La Stampa’s Asia editor Francesco Sisci offers a contrarian vision of a “Catholic ‘Destiny’ in China” on the newspaper’s blog today, predicting an early rapprochement between the Vatican and the Chinese government. China already has 130 million Christians, according to Chinese government estimates, Sisci reports, significantly more than the 70 million to 110 million range cited by most Western sources.

Christian conversion, though, is broad but shallow, Sisci reports:

Most just follow whichever pastor they meet out of “yuanfen,” or fate. Many of those pastors are self-taught, having read a translation of the Bible in Chinese. The translation may be not very accurate or done in a scholarly way. To this very weak Biblical background they add their own preaching, which is bound to draw more from the local Chinese lore (non-Christian) than from the Bible, simply because the Bible is not part of Chinese education or tradition. Many pastors mix Christianity with Taoism and Buddhism.

What explains the enormous rate of nominal conversion? According to Sisci,

. . . many of these new Chinese Christians are new converts to ‘modernity,’ which in China is largely tantamount to ‘Westernization’—or the American way of life. They pray to Jesus as they eat at MacDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken. But just as they can’t eat hamburgers every day (and can’t digest cheese and can’t stand its smell), so they can’t take the pure overeducated Christianity, and even the purely American Presbyterians or Evangelicals are hard to swallow. In the same way they add soy sauce or rice vinegar to their food, to Evangelical faith they may add belief in feng shui (”wind and water,” traditional Chinese geomancy) and the Yijing (an ancient soothsayers’ manual).

To gauge the depth as well as the breadth of Christian conversion, Sisci argues, one has to focus on the Catholic population. He cautions, “If one takes a closer look at these numbers, little appears to have changed since 1949. The Catholics, even in the rosier estimates, are about 12 to 13 million, or 1 percent of China’s population, the same percentage as in 1949”. The question is, Sisci believes,

Can this tiny Catholic minority in China—which, anyway, is more numerous than the Catholics in extra-Catholic Ireland—be the backbone of a new Catholicism worldwide? Now more than ever: God knows. These Catholics have a very strong faith because they have converted twice: They accepted a religious tradition that is strange to them, and they have accepted a culture and rituals that are totally foreign.

The Chinese government attitude towards Christianity changed dramatically in 1999, Sisci notes, when the Falun Gong offered a challenge to modernization rooted in traditional Chinese beliefs. The government feared that a politically potent traditionalist movement might fill the spiritual void that emerged in China after Mao was discredited. Chinese Christianity presented a purely spiritual direction with no political ambitions or centralized structure, unlike Falun Gong, and the government viewed it benignly.

At the 2007 Communist Party Congress, Party Secretary Hu Jintao prasied the role of religion in building a “harmonious society.” Sisci foresees a new era of trust between China and the Holy See, following decades in which the government forced Catholics to join a “patriotic association” or work underground. He offers a detailed account of the state of Vatican-Chinese relations, arguing that

. . . there is growing trust between the two sides. China and the Holy See reached a common agreement for the man who became bishop of Beijing last year, after the demise of Fu Tianshan. Fu had been appointed by the government but not recognized by Rome. Conversely, in 2007, through intense consultations, Beijing and Rome jointly picked young Li Shan (born in 1965) for the prestigious and symbolic position of Bishop of Beijing, virtually the head of the Chinese Catholic Church.

Sisci is the author (with Fr. Francesco Strazzari) of a recent book on China’s relations with the Holy See, Santa Sede - Cina: L’incomprehensione antica, l’interrogativo presente.

In a medieval history class my junior year of college, our professor assigned us a book of the selected works of Bernard of Clairvaux. I found it to be the richest spiritual work I had ever read, and would later take Bernard as my confirmation name. Now re-reading Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs, the other day I came across a beautiful passage in Sermon 83 (the translation below comes from here):

Now the Bridegroom is not only loving; he is love. Is he honor too? Some maintain that he is, but I have not read it. I have read that God is love, but not that he is honor. It is not that God does not desire honor, for he says, ‘If I am a father, where is my honor? Here he speaks as a father, but if he declares himself to be a husband I think he would change the expression and say, ‘If I am a bridegroom, where is my love?’ For he had previously said, ‘If I am the Lord, where is my fear?’ God then requires that he should be feared as the Lord, honored as a father, and loved as a bridegroom. Which of these is highest and most lofty? Surely it is love. Without it fear brings pain, and honor has no grace. Fear is the lot of a slave, unless he is freed by love. Honor which is not inspired by love is not honor but flattery. Honor and glory belong to God alone, but God will receive neither if they are not sweetened with the honey of love.

