While We’re At It

• Here are some of the “great women and men of God [who are] the ancient foundation of our faith and our inspiration.” The list, in a prayer written for All Saints Day and disseminated on the website of the Worldwide Anglican Communion, includes “Buddha and Muhammad and all the prophets of old. They led God’s people to God’s light.” George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, said the inclusion of Buddha and Muhammad was “very unfortunate.” He added, “Although they can be respected, they are not saints who fall within the Christian understanding.” Bishop Stephen Sykes, who heads up the Church of England’s doctrinal commission, declared himself “amazed.” “It is a triumph of good intentions over good theology,” he added. The Rev. George Curry, chairman of the evangelical Church Society, said it is “blasphemous,” “appalling,” and an endorsement of a “false prophet.” Canon James Rosenthal, who oversees the website, says he has not heard from Archbishop Carey and the prayer will stay. He notes that it came from an “official source,” the Episcopal Church in the U.S., and its aim is to “transform this world for the love of Jesus.” But of course.

• Pastors from a really mega megachurch, Southeast Christian in Louisville, Kentucky, traveled up to Ground Zero to hand out about half a million dollars they collected to help people in need as a consequence of September 11. Out of work? Can’t pay the rent for the store? Medical bills coming due? No problem. No investigation. No paperwork needed. Here’s a check for $1,000, or $2,500, or maybe even $5,000. “We just want you to know that God loves you, and we do, too.” A very unprofessional approach to philanthropy, you might well say. So also, according to this New York Times report, says John Keightley, spokesman for Catholic Charities USA. “I would say we have a certain approach to how our agencies respond to disaster and the process of meeting people’s needs,” he sniffed, “and it’s based on professional social work. We’re not trying to do something outside our expertise.” Unlike those rubes from Kentucky who just go around helping people, in appalling disregard of the expertise required for the professional processing of meeting people’s needs. They probably don’t even have an advanced degree in charity.

• “The Pope today called for world peace.” That item in the paper, while not wrong, hardly does justice to the World Day of Peace message issued by John Paul II, “No Peace Without Justice, No Justice Without Forgiveness.” The message begins with a reflection on September 11, and goes on to address the scourge of terrorism: “When terrorist organizations use their own followers as weapons to be launched against defenseless and unsuspecting people they show clearly the death wish that feeds them. Terrorism springs from hatred, and it generates isolation, mistrust, and closure. Violence is added to violence in a tragic sequence that exasperates successive generations, each one inheriting the hatred which divided those that went before. Terrorism is built on contempt for human life. For this reason, not only does it commit intolerable crimes, but because it resorts to terror as a political and military means it is itself a true crime against humanity. There exists therefore a right to defend oneself against terrorism, a right which, as always, must be exercised with respect for moral and legal limits in the choice of ends and means. The guilty must be correctly identified, since criminal culpability is always personal and cannot be extended to the nation, ethnic group, or religion to which the terrorists may belong. International cooperation in the fight against terrorist activities must also include a courageous and resolute political, diplomatic, and economic commitment to relieving situations of oppression and marginalization which facilitate the designs of terrorists. The recruitment of terrorists in fact is easier in situations where rights are trampled upon and injustices tolerated over a long period of time. Still, it must be firmly stated that the injustices existing in the world can never be used to excuse acts of terrorism, and it should be noted that the victims of the radical breakdown of order which terrorism seeks to achieve include above all the countless millions of men and women who are least well positioned to withstand a collapse of international solidarity—namely, the people of the developing world, who already live on a thin margin of survival and who would be most grievously affected by global economic and political chaos. The terrorist claim to be acting on behalf of the poor is a patent falsehood.” The Pope’s message underscores St. Augustine’s understanding of tranquillitas ordinis—peace through right order. Right order requires speaking the truth: “In this whole effort, religious leaders have a weighty responsibility. The various Christian confessions, as well as the world’s great religions, need to work together to eliminate the social and cultural causes of terrorism. They can do this by teaching the greatness and dignity of the human person, and by spreading a clearer sense of the oneness of the human family. This is a specific area of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and cooperation, a pressing service which religion can offer to world peace. In particular, I am convinced that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious leaders must now take the lead in publicly condemning terrorism and in denying terrorists any form of religious or moral legitimacy.” The Pope’s gathering of the representatives of the world’s religions to meet in Assisi on January 24 to pray for peace is dismissed by some as no more than a piece of piously idealistic theater, but it is in fact the most sober realism. One day the current war against terrorism will give way to a new relationship among world civilizations, and especially between Islam and the West. If that deep conflict, now more than a millennium old, is to yield to a more hopeful future, we must recognize that the Pope’s initiatives are indispensable. The title of the message has it right: there is no peace without justice, and temporal justice is secured by the acknowledgment of a transcendent judgment that reveals our need to be forgiven and to forgive. This is said without any blurring of the line between good or evil, or any obscuring of the duty to defend the innocent. Rather, it anticipates the day when, beyond the present battles, there may be a new order based on a shared recognition of God’s justice and mercy. Some call that idealistic. The right word is prophetic.

