Last week, Amanda wrote about Elizabeth Marquardt’s fascinating studies on the inner lives of children of divorce. On Sunday, Marquardt had an equally fascinating essay in the Washington Post about the living–and dying–of the adults of divorce.

Here’s a bit from the beginning:

My friend isn’t alone in her uncertainty. Because of profound changes in how Americans organize and sustain — and often break up — our families, our nation will soon confront a never-before-seen shift in how we die and whom we’ll have around us when we do. And the likelihood is that on every level, we will be dying much more alone.

Reduced birth rates, widespread divorce, single-parent childbearing, remarriage and what we might call “re-divorce” are poised to usher in an era of uncertain obligation and complicated grief for the many adults confronting the aging and dying of their divorced parents, stepparents and ex-stepparents. And compared with the generations before them, these dying parents and parent figures will be far less likely to find comfort and help in the nearby presence of grown daughters and sons.

She closes with this:

The situation with stepparents is even more complex. In his study, Temple University’s Davey found that aging stepparents were only half as likely as biological parents to receive care from grown children. “Society does not yet have a clear set of expectations for stepchildren’s responsibility,” he observed.

You can say that again. All stepchildren and stepparents forge a relationship in their own way. Some become deeply attached, some are virtually strangers, many fall somewhere in between. Even when stepchildren and stepparents are close, the deep ambiguity of the relationship can make losing a stepparent to death or divorce a profoundly lonely experience for the child. A friend told me about a colleague who had recently nursed her beloved stepmother, a woman she had grown up with, during a long illness. Even as she mourned her stepmother’s death, the woman was mystified and hurt by the lack of support she had received from many friends and co-workers, who’d wondered why she would go out of her way to provide long-term, hands-on care to someone who was “only” a stepmother.

Her story was all too familiar to me. When I was 13, my beloved stepfather took his own life. He and my mother had been divorced for several years, but from the time I was 3 years old until they separated when I was 9, he had been my in-the-home father, a man I’d fallen in love with not long after my mother had. His death was devastating for all of us, but my immense grief, which stretched through my teenage years and into my 20s, was made all the more lonely and isolating because almost no one around me — friends, teachers, many members of my extended family — recognized that I’d lost anyone of importance at all.

As the generation that ushered in widespread divorce ages, an epidemic of such lonely grief may well sweep in behind it. Much of the expert literature on death and dying implicitly assumes an intact family experience. It assumes that people grow up with their mothers and fathers, who are married to each other when one of them dies. Some scholars are beginning to investigate aging and dying in families already visited by divorce. But most scholars and the public still give scant attention to the loss of other parent figures or to the deeply complicating, long-lasting effects of family fragmentation.

Nearly 40 percent of today’s adults have experienced their parents’ divorce. Increasing numbers of younger adults were born to parents who never married each other at all. I am certain, because I’m one of those living it, that the painful contours of the new American way of death will be discovered and defined by my own generation for years to come.

In the New York Times today, David Kuo and John J. DiIulio have an op/ed on faith-based initiatives: “The Faith to Outlast Politics.” Kuo and DiIulio are the former deputy director and director (respectively) of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Jim Nuechterlein reviewed DiIulio’s new book, Godly Republic, in the February issue of First Things; I did a review of the book back in November for National Review.

The op/ed reiterates many of the arguments from the book (along with arguments from Kuo’s book Tempting Faith) and applies them, in light of last night’s State of the Union address, to the current campaigns:

President Bush has promised much. It will be left to the next president to deliver on those promises. The good news is that every major presidential candidate seems open to doing just that.

Hillary Clinton has declared that there is no contradiction between “support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles.” John McCain has supported the idea especially as it relates to improving educational programs for disadvantaged children. Barack Obama describes faith-based programs as a “uniquely powerful way of solving problems” especially where former prisoners and substance abusers are concerned. When he was governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney created his own faith-based office.

