I think that, in his recent web article, Fr. Neuhaus underestimates Professor Budziszewski’s point that written constitutions can undermine constitutionalism.

Fr. Neuhaus rightly notes that this need not happen if judges interpreting the constitution take an appropriately deferential attitude towards the constitutional text. This shows, however, only that there is no necessity to the idea that constitutions undermine constitutionalism. I’ve not read Budziszewski’s article, but I suspect that all he’s saying is that there is a tendency in practice for constitutions to undermine constitutionalism because, although judges should defer to the text, in practice they very often don’t. American constitutional history confirms the existence of this tendency, and, as Robert Bork showed in his Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, the tendency is not just an American one but seems to attach the judicial office as such because judges in Canada and Israel behave as badly or worse than their American counterparts.

The theory of the U.S. Constitution was never to rely for good government on the virtue of officeholders but rather to control them through a system of checks and balances. Although on the whole an absolutely brilliant design, the Constitution provides for no check on the judicial power to interpret the Constitution short of the amendment process, which is in fact almost always impracticably difficult. The result is that, in practice, there is no check on the Supreme Court’s power to interpret the Constitution. In this respect, there is a serious flaw in the Constitution’s system of separation of powers.

It need not have been this way. Legal theorists as diverse as Bork, Bruce Ackerman and Michael Perry have all proposed systems in which, in one way or another, there would be a viable political process that would overrule the court’s constitutional interpretations. In one of the simpler of such proposals, two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress, along with the concurrence of the President, could overrule the Supreme Court. This particular proposal might make it too easy to overrule the court, but there’s plenty of room for tinkering with details here. One could require larger supermajority votes, concurrences of a percentage of state legislatures, confirming votes in subsequent congresses, national referenda, etc. The point is that the process to overrule the court should be difficult and require significant supermajoritarian support but should not be so difficult as to become impracticable the way the amendment process has become.

A system like this would correct the design flaw in the U.S. Constitution and would return final authority to interpret the Constitution back in the hands of the American people.

What did he know of statistical randomness and probability theories, chance mutations and genetic predispositions? He prayed. George Müller prayed. And there was a knock at the door, and there stood a stranger, as if compelled, with a bagful of food. The children would not go hungry that night. Or the night after. Or the night after that.

What did he know of Doppler shifts and multiverses, or, for that matter, the historical-critical method? George Müller prayed. And money arrived in the mail. Never a request spoken aloud. Only to God.

Born in Prussia, in 1805, Müller, trained for orders in the state’s Lutheran church, an easy living, his father the tax collector’s best wish for his son. He became licensed to preach but preferred to sin: a liar, a drinker, a gambler, and thief, Müller knew neither God nor moderation.

One day, age 20, a guest at a small meeting, Müller heard the gospel and fell to his knees, finally converted, his heart strangely warmed.

Now my life became very different, though not so that my sins were all given up at once. My wicked companions were given up; the going to taverns was discontinued; the habitual practice of telling falsehoods was no longer indulged in, but still a few times more I spoke an untruth. . . . I now no longer lived habitually in sin, though I was still often overcome and sometimes even by open sins, though far less frequently than before, and not without sorrow of heart. I read the Scriptures, prayed often, loved the brethren, went to church from right motives and stood on the side of Christ, though laughed at by my fellow students.

He preached in the fields, a veritable Methodist, but yearned for more, a mission, a great call. The London Missionary Society offered Müller just that, but the Lord has his ways. Upon landing in England, Müller took ill. He moved to the countryside for the sake of his health, and it was there that he would pastor. But physical debilitation had taught him to lean heavily on grace, and he soon stopped a common practice, the renting of pews. He cited the Book of James, that warning against favoring the rich. “The renting of pews,” Müller wrote to posterity, “is also a snare to the servant of Christ. Fear of offending those who pay his salary has kept many ministers from preaching the uncompromising Word of God.”

And so he gave up that salary. A box in a corner—“Give if you please”—would prove his support. No in-the-hand gifts, with a wink and a nod. No names, no faces. Coins in a box. That would be enough, George Muller prayed.

He built orphan houses in Bristol, two shillings in his pocket. “When a believer is doing the work that God has called him to do, he may be confident of success in spite of obstacles.” Müller would not plead for contributions or contract debt. He took no subscribers, no patrons, and charged no fees. He would trust God. God would provide. But always through means.

“He has told me to give you some money,” Müller heard not once but often. The subject, that He, the anthropic principle had not yet made redundant. Despite temptations to doubt, George Müller prayed. “A Christian lady brought five sovereigns for us, with these words written on paper: ‘I was hungry and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink.’”

What are the odds? Unbidden, the money came: through the mail, through a still small voice driving brothers and sisters in the Lord to a knock on the door. Prayers repeatedly answered, concretely, precisely, not a minute too soon. How do mere superstitions contrive such results, how does natural selection provide for generosity to strangers, when the competition is so thick you stumble over them in the streets?

“When I gave thanks after lunch, I asked Him to give us our daily bread, meaning literally that He would send us bread for the evening. While I was praying there was a knock at the door. A poor sister came in and brought us part of her dinner and five shillings. Later, she also brought us a large loaf of bread.”

“I could buy a considerable amount of goods on credit, but the next time we were in need, I would turn to further credit instead of turning to the Lord.”

“The primary object of this ministry is to lead those who are weak in faith to see that there is reality in dealing with God alone.”

“God is now in the tenth year of feeding these orphans, and He has never allowed them to go hungry.”

