While We’re At It

• More on “The Best Bioethicists that Money Can Buy” (Public Square, March). Professor Carl Elliott of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota is probably not ingratiating himself with some of his colleagues by publishing in the American Prospect a bracing critique titled “Pharma Buys a Conscience.” It is not only the pharmaceutical industry, of course, but it is mainly that industry that bids fair to take over bioethics as a wholly owned subsidiary, Prof. Elliott cites numerous instances in which both medical research and ethical counsel about medical research are provided by people in the employ-frequently the very lucrative employ – of companies that have a steep interest in outcomes. Elliott writes, “Industry-sponsored bioethics programs face problems that parallel those encountered by industry-sponsored medical researchers. What do you do when your scholarly work conflicts with the goals of your industry sponsor? No one is forcing industry money on bioethics programs, but many of them are located in academic health centers, where faculty members are expected to generate money to fund their research either by seeing patients or by obtaining grants. If bioethics is seen as an activity that can attract industry sponsorship, university administrators strapped for cash will inevitably look to industry as a financial solution. All that remains is for bioethicists themselves to dispense with the ethical roadblocks.” Our ethicists have a conflict-of-interest problem? Oh dear, we’d better check with our ethicists on that. Good news: they’ve ruled that there’s no problem. Next question? Of course there are different ways of rationalizing the unseemly circumstance of being a paid piper. Elliott writes: “Defenders of corporate consultation often bristle at the suggestion that accepting money from industry compromises their impartiality or makes them any less objective a moral critic. ‘Objectivity is a myth,’ (one bioethicist] told me…. ‘I don’t think there is a person alive who is engaged in an activity who has absolutely no interest in how it will turn out.’ Thomas Donaldson, director of the ethics program at the Wharton School, has compared ethics consultants to the external accounting firms often employed by corporations to audit their financial records. Like accountants, ethicists may be paid by the very industries they are assessing, but they are kept honest by their need to maintain a reputation for integrity. But the comparison of ethicists to accountants is deeply misleading. Ethical analysis does not look anything like a financial audit. If a company is cooking its books and the accountant closes his eyes to this fact in his audit, the accountant’s transgression can be reliably detected and verified by outside monitors. But how do you detect the transgressions of an ethics consultant? Ethicists have widely divergent views: they come from different religious standpoints, use different theoretical frameworks, profess different political philosophies. They are also free to change their minds at any point. How do you tell the difference between an ethics consultant who has changed her mind for legitimate reasons and one who has changed her mind for money? How do you distinguish between a consultant who has been hired for his integrity and one who has been hired because he supports what the company plans to do? A sawy CEO will have no problem finding an ethicist to say virtually anything. Yet influence is not exactly what’s at issue. If a policeman takes money to overlook a speeding violation and then writes the ticket anyway, he has still accepted a bribe, even if he has not been influenced by it. The point is that certain people in whom public trust is placed must not have a financial interest in violating the duties carried by their institutional role. In this respect, at least, they must be financially disinterested. What is more, they must be seen as disinterested; otherwise, the institution they represent risks falling apart. Judges and jurors, for instance, depend on the appearance of disinterestedness for their fragile hold on public trust. Judges get paid, of course, as do bioethicists and other academics. But the source of that payment is crucial. If we allowed judges to be paid by corporate litigators, they would soon lose their credibility— and rightly so. If bioethicists have gained any credibility in the public eye, it rests on the perception that they have no financial interest in the objects of their scrutiny.” At present, that public credibility, such as it is, is being fast eroded. The pharmaceutical industry is not about to go away, nor should it. And ethical oversight is undoubtedly necessary. But if it is to be done by watchdogs rather than lapdogs, some independent arrangement for their care and feeding will have to be found.

• Hymns are out, choirs are out, “praise teams” are in. So says Anderson Rearick of Nazarene College in Ohio. It’s part of the “entertainment worship” thing, with members of the praise team scattered around the audience, mikes in hand, making sure that everybody takes hearty part in eighteen reprises of “I love you, Lord, love you, love you, love you.” Rearick, writing in the Christian Century, observes: “It’s all to our benefit. After all, if a member of the congregation is filled with jealousy, and thus a carnal heart, the discipline of standing through fifteen choruses of Thank you, Jesus’ will chastise the flesh. And although the words may sometimes be a mystery, no one should worry. The lyrics are so simple and short that memorization is automatic. And so I say, ‘Praise the Lord!’, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’, and ‘Awesome is as awesome does.’ Catholics should not sneer, for there is evidence that this slappy-happy kitsch is invading Catholic parishes as well. When it comes to congregational singing, it sometimes seems that American Catholics went directly from silence to decadence without passing through the period of great hymnody.

• Avery Cardinal Dulles did his usual incisive job in reviewing Passionate Uncertainty, the McDonough-Bianchi book on the state of Jesuits today, his incisiveness always being tempered by generosity of spirit (FT, April). Discussing the book in the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills notes that the Society of Jesus in the U.S. has declined from 8,393 in 1965 to 3,635 today, with a marked increase in the number of homosexuals. There are more ex-Jesuits in the U.S. today than Jesuits. He writes, “It is not surprising that the numbers of heterosexuals have declined, as many left to marry and others were deterred by the celibacy requirement from entering. The remaining or arriving gays have formed protective networks-the authors call it a ‘lavender Mafia’—to provide the sense of community otherwise so hard to come by in the order. Of course, this works against a larger sense of community, since some of the Jesuits interviewed express resentment at being excluded by the gays.” Father Raymond Schroth, a jesuit, comes to a more sanguine conclusion in a review in the Newark Star-Ledger (March 3, 2002): “Yet the overall portrait is one of men content in their vocations, who have drawn closer to the person of Jesus while leaving an earlier Almighty God figure behind.” In view of recent and much-publicized developments regarding sexual abuse by priests, including Jesuits, one hopes that men who are on such friendly terms with Jesus will be able to get a reintroduction to his Father. One waited to see how America, the main Jesuit publication in this country, would deal with the book. The editors assigned it to a social scientist who took issue with the authors’ interviewing methodology; observed that, if one read only the statements of those who had good things to say about the Society, one would come away with a better impression of the Society; and suggested that the “inspiring” official Jesuit documents provide “a more reliable picture.” There are undoubtedly problems with the McDonough-Bianchi book, as Cardinal Dulles noted, but surely one might have hoped for at least a hint of openness on the part of America to the possibility that there is a problem or two in the Society as well. In other contexts, such denial is sometimes called stonewalling.

