While We’re At It

♦ Tyler Austin Harper is a young comp-lit professor at Bates College, and (no surprise) a leftist. Here’s what he has to say about recent decisions by the University Board of Governors at the University of North Carolina.

This is what we’re witnessing—the dismantling of public higher ed in conservative states—and we’ve created the conditions for what’s going on at UNC. How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost?

Universities have always been tacitly left-leaning and faculty have always been openly so, but institutions have never been this transparently, officially political. Almost every single job ad in my field [and] related fields this year has some kind of brazenly politicized language.

An example. Here’s language from a current lit job ad: “We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in decolonial and anti-racist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Imagine if a public university job ad instead read: “We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in traditionalist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to pro-life ethics, nationalism, and family values.”

If you lived in a blue state and your public universities were advertising jobs seeking scholars who promote family values and nationalist pedagogies, you would *rightly* be having a meltdown and demanding representatives fix it!

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♦ In 2020, Black Lives Matter protests and riots induced panic in America’s ruling class. Support for police receded; solicitude for criminals surged. We can now weigh the costs. Homicide rates increased significantly in 2020. They’ve peaked and fallen a bit since 2021. But that’s not the full story. As Aaron Chalfin and Brandon del Pozo report in Vital City (“When City Streets Really Are War Zones”), young male residents of the poorest urban neighborhoods are two hundred and fifty times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than is the average American. Perhaps anxious to avoid today’s political landmines, Chalfin and del Pozo avoid telling readers that these victims are overwhelmingly young black men. They focus on Garfield Park, Chicago (70 percent black), where a young man is three times more likely to die by firearm homicide than soldiers deployed in Afghanistan were to die in combat. Things are just as bad in the overwhelmingly black neighborhoods of Philadelphia, New Orleans, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, Memphis, and Kansas City. The virtue signaling of the upper-income white people who put BLM signs in their windows was a luxury that is still being paid for by the blood of poor blacks. Beware becoming the object of progressive solicitude.

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♦ In his regular column in the New Criterion, “The media,” James Bowman conveys a startling insight made by Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which she articulated in an interview with Peter Boghossian:

Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from [transgender ideology]. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific Islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced. A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of [transgender ideology]. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.

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♦ Sacred Architecture Journal is a publication of the Institute for Sacred Architecture. A recent issue (Vol. 44) surveys Spanish-influenced churches in the Americas. It includes the recently completed Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine in Oklahoma City, designed in the Spanish Baroque style, as well as other newly constructed churches. Yes, Virginia, beautiful churches can be built in our own time. If you serve on a building committee, aspire to be the benefactor of new construction, or just like lovely churches, take out a subscription to Sacred Architecture.

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♦ One omission from the survey of Spanish-influenced churches: Saint Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, Nebraska. Designed by Omaha architect Thomas Rogers Kimball and built in the early decades of the twentieth century, the cathedral takes its inspiration from El Escorial, the vast sixteenth-century complex erected by Philip II in the foothills outside of Madrid.

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♦ Late Friday night, November 3, in Indianapolis, Ruba Awni Almaghtheh rammed her vehicle into a building with a Star of David emblazoned on its front door. Arrested by police, she confessed, “Yes, I did it on purpose,” and went on to say that her motive was to defend “her people back in Palestine.” One problem: The building houses a local congregation of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a sect that rejects white Jews as agents of Satan. Ah, the ironies of a multicultural society.

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♦ Bishop Robert Barron participated in the Synod on Synodality. He made some thoughtful observations about his experience on his teaching ministry’s website, Word on Fire. The following caught my attention:

The primary mission of the Church is to declare the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and to invite people to place themselves under his Lordship. This discipleship, to be sure, has implications for the way we live in the world, and it certainly should lead us to work for justice, but we must keep our priorities straight. The supernatural should never be reduced to the natural; rather, the natural order should be transfigured by its relationship to the supernatural order.

Bishop Barron ends his reflections with strong criticism of the notion that we know more about sexuality than did our forebears and that these purported advances “require an evolution in moral teaching.” In my years as an Episcopalian I encountered this non sequitur many times: handwaving about science in order to justify moral revisions that alter Christian norms to accommodate the sexual revolution.

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♦ I foresee that the Francis pontificate will continue to host voices that urge relaxation of sexual norms, especially norms concerning homosexuality. For an explanation of why this is likely to be the case, readers can return to “A New Concordat?,” my January 2015 Public Square. In that column I observed that in the 1930s the Church was unable to maintain a clear witness against Nazism. The pressures to accommodate and collaborate were too powerful. The same holds for the sexual revolution and today’s ascendant Rainbow Reich, which demands compliance with its “inclusive” dictates. Pope Francis is an enigmatic and often unpredictable character. Nevertheless, I predict that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Western Europe (and, perhaps, in the United States, although to a lesser extent) will accommodate itself to the Rainbow Reich in more open ways than it currently does. The LGBTQ vocabulary will be adopted. Collaborationists such as Fr. James Martin will be championed and rewarded. Those who resist the Rainbow Reich (data show that younger clergy in America are solidly orthodox on this and other issues) will be censured as “backward-looking” and “preoccupied with sexual issues” at the expense of social justice. This prospect fills me with sadness. The Rainbow Reich has profoundly disordered the male–female dance. It is a regime of infertility and loneliness that seeks spiritual consolation in a never-ending campaign to topple taboos and liberate desire. A generation from now, intelligent people will look back and condemn the churches for their complicity.

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♦ The Center for Christian Studies provides ongoing theological formation for pastors and laity. We work with director Keith Stanglin and his staff to put on an annual lecture in Austin, Texas. The Center also hosts seminars and classes. This winter’s offering, “Understanding Our Christian Neighbors,” takes up ecumenical questions. What divides our churches? What unites them? The seven-week class (in-person for those living near Austin and by Zoom for others) starts on January 8 and runs through February 19. The Center is offering a discount for First Things subscribers (a $100 fee rather than the regular $150 fee). Sign up at christian-studies.org/event-details/neighbors.

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♦   Rene Nevarez of El Paso, Texas, wishes to form a ROFTers group. Get in touch to join: nevarez77[at]sbcglobal.net.

In Toledo, Ohio, James Coffey is issuing a call to local readers to form a ROFTers group. Contact him at jcoff162[at]gmail.com.

The ROFTers group in St. Louis, Missouri would like to add new members. Contact Demetrios Tsikalas for details: demetrios.tsikalas[at]gmail.com.