Bah—accidents! Accidents! Every courtesy shown, every gratuity given, is but one more billowing aftereffect of the Big Bang. A poor pastor need not ask for what his congregation knows he needs. Guilt has been set into motion, and so provision is made. Once, twice, a thousand times over. Cause and effect, as predetermined as toppled dominoes. That such effects appear bidden by prayer—coincidence! coincidence!

But how long before blind faith in coincidence wrecks reason? As opposed to a reasoned faith in Divine Providence?

A master of six languages, taking Scripture alone as his guide, a fool for Christ, Müller never asked a soul for a sou and raised seven million in today’s coin and cared for more than ten thousand children.

What are the odds?

Only an atheist would know.

Happy new year.

The blog Instapundit notes a report of moderation at the Modern Language Association. Well, moderate moderation, anyway. In its general meeting this year, the MLA managed to turn back proposals to condemn American universities for failing to support anti-Israeli activists.

More, the MLA rejected a strong condemnation of the University of Colorado for its firing of the activist professor Ward Churchill. The best line: “‘I support speaking truth to power,’ said [Charles] Rzepka [of Boston University], but that requires truth.”

Robert Benchley was an American original. An original what, I have no idea. Some say humorist. But he was more than that. He was also a first-rate pedagogue. Consider his Academy Award–winning short film How to Sleep. Thought you could sleep before? You fool . . .

I started picking through my worn copy of Benchley Lost and Found after coming across this fun site. Benchley’s concerns are still our concerns: quack medicine, quack politics, quack religion, and the unutterable indignities that accompany public transportation.

Flipping through Lost and Found, a collection of thirty-nine essays composed in the early 1930s, these gems fell out:

“[W]e read one day in the newspapers that Germany has gone over from the control of the Workers National Peoples Socialist Centrist Party (with 256 seats) to the Bavarian Nationalist Optimist Fascist Unreinigung Party (with 396 seats) . . . the next day you read that the election which hurled the Workers Nationalist Optimist Centrist, etc., people into office was a preliminary election or Wahl, and that the finals have shown that the balance of power resides in the hands of the Christian Hanoverian Revalorization Gesellschaft Party (with fifteen seats and a bicycle), which means that Europe is on the verge of conflagration, beginning with a definite rupture with the Slovenes (the Extreme Left Slovenes, that is, not to be confused with the Conservative Radical Slovenes).”

“The sad suicide of Dr. Eno M. Kerk in 1930 was laid to the fact that he had just got a vitamin isolated from the E class and almost in the F, when the room suddenly got warm and it turned into a full-fledged vitamin G. The doctor was heartbroken and deliberately died of malnutrition by refusing to eat any of the other vitamins from that day on. If he couldn’t have vitamin F, he wouldn’t have any.”

“The U.S. Post Office is one of the most popular line-standing fields in the country. It has been estimated that six-tenths of the population of the United States spend their entire lives standing in line in a post office. When you realize that no provision is made for their eating or sleeping or intellectual advancement while they are thus standing in line, you will understand why six-tenths of the population look so cross and peaked. The wonder is that they have the courage to go on living at all.”

“I first began my experiments with spiritism in 1909 while sitting in the dark with a young lady who later turned out to be not my wife. Watches with phosphorescent dials had just come into use and I had one of the few in town. . . . I had just moved my watch up to my nose to take a look at it in the dark, as I realized that it was time to go beddie-bye, when the young lady, seeing a phosphorescent blob of light make its way like a comet through the dark at her side, screamed, ‘There’s a ghost in the room!’ and fainted heavily. . . . So, stepping across he prostrate body, I went out into the world to become a medium, or, in the technical language of the craft, a medium stout.”

“They were laughing at commas.” (upon hearing George Bernard Shaw’s effect on an audience)

Benchley sat regularly at the Algonquin Round Table. Among Benchley’s tablemates: Dorothy Parker (”If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me”), George S. Kaufman (whose plays include You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner), Alexander Woollcott (the man in The Man Who Came to Dinner), and Harpo Marx (no comment). This inimitable collection of wags was imitated with varying degrees of success in the film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, with Campbell Scott (George S.’s son) playing Benchley. It seems that our hero at one time trysted with Mrs. Parker, to no lasting effect.

The Harvard Lampoon, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair all saw Benchley in their pages. (He famously left a staff position at VF as an act of loyalty to Mrs. Parker, who was terminated with extreme prejudice for being an uncongenial employee, which is exactly what you would have expected from an underpaid socialist.)

Benchley had something of a career in films, including a supporting role in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, as well as his own award-winning shorts, which instructed audiences in how to train a dog and oneself. A generous consumer of alcohol, he suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and died in 1945, at age 56.

Yes, Benchley was—like Parker and Kaufman and Woollcott and Mark Twain and S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, and, for that matter, John Harvey Kellogg—an American original.

I still have no idea what that means . . .

Alan Jacobs, who has written often for First Things, always with wit and wisdom, has written this for Christianity Today.

For those of us outside the Anglican Communion, it’s all too easy to wax snide about the, well, you know. Everyone knows. And that seems to be Jacobs’ point. What else needs to be said? What needs to be done, is the issue, and there are men (and women?) appointed to do it: namely, bishops. (I don’t know where Jacobs stands on women clergy; we do know where he stands on the bishop of New Hampshire business.)

Ah, bishops. As far as the history of my denomination goes: The Saxon Lutherans who left Germany in 1838 for the U.S. soon found themselves having to decide what the hierarchy in American was to look like. Bishop Martin Stephan made it easy for them—found guilty of sexual misconduct and financial corruption, he was deposed, and what became the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod remains, to this day, bishopless.

If Jacobs is correct about the biblical and ancient ecclesiology of bishop, priest, deacon, is the LCMS then something less than biblical and catholic? All depends on how you define “bishop,” I guess. (Just ask a presbyterian.)

