Actually, Amanda, I think I said those lines from Robert Frost were hendecasyllabics, not hexameters. Or I may have misspoken. Regardless, hendecasyllabic they are, the eleven-syllable line passing into English ultimately from Latin.

Here, for example is the meter of Horace’s alcaic stanza in Latin poetry:

x — u — — ^^ — u u — u x
x — u — — ^^ — u u — u x
x — u — — — u — x
— u u — u u — u — x

(Where “—” means a long syllable, “u” a short, and “x” either, and “^^” means the caesura.)

Translated into stresses, with a trochee substituted for the spondee, that makes it in English:

x / v / v / v v / v x
x / v / v / v v / v x
x / v / v / v / x
/ v v / v v / v / x

The first two lines here are hendecasyllabics. Such eleven-syllable lines have a strong life in Italian—in Dante, for instance—where they are very flexible and where rules have emerged to keep track of the dactyl and the number of stresses.

Still, there’s a difference in the ways these hendecasyllabic lines are used in English. One can speak here of asclepiads, first, second, etc., but an easier way to think of it might be this: The hendecasyllabic line in narrative poetry wants the two unstressed syllables to come early, the opening two hendecasyllabic lines in an alcaic want them to come late.

The example you cite, Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something,” is a fine example of narrative hendecasyllabics. What’s amazing, I think, about this poem is that it sounds unstrained, but every line is exactly regular: /v/vv/v/v/v.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
/v/vv/v/v/v
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
/v/vv/v/v/v
Deeper down in the well than where the water
/v/vv/v/v/v
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
/v/vv/v/v/v
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
/v/vv/v/v/v
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
/v/vv/v/v/v

Tennyson’s “Hendecasyllabics” is perhaps even more amazing, though much more artificial, for Tennyson has tried to line up long syllables (so the poem is accurate in quantity) with the stresses:

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
/v/vv/v/v/v
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
/v/vv/v/v/v
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
/v/vv/v/v/v
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
/v/vv/v/v/v
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
/v/vv/v/v/v
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him
/v/vv/v/v/v

In the two hendecasyllabic lines that open an alcaic stanza, however, the dactyl typically comes later in the line, not as the second foot but after the caesura: not /v/vv/v/v/v but x/v/v/vv/vx. So, for example, here are the opening two lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Alcaics: to H. F. B.”

Brave lads in olden musical centuries
//v/v/vv/vv
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses,
//v/v/vv/vv

And here are the opening two lines of Tennyson’s “Milton: Alcaics” (again a tour-de-force, trying to line up quantity and stress):

O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,
//v/v/vv/vv
O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,
//v/v/vv/vv

Here’s the beginning of Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Alcaics”:

So spake the voice: and as with a single life
//v/v/vv/vx
Instinct, the whole mass, fierce, irretainable,
//v/v/vv/vx

It’s interesting that these Victorian examples all attempt the difficult task of forcing a spondee to begin each line. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Late Summer” doesn’t attempt that (although I think he may “hear” it in some way, thickening that opening foot with a hint of quantity):

Confused, he found her lavishing feminine
v/v/v/vv/vv
Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;
/vv/v/vv/vv

As this example shows, there’s plenty of room for substitution in the first few feet, but that dactyl in the penultimate position seems to me the defining feature of the hendecasyllabic line in an alcaic stanza.

More recent poets have treated the opening two lines of the alcaic stanza in English as almost genuine “syllabic” lines: carrying any metrical pattern that sounds good, as long as it has eleven syllables. W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” are alcaics that will sometimes use the traditional pattern:

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
/v/v/v/vv/v

but often Auden will vary this wildly, to great effect:

For about him till the very end were still
/v/v/v/v/v/
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
/vv/vv/v/v/

Regardless, after the opening eleven-syllable lines, the alcaic stanza adds two more, a nine-syllable line and a ten-syllable line. At an early stage in Greek, these were apparently one nineteen-syllable line, but by the time they reach the Romans, it is routine to hear them as two lines (so Horace, for example, will admit hiatus between them).

x/v/v/v/x
/vv/vv/v/x

To use the same examples as above, here’s Stevenson’s “Alcaics: to H. F. B.”:

Brave lads in olden musical centuries
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses,
Sat late by alehouse doors in April
Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising.

