While We’re At It

• The Christmas wars have come and gone. Until next December—or, more accurately, the start-up of the shopping season in late October. The wars received more attention than usual this time, with numerous localities dubbing Christmas trees as “holiday” trees or “winter” trees, which elicited widespread demands that Christmas be called Christmas. In response, major retailers reverted to “Merry Christmas” in advertising and greetings by sales personnel. Cultural critics reached to discover ironies in all this (irony being the paydirt of cultural criticism). For instance, Adam Cohen, writing in the New York Times, is excited by the discovery that the Puritans of Massachusetts despised Christmas as an unbiblical papist innovation. When, later, merchants discovered that money was to be made from the season, Christian leaders deplored its commercialization. Already in 1906, Mr. Cohen writes, the Jews of New York had the right idea about observing the season when they demanded the banning of Christmas carols from public schools. The de-Christianization of Christmas, he suggests, is the truly American way required “out of respect for the nation’s religious diversity.” But now, all of a sudden, you have these religious fanatics “with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.” Forget about prayer in schools. The annual campaign to “Keep Christ in Christmas” goes back to the beginning of the discovery of the season’s commercial possibilities. Mr. Cohen sides with the Puritans, forgetting that they knew a thing or two about theocracy. Not incidentally, they did not take kindly to Jews in their holy commonwealth. For a very different Jewish view of Christianity in our public life, I recommend the late Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski’s “A Rabbi’s Christmas” (FT, December 1991).

• Rabbi Petuchowski was nothing if not Jewish, and he relished the carols, festivities, and pageantry of Christmas. He never missed watching on television the papal Midnight Mass from Rome. “Still all of that is a matter of mere externals,” he wrote. “What really intrigues [me] is the fact that millions of [my] non-Jewish fellow human beings are celebrating the birthday of a Jewish child. And they are doing so by extolling the values of peace and good will. All the more misplaced . . . are the efforts by some supposedly Jewish organizations to arouse, through their battles against Christmas symbols in public places, the ill will and resentment of Christians—at the very time when the Christian religion, more than at other times of the year, inspires its followers with irenic and philanthropic sentiments.” Rabbi Petuchowski notes that it is the Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who may have the most bitter memories of living in a “Christian society.” But they are not the ones leading the charge against the public observance of Christmas. “In other words, what we are really dealing with in this annual battle against public Christian observance is not so much a ‘Jewish’ attack on that observance as it is a secularist one—with some of the prominent secularists identifying themselves as Jews. They are the same people who fight the use of public school facilities for meetings of high school religious-interest groups, and state support of private schools. They fight with equal vigor the attempts by other Jewish groups to have Jewish religious symbols exhibited alongside the Christian ones, such as the efforts of the Chabad (Lubavitch) group of Orthodox Jews to place a Hanukkah candelabrum on the public square when a Christmas tree is put there, which would be a fitting demonstration of America’s religious pluralism. They are, in other words, not singling out Christianity. They are against the public manifestation of religion per se—even (or perhaps particularly) against the public manifestation of the religion of their own ancestors.”

• Du bist Albert Einstein. Germans are being treated to a television barrage of slick commercials aimed at elevating their self-esteem. Germans are feeling poorly about themselves. The economy is stagnant, the culture is in the doldrums, the churches are relics, and it seems nobody but Muslim immigrants is having babies. Forty years ago, German thinkers produced a “philosophy of the future” and “theology of the future.” And now there is no future. One commercial says: “Beat your wings. Uproot trees. You are the wings. You are the tree. You are Germany.” It is the fatuity of deep depression. Not many years ago, Germany was to be reinvigorated by the reunification of East and West. The West poured billions upon billions into the East, and it seems to have vanished without a trace. Richard Bernstein writes: “Now the westerners are unhappy because the disappearance of all that money is seen as the root of Germany’s economic stagnation and high unemployment. The easterners are notoriously unhappy because life is less secure than it used to be under Communism, and, as this cycle continues, the westerners are irritated that the easterners are unhappy.” In the nineteenth century, Germany was the model of high culture; in the twentieth, the archetype of barbarity. That was briefly followed by a celebrated economic miracle and success in democratic government. As Steven Ozment writes in A Mighty Fortress, Germans want so desperately to be a normal nation (While We’re At It, November 2004). At the same time, they decided, couple by couple, not to have babies, not to have a future, not to have hope. It seems the last thing Germans need to hear is “Du bist Einstein.”

• St. Edmund Campion is a figure of monumental heroism in Catholic history and, more specifically, in the Jesuit tradition. A convert, scholar, and powerful preacher, he was, for his refusal to revert to the Church of England, put on the rack and executed at Tyburn on December 1, 1581. The University of San Francisco is an institution “in the Jesuit tradition.” A notice from Dave Macmillan, vice president for “university advancement,” alerts the faculty to the fact that Campion Hall will be renamed Kalmanovitz Hall. Paul Kalmanovitz was a beer and real-estate magnate, and the family foundation offered the university $7.5 million to renovate the hall if it would be renamed in his honor. The leadership of the university, however, is deeply devoted to St. Edmund Campion and the Jesuit tradition. Mr. Macmillan reports that “the university asked the foundation to upgrade its ‘naming commitment’ to $10 million.” The foundation agreed. Campion Hall is now Kalmanovitz Hall. As Winston Churchill said to the offended lady, “We already know what you are. We are simply haggling over the price.” Not to worry, however. Mr. Macmillan reassuringly notes that there are still tributes to St. Edmund Campion at other Jesuit institutions.