Politicians from both parties have come to realize that faith-based programs are indispensable even if they are not miraculous. America’s churches, synagogues, mosques and other congregations supply dozens of major social services — like day care, homeless shelters and anti-violence programs — worth billions of dollars each year, as Ram Cnaan, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, has proved in several studies. Dr. Cnaan is not even counting the work done by inner-city religious schools and other local faith-based programs. From coast to coast, the primary beneficiaries of these services are low-income children and families who are not otherwise affiliated with the religious nonprofit organizations that serve them.

The Constitution is no longer a potential obstacle to a successful faith-based initiative in the White House. In several cases decided since 2001, the Supreme Court has clarified that even “pervasively sectarian” religious nonprofit organizations remain tax-exempt and can receive government social service grants on the same basis as secular nonprofit organizations. Their eligibility is constitutionally secure so long as they do not proselytize or engage in sectarian instruction; serve all persons without regard to religion; follow applicable federal anti-discrimination laws; and use public monies only to serve grant-specified secular purposes.

“Follow applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.” That clause may cause a dust storm in the coming days, but first, it seems, at the state level. Consider the case of Colorado. Here’s how Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, summarized the moves of the Colorado House Majority Leader, Alice Madden (D):

Last year the Colorado legislature enacted a state version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which forces businesses to forfeit their religious convictions in matters of firing, hiring, and promotion regardless of a person’s faith, age, gender, or sexual orientation. In a classic move to abate opposition from the religious community, they exempted religious organizations like Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army that provide social services. Madden, who supported the exemption last year, has now introduced H.B. 1080, a bill that would put religious charities under these onerous requirements and clearly violate the religious tenets of many of them.

Archbishop Charles Chaput, has promised to close down Catholic Charities in Denver if this bill passes:

In its effect, HB 1080 would attack the religious identity of religious nonprofits serving the wider community. And since Catholic nonprofits play a major role in serving the needy through organizations like Catholic Charities — in fact, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Denver is the largest non-government human services provider in the Rocky Mountain West — Catholics will bear a disproportionate part of the damage.

House Bill 1080 would greatly hinder any Catholic entity which receives state money from hiring or firing employees based on the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church. Many non-Catholics already work at Catholic Charities. But the key leadership positions in Catholic Charities obviously do require a practicing and faithful Catholic, and for very good reasons. Catholic Charities is exactly what the name implies: a service to the public offered by the Catholic community as part of the religious mission of the Catholic Church.

Catholic Charities has a long track record of helping people in need from any religious background or none at all. Catholic Charities does not proselytize its clients. That isn’t its purpose. But Catholic Charities has no interest at all in generic do-goodism; on the contrary, it’s an arm of Catholic social ministry. When it can no longer have the freedom it needs to be “Catholic,” it will end its services. This is not idle talk. I am very serious.

And he concludes with this:

Finally and quite candidly, one of the Catholic community’s deepest concerns in regard to HB 1080 is the bill’s source. I’ve heard from quite a few Catholics over the past week; Catholics who find HB 1080 offensive, implicitly bigoted, and designed to bully religious groups out of the public square. But the Colorado Catholic Conference has also heard — repeatedly — that the Anti-Defamation League has been a primary force behind this bad bill. I hope that isn’t true. It would be a very serious disappointment. I invite and encourage the Anti-Defamation League to disassociate itself from this ill-conceived piece of legislation. And I strongly urge Catholics to contact their state representatives, urging them to vote against this bill.

This is saddening, but not surprising. Religious liberty and non-discrimination clauses, especially, as Maggie Gallagher has persuasively argued, when applied to same-sex issues, will be very important in coming years. Archbishop Chaput has provided a good example on how to respond. Read the entire column.

Anthony, the Office Linebacker is all fine and good–I don’t drink coffee anyway–but what this office really needs is the Evangelism Linebacker: “As a fish was created to swim in water, as a bird was created to fly, I was created to knock people out who don’t evangelize.”

A junior fellow who shall remain nameless (Nathaniel Peters, graduate of Swarthmore College, photo and other identifying marks to follow) forwarded this YouTube video to me with extreme prejudice.

