It’s no secret that one major undercurrent of the same-sex marriage movement is the desire to change the marriage culture—family and childrearing norms, for instance—not simply to realize the practical benefits of marriage. But once a redefined marriage culture is in place, one wonders whether marriage will continue to matter at all to those who at one time touted it as the panacea for same-sex woes.

In yesterday’s Times, Columbia Law School professor Katherine M. Franke opined that, while some gay couples may wish to get on board with marriage, others don’t see the “one-size-fits-all rules of marriage” as the ideal setup for the kinds of arrangements some same-sex relationships demand. She goes on,

Here’s why I’m worried: Winning the right to marry is one thing; being forced to marry is quite another. How’s that? If the rollout of marriage equality in other states, like Massachusetts, is any guide, lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners will be required by both public and private employers to marry their partners in order to keep those rights. In other words, “winning” the right to marry may mean “losing” the rights we have now as domestic partners, as we’ll be folded into the all-or-nothing world of marriage.

After “winning the right to marry,” Franke argues, couples uninterested in marriage risk being “forced to marry” in order to keep their domestic partnership rights. She wonders further why couples should have to seek marriage at all if they seek mainly to have their relationships “recognized and valued.”

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Joe Carter’s column this week draws on the autobiographical to illustrate an important point of comparison between workers in the world of labor and their counterparts in the world of ideas: Both idealize the other’s lot; but, as Carter argues, the two life courses are different in kind, and neither benefits from undue idealization:

Of course there’s nothing wrong with wanting to talk about ideas, even the idea of how manual labor can lead to an intellectually fulfilling life—a theory I fully endorse. But the ideas about work proffered by agrarian academics and garage-dreaming cubicle workers are hardly the same as those of real farmers and trade workers. If we ask manual laborers to speak for themselves, we may find that they view manual work as work and shop class as a place for crafting stuff, not souls.

George Weigel’s column this week makes an argument not about theology or the role of the Church in the world, but baseball. Weigel makes the case for including 61* among baseball’s all-time greatest films:

61* is not flawless. It’s crude at one or two points (but so was the Commerce Comet, Mantle). The computer imaging of old Yankee Stadium (not the redesigned one just torn down but the original House That Ruth Built) is a little shaky, as is the re-creation of Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, site of most of my sacred baseball memories. A few bits of casting are off: Neither Whitey Ford nor Ralph Houk looks quite right. Nonetheless, it’s a terrific film.

The movement advancing same-sex marriage has of late been preoccupied with preeminence more than debate, better thriving in the echo chambers of Ivy League classrooms and judges’ chambers than the dialectic of town halls. But a culture of self-congratulation is hardly the context for honing the art of persuasion. What passes for an argument these days–at least in the mind of newspaper editors–is truly astounding.

Today’s Star Tribune published this letter to the editor from Minneapolis resident Robert Alberti :

The lowest temperature this year was minus 22 in January, while on Tuesday, the high was 103 — a range of 125 degrees. We Minnesotans take that incredible diversity in stride like few other places in the world.

Can’t the state that tolerates these temperature differences also embrace a wide range of marriage types? Passing a constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to heterosexual unions would be like passing an amendment restricting the weather to 68 degrees and sunny.

Both amendments would be futile and would undermine what makes Minnesota one of the most special places on Earth: our diversity in all things.

(Via: Mark Shea)

Joe Carter’s column today explores the unsettling extent to which Ayn Rand, the ill-chosen hero of some conservatives and libertarians, finds a twin in Anton LaVey, the founder of modern satanism:

Perhaps most are unaware of the connection, though LaVey wasn’t shy about admitting his debt to his inspiration. “I give people Ayn Rand with trappings,” he once told the Washington Post. On another occasion he acknowledged that his brand of Satanism was “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.” Indeed, the influence is so apparent that LaVey has been accused of plagiarizing part of his “Nine Satanic Statements” from the John Galt speech in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

George Weigel’s column profiles Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the 40-year-old episcopal leader of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine:

Major-Archbishop Shevchuk is 40, and if he becomes a cardinal shortly after his predecessor, Cardinal Lubomir Husar, turns 80 in 2013, Shevchuk will be the youngest member of the College of Cardinals in over a century.

…

Since his enthronement, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk has reached out to the Orthodox communities in Ukraine as well as to the leadership of Russian Orthodoxy, making clear his interests in genuine dialogue, real problem-solving, and joint work to repair the vast human damage done to Ukraine by 70-plus years of communism.

