As an ELCA Lutheran I share James Nuechterlein’s concerns in his “Ecumenical
Conundrums” (March). I’m not sure I can agree with Pope John Paul II that
the present institutional expression of the faith in some thirty–six thousand
denominations worldwide is scandalous and weakens “the voice of the gospel.”
Unless I’m mistaken, the voice of the gospel is God’s own and has the power
to create faith in those who hear it. Perhaps God is less concerned with having
one authoritative structural “voice” in control of the broadcasting of the gospel
and more concerned with getting a hearing wherever and whenever His servants
actually focus on loving unbelievers enough to proclaim and live the gospel
in their presence.

Believers are being made every minute all over the world because the Holy Spirit,
the gospel, and sinners are a volatile mix that no single earthly structure
can contain. The Book of Acts and missionary history testify to that. The harder
modern ecumenists try to squeeze everyone into one mold, the more eruptions
of this mixture will escape between their fingers.

(The Rev.) Jeffrey A. Stoopes
Grace Lutheran Church
Pembine, Wisconsin

Predictably, the local ecumenical service that James Nuechterlein described
did not limit itself wherever possible to what virtually all Christians through
the centuries and across the globe agree upon. Instead, it thumbed its nose
at a huge majority of Christians by prominently featuring something entirely
unknown or prohibited throughout the City of God outside the tiny ghetto of
late–twentieth–century liberal Protestantism—a clergywoman. The substantive
issue is not the gender of the minister but the overarching authority recognized
by the sponsors of the service.

Submission to the ecumenical mandate requires, first and foremost, recognition
of some authority that has the right to issue difficult mandates. Thus, true
ecumenists seek agreement on whether Scripture, tradition, ecumenical councils,
or Peter’s successor have the highest claim to speak for Christ. An ecumenical
service ought either to acknowledge up front which particular ordering of those
sources it recognizes as the voice of the Shepherd (and let those who disagree
participate as observers), or else limit itself to those things that all four
voices agree upon.

All four voices, for example, call for unity in the Church, providing the impetus
for ecumenism in the first place. At the same time, they all speak against the
ordination of women. Therefore, an ecumenical service presided over by a woman,
no matter how uplifting or orthodox her message, necessarily militates against
true ecumenism, because clergywomen can only exist where the “sufficiently leftward
politics” that Mr. Nuechterlein views so dubiously is the highest spokesman
for Christ in the Church. Such leftward politics prevails wherever natural knowledge
of God wrongly trumps revealed knowledge, allowing reason and conscience, warped
by total separation from fixed truths, to have veto power over revelation in
matters of doctrine.

Having intentionally erased the only useful thing about denominations—the delineation
of internally coherent confessions of faith flowing from particular orderings
of revealed authority—typical ecumenical services go on to reinforce the primary
danger of denominationalism by cultivating the attitude that our view
of authority (in this case that of late–twentieth–century liberal Protestants
and their Catholic sympathizers) is the one that really counts. Thus, they can
offer nothing other than what Mr. Nuechterlein calls an “incoherent hodgepodge”
of a service that serves no purpose other than to make those in attendance feel
open–minded, which in turn only serves the very un–ecumenical goal of jettisoning
revealed truth as the norm of Christian reason, conscience, and ultimately,
doctrine.

Those who put on such services tend to view their church bodies’ nominal authorities,
generally either the Bible or the Pope, as stumbling blocks in the way of progress.
Not coincidentally, such ecumenists are also the only Christians in history
who regularly fail to see abortion and homosexual conduct as sinful. Participating
in the rigidly sectarian “ecumenism” that these services offer does not prove
that one loves one’s brothers and sisters in Christ; it only makes the ecumenical
conundrum worse.

(The Rev.) Peter A. Speckhard
Faith Lutheran Church
Green Bay, Wisconsin

Thanks to James Nuechterlein for his commentary—brief,
incisive, caring.

Another commentary on ecumenism, brief, incisive, and flip, came in the form
of a cartoon some years ago. The cartoon showed a church with its doors wide
open and a nearby sign reading, “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.” Through
the doors a column of clergy were making their exit in pairs. The first wore
a miter and carried a bishop’s staff; his partner wore a clergy suit and clerical
collar. Next: a clergyman with a very tweedy jacket; his partner, female, was
still singing heartily. Next: a clergyman wearing shorts and what might have
been beach attire; and so on.

