acknowledged in Nine’s beauty-pageant format. (Fellini had anticipated women’s lib with his next feature, Juliet of the Spirits.)

The central dilemma, in which Guido (Day-Lewis) must hide his mistress (Cruz) from his visiting wife (Cotillard), lacks bomb-era gravity. Fellini’s film respected the sanctity of marriage but realistically faced mankind’s weaknesses, looking candidly at how a man and his wife’s mutual loyalty are beset by temptation and confusion. In Nine, fidelity is old hat, an impediment to a man’s erotic license and restricting to a woman’s autonomy. By depicting women as satellite ecdysiasts to Guido’s ego, Nine panders to the Catholic-manqué feminism of the Madonna era—a further coarsening of Fellini’s original insights about spiritual anxiety.

To vogue about sexual freedom in the face of personal responsibility misrepresents the worldliness that Guido feels compelled to scrutinize to make sense of his creative urge as more than just an extension of his libido. What’s still profoundly impressive about 8½ is that its extraordinary visual design—sensationally high-contrast, black-and-white photography by the great Gianni Di Venanzo and fantasy/realist sequences that are accomplished with musically rhythmed editing—draws a viewer ever deeper into the labyrinth of Guido’s conscience. (See the ravishing Criterion DVD.) His outer world is reflected in his tormented inner world. His autobiographical reconsideration of life’s desires and mistakes conforms to the road-to-Damascus Christian parallel that Fellini had explored previously in such films as The Miracle, La Strada, and Nights of Cabiria—and especially in La Dolce Vita, with its famous opening gambit: a Second Coming joke in which a statue of Christ flies over the supine bodies of lazy sunbathers on the Mediterranean.

That gag was paralleled in 8½’s often quoted opening scene, in which Guido, stuck in a traffic jam, feels he’s suffocating until he rises out of the sunroof of his limousine and floats above the throng, delivered from his troubles in a burst of both cinematic rapture and Freudian portent.

That primal symbol of the desire to escape has received dutiful homage in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, and even REM’s music video “Everybody Hurts.” Screenwriter Michael Tolkin, who directed the eschatological melodrama The Rapture (and wrote Robert Altman’s Hollywood moral-murder mystery The Player), supplies Nine’s most Felliniesque—and ironic—moment when Guido is told “your imagination has no moral training; the imagination is God’s garden.” But now Guido’s fixations feel immediately less serious because the widely shared, ecumenical sense of predicament and resolution that derives from the common bond of Judeo-Christian morality is not central to the contemporary, nonintellectual fashion that Nine patronizes.

This diminishment is not just thematic, it is also aesthetic. 8½ was made during the period cinema scholars call “high modernism,”—when a pop artist like Fellini could dare title a movie the way a painter titled an art project. ( 8½ refers to the internationally celebrated director’s total output at the time—atop six features and three shorts. It also ingeniously indicates that Fellini himself was admittedly “a work in progress—God’s not finished with me yet.”)

Like modernist artworks that reveal their construction as part of their narrative, 8½ exposes behind-the-scenes film production to disclose its process and analyze its spiritual origins. Almost fifty years later, Nine renders Guido’s memories and fantasies banal through assorted literal-minded scenes—on a soundstage, in the streets, on a proscenium. Flashy montage adds tritely modern style that mirrors the hectic, gaudy surfaces of today’s entertainment-crazed, media-mad culture. 8½ had no “story” in the conventional sense, but Fellini’s montage reproduced Guido’s movement of mind just as Resnais’ Marienbad used montage to replicate the electric synapses of thought and memory.

In Nine, those artistic breakthroughs have been re-conjugated from innovative spiritual exploration into oversimplified showbiz extravaganzas. Rob Marshall, a television director and former choreographer who broke through to the Hollywood mainstream with his 2002 film Chicago, has a pedestrian, television-oriented technique. He keeps reverting to the stage-show format from which Fellini liberated cinema—as did the great movie-musical directors Minnelli, Kelly, Donen, Clair, Ophuls, and Fosse, all of whom eradicated proscenium perspective. Putting women on display on stage as Marshall does actually denies mental, cultural, religious, erotic obsession. Fact is, 8½ wasn’t about women but about life’s complexity, the elusiveness of certainty, and the difficulty of human fidelity. Even Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz—a bitterly secular adaptation of 8½’s style and themes—maintained a larger view than that of its self-pitying egocentric protagonist.

Because Marshall’s filmmaking lacks musicality, Nine gets close to 8½’s profundity only in the brief grotto scene in which a priest asks, “Are you Catholic?” Guido answers, “I’m trying.” The priest responds, “Try harder.” While Fellini pondered the possibilities of sin and redemption, Nine’s all-singing, all-dancing, all-laughing remake proffers a mindless celebration of capital S (as in silly) sin. In every way, it removes the significance of man’s self-questioning moral consciousness and substitutes in its place ephemeral, conventional showbiz. For Fellini, Guido’s search for meaning didn’t celebrate show business; it contemplated the soul.

Armond White, film critic of the New York Press , is chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle.

In seeking to refocus our attention on the miseries of health care, foreign wars, and political discontent, the once pragmatic Obama has evolved into a true downer. Most recently, he has gone so far as to scale back our nation’s once-inspiring effort to slip earth’s surly bonds.

Despite early reports that President Obama would maintain George W. Bush’s plan to return humans to the Moon by 2020, it now seems clear Obama’s NASA will bear little resemblance to the organization’s eventful past. Obama’s plans to privatize space travel—$6 billion to fund commercial space taxis, for example—are intriguing, but still leave us without the thrill and sense of direction bestowed by space programs of past decades, especially JFK’s 1962 pledge (honored by his nemesis, Richard Nixon) to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. No space-exploration plans have been left on the table, and Obama has essentially turned over our fate in the space race to the private sector.

If there were ever a valid comparison between our president and John F. Kennedy—one that Obama and his advisers aspire to draw—the analogy has been shattered once and for all by this decision. Even with an ambitious agenda and personal qualities many leaders covet. Whatever his weaknesses, Kennedy gave America an unmistakable sense of direction when he entered the United States into the space race against the Russians, putting before everyone’s countenance a goal that was not only novel but outlandish—and seemingly impossible.

Meanwhile, president Obama has made nostalgic mention of the past and ethereal hopes for the future, but his choices do not reflect the mind of a believer in true progress—that is, progress toward a goal. “What the administration calls a ‘bold new initiative,’” The New York Times reported this morning in its wrap-up of Obama’s scrapped plans for a return to the moon, “does not spell out a next destination or timetable for getting there.”

But what’s the point of mentioning “progress” without proffering a goal to progress toward? With one year passed after the conclusion of Obama’s campaign to inspire voters with rhetoric and promises, the droning hope-and-change mantra has not yet subsided. But Obama’s most deeply held beliefs remain an enigma, and the notion of change remains a word—not a clear vision of the road ahead.

Indeed, Kennedy did not promote the abstract ideals that pervade Obama’s agenda. Rather, he acted in a way that compelled America to choose hope and to embrace change, with an agenda that directed us toward both: The space program served as a paradigm for government initiatives with an identifiable end point. The moon was just one of many destinations set before the nation.

