While We’re At It

• “The literary imagination has not been much taken with scientists who manipulate the deep things of life just because they can.” So said Jody Bottum, our poetry editor, at a Washington seminar on biotechnology, with specific reference to cloning. He cited, inter alia, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Huxley’s Brave New World, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Bottum says: “The truth is, after reading these authors, I worry about people who reach into the stuff of life and twist it to their will. I worry about people who act simply because they can. If they lived in crumbling castles-their hair standing up on end and their voices howling in maniacal laughter-we’d know them to be mad scientists. But they wear nice white lab coats, and their pleasant-looking chief executive appears on television to assure us that they are really acting for the best of medical motives and, besides, there is a great deal of money to be made in biotech and pharmaceutical stocks. . . . The people who say that this technology can be regulated are simply ignorant of human nature. If you were to put up a lever with a sign that said, ‘Don’t touch or the world will be destroyed,’ the paint wouldn’t even be dry before someone’s last words were, ‘I just wanted to see what would happen.’“ As things turned out, the “maniacal laughter” did come through loud and clear with the December announcement by an outfit called Clonaid that it had successfully cloned a baby girl. Everybody has since become familiar with the weird cult behind Clonaid, headed by a former journalist who says he was some thirty years ago visited by aliens who helpfully explained how human life had appeared on earth in the first place. On a previous visit, the aliens had populated the earth with their clones. Why of course. Some more responsible mad scientists complained bitterly that the first announcement of a successful clone-although, as of this writing, still unverified-was under such disreputable auspices. “This will be a great boost,” declared one enthusiastic meddler in the deep things of life, “to those who want to ban cloning altogether.” One may devoutly hope so.

• The second movie installment of Lord of the Rings should generate yet further interest in the question of what J. R. R. Tolkien thought he was up to with that remarkable tale. And that, in turn, should generate interest in Bradley J. Birzer’s new book, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (ISI, 203 pages,, $24.95). Tolkien was very much a Christian and very much a Catholic, and what he was up to, says Birzer, is the reenchantment of the world. Some critics will undoubtedly say, in the academic jargon of the day, that Birzer’s Christian interpretation of Tolkien is “overdetermined.” But he lets the man speak for himself, and provides a very impressive bibliography in support of his understanding of Tolkien’s intention. Asked the really big question, What is the meaning of life?, Tolkien wrote this: “The chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis. . . . We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendor. And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf . . . all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.” To which Birzer adds: “Tolkien the subcreator fulfilled his purpose as best he could. His vocation was to redeem the time through a Christ-inspired and God-centered mythology, to counter the dryness and devastation of the modern world with enchantment, to provide a glimpse of the True Joy, and to speak for all things: Valar, Maiar, incarnate angels, Elves, Dwarves, ents, hobbits . . . even modern men and women. His achievement helps one believe, indeed, that there is always hope.” I don’t know if Birzer’s interpretation is overdetermined, but Sanctifying Myth leaves little doubt that Tolkien’s purpose was determinedly Christian.

• “A Moral Reckoning is a disturbing journey back into the Goldhagen universe. This is a place in which the black hole of the Holocaust draws the past irresistibly into its darkness, while the present and future are bent back toward it, for the work of restitution and self-cleansing is all-encompassing and has only just begun.” So says Christopher Clark, a Cambridge historian, reviewing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book-length expansion of a notorious article in the New Republic claiming that the Catholic Church is responsible for the Holocaust. Clark, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, notes that the many Holocaust scholars who have challenged Goldhagen’s argument are dismissed by him “as acting from malevolent or morally dubious motives.” One detects an element of dismay in Clark’s observation, “I cannot recall ever encountering such venomous ranting in the pages of what purports to be a serious piece of historical writing.” For Goldhagen, there is a straight line from Jesus to Hitler. He rather completely ignores the vast literature on the history of anti-Jewish prejudice, including its complicated social, political, and economic factors. “What we get instead,” says Clark, “is an intensely teleological narrative in which the horned beast of anti-Semitism creeps, essentially unchanging, through the centuries towards its consummation with destiny in January 1933.” Stirred up mainly by German intellectuals, there was a big controversy over Goldhagen’s earlier book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which, Clark says, made him into a celebrity. “It seems unlikely that we shall see a second ‘Goldhagen controversy’ to match the first,” he concludes. I expect he is right. From the reviews that I have seen, it appears that, far from generating controversy, A Moral Reckoning has brought about a remarkable agreement among usually contentious scholars that the book is an embarrassing exercise in mendacity and malice.