I don’t get it . . . the gentleman in the red jersey obviously enjoys an intense work ethic and dedication to obtaining the group’s goals in a timely fashion.

Now get back to work, Nathaniel, or, as the sign on my office door says, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Regarding Ryan’s ruminations on S.M. Hutchens’ review of E.O. Wilson’s The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (warning: I’ve read neither the book nor the review, just Ryan’s post about them), I think Ryan has it right in concluding that in Wilson’s account of Christianity “nature has become only a vehicle for supernature.”

It’s easy enough to see how this might happen. Suppose that, as Aristotle and Aquinas and eudaimonistic ethicists generally have thought, there is a natural end for man knowable by human reason and that this end is normative for human beings in the sense that human beings should order their actions to it. Suppose further that some religion teaches that there is some other end disclosed by God in revelation and that religious believers ought to treat this other end as normative, ordering their actions to it rather than to any other. If all this is the case, then it’s easy to see that those pursuing the natural end for human beings and those pursuing the supernaturally revealed one have adopted quite different agendas and that these agendas may come into conflict.

The solution to this problem in the Catholic moral tradition has been to point out that a difference of ends need not make for a conflict of ends if the one end is appropriately subsumed within the other. For example, the end of running an excellent emergency room need not conflict with that of running an excellent hospital, and the end of being a good father need not conflict with that of being a good man, for in each case the former end is subsumed in the latter. Hence, the Catholic tradition has taught that the natural end for human beings is subsumed within the supernatural end, with the result that there is no conflict between them. Although the supernatural end, as something grander and more expansive than the natural end, requires us to do more than the natural end does, nevertheless no action enjoined by the supernatural end is contrary to the natural end (theology never commands what natural ethics knows to be wrong), and every action contrary to the natural end is also contrary to the supernatural one (what natural ethics forbids, theology forbids too). This is one of the things Catholic theologians have traditionally meant when they said that grace does not destroy nature but perfects its.

It’s worth pointing out in this context that Wilson seems to be writing against some of the Protestant traditions, not the Catholic one. If a person thinks that nature is wholly corrupt, that there is no natural morality knowable by human reason, that grace completely supplants nature, that the basis of morality is the divine command and not the essences of things as created by God—and some Protestant theologians can plausibly be read as having said such things—then all bets are off. Then there really can develop a conflict between a natural human morality and a supernatural, divinely revealed one.

In the Catholic Church, today is the memorial of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the Office of Readings for the day, we find this passage by Thomas:

The Cross exemplifies every virtue

Why did the Son of God have to suffer for us? There was a great need, and it can be considered in a twofold way: in the first place, as a remedy for sin, and secondly, as an example of how to act.

It is a remedy, for, in the face of all the evils which we incur on account of our sins, we have found relief through the passion of Christ. Yet, it is no less an example, for the passion of Christ completely suffices to fashion our lives.

Whoever wishes to live perfectly should do nothing but disdain what Christ disdained on the cross and desire what he desired, for the cross exemplifies every virtue.

If you seek the example of love: Greater love than this no man has, than to lay down his life for his friends. Such a man was Christ on the cross. And if he gave his life for us, then it should not be difficult to bear whatever hardships arise for his sake.

If you seek patience, you will find no better example than the cross. Great patience occurs in two ways: either when one patiently suffers much, or when one suffers things which one is able to avoid and yet does not avoid. Christ endured much on the cross, and did so patiently, because when he suffered he did not threaten; he was led like a sheep to the slaughter and he did not open his mouth. Therefore Christ’s patience on the cross was great. In patience let us run for the prize set before us, looking upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith who, for the joy set before him, bore his cross and despised the shame.

If you seek an example of humility, look upon the crucified one, for God wished to be judged by Pontius Pilate and to die.

If you seek an example of obedience, follow him who became obedient to the Father even unto death. For just as by the disobedience of one man, namely, Adam, many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one man, many were made righteous.

If you seek an example of despising earthly things, follow him who is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Upon the cross he was stripped, mocked, spat upon, struck, crowned with thorns, and given only vinegar and gall to drink.

