“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the convictions of things not seen,” the Letter to the Hebrews tells us. I couldn’t help thinking of that today when I scanned the list of articles on Real Clear Politics.

A piece in Roll Call ponders which notes the discrepancy between the two possible versions of Barack Obama that could be elected: “After 22 months that he’s been campaigning, after thousands of speeches, dozens of debates and reams of position papers, it’s still not clear if he is a pragmatic post-partisan unifier or a populist liberal ideologue.” After a back-and-forth consideration of many questions and the possible sides Obama could take, the article ends: “Let’s hope he’s the man we hope he is.”

An article in the National Journal has a similar list of hopes and wonders, concluding that Obama “the liberal ideologue could be a political failure; the pragmatic reformer could be a great leader.”

Finally The Economist endorses Obama, noting that: “the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.”

I’m not so sure. I tend to think that a man’s voting record and remarks outside of a campaign are just as important, if not more so, than his conduct in a debate or in a convention hall. Furthermore, I have much less faith than these authors that a President Obama would rise above the party agenda he supports to attain a common ground he wouldn’t need.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the convictions of things not seen.” Maybe I’m too much of a pessimist, but I haven’t seen anything more solid than rhetoric–albeit the finest rhetoric America has seen in a long time–on which I can base a hope that is more than foolish, wishful optimism.

If he’s elected, I sure hope Sen. Obama’s the man many hope him to be. It’s just that the things I have seen keep getting in the way of any assurance or convictions of my own.

In honor of today’s holiday–Reformation Day–I have been rereading Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. A few of his theses, in particular, stood out this time around:

41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them preferable to other good works of love.

42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of mercy.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons;

44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more free from penalty.

45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God.

Striking is his emphasis on works of mercy and love, implicitly evoking the sheep and the goats of Matthew 25: “Truly, I say to you. As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

“Faith,” Luther wrote in his Introduction to Romans, “is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God.” Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the faithful man “freely, willingly, and joyfully does good to everyone, serves everyone, suffers all kinds of things, loves and praises the God who has shown him such grace.” True faith, in short, is alive in love.

For love, the Apostle John wrote and Luther certainly agreed, is our grateful and grace-filled response to the One who loved us first and called us to himself: “He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. . . . Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth” (1 John 2:6, 3:18).

On the door of the church in Wittenberg, Martin Luther proclaimed it well: “Love grows by works of love.”

Voting for Obama for sake of having a black president would be irresponsibly self-indulgent, but few would deny that there’s something moving in this story from Texas:

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country’s first black presidential nominee.

Read the rest here.

At least, that’s what a new research study is telling us:

Clocks spring ahead and fall back when adjusting in and out of daylight saving time. A study published on Wednesday finds that heart attack rates do the same.

The research, based on heart attacks in Sweden, concluded that the chance of a heart attack goes up during the first three weekdays after the springtime shift to daylight saving time, possibly because of sleep deprivation. . . .

During the shift to daylight saving time, women seemed more vulnerable to heart attacks than men. Men were more likely to be protected during the Monday in the autumn, the researchers said.

As if the fact that the rate of diabetes has doubled in the past ten years wasn’t enough to worry about.

Want to escape from election-mania without severe withdrawal symptoms? Start weaning yourself off the constant, intense coverage by checking out this appreciative retrospective on the presidency of George W. Bush.

“Vote your conscience” said a recent election message aimed at Catholic voters, and I’ve heard more than one objection. The number of believing Americans without a proper understanding of ethics and civic duty is, I’d venture to guess, devastatingly large, and the last thing these individuals need is affirmation in their (and the media’s) confusion. Among those who do have a sense of morality in public life, most are wrenched in multiple directions, struggling to perform a moral calculus that avoids any scent of one-issue proclivities. Conscience is a murky land, not the sort of place to make a firm decision.

As Luther observed, however, where else can one stand if not on his own conscience? The underlying imperative here (not lost on the Catholic Vote campaign) is to form one’s conscience, and form it well.

Thomas More, patron of statesmen and politicians, illuminates this call. “More believed he had to follow his conscience, but not because he thought he was smarter or holier than anyone else,” writes Archbishop Chaput in his new book, Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. “More obeyed his conscience because he knew that he was obligated to obey God first. And knowing his personal sins and weaknesses, he also knew his duty to rightly form his conscience by anchoring it in the truth outside his own will.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Thomas More lately, especially after seeing the Broadway revival of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. At one especially memorable point, Bolt’s More gives an impassioned defense of his political conviction: “What matters to me is not whether it’s true or not but that I believe it to be true, or rather, not that I believe it, but that I believe it.”

