A couple additions from The Tablet on the subject of yesterday’s Limited Commemorations, pointing out that much of the worrisome statements comes from liberal organizations:

The Hitler Test, in which a Weekly Standard writer argues that

The editors of magazines and newspapers have a responsibility as gatekeepers of polite society. It turns out the gatekeepers haven’t been vigilant. We live in a culture where the social taboo against anti-black racism is so fierce that violating the taboo means certain expulsion from polite company. But the very reverse process is taking place when it comes to anti-Semitism: The taboo is being rapidly eroded, and those who ought to confront it are enabling it.

And Sounding Off, in which a Wired writer who describes himself as a Jewish leftist, argues that

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric . . . . “Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. . . . This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

“Hatred targeting Jews and Judaism remain disproportionately high,” writes the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in an article on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, observed every January 27th. I’m not, by the way, sure what a “proportionately high” degree of hatred would be. This is why writers need editors. In any case, Rabbi Abraham Cooper gives several examples, including

Egypt Everyone is courting the electorally victorious, supposedly “moderate” Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the group’s first move was to block Jewish prayers at the graveside of a saintly scholar and its Arabic language webpages tout Holocaust denial while a spokesmen observes that the Shoah is “a tale” exploited for politics, and that “the entire world, and Germany in particular, has become yearly scapegoats of world Zionism, and has capitulated to the greatest political extortion in history.” No western democracy has condemned the Brotherhood’s religious intolerance.

Latvia A Riga court removed the city council’s ban on “Legion Day” paving the way for a march down main street honoring 140,000 Latvians who fought in the Waffen SS during WWII.

There is a gap between lamenting the murder of  Jews back then and rejecting anti-semitism today. The latter may have costs people don’t want to pay. In my experience, people who are normally very sensitive to the slightest expression of prejudice wherever they are found are often weirdly insouciant about expressions of prejudice against Jews. Imagine if an Afrikaner group in a city in South Africa tried to organize a march celebrating the Apartheid years and the howls we’d hear. But Latvians marching in memory of the SS. I didn’t hear any squeaks, much less howls. That insouciance is good reason to be more than usually alert to such things.

One of the examples Cooper gives is from the Friends Seminary, which is just a few blocks from the First Things office. Here’s Alan Dershowitz’s article on the event and the Seminary’s response.

First Things has a long and implacable commitment to the defense of unborn life and an equally long and implacable resistance to all the philosophies that seek to justify the utilitarian treatment of such life. Here’s a selection of articles, all of the most recent ones and a selection of past articles from the magazine and the “On the Square” section of our website—but only a selection, because we’ve published so much on the subject.

From the magazine:

Richard John Neuhaus’s The End of Abortion and the Meanings of “Christian America”.

Nicholas Windsor’s Caesar’s Thumb.

Joseph Bottum’s The Signpost at the Crossroads.

Russell Hittinger’s Abortion Before Roe.

Richard Stith’s Her Choice, Her Problem.

Frederica Mathewes-Green’s Abortion in the Tide of Culture.

Terry Teachout’s Abortion, Set to Music.

Bernard N. Nathanson’s The Abortion Cocktail.

Killing Abortionists: A Symposium.

From On the Square:

Eve Tushnet’s Grotesquerie and Grief: Abortion in Horror Media.

Joseph W. Dellapenna’s Recycling the Myths of Abortion History.

Ryan T. Anderson’s Parsing Abortion Statistics and the Law.

Elizabeth Powers’ Slavery and Abortion.

For future planning, Fordham’s Natural Law Colloquium will be offering a lecture on The Natural Law Origins of the American Right to Privacy by Anita L. Allen of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It will be held on Wednesday, March 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the McNally Amphitheatre at the niversity’s Law School.

The Colloquium’s home page has a picture of St. Thomas’s writing, which is kind of cool.

Mercedes has apologized (but only “to those who took offense”) for using Che Guevara as a symbol, which I mentioned in yesterday’s The Benz and the Psychopath. The company’s statement:

In his keynote speech at CES, Dr. Zetsche addressed the revolution in automobility enabled by new technologies, in particular those associated with connectivity. To illustrate this point, the company briefly used a photo of revolutionary Che Guevara (it was one of many images and videos in the presentation). Daimler was not condoning the life or actions of this historical figure or the political philosophy he espoused. We sincerely apologize to those who took offense.