While Obama always seems to direct attention to himself, Kennedy skillfully deflected attention, even when announcing “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Kennedy’s boldness and youthful recklessness did not bridge his distance from the mission. At no point did he ask the American people to place trust in him personally. Any American success in space would be “by the people and for the people,” as modern progressives are so fond of saying. Incidentally, any failure would not rest on Kennedy’s shoulders—his was the role of cheerleader, not fall guy.

Obama’s unrelenting self-reference has yielded many cringe-worthy moments. While evidently still impressed by his successful election, the president still makes constant reference to the difficult circumstances he inherited. But most of Obama’s disastrously self-referential moments could be avoided by mere turns of phrase, making their deliberacy all the more alarming. Distant and cold, Obama just can’t pull off the sheer gratuity of Kennedy’s speech, as when he answered his own rhetorical questions about the wisdom of a trip to the moon in his initial space-race challenge at Rice Stadium in September of 1962:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

Many years ago the great British explorer, George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said: "Because it is there."

In what is ostensibly a purely rhetorical—not principled—argument for a moon visit, Kennedy’s boldness made a powerful point. Human nature, it seems, is most rightly ordered when the mind is fixed on a goal. Aimlessness—the great torture of socialist countries—is as un-American as the Soviet flag.

While Obama is oft accused of being elitist, or for that matter, Gnostic about his inner goals, Kennedy took ownership of the words he read, and of the continuation of American history. Obama uses flowery rhetoric to gloss over difficult realities.

Kennedy did quite the opposite when he declared that we chose the moon as a goal “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

Goals are always before us—the successful completion of work each day, a meaningful relationship with our family members, and, say, saving money. Achieving those goals is hard, but judging their distance from our grasp is not. Unless Obama sets before the nation a tangible goal of the likes of an adventuresome space program, he will continue to be seen as a directionless president. He has nowhere to go but up.

Kevin Staley-Joyce is a junior fellow at First Things.

Critics tend to demonize the living and glorify the dead. There is a little bit of the latter going on in James’s review in particular. If we ignore the hyperbole, however, his main point—that Updike was indeed a serious poet, albeit a minor one because of the relative sparseness of his poetry—is correct. Yet, it seems to me, James fails to identify the right domain of Updike’s accomplishment. He hangs his hat on the few “serious” poems that exhibit “all the linguistic vigour of the prose that had made his novels compulsory reading.” This is misplaced to the extent that it dismisses Updike’s light verse and occasional poems, and it is in these poems, I believe, that Updike’s true poetic accomplishment is located.

Technically, the term “occasional” in poetry refers to poems written for a specific, often official, occasion. There is a sense, however, in which all art is occasional. All art is grounded in the particularities of human experience. This is one of the things that makes art art and not philosophy. For Sir Philip Sidney, for example, poetry embodies virtues and vices in finite situations. It does not define love in the abstract. It shows us what love looks like. For Rainer Maria Rilke, poetry names objects of experience—“house, / bridge, well, gate”—and provides them with a fullness of being; for Boris Pasternak, poetry is an expression of what life feels like “now.” Even Wallace Stevens, who stated that poetry “must be abstract,” cannot escape the particularities of his experience. His poems are full of things—snow, blackbirds, oranges—and sounds.

Yet, while certain poets embrace the “occasional” nature of artistic expression, including the everyday, others wish to escape it altogether and express disdain for the light, naive verse of the “everyday” poets. No doubt a lot of sentimental, metered prose wrongly passes for poetry today. So too does a lot of obfuscation. Indeed, if “difficult” poetry is the natural result of a powerful mind examining the complex problems of the world, it can have other less noble, less intellectually compelling sources, as well.

One of those sources, as Czeslaw Milosv argues in “Against Incomprehensible Poetry,” is the rejection of the personal and transcendent God of Christianity and the rise of the poet as a priest or prophet of Art. Following the work of the French Symbolists, certain poets produced inscrutable texts to both create and confirm their superior position above the masses. Understood in this way, poetry does not represent the longings, fears, virtues, and vices of the human mind but gives form to the primordial, hitherto unexpressed “force” at work in the world. These forms can, in turn, be scrutinized for their residue of “spiritual sentiment,” to use Georges Braque’s term. This effort, Milosv argues, quoting Ortega y Gasset, entailed a “dehumanization of art”—a movement away from drama, emotion, and feeling and toward radical formal experimentation.

Whether Milosv is correct or not regarding the influence of Symbolism, there is no doubt that there has been a “dehumanization of art.” If for the Symbolists the poet was a priest, today he is a grammarian. Having rejected the notion of a transcendent, moral God, a number of modern scientists and artists reduce human nature to its constituent parts. Consequently, the material of the lyric—love, virtue, vice, and all other “qualia”—are reduced to the firings of neurons. This often leaves the poet little choice but to use what is left of meaning in language to create puns, jokes, and wordplays by the tossing of a coin—to become, in other words, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

It is against this “dehumanization of the arts” that Updike’s occasional poetry can, in part, be understood. Without overstating the case, the treatment of everyday situations and objects of which the “I” of the poet is the center can be understood as an effort to maintain a sense of self in the arts. Faced by the attacks of a secularized modern science against all that is human, Updike’s occasional poems and light verse function as a “testament of the self,” to borrow Frank O’Hara’s term, rightly pointing to the irreducibility of human emotions and feeling while, at the same time, highlighting the self’s multiple and seemingly inescapable contradictions.

Updike’s Endpoint is full of the finite particulars of modern existence. In the long title poem, which begins on the poet’s birthday in 2002 and ends the month before his death, Updike charts his attachment to the material world—an attachment that is both exhilarating and empty, powerful and fleeting. The final line of the opening section of the poem states the central motif of the volume: “Birthday, death day—what day is not both?” Everywhere the poet looks—from Connecticut winters, news of Payne Stewart’s death, and malls in Tucson to the architecture of St. Petersburg and thunderstorms in Vermont—he is reminded of both the fullness of life and its impermanence. The arthritis of his left hand reminds him of his hand’s relatively leisurely life compared to that of his right and the irony that it must be the first to suffer the foretaste of death. He recalls how Frankie Laine’s voice in the sweet shop of his youth “soared, assuring us of finding our / desire,” which, of course, would be both fulfilled and unfilled. The expanse and silence of snow is both peaceful and frightening, and the golden leaves are both strikingly beautiful and dead, piled up “demanding disposal.”

One of the ironies, however, of establishing the contours of feeling is that as one’s sense of self increases, death becomes all the more unbearable:

I settle in, to that decade in which,
I’m told, most people die. Then, flying south,
I wonder why houses in their patterned crowds
look white, whatever their earthbound colors,
from the air. Golf courses, nameless rivers.

The pilot takes us down Manhattan’s spine—
the projects, Riverside cathedral, Midtown
bristling up like some coarse porcupine.
We seem too low, my palms begin to sweat.
The worst can happen, we know it from the news.
Age I must, but die I would rather not.

As the poet gains altitude and is removed from the “Raw days” of winter, the world below him loses its distinction. All the houses are white. Golf courses and woods become like rivers and the sea. Yet, as the plane descends and the world gains in detail—”Manhattan’s spine” first becomes visible, followed rapidly by “Riverside cathedral”—fear grips the poet: “We seem too low, my palms begin to sweat.” It is this fear, brought on by the sudden detail of the world, with which Updike struggles throughout the book. “For life’s a shabby subterfuge,” he writes, “And death is real, and dark, and huge. / The shock of it will register / Nowhere but where it will occur.”