• Among the most devastating of many devastating reviews of A Moral Reckoning is written by Marc Saperstein, professor of Jewish history at George Washington University. Goldhagen, says Saperstein, sets himself up as the bold truth-speaking prosecutor of the Church but his passionately muddled reasoning sometimes makes him sound like “a defense attorney for Hitler.” Saperstein writes: “Goldhagen’s attempt to shift the status of church leaders from bystanders to perpetrators of the Holocaust blurs this important distinction, ultimately diffusing the guilt of the Nazis. Despite the complexities and occasional ambiguities in the conceptual framework of perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and rescuers, there is a broad consensus that these categories are valid and useful. The culpability of church leaders, the American government, or the American Jewish community is fundamentally different from the culpability of the leaders of Nazi Germany or members of Einsatzgruppen. To suggest that the Church was as guilty of incitement to murder as was Julius Streicher, to imply that Hitler’s role was only to provide the match that enabled Roman Catholics to kindle the straw that the Church placed around the houses of Jews, is not to ‘speak the truth,’ as Goldhagen so frequently claims for himself. In addition to being counterproductive to the purpose he espouses, it is to wander into a conceptual and moral wilderness.”

• So why now are evangelical Protestants and Catholics able to think together in a new way about Scripture and tradition? Reviewing the latest book of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), Your Word Is Truth (Eerdmans), Stanley J. Grenz of Baylor University suggests that there are deep cultural and intellectual churnings at work: “The current interest in the retrieval of tradition emerges as a part of a larger response to the demise of the kind of epistemological foundationalism that was prevalent throughout the modern era, a foundationalism allied with the empirical science that grew out of the Enlightenment. Among evangelicals, assumptions about the nature of knowledge that reigned in modern society evoked the optimistic belief that scientific methods of Bible study, together with the illuminating work of the Spirit, readily lead the ‘Bible-believing Christian’ to the true meaning of the biblical texts, and this without recourse to either premodern exegetes or the hermeneutical traditions of the Church. In recent years, however, the confidence of many evangelicals in the modern epistemological triunity of Scripture, the individual interpreter, and the indwelling Spirit has been shaken, a situation that opens the door to a new trio-Scripture, tradition, and Church.” He adds that Your Word Is Truth and related developments have not adequately come to terms with the question of magisterium or the “locus of authority” in the Christian community. And, of course, he is right about that. ECT_is a work in progress.

• After the reign of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in Chicago, there was speculation about what Father Michael Place, Bernardin’s ghost writer and factotum, would do. Not to worry, he has done very well for himself. He became the chief executive of the Catholic Health Association and, according to Modern Healthcare, is among the highest paid in that world. The average base compensation for chief executives of major healthcare associations is $399,062. In the year that CHA went from healthy profits to post a $656,559 loss on total revenue of $15.3 million, Fr. Place had his annual salary raised to $529,288, not including $37,000 in benefits and expense allowance. Fr. Place points out that he gives ten percent of his income to the Church, leaving him with barely half a million per year for himself. “After three years in my position, [the CHA board] said I was far below the market basket and needed to catch up to where I should be.” Consider, too, that catching up includes those years as a priest in Chicago, which really didn’t pay all that much. It is pointed out that Fr. Place’s remuneration is 3.7 percent of the total revenue of CHA.