And given the congregational polity of the LCMS, it would be foolish to import bishops now. It would only invite schism. And, let’s face it, we need not look to the Anglican Communion to question the value of a bishopric in maintaining doctrinal integrity within a denomination.

Yet many, certainly Catholics and Orthodox, would argue that denominationalism is the problem. Dopey or lazy bishops are no excuse for rejecting in toto what the majority witness of Christ’s church has maintained as the necessary bulwark against a rampant individualism and sectarianism.

Ain’t gonna be settled here . . . and back to the business of this post: If the day comes that the Anglican Communion finally collapses and fragments, it should be a day of mourning for all Christians. That Communion has produced great men and women of God who have been a blessing to the church for centuries: Consider Archbishop Cranmer and the beauty of his Prayerbook and the witness of his martyrdom; Lancelot Andrewes’ stewardship of the Authorized (King James) Bible translation; the social reformers, from John Wesley to William Wilberforce, who wedded a conservative loyalty to the Crown with a progressive social conscience, thereby staving off revolution along French lines; the tireless preaching of Bishop Ryle on the call to holiness; the apologists and scholars of the twentieth (and now twenty-first) centuries, from C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers to John Stott, Alister McGrath, and N.T. Wright.

So we should probably can the Jefferts Schori jokes. (Although, she does make it so darn easy.) And pray that Alan Jacobs need not learn to be a Christian some other way.

• If Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks had wanted to make a screwball comedy about modern American covert operations that was also a not-so-covert commentary on the current war in Iraq, Charlie Wilson’s War would have been it.

• Yes, sir—killing Russians has never been such a gas. And to think Mike Nichols (Primary Colors), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), and Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump) are the one’s throwing the party.

• Not so hard to believe: We all know that the old Soviet Union was just horrible, and that the Cold War against left-wing fascism was a bipartisan effort. (Your laugh here.)

• In 1980, under the Carter regime, the United States was throwing chump change at the problem of Soviet helicopters blowing men, women, and children to pieces in Afghanistan until “Good Time” Charlie Wilson, representative from the second congressional district in Texas, happened to see Dan Rather (remember him?) dressed in Afghan garb among the Mujahideen on TV. The Afghan fighters were complaining of a lack of era-appropriate weaponry to fend off the communist invaders. Let it be known that Mr. Wilson was in a hot tub full of Vegas strippers as he watched Mr. Rather, a night on the town that would come back to haunt him when none other than Rudolph Giuliani, then a prosecutor, was going after corrupt congressmen.

• Giuliani fails to make charges of coke-sniffing stick, so Charlie is free to call in his IOUs and raise the covert-ops budget for Afghanistan, first from $5 million to ten, then from ten to, oh, a billion. Literally. A billion dollars.

• Throw in a wealthy Texan who love Jesus, hates communists, and comes with her own exegetical tools regarding the prohibition against fornication (Julia Roberts); the Democratic chairman of the foreign-relations subcommittee who hates the Islamic fundies almost as much as he hates the commies (Ned Beatty) but comes to see the light, old softie that he is; and a CIA operative who has something on everyone, curses like a Hollywood actor, and has all the tact of a suicide bomber—and the Soviets do not have a chance.

• Said CIA agent is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who appears in three films this year: Before the Devil Know You’re Dead, The Savages, and this one. While it appears that he is constitutionally incapable of giving a bad performance, there is always the risk that his career will go the way of DeNiro’s (into that dark night of irrelevancy) if he doesn’t scratch off a few commitments in the old DayPlanner.

• And then there’s Tom Hanks, who breezes through his performance like Jimmy Cagney doing a soft shoe with a machine gun in his hands. It’s hard to tell who’s having more fun here, Hanks or the audience. Sorkin has handed him a doozy of a screenplay, based on the bestselling book by George Crile. I never read the book, so either Sorkin preserved the most ironic and risible parts of Wilson’s/Crile’s story, or he enhanced them, as the screenplay glides effortlessly from one machination to another with all the zest and pinpoint accuracy of a spanking new Stinger anti-aircraft missile—supplied, by the way, in bulk by the Israelis to support Muslim Afghanistan. (Seems Charlie, though a self-described liberal, was also pro-Israel. This was 1980, after all . . .)

• Despite the sometimes farcical tone of much of this film, Nichols & Co. play it straight when depicting the despicable tactics used by the Soviets: disguising IEDs as toys, which left countless children maimed and dismembered—and also forcing entire families out of Afghanistan across the border to refugee camps in Pakistan. Soviet MiG fighters are pictured engaging in banal chatter about girlfriend problems as they rain bullets on fleeing Afghan civilians. No, the Soviets are definitely the bad guys . . . but . . .

• Before you think Hollywood has gone soft, there’s a spanking coming, about U.S. intervention in other people’s fights: We import our ideals—and then we leave. “We always leave. And the ball keeps bouncing,” Charlie tells another appropriations committee from whom he’s trying to wring a scant $1 million for new schools in the now Russian-free Afghanistan. All those kids who fled Afghanistan with their families to Pakistan are going to come flooding back into the country and witness the devastation that the atheistic Soviets have wrought—without any idea that it was an American covert operation that saved their country. Who is going to fill that education/indoctrination vacuum? One guess—and it ain’t Scholastic.

• And there is the obligatory lecture about American evangelicals and their nonsecular war talk. Americans don’t wage holy wars, we are reminded. To be fair, the point, while obvious, is well taken and not nearly as strident as it would have been in other hands.

• Critics have noted that Americans suffer political lessons only when sugar-coated, explaining the failure of such films as Rendition, Lions for Lambs, and In the Valley of Elah. It also helps if the films aren’t tendentious, pretentious, self-righteous, and dull.

• Yes, the U.S. government comes across as clumsy and comic and crude—but not without genuine compassion when face-to-face with genuine suffering. It is also superlatively effective in achieving its desired goals when focused, determined, and united.

• All told, Nichols & Co. have provided about as “balanced” (if not very original or profound) interpretation of American political prowess wedded to an ideological confusion as we can expect from a very unbalanced Hollywood: Everyone wants to get reelected, almost no one is clean, and very few learn from history.

• But we wouldn’t live anywhere else.

• Amen. Er, sorry. Righty-o.

In the January issue of Commentary, there’s a fascinating article called “Stem Cells and the President—An Inside Account,” written by Jay Lefkowitz, who was the official “primarily responsible for advising the President” on the issue of stem cells during the debates that produced Bush’s compromise in the summer of 2001.

In “Stem Cells and the President,” Lefkowitz writes, “Now that the debate seems to be over, what can we say about Bush’s policy and the long months it took for him to devise it? I think it is fair to look upon it as a model of how to deal with the complicated scientific and ethical dilemmas that will continue to confront political leaders in the age of biotechnology.”

That’s a large claim, and it requires not only thinking about how recent breakthroughs have changed the debate but also remembering what the situation was like in 2001. There’s a touch of beyondism in the Commentary piece—a bit of the move that suggests “We must have been correct because we were attacked from both the left and the right.” It’s true, for example, that Judie Brown, the president of the American Life League, told the New York Times that after the stem-cell compromise in 2001 President Bush could “no longer describe himself as pro-life.” But if being attacked at some point by the hard-line American Life League is the criterion, few of us would qualify as pro-life.

For that matter, the two sides would gradually change their opinions in opposite directions: Many on the supporters of stem-cell researcher—including, as Lefkowitz notes, the actor Christopher Reeve and Irving Weissman of Stanford—began with mild praise of the decision and moved over the next three years to raging opposition.

Meanwhile, the compromise was generally received with mild disappointment by the pro-life side (including by First Things, which characterized the compromise as “morally defensible in principle but gravely imprudent.”) But the political left increasingly decided the issue was a winning one, and their attacks on President Bush escalated until, at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, the phrase stem cells was spoken from the dais dozens of times, in nearly every major speech—while the word abortion was never heard. The effect of all this work by the left was that, across the nation, Bush’s 2001 position was no longer understood as a compromise. The Democrats insisted it was a complete surrender to a pro-life extremism, and the nation, I think, came to believe the Democrats (and voted, one notes, for President Bush over John Kerry anyway—or, perhaps, voted for Bush precisely because of what it perceived as the president’s enduring pro-life stand).

Still, Lefkowitz is basically right about the reaction to the president’s address on August 9, 2001: It pleased no one particularly at the time. He attributes the president’s position to Bush’s courage in 2001, but, the man’s courage may have been better displayed by the fact that Bush stuck to his compromise even as the Democrats and the mainstream media ginned the issue up into one of the major themes of the elections of 2004, 2006, and 2008. Or, rather, what was going to be one of the major issues of the 2008 election, until this year’s breakthroughs suddenly changed the entire landscape of the debate—and gave an enormous victory to the pro-life side.

Let’s think for a moment, however, about the 2001 compromise. We tend to forget that confusion and disorganization in the first days of the Bush administration helped produce the original political crisis over stem cells: An executive order, issued in the first flurry of such orders as the new administration took office, might well have passed without comment for some time.

Once the issue was on the table, however, Bush was forced to act in the full glare of publicity. It’s easy to accept Lefkowitz’s claim that the 2001 compromise seemed the clearest solution at the time. But Lefkowitz makes too easy an elision to move from there to the claim that the recent breakthroughs are a vindication of Bush’s 2001 position—for that would require showing that the new results would not have happened, or would have happened slower, if Bush had instead refused to fund even previously created stem-cell lines.

Meanwhile, it’s not as though Bush’s compromise bought him much respite from attacks by the pro-research world or the political left. And though his speech on August 9, 2001, was a brilliant one, he missed—as he has often missed during his presidency—the chance to educate the public on the deeper pro-life position.

And yet, along the way, the public did get educated. The political left’s endless attacks on the 2001 compromise made it seem less of a compromise and more of an entirely pro-life stand. And then the new breakthroughs suddenly stranded the attackers in odd and unsustainable positions. Lefkowitz is surely right that all this marks a great triumph for President Bush. But it is one with many twists and turns between 2001 and 2007.

• It’s late thirties England and a little rich girl named Briony Tallis with an overlarge vocabulary and pretensions to literary greatness tells a big fat lie to the police and ruins the life of her sister’s love interest (James McAvoy) because, well, she’s got a crush on him too, and he’s just a working-class mope who’s gotten above his station, and the upper-crusties are like that, you know . . .

• Filler filler filler World War Two filler filler filler beaches of Dunkirk filler filler fantasy bits filler filler.

• For some strange reason, one of George Romero’s living dead is cast as older version of little rich girl filler filler tippy typee at the typewriter filler filler.

• Vanessa Redgrave is little rich girl all grown up and waxing pretentious about art as her only means of atonement.

• I forgot what loud and extraordinarily violent contraptions typewriters were. There also was no delete button.

• Some nice performances, some nice window dressing of British soldiers frolicking on the beach—and all of it as shallow as a finger sandwich what’s been sat on.

• We’re expected to feel puddles of pity for McAvoy, the Tallis’ gardener’s son, a character we’ve barely been given time to know. That was problem number one. Problem number two is that we’re then expected to go all gooey because he was given a choice between staying in prison for a crime he didn’t commit (the rape of a young girl staying on the Tallis estate) and fighting the Germans. So he chooses a uniform over a prison jumper and we’re exposed to the horrors of war—something hundreds of thousands of others are experiencing right along with him for something they never did.

• Had McAvoy’s character never been imprisoned in the first place, he most probably would have wound up in a uniform and on the front anyway. The one thing he is subjected to directly because of the injustice that has been done to him is time in prison. And that’s the one thing we never see. One sentence escapes him about how awful prison was—and, as it turns out, he never uttered it! (You have to see the movie, assuming I haven’t put you off, to understand how that works itself out.)

• Perhaps the Second World War never really happened. Perhaps it was all made up in little Briony’s head, a way to reinvent herself as someone who joined the Nurses Corp and did “her part” for “our boys.”

• Want to show what one little lie can do to the wrong person cast among the wrong set of the effete elite? Then make the film about McAvoy’s time among hardcore criminals—not among the expeditionary forces in France! (Of course, that would have entailed a complete conconstruction of the book on which the film is based, something the book’s author might not have appreciated.)

• Speaking of whom, Ian McEwan was interviewed recently and asked about the whole idea of atonement:

It seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist. Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.

Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain. Well, we won’t get into that.

Yes, quite, we won’t get into that, because all the movie offers us is a variation on how fantasy is our only retreat in a meaningless universe devoid of notions of ultimate justice—in this life and the next. This is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point redivivus.

• Keira Knightley is also in Atonement. She plays Briony’s older sister and McAvoy’s lover. She looks mortally wounded and very thin throughout. She also dives into a fountain in her bloomers.

• I swear, There Will Be Blood had better live up to its reviews or the only thing I’m left with for Best Picture of the Year is Mr. Bean’s Holiday.

Over at Beliefnet, Michael Kress has a coup of an interview—one that includes audio clips—with Denzel Washington, who starred in two films this year: American Gangster and the just-released The Great Debaters—both based on true stories.

Like all the Bnet interviews, which have included Q & A’s with Jane Fonda, Patricia Heaton, and Susan Sarandon, the questions focus on the spiritual pilgrimage of the interviewees.

Turns out that Washington is a member of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, a 22,000-member evangelical and charismatic congregation.* The actor admits, though, to experimenting with Eastern philosophies and reading the Qur’an, finally returning to the faith in which he was reared.

I’m sure there are plenty of evangelicals who shake their heads at the likes of Washington, Christians who make R-rated films filled with four-letter words, violence, and/or nudity. But Washington approaches his film choices with an eye toward a bigger message than “keep it sanitized”—for example, “the wages of sin is death” in Training Day, the film for which he was awarded a much-deserved Best Actor Oscar.

Seems Washington prays through every decision when it comes to putting a film together, but if there is one theme in his prayer life, it’s apparently “A whole lot of thank you’s.”

(Check out the sidebar link to The Twelve Most Powerful Christians in Hollywood. Washington comes in at number two. One guess who reigns at number one.)

*Read the church’s Statement of Faith: The Blessed Hope is construed as the rapture, as opposed to the more traditional interpretation of Titus 2:13 as Christ’s Second Coming in glory signaling the final judgment and the end of history—not merely a millennial interlude. In dispensational/rapture theology, we have a second and a third coming—the second for the saved at the time of the “great tribulation” (pre-, mid-, or post-) and yet a third that will initiate the Great White Throne (final) judgment, just before the birth of a new heaven and a new earth. John Nelson Darby, call your office . . .

Repressed-memory syndrome—a claim that dissociative amnesia follows a traumatic experience—was one of the most popular psychiatric diagnosis in the 1980s and 1990s. Back in 2003, Paul McHugh wrote what was probably the definitive account of the long struggle by a handful of psychiatrists and researchers to contain the metastasizing diagnosis, which was being offered as an explanation for nearly everything unpleasant in human life. To large degree, they succeeded: The memory wars are over, for the most part, and it’s hard to find anyone willing to stand up and defend the broad application of repressed memories.

Still, the diagnosis has not entirely disappeared, and a researcher in Boston, Harrison Pope, began wondering what exactly it would mean to claim that dissociative amnesia is a disease to which the human brain is innately susceptible. Surely we could find references to it throughout the history of literature. So, in collaboration with a team of other researchers, he began pouring through fiction and memories from the classical age on—and he offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find a work from before 1800 that revealed the phenomenon.

The Harvard alumni magazine has a short account of the result. The researchers themselves came up with two Victorian examples: Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which a man forgets he is a doctor during his time in the Bastille, and Kipling’s Captains Courageous, in which a man forgets he is a minister after the death of his family in a flood. The $1,000 prize for pre-1800 examples was awarded just once, for a 1786 French opera, Nina, in which the heroine forgets that she saw her lover apparently killed in a duel and waits for him daily to return.

The social and artistic explanations that Pope offers are interesting, though not immediately persuasive. Still, he seems to have lit upon an interesting point in the absence of references to dissociative amnesia before 1786. “The challenge,” he points out, “falls upon anyone who believes that repressed memory is real to explain its absence for thousands of years.”

So, the actor Will Smith tells a British newspaper that “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’” Whereupon he is pilloried for praising Hitler.

Roger Kimball has a solid roundup of the supposed scandal. Will Smith is, at the moment, the most successful and bankable star in Hollywood, and that’s not usually a postion of authority for philosophical rumination. Still, don’t you have to push pretty hard to make this into anything like praise for Hitler? It looks like a straightforward Aristotelian proposition that human beings have to think the intentions of their actions good, or they wouldn’t do them. And Hitler, in Smith’s line, is clearly chosen as the example because we know that he did evil.