Do not be attached, therefore, to clothing and riches, because they divided my garments among themselves. Nor to honours, for he experienced harsh words and scourgings. Nor to greatness of rank, for weaving a crown of thorns they placed it on my head. Nor to anything delightful, for in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

For a nice introduction to his philosophical thought, check out the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (written by Ralph McInerny and John O’Callaghan).

The Eve of St. Agnes—Green Bay, 2008
John Keats for Today’s Reader

Saint Agnes Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was,
The coach for all his sweaters was acold;
The team limped weakly through the frozen grass,
And bundled were the fans, a woolly fold.
Numb were the passer’s fingers as his hold
Embraced the ball and flung a mighty pass.
It flew like cannon from a warship old,
Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death,
To the alert receiver, while his prayer he saith.

—A. Dulles, S.J.

Time to apply for the Junior Fellowship at First Things. As I wrote last year, here are

Some of the Things You Might Do As a First Things Junior Fellow (Not All in One Week):

Monday, 3 pm: First Things editorial meeting; 8 pm: $15 tickets for Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Metropolitan Opera

Tuesday: Read the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Claremont Review of Books, and Books and Culture. (And take out the recycling at home.)

Wednesday: Read manuscript submissions and write a daily article or a post for the blog.

Thursday, 2:30 pm: Edit article or blog post with Jody Bottum; 8:00 pm: Performance of David Ives’ adaptation of Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? at the Lyceum Theater near Times Square

Friday, 11 am: Email about new and upcoming books with the editor of Books and Culture.

Saturday, 7 pm: Night prayer, drinks, and dinner with Richard John Neuhaus, Fr. Joseph Koterski, and Avery Cardinal Dulles

I’ve finally gotten around to reading the new issue of The New Atlantis. For those not familiar with it, The New Atlantis is published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and has legitimate claim to being America’s premiere “Journal of Technology and Society.” In this new issue, S. M Hutchens, senior editor of Touchstone, reviews E. O. Wilson’s The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. Wilson’s book is written as an extended letter to an Evangelical Baptist pastor, so having Hutchens (a theologian in the Evangelical Lutheran tradition) respond makes considerable sense. (Readers of First Things may remember the review of The Creation that Stephen Barr wrote for us here.)

The main thrust of Hutchens’ review is the contrast between humanist views (like Wilson’s) of creation and Biblical accounts. As Hutchens sees it:

One of the more exasperating characteristics of the biblical God is that He, inferior to greater souls in this regard, seems to evince very little reverence for life. By this I mean His attitude toward the biological life we prize so highly in ourselves and by natural extension in other living things seems to be entirely, and jealously, proprietary, and that what we would bestow more generously, had we the power, He, in accordance with His own lights, keeps short and difficult. We humans in particular, who would be gods, He quickly recycles: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

The scriptures show him removing life from the whole earth when men displease Him, contemplating this event not only once, but twice, “the fire next time.” The attitude that seems to please Him most toward this gift which seems so precious to us that we are constantly tempted to define our being by it is “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away—Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

He goes on to explain the difference this makes:

The principal difference in the horizons against which orthodox Christianity and earth-piety work is that the earth as it presently exists is the eschatological telos of the latter’s vision, while for the former it is subsumed under the more general category of Creation. The concept of Creation carries with it belief in the biblical God as its Creator, and thus acquires subordination to a purpose in which it exists not as the end of a vision, as it must be to non-theists who believe in no other home, but a means to the accomplishment of a divine purpose that transcends and shall eventually subsume it.

Here, then, is the first inescapable offense Christianity gives to earth-piety: the earth as we know it empirically is not a final thing but a first creation. The second offense is that Christianity’s principal reason for the earth’s existence is to serve the cause of human redemption, to be defined and carried out not by what seems reasonable to man, but the purpose and method of God. The earth is presented to the faith as sacramental, and as sacrament its end is to be consumed so that a second and higher Creation may come. Its end is as the end of man who has been made from and returns to its dust, who must pass away so the Second and Eternal Man can arise to take his place in a new heaven and earth, the old having passed away. It is difficult to exaggerate the breadth and depth of the chasm that exists between biblical religion and earth-piety.

