Chances are you know at least one atheist who finds religious views foolish–the very idea of believing that God became man or that a virgin gave birth is hogwash, they think. But even while many of these people can’t imagine believing what we believe, they never the less treat religious people with respect and decorum.

Then there are people who think religious people are foolish and, in an exceptionally juvenile way, take great efforts and pleasure in mocking them. One such man is a Minnesota professor who solicited readers of his blog this past summer to attend Catholic Masses, aquire consecrated hosts, and mail them to him so he could publicly desecrate them.

And last week, a man attacked a priest during Mass when confronted about walking away with a host. Perhaps the man was one one of the blog-readers, or perhaps just a like-minded fanatic. In any case, he didn’t get away with it. Here’s the best part of the news story covering it: “The enraged and offended parishioners pinned him to the ground until police could arrive.”

It’s sad and troubling, of course, and mind-boggling why one who doesn’t believe these things could care and take such great effort to disrupt believers’ practices.

But it’s heartening to see the faithful so ready to defend the priest and the Eucharist, not to mention their freedoms of religion and assembly.

Geez, you write a piece on pointed musical assertions of cultural identity, and folks seem to take notice. Another friend wrote and directed me to a song by the Afrikaner folk and rock singer, Bok van Blerk. This one (not surprisingly) has generated controversy in South Africa, where liberal whites have expressed horror over its apparent call to arms — and ANC leader Jacob Zuma has asked the sensible question, “Why should Afrikaners not remember their heroes?”

Apparently this song is now frequently sung spontaneously at rugby matches, complete with the waving of the old South African national flag. Nelson Mandela has called van Blerk one of his favorite singers. Another reason to put his picture in every dictionary by the entry for magnanimity.

Dreading the Thanksgiving-dinner arguments on religion and politics? Resistance is futile. Just accept the inevitable and start them yourself.

Slate provides some ideas here for dinner-table disagreements on politics. As for religion, First Things has dished up some ideas sure to spark lively discussion. How about the question of whether Islam is compatible with the separation of church and state? Or whether East and West, the two lungs of the Church, can ever be reconciled? Conversation slow? Ask the table whether they think Mormonism is Christian. How ’bout that Lambeth conference, or that book Rowan Williams just wrote? Or, is the Catholic Church, in opposing contraception, sterilization, and abortion, perpetuating overpopulation? This is bound to liven things up: Is Protestant America dead?

The assistant editors of First Things have back-to-back book reviews in Touchstone. Last month I wrote on three books describing the hook-up culture on college campuses. The article’s now available online, and here’s a sample:

One student she interviewed talks about a girl who calls him just to have sex while they’re both single: “I could never have a conversation with her if I wanted to. . . . The next day I’ll see her on the street and it’s, ‘Hey, what’s goin’ on?’ And that’s it.” Another student told Stepp, “Sex is just something you should experience, like drugs.”

Though even the average secular adult would argue that sex should be about more than just the physical experience, colleges and their students focus only on sexual performance. Universities with no creedal convictions feel ill-equipped to help students address metaphysical questions like the meaning of sex. They can answer only the physical questions, and those end up being the only ones discussed.

At my freshman orientation at Swarthmore College five years ago, we were told about the Sexual Health Counselors, peers who advertised the ability to help with sex toys, contraception, or intriguing permutations of positions and partners. But the college offered no help to those who might ask deeper questions, or even to those who wondered what to do the next morning with the person beside them.

In the December issue, Amanda Shaw reviews Alan Jabcobs’ Original Sin. The text isn’t online yet, but we’ll put up another notice here when it is. In the mean time, keep an eye out for the review should you find a copy of Touchstone.

After reading my post on Show of Hands, Paul Allen, who teaches theology at Concordia University in Montreal, wrote and passed along a link to a Quebec group that sings an edgy protest song — a protest against cultural suicide, that is. Check it out.

You thought it was just another American presidential election. But Howard Adelman thinks there’s more to it than that.

In an article “Magic, Comedy, and Civic Religion” for the Social Science Research Council’s journal, the Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Square, Adelman writes:

We must understand the underlying, naked, mythological background behind what we see in the rhetorical clothing of the cut and thrust of daily politics. Barack Obama must not simply be celebrated because of his expertise, his organizational depth, or his ability to discipline marginalized references to growing watermelons and holding barbecues on the White House lawn. He must not be adulated because he became a celebrity in the eyes of many who wanted to party and celebrate good times because, in the words of Kool & the Gang, “everything’s gonna be all right.” Rather, we must extol, consecrate, solemnize, and honor Barack Obama by performing the rites due to a transformative figure, beginning with the ritual of turning water into wine, or transforming the irrationality of the political process to reveal the underlying logos.