These final lines run //v/v/v/v and /vv/vv/v/v. Tennyson’s “Milton: Alcaics” is precisely the same:

O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,
O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;

These end with //v/v/v/x and /vv/vv/v/x, as do Clough’s “Alcaics”:

So spake the voice: and as with a single life
Instinct, the whole mass, fierce, irretainable,
Down on that unsuspecting host swept;
Down, with the fury of winds, that all night

Robinson’s “Late Summer” drops the attempt to have a spondee open the third line, but otherwise uses the same pattern for the last two lines, v/v/v/v/x and /vv/vv/v/x:

Confused, he found her lavishing feminine
Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;
And yet she smiled. Why, then, should horrors
Be as they were, without end, her playthings?

These, then are the two main uses of hendecasyllabic lines in English: As a straight-forward narrative line, with the substitution typically in the second foot, and as the opening of an alcaic stanza, with the substituted dactyl typically coming later in the line.

More information than you need, Amanda, to appreciate the Frost poem, I know, but there it is.

Last night I saw The Lion in Winter, the movie about Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their three sons gathered together for the Christmas holidays. The threats, the manipulation, the backbiting–imagine if George and Martha had had three children, and crowns.

One line of dialogue struck me in particular. Eleanor is with her sons, two of them being the future kings Richard and John, when Richard pulls out a knife. John squeals “He’s got a knife!” to which his mother replies:

“Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history’s forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can’t we love one another just a little–that’s how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.

Aside from two factual errors–the 12th century saw a splendid renaissance, and syphilis had yet to appear in Europe–the quotation is brilliant. Contra Marx and other theoreticians of history, war’s ultimate cause lies like a disease in the human heart. Sin plagues us and we cannot escape. In fact, the whole play is a study in original sin. A family that might, as their mother says, have “so much to love each other for” spends its Christmas festering in hate.

From the end of the quotation above, you might think that redemption lurks on the horizon. But Eleanor is just as conniving and unforgiving as the rest. Her love for Henry and Henry’s love for her cannot overcome their own selfish desires, and so love only acts as salt in the wounds they inflict. At the end there is a kind of peace, more wrought by fatigue and impending departure than by forgiveness, and we last see the king and queen sailing away and promising to see each other at Easter.

There is no sign that things will stand differently then. The royal succession will still be up for grabs, and one imagines the whole drama playing out all over again. Because, contra Eleanor’s hopes, they cannot change the world on their own. Left to their own devices, they might not kill each other, but they can do much worse. Without the operation of some kind of grace, all will remain in their depravity.

Sarah Palin was a nervy choice for John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee, and—nervy being right on the edge of the nerves—it makes me edgy.

Palin has a lot of possibilities, which is another way of saying that the public’s perception of her could break either way. There is an enormous chance of appealing to voters in her, but she also offers the media an opportunity to paint her as a nut or as a fool. Dan Quayle was another such candidate, and by the time the newspapers got through with him, he looked like a bumbling idiot.

Count me nervously pleased with this choice.

Well, McCain has chosen, and our editor won’t be the only one relieved to see that the nod has gone to the staunchly pro-life Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

A former beauty-queen with a passion for grueling outdoor sports and an unembarrassed attachment to family and religion, Mrs. Palin is quite the All-American marvel. Because she has frequently defied GOP leaders in Alaska, she also has something like John McCain’s maverick reputation, which should endear her to the media. It seems social conservatives have good reason to be satisfied with McCain’s pick.

It seems to me that the Catholic bishops are missing a golden teaching opportunity.

Bishops are rightly concerned that for them to publicly warn or chastise politicians because of their voting records on abortion will be misunderstood as politically motivated. All sorts of issues get dragged into the discussion, such as separation of church and state and the role of prudential judgment in applying the Church’s moral and social teachings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, has presented the Church’s bishops with a very new situation. In her recent statement, she did not merely defend her legislative record; she has made a crystal-clear public declaration on a doctrinal question that is not in any way political in itself (though obviously it has implications in the political order). She says that she does not believe that life begins at conception, and she cites St. Augustine to support her position.