I don’t know what I think about this. For whatever reason my initial reaction was that Hutchens has overstated his case. But I’m no expert on the theological status of creation. Still, this seems just a little too other-worldly, and a little too “Man is the ‘only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake.’” (That, of course, is a quote from the Second Vatican Council; in the broad contours, Hutchens has obviously gotten it exactly right.) So maybe it’s just the emphasis. The impression one gets is that nature has become only a vehicle for supernature. The nature-supernature debates are well-known in Christian anthropology and moral theology circles; do they undergird the debates over environmental stewardship as well?

Anyway, give Hutchens’ entire review a read. And you might want to check out the symposium on Hannah Arendt’s “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” also in the new issue of The New Atlantis. And if you like what you read, you might want to subscribe to The New Atlantis.

The US has “In God We Trust,” the French have “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” but the British don’t have anything. And they seem to like it that way. Recently the Times of London sponsored a motto-writing contest, the winner of which being, “No motto please, we’re British.” The story of the British and their potential motto provides another example of European nations trying to find their national identity in the midst of immigration and other societal changes. The New York Times article covering this story, however, did not involve many grave matters. It ends with the following exchange from the House of Lords that sums up the British better than any motto could:

After Lord Hunt’s assurances that the government had no plans for a motto and his colleagues’ insistence on discussing one anyway, Lord Conwy had a thought. Why, he asked, could they not just use the French “Dieu et mon droit,” which means “God and my right?”

Lord Hunt replied: “As the noble lord will know, that represents the divine right of kings. While it is of course a well-known phrase, one would need to reflect on whether that would be entirely relevant to a motto that we are not going to have.”

I’ve been following the somewhat acrimonious debate over the extent of the biblical canon and the place of the Apocrypha in it that has been taking place between some Reformed (James White, William Webster, and James Swan) and Catholic folk (Gary Michuta and Steven K. Ray) on their respective blogs. (See here, here, and by way of Reformed Catholicism here for the Protestant side, and here, here, and here for the Catholic.)

The Prots have the better historical argument on this one (but, being a Prot, I would say that), following St. Jerome, who is cited, for example, in the Thirty-nine Articles in an aside precisely about the apocryphal books:

And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:

The Third Book of Esdras
The Fourth Book of Esdras
The Book of Tobias
The Book of Judith
The rest of the Book of Esther
The Book of Wisdom
Jesus the Son of Sirach
Baruch the Prophet
The Song of the Three Children
The Story of Susanna
Of Bel and the Dragon
The Prayer of Manasses
The First Book of Maccabees
The Second Book of Maccabees

Nevertheless, in reading through a chapter of N.T. Wright’s New Testament People of God, I was taken by a passage from the Wisdom of Solomon that Wright quotes for the purpose of situating his readers in the prophetical/eschatological mindset of first-century Jews. Wisdom 2:12-20 is worth reproducing at length:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
Let us test him with insult and torture,
so that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.

I am ashamed to say that this past Saturday is the first time I can remember ever encountering these stunning verses. It seems to me that “Protestant Bibles” that do not have the apocryphal books are missing rich material that most certainly would have informed to some degree the Apostles’ own thinking about the relation of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection to the suffering of Israel and the promises of God to redeem that suffering and liberate them from oppression. Certainly there are echoes of the Wisdom of Solomon in Paul. This does not, ipso facto, make the apocryphal books canonical; there is also a cryptic allusion to the Assumption of Moses in Jude, and no Christian church includes the pseudepigrapha in its lectionary. (Though see this interesting interpretation of the passage in question by Jonathan Edwards that, if tenable, makes the issue moot.) Paul also cites approvingly the works of a Greek playwright, which doesn’t mean that, if the complete works of Menander were to be unearthed in a clay pot somewhere, our New Testament would expand to accommodate them, with Sunday school classes adding papier-mâché skene buildings to their Christmas pageants.