However, rather than escape this fear via abstraction (which is, perhaps, another source of obfuscation in poetry), he confronts it head on, names it with all the detail his mind can summon, and, in the end, turns to the faith of his childhood:

The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

“Surely,” of course, can be both an expression of hope and doubt. Here, however, it seems that hope wins. For it is while looking back at his life and seeing God’s “goodness and mercy” that the poet looks toward the darkness of death and in faith speaks the words, “my life, forever.” Like Saint Augustine, perhaps, so with Updike: The restlessness of youth, of Rabbit, is replaced with a hope to inherit that final rest, that fullness of existence forever.

Thus, while light verse and occasional poems can be just that—light and occasional—in the work of most poets, in the hands of the best poets—and Updike is perhaps one of them—they become the tools of serious philosophical, ethical, and even theological work. If, as Geoffrey Hill claims, the poet’s excavation of the obscure meanings of words is a means of pointing us toward that “terrible aboriginal calamity,” so, too, does Updike’s use of words point us toward what is everywhere obvious, but often ignored—that life is both a “passionate sweetness” and a “desolation,” evoking both dreams of the afterlife in “Acres of gold leaf, feathered into place” and nightmares of a never-ending death.

Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana College.

Slowly now the evening changes his garments
held for him by a rim of ancient trees;
you gaze: and the landscape divides and leaves you
one sinking and one rising toward the stars.

And you are left, to none belonging wholly,
not so dark as a silent house, nor quite
so surely pledged unto eternity
as that which grows to star and climbs the night.

To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.

Philosophers and psychologists have offered a lot of different theories about the nature of the human person. But few have captured the human condition better than Rilke does in those twelve lines. We are creatures made for heaven; but we are born of this earth. We love the beauty of this world; but we sense there is something more behind that beauty. Our longing for that “something” pulls us outside of ourselves.

Striving for “something more” is part of the greatness of the human spirit, even when it involves failure and suffering. In the words of Venerable John Paul II, something in the artist, and by extension in all human beings, “mirrors the image of God as Creator.” We have an instinct to create beauty and new life that comes from our own Creator. Yet we live in a time when, despite all of our achievements, the brutality and indifference of the world have never been greater. The truth is that cruelty is also the work of human hands. So if we are troubled by the spirit of our age, if we really want to change the current course of our culture and challenge its guiding ideas—and this is the theme of our session here today—then we need to start with the author of that culture. That means examining man himself.

Culture exists because man exists. Men and women think, imagine, believe and act. The mark they leave on the world is what we call culture. In a sense, that includes everything from work habits and cuisine to social manners and politics. But I want to focus in a special way on those elements of culture that we consciously choose to create; things like art, literature, technology, music and architecture. These things are what most people think of when they first hear the word “culture.” And that makes sense, because all of them have to do with communicating knowledge that is both useful and beautiful. The task of an architect, for example, is to translate abstract engineering problems into visible, pleasing form; in other words, to turn disorder into order, and mathematical complexity into a public expression of strength and elegance. We are social animals. Culture is the framework within which we locate ourselves in relationship to other people, find meaning in the world and then transmit meaning to others.

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that “beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.” There is “an ethic, even a 'spirituality' of artistic service which contributes [to] the life and renewal of a people,” because “every genuine art form, in its own way, is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world.”

He went on the say that “true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience . . . Art by its nature is a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice [to] the universal desire for redemption.”

Christianity is an incarnational religion. We believe that God became man. This has huge implications for how we live, and how we think about culture. God creates the world in Genesis. He judges it as “very good” (Gen 1:31). Later he enters the world to redeem it in the flesh and blood of his son (Jn 1:14). In effect, God licenses us to know, love and ennoble the world through the work of human genius. Our creativity as creatures is an echo of God's own creative glory. When God tells our first parents, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28), he invites us to take part, in a small but powerful way, in the life of God himself.

The results of that fertility surround us. We see it in the great Christian heritage that still underpins the modern world. Anyone with an honest heart will grant that the Christian faith has inspired much of the greatest painting, music, architecture and scholarship in human experience. For Christians, art is a holy vocation with the power to elevate the human spirit and lead men and women toward God.

Having said all this, we still face a problem. And here it is: God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some increase of cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of the past, consumer greed, little genocides posing as “rights” like the cult of abortion, and a basic confusion about what—if anything at all—it means to be “human.”

Science and technology give us power. Philosophers like Feuerbach and Nietzsche give us the language to deny God. The result, in the words of Henri De Lubac, is not atheism, but an anti-theism built on resentment. In destroying God, man sees himself as “overthrowing an obstacle in order to gain his freedom.” The Christian understanding of human dignity claims that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Thomas Aquinas—whose feast we celebrate tomorrow—said that “In this [likeness to God] is man's greatness, in this is man's worth, in this he excels every creature.” But this grounding in God is exactly what the modern spirit rejects.

Of course, most people have never read Nietzsche. Nor will they. Few have even heard of Feuerbach. But they do experience the benefits of science and technology every day. And they do live inside a cocoon of marketing that constantly strokes their appetites, makes death seem remote, and pushes questions about meaning and morality down into matters of private opinion. The result is this. While many people in the developed world still claim to be religious, their faith—in the words of the Pontifical Council for Culture—is “often more a question of religious feeling than a demanding commitment to God.” Religion becomes a kind of insurance policy for eternity. Too often, it is little more than a convenient moral language for daily life. And what is worse is that many people no longer have the skills, or even the desire, to understand their circumstances, or to think their way out of the cocoon.

Part of what blocks a serious awareness and rethinking of our current culture is the “knowledge economy” we have created. In its 1999 statement Towards a Pastoral Approach to Culture, the Pontifical Council for Culture saw that the constant flow of “information provided by [today's] mass media . . . affects the way things are perceived: What people come to know is not reality as such, but what they are shown. [The] constant repetition of selected items of information involves a decline in critical awareness, and this is a crucial factor in forming what is considered public opinion.” It also causes “a loss of intrinsic value [in the specific] items of information, an undifferentiated uniformity in messages which are reduced to pure information, a lack of responsible feedback, and a . . . discouragement of interpersonal relationships.” This is all true. Much of modern technology isolates people as often as it brings them together. It attacks community as easily as it builds it up. It also forms the human mind in habits of thought and expression that are very different from traditional culture based on the printed word. And that has implications both for the Word of God and for the Church.

There is one other important point here that even strong religious believers often find hard to talk about. Let me explain it this way.

Referring to artists, John Paul II said that, “In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also . . . reveals his own personality by means of it.” In other words, “works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life.” This is quite normal. But it also poses a danger. A key temptation of our age is the will to power. It is most obvious in our politics and science; in the constant erosion of our respect for the weak, the infirm, the unborn and the disabled. But the impulse to pride—that hunger to smash taboos and inflate the self—appeals most naturally to artists and other creators of high culture. Genius breeds vanity. And vanity breeds conflict and suffering. The vanity of creative genius has a pedigree that leads back a very long way; all the way back to the very first non serviam from Satan himself.

