While We’re At It

• This is a true story. At least the Seattle Times says so. Two lesbians living together decide they want a baby, so one gets pregnant with the help of sperm from a gay friend and a daughter is born. The two women break up and, after a while, the mother marries the gay friend. Now, with the help of the ACLU and gay activist lawyers who know that a gay man cannot go straight, the other woman goes to court to claim parental rights on the grounds that she was living with the mother when the mother became a mother and is, therefore, also a mother. As of this writing, she and her attorneys expect to prevail. Andrew Sullivan would no doubt point out that such confusion and heartbreak would be avoided if we had same-sex marriage. Then the two lesbians could simply have obtained a divorce before the one remarried, and well-established rules would apply regarding visitation rights and other claims on the child. In short, this situation would be, in Mr. Sullivan’s favored phrase, virtually normal—it being assumed that virtual normality is about as much normality as our society can manage.

• Many, many years ago I wrote In Defense of People (1971), the first book-length critique of environmental extremism. It was provoked, in significant part, by Paul Ehrlich, he of the “population bomb,” who predicted in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” In subsequent books, Ehrlich predicted that by the 1980s “mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity” in which “accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” In fact, the world’s food supply has tripled and key minerals are available in greater abundance than ever. Reviewing Ehrlich’s latest book, One with Nineveh, Ronald Bailey writes, “Naturally, Mr. Ehrlich has won a MacArthur Foundation genius award and a Heinz Award for the environment.” (Teresa Heinz Kerry, chairman.) “So why pay him any notice?” asks Bailey. In Greek mythology “the prophetess Cassandra makes true predictions and no one believes her; Mr. Ehrlich makes false predictions and they are widely believed. The gloomier he is and the faultier he proves to be as a prophet, the more honored he becomes, even in his own country.” That puts it very nicely. What provoked me about Ehrlich, and also suggested the title of my book, is that he sees people, and especially poor people, as the enemy. Way back when Jesse Jackson was pro-life, he spoke about LBJ’s war on poverty being replaced by a war on poor people. Paul Ehrlich was and is among the chief propagandists for that war. The chilling thing is that he and those who lionize him seem to want his predictions to come true. It is a disposition that is at the heart of the darkness of what is aptly called the culture of death.

• “Now it’s their turn to get it,” some might smugly observe. If, that is, they even knew about the brutal ethnic cleansing currently being carried out by Albanian Muslims against the Orthodox Christians in Kosovo. Remember Kosovo? That was when Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, boasted that U.S. power is on the side of Islam. It is true that many Serbian Orthodox sided with the now defunct regime of Slobodan Milosevic when it was engaged in ethnic cleansing, but that in no way mitigates the tragedy and injustice of what is happening now. Muslim fanatics have destroyed or vandalized more than a hundred Orthodox churches and dispersed or killed thousands. Lawrence Uzzell writes, “Some of these churches had been places of Christian worship since the fourteenth century, jewels of medieval architecture treasured by art historians worldwide.” The goal of the Albanians, says Uzzell, is a purely Albanian Kosovo free of any Serbian presence, even of memories of that ancient presence. “It’s as if a Palestinian state were to win control of Jerusalem and then start demolishing every architectural relic of Judaism.” The ineffective NATO command is transferring patrol duties to the even more ineffective UN administration, which passes them on to the totally ineffective, and sometimes complicit, local police. Kosovo, readers will remember, was one of those successful “humanitarian interventions.” Among policy makers here, it is frequently recalled with pride. Only the people left behind have been forgotten. Lacrimae rerum.