Love is sufficient for itself; it gives pleasure to itself, and for its own sake. It is its own merit and own reward. Love needs no cause beyond itself, nor does it demand fruits; it is its own purpose. I love because I love; I love that I may love. Love is a great reality, and if it returns to its beginnings and goes back to its origin, seeking its source again, it will always draw afresh from it, and thereby flow freely. Love is the only one of the motions of the soul, of its senses and affections, in which the creature can respond to its Creator, even if not as an equal, and repay his favor in some similar way . . . Now you see how different love is, for when God loves, he desires nothing but to be loved, since he loves us for no other reason than to be loved, for he knows that those who love him are blessed in their very love.

The ringing declaration of God first and foremost as lover still strikes me, perhaps because it is a message of which I need constant reminding. The core of our relationship with God should not be guilt or fear or sorrow for our imperfections, but love. For love alone pleases God and brings freedom, life, and yet more love.

It’s not just the American mainline that is running dry; over at EPPC, George Weigel notes the latest divorce for Henry VIII’s ecclesial progeny: “England’s cause, and Anglicanism’s, are no longer thought to be the same.” Unfortunately, this arguable de facto split between the Church and society of England is not due to recent First Amendment importation or imposition; the British have not suddenly recognized the spiritual and social value of disestablishment:

“English = Protestant” has been replaced by a new equation: “English = Multiculturally P.C.” Evensong is still sung superbly in King’s College chapel, Cambridge; but the psalms and canticles echo amidst the real absence. Bunyan’s Pilgrim has come to an even deeper slough: not of despond, but of spiritual apathy and boredom.

Into that slough now rides Father Aidan Nichols, the distinguished English Dominican theologian. His small book, The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England, makes a bold claim about the past and a bold wager about the future: “England is in fact inseparable from Catholicism, unimaginable without it.”

Moreover, Father Nichols argues, to preach, teach, propose and invite the conversion of England is not bad manners, but true courtesy. Replying to a BBC interviewer who fretted that England’s return to the Catholic orbit would violate contemporary ecumenical and multiculturalist sensibilities, Nichols responded … :

“If Catholic Christianity conveys in human form the divine revelation which is the greatest truth, goodness and beauty man can know, then all the elements of truth, goodness and beauty in the theory and practice of other forms of Christianity and indeed in other faith traditions would attain their crown in this [Catholic] context, would come to their intended fulfillment.”

Father Nichols’ description of the cultural challenges of the New Evangelization after Vatican II rings true far beyond Land’s End: our problem today is less the new atheism than the new apathy, an apathy that has grown exponentially amidst uninteresting and soggy Christianity, material wealth, and the decline of any public consensus that some things are, simply, true.

Like those who will read him with appreciation here in the former colonies, Father Nichols also recognizes that the challenge of spiritual boredom in post-Christian culture cannot be met by Catholic Lite. It can only be met, and the 21st century world converted, by Catholicism in full.

Aidan Nichols’ Unfashionable Essay–published last February–is already sold-out. Perhaps the converstion, or reversion, of England is not so unfashionable after all.

Joke of the day: Two fonts walk into a bar. The bartender snarls and says, “We don’t serve your type here. If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the serif.”

Joy isn’t the first word that comes to mind when most people think of cloistered nuns. For that matter, most people don’t think of cloistered nuns at all, or when they do cobwebby, claustrophobic choir stalls and deafening silence and penitential potatoes form their image of the strange world of enclosed religious. And there is little to dispel the shadows from this haunted-house portrait—for cloistered life is inherently hidden, and it isn’t often that the outside glimpses in.

I recently came across a small, yellowed volume that I first read over a decade ago: A Right to Be Merry by Mother Mary Francis P.C.C. First published in 1956, this delightful book takes the reader into the close quarters and ancient Franciscan traditions of a convent of Poor Clare nuns. Grim and musty it is not: The joy of St. Francis’ spirituality—even, or especially, embraced in this most radical form—is unavoidable.

