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.