Adelman is not content with uncovering of the “underlying logos” of the Obama phenomenon. He’s had a revelation about the McCain campaign, too:

The choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice-presidential candidate was not just an effort to round up the fundamentalist vote for the Republican party, but was also a re-creation of the Slavonic pagan sacrifice, made in the name of the Ritual of the Rival Tribes that constitute the Republican party.

Adelman is a research professor at the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice, and Governance at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. So, evidently this is not a joke. It would, however, make a great Saturday Night Live sketch.

Don’t read this link. I say don’t read it. The culture of blogs and research databases has been promoted as a way of democratizing the business of ideas; everyone can have a voice, and the most minority of minority positions can gain leverage. As the Boston Globe writes, “For scholars—especially who like to wear pajamas–the Internet has been a godsend. It allows instant communication with colleagues around the globe, and makes tracking down published research a matter of seconds. But perhaps the greatest boon is the sheer quantity of readily accessible knowledge.”

Yet, as a slew of social scientists has begun to point out, the end result is more often the opposite; the ideas and news that actually gain attention is a narrower, and often more arbitrarily selected, pool than before:

The explosion of online materials has two, somewhat contradictory effects. The scope of available information expands, remarkably so; but as a consequence, the information needs to be filtered somehow.

To make sense of this overwhelming sea of data, search tools must present results in some kind of order. Scholars, like other Internet users, rely on tools that rank results primarily in two ways: in reverse chronological order, and by popularity. (Google’s algorithms, for example, take into account the number of times a website is linked from other websites.)

For lack of a better system, Google searches determine our reading lists, and the number of Web hits rank our Google searches. It’s a vicious cycle, and the separation of the wheat from the chaff is no guaranteed byproduct. I am reminded, again, of these lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay–an excellent, unwitting metaphor for the Information Age:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no look
To weave it into fabric.

From Fr. George Rutler’s weekly column in the bulletin of the Church of Our Saviour, this time on removing references to God in our culture:

It would be easy to exploit this out of demagoguery, and some politicians do indeed like to pose righteously protesting against “the removal of God” from our culture. That kind of rhetoric itself betrays some insecurity about God’s ability to be God. God cannot be removed from anything because he is eternal and omnipresent. Attempts to marginalize God only marginalize those who try. The Catholic should understand this better than anyone, for the Holy Church outlives all nations and cultures. In the practical order, however, many nominal Catholics do not realize how they have been invaded by banal agnosticism and degraded by cultural mediocrity. Once in preparing a wedding, a bride from another part of the country wanted excerpts from Ernest Hemingway and Kahlil Gibran read as scripture in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Her reaction to my refusal was the indignation of an indulged youth who had never been denied access to a parallel universe of sentimental delights. It has been observed that even many self-styled Christians seek no Saviour for they do not know that there is anything to be saved from.

A presidential proclamation of Thanksgiving Day enshrines a civic obligation to the Divine Creator, but for some it is a vestigial tribute to custom, encroached by football and parades. No president is a pontiff, and civic prayers are only commentary on the Eucharistic duty of the stewards of God’s creation. So the Feast of Christ the King, which we celebrate today, puts all civic intuitions of God into perspective, and reminds us that Jesus was crowned with thorns by self-satisfied people who hymned their way to destruction by shouting, “We have no king but Caesar.”

Now they’re even trying to domesticate 007. MI6 is pushing a softer image in its new recruiting campaign. One recruitment officer insists that the agency is “not looking for … people jumping out of windows, running around disobeying orders, drinking dry martinis, clutching women, and firing guns.”

How truly disgusting. Perhaps the men of MI6 will give in to this pressure to adjust to “post-Cold War” (more like “post-awesome”) geopolitical realities, but I plan to cling to my guns and martini until the bitter end.

Yesterday, the Scripture readings I heard in church—no doubt the same readings preached to countless other Christians across the country—reminded that Christ is king, that he will return at the end of time to restore his kingdom. That, although he humbly entered Jerusalem on a donkey and didn’t live as a king on earth, he has been king since the foundation of the world. That it is only through him that any ruler on earth has authority to rule—and the freedom to rule either justly in accordance with God’s authority, or unjustly. This makes me wonder whether the president-elect fully grasps from where his power comes.