A powerful statement, and yet, when the real Thomas More clung to his conscience, it was because his conscience clung to his heritage–a heritage his reason trusted to be true. “If there were no one but myself upon my side, and the whole Parliament upon the other,” court transcripts record him as saying, “I would be sore afraid….[But] I am not bounden to change my conscience and conform it to the council of our realm against the general council of Christendom.”

Following one’s conscience is a duty that falls solely to the individual. Forming one’s conscience, however, takes place within a civilization, a culture, and a Church. It takes place here and now, but never alone; it looks back to the wisdom and tradition of the past, and ahead to the sure prospect of eternity. “I die the King’s good servant,” Bolt’s More asserts on his way to the gibbet, and there he stops. The martyr of history, however, continues: “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Following up on the archaeological discovery of King David’s kingdom in 2005, the New York Times today speculates: “Find of Ancient City Could Alter Notions of Biblical David.”

Overlooking the verdant Valley of Elah, where the Bible says David toppled Goliath, archaeologists are unearthing a 3,000-year-old fortified city that could reshape views of the period when David ruled over the Israelites. Five lines on pottery uncovered here appear to be the oldest Hebrew text ever found and are likely to have a major impact on knowledge about the history of literacy and alphabet development.

The five-acre site, with its fortifications, dwellings and multi-chambered entry gate, will also be a weapon in the contentious and often politicized debate over whether David and his capital, Jerusalem, were an important kingdom or a minor tribe, an issue that divides not only scholars but those seeking to support or delegitimize Zionism.
. . .
Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and a prominent skeptic toward a Bible-based historical chronology, [says] . . . “so there is a late tenth-century fortified structure there. I don’t believe that any archaeologist can revolutionize our entire understanding of Judah and Jerusalem by a single site.”

Mr. Finkelstein is among the most prominent advocates of what is called the “low chronology,” meaning those who date David and Solomon’s rule to closer to 900 b.c. than 1000 b.c. They argue that the kingdom was a minor affair that a later generation of Israelites in the seventh century b.c. mythologized for its own nationalistic purposes.

That’s the question the Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person, “a research institute conducting interdisciplinary, natural law analysis of complex, contemporary moral issues,” tackles in its latest white paper, “When Does Human Life Begin? A Scientific Perspective.” Here’s part of the paper’s summary:

Resolving the question of when human life begins is critical for advancing a reasoned public policy debate over abortion and human embryo research. This article considers the current scientific evidence in human embryology and addresses two central questions concerning the beginning of life: 1) in the course of sperm-egg interaction, when is a new cell formed that is distinct from either sperm or egg? and 2) is this new cell a new human organism–i.e., a new human being?

Based on universally accepted scientific criteria, a new cell, the human zygote, come into existence at the moment of sperm-egg fusion, an event that occurs in less than a second. Upon formation, the zygote is radically unlike that of either sperm or egg separately and is characteristic of a human organism. Thus, the scientific evidence supports the conclusion that a zygote is a human organism and that the life of a new human being commences at a scientifically well defined “moment of conception.” This conclusion is objective, consistent with factual evidence, and independent of specific ethical, moral, political, or religious view of human life or of human embryos.

Of course, the findings of this research are nothing new, but it’s always important to reiterate the point that arguments against embryonic stem-cell research and abortion are grounded in solid, scientific fact. As our own Fr. Richard John Neuhaus says in the foreword to the paper:

It is sometimes said that the abortion debate is about “values” rather than “facts.” An honest debate about abortion, however, is about values based on facts. If we don’t get the facts right, we will not get our values right. Establishing by clear scientific evidence the moment at which a human life begins is not the end of the abortion debate. On the contrary, that is the point from which the debate begins.

Let’s hope this scientific paper can bring us one step closer to the honest debate this country needs.

A couple days ago, Nathaniel discussed an article in the New York Times that highlighted the increasing percentage of woman involved in extramarital affairs. Among other observations, Nathaniel noticed that the language used in the article to refer to the increasing rate of adultery was “the same language you use when talking about women achieving parity with men in the classroom, workplace, etc.” Here’s another example of this type of language, taken from the lead of a story in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune:

How’s this for sexual equality?

Though men are still overwhelmingly more likely to cheat on their spouses than women, the fairer sex is gaining ground.

Gaining ground? This makes adultery sound like a game of Risk.

The romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, for all his earnest and ethereal musings, his Skylarks and his West Winds, is sometimes wonderfully funny. To read some of his poems, one would think he was satirizing himself and his age, only he writes–no, wafts, soars, swoops, descants–with such sensitivity and solemnity that I’m convinced of his fantastic genius and genuine fantasy.