• One may be heartened, or not, by polls showing that the overwhelming majority of Americans back the security measures being imposed by the government. It depends upon whether one reads those polls as reflecting support for the war or indifference to civil liberties. Robert Harris, writing in the Daily Telegraph, wants it understood that he supports the war, but he is definitely disheartened. Drawing on the experience of World War II, he says that wars, even wars fought for freedom, are bad for freedoms. “Terrorist wars are, if anything, even more insidious, for there is never any definite victory after which prewar conditions can once again prevail. If proposed new powers of arrest and detention, interception and suppression are pushed through in allied nations, we may take it as absolutely certain that the rights that are being taken away will never be restored.” A problem with that is that we have never before been in this kind of war against terrorism. Another problem is that, in fact, after both world wars of the twentieth century, civil rights were not only restored but dramatically expanded. But he does have a good point about what constitutes “definite victory” in this kind of war. We are only a few months into the war, and so far there has been very little, if any, curtailment of the rights of citizens (unless it is a right not to have one’s nail clipper confiscated at the airport check-in). In any event, as with David Yeago’s assertion above, the conflict before us will likely provide ample time for reflection on, and debate about, such issues.

• The Irish Times reports that, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Irish students rank second highest in reading and fifth highest in math among thirty-two industrial countries. There is one problem, however. “The OECD sounded a disapproving note, pointing out that education spending in the Republic of Ireland is significantly lower than in many developed states. It suggests that students here are forced to work harder to achieve their grades because of lack of investment.” Students succeeding by working harder? Clearly, something must be done.

• You may recall the item on Professor Patrick Henry’s relentless sleuthing to track down that Eisenhower remark on the importance of religion. Prof. Henry is a stickler for details and reminds me that on December 22, 1952, it would have been President-elect Eisenhower, not President Eisenhower. But of course. (I’m glad I didn’t have him grading my college papers.)

• There are as many apostolates as there are Christians. Richard Bruce of Davis, California, has taken on the responsibility of getting Catholic books and periodicals into libraries and bookstores. You can find out how he does it by checking out www.geocities.com/richleebruce.

• You know I like Nicotine Theological Journal or I wouldn’t quote it as often as I do. But then, perhaps from inhaling a good cigar too deeply, the editors lose their equilibrium. There is this unpleasant and just plain dumb little article, “In Praise of the Humble Condom.” The authors are disturbed that some Reformed (Calvinist) Christians think having babies is a mark of faithfulness. We live in a “messy” world, they say, and they say that several times. They allow that the Catholic moral tradition “deserves much admiration,” but it is, they say, all wrong on contraception. The Pope says that, in conjugal love, openness to new life is related to the mutual gift of self on the part of husband and wife. This view, we are told, “seems to rest more upon emotions than on objective moral argumentation, raising doubts about such claims coming from one with presumably no experience of any sort of conjugal love.” One might have thought that the celibacy cheap shot had been retired by all but the likes of Planned Parenthood. The authors are also upset by Christians who oppose contraception because it is God who “makes babies.” They invoke the distinction between God’s “decretive” will and his “preceptive” will. “The fact that the Holocaust did occur according to the sovereign, inscrutable plan of God does not absolve the perpetrators from their actions.” The analogy between the Holocaust and having babies may escape some readers. And yes, the authors admit, God did say to be fruitful and multiply, but “a couple that has produced one child has been fruitful and has multiplied.” Well, not quite. A couple is two, and one is not a multiple of two. The article concludes, “Certainly it is an inconvenient fact, but we must be constantly reminded that living in a fallen world is often a messy affair—which may make the infamous condom in some ways an appropriate symbol of the Reformed life.” In some very messy ways.