• India is the most pervasively religious society in the world and Sweden the most secular, giving rise to Peter Berger’s jibe that, in order to understand America’s culture wars, one must know that it is a nation of Indians ruled by an elite of Swedes. But things are not going well with religion and society in India, as witness the resent slaughter of five hundred Muslims by Hindu mobs in the western part of the country. Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page notes that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had no use for religion of any sort and tried to impose a secular regime from on high. But he knew he couldn’t do what Ataturk did in Turkey or the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Varadarajan writes: “India’s secularism has, from its inception, offered a contrast to the Jacobin-Turkish model. Religion is not excluded from the political sphere; in fact, there are numerous political parties which have patently religious manifestos. The Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is often described as a ‘Hindu nationalist’ party, and counts among its extra-parliamentary allies a few groups that are avowedly Hindu-chauvinist. Secularism, in its Indian ideal, emulates some of the ways of the liberal West, which is one reason why Indian democracy—in spite of its flaws-has so many admirers in America and Europe. Religious parties are not proscribed; religiosity is not a bar to political advancement; and religious discrimination is unlawful. The framers of the Indian constitution envisaged a multireligious state whose citizens coexist, with no group enjoying advantage, nor disadvantage, by virtue of religion. Varadarajan is surely right in calling for tolerance in a religiously pluralistic society, and tolerance is most securely grounded in religious belief and practice. One has to wonder why, in advancing his proposal, he uses the Western term “secularism,” with all the Jacobin connotations it carries. There would seem to be no better way to guarantee the opposition of those devoted to the flourishing of both religion and democracy.

• Father Benedict Groeschel is one of the wisest spiritual directors around, and his little essay “Waiting for Grace” is one of the wisest reflections on the pastoral care of homosexuals. It is included in a book, With Mind and Heart Renewed (University Press of America), celebrating the ministry of Fr. John Harvey, the founder of Courage, an association of recovering homosexuals. The subtitle of Fr. Groeschel’s essay is “The Pastoral Care of Those Who Are Not Yet Disposed to Follow the Commandments.” He writes: “The thorny problem of the pastoral care of those who desire to participate in the life of the Church, and who are yet either unwilling or unable to observe its moral teachings, is one that many pastors and pastoral workers encounter every day. In every good-sized parish there are people beginning to experience a real call to conversion, but who are involved in moral difficulties ranging from invalid marriages and homosexual relationships to addiction to alcohol and drugs. There are others who are unaware of the call to real conversion but who at least want to be a part of the life of the Church, and this desire may indeed be a call of divine grace. The question of the pastoral care of this very needy group presents itself over and over again. What can be done for them without becoming an enabler, someone who out of compassion or need to be agreeable or even guilt, cooperates in another person’s immorality or psychological confusion by pretending that a real and ongoing conversion has taken place?” The great difficulty, Fr. Groeschel knows, is in being compassionate without becoming an “enabler” of sinful actions. The essay offers sage counsel on many questions, including how to respond to the claim of homosexuals that “God has made me this way.” In ministering to homosexual persons over many years, he has also learned. For instance: “It may come as a surprise to many to know that those who were sexual partners may live in chastity together. I myself know a number of people who once lived together in homosexual relationships who now share the same domicile but lead scrupulously chaste lives as friends. It is conceivable that the only way that they were going to lead a chaste life was with the emotional support of another person struggling with the same difficult adjustment. They now have the love of a chaste friendship. Now it is my pastoral impression that such people, having gained chastity, merely need to communicate to their close circle of relatives and friends that they are living a chaste Christian life, in order to avoid misunderstanding and confusing others. I would not have thought this possible, but we live and learn.” Too often, Fr. Groeschel believes, ministries ostensibly aimed at leading those with same-sex desires to the fullness of conversion-as we all need to be led to the fullness of conversion-become part of the problem rather than the solution. “This brings up the oxymoron of ‘gay-lesbian ministry’ Truth be told, there is simply no such Christian ministry, any more than there is a ministry to ‘drunks.’ There is a very needed ministry to homosexual persons and recovering alcoholics. The terms gay and lesbian’ mean the acceptance of a lifestyle with a commitment to immoral behavior. Homosexual is a condition; gay and lesbian is a decision, a commitment which is powerfully denounced by St. Paul. It is my personal conviction that the accepted use of these terms for a ministry is a profound cause of confusion for the faithful and a dangerous spiritual disservice to those who have a right to be shepherded by the Church.” But the essay, as well as other essays in this fine book, deserves to be read in full.

• Christianity is ever so much more interesting as a venture of obedience to truth revealed. Yet so many Christians persist in making it up as they go along, living a truth contrived in their own image. “Childless by Choice” is an article in Prism, “America’s Alternate Evangelical Voice,” published by Evangelicals for Social Action. The author explains that when she got married she and her husband assumed they would have children. “But before giving us a child, God called us to steward our other talents.” God got her husband into graduate school “and put in my heart a conviction that my gift for writing came with a command to publish.” Ergo, no time for children. The author includes a bibliography promoting childlessness, admitting that the books mentioned might not be endorsed by evangelicals. In fact, some of the books mentioned are aggressively anti-Christian and pro-abortion. But, she says, “they’re all we have until Christians write their own.” She adds, “I do plan to write that book.” Being a good evangelical, she of course quotes Scripture in support of her position. “Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child; break forth into joyful shouting and cry aloud, you who have not travailed; for the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman.” That’s Isaiah 54, the context being the suffering of the Messiah, which is quite an analogical reach for the author’s belief in her mission to publish. She writes, “Paul’s comments on not marrying, if single, might have been meant to include not reproducing, if married. It is an alternative call, a radical one even, but it is a call.” Why get bogged down in what Paul actually said when he might have said what we think he should have said? The magazine is Prism, which is, at times, an alternative to the evangelical voice.