• Several readers have suggested that I was unfair in my criticism of a statement signed by many evangelical Protestant leaders, “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” It would be a sad irony, I said, if evangelicals followed in the path of the old National Council of Churches in conflating the gospel with a political agenda, and that is true. But I should have said more about the merits of the statement. The document is comprehensive and considered. It tries hard to bridge conventional liberal/conservative, left/right divisions on many issues in dispute, and to do so without fudging disagreements. It recognizes that the Bible does not answer every question about the right ordering of society; that biblical witness must be joined to experience, reason, and attentiveness to something like natural law (although that last term is not used). On policy specifics there is little with which to disagree, in part because the document largely limits itself to generalizations and both/and affirmations. All in all, “For the Health of the Nation” is an encouraging response to Carl Henry’s call of a half century ago for evangelicals to engage responsibly the cultural, social, and political tasks of our time. It is also a welcome answer to Mark Noll’s observation that evangelical engagements in public tasks are too often “episodic and reactive.” The statement seeks to provide a thoughtful framework for sustained commitment. And yet . . .

• Disclaimers to the contrary, “For the Health of the Nation” gives an unwarranted priority to the political. “Disengagement is not an option,” we are told. Maybe not for Christians in general, but some Christian vocations are rightly disengaged from the political task. Then the signers say their commitments constitute “the platform for evangelicals to engage in common action.” Should churches have political platforms? While the statement calls for humility, it may not be unfair to detect a touch of hubris at points. For instance, “We make up fully one quarter of all voters in the most powerful nation in history.” Is this the language of the little flock to whom Our Lord promises the kingdom, or of the principalities and powers of the present time? If evangelicals do not assert the lordship of Christ over the world, it is said at another point, the result would be “to functionally abandon it to the Evil One.” Is it then the case that the lordship of Christ is dependent upon us? If we do not rule, it is then the case that not Christ but the Evil One rules? The statement urges Christians “to speak prophetically to society,” but the certification of prophets and the discernment of prophecies is left unclear. Christians, we are told, “bring a unique vision” to politics, but there is no policy mentioned that is not supported also by non-Christians. Instead of insisting upon their uniqueness, should not Christians cultivate a vision of justice that God has imprinted on the hearts of all? Personal conversion and social transformation are repeatedly put on what would seem to be the same plane. Environmental concern is urged by invoking the great eschatological vision of Romans 8 (“the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay”), which, the statement says, “teaches us that God is not only redeeming his people but is also restoring the whole creation.” I expect St. Paul would be surprised by the lesson drawn: “[Christians] shape their personal lives in creation-friendly ways: practicing effective recycling, conserving resources, and experiencing the joy of contact with nature.” This is what is meant by “the glory that is to be revealed to us”? While at one point recognizing that government cannot do everything, we are told that “it is not the primary role of government to provide everything that humans need for their well-being.” Is it then the secondary role, perhaps? “God’s prophets call his people to create just and righteous societies.” That is followed by references to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos. The apparent assumption is that Christians are in the same prophetic relationship to American society as were the Old Testament prophets to Israel of old.

• Let me say it again: “For the Health of the Nation” is an admirable statement in many respects. I agree with almost all its policy recommendations. But some of its formulations are infelicitous, and others theologically mischievous or incoherent. Lacking a developed ecclesiology, “the church” is proposed as God’s lobby for the New Israel that America is or is to become. Almost entirely absent is St. Augustine’s awareness of the pilgrim City of God in ambiguous interaction with the politics of the city of man that is in bondage to the libido dominandi of earthly powers. And yes, it is in important ways similar to the putatively prophetic pronouncements of the old National Council of Churches in its proposal of a political platform that presumably claims the allegiance of all who acknowledge the lordship of Christ. Some of the policy lyrics are different—most significantly on the protection of human life at every stage of development and decline—but the melody is troublingly familiar. “For the Health of the Nation” is a welcome effort to provide a comprehensive framework for sustained evangelical engagement in public affairs. But half a century after Carl F.H. Henry issued his challenge, evangelicals are no longer newly arrived refugees from their fundamentalist exile. Given the current influence and responsibility of evangelicals, they, their fellow-Christians, and their fellow-citizens are entitled to something better than this.

• Here is something really fine. It is an eminently accessible and informed introduction to one of the greatest questions facing our society, and every mortal in our society, which means all of us. Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society is published by the President’s Council on Bioethics. Leon Kass, past chairman of the council, writes: “As a society, we have not yet faced up to this difficulty especially in its human dimensions. And the popular legal instruments that we are being encouraged to employ to avoid the problem will fall short of what we need as individuals. As this report points out in great detail, living wills, drafted years in advance, are not the answer. They simply cannot substitute for reliable and responsible caregivers on the spot, devoted to the welfare of the incapacitated person here and now. Even worse is the deadly ‘solution’ of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia, advocates for which are again active in several state legislatures. Caring wholeheartedly for a frail patient or a disabled loved one is incompatible with thinking that engineering their death is an acceptable ‘therapeutic option.’ Betrayal and abandonment of the elderly can never be part of a decent and compassionate society, one devoted to the equal worth and dignity of every human life, from start to fish, regardless of personal strengths, weaknesses, or disabilities.” There is in prospect a great conflict. “As we bend our efforts in support of the elderly, we can ill afford to neglect the needs of the young, who, unlike the old, have no organized voice to speak up for their needs. We must at all costs avoid a conflict between the generations over scarce resources.” But be assured that this is not a book of sweeping policy generalizations. In its three-hundred-plus pages, it treats in detail the problems encountered in growing older and more dependent, and addresses with moral wisdom the difficult decisions to be made about care toward the end of life. I have come across no single book that covers so much so well of a subject of inevitable interest to all of us. (For a copy of Taking Care, write the President’s Council on Bioethics, 1801 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20006, or visit www.bioethics.gov.)