Francis Cardinal Stafford, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary in Rome, delivered a lecture on November 17 at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C. Entitled “Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: ‘Being True with Body and Soul,’” the speech also touched on the recent election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The full text of the speech can be found here, but a few excerpts are below:

On November 4, 2008 a cultural earthquake hit America. Senator Barack Obama and Senator Joseph Biden were elected President and Vice President of the United States together with a significant majority of their Party in the federal Congress supporting their deadly vision of human life. Americans were unanimous in their joy over the significance of the election of a Black President. However, if Obama, Biden and the new Congress are determined to implement the anti-life agenda which they spelled out before the election, I foresee the next several years as being among the most divisive in our nation’s history. If their proposals should be initiated and enacted, it would be impossible for the American bishops to repeat in the future what their predecessors described the United States in 1884 as “this home of freedom.”

While reflecting about the profoundly negative impact of Obama’s vision on the humanum (and also of Biden’s), I recalled how current are the reflections of Mauriac upon his contemporary, an influential European author. Even though Mauriac disagreed with him on almost every point, he acknowledged his great intelligence and personal attraction. “But under all that grace and charm there was a tautness of will, a clenched jaw, a state of constant alertness to detect and resist any external influence which might threaten his independence. A state of alertness? That is putting it mildly: beneath each word he wrote, he was carrying on sapping operations against the enemy city where a daily fight was going on.”.

Similar characteristics were evident in Senator Obama’s talk before Planned Parenthood supporters on July 17, 2007 - tautness of will, a clenched jaw, etc. - where he asserted, “We are not only going to win this election but also we are going to transform this nation . . . The first thing I will do as President is to sign The Freedom of Choice Act . . . I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law . . . On this issue I will not yield.” During a town meeting in March 2008 in Johnstown, Pa., he spoke with equal determination on the necessity of universal sex education for preteens and teens, “I don’t want my daughters punished with a baby.” The President-elect did not qualify in any way the methods his single daughters might employ in the event they needed to avoid being “punished with a baby,” that is, giving birth to his grandchild. Obama’s vision is modernist and rooted in the Enlightenment. The content and rhetoric of Obama and Biden have elements similar to those described earlier: aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.

Catholics weep over Barack Obama’s words. We weep over the violence concealed behind his rhetoric and that of Joseph Biden and what appears to be that of the majority of the incoming Congress. What should we do with our hot, angry tears of betrayal?

First, our tears are agonistic. Secondly, we must acknowledge that the model for our tears is ancient. Over the next few years, Gethsemane will not be a marginal garden to us. . . .

(Via Amy Welborn)

Overheated partisan rhetoric can create the impression that the world is divided between crypto-communists and heartless capitalists, but philosopher Christopher Tollefsen urges a subtler analysis. The gist of Tollefsen’s argument is that we should acknowledge welfare rights, but it does not follow that we should support welfare states.

This lucid and helpful essay demonstrates that Public Discourse is living up to its ambition to clarify and advance our most important contemporary political debates. In just over a month, it has become a valuable resource–I strongly recommend frequent visits.

After reading our daily article by Fr. Neuhaus—a particularly pointed call to Christians “never [to] surrender to the cultural captivity that is the delusion of ‘Christ without culture’”—you might look at George Weigel’s reflection on “The Two Americas,” posted today at EPPC:

By the dawn’s early light on Nov. 5, two distinct Americas hove into view. The two Americas are not defined by conventional economic, ethnic or religious categories; it’s not rich America vs. poor America, black America vs. white America, or Catholic America vs. Protestant America.

No, what this year’s election cycle clarified decisively is that the great public fissure in these United States is between the culture of life and the culture of death.

In 1995, when Pope John Paul II introduced the phrase “culture of death” in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (”The Gospel of Life”), more than a few commentators coughed politely and tried to suggest, if gently, that this terminology was a bit over-the-top—too dramatic, too confrontational, incapable of being heard by those it was intended to persuade.

Thirteen years later, it is obvious that the critics were wrong and John Paul the Great was right.

“What is to be done?” Weigel asks, and goes on to sketch the key ways that we can and must stem the tide of the culture of death through legislation and education. This is a task which affects and calls each American, for on its base level the culture of life is not Christian per se, but human: It is a culture in which man recognizes and is accorded his essential rights and responsibilities.

Yet the challenge, as Fr. Neuhaus reminds, is one that has particular bearing on the Christian, who may be called to sacrifice for his faith much that he holds dear—even to the point of life itself. How Christians might share the Cross in the time ahead remains to be seen, but this is sure: Nothing will be won without the power of the Cross, and nothing will be lost with it. As Weigel concludes, “And we need prayer—lots of it. Some demons require special powers to exorcize. As of Nov. 5, it is clear that certain of them have taken up residence in the United States of America.”

Over-the-top, too dramatic? I pray we won’t need to answer.

