“I’m going to open a barbed-wire museum!”
“I want to look at spoons all day!”
“I want to own all the squished pennies in the world!”
Then again, maybe some do . . .
Thanks to Evangelical Outpost for this fun link.
Listen to Mollie Ziegler Hemingway on the White Horse Inn talking about the Issues, Etc. debacle and the real issues behind the precipitate purging of that very popular radio call-in show.
Mollie pulls no punches in her analysis of the division within the LCMS and the role that division may–most probably did–play in the pulling of Issues from the air.
Nota Bene: That online petition to save the show has nearly 6,000 digital signatures. And if you look at who is taking the time not only to share their John Hancocks but also to leave a comment or two, you will find that folks from Baptist, Presbyterian and Reformed, “Bible church,” and ELCA backgrounds were fans and supporters of Issues.
Given that Lutherans, particularly of the LCMS variety, are known more for their insularity than for their outreach, this program, and the response the cancellation has elicited, is setting Lutherans ablaze in a way the powers that be most probably never intended.
Here’s a question: Why must confessional Lutherans, who number in the millions and cross LCMS, ELCA, WELS, and ELS denominational borders, rely on corporate headquarters for their media—namely programs such as Issues, Etc. and magazines like The Lutheran Witness? Are there no other resources, no other media mavens, who would be inclined to fund radio broad- or podcasts and an independent magazine? (Let’s get really bold here, how about a cable network along the lines of EWTN? Nah…I know…that’s just loony…)
Update: I have been reminded that Lutheran Forum is an independent confessional Lutheran publication that can provide an outlet for Lutheran voices outside the usual channels.
Some readers have objected to my blog about Pope Benedict’s baptizing at the Easter Vigil a Muslim man who is a famous public critic of Islam. In particular, these readers think that it was vulgar of me to suggest that, in so doing, the pope was “flipping the bird” to Osama bin Laden, who had lately accused the pope of being a crusader.
Now, this is just a category mistake. Flipping the bird may be vulgar, but talking about someone flipping the bird is not, just as discussing pornography is not pornographic and talking about injustice is not unjust. The expression flipping the bird is slang, to be sure, just as the synonymous expression digitus impudicus is pedantic, but neither expression is vulgar, even if the gesture iteslf is.
More interestingly, my friend Stephen Barr thinks that I missed an important distinction between intentionally insulting someone and doing something inoffensive in itself that will foreseeably annoy someone because of that person’s unreasonable beliefs. He suggests that Benedict was doing the latter but not the former, and since flipping someone the bird implies intentionally annoying someone, Benedict did not really flip anyone the bird at the Easter Vigil.
The distinction Steve makes is perfectly correct, but I’m not sure how it applies in this case. If someone’s beliefs are unreasonable in a way that causes him to become deeply agitated when someone else does something perfectly inoffensive, might we not, in some cases, do such things with the intention of upsetting such a person? If we are already involved in a desperate struggle with a man, and upsetting him would cause him to appear to disadvantage in the public eye or to overplay his hand or would otherwise lead to some good result, then intentionally annoying such a man could well be the right thing to do. If Benedict saw the situation in these terms, then maybe he was intentionally annoying bin Laden. Compare some of the things our blessed Lord said to the Pharisees.
More to the point, however, I never said that the pope intended to insult bin Laden or anyone else. In saying Benedict was flipping bin Laden the bird, I meant—as I thought I had made clear—that he was sending a public message to Muslim fanatics that he would not be intimidated by threats, that he would preach the Gospel in season and out, even to Muslims, etc. Sending such a message is clearly not to insult anyone.
If so, can what the pope did reasonably be described as flipping bin Laden the bird? Well, it’s obvious that the pope did not literally flip bin Ladin the bird during the Easter Vigil. Although the image of Benedict XVI, in full papal regalia exclaiming, “Osama, azenda me!” and then making the requisite gesture diverts me exceedingly, we all know that didn’t happen. Hence, it’s clear that in suggesting that Benedict flipped bin Laden the bird, I was speaking metaphorically, not literally. I was thus saying only that Benedict did something that in certain respects, but not all was like flipping bin Laden the bird. Here, those respects were that Benedict boldly indicated in a public manner that he would not accede to bin Laden’s wishes.
At the risk of restarting this dispute, I think Benedict was, as my grandmother might have said, telling bin Laden to go soak his head.
