I love this sonnet by Robert Frost, capturing something of an autumnal wistfulness. He begins with a straightforward, almost flat statement, “There is a singer everyone had heard,” but his description of the oven bird’s plain chirrup soon wafts into evocative paradox: “On sunny days, a moment overcast.” His lyricism builds as he develops a steady meter, only to leave the reader lingering in question with his final line.

Words fall short of expressing life’s mysteries–especially in a fallen world, especially about a fallen world–but Frost shows that the music of poetry, like birdsong, is composed of more than mere words.

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Some years back, the Washington Post editorial board apologized for an editorial calling evangelical Christians “poor, ignorant, and easily led.” Good thing, too.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reports:

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith–it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

It is not the case, however, that all new atheists are “poor, ignorant, and easily led.”

Many Baby Boomers have noted that, from an intellectual point of view, the American national response to Islamic radicalism has been shockingly sluggish and uninspired, especially as compared with the vast mobilization of the Cold War. After the Sputnik embarrassment, for instance, the entire math and science curriculum was radically reworked and improved. As far as I am aware, no remotely comparable initiative has been taken in the wake of September 11.

Because we’ve spent the past several years arguing about the justice and effectiveness of the invasion of Iraq, we tend to forget that the most crucial part of the struggle against terrorism does not involve conventional military operations at all.

To fight terrorism effectively you must not only know how to decisively interrupt complex international flows of money without stopping up the arteries of prosperity. You must not only familiarize yourself with languages, geography, national and ethnic histories and religious schools. You must also try to understand why and how ideas are spread—an engrossing psychological and sociological exercise.

The French, for instance, have belatedly recognized the need to carefully study the spread of Islamic radicalism in their Muslim-dominated prisons. Is it better to bind extremists together in clusters, allowing them to plot, or to disperse them throughout the prison population, allowing them to proselytize? And what effect would it have to introduce a greater number of moderate Muslim chaplains into the prison environment?

I think that, if given a push, many of us would find wrestling with such important questions fascinating and rewarding. Perhaps the next president will find a way to give them that push.

Reuters brings us the latest in the ongoing quest to conflate the news so readers don’t have to:

“Evolution fine but no apology to Darwin: Vatican”

The Vatican said on Tuesday the theory of evolution was compatible with the Bible but planned no posthumous apology to Charles Darwin for the cold reception it gave him 150 years ago.

Wait a second. Why is the Church expected to apologize to Darwin in the first place? According to the very same news article,

Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans in 1950 and Pope John Paul reiterated that in 1996. . . . Darwin’s theories were “never condemned by the Catholic Church nor was his book ever banned”. . . .

Creationism is the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible. The Catholic Church does not read the Genesis account of creation literally, saying it is an allegory for the way God created the world.

Christian churches were long hostile to Darwin because his theory conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation.

Earlier this week a leading Anglican churchman, Rev. Malcolm Brown, said the Church of England owed Darwin an apology for the way his ideas were received by Anglicans in Britain.

Let me get things straight: Other Christian churches understand the creation story literally. An Anglican in Britain hopes his church apologizes for not adopting evolution from the start. Sounds like the Vatican has some explaining to do.

A subscriber writes to ask if I know any good churches in Amsterdam. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Does anyone else have an idea? Beautiful old churches to visit—likely, I imagine, to be Dutch Reformed? And a good church at which to attend a Catholic Mass? Email here if you have a suggestion.

Our friend Thomas Farr—author of a major article on U.S. foreign policy and religious freedom in the next issue of First Things—writes to remind us of a conference at Georgetown University on October 10.

The last in a series of conferences commemorating the 10th anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act, it features such speakers as Rick Santorum, William Galston, Mark Plattner, William L. Saunders, and Hadley Arkes.

To see more information and to register for the conference, visit their webpage.

I’m reading A Brief History of the Normans by François Neveux. So far it’s quite informative and readable, but the author, apparently following current scholarly fashion, insists on referring to the medieval expeditions of the Northmen as “migrations.” For, you see, the word “invasion” (which he always puts in condescending scare-quotes) has a “very pejorative connotation” that reflects the “pessimistic vision of Frankish, Anglo-Saxon and Irish clerics, who . . . were describing the point of view of the victims.”

But later he notes that, when trade brought diverse Scandinavian peoples into sustained interaction with “Frankish and Russian worlds,” they “discovered rich but poorly defended countries, which soon encouraged them to move from trade to plunder.” So, we are told with a happy flourish, thus began “one of the most extraordinary human adventures of the Middle Ages . . . the Viking migration.”

Now, just yesterday I re-read G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse with great but critical appreciation. I can see why a careful modern historian would want to challenge Chesterton’s characterization of the “Danes” as vectors of “heathen nihilism,” who “only saw with heavy eyes/ And broke with heavy hands.” No doubt we are right to recognize great cultural and political creativity even among unlettered warriors–and for this reason we may well view the coming of the Vikings as something less than a total disaster.

But this does not make it reasonable to call a mass movement of armed and organized men, primarily motivated by the opportunity to take things without asking, anything but an “invasion.” This is not a characterization only morose monks could find intelligible.

This mealy-mouthed terminology may not indicate over-scrupulous scholarly neutrality so much as an internalized hostility to the story Western Christendom told about itself. Call me a cynic, but I doubt it will ever become fashionable to speak of Cortes’ “migration” to Mexico.

“I’m a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage. Do those positions sound contradictory? To me, they fit together.”

So writes David Blankenhorn, author of The Future of Marriage, in a recent LA Times editorial. The legalization of same-sex marriage, he writes, is not an easy case of good versus evil, but one of competing goods: the reduction of homophobia and the protection of every child’s birthright to a loving, stable family. Which wins out?

For Blankenhorn, the truly liberal response–aimed at societal flourishing and the protection of human rights–must be honest about our past to be honest about our future:

Many seem to believe that marriage is simply a private love relationship between two people. They accept this view, in part, because Americans have increasingly emphasized and come to value the intimate, emotional side of marriage, and in part because almost all opinion leaders today, from journalists to judges, strongly embrace this position. That’s certainly the idea that underpinned the California Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. But I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I’ve come to a different conclusion.

Read the rest of Blankenhorn’s case here.