He was practically a mystic. Take, for example, his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Shelley sings to the “awful shadow of some unseen Power / . . . Spirit of BEAUTY, that doth consecrate / With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon / Of human thought or form.” Intellectual beauty, he says, that Platonic ideal illuminating our darkened world, can redeem us. It’s a lovely thought, no doubt revealing something deep and true about divine grace and love. But Shelley has a different take transcendence:

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given—
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone—like mist oe’er the mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent…

It would be a brilliant parody of romantic religiosity–the autological virtues, these three remain–but I do believe he’s serious. Shelley is the almost-mystic, caught in the mirror of his mind.

Today’s Los Angeles Times echoes the survey from Faith in Public Life, but mentions a small exception to the general trend:

What we’re seeing in these three swing states is the end of the Catholic vote, as conventional political strategists traditionally have expected it to behave–in part because it’s now so large it pretty much looks like the rest of America; in part because of its own internal changes. National polls have shown for some time that, although Catholics are personally opposed to abortion, they believe it ought to be legal in nearly identical percentages to the rest of America. Moreover, as a survey by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found earlier this year, only 18% of Catholics “strongly” agree with the statement: “In deciding what is morally acceptable, I look to the church teachings and statements by the pope and bishops to form my conscience.” . . .

What all this suggests is that, in this and coming election cycles, we may see a new model for the Catholic vote, one whose participation more closely resembles that of Jews, 75% of whom are overwhelmingly pro-Democratic, while a devout minority, the Orthodox, tends more strongly Republican. If you break the Catholic vote down in roughly the same pattern, you get something that looks like the current national spread. According to most reliable data, slightly less than one in four Catholics now assist at weekly Mass and are more open to GOP policies, while the overwhelming majority of their co-religionists have cast their lot with the Democrats’ domestic and foreign policies.

So Catholicism is comprised of a small body of especially devout and conservative believers and a larger body that are less devout in church attendance and doctrinal adherence, and are also politically more liberal. The picture is more complex than that, of course, but it’s another analysis to file away.

(Via Real Clear Politics)

Researchers have known for a while now that piety can help protect a person from depression and anxiety. Now, a new study published online in Psychological Medicine has gone further in developing the relationship between mental health and spirituality by comparing the effectiveness of different forms of this piety, which they label religiosity:

Lead researcher Joanna Maselko, Sc.D., characterized the religiosity of 918 study participants in terms of three domains of religiosity: religious service attendance, which refers to being involved with a church; religious well-being, which refers to the quality of a person’s relationship with a higher power; and existential well-being, which refers to a person’s sense of meaning and their purpose in life. . . .

Maselko and fellow researchers compared each domain of religiosity to their risk of depression, and were surprised to find that the group with higher levels of religious well-being were 1.5 times more likely to have had depression than those with lower levels of religious well-being.

Maselko theorizes this is because people with depression tend to use religion as a coping mechanism. As a result, they’re more closely relating to God and praying more. . . .

Researchers also found that those who attended religious services were 30 percent less likely to have had depression in their lifetime, and those who had high levels of existential well-being were 70 percent less likely to have had depression than those who had low levels of existential well-being.

Another reason it would be nice if these numbers were higher. . . .

New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest gothic cathedral, offers this on the evening of October 31: a “Halloween Extravaganza & Procession of the Ghouls.”

For $15 you can sit in the nave and watch a screening of the silent movie “The Phantom of the Opera” accompanied by the newly restored cathedral organ played by Tim Brumfield. When the movie’s over the procession begins. But it’s not bishops, deans, deacons, and thurifers in procession, but various nasties: the undead, ghouls, demons and whatnot, all choreographed and directed by the cathedral’s artist in resident Ralph Lee. It’s quite popular on the Upper West Side and you can see a bit of last year’s procession here.

The New York Post recommends it as a “unique family experience on Halloween night.” The folks in the nave seem to enjoy the parade and the various beasties do seem very much at home.

The cathedral’s website is here.

A few days ago, the Catholic News Service put out a notice about a survey from Faith in Public Life:

The survey showed that young Catholic voters are the most pro-government among voters of any major religious group, even more pro-government than other surveys show the rest of the young population is. Sixty-seven percent said that they prefer government play a larger role, offering more services to the public, compared to 41 percent of the older Catholics surveyed. . . .

Young Catholics said they are more likely to support legalized abortion and same-sex marriage than older Catholics; 60 percent of young Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 51 percent of older Catholics who believe that.