• I have already mentioned (While We’re At It, January) the lovely little book by Sam and Bethany Torode, Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception (Eerdmans). At the time, I had not seen the foreword by our J. Budziszewski. (I presume to say “our” because of his frequent and distinguished contributions to these pages.) Jay has this to say about Open Embrace: “Another great error of our age is ignoring the design of the procreative power itself. It’s true, of course, that even when spouses welcome children, there may be grave reasons to delay conception. But God has taken care of that already. So deeply has he wrought his purposes into us that a woman’s body not only bears fruit, but has seasons—spring, summer, fall, and winter, once every cycle of the moon—providing not only for bringing babies forth, but for spacing them. There is no need to thwart the design, to artificially block fertility during a naturally fertile time. One only has to wait for a few days. If that is too difficult for us, something is wrong. It might be asked, ‘Whether we hinder or cooperate with the times and seasons of our bodies, what difference does it make? The end is the same, whatever the means.’ But God cares not only about our ends but our means; he expects us to honor not only His purposes but His arrangements. Doing so brings unexpected graces, some of which are described in this book. Failure to do so brings unexpected harms, and some of these, too, are described. Speaking of the book, I wish I had read something like it when I was young, and I am glad that it was written by the Torodes. G. K. Chesterton wrote, ‘It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people.’ Sometimes the oldest things must be taught by the youngest people, provided that they have learned well from the older ones who taught them. Sam and Bethany have this qualification. They claim no originality, but they have been married long enough to confirm that the oldest things about conjugal love are true, and they are young enough to retain the excitement of the discovery. I cannot imagine better missionaries. From now on, if anyone supposes that ancient wisdom kills youthful romance, I will simply point to them. My generation pioneered in forgetting the oldest things. Perhaps theirs will pioneer in remembering them.”

• Richard Pipes of Harvard has written a little book, Communism, in Modern Library’s history series, and he packs a world of learning into a brief 175 pages. He concludes with this: “Marx maintained that capitalism suffered from insoluble internal contradictions, which doomed it to destruction. In reality, capitalism, being an empirical system responsive to realities and capable of adjustments, has managed to overcome every one of its crises. Communism, on the other hand, being a rigid doctrine-a pseudoscience converted into a pseudo-religion and embodied in an inflexible political regime—has proven incapable of shedding the misconceptions to which it was beholden and gave up the ghost. If it is ever revived, it will be in defiance of history and with the certainty of yet another costly failure. Such action will border on madness, which has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

• Back in 1969 Peter Berger published The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, arguing that, when an overarching religio-cultural consensus (the sacred canopy) is shattered by pluralism, the result is bad for religion because its taken-for-granted “plausibility structure” is thrown into question. In the 1990s Rodney Stark and a number of associates started publishing books and articles contending that just the opposite is the case: that pluralism means market competition among religions, leading to religious growth and vitality. These conflicting claims have occasioned a decade of raging, and sometimes raucous, debate among sociologists of religion. Now Mark Chaves (University of Arizona) and Philip Gorski (University of Wisconsin-Madison) have published a comprehensive account of the literature and crosscultural evidence in the Annual Review of Sociology. Their conclusion: “Finally, let us state explicitly a conclusion that has been implied several times in the foregoing: the quest for a general law about the relationship between religious pluralism and religious participation should be abandoned. The evidence clearly shows that any such general law, to be accurate, would have to be formulated with so many exceptions and qualifications that its claim to generality or lawfulness would be empty. Rather than an either-or argument about whether religious pluralism is, in general, positively or negatively associated with religious participation, the most valuable future work on this subject is likely to include investigations into the social, cultural, and institutional arrangements that determine, in part, religious pluralism’s consequences for religious vitality. This will be the route to a more adequate sociology of religion, one that moves toward a political economy of the religious sphere by placing religious markets in larger cultural and institutional contexts.” That strikes me as being just about right. I confess to having a dog in this fight. The economistic or “rational choice” school seems content with religion supplying what sociologist Christian Smith calls the “sacred umbrellas” of individual choice rather than a sacred canopy of social cohesion. That strikes me as settling for sectarianism, which, quite apart from its social consequences, is not true to the Christian understanding of communio, as in “the Church.” Of course, one readily admits that what is theologically the case is not necessarily supported by the empirical, and therefore very limited, studies of the sociologists.

• “Expressive association” is a phrase that has gained some currency in legal circles. It played a big part in the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Boy Scouts had a constitutional right not to accept men who are openly homosexual as troop leaders. Expressive association means that you have a right to hang out with, and form organizations with, people who share your interests and purposes. The Minnesota Law Review has a fine article on the subject, “Expressive Association and Organizational Autonomy,” by Steffen N. Johnson, which comes to this conclusion. “I would like to think that part of the reason we protect the freedom of expression is that we recognize our human failings and potential for error—a humility, if you will. Views on homosexuality today are quite different than they were fifty years ago, and the passage of another fifty years may bring yet a different perspective. But the fact that societal views can change so frequently, and so dramatically, suggests that we should be cautious about suppressing views we think are wrongheaded, outmoded, or, as Justice John Paul Stevens suggests, ‘atavistic.’ A government that allows individuals, rather than the majority, to discover the truth for themselves, to express it as they see fit, and to freely associate with others of like mind is far more consistent with the ideals of the First Amendment than a government that places obstacles in their path.” The same issue of the law review has a spirited article by Richard W. Garnett of the University of Notre Dame with the engaging title, “The Story of Henry Adams’ Soul: Education and the Expression of Associations.” He takes aim at the educational establishment’s efforts, backed by state power, to monopolize and standardize what is meant by education. He ends on a moderately hopeful note that the courts are increasingly alert to that danger.

