When not editing an illustrious magazine, defining agenbites, or unraveling true-crime plots (cf. forthcoming FT), Joseph Bottum has been taking me through the history of the English novel. Pilgrim’s Progress (1676), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Pamela (1740), so far—from the slough of despond to the garden of seduction. I must admit I gave up after fifty pages of Richardson’s Pamela, which struck me as drugstore romance baptized as a chastity catechism in want of a ruthless editor.

Now it’s on to Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones, with its archaically ironic (or ironically archaic?) narrator, its Allworthy magistrate, and its not-so-worthy foundling. The chapter headings alone are delightfully wry: “Containing such grave Matter, the Reader cannot laugh once through the whole Chapter,” “A Domestic Government founded upon Rules directly contrary to those of Aristotle”–immediately followed, go figure, by “One of the Most bloody Battles ever recorded in domestic History”–and, my favorite, “With some proper Animadversions on Bastards.” You might start to guess the storyline.

More to be said on that, but I’d like to go back to the beginning, where Fielding proposes his “Bill of Fare”–with a bit of advice to authors and readers alike:

The provision which we have here made is no other than Human Nature. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.

An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too common and vulgar; for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops.

Two and a half centuries later, appreciation of both ham and humanity is still in short supply.

The Democrats didn’t invite Archbishop Charles Chaput to their convention in Denver this year, for understandable reasons. Instead, they invited Sr. Helen Prejean C.S.J. to speak at their interfaith gathering. If they were trying to avoid controversy and shore up support from religious party members, however, they were in for a disappointment:

COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER — Following the hot topic of abortion, Sister Helen Prejean tackled another: calling for abolition of the death penalty to raucous applause at the DNC’s interfaith gathering.

She received nothing but a stony silence, however, when she questioned the basis of the biblical crucifixion story as a “projection of our violent society.”

“Is this a God?” Prejeans asked about the belief that God allowed his son, Jesus, to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. “Or is this an ogre?”

The other day while reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” I came across the following passage:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think.” If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry–when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech–it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.

In other words, Orwell says, writers prefer complexity and euphony to clarity and directness. This in turn waters down our language, and since language is the clay with which we mold our thoughts, we dumb down our thinking as well.

That brought to mind a book I read in college, John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing: The Degredation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. Part of McWhorter’s thesis is that we no longer value the formality and structure of writing. Our culture values the spoken word, which is by nature more focused on the flow of the sounds, more spontaneous, and therefore less developed and thought out than prose.

We can see this in the difference between the song lyrics, journalism, and political speeches of the 1940s and those of today. As we outgrew oratory and cogent sentences, we forgot that they were conducive to concrete thought. The rise of post-modernism didn’t help either. If there is no truth or definite meaning, language becomes reduced to its form. If sentences can’t say much, they might as well sound nice and intelligent.

Orwell’s solution to this problem–at least the linguistic part–was to write with care and to write well: “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.” Fight with your words as you fight for them, for precision in meaning and argument is needed in our time.

If you’re at all sick of non-stop political reporting on the election, here’s the perfect antidote: Dave Barry is reporting daily from the Democratic National Convention in Denver. His pieces for August 24, 25, and 26 are currently on the Miami Herald’s website, with more to come. Here’s a sample of the 24th’s column:

It’s hard to blame Sen. Clinton for being bitter. Here she is, the smartest human ever, PLUS she spent all those years standing loyally behind Bill Clinton wearing uncomfortable pantyhose (I mean Hillary was, not Bill) (although there are rumors), PLUS she went to the trouble and expense of acquiring a legal residence in New York State so she could be a senator from there, PLUS she assembled a team of nuclear-physicist-grade genius political advisors, PLUS she spent years going around to every dirtbag community in America explaining in detail her 23-point policy solutions for every single problem facing the nation including soybean blight. And after all that, she loses the nomination to a guy who has roughly the same amount of executive governmental experience as Hannah Montana. Hillary is like: “Are you KIDDING me?” . . .

But in the end, the focus of this convention will be on Barack Obama, who on Thursday night will receive the nomination in long-overdue recognition of a distinguished career of seeking the nomination. His goal, in his acceptance speech, will be to win over the undecided voters–the people who are unsure of what he really stands for, or who have received emailed rumors that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or a vampire, or a lesbian. His goal will be to show, with no disrespect to the Muslim socialist vampire lesbian community, that he is a regular person just like you, except he has Vision and Leadership. After that, he will lay out his specific policies for building a brighter future. Then he will turn into a bat.