Here are some unambiguous facts:

(1) Pope John Paul II taught explicitly in Evangelium Vitae that direct killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral:

Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom. 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

(2) The teaching in question is an article of faith, according to an explicit statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (in the Commentary that accompanied the statement Ad Tuendam Fidem):

To the truths of the first paragraph belong the articles of faith of the Creed, the various Christological dogmas and Marian dogmas; the doctrine of the institution of the sacraments by Christ and their efficacy with regard to grace; the doctrine of the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the sacrificial nature of the eucharistic celebration; the foundation of the Church by the will of Christ; the doctrine on the primacy and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff; the doctrine on the existence of original sin; the doctrine on the immortality of the spiritual soul and on the immediate recompense after death; the absence of error in the inspired sacred texts; the doctrine on the grave immorality of direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being.

About this category of doctrines the same document states:

These doctrines are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and defined with a solemn judgment as divinely revealed truths either by the Roman Pontiff when he speaks ‘ex cathedra,’ or by the College of Bishops gathered in council, or infallibly proposed for belief by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

These doctrines require the assent of theological faith by all members of the faithful. Thus, whoever obstinately places them in doubt or denies them falls under the censure of heresy, as indicated by the respective canons of the Codes of Canon Law.

(3) Whatever one’s theory of ensoulment might be, it is clear that the phrase “innocent human being” used both in Evangelium Vitae and in the statement of the CDF was meant to include unborn human life at all stages after conception.

Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that, while the general principle of the immorality of killing innocent human beings is an article of faith, the factual question of whether a child just after conception is a human being is not an article of faith. Yet, even if that is so, the humanity of the unborn child after conception would still be something taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium, and fall under the category of “truths definitively to be held.” In the words of the same CDF document:

The second proposition of the Professio fidei states: “I also firmly accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.” The object taught by this formula includes all those teachings belonging to the dogmatic or moral area, which are necessary for faithfully keeping and expounding the deposit of faith, even if they have not been proposed by the Magisterium of the Church as formally revealed.

Such doctrines can be defined solemnly by the Roman Pontiff when he speaks ‘ex cathedra’ or by the College of Bishops gathered in council, or they can be taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church as a “sententia definitive tenenda.” Every believer, therefore, is required to give firm and definitive assent to these truths, based on faith in the Holy Spirit’s assistance to the Church’s Magisterium, and on the Catholic doctrine of the infallibility of the Magisterium in these matters. Whoever denies these truths would be in a position of rejecting a truth of Catholic doctrine and would therefore no longer be in full communion with the Catholic Church.

To all appearances, Pelosi has publicly and pointedly denied a “truth of Catholic doctrine” that is “definitively to be held” (“definitive tenenda”) by “all believers”, and the denial of which renders them “no longer . . . in full communion with the Catholic Church.” Moreover, Pelosi simultaneously proclaims her right to do so because “many Catholics” agree with her. Clearly, this is a scandal in the original sense of the term.

What can the bishops do? There is something very simple they can do that would have an enormously salutary effect.

They can, in a public statement, explain the doctrinal situation and require Pelosi to respond to the following question: “Do you assent to the teaching of the Church that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being at any stage after conception is gravely immoral?”

Her previous public statement makes it presumable that her answer is no. This presumption can only be removed by a clear affirmative answer. In light of the public nature and scandal caused by her earlier statement, she should be required to make a public assent to this Catholic teaching.

This is no longer a question of a politician claiming some kind of rights or leeway as a politician. It is a well-known Catholic very publicly explicitly rejecting a “truth of Catholic doctrine.”

Yesterday at the FT office, this Robert Frost poem came up in conversation. Technically masterful, with a regular but unusual metrical pattern, it is unrhymed and verbally simple yet laced together with a wistful lyricism that echoes between image and line. Joseph Bottum reads it as an uncommon example of English hexameter—and, more uncommon, hexameter that works—with an absent stress in each final foot, as allowed by classical prosody. (I’m inclined to scan it as trochaic pentameter, with anapestic substitutions.)

