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Commonweal is running a symposium of sorts on John Paul’s legacy. Here’s an appreciation from noted theological gadfly Stanley Hauerwas.

In the course of a (well-justified) tirade against “young earth creationists,” Chris Williams at Here We Stand links to a good article from a geology prof at Calvin College discussing Augustine’s views on the interpretation of Genesis.

The Fathers were, as a rule, pretty undogmatic about how these early chapters should be interpreted. They certainly didn’t make any particular interpretation the litmus test of authentic Christianity.

In his essay “Genesis and Evolution” (found in his excellent book God, Mystery & Knowledge), philosopher Peter Van Inwagen suggests that a non-literal reading of Genesis is perfectly compatible with as high a doctrine of biblical inspiration as you’d like. The reason being that God would have good reasons to make sure that any account of creation whose purpose it was to convey important theological truths would be understandable by people throughout history, not just to scientifically educated 20th century (the book was published in 1995) people. A creation account that was “scientifically accurate” would have been incomprehensible to pretty much anyone living before the 20th century. Not to mention that what we take to be the last word in cosmology could itself become outdated some day.

Mr. Williams puts it well:

Honestly, scientists may be atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, even Christians. And I really don’t think we have anything to fear from “them”. The theory of evolution is not anti-God, nor anti-Christian, nor anti-Bible. If it is, then I guess so were the early Church. So no, you don’t need to be a liberal to think that the Genesis accounts are theological in nature, telling us about our relationship with God, each other, the world, and that something went wrong to place us in the condition we are now in, with God promising a Saviour.

The Christian community lives on, loving the true peace of the heavenly Jerusalem, devoid of illusions about the transient world in which it finds itself. This illusionless existence gives the Christian church a detachment from the secular world that in practice it does not always maintain. While secular governments attempt to create lasting peace in a world destined to know only strife and struggle until the last days, there is a subversive quality about the life that Augustine imagines for the church in these circumstances. She is, he says, to “use the peace of Babylon,” (19.26) that is to say, take advantage of all the limited and partial peace that human society can find for itself, without ever settling for that peace. She is to use, not enjoy, the peace of the earthly city, and always to keep her eyes focused on the ultimate goal. As citizens of the heavenly city, Christians are always to recall where their true allegiance lies.

What then of the warfare of the earthly city? Augustine is often invoked as a kind of patron saint of the Just War. The passage in City of God in which he expounds his theory in its greatest detail deserves quotation in full: “But the wise man, they say, will wage just wars. Surely, if he remembers that he is a human being, he will much rather lament the need to wage even just wars. For if they were not just he would not have to fight them and there would be no wars for him. The injustice of the opposing side is what imposes the duty of waging wars.” (19.7) For Augustine, the Christian’s job is to resist, conceding the justice of a cause only with reluctance, always on the lookout for the moment justice deserts his own cause. The siege of his own Hippo in the last months of his life seemed to Augustine a conflict both just and wretched, a calamity for the people he had served lovingly for forty years.

In earthly terms, the vision of human society City of God provides is unremittingly bleak, even if indisputable. Most human societies, enamored with the daydreams of politics, pretend the human condition is better than it is. Men forget history because they do not want to remember that others have gone down paths of prosperity and complacency before them. But in western Christianity since Augustine there has always been a prophetic voice to proclaim the ultimate weakness of human political societies. Christianity offers mankind a hope besides which the gloom of the human condition is as nothing. Christian theology after Augustine is always hopeful and, in the deepest sense optimistic. But for those who reject that theology, the vision of human society that is left is stark and terrifying. In this sense as well, all history is salvation history. The salvific quality of that history makes it possible to be realistically honest about the damnable qualities of life in the interim; there are no easy ways out for Augustine.

–James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine: Christianity and Society”

Keeping with the consumerism theme (sort of) here’s an interesting article on the history of the “straight edge” movement (i.e. punks who eschew drinking, drugs, smoking, casual sex, and often meat).

Me, I just really liked the album “12” by Minor Threat.

[L]ove is consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness. We all start with needs, and with dependence on others to meet them. As we grow up, self-consciousness brings the tendency to make ourselves the centre, and with it the commonsense understanding that the very needs of survival depend on our own efforts. These facts push us in the direction of egocentricity. When life becomes dominated by self-serving, the reality of otherness, in its own being, almost disappears for us. In sexual life, where most of us make some contact with otherness, there is yet a tendency to lose sight of it, so that we go on wanting things from others just as we fail to recognize their authentic otherness. In all the vast permutations and combinations fo sexual desire the beauty of otherness is both present and absent. Indeed, the present tendency for sexual life and family life to be held apart is frightening, because for most people children have been the means whereby they were presented with unequivocal otherness. In political terms, Plato presents the tyrant as the worst human being because his self-serving has gone to the farthest point. He is saying that the tyrant is mad because otherness has ceased to exist for him. I can grasp with direct recognition the theological formulation of this: “Hell is to be on one’s own.”

The old teaching was the we love otherness, not because it is other, but because it is beautiful. The beauty of others was beleived to be an experience open to everyone, though in extraordinarily different forms, and at differing steps toward perfection. It was obviously capable of being turned into strange channels because of the vicissitudes of our existence. The shoe fetishist, the farmer and St. John of the Cross were on the same journey, but at different stages. The beauty of otherness is the central assumption in the statement, “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.” (Simone Weil)

—George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity” in Technology and Justice

The post below on consumerism generated some good comments; thought I’d do a bit of follow up.

I read the William Cavanaugh article from Sojourners and he made what I thought were some very good points. Cavanaugh emphasizes that the problem with consumerism is not just about “having more stuff” but also that it tends to reduce everything to the level of a commodity to be bought and sold. He argues that this is deeply bound up with the changes wrought be the industrial revolution – specifically with the fact that we are removed from the process by which the things we consume are produced.

Cavanaugh writes:

Consumerism is a spiritual attitude that is deeply entangled with changes since the Industrial Revolution in the way goods are produced. In pre-industrial society, the home was a place not merely of consumption but of production. Most people lived on farms and made the majority of the goods that they needed. Starting with the enclosure of common lands in England and elsewhere in Europe, the bulk of the population was moved away from subsistence farming and into factory labor. Cottage industries were wiped away by the production of cheap goods from mechanized factories, compelling people to enter the market as wage laborers.

With the relentless pressures on the family farm that continue today, the home as a site of significant production has all but disappeared. We make almost nothing of what we consume. The process of globalization has accelerated this detachment from production. Fewer and fewer of us have any idea what factory work is like, since manufacturing jobs are more and more being transferred overseas. Nor do we have much more than a vague idea of the wages or working conditions of the workers who make what we buy.

The result is that we are detached from our labor (since most of us now work for wages rather than to produce things for ourselves) and we are detached from the way the things we use are produced. Things come to us almost as free-floating bits with no history and no connection to a wider web of human relationships.

Cavanaugh also contends that we have been trained, counterintuitive as it may seem, to find dissatisfaction pleasurable:

Pleasure resides not in having but in wanting. Insofar as an item obtained brings a temporary halt to desire, it becomes undesirable. This is why shopping, not buying, captures the spirit of consumerism, and why shopaholism is being treated as an addiction. Consumerism is a restless spirit, constantly in search of something new. Consumerism is typified by detachment, not attachment, for desire must be kept on the move. Consumerism is also typified by scarcity, not abundance, for as long as desire is endless, there will never be enough stuff to go around.

The proper response to this is for Christians to recover the sense of creation’s interconnectedness. We can do this by “creat[ing] economic spaces that underscore our spiritual and physical connection to creation and to each other.”

We must strive to demystify commodities by being informed about where they come from, who makes them, and under what conditions. We should support products, such as fair-trade coffee, that pull back the veil from the production process and offer a sustainable life to their producers. We should attempt to create local, face-to-face economies, where consumers and producers know each other well enough that their interests tend to merge. My parish’s connection to a local cooperative of family farms (www.wholefarmcoop.com) is a hopeful example.

Finally, we should attempt to close the gap between work and consumption by supporting worker ownership of the means of production. The first step toward doing so is turning our homes back into sites of production. To bake bread, to make our own entertainment, and do so in community with others: These are small but important steps in turning from consumers to celebrants of God’s abundant life.

I think Cavanaugh is right that part of the problem is the commodification of everything. We could see this as a result of our drive for technological mastery which strives to make goods, services, and even experiences available upon demand. Surely a better attitude for Christians is to recognize the goods of this world as gifts that come from God which reflect the goodness of the Creator.