After you’ve bought this . . . and this . . . and this . . . and this thingee . . . definitely buy this.

In The Jesus Legend, Doctors Paul Rhodes Eddy, professor of biblical and theological studies at Bethel University, and Gregory A. Boyd, senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, perform what amounts to an autopsy on the pet theories of the Enlightened higher-critics and Bultmanniacs who have wasted generations’ worth of time trying to disprove the veracity of the gospels in their vainglorious attempt to remake Jesus in their own image.

Eddy and Boyd have immersed themselves in the revisionist material and deconstruct, argument by argument, gimcrack conspiracy theory by gimcrack conspiracy theory, all the legendary “explanations” intended to prove the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ a mere legend. From “Paul was constructing a mystery religion” to the gospels are coded midrash/pesher texts to (my personal favorite) Mark modeled his gospel on Homer’s Odyssey–all are shown to be untenable in the light of current scholarship.

Eddy and Boyd go on to demonstrate how the supposed pagan influences on the fiercely monotheistic gospel writers are based more on wishful thinking and ignorance of first-century Judea, Samaria, and Galilee than on fact, and how many of these supposed influences were born centuries after the gospel writers lived and died, arguing for an influence going the other way. The authors also go into great detail about the nature of oral history and oral tradition, and how communities were quite conservative and guarded about mucking about with original source material.

As if that were not enough, Boyd and Eddy retire the tired wheeze about the ancients’ being illiterate, overly credulous dunces (the archaeological evidence alone proves that to be wrong) and invigorate Bauckham’s (and others’) work on Paul’s and the gospels’ reliance on eyewitness testimony (the kind of testimony still used in, say, twenty-first-century law courts).

While not arguing for an overly literalist interpretation of the biblical texts (whereby discrepancies are reconciled so that “two” magically equals “three”), and making room for the editing typically found in “oral composition,” the authors leave no doubt that the gospels are completely reliable in communicating the fundamentals of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and that the gospel writers were neither attempting to deceive or were themselves deceived.

Moreover, Eddy and Boyd marry accessible language with exhaustive, serious research, making The Jesus Legend the best one-volume debunking of the debunkers you could possibly give a college student, seminarian, or curious layperson.

When all is said and done, Spongian liberals and Dawkinsian New Atheists alike will be left lambasting orthodox Christians for adverting to pointy-headed scholarship instead of relying on good old-fashioned fideism. First science, now archaeology, ethnography, orality/literacy studies, and history—where’s a good neo-Gnostic or materialist to go for ammunition now that Christians have become cutting edge?

On second thought, forget the other junk I listed up top: Just buy this. Now! There are only forty-two shopping seconds left till Christmas . . .

Nativity scenes set the tone of Christmas. There are placid olive-wood ones, arranged in hushed stillness amid pine sprigs and juniper. There are bejeweled rainbow ones, frozen on hills of cotton batting and glinting merrily in the candlelight. There are illuminated plastic figures, the size of small children, that pop up in every suburban neighborhood—cookie-cutter crèches decorating cookie-cutter houses. I’ve even seen the sort that blink on and off—an egregiously unabashed way of flashing the joy of the season. There are clay crèches and crocheted crèches; crystal and cornhusk; big and little; bright and bland; modest and fantastic.

My family has at least as many nativity scenes as we have personalities. But one of my favorites has long been the doll-house crèche. It’s not a Victorian relic or a dainty and detailed plaything. The little people wear plastic snap-on garb and printed smiles. But the child’s imagination, free from practicality and preconceptions, can bring all that to life. Perfect for long hours of play while mom decorates the house and cooks the Christmas roast.

In those days a decree went out . . . But there’s a problem: Scripture provides a rather sparse script. Luke devotes less than half a chapter to that first Christmas, Matthew only narrates the adoration of the magi (omitting exciting details like their names or nationalities), Mark fast-forwards to the adult life of Christ, and John’s prologue, magnificent as it is, does not lend himself to doll-house reenactment: The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. But anyone who listens to a child arranging the shepherds and kings—choirs of angels suspended from the bookshelf by scotch-tape and dental floss, and a menagerie of animals grazing on the carpet—realizes how much he’s missed, and how rich is the child’s sight: Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and the prudent and revealed them to my little ones.

Of course, the three wisemen did not worship alongside the shepherds. For that matter, we don’t really know that there were three, despite the fifth-century decree of Leo the Great and the artistic witness of almost every Adoration of the Magi before and since. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh were their gifts, but who is to say that the three richly-clad bodies—brought from Persia to Milan by St. Helena and then carried in the twelfth century to Cologne—had anything to do with the wisemen of old? The bodies are clad in damask and silk, woven in the East about 2000 years ago, but what of that? Science and history, or rather the science of history, falls silent.

And what of the requisite ox and ass, humbly framing the crib? The ox knows its master, writes the prophet Isaiah, and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. Unfortunately, the gospels forget to mention these lowing and braying onlookers. Or—maybe—they weren’t there. We simply don’t know about the ox and the ass, the camels and sheep, Casper, Melchior, and Balthazar, the astronomical details of the star, or even the little drummer boy. And we don’t need to know. The Christmas story is about the coming of Christ; it is about the Son of God, dwelling in our midst, in our hearts, and in our sight.