The trochaic rhythm of stress–unstress creates a strange feeling—almost as though the speaker is leaning over the edge of the well with his very words, peering into the rippling water that always eludes clear sight and resolution: Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Moments of truth, I call these times, where we glimpse the deeper meaning for a moment, and then it’s beyond grasp. But the memory of that “once, then, something” stays . . . along with the knowledge of how little we know.

For Once, Then, Something

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths–and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

–Robert Frost

At the New Liturgical Movement, Jeffrey Tucker argues that Summorum Pontificum is indicative of the new spirit of reform creeping into the Church, one in marked contrast to what came before:

Everyone knows the more obvious specifics. Vatican II said Gregorian chant should assume primary place but instead we got pop tunes more suitable for a children’s playground than Mass. We were told that nothing would change about the liturgy unless it was absolutely necessary, and instead with got liturgical revolution. With it came an upending of doctrine, morals, and the faith itself, with the inevitable draining of monasteries, convents, and seminaries.

If you were going to describe this false spirit correctly, the last word one would use is “liberal.” In fact, the spirit that was foisted upon us was illiberal in the extreme. It banned liturgical forms of the past. It sought to ban music of the past. It sought to ban our holy cards, our art, our architecture, our established prayers, our lay organizations, and our very way of life as Catholics. Change was in the air, but what was it all about? The only thing we knew for sure is that the past was off limits. And this was enforced.

The “Spirit of Vatican II” then became an excuse for mandatory heterodoxy, for undermining the true intent and contradicting the letter and the purpose of the reform. This Council that sought authenticate liberalization was ironically used by people invoking its spirit as a means for closing off all history and tradition, interdicting the past. A kind of autocratic and despotic censorship of all treasured things came into effect. This ill-liberal attitude shut it off the Catholic a source of its very name life, that is, its traditions. . . .

What Summorum represents, then, is far larger than what first appears. Summorum not only has a letter but also a spirit and that spirit is liberation, the liberty to love what came before. This is not only about the 1962 Missal. It is about a worldview and a civilization. What was holy then is holy now. I know that plenty of problems still exist and the claims about the “Spirit of Vatican II” haven’t been put to rest completely. But we seemed to have turned the corner, such that all old things seem new again.

Judging from what I’ve seen by just over a year in the Catholic Church, he’s right.

In the wake of Senator Obama’s acceptance speech last night, readers of First Things will enjoy David Brooks’ delightful satire. A sample:

My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.

We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. This feast was the occasion on which the the Venerable (soon to be Blessed) John Henry Cardinal Newman preached a characteristically brilliant sermon called “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training.” The whole thing is (of course) worth reading and re-reading, but here is my favorite passage:

Generation passes after generation, and there is on the one side the same doleful, dreary wandering, the same feverish unrest, the same fleeting enjoyments, the same abiding and hopeless misery; and on the other, the same anxiously beating heart of impotent affection. Age goes after age, and still Augustine rushes forth again and again, with his young ambition, and his intellectual energy, and his turbulent appetites; educated, yet untaught; with powers strengthened, sharpened, refined by exercise, but unenlightened and untrained,—goes forth into the world, ardent, self-willed, reckless, headstrong, inexperienced, to fall into the hands of those who seek his life, and to become the victim of heresy and sin. And still, again and again does hapless Monica weep; weeping for that dear child who grew up with her from the womb, and of whom she is now robbed; of whom she has lost sight; wandering with him in his wanderings, following his steps in her imagination, cherishing his image in her heart, keeping his name upon her lips, and feeling withal, that, as a woman, she is unable to cope with the violence and the artifices of the world. And still again and again does Holy Church take her part and her place, with a heart as tender and more strong, with an arm, and an eye, and an intellect more powerful than hers, with an influence more than human, more sagacious than the world, and more religious than home, to restrain and reclaim those whom passion, or example, or sophistry is hurrying forward to destruction.