Stephen M. Barr, physicist, author, and First Things contributor, will be giving the following lectures in April:
Tuesday, April 1, 11:05 p.m., Wyncote, PA
“Faith, Physics, and God: A Physicist Looks at the Dialog between Science and Religion”
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
1299 Church Road, Wyncote, PA
Thursday, April 3, 7:30 p.m., Vancouver, BC
“Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”
Trinity Western University
Auditorium, NW BUilding
Friday, April 4, 12 Noon, Vancouver, BC
“Scientific Materialism Re-examined: Recent Discoveries Raise Important Questions”
University of British Columbia
Scarfe 100
Monday, April 14, 7 p.m., Newark, DE
“Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”
University of Delaware
Gore Hall, Room 205
Monday, April 21, 7:30 p.m., Sioux Fall, SD
“Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”
University of Sioux Falls
Salsbury Science Center, Zbornik Hall
. . . is the Catholic Channel’s morning show (6–10 am), hosted by Gus Lloyd, on Sirius Satellite radio. Starting Monday you may want to make a point of tuning in (available online), as there are several noteworthy guests and a couple of significant anniversaries.
Monday
On the third anniversary of Terry Schiavo’s death, her younger brother, Bobby Schindler, reflects on his sister’s life and the issues raised by her controversial death. Also, Laser Monks! Not a Catholic sci-fi movie, but a soaring business-supply company run by a savvy monk named Fr. Bernard McCoy. And—ever wonder why a curve ball curves? Davin Coburn of Popular Mechanics magazine has the answer as he explains the science behind athletic achievement.
Tuesday
Actor David Carradine (Kung Fu, Kill Bill) talks about his new Hallmark HD adventure film Son of the Dragon. Plus, the comedy sketch troupe Chocolate Cake City speculates on what would happen if Pope Benedict XVI opened a My Space Page.
Wednesday
Seize the Day marks the third anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II with guests Victor Claveau, founder of the JP II Society of Evangelists, and Trace Murphy, editor of the book A Life with Karol.
Thursday
Military chaplain Marc Unger reflects on the life of his son Daniel, who while serving in Iraq sacrificed his life to save two Iraqi civilians from a terrorist attack.
Friday
Omar Shaban, head of Catholic Relief Services in Gaza, talks about providing trauma counseling to children impacted by violence in the Holy Land.
Having recently attended Jody’s Georgetown lecture on death and politics, I was primed for this Wired piece on Ray Kurzweil, who believes in AI, the singularity, and immortality.
There’s all sorts of Skynet-ish goodness in the piece, but the most interesting (by which I mean disturbing) passage is this one, where Kurzweil and his anti-aging doctor, Terry Grossman, outline how immortality is going to be achieved:
According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won’t die.
I’ve watched enough Battlestar Galactica to be suspicious of any scheme relies on robotic self-awarness, even if it comes in the form of Tricia Helfer. (Actually, if our robot overlords wind up looking like Tricia Helfer, I might pull a Kent Brockman . . .)
Obviously, I have no deep thoughts the subject, but I’m sure Jody does and perhaps he’ll read the Wired piece over the weekend and share them with us on Monday? It would give me something to look forward to next week.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway has a fine article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, in which she addresses the precipitate cancellation of the popular Lutheran radio interview/news program Issues, Etc. by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s board of communications. Mollie puts this strange and very unpopular action—an online petition to bring the show back has more than 5,000 signatures—in the context of the denomination’s latest identity crisis.
As Mollie notes, the official LCMS explanation for the cancellation of a program that was a faithful representation of confessional Lutheran thought and practice is dubious. Even if the numbers were as bad as claimed—another week or two on the air was going to bankrupt the KFUO network? Jeff Schwarz and Todd Wilken, the producer and host, respectively, couldn’t be given the dignity of some notice? But the numbers cited on the LCMS website are misleading, as a blog dedicated to the Issues issue explains in some detail.
The LCMS, in which I was baptized and confirmed, is unlike any other Protestant body: It’s not mainline and not quite evangelical, at least in the altar-call, clap-happy sense. Rather it is orthodox, confessional, and liturgical—or at least it’s supposed to be. For those Christians who are tired of the strip-mall approach to church-hopping, in which the congregation with the best music and most emotional appeal wins your heart this week, the LCMS has always been a traditional, sober, and catholic alternative. Unfortunately, many within the LCMS have decided that being Lutheran isn’t enough; they also want to be BIG and compete with the nondenoms around the corner. And so some congregations have gone all Baptist and charismatic in terms of worship style, and in some cases present a soteriology that contradicts that of a church with a very high view of the sacraments—a view that includes a doctrine of baptismal regeneration.