An excerpt from a letter of St. Thomas More to Erasmus, written on the 14th of June, 1532:

Congratulations, then, my dear Erasmus, on your outstanding virtuous qualities; however, if on occasion some good person is unsettled and disturbed by some point, even without making a sufficiently serious reason, still do not be chagrined at making accommodations for the pious dispositions of such men. But as for those snapping, growling, malicious fellows, ignore them, and, without faltering, quietly continue to devote yourself to the promotion of intellectual things and the advancement of virtue.

This past Sunday on Meet the Press, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed that, having studied the matter carefully as a “fervent, practicing” Catholic, she had learned that doctors of the Church have historically had no fixed position on when human life begins; therefore, one should not interfere with a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

No-one was surprised when, not twenty-four hours after the program aired, Denver’s indefatigable Bishop Charles Chaput sent out an open letter correcting Pelosi’s gross misrepresentation of Catholic tradition. But it did not stop there. Rather unexpectedly, more bishops chimed in, including New York’s Edward Cardinal Egan, whose firm rebuke included these thunderous lines:

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.

The Speaker responded yesterday morning. She acknowledged that “Catholic teaching is clear that life begins at conception” but she, like “many Catholics,” dissents from this view. She instead follows St. Augustine, whom she quotes as saying that “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation” (Saint Augustine, On Exodus 21.22).

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Pelosi to explain how a “fervent, practicing Catholic” can justify dissent from an immemorial teaching in the name of outdated science. Anyway, let’s hope that, especially with the election coming up, the bishops get a taste for this kind of forthrightness.

Recently Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a frequent contributor to First Things, was on CNN’s Glenn Beck Show with some of his students to discuss life on college campuses, specifically the acceptability of conservatism and the hook-up culture. One of the students was our new junior fellow Stefan McDaniel. A recording of the program is available online, but takes a long time to load, so you might be interested in the transcript of the show instead.

From ZENIT this week, an interview with Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver on his new book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. “Nobody wants a theocracy,” says the archbishop, but if we do want democracy, we need a culture of political decision-making imbued with religious and moral convictions:

Q: Catholicism in the public square in the United States has had a long and complicated journey, and you say that Catholics have a lot to offer the political process, but that more often than not they keep their beliefs and convictions separate from their political actions. Why is that?

Archbishop Chaput: Catholics have always been a minority in the United States, and prejudice against Catholics in this country has always been real, even before the founding. Sometimes the bias has been indirect and genteel. Just as often it has taken more vulgar forms of economic and political discrimination, and media bigotry. Either way, prejudice always fuels the appetite of a minority to fit in, to achieve and to assimilate, and American Catholics have done that extraordinarily well–in fact, too well.

In the name of being good citizens, a lot of Catholics have bought into a very mistaken idea of the “separation of Church and state.” American Catholics have always supported the principle of keeping religious and civil authority distinct.

Nobody wants a theocracy, and much of the media hand-wringing about the specter of “Christian fundamentalism” is really just a particularly offensive scare tactic. The Church doesn’t presume to run the state. We also don’t want the state interfering with our religious beliefs and practices–which, candidly, is a much bigger problem today.

Separating Church and state does not mean separating faith and political issues. Real pluralism requires a healthy conflict of ideas. In fact, the best way to kill a democracy is for people to remove their religious and moral convictions from their political decision-making. If people really believe something, they’ll always act on it as a matter of conscience. Otherwise they’re just lying to themselves. So the idea of forcing religion out of public policy debates is not only unwise, it’s anti-democratic.

That sounds like an argument I heard somewhere once before. . . .

Dennis Byrne, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune, reminds us yet again that the question about abortion has changed for this election. It’s not just a question of whether abortion is permitted in the womb, but whether infanticide is legal when the mother doesn’t want to keep a newborn baby. There is no way a thinking person can get around it. Are newborns people, or not?

The most lasting impact of the recent nationally televised interview Rick Warren did with Senators Barack Obama and John McCain may not have to do with the two presidential candidates. It may be its effect on, and the impression people have of, evangelical Christianity.

Rick Warren, already in the process of becoming one of the most significant faces within the evangelical world, went a good distance toward becoming one of its most recognizable and influential leaders. And because of the tone, grace, and sensibilities with which he approaches politics, Warren is replacing the “religious right” model with a new, better, and, I think, more Christ-based paradigm.