• David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values is of the view that President Bush’s admirable initiative is not helped by the tag “faith-based.” Is it true that some groups working with those in need are faith-based and others are not? Blankenhorn thinks not: “Most of what we do in life, we do because we believe—we have accepted on faith—what others have told us. If we tried to restrict our activities or (even more) our ideas to those areas untouched by ‘faith’—for example, those areas in which we had personally conducted empirically conclusive research—few of us would ever put on a pair of shoes or take a drink of water, much less try out more complex procedures, such as getting married, figuring out right from wrong, or helping to reduce child poverty. Human beings by definition are ‘faith-based’ creatures. The important question, then, is not whether we believe, but what we believe. If the term ‘faith-based,’ currently so much in vogue, ends up reinforcing the popular but deeply flawed notion that there is a natural split between faith and reason, and that the world is divided between those who have ‘faith’ in something and those who do not, then it may be time for an emergency meeting of the Conceptual Frameworkers Union. Meanwhile, when it comes to helping at-risk children, if I must choose between a social service agency whose guiding value is the God-given dignity of the human person, and one whose guiding value is the latest proposition coming out of our most prestigious schools of social work, I will choose the former.” Blankenhorn notes the widespread anxiety that religious organizations will compromise their integrity by accepting government funds, and the regulation that attends funding. He writes: “In light of this potential danger, and to safeguard the distinctive ways that religious organizations can contribute to the common good, I hope that President Bush’s initiative will develop a fundamentally new approach to government funding of religious organizations that provide social services. A friend calls it the ‘black box’ approach. The religious organizations are the black boxes. Government funding, allocated for secular purposes, can legitimately flow into these black boxes. The government is then responsible for rigorously measuring and evaluating the results that emerge. Are the drug addicts off drugs? Are the drop-outs back in school? Are the fathers supporting and nurturing their children? These are secular questions, to be answered empirically. At the same time, apart from guaranteeing that client participation is voluntary—that is, making sure that clients can choose from a range of programs, nonreligious as well religious—the government is officially disinterested in what goes on inside the black box. If the program inside the box involves jumping, jumping is OK. No messing around with their method, no telling them what their code is. What matters is results. An organization that produces good secular results, be that organization secular or religious, is a good candidate for funding. An organization that does not, is not.” What about that is so hard to understand?

• With scientific authority and literary flair, David Berlinski has earned a reputation as one of the more effective challengers of Darwinist orthodoxies. It is hard, he writes in Commentary, to take entirely seriously a theory “in which both rape and altruism are successfully explained as tactics of survival.” In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins wrote that Darwin’s theory is profoundly liberating. Berlinski says he, too, would find it liberating, if it were true. Yet people worry that skeptics such as Berlinski are flirting with theology. He writes: “The scientific community regards itself as a uniquely self-aware collective, one whose members are prepared, even eager, to subject their most cherished assumptions to a veritable firestorm of critical analysis. Yet the same community warms to the view that general criticisms made of various scientific disciplines, especially when they are severe, are not, in [the words of a critic], ‘very helpful.’ Not helpful, as in not needed; not needed, as in not wanted. There is plainly a fissure here between two self-conceptions, the one open and confident, the other narrow and defensive. To put it another way: in science, as in politics, large and general principles are often upheld precisely to the extent that they are not believed in. To which I would respond: it is profoundly liberating if true. I am as willing as the next man to be liberated; I am simply not persuaded that Darwin’s theory is true. Or even plausible. I remain where, I suspect, most of us find ourselves. I regard Darwin’s theories and various theories of design as inadequate; I have no replacement for either. It is quite true that an appeal to the divine is no longer in fashion. The decline of religious faith is a complex and disturbing topic, but the facts are what they are: sophisticated men and women rejoice in their atheism, prepared to believe in nothing and simultaneously prepared to believe in anything. Those who concur with Richard Dawkins that Darwin has made atheism intellectually respectable have often demonstrated a degree of credulity that would embarrass a seminarian. How else might one explain currently fashionable doctrines of evolutionary psychology, a field so richly preposterous that, in reading its literature, only a man born with a petrified diaphragm, to quote H. L. Mencken, could fail to laugh out loud.”

• I had favorable things to say (“A Different Kind of ‘Coming Home,’” Public Square, October 2001) about Ronald Radosh’s Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left. Ruth Wisse reviews the book, with some additional wisdom on what might be called the Jewish connection: “Despite his candid and generous testimony, and his careful attention to the many ironies of his experience, certain ironies still seem to elude Radosh. Chief among them is the way that Jewish families like his managed to create, in their fidelity to communism, a much more sectarian and repressive culture than the allegedly sectarian and repressive one they had abandoned. For the youthful Radosh as for his good friend David Horowitz—who gave a harsher account of his break with the Left in his 1997 autobiography, Radical Son—radicalism was an attempt to perpetuate the ‘secular religion’ of their parents, but this was a religion that had sacrificed every single one of the values that flowed from a concept of human beings created in God’s image. In the certainty that they were improving on Judaism, the parents wrenched their children from the moorings of a civilization promoting good in favor of a system promoting evil.”