Please note that the LCMS is not TEC: It has not fallen prey to the historical-Jesus wars and continues to teach the Christian faith’s traditional sexual morality. And if you asked Dr. Kieschnick, the Synod’s president, or any other LCMS pastor for that matter, whether Jesus literally rose from the dead, I have no doubt he would answer with a swift and emphatic yes. As opposed to many, if not most, mainliners, who would most probably respond, “Well, it all depends on what you mean by literally and rose.” In fact, if the LCMS errs, it’s definitely in the direction of a biblicism that brooks little to no debate over modes of biblical interpretation, even of such controverted works of prehistory as Genesis. (In fact, Dr. Kieschnick a couple of months ago gave an interview in which he explained his own theory of how Noah ventilated the ark so as to make it habitable.) Talk of Genesis as poetry or a reworking of ancient creation myths to say something unique about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will not go over well. As for how the evidence for biological evolution fits into biblical history . . . my, it looks like rain today . . .
Whither the LCMS? Given its congregationalist polity, it will probably vary from city to city and congregation to congegation. But if the LCMS want to be the “home” that worn-out wandering evangelicals come back to—as opposed to the Roman and Orthodox churches—it needs a president who respects the tradition’s confessional roots and will allow Lutherans to be Lutherans: not fundamentalists, not evangelicals (although Lutherans, historically, were the original evangelicals), not charismatics, and not mainline Protestant liberals.
I’m not holding my breath.
So, was the man whose name has become synonymous with political manipulation and ends = means duplicity merely a satirist? Was Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince intended to be read for giggles rather than for counsel?
Peter Constantine, winner of the PEN Translation Prize and a National Translation Award, has just published a new translation of The Prince, and it’s winning raves for how elegantly it has captured the “pith of Machiavelli’s brilliant Italian prose.”
Now, imagine picking up any number of classics you’ve read before and reading them again with the idea that they were really intended as lampoons. Select a few titles at random—say, Crime and Punishment, The Scarlet Letter, The Magic Mountain and Oliver Twist—and now read them again, but this time as if the authors had intended to elicit guffaws, or at least wry smiles, not only at the dysfunctions of their respective societies, but also at the plights of their characters.
For some authors it would be a natural—think Kafka. For some titles, it would definitely make for some entertaining text—think Atlas Shrugged played as farce. (I’m rather keen on The Fountainhead, however, even if Roarke/Wright’s aesthetic is that of the average airport’s baggage-claim area.)
I see a whole new set of Cliffs Notes written for a whole new generation of ironists . . .
Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute says that the best way to fight is to strengthen two-parent families, not pouring more money into government programs:
Yet both candidates are largely missing the point. While they insist that strengthening labor unions or protecting homeowners from foreclosures will alleviate the hardships of the poor, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census remind us that the breakdown of the traditional two-parent, married family is a far greater contributor to poverty in America than many of the supposed shortcomings of our economy. It’s hard to imagine that America will make much more headway on reducing persistent poverty until it halts this long-term trend.
The Census Bureau’s study on the living arrangements of American children appeared in mid-February. The data show that the number of children now living in two-parent families has dipped just below the 70 percent mark for the first time since the Census began collecting data on family formation nearly 130 years ago. After peaking in the 1950s—when about 87 percent of all children lived with two parents—the traditional family went through a rapid decline beginning in the 1970s and has continued to shrink over the last three decades, though the rate of decline has slowed somewhat. As part of this sweeping change, the percentage of children living with married parents has fallen more rapidly, down more than two full percentage points, to 66.6 percent of all kids, in the last 10 years alone. Consistent with these decreases has been a sharp rise in the number of children living with single parents and with unmarried parents.
The economic impact of this breakdown has been profound. Researchers estimate that the entire rise in poverty in America since the late 1970s can be attributed to “changes in family formation,” a euphemism for the decline of families headed by two married parents. The latest Census data illustrate the problem. Only one out of ten American kids living in two-married-parent families is in poverty—and about one-third of these families are recent immigrants whose poverty is temporary. By contrast, 37 percent of children living with single mothers are impoverished.
