Month: April 2006

I’m second to no one in my love of the Beastie Boys, but I have to say, some of the rhymes on the recent To the 5 Boroughs, which I checked out from the library the other day, leave a bit to be desired. My longstanding theory has been that there is an inverse relationship in the Beastie oeuvre between the quality of the material and the degree of social consciousness they attempt to convey. To wit:

We have a president that we didn’t elect/the Kyoto treaty he’s decided to neglect

Sigh…

Consider: widely regarded as their best album, Paul’s Boutique is almost entirely devoid of socially redeeming qualities. Unless you consider drug use, casual sex, throwing eggs at people, shaking your rump and gunplay socially redeeming topics.

Actually, as a whole To the 5 Boroughs is pretty decent. But the rapping about global warming and the perfidy of George Bush I can do without.

In the new First Things, Gilbert Meilaender takes a bite out of Crunchy Cons. He’s put off, as I admit I was, by Dreher’s apparent disdain for non-crunchies:

A strong sense of impatience runs through the pages of Crunchy Cons. Perhaps it is the impatience of the prophet, and, to the degree that it is, one must attempt to learn from it. Still, over the years I have not found the folks who sit in church with me to be as vapid as Dreher seems to think they are. I admit that, on those occasions when for one reason or another I have been at a Catholic Mass, the liturgy (let us not even mention the hymnody) has largely failed to move me.

Still, even as a Lutheran, I would never say (as Dreher does), that “if the only contact a typical American Catholic has with Catholic teaching and thought is what he hears at Mass, he will remain a self-satisfied ignoramus.” I would not say it, in part, because I have watched ordinary bourgeois folk struggle in the different ways to take seriously what happens in the church’s worship. And I would not say it, in part, because, evidently unlike Dreher, I do not suppose they were self-satisfied ignoramuses before coming to church. Nor do I think that “traditional Christian values [make] so little apparent difference in the lives many conservative believers lead.”

Meilaender also questions the crunchies’ idea of being “mission-minded” about raising kids: shaping their character, insulating them from mass culture, and raising “rebels with a cause” as Dreher puts it:

There must be a way to take seriously the rearing of one’s children without focusing with such intensity on “family as mission” (probably the central concept of Dreher’s chapter on education). Doing the best we can to rear our children is a task that is both obligatory and (sometimes) satisfying, but to clothe it in the language of “mission” begins to lose something essential to the relation between parents and children: namely, the mystery of it all.

Child-rearing is not pottery or sculpture; the materials in our hands turn out to have ideas of their own. Most of what we know about the task we learn only too late, after our mistakes have been made. Rather than a mission of rearing countercultural children, we have the task of doing the best we can, in love, to set our children on the way in life. We teach them how to behave, we try to set them on the right path and shape their character properly, but we don’t own their souls. They must for a time obey us, but they don’t have to share all our likes and dislikes.

He worries that an excessive focus on the family (pardon the expression) can, like anything else, become idolatrous:

The most important issue, however, lies in the way the book’s discussion of the family as mission-minded intersects with religion. I have already recounted how the women with whom Dreher’s wife Julie came to be friends in Brooklyn shared a belief “that there was something supremely important about caring for their children.” In that context Julie also comments: “All of us wanted more than anything to be a real part of our baby’s life. A baby, that’s a human being. That’s a soul. That’s a life. The baby is not an accessory. He’s not part of life. He’s everything.”

But no, as a matter of metaphysical fact, he’s not everything. We understand, of course, how a devoted and caring mother might sometimes feel that he is. We understand how he might absorb so much of her time and energy as to seem to be everything. We understand that caring for him is her vocation in life. We understand that the tie between her and her child is so deep and intimate that nothing could entirely efface it. But her child is not everything.

To love that child more than Jesus is, we have it on good authority, to be unworthy of Jesus. To bring that child to baptism is to hand him over to God, who must be the guarantor of his existence, and to the church, which must accept responsibility for him. There is something stiflingly possessive in this account of the parent-child bond. It is, no doubt, understandable–even admirable–in a world where so many children are left simply to fend for themselves, but it sometimes strikes a disturbing note.

Not being a parent myself, I can’t really offer informed comments on people’s parenting style. But I do think there is a danger in making “family” the center of everything. And, as a Lutheran, I’m inclined to argee with Meilaender that the extent to which parents can shape their children’s characters has limits imposed both by human nature and the stubbornness of original sin.