• Poland, with a population of forty million, is the largest of the ten states recently joining the European Union. I recently wrote here about whether Poland would, on crucial social, cultural, and economic questions, be more influenced by or be an influence on the EU. A little test came in December when the Polish delegation erected a pro-life exhibit in a corridor of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Parliamentarians from France and elsewhere protested vigorously and the exhibit was promptly removed. As a result of Poland’s presence, said British parliamentarian Michael Cashman, “On women’s rights and gay equality, we are fighting battles that we thought we had won years ago.” Poland’s low-tax and growth-oriented economic policies are also seen as a threat to the stagnating economies of such as Germany and France. As if that were not enough, the Poles were more assertive than the EU thought necessary in supporting democracy in Ukraine, and, in their support for U.S. foreign policy, seem not to understand what the EU is for. “We want to see Europe based on a Christian ethic,” says Maciej Giertych, one of the ten Polish members of the EU parliament. Of the intolerance displayed in the removal of the pro-life exhibit, he says, “It reminds us of what we had in Poland before 1989.”

• Forget his use of the ugly and misleading phrase “organized religion.” You know what he means. Stephen Prothero of Boston University is reviewing Restless Souls by Leigh Eric Schmidt, professor of religion at Princeton. Schmidt takes the side of the many “seekers” who are into “spirituality” and can’t give the time of day to “religion.” Prothero writes: “One of the grand conceits of the Spiritual Left is that each of us can (and should) invent our own spirituality, which to be authentic must also be unborrowed. But the meditation techniques and yoga postures so loved among spirituality’s champions did not spring forth fully formed from the genius of any American. They were cultivated over millennia by Hindus and Buddhists in India and Tibet and Japan, who were themselves sustained in those practices by institutions and clerics and everything else that [Ralph Waldo] Emerson loved to hate. Mr. Schmidt knows this, of course. And at a few points he seems to sense the irony of foisting an intellectual genealogy on folks who, like Charlie Brown and his friends, fancy themselves parentless. In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is in contemporary American spirituality more than a modicum of the feckless teenager who imagines that his foolish parents have bequeathed him nothing except perhaps a new car. The problem with this conceit is not simply that it is historically inaccurate or that it fails to give credit where credit is due. The problem—and this should matter more to spirituality’s friends than to its enemies—is that spirituality depends very much on organized religion, since each of its key characteristics (even its disdain for religion itself) was created and sustained by religious believers operating inside religious institutions and for religion’s sake. What is missing from this otherwise intelligent book is a hard-headed engagement with the broader question of spirituality’s provenance, specifically its symbiotic relationship with organized religion itself. Spirituality is not so much an alternative to religion as a part of it. Should the prophesy of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier ever come to pass—that ‘altar, church, priest, and ritual will pass away’—spirituality would go with them.”

• The sprightly newsletter catholic eye notes that during the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist the New York Times‘ Rome correspondent reported that the Eucharist is “the sacrament of bread and wine in which believers commune with the body and blood of Christ.” On another day, he reported that it is “the Catholic rite in which the sacrament of bread and wine are distributed.” The editors of catholic eye apparently do not understand that the New York Times is a newspaper where a reporter’s ignorance of a subject is considered a qualification. I’m not making this up. More than one person at the Times has explained to me that having someone report on a subject with which he is not familiar provides a fresh and unbiased perspective, and makes it more likely his reporting will be readily understood by non-specialists. That is not the policy on really important subjects, mind you, such as science, the Supreme Court, and same-sex marriage. But it will do for religion. It is perhaps noteworthy that, in this case, the reporter and his editors assume that readers of the Times will not know what the Eucharist is. Perhaps so, which says a great deal about the readers whom the Times assures us are highly educated. In any event, it is striking that a reporter covering a three-week deliberation on the Eucharist comes up with descriptions that nobody in the synod would recognize as the subject of their deliberation.

• William Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore is interviewed by John Allen on Jewish-Catholic relations, a longtime passion with the Cardinal. Keeler tells the story of John Paul II’s refusing the request of a Catholic couple to baptize a child whom they had rescued from the Holocaust but who had Jewish parents who may still have been living. “In my view,” says Keeler, “that’s the big difference between the situation now and 150 years ago, when Pius IX did not hesitate to claim a Jewish child for the Church.” Well, not quite. The big difference, one might respectfully note, is that in that much-publicized nineteenth-century instance the child was already baptized, the country’s law forbade Catholic children to be raised by Jews, and the boy, effectively adopted by Pius IX, went on to become a priest and declared himself forever grateful for the intervention of the pope. Pius IX, in short, was responding to a very different situation from that addressed by John Paul II. John Allen goes on to ask about the delicate question of conversion in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. His Eminence responds: “We speak to them now as beloved elder brothers and sisters in the faith. Obviously, if an individual Jew should be persuaded that the Catholic-Christian faith is where God is calling him or her, our teaching on religious liberty means that choice must be respected, and we will receive that person with great joy.” It is not evident why it should be an occasion of great joy if nothing more than the exercise of religious liberty is involved. John Allen presses on: “You use the verb ‘persuaded,’ which begs the question. Should we be attempting to persuade Jews?” Keeler: “The Church has no organization directed to the conversion of the Jews at this time. I think that’s the most I can say on that question.” Allen then changes the subject. It would seem, however, that a great deal more can and should be said about conversion. The magisterial teaching of the Church—powerfully set forth in, for instance, the encyclical Redemptoris Missio—is that we are under the mandate to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with everyone. The Second Vatican Council states that those who are persuaded that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be must, in order to be saved, enter into and remain in full communion with her. Among the children of Abraham, Jews are indeed our elder brothers. According to Romans 9:11, we are to revere God’s abiding covenant with Israel. One unfortunate interview does not detract from Cardinal Keeler’s many contributions to Jewish-Catholic relations, but after more than thirty years of dialogue, the Jews and Christians involved should have achieved a level of mutual trust that precludes nervousness about truth claims in tension and sometimes in conflict. Of course Christians hope and pray that all, including Jews, will come to accept the fullness of truth revealed in Jesus Christ. We need not condescend to our Jewish interlocutors by fudging that fact of the faith. Nor does that fact diminish all that Jews and Christians have in common that is worth dialoguing about until Christ returns in glory, at which time the great question between us will be definitively settled. The counsel of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is ever pertinent: “Interfaith dialogue begins with faith.”

