Magdalene's Egg

"Those Monk People"

2012-02-01T08:52:00.002-05:00

Hey, did you know there's a lively evangelical catholic movement in the United Church of Christ? Yep. We've heard rumors of such a thing for years, but don't recall stumbling across it today.

The Order of Corpus Christi describes itself as a "religious order" which draws its members from the UCC laity and clergy, as well as those of the UCC's partner churches in COCU and other full communion agreements. The website provides background, a few pictures and the very simple foundational documents; you can read the whole thing in ten minutes, and we encourage you to do so.

It all seems unlikely. After all, the UCC is the left edge of mainline Protestantism, both politically and theologically. It was once chided by no less than Barbara Lundblad for threatening to become "the United Church of Causes." (And when Barbara chides, smart people pay attention.) UCC congregations are not infrequently dually aligned with the American Baptist Convention. Unlike most Reformed churches, it treats its historic confessions as "testimonies, not tests of faith" much as the (D&FMS of the) PECUSA now treats the Thirty-Nine Articles. One obstacle to full communion with the ELCA was our fear that the UCC lacked either the theological or organizational coherence to make a binding agreement.

And yet, let it never be forgotten that the UCC is the successor to the old German Reformed Church, in which two brilliant young theologians -- John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff -- pioneered a return to the sources of Reformed Christianity which practically demanded traditional liturgy, an emphasis on the reality and power of the sacraments, and so forth. Their "Mercersburg Theology" was an enormous influence on Charles Porterfield Krauth, and through him upon the General Council and ultimately the ELCA. Lutheranism in America owes as much to these guys as it does to Wilhelm Loehe. Maybe more.

Of course, among the Reformed, they were treated as heretics. Literally. Which is why we have generally argued that the long-term impact of Mercersburg is felt in Lutheranism, not the Reformed churches. It is a delight to be proven wrong. And certainly, the existence of the OCC is less surprising than that of the Methodist Order of St. Luke.

So, apart from an attempt to remember Nevin and Schaff, what is the OCC? The blogger A Simple Country Pastor describes the presence of some fellow-members at his installation last year:

One of the members of our church asked, “who were
those people all dressed alike?” The Order ‘dresses’ in similar albs and instead of a stole, wears the ‘scapular’ of the order. A friend’s wife asked, “who are those ‘monk’ people?”

... What is not immediately apparent is that participation in the Order is participation in a community of prayer. The community aspect became abundantly clear yesterday when those ‘monk’ people nearly outnumbered the local clergy who attended. They came from as far away as West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia.

That's sort of sweet.

The OCC will instantly remind Lutherans of another triliteral club, the Society of the Holy Trinity. We have many friends in the STS, and have attended a couple of its functions. But we have also said some sharp things about it on this blog in the past, which we will defend if challenged. It is one of those things we love in theory, but can't get comfortable with in practice. The OCC and the STS do indeed seem parallel, making suitable allowance for the conditions of their respective mother churches. But since those conditions are markedly different, we wonder just what the "feel" of an OCC meeting is. We wonder, for example, whether the Anglo-Catholic Socialism website linked on the sidebar would get more hits from the OCC than the STS.

Anyway, it seems to us that this poses a challenge for at least one of our ecumenical partners. Look, we've got the STS; Congregationalists have the OCC; Methodists have the OSL; Episcopalians have freaking Nashotah House just for starters, and Presbyterians are a lost cause. But, okay, Moravian Church, it's time to pony up. Show us your scapulars!

Davos Update: Nobody Knows

2012-02-01T03:13:00.006-05:00

Foreign Policy's Clyde Prestowitz should take his shirt off. He is clearly of one mind with those lovely Ukrainian protesters at Davos. He begins,

As it always does this time of year, my inbox is filling up with messages of a certain kind. They all begin with: "I'm here in Davos" and then, in an intellectual form of name dropping, proceed to mention key words and phrases such as Geopolitical Risk, G-Zero World, and Rise of Regions. This, of course, sounds really heavyweight and important. But I am not fooled. Nobody knows what those words mean.