Meilaender adds that it’s curious to bemoan “alienation and a loss of community” while at the same time praising the virtues of self-sufficiency (growing your own food, living the agrarian lifestyle, etc.). Whatever its flaws, a market economy connects us by making us dependent on others for things we can’t do for ourselves.

He concludes:

There is much that strikes me as on-target in Crunchy Cons, along with a good bit that strikes me as misguided or ill informed, but where the book goes awry has less to do with substance than with tone. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, if one really wants to be a prophet, one may need to be an itinerant; it is hard to hang around those who have been bludgeoned by our critique. No doubt such prophets are sometimes needed by all of us, but I wonder whether the tone of this book might not have been more successful had its author been less intent on demonstrating that those who live in ways different from his own are flawed souls–and more intent simply on depicting the goods he has found without invidious comparison with goods others enjoy.

Brandon has a post on St. Anselm with lots of good links.

N.T. Wright on the Resurrection, via Pastor Frontz.

At Alternet, an interview with journalist Michael Pollan, who just publised a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma, on “America’s Eating Disorder.” Interestingly, one of the people engaged in sustainable farming practices that Pollan talks about is also mentioned in Crunchy Cons, I think.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that today is the feast day of Archbishop of Canterbury and my favorite medieval philosopher-theologian St. Anselm. He is often referred to as the “founder of scholasticism” and is one of the great doctors of the Church. As Archbishop he was also instrumental in the struggle against lay investiture in England and settling doubts about the filioque harbored by the Greek bishops of Southern Italy.

Not too many other people can lay claim to having come up with two of the most enduring and controversial arguments in philosophical theology. The first is his famous ontological argument for God’s existence whose shelf-life has been surprisingly long. It was criticized in his own day and St. Thomas didn’t seem to think too much of it, but it was revivied by early modern luminaries like Descartes and Leibniz. Kant was widely thought to have finally put it to rest, but recent philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Charles Hartshorne have given it new life.

The second, of course, is his so-called satisfaction account of the Atonement. I’ve defended it from certain misunderstandings before. It’s also recently received a respectful treatment in David Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, which is especially interesting considering that Anselm has often not fared well at the hands of Eastern Orthodox theologians.

Sometimes overlooked, however, is Anselm’s contribution to piety and the devotional life. He composed many prayers and, according to some scholars was influential in forging a kind of individual piety that became very popular in the Middle Ages. His prayers and meditations served as a means for individual lectio divina, or a meditative form of reading intended to give rise to prayer.

This article is one of those classic pieces that proclaims the existence of a trend but then offers little more than the sparsest of anecdotal evidence that such a trend is actually occurring.

Still, the question is a perennial one. How important to Christian belief is it that Jesus “literally” rose from the dead? The classic Christian position is that Jesus was raised bodily but that he was raised to a new kind of existence, with a “spiritual” body. In the Gospel accounts the risen Jesus is not bound by the usual constraints of the physical world; he appears in locked rooms, he is at times unrecognizable to his disciples, etc. And yet he also eats and is very tangible, as in the story of Doubting Thomas. This stands somewhere between a sheerly physcialist “resuscitation” view (which pretty much no one that I’m aware of holds) and a “spiritual” view which denies that Jesus rose bodily.

To me the Resurrection has always been key. I could never work up much interest in a Christianity that reduced it to a metaphorical truth about Jesus’ teachings living on in his disciples or some such thing. For one thing, it’s clear that the disciples claimed that he really rose. As Pascal said, if Jesus wasn’t raised, then the disciples were either deceived or deceivers. So if the Resurrection isn’t real, then Christianity, whatever great moral insights it may offer, is based on a mistake or a fraud.

Even when I was an agnostic investigating Christianity, I always thought it was a dishonest dodge when modernist theologians would write that it didn’t matter whether Jesus really rose from the dead, and that the Resurrection was really a metaphor for some higher, more “spiritual” truth. St. Paul’s famous hypothetical that “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” always seemed compelling and just flat-out more honest than the revisionist view.

I think Ian Markham, the dean of Hartford Seminary who is quoted in the Post article makes a good point:

“We are just aware that life is much more mysterious and surprising,” Markham said. “People are less inclined to dismiss things just because they are unscientific.”