On the issue of same-sex marriage, young Catholics resemble other young adults on the issue, with 44 percent saying that same-sex couples should be able to marry if they are in a committed relationship; 46 percent of the general young adult population shares that view. Twenty-six percent of older Catholics said they approve of same-sex marriage.

The majority of young Catholics, however, were less likely to believe that abortion or same-sex marriage were significant issues in this election.

However, a majority of most older and younger Catholics agreed that a candidate’s stance on abortion is not the deciding factor in their vote. More than half agreed that they would vote for a candidate who disagreed with them on abortion. . . .

“As we go forward, expect to see young people across faiths focusing more and more on issues that reflect a concern for America’s image in the world and how our government treats the least of these at home and abroad. Expect to see the dividing lines of the culture wars continue to fade,” said Katie Paris, director of communications strategy at Faith in Public Life.

Given that these results line up squarely with Faith in Public Life’s mission, I was inclined to be skeptical, but the results are sobering nonetheless.

(Via Whispers in the Loggia)

I’m reading Freedom Just Around the Corner, Walter McDougall’s delightful tour of American history from the colonial period to the age of Jackson. His main claim is that Americans are “hustlers,” both in the sense of shrewd, industrious, creative go-getters and in the sense of manipulative, sneaky, selfish “scofflaws, speculators, rogues, and demagogues.” Americans, in short, are a future-directed people trying to get what they want (good or bad) by available means (fair or foul) in a land that allows them more opportunity to do so than any other.

If this view of America is as accurate as I think it is, it shows how profoundly American, to the point of lurid caricature, is the ethic manifested in rap. Rappers construe life in starkly agonistic terms: The goal of life is emphatically to hustle, to use ingenuity, hard work and courage to make advantageous “deals,” outwit and defy inconvenient authorities whenever possible, and finally win the “game.” This means gaining the wealth that gives access to to all the pleasures of sense, to the refined pleasures of power, prestige and public munificence, and (more nobly) that enables one to shower benefits on beloved friends and family. According to this worldview, dealing drugs, pimping, selling retail and making music are all ventures with the same goals, operating on the same basic principles–they merely have somewhat different risks and rewards. And American future-directedness is often as explicit as you could want. Consider the chorus of Jay-Z’s “I Just Wanna Love You (Give It to Me)”: “I’m a hustler, baby / I just want you to know / It ain’t where I been / But where I’m about to go.”

But rap lyrics also demonstrate a quintessentially American sense of the harrowing inconstancy of fortune and the terrible burdens of success, and show the subtle omnipresence, in the vile morass of materialism, of an awareness that the frenzy of achievement and acquisition can’t be the point. The rapper can’t shake the feeling that we are ultimately judged from a transcendent perspective; his world most-definitely “Christ-haunted.” This streak of transcendence is far from being enough to justify these songs, which glorify (they do not, contra the apologists, merely “depict”) one of the basest visions of human life ever conceived. But it is reassuring evidence that God pierces every form of darkness–He can surely pierce mainstream America’s complacent consumerism.

There must be a lesson in here for all of us:

Boxing fans will gather in Birmingham on Friday night to witness the final fight of a man who should be remembered for ever as Britain’s most spectacular sporting loser. . . .

Buckley has lost more fights than any other boxer in the world. Throughout his 256 defeats, he has remained magnificently undeterred. While the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) remained desperately concerned that he would do himself a serious lasting injury, Buckley persisted, losing bout after bout.

In the past five years he has put together a particularly impressive losing streak, failing to win in 88 successive bouts. He has lost to 42 future world, European, British and Commonwealth champions, including Naseem Hamed, and has fought more bouts than any other boxer in the world. But this one, No 300, will be his last. . . .

Buckley has sometimes boxed so often that he has turned up with a black eye before a bout. Though the governing body continues to send him for medical tests, Buckley continues to pass them. Throughout his career, he has kept himself in a constant state of readiness, ready to lose a fight at a moment’s notice anywhere in the country. Buckley has been known to agree to bouts as late as 8pm on the night of the fight. . . .

“I don’t know what I’ll do when it’s all over on Friday, but I’d love to stay in boxing in one capacity or another,” he said. “Boxing has been good to me over the years. When I was a youngster I was in trouble with the police, a really wild kid. But the sport has given me a focus in life.”