• Now I’m in for it. Please, hold off on the protests and let me explain. A long and generally fair story in the New York Times on Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) says that I “confided” in the reporter, Laurie Goodstein, that there are aspects of Evangelical culture that Catholics are uneasy about, such as “the overly confident claims to being born again, the forced happiness and joy, the awful music.” No, I’m not going to complain that I was quoted out of context, although of course I was. The context was an interview of well over an hour, and publishing it all would have taken up a large part of that Sunday’s paper. Ms. Goodstein asked about tensions between Evangelical and Catholic religious cultures, and I offered an extended list of such tensions, including the items quoted above. The “overly confident claims” sound to many Catholics like the sin of presumption, while Evangelicals intend what they call “blessed assurance” or, if they are Calvinists, “the perseverance of the saints.” The seemingly forced expressions of happiness and joy (I should have added “seemingly”) reflect an Evangelical accent on the subjective and experiential, as distinct from the Catholic accent on the objective and sacramental. As for awful music, Catholics know that Evangelicals have no monopoly on that, but I had just been to an Evangelical rally in which the worship (or was it entertainment?) was an emaciated-looking young man with an electric guitar working himself into a frenzy with ten minutes of a loud and escalating screech, “Jeeeesus, I love YOU!!!” There is awful, and then there is really awful. But, mind you, all this was in the context of describing to Ms. Goodstein the stereotypes that Evangelicals and Catholics commonly have of one another. Don’t get me wrong. I love Evangelicals. Some of my best friends are Evangelicals. Evangelicals are swell. (Chuck Colson, can you help me out here?)

• “That’s how the communion crumbles,” is an Anglican play on an old saying as various jerry-built arrangements are made for bishops from Africa and Asia to assume oversight of traditional Anglicans in North America who are protesting what they view as heretical innovations, most recently the consecration of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. Something similar is happening in the Church of Sweden, where candidates are refused ordination if they do not go along with the ordination of women. Bishop Walter Obare, the presiding bishop of the Lutheran Church in Kenya, has indicated his readiness to ordain men in Sweden who he says suffer under a liberal “oppression” and “persecution” that has contributed to the fact that “historical Protestantism is rapidly crumbling” in countries such as Sweden. In a sharp exchange of letters, K. G. Hammar, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, stated in no uncertain terms that any priests ordained by Obare would belong to the Lutheran Church in Kenya, not to the Church of Sweden. Of those in Sweden who object to the ordination of women, Hammar says, “We seem to have reached the painful situation where the wish for some to stay together is no longer as strong as the need to stress one’s own perspective.” If Sweden persists in its policy, Obare wrote in response to Hammar, “I must with other Lutheran bishops take upon myself the heavy and historic burden to heed the call of oppressed Lutheranism in your church and to ordain bishops and pastors in the Church of Sweden on the basis of emergency legitimacy set forth in the Lutheran Confessions. As Lutherans, we must also understand that this kind of calling comes from the Head of the Church himself. Who dares disobey him?” Obare refers to women’s ordination as “this Gnostic novelty [that] is now obviously claiming, not only autocracy in the Church, but also tyranny, since it cannot tolerate even minimal coexistence with classical Christianity.” Dr. Ishmael Noko, general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), to which both churches belong, invited the two bishops to a meeting aimed at working out their differences. Hammar flatly refused, saying, “I do not want to give the impression that there is anything to negotiate.” That response probably did not surprise Bishop Obare who wrote in his letter that he and “many other Lutheran colleagues” fear that they are witnessing in Sweden and elsewhere “the rise of a secular, intolerant, bureaucratic fundamentalism inimical to the word of God and familiar from various church struggles against totalitarian ideologies during the twentieth century.” Noting that Anglicans are having similar problems, Kyrkans Tidning (Church News) asked LWF’s Noko, “Are we witnessing a growing disintegration of the worldwide church, giving us a more liberal northwestern part and a more conservative southern?” Said Noko, “No. There is no such geographical line. And this is not a specifically African issue.” One might suggest it is more of a theological line, with Africans being less inhibited in asserting that Scripture and the sixteenth-century confessional writings are normative for the ordering of the Lutheran communion.