For me, the argument that God is, after all, God, and if he wants to raise someone fromt the dead he no doubt can do so, has always been compelling. C.S. Lewis makes the point in his book Miracles that the question of God is logically prior to the question of whether miraculous events can happen. For, if there’s a Power that exists “outside” of the natural world and its nexus of cause and effect, we have no guarantee that it can’t or won’t intervene.

Another, though maybe less rational, experience that predisposed me to not find a literal Resurrection absurd has been, I think, the fact that I grew up reading comic books and science fiction. So the ideas of parallel dimensions, supernatural powers, beings existing beyond the mundane world were already part of my mental furniture when I started to think seriously about Christian claims. I was used to thinking that the laws of nature might well apply to only a small sliver of our experience. If Jean Grey can come back from the dead umpteen times, why not Jesus? I could at least imagine the possibility, so the idea of resurrection didn’t present some kind of insuperable obstacle for me.

More seriously, I think the Resurrection is important for Christian belief, not least because in raising Jesus from the dead God showed us what kind of God he is. That has always been the Church’s contention from day one – that in the cross and resurrection of Jesus God was at work “reconciling the world to himself.” Apart from that what basis do we have for knowing what God is like? The insights of the apostles would not be of any more intrinsic merit than any other sage or religious guru.

Moreover, the Resurrection shows that God is at work redeeming all aspects of our existence, not just our souls or spirits. He is concerned with the physical dimension as much as the spiritual. Contra the Gnostics (and to quote Lewis) “God likes matter; he invented it.”

(Note: Edited slightly Friday afternoon)

I realize I’m starting to sound like a Matthew Yglesias groupie, but this article on why war with Iran is a very, very bad idea is one of the best I’ve read. Even bracketing moral considerations, there just doesn’t seem to be a feasible military option that prevents Iran from getting nukes, rather than perhaps delaying it. Aerial bombing wouldn’t guarantee anything more than a setback, regime change-plus-occupation simply isn’t doable under current conditions, and a Mark Steyn-style “decapitation” (regime change without occupation) would just be plumb foolish.

P.S. See also this piece by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld.

Thanks to Pastor Chip Frontz, who graciously loaned me his copy of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, I can weigh in, if somewhat belatedly, on the whole phenomenon.

As I see it, the crunchy con ethos can be understood as an attempt to bring to bear a traditionalist religious (or philosophical) sensibility to bear on the modern world and finding that it doesn’t match up with the kinds of positions usually labeled “conservative.” Dreher himself expresses surprise at the extent to which religious commitment informs the choices of the crunchy cons he interviewed.

In one sense, this shouldn’t be surprising. Popular American conservative ideology as we know it, rather than being an organic and coherent worldview, was in many ways a reaction against Communism. During the Cold War we seemed to need an ideology to pose against that of the godless communism of the Soviets, and this ended up being something like “God + Patriotism + Democracy + Capitalism” (not necessarily in that order). But a commitment to “democratic capitalism,” or at least actually existing democratic capitalism, is not obviously congruent with the values found in the Western religious and philosophical tradition. Any reader of the Gospels (or Plato or Aristotle for that matter) will quickly discover that the pursuit of wealth, for instance, is eyed with considerable suspicion.

So it makes sense to me that people who are strongly committed to a fairly traditional religious worldview would grow uneasy with consumer capitalism, disregard for the integrity of the environment, and vulgar or vacuous pop culture. For the crunchy con, the good life is defined by the pursuit of virtue and fidelity to tradition, even when this conflicts with the values that prevail in American society. The “con” part is the fidelity to tradition, and the “crunchy” part is the unorthodox (from a mainstream conservative perspective) stance with respect to capitalism, the environment, consumerism, etc.

This sensibility is given more concrete shape through Dreher’s discussion of his own family’s experience as well as through interviews with other crunchies. The organizing principle he offers for the crunchy view of the world is “sacramentalism.” In short, this is the idea that holiness or spirit is mediated through the physical.

The best explication of this that I’ve seen is in Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World. Fr. Schmemann says that there are two basic ways of looking at the religious life. One sees religion as a “spiritual” realm removed and separate from ordinary life, a sanctuary to which we retreat from the mundane physical world. The flip side of this spiritualized religion is the “activist” type which embraces the secular, focusing everything on politics, social justice, etc. and basically ignoring the spiritual aspect of existence. We work to feed the hungry but forget to tell them about the Bread of Life.