• Coming out this month is Thomas Oden’s Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements are Changing the Church (Baker Press). This is undoubtedly an important book. Oden, a United Methodist, was for many years professor of theology at Drew University and has made inestimable contributions to Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Many have assumed that the drift and decline of the mainline/oldline Protestant churches—United Methodist, Presbyterian USA, Episcopal, United Church of Christ, ELCA Lutheran, et al.—is unstoppable. As his title suggests, Oden enters a vigorous dissent. Writing, as he says, more as an archivist than as a historian, he documents the decades-long efforts within these bodies to return them to a center of theological orthodoxy and moral sobriety. The goal is to restore their confessional identities and sense of mission, but without the “denominational rivalries” of the past. Oden has elsewhere written at length about the possibility of reconstituting confessional integrity on the basis of the “consensual tradition” of the first millennium of Christian history. He is sanguine about the possibility of achieving this goal. Some would say he is naively sanguine, but, as he documents in the present volume, many people have been working at this for a very long time, and not without some encouraging results. He repeatedly says that the goal does not include “organic union” among the churches. This would seem to preclude the goal of “full communion” as understood by Catholics and others, where full communion means unity in faith, sacraments, and ordered ministry. But perhaps not. As you might imagine, Tom Oden and I have discussed these questions frequently and at length. I have serious reservations about the theological coherence of his “consensual tradition” and the ecumenical coherence of his vision of a mainline/oldline renewed. Nonetheless, Turning Around the Mainline is an indispensable introduction to the people and organizations who are determined not to despair of the denominations that they love.

• The morning service at Harvard University’s Memorial Church is strictly limited to fifteen minutes, of which the sermon gets no more than five. Harvey Mansfield, professor of government, packed a lot into his allotted time, including this: “Both science and religion seek truth, and both respond to human needs. Science responds to the human need for power. We need power because we are weak; without science we cannot protect ourselves securely against the risks to which we are exposed by our mortality. With science we have the means, in Francis Bacon’s phrase, for ‘the relief of man’s estate.’ Religion, too, must face the fact of death, but it does so differently, in a spirit of gratitude. The Christian religion says that though life is imperfect, life is sweet because man is made in the image of God. When we consider the divinity within us we are reminded that life is good, life is a gift—but also that we are imperfect in goodness as well as in power. We yearn for perfection in both goodness and power. Science offers only an increase in power and has no way to understand goodness, let alone produce it. For all its wonderful benefits it cannot tell you what is a benefit, what not. Science believes in progress and has no gratitude for the past. It feels no debt to St. Jerome and others from the so-called Dark Ages who preserved philosophy—hence science—when it could have been extinguished. The Christian religion, or any religion concerned with both goodness and power, is wiser, more sophisticated, and more responsible than our modern science. As individuals, scientists are not mad for power, but the enterprise of science is sure, though sure it cannot prove, that more power from science is good for humanity. In its confusion science must settle for the condition of a captive woman who, if fortunate in her captor, may become, said St. Jerome, ‘a woman of Israel.’”

• There is such a glut of biopathology passing itself off as biography that one welcomes a writer who is not sniffing through the laundry of the great to turn up dirty little secrets. Such a writer is Morton N. Cohen, the biographer of Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and other stories for children of all ages. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement Cohen surveys the scholarly and pseudo-scholarly literature on Carroll, much of it filled with innuendos and slanders, most notably that he had a very unhealthy thing for prepubescent girls. Cohen’s conclusion is emphatic: “Charles Dodgson’s life is well documented. We have eleven volumes of diaries and a large number of his letters. Yet, in spite of all the evidence, we still cannot chart his affections as clearly as we would like to, and how they may have changed. We do know, however, from the mountain of records, that in spite of his private needs, he would never choose to hurt anyone. His life is a monument to kindness, to doing things for others. He was an uncompromising Christian who practiced what he preached. He knew full well that if he ever violated his own strict ethical code, he would not be able to live with himself.” I have not and do not intend to read all the books pushing conclusions to the contrary. I think—and in part I think because I prefer to think—that Cohen is right. It is a preference closely related to what used to be known as the virtue of charity.