To understand why, it is worth reading Warren’s Wall Street Journal interview with Naomi Schaefer Riley. In it, we learn that unlike other prominent religious leaders, Mr. Warren won’t be endorsing anyone this fall. He places an admirable emphasis on civility and mutual respect in public discourse (his feelings of respect and even affection for both McCain and Obama were evident). Warren’s effort to move evangelical Christians away from what he calls the “combativeness” of the religious right is welcome and long overdue. And his call for conservative Christians to broaden their agenda to include issues like fighting poverty and disease, as well as environmental conservation, rings true to me.

“I don’t just care that the little girl is born,” Warren tells Schaefer. “Is she going to be born in poverty? Is she going to be born with AIDS because her mom has AIDS? Is she going to never get an education?”

At the same time, there is a tendency for the mainstream media to exaggerate how much the evangelical community is shifting in its attitudes on key political issues and its worldview. According to Warren, “A lot of people hear [about a broader agenda] and they think, ‘Oh, evangelicals are giving up on believing that life begins at conception. They’re not giving up on that at all. Not at all.’”

When asked about the assertion that the Democratic party is changing its abortion platform, Warren replies, “Window dressing. Too little, too late.” And when asked about the opposite claim by the Rev. Jim Wallis, Warren is admirably honest and dismissive. “Jim Wallis is a spokesman for the Democratic party,” according to Warren. “His book reads like the party platform.”

Warren has a sophisticated view of the role churches can play in shaping our culture and, while not himself reflexively hostile to government—he praises the Bush administration for its global AIDS initiative, for example—he understands that the Church can shape attitudes and serve the poor and dispossessed in ways the government often cannot. After having attended a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute, for example, Warren commented that many secular liberals there thought “the answer to everything was a government program.”

Warren begs to differ, and the remarkable work of Saddleback Church is the best evidence he can amass to prove his case.

The last quarter-century have shown us that striking the right balance when it comes to Christians being responsibly involved in public affairs without being consumed by them is not always an easy task. Even Billy Graham slipped up for a time, having gotten too close to Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, causing those closest to him to fear he was injuring his ministry.

A passionate commitment to issues has sometimes led Christians in the public square to demonize those with whom they disagree, which has badly harmed their witness. And of course the allure and temptations of power can corrupt even those with good intentions. It doesn’t help when Christians who weigh in on matters of policy are often uninformed, misinformed, or say silly and even malicious things.

Rick Warren, along with Tim Keller and some others, are helping evangelical Christians to be associated again with intellectual and moral seriousness and fidelity to their faith. That is very good for Christianity, and very good for America.

Yesterday I wrote on the excommunication scene in the movie Beckett. Last night while looking up the exact definition of anathema, I found the actual text of the old rite of anathematization, the gravest form of excommunication:

“Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N– himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate. . . .”

In the film, it all ends there. Lord Gilbert is condemned to eternal fire. The honor of God is defended. So be it.

But the actual declaration continues: “so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.” The whole point of the act is made clear: Excommunication is the last resort to bring about repentance and salvation. It should be a punishment given in mercy and for good, not out of vengeance.

Though Becket’s declaration of excommunicaton ends in judgment, the story continues. For as he proceeds to confront the sheriff sent to arrest him, the chorus of monks begins the Miserere of Psalm 51–a reminder of their own sinfulness and an example of the right response to it.

The hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in its fullness, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at his moment when the human race is undergoing so deep a transformation, women imbued with a spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling.

With these words, quoted from the closing message of the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II opened his Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, On the Dignity and Vocation of Women.

“The Dignity of Women”: It’s a phrase one often hears thrown around, usually with little reflection about its philosophical or theological depth. But this fall, Oct 3–4, the Columbus School of Law and Ave Maria School of Law will be hosting a conference to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of this letter and to continue a serious study of its implications for women and men today. Scholars from around the country–Sr. Prudence Allen, Brad Wilcox, Gerry Bradley, and Helen Alvaré, among others–will convene to discuss such topics as “the nature and significance of the feminine vocation to the meaning of equality, societal attempts to redress the disorder between men and women, the importance of the dual dimensions of motherhood-virginity, and the relevance of the Church-Bride Mystery.”

Come October, I’ll be visiting my alma mater, Catholic University, and its neighboring John Paul II Cultural Center to fill you in on the conference highlights. But FT readers in the DC area are strongly encouraged to attend and hear the discussions for themselves!

It looks as though amateurs such as myself will soon have an easier time accessing one of the most interesting collections of documents from the Second Temple period: The Dead Sea Scrolls. As the New York Times reports:

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet. . . .

