While We’re At It

♦ A favorite collect (liturgical prayer) from my Anglican days is said on the Second Sunday of Advent:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

I heard that prayer as a child. The liturgical experts of that time were convinced that “hast” and “thy” made such a prayer remote and inaccessible. Entirely untrue. At age ten, if not before, I knew the plain meaning: I should read the Holy Scriptures and cleave to their message of salvation. That as an adolescent I did not read, mark, and inwardly digest reflected my own falling away from the faith, not the “remoteness” of older forms of the English language.

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♦ “Adolescents with very conservative parents are 16 to 17 percentage points more likely to be in good or excellent mental health compared to their peers with very liberal parents.” So concludes Jonathan Rothwell in a new study, “Parenting is the Key to Adolescent Mental Health,” sponsored by the Institute for Family Studies and Gallup. The crucial factor contributing to good mental health is clear discipline combined with parental love. Children need a warm authoritarian family culture. The problem among progressive parents is not affection. Liberal parents manifest parental love at only slightly lower levels than conservative parents. (The survey asked for responses, among other things, to the statement, “I hug or kiss my child every day.”) But liberals are significantly less likely to impose discipline than are parents who identify as conservative. (This assessment is based on responses to statements such as “I find it difficult to discipline my child” and “My child often gets their [sic] way when we have a conflict.”) Put simply, the liberal ideal of an affectionate permissive family culture is bad for children, whereas the old-fashioned view of authority is good.

And not just for children. In the twentieth century, the rise of the permissive family culture correlated with anxieties about “adolescent rebellion,” the purported cause of troubled relations between parents and teenage kids. Rothwell notes that survey data show that conservative parents enjoy the strongest relations with their adolescent children, while liberals suffer the worst. It’s interesting to note that parents who are “very liberal” as opposed to “liberal” have nearly as good relations with their adolescent children as do conservatives. In my estimation, this positive outcome stems from the fact that “very liberal” means adherence to doctrinaire progressivism, which has its own authoritarian character, as we see at universities. Ironically, the key to successful parenting by the “very liberal” is the progressive taboo: authority.

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♦ Anthony Lusvardi, S.J., teaches sacramental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In “Confessing Other People’s Sins” (The Lamp, Issue 19), he takes issue with the practice of apologizing for historic wrongs. In his experience, there’s a certain type who enters the confessional only to launch into complaints about other people’s misdeeds, which amounts to a spiritual evasion of his own sins. Is something like that happening when a city council or college president issues statements that repent of past harms? “The problem with historical apologies is that they never involve taking responsibility for one’s own actions but necessarily mean confessing sins committed by others.” And it is in the faux penitents’ interest to exaggerate those sins. “The more heinous the crimes of others, the more venial our own offenses seem. We can get off the hook for our smaller sins by spotlighting the graver sins of others.”

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♦ At Vatican II, the Church repudiated the view that Jews inherit the guilt of crucifying Christ. Yet, Lusvardi continues, “if we apologize for crimes committed a century ago, we seem tacitly to have accepted at least some notion of collective guilt—our own.” Those who issue apologies for past misdeeds imagine that they are engaging in a helpful therapeutic exercise, diffusing present-day grudges and blunting animosities. Lusvardi is not so sure: “Collective guilt opens the door to collective punishment.” Such apologies invite endless relitigation of past grievances, which practitioners of identity politics exploit. There is no resolution or forgiveness: “Our contemporary rites of public apology are ineffective, ultimately counterproductive—like adding new stories to the Tower of Babel—because they pretend to a justice that only God can give.”

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♦ Sebastian Milbank offers a sober assessment of the university rot exposed by tenured professors’ grotesque cheerleading for Hamas’s atrocities:

Even as real academic freedom is crushed to nothing by the neoliberal transformation of universities into giant quangocracies, a group of resentful, self-indulgent bourgeois radicals are quite happy to take on academic sinecures. In a sense, both groups authorise the other. For the radicals, their extremism gets a steady stream of subsidy, and hides behind the veil of respectability that is a major university. For the administration, they gain a halo of radicalism, even as they grind down academic freedom, prestige and scholarly independence in service of an ever more marketised and routinised higher education system.