• Add two more books to the long and dreary list of tracts against the authoritarian and undemocratic ways of the Catholic Church. They are of slight interest, but in reviewing them Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard arrives at an interestingly phrased conclusion: “But it is hard to see how democratic reforms can arrest the crisis in Western Catholicism. For what can ‘religious liberty’ mean in the context of a doctrine? In free societies, dissent gets expressed through ‘exit’ rather than ‘voice,’ to use the economist Albert O. Hirschman’s terms. The less doctrinaire a parishioner, the more likely he is to find his preferred spiritual product elsewhere. So the democratic world may offer the Church a hard choice—between growing more reactionary or dying. Perhaps the Church’s real arrogance was to assume at the time of Vatican II that it had the standing to open a dialogue with modernity. The Church could never command that non-Catholics listen to it; all it could do was expose its faithful to the siren song of democracy, capitalism and sex.” For those to whom the democratic world—read: liberal culture—is the default position, “reactionary” is the irresistible word. But one can also envision the Church in her restored integrity providing an attractive “contrast society” for people wearied by the discontents of liberal culture. That does not mean that the Church is countercultural, although at times she must be against the world for the world. The Catholic genius is always for the world, proposing a “more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31) toward the realization of the best to which the culture aspires. “Arrogance” is not the right word, but the Holy Spirit who guided the Council did not expunge in the bishops a human capacity for misreading “the signs of the times.” This is notably evident in Gaudium et Spes, the constitution on the Church in the modern world. What was new in the constitution, and therefore what caught attention, was the very hopeful (optimistic?) depiction of the modern world. I once asked a bishop who had played a major part in drafting the constitution whether the document was not marked by a certain naïveté about the modern world. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Perhaps.” He then quickly added, “But, if so, it was an evangelical naïveté.” I have no doubt about that. A careful reading of Gaudium et Spes shows that the doctrinal tradition is uncompromised and the necessary cautions against worldly optimism are not absent. Contra Caldwell, it was not wrong to assume that the Church had the standing “to open a dialogue with modernity.” What other religious institution had or has a better claim to such standing? And it is obvious that the Church cannot “command” that non-Catholics listen to it or, for that matter, compel Catholics to listen. Yet Caldwell makes an important point. It was not “all it could do,” and in fact it was far from all it did do, but it is true that at the Council the Church did “expose its faithful to the siren song of democracy, capitalism, and sex.” Inadvertently, of course. It is a risk that comes with reading the signs of the times. And with believing that, if you are nice to the world, the world will be nice to you. A measure of what can look like evangelical naïveté may be unavoidable, however, in a community that tries to be faithful to the one of whom it is said, “For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” That assumes, as Gaudium et Spes did say, although many did not hear it—perhaps because they did not want to hear it—that the world cannot save itself.

• A Pentecostal pastor robbed five New England banks before being caught and sent to jail. John T. McNeil, the prosecutor, remarked, “What I find most interesting about this case is that even though this was a man of God who was devoted to the church, he was involved in some pretty sophisticated bank robberies.” Pastor Russell Saltzman of Forum Letter takes umbrage, seeing this as a slur on the capabilities of clergy. Touchy, touchy.

• Emmet Kearney takes me to task for saying that a survey showed that “only 21 percent of [college] administrators knew that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom” (While We’re At It, February). He notes that the survey question asked them to name any First Amendment right, and 79 percent named a right other than the freedom of religion. Mr. Kearney is right: that is much less worrying.