• I should have made it clear in last month’s commentary that the Maurice Blackwell of Baltimore who was shot three times by Dontee Stokes, the man acquitted of attempted murder, had been removed from ministry several years ago. In his testimony in Stokes’ defense, William Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore said he regretted reinstating Blackwell in 1993 after he had been accused of sexual abuse and sent for ninety days of evaluation and therapy. While the clarification does not affect the substance of my commentary, facts matter.

• At the end of each year, the Pope issues a message on world peace, and this time it marked the fortieth anniversary of the John XXIII encyclical Pacem in Terris. At the time, many critics of a “realist” bent said the encyclical was a farrago of sentimentality with a distinctly utopian flavor. Forty years later, John Paul II declares it “prophetic” and finds in it lessons that others have missed in their reading of the document. For instance, there is this reflection on how just order is the foundation of peace: “I would like to suggest that the Church’s fifteen-hundred-year-old teaching on peace as ‘tranquillitas ordinis-the tranquillity of order’ as Saint Augustine called it (De Civitate Dei, 19, 13), which was brought to a new level of development forty years ago by Pacem in Terris, has a deep relevance for the world today, for the leaders of nations as well as for individuals. That there is serious disorder in world affairs is obvious. Thus the question to be faced remains: What kind of order can replace this disorder, so that men and women can live in freedom, justice, and security? And since the world, amid its disorder, continues nevertheless to be ‘ordered’ and organized in various ways-economic, cultural, even political-there arises another equally urgent question: On what principles are these new forms of world order unfolding? These far-reaching questions suggest that the problem of order in world affairs, which is the problem of peace rightly understood, cannot be separated from issues of moral principle. This is another way of saying that the question of peace cannot be separated from the question of human dignity and human rights. That is one of the enduring truths taught by Pacem in Terris, which we would do well to remember and reflect upon on this fortieth anniversary.” The Pope’s message also has strong words on the importance of the United Nations in developing the international order necessary to peace. Many will fail to see how the present constitution and practices of the UN can bear the weight of the hopes that the Pope apparently invests in it. The complicated relationship of the Holy See to the UN will certainly be coming in for more discussion if, as is reported, the Holy See applies to become a member nation, as distinct from its present status as a permanent observer. At one time, a number of smaller countries chose permanent observer status but, one by one, they have become member nations, with Switzerland being the most recent instance. Now the Holy See is all alone as a permanent observer, and the fear is that there will be a gradual whittling away of its opportunity for influence in the counsels of the organization. It would appear that the Holy See can meet the official qualifications to become a member nation. It has independent sovereignty over a territory, no matter how small, with permanent residents, and it has diplomatic relations with most of the nations of the world. From a theological perspective, however, the idea that the Holy See can be viewed as a nation among the nations is not without its problems. To the extent that the Holy See represents the Catholic Church and has no raison d’être apart from that, puzzling questions arise. I am by no means joining those who recently, and with crushing lack of success, tried to get the Holy See expelled from the UN. In its role as permanent observer, it has played an invaluable role and perhaps could continue to do so in the future. I do confess to being uncertain about what would be entailed-not so much for the UN as for the Church’s self-understanding-in becoming a member nation. If there is, in fact, a move in that direction, you can be sure that we will be coming back to the subject in these pages.

• Our reviewer, while not giving it a rave, did have positive things to say about Randall Balmer’s recently published Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism (Briefly Noted, December 2002). A sterner assessment is offered by Christianity Today, the magazine of mainstream evangelicalism, and that despite the fact that Balmer is a contributing editor. The review makes allowances: “In some ways it is appropriate that a sprawling, unstructured subject has spawned a sprawling, unstructured book.” But, while noting much of the nuttiness and kookiness in the worlds of evangelicalism, “Balmer gives short shrift to evangelicals’ recent attempts to forge a more intellectually rigorous worldview. . . . While evangelical pop culture permeates the book, evangelical thought culture barely appears. Creationism is in; Intelligent Design is out. Tyndale House Publishing, home of the Left Behind series, has an entry. Eerdmans, Baker, InterVarsity Press, and Zondervan do not.” All good points. I must have a word with our reviewer.