• It’s been ever so long since I’ve commented on Christian News, a collage of news clippings harvested from many sources and published by a Lutheran pastor, Herman Otten, who takes being called a right-winger as a compliment. This item has an old picture of me (you can actually see the few hairs on the top of my head) and reproduces, for the umpteenth time, some left-leaning statements of mine from twenty-five and thirty years ago when I was, with increasing difficulty, trying to maintain my liberal credentials. The point of this story, as of many others in Christian News, is that I continue to be invited to speak at Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod institutions, whereas Pr. Otten is not. But what I liked about the item is the charge, in boldface, that accompanies the picture: “Father Richard Neuhaus Says Non-Christians Can Be Saved With Faith in Christ.” I suspect there may be a typo there, but it states my position fairly enough. Of course, I would want to add that it must be a living faith attended by good works.

• Religion is what a person does with his solitude, William James believed, and Richard Rorty, who claims the legacy of James, agrees. Rorty also claims to be the heir of John Dewey, however, who had a different understanding of the public nature of religion, even proposing his own version of a public religion, which he called “A Common Faith.” (See “The American Mind.” Public Square, December 2001.) Rorty recently expanded on his understanding of religion in a speech he gave in Germany upon being awarded the Meister Eckhart Prize. He noted the oddity that Eckhart was God-obsessed while he has frequently described himself as an atheist. But the word atheist, Rorty says, is dated and misleading. Both theists and atheists think they have an epistemological or metaphysical disagreement, when in fact religion has been decisively defeated by science and common sense in its claim to describe reality or how we can know what is real. Now Rorty says he is more accurately described as an anticlericalist, which he defines this way: “It is the view that ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do-despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or in despair-are dangerous to the health of democratic societies, so dangerous that it would be best for them eventually to wither away. The dangers that we anticlericalists fear are particularly evident in my own country. The Christian fundamentalists whose support has become indispensable to right-wing American politicians are undermining the secularist, Jeffersonian tradition in American culture. They are making it respectable once again to say that the U.S. is ‘a Christian nation’—an assertion that would have been considered, a few decades ago, as in bad taste.” Rorty devotes most of his speech to the thought of Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who has returned to the Catholicism of his childhood, but with the difference that he now understands that the Incarnation means that God has emptied Himself (the kenosis of Philippians 2) of any claim that impinges upon public truth. (I have not read Vattimo, but Rorty’s description of his argument in favor of radical secularization seems reminiscent of “secular society” and “death of God” discussions in this country in the 1960s.) Rorty once again sets forth his religious-like commitment to our making a human future that he allows may be utopian, and concludes with this contrast between his view and Vattimo’s: “I have no idea how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery. That mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concerns the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things. First Corinthians 13 is an equally useful text for both religious people like Vattimo, whose sense of what transcends our present condition is bound up with a feeling of dependence, and for nonreligious people like myself, for whom this sense consists simply in hope for a better human future. The difference between these two sorts of people is that between unjustifiable gratitude and unjustifiable hope. This is not a matter of conflicting beliefs about what exists and what does not exist. So I should like to think of both Vattimo and myself as having gotten at least a little way past the issue of theism versus atheism.” His drawing of the difference between living by gratitude and living by hope is suggestive. Rorty admits he may be deluded in his hope, but only the future can tell. On the other hand, one who is deluded in his gratitude, which necessarily assumes a gift or grace already given, is simply deluded. Is Vattimo right or wrong in being grateful? The response to that question necessarily entails considerations metaphysical and epistemological; in short, considerations of truth. Once again, it would seem, Richard Rorty has failed to escape from the bothersome question of what counts as truth. Moreover, Meister Eckhart, with his wild and wily theological mind, would say that Rorty, who says the one absolute is love, is in fact, whether he knows it or not, speaking of God.

• Something odd is happening in Protestant groups that used to be strongly opposed to bishops, according to a story in the Atlanta Constitution. Once it was “Mister,” then “Reverend,” then “Doctor,” and now it is “Bishop.” Or more. The Rev. Miles Fowler of Big Miller Grove Baptist Church is now Bishop Miles Fowler. The popular television preacher is Bishop T. D. Jakes. Earl Paulk of the International Communion of Charismatic Churches is nothing less than Archbishop Paulk. Not to be outdone, Jamie Pleasant of Kingdom Builders Christian Center in Norcross, Georgia, is Apostle Pleasant. The way this is going, we may yet see a return to the time of anti-popes.

• In his Gifford Lectures, Stanley Hauerwas is sharply critical of William James and Reinhold Niebuhr as representatives of the liberalism he thinks we should reject (see Stephen H. Webb’s “The Very American Stanley Hauerwas” elsewhere in this issue). I am inclined to think Niebuhr was more of a believing Christian than Hauerwas allows, but that’s for another time. At hand is a review of Hauerwas’ book by Richard Wightman Fox, a biographer of Niebuhr. He writes: “With the Grain of the Universe shows Christian and secular liberals why James and Niebuhr are so important to their faith. James, like his hero Whitman, underwrites the quest for novel experience, for becoming more fully human. This was Emerson’s way: living one’s life in a quest for wider and wider circles of experience. Liberalism is about individuals getting to he who they decide they most truly are, according to their own lights, whether they are women or men, gay or straight, no matter what their color, cultural hackground, or economic status. Liberal modernity is about choice, and helping others acquire the power to choose. It is about choosing again and again, remaining open throughout one’s life to refashioning oneself. This can look like anarchy to many defenders of tradition. But now it is a tradition in its own right, a tradition (in the nineteenth-century U.S. alone) developed by Jefferson, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Whitman, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, Gilman, Rauschenbusch, Gladden, Debs, Dewey, and James, among many others. It is a tradition that needs defending today more than ever. It is the tradition at the fountainhead of liberal and democratic freedom.” That is in some ways an attractive vision of liberalism, but note how incessantly and stiflingly self-referential it is. The alternative view is that the high adventure of life, intellectually and spiritually, is in losing oneself in obedience to upper case Truth, in which, by surprising grace, one finds oneself. I suppose Fox would call that conservative. Another word for it is Christian.