A friend sent me the link to the grimly amusing El Che: The Crass Marketing of a Sadistic Racist by the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Gonzalez. Mercedes Benz, it turns out, just launched a new car in front of a giant picture of Che Guavara with the Mercedes Benz symbol on his beret.

They used the picture in service of announcing a new gadget that would let owners find people to share rides.  ”Some colleagues still think that car-sharing borders on communism,” declared their chairman of the board. ”But if that’s the case, viva la revolucion!”

There’s something smarmily over-dramatic about claiming the gadget to be communistic or revolutionary. But okay, smarmily over-dramatic is what the boys in the advertising department do. Rather worse is their choice of icon. Gonzalez writes:

Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure. He had, moreover, little time for youthful rebellion and none at all for individualism. Lastly, Che Guevara was a racist who specifically held blacks in contempt.

Here, with a great deal more evidence, is Alvaro Vargas Llosa on Che, in an article originally published in The New Republic.

As I’ve commented before, the people who would recoil in horror, and rightly so, from a t-shirt bearing a romanticized image of Himmler or Eichmann do not even notice the image of men who were their equal in wickedness. Especially Che Guavara. He’s cool. Maybe it’s the beret.

But there is, as others have undoubtedly said, something very pleasing in the thought that he’s now just  consumer symbol and an advertising gimmick. One hopes he knows.

My thanks to Mark Barrett for the link.

For those of you near Columbia, South Carolina: a symposium on Religion in the Civil War, to be held on Saturday, January 28th. The keynote speaker is the historian George C. Rable, author of God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the Civil War, which both won the Jefferson Davis award and was praised by the New York Review of Books.

The first speaker, Joe Long, may be familiar to readers of “While We’re At It.”

An English Catholic bishop makes what to some of us is an obvious point: Bishop asks if church should stop funding schools that are ‘Catholic in name only”. The Bishop of Lancaster, Michael Campbell, wrote in his new year’s day pastoral letter that parishes needed to “address some demanding questions that will grow larger the longer we put them off”:

Is it right or sustainable to expect our Mass-going population of 21,000 to support our schools and colleges in which often the majority of pupils, and sometimes teachers, are not practising Catholics? Is it time for us to admit that we can no longer maintain schools that are Catholic in name only?

Faced with fewer priests and smaller congregations, where should our parishes and schools of the future be located? Where should we consolidate and merge others?

Granted, the schools can be organs of evangelization — one of the arguments for reducing their overt presentation of the Catholic faith — but they are also, as schools, primarily ways of passing an intellectual and cultural heritage and therefore a way of maintaining an identity through generations. Only when do they do this well can they be effective ways of evangelizing others. As the Bishop of Nottingham who chairs the Catholic Education Service of England and Wales, Malcolm McMahon, said  (more…)

Dr. Margaret Barker will be giving the 2012 Fr. Alexander Schmemann Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary in Yonkers on Sunday, January 29th at 4:00 p.m. The lecture will be titled “Our Great High Priest: The Church as the New Temple.” Barker, according to the seminary’s announcement,

has received wide recognition for her fascinating scholarship, based on the premise that early Christian theology matured so quickly because it was a return to a far older faith. Dr. Barker believes that those who preserved the ancient tradition rejected the second temple and longed for the restoration of the original true temple and the faith of Abraham, and of Melchizedek, the first priest-king. In her writings, she refutes the scholarly assumption that crucial Christian concepts such as the Trinity, the earth as a reflection of heaven, and the cosmic structure of the atonement, are informed by Greek culture. Rather, she argues, they are drawn from the eclipsed faith of the first temple.

The public is invited. The seminary is a short walk from the Crestwood Station on the Metro North line. Commuter train and driving directions can be found here.

To balance yesterday’s rather optimistic “On the Square” article The Potomac and the Tiber—I don’t myself see much reason to believe that Gingrich has been affected by Catholic social teaching—here is a different view of Gingrich’s character, Newt the Destroyer.