• The Faith & Reason Institute is a think tank in Washington run by Robert Royal and they recently ran a conference on “Catholics, the Media, and the American Public Square.” A booklet by that title includes several presentations, and I was particularly interested in what was said by Rod Dreher of National Review and Jody Bottum of the Weekly Standard. They both had nice things to say about me, which is, well, nice. Except Rod Dreher says, “Father Richard John Neuhaus of First Things has been more of a pastor to me in his writing than any pastor I’ve actually had in real life,” which makes me worry about his experience with priests. Then there is a sharp exchange between Bottum and Dreher. Bottum contends that the Catholic writer has to be careful not to be pigeon-holed as a “professional Catholic.” He notes that the left trots out their professional Catholics such as Garry Wills and Mary Gordon to do their little routine of “I’m a Catholic, but I disagree with the Church on (fill in the blank).” On the conservative side, says Bottum, Dreher has fallen into the “professional Catholic” trap in his writing about the current scandals. Then comes the exchange. Dreher: “So what’s the alternative? If we only leave the public square open to the Richard McBriens, the dissenters, among the professional Catholic set, who is going to be out there to stand up for what the Church really does teach? Being a faithful Catholic does not mean that you have to fall in line behind the bishops just out of respect for their office.” Bottum: “It’s when it becomes obsession that it begins to worry me. I also think you are mad, Rod, if you imagine that by being widely quoted in dissent you are thereby going to gain a standing that you will be able to use in the mainstream media when you want to put out a position of orthodoxy. You are not gaining resources on this topic which will then allow you to print something otherwise orthodox on a later issue in the New York Times. It’s just not true.” Dreher: “I just don’t see what the alternative is. I don’t enjoy attacking the Church, but I think it has to be done and it has to be done from a position of fidelity to the Magisterium and fidelity to the laity as well because the Church is not just the institution.” In this case I’m not taking sides, except to commend Dreher and Bottum for making progress toward the achievement of disagreement, as distinct from confusion.

• Continuing my only half-whimsical campaign against the anti-smoking fascists, I thought you might be interested in this comment on unhappy Wilhelmus Kieft, governor of what used to be New Amsterdam. It is found in A Knickerbocker’s History of New York by Washington Irving-who, by the way, lived and wrote only three blocks from here. “Wilhelmus Kieft . . . had been greatly annoyed by the factious meetings of the good people of New Amsterdam, but, observing that on these occasions the pipe was ever in their mouth, he began to think that the pipe was at the bottom of the affair, and that there was some mysterious affinity between politics and tobacco smoke. Determined to strike at the root of the evil, he began forthwith to rail at tobacco as a noxious, nauseous weed, filthy in all its uses; and as to smoking, he denounced it as a heavy tax on the public pocket-a vast consumer of time, a great encourager of idleness, and a deadly bane to the prosperity and morals of the people. Finally he issued an edict, prohibiting the smoking of tobacco throughout the New Netherlands. Ill-fated Kieft! Had he lived in the present age and attempted to check the unbounded license of the press, he could not have struck more sorely upon the sensibilities of the [people]. The pipe, in fact, was the great organ of reflection and deliberation of the New Netherlander. It was his constant companion and solace: was he gay, he smoked; was he sad, he smoked; his pipe was never out of his mouth; it was part of his physiognomy; without it his best friends would not know him. Take away his pipe? You might as well take away his nose!” Three centuries later, alas, Mayor Michael (Wilhelmus Kieft) Bloomberg has done it.