Full article here, via Real Clear Politics
Last September, I published on our homepage an article entitled “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”—my response to the depressing news of the phenomenal success that is that exercise in New Age dimwittery The Secret.
Seeking to profit from the general public’s inability to distinguish true religion from gimme-gimme hokum, I invented my own magical mystery con, entitled The 7 Laws of the Key.
Would you believe that, since the publication of my article, at least two books have come out referencing the power that is “The Key”?!
Am I credited anywhere with inspiring this glut of flapdoodle? Forget it. If you’re going to lead the gullible masses away from the narrow gate that leads to life down the broad road that leads to the unquenchable flames of hellfire, where the worm never dies and there’s nothing but reruns of Scrubs 24/7—at least do so honestly. But to plagiarize! If I had a lawyer, I’d sue! Why, if I had a lawyer, I’d probably be making enough money that I wouldn’t have to sue—I could just go home about now and take a nap.
Instead I see that the Oracle that is Oprah has succeeded in selling the public on another bit of faux-spiritual malarkey entitled A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, written by the same man who brought you The Power of Now (a sequel, I believe, to Zen and the Power of Then).
“Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness?” Tolle asks in A New Earth, with all the wide-eyed wonder that it is possible to muster while contemplating the redwood trim on a new Bentley.
O what I wouldn’t give to break through with a 336-page paean to self-aggrandizement of my own! O the joys of soft-soaping the soap-opera crowd with the promise of dreams manifested and a cholesterol level in the 180s!
I partially disagree with my friend Robert Miller on the matter of papal bird-flipping. Only partially, because I tend to agree with him about the quasi-apologies proffered by the Vatican after the Regensburg speech, but disagree about Cardinal Re’s remarks.
Robert says, “if you intentionally flip someone the bird, don’t pretend afterwards you did it by accident.” The question is whether the Holy Father intentionally flipped anyone the bird at the Easter Vigil. I think not. If I may apply a well-known distinction from Catholic moral theology, there is a difference between an insult that is intended and one that is an unintended (even if admittedly foreseen) by-product of one’s act or statement. If a man says, “The Catholic Church is the one true Church,” his statement implies that other Christian groups are something less than that. Consequently, it is to be anticipated that his statement will annoy many non-Catholic Christians. That doesn’t mean that the statement is made with the intention of causing annoyance. When recently the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document that in essence made just this assertion about the Catholic Church, its purpose was obviously the positive one of clarifying the Church’s teaching on ecclesiology for the benefit of her own members and most especially of her theologians. I am sure the CDF and the pope realized that there would be interreligious fallout but thought it was a price that had to be paid for the sake of a greater good. In the same way, if any Christian says, “Jesus is Lord,” it does not mean that he “intends to flip the bird” to all those who think Jesus is not Lord.
Robert himself states very well one message that the pope presumably meant to convey by agreeing to baptize Mr. Allam at the Easter Vigil—namely that the gospel is to be preached in season and out. One imagines the pope also meant to underline the fact that the gospel message is intended for all people of whatever background. Popes have publicly baptized former animists and Buddhists and members of other religions. To refuse to baptize former Muslims, or to treat such baptisms as something to be hidden away, would be to deny the universality of the Church’s message and mission.
I understand what Cardinal Re said about not taking things “negatively” to be a simple statement that the pope’s act in baptizing Mr. Allam had a positive purpose that did not include giving “one in the eye” to anybody. This isn’t to say that Cardinal Re’s statement was perfectly formulated. Baptism is never a purely private matter. And what the cardinal said about negative interpretations does sound a little like an apology—even though I don’t think it was or was meant to be.
There is another distinction that needs to be insisted upon in today’s world, namely the distinction between acts or words that are “offensive” in some objective way, and those that are “offensive” merely in the sense of bothering someone or another. An objectively offensive act or word, I would say, is one that offends against some objective standard—for example, which offends against truth, or justice, or charity, or modesty, or the innocence of children, or the majesty of God. What the “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright said about the U.S. government inventing the AIDS virus to kill Blacks offends against both truth and justice. As a statement clearly inspired by hatred, it also offends against charity. It is a statement that ought to offend everyone, whether or not it actually offends anyone. On the other hand, the statement of Geraldine Ferraro was offensive only in the sense that some people were made uncomfortable by it.
This is not to say that the two kinds of offensiveness can always be neatly separated. There are times when one’s duty to truth (as in the case of the CDF statement) requires one to say something that will be hurtful to someone. But gratuitous hurtfulness is to be avoided—which is, I think, the point of Churchill’s amusing observation. Charity requires that we avoid hurting the feelings of others either intentionally or unnecessarily. Thus it can be objectively offensive to hurt someone’s feelings, but in many cases it is not.
I think the larger point that Robert is making—and I agree with it wholeheartedly—is that we have become tyrannized over by a ridiculous cult of niceness where any statement however true or salutary has to be apologized for in groveling terms just because somebody somewhere doesn’t like it. What we need is a national—indeed a world—conversation about “offensiveness,” before we suffocate on our own good manners.
Tom Stoppard looks back on the student protests of 1968 and sees that despite its problems, the West wasn’t so bad after all:
I was as aware as most people were that not everything in the gardens of the West was lovely and of course we didn’t know – one never knows – the half of it. But when in August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, an act which was simply the ongoing occupation of eastern Europe writ bold, my embarrassment at our agit-prop mummers’ “revolution” turned to revulsion.
What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.
A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”
Full piece in the Times here, via Arts & Letters Daily
Spengler wrote in this space on Monday about how, at the Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Benedict XVI baptized and received into the Catholic Church Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born author and critic of Islamic fundamentalism. Just last week, Osama bin Laden had rather absurdly accused Benedict XVI of participating in a “crusade” against Islam, a charge that the Vatican of course denies. In these circumstances, when the pope personally baptizes a Muslim man who is a famous public critic of Islam and does so on international television, well, it seems pretty obvious that the Holy Father is giving radical Islam one in the eye.
But then Reuters reports that Cardinal Re tells an Italian newspaper, “Conversion is a private matter, a personal thing, and we hope that the baptism will not be interpreted negatively by Islam.” A private matter? When it takes place at the Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica and on international television? Good luck with that one, Eminence. Not surprisingly, the conversion of Mr. Allam was big news in the Italian press, and the Vatican certainly foresaw this result. That, presumably, is why the pope’s staff did not disclose to the media that Benedict would baptize Mr. Allam at the vigil until less than an hour before the ceremony began.
What about Cardinal Re’s hope that “the baptism will not be interpreted negatively” by Muslims? Well, Yaha Sergio Yahe Pallavinci, the vice-president of the Italian Islamic Religious Community seems to be interpreting it negatively. “What amazed me is the high profile the Vatican has given this conversion. Why could he have not done this in his local parish?” No word from bin Laden yet, but I venture to say that his interpretation will be even more negative than that of Mr. Pallavinci.
Now, if the pope wants to send a message to bin Laden and his ilk that he will not be intimidated by their threats and that he will preach the Gospel in season and out, including to Muslims, then well and good. That’s a message of which I heartily approve. But the Vatican should be straightforward about it. It shouldn’t try to say that when the pope baptizes a famous public critic of Islam on international television it’s “a private matter” or that it thinks that Muslims will not interpret the event negatively. Both ideas are ridiculous, and saying such things makes the Vatican look either foolish or disingenuous. Winston Churchill once said that if you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite. There’s a converse to this maxim: if you intentionally flip someone the bird, don’t pretend afterwards you did it by accident.
This sort of thing has happened before in Benedict’s pontificate. At Regensburg, Benedict wanted to take Islam to task for being insufficiently amendable to reason, and so he made a very strong speech, needlessly quoting, albeit without endorsing, a Byzantine emperor who said that everything new in Islam was “evil and inhuman.” This was a shot across the bow of Islam. But then, when the Muslim reaction—which anyone in public life should have foreseen—was extremely angry and in some cases even violent, Benedict issued a series of increasingly sweeping apologies. With the Regensburg speech and now again with the conversion of Mr. Allam, it seems that Benedict wants to speak and act boldly, but when the inevitable reactions come, he wants to avoid responsibility by saying he was misunderstood. He can’t have it both ways.
It would be better to take one position and stick to it, to say in effect, “Here are our real beliefs and our real values. If you don’t like them, that’s too bad. You have some beliefs and values we don’t like much either.” Don’t say one thing one minute and another the next.