Or so the history of children’s literature is usually told. That history, however, is wrong. J.K. Rowling’s success doesn’t just give us a recent series to add as an incidental to the received canon. It also gives us a chance to rewrite the entire list of classic children’s books we’re all supposed to know—for Rowling makes visible the fact that we are actually living now in a golden age of children’s literature.

That’s Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, in his latest article, “Children’s Books, Lost and Found,” which can be found both in print in the December issue of First Things and online as our bonus article this month. Our features editor R.R. Reno recently interviewed Bottum about his article and the current state of children’s literature and you may listen to their conversation below.

Around the office, one of our favorite pieces to have published is “The Giving Tree: A Symposium,” in which we asked various contributors to comment on Shel Silverstein’s story. It appears that someone else has a retelling of the story, one in which the tree is not quite as forgiving as he seemed at first.

You may have already heard about golfer J.P. Hayes, whose honesty last week wound up costing him a shot on the PGA tour:

Hayes shot a 74 Wednesday and a 71 on Thursday, putting him in good shape to finish in the top 20 and advance to the final qualifying stage in December.

But on Thursday night in his hotel room, Hayes realized that [an] errant golf ball might not have been on the approved list.

“It was a Titleist prototype, and somehow it had gotten into my bag,” he said, according to the Journal Sentinel. “It had been four weeks since Titleist gave me some prototype balls and I tested them. I have no idea how or why it was still in there.”

Hayes had a choice: He could have said nothing and kept playing, with no one aware of his mistake. Or he could turn himself in and let his mistake cost him a 2009 PGA Tour card.

He chose the latter.

ESPN’s Jason Sobel reminds us, however, that this sort of integrity is not uncommon in the “gentleman’s game”:

J.P. Hayes’ recent decision to disqualify himself from the second stage of the PGA Tour qualifying tournament after inadvertently playing with a nonconforming golf ball has elicited deserved applause from those who respect his honesty. The decision also has sparked debate over why such practice isn’t applied to other sports.

Of course, such glorification for this gesture will appear a bit overblown in golf’s inner circle, where it goes without saying that this was the only proper conclusion. As Bobby Jones said after receiving commendation for issuing himself a 2-stroke penalty during a playoff in the 1925 U.S. Open, “You may as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.”

He founded Family Theater Productions in Hollywood, which produced some 600 radio and T.V. shows, airing a total of 10,000 broadcasts. Such film elites as Loretta Young, Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby, and Lucille Ball appeared on his programs. The goal?–to promote prayer and fidelity. The audience?–Christian families. The inspiration and patrons?–Christ and his mother.

“The family that prays together, stays together,” Fr. Patrick Peyton (1909–1992) was fond of saying, coining a phrase that has entered the list of Christian truisms. And, hopefully along the way, it has entered some hearts and homes, too.

With the celebration of a Mass today in Baltimore, reports the LA Times, the official investigation in Fr. Peyton’s cause for canonization will begin:

Three priests from Baltimore’s archdiocese will spend much of their time reviewing the documents and examining witnesses to prepare Peyton’s sainthood case for a three-step process in Rome that requires evidence of two posthumous miracles: a declaration of heroic values, then beatification and canonization, or sainthood.

“Saints are heroes to those of us trying to live our faith,” said the Rev. Gilbert Seitz, one of the priests who will review documents and examine witnesses. “We want to know and learn about them and emulate them.”

The “heroic values” of Fr. Peyton might not make for a thrilling tale or poignant film, no Golden Legend or Scarlet and the Black. His are the heroic values of the living room, and kitchen, and mini-van, and ball field–and they matter no less for that.

If any of you miss the writings of our former managing editor, Anthony Sacramone, or enjoyed his previous career as Luther at the Movies, rejoice and be glad. Anthony will continue to write for us, but now has his own blog as well. Strange Herring is like a funnier, less serious First Things, so when the gravity of the world begins to be, well, grave, visit Anthony for some Lutheran relief.

The Times of London has a troubling story today on Hindu extremists in the Indian province of Orissa who are offering rewards to those who kill Christians:

Extremist Hindu groups offered money, food, and alcohol to mobs to kill Christians and destroy their homes, according to Christian aid workers in the eastern state of Orissa. . . .

The U.S.-based head of a Christian organization that runs several orphanages in Orissa–one of India’s poorest regions–claims that Christian leaders are being targeted by Hindu militants and carry a price on their heads. “The going price to kill a pastor is $250 (£170),” Faiz Rahman, the chairman of Good News India, said.

A spokesman for the All-India Christian Council said: “People are being offered rewards to kill, and to destroy churches and Christian properties. They are being offered foreign liquor, chicken, mutton, and weapons. They are given petrol and kerosene.”

(via Rod Dreher)