• Bill Buckley tells how he sent one of his books to Norman Mailer, writing in the index beside Mailer’s name, “Hi, Norman! I knew you would look here first. Bill.” So of course I looked in the index upon receiving William F. Buckley, Jr: A Bibliography, edited by William Meehan. So few references to me! Although I’m glad to say that they’re all complimentary, while noting that one, upon my becoming a Catholic, is not included. Any time is a good time to celebrate Bill Buckley. Since 1951, he has published 31 nonfiction books; 14 books of fiction; 48 introductions and forewords to books by others; 222 obituary essays; more than 800 editorials and other pieces in National Review; more than 350 articles for other periodicals; and more than 4,000 syndicated news columns. In his mid-70s he’s going strong. Indefatigable is one word for him. Others are joyous, considerate, wry, and generous. He is living one of the notable and edifying lives of our times. And, as you might have guessed, I count it a grace to call him my friend.

• Aquinas felt quite at home in the growing urban enclaves of the thirteenth century. Man, he assured us, is “naturally a town-dweller,” and rural life is “the result of a misfortune.” We cannot know what he would have thought about today’s suburbs. The University Bookman devotes a special issue to the “new urbanism,” which has been the subject of a flood of books in the past ten years. Peter Katz, Vincent Scully, James Howard Kunstler, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Kathleen McCormick are some of the big names in the movement. Railing against the suburbs, writes senior editor Mark C. Henrie, used to be a very liberal thing to do: “The critique of the American suburbs has long been a staple of the political left. In the 1950s and 1960s, the ticky-tacky boxes of postwar suburban tract housing were attacked for the conformity and ‘inauthenticity’ of the lives lived therein, with gray-flannelled fathers making their way in the ‘system’ and oppressed mothers ‘imprisoned’ at home with their children. Presumably, authenticity lay in the orgiastic, liberated irresponsibility of urban bohemia. In the 1970s and 1980s, the left’s critique of the suburbs moved to environmental concerns. Suburbanites commute, which means that suburban life demands ever more internal combustion engines, holding the fate of earth in the balance. Moreover, it was said, the green-field developments characteristic of suburban sprawl eat up precious ‘wilderness,’ endangering biodiversity. Finally, in the 1990s, the left’s critique took a fanciful turn. Films and other products of popular culture depicted suburban normalcy as a Potemkin village hiding such perversities as incest, murderous amorality, and even cannibalism. Suburban bourgeois life was ‘revealed’ to be a pathology.” Today’s new urbanists, who are trying to create real small towns for real people, may be, whether they know it or not, the new traditionalists. The editors write: “Ours, however, is a time unanticipated in progressive ideology-an age of recovery in which many have awakened to the wisdom of tradition and the foolishness of our novelties. Still, short of religious awakening, conservatives have been stymied about practical responses to our pressing need for cultural renewal. Culture is a habit of the heart, and therefore not susceptible to straightforward manipulation. Changing the culture seems beyond our power. But asphalt, vinyl siding, street trees, and building codes are in our power. This is the hope that the new urbanism offers: a means of renewing the culture by recognizing the culture-forming power of the built environment. Perhaps, in the end, the claims of the new urbanism are overblown. But, after a century of experimental novelty, what remains to be tried is the experiment in tradition. Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke observed that in order for men to love their country, their country must be lovely. Here too, agrarians and new urbanists alike are inheritors of the deepest currents in the conservative tradition.” Flannery O’Connor observed that “Somewhere is better than nowhere.” Any somewhere. The thing that has always impressed, and depressed, me about suburban developments is that most of them could be anywhere, which is pretty much like nowhere. Of course, I’m an incorrigible city-dweller, and a New York City-dweller to boot, so you probably shouldn’t take my word for it. For more on the promising movement called the new urbanism, you might want to check out the Spring 2002 issue of the University Bookman.