• A good many conservatives think that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is a good example of the kind of thing government has no business doing. It may not have changed minds but it blunted complaints when President Bush appointed Dana Gioia the chairman of the NEA. Gioia is a distinguished poet and has a way of winsomely engaging those who disagree with him, as many do. He was also our Erasmus Lecturer last year and we are looking forward to publishing his text, which, we are assured, is undergoing final, final revision. With Gioia in charge, the administration has even increased, modestly, the NEA’s $139 million budget, which is about the budget line for paper clips in government agencies thought to matter in Washington. But of course the NEA matters greatly to many people in the arts. John Rockwell, a critic at the New York Times, is deeply ambivalent about the new management at the NEA. He doesn’t exactly call for a return to the tumultuous times of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” Chris Ofili’s “Blessed Virgin of the Elephant Dung,” or the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio,” which celebrated the nuances of anal intercourse, but Mr. Rockwell does seem to miss the good old days. Rockwell’s reflection is titled, “Help for the Old and Safe, Neglect for the New and Challenging.” He notes that Gioia is promoting traveling Shakespeare companies to do live theater in small cities, schools, and military bases, along with touring groups performing jazz and other American masterpieces. Rockwell writes, “This is all well and good. Really it is. But it does provoke some questions.” When he has to assure the reader that he “really” thinks this is all well and good, the reader may suspect he doesn’t really mean it, and it turns out he doesn’t. Gioia says his program is a “win-win” approach to the arts, to which Rockwell protests: “But what happened to multicultural disdain for dead white European males? If touring Shakespeare is such a win-win deal, just how does transgressive, transsexual, multiracial, confrontational performance art ‘win’?” How indeed. Thus, according to Rockwell, does Gioia neglect “the new and challenging.” One might respond that Macbeth is a great deal more challenging than Mapplethorpe and, as for the latter being new, pornography goes way on back. Rockwell complains, “Rich people support major arts institutions disproportionately, and rich people are mostly conservative.” It is true that a disproportionate amount of financial support for the arts comes from rich people. It probably has something to do with the fact that rich people, generally speaking, have more money than poor people. As for rich people being “mostly conservative,” however, one has to wonder whose patronage made the likes of Serrano, Ofili, and Mapplethorpe rich. Adolescents of all ages who would prove they are artists by behaving badly and shocking the grownups also want to be rich. They understandably grouse that not enough money goes to support the “transgressive, transsexual, multiracial, confrontational performance art,” but such bad behaviors would not abound without a lot of people paying for them. And some of what Mr. Rockwell and others deem “new and challenging” may, it is quite possible, some day be recognized as art worth preserving as part of the American heritage. Of the NEA approach Rockwell writes, “Certifying masterpieces and making them available to all is not inherently evil.” That is a magnanimous concession. Evil perhaps, but not inherently evil. Then comes an even greater concession: “Edgy art was made long before public arts support became a reality in this country; not all rich patrons are conservative.” So it seems the new and the challenging are safe after all. And all without taxpayers being forced to pay for being insulted by the antics of those who hold them in contempt. It may not be entirely a win-win approach, and it may not change the minds of those who think the NEA should be abolished, but the direction taken by Dana Gioia holds the promise of preserving and sharing a heritage of proven achievement, to which the work of those who outgrow their captivity to “the new and challenging” may one day be admitted.

• On April 23, 1993, after having fasted for several days, which was a regular part of his spiritual discipline, Cesar Chavez died in his sleep. Rees Lloyd, a reader who served as an attorney for Chavez for twenty years, writes to tell me about his personal experience of Chavez’ deep and vibrant faith. At his funeral in Delano, California, fifty thousand people joined in processing along the hot and dusty roads, and a message from Pope John Paul II was read at the service. Chavez was, of course, a hero of monumental proportions to the Mexican-American farm workers he organized. But he was also much celebrated by others. California, for instance, has a Cesar Chavez Day. Mr. Lloyd includes the poignantly telling observation that it is a paid holiday for government workers. For the farm workers it is another day in the fields.

• Rivers of Gold is the story of the rise of the Spanish empire. Publishers Weekly scolds the author, Hugh Thomas, for insensitivity to the cultural “other.” The review includes this: “Indeed, readers free from colonial prejudice will be surprised to find themselves also written out of history: ‘Who can doubt now,’ Thomas asks rhetorically, ‘that the Spanish were right to denounce the idea of religion based on human sacrifice or the simple worship of the sun or the rain?’” Presumably those who are free from colonial prejudice are open to, or even harbor no doubts about, the merits of a religion that sacrifices human beings to the gods. But then, as the reviewer notes, Mr. Thomas has become ever more conservative, even to the point of serving as an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and we know how narrow-minded she was about human sacrifice.

• I have from time to time been critical of Alan Wolfe, Boston College’s man on religion and public life and contributing editor at the New Republic. So I’m not surprised when, in a recent article, he refers to “the small and sectarian journal First Things.” One might, very delicately, observe that the New Republic is almost as small and is a great deal more sectarian, if sectarian means narrowly preoccupied with partisan politics. Although I expect that by “sectarian” he means religious. Wolfe is reviewing books on atheism in America and, as a self-described nonbeliever, wishes that some of the authors were less fervently religious in their atheism. He is more sympathetic to Doubt: A History by Jennifer Hecht because “Hecht is the rare doubter who can simultaneously disagree with people of faith while granting them respect and taking their ideas seriously.” That is obviously how Mr. Wolfe would like to think of himself. And in his books, such as One Nation, After All and The Transformation of American Religion, it is how he claims most Americans think. Religion and nonreligion, he writes, “raise first questions about the world that deserve heated exchange.” But such questions must be kept safely distanced from our public life, and he indulges himself by whacking the Bush administration for violating that liberal dogma. “Whatever our differences over faith,” Wolfe writes, “Americans belong to a common political community in which, assuming that we will continue to live together, we must find ways of talking to each other not just past each other.” I am resigned to living together with Alan Wolfe but confess that it would be a great deal easier if he followed the example he says is set by Ms. Hecht in granting others respect and taking their ideas seriously—notably the ideas of those who disagree with Mr. Wolfe’s belief that liberalism trumps truth and that, therefore, “first questions” must be banished from public life. Contra Mr. Wolfe, first questions—as in “We hold these truths to be self-evident”—are the foundation and not the enemy of the continuing American experiment. He says we must find ways of talking to each other and not just past each other. I am talking to you, Alan.

• The Weather Underground was a particularly nasty part of the radicalisms that emerged from the 1960s. Shooting cops and that sort of thing. Now they are examined in a documentary, “The Weather Underground,” and it is reviewed by Johnny Zokovitch in a recent issue of The Catholic Peace Voice, an organ of the Pax Christi movement. “This provocative film should give members of the peace movement and those who espouse nonviolence reason to pause and engage in a bit of self-examination. While many activists then and now would criticize the violence of the Weather Underground, we must recognize and pay serious attention to the depth of their commitment—a commitment that would not allow these young people to be satisfied with the often choreographed, low-risk protest that so often passes for dissent in our country. While disagreeing with their use of violence, we who espouse nonviolence as a force for social change must be challenged by how much these young people were willing to sacrifice and how drastically their lives were disrupted by their opposition to a government steeped in the evils of militarism, materialism, and racism.” If the ends are so admirable, the pacifists of Pax Christi are given “reason to pause and engage in a bit of self-examination.” Might not noble intentions and “depth of commitment” justify just a little mayhem and murder?

• A reader sends me an old copy of The Lutheran Witness from May 1961, which carries a story on my installation as pastor of St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn. The report says, “This church offers weekly Communion to colored and white people at the same altar rail.” The reader wonders whether this was written in approval or in order to warn potential visitors. In any event, it is good to remember that it was thought worthy of note at the time. Conservatives too often play to stereotype as the stupid party by refusing to acknowledge that, amidst the encircling gloom, there are undeniable instances of moral progress.

• I have a measure of respect for people who remain aloof from politics, and I have a number of friends who never vote because, they say, “It only encourages them.” There are more important—much more important—things in life than politics. That being said, I get a mite impatient with people who seem to think it a mark of political sophistication to say that our political system only gives us a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. There are even purists in the pro-life movement who say there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Kerry and Bush: “Neither of them is going to repeal Roe v. Wade.” That’s true, of course, but there are things to be done on the way to the hoped-for repeal of that odious decision and the lethal logic behind it. And it is arrogantly obtuse to ignore the fact that President Bush has done some of those things and will likely do others. This past April he signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, making it clear that an attack on a pregnant woman is an attack on two people. Last year he signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that outlaws one of the most manifestly brutal forms of child killing. Yes, its implementation is being blocked by some courts, but that only underscores the importance of Bush’s efforts to get federal judges who understand themselves to be servants and not masters of the law. In 2002, Bush signed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which ensures that every infant born alive—including those surviving an abortion procedure—is considered a person under federal law. Has that saved many lives? Probably not, but it is crucially important because it establishes in law that whether or not a baby is a person does not depend on whether the baby is “wanted” by a woman and her abortionist. And anyone who thinks that establishing that is not important has not read the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. President Bush has also strongly supported a ban on human cloning, arguing that life is not a commodity but a creation. Babies must not be manufactured for research or body parts, nor “designed” to customer specification. In one of his first acts in office, he restored the Mexico City Policy that had been put in place by Ronald Reagan and then rescinded by President Clinton. That policy means no federal money for organizations promoting or performing abortions in other nations. One could list other initiatives of this president in strengthening families, encouraging adoptions, supporting abstinence for young people, and other issues closely related to the moral vitality of our society. To pretend there are no substantive differences between the candidates in this presidential election is simply dumb. (Lest we jeopardize our tax exemption, a note to whoever at the Internal Revenue Service has the happy job of reading FT: the above is not an endorsement of President Bush. It is a service to our readers in clarifying issues. We readily recognize that people may, for reasons they deem sufficient, vote for his opponent.)