Joe Carter’s column this week argues that opinion polls make us dumb—but not simply because they’re often inaccurate. Instead, it’s that opinion polls themselves can seem to instruct the public on how to form opinions:

If you are told that the president’s approval rating is 95 percent, then you are more likely also to approve of the job he is doing. Likewise, if his rating is low, then your opinion is also likely to be low. If you take a view contrary to the poll’s suggested opinion, then you will be the one put on the defensive—even if your opinion is based on a weighing of relevant facts and evidence.

George Weigel’s On the Square essay this week sets the record straight for a number of Catholic theologians who sent a missive to House Speaker John Boehner, arguing he was out of communion with established Catholic teaching on caring for the poor. It seems that some theological liberals are tired of seeing only liberal politicians chastised for their divided loyalties, but their reaction only created more confusion on the Church’s social teaching:

The Church’s concern for the poor does not imply a “preferential option” for Big Government. The social doctrine teaches that the problem of poverty is best addressed by empowerment: enabling poor people to enter the circle of productivity and exchange in society.

Joe Carter’s column this week ponders Harold Camping’s most egregious flaw in his prediction of Judgment Day. It wasn’t, mind you, his inaccuracy or even his scandal to non-Christians, but, as Carter argues, his desire to reduce the gospel to a matter of mere calculation, and failing to place faith in Providence’s designs for the day of judgment:

The same could be said about the message of the Christian faith. The gospel should be presented as reasonably as possible, but not so reasonably that it excludes faith. After all, God has not recruited us to be spin-doctors for the church; he calls us to be fools for Christ. As Camping continually proves, we are likely to be fools anyway. We might as well strive to become the right kind of fools.

George Weigel argues today that the Catholic Church in Poland, as it develops its public voice, should honor the vision of John Paul II not by looking to him as the apex of Polish life after which all is in decline. Instead, the Poles should cast their nets still deeper:

Polish Catholicism should adopt this future-oriented stance. Remembering the John Paul II years should now be a remembering in service to the future. The 21st century Church in Poland must take up John Paul’s challenge in the 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio and re-imagine itself as a Church that is a mission, not an institution for which mission is one among many activities. Or as John Paul put it in closing the Great Jubilee of 2000, the Church must leave the shallow water of institutional maintenance and put out “into the deep” of the New Evangelization.

Joe Carter’s column this week coins the term “X-Cons,” the conservative subset of Generation X which takes great pains to distinguish itself from the Baby Boomer mindset. Carter provides a compelling sketch of what to look for in an archetypical X-Con, including, among many other points, the religious worldview of the group:

X-Cons tend to be extremely religious in a “mere Christianity” sort of way. Although our political views are often shaped by our theology, we are willing to cross theological lines to forge political alliances. We’re the children of the Moral Majority; we tend to be either Catholic-friendly evangelicals or evangelical-influenced Catholics. We can’t understand why conservative Protestants and Catholics fought each other rather than with the true enemy: godless liberalism.

George Weigel’s column points convincingly to the danger of viewing Osama bin Laden’s death as a mere practical victory in the battle against jihadism. But there are many problems bin Laden’s death will not solve, making it all the more important to view it primarily as a freestanding act of justice.

As usual, Rutgers University’s James Turner Johnson got it exactly right: bin Laden’s death was “an execution of justice, plain and simple, carried out under the authority of the one who can properly use bellum (war) in the service of good.” And why is it important to grasp this? Because if soft-minded and ill-informed religious leaders and intellectuals succeed in gutting the just war tradition and loosening our public culture’s grasp on it, the only alternative will be a raw pragmatism that justifies any end and any means.

Back in 2006, at the height of Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion much ado, Terry Eagleton wrote a singeing review of Dawkins’ work in the London Review of Books, the first line of which gives some indication of his general impression of it:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Stephen Hawking is no Richard Dawkins, and by that I mainly mean Richard Dawkins is no Stephen Hawking. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hawking has indeed read the Book of British Birds. But that doesn’t mean Hawking sounds good when we read him on theology. In a decidedly Dawkinsian moment, yesterday’s Guardian published an interview in which Hawking compared heaven to a “fairy story” for “people afraid of the dark.”

You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

It’s the usual critique of religion-as-wish-fulfillment, coupled with Hawking’s philosophical materialism. But, as usual, the usual arguments are well and ready for a response. Those acquainted with Ivan Karamazov will recall his apparent belief that if there is no God, anything is permitted. One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism. And second, if heaven is merely a fairy story peddled to believers to console them from fears and earthly suffering, why, we should ask, does the Christian tradition place so much emphasis on the possibility of hell?

Joe Carter’s column today explores an example of modern culture’s fascination with conspiracy theories. A more easygoing form of logic, the thrill and intrigue of drawing connections, and the ability to elevate proponents of such theories to the status of expert among other conspiracy theorists—all these make conspiracy theories irresistable for some. Or perhaps that’s just what they want us to think, such as in the case of the “Guantanamo Murders“:

…When you’re building a conspiracy theory you don’t want to obtain information that might discredit or undermine your belief. But while it is necessary not to ask too many questions when you are developing propaganda, it is no way to conduct award-winning investigative reporting.

George Weigel’s weekly column details a trip—or perhaps more of an outing—he made to Wyoming Catholic College, where scholarship and the great outdoors are both taught as much as they are lived:

…Wyoming Catholic College, where students read Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin, take a mandatory freshman course in horsemanship, and go on a three-week, survival-skills trek through the Rockies before they crack a book. Oh yes: At Wyoming Catholic, students are not allowed to have cell phones, but the college provides a gun room for their rifles. A visitor from the Ivy League found this combination disconcerting. I found it charming.

Joe Carter’s column today brings to light an example of one of the odder phenotypes in the conservative political spectrum–conservatives who put, as Carter says, “preference for procedure ahead of principle.” When dealing with the right to life, there is hardly room for political procedure not oriented toward the state’s most fundamental aim: protecting the lives of its citizens.

If any level of government fails to do its duty in defending and protecting the lives of its innocent citizens, it is the obligation of the other branches to compensate for the failure in governance. [Ron] Paul disagrees, preferring, when the two conflict, to defend federalism rather than the lives of the unborn.

George Weigel’s column also broaches matters political, noting that Catholics seem to have forgotten the true meaning of subsidiarity in recent political debates, construing it as statism:

Because this statist misreading of Catholic social thought often flies under the flag of “Justice for the Poor,” it’s important to underscore one crucial point as the 2012 debate unfolds, this year and next: Catholic social thought is about the empowerment of the poor. It is not about failed polices of social assistance that treat poor people as problems to be solved rather than as people with potential to be unleashed.

 

Joe Carter’s column today explores the impulse among some Christians to try to outdo Christ at his own game. Though a good number of Christian groups mandate teetotaling, Carter takes the Southern Baptist Convention to task for its disappointing effort to answer the question, “What Would Jesus Drink?“:

…While my fellow Southern Baptists consider Christ to be the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos, we would not consider him fit to serve as a trustee for the Southern Baptist Convention. Not only was Jesus a “user of alcoholic beverages” (Luke 7:33-34), but he had the audacity to turn perfectly good water into wine.

George Weigel’s column is a reminder that, as the beatification of John Paul II nears, we ought not to forget he was an everyday Christian disciple as much as an extraordinarily saint:

When the Church puts the title “Blessed” or “Saint” on someone, the person so honored often drifts away into a realm of the unapproachably good. We lose the sense that the saints are people just like us, who, by the grace of God, lived lives of heroic virtue: a truth of the faith of which John Paul II never ceased to remind us.

Growing up attending the “First Church of Hellfire and Damnation,” Joe Carter recounts that it wasn’t easy to warm up to Catholics, but the example of John Paul II quickly changed that. In today’s column he points to areas in which Evangelicals can learn something from Catholics–Marian theology, the sanctity of life, and ecclesiology.

I’m often amazed when I consider how much of my thinking is shaped by papist scholars’ writing about such issues as bioethics, social thought, natural law theory, and the Just War tradition. Although I do not always find myself in complete agreement with it, the Catholic perspective has caused me to rethink my views on such matters as contraception, in-vitro fertilization, just wages, and the death penalty.

And George Weigel offers reflections as he makes his way through Rome’s “station churches” this Lent, on the venerable custom, his forthcoming book on it, and on Pope Benedict’s newest Jesus of Nazareth title:

From at least the early fourth century, the Pope celebrated Mass during Lent with his clergy and the Roman Christian community at a designated “station” church. As Christianity became a more public faith, these “stations” were often basilicas built to honor Roman martyrs, constructed atop or around a former house church.

On Benedict XVI’s newest book, Weigel has few reservations about the sheer gravity of the pope’s scholarship:

Father Raymond de Souza has written that this second volume of the Pope’s projected three-volume masterwork on Jesus firmly establishes Joseph Ratzinger as the most learned man in the world. It’s a title the Holy Father would doubtless dismiss with his usual shy smile. A close reading of the book suggests that Father de Souza was not exaggerating.

In “Abortion and the Negation of Love,” Joe Carter sheds light on a side of the abortion debate not often given attention: the arguments against it coming–sometimes unintentionally–from the very women who procure and provide abortions.

“We in the movement, those of us in the clinics at the beginning, were so caught up in the early euphoria about winning a right to an abortion, we weren’t listening to what the patients were saying. They weren’t talking about abortion in the same way we were. They weren’t talking about the constitution or women’s rights. And many of them weren’t talking about a bunch of cells, either. They might call it ‘my baby,’ even though they were firm about going through with the procedure. Many of them expressed relief, but many also talked about sadness and loss. And we weren’t paying attention.”

George Weigel’s column this week, “Christians in the Middle East,” details the work of Dr. Habib Malik in exposing how Middle Eastern Christians both suffer from and benefit life in the Islamic world.

Middle East Christians today have had two distinct historical experiences. One is an experience of freedom. The other is an experience of being a dhimmi, a second-class citizen existing on the sufferance of the Muslim majority in an Islamic state.

Yesterday at Public Discourse, Archbishop Charles Chaput argued that we must keep in perspective the onslaught of offenses to traditional Christian life–threats to religion from the secular world, science unrestrained by ethics, and corrupted power–in relation to the most fundamental offense of them all. Being consistent, he suggests, means we cannot afford to treat abortion as a mere social woe, but should instead regard it as we would any other concrete evil in the world:

The moral and political struggle we face today in defending human dignity is becoming more complex. I believe that abortion is the foundational human rights issue of our lifetime. We can’t simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing of unborn children. We can’t build a just society, and at the same time, legally sanctify the destruction of generations of unborn human life. The rights of the poor and the rights of the unborn child flow from exactly the same human dignity guaranteed by the God who created us.

When then-senator Obama said during the 2008 campaign that he feared his daughters might be “punished with a baby” if not properly schooled in contraceptive practices, he probably thought the statement would be regarded as self-evidently reasonable. Among some it might.

Obama’s public viewpoint on sex falls within what some call “lifestyle liberalism,” treating moral instruction on sex as private and strictly confining public instruction on it to limiting its undesired consequences (or punishments, if you like). As far as the state is concerned, the greatest fallout from a sexual mistake is not a lessening of innocence, self-worth, or ability to be faithful, but the creation of new life–the punishment a baby brings.

It’s not hard to see that this utilitiarian view of sex can lead one to an almost purely economic approach to sexual ethics. What costs me time, money, health, or mental anguish is a negative consequence of sex, and what does the opposite for me is good. Unfortunately, it’s hard to work out this calculus until after the deed is done.

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Joe Carter’s column this week draws attention to recent efforts to stop capital punishment in Arizona on the grounds it “is not in keeping with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The state’s duty to enforce justice for murderers provides insight into the role of modern governments in dispensing authority from higher sources:

The passage by St. Paul is unambiguous: Governing authorities are instituted by God to carry out God’s wrath on the evildoer. Whether citizens of the State—including we Christians—recognize his Lordship over civil government is inconsequential; the Bible makes it clear that nations and rulers are servants of God.

George Weigel’s column brings to light recent disturbing developments in Spain, where it seems that World Youth Day participants will have their work cut out for them, and will have to resist the Stalinisit approach to religion taken in recent months by their government.

Textbooks were being rewritten to enforce the government’s leftist view of modern Spanish history; students aiming for admission to prestigious universities would be required to give the “correct” answers about such traumas as the Spanish Civil War in order to pass their entrance exams. Street names were being changed to eradicate the memory of the politically disfavored from Spain’s past.

Readers of our website have no doubt taken notice of the ad for our Junior Fellowship program, which for the two new recruits will begin this August. College students graduating this spring and recent collegians should look closely at this unique internship and be sure to send in their applications before April 15th.

Of the diverse field of internships available to recent college graduates, some offer a glimpse into the political scene of Washington, D.C. or the financial world of New York, while others promise a gateway to stardom as a mover and shaker in the world of ideas.  Few can deliver on these promises, and if they do deliver, they do so at the cost of intellectual life.

First Things‘s Junior Fellowship offers a synthesis of what so many other internships promise but cannot deliver: Constant contact with the issues and minds of the day in academic and cultural life; experience in the tradecraft of writing and editing; the lively engagement of New York City; and the most central demand of the job: rigorous wrestling with ideas.

All the while, you’ll accompany the sharp and experienced staff at the magazine as they continue the mission of Richard John Neuhaus. If ideas matter to you, First Things may already be a part of your life. If you’d like it to become an even more integral part, crack open the books, relight your midnight wick, and get to work on that application.

Along with a short description (250 words) of what you seek to learn through the Fellowship, applicants should send three references (at least one should know your writing or editing ability) and a resume, all by April 15th, to firstthingsfellows@firstthings.com.

Wednesday brings two of our On the Square web column’s most anticipated weekly pieces–Joe Carter’s and George Weigel’s. Today, Joe Carter brings to bear “Six Thoughts About Jesus.” Here’s just one of his keen and original insights, on the “What Would Jesus Do” phenomenon:

The question we should keep constantly before us is “What Would Jesus Want Me To Do?” But then WWJWMTD isn’t as easy to embroider on a bracelet or fit on a bumper sticker.

George Weigel examines the danger to Caritas International as it works with its secular counterparts, especially the concern that its Catholicism has grown “anemic.”

“Is there a uniquely Catholic approach to the global HIV pandemic? And if so, what is it?” Her first answer: “I fear that there may be people here in Vienna this week who would answer that it is one characterized by dogma, hypocrisy, moralizing, and condemnation.”

First in line “On the Square” today is Elizabeth Scalia‘s column, where she parses a particularly poisonous form of idolatry in the media:

Our ideological allegiances to these cults of personality have us slip-sliding into the sin of idolatry and everything that comes with it—a comfort level with truthiness that helps us to maintain our world views, a grim joylessness that permits no laughter and justifies tossing aside friends and family members who do not believe, and a bunker mentality that is ever on-guard for perceived heresies.

Second is Christopher Benson‘s essay on inclusivism, and its contention with exclusivist and universalist accounts of salvation theology. It’s sure to generate discussion in Evangelical circles, most notably given its focus on noted pastor Rob Bell’s controversial recent book on the topic.

Exclusivists and universalists are presumptive demographers: The former claims hell is crowded and the latter that hell is empty. By contrast, inclusivists are agnostic about the population in hell, refusing to name and number the individuals who inhabit the place of torment. God alone keeps the statistics. There’s a family resemblance between exclusivists and inclusivists insofar as they both affirm the existence of hell and believe “there is salvation in no one else [Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The feud relates to how this salvation gets worked out.

Second in line On the Square today is theologian Francesca Aran Murphy‘s reflection on Lenten fasting. A Lent-long abstinence from meat, she submits, is not an exercise in trendy vegetarianism, but an ancient practice rooted in the desire to reset our spiritual sensibilities.

Here’s the thing: the spiritual writers know that we are carnal creatures, and that we cannot skip that step in the ladder of ascent. When we try that, we’re aiming to leap up a step before we’re ready. We won’t make it. When we can’t make it, we will think of Lent—and possibly other disciplines as well—as a brief but necessarily failed resolution to do something impossible. You might say, rightly, anything is possible with the grace of God. But, why not let the grace of God work with your animal nature? Grace, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, “does not destroy nature, it perfects it.” God’s grace works against our fallenness. But it does not eliminate our created human nature. It makes our natures whole. As carnal, embodied creatures, our desire to eat meat works in us at a more elemental level than desires for cognitive pleasures. Our carnality is at the rock bottom of what forms us as persons. Our fallenness, it goes all the way down too, so why not let God’s grace rebuild you from the bottom up?

On the Square today, Meghan Duke draws an intriguing connection between the radical trust required by both the bond of marriage and anticipation of the end-times.

Save the date. On May 21, 2011, my brother is getting married. Or Christ will return to the earth to pronounce final judgment. It depends on whom you ask. According to my brother and his lovely bride-to-be, it will be the former, according to radio evangelist Harold Camping, the latter. On May 21, Camping predicts, God will take up his elect into heaven and the dead will be raised, with those saved being resurrected and those damned, scattered about the face of earth. Then, on October 21, the world will end.

. . .

Hoping for the end of the world is not such a strange desire of the heart and it’s by no means an exclusively religious one. Paul Erlich’s predictions of mass starvation by the 1970s in The Population Bomb were certainly apocalyptic. There was a twinge of the apocalyptic to the Y2Kers who seemed almost gleeful as they stockpiled food and water in preparation for the impending worldwide computer glitch that would return us to pre-computer life. Today, the dire forecasts of some global warming proponents sound almost biblical: pestilence and mourning and famine.