• One-quarter of the pre-war Jewish community in the Netherlands survived the Holocaust, but it seems doubtful they will survive the way they live now. According to a study reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among the forty-four thousand Dutch Jews, only 28 percent of couples have children, 44 percent under age thirty-five live alone (almost double the rate for the general population), and one-third of the women are still childless at the age of forty. On drugs, homosexuality, euthanasia, and a host of other matters—not least in adapting religion to, as they say, speak to the modern world—the Netherlands is ever so advanced.

• I was down speaking at Duke University the other week and was reminded that the question of blessing same-sex unions in the Duke chapel, on which I had commented some while back (“When Tolerance Is Trump,” Public Square, February 2001), is still a hot issue there, as it should be. Since my comment, my friend William H. Willimon, dean of the chapel, who makes it clear that he does not approve of such blessings and will personally have nothing to do with them, responds in the Christian Century to the criticism that he should not have gone along with the chapel’s permitting them. Of a divinity school colleague who says such blessings desecrate a Christian chapel, Willimon asks, “Where was this theologian’s protest when the university had the gall to parade in an American flag at opening convocation?” Surely he is not suggesting that displaying the flag is incompatible with Christian morality. Or maybe he is. He writes that the claim that allowing same-sex blessings is “an attack on biblical principles and the United Methodist Church is just plain silly.” He explains: “I don’t get it. Divorce? Remarriage after divorce? Greed? Those are biblical subjects on which we ought to have no disagreement. Our Lord has expressly forbidden such sin, even though my church has found a way to overlook it, even among our bishops.” We overlook divorce, remarriage, and greed, so what’s the big deal with homosexual coupling? In view of so much heterosexual misbehavior, Willimon writes, “I think it is in bad taste for me, or any other pastor, to focus on homosexual sin as the worst of sin.” It would not only be in bad taste, it would be heretical. Did any of the critics of whom he complains say that homosexual sin is “the worst of sins”? I rather doubt it. He writes, “Richard Hays has written convincingly that, while there is New Testament evidence that the practice of homosexuality is contrary to Pauline views of the self under Christ, there is absolutely no biblical justification for making this the predominant issue for the Church, the supreme test of fidelity.” He is at least partly right about that. Certainly it is not the supreme test of fidelity, and it should not be the predominant issue for the Church. But who has made it such a dominant issue for some churches if not homosexual activists who demand that Christians abandon two millennia of biblical and traditional teaching on human sexuality? One semi-plausible argument for Duke’s decision is that Duke University and its chapel have long since ceased to be Christian in any meaningful sense of the term. But then, as I said in my earlier comment, the question is: Who decided that, and when, and by what authority? Hasn’t Will Willimon simply caved in the face of a false, even if institutionally entrenched, assumption? And if, in fact, the assumption is correct, why is he dean of a non-Christian chapel? Willimon should work on a better response to his critics. Better yet, he should retract his acquiescence in the decision made by the university administration. “T’m not resigning,” he defiantly declares. Good. The only thing missing is an assurance that the Rev. William H. Willimon, minister of the gospel and dean of a chapel dedicated to the lordship of Jesus Christ, is staying to contend for the truth he professes and against the flaccid liberalism that he says he rejects.

• The nice thing about assigning inexperienced journalists to a story is that the press can invent a whole new world, or, in this case, resurrect realities long dead and buried. John J. Fialka, staff reporter of the Wall Street Journal, has just discovered the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a scattering of mainly mainline Protestants who have joined hands with the Sierra Club and other environmental alarmists. The story goes on and on about what a coup this is, since the churches “set the moral tone for the whole country,” and so forth. “Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, which represents some fifty million members of U.S. Protestant churches, says…” That description of the NCC, common fifty years ago, was perhaps last used some twenty years ago. Today the NCC is largely a letterhead organization with a slew of “member churches,” most of which make no financial contribution, which is why the organization, headed by the former liberal Democratic Congressman Bob Edgar, has a skeleton staff focused on priorities such as paying overdue telephone bills. The more troubling thought is that Mr. Fialka is not inexperienced, that he knows the NCC has simply hitched a free ride with environmental organizations that do have resources, and that he is just shilling for the cause. I prefer to think the article is best explained by ignorance.

• Mention Gore Vidal and the phrase “acerbic wit” is sure to follow. His métier is more accurately described as full-bore nastiness in the service of a perpetual snit. Publishers Weekly comments on a new collection of Vidal rants, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. The reviewer is a bit put off by Vidal’s suggestion that we should try to see the world from the viewpoint of Osama bin Laden, and that Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City infamy was a martyr in the libertarian cause. “But in this book, the tone is as important as the text,” says Publishers Weekly. “Vidal gleefully skewers American capitalism and the role of the religious right in American politics at every opportunity.” So the book is not all bad.