• Throughout the last decade, year by year, abortion rates have been in decline. One reason, Rachel McNair suggests, is that people now know a great deal more about post-abortion trauma. Women are now discouraging their sisters, daughters, and coworkers from taking “the easy way out.” Dr. McNair, former president of Feminists for Life, suggests that pro-lifers should be making more of this fact. The declining abortion rates may not produce a “bandwagon effect,” but, if effectively communicated, they can alert people to the fact that a turnaround is underway and, not incidentally, pump a bit more hopefulness into the pro-life movement. Dr. McNair writes: “Educating the public about the aftermath of abortion is especially important. Most people who have supported a ‘pro-choice’ position understood themselves as supporting something that was good for women. When they find out that abortion rates are declining, that better-informed women are choosing abortion less frequently, and that those who have had abortions are now counseling against it and entering into post-abortion healing programs, it will not be difficult or stressful for them to accept this new information and modify their views to a more pro-life position. This approach allows them to maintain their view of themselves as compassionateboth before and after they learned this new information. We have come a long way since 1973. For nearly three decades the pro-life movement has tried to argue not only the case against abortion, but also the case for our society’s guilt. That most people didn’t want to hear this isn’t surprising. Today, the situation has changed. Abortion rates are declining. Instead of focusing on guilt, we can focus on hope. If we are mindful now of the task of relieving psychological distress, we will find our task of educating on abortion aftermath to be easier.”

• The pressure on Jewish children not to marry non-Jews, says a liberal Jewish friend, is simply a form of racism, and would be roundly condemned if practiced by any other group. The question, however, is not the formal similarity with other prejudices, but the substantive concern for the survival and flourishing of the Jewish people. Christians can benefit by listening in on how intermarriage is being discussed among Jews. Rabbi Marc Gellman, President of the New York Board of Rabbis and an FT contributor, notes that intermarriage has risen from about 10 percent in the 1960s to over 50 percent today. (Irving Kristol has observed that the problem in America is not that gentiles hate Jews but that they want to marry them.) Only 14 percent of children in intermarriages are raised as Jews. “The truly chilling statistic,” Gellman writes, “is that less than 5 percent of the grandchildren of intermarriages are raised as Jews. In other words, in every intermarriage there is a virtual statistical certainty that Judaism will die in that family in one more generation.” The causes of this “demographic holocaust,” he says, go beyond “myopia, cowardice, and ignorance.” There is the great increase in Reform Judaism, which tends to be easygoing about intermarriage and most everything else. “Even Reform rabbis like myself who do not perform intermarriages have benefited from a huge influx of intermarried couples who have nowhere else to go,” says Gellman. The timidity of the Reform movement doesn’t help either. “Most rabbis are just no match for powerhouse intermarried couples who do not want to hear nuanced reservations based on Jewish law from someone who drives on the Sabbath and eats shrimp.” Then there are the rabbis who officiate at the marriage of David and Steven. “Congregations are not going to listen to some self-serving contrivance about how gay marriage is no threat to Jewish values while intermarriage is.” So what is to be done? Rabbi Gellman has some ideas about that, most of them having to do with Jewish education and strengthening rabbinical backbones. He ends with this: “Trying to halt intermarriage by guilt or shame will not work. Trying to convince Jews in love with Christians that they need to end their love for the good of the Jewish people will not work. Only a personal faith in Judaism has the power to move an individual to want to share that faith with his or her mate and to make it a priority in their home.” About half the children of Jewish-Christian marriages are raised as religiously nothing or as religiously both, the latter often being hard to distinguish from religiously nothing. Christians, too, should recognize that as a very big problem.

• A reader tells me I am further burdening an already troubled part of our community by pointing out that there is no historical parallel for a leadership of a people actively collaborating in the dramatic reduction of their numbers, as the leaders of black America do by their overwhelming support for abortion. No, I don’t think so. The fact is that, were it not for the children killed in abortion over the last thirty years, there would be more than twenty million more blacks in America than there are, with the greatly increased influence, political and otherwise, that comes with such numbers. Hispanics are on the edge of overtaking African Americans as the largest minority group, and one reason is abortion. There are white people in this country who think that, all in all, we would be better off if there were fewer black people. Until a few years ago, Planned Parenthood literature boasted of the huge amounts saved in education, welfare, and crime costs because of its “services” to the poor, meaning mainly the abortion of black babies. Many years ago, Jesse Jackson and other blacks used to draw the analogy between abortion and Pharaoh’s population policy for the Israelites. Not any more. Today there is hardly a black leader of national prominence who does not uncritically back the unlimited abortion license. I point this out not to further burden black Americans but to note their onerous burden in having a leadership that actively collaborates with those who do not wish them well. The immediate occasion for bringing this up again is that Dayton Right to Life has produced a fine outreach program to African Americans, including some very persuasive literature. For more information, write Peggy Lehner, 211 S. Main St., Suite 830, Dayton, Ohio 45402.

• We have the word of catholic eye that this appeared in a London church bulletin: “The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the church basement on Friday.”

• In the old days at Cambridge it was thought vulgar to publish. Dons might go so far as to make a carbon copy or two for purposes of private discussion. But here’s a mailing from Cambridge University Press soliciting subscriptions to the Harvard Theological Review. It includes titles of recent articles. “The Cults of Isis and Kore at Samaria-Sebaste in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods.” “The Semi-Circumcision of Christians according to Bernard Gui, His Sources, and Eliezer of Metz.” “Armenian Canon Lists VI—Hebrew Names and Other Attestations.” The mailing says the review is “Published for the Faculty of Divinity of Harvard University” (emphasis added). Precisely. So what’s with this subscription promotion? In deference to an older Cambridge tradition, I declined the offer.

• In a recent issue we quoted a statement by Mr. Randy Cohen of the New York Times that was contained in a private communication to a reader who forwarded it to us (While We’re At It, October 2001). We should have obtained Mr. Cohen’s permission to quote the statement. Our apologies.

• I have had some favorable things to say about sociologist Rodney Stark’s bold and frequently suggestive One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton University Press), but there are also big problems. Monotheism turns nasty, he argues, when its monopoly is threatened by alien “others.” Paul Griffiths of the University of Illinois at Chicago, writing in Commonweal, is not entirely persuaded. He writes: “It follows that in order to minimize the use of violence, such conditions ought to be removed. And this is best done, claims Stark, when religious diversity is maximized and no one, or two, monotheisms hold the reins of political power. Under such conditions, civility on the part of monotheists is not only possible but likely, and this without loss of deep conviction. This is an interesting argument to consider in light of September’s events. On one reading, those events confirm Stark’s analysis. If it is the case that Muslims planned and executed the killings in the name of Islam, then it’s likely they did so in part because they felt themselves under threat from the United States as a world-dominating cultural force. But in another way, perhaps, Stark’s analysis is called into question by the events. For an element in the perceived threat of U.S. political and social culture is precisely its advocacy of deep religious pluralism and maximal religious diversity. What Stark presents as the condition for the possibility of monotheistic civility may in this case have been (and may continue to be) among the conditions for the possibility of continued violent hostilities. This is not a pleasing prospect.” And that is an understatement. Griffiths’ further suggestion is that Stark’s enthusiasm for everyone else becoming like us pluralistic and ever so tolerant Americans leads to his “drastically underemphasizing the corrosion and privatization of monotheistic commitments caused by the very social conditions that he takes to maximize monotheistic civility.” In other words, Muslim rage is powered not least of all by their fear that they might become like us.

• An Associated Press story reports on a new study that finds that “feminine beauty affects a man’s brain at a very primal level, not on some higher, more intellectual plane.” Science marches on.

• Admittedly, it is a delicate question. President Bush is undoubtedly right in not wanting to have the war against terrorism framed as a war between Islam and the Christian West—although sensible people acknowledge, sotto voce, that it is also that. The problem is that Bush—and, more egregiously, the State Department—keep making public statements about how authentic Islam is peaceful, nonviolent, supportive of religious freedom, and so forth. A Taliban spokesman is representative of the Muslim reaction to such statements: “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?” Surely it is enough for U.S. officials to say that we are fighting a war against terrorism, not against Islam; and that some Muslim scholars say terrorism is contrary to Islamic teaching, and we hope they are right. For our political leaders to go much beyond that is to raise questions about their credentials as scholars of comparative religion among non-Muslims, and to make them appear ludicrous to Muslims, who presumably do know something about Islam.

• We can’t control perceptions, but misperceptions may sometimes occasion our asking why. A Washington Post story says that criticism of the war on terrorism comes mainly from the right. Then there is this: “In contrast, there has been no antiwar movement of note. Campuses have not erupted with protests, and many on the left who have opposed U.S. intervention in the past have embraced military action against bin Laden and the Taliban. From organized labor to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the military campaign has drawn support from the left.” “Why,” we hope someone at the USCCB is asking, “are we perceived to be on the left?” As it happens, the bishops in solemn assembly did in November issue a statement, “Living With Faith and Hope After Sept. 11.” The language is not inspiring, and it is cluttered with a laundry list of other concerns not to be neglected, but it does unequivocally condemn terrorism and support the U.S. war on the same, touching the usual bases of just war doctrine. (We do hope the statement does not establish a pattern in speaking about the Church as “our community of faith” and “our faith community,” or in its urging that we rely on “our faith” rather than on the One in whom we have faith.)

• Making it in America. Lindsey Vuolo was the nude of the month in Playboy, and the issue played up her Jewishness, including a bat mitzvah photo. Rabbi Bradley Hirschfield says on Beliefnet.com that it is a “step forward.” “When you go to Yad Vashem and see naked Jewish women who really were thought of as vermin and then you can open up Playboy and see a beautiful Jewish body that’s actually being fantasized over by millions of men, I absolutely understand this is not the highest level to reach, but it is the next level in our development.” As the Wall Street Journal, from which we plucked this item, succinctly commented: Oy vey.

• James Carroll, perpetrator of the risible history of Christian anti-Semitism Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe. “This War Is Not Just” is a rehash of the usual arguments, but he adds the complaint that the government used the anthrax scare to justify the war on terrorism. “Now, the operating assumption is that the anthrax cases, unrelated to bin Laden, are domestic crimes, not acts of war. But for a crucial moment, they effectively played the role in this war that the Gulf of Tonkin ‘assault’ played in the Vietnam War, as sources of a war hysteria that ‘united’ the nation around a mistake.” Apart from the fact that, as of this writing, we don’t know whether the anthrax attacks were domestic in origin, the events weeks earlier at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seemed to have escaped Mr. Carroll’s attention. As readers of Constantine’s Sword have reason to know, Mr. Carroll has problems with making connections.

• For the record: “An Evening of Readings and Carols,” on which I commented in the December issue, is presented on the Princeton campus but is sponsored by the Westminster Choir College of Ryder University, not by Princeton University.

• Of the hundreds of articles I have published, few, if any, have received such a strong and favorable response as “Born Toward Dying” (FT, February 2000). It has been reprinted in publications around the world and in at least two anthologies, and, even before it was suggested to me by a number of readers, I suspected it might make for an interesting book. As I Lay Dying: Meditations upon Returning comes out this month from Basic Books. It is the story of my bout with cancer some years ago, of what I call a near-life experience, of friendship in time of illness, of coming to understand, if just a little, the connections between body and soul when we come to the place where I was, and will be again, and where we all will be. It is a very personal book. It is about the most difficult of subjects, and was a difficult book to write. Yet, upon rereading it now, I am surprised by its sense of serenity. And am reminded again, for I am prone to forgetting, what it means to be grateful. As I Lay Dying. I very much hope you will like it, and will tell your friends about it.

• It is not as though the Christianly specific is forbidden everywhere. The Somerville Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts, presented “Jesus Has Two Mommies.” Daniel Gewertz of the Boston Herald hailed it as “a lesbian revision of the nativity tale just in time for the Yule season.” When asked why a Jewish lesbian is staging a play starring Jesus, Faith Soloway opined that “he’s like the icon of the Bible” and that around Christmastime he is “sort of the star.” In the play, two women join in a “commitment service,” and Ms. Soloway meets Jesus who approves, admitting that he had two mommies, Mary and Josephine, who met at a dyke bar called “The Burnin’ Bush.” Somerville is an upmarket and achingly PC community where one is not likely to meet Christians who would even hint at taking offense. Hey, it’s just blasphemy. Can’t you take a joke?

• Here’s a feisty article in a journal with the ponderous title Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, published by the American Scientific Affiliation. It is by David Snoke, a physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, and called “In Favor of God-of-the-Gaps Reasoning.” “God of the gaps,” as you likely know, is a pejorative phrase used to dismiss the argument that, since there are lots of things we don’t know, there are still gaps to be filled, and that’s where God comes in as the answer. The response to that is that one day scientific knowledge will fill those gaps, and there will be no room for the God answer. Dr. Snoke has a different take on the question. There are two rival theories before us, he says. “One says that the most fundamental ground of the universe is personal, that there is a God. The other says that the ground of the universe is impersonal, that there is no God. Do we not want to judge between these two theories based on their explanatory power? Atheists seem to have no qualms with pointing out ‘gaps’ in the theistic theory, for example, the apparent failure to explain evil or the silence of God. Why should we not point out the failures of the atheistic theory to explain things such as the apparent design of life and the universe or the nearly universal desire among people to worship something?” He then goes on to explain philosophically what he means by a scientific “explanation” and concludes with this: “Perhaps God has not given us evidence of design in nature, and has made all things to appear as if they arose with no design or fine-tuning. After all, God does not need to give us all the evidence we may want, as we see in the fact that He does not generally speak miraculously to the public, or write ‘GOD MADE ME’ in English on the side of every cow. Yet I can think of no a priori reason to rule out the possibility that He has put observable fine-tuning into nature, and that if we see such, that we should point out this fact to atheists. As in many theoretical debates, certain data may weaken one theory but lend support to more than one alternative theory. Not only Christianity, but also Deism, Islam, and New Age theories may find support in evidence of design and fine-tuning. That is well and good; other evidence will have to distinguish between these theories. In the scientific world, no one complains if an observation eliminates only one of several theoretical possibilities. Let us therefore happily point out the gaps in atheistic science, while also admitting the gaps in our own explanations if such arise. To paraphrase a trite old saying, ‘Better to have predicted and lost than never to have predicted at all.’” In short, nobody has a monopoly on gaps.

• The quest for the historical Jesus, employing historical-critical methodology, goes back to H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768), which justifies Luke Timothy Johnson’s calling the method “classic.” He is reviewing John Meier’s third big volume under the title A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (Doubleday), and notes that Meier is “deeply, even passionately, committed” to the enterprise of testing the Gospel accounts by criteria that can be agreed to by all disinterested scholars, quite apart from their religious beliefs, if any. When the first volume of A Marginal Jew appeared in 1991, I discussed at length some of the problems with this approach, and especially with Meier’s effort to protect the Christ in whom he believes as a Christian from the implications of his findings about the Jesus who is the object of his study as a historian (see “Reason Public and Private: The Pannenberg Project,” FT, March 1992). The third volume is on the “companions and competitors” of Jesus, and Professor Johnson’s complaint is about the sterility of Prof. Meier’s erudite probings. He writes, “He dissects the material on ‘disciples’ and concludes that there were some people who followed Jesus and had that designation. He argues that there was a group among his followers called the Twelve and that Jesus probably sent them on a symbolic tour of Israel. About the individual members of the Twelve, we have real knowledge only of Judas and Peter. Net result? Jesus had companions. Pages to accomplish this result? One hundred seventy of text and 115 of notes.” Prof. Meier examines what we know about “competitors,” such as the Sadducees, Zealots, and Herodians. Johnson remarks, “The overall results from 190 pages of close analysis in the text and 134 pages of intense discussion in footnotes? That the information about these groups in the Gospels fits intelligibly within all our other historical knowledge about them, and that all our other historical knowledge about the groups does not throw much additional light on what the Gospels say about them.” Prof. Johnson’s conclusion is withering: “Over the course of these three massive volumes, Meier has made the case that Jesus was a prophetic figure within Judaism who was linked to John the Baptist, who expected God’s rule and performed healings as a sign of that rule, who associated with the outcast, who had a more or less definite group of followers, and who interacted with other intentional Jewish groups. Has Meier’s method made these aspects of Jesus more historically probable? Yes. Has the yield been worth the effort expended by the author or demanded of the reader? Let each one judge.” So very much effort to produce so little. As other historians have observed, the truly remarkable thing is that, after three hundred years of historical-critical demolitions and reconstructions, the resulting picture of Jesus and his mission is pretty much what Christians have thought it to be all along.

• That elegantly erudite curmudgeon John Lukacs says that when most people speak of multiculturalism what they really mean is multicivilization—“the coexistence of altogether different civilizations within the same country.” The result is something like post-civilizationism. Lukacs writes: “It is possible to exaggerate the virtues of civilization. It is possible to exaggerate the virtues of Babbitts, but the idea of Babbitt is now at least two generations behind us. Yes, there were too many Babbitts in this country at the time of Sinclair Lewis and Calvin Coolidge. But this was a powerful civilization then, with ample and varied opportunities for the tending of culture, when even the Babbitts, innocents as Sinclair Lewis described them, were made to pay some respect to culture, usually through the insistence of their wives. The yuppies are the grandchildren of the Babbitts, they are not innocent; they are ‘culture oriented,’ except that theirs is a movie culture. The New Yorker, founded during the Babbitt era, was supposed to have proclaimed that its readership would not include old ladies in Dubuque. Well, for some years now the last readers of the old New Yorker, the remnant members of civilization, the true American Kulturträgerinnen, were, and still are, a few old ladies in places such as Dubuque, while the New Yorker has become soft-porn Vanity Fair, with a few culture cookies thrown in, but just about devoid of civilization, and with an emphatic presence of what its editor thinks is a tony barbarism. I read that Miss Susan Sontag has appeared in Sarajevo, arranging a performance there of Waiting for Godot. What endangers the lives of people there is a breakdown of civilization, not of culture; but that is not my point. I respect the courage of her impulse; but I question the clarity of her purpose. When the Papuans will again practice cannibalism—inspired by what they have seen of it on American television—will their victims be Waiting for Sontag? We face something new in the long history of mankind. One can have culture without civilization. The progressive notion of the great chain of evolution—from primitiveness to civilization to culture—has become laughable.”

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