Jonathan Ben-Dov, a professor of biblical studies at the University of Haifa, is taking part in the digitalization project. Watching the technicians gingerly move a fragment into place for a photograph, he said that it has long been very difficult for senior scholars to get access to these scrolls because of great demand and risk to the documents.

Once this project is completed, he said with wonder, “every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed look at them from numerous angles.”

The discovery of the first of these documents in the middle of the Israeli desert back in 1947 was a great event—and now amateurs can examine them, too, in the desert of the Internet.

An aside on religion in contemporary society from David Lebedoff’s The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War: “The mainstream churches are losing members and often seem devoted to causes more worthy than holy.”

That sums it up well.

Nathaniel’s nice reflection on Thomas Becket this morning put me in a medieval mood. While Dante also had plenty to say about those who are anathema, the following poem is decidedly more romantic:

Love and the gentle heart are one thing,
just as the poet says in his verse,
each from the other one as well divorced
as reason from the mind’s reasoning.

Nature craves love, and then creates love king,
and makes the heart a palace where he’ll stay,
perhaps a shorter or a longer day,
breathing quietly, gently slumbering.

Then beauty in a virtuous woman’s face
makes the eyes yearn, and strikes the heart,
so that the eyes’ desire’s reborn again,
and often, rooting there with longing, stays,

Till love, at last, out of its dreaming starts.
Woman’s moved likewise by a virtuous man.

Last night I watched Becket, the 1964 film with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole about the relationship between Thomas Becket and Henry II—the famous friendship that ended in assassination. The performances were superb, and the script was surprisingly rich. But the portrayal of Becket as defender of the Church, her beliefs, and her privileges got me thinking, particularly the scene in which he excommunicates a nobleman who has murdered a priest.

The singing of the Dies Irae, the splendor of Becket’s robes, the fierce ringing of the dread anathema—the violent extinguishing of the baptismal candle. As I watched Burton change from compassionate cleric into terrible judge of souls, I cheered Becket on, my fist pumping, the way that, as the background music in a film swells, one cheers on the army as it sweeps down to crush the enemy.

But beyond the Hollywood excitement lies a challenging notion that seems to have become unpopular in our time. Unlike Henry, Becket did not see the Church as political faction or a birthright or a society with which one identifies at one’s convenience. He believed in a Christianity with consequences. Of course, the vengeance of Hollywood does not belong in the church. But the virility with which Becket stood to defend the faith shines clearly as an example for us today.

So does his willingness to acknowledge that some men who claim to be Christian have rejected Christianity in belief and in deed, and that their rejection should be honored by the Church. To cheer for this is not to call for a new Torquemada. It is to call for the non-negotiability of the faith.

OK, I understand the desire to make the consecrated life look attractive, but a religious sisters’ beauty pageant is going too far.

There couldn’t be much harm in, say, profiling young and joyful nuns, but surely a beauty contest, no matter how modest and unobjectionable the operative notion of “beauty,” could only risk exciting the worldly vanity that consecrated sisters have presumably repudiated. Of course, this reasoning does not necessarily apply to secular priests . . .

It’s strange that with all the constant chatter about hope in the presidential election, nobody seems to have adverted to the wisdom of the Angelic Doctor.

Got a headache? Earache? A bum knee? If so, this article might be of use to you. A couple weeks ago, the Times of London ran an online article called “Top 50 Saints for Sickness.” It’s a fun little who’s who list of saints to ask for a little intercessory help when you aren’t quite feeling your best. Here are some of my personal favorites:

27. For earache pray to St Polycarp of Smyrna. A second century martyr, Polycarp is said to have predicted he would be burned to death, after dreaming of a pillow in flames. When cast into the fire, the 86-year-old bishop was said to have glowed golden like baking bread.

30. For hangovers, pray to St Bibiana, a 4th century Roman scourged to death. In the garden of the church built over her grave, a herb grew which was reputed to cure headaches and epilepsy.

36. Bad knees? St Roch is your man. Born in 1295 with a birthmark on his chest in the shape of a red cross, St Roch was said to be able to cure plague victims by making the sign of the cross. In the 15th century, public processions were held in his honour in Constance during an outbreak of plague, which according to legend, subsequently ceased.

39. The patron saint of migraine sufferers is St Gereon known as the “Golden Saint”. He was a soldier who was beheaded in 4th century Cologne for refusing to sacrifice to pagan Gods to ensure victory in battle.

As baseball and softball end their brief terms as Olympic sports, The Economist provides a collection of other events that have been discontinued. Those who felt a stirring in their hearts for tug-of-war, live pigeon shooting, or swimming obstacle courses, start your petitions to the IOC now.