When not editing an illustrious magazine, defining agenbites, or unraveling true-crime plots (cf. forthcoming FT), Joseph Bottum has been taking me through the history of the English novel. Pilgrim’s Progress (1676), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Pamela (1740), so far—from the slough of despond to the garden of seduction. I must admit I gave up after fifty pages of Richardson’s Pamela, which struck me as drugstore romance baptized as a chastity catechism in want of a ruthless editor.

Now it’s on to Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones, with its archaically ironic (or ironically archaic?) narrator, its Allworthy magistrate, and its not-so-worthy foundling. The chapter headings alone are delightfully wry: “Containing such grave Matter, the Reader cannot laugh once through the whole Chapter,” “A Domestic Government founded upon Rules directly contrary to those of Aristotle”–immediately followed, go figure, by “One of the Most bloody Battles ever recorded in domestic History”–and, my favorite, “With some proper Animadversions on Bastards.” You might start to guess the storyline.

More to be said on that, but I’d like to go back to the beginning, where Fielding proposes his “Bill of Fare”–with a bit of advice to authors and readers alike:

The provision which we have here made is no other than Human Nature. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.

An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too common and vulgar; for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops.

Two and a half centuries later, appreciation of both ham and humanity is still in short supply.

The Democrats didn’t invite Archbishop Charles Chaput to their convention in Denver this year, for understandable reasons. Instead, they invited Sr. Helen Prejean C.S.J. to speak at their interfaith gathering. If they were trying to avoid controversy and shore up support from religious party members, however, they were in for a disappointment:

COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER — Following the hot topic of abortion, Sister Helen Prejean tackled another: calling for abolition of the death penalty to raucous applause at the DNC’s interfaith gathering.

She received nothing but a stony silence, however, when she questioned the basis of the biblical crucifixion story as a “projection of our violent society.”

“Is this a God?” Prejeans asked about the belief that God allowed his son, Jesus, to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. “Or is this an ogre?”

The other day while reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” I came across the following passage:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think.” If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry–when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech–it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.

In other words, Orwell says, writers prefer complexity and euphony to clarity and directness. This in turn waters down our language, and since language is the clay with which we mold our thoughts, we dumb down our thinking as well.

That brought to mind a book I read in college, John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing: The Degredation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. Part of McWhorter’s thesis is that we no longer value the formality and structure of writing. Our culture values the spoken word, which is by nature more focused on the flow of the sounds, more spontaneous, and therefore less developed and thought out than prose.

We can see this in the difference between the song lyrics, journalism, and political speeches of the 1940s and those of today. As we outgrew oratory and cogent sentences, we forgot that they were conducive to concrete thought. The rise of post-modernism didn’t help either. If there is no truth or definite meaning, language becomes reduced to its form. If sentences can’t say much, they might as well sound nice and intelligent.

Orwell’s solution to this problem–at least the linguistic part–was to write with care and to write well: “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.” Fight with your words as you fight for them, for precision in meaning and argument is needed in our time.

If you’re at all sick of non-stop political reporting on the election, here’s the perfect antidote: Dave Barry is reporting daily from the Democratic National Convention in Denver. His pieces for August 24, 25, and 26 are currently on the Miami Herald’s website, with more to come. Here’s a sample of the 24th’s column:

It’s hard to blame Sen. Clinton for being bitter. Here she is, the smartest human ever, PLUS she spent all those years standing loyally behind Bill Clinton wearing uncomfortable pantyhose (I mean Hillary was, not Bill) (although there are rumors), PLUS she went to the trouble and expense of acquiring a legal residence in New York State so she could be a senator from there, PLUS she assembled a team of nuclear-physicist-grade genius political advisors, PLUS she spent years going around to every dirtbag community in America explaining in detail her 23-point policy solutions for every single problem facing the nation including soybean blight. And after all that, she loses the nomination to a guy who has roughly the same amount of executive governmental experience as Hannah Montana. Hillary is like: “Are you KIDDING me?” . . .