It is very odd that in the wake of the bloodiest century in history—a century when tens of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity—even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil. In fact, it is more than odd. It is revealing. Mass murder and exquisitely organized cruelty are not just really big “mental health” problems. They are sins that cry out to heaven for justice, and they carry the fingerprints of an Intelligence who is personal, gifted, calculating and powerful. The devil is only unbelievable if we imagine him as the black monster of medieval paintings, or think The Inferno is intended as a literal road map to hell. Satan was very real for Jesus. He was very real for Paul and the other great saints throughout history. And he is profoundly formidable. If we want a sense of the grandeur of the Fallen Angel before he fell, the violated genius of who Satan really is, we can take a hint from the Rilke poem The Angels:

. . . when they spread their wings they waken a great wind through the land: as though with his broad sculptor-hands God was turning the leaves of the dark book of the Beginning.

This is the kind of Being—once glorious, but then consumed by his own pride—who is now the Enemy of humanity. This is the Pure Spirit who betrayed his own greatness. This is the Intellect who hates the Incarnation because through it, God invites creatures of clay like you and me to take part in God's own divinity. There is nothing sympathetic about Satan; only tragedy and loss and enduring, brilliant anger.

In 1929, as the great totalitarian murder-regimes began to rise up in Europe, the philosopher Raissa Maritain wrote a forgotten little essay called The Prince of This World. It is worth reading. We need to remember her words today and into the future. With no trace of irony or metaphor, Maritain argued:

Lucifer has cast the strong though invisible net of illusion upon us. He makes one love the passing moment above eternity, uncertainty above truth. He persuades us that we can only love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil's victories is to have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he reign in this world.

If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later we will not believe in God. We cannot cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. Satan is not God's equal. He is a created being subject to God and already, by the measure of eternity, defeated. Nonetheless, he is the first author of pride and rebellion, and the great seducer of man. Without him the Incarnation and Redemption do not make sense, and the cross is meaningless. Satan is real. There is no way around this simple truth.

Let me underline that even more strongly. Leszek Kolakowski, the former Marxist philosopher who died just last year, was one of the great minds of the last century. He was never a religious person in the traditional sense. But Kolakowski had few doubts about the reality of the devil. In his essay Short Transcript of a Metaphysical Press Conference Given by the Demon in Warsaw, on 20th December 1963, Kolakowski's devil indicts all of us who call ourselves “modern” Christians with the following words:

“Where is there a place [in your thinking] for the fallen angel? . . . Is Satan only a rhetorical figure? . . . Or else, gentlemen, is he a reality, undeniable, recognized by tradition, revealed in the Scriptures, commented upon by the Church for two millennia, tangible and acute? Why do you avoid me, gentlemen? Are you afraid that the skeptics will mock you, that you will be laughed at in satirical late night reviews? Since when is the faith affected by the jeers of heathens and heretics? What road are you taking? If you forsake the foundations of the faith for fear of mockery, where will you end? If the devil falls victim to your fear [of embarrassment] today, God's turn must inevitably come tomorrow. Gentlemen, you have been ensnared by the idol of modernity, which fears ultimate matters and hides from you their importance. I don't mention it for my own benefit—it is nothing to me—I am talking about you and for you, forgetting for a moment my own vocation, and even my duty to propagate error.”

We live in an age that imagines itself as post-modern and post-Christian. It is a time defined by noise, urgency, action, utility and a hunger for practical results. But there is nothing really new about any of this. I think St. Paul would find our age rather familiar. For all of the rhetoric about “hope and change” in our politics, our urgencies hide a deep unease about the future; a kind of well-manicured selfishness and despair. The world around us has a hole in its heart, and the emptiness hurts. Only God can fill it. In our baptism, God called each of us in this room today to be his agents in that work. Like St. Paul, we need to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22). We prove what we really believe by our willingness, or our refusal, to act on what we claim to believe.

But when we talk about a theme like today's topic—“Priests and laity together, changing and challenging the culture”—we need to remember that what we do, proceeds from who we are. Nothing is more dead than faith without works (Jas 2:17); except maybe one thing: works without faith. I do not think Paul had management issues in his head when he preached at the Areopagus. Management and resources are important—but the really essential questions, the questions that determine everything else in our life as Christians, are these: Do I really know God? Do I really love him? Do I seek him out? Do I study his word? Do I listen for his voice? Do I give my heart to him? Do I really believe he's there?

For more than thirty years, first as a bishop and now as the successor to St. Peter, Benedict XVI has spoken often and very forcefully about the “culture of relativism” that guides today's developed world, breaks down human community and intimacy, and drains the meaning out of human activity. That culture flows out of the “new Areopagus” John Paul II described in Redemptoris Missio—a culture formed by radically new technologies and methods of communication; a culture with a power that reshapes how we think, what we think about, and how we organize our personal and social lives.

We have an obligation as Catholics to study and understand the world around us. We have a duty not just to penetrate and engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ. That work belongs to all of us equally: clergy, laity and religious. We are missionaries. That is our primary vocation; it is hardwired into our identity as Christians. God calls each of us to different forms of service in his Church. But we are all equal in baptism. And we all share the same mission of bringing the Gospel to the world, and bringing the world to the Gospel.

And yet, Kolakowski's devil was right. The fundamental crisis of our time, and the special crisis of today’s Christians, has nothing to do with technology, or numbers, or organization, or resources. It is a crisis of faith. Do we believe in God or not? Are we on fire with a love for Jesus Christ, or not? Because if we are not, nothing else matters. If we are, then everything we need in order to do God's work will follow, because he never abandons his people.

I began this talk today with the words of a poet, so I will end with the words of another poet. You may not have heard of him here in Italy. His name was Dante Alighieri, and he wrote an interesting little work called The Divine Comedy. He ends the Paradiso and the entire Comedy with these words: “The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. That is the nature of the God we preach. A God so great in glory, heat, light and majesty that he can populate the heavens and call life out of dead space; yet so intimate that he became one of us; so humble that he entered our world on dirt and straw to redeem us. I think we can be forgiven for sometimes running away from that kind of love, like a child who runs away from a parent, because we simply cannot understand or compete with that ocean of unselfishness. It is only when we give ourselves to God that we understand, finally, that we were made to do exactly that. Our hearts are restless until they rest in him. We should not be afraid to believe and to love; it took even a great saint like Augustine half a lifetime to be able to admit, that “late have I loved thee, Beauty so old and so new; late have I loved thee.”

God calls us to leave here today and make disciples of all nations. But he calls us first to love him. If we do that, and do it zealously, with all our hearts—the rest will follow.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap., is the archbishop of Denver. This address was delivered on January 27, 2010, at the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission.

According to Plato’s Republic, the human soul, or psyche, can be understood as made up of three distinct parts: desire, spiritedness, and reason. The Republic is famous for, among other things, its comparison of the city or political community and the soul. In the soul as in the city, when we have one thing made up of different elements, the question arises: who should be in charge, who should rule? According to Plato, in a properly ordered soul reason rules over the desires with the assistance of spiritedness, the seat of our capacity for shame and anger. One might halt the discussion here and conclude with the obvious point that Tiger Woods got into trouble precisely because his reason was not ruling his passions but vice versa, that, on Plato’s view, he has a disordered soul and suffered the misfortunes that tend to befall such souls. This is true so far as it goes, but there is yet more to Plato’s account, and more to what we can learn about Woods and ourselves from it.

As Plato develops his account of the soul, he reveals that, despite the simplicity of his initial formulation (according to which one part was characterized by desire), each of the three parts of the soul in fact possesses its own proper desire. The “desiring part,” it turns out, longs specifically for the satisfaction of the pleasures of the body, especially those associated with food, drink, and sex. Spiritedness he presents as the victory- and honor-loving part of the soul. Finally, reason desires wisdom, understood as knowledge of what is truly good. According to Plato, moreover, the rule of reason in the soul is appropriate because reason’s desire is the most authoritative of all the desires experienced by the soul. Reason, after all, is what makes us distinctively human. All animals experience the passions of the body, and some animals—such as dogs or horses—can be said to be spirited, to show a kind of love of self-assertion and status. Only human beings, however, manifest a desire for knowledge of the good. Reason, therefore, more than any other part of us, is our true self, the core of our humanity; and when its desire is unmet the soul as a whole is frustrated and unhappy.

To this high standard of human goodness Plato adds a sober realism about what is in fact usually achieved by human beings. While he holds that reason will rule in a properly ordered soul, he is not so naïve as to think that this is what usually happens. For, as Plato concedes, while reason is the best part of us, it is not ordinarily the biggest or strongest part. His account of the soul, accordingly, is useful not only as a guide to the best human type but to the various imperfect human types that we normally encounter. The different human types arise because different parts of the soul tend to dominate in different people. The few for whom reason rules as it should are lovers of wisdom or philosophers. In some spiritedness rules, and they spend their lives in the pursuit of victory and honor. In most, however, the desiring element dominates, and the majority of human beings accordingly seem to live their lives around a pursuit of materialistic pleasures.

Returning now to the present, we may ask: what light does all this shed on Tiger Woods, our culture, and our humanity?

The case of Tiger Woods is so striking because he seems to have pushed two of the three parts of the soul to their most extreme limits, with damaging but instructive consequences. Prior to the revelations about his numerous marital infidelities, one would almost certainly have defined Tiger Woods as a spirited type—indeed, as the best public example of the spirited type since the retirement of Michael Jordan. His life was, to all outward appearances, organized around an unremitting quest for victory and honor. He made his living in a competitive endeavor to which he brought an unmatched dedication to practice in the pursuit of perfection. Moreover, Woods stands out not only as a spirited lover of honor but as a remarkably successful one. As was the case with Michael Jordan, he is better at his sport than any living person, may be better at it than any person so far, and will certainly be known to history as one of the best ever to play it.

It would seem—as Plato would have predicted, but as too few of us suspected—that not even the nearly perfect satisfaction of his spirited desires that Tiger Woods achieved was enough to answer his soul’s deepest longings. He was the best at what he did and the object of almost universal admiration for it. Yet his soul still hungered for something more. For Plato, such hunger is potentially instructive regarding our true nature: it should be taken as a sign that our deepest happiness is not to be found in the satisfaction of spirited desire, and that we should accordingly turn to the quest for knowledge of the good. Tiger Woods was probably unaware of such an alternative (perhaps because Stanford University, which he attended for two years, dropped its western civilization requirement prior to his arrival). His quest for satisfaction therefore turned to the most obvious, though not the best, objects, which were presented to him by the most powerful, though not the loftiest, part of the soul. He sought to fill up his inner emptiness through the pursuit of bodily pleasures.

Plato, however, would warn us that such a turn must prove to be as futile and unsatisfying as a life organized around the pursuit of spirited satisfactions. The pleasures of the body, he suggests in the Republic, are “impure”—not in the sense of being dirty or immoral, but in the sense of being only imperfectly pleasant. They are experienced not simply as positive pleasures but are always to some extent mixed with pains, because they arise only in relation to certain uncomfortable urges—hunger, for example, or thirst—that they seek to quiet. These urges, however, are recurring, and they seem to recur all the more frequently and insistently the more they are indulged beyond what nature requires. The more they are given the more they demand. Hence Plato’s characterization, in the Gorgias, of the pleasures of the body as a kind of leaky jar that requires constant replenishment. A soul dedicated to the pleasures of the body, like a leaky jar, can never be filled up, can never be satisfied. Here again, however, Woods’s behavior seems to confirm Plato’s wisdom. After all, if the satisfaction of sexual desire were a source of a secure happiness for human beings, then why did Woods have to pursue it to such an extreme degree with such a large number of women?

Considering Woods’s actions in light of Plato’s philosophy, we must ask ourselves: is this the behavior of a happy man? The answer is obviously “no.” It is instead the behavior of a man constantly seeking to satisfy longings that turn out to be insatiable and that are not, in fact, quite what his soul really wanted in the first place. This lesson needs to be emphasized, moreover, because the dominant public culture tends to obscure it. In much of American entertainment, advertising, and commentary—in so much of the cultural air we breathe, so to speak—we find the suggestion that human happiness is to be won through “success,” understood as the attainment of high status conventionally understood, and pleasure, understood as bodily satisfactions. Tiger Woods, however, achieved more status, and experienced more bodily pleasures, than probably any other living person. If extreme pursuit of, and extreme success in winning, these kinds of pleasures could not make him happy, why should we think they will make any of us happy? Woods’s fall should rather prompt us, as individuals and as a people, to reconsider the quest for what is truly good, lest we continue to mislead ourselves and others down the same sad path that Tiger Woods has followed.

Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author most recently of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

Ralph excelled in so many spheres and combined so many virtues in his person that it is difficult to know where to begin in recounting his noteworthy achievements. He was a philosopher (author of more than two dozen scholarly books, he gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1999–2000), a translator (he translated the texts of Aquinas for Penguin Classics), a critically acclaimed and popular novelist (author of a number of mystery series, including the popular Father Dowling series that became a television series), a public intellectual (he appeared on William F. Buckley's Firing Line, and was a member of President George W. Bush's Committee on the Arts and Humanities), a journalist (with Michael Novak, he founded Crisis, a journal of lay Catholic opinion), and a published poet. In the midst of all this activity, Ralph was remarkably generous with his time and his help, especially for his students, in whose families he expressed an avid interest.

In recent years after the death of his beloved wife Connie, with whom he had seven children, his thoughts turned increasingly to age and death. In a wonderful and deeply autobiographical volume of poems, The Soul of Wit, he reflected at length on death. He said often that since Connie died, he felt posthumous. They were indeed a perfect match. As a graduate student, I met Connie when Ralph introduced her by saying, “Have you met my first wife?” With a wit as quick as Ralph’s, she had no trouble keeping up. Even or especially when occupied with thoughts of easeful death, Ralph’s humor emerged. He liked to tell the story about a hospital visit to see a failing Jean Oesterle, his Notre Dame colleague, a convert to the faith, and a translator of Aquinas. Hesitantly, he asked, “Jean, do you know who I am?” She retorted, “Don’t you know?”

Ralph had an indiscriminate love of puns; he seemed to enjoy bad puns more than good ones—a thesis that would seem to be confirmed by a perusal of the titles of his mystery novels (On This Rockne, Irish Gilt, Law and Ardor, Rest in Pieces, or The Book of Kills). An appreciation for the nuances and richness of ordinary language informed not only his humor but also his practice of philosophy. His most important philosophical text was Aquinas and Analogy, a study of the way Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, teased out of the complexity of ordinary language unities of meaning. He rejected the idea that Thomas Aquinas provided us with a philosophical system intended to compete with other systems. Instead, Thomas was asking in a more precise way questions every human being asks; he is interested in the human good, not the good of professional philosophers or intellectuals. In keeping with this working assumption, Ralph wrote both for elite groups of scholars and for intrigued laymen. With the latter group in mind, he penned A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists. His distinctive approach to Thomas Aquinas is most evident in his supple account of natural law (see Ethica Thomistica, for example), and in his defense of natural theology in the text of his Gifford Lectures, published as Characters in Search of Their Author, the thesis of which Ralph states thus: “For us it is all but inevitable that, however momentarily, we feel ourselves to be part of a vast cosmic drama and our thoughts turn to the author, not merely of our roles, but of our existence. Natural theology is one version of that quest.” Ralph’s philosophical work flourished at the University of Notre Dame, to which he moved in 1955, after receiving his doctorate at Laval under the great Thomist Charles DeKoninck and teaching for one year at Creighton. His first office at Notre Dame was in the administration building, the Golden Dome. When he and a colleague became intrigued by the presence of an old safe, they opened it, and, amid the clutter, discovered a draft of a novel written by Knute Rockne. At Notre Dame, he held an endowed chair as the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies; he was also director of the Maritain Center and of the Medieval Institute.

Early on at Notre Dame, he began, in addition to his teaching and philosophical work, to write fiction. The story of how he made the transition from wanting to be a writer to becoming one is illuminating. After a time in which he haphazardly polished off and sent out short stories for publication, only to receive rejection letters, he decided that he would write daily over the next year. If nothing were accepted for publication, he would take that as a sign it was not meant to be. So, every evening, after he had put his children to bed, he would repair to his unfinished basement and stand, not sit, before his typewriter pecking away from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. On the wall in front of him, he had posted these words in bold, “No One Owes You a Reading.” He eventually published some short stories and then had a breakthrough in 1969 with The Priest, a work that became a bestseller. He wrote more than eighty novels and received the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery writing.

Ralph’s life and career will always be enmeshed with the university he loved, Our Lady’s University. He was of course deeply chagrined at the direction of the University. The concerns about Notre Dame’s Catholic identity have become very public in the past few years with the administration’s decisions to elevate the tawdry Vagina Monologues to the status of great art and to award an honorary doctorate of laws to a pro-abortion president. Before all that, Ralph objected to the premature firing of Coach Tyrone Willingham, in an New York Times op-ed piece “The Firing Irish,” and to the unseemly image of a president and priest chasing down potential coaches on airport tarmacs in the dead of night. Even prior to that, Ralph objected to hiring practices that focused exclusively on “academic” criteria and rendered irrelevant knowledge of, and sympathy for, the Catholic faith and intellectual tradition. For Ralph, the accelerating abandonment of things Catholic at Notre Dame was the direct result of a craven quest for success understood in conventional, and often quite secular, terms.

It is common to say that Notre Dame’s motto is “God, Country, Notre Dame,” but Ralph was quick to remind us that the official motto is “vita, dulcedo et spes”—words meaning “life, sweetness, and hope” from the Latin Marian prayer, Salve Regina. How fitting that Ralph’s last book, published just months ago, is Dante and the Blessed Virgin. Again, what he said of Jacques Maritain is equally true of Ralph. Teacher of teachers, he was a “model of the Christian philosopher, of the Thomist, both by what he taught and what he was.”

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

A huge jump in the retirement rate coincides with the collapse of an asset-price bubble that has left a dangerous level of debt on domestic balance sheets. The consumer-driven model cannot be restored, because the problem it faces has nothing to do with the random, temporary shifts in psychology (“animal spirits”) that Keynes noted. The problem we face instead is that the accumulation of mistakes and loss of wealth happened just as the baby boomers were about to retire.

It certainly is true, as conservative commentators insist, that Obama steered too hard and too fast to the left for the majority of American voters. But underlying all the discontent is the simple and obvious fact that a very large number of Americans are watching their lives go to ruin. They are losing their homes, their savings, their jobs, and their prospects for dignified retirement. The trouble is not the short-term pain, but an adverse and irreparable change in the lives tens of millions.

What will Obama do when it dawns on him that the economy will not be better next year—perhaps a couple percentage points larger in terms of GDP, but worse in terms of employment and household balance sheets? The economy requires major surgery. As Brenner and I argued in the cited article, Americans can increase savings while maintaining full employment only by exporting and investing, and that requires a fundamental shift in the tax burden away from investment income to consumption—a tax reform more sweeping than Reagan’s.

Obama’s Clintonesque pose will last as long as his perception that future economic growth will give him something for which to take credit. Well before the mid-term elections Obama will re-invent himself yet again, this time as a raging populist.

David P. Goldman is senior editor for First Things.

Why do advocates of abortion and contraception find the conscientious objection of pharmacists and other medical professionals so intolerable? Recognizing a right to conscientious objection, some hospitals allow the shifting of work schedules and duties to respect conscience on a variety of issues. Nonetheless, the issue of conscience protection has helped throw the current health-care reform bills into serious doubt, illustrating once again that a society-wide debate about abortion . . . or contraception or euthanasia . . . will be settled by consciences first, with stable legislation following. The development of practical alternatives, again the work of consciences, will help resolve these debates. So why deny conscience protection to the health care professionals whose objection would motivate them to seek those alternatives? Better to reform our health care system by keeping those professionals within it.

The history of slavery and its abolition in the United States vividly illustrates a period during which the justice of a social practice was tirelessly debated, with the common recognition that a social conscience would form and either accept slavery as just or reject it as unjust and radically change social practice. As more and more people became convinced of the immorality of slavery, our society was able to address some of its evil effects and recognize more clearly why both slavery and the discrimination that remained after its abolition are unjust. Similarly, our current moral debates about certain health-care practices, especially those that kill human life, may eventually establish or abolish certain medical practices as just or unjust. A healthy debate may in time establish a sound public conscience about how to pursue important social goals without the destruction of human life.

In the current political climate, opponents of conscience protection in health care sometimes accuse objectors of seeking privileged exemption from the law, as if objectors want to be excused from a burden licitly imposed on all. This charge grossly misrepresents conscience. Definitions of conscience typically emphasize the individual’s judgment about himself, overlook the social dimension, and risk misrepresenting conscientious objection as self-serving. By contrast, consider the root idea of “conscience” in Greek thought, as deftly outlined by the philosopher Timothy Potts. To exercise one’s conscience originally meant “I know in common with . . . and bear witness” and applied to a person who knew another’s mind and testified for or against him in court. As a variation on this meaning, the concept of conscience came to describe an awareness of one’s own mind and a witness regarding one’s own actions. In conscience, one judges oneself as if one were another. The act of conscientious objection illustrates not only this self-critical aspect of conscience but also its social argument. Conscientious objection presumes the type of self-criticism that one could and should share with others for society’s own benefit. For example, a pharmacist’s refusal to fill a prescription for a contraceptive or abortifacient constitutes an act of self-criticism about the meaning of his action if he were to fill it. In justice, that pharmacist should consider how this self-criticism applies to other pharmacists. In doing so, he should consider not merely the inconvenience to those in disagreement but, more importantly, the moral effects on those in disagreement. A personal interest in self-criticism is not the same as self-interest, and a public argument related to this self-criticism is not necessarily an “imposition of one’s own values.”

When the members of a society carry on a serious debate, the activity of conscientious dialogue, the sharpening of individual consciences, and a relatively stable peaceful consensus all characterize that society’s common good. In an analysis of the common good in social encyclicals, Russell Hittinger shows that the common good has three interrelated sets of meanings. First, the common good can refer to goods realized in individuals and common to human beings, such as patient health and the experienced, well-formed consciences of medical professionals who are consistently able to imagine ethical and personal plans of patient care. Second, the common good can refer to common activities, such as professional work and the dialogue of consciences about how to provide care ethically. Third, the common good can refer to forms of communion, such as marriage, the patient-physician relationship, and a consensus among well-formed consciences that certain medical practices ultimately undermine human flourishing and therefore must be replaced with other practices. There is good evidence that current policy on conscience protection will stifle the serious ground-level debates required to promote these common goods. Early in 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed to rescind some existing conscience protection regarding abortion and accepted public comments on the proposal. Reading these public comments is instructive. Arguments against conscience protection lead to the conclusion that any medical professional with objections to abortion should simply leave medical practice. This view overlooks the fact that health-care professionals regularly note ethical problems about a variety of medical practices, argue convincingly for change, and contribute to the common good. At best, this view overlooks the fact that conscientious objection itself constitutes a moral argument in a society-wide debate. At worst, this point of view refuses to engage with any perspective and seeks to legislate away differences of opinion and conscience.

Commentators to the HHS also argued that allowing conscience protection would restrict access to the abortion procedure, causing undue burden to women seeking it. Commentators who made this argument, such as the Southwest Women’s Law Center, typically provided no data showing reduced access as the likely result. In fact, there probably are no data to prove this point. It is more likely that conscience protection will increase access because people may enter medical practice with less fear that their conscience will be violated, if not about abortion, then about another issue. Furthermore, denying conscience rights will force some professionals to abandon the profession. Patients will not be able to find medical professionals who share their moral convictions and benefit from their expertise in providing care according to those convictions. To illustrate this danger, consider the pregnant wife pressured to abort her child because her obstetrician does not accept or, practically speaking, even know another way of managing her risky pregnancy. Surely the common good requires consideration of these burdens as well as an open discussion of the morality of abortion and the justice of laws regulating it.

The contribution of conscience to the common good explains why conscientious objection is so intolerable to abortion advocates: It makes a public argument for the abolition of abortion and the discovery of alternatives, wherever possible. Objection generates public debate in which every side expects short-term compromises while complex questions are answered. It aims, however, at the formation of a social conscience sufficient to reject certain medical practices as inherently immoral and unfit for the common good. History offers encouraging as well as discouraging evidence for the formation of such a social conscience. Nevertheless, persons cannot morally “opt out” of expressing a conscience regarding the common good, whether or not their laws offer them protection in doing so.

Dr. Grattan Brown is an assistant professor of theology at Belmont Abbey College. His scholarly research has focused on issues of conscience in Catholic health care.

The noted British novelist, Martin Amis, became the latest to support establishing a radical euthanasia license. In an interview in the January 24 Sunday Times (London) Amis expressed views that were hardly compassionate—the usual pretext for supporting euthanasia/assisted suicide. To the contrary: He denigrated the elderly as a “silver tsunami,” whose very existence threatens society. “There’ll be a population of demented very old people like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops,” Amis told the Times. His answer to this malodorous demographic incursion? “Suicide booths on every corner,” Amis offered, a hyperbolic turn of phrase that quickly went viral.

Mostly missed in the resulting commentary to Amis’ diatribe is that he wasn’t as much ageist as self-loathing. “Medical science has again over-vaulted itself so most of us have to live through the death of our talent,” Amis said. “Novelists tend to go off at about 70. And I’m in a funk about it. I’ve got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how talent dies before the body.”

In other words, Amis rejected his own intrinsic dignity and moral worth in the apparent belief that should he become incapable of producing good writing, his life would be rendered useless. This terror of not being “special”—certainly not limited to the cognoscenti—isn’t really about a feared loss of talent (or productivity, or independence, and so on), but an abiding worry that if we lose our vigor or health, we will become unworthy of being loved.

From the post-modern perspective, this is entirely logical. If we believe moral worthiness is solely a byproduct of some measurable attribute or capacity—rather than being intrinsic—we will naturally disdain our future selves when, because of age, illness, or injury, we lose whatever it is that we decide gives life value. From this wider angle, support for euthanasia can be seen as merely a symptom of the deeper illness of nihilism, a social cancer that has been gnawing steadily away at us for more than a century.

This existential terror can only be overcome by embracing human exceptionalism and its corollary that each and every one of us matters—no matter what. But this corrective is quite beyond the most brilliant intellectual argument or reliance upon religious or philosophical principles—which at most, effectively can be deployed as holding actions. If we really want to reverse the tide, we must strive to love our neighbor even more than we love ourselves.

In this sense, we need to demonstrate true compassion—the root meaning of which is to “suffer with”—by fully engaging our neighbors’ most trying trials and tribulations. We see that tonic administered all the time—in the selfless care of a daughter for her Alzheimer’s stricken mother and in the hospice volunteer confronting his own mortality by engaging profoundly with dying strangers. Love is what motivates the good people who bring dogs and cats into nursing homes to brighten the day of residents and is the ultimate motivation of the pain-control physician who burns the midnight oil seeking a solution to an intractable case—even though it is work for which she will never be paid.

There will always be the Martin Amises of the world raging in despair against life’s vicissitudes. But they will be rendered societally impotent if each of us loves actively. As St. Paul put it so eloquently, love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” In the end, if we want to finally defeat euthanasia, it will have to be so with us.

Wesley J. Smith is an award-winning author, a senior fellow in human rights and bioethics for the Discovery Institute, and consults with the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. His Secondhand Smoke is one of the First Things blogs.

We could never have imagined, for instance, we’d live to see the day a book of the Bible is illustrated by an R-rated comic-strip cartoonist; or the day Federico Fellini’s 8½ is remade into a song-and-dance movie—seriously, you must be kidding.

But, then, here we are! Indeed, R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis is a bestseller, and Nine, a showbiz version of Fellini’s 8½ is now playing in theatres. Yes, The world may never cease to surprise us.

But do not be alarmed; amid all the turning tides of change today, First Things is your lighthouse—your guide to those changing times with the best commentary and reviews. All you need to do is subscribe.

Subscribe now, and you’ll receive issues like the latest February 2010 issue hot off the press—with articles like this one by Gary A. Anderson, FT's leading biblical scholar and contributing writer, reviewing R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis in “The Bible, Rated R”:

While some have called . . . [it] a “scathing satire” on the Bible, I would disagree. . . . No one has paid much attention to the commentary Crumb provides at the close of the book. Yet Crumb’s prose is a significant addendum to his visual art. It gives witness to Crumb’s reverence for (but not belief in) his subject. The Bible is remarkable, he writes, due to its antiquity and tradition of continuous commentary over the centuries: “[It is] the oldest text in Western civilization. It’s no wonder that people believe [it] to be the word of God.”

And articles like this one by chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle Armond White, “Filmmaking by Numbers”:

Nine gets close to 8½’s profundity only in the brief grotto scene in which a priest asks, “Are you Catholic?” Guido answers, “I’m trying.” The priest responds, “Try harder.” While Fellini pondered the possibilities of sin and redemption, Nine’s all-singing, all-dancing, all-laughing remake proffers a mindless celebration of capital S (as in silly) sin. In every way, it removes the significance of man’s self-questioning moral consciousness and substitutes in its place ephemeral, conventional showbiz.

One might think there couldn’t be a worse distortion of legendary great work, but then we hear a University of Chicago professor's baseless attack on Hannah Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement, “stitching together a picture of her as either a gullible reader of neo-Nazi literature or a closet Jewish anti-Semite in need of intellectual detoxification.” In our pages, sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz sets the story straight.

How about the epic poem, Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto—of which “a new verse translation” by David R. Slavitt was recently published. Laurance Wieder mournfully describes how Slavitt wrote his own lines in place of the original, a great work that in its true form is “the artistic and temperamental opposite of the other Tuscan epic, The Divine Comedy.”

Then FT contributing writer Mary Eberstadt bemoans the dismal effects of watered-down Christianity:

Exactly as has happened with divorce, the Anglican okaying of contraception was born largely of compassion for human frailty and dedicated to the idea that such cases would be mere exceptions to the theological rule. Thus Resolution 15 itself—for all that it was a radical break with two millennia of Christian teaching—abounded with careful language about the limited character of its reform, including “strong condemnation of the use of any methods of contraception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

And also as has happened with divorce, the effort to hold the line at such carefully drawn borders soon proved futile. In short order, not only was birth control theologically approved in certain difficult circumstances but, soon thereafter, it was regarded as the norm. . . . Artificial contraception went on to be sanctioned by some prominent members of the Anglican Communion not only as an option but in fact as the better moral choice.”

In her provocative feature, “Christianity Lite,” Eberstadt describes the experiment that failed.

But it’s not all bad news. In “The Orthodox Moment,” Rabbi Ben Greenberg of Harvard notes the steady growth of Orthodox Judaism and the good it portends for its young followers:

The percentage of American Jews who define themselves as Orthodox [is] 10 percent of the total Jewish population. In addition, another 21 percent of Jewish households belong to an Orthodox synagogue. What is perhaps most stunning is that 34 percent of Jews within the age racket of 18-34 identify with Orthodoxy.

David P. Goldman complements Greenberg’s piece with his scathing review of Dana Evan Kaplan’s latest book, Contemporary American Judaism. In the book, Kaplan lists and praises the many unorthodox practices that go by the name of Judaism in America, including “Storahtelling,” which he describes as “one of the hottest Jewish educational programs. . . . Founder Amichai Lau-Lavie explains that it is part psychodrama and part psychotherapy, with the Storahtelling staff using the stories of the Torah to engage worshippers. ‘We use edu-tainment. We make them laugh. It’s 95 percent humor, culture, radical fun and 5 percent meaning.’” Or consider the “new genus of hyphenated Jews: “American Jews interested in Buddhism have been called JuBus, or sometimes BuJews. Likewise, a Hindu Jews is called a Hinjew, a Sufi Jew is called a Jewfi, and so forth.” To all this, Goldman asks the pivotal question: “When does this stop being Judaism?”

Not only does the February issue of First Things look at the here and now of religion, culture, and public life—and why it matters. We also delve into the Great Beyond and predict what is to come! Gabriel Said Reynolds reviews The Future of Islam by John L. Esposito. Fr. Raymond J. de Souza reviews The Future Church by John L. Allen Jr. James Nuechterlein assesses the future of the political right in his smart review of Reappraising the Right by George H. Nash. And William Anderson examines the fate of planet Earth in his piece on climate-change politics, “Some Like It Warm.”

And, when you’ve had enough of looking ahead, we give you Robert Louis Wilken’s lovely review of The Forge of Christendom by Tom Holland in his piece “The Gift of the West.” And don’t miss Joseph Bottum’s insightful essay in The Public Square, “The Papal Difference”:

For a long while, Americans thought Catholicism was an un-American form of religion, but in our current situation, Catholicism alone appears able to synthesize faith and reason long enough, broadly enough, and deeply enough to avoid sectarianism. John Courtney Murray, the American Jesuit who influenced the Second Vatican Council’s decree on religious liberty, made essentially this argument, and the thirty years of debate over abortion has confirmed it. Catholic thought now defines the nonsecularist terms of American discourse—and does so, at its best, without threatening either the religious freedom or nonestablishment clauses of the First Amendment.

But then, not everything in this issue is an active look forward or look back. There’s some value in a piece that simply about thinking—about human curiosity and the desire to know. This issue offers a trenchant analysis by FT senior editor at large, R.R. Reno, “Brain Food,” in which he contemplates Paul Griffiths’ latest book, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar:

Our sin-sick souls fear the sharp, healing scalpel of an involving knowledge that will cut and shape and circumcise our hearts. Thus, our lust for tidbits of local gossip; for reassuring (or irritating) sound bites of political opinion; for views we can categorize by race, class, and gender; for well-defined areas of scholarly expertise; for long bibliographies and endless facts; for legally defined intellectual property; and even (as St. Augustine reports of his own vulnerability to distraction) for picturesque scenes of dogs chasing rabbits across open fields.

These forms of atomized, sequestered, and isolated knowledge can satisfy our desire to know, at least for a time; they grant the relief of feeling full while remaining empty.

Don’t fall into cerebral malnourishment. Satisfy your intellectual appetite by subscribing now to First Things.

Justice Thomas is magnificently right in making the case that the whole scheme of requiring the public disclosure of contributions is something that deserves to be struck down. One could argue in this way: The right to engage in legitimate associations should entail the right to engage in those associations with confidentiality, for the disclosure could make a person vulnerable to pressures that have, as their purpose, intimidating him from engaging in projects that are quite legitimate.

The best example comes from the old case in which the Court had struck down the move to require teachers in Alabama to disclose their associations. The concern was that membership in the NAACP could threaten one’s job, especially when teachers did not know they were hired for the next year until they received their contract. My own reading of NAACP v. Alabama (1958) was that this decision had to rest with the individual himself, for no one knew as keenly as he did the pressures and threats that were directed against him.

Clarence Thomas invokes here the sharpest examples from our own day: the threats directed at supporters of Proposition 8, threats that caused people to be fired, and small businesses to suffer boycotts. There is real danger in the air there, and yet to take it seriously is to call into question the whole scheme of “disclosure” that is central and necessary to any policy to restrict the funding of political campaigns.

On the main opinion, it is curious that the dissenters do not appreciate this axiomatic point: that a corporation is simply another form of an association of “human persons.” The question was raised in the first case eliciting a set of opinions from the Court (Chisholm v. Georgia, 1793) as to how a State could be obliged to keep its contracts. The power of the State was necessary to the enforcement of contracts, and so if a State were challenged, who would have the authority to pronounce a judgment and enforce it against a State?

But Justice James Wilson took the problem from this angle: On what ground could a state be obliged to honor its promises and contracts? On the same ground that a person can be obliged to honor his promise, for he has made people vulnerable to the prospect that the promise will be kept. But if that holds true for the ordinary human person, why would it not hold true for an organization that is simply an association of human persons? It made the most profound difference that one understood “the State,” in America, as an association of free persons, who have a claim to be ruled only with their consent. In England, as Wilson noted, the “law” began with the notion of a Sovereign issuing commands. But in America, he said, the law would begin with “another principle, very different in its nature and operations . . . laws derived from the pure source of equality and justice must be founded on the consent of those, whose obedience they require.

“The Sovereign, when traced to his source, must be found in the man.” It must be found, that is, in the human person, the only being who could weigh the moral grounds of justifying laws and tendering his consent.

Hadley Arkes, a member of the editorial advisory board of First Things, is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College.