• It has been a long time since I have so enjoyed an intellectually ambitious work of theology. “Enjoy” is exactly the right word, since joy is at the heart of David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans). Those familiar with Hart’s writings in these pages will not be surprised to learn that the book is not always light reading. Despite the convoluted word games and superfluity of neologisms, however—he is, after all, engaging the postmodernist exertions of the likes of Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault—delight is the theme of Hart’s Balthasarian argument about human desiring and the beauty of God. For further details, see the review of the book by Geoffrey Wainwright in the March issue of FT. Herewith an excerpt from the book (with the author’s permission) in response to those who, in the tradition of Nietzsche, would escape from dead and deadly Apollo to the delusory delights of Dionysius. In that tradition, it may be recalled, the crucifixion of Christ is construed as Christianity’s repudiation of the earthly and fleshly, to which Dionysian intoxication is the alternative. But the wine of Dionysius, says Hart, makes human fellowship impossible, being but a brute absorption into anonymity and violence. Hart writes: “In fact, if I may be permitted an excursus, it is conceivable that a theological answer to Nietzsche could be developed entirely in terms of the typology of wine. After all, the wine of Dionysus is no doubt of the coarsest vintage, intended to blind with drunkenness rather than enliven whimsy; it is fruit of the same vine with which Dionysus bridged the Euphrates, after flaying alive the king of Damascus, so that he could conquer India for viniculture (so we know from Plutarch, Pausanias, Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus, Siculus, and others); and of the same vine for which Lycurgus mistook his son Dryas when driven mad for offending the wild god, causing him to cut Dryas down for ‘pruning’ (as Homer and Apollodorus report); the vine that destroyed the pirates who would not bear Dionysus to Naxos (so say Homer, Apollodorus, and Ovid); it is the wine that inflamed the maenads to rend Pentheus limb from limb, led by his own mother Agave (as Euripides and others record); the wine repeatedly associated with madness, anthropophagy, slaughter, warfare, and rapine (one need consider only the Dionysian cult at Orchomenus—with its ritual act of random murder—and the story of the daughters of Minyas—frenzy, infanticide, cannibalism—from which it sprang). The wine of Christian Scripture, on the other hand, is first and foremost a divine blessing and image of God’s bounty (Genesis 27:28; Deuteronomy 7:13; 11:14; Psalms 104:15; Proverbs 3:10; Isaiah 25:6; 65:8; Jeremiah 31:12; Joel 2:19; 3:18; Amos 9:13–14; Zechariah 9:17), and an appropriate thank offering by which to declare Israel’s love of God (Exodus 29:40; Leviticus 23:13; Numbers 15:5–10; 18:12; 28:14; Deuteronomy 14:23; 15:14; 18:4); it is the wine that ‘cheers the hearts of gods and men’ (Judges 9:13), to be drunk and shared with those for whom nothing is prepared on the day holy to the Lord (Nehemiah 8:10), the sign of God’s renewed covenant with his people (Isaiah 55:1–3), the drink of lovers (Song of Solomon 5:1), and the very symbol of love (7:2, 9; 8:2), whose absence is the eventide of all joy (Isaiah 24:11); it is, moreover, the wine of agape and the feast of fellowship, in which Christ first vouchsafed a sign of his divinity, in a place of rejoicing, at Cana—a wine of the highest quality—when the kingdom showed itself ‘out of season’ (John 2:3–10); the wine, again, forsaken with all the good things of creation, when Christ went to his death, but promised to be drunk anew at the banquet table of his Father’s kingdom, and from which—embittered with myrrh—he was forced to turn his lips when on the cross (Mark 15:23; Matthew 27:34); the wine, finally, whose joy is imparted to the Church again, and eternally, with the fire of Pentecost (Acts 2:13), and in which the fellowship of Christ and his flock is reborn with every celebration of the Eucharist. Of course, Nietzsche was a teetotaler and could judge the merit of neither vintage, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that his attempts at oino-theology should betray a somewhat pedestrian palate.”