At the head of the recessional, the bishop with the staff says to his partner,
“See you next year!”

E. Earl Anderson
Waterloo Lutheran Seminary
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada

Who’s Got That Swing?

Re Hugh Liebert, “It Ain’t
Got That Swing,” March: In 1998, social critic and jazz fan Martha Bayles,
the author of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American
Popular Music, wrote a wonderful piece about jazz for the Public Interest.
In the introduction, Bayles reminded readers that in 1939 the great jazz saxophonist
Coleman Hawkins recorded his now–classic take on “Body and Soul,” and that the
piece was dismissed by both the left and the right. To the right, wrote Bayles,
jazz “was considered a violation of traditional musical standards committed
for the basest of motives.” On the left, jazz was seen as “the shameless commercialization
of a once–authentic folk music or, in the highbrow anti–Stalinist opinion of
Partisan Review, as kitsch: cheap, disposable, and derivative of genuine
art, which it threatened to cannibalize.”

More than sixty years later, we have an interesting amalgamation of these two
ideas. In Hugh Liebert’s piece about swing and my book If It Ain’t Got That
Swing: The Rebirth of Grown–Up Culture (Mr. Liebert slyly omitted my subtitle,
which helps shore up his argument that my book is about music and not culture),
we have a conservative who thinks that jazz is art—well, kind of, that is to
say, certain kinds of jazz, even though it could be in a base way that may be
insulting to God, even if it is nonetheless good for “the common man” (!)—and
that rock and roll is trash.

I’ve been fighting this battle with conservatives ever since I became a serious
Catholic, and I always find myself circling back to the same thing: whether
it’s Gershwin, Ellington, the Beatles, the neo–swing band Indigo Swing, or the
new Radiohead album I bought last month, much of pop music is art. To claim
otherwise by retreating into political stances or making a demarcation between
genres—or, in Mr. Liebert’s case, making demarcations within demarcations by
banishing all neo–swing from the garden of swing–era swing—is just silly hairsplitting.
It’s also against our God–given instincts. When we hear a great song or symphony,
we experience a joy, a swelling–up, that I believe is religious in nature. We
are hearing something beautiful that touches us deeply and elevates our senses
and spirit. Genre doesn’t matter, sound does. Further, saying, as Mr. Liebert
does, that we run the risk of worshiping music rather than God in doing so is
like saying we shouldn’t go to church services because we run the risk of worshiping
the church building.

But then, Mr. Liebert doesn’t seem too concerned about the facts. He claims
that because I make a connection between Elvis and swing—anyone with ears can
do the same thing—and call the Beatles brilliant musicians, I advance the notion
that “rock bears a close resemblance to swing.” In my book I make exactly the
opposite argument, noting that much of rock went sour in the 1960s when it lost
its connection to American popular music.

What I didn’t do, and should have done, is to have been much kinder to modern
popular music, which began with the Beatles and continues to produce art. Mr.
Liebert calls today’s popular music “blues–driven, power chord dependent noise
that today’s ten–year–olds can play after a few weeks of guitar lessons.” This
is just, excuse me, dumb. Has Mr. Liebert ever heard the song “One” by the Irish—and
Christian—band U2? I doubt any ten–year–old, even a ten–year–old Mozart, could
have written it. It is unspeakably grand, has no connection with the blues that
I can see (as is the case with most post–Beatles pop music), and has some lyrics
(“You say love is a temple / Love the higher law / You ask me to enter / And
then you make me crawl”) that can make one glad that the strict moon/swoon conventions
of swing–era lyrics were tossed out.

Of course, Mozart wouldn’t have written “One,” and there’s another rub. As
Martha Bayles pointed out in her article, classical music and popular music
or rock and roll are different animals. Comparing them is like comparing painting
and sculpture. As Terry Teachout once noted, Ellington and classical composer
Aaron Copland “are both masters of American music, each in their own way.” Ellington
and the Beatles—and, yes, the gifted young rock band we’ll hear about next week—are
all masters of American popular music, each in their own way. Conservatives
know this in their hearts like a natural law—come on, the Supremes don’t make
your heart sing?—and they should stop forcing themselves to switch the station
when “She Loves You” comes on. Sit back and enjoy it.