• Political liberalism as a doctrine is not what is meant by being politically liberal in today’s America. The doctrine—which has to do with such things as checks and balances, representative government, tolerance, and individual rights—is, many claim, quite thoroughly at odds with what is now usually meant by liberalism. But that is another discussion. Christopher J. Insole, a Cambridge theologian, is responding to the attack on political liberalism, the doctrine, launched by a theological movement called Radical Orthodoxy, of which John Milbank is the foremost champion. Writing in Modern Theology, Insole says: “There is something regrettably shrill about the broadside given by Milbank in his recent Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, where he comments that ‘political liberalism . . . engenders today an increasingly joyless and puritanical world.’ Indeed, such a world is marked by a ‘totalitarian drift and may always become really totalitarian at the point where its [political liberalism’s] empty heart is besieged by an irrational cult of race, class, science, style, or belief.’ This is just wrong. Any careful attention to political liberalism—on the conceptual or historical level—makes evident that the finest instinct of political liberals is not an emptying of their hearts, nor is it a slide towards ‘totality’ in order to ‘confirm . . . free-will as such’ and identify it with the good. It is rather that political liberals make room in their hearts and in the heart of society—out of love, humility and charity—so as to allow for a diverse range of incompatible but humanely possible identifications of the good. It is not always clear that ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ has room for such generosity, at least in its more extravagant flourishes. It is perhaps time for theologians to reckon more strenuously and charitably with the highest possibilities and motivations of political liberalism, as well as exposing its manifest failings, historical debasement and concrete problems. Christian theologians legitimately complain when ‘Christianity’ is judged by its worst historical and concrete moments, and ask critics instead to reckon with Christianity’s higher aspirations and deepest truths. One might do well to extend this same courtesy to other traditions, such as political liberalism.” There is among ideologues, including Christian ideologues, a propensity for attributing to a disfavored “system” the failings and frustrations of the human condition. For Marx it was capitalism, for conservatives of a libertarian bent it is socialism. In this country, Stanley Hauerwas and his disciples, who are usually on what is perceived to be the left, share with Theonomists, usually on the right, a passionate animus against the liberal democratic order. Theonomists—a.k.a. Dominionists or Reconstructionists—share with the late R.J. Rushdoony a belief that our constitutional order is fundamentally misbegotten and the nation should be reconstituted on the basis of “Bible law.” (See my article “Why Wait for the Kingdom? The Theonomist Temptation,” May 1990.) While proposing very different alternatives to our putatively misbegotten political order, the anti-liberals of the left and right are both lacking in an Augustinian sense of our creaturely limits within a fallen creation that is far short of the historical realization of the promised Kingdom. Insole is right: humility is needed. Which is in no way to be confused with wimpishness.

• Googling “John Rawls” and “justice,” one comes up with a few hundred thousand references. That’s a lot, but I thought there would be many more. No book on political philosophy has been so widely discussed in recent decades as Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Critics have noted that Rawls tends to skirt the most controverted question of justice in our public life, namely, abortion. Most have assumed that his theory favors an almost unlimited abortion license. In a 1997 book, Moral Status, Mary Anne Warren challenged that assumption, arguing that Rawls’ position on “the basis of human equality” leads directly to the conclusion that human embryos have the same basic moral rights as human infants. Now Russell DiSilvestro of Bowling Green State University supports and further develops that challenge. Not only Rawls’ understanding of equality but also what he says about “paternalism”—meaning concern for those who are not present participants in deliberating in what he calls “the original position,” the requirements of a just society—leads to a thoroughly Rawlsian interest in protecting the unborn. Writing in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, DiSilvestro concludes: “Finally, the proper treatment of the human embryo has been an issue of public policy deliberation for many years now. In such deliberation, the claim is often made that one’s private moral or religious convictions should not be invoked when deliberating over the way state institutions operate. Sometimes this claim is backed up by either explicit or implicit reliance upon Rawls’ own concept of ‘public reason,’ and it is often assumed that when this claim is taken seriously, there is not much moral status to be ascribed to the human embryo. But if Rawls’ own writings about justice lead to a conservative view on the moral status of the human embryo, it follows that one need not rely on any moral or religious positions outside of those Rawls himself assumes in order to invoke this conservative view in forming public policies.”

• Readers who’ve been around for a while know that my August spell at the family cottage in Quebec is the annual occasion for my re-reading and re-thinking a major chunk of the western canon. This year, as in 1999, it was the plays of Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare again was greatly enhanced by Shakespeare After All, a marvelous book by Marjorie Garber of Harvard (Pantheon). Little wonder that her lectures are packed as she goes through all the plays one by one with erudite brio and an irrepressible delight in the genius of the Bard. Now that she has published all her lectures on the plays, what is she going to do for a follow-up in the lecture hall? Not to worry; her delight and passion for discovery are obviously inexhaustible, and I would not be surprised if, a few years from now, we are graced with another thousand-page tome. Garber knows all about the postmodernist deflations, the feminist revisionisms, and Marxist deployments of the plays, and she gives them a nod in passing while never being deflected from the main subject of what they meant in the time when they were written, what they say about the times about which they were written, and how they have been understood in subsequent readings and performances up to the present. She notes the claim of many scholars that Shakespeare was a Catholic but while acknowledging the family connections faithful to the “old religion,” stops short of endorsing the claim. She is alert to the Christian and specifically biblical references that elude, or are ignored by, many other commentators. On that score, upon first reading, I thought she was reaching in several instances but, upon reflection, was persuaded. In this connection and others, she is much more persuasive than Harold Bloom in his book of a few years ago, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. The greatness of the man was not in “inventing human personality,” as Bloom would have it, but in reworking the vast and varied traditions, including those of Greece and Rome, as refracted through the Christian sensibilities of his time—and, for the most part, of our time. Paul, Augustine, and—as Robert Alter has recently demonstrated, the writers of the Old Testament—formed the understanding of human personality so brilliantly explored and displayed by Shakespeare. But enough. Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All is that rare book that puts one on guard against excessive aggressiveness in pressing it upon others.