Upon reflection, he's not really of one mind with the ladies from Femen. They are protesting because they believe that the global elites gathered at the World Economic Forum do in fact control the world, and have brought it to the present crisis. Prestowitz, on the other hand, protests that they do not; for him, the whole thing is a self-deluding sham. He points out how these supposedly agenda-setting financial wizards failed to perceive the 1997 Asian crisis, the 2008 American crisis, or the 2010 European crisis.

His funniest bit of derision is this:

You have to hand it to Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the Forum. He's the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum. Short, bald, and unimposing, he is what you envision when someone says "gnome of Zurich." Yet, despite his anti-charisma, Schwab has managed to persuade a large number of the world's top CEOs, politicians, academics, media stars, and bureaucrats that they have to be in a cramped, second rate hotel in a cold Swiss village with mediocre skiing and food every year during the bridge weekend between January and February. Indeed, he has not only convinced these people that they have to be there, he has them begging him for invitations and prime spots on the program.

More to the point, Prestowitz argues that the WEF is founded upon a delusion, and that in fact Davos-style globalization "doesn't work under today's circumstances," pretends to be a win-win propostion but isn't, and may not even be "sustainable." he concludes with this blanket condemnation:

Anyone interested in knowing what's really happening or in changing the way things are doesn't go to Davos.

Fine, Clyde. But why is your shirt still on?

Gingrich Campaign Lied About Florida Pastors

2012-02-01T02:46:00.002-05:00

Per RD's Sarah Posner, the Gingrich campaign gave the press a list of names, all of whom were supposed to be members of its Florida Faith Leaders Coalition -- basically, members of the clergy who would support the Florida primary campaign.

But when Posner contacted three of the pastors on the list, they expressed confusion, and denied that they had agreed to help the campaign, or even been asked.

Oops. Guess those guys won't get to visit Moonbase Alpha.

Rugăciunea de dimineaţa a lui Luther

2012-01-31T11:15:00.002-05:00

If you've always wondered how to say Luther's Morning Prayer in Romanian (or Hungarian), you can find it posted at the parish soapbox. Had to post it as a JPEG file, because WordPress wouldn't display the Romanian diacritics. For shame!

To the Best of Them

2012-01-30T16:37:00.003-05:00

In our first parish, there were some financial shenanigans being played by the people who held the money. It ranged from a family that routinely reimbursed itself for gifts directly from the donation plate to an endowment treasurer who decided that he wasn't going to make reports anymore. Most of the congregation's leaders grumbled, but refused to take any action.

The upshot was that Father A. made it his policy to personally open every single piece of mail that came onto the property, no matter to whom it may have been addressed, and to record in a priate account book every account statement and remittance that he could find. This never provided a complete picture, mind you. The general-account treasurer was also chair of a committee that handled significant amounts of cash, for which she refused on principle to give any account.

Oh, yeah. Good times.

But by the time he left, Fr. A. was the only one -- the only one -- who could say with any certainty how much money the church had in its various accounts. He took a grim pride in this, but also bitterly regretted the time spent playing a combination of accountant and detective. None of it was much good for his spiritual life, or that of the congregation.

So he resolved that, in the future, he would let lay people do the work for which they are elected and appointed -- which most certainly includes taking care of the money -- and concentrate his own energy on preaching, praying, and teaching the faith. For a couple of years, it worked okay, too.

But after leaving one parish -- we will leave the details vague here -- Fr. A. learned of a pattern of fraud and deception, perpetrated by people who had been trusted with significant responsibility, which had cost quite a bit of money in a very short time.

On one hand, the system ultimately worked. It was an astute council president who had uncovered the deception; laypeople came though. On the other hand, Fr. A. has been tortured by the experience. Had he returned to the role of accountant/detective, he could probably have stopped it all much earlier and less expensively. Upon his eventual return to conventional parish ministry, he will --- not without some regret -- take more responsibility for small-scale financial oversight.