A couple more small things. Mr. Liebert claims that my view that “swing is
the first fad that has kids looking to grandparents and traditional rules for
what’s hip” is “tenuous at best.” Okay. What other pop fad that predated swing
had kids looking to grandparents? The hula hoop? Mr. Liebert also says that
I “wax nostalgic for the bygone communitarian paradise in which swing first
emerged.” Good heavens, haven’t conservatives won this argument? Haven’t we
proved, with books like The Lost City—and, ahem, mine—that the past was
more complicated than the ready–made chimera the left offers up of repressed
housewives and gray–suited drones? I was surprised to see this cliché advanced
in First Things.

Mark Gauvreau Judge
Potomac, Maryland

Congratulations on Hugh Liebert’s “It
Ain’t Got That Swing.”

There are, however, a few important points that Mr. Liebert left unexplored.
He quoted Richard Weaver rightly as having said: “In swing one hears a species
of music in which the performer is at fullest liberty to express himself as
an egoist.” Mr. Liebert gives partial credence to this false notion by saying:
“No jazz musician plays for the greater glory of God, nor any universal idea.”

This is a profound misconception, which I fear is rather widely held. Jazz
does not presume to begin with God; instead it arrives at the divine with a
particular sort of humility. Man has inflicted much suffering on his own kind
by the reverse presumption—that he can know God outside the quotidian context
of this existential life. Jazz is first existential. It deals with that which
is the case for man­ kind, and begins by redeeming each man to every other.
This is an idea held to be universal even in the age of the pre–Socratics.

Secondly, jazz emerges within, projects, demands, and embodies freedom. This
is the extent to which it is political. Yet, in one respect it is inherently
Christian, since its overriding demand is submission. The solo performer plays
within a cycle of risk, open to all challenges—including humiliation by some
unknown artist. And when, indeed, he succeeds at this, he is certainly heroic,
but that is tempered by the inevitable truth of tomorrow, and tomorrows to come.
In this sense he is not triumphal because he is aware of his limitations of
age, time, and death. John Coltrane was the apotheosis of this sentiment, which
is both biblical and Greek.

Mr. Liebert is right to suggest that “art detached from transcendental ends
is decadent.” I do not believe, however, that anticipating or desiring an audience
limits the transcendent impulse. Beethoven, whose art may be the highest human
expression of the divine, not only obsessed about audience, he was inspired
by the mundane events of everyday life.

T. S. Eliot wrote more on these questions than any modern. His criterion for
art was that it address something external to and larger than itself. Jazz then
has a double discipline: the chords and harmonies within, and the fellow performers
and audience without—and in its apparent apostasy embodies a sensuous universality
long absent in American Christianity.

Gilbert N. M. O. Morris
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia

I am utterly baffled by Hugh Liebert’s somewhat abstruse concept of a political
divide between conservatives and swing, jazz, call it what you will, relying,
it seems, on the painful antagonism of someone like Miles Davis for support.
It is a fringe argument, utter nonsense on its face, particularly when one considers
that young conservatives are mainly in thrall to rock and roll (Bill Bennett,
Fred Barnes, Rush Limbaugh) while the old fogies, both left and right, if musically
oriented at all, are still pining for the Barnets, the Basies, the Goodmans,
and the Millers. Mr. Liebert, I would hope, will think over this eccentric premise
and give it the heave–ho.

As to his other assertions, I must say, with all due respect, that Duke Ellington’s
songs were not necessarily among the most popular of the period, nor were they,
in everyone’s view, always that fetching. Brilliant as he was, he was not the
apotheosis of American songwriters. There is a body of music produced in the
1920s, ’30s, and ’40s bulging with breathtakingly beautiful songs by Vernon
Duke, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz, Gershwin, Berlin, Cole Porter (whom Mr.
Liebert mentions in passing), and many others. Mr. Liebert’s reference, by the
way, to “The Way You Look Tonight,” without composer attribution, as a “jazz
classic” was enough to set the teeth on edge. It was a ballad, and a stunning
one, by Jerome Kern. Oscar Peterson did a marvelous up–tempo “jazzy” version
in his Jerome Kern Songbook. Bing Crosby and wife Dixie Lee leave one
misty–eyed with their little–known recording. It can be performed variously.
But it is in its musical core cast in an Americanized European structure.

There happen, in fact, to be a number of slow, limpid songs that have indeed
become jazz classics by virtue of a particular performance. Artie Shaw’s rendition
of “Indian Love Call,” a song originally as sedately operatic as possible, is
an outstanding example. Basically, one gets the feeling that none of those,
with some notable exceptions, who are younger than seventy–seven know enough
yet to express valid opinions on the subject.

Elliot West
Post Mills, Vermont

I greatly appreciated reading Hugh Liebert’s opinion piece. As a twenty–something
myself, I share his discriminating skepticism regarding “neo–swing,” which already
seems to have run its course and is fading fast from the pop scene.

But I was puzzled that his discussion of jazz and its (as conservatively criticized)
apparent lack of spirituality failed to mention the strong undercurrent of religious
themes in jazz music. One of the widely accepted masterpieces of jazz, John
Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” set forth as its sole purpose to give praise to
the Creator. I have rarely been moved more in religious meditation than when
listening to Coltrane’s band chant “a love supreme, a love supreme . . .” Moreover,
a substantial amount of Ellington’s work articulates profound religious themes.
(I recall attending Wynton Marsalis’ Ellington tour a few years ago, when he
played his sacred piece “The Shepherd,” moving the well–educated, relatively
affluent audience to an exhilarating religious fervor.) If Mr. Liebert was attempting
a criticism of the conservative perspective on this point, he missed the most
obvious point of contention. Perhaps, here, he agrees with the conservatives
he criticizes.

In which case, he’s overlooking the diversity of the jazz genre. Of course,
jazz generally speaking is not a sacred art form. But then again, neither is
classical music since Mozart. And the case could be made that composers like
Mozart and Wagner were as “decadent” as Miles Davis and Count Basie.

Travis J. Scholl
Lutheran Hour Ministries
St. Louis, Missouri

Hugh Liebert replies:

Mr. Morris is right to stress how humility and submission are closely linked
to the freedom embodied in jazz. The freedom of a virtuoso jazz soloist also
presupposes a certain submission insofar as a jazz musician must attain considerable
skill before soloing well. Critics often say that jazz music is merely
emotive and therefore undemanding—indeed, jazz musicians who do not give themselves
enough credit often support such a misunderstanding. Mr. Morris is right to
note that this is not so.

I did not argue that desiring an audience as such limits the “transcendent
impulse.” In Christian ages, something like a transcendent impulse is required
for winning an audience. In secular times, however, this is not the case. Modern
musicians’ desire for an audience does, I think, limit the religiosity of their
music, or at least there are strong pressures to appeal to an audience’s less
pious impulses.

Both Mr. Morris and Mr. Scholl mention John Coltrane as an example of a jazz
musician who plays for the greater glory of God. This is an excellent point,
which calls our attention to the diversity of the jazz genre, as Mr. Scholl
suggests. However, Coltrane’s appeal to transcendent ideas is not of the same
nature as the transcendence of, say, Handel. In Christian ages public life—including
public art, like music—is more easily oriented towards higher ends. An audience
accustomed to enjoying meaningful music within a world largely ordered with
regard to the same ideas and emotions expressed in that music must be somewhat
different than any of Coltrane’s audiences, which are necessarily composed of
modern men and women. Coltrane can—and does—express transcendent impulses, of
course, but they are nevertheless different from those of previous forms of
music. As Mr. Morris suggests, the same might be said of more or less all classical
music since Mozart, not only jazz.

Mr. West notes that there are other great jazz musicians besides Duke Ellington.
I couldn’t agree more. My article focused on Ellington due to my taste for the
virtuoso soloing of the Swing Era. This is not limited to Ellington, but his
band (with such greats as Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, and Clark Terry, to
name a few) exemplified this aspect of jazz more than great musicians like Gershwin
or Cole Porter. I take exception to Mr. West’s claim that one must be at least
seventy–seven years old to write about the Swing Era; thankfully, the essence
of that era was preserved on record.