• We hope to give further attention to David Albert Jones’ The Soul of the Embryo: An Inquiry into the Status of the Human Embryo in the Christian Tradition (Continuum), but I was struck by Anthony Kenny’s review in the Times Literary Supplement. Kenny, former vice-provost at Oxford, admires Jones’ historical scholarship but disagrees with him that a human being exists from the moment of conception. Others share Kenny’s view that, since before fertilization there are two entities (two different gametes) and after fertilization there is a single entity (a zygote), the point at which one entity (a single embryo) splits into two entities (two identical twins) is of defining importance in determining whether a human life (or lives) has been unjustly taken. As I say, this is not a new argument, but I confess I have never found it persuasive. The morally pertinent fact, I would suggest, is that destroying the embryo before the fourteen-day possibility of twinning is destroying one or more human beings. This on the premise that nothing that is not a human being has the potential of becoming a human being, and nothing that has the potential of becoming a human being is not a human being. Whether the embryo before fourteen days is one human being or might turn out to be two or three human beings is morally beside the point. Having said that, however, one is impressed by the straightforwardness of Kenny’s conclusion: “David Albert Jones is a skilled and fair-minded advocate for the position that individual life begins at conception. However, in my view, his arguments fail to weaken the case for placing the origin of personhood somewhere around the fourteenth day of pregnancy. But there are two sides to the reasoning that leads to that conclusion. If the course of development of the embryo gives good reason to believe that before the fourteenth day it is not an individual human being, it gives equally good reason to believe that after that time it is an individual human being. If so, then late abortion is indeed homicide—and abortion becomes ‘late’ at an earlier date than was ever dreamt of by Aquinas.”

• A procrastinating preacher who takes exception to my rule in Freedom for Ministry defends himself by reference to this from St. Augustine. “Look, here I am, now speaking to you; before I came to you here, I gave some thought beforehand to what I am going to say to you” (Sermon 225). Yes, my friend, but we’re not St. Augustine. I’ll stick to my rule: “If by Tuesday morning you haven’t started thinking about Sunday’s homily, you are a day behind schedule.”

• “The fundamental problem is never the sword, but the hand that wields it—not the weapons, but the frail human spirit, so easily overcome by furor rather than guided by pietas.“ In this essay, which appeared in the New Atlantis, Gilbert Meilaender is reflecting on an essay by Simone Weil in which she portrays the ways in which both conqueror and conquered are turned by war into “things.” Meilaender again: “Rightly understood, the limits of just war exist to make war a thinkable and human undertaking, to remind us that techne must be controlled by human moral purpose. And, ironically, we are most likely to exercise such moral control if we do not suppose that we can easily master or possess the technical capacities that are our own invention. ‘War first became total in the minds of men,’ Paul Ramsey once wrote. He meant that total war—being possessed by force in a way that makes us blind momentum—is not the result of technology. It is the result of supposing—always falsely—that everything is within our power. We stand at a time when many particular questions—the meaning of just cause, the nature of permissible preemption, the responsibilities of nation states, the limits and possibilities of humanitarian intervention, the meaning of ‘precision’ weapons—are being rethought, often to very good ends. Precisely that is the work of just war theory, which is never simply static. But we sometimes imagine that its purpose is chiefly to help us identify—after the fact—guilty parties. No doubt it may sometimes help with that task, but more important is the framework it provides as we try to think in advance about the dangers and temptations we may face. We are tempted, on the one hand, to suppose that techne creates its own moral world, and that we must conform to it or opt out of global responsibilities. We are tempted, on the other hand, to be enslaved by the world of force, supposing that everything is within our power. How we find our way through these dual temptations will determine, in large measure, the character of American empire. Recent discussions of the morality of war—especially Roman Catholic discussions—have fostered the notion that just war thinking requires a ‘presumption against war.’ This is not, I think, a very helpful way of putting the matter, though it is trying to get at something important. A simple presumption against war would sometimes mean an unwillingness to seek justice—and a willingness to permit force to rule. It would decline to compel tyrants to hesitate before the human countenance of those whom they oppress, torture, and kill. What we need is not a presumption against war but the humility that prays for grace to be freed from the enslaving power of force—a power that would make things of us all, even and especially in fleeting moments of triumph. For, as Weil writes, a man ‘cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul. Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, but it cannot spare him the wound.’ Only as we are prepared to ask for such grace should we be trusted to place our techne in service of force.”