We confess all this as a way of extending our sympathy to Archbishop (and Cardinal-designate) Timothy Dolan, who is probably feeling some mixture of rage and shame tonight. He too has been cheated by somebody he trusted, to the tune of a cool million. Here's the Times lede:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday arrested a Bronx woman who is accused of stealing more than $1 million from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York when she worked in the archdiocese’s finance office, law enforcement officials and church leaders said.

Ooof. That's gotta hurt.

For what it's worth, we recall that the ELCA's New England Synod was victimized the same way a few years back, and for a similar sum. Which doesn't make it any less painful.

Lady Godiva in Davos

2012-01-30T10:51:00.010-05:00

We're torn. These interwebs are buzzing with pictures of three Ukrainian protesters at the World Economic Forum in Davos. That's a politics story. The reason the pictures are everywhere is that the protesters were topless women -- extremely pretty topless women. So that's a sex story. And for the trifecta, the same organization to which these young ladies belong has previously protested at the Vatican, making it a religion story. In other words, perfect grist for the Egg's mill.

The problem, of course, is that this is a family blog. (At least if your family is a little odd.) Didn't used to be that way. Six years and 1300 posts ago, we would have posted pictures, and probably subtitled them with mildly off-color observations about, um, Ukrainian politics. Sadly, we have been tamed by the loss of our relative anonymity, not to mention the knowledge that our mother, wife and godfather all read the thing.

So instead, we'll -- sigh! -- try to provide a little background.

The group is called Femen (Ukrainian portal here; Wikipedia page here; hi-res glamor shots from Davos here; nothing safe for work). Founded in 2008, it consists mostly of university students, and uses topless protesting as its publicity tool. Its main goal appears to be organizing women, full stop; founder Hanna Hutsol says "I set up FEMEN because I realised that there was a lack of women activists in our society; Ukraine is male-oriented and women take a passive role." It is considering entering partisan politics and seeking a place in the legislature.

Surely there is more to it than Wikipedia lets on. Hutsol was apparently moved by stories of Ukrainian women "duped by false promises from abroad" -- this sounds like coded language for human trafficking. Femen has protested at the Turkish embassy in the Ukraine, and in front of Iranian diplomats as a protest against the execution of a women in Iran. So the organization does seem to have some broadly feminist goals. But to get their message across, they really ought to consider a manifesto.

At Davos, the Femen activists have written slogans on their body -- conveniently enough, in English:

Gangsters Party in Davos
Poor Because of You
Crisis Made in Davos

Our opinion? As a means of gaining attention -- personal or political -- few tactics surpass naked breasts. In that sense, the Femen activisits are just using the tools at their disposal. After all, protest movements are engaged, almost by definition, in a kind of asymmetric warfare. So Femen uses breasts the way Greenpeace used to use its Zodiac rafts. On the other hand, we'll find their feminism a bit more convincing when we see protesters with a more diverse range of body types.

Now then -- on to Davos. The World Economic Forum calls itself "The World's Foremost Stakeholder Community," which gives you a sense both of the its self-importance and of its corporatespeak-heavy culture. It was founded in 1971 by a German businessman and, despite other activities and gatherings, is symbolized by its annual gathering of 2500 or so business and government leaders in the Swiss mountains. Here's a sample of this year's prospectus:

The contextual change at the top of minds remains the rebalancing and deleveraging that is reshaping the global economy. In the near term, this transformation is seen in the context of how developed countries will deleverage without falling back into recession and how emerging countries will curb inflation and avoid future economic bubbles. In the long term, both will play out as the population of our interdependent world not only passes 7 billion but is also interconnected through information technology on a historic scale. The net result will be transformational changes in social values, resource needs and technological advances as never before. In either context, the necessary conceptual models do not exist from which to develop a systemic understanding of the great transformations taking place now and in the future.