Mr. West calls my claim that conservatives have never adequately appreciated
swing “utter nonsense on its face.” On this point, Mr. West misunderstands my
argument. Of course many contemporary conservative “fogies” pine for swing (although
Mark Judge hardly qualifies as a “fogy”). But their pining is insufficient to
the extent that they fail to recognize the genuine quality of swing music.
They like jazz simply because it is old or because its lyrics tend to be preferable
to those of Snoop Doggy Dogg. This is how, for example, Robert Bork praises
jazz in Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Swing music is unique because it
is both popular and high, but to understand the latter one must address the
music itself.

In my article, I claimed that Mark Judge failed to do this; based on his letter,
I see no reason to amend this argument. Mr. Judge is of course right to speak
fondly in his book of communities like Shaw in Washington, D.C.—such communities
are indeed preferable, as he notes, to the suburbs. But New Urbanism does not
quite capture what makes jazz great (and as far as I know, prior to Judge’s
book it never claimed to do so).

At the beginning of his letter, Mr. Judge claims that my article is an amalgamation
of two dismissals of jazz. This could not be more contrary to the spirit of
my article, an obvious defense of swing. I did not write that swing was “insulting
to God,” merely that most jazz does not call forth the same emotions as the
music of Christian ages. I did not write that jazz is “good for ‘the common
man,’” merely that common men rather enjoyed swing, to swing’s credit. Nor did
I argue that Mr. Judge’s book is “about music and not culture”; on the contrary,
I think that his book is almost oblivious to swing music and focuses
on culture entirely too much.

Later in his letter, Mr. Judge takes issue with my doubt that neo–swing has
kids looking to their grandparents to learn what’s hip. Since the Swing Era
ended around 1945, the last group of Americans to spend a significant amount
of time as members of a swing dancing, record buying public were born in the
early 1920s. Today, that generation is pushing eighty—which is to say, the last
living link to the Swing Era is largely deceased. Today’s kids would have to
ask their great–grandparents to tap memories of swing’s salad days. This
distance from the Swing Era is all too evident in the neo–swing movement Mr.
Judge favors.

More important than Mr. Judge’s misunderstanding of my argument is his insistence
on a sort of musical democratization: “Genre doesn’t matter,” he writes, “sound
does.” This is fine as far as it goes—there are certainly some recent pop songs
that are quite good, as Mr. Judge notes. Classical music, jazz, and rock are
not “different animals” in at least one important sense—they are all
forms of music. Each calls forth certain emotions and lends itself to certain
virtues. Today’s pop music favors a half–hearted rebelliousness or an ugly lust
(with exceptions, of course). Early rock did much of the same, though without
the maliciousness of Mick Jagger and everything that followed. Jazz is considerably
more ennobling, even while being popular (due to records and radio) in a way
classical music never could be. This is why jazz is great. Conservatives like
Mark Judge, who insist on equalizing genres and are reluctant to discuss swing
music itself, only obscure this greatness, even while appearing to praise it.

Getting Locke and Jefferson Right

In his review of A New Birth
of Freedom (March), George McKenna criticizes Harry V. Jaffa on at least
two points. First, Mr. McKenna believes Jaffa is not careful enough to distinguish
Locke’s thought from the Founding:

Surprisingly, for such a noted student of Leo Strauss, Jaffa
seems to assume that Locke fits smoothly into the natural law tradition of Western
thought. But in Natural Right and History Strauss made a convincing case
that Locke’s “state of nature” represented a radical break with the tradition
and brought him closer to Thomas Hobbes.

Mr. McKenna makes a common mistake in reading the Hobbesian Locke into the
Founding. This has the effect of claiming the Founders read Locke as a moral
relativist. There is no such evidence. Just because Strauss found Hobbes in
Locke does not mean the Founding Fathers did. This is the essential point Jaffa
makes in his essay “The American Founding as the Best Regime,” but it can also
be inferred from his chapter on the Declaration of Independence in Crisis
of the House Divided. More pointedly, Jaffa explicitly denounces such an
interpretation in his review of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind
(Interpretation, Fall 1988).

No one has maintained more persistently than I have . . .
the importance in the American Founding of Locke’s teaching. . . . But to say
that a radical atheism discovered in Locke’s esoteric teaching was part of what
they understood, believed, and incorporated into their regime—when every single
document bearing on the question contradicts it, and there is not a shred of
evidence to support it—is just plain crazy.

While there is no evidence for Mr. McKenna’s interpretation of a Hobbesian
Locke, there is evidence that the Founders despised Hobbes. Both James Wilson
and Alexander Hamilton regarded his doctrine as “repugnant,” “absurd,” and “impious.”
Their low opinion of Hobbes is in contrast to their high opinion of human ends.

Second, Mr. McKenna asserts that Jefferson “pioneered in the same crackpot
scientism, the same methodology for treating some people as less than fully
human, that Jaffa rightly deplores in Calhoun and Stephens.” Jefferson certainly
did not subscribe to “the same” science. While Jefferson may have held that
certain characteristics of blacks were wanting, he never questioned their humanity.
Jefferson did not even intimate, unlike John C. Calhoun and Alexander Stephens,
that blacks should be enslaved “for their own benefit.” Nor did he disinherit
them from salvation as Stephens and Jefferson Davis did when they likened the
slaves to the cursed race of Canaan, thus making them “fitted for that condition
which [they occupy] in our system.”

It is true that Jefferson recognized the slaves as “inferior,” but in the same
“Query” (number 14) from the Notes on the State of Virginia from which
Mr. McKenna quotes, Jefferson does not assert that they have lost their rights
as a consequence. Rather, Jefferson speaks of a gradual emancipation, while
also not ruling out that the slaves could catch up with their learned masters
through education. Concerning the physical and mental differences, Jefferson’s
concerns were wholly practical. He had little hope that blacks and whites could
live together after emancipation. Yet justice demanded it. In his 1820 letter
to John Holmes—the famous “Fire Bell in the Night” letter—Jefferson lamented
the rejection of the Founding by defenders of slavery: “If they would dispassionately
weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more
likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they
would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves and of treason against the
hopes of the world.”

Jefferson never wavered in his devotion to that “abstract principle.” The Declaration
was a beacon of hope not to a few, but to all. In his 1826 letter to Roger Weightman,
Jefferson stated explicitly that the principles emanating out of the Declaration
“are the grounds of hope for others.” These sentiments are so dissimilar from
the opinions of such Confederate icons as Calhoun and Stephens that there is
no rational connection between them.

Erik S. Root
John Locke Foundation
Raleigh, North Carolina

George McKenna replies:

In my review of Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom I noted that Jaffa
brackets together a number of thinkers who in important respects were really
quite different from one another. For example, Jaffa assumes that Locke and
Jefferson fit comfortably into the medieval and classical tradition of natural
law. Leo Strauss, I thought, rightly challenged that assumption. From this,
Erik S. Root reads that I have branded Locke a “relativist”—and therefore also
Jefferson, Hamilton, James Wilson, and all the other Founding Fathers. He goes
on to show that the Founders were not in fact relativists. But since I never
ventured to brand Locke a relativist in the first place, all the cars on Mr.
Root’s train seem to be proceeding without an engine.

What Strauss said, correctly, I think, is that Locke, like Hobbes before him,
broke with the natural law tradition by denying that man is by nature a social
and political animal, holding instead that man is naturally independent and
once lived without government in a state of nature. This forces him into the
fiction that all just government must originate in some primitive “contract.”
I don’t think this amounts to relativism (Locke seems to have believed that
some version of the contract was applicable to all times and places), but it
certainly is a very different foundational concept than that of Aristotle or
of the medieval natural law theorists, and it has very different implications
for governance.

I regret leaving the impression that Thomas Jefferson denied the humanity of
blacks. At times he came pretty close—as when, for example, he speculated that
the preference of black men for white women over black women was analogous to
“the preference of the Oranootan [sic] for the black women over those of his
own species.” But he never explicitly denied their humanity. So far as I am
aware, neither did John C. Calhoun and Alexander Stephens. What all of them
shared was a belief that blacks belonged to a lower order of humanity. This
prejudice was widespread in the nineteenth century, but in the previous century
it was Jefferson who was one of the first to give it the patina of objective
“science.” So, if we must arrange thinkers into contending armies, as Jaffa
seems to do in his book, it is not so easy to decide where to put Jefferson.
For the most part, I am sure, he belongs with the forces of light, but there
is a dark side of Jefferson that cannot be ignored.

Proper Fraternal Reproof

David B. Hart’s contribution to the symposium on “The
Future of the Papacy” (March) deserves special commendation. He acknowledges
gratefully how hard John Paul II has tried to span the distance separating the
Eastern Church and the Roman Catholic Church. That the results have been disappointing
must be a source of sorrow to the ailing Pontiff. Moreover, Mr. Hart expounds
with clarity and sincerity the obstacles that lay in the path of a reconciliation.
He seems to draw the conclusion that the moment has not yet come. The Kairos
is not yet ripe. The obstacles are many and the solution lies not in human diplomacy,
but will be the fruit of prayer, sacrifices, penance, and an ardent desire on
both sides to mend a tragic separation.

But what I particularly appreciate is Mr. Hart’s conviction that there are
obstacles that the Latin Church could remove, obstacles that have no doubt increased
the difficulty of reaching a fruitful dialogue between East and West. He deplores
the desacralization of the Liturgy—“disfigured by rebarbative banality, by hymnody
both insipid and heterodox, and by a style of worship that looks flippant if
not blasphemous.” Alas, this severe fraternal correction is justified: blasphemous
masses have proliferated since Vatican II.

Mr. Hart charitably chides the Latin Church for not censuring theo­ logical
heresies, thereby giving the impression that her faith has become pluralistic.
“Academic theologians explicitly reject principles of Catholic orthodoxy, but
are not (as they would be in the East) excluded from communion.” These words—spoken
in fraternal charity—are a clarion call for authorities in the Roman Catholic
Church. Those truly faithful to the teaching of the Holy Catholic Church have
suffered unspeakable anguish for the last forty years for the reasons bluntly
stated by David Hart. Let us hope that the criticisms of an “outsider” will
be gratefully received by those to whom they are addressed.

Alice von Hildebrand
New Rochelle, New York

What Makes a Just Wage Just

Stephen T. Worland’s “Just
Wages” (February)—as its title implies—tries to dismiss the suffering of
American workers with a quick wave of a scholarly wand and a dash of discredited
economic theories. Mr. Worland labels support for a higher minimum wage “class
warfare.” The minimum wage in this country has been falling rapidly for thirty
years. It would have to be over $8 now, instead of $5.15, to restore it to its
level of three decades ago. It would have to be much higher than that for many
families to be able to afford housing. While income has remained the same or
fallen for most Americans, the richest among us have seen their wealth skyrocket.
The tax cuts for the wealthy now being planned in Washington constitute class
warfare, but notice which class is being victimized.

Yes, victimized. Mr. Worland dismisses Marx’s idea of surplus wealth as a myth.
I dismiss Mr. Worland’s argument as attacking a straw man. Has anyone proposed
the elimination of profit? At most, some have proposed slicing a bit off the
ever–growing profits of quite secure corporations. Meanwhile, such radical journals
as Business Week and Crain’s have admitted that living wages do
not cause unemployment. On the contrary, in many cases they have reduced turnover
and increased morale, productivity, and competition.

Mr. Worland not only ignores these facts. He ignores the entire problem of
growing poverty and homelessness in the United States. The concept of a living
wage, he tells us, belongs to the Catholic Church of a century ago, and may
still be relevant in the Third World. But this is coopting a concept in order
to kill it. The living wage movement, which columnist Robert Kuttner has called
“the most exciting grassroots enterprise to emerge since the civil rights movement,”
has grown up in the United States over the past seven years, and for good reason.

Mr. Worland is, of course, right that it makes no sense for American factories
in the Third World to pay high wages (especially since the same companies refuse
to do so in America). But, again, few if any have argued to the contrary. Many,
however, have argued that workers everywhere should be permitted to organize.
This is how Pope John Paul II put it: “It is a fundamental right of workers
to freely establish organizations to defend and promote their interests and
to contribute in a responsible manner to the common task.” Until union–busting
of the sort engaged in by American corporations abroad—or by the Catholic University
of America in Washington, D.C., for that matter—stops, all high–minded economic
arguments for holding down incomes will remain laughable bunk.

Mr. Worland seems to think wages will go up when productivity does. Yet he
remains oblivious to the glaring fact that productivity in the United States
has shot up in recent decades, while wages have not.

Cardinal Roger Mahony has shown us an admirable example with his efforts on
behalf of janitors in California. His is the path we should follow, not that
of pseudo–academic apologists for oppression.

David Swanson
Orange, Virginia

Stephen T. Worland replies:

The “living wage movement” David Swanson refers to is mainly intended to protect
workers employed by firms that contract with city and county governments. To
understand such a movement it is important to keep in mind the crucial difference
between public and private sector employment. Public sector employees can negotiate
themselves a raise, and then use their political leverage to secure the taxes
to pay for it. To provide moral cover for this procedure they can recall the
memory of Pope Leo XIII and invoke the concept of “a living wage.”

A private sector business firm has to meet payroll out of sales revenue. The
cost of a wage increase cannot be covered by raising taxes. Because of the connection
between sales revenue received and wages disbursed the firm cannot be required
to pay more than what theologian Michael Naughton identifies as the “sustainable
wage.”

Too Cursory Dismissal

I was disappointed to read the rather cursory dismissal of Joseph Pearce’s
Solzhenitsyn:
A Soul in Exile in the March issue of First Things. The book in fact
is a useful and important addition to the literature on Solzhenitsyn. Michael
Scammell’s massive 1984 biography contains much original research but is openly
hostile to Solzhenitsyn’s religious convictions and far from fair in reporting
his fundamentally moderate political positions. Scammell’s book is marked by
an aggressively secularist, liberal academic bias. It is also far too long to
be of much value to the ordinary reader. D. M. Thomas’ well–written 1998 biography
more accurately reports Solzhenitsyn’s views but is marred by a bizarre Freudian
interpretive framework. Pearce’s more manageable biography provides little original
research but has the merit of presenting a readable and quite accurate account
of Solzhenitsyn’s life and thought, one which sympathetically engages his deepest
moral and political convictions. It is a good place to begin one’s reading on
Solzhenitsyn.

Pearce does indeed go too far in assimilating Solzhenitsyn’s views to those
of E. F. Schumacher and G. K. Chesterton. But like them, Solzhenitsyn is a critic
of industrial mass society and an advocate of decentralization, small–scale
technology, and local self–government. There may be a touch of romanticism in
these views, but they need to be thoughtfully engaged and not summarily dismissed.

The “one long interview” that Pearce is said to make “too much of” includes
interesting details on Solzhenitsyn’s life, reconsiderations of older writings
and essays, a fascinating account of Solzhenitsyn’s 1993 meeting with Pope John
Paul II (on the fifteenth anniversary of the Pope’s pontificate), as well as
remarkable reflections on how the Church might come to terms with modernity
without losing its soul. I found this material quite helpful as I completed
my own soon to be published work on the “political philosophy” of Solzhenitsyn.

Pearce’s book concludes with an Appendix that reproduces nine never before
translated “prose poems” of Solzhenitsyn’s that were originally published in
Russia in 1997. These poems have an elegiac quality and thoughtfully deal with
such subjects as nature, death, and the power of conscience against the backdrop
of Russia’s new “time of troubles.” These alone are worth the price of admission.

Daniel J. Mahoney
Assumption College
Worcester, Massachusetts
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More to the Story

Richard John Neuhaus would have been better served to have gathered all the
facts before commenting on the controversy concerning Baylor University and
Professor William A. Dembski (While We’re At It, February). It is true that
William Dembski was removed from the leadership of the academic unit formerly
known as the Michael Polanyi Center. However, his removal was related to matters
of internal relationships and not to his academic work. The fact remains that
Bill Dembski is still a faculty member at Baylor University. The project known
as Intelligent Design—among other projects related to science, the philosophy
and history of science, and science and religion—continues. Dr. Bruce Gordon,
a friend of Bill Dembski and also an advocate of Intelligent Design, is now
the director.

Baylor University is indeed committed to a thoroughgoing integration of faith
and learning and the implications for an academic institution of the confession,
“Jesus is Lord.” (See Thesis I of Father Neuhaus’ superb essay, “The
Christian University: Eleven Theses,” first delivered at activities related
to my inauguration, later printed in First Things [January  1996], and discussed
and analyzed every year by incoming students in the Baylor Interdisciplinary
Core.)

Robert B. Sloan, Jr.
President
Baylor University
Waco, Texas