• This is a little late, but it should not go unremarked. A few days before Easter, President Bush issued from the White House a message to “Christians around the world [who] celebrate the central event of their faith–the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, whom Christians believe is the Messiah, the Son of God.” The message could not have been more theologically specific. “Jesus’ death stands out in history as the perfect example of unconditional love. The four Gospels of the Christian Bible recount his amazing life, his miraculous death, resurrection, and ascension, and his unending offer of salvation to all.” Referring to the current war against terrorism, Bush says, “As we fight to promote freedom around the world and to protect innocent lives in America, we remember the call of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: ‘As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.'” I don’t know when was the last time that such an explicitly Christian message was issued from the White House, but I suspect it has been a very long time. It received almost no mention in the media and, as far as I know, there was not a word about the “violation of the separation of church and state” from the usual suspects. Was it a good thing to do? Jaded political analysts might say the President was shoring up support among his “Christian constituency” —about 90 percent of the country being Christian of one sort or another-and it cost him nothing. Some thoughtful Christians may admit to a measure of ambivalence about the mixing of Christian faith and piety with the Administration’s foreign and domestic policies. The mixing was minimal, however, noting September 11 and observing that “Americans responded with strength, compassion, and generosity” —which virtues likely have something to do with Christian faith. One friend thought such an explicitly Christian message divisive, since the President is “supposed to represent all the people.” But there is no way Mr. Bush can be a Buddhist to Buddhists or a Muslim to Muslims. He is— not at all incidentally—a Christian. Of course, one might argue that, precisely for that reason, a religious message is “inappropriate,” which is the argument for what someone has called the naked public square. My hunch is that Mr. Bush just thought it would be the right thing to send Easter greetings to his fellow believers, and so he did it. The only wrong note is the misquotation of Julia Ward Howe’s hymn. She wrote, “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” The more comfortable “live to make men free” appears in many contemporary hymnals (along with “inclusive” substitutes for “men”). The message of Jesus, to follow him in being prepared to die for the right, is the deeper truth. But I don’t want to cavil. The Easter statement was welcome and, as I say, should not go unremarked.

• The Washington Times quotes this from the Easter homily of a Catholic bishop: “Christ is our light in this time. He leads us to apologize humbly and profoundly for past sinfulness, to follow our strict diocesan policy on sexual abuse and misconduct in the future, and to develop additional protocols in order to prevent harm to any member of the Church.” It does not say what biblical text the bishop was expounding, but apparently there was no mention of millstones.

• “The mores of New Jersey.” The phrase may puzzle people whose view of New Jersey is formed by watching The Sopranos. I can, however, give personal testimony to the fact that there are many people and communities of virtue and sense in that great state. But then there is the matter of the courts in New Jersey and, more specifically, their cutting edge role in devaluing human life, as in what are called “wrongful birth” and “wrongful life lawsuits (see Jay Webber, “Better Off Dead?” FT, May). The New Jersey Law Joumal–a journal of, by, and for lawyers–is editorially critical of the French National Assembly for legislating against awarding damages to the parents of a disabled boy “because medical errors allowed him to be born.” He would have been better off dead, and his parents would have been spared great trouble and expense. The Journal opines: “Wrongful life and wrongful birth cases implicate deep feelings not just about law, but religion, ethics, and other fundamental values. In a pluralistic society, different people, understandably, may hold different views that are contentious.” Ah yes, that pesky pluralism again. What to do when there are different and contentious “feelings” about fundamental values? Obviously, let it be settled by lawyers who have a bundle to make in the common law of torts as interpreted by very progressive courts. The editorial concludes: “Given the difference between the legal systems and the mores of France and New Jersey, we hesitate to say that the National Assembly reached the wrong decision for France. Suffice it to say, we are satisfied with the state of the law in New Jersey.” “Why the hell not?” as Tony Soprano might say.

• Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was beyond doubt the most celebrated Catholic cleric of his time, and remains a hero to many today. The end of his life trailed off toward the inglorious, however. After clashing with Cardinal Spellman of New York, he was appointed Archbishop of Rochester, New York, which some (perhaps Sheen as well) viewed as a form of exile. The Second Vatican Council had recently concluded, and Sheen declared his ambition to make Rochester a model of Vatican II reforms. James Hitchcock, St. Louis University historian, reviews Thomas C. Reeve’s America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen, and offers this reflection: “During the council he had supported most changes, at one point even exulting that the gathering ‘undid’ four hundred years of history, although prior to that time he had given no public, and few private, intimations that he thought the Church needed change. Now he seemed often to lose his critical faculties in a rush of euphoria (including President John F. Kennedy in an account of “modern saints,” for example). His brief career in Rochester was a sad story, full of obscure conflicts the full nature of which are not known, partly because the Sheen archives there are in disarray. What seems to have happened is that he attempted to establish himself as a leader of change, at one point even getting maneuvered by a television interviewer into saying that contraception might be a permissible practice, then found that he had unleashed forces that he could not control. Attacked from both left and right, he was practically forced to retire, and his personally chosen successor went on to make Rochester perhaps the most liberal diocese in the United States, an ironic legacy from a man who for decades epitomized Catholic orthodoxy for millions of people. Sheen’s career illustrates both why the Church was so strong in the United States for so long and also why it began to unravel after 1965. If biography, as used to be thought, is for the purpose of teaching moral lessons—the secrets of both greatness and decline—Archbishop Sheen should perhaps above all be seen as a victim of his own success. At every stage of his career he faced an ambiguous situation in which he could use his great talents to further the kingdom of heaven, yet those very efforts required pursuing the path of ever greater fame and adulation, measuring success by public recognition. Often he seems to have been unable to distinguish between acting for God and acting for himself. But he titled his autobiography Treasure in Clay, and of few such flawed vessels has God made more prodigious use.”

• After his best-selling tribute to his own people, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and a second in obeisance to another people who really matter, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels–which, one notes, is an awful lot like saving civilization–Thomas Cahill does his duty by Catholic liberalism with Pope John XXIII, which is part of the Penguin Lives series. It is too much even for liberal Commonweal, where Christopher Ruddy writes that the book will be enjoyed by “those who like their biography Manichean-style.” In this case, it’s Good Pope John XXIII against Evil Pope John Paul II. The latter is, according to Cahill, a tyrannical reactionary under whom “we have come full circle and are back in the pontificate of Pius XII.” Ruddy writes: “Only the most hardened of John Paul’s opponents could makes such a claim. Diplomatic inertia and regal aloofness are not John Paul’s faults. And the claim that this pontificate is ‘restorationist’ could only be made by someone who has paid only slight attention to the best theology of the last twenty years.” Here is his summing up: “One need not subscribe to papal biographer George Weigel’s flights of hagiography-wherein John Paul’s only faults are that he is sometimes too patient, too visionary—to realize that Cahill has misjudged the current pope. Perhaps the time has come to call a cease-fire on polemical contrasts between John and John Paul. Aspects of the present pontificate (including some of those mentioned by Cahill) should be criticized. Ironically, however, Cahill’s portrait of John Paul violates the gentleness so characteristic of his hero Good Pope John, and fails to exhibit the “primacy of charity’ that Ives Congar held to be the first condition for all true reform in the Church.” It is possible that some may detect in that just a hint of animosity toward Weigel’s splendid biography, Witness to Hope. With the gentleness so characteristic of this space, I take Ruddy to mean that Weigel’s acutely insightful and exquisitely nuanced book is hagiography, which means writing about a saint, which, in my judgment, is what Weigel was doing. In any event, Ruddy is right about the “polemical contrasts” that have become such a liberal convention and only demean John XXIII by making the case for his greatness dependent upon denigrating the greatness of John Paul II.

• Andy Lamey, writing in the National Post, complains about Canadians who complain that “our political culture is biased against religion” and is guilty of “unfairly excluding faith-based perspectives from the so-called naked public square.” Nonsense, says Mr. Lamey. He points to provinces that fund religious schools, which is true, although some of them increasingly limit just how religious those schools can be. He notes the existence of Sunday closing laws in some provinces, and that Elizabeth is acknowledged as Queen “by the grace of God,” and even that the Mounties can wear wedding rings “as a symbol of their commitment to holy matrimony.” In sum, Lamey writes, “church leaders [should admit that] they occupy a position not of victimhood but conspicuous and longstanding privilege.” This might not be worth mentioning, except that also in this country one encounters a similar misunderstanding of what is meant by the naked public square. Like Mr. Lamey, people point to various public symbols, often of a vestigial nature, reflecting the cultural influence of Christianity, and suggest that religious leaders or institutions are falsely claiming to be victims. That entirely misses the point. The point is the exclusion of religion and religiously grounded moral arguments from political discourse. That such exclusion is the established practice, more overtly in Canada than here, seems to me to be manifest. See Raymond J. de Souza’s analysis of the last Canadian election (“The Politics of Incivility,” FT, March 2001), in which any reference to moral argument associated with religion was subjected to vulgar condemnation as a violation of the totally secularist (read naked) public square. Yes, Mr. Lamey is right, the Mounties are allowed to wear wedding rings, and Elizabeth is queen by the grace of God, and some provinces close stores on Sundays, but at question is the way in which a society deliberates how to rightly order its life together. In that deliberation, only arguments that are not guilty by association with religion are allowed a voice. And, as I say, that is much more the case in Canada than in the U.S.

• When it came the time to die, his wife Joanie and their three children, ages two to five, gathered by his bed and sang Dona Nobis Pacem (Give us your peace). David Orgon Coolidge died in peace as they were singing. David was a friend. A man without guile and with bottomless good humor. He put his enormous energy into launching the Marriage Law Project, working closely with the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the law school of Catholic University, both in Washington. His project became the clearing and coordinating center for the legal defense of marriage against revisionist campaigns for, inter alia, same-sex marriage. He fought well, and he fought clean, and he never let the fight consume him. Then came the brain cancer and months of vigil that led a large network of family and friends into new intensities of prayer and caring. David Orgon Coolidge. May choirs of angels greet him on the far side of Jordan.

• “Companions on the Sacred Journey: An Interfaith Conference Celebrating Love, Compassion, and Spiritual Wisdom.” Well, I’m certainly for all those good things. Scheduled for next month at Princeton University, it is presented by the chapel ministry of the university and funded by something called The Infinity Foundation (which one may assume is not only far out but farthest out). The conference is exquisitely inclusive, with Rabbi Marcia Prager offering “Jewish spiritual wisdom that draws from the wisdom of other paths as well,” and therapist Joan Borysenko offering an exciting alternative to “patriarchal” oppression, it being the sad case that “in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the map for the spiritual journey was written by men for other men.” The Venerable Gelongma Trime Lhamo, a Buddhist nun, will demonstrate “practices that develop the healing properties of your own mind,” while “behavioral neurologist” Susan Mickel will show how Buddhist vipassana meditation “helps us see clearly into the true nature of our embodied hearts and minds, and into the nature of reality.” Paul Rasor, a Unitarian Universalist minister, will explain why materialism leads to violence, and Father Robert E. Kennedy, a Jesuit and Zen Master, will enhance “appreciation of the practice of what is good in the world’s religions.” Among many other attractions, Robin Becker, teacher and dancer, will explain how “the longing to remember, unite with, and live our divine inheritance is the heart of Sufi practice.” Dr. Robert K. C. Forman, executive editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, will explore what may be the constitutive question posed by the conference: “Might it be possible to forge communities of the spirit yet not sacrifice our own beliefs, insights, and experiences on the altar of traditional religious creeds and institutions?” I have this hunch that his answer is that it is possible. For three days in June, Princeton offers a wondrous array of alternative altars, turning itself into a veritable Walmart of unabashed spiritual consumerism, requiring no sacrifice other than the $200 registration fee. Only in America. Love it or leave it.

• I have often quoted Herbert Butterfield to the effect that realism is a boast, not a school of thought. That is often the case, especially in discussions of public policies, foreign and domestic, as they touch on the dynamics of interest and power. Philosophically, however, realism is also a school of thought. In his recently published intellectual biography, A Mind’s Matter (Eerdmans), Stanley L. Jaki-priest, scientist, philosopher, and theologian-looks back on a long and productive life, and is inclined to settle scores with anyone and everyone who ever disagreed with him. Along the way, he offers this suggestive description of what it means to be a philosophical realist. “Heavy reliance on the phrase, ‘objects do object,’ or some equivalent of it, such as ‘objects are here to object,’ could at least convey the measure to which commitment to realism has become with me nothing short of a methodical obsession. For in order to be a realist it is just not enough to stand by the primacy of objective reality. As a historian and philosopher of physics I saw some egregious examples of how inadequate such a stance can be. Einstein’s is a classic case. So are Pauli’s words to Born that Einstein’s refusal to accept the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was rooted not so much in a connection between causality and exact measurements as in an obsession with the primacy of the physically real. Pauli had only ridicule for that obsession. But in the absence of such an obsession the most inadequate, indeed half-baked, philosophies can be grafted onto excellent physics. These philosophies may amount to no more than the individual physicist’s rumination about his own universe. Obsession with the real ought to be articulated systematically, if it is to turn into a well-reasoned message. Yet this means much more than just to be systematic in one’s realism. Preoccupation with a system may, in fact, distract one s attention from what gives life to the system, namely, the very starting point of one’s philosophizing. Realism has to be methodical, that is, a continual return to what one has most consciously taken for one’s primary step. This is something more than what I said about the importance of the first step taken in any activity. Continual return to that first step, to an ever fresh reconsideration of what it means, of what it implies, is what gives life to one’s realism in philosophy. What I would say now is that a true realist, a true objectivist, should never tire of taking an ever fresh look at that primary step of his. He should be ready to test it again and again against ever new problems, tasks, and possibilities, in fact against all of one’s major concerns.” Father Jaki is today honored as a leading Catholic conservative, but he persists in thinking of himself as a liberal. The problem is with what has happened to liberalism, especially in the Church. “Liberal theologians and their journalist allies writing on religion hand down in any given month more infallible statements than all the popes in two thousand years. At the same time they keep denouncing dogmatism.” So in what sense is he a liberal? He answers: “The liberalism I believed in from early on simply meant an openness to the immense variety in which the real encounters us and, hopefully, we encounter the real. In other words, my liberalism seems to have been an integral aspect of a realism that held me in its grip from early on.” One wishes such liberalism, and Fr. Jaki, ad multos annos.

• That wickedly keen social observer David Brooks has this in the Atlantic Monthly: “The New Age quest is for those who have a bias toward self-discovery techniques that are performed while barefoot. It suits men who believe that everyday life is full of trivial distractions and who want to discover inner joys and deep harmonies, which can then be used as fodder for self-adoring monologues before captive dinner-party audiences. The quest usually starts with a few afternoons in the spirituality section of the local bookstore. Several months of journal keeping, bread making, yoga classes, and suburban Buddhist epiphanies follow. Pretty soon Hermann Hesse novels begin to seem intelligent; the garage has been transformed into a pottery studio; the days start with chants to Eos, Goddess of the Dawn; and it seems like a good idea to grow a ponytail on the back of your head even though there’s no hair left on top. This spiritual mid-life crisis is the near exclusive province of a certain kind of soft-spoken, upscale Democrat.” That’s very nice, although I know some Republicans and a great many Independents (as in the herd of independent minds) who fit the picture. Which reminds me of a comment read somewhere recently that in the center of the monstrance held up for adoration by our culture is a mirror.

• The Woodstock Theological Center, a Jesuit enterprise, takes on the tough questions. This is from the announcement for a forum on religion in the public square: “This discussion will examine two forms of radical religion in public life: the uncompromisingly nonviolent as modeled by Mahatma Gandhi and Dorothy Day, and the unflinchingly violent as represented by Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. By way of contrast, we shall also discuss how God may be found along more moderate paths amid the ambiguity and compromise of public life.” Somehow I don’t think they mean “more moderate” than Mahatma Gandhi and Dorothy Day. Then there is this: “Some claim that each of the following lived fully integrated, publicly uncompromising religious lives: Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Osama bin Laden, and Timothy McVeigh. Can we grant their search for religious integrity yet distinguish between them? On what grounds?” How to distinguish? Oh, that’s a tough one. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa were women? They were Catholics? No? I give up.

• A reader reports that Melrose United Church in Hamilton, Ontario, posted this mantra on its bulletin board last Palm Sunday: “Jesus Christ and Judas are both movements of a single dance.” Our puzzled reader thought we might want to join in pondering that. I think I hear the sound of thousands of one hand clappings.