We can certainly see why English teachers would protest outside this assembly. But it turns out that other people do as well, and pretty routinely.

The WEF gathering has drawn many protests over the years, most notably the sometimes violent anti-globalization demonstrations of the 1990s. Briefly, protesters see the WEF as a club of elites ("Davos Man," who lives not in a nation but in a the cloudcuckooland of wealth and power), out of touch with the needs of the masses and gathering only to consolidate and perpetuate its own collective power.

Now, it is not intrinsically feminist to oppose the regime of bankers and politicians who drive the world into economic crisis and walked away just as rich and powerful as ever. But since women are often hurt most by ... well, everything ... it makes sense that groups with an interest in justice for women would stand outside the gates at Davos. And if they want to take their shirts off in the Alpine cold, well, more power to them.

Latin News. In Latin.

2012-01-30T05:23:00.004-05:00

Zuhlsdorf posted this today. Even if your Latin is as shaky as ours, it's worth a look. Not to mention the German subtitles!

For those who prefer their Latin news on the page, we remind you of those sturdy souls at Ephemeris.

Havel's New God

2012-01-30T04:04:00.004-05:00

Fifteen years ago, in a Prague castle, a former theatre critic for the Village Voice sat across the table from a former playwright, well-regarded in downtown circles. They spoke of Joe Biden, NATO, real estate and God.

Paul Berman had gone on to write for the Times, and Vaclav Havel, of course, to lead the Velvet Revolution and become the first president of the post-communist Czech Republic. In a New Republic essay, Berman reflects on their interview. It's a magnificent read for many reasons: the portrait of Havel; the snapshot of Biden undiplomatic bluster; Berman's voice, as he describes his beer-soaked realization that Biden may have done some genuine good. But the essay's principal value is that it lays out and tries to make sense of Havel's ides about the role of God -- or a god, some god, a transcendent reality -- in the modern world.

Havel borrowed from Heidegger, whose disciples, as Berman notes, tend to veer off toward the extreme right to the extreme left. Yet at first, Havel sounds almost Tea-Party-friendly:

He granted that, in modern times, it has become unfashionable to speak about democracy in connection to anything above us or beyond our understanding. ... He stood in a grand tradition, though. He invoked the American Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers spoke about a Creator. Why, after all, does man have a right to freedom and a right to dignity? Who has bestowed these rights? They do not come from treaties. They are not human inventions. They are gifts of the Creator. The rights also imply a duty to the Creator. Havel cited the Declaration of Independence—all of which seemed to me rather stirring, given that, unlike a lot of people who natter on about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, Havel meant what he was saying, and the Czech Republic was there to prove it. He was Thomas Jefferson. Without slaves!

But of course there is more to it:

His proposed new god, for instance, did not have an Enlightenment look. Havel paused to reflect on the god. A new god, he told me, would most likely be abstract and multicultural —- a god who brought together Allah, Buddha, Christ, and so on.

Berman rightly catches the Romantic heritage behind this idea. He also sees why this sort of speculation, useful enough for an artist, might not have been helpful to a statesman:

... Of course I could see why he was in no rush to be quoted. One of his closest advisers had confessed to me that even his inner team rolled their eyes over Havel’s screwy ideas. A multicultural god -— “multicultural” was his word -— might upset the various mono-cultural churches. There was no reason to start up pointless controversies over theological musings of a kind that might, in fact, have been enhanced by beer.

Havel was not entirely clear about any of these ideas, so interpretation is needed; Berman does a fine job, one we expect that PhD candidates will spend debating. The whole article is well worth a read.

It is especially interesting because, although Berman does not go into this, the Czech Republic is often pointed to by apologists for atheism. It is, to judge from poll numbers, the least theistic nation in the world; roughly 30% of its residents say that they believe in no god, spirit or transcendent "life force." And yet its citizens are decent, law-abiding folk, possessed of ethical standards comparable or superior to those of their neighbors (except perhaps in the realