(Note: I tried getting this on the comments board of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new blog–but it was rejected by the moderator.)

Dear Mr. President and/or Your Excellency:

My friend, a native of your country, and I have been debating a very critical point that I believe only you can resolve, and in so doing create peace in our time. I have argued, with great force, I do admit, that the finest American depiction of a sitcom English butler is Christopher Hewett in Mr. Belvedere. He, on the other hand, insists with equal, nay greater, vehemence, that it was Sebastian Cabot in Family Affair.

My friend demands that I retract my repugnant suggestion immediately or he will be forced to explode the sun.

I ask you, Your Excellency, to please settle this dispute, lest chaos reign and madness rule. Also: Do not suggest Peter Cook in The Two of Us. It will only muddy the waters.

Yours sincerely,
Anthony Sacramone

P.S. Rumors are rife in the American media that your scientists are secretly working on a plan to end the international scourge that is hat hair. Please confirm.

The New York Times today has an interesting article, which talks about a prayer service held late at night for the express purpose of spiritual warfare.

The students, taxicab drivers, homemakers and entrepreneurs, all Christians, mostly from French-speaking Africa, attend a midnight service four nights a week to seek deliverance from lust, anger, fear and sadness.

They sing. They pray fervently. Finally, they kick and shadowbox with what they contend is the real force behind life’s problems: the witches and devils whose curses they believe have ground down their families, towns, entire nations in Africa and that have pursued them to a new country, making it hard to find work, be healthy and survive.

“Some situations you need to address at night, because in the ministry of spiritual warfare, demons, the spirits bewitching people, choose this time to work,” said Nicole Sangamay, 40, who came from Congo in 1998 to study and is a co-pastor of the ministry. “And we pick this time to pray to nullify what they are doing.”

The ministry was started by a Congolese couple and illustrates a significant feature of African Christianity. For many Christians, especially African ones, the battle really is against spiritual forces, not those of the flesh. One of the great joys for African Christians is the conquering freedom that Jesus brings over the old order of witch doctors, spells, and totems. The Bible talks about this, but since idol worship and magic are not in our immediate cultural past, the Bible’s words do not resonate as deeply for Westerners. Not so for African Christians: “The day before, the parishioners began a fast. ‘Why do we fast toward the end of the year?’ Mrs. Shinga said to the worshipers. ‘That is when Satan wants sacrifices, blood, and so we ask God to protect us and our families.’”

This article made me think back to a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride that I saw Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera. The story is a retelling of the Orestia in which Iphigenia is not actually sacrificed, but rather snatched away by Diana to serve in her temple. The form of her service is as the offerer of human sacrifices, and much of the production involves characters crying out to blood-lustful gods for mercy.

Iphigénie en Tauride and the Times article have reminded me that this picture of religion is not just a Baroque construction of foreign cultures. Indeed, it is what most of the world throughout history has known as religion. Once we see remember what the old order was, we can see all the better the extent to which Christ overthrows it as the one who takes the Curse upon himself and the one who is the final sacrifice to end all sacrifices. As Christmas approaches, we can recall the pious legend that when the infant Christ entered Egypt, his mere presence toppled the idols of the land. The presence of the baby in the manger is the first glorious step on the path to conquering the darkness and fear of the pagan powers of the world–powers literal and figurative–and bringing about the joy of the Kingdom of God.

Of course, Ryan, I’m always happy to help.

I’m no Rahner scholar, but it seems implausible to me that a fellow can get famous for saying nothing more about the possibility of salvation outside the visible Church than had been said by Pius XII, Karl Adam, Pius IX, Thomas Aquinas, or even John Chrysostom.

More generally, I think virtually everyone, including Rahner and most Rahnerians, agree that (a) it is possible to be saved outside the visible Church, and (b) there is nevertheless a benefit to being inside the visible Church.

The disagreement concerns the nature of the possibility and the magnitude of the benefit. Is the possibility of salvation outside the Church a remote, metaphysical possibility rarely attained in practice, or is it a realistic feasibility that is routinely actualized? Is the benefit of being inside the visible Church a small help at the margin, or does it usually make the difference between salvation and damnation? The traditional view tilts strongly towards the idea that salvation outside the visible Church is rare and difficult and that membership in the visible Church is often the determining factor between salvation and damnation. The modern—I might say Rahnerian—view tilts strongly in favor of the idea that salvation outside the visible Church is commonplace and membership inside the visible Church is only a small help at the margin. I see the CDF note as a nudge back towards the traditional view.