“A sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future,” the Catechism says. In marriage you go one step further, placing not only yourself, but your spouse, your children, and all future generations of your family in the hands of Providence.

 

Almost every news report on the Church contains errors, but some journalistic misunderstandings are so risible they make one wonder if the journalism profession is populated primarily by disaffected Catholics. A recent story on a married German priest is a good example, especially given current obsessions about clerical celibacy.

Harm Klueting, 61, was recently ordained for the Diocese of Cologne after entering the Catholic Church. Klueting and his wife both functioned as Lutheran clerics before the move, and as the Associated Press story runs, they will be “allowed to remain married” through the transition. One would think so, since the Church views the dissolution of a valid marriage as impossible, except by the death of a spouse. So far, so good: The Church neither required Fr. Klueting to abandon his wife nor to throw her into a lake to meet the requirements of his ordination.

The report’s second detail is even stranger: Klueting will “remain married to his wife—who has already become a nun.” Aside from the fact the journalist seems to think a nun is simply the female version of a priest, Edeltraut Klueting is, in fact, a third-order Carmelite, living out her calling in academic and family life rather than within monastery walls. While there are a good number of married Catholic priests in the Latin Rite, there are no married nuns. And, we should add, while nuns take vows, diocesan priests do not, so the “vow of celibacy” later mentioned in the article is simply moot.

The next line in the AP story seems at first to be an ironic joke: “The Cologne archdiocese said in a statement that the couple would not have to take the traditional vow of celibacy as long as they remain married.” It’s rather like saying they will be allowed to live as long as they do not die. Celibacy is, after all, the state of being unmarried, while continence—perhaps what the journalist had in mind—pertains to the choice not to lead a conjugal life.

The article later speculates on matters conjugal: “Klueting and his family could not be reached for comment, and it was not clear whether they still lived together as a couple.”

Last in the list of details is a snapshot of Fr. Klueting’s ordination, pictures of which showed Klueting “with short gray hair and a beard, wearing a simple white priest vestment as he received his blessings from Meisner, who was wearing a festive yellow embroidered robe and a golden cardinal’s hat.” A visit to Wikipedia might have helped to clarify the terminology of vestments, and made clear that the “festive” robe and cardinal’s hat are not just for fun.

Today’s first “On The Square” item is Joe Carter’s “My Heroes Have Always Been Hebrews,” where he explores evangelicals’ theological commitments to the welfare of Jews and the state of Israel:

Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the influence of the Old Testament on the evangelical imagination. In its most basic sense, the evangelical mind is an anomalous type of the Hebraic mind. Modern Jews might sneer at the presumptuous nature of the connection, but it is a truism that evangelicals consider themselves to be the other “People of the Book.”

Later, George Weigel recalls the recently deceased R. Sargent Shriver, the “last of the classic American Catholic liberals.”

Sarge and Eunice fought the good fight, but they never did the most dramatic thing they might have done for the pro-life cause, which was to leave the Democratic Party after the Clintonistas denied pro-life Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey an opportunity to speak at the 1992 Democratic national convention. That was the break-point for many of us who had been lifelong, genetically programmed Democrats.

Today’s second “On The Square” essay for Valentine’s Day is Michael Novak’s “The Myth of Romantic Love,” wherein he explores romantic love, and its relation to caritas and agape:

As a result of this invention, we Westerners have come to think that the central fire of human happiness is romantic love, love forever and ever (love “happily ever after”). Imagination ends with the romantic couple walking hand in hand across the fields toward the sunlight. Many people spend their entire lives looking for such love, wanting to feel such love, wondering, when they are first attracted to another, if that’s what they’re now feeling. Above all, most people love being in love, love the feeling of loving, love even the mad passion of being in love.

Today’s first “On the Square” item is Justin Paulette’s essay, “Conceding Good Faith,” in which he recounts instructive encounters with ideological opponents. Their greatest flaw, Paulette argues, was not in their arguments, but their assumptions that disagreement necessarily owed to defect of reasoning, or worse, bad faith:

Political confrontations don’t, by and large, involve clear contests between pure good and pure evil. On the whole, both sides, even in the most heated debates, believe their end is good, and don’t proceed with evil intent or malice. Politics requires rational, moral, and informed decisions, but prejudiced presumptions of concealed malevolence in political adversaries cripples communication and excludes meaningful debate.