But is it time to revive the Reformation practice of including the Apocrypha in Bibles published for Protestant churches as a deuterocanon (which is most probably how these books functioned throughout much of church history, however you parse the vote or scholarship at Trent).

Lutheran Pastor Paul McCain asked this question a couple of months back on his Cyberbrethren blog:

How is it that the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod did in fact have the Apocryphal books in its Bibles right up to the very time when they moved to English? One can see that every German Bible printed by Concordia Publishing House [and very beautifully printed I might add!] had the Apocryphal books, but one is hard pressed to find any English Bible sold by CPH starting in the early 20th century that contains the Apocrypha.

And so is it time we Reformation Christians repair to our roots and thicken our Bibles for the sake of enriching our understanding of first-century Jewish theo-thought, and, by extension, that of the biblical authors themselves?

I’d say yes.

• So I was expecting The Blair Witch Project Meets Godzilla vs. Mothra with a fairly decent (read: lousy) “undead slasher chases teens in their underwear” flick thrown in for good measure. Another way of saying, something not so good.

• But Cloverfield wasn’t half bad. It was sufficiently gripping with a minimum of kitsch (although the impaled girlfriend crooning, “You came back for me,” almost made me spit out a Goober). And the occasional goofy-funny line hinting at a certain ironic distance was much appreciated. (Thank you, Seinfeld generation!)

• Yeah, yeah, I know: The Japanese monster movies of old were Hiroshima/Nagasaki effluvia, and so Cloverfield should be read as some kind of coded blowback from 9/11. (That Fido, or whatever the alien is called, starts his romp in Lower Manhattan is certainly no accident.)

• Is it just me or have they run out of ways to render space aliens? They all look like lizard people (or my seventh-grade science teacher), with crustacean spawns tossed about like so much parmigiana. Where is the imagination in that? I have been skteching a completely original monster, one that is in no respect anthropoid or recognizable from a seafood menu: It consists of a giant bag of No. 34 De Cecco Fussili semolina pasta balanced precariously on a triangular wedge of imported provolone and trailing a Wang Freestyle laptop with radioactive stylus.

• Now that’s scary.

• Favorite line in the movie: “The air caught on fire! There’s not gonna be a lull!”

• Favorite moment: The driverless hansom cab clip-clopping down—is it Broadway? Central Park West?

• Anyone catch the May 22 doomsday date? Just happens to be the day Spielberg and Lucas like to debut their new blockbusters. (As I was leaving my local googleplex, I saw a poster for the upcoming Indiana Jones IV: The Case of the Quartz-Crystal Timex, or whatever the heck it is. Opens . . . May 22.)

• File this under Suspension of Disbelief Alert: Lily walking a good three, three and a half miles through the No. 6 subway tunnel, from Spring Street to Bloomies, in three-inch heels—this after a rather heart-thumping run for your life that included barely surviving the collapse of the Brooklyn Bridge. Space aliens invade Manhattan—no problem. (I lived through the Koch/Dinkins years.) But I’m sorry . . . lose the pumps.

• By the way, if you were wondering what “Cloverfield” stands for (by way of IMDB.com):
The title “Cloverfield,” initially just a codename for the movie, is named for the boulevard in Santa Monica where the Bad Robot offices were located during the making of the film.

• What lessons can we take away from Cloverfield, boys and girls?
1. Ask Jesus to forgive you your sins before the space alien lands.
2. Spend as much quality time with your loved ones as you can (and seriously reconsider the one-night stands—you’re only going to have to go back for her in the end).
3. DON’T GO BACK FOR THE CAMERA, MORON.
4. Find out the brand name of the digital handheld the moron did go back for. Talk about takes a licking and keeps on ticking . . .

Note to RJN: We should check out whether there really is a Hammer Down Protocol. If so, we may want to consider moving the offices to Staten Island. No one will find us there . . .

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.

Now here’s an interesting blog, one that addresses what probably remains a much-too-unremarked-upon phenomenon within the Church.

Definitely not for theologians of glory or health-and-wealthers.