• Charles Porterfield Krauth was a Lutheran historian and theologian of distinction. This is from his The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology. It is the more impressive for its having been written in 1871. “Hence the Church of England has been more depleted than any other by secessions. Either the Anglican Church must come to more fixedness in doctrine or to more pliableness in form, or it will go on, through cycle after cycle of disintegration, toward ruin. In this land, which seems the natural heritage of that Church which claims the Church of England as its mother, the Protestant Episcopal Church is numerically smallest among the influential denominations. Its great social strength and large influence in every direction only render more striking the fact that there is scarcely a Church, scarcely a sect, having in common with it an English original, which is not far in advance of it in statistical strength. Some of the largest communions have its rigidity of form, some of the largest have its looseness in doctrine; but no other communion attempts to combine both. The numbers of those whom the Church of England have lost are millions. It has lost to Independency, lost to Presbyterianism, lost to Quakerism, lost to Methodism, lost to Romanism, and lost to the countless forms of Sectarianism of which England and America, England’s daughter, have been, beyond all nations, the nurses. The Church of England has been so careful of the rigid old bottle of the form, yet so careless or so helpless as to what the bottle might be made to hold, that the new wine which went into it has been attended in every case by the same history—the fermenting burst the bottle and the wine was spilled. Every great religious movement in the Church of England has been attended ultimately by an irreplaceable loss in its membership. To this rule there has been no exception in the past. Whether the present movement which convulses the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church in America is to have the same issue, belongs, perhaps, rather to the prophet’s eye than to the historian’s pen. Yet to those who, though they stand without, look on with profound sympathy, the internal difficulties which now agitate those Churches seem incapable of real, abiding harmonizing. True compromise can only sacrifice preferences to secure principles. The only compromise which seems possible in the Anglican Churches would be one which would sacrifice principles to secure preferences, and nothing can be less certain of permanence than preferences thus secured. These present difficulties in the Anglican Churches proceed not from contradiction of its principles, but from development of them. These two classes of seeds were sown by the husbandmen themselves—that was the compromise. The tares may grow till the harvest, side by side with the wheat, with which they mingle, but which they do not destroy, but the thorns which choke the seed must be plucked up or the seed will perish. Tares are men; thorns are moral forces of doctrine or of life. The agitation in the Anglican Churches can end only in the victory of the one tendency and the silencing of the other, or in the sundering of the two. In Protestantism nothing is harder than to silence, nothing easier than to sunder. If the past history of the Anglican Church, hitherto unvaried in the ultimate result, repeat itself here, the new movement will end in a formal division, as it already has in a moral one. The trials of a Church which has taken a part in our modern civilization and Christianity which entitles it to the veneration and gratitude of mankind, can be regarded with indifference only by the sluggish and selfish, and with malicious joy only by the radically bad.” To which Episcopalian readers may say, “Ah yes, but that’s precisely the point. He said that in 1871. Newman said it as well or better in the 1840s. But behold, we are still here.” One cannot, in a manner of speaking, entirely dismiss that riposte, can one?

• Brace yourself for some good news. I had been noticing it for the last several years, and others said they, too, thought it to be the case. There are more babies in Manhattan. Infants in strollers, toddlers in stores, obviously pregnant women are all over the place. The impression turns out to be true. In the last four years, the number of children under five in Manhattan has increased by 26 percent. That compares with an 8 percent increase in all five boroughs. The increase is not among Mexicans, Dominicans, and various immigrant groups. Their birth-rates have declined slightly. The dramatic increase is among affluent professionals who are deciding to have babies. Manhattan is an expensive place to live. Preschools charge $23

,000 per year. An outfit called Private School Advisors charges parents $6,000 to coach parents on how to get their child admitted to preschool. “Manhattan has always been a great place for raising your children,” says Lori Robinson who heads up the New Mommies Network. “It’s easier to be in the city with a baby. It’s less isolation. You feel you are part of society.” She doesn’t go quite so far as to say so, but it’s almost as though having children is, well, natural. Who says Manhattan is not part of the real world?

• Historian David Hollinger of Berkeley likes the book, which is not surprising in view of his judgment that it is a very good thing that American intellectual elites in the last half century and more have turned away from a dying Christian tradition to engage the thoroughgoing secularism of the European mind. His endorsement notwithstanding, Jews and the American Soul (Princeton University Press) by Andrew R. Heinze is a richly researched and fascinating study. Against the “myth” of ours being a Protestant culture, he posits the thesis that over the last century psychotherapy, in its various forms and largely under Jewish direction, has redefined the dominant ways in which Americans understand human nature and the self—i.e., “the American soul.” Jews were the outsiders who became the insiders, and once inside they changed the house rules. “It is hard to believe,” Heinze writes, “that a few hundred professionals could change the culture of a nation, but that is what happened in the United States after the Second World War.” Psychotherapy under Jewish auspices redefined negative stereotypes as signs of health. “To reckon with the myths and realities of Jewish neurosis, these popular psychologists emphasized the psychologically crippling effects of religious persecution and orthodox dogma, defended the neurotic as a creative force in society, and presented the once-ghettoized Jew as an exemplar of psychic survival in modern civilization.” A great strength of the book is the profiles of major players in this drama, ranging from Freud and Adler to Abraham Maslow and popularizers such as Rabbi Joshua Liebman (Peace of Mind), Rabbi Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People) and columnists Ann Landers and Joyce Brothers. Situating the fertile ground for psychotherapy in several older Jewish traditions, Heinze relates the ways in which Jews tried to protect and advance themselves by undermining Christianity and, in many cases, religion more generally. Liberally religious Jews such as Liebman and Kushner radically modified Christian understandings of God and the self, while others frontally assaulted Christ as “crazy” and Christianity as irredeemably pathological. The author’s limited knowledge of Catholicism results in a disappointingly biased account of efforts by Fulton J. Sheen and Clare Boothe Luce to popularize an alternative understanding of mental health. In any event, the Catholics were outgunned. Heinze writes, “Perhaps the simplest measure of the difference between Jewish and Catholic perceptions of psychotherapeutics was the fact that Jews constituted a large proportion of psychoanalysts and Catholics did not, even though there were many more Catholics than Jews in America.” Jews had more therapists and more people in therapy. In the 1960s a survey “found that nearly two-thirds of the people who came to psychoanalytic clinics in New York were Jews.” Toward the end of his long and intriguing study, Heinze writes: “More specifically—and we cannot emphasize this point enough—we have seen that the emergence of America’s powerful psychological or ‘therapeutic’ culture was not simply a secularization of a once-Protestant society or a shift away from the Protestant work ethic toward a ‘culture of narcissism.’ Beneath the great shift in American culture toward psychological evaluations of human conduct was a dynamic interaction between Jews and Christians and a dynamic tension between Jewish and Christian values.” In that dynamic tension—sometimes depicted in terms a culture war—the conclusion is that the Jews won. Elsewhere, Heinze admits that, in his focus on Jews, he may have downplayed the role of Christian psychotherapists, but that does not significantly change the result, namely “the triumph of the therapeutic,” as Philip Rieff dubbed it in his classic 1966 book by that title. In placing so much emphasis on bestselling books by Jews, I believe that Heinze also overlooks the vast and still-growing market served by Christian literature of a therapeutic nature. Yet there is no doubt that Jewish understandings of mental and spiritual health, both religious and anti-religious, have been massively insinuated also into that market. Jews and the American Soul is important reading for people who are trying to puzzle through what has happened to American culture in the last hundred years, and especially since World War II.