Still (and you know I’d have to say something critical), Cavanaugh seems to me a bit unwilling to acknowledge that the social phenomena he bemoans bring benefits as well as costs. Two things in particular stand out for me.

First, it has to be recognized that the division of labor and specialization have made available many goods that probably would otherwise have been available only to the very rich, if at all. And not all of these are trivial things – cheap food, clothing, eyeglasses, vaccines, etc, all owe their existence, at least in part, to the process of industrialization that Cavanaugh sees as the cause of so much ill.

Secondly, does it seem that Cavanaugh has a somewhat romanticized view of work? Surely it was wrong that English peasants were forced off their land by coercive enclosures, but that doesn’t mean the life of a subsistence farmer is any great shakes. I think the notion of work as “co-creation” – as a creative participation in the shaping and care of the world – downplays the extent to which, in a fallen world, work will necessarily be irksome (see, for instance, Stanley Hauerwas’ essay “Work as Co-Creation: A Critique of a Remarkably Bad Idea” in his book In Good Company).

In general I’m wary of identifying any particular set of economic arrangements with Christian truth. Every system has its good and bad points (which should not blind us to places where reform is needed!), and every system has to reckon with the intractable nature of human sin. This includes Wendell Berry-style agrarianism as much as corporate capitalism or state socialism.

None of which is to deny the validity of Cavanaugh’s critique, or much less to offer an apology for unfettered capitalism. But in discussing these matters I think we should be frank about the costs as well as the benefits of any project of social reform.

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by folks who see the USA as the ne plus ultra of evil in the world, and yet get all dewey-eyed about the prospects of the UN bringing peace and harmony to our benighted globe. To wit.

Question: has the UN ever prevented a war from happening that its member states sought to bring about? Do the Code Pink ladies recall that it was under the cover of the sacred UN that we went to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 resulting in: large numbers of Iraqi casualties, the destruction of much of Iraq’s infrastructure such as water treatment facilities, the post-war imposition of draconian sanctions (under UN auspices, lest it be forgotten!) which resulted in an estimated 500,000-1 million civilian casualties? And that all of this made a follow-up war with Iraq all but inevitable?

We here at VI repeat our call of a month ago: No to Boltonism! No to Globaloney!

(Code Pink link via Clark Stooksbury)

In the spirit of Russell Arben Fox‘s post from the other day, here are a couple of items of interest.

• “A Nation Divided: or, Ass Cleavage” from the hip new lefty mag n+1 argues that modesty in dress is something the left can get behind (no pun intended).
• This post from the New Donkey blog explores some of the tensions between “(social) libertarian liberals” and “communitarian liberals” over the issue of marketing corporate culture to kids.

The split, in a nutshell, is between those (the communitarians) who think the state, or the political community more broadly, has a stake in inculcating certain virtues in its citizens, or in restricting choices in the name of some kind of “common good” and those (the liberals) who think political intervention is justified primarily to prevent harm (where “harm” is supposed to be defined in some value-neutral way).

Liberals want the political community to remain, as much as possible, neutral between competing notions of the good life; they think the purpose of politics is to secure a framework within which people can pursue their own goals and projects, unconstrained by some socially imposed vision of the good. Communitarians think that such a “thin” notion of the aims of politics results in a society of extreme individualism and anomie.

Sojourners has just posted a handful of articles on the topics of consumerism and “the simple life.” One is by big time Radical Orthodoxy guy William Cavanaugh, which looks particularly interesting.

A confession: it’s really easy for me to condemn consumerism in the abstract, but rejecting it in practice not so much. One way I justify my own purchases is their high-brow character. My weaknesses are for good books, good coffee, good scotch, etc. Not lowbrow stuff like Britney Spears CDs or Friends DVDs. There’s a reason, I think, that the phrase that appears in so much social criticism is “crass consumerism;” often there appears to be a certain class angle at work.

On the other hand, though, how do we distinguish good from bad consumption? Obviously there are economic justice and environmental concerns, but beyond that, the things of this world, including the artifacts of human ingenuity, should be enjoyed shouldn’t they?

