First Things RSS Feed - Frederica Mathewes-Green

When Mother Comes Home

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

While I’m not very informed about the Intelligent Design debate, the idea sounds inoffensive enough: Scientists cannot prove there is a Designer, and neither can they prove there’s no Designer, so why not leave the question open? Instead the concept of Intelligent Design has been greeted with outrage and the case is considered closed. Clearly, it struck a nerve.

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Hannah Montana

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Even if you go around with one or several fingers stuffed into each ear, you will not be able to exclude the words “Hannah Montana” from your field of consciousness, especially now that the number one movie in the United States bears that name. No American citizen is permitted to be unfamiliar with the words “Hannah Montana.” What you are permitted is to be uncertain of what the words mean. Unless you made the decision to have a seven-year-old granddaughter about now, without taking sufficient forethought for the consequences.

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The World and the Holy Grail

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

For some time now, I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s terrific 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything . (You should interpret "some time" to mean "a pretty long time," because not only is this a hefty-sized book, it’s also about science.) In his introduction Bryson, an entertaining travel writer, explains how he came to write a book about the origins of life, the universe, and nearly everything. He says that when he was in the fourth or fifth grade the cover of his science text showed the earth with a quarter cut away, revealing an interior neatly arranged in colorful layers. Not only did he enjoy the thought of unsuspecting motorists sailing off the edge, he was also awed by the scope of science. He wondered, "How do they know that?" But eagerness turned to disappointment as he discovered that the text didn’t address that question, and in fact managed to make science seem boring. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the book Bryson wanted to read. It’s a marvelous work built on a truly immense amount of research and delivered in a style that is inviting and clear.

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Mathewes-Green: Thoughts on Haggard

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I was in Denver for about a hundred minutes this weekend. I hadn’t planned it, but when I arrived at the airport Friday morning to begin my journey to Calgary, I was surprised to see that’s where I would change planes. The story about Ted Haggard had hit the news the night before, and I had been for some reason really moved by it. I walked through the Denver airport praying the Jesus Prayer for him: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on Ted." That whatever needed to happen would happen, and that it would be used for Ted’s ultimate healing. And I prayed for his wife, Gayle, and their five children. I cannot imagine their pain. I was probably not the only person who found his initial response suspicious: "I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver." Imagine that you’re a guy, and a male escort you’ve never heard of suddenly announces to the press that you two have been in a sexual relationship for years. After you got through screaming "WHAT?!?" for a few hours, you would say, "This is really sick and creepy and repulsive. I have never met this guy. It is scary to think anyone could have this kind of full-blown delusional fantasy going on. This is some kind of John Mark Karr thing. I’m disgusted, and I feel stalked, and I am talking to the police about protection." So "I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver" was pretty feeble. "In Denver"? But in the rush of travel, I didn’t catch any images of Haggard until the return trip Saturday; I didn’t know what he looked like. An airline rescheduling unexpectedly brought me back through Denver on the way home¯that had the looks of something God-arranged. This time, while praying my way through the airport, I spotted some newspaper dispensers with Haggard’s name in the top headlines. I knelt to read the stories and saw that sad truths were coming to the surface. But I also saw a photo of Haggard and for the first time connected a face with the name. So that’s the guy! I had seen this face before, I guess in photos of evangelical leaders. It sure had struck me as a crazy-scary one ¯somebody I’d instinctively step away from. The zones of his face are sending out conflicting messages. It looks like both terror and attack. The overall effect is frenzied. Ted wrote in the letter read to his church on Sunday: "There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it all my life." In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we speak of the impulses that move us toward any kind of sin as "passions." You shouldn’t think of this term as related to "passionate." It’s more like "passive" (as in "the Passion of Christ"; his passion is what he endured). These impulses beat us up. They originate as thoughts, sometimes as thoughts that evade full consciousness. The roots are tangled with memories, shame, anger, fear¯and the thoughts are also very often inaccurate. All this mess damages our ability to see the world clearly. We go on misreading situations and other people, and venture further into confusion. The illness compounds itself, to the delight of the Evil One, who nurtures lies and has no compassion on the weak. To him, the weak are breakfast. Eastern Christianity speaks of this as the darkening of the nous , that is, of the perceptive center of a person. (Most English bibles translate nous as mind , but that’s not quite it; the nous is not the rational intellect but a perceiving faculty. Thoughts and emotions are subsequent reactions to the nous ‘s perceptions.) The damaged nous is like a pair of glasses fitted with distorting lenses. It needs healing. The Greek word represented by this kind of "passion" is pathos . It means "suffering." It is because we are helpless in our suffering that Christ came. He took on vulnerable human form and went into the realm of death and defeated the Evil One. Now we are invited to gradually return to health by fully assimilating the truth that sets us free¯by assimilating the presence and life of Christ himself. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me," St. Paul said. This life fills and changes us like fire fills a piece of coal. In the Eastern Christian understanding, sins are not "bad deeds" that must be made up in order to satisfy justice. They are instead like bad fruit, which indicates a sickness inside the tree (the analogy Jesus uses in Matthew 7:7¯8). Sin is infection, not infraction. And God not only forgives freely but also sent his Son to rescue us when we were helpless. With God’s help, we begin to heal. Like an athlete striving for the prize (I Cor. 9:24, Phil. 3:14, 2 Tim. 2:5), we resist succumbing to lying thoughts. The ancient spiritual disciplines¯continual prayer, fasting, and love of others¯are like the exercises in a time-tested workout routine. They make us stronger. When we fall, we get up. This is a life of continual repentance¯and you can see in that word re-pent , "re-think." Salvation is health, and health comes from knowing the truth and resisting lies. This gradually heals the nous so that it is restored to its original purpose: to perceive God’s light permeating all Creation. St. Paul writes, "Be transformed by the renewal of your nous ." The biblical word for repentance, meta-noia , means literally the transformation of the nous . We are welcomed into God’s kingdom in an instant, as we see in the story of the Good Thief; but full healing comes slowly and will continue every day that we live. So it is a mistake to present Christianity the way some churches do, as if it is the haven of seamlessly well-adjusted, proper people. That results in a desperate artificial sheen. It results in treating worship as a consumer product, which must deliver better intellectual or emotional gratification than the competition. And that sends suffering people home again, still lonely, in their separate metal capsules. What all humans have in common is our pathos. Getting honest about that binds us together. And then we begin to see how the mercy of God is pouring down on all of us all the time, just as the Good Samaritan bound the wounds of the beaten man with healing oil. May God give this healing mercy to Ted and Gayle, and to their children. May God reveal his healing mercy to Michael Jones, who told the truth. May God have mercy on all of us.