We’ve been following, here on the First Things website, the case of the Princeton student who admitted on Monday that he had faked attacks on himself last Friday.

I find it a fascinating, albeit sad, story, but a pair of our friends—both members of First Things’ board and both, interestingly, academics—have written to object to the coverage. “What does this have to do with religion and public life?” asks one. And the other friend is even sterner: “There is no good reason for FT to have been swept into this story. . . . Assure me that I am wrong in fearing that FT is taking on the role” of culture-wars publications.

There are two easy answers here. The first is that, over the weekend, one of our assistant editors, Ryan Anderson, got hold of information that no other publication seemed to have—namely, that in the student’s background at Groton and the timing of events there were reasons to doubt the story. We’re a magazine, in competition with other magazines. How could we not post the material? In its Monday morning article , the New York Sun still didn’t have the reasons for doubt—and neither did Brit Hume on Fox television Monday night (he apparently corrected himself later in the broadcast).

The second easy answer is that there shouldn’t be anything we can’t cover. I’ve never been fond of navel-gazing—this kind of Who-Are-We? introspection, energy turned in on an organization’s structure rather than out on the organization’s work—but, generally speaking, I think the work of the magazine is broad enough that it can fit in a little bit of almost any genre, including the kind of small newsbreaking we had with the Princeton story. We’ve got a magazine, a daily article, and a blog. There’s room in all that for a little bit of everything.

But maybe easy answers aren’t sufficient. As I said, I find the Princeton story fascinating. For one thing, it all happened so quickly. On Friday night, the boy reports his attack. On Saturday the bloggers and early news reporters start noting it. Late Sunday night Ryan Anderson reports the story on First Things—adding the background for doubting the story and urging calm. And Monday around noon the Princeton student confesses. Just as an example of the speed of news cycles in the Internet age, it’s an interesting case study.

And that’s to say nothing of the general phenomenon of faked attacks that seem to have become endemic in academia—or of the fallout from this particular case. Though all the prior incidents of which I’ve read have been on the far left, from now on there will be assumed to be parity: Thanks to the Princeton student, newspapers will comment on faked attacks as something crazed people do on both the left and the right. There’s real damage here, as well, to our friend and boardmember from Princeton, Robert George, who will be attacked for not seeing through the student (though the fact that, with Prof. George’s help, the fraud broke down so quickly helps).

Still, even though the story is a good one—good in the journalistic sense of the word—maybe it’s not good that we covered it, in the institutional, final-cause sense of good.

That doesn’t seem right. But, then, I’m just a journalist—and journalism, as Andy Ferguson once remarked, isn’t so much a vocation as a character defect.

Over at the Cato Institute’s website, Aubrey de Grey, Diana Schaub, Ronald Bailey, and Daniel Callahan are having an interesting discussion under the title “Do We Need Death? The Consequences of Radical Life Extension.” Diana—a professor of political science at Loyola College of Maryland and member of the President’s Council of Bioethics—is one of the most serious political theorists around, and in one of her posts she mentions
the role of death in political theory, a topic we’ve discussed in these parts before. The whole exchange with de Grey, Schaub, Bailey, and Callahan is very much worth reading.

Appreciative piece in the Los Angeles Times about a ragamuffin missions group and the risks its members take—even among their own.

It’s too easy sometimes to poke fun at these so-called “edgy” nondenom movements, especially those that huddle under the umbrella of the emerging church. But we should also be reminded occasionally that there are some hearty and faithful folks out there in nontraditional garb putting it on the line to help the wanderers among us.

I’ve never understood all the fuss about Santa Claus. Not the believing part: We have no problems in that department, being a happily credulous lot at our house. Two of us, after all, are under the age of six, and the rest of us read fiction without stopping every other sentence to say to ourselves, “But of course this is a lie.”

Actually, with regard to Santa Claus, it’s the worries about lying that I don’t understand, and the need to establish some moment of revelation, like a birds-and-bees talk, wherein a child learns that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

My niece learned the truth at eight, which seemed awfully young to me at the time. It’s been some years now, and I’m not sure how my sister-in-law went about engineering this epiphany for her daughter, but her rationale was that she had learned at eight, and so her daughter would, too. A friend of mine told her eight-year-old daughter about both Santa Claus and sex, if not in the same conversation, at least in the same year. Hello, third grade; goodbye, childhood. Again, it was what her mother had done before her.

I’ve been thinking about Santa lately, not only for the obvious reasons — “Oh, when is he coming?” my four-year-old asked on rising this morning — but also because “doing” or “not doing” Santa is making its seasonal rounds as a topic of conversation, here, for example, and here.

Also, my 10-year-old son has lately been trying to work out a theology of Santa Claus that he can live with, taking the reasoning-from-Saint-Nicholas approach. “Okay,” he said to me the other day, “I get that he doesn’t have reindeer, because there are no reindeer in Turkey. And he was a bishop, so there’s no Mrs. Claus. This whole fat-guy-down-the-chimney thing — it’s basically — ”

He stopped. I waited. Better a listener than a lecturer be.

“And I know you and Dad painted my model aerodrome when I was five. So — so –” He hesitated again. “I know Saint Nicholas was real –”

“Well,” I began. Better a lecturer be, sometimes. “Think about it this way. We say God fills the hungry with good things, right? But who goes down to deliver Meals on Wheels?”

“Grammy,” he said.

“So there’s no God? It’s just your Grammy doing what everybody says God does?”

“No,” he said. Duh.

“Well, then,” I said, as if I had proven something. And I left him to think about it.

It occurs to me that maybe we’ve been doing our children a grave misservice, leading them on this way, exhorting them to pay no attention to the Mom and Dad behind the curtain, avoiding the moment of speaking plainly, not using any figure. But then, without the figure, it’s harder to get around to talking about the truth. You can see the figure as obfuscation, or you can see it as icon, a window onto something which can’t itself be framed by the human mind. In the case of Santa Claus, I like to think of Father Christmas, as he appears in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a harbinger of the end of the long, cruel winter, a sign of Aslan’s coming.

The saints live with God, we tell our children, and they live to point to God. There’s a certain convenient logic in moving from All Saints into Advent and Christmas: it’s useful to have been talking so recently about the Communion of Saints and the fact that we, too, the faithful, belong to that company.

“So –” The 10-year-old waylaid me again. “Saint Nicholas. I know he’s real. But –”

“Look, son,” I said — I was doing my fourteen-gazillionth load of laundry that day, and tired of philosophizing. “He has many servants, all right?”

It’s true. He does. He has many servants. Santa Claus, Mom and Dad — we’re a conspiracy, all right. And all of us, great and small, wait with joy for His coming.

The Daily Princetonian has good coverage here and here. I’ll have some further thoughts later today or tomorrow.

Rob, you probably know Rahner better than I do, but I’m not sure Rahner would disagree with anything in that paragraph (or the document) you cite. Could you spell it out?

When I took a course on Rahner with the eminent Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson, I got the impression that “Anonymous Christianity” was his thesis on how non-Christians might be saved and participate in same aspect of true religion, but that he never denied that they were lacking important aspects of the truth or that they’d be better off as Christians. If I remember correctly, Jenson noted that the more extreme forms came from his followers, that there’s a world of difference between Rahner and Rahnerians…

Can you help us out?

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a doctrinal note on evangelization. Here’s a sample:

Although non-Christians can be saved through the grace which God bestows in “ways known to him”, the Church cannot fail to recognize that such persons are lacking a tremendous benefit in this world: to know the true face of God and the friendship of Jesus Christ, God-with-us. . . . The revelation of the fundamental truths about God, about the human person and the world, is a great good for every human person, while living in darkness without the truths about ultimate questions is an evil and is often at the root of suffering and slavery which can at times be grievous. This is why Saint Paul does not hesitate to describe conversion to the Christian faith as liberation “from the power of darkness.” . . . It is an inestimable benefit to live within the universal embrace of the friends of God which flows from communion in the life-giving flesh of his Son, to receive from him the certainty of forgiveness of sins and to live in the love that is born of faith. The Church wants everyone to share in these goods so that they may possess the fullness of truth and the fullness of the means of salvation, in order “to enter into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

Take that, Karl Rahner. The full text of the note is available here.