One persistent criticism of John Paul II has been that the Vatican’s opposition to artificial means of birth control, specifically condoms, has exacerbated the African AIDS epidemic. For instance, in today’s Inquirer we get this op-ed, which reads, in part:

John Paul II mesmerized those who saw him. He spoke forcefully for the dignity of all human beings. But this champion of compassion also spoke forcefully against the use of condoms, even as AIDS killed tens of millions. Stop for a moment and picture the lives of 12 million children orphaned by AIDS. Twelve million, and the Pope would not relent. Because condoms might encourage sex, and the church cannot countenance sex, except to make more babies, no matter how many babies already live without parents, or without enough food, clothing or shelter.

Brendan O’Neill, however, applies a bit of healthy skepticism to these kinds of arguments.

Sez O’Neill:

The most striking thing about these articles claiming the Vatican makes Africans die from AIDS is the dearth of factual material. Despite getting the cover of the New Statesman, Michela Wrong’s piece elevating the Pope over prostitution in the AIDS-spreading stakes doesn’t even ask, never mind answer, questions you might expect of such a journalistic endeavour. Is the incidence of AIDS higher in Catholic countries in Africa than in non-Catholic countries? Are a majority of AIDS victims in Africa observant Catholics? How are the Pope’s eccentric edicts on condoms relayed on the ground in Africa, and what do Africans think of them?

None of that is interrogated. It is simply asserted that the Pope says something about condoms and – boom! – another few thousand get AIDS. For example, many of these pieces point to the ridiculous statement made by Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, Vatican spokesman on family affairs, who once said that condoms have tiny holes that can ‘leak’ the AIDS virus. Yet Trujillo made that comment at the end of 2003, after the AIDS virus had already gripped parts of Africa, and he was roundly denounced by the World Health Organisation, which issued an international statement saying that, in truth, ‘intact condoms…are essentially impermeable.’

Moreover, as O’Neill points out, there is not necessarily a strong correlation between the rate of AIDS and the number of Catholics in a given country:

A cursory glance at the incidence of AIDS in various African countries suggests that things are more complex than some of these Vatican-attackers allow. According to the AIDS charity Avert, southern African countries have the highest national adult HIV prevalence rate. The two worst-hit countries (not only in Africa, but the world) are Swaziland, where the rate is 38.8 per cent, and Botswana, where it is 37.3 per cent. Yet these countries have low numbers of practising Catholics: in Swaziland, between 10 and 20 per cent of the population is Catholic, while 40 per cent are Zionist (a blend of Christianity and indigenous ancestral worship) and 10 per cent are Muslim; in Botswana fewer than 5 per cent are Catholic, with 85 per cent of the population subscribing to ancient indigenous beliefs.

In South Africa, Avert says the HIV infection rate is around 20 per cent. South Africa is one of Africa’s more secularised nations; around 68 per cent of the population describe themselves as Christian, but only around 7 per cent of the population are Catholic. Do the Pope’s and Cardinal Trujillo’s silly statements on condoms have a hold over countries such as Swaziland, Botswana and South Africa?

He then makes this interesting suggestion:

One idea that these anti-Pope radicals refuse to entertain is that perhaps some Africans choose not to use condoms. As Avert claims, ‘condoms are not without their drawbacks, especially in the context of a stable partnership where pregnancy is desired.’ In underdeveloped countries it is often important to have large families, so that there are more individuals who can work and take care of their parents as they get older and can no longer work. People in these countries may simply desire to have more children, even if that involves the risk of having a child with HIV.

It perhaps isn’t surprising that this possibility is not spoken about, considering that some of those attacking the Vatican’s stance on condoms seem to see the problem in Africa as one of ‘too many people’ and the solution as condoms for all. Michela Wrong attacks the Vatican’s ‘sheer irresponsibility [in] rejecting population control, on a continent stalked by famine and stunted by malnutrition, where each year brings another 10million mouths to feed.’ Perhaps the lack of condom-use is not a consequence of Africans being in thrall to Vatican edicts, but because they are equally not in thrall to the population control lobby, those NGOs, charities and commentators who would have us believe that Africa’s problem is primarily one of there being too many black babies around. If it is absurd for the Vatican to depict the condom as evil, it is equally absurd for others to describe it as Africa’s saviour.

(O’Neill link via The American Scene)

(N.B. and FWIW: The official VI policy on condoms is that they are a perfectly acceptable form of birth control and a good way to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Though, of course, monogomy is aces.)