I have Scripture on my side here. Do I make plans like a worldly man, ready to say Yes and No at once? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been Yes and No. For the Son of God, whom we preached among you, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes (2 Cor. 1:17–19).
So Brother Mikhail’s supposed conversion turns out to be piffle. Gorbachev remains an atheist.
As it happens, his visit to the Sacro Convento friary was the result of his poor Italian. “I asked the cab driver to take me to a Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Gorbachev told some 11-year-old children who were staring at his head. “I guess I need to brush up on my languages.”
Jody Bottum referred to the old story of the Holy Cross alumni magazine that showed an FBI agent leading away in handcuffs a priest at an anti-Vietnam protest—with both identified by their graduation years from the school.
He treated the story as possibly apocryphal, but it is, in fact, true. Memory fades, but I knew the editor of this magazine at the time, a Jesuit whose name escapes me. The issue featured a story on the Berrigans, headlined on the cover “The Burden of the Berrigans.” The photo in question was of an FBI agent escorting Philip Berrigan away, in handcuffs, with, indeed, their class identities in the caption.
The editor offered to give me extra copies for my students, which I accepted, because of interest at the height of the anti-Vietnam-war movement. The box was too heavy to mail, and he proposed that I meet him at a Holy Cross alumni event in Holyoke (near my home).
So I went, to find a room full of men (Holy Cross wasn’t yet coed) well on their way to inebriation. I retreated to the corridor and was relieved to find a Jesuit collar with a familiar face above it headed my way. He told me how much he hated these events, then led me out to the parking lot. We moved our cars to a dark corner and transferred the box of magazines, like contraband, and I took the magazines back and gave them out to any students who wanted one. Everyone found that photo wryly funny, of course.
A good line from Megan McArdle of The Atlantic Monthly regarding a piece in the New York Times which quotes people happy about the potential decline of New York’s real estate market:
This is perhaps why I have so little sympathy for the princes of schadenfreude in this New York Times article, who are hoping that Wall Street will collapse, allowing them to buy Manhattan apartments. Bizarrely, despite the fact that all of them seem to work in some service associated with the finance industry, they seem entirely unaware that if the financial industry in New York collapses, their employers will suffer the same fate. They also seem not to realize that it is the taxes from the banking industry (and its lavish, ridiculous bonuses) that finance Manhattan’s low crime rate and excellent public services. Not to mention the restaurants, theaters, and so forth that make them want to live in Manhattan in the first place.
If they wanted to live in the New York that I liked–the one with the Dominicans hanging out on the street corner, the little hole-in-the-wall pizza joints and the improbable shops with ancient leases that sold scavenged junk alongside ticky-tack imports–well then, I could understand their celebration. But they want to live in the New York that the bankers created without the bankers. This is like wanting to go to heaven, but not wanting to die.
The full piece is here.
This, ladies and gentlemen, could be the Official Papal Skateboard.
I wish I could just leave it at that, but you probably want to know exactly how the papacy will, after 2,000 years, finally get its own board. Some time last week, I saw that the Archdiocese of New York was having a contest for youth to design the Papal Skateboard, which would be presented to Benedict at the youth rally at St. Joseph’s Seminary during his April visit to the US. The National Catholic Register shows this submission from a 14-year-old New Yorker, with its impressive rendering of the keys and tiara. Stay tuned for further updates on the winner of the competition, and the liturgical incorporation of the skateboard at the rally.
Vatican City. Or so says this survey. Of course it’s easy to prosper when the only way you can lose your job is to die and your number one export is infallibility. Try competing with that!
Interesting that two independent states within Italy rank in the top 10, but Italy itself ranks only 27th. Does that mean that if each province declared independence, it would prosper and become more stable? Don’t give the Italians any ideas…
The United States ranks a mere 23rd. I assume that poor showing has something to do with the recent trashing of HD-DVD for Blue-ray technology. Who can remain “stable” when every five seconds you have to go out and buy yet another machine on which to play yet another iteration of St. Elmo’s Fire?
Most of the “winners” on this list are barely countries at all. Andorra? Liechtenstein? I’m sure they are lovely places, filled with wonderful, God-fearing, child-loving, environmentally friendly, fur-hating people. But if your idea of national defense is a guy with a bright orange sash yelling, “Nothing to see here! Move along! Mo-o-o-ve along!” then maybe we should consider calling you something else. Like Schenectady.
In the March 26 issue of the New Republic, Leon Kass and Eric Cohen analyzed the moral crisis of professional American sports. While focusing on the steroid scandals that have rocked Major League Baseball, Kass and Cohen argue that biotechnology is only a symptom of a deeper and broader adulteration of play.
The heart of the corruption, they argue, is a failure to grasp the proper ends of sport. It’s not all about winning and losing, “the separable, the measurable, and comparative results.” Sport is about the “humanity of the human performer.” At the heart of human play is “the lived experience, for doer and spectator alike, of a humanly cultivated gift, excellently at work, striving for superiority and with the outcome in doubt.” In professional sport, Kass and Cohen lament that these ends and goods of sport have been almost buried beneath mountains of hype, cheating, betting, drug abuse, scandals, and greed.
College athletics has an air of innocence lacking in pro sports, but even college sports has been infected with a spirit inimical to the ends of sport. All year, media attention has been focused on the fab freshmen: Kevin Love of UCLA, USC’s O. J. Mayo, and several others. Media attention to superstars conspires with the hype of March Madness to give NCAA basketball an ever more professional aura.
Not in Pullman, Washington, where the Washington State University Cougars have put together a remarkable two-season run, igniting frenzy in a chilly town hardly known for basketball.
My sons and I became Cougar fans when we moved to Idaho a decade ago. It hasn’t been easy. For the first several years, the Cougs were bottom-dwellers in the tough Pac-10. With the arrival of former Wisconsin coach Dick Bennet, who came out of retirement to take over the Cougs in 2003, things began to turn around, and in the last two seasons, under the command of Bennet’s son, Tony, the Cougs have attained heights fans could only dream of a few years ago. It’s a story straight from Hoosiers.
This year, they have been in the Top 25 all season, compiled an impressive 26-8 record, and obliterated Winthrop and Notre Dame in the first two rounds of the tournament. This week they have a chance to face off against North Carolina, who are favored to be this year’s tournament winners.
The Bennets have turned the program around without any All-American star to lean on. Many of the players were lightly recruited coming out of high school, and the Bennets drew players from Serbia, New Zealand, and Australia to round out the team. They recruited players for their character—their willingness to sacrifice, to subordinate their stardom for the team, their work ethic and their off-court conduct. They have emphasized fundamentals—tough defense, unselfish team play, ball control, hustle. They have one of the best defenses among Division I teams, and one of the lowest turnover average. These stats don’t get anyone Gatorade contracts, but they win games.
It’s entirely characteristic that junior guard Taylor Rochestie gave up his basketball scholarship so the coaches would have more to offer recruits for next year. And it’s entirely characteristic that, when asked how the Cougars held Notre Dame to half their season point average, senior forward Robbie Cowgill answered, “Coach told us to get back on defense.”
The Bennets’ coaching style illustrates Kass and Cohen’s point that the beauty of individual performance is multiplied by the choreography of team play: “Players survey the entire scene as they perform in concert with others, attending to where their teammates are heading and how their opponents are defending. They embody the rules, manage the clock, execute their game plans, and make innumerable strategic adjustments when things go badly.” Team sports thus cultivate not only “game-specific skills” but “determinate, discipline, courage, endurance, enterprise, perspicacity, and mental toughness.”
The Cougs have their work cut out for them. Few people give them much chance to beat North Carolina. But Washington State’s success illustrates that the kind of sport Kass and Cohen, and many others, long for still exists. WSU’s turnaround shows that there are still places where “the deepest appeal of sport is . . . the drama of the game,” where “in microcosm, the human drama is on display, with all its pathos and possibility.”
First Things readers in the DC area might be interested in an international symposium on natural law, hosted by Catholic University’s Center for Law, Philosophy and Culture. Beginning this Thursday evening and continuing through Sunday afternoon (March 27-30), the symposium will include plenary addresses from a number of FT board members and contributors, including Hardley Arkes, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert P. George, Kevin Hart, Stanley Hauerwas, Thomas S. Hibbs, and Gilbert Meilaender. Organized at the request of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, shortly before his election to the papacy, the conference “will focus on the human capacity for knowledge of universal moral principles across faiths and traditions.”
Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it–believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt. . . . As long as we remain within [this shared understanding] . . . we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)
The symposium is free and open to the public, but advance registration is recommended.