Only in the Bible, he says, is this dichotomy overcome:

In the Bible the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. The world as man’s food is not something “material” and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically “spiritual” functions by which man is related to God. All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (p. 14)

For crunchy cons, this sacramental view of the world can and should carry over into areas like how we spend our money, how we prepare and consume food, how we educate our children, and our attitude toward the environment and technology. In Dreher’s view mainstream American conservatism has largely abandoned this outlook in favor of a utilitarian devotion to the free market. This is combined with a view of the material world as a sheer resource to be consumed, rather than something to be received as a gift.

For instance, if the natural world is a gift from God with its own integrity, then practices like large-scale industrial farming and fast food suddenly come into question. This isn’t because it’s wrong for us to use nature for our own benefit, but because these practices tend to reduce to the natural world to a commodity to be exploited rather than a gift to be received in gratitude. Though Dreher doesn’t mention him, the insights of philosopher Albert Borgmann seem pertinent here. Borgmann is a critic of technology, but not a Luddite. His worry is that technological exploitation of nature threatens what he calls “focal things” and “focal practices.” At the risk of seeming pompous, I’ll quote what I wrote about Borgmann last year:

A focal thing is something that calls forth our attention and engagement rather than being immediately available for our use. Focal things are real in their own right, rather than being commodities produced for our effortless consumption. And a focal practice is the activity whereby we engage with this reality. Paradigm instances of focal things for Borgmann are wilderness, musical instruments, the written word and the communal meal. The corresponding focal practices might be hiking, learning to play music, reading to each other and preparing the meal. These all require an active understanding and engagement with the underlying reality and the development of certain skills and virtues.

Technology threatens focal practices because it attempts to make everything available and pliable at the push of a button or flip of a switch. It’s much easier to turn on the CD player and hear a flawless performance than to practice my own halting efforts at learning to play an instrument. But Borgmann thinks that focal practices are precisely what give life its meaning – a life reduced to an endless variety of consumption is unbearably banal.

Crunchy cons worry that a world where everything is available as a commodity is one where we risk losing meaning and virtue for the sake of ease and convenience. Dreher writes about the family of evangelical Christians who started their own organic farm in order to raise food and animals in a way that more closely mirrors the way they believe God intended. To do this is to renounce the attitude that would turn the natural world into a commodity in favor of one that respects nature’s own integrity.

To use Borgmann’s terminology, crunchy cons think that too many of our focal practices have been “outsourced” to corporations and the state. That’s why growing and/or preparing one’s own food, avoiding mass-produced culture, and homeschooling are central crunchy con endeavors.

The political implications of all this are never made entirely clear. Dreher emphasizes that crunchy con-ism is more of a way of life than a political program. Though he does offer near the end of the book a tentative (and somewhat vague) crunchy con platform that includes reform of agricultural and health policies that make it easier for small farms to compete with agribusiness, zoning laws that favor historical preservation and high aesthetic standards, laws that make it easier to homeschool, and an energy policy aimed at reducing our dependence on foreign oil, along with more traditional social conservative concerns like restricting abortion and pornography, banning cloning, and tighter regulation of the biotech industry. He emphasizes, however, that not all crunchy cons would sign on to this; many, in fact, seem to have a strong libertarian streak and would be wary of using the government to instill “crunchy” virtues.

I have to say that I’m generally sympathetic to many of the crunchies’ concerns, but there are some points of weakness. The most glaring, in my view, is that Dreher presents a lot of false dualisms. There are, on the one hand, virtuous crunchies, and on the other soulless, fast food munching, McMansion-dwelling mainstream conservatives. There are traditionalist religious believers who submit themselves to something greater than themselves, and “progressive” religious believers whose religion is little more than a projection of the needs or desires of the self. There is the wicked world of decadent American pop culture, suburban subdivisions, SUVs and consumerism versus the crunchy enclaves of quasi-monastic preservers of high culture (the last chapter is called “Waiting for Benedict”, a nod to Alasdair MacIntyre’s call for new forms of community that can uphold virtue in an increasingly barbarous world), Arts-and-Crafts urban bungalows, Volvos and bicycles, and self-sacrificing homeschoolers.

Needless to say, there are a whole bunch of people who don’t fall into either of these stereotypes. And I can’t help but wonder if Dreher (unconsciously?) exaggerates how bad American culture is in order to validate the rebellious, “countercultural” (a word he uses with annoying frequency) self-image of the crunchy cons. Are most people in America really mindless consumerist drones driving their SUV’s to their bleak suburban subdivisions only to flop on the couch in front of the TV with their frozen pre-packaged dinners?

