A reader/interlocutor has chided me for being too hasty in condemning Archbishop Rowan’s shariah remarks, noting that one, and only one, system of civil law gets you exactly what is happening in Colorado—an attempt to curtail the Catholic Church’s freedom to hire whom it will.

And our own Fr. Edward T. Oakes has sent along a link to a Tablet article, in which the Muslim muezzin’s call to prayer in Oxford is defended. (I believe you have to log in to retrieve the article.)

The point I made to my reader/interlocutor is that, while Archbishop Rowan probably does have to be read more closely, Shariah law is not comparable to religious laws among Orthodox Jews or among Catholics (think annulment vs. divorce and the status one confers that the other does not within the church). The proper analogy is between Shariah laws today and the blurred lines between church and state in the West in the sixteenth century.

Shariah laws TO THIS DAY often justify execution for what other religious communities in the West deem sins to be dealt with as a spiritual matter, even when said sin does impact one’s status within the religious community (or deter some people from getting remarried, say). This is very different from forcing Muslims to hire Presbyterians to work at day schools.

The ABC may be appalled at the notion of beheadings in stadiums under the Taliban or how rape victims are treated in Saudi Arabia, but it has taken centuries for Christians and Jews to work out their ecclesiastical bodies’ proper sphere of influence and authority in relation to the state. (Just think about blasphemy laws, which are still on the books in Britain, even if never enforced.) Can Islam claim the same hard work? And once Shariah is given its sphere of influence, can everyone be so sanguine about where that influence will end, when too many (yes, granted, not all) of its adherents believe that violence is an appropriate response to non-Muslim interference in Muslim affairs?

That is why people are freaking out.

The Farrelly brothers are known for their profitable, occasionally droll, gross-out comedies, notably Kingpin, Dumb & Dumber, and There’s Something About Mary. In 1999, they wrote and directed the disastrously earnest, and bad, film Outside Providence, based largely on their personal experiences growing up in Rhode Island. It took in a total of $7 million at the box office. Noting this misstep, a studio head later observed (I’m paraphrasing here), “Inside every filmmaker’s heart is one deeply personal and important story that they want to tell. My job is to make sure those movies never get made.”

I was put in mind of that wisdom reading the new issue of The Atlantic, a magazine for which I have enormous affection. But the editors there have done a grave disservice to writer Lori Gottlieb by publishing her long piece arguing that women should “settle” in marriage.

I’m unfamiliar with Ms. Gottlieb’s work, but it can’t possibly be as parochial, self-serving, and offensively useless as this essay: Gottlieb is a single forty-something who, facing no marriage prospects, decided to become pregnant through the use of a sperm donor. Her piece is a crushing epic explaining why she probably should have just married some schlub and had a traditional family instead. She then extrapolates her own experiences and regrets and uses them to formulate a thesis—“Marry Him!”—which she says women ignore at their peril. She relies for her argument on a string of personal reflections and comments from friends and acquaintances. Here is a sample:

Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.

Well who could argue with that.

Gottlieb tells us nothing in 5,000 words that Charlotte Lucas does not explain in a few sentences. But she does tell us an uncomfortable amount about Lori Gottlieb. The editor’s most important and fundamental job is to, when needed, save their writer from himself. For everyone’s sake, I wish The Atlantic had done its duty.

There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times on the head sacristan of Notre Dame de Paris, who is also the cathedral’s head bell-ringer. A small sample:

Notre-Dame has 11 bells. The four in the north tower were cast in 1856 to replace older ones that were melted down during the French Revolution to make cannons and coins. The 14-ton bass bell in the south tower was cast in 1680 and is supported by a vast wooden cage that dates to the Middle Ages. Six small bells were installed in the 19th century in and below the spire above the church’s transept. The bells, as sacred instruments, are all christened: the bass bell is Emmanuel; the largest of the smaller bells is Angélique Françoise; the smallest, Denise David.

Almost as soon as he took office, Mr. Urbain began to change the way the bells were rung, drawing on his experience at Lourdes. “There was no plan, the bell ringing was always the same,” he said.

The bells were mainly used to sound with simple strokes the thrice-daily Angelus and the Masses on Sunday. But Mr. Urbain realized that he could program the four north tower bells to ring bars of well-known music, including the Bach chorale “Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland,” or at Easter time the hymn “Regina Coeli Laetare.” The bass bell posed more of a challenge. It was rarely rung except for solemn feasts like Easter or to mark the death of a pope or archbishop of Paris. But Mr. Urbain devised programs combining the bass bell and the four lesser bells.

Mollie Hemingway follows on up on the fallout from Rowan Williams’ declaration that “some form” of Shariah law is “inevitable” in Britain.

Favorite headline: “Has the Archbishop Gone Bonkers?” Gledhill comments on how “uncharacteristically clear” the archbishop suddenly became when the issue was the future of Islamic law in Britain, a clarity normally missing when discussing controversial issues within his own church.

What can we take from this? That the only way to resolve the ongoing Anglican confusion is to accept Shariah law in supposedly secular Britain, thereby frightening doctrinally disparate members of the Communion into compromising and finding common ground? Perhaps motivating them finally into working to preserve the Christian heritage of the Motherland before women are regularly beheaded in Wembley Stadium?

Nah. He probably didn’t mean anything at all. He probably only bent in anticipation of where the wind would blow. Which is one definition of progressive.