• Had we the time for it, we untutored carnivores could learn many things from the dialectics of ethnology, which is the study of putative feelings, thoughts, and even languages among animals. E. S. Turner reviews some new books in the area, including Marc Bekoff’s Minding Animals. “Minding Animals teems with unanswered, partially answered, and unanswerable questions. [Among them] are these: Are animals smart enough to play dumb? Is it permissible to play music to a dolphin as long as they can move away? Do fish look for beauty in a mate, or just symmetry? Sometimes the reader may wish to pose his own questions. How did the researchers prove that ‘Female Japanese macaques experience more orgasms when they mate with high-ranking males than with lower-ranking males’?” Also reviewed is a book that advocates better ways to hold conversations with apes. Its author says that the controversy over this provides us with “a wealth of interesting observations on the reactions and assumptions” of those taking part. To which Mr. Turner responds, “And, in the friendliest spirit, that goes for cognitive ethnologists everywhere.”

• Now we’re getting somewhere. Long-suffering readers know that I was fond of citing James Joyce to the effect that the Catholic Church is “Here Comes Everybody.” Until the pedantic Jody Bottum, our poetry editor, spoiled the fun by claiming that nowhere in the Joyce corpus is “H.C.E.” applied to the Catholic Church. Several erudite readers, invoking Joycean fragments, have in recent months suggested ways of rehabilitating my wonted usage, for which I am grateful. Now arrives a helpful reflection from Craig Payne of Indian Hills College in Ottumwa, Iowa. Is it possible that what was not seen by the Ivy League has been revealed to Indian Hills? Mr. Payne suggests that the text of Finnegans Wake supports the application of H.C.E. to the Catholic (and particularly the Irish Catholic) Church. His letter is submitted in evidence: “In the ongoing dream of Mr. Porter, Porter’s dream persona, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), appears to have become identified at one point with Finn MacCool, the legendary or semi-legendary Irish hero of the third century a.d., leader of the Fianna warriors. MacCool is partly human and partly divine; in later stories, he is also described as being of gigantic stature. Anyway-during this sequence the following passages occur: ‘The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphry bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hunger-lean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation. . . . [F]rom good start to happy finish the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in that king’s treat house of satin alustrelike above floats and footlights . . . in a command performance by special request with the courteous permission for pious purposes the homedromed and enliventh performance of the problem passion play of the millentury, running strong since creation, A Royal Divorce . . .’ A few lines later comes a reference to ‘the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence . . .’ ‘Here Comes Everybody,’ then, is the other partly human and partly divine Irish giant, the universal and ‘truly catholic’ assemblage, gathered ‘for pious purposes’ to watch yet another performance of a passion play, a play which has run ever since creation, when the ‘Royal Divorce’ took place. And one more point: this passage is presented at precisely the point where the ‘christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant’ HCE is called into serious question, by accusations of sexual misconduct involving himself and a youngster (a girl, in this case). I’m pretty sure this will clear up nothing, as is the case with most Joyceana. However, it was worth a try.” It was, I think, more than a worth a try. It may not be the find of the millentury, but my hunch is that Mr. Payne has hit pay dirt with respect to the ecclesiological significance of H.C.E.