• “Can There Be a Decent Left?” When that question, with its implication that there is not now a decent left, is asked by the editor of Dissent, the chief intellectual journal of the left, attention should be paid. And when that editor is Michael Walzer, the much respected political philosopher of Princeton, very careful attention should be paid. In the fall of last year, he writes, the left did its best to organize opposition to the war on terrorism, arguing that it was unjust in its cause and/or consequences, or unwinnable as in “another Vietnam.” Walzer writes: “But among last fall’s antiwar demonstrators, ‘Stop the bombing’ wasn’t a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing-or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.” And that raises some larger considerations: “The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: Can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.” The left has no future, he says, if it persists in pitting itself against sympathetic identification with America. “I grew up with the Americanism of the Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s; I look back on it now and think that the Communist Party’s effort to create a leftist pop culture in an instant, as the party line turned, was kitschy and manipulative—and also politically very smart. Paul Robeson’s ‘Ballad for Americans,’ whatever the quality of the music, provides at least a sense of what an unalienated American radicalism might be like. The days after September 11 would not have been a bad time for a popular front. What had happened that made anything like that unthinkable?” Walzer specifies four factors leading to the bankruptcy of the left. The first is an “ideology” that reflects the lingering effects of the Marxist theory of imperialism and the third-worldist doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s. “We may think that we live in a post-ideological age, and maybe most of us do, but the traces of old ideologies can be found everywhere in the discourse of the left. Perhaps the most striking consequence is the inability of leftists to recognize or acknowledge the power of religion in the modern world. Whenever writers on the left say that the root cause of terror is global inequality or human poverty, the assertion is in fact a denial that religious motives really count. Theology, on this view, is just the temporary, colloquial idiom in which the legitimate rage of oppressed men and women is expressed.” The second factor, following from the first, is that the left has turned itself into a permanent elite of “internal aliens.” The left despairs of ever exercising power, and therefore cannot speak responsibly to those who do. In its self-indulgence, it does not even desire to exercise power. “But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness that comes with abandoning any such desire. The alienation is radical. How else can one understand the unwillingness of people who, after all, live here, and whose children and grandchildren live here, to join in a serious debate about how to protect the country against future terrorist attacks? There is a pathology in this unwillingness, and it has already done us great damage.” The third and fourth factors have to do with delusions of moral purity that preclude the recognition that there are evils in the world that we have the right, and obligation, not only to criticize but to oppose. “The world (and this includes the third world) is too full of hatred, cruelty, and corruption for any left, even the American left, to suspend its judgment about what’s going on. It’s not the case that because we are privileged, we should turn inward and focus our criticism only on ourselves. In fact, inwardness is one of our privileges; it is often a form of political self-indulgence. Yes, we are entitled to blame the others whenever they are blameworthy; in fact, it is only when we do that, when we denounce, say, the authoritarianism of third-world governments, that we will find our true comrades—the local opponents of the maximal leaders and military juntas, who are often waiting for our recognition and support. If we value democracy, we have to be prepared to defend it, at home, of course, but not only there.” Walzer concludes with the declaration, “The left needs to begin again.” Agreeing with the gist of his argument about what has gone wrong with the left, and what it got wrong from the start, and in no way meaning to be flippant, the obvious response to that concluding declaration is, Why? The clear, if implicit, answer to his title question is that there cannot be a decent left, or at least not a decent left in recognizable continuity with the left that was and is. A better conclusion is that the left needs to be given a decent burial. Which, in fact, Michael Walzer’s remarkable article may be doing.

• Some readers have asked, with a note of puzzlement, what I mean when I write in my recent book As I Lay Dying that I came better to appreciate why I had always found so unconvincing the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum. Much better, I wrote, is Cogitor ergo sum—I am thought, therefore I am. There are many literary references in the book, but I had not come across this before. It is a 1929 poem by C. S. Lewis:

Master, they say that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream
– One talker aping two.

They are half right, but not as they
Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say,
And lo! the words are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
The Listener’s role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.

What they say is half right, Lewis says, and when he knows that he knows his own emptiness into which God speaks “the thoughts I never knew.”

And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.

Exactly. Cogitor ergo sum. The poem is in Stephen Medcalf’s review of Denis Donoghue’s Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature (University of Notre Dame Press) and, while I’m at it, there is also Medcalf’s insightful comment on the claim that Milton in Paradise Lost portrays an Arian, not-quite-God, Christ and, in addition, has no place for the Holy Spirit. Not so, writes Medcalf. “But the opening of Paradise Lost, when Milton invokes the Holy Spirit instead of the Muse, makes it clear that in Milton’s hope the Spirit will, like the Muse in the Iliad, be not only present but omnipresent in the poem. As in Lewis’ understanding of prayer, everything in Paradise Lost is sung or said by the Spirit. No more than in prayer will this always work out in fact. The Spirit can only work through Milton and through human language. But that is the paradigm, and in such magnificent lines as ‘As thus the Filial Godhead answering spake,’ we feel not only the explicit presence of the Son in His relation with the Father, but the implicit presence of the Spirit. The poem is not Arian, but fully Trinitarian.” I am thought, therefore I am; I am spoken, therefore I am.

• The airing of an hour-long interview on Booknotes with Brian Lamb is scheduled for a Sunday evening in May at eight o’clock EDT and rerun at eleven. The occasion is my recent book, As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning, and the discussion covers my life and work, the continuing influence of the sixties and seventies, the clerical and sexual disarray in the Catholic Church, and much else, including As I Lay Dying: I think you might enjoy the program. Booknotes is broadcast on C-Span, and you can check TV listings for the day of showing. And, since you may have been about to ask, As I Lay Dying is selling very nicely and getting good reviews. Thank you for having been about to ask.

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• Sources: while we’re at it: On praise teams, Christian Century, November 14, 2001. On the state of American Jesuits, New York Review of Books, March 28, 2002; America, March 25, 2002. Tunku Varadarajan on India, Wall Street Joumal, March 11, 2002. Childless evangelicals, Prism, November/December 2001. Herman Otten on RJN, Christian News, January 7, 2002. On Protestant bishops, Christian Century, February 13-20, 2002. Richard Wightman Fox on liberalism, Christian Century, November 21-28, 2001. Jews in the Netherlands, Christian Century, November 21-28, 2001. Same-sex marriage at Duke University, Christian Century, May 2, 2001. On the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2002. On Gore Vidal, Publishers Weekly, April 1, 2002. On wrongful life suits, New Jersey Law Joumal, April 1, 2002. James Hitchcock on Bishop Fulton Sheen, Touchstone, April 2002. Christopher Ruddy on Thomas Cahill, Commonweal, March 8, 2002. Andy Lamey on religion in Canada, National Post, March 19, 2002. David Brooks on the New Age quest, Atlantic, March 2002. Michael Walzer on what’s wrong with the left, Dissent, Spring 2002. On Cogitor ergo sum, Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 2002.