“What do they do all day?” friends and acquaintances often wonder, and one of Mother Mary Francis’ goals is to explain. After she takes us through the jam-packed day—with communal prayer seven times a day beginning just after midnight, and monastic meals, artistic and domestic work, and an hour of recreation squeezed in between, a very different question arises: “How do they accomplish all that?” The answer comes in love and silence, in silent love:

It has sometimes been said that St. Clare was a missionary at heart and became a cloistered contemplative only because that was the sole kind of religious life for women known in her day. This never fails to make her daughters bristle! If St. Francis had wanted his Second Order to be a missionary order, he was just the man to have made that fait accompli in no time at all. No one was ever more “original” than the saint who walked at right angles to everything characteristic of his age. What he founded was a Second Order of enclosed, praying nuns, because that is what he wished to found. St. Clare, on her part, did indeed have a missionary heart. That is why she entered the cloister, to be a missionary to all the world.
. . .

St. John of the Cross says something to the effect that one act of pure love is worth more than a hundred years of activity. It is likewise true that love ennobles activity, just as prayer nourishes it. Mere activity of itself is quite meaningless in the eyes of God; but the meanest tasks done out of love for Him burst in glory on His vision. Perhaps the silent Sister-cook taking the fat brown loaves from the oven, or canning the pickles which will be sold in the city to help defray our expenses, is tipping the scales of the world in its own favor and in God’s. Her sweat and her love and her labor pull their weight in the mystery of salvation as sure as the writings of philosophers or the wonder-revealing beakers of the scientists.

We live in such a noisy world that many of us have come to be afraid of silence. We think that if only we do a great deal, it does not much matter what we are. In fact, we seldom stop to investigate what manner of man we are. The hero of the hour is the one who can accomplish the greatest number of things in the shortest possible time. But he makes a sorry monastic hero. It is not what our Lady did which made her the Queen of heaven and earth, but what she was.

St. Clare is a true mirror of Mary. She built no hospitals made no political pronouncements, inaugurated no new systems of pedagogy and wrote no books. In the world’s eyes, she did just nothing at all. But what was she? Holy Church declares that she was and is a light more shining than light itself. . . . She was a citadel of silence, and that is why she answers a crying need of our time. We have forgotten how to be silent; we have grown afraid. Yet nothing truly great or enduring was ever yet or will ever be achieved without silence. “While all things were in quiet silence, thy almighty Word, O God, leaped down from heaven.” In the singing silences of eternity that Word was begotten in the bosom of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeded as their mutual Love ablaze with silence.

I am reminded of Mother Teresa’s prayer, “The fruit of silence is prayer…” and of Pope Benedict’s probing questions to American youth: “Have we perhaps lost something of the art of listening? Do you leave space to hear God’s whisper, calling you forth into goodness? Friends, do not be afraid of silence or stillness, listen to God, adore him in the Eucharist. Let his word shape your journey as an unfolding of holiness.”

A sign of contradiction to the busy world, the silence of the cloister preaches boldly indeed. But have we lost something of the art of listening?

This August, Kay Ryan will begin serving her one-year term as the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. A friend of mine pointed me toward one of her poems, which gives a delightful twist of thought that I’d never had before. Originally in the November 2003 issue of Poetry, it is reproduced below.

Repulsive Theory
by Kay Ryan

Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I’m convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.

The Volokh Conspiracy highlights a funny passage from Morse v. State on the use of big words in legal proceedings:

As to the other objection — that the language is abstractly incorrect — if incorrectness from a legal standpoint is intended, the objection may be disposed of by citing Wigmore on Evidence, § 1150 et seq. If philological incorrectness is referred to, the objection is more tenable; for, while “autoptic” is a good word, with pride of ancestry, though perhaps without hope of posterity, the word “proference” is a glossological illegitimate, a neological love-child, of which a great law writer confesses himself to be the father (see Wigmore on Evidence, § 1150, note 1). Despite all this, we cannot brand the statement as reversible error. This court is rather liberal in allowing the judges on the trial benches the privilege of big words. . . .