Thirteen years later [after Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House rather than face angry Republican colleagues he'd managed to tick off yet again], it was tough for Newt-watchers to feel any sympathy, when he whined about the incoming attacks mounted by a Romney-supporting super-PAC. His bleating about negative campaigning was, given this historical perspective, farcical. His claim that Romney was a “liar” carried little heft—after all, Gingrich himself had recently displayed his penchant for prevarication, such as when he claimed he had been paid by Freddie Mac for performing duties as a “historian.”

But a presidential candidate scorned can be a dangerous thing. Gingrich has never had a self-esteem problem. His ego is supersized. And with his late-autumn jump in the polls, he, no doubt, was measuring himself for a crown. (Tiffany’s?) He all but declared his ascendancy was inevitable. Yet then that nasty super-PAC came along and…told the truth about Gingrich, in killer attack ads, behaving much as Gingrich had always counseled GOPers to act. In a 1978 address to College Republicans, before he was elected to the House, Gingrich declared, “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Well, if his goal back then was to nastify the GOP, he can proudly proclaim, “Mission Accomplished.”

It’s from a lefty magazine, admittedly, but it’s at least as plausible as the idea of Gingrich as an exponent of Catholic social teaching. Here and here are Mother Jones‘ take on Santorum’s chances. They’re fairly fair, except for the stupid summary of Santorum’s views in the third to last paragraph of the second.

By the way, readers interested in Catholic social teaching (which you’ll sometimes see referred to as “CST”) will want to read The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, also available as a book. It’s a very good summary of the subject, though at times a little quick or abstract in its explanations, and readers pursuing the subject will want to read the major encyclicals as well, starting with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (here is a useful summary).

“If the Occupiers were right about one thing, it was that there is a growing inequality in American life,” writes David Paul Deavel in One Percent or 33: America’s Real Inequality Problem in the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty. But to the extent they articulate any explanation, they leave out a very important one, one he thinks explained in great and persuasive detail by Mitch Pearlstein in From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation. Pearlstein, writes Deavel,

focuses on the 33 percent. This is the percent of children living with one parent rather than two. These children, victims of what many call “family fragmentation,” start out with tremendous social and educational deficits that are hard to narrow, nevermind close. These are most often the children for whom upward mobility has stalled. Their economic well-being has led to decline in American competitiveness and also the deeper cleavages of inequality that have been so widely noted.

One (this is me, not Deavel) doesn’t have to discount the wickedness of bankers to see that a dysfunctional family will severely reduce most children’s ability to live successfully in a world in which bankers are wicked. One might, as Chesterton did, suggest a connection between the bankers’ self-interest and their promotion of programs that destabilize and undermine the family. (Who invests in this stuff, after all?) This would seem to be a n0-brainer for the Occupiers. But the sexual revolution and its effects on the formation of children is one of those aspects of the contemporary establishment of which those earnest critics of the establishment are oblivious.  Judging from Deavel’s review, Mitch Pearlstein sees it clearly.

An fyi, though I can find no information on the web about it: On February 27th, the G. K. Chesterton Institute (publisher of The Chesterton Review, on whose board I sit) and the American Bible Society will be sponsoring a conference on  Chesterton and the Bible. It will be held at the ABS’s headquarters in Manhattan. More information when I have it.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation for Catholics. Here, for those who might find it helpful, is something I wrote last year giving a hit-and-run introduction to the dogma: Delivered From All Stain.

For those of you interested in the changes in the new Mass, beyond those explained by Anthony Esolen in Restoring the Words (November), my friend Mike Aquilina has written a popular article on “And with your spirit”, just published by The Priest. The experts have picked out the restoration of “spirit” as a significant change, he notes:

The U.S. bishop most intensely involved with the promotion of the new translation, Cardinal Francis George, has singled out this response as somehow illustrative of the whole project. But that’s not all. The American hierarch who has been most critical of the new translation, Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, has tagged this particular change as problematic — and illustrative of the problems he had with the entire project.