But in the end, the focus of this convention will be on Barack Obama, who on Thursday night will receive the nomination in long-overdue recognition of a distinguished career of seeking the nomination. His goal, in his acceptance speech, will be to win over the undecided voters–the people who are unsure of what he really stands for, or who have received emailed rumors that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or a vampire, or a lesbian. His goal will be to show, with no disrespect to the Muslim socialist vampire lesbian community, that he is a regular person just like you, except he has Vision and Leadership. After that, he will lay out his specific policies for building a brighter future. Then he will turn into a bat.

An excerpt from a letter of St. Thomas More to Erasmus, written on the 14th of June, 1532:

Congratulations, then, my dear Erasmus, on your outstanding virtuous qualities; however, if on occasion some good person is unsettled and disturbed by some point, even without making a sufficiently serious reason, still do not be chagrined at making accommodations for the pious dispositions of such men. But as for those snapping, growling, malicious fellows, ignore them, and, without faltering, quietly continue to devote yourself to the promotion of intellectual things and the advancement of virtue.

This past Sunday on Meet the Press, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed that, having studied the matter carefully as a “fervent, practicing” Catholic, she had learned that doctors of the Church have historically had no fixed position on when human life begins; therefore, one should not interfere with a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

No-one was surprised when, not twenty-four hours after the program aired, Denver’s indefatigable Bishop Charles Chaput sent out an open letter correcting Pelosi’s gross misrepresentation of Catholic tradition. But it did not stop there. Rather unexpectedly, more bishops chimed in, including New York’s Edward Cardinal Egan, whose firm rebuke included these thunderous lines:

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.

The Speaker responded yesterday morning. She acknowledged that “Catholic teaching is clear that life begins at conception” but she, like “many Catholics,” dissents from this view. She instead follows St. Augustine, whom she quotes as saying that “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation” (Saint Augustine, On Exodus 21.22).

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Pelosi to explain how a “fervent, practicing Catholic” can justify dissent from an immemorial teaching in the name of outdated science. Anyway, let’s hope that, especially with the election coming up, the bishops get a taste for this kind of forthrightness.

Recently Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a frequent contributor to First Things, was on CNN’s Glenn Beck Show with some of his students to discuss life on college campuses, specifically the acceptability of conservatism and the hook-up culture. One of the students was our new junior fellow Stefan McDaniel. A recording of the program is available online, but takes a long time to load, so you might be interested in the transcript of the show instead.

From ZENIT this week, an interview with Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver on his new book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. “Nobody wants a theocracy,” says the archbishop, but if we do want democracy, we need a culture of political decision-making imbued with religious and moral convictions:

Q: Catholicism in the public square in the United States has had a long and complicated journey, and you say that Catholics have a lot to offer the political process, but that more often than not they keep their beliefs and convictions separate from their political actions. Why is that?

Archbishop Chaput: Catholics have always been a minority in the United States, and prejudice against Catholics in this country has always been real, even before the founding. Sometimes the bias has been indirect and genteel. Just as often it has taken more vulgar forms of economic and political discrimination, and media bigotry. Either way, prejudice always fuels the appetite of a minority to fit in, to achieve and to assimilate, and American Catholics have done that extraordinarily well–in fact, too well.

In the name of being good citizens, a lot of Catholics have bought into a very mistaken idea of the “separation of Church and state.” American Catholics have always supported the principle of keeping religious and civil authority distinct.

Nobody wants a theocracy, and much of the media hand-wringing about the specter of “Christian fundamentalism” is really just a particularly offensive scare tactic. The Church doesn’t presume to run the state. We also don’t want the state interfering with our religious beliefs and practices–which, candidly, is a much bigger problem today.

Separating Church and state does not mean separating faith and political issues. Real pluralism requires a healthy conflict of ideas. In fact, the best way to kill a democracy is for people to remove their religious and moral convictions from their political decision-making. If people really believe something, they’ll always act on it as a matter of conscience. Otherwise they’re just lying to themselves. So the idea of forcing religion out of public policy debates is not only unwise, it’s anti-democratic.

That sounds like an argument I heard somewhere once before. . . .