Now, lest our manner of treating this exception be regarded as a reflection upon the very able judge of the superior court whose language is under review, let us hasten to explain that the language is all right — that to quote the excerpt alone does him injustice. During the progress of the trial, certain bottles and their contents had been introduced in evidence and were given the jury for their consideration, and the necessity was upon the judge of explaining to the jurors what use they could make of this class of testimony. As to such evidence the older writers used the phrase “real evidence”; but Professor Wigmore in his wonderful treatise, has pointed out that this is not an accurate expression, and has coined a new phrase, “autoptic proference,” to express it. Following Wigmore, Judge Felton used this expression, and then most clearly explained and illustrated to the jury, in plain, simple, homely language, just what the big words mean.

I’m filing “neological love-child” away in my vocabulary for the next occasion when I exercise my “privilege of big words.”

What’s going on over at Popular Mechanics?

First, the magazine rains on the idea of using the international space station as an interplanetary vehicle (an idea I had applauded).

Then, on the unveiling of Richard Branson’s much-ballyhooed space-tourism plane, the magazine runs a slightly negative review—which, in the Popular Mechanics context, is an extremely negative review.

Unfortunately, the arguments look pretty convincing. Or, at least, I’m convinced. But we do need something to revitalize the human imagination with the dream of space. And the new headline in Discover magazine, “Mars Phoenix Lander Wrestles With Sticky Dirt,” just isn’t going to do it.

Over at City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple writes about the case of the student who, taking a national exam in Britain, answered the question, “Describe the room you’re in,” with “F—k off,” and received a grade of 7.5 percent.

The examiner explained, “it would be wicked to give it zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for.” To which Dalrymple replies, “Unfortunately, my knowledge of English expletives is not sufficiently extensive to compose a sentence that would have attracted marks of 100 percent.”

We’ve mentioned the Canadian Human Rights commissions before on our blog, and the most recent issue of First Things has an article on the topic by Douglass Farrow called “Kangaroo Canada” (subscription required). But today I discovered videos of testimony Ezra Levant gave before a member of the commission. Levant, you may recall, was the publisher of the Western Standard and had a complaint filed against him by an imam for reprinting the controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammad. That complaint has since been dismissed, but one filed by the Edmonton Muslim Council still stands.

Much of his testimony is spent in repeated, and understandable, outrage that he has been brought before a Canadian court–part Kafka, part Stalin, he calls it–that would try to restrict his freedom of speech. This is marvelously summed up in his closing statement:

There’s also a thirty-nine second video in which, after some of his remarks, the commissioner says, “You’re entitled to your opinions.” To which Levant immediately responds, “I wish that were the fact.”

It would be funnier if he weren’t right.

I used to enjoy reading the journal of the Association of Women in Mathematics. Then Lawrence Summers happened. The valiant female mathematicians weren’t really discouraged, but they were angry. Angry and vocal, filling the editorials of the next couple years’ worth of issues with their outraged protests. As a female math major, I couldn’t helped feeling a little miffed. So maybe men did tend to gravitate toward and perform better in math and science. I didn’t need my advanced statistics course to confirm at least the former. But didn’t that make us female mathematicians special—the few, the proud, the non-Euclidean, or something like that?

City Journal ‘s Heather Mac Donald takes up Summer’s hypothesis this week and offers some mathematical evidence that he was right, contra a recent Title-IX waving article from the New York Times:

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
. . .

Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.

The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.

The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.” That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.

The epiphany of NYTimes-unreliability aside, Mac Donald’s note about women’s “personal choices about career and family” rings especially true. Several women that I know could have pursued careers in theoretical math or the hard sciences, but they didn’t want to be working in front of a computer or in a laboratory all day. Of the few who did pursue studies in engineering—and I was almost one of them—the majority specialized in its more “living,” less mechanistic divisions such as environmental or biomedical engineering. They wanted a career with a visibly human, interpersonal dimension. And often, they wanted a career that would meld easily into family life.

You hear a lot about Summers’ fatal faux pas in noting that men are more number-oriented. Yet you’ll never see the headlines: “Summers fired for Saying Women are More People-Oriented.” Who decided that playing with numbers is the higher calling? As a female mathematician, I don’t think it was a woman.