After all, things like enthusiasm for organic food, environmentalism, “smart growth” and so on are hardly fringe movements anymore. Not to mention that many of the social problems that conservatives are worried about (teen pregnancy, abortion, school violence) have actually been getting better in recent years. And, personally, I think popular culture still has lots of bright spots (even TV!). Granted it’s tempting to think of oneself as part of a virtuous remnant in Babylon, but wouldn’t it make more sense for crunchy cons and their fellow travelers to encourage these positive trends by participating in and building up a common civic culture that can respond to crunchy concerns?

Interesting story in the Chicago Tribune about a Catholic parish outside of Chicago that has consciously, and by this account successfully, modeled itself after evangelical megachurches. In fact, it’s a mere three miles away from the (in)famous Willow Creek, and has managed to win parishoners back who were worshiping there.

The secret to the 22-year-old church’s success has been replicating what growing churches are doing, but in a Catholic way. The result is an innovative congregation that bills itself as “an evangelical church in the Roman Catholic tradition.”

“I think what happened to the Catholic Church is we became a little comfortable with ourselves and forgot some of what made us Catholic. We forgot what made us passionate,” said Holy Family’s pastor, Rev. Pat Brennan. “So I’ve just taken the best that I’ve seen of Catholic parishes and evangelical churches and put them together to make Holy Family. In doing that, I think we’ve rediscovered the heart of Catholicism.”

Like several other parishioners, Mary Whiteside said she was on the verge of abandoning her Catholic faith when she found Holy Family. On her first visit, Whiteside said she was hooked by the music and the pastor’s riveting homilies. Her husband, Phil, who was raised a Baptist, was so moved that he converted to Catholicism.”

Great things are happening in this church. We’re just very alive,” said Whiteside, who is on the parish leadership council. “We’re sharing some elements of the evangelical church, but I don’t think we’re trading any part of our Catholic identity.”

Holy Family was started two decades ago when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin [coiner of the “consistent ethic of life” – Lee] became concerned about the large numbers of Catholics in the northern suburbs leaving their churches to become members of Willow Creek Community Church. In 1984, the former archbishop purchased 16 acres of farmland in Inverness and founded a new parish community, Holy Family.

You can read the rest of the story here (link via Wesley Blog).

Though there has been some controversy:

But tensions have risen with the current archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, who supports a more orthodox view of the liturgy than his predecessor. Parishioners say the most recent example of that tension is the dispute over kneelers.

In the church’s original design, Holy Family never had kneelers, partly to replicate evangelical churches but also to provide more room between pews. But when the church presented renovation plans to the archdiocese last year, parishioners learned the plans would not be approved unless the church installed kneelers.

“I’m disappointed,” said Rosemary Geisler. “That was a decision that should have been left up to the people, and instead it was forced on us.”

The minor dispute has led some parishioners to worry about the type of priest who will be selected as pastor of Holy Name after Brennan’s term ends in two years. Dolores Siok, who has been at Holy Family for 17 years, worries about what will happen if the new priest wants to take the church back to Catholic orthodoxy.

Now, I’m guessing most of the members of Holy Family wouldn’t say they’ve departed from Catholic orthodoxy!

Clearly, though, it’s not just Protestants who deal with the tension between being faithful to our tradition and attracting new people (or retaining already existing members).

I may have mentioned previously that we are relocating to the Boston area this summer. By all accounts Boston is a great town, and I’m really looking forward to the move.

However, I am disgruntled to discover that Yuengling doesn’t distribute to Massachusetts! For those not in the know, Yuengling (‘ying-ling’), the self-proclaimed oldest brewery in America (located in Pottsville, Pa.), is the maker of the most widely-drunk beer in the Philadelphia area, Yuengling Lager. Unlike most of your mass-marketed American lagers, Yuengling makes a smooth-drinkin’ lager that actually tastes good and is comparatively cheap. Walk into any bar in Philly and simply order “lager” and Yuengling is what you’ll get. Not to mention they make a good porter and Black and Tan as well.

Though, by all accounts, Boston is no slouch when it comes to beer, so I’ll no doubt be able to cope.

Jonathan R. Wilson, whose daughter and son-in-law were part of a Christian Peacemaker team in Iraq (not the one that was held hostage), offers a primer on “gospel pacifism.”