And yet, if Christmas celebrates the Word made flesh, there is something fitting about fleshing out the gospel account, so to speak—about bringing the biblical word to life. Children know how to wonder and dream and tell stories. They do it in the corner behind the Christmas tree, where the Santa Claus ornament joins the shepherd dolls in adoration before the Christ-Child, and the wooden Christmas mouse peeps wide-eyed from the toy stable. They worry that the mouse has nothing to bring the babe, that there’s not enough straw in the manger, that swaddling clothes look chilly for a winter’s night—and no one needs to explain that we don’t really know what day or season it all came to pass, and that there is certainly no mouse in Scripture. Little hands nudge the ox and ass close to the manger, so that the animals can warm the baby with their soft breath. But, their elders wink and nod, of course it’s only make-believe.

In a sense, though, the child’s spiritual imagination is also that of the poet and the artist and the mystic. The tradition of nativity scenes was popularized by St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century. It was 1223, to be precise, when the rough-clad friar assisted at a torchlight Mass in Greccio, Italy—with a manger for an altar, and an ox and ass attending. Francis describes the dream-vision that was his inspiration: He stood before the manger and lifted up the Christ-Child, who woke in his arms and smiled. It was this living presence, intimate and profound, that he wanted to share with his people.

The custom of the crèche—living at first, and sculpted soon after—spread throughout Italy, up into Poland, over into France. In the Provence region, especially, the practice of making nativity figures engrained itself deeply into the local culture. Santons, they are called, little saints. And as anyone who has seen a Santon crèche knows well, the figures are not just part of the culture: Culture is part of the figures. There are the usual players, for sure, but also the dogs and chickens, horses and doves. There’s the rooster who helps the angel Boufarèu (“Big-cheeks”) blow his trumpet to awaken the town, and there’s the washerwoman, bringing fresh linens for the mother and child. There’s the gypsy woman with her tambourine, come to play for the babe, and her husband with his performing bear.

There’s the shepherd Gabriel, whose dog has just died and who’s afraid to approach the manger with tears still in his eyes. Miraculously, the animal comes back to life, and he offers it as his gift. “No,” the blessed Mother responds with maternal care; “you keep the dog; you need it to guard your sheep.” Each figure has a story, each story is personal

Apocryphal excess? Distracting clutter? Maybe. Or maybe not—Nativity scenes set the tone of Christmas, and here the whole town takes part. The animals and the outcasts, the young and the old: Each brings the little he has to offer, the work of his hands, his daily life, his piddly worries and cares and pursuits and pastimes. And as the Christ-Child smiled at the simple friar of Assisi, he smiles at each of them: I reveal these things to my little ones.

Poets and artists and mystics glimpse through the child’s eyes. Take, for instance, the ox and the ass. Though absent from the gospels, some of the earliest Christian carvings, catacomb-frescos, and manuscripts depict the humble creatures gazing with mute love on their infant master. Origen, in the third century, first mentioned the ox and ass in his commentary on Luke, and Ambrose and other Church Fathers followed suit. The fifth-century Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew said that “the ox and ass, with him between them, worshipped unceasingly.” And St. Bonaventure—with the scholar’s intellect and child’s imagination—described the scene in loving detail: The ox and ass, with bended knees, and with their heads placed over the manger, breathed upon him, as if they were gifted with reason, and knew that their warm breath would be of service to an infant so slightly protected from the severity of the season.

The ox knows its master, and the ass its master’s crib. The ox and the ass appear and reappear in early nativity art: a manuscript page, a painted panel, a sarcophagus carving. Curiously, they are often paired opposite the magi bearing fine gifts and wearing fancy robes: the mute and the mighty, the lowly and the learned. The whole span of creation bows down in wonder. It’s a homely scene, to be sure, and the drab russet ox and drabber grey donkey always seem to clash with the gilded angel behind, and gilded wisemen beside, and gilded star overhead. Even the glitteriest crèches have a hard time dressing up the twin beasts, and perhaps that’s why they take the place of honor—one at the Child’s right hand, the other at his left. The least of these shall be the first.

Israel does not know, my people do not understand, Isaiah tells us, and how right he is. But the nativity scene, with all its quotidian clutter, imaginative additions, and tender detail, reminds us what we have forgotten. The Christmas story is about the coming of Christ—the Son of God entering our minds and hearts and lives. We see Him in seeing his little ones: the gift of the least of these.

True devotion to Mary, as Fr. Neuhaus recently reminded us, always points us to Christ. Like most converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, Marian devotion has taken some getting used to for me. I therefore found Frederica Mathewes-Green’s The Lost Gospel of Mary: The Mother of Jesus in Three Ancient Texts very helpful, and particularly suitable for Advent. Aside from the sideswipes at the Western church that one finds too often in Orthodox writing, the book a gem for those seeking to learn more about Mary from the primary texts of sacred tradition. Frederica has translated The Proto-Evangelium of James, the Sub Tuum Praesidium, and the Akathist Hymn of St. Romanos to the Theotokos, these being excellent examples of pious legend about Mary, prayer to her, and hymns of praise in her honor. I found the latter especially beautiful not only in its imagery but in the way it pointed to Christ as well. A free translation of the Akathist Hymn can be found here, but a sample is below. As we contemplate the coming of Christ and the actions of his Mother leading up to it, this hymn can lead us to a better love of both.

Pregnant with God, the Virgin hastened to Elizabeth, her unborn child rejoiced, immediately knowing her embrace. Bouncing and singing, he cried out to the Mother of God:

Hail, O Tendril whose Bud shall not wilt!
Hail, O Soil whose Fruit shall not perish!
Hail, O Tender of mankind’s loving Tender!
Hail, O Gardener of the Gardener of Life!
Hail, O Earth who yielded abundant mercies!
Hail, O Table full-laden with appeasement!
Hail, for you have greened anew the pastures of delight!
Hail, for you have prepared a haven for the souls!
Hail, acceptable Incense of Prayer!
Hail, Expiation of the whole universe!
Hail, O you Favor of God to mortal men!
Hail, O you Trust of mortals before God!
Hail, O Bride and Maiden ever-pure!

Hail, O Bride and Maiden ever-pure!

First, I want to follow Jody in congratulating Tony Blair, who has been a good friend to this nation, on his conversion to Catholicism.

I am also happy to congratulate Mr. Blair’s country, the United Kingdom, on its conversion to Catholicism. Yes, you read that correctly. What I mean is that, according to this story in the Telegraph, “Britain has become a ‘Catholic Country’” because “Roman Catholics have overtaken Anglicans as the country’s dominant religious group. More people attend Mass every Sunday than worship with the Church of England.” Hence, “the established Church has lost its place as the nation’s most popular Christian denomination after four centuries of unrivaled influence following the Reformation.”

When you read more carefully, however, it turns out the picture is not quite so rosy, even for the Catholics. It turns out that 861,000 persons in Britain attend mass every Sunday while only 852,000 turn up for Anglican services. The population of Britain is about 60.7 million souls, so even the combined weekly attendance of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church aggregates only 2.8 percent of the population.

Moreover, the Catholics numbers have surpassed the Anglican ones only because, although attendance at Anglican services has fallen 20 percent since 2000, attendance at mass has fallen only 13 percent. The difference seems to be explained by an influx of Catholic immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe; this has reduced the rate of decrease in the Catholic numbers. So attendance at both churches is declining rapidly; it’s just that Anglicans are even worse off than the Catholics.

The Rt. Rev. Crispian Hollis, the Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth, has a curious take on this. He says that “these figures are encouraging. It shows that the [Catholic] Church is no longer seen as on the fringes of society, but in fact is now at the heart of British life.” Well, sure, if an organization with committed members totaling 1.4 percent of the population (and many of these recent immigrants who may not remain in the country for long) can be at the heart of a nation’s life.

The Anglican clergy, too, seems to misunderstand the significance of these numbers. Says the Church of England’s Rt. Rev. Graham Cray, “It isn’t a competition. I’m delighted to see all the Christian denominations flourishing.” I appreciate the ecumenical sentiment, but that’s quite a strange definition of flourishing you got there, Rt. Rev.

Let me see if I understand the T-shirt on the right correctly:

Don’t buy that Christmas gift and thereby perpetuate the consumerist mentality.

Do obliterate the lumpenproletariat, terrorize the masses, and establish a one-party dictatorship.

All by Christmas morning?

I went out and bought 11 more things just for spite . . .

Here is one definition.

Here is another (second paragraph).

It has often been commented on that there is no English equivalent for the wonderful German term. I do hereby suggest we use the word goldencompass.

“I was overwhelmed by a sense of goldencompass when I learned that The Da Vinci Code was booed at Cannes.”

Well, Jody, you should, indeed, let the Sussex Carol console you for the Georgetown Hoyas’ defeat by the Memphis Tigers. But I’m afraid that all I can add is:

Go Tigers!

(The teams of the college I attended amount, as one friend put it, to a really great library. So, living here in Tennessee, I have to root for my hometowners.)

As far as the Sussex Carol goes, however, that’s one of my favorites, too—I’ve been going around singing those two lines you quote for days:

Then why should men on earth be sad,

Since our Redeemer made us glad?

That’s easier to sing on one’s own than my real favorite, “In Dulci Jubilo,” which really requires four separate choirs. When that one gets stuck in my head, I have to go around singing:

O Jesu Parvule, I yearn for thee alway—
O, that we were there—
O, that we were there—
O that we were there,
O—

until somebody throws a shoe at me.

Our beloved editor here at First Things has written on many topics, yet on no two has he expounded in greater depth and at greater length than Christmas and death. Apparently many residents of the Great State of California have decided to combine the two. Scholars who study this sort of thing think that it comes in part from the Mexican tradition of decorating graves on the Day of the Dead, and also from the desire to personalize what can otherwise seem to be generic burial plots. The New York Times reports that the Archdiocese of San Francisco has decided to take action:

At the three cemeteries run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, Christmas decorating is now officially limited to flowers placed in a maximum of two urns and potted evergreens no more than 12 inches high, with weekly sweeps on offending Santa Claus blankets, Styrofoam candy canes and the like.

“Decorations can be an impediment to backhoes, and there are liability issues in tripping over candy canes,” said Kathy Atkinson, the director of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. “People understand this with their head,” she added. “But with their heart they need to do something.”

What does this tell me about America? First, the American desire for Christmas displays is more innate than I had thought. Second, California really is a mysterious foreign country. Third, de gustibus non disputandum est. All kidding aside, I’d feel bad for really mocking the memorials people leave for their departed kin. Nonetheless, I hope that when I’m dead and gone my family remembers me with a simple wreath and lets someone else’s relatives indulge in “battery and electrically operated equipment, anchoring spikes, easily breakable ornaments and standing Santa Clauses, Nutcracker figures, snowmen” etc.

Mary Ann Glendon resigned last month from the board of First Things in order, she said, to clear herself of all commitments before beginning work for the U.S. government.

It seemed an unreasonable trade to me—I mean, an ambassador rather than a First Things board member?—but she decided to do it, and after some news reports of agitation and delay, the Senate on Friday confirmed her as ambassador to the Holy See. It’s an astonishingly good appointment in this last year of the Bush administration and a deserved tribute to our friend, whose work representing the United States to the Vatican should produce first-rate results.