The Claremont Institute’s Bradley C.S. Watson has an article on ISI’s First Principles web journal on the need for a federal amendment defining the nature of marriage. The heart of his argument is twofold. First, Watson predicts, judicial fiat will override the decisions of voters in individual states, as we have already seen in Massachusetts and California. Then, he writes:

Same-sex couples mar­ried in one state will invariably seek to have those marriages (and the incidents thereof, including child custody decrees) enforced in states that do not rec­ognize such marriages. For traditional marriage to survive, at least in some states, these states must ignore the court orders of other states, which will likely not be constitutionally possible. As Lincoln said of another fundamental moral question, “this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” In short, for both marriage and self-government on marital questions to survive, a federal constitutional amendment will be required.

Watson also has an interesting aside on the way in which the California Supreme Court claimed a right not only to grant benefits and governmental recognition to same-sex partnerships, but to change the actual meaning of the word marriage:

Furthermore, in requiring that same-sex couples have the right to call themselves married, courts have engaged in a kind of nominalism that is unknown to the common law. The material benefits of marriage can be conferred through civil union status rather than actual marriage. This means that the courts in Canada, Massachusetts, and California have asserted a stunning claim: the right to a noun. The arguments advanced by the courts’ majority opinions have less to do with constitutional documents or constitutional reasoning, and more to do with the Orwellian desire to police the English language, allowing parties the legal entitlement to label themselves as they see fit. This revolutionary development in effect gives courts the right to control the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Another reminder of why the definition of marriage is what’s at stake.

Some of the oddities and abominations of the English translation of the liturgy are about to go extinct, reported the Congregation for Divine Worship last week. Of course, Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Congregation, didn’t relay the Vatican’s formal approval in precisely those terms. But his pleasure was scarcely masked: The Congregation reported “no little satisfaction in arriving at this juncture.”

The changes of “this juncture” will unite the English liturgy more fully with the universal Church, with more theologically accurate–and, in many cases, more faithfully beautiful–language. It’s amazing how those two attributes go together. The more noteworthy changes include:

* At the Consecration, the priest will refer to Christ’s blood which is “poured out for you and for many”–an accurate translation of pro multis–rather than “for all” in the current translation.

* In the Nicene Creed the opening word, Credo, will be correctly translated as “I believe” rather than “we believe.”

* When the priest says, “The Lord be with you,” the faithful respond, “And with your spirit,” rather than simply, “And also with you.”

* In the Eucharistic prayer, references to the Church will use the pronouns “she” and “her” rather than “it.”

* In the Agnus Dei, the text cites the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,” rather than using the singular word “sin.”

* In the preferred form of the penitential rite, the faithful will acknowledge that they have sinned “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”

* Throughout the translation of the Offertory and Eucharistic Prayer, the traditional phrases of supplication are restored, and the Church is identified as “holy”–in each case, matching the Latin original of the Roman Missal.

While the new translation will probably not be completed in its entirety until 2010, the most common liturgical prayers and texts are now in place. Formally, at least–they will be implemented gradually by local bishops to give clergy and the faithful time to adjust. In the meantime, we can certainly share with the Congregation “no little satisfaction.”

Ross Douthat, an occasional FT contributor and assistant editor at the Atlantic has some interesting comments on Joseph Bottum’s “The Death of Protestant America.” I think he is right in claiming that the more “conservative” economic fulfillment gospel and the more “liberal” personal fulfillment gospel link to make make a common, and distinctly American, heresy. Douthat writes:

The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they’re imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori’s liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate. And this difference, I suspect, has a great deal to do with social class. Osteen and Co.’s God wants us to pursue financial fulfillment because they’re largely preaching to entrepreneurial, upwardly-mobile members of the middle class, whereas Schori’s God wants us to pursue a more personal fulfillment - sexually, emotionally, philanthropically - because she’s preaching to a demographic that, financially speaking, has already got it made. (Which, in turn, is why it isn’t a surprise that as American evangelicals grow more prosperous, they’re starting to discover their God’s Dag Hammarskjöld side as well.)

Read the rest of Ross’ comments here.

Via Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments blog

Or rather, he came to Europe and has now returned to our shores to grace us once more with his blessed presence. The Times (London) had a delightful piece on his messianic visit across the pond:

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth–for the first time–to bring the light unto all the world.

In the remainder of the report, Gerard Baker, the Times’ US Editor and Assistant Editor, further catalogues the miracles of the Messiah: bringing peace in the Middle East, lowering oil prices, and ending global warming, to name but three.

And he uses the adjective priapic. Get that man a beer.

Literary criticism may be near extinction, to judge from the comments of some scholars in the field, not to mention the dregs of refuse called “papers,” collected every year at such major conferences as Kalamazoo or MLA. We’re desperate,” says Jonathon Gottschall, literature professor and Boston Globe contributor. “The field is really, really desperate. Morale is so bad. No one really knows what to do. Everyone is saying what I am, in some way—they have the same critique, the same feeling that our old ways are just plain spent.”

And small wonder, to look through the “research interests” of the professors at the top (or top-ranked by the expert US News and World Reports) literary departments. “Cultural theory—subjective, deliberately obtuse, politicized, based on outmoded assumptions—is the disease that’s stricken the academy,” says a new group of lit-crit critics. “Most of the big ideas in literary theory have been tried out and rejected in other disciplines. So psychoanalysis has no life in psychology anymore—it only exists in the humanities. Marxism has no life really in political theory or in economics classrooms,” but as a way of dismembering the Shakespearean corpus or basically any substantive work of literature, it has become widely accepted.

One last ditch effort for survival, scientifically rigorous reading, has been the subject of much discussion in the past few years, most recently from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Literary Darwinism, it is called, and despite the unaesthetic name, it might actually take hold, and might even do some good.

“Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof,” [Gottschall] writes. “The alternative is to let literary study keep withering away.” He provides two demonstrations of his approach. The first is a study just published in the journal Human Nature, in which he collects accounts of beauty in fairy tales from around the world to test whether Western tales place an extraordinary importance on female beauty. The second is a comparison of reactions from “500 literary scholars and avid readers” to characters from 19th-century British novels to gauge whether the author is truly dead—in other words, whether the meaning of a text is derived primarily from each reader’s particular experience, as cultural theory has had it.

The subjects of the two experiments are not accidental. Literary Darwinism conceives of itself as the primary opposition to cultural theory in all its forms: Marxism, poststructuralism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, and so forth.

No doubt, those forms (or deformities) of literary theory need some opposition. But Literary Darwinism still makes me cringe. It’s reductionist, for one thing, unequipped to illuminate either individual creativity or the intricacies of culture, much less to appreciate them. It might be able to refute the beauty myth, proving that “beauty” is not an oppressively Western concept, but it has nothing to say about the truth of beauty or the beauty of truth.

Literary Darwinists might be able to analyze “evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts—the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals,” but what about the arresting beauty of a Homeric metaphor, the brilliant irony of an Austen social portrait? Metaphysics and aesthetics are reduced to biology and sociology.

Literary Darwinism might not be the answer to the existential crisis of literary criticism but another step toward its extinction. Yet . . . hope springs eternal. I’d like to think that, in broad strokes, some evolutionary truths—survival of the fittest, for instance—do govern scholarship. And I’d like to think that Literary Darwinism, Marxism, Feminism, Freudianism, poststructuralism, and all the other myopic “isms” are simply unfit.

[Chronicle essay via ALDaily.]

N.T. Wright is an outstanding New Testament scholar, having authored some very significant books on Christianity in the last several decades. When speaking out on issues on which he has expertise, Wright is among the best in the world. But when it comes to making pronouncements on international affairs and especially the war against militant Islam and Iraq, of which he seems to know very little, Tom Wright ought to remain silent rather than make comments that indicate he is way out of his depth.

Wright, the bishop of Durham, has delivered among the most shallow and misleading speeches on the struggle against jihadism and Iraq that any prominent religious leader has given. I have in mind his November 9, 2006 Durham Cathedral Lecture, “Where is God in ‘The War on Terror’?” in which Wright badly mischaracterizes the response of the United States to the September 11th attacks, as well as the views of President Bush and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, declared that the 2006 mid-term elections was an example of God “calling to account those who abuse powers,” showed a disturbing tendency toward moral equivalence between jihadists and those who are fighting to defeat them, and directed virtually all of his scorn against the United States and Great Britain rather than al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Just a few days ago, at the Anglican Communion’s gathering in Canterbury, Wright continued to build on his reputation for unseriousness.

The context of Wright’s most recent remarks, and much of the focus of the Anglican gathering, was the ordination five years ago of V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican church. That ordination has threatened to split the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest church.

According to the Washington Post:

Tom Wright, the bishop of Durham, England, told reporters at the start of the conference last weekend that Americans had stirred up the current problems in the church. He likened it to the United States starting the Iraq war. “George Bush said he was going to invade Iraq. Everyone told him not to because there would be consequences, but he did it anyway. The Americans floated the balloon in 2003 when they consecrated Gene Robinson. . . . They knew it would be unacceptable” to most people in the Communion, Wright was quoted in British newspapers as saying.

This is a silly and inept analogy.

For one thing, not “everyone” told the President not to invade Iraq. The vast majority of the United States Congress—including 77 U.S. Senators and 296 Members of the House—supported the war before it began. So did the “coalition of the willing,” which Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands, Norway, El Salvador, and 17 other countries—including Wright’s own Great Britain. And perhaps Wright is unaware of UN Resolution 1441, which was passed unanimously, found Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and warned Iraq of “serious consequences” (which all parties understood to mean war) for continued violations.

As for the consequences of the war: They still have to be played out. But of late the consequences of the war look far better than they did only 18 months ago. The sadistic regime of Saddam Hussein has been replaced by the only authentically democratic nation in the Arab Middle East. The civil war that Iraq was edging toward has been arrested and reversed. Al Qaeda has absorbed enormously damaging blows. And Iran is, in the words of the scholar Vali Nasr, “on its heels” for the first time because of events in Iraq.

There have been huge costs to the war, both financially and in the number of people killed and maimed. And one can make a serious argument that the war has been more costly than it has been worth, at least at this point. My own view is that the acid test will be what emerges in Iraq and its radiating effects in the Middle East and in the larger struggle against militant Islam. Those effects are still playing themselves out, and will for some time to come. But we can now say that a decent outcome, and even victory, in Iraq is plausible. And that should be something that men and women of good will and good conscience delight in.

Yet Tom Wright, for what appear to be deeply ideological reasons, cannot let go of his narrative that Iraq was a terrible misadventure that must end up badly. It’s odd that a Christian leader would appear to hold with such intensity to the conviction that he wishes a genocidal dictator—head of one of the two most cruel and inhumane regimes in the second half of the 20th century, according to former Ambassador Peter Galbraith (the other being Pol Pot’s Cambodia)—were still in power.

In his outstanding book The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright says this: “we must not project our contemporary fondness for certain kinds of narrative on to a historical problem which demands not prejudgment but analysis.”

Wright could say that same thing about modern-day problems in the realm of foreign policy. It is too bad that for several years, and again this weekend, Wright substitutes a serious and informed analysis of Iraq—which could certainly be critical of the war and its execution—with his own tendentious prejudgments.

N.T. Wright has done a lot of good in the arena of New Testament scholarship. But he would be wise to heed the words of Clint Eastwood’s character Harry Callahan, from the “Dirty Harry” series (and the “Magnum Force” movie in particular): “A man’s got to know his limitations.” For Wright, those limitations include speaking out on international affairs, the war against jihadism, and Iraq.

A friend, working his way again through Moby Dick writes me to say that the book contains “the greatest description of the American soul,” in the first paragraph of Chapter 49:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

“No De Toqueville, or Pascal, or any European,” my friend writes, “can understand this paragraph. Theologically it’s appalling. But it’s just right about the way we are.”

It’s not, of course—except when it is. Americans swing to such extremes: the greatest desperados, the sternest Puritans.

Randy Pausch, famous for his “last lecture,” has died.

Mr. Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet.

In it, Mr. Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending death.

Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey Zaslow, who first popularized the lecture with his September 2007 column, also wrote this final farewell to Pausch in May.

Have an hour or so free? For your viewing, here is Pausch’s last lecture:

After making an emergency landing in the Philippines, passengers of the Quanta flight from Hong Kong to Melbourne today described their experience of the plane’s in-flight accident thus: “There was an almighty crack,” and, “There was a big bang.”

Thankfully they’ve all landed safely — but perhaps not without the lingering sensation of nearly meeting the Maker of the cosmos.