• Pastor Russ Saltzman of Forum Letter comments on John Mason Neale’s translation of the Palm Sunday hymn, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” composed in Latin by the ninth-century St. Theodulph of Orleans. He notes that almost all hymnals omit one verse of Neale’s fine translation:

Be thou, O Lord, the rider
And I the little ass
That to the Holy city
Together we may pass.

The language sounds rude to contemporary ears, but the verse should not be offensive to those familiar with G. K. Chesterton’s marvelous poem, “The Donkey.”

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

• It seems that groups of ROFTERS (Readers of First Things) are sprouting all over. Here is a letter from Kevin Wainwright, a Presbyterian chaplain with the 30th Brigade, North Carolina National Guard, stationed in Iraq. He explains how FT has been “a vehicle of God’s grace” among the soldiers there and includes a picture of eight of his men—with Father W. Kelly, a Catholic chaplain, in the middle—holding copies of FT. If you’re interested in starting a ROFTERS group, probably closer to home, contact ft@firstthings.com. Here are some new ROFTERS contacts. For a complete list, visit the ROFTERS page on [our website->old.firstthings.com].

In Lawrence/Kansas City, Kansas contact:
Robert J. Bingaman e-mail: mail@robertjosiah.com

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Jim Duncan
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Easton, Maryland 21601
Phone: (410) 215-6008
e-mail: Jim.Duncan@navtrak.net

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David C. Springman
3875 Gilbert Station Road
Barboursville, Virginia 22923
Phone: (434) 975-6248
e-mail: dcarlspring@ntelos.net

In Pasadena, California:
Ralph D. Winter
President
William Carey International University
1469 Bresee Avenue
Pasadena, California 91104
e-mail: rdw112233@aol.com

In the Sarasota/Bradenton area of Florida:
Maureen and Terry Aldrich
7821 Alhambra Drive
Bradenton, Florida 34209
Phone (941) 795-1212
e-mail: aldrich123@verizon.net

In Miami/Dade, Florida:
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660 Warren Lane
Key Biscayne, Florida 33149
Phone: (786) 348-6363
e-mail: jesserodriguez00@yahoo.com

In and around Lexington, Kentucky:
Charles Walsh
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Wilmore, Kentucky 40390
Phone: (859) 223-2180 or (859) 858-9582
e-mail: cwalsh@lexingtonchristian.org

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Sources:

Lesbian custody battle, Seattle Times, May 6, 2004. Paul Ehrlich as the reverse Cassandra, Richard Bailey, Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2004. Albanian Muslims slaughter Orthodox Christians, Christian Science Monitor, May 20, 2004. Laurie Goodstein interview with RJN on evangelical culture, New York Times, May 29, 2004. Lutheran Church in Kenya, Letters of Obare and Hammar, plus Kyrkans Tidning, April, 22, 2004. “Emerging Church,” Nicotine Theological Journal, April 2004. Reply to Caldwell on Vatican II, New York Times Book Review, May 2, 2004. Pilfering Pentecostal, Forum Letter, June, 2004. NEA under Dana Gioia, New York Times, February 13, 2004. Prejudiced reviewer, Publisher’s Weekly, April 12, 2004. Alan Wolfe on a small, sectarian journal, New Republic, April 12, 2004.