Dennis Byrne, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune, reminds us yet again that the question about abortion has changed for this election. It’s not just a question of whether abortion is permitted in the womb, but whether infanticide is legal when the mother doesn’t want to keep a newborn baby. There is no way a thinking person can get around it. Are newborns people, or not?

The most lasting impact of the recent nationally televised interview Rick Warren did with Senators Barack Obama and John McCain may not have to do with the two presidential candidates. It may be its effect on, and the impression people have of, evangelical Christianity.

Rick Warren, already in the process of becoming one of the most significant faces within the evangelical world, went a good distance toward becoming one of its most recognizable and influential leaders. And because of the tone, grace, and sensibilities with which he approaches politics, Warren is replacing the “religious right” model with a new, better, and, I think, more Christ-based paradigm.

To understand why, it is worth reading Warren’s Wall Street Journal interview with Naomi Schaefer Riley. In it, we learn that unlike other prominent religious leaders, Mr. Warren won’t be endorsing anyone this fall. He places an admirable emphasis on civility and mutual respect in public discourse (his feelings of respect and even affection for both McCain and Obama were evident). Warren’s effort to move evangelical Christians away from what he calls the “combativeness” of the religious right is welcome and long overdue. And his call for conservative Christians to broaden their agenda to include issues like fighting poverty and disease, as well as environmental conservation, rings true to me.

“I don’t just care that the little girl is born,” Warren tells Schaefer. “Is she going to be born in poverty? Is she going to be born with AIDS because her mom has AIDS? Is she going to never get an education?”

At the same time, there is a tendency for the mainstream media to exaggerate how much the evangelical community is shifting in its attitudes on key political issues and its worldview. According to Warren, “A lot of people hear [about a broader agenda] and they think, ‘Oh, evangelicals are giving up on believing that life begins at conception. They’re not giving up on that at all. Not at all.’”

When asked about the assertion that the Democratic party is changing its abortion platform, Warren replies, “Window dressing. Too little, too late.” And when asked about the opposite claim by the Rev. Jim Wallis, Warren is admirably honest and dismissive. “Jim Wallis is a spokesman for the Democratic party,” according to Warren. “His book reads like the party platform.”

Warren has a sophisticated view of the role churches can play in shaping our culture and, while not himself reflexively hostile to government—he praises the Bush administration for its global AIDS initiative, for example—he understands that the Church can shape attitudes and serve the poor and dispossessed in ways the government often cannot. After having attended a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute, for example, Warren commented that many secular liberals there thought “the answer to everything was a government program.”

Warren begs to differ, and the remarkable work of Saddleback Church is the best evidence he can amass to prove his case.

The last quarter-century have shown us that striking the right balance when it comes to Christians being responsibly involved in public affairs without being consumed by them is not always an easy task. Even Billy Graham slipped up for a time, having gotten too close to Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, causing those closest to him to fear he was injuring his ministry.

A passionate commitment to issues has sometimes led Christians in the public square to demonize those with whom they disagree, which has badly harmed their witness. And of course the allure and temptations of power can corrupt even those with good intentions. It doesn’t help when Christians who weigh in on matters of policy are often uninformed, misinformed, or say silly and even malicious things.

Rick Warren, along with Tim Keller and some others, are helping evangelical Christians to be associated again with intellectual and moral seriousness and fidelity to their faith. That is very good for Christianity, and very good for America.

Yesterday I wrote on the excommunication scene in the movie Beckett. Last night while looking up the exact definition of anathema, I found the actual text of the old rite of anathematization, the gravest form of excommunication:

“Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N– himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate. . . .”

In the film, it all ends there. Lord Gilbert is condemned to eternal fire. The honor of God is defended. So be it.

But the actual declaration continues: “so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.” The whole point of the act is made clear: Excommunication is the last resort to bring about repentance and salvation. It should be a punishment given in mercy and for good, not out of vengeance.

Though Becket’s declaration of excommunicaton ends in judgment, the story continues. For as he proceeds to confront the sheriff sent to arrest him, the chorus of monks begins the Miserere of Psalm 51–a reminder of their own sinfulness and an example of the right response to it.