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♦ Bret Stephens on the double standards at elite universities:

At Yale, the law professor Amy Chua was relieved of some teaching duties and ostracized by students and the administration on blatantly pretextual grounds while her original sin, as the Times reported in 2021, was her praise for Brett Kavanaugh. Yet when Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies at Yale, posted on X on Oct. 7 that Israel “is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle,” Yale defended her by saying Grewal’s comments “represent her own views.”

The University of Pennsylvania manifests the same pattern. Conservative law professor Amy Wax was waterboarded with investigations and hearings. Meanwhile, administrators fall over themselves to protect the free speech of the most rebarbative defenders of Hamas.

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♦ Corruption of a different sort: The Yale Daily News reports that 78.9 percent of grades given to students in 2022 were A or A-. The A grade was given to 58 percent of students. There are variations among disciplines. In Engineering & Applied Science, 57 percent received A or A-, while in Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies, 92 percent got the top grades.

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♦ Ron E. Hassner, a Cal Berkeley professor of political science, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake). Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed.

Dr. Johnson’s words come to mind: “Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.” All the more so when the ignorant take up chants that call for the annihilation of a nation.

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♦ There are many reasons to be unhappy with the academic establishment. One friend took action. She had made a generous donation twenty years ago to our alma mater, Haverford College. In response to this year’s fundraising campaign, she wrote to the development office that, far from making another contribution, she wanted her money back. As I write, she reports that no response has been forthcoming.

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♦ Another course of action: Found alternative institutions. That’s what Jewish leaders have done in Manhattan. In fall 2024, Emet Classical Academy, a Jewish preparatory school for grades 6 through 12 on New York’s Upper East Side, will enroll its inaugural class of sixth graders. The school’s mission offers mastery of classical languages, understanding of the great books and figures of the Western tradition, preparation for American leadership, and a commitment to Jewish identity and modern Israel.

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♦ Psalm 45:3–4:

Strap your sword upon your thigh, O mighty warrior,
          in your pride and our majesty.
Ride out and conquer in the cause of truth
          and for the sake of justice.

In the face of today’s challenges, we need the élan of the Church Militant. Recall Matthew 10:34: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword.”

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♦ During the week before Christmas, Rome issued Fiducia Supplicans, a woolly-headed document about blessing same-sex couples. Anything remotely resembling a marriage blessing is streng verboten. But it’s OK to use exquisitely refined pastoral judgment sometimes, in some circumstances, to bless same-sex couples. The document strikes a clear note: Nothing can be blessed that is counter to God’s will. But one wonders: couples? We’re not talking about tennis partners. Confusion mounts. Two homosexuals united in a relationship can be blessed as couples, but not as sexual partners? One predicts that Fr. James Martin, Catholicism’s leading Rainbow collaborationist, will jump into the confusion to provide clarification. Indeed, within hours of the release of the document, he offered a blessing to a same-sex couple, helpfully (for his purposes) photographed by the New York Times. They are holding hands, heads bowed, as Fr. Martin makes the sign of the cross. No, no, he was not blessing their sexual relationship! That can’t be done, the Vatican assures us. Except, of course, when it is done, which seems to be the obvious consequence of the document, and possibly its intent.

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♦ During the long year of 2020, I marveled at Anthony Fauci’s ability to combine winsome cheerfulness with off-putting arrogance and moral self-satisfaction. Both were very much in evidence in a recent BBC interview of Fauci conducted by Katty Kay. As they strolled past Dahlgren Chapel on the Georgetown campus, where Fauci and his wife Christine Grady were married decades ago, Kay asked him why he no longer goes to church. In his charming way, Fauci replied that he regards his “personal ethics on life” to be strong enough to keep him “on the right path.” He adverted to unspecified “negative aspects” of the institutional church and dismissed churchgoing as “a pro forma thing that I don’t really need to do.”

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♦   Christopher Colby of Mobile, Alabama heads the local ROFTers group. They are looking for new members. Contact him at frcheese[at]aol.com.

Gordon Dirks would like to form a ROFTers group in the greater Vancouver, British Columbia area. To join, contact him at gordondirks[at]gmail.com.

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♦ As I write, we are conducting our year-end fundraising campaign. Preliminary results suggest that we’ll set records. I’d like to thank everyone who donated. Your support keeps First Things a strong voice of truth in a time of lies.