The journal Psychosomatic Medicine has published a study that shows how intellectual work actually makes you hungry. A group of students was asked to complete a series of mental tests, after which they were presented with an all-you-can-eat buffet. On average, the group ate more after thinking than after simply sitting and relaxing:

Each session of intellectual work required the burning of only three more calories than relaxing did. But when the students hit the buffet table after the text summation, they took in an additional 203 calories. And after the memory and attention tests, the subjects consumed another 253 calories. Blood samples taken before, during and after the activities found that all that thinking causes big fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels. And because glucose fuels the neurons, a transitory low level in the brain may signal the stomach to get the hands to fill up the mouth, even though the energy actually spent has gone up just a hair. The researchers note that such “caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic.”

Intellectual work makes you hungry–so that’s why I’m always ready to eat after reading the latest issue of First Things.

Or at least higher infidelity in 2006 than in 1991, says the New York Times. The noticeable shifts came in men and women over 60 and those under 35. One could say many things about the findings, but I was struck by the tone of a few sentences. One, in the print edition, summarized the article:

“More people are cheating, new studies find, and younger women appear to be catching up with men.”

Another did the same, but in the body of the piece:

“Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.”

Notice the language. It’s not that women are as unfaithful as men or that women’s infidelity is rising; it’s that women are “closing the adultery gap” and “catching up with men,” the same language you use when talking about women achieving parity with men in the classroom, workplace, etc.

Tara Parker-Pope, the author of the article, and the researchers taking these surveys make it clear that they do not support infidelity, and there’s no reason to think that they do. But her choice of phrasing makes me think of the feminists who want, for example, to create feminist pornography–the ones who, instead of proposing virtue for both sexes, seek to give women equal opportunity for vice.

Again, I don’t think that that’s the intended message of Parker-Pope or the researchers, but it is striking to see the facts of adultery described in terms of women finally catching up to men.

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University. Writing in the magazine Prism, a publication of Evangelicals for Social Action, Prof. Gushee tells us about a “Holocaust travel course” he took this past summer and the lessons he took away from that trip:

This sobering visit to Berlin, Prague, Cracow, and Warsaw—and to such sites as the Nazi concentration camps Ravensbruck and Auschwitz—did more than deepen our understanding of the details of Nazi evil and Jewish suffering. It also clarified for me what matters most in Christian public engagement. However, the misuse of [just war theory], especially in the United States, is a common “worst practice” that contributes to war. It happened in the run up to the misbegotten Iraq War, and it happens in the run-up to just about every U.S. war. Partly because of the abuse of [just war theory], we are a church that can’t “just say no.” That is a violation of the teachings of Jesus and thus a failure of discipleship.

After reading Prof. Gushee’s article I’m not sure I see the connection between his visit to the Nazi concentration camps and his hostility to just war theory. In any case, I hope I am not being too churlish by suggesting that there is something unseemly about using a visit to the concentration camps as a means to score a few politically correct jabs against the Iraq war or the just war tradition.

Besides, a profoundly opposite lesson might well be taken away from such a trip. That lesson might be gleaned from a story told by James H. Toner, who until recently was professor of international relations and military ethics at the Air War College. Toner writes:

A number of years ago, while teaching at a university in Vermont, I was invited to join a public affairs panel to discuss just war issues. I soon discovered that I was the sole supporter of that notion, and I was getting much more than I was giving. Indeed, the audience seemed hostile, not only to the concept of just war, but also to me. An elderly man in the rear of the audience stood and said something to the effect that he wanted to support my views on just war; he added that he was a classical musician. I remember thinking to myself that there was one person in the room who agreed with me–and that he was probably a nut. “I want to tell you,” the man continued, “what is the sweetest music I have ever heard.” I was still mentally cringing. “Although I have heard wonderful music thousands of times, the most beautiful was the sound of U.S. Army tanks. You see, they were coming to [the death camp which then held him as a young man], and that sound meant that I would be able to grow up.” The audience and I had the grace to sit in silent reflection for a few moments, and I felt rather like Edward Everett must have at Gettysburg.

I wonder what this Holocaust survivor would think about Prof. Gushee’s rather contrary lesson. Not much, I would think.

From book twelve of Homer’s Odyssey:

Enough: in misery can words avail?
And what so tedious as a twice-told tale?

Zbigniew Janowski, reviewing Edith Hall’s new book The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey in the November issue of First Things, shows how these verses don’t apply to Homer’s own masterpiece:

Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses is a sweeping tour of almost all one could wish to demonstrate about the spell of Homer. A professor at the University of London, Hall takes the reader through literature, stage performances, musical works, and films—all showing the enduring impact of the Odyssey.

But don’t take my word for it. Subscribe to First Things and read the entire review online today.