When I heard Hillary Clinton’s statement at the recent 2015 Women in the World Summit that “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” for the sake of giving women access to “reproductive health care and safe childbirth,” at first I was confused. She has spoken often about being a Christian and having a rich prayer life, and I have no reason to doubt that she has real religious commitments. I wondered how someone who attends church regularly, prays, and therefore presumably knows something about the value and the sanctity of religious belief could say something so hostile toward religion.Then I thought of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. Something about her statement rang that bell. I have no idea if Secretary Clinton read Cox’s influential and popular 1965 book, or assuming she did, if the book influenced her thinking. Tracing the particular influences behind anyone’s conceptions is rarely a simple matter. What struck me, though, was the possibility that I have been missing something big: it is likely that many of those who denigrate religious beliefs aren’t drawing just on secular, anti-Christian ideologies, but on liberal Christian ideas about God. What I assume to be anti-religious animus might in some cases actually issue from a particular form of religiosity. Continue Reading »
Much has already been written on the University of Notre Dame’s current core curriculum review—and on its toying with the idea of dropping the two undergraduate theology requirements. The question has been addressed from a number of angles: Margaret Blume, a doctoral student in theology at ND, . . . . Continue Reading »
David Mills, inspired by a Facebook post from Robby George, has exhorted mostly unnamed proponents of the “Benedict Option” to reverse their various avenues of retreat and remain in the political fight. Now I can only guess the identity of the defeatists who have “left the front lines to read books in the library and argue causes and effects in the coffee shop.” But the charge puts me in mind of the colloquium discussion in the January issue of First Things which treated the debate between so-called “liberal” and “radical” Catholics, perhaps because my contribution to that discussion has elicited similar accusations of political irresponsibility or moral cowardice from people sympathetic to the liberal line of thought. Continue Reading »
Partly a rehabilitation of Ian Watts’s Rise of the Novel, partly a theological deepening of Watts’s thesis, Joseph Bottum’s splendid essay on “The Novel as Protestant Art Form” is a literary education. Bottum hits all the fundamental issues, and he hits most of them out of the park.He defends the once-standard judgment that Don Quixote is the “door by which we entered the modern novel,” since Cervantes’s mockery irreversibly cut the novel off from medieval romance. Despite complaints from Byron and others, “Cervantes won, his work too good not to provide us with permanently comic lenses through which to view that lost time.” Something of the “supernatural thickness” of medieval romance reappeared in the spooky Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there was no going back. Continue Reading »
One recent day at the Baltimore clinic where I care for the homeless, I spoke with a patient about the death of Freddie Gray. He prefaced his thoughts—as many people do when they discuss police brutality—with the caveat that there are good police officers, those who honor the law as they work diligently to enforce it in neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray was injured. He then showed me scars on his body from his encounters with the police over the years— some of which had occurred after he was already in custody. He described how officers would raid his home and take half of his drugs and his money, then charge and arrest him for the remainder. “They’re a necessary evil,” he said. “If they weren’t out there, it would be total chaos.” Continue Reading »
I wasn’t going to say anything further about being adopted, not beyond what I’ve said before. The wistful “melancholic nostalgia” I described about being adopted is gone. It has been replaced with . . . well, I don’t know, perhaps, a practical certainty I’m better off. The fact of adoption weighs on some adoptees, adopted as babies with little or no access even in later life to the real story. I was one of those.There is at the heart of things the knowledge somebody could not, or would not keep me. It puts a strain on things. It adds a tentative dimension to many relationships. I don’t like it, but there it is, hunched in a corner waiting to snag me unawares. So, no, I wasn’t going to say anything more. Continue Reading »
In the years preceding the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II held a series of continental synods to help the Church in different locales reflect on its distinctive situation at the end of the second millennium, and to plan for a future of evangelical vigor in the third. These Special Assemblies were easily named in the case of the Synods for Africa, Asia, and Europe. But when it came to the Synod for the western hemisphere, John Paul threw a linguistic curveball that made an important point. Continue Reading »
Today, we mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, a courageous Hungarian prelate who fought against communist tyranny despite great suffering, yet at the end was betrayed by Rome. As today’s Church faces threats around the world from secularists, Islamic fundamentalists and others, it is worth recalling his story to see the dangers of being excessively polite with evil ideologies.The Hungarians are an ancient, patriotic people united under one state and Christianized during the reign of King St. Stephen I (997-1038). In the subsequent millennium, Hungary had at times been a regional power (before the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, Hungary was three times its present size), and at others was subjugated and invaded by Mongols, Turks, Habsburgs, Nazis, Soviets. Continue Reading »
The world must have seemed upside down when the disciples left the holy city Jerusalem. Jerusalem was believed to be the “true pole of the earth, the great king’s city” (Ps. 47:2). It was supposed to be God’s dwelling on earth, the city of David, where the Messiah was expected to reign and restore Israel. And yet, the one who they believed to be Messiah and Redeemer had come into Jerusalem, only to die. Now everything was in question. Their disappointment rings through to this day with startling clarity: “We were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel” (Lk. 14:21). We were hoping…A similar lament can be discerned in modern society, in which Christendom gives way to a “post-Christian” world. Perhaps not surprisingly, these words also speak to a profoundly disintegrating experience for any individual: angst. Reflecting on the mental world of the disciples, Cardinal George once commented: “Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we can feel that we are victims of time, fate, circumstances and external factors. We might even feel that our world is caving in on us…[The disciples] were caught in expectations they thought were now doomed…But [they] were wrong to give up on their hope.”Continue Reading »
President Lindsay of Gordon College is a great guy and Gordon is an important evangelical institution of higher learning. I'm delighted that the Administration and Board of Gordon College has not eliminated a prohibition of “homosexual practice” from its Life and Conduct Statement in the face of an unwarranted accreditation attack.Nevertheless, the present situation does not appear to me to be as rosy as David French (a lawyer who has advised President Lindsay and Gordon College) depicted it in his May 1 National Review online article, “Gordon College Keeps Its Faith and Its Accreditation.”French declares that “Gordon prevailed against a dangerous threat and secured an important victory for religious liberty and academic freedom…. In its moment of crisis, Gordon doubled down on faith. May other Christians under cultural fire do the same.” Continue Reading »
