Our friend William Baer writes to remind us that it’s that time of year again: The St. Robert Southwell Institute is taking applications for this summer’s installment of its annual creative writing workshop. This year, it’s from June 1 to June 11 at the Carmel Retreat House in Mahwah, New Jersey.

Here’s an article about the institute. The purpose of the workshop—which is on playwriting, this year—is to encourage a small group of interested, post-baccalaureate Catholics (ages 21-30) to develop their talents in creative writing from a traditional Catholic point of view. Each accepted participant will receive a Southwell Scholarship covering all costs, including room and board, except for travel expenses to and from the Retreat House. The application deadline is April 1.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, formerly an Iran specialist for the CIA and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, now thinks that Islam deserves serious study as a subject of strategic interest. “God may be kaput in most of the West, but he has hardly been reduced to the status of personal philosophy in Islamic lands,” he avers. “And, yet, our God-diminishing, mirror-imaging impulse keeps blinding us to Islam’s place at the center of the political realm. The tendency to view Muslims through secular eyes, or to recast them and their faith into a version of Christianity (“Islam is a religion of peace”), is perhaps the greatest impediment to rational American policy.”

Sadly, Gerecht seems to think that it all boils down to fanaticism vs. free-thinking.

He has some important points to make in an article released today on the AEI website:

In the nine years (1985–1994) that I spent in the Central Intelligence Agency working on Middle Eastern issues, especially on the “Iranian target,” I cannot recall a single serious conversation about Islam as a faith, and about why a glimpse of the divine inspired an entire generation of young Iranian men to draw closer to God through war and death. . . . The CIA, like the State Department, is a secular institution where officers typically do not discuss their faith (or, more to the point, lack thereof) or the faith of others. Friends at Langley tell me that even today there remains little sustained attention to the question of how believing Muslims, country by country, view the outside world, or how Saudi-supported militant Salafi teachings have gobbled up mosques and religious schools throughout the once virulently anti-Wahhabi lands of the eastern Mediterranean. . . .

When I was an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, the overwhelming majority of my colleagues thought that America under George W. Bush, not Iran under Ali Khamenei, deserved more blame for delaying the restoration of “normalcy” between the two states. In its deliberations and its final recommendations, the ISG barely acknowledged Islam. Read a stack of essays and op-eds about the Middle East by Bush père’s former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, one of America’s preeminent realists, and the words “Islam” and “Muslim” seldom appear, much less any discussion of how Islam as understood and practiced by Iran’s rulers could affect American diplomacy–which, in Scowcroft’s eyes, really ought to be able “to assuage Iran’s security concerns and temper its urge to acquire a nuclear capability.” . . .

Islamism, however, comes much closer to being an authentic expression of Islam than Brzezinski realizes. Devout Muslims probably constitute a majority in every Muslim country in the Middle East. Iran may—just may—be the exception, twenty-eight years of theocracy having dampened the average Iranian’s attachment to his faith and its clerical custodians. Who, then, qualifies as devout? Someone who believes the Koran embodies the literal word of God and that the Holy Law, the Sharia, ought to be revered and obeyed. Devout Muslims can pick and choose to an extent, allowing local customs, man-made legislation, and human weaknesses to intrude into their everyday lives. But the Sacred Law remains the beloved ideal.

Gerecht’s piece is full of valuable insights, and for that reason it is all the more disappointing to read this invidious comparison of Islamist leaders to Augustine and Aquinas:

As much as Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Algerian Islamist leaders Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, or Iran’s Mohammad Khatami and Mesbah-Yazdi, view themselves as God’s men trying to keep the faithful on the “straight path.”

If we can’t distinguish between the founders of European culture and today’s Islamists, we are in a hole we can’t climb out of. Apparently Pope Benedict XVI’s Sept. 2006 effort to explain the difference between religion compatible with reason, and religion that repudiates reason has not been absorbed even by conservative analysts in the Beltway, and not even by those who belatedly have come to realize that Islam is a strategic issue.

The last semester of my senior year at college, I was staring down the barrel of what seemed like years upon years of graduate school. At the time, with my senior thesis dragging on, and given the fact that I’d been in school continuously since kindergarten, the prospect didn’t seem all that appealing. Hence one fine January morning found me procrastinating at my desk, trolling around the Internet for things to do after graduation, until I happened upon the application for the First Things junior fellowship.