• For readers under twenty-five or so, says Wilfred McClay in his introduction, “an encounter with the contents of this book may feel rather like the discovery of a time capsule, filled with the brilliant fragments and curious remains of a singular world that has all but vanished.” The book is Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul (ISI). It is not just those under twenty-five who find this a story out of time. I came of political age well after the Hiss-Chambers affair broke in 1948, and for a long time failed to appreciate the ways in which the controversies it engendered defined, perhaps more than any other dispute, the battle lines of American public discourse. That was remedied, at least in large part, by the reading of Chambers’ magnificent autobiography, Witness. The present book, edited by Patrick A. Swan, is a collection of essays-sometimes inspired, sometimes venomous-on the Hiss-Chambers affair. The controversy went on well into the 1990s, by which time all but the most fanatical of true believers recognized that Hiss was certainly guilty of perjury, and almost certainly guilty of spying for the Soviet Union. Much earlier, William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers in his latter years, had written that Hiss’ innocence had once been “a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith, and now was rank superstition.” Despite everything, the patrician Hiss protested his innocence to the end, and there were still those who desperately clasped the superstition. In one of the many spirited essays in this collection, Hugh Kenner wrote in 1979: “Alger Hiss lives yet, to a rhythm of his own. It is the rhythm of the sewing-machine, busily piecing and stitching; the parts glinting, the motor humming, the needle hopping, the pieces of material lapped and fed: no thread in the bobbin, none in the needle.” In Witness Chambers had written that communism represented “the next logical step which three hundred years of rationalism hesitated to take, and said what millions of modern minds think, but do not care or dare to say: If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God? Henceforth man’s mind is man’s fate.” Reflecting on the biotechnologies that place in human hands the power to redesign humanity itself, McClay concludes his introduction with this: “Such a statement may well have seemed overdrawn a half-century ago. We will see if it seems less so in the half-century to come.” Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul is a marvelous read-about politics, morality, the American intelligentsia, and the disordering of the human will to believe. One consequence of its publication devoutly to be wished is that it might inspire more people, also those under twenty-five, to read Witness.

• Ministers, priests, monks, and other “religious professionals” live longer, according to a study drawn from three decades of research and published in the Journal of Religion and Health. A summary of the study reports that “the standardized mortality rate for clergy was below 90 percent, which means that ten percent fewer clergy died than did ordinary people. The study speculated that it may be religious professionals’ ‘contemplative lifestyle’ that accounts for the difference.” I suppose this means I must reexamine my assumption that the mortality rate remains pretty steady at 100 percent. I had thought the pattern was more or less standardized, but it appears I’ve been overlooking some extraordinary people.

• As professors of what is called sociobiology are inclined to do, David Sloan Wilson explains it all-or at least the ultimate things-in Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Jerry Coyne of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago says the book is gravely flawed on a number of scores. He also notes: “Finally, as Wilson admits, his theory of cultural group selection also applies to nonreligious social groups, from Freemasons to Marxists, whose tenets rest on emotional symbols and supposed benefits to members. Thus his is a theory of cooperation, not of religion. He fails to address the essence of religion-what it is that sets, say, Catholicism apart from Rotary Clubs. Rates of martyrdom are higher among Catholics than among Rotarians. Understanding the root of this difference would reveal the essence of religion, but here Wilson has nothing to offer.” Coyne finds it curious that Wilson’s work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting harmony between science and religion. The harmony proposed by Wilson, he says, is the disappearance of religion.

• Once again readers are responding generously to the annual appeal. Believe me, we wouldn’t ask for help if we didn’t need it. This is not a begging notice but simply a reminder. And, if you’ve misplaced the original appeal and return envelope, our ever resourceful secretarial staff assures me that they are perfectly capable of handling checks received in the most ordinary of envelopes, and even checks delivered by hand. So you can see everybody is pitching in to keep the editors working, underpaid though they undoubtedly are.

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Sources:

On homosexuality and the priesthood, John Leo, U.S. News & World Report, May 27, 2002; Ray H. Siegfried II, New York Times, January 18, 2003; Robert Bennett, Boston Globe, January 18, 2003; survey by Dean Hoge, Washington Post, August 16, 2002; Jason Berry, New York Times, April 3, 2002. Mark Lilla on Franz Rosenzweig, New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002.

While We’re At It: J. Bottum on mad scientists, Public Interest, Winter 2003. Christopher Clark on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 2002. Marc Saperstein on Goldhagen, America, December 2, 2002. Stanley Grenz on Your Word Is Truth, Christian Century, October 23-November 5, 2002. On Fr. Michael Place, Modern Healthcare, February 11, 2002. Review of Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, Christianity Today, January 2003. The new urbanism, University Bookman, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2002. E. S. Turner on ethnology, Times Literary Supplement, October 11, 2002. Religious professionals’ mortality rate, Religion Watch, January 2003. Jerry Coyne on David Sloan Wilson, Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 2002.