That one additional word, Mike argues, for example, conveys a more developed and explicit understanding of what the priest is doing and the role of the laity in the Mass.

(more…)

A great story about a man who felt himself lucky in circumstances many of us would have felt unfortunate if not cursed: the story of Hugh Mulcahy, who played in the majors for a terrible team and lost twice as many games as he won, and then spent five years fighting in World War II, and never really got a chance to pitch for a good team. And yet, as I say, felt himself a lucky man.

Thanks to Mark Barrett for the link.

In my Occupy Wall Street’s Empty Anger on Monday, I wrote about the group — for whom “movement” would be too binding a term — and its lack of any end or purpose that would make their anger effective — to the extent that anger isn’t part of an inner personal drama projected onto public life. Which I think, let me stress, a bad thing. Along the same lines, Rod Dreher calls them “decadent, in the sense of unserious, narcissistic, and sometimes flat-out ridiculous.” Which he thinks, let me stress, a bad thing.

Following a link from a friend dealing with an entirely unrelated matter, I came across An Exchange on the Left between the socialist writers Irving Howe and Philip Rahv, published in a late 1967 issue of The New York Review of Books. (And their remarks are similar to those of George Orwell, which I posted in Socialism’s Magnetic Force.)

It bears upon the matter at hand. Howe begins his response to an essay of Rahv’s:

Radicalism is again becoming chic in the intellectual world, a fate not even its worst enemies could suppose it to deserve. This is not, to be sure, the radicalism of desperate Negroes and disaffected youth which, for all its political failings, is at least grounded in urgent experience. (more…)

When writing yesterday’s “On the Square” column, Occupy Wall Street’s Empty Anger, I reread parts of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. The crowd at Zuccotti Park reminds me of the famous lines from the book in which Orwell describes the developed form of socialism as “a theory confined entirely to the middle classes.” After describing such socialists, and not kindly, he remarks on

the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

He then describes riding on a bus when

two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple.

Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured “Socialists,” as who should say, “Red Indians.”

Not a cheery view of socialism, but then Orwell was himself a socialist. Seventy years later, we can feel his pain (I don’t mean that sarcastically). He would write similarly, I think, of Occupy Wall Street, and for the same reason.

You can find the chapter in which these lines appear here.

In Virtual Deity, our friend and writer Maureen Mullarkey reflects on the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. “Without a doubt, King is owed a memorial in the company of statesmen,” she writes. “But whether he—and we—deserve this particular one is less clear.”

The byways and limited victories of historical reality are too many and too intricate for formal commemoration. This 4-acre memorial on the National Mall enshrines King’s iconic status in the American imagination and communal memory. In doing so, it necessarily erases the continuum of which he was part. Granted, monumental sculpture is intended to transpose into image those myths chosen to become artifacts of memory—that is its public function. Still, the grandiose aura of sanctity that informs the King memorial tilts toward idolatry. It carries a certain falsity, a hint of bathos, that speaks more poignantly of our own cultural moment than of his.

After you read this article, you will want to look at the articles Maureen has written for “On the Square”:

Modernity’s Seductive Hedges

The Popular Myth of Convivencia

Selected Watercolors from James Tissot’s Life of Christ

Faith Behind Glass

You will also want to look at her website, which includes both her own art work and her blog “Studio Matters.”

A reminder of tomorrow’s evening’s lecture here at the office, at which the writer and director of the Off-Broadway production of The Screwtape Letters, now touring the country, speaks on the craft of writing plays and the calling of the Christian artist. Come hear Jeffrey Fiske speak on “The Airborne Rangers of Theatre.” Details here.

A reminder: We invite you to attend a talk by playwright Jeffrey Fiske on the evening of Wednesday, October 26th, at 6:00 p.m. Jeffrey is an independent playwright and director, best known for writing and directing the Off-Broadway production of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. I saw the play, and it was very good, and have been privileged to have one long talk with Jeffrey about his work. I learned a lot about the craft of writing plays just from that one talk.

He will be speaking on “The Airborne Rangers of Theater: Christians in the Performing Arts” at the magazine’s office at 35 East 21st Street, Sixth Floor (between Broadway and Park and a few blocks north of Union Square). A wine and cheese reception will follow.