• The original language of Christianity is translation. So says Lamin Sanneh, professor of missions and world religions at Yale Divinity School, in a lecture at Santa Clara University, California. “Christianity is the most pluralist and diverse of the religions of the world,” and it is that because it is the most portable, appropriating all the languages and cultures of the world. As does Philip Jenkins in his rightly acclaimed The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Sanneh underscores the explosion of Christianity in the southern hemisphere. “We are witnesses,” he says, “to a seismic shift in religious history.” The shift is from the “heartland” (Europe and America) to the “frontier” (Asia, Latin America, and Africa), and the greatest explosion is yet to come when and if China relaxes its repression of religion—which is more a matter of when than if. John Paul the Great understood what was happening, says Sanneh. “John Paul II responded to these momentous changes by affirming Catholicism as the church on the frontier, not just as the church in its European heartland. A spell was broken, and the peoples of the world arose to claim the heritage as their own. Few people in Europe or North America were prepared for this, so common was the assumption that Europe is the faith, in the famous words of Hilaire Belloc (Europe and the Faith). But Pope John Paul stepped into that new role with the natural flair of a brilliant pioneer, affirming the changes and giving them fresh impetus and new direction. It is to be hoped that in any assessment of his legacy, his role as transmitter and agent of Christianity as a world religion will be recognized. Little of that has been reflected so far in accounts of his accomplishments and yet it is unquestionably the case that, with remarkable stamina and with unwavering vision, John Paul II presided over Catholicism as a world religion, as a world church—and that way of describing the Catholic church is not an oxymoron. The way to understand the changes is to think of a heartland Catholicism with its great cathedrals, its great heritage and legacy in art and literature, philosophy, theology, great music, buildings and architecture, and frontier Catholicism where the greatest monuments of the church are living men and women, often children, and where the greatest buildings of the church lie in the distant future. They have not been built yet because the church is too busy receiving new members and establishing them in the faith.”

• Staying with Lamin Sanneh for a moment, he touches interestingly on the meeting between Islam and Christianity: “So thorough and so complete has been the Islamic capture of Arab culture as its necessary and inalienable medium that it has been difficult to conceive of a time in the pre-Islamic age when Christianity and Arab culture were congruent, as, indeed, they were. The name ‘Abdalláh,’ ‘slave or servant of God,’ for example, had been intoned over the heads of numerous Arab children at the baptismal font of the church long before it became the name of the father of the founder of Islam. Yet today, that name is properly and almost exclusively the property of Islam, suggesting a Muslim cultural revolution that effectively dissolved Christianity in its once Arab stronghold. Arab Christians survived as historical remnants, sometimes tolerated, sometimes repressed, but more often on notice.” From the beginning, Christians were uncertain about the right response to Islam: “In his thought-provoking examination of the issue, Sir Richard Southern argued that the reality of Islam was the most far-reaching problem facing medieval Christendom, affecting every level of experience. At the practical level it called for action, including the Crusades. Islam was a gathering geopolitical challenge that had to be resisted. As a theological problem it called for an answer to the mystery of its existence and apparent resilience. Was Islam a Christian heresy? Was it a schism? Or was it a new religion? What was God’s role in it, or was it a religion devised by the devil? Does its system of thought deserve to be treated with respect? The feeling all this engendered was that Islam was close enough intellectually to make differences with Christianity familiar, if no less objectionable for that. Islam upholds belief in one God, but that sublime teaching ends up with a repudiation of the Holy Trinity. An old theological principle produced the incomprehensible novelty that was Islam.”

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Sources:

Instruction on the priesthood, Commonweal, December 16, 2005; D’Arcy statement, November 29, 2005; Bruce Williams paper, November 29, 2005; Niederauer interview, Intermountain Catholic News, December 19, 2005, Coleman in San Francisco Faith, December 2005; Keenan in Theological Studies, May 2003; the instruction from Rome, origins, December 9, 2005. Christmas wars, New York Times, December 4. Deutschland doldrums, New York Times, December 6. That upstart Poland, New York Times, December 4. Prothero’s spirituality, Wall Street Journal, November 15. New York Times on the Eucharist, catholic eye, October 31. Harvey Mansfield on science and religion, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2004. Revisiting Charles Dodgson, Times Literary Supplement, September 10, 2004. Insole on liberalism, Modern Theology, April 2004. Kenny unpersuasive on twinning, Times Literary Supplement, March 25. Meilaender on techne, The New Atlantis, Summer 2003. Manhattan baby boom, New York Times, December 1.