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Ole Anderson and Douglas Duncan

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

A while back, I referred here to a lengthy article in the Dallas Observer about Ole Anderson and asked prayers for that apparently driven and unhappy Christian leader. I received a thoughtful message in response from Douglas Duncan, who was involved with Anderson’s organization for many long and difficult years. Duncan reminds me that people who have been caught up in such groups are equally in need of prayer. He sent me a copy of the book that prompted the Dallas Observer article, I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult , written by his wife, Wendy Duncan. It looks like an engrossing read.

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Movie “Children of Men”

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Wilfred McClay’s thoughts on the “party of death” and the grasping for life brought to mind a movie trailer I saw recently for Children of Men , due in theaters December 25 .

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Internet child pornography

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Buried in the course of Sunday’s New York Times front page story about pedophilia and the Internet , there was an unexpected kernel of good news. There are “a shrinking number of Internet locations for sexual images of minors.” A pedophile who goes by the screen name Heartfallen complained to a discussion list that the sources for graphic child porn are disappearing: “They’ve vanished. There is much less freedom on the Internet now.”

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“The Incredibles,” “The Science of Sleep”

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

“My bonnie lass she smelleth, making all the flowers jealouth.”

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Ole Anthony and Joe Francis

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

I read Michael Linton’s posting that begins: “R.R. Reno recently wrote here (I tried to come up with another ‘r’ word instead of ‘h’ but got stumped) . . . ” Friend, are ye not Southren? Know ye not the handy location indicator, “right-here,” pronounced “rat-cheer”?

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FMG: Response to Robert Miller

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Robert, you quote in your First Things post today a line from Hassan Nasrallah that epitomizes the mysterious and frustrating thing about dealing with this culture. He’s being blankly honest. They aren’t expecting to win, militarily; they are fighting to achieve “honor” and fighting against “humiliation.”

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