For more information or to RSVP click here.

C. S. Lewis fans will want to know about the New York C. S. Lewis Society. The group meets the second Friday of every month in the parish house of an Episcopal church on West 11th Street in Manhattan, and publish a bi-monthly bulletin, which usually features a substantial essay on Lewis.

I went last night to hear my old friend Kevin Offner speak on “Lewis’s ‘Theology of Salvation’ in the Narnia Chronicles.” He gave a very interesting talk, both drawing out Lewis’s understanding of salvation from the stories and showing how he illustrated it in the stories.

He pointed out, for example, how Lewis emphasized the importance of human action by making their actions crucial and urgent, and having the result depend upon their arriving in time, or (sometimes) not. Even Aslan has to hurry the characters along, in one scene (in which book I can’t remember, though Kevin said) pawing the ground impatiently because the children won’t get moving. I’d always assumed this was just part of writing an exciting story for children.

I’ll be speaking to them, but not until April 2013. (They plan ahead.)

Some of you will want to know about a new journal being produced by graduate students at the University of Dallas’s Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts. Ramify is published annually, and the editions for 2010 and 2011 are out. The articles, written by Dallas professors, graduate students, and graduates, tilt to the philosophical and literary. Among articles in the first two issues are “Freiedrich Nietzsche and the Phenomenology of Prayer,” “Demonic Possession and Milton’s Sons of God,” “Wineskin or Windbag? Elihu and the Problem of Justice in the Book of Job,” and “An Analysis of Gilson’s Historical Method and Treatment of Neoplatonism.”

For more information about Ramify, click here.

For those interested in alternative political thinking, the “Red Tory” writer Philip Blond will be speaking at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service on Friday at 4:00. To register for his talk on “The Broken Society vs. the Big Society,” click here. A few articles on Blond and Red Toryism:

The Problem With Phillip Blond: He’s Wrong About Markets from the Wall Street Journal.

Rise of the Red Tories from the English magazine Prospect.

The NS Profile from the English magazine The New Statesman.

Philip Blond’s Red Toryism from adamsmith.org.

David Brooks on Philip Blond from the New York Times.

Patrick Deneen on Philip Blond from a Cato Institute symposium.

For those of you in the part of the country where Eastern Catholicism is mostly to be found (New Jersey and Maryland straight across to Michigan, for the most part), a concert series you will want to know about: The seminary choir from the Blessed Paul Gojdich Seminary in Presov, Slovakia, will be performing from September 24th to October 23rd. Here is their schedule and here is the program. The series is called, as you may have guessed already, “Let the Earth be Glad!”

I have not heard this choir, but last year went to a similar concert given by the choir from the Ukrainian Catholic seminary, and it was wonderful. Not to be missed, which is not something I say very often.

A report on an encouraging conference — attended by Leroy Huizenga, author of several recent “On the Square” articles — held by the Catholic bishops’ doctrine committee for young (untenured) Catholic theologians: Young Theologians Encouraged to Confront ‘The Intellectual Tasks of the New Evangelization by Joan Frawley Desmond. Among the addresses was one by Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia, secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and FIRST THINGS contributor (Jesus and the World Religions and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas):

At the symposium, Archbishop DiNoia explored related themes in an often passionate address. The work of a Catholic theologian “is not simply an academic vocation. It is an ecclesial vocation,” he stated. The task at hand required an affirmation of the “doctrinal core of the Catholic faith” and a concerted effort to address the “internal and external factors” that impede the New Evangelization.

He counseled his audience not to allow academic specialization and speculative work to lead them to ignore the fullness of the Church’s teaching.

Archbishop DiNoia, a member of the Order of Preachers, observed that St. Thomas Aquinas mastered every aspect of Catholic theology and would never have divided it up into patristics, systematic theology, bioethics and other areas of specialization.

The fragmentation of theological work has resulted in the weakening of the holistic vision and power of Revelation, he said. “You have to keep asking yourself: What does this have to do with . . . the central doctrines of the faith?” he said. “The part you specialize in relates to the whole.”