I applied, not thinking that I had much of a chance at it. I’d been an avid reader of First Things since high school, and the prospect of spending a year writing and working in Manhattan with the editors and writers I’d long admired seemed like the perfect post-college job. Somewhat miraculously, I got a call from Jody Bottum not long afterward, offering me the spot. I took it, and it turned out to be just the job I’d been hoping for.

For one thing, it’s the chance to learn from and work with the folks you read each month—Father Neuhaus, Jody Bottum, R.R. Reno, and regular contributors such as Cardinal Dulles, George Weigel, Robert Louis Wilken, Father Edward Oakes, Robert George, David B. Hart, and Mary Ann Glendon. Lots of those folks will show up now and again for Saturday dinners with Father Neuhaus, as well as for conferences such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the Dulles Colloquium, and the
Erasmus Lecture. I can’t overstate how much I’ve learned from conversations with these people.

You’ll also get the chance to become a regular contributor to the magazine and website. I’ve written quite a few pieces for the website and a couple for the magazine, and I definitely plan to continue as long as they’ll let me. In the process, your writing will be shaped and improved by the First Things editors. It’s an invaluable opportunity—and believe me, it beats the heck out of writing term papers.

In short, I now look back on my year at First Things as a tremendous privilege. The education I received there was just as valuable as anything I’ve gotten from college or grad school (probably more valuable, in fact), and what’s more, it was a lot of fun. If you’re anything like me—a young prospective writer and wannabe academic—you ought to jump at the chance, like I did. So what are you waiting for? Apply to be a First Things junior fellow today.

You have to love the headline: “Military Now Says…”

Yeah, right. We’re onto the military and their filthy lies. First they unleash The Mist. Then they silence Dennis Kucinich. Now they’re guiding alien intelligence out of Texas airspace and into another space-time dimension, where our extraterrestrial “guests” will be given the Guantanamo treatment until they come clean about how on earth Howie Mandel has a career.

AND DON’T THINK WE’VE FORGOTTEN ABOUT AREA 51! And what about this, huh? Videotape doesn’t lie—only the government lies!

“As a child of divorce you’re always missing somebody,” says Elizabeth Marquardt of the Institute for American Values. Missing a mother, missing a father . . . missing God.

In a first-of-its-kind study on the spiritual lives of children of divorce, Ms. Marquardt found that young adults who grew up in broken families were far less likely to be religious, to join a faith community, and to hold an ecclesial leadership position. And she is not particularly surprised. “The rough edges of [mom and dad’s] different worlds rub together in only one place—the life of the child,” she notes, often leaving the child to sort out the big questions of life for himself–What is truth? and Who is God?, for instance.

Maybe this is the place for church community to step in, to provide stability, continuity, and love to these children. But that rarely happens. Two-thirds of the young adults surveyed said that that neither clergy nor congregation reached out to them at the time of the divorce; quite simply, no one knows what to say, no one wants to offend the parents, no one wants to see the children cry. And as those children grow older–often literally traveling between two worlds, the shattered community of their family–they have difficulty becoming part of any community, much less a spiritual one.

Moreover, the story of Salvation History—a Father’s unbroken convent to his children—frequently has little resonance in their lives. As one young man comments, it is not the end but the beginning of the parable of the prodigal son that stands out for him: The parable is not so much an illustartion of paternal forgiveness as a painful reminder of his own father’s departure.

Ms. Marquardt does not give solutions, but she does bring a very real question to light: How do Christians, individually and communally, minister to the growing number of children of divorce? Her published study, complemented by a documentary out this month from the Institute for American Values, is a great first resource for church leaders and members unsatisfied by indifference.

I’ve heard of the odor of sanctity, but this carries things rather too far.

is now becoming a sport. OK, it was a roast, it was a roast of sportscasters (two guys I like, by the way), and it’s easy to go too far. My question is: Why was Jesus the object of Dana Jacobson’s obscenity-laden rant? Because Notre Dame’s coach happened to be in the audience? Because the mural known as “Touchdown Jesus,” associated with the school, was just too easy to leave alone—and so she was on a kind of Jesus rhetorical roll? Or has blasphemy simply become cool? (We’re talking strictly about references to Christianity, of course. Insert “Muhammad”—or a racial or ethnic minority group—for “Jesus” and see how quickly Jacobson would have been filling out paperwork at the nearest temp agency.)

In other words, whereas a shot at church or clergy would have been edgy before, has New Atheist bestsellerdom, and the general coarse level of discourse in media in general, made derogating the figure of Jesus himself a way of proving your bona fides as a fearless commentator (not to mention first-class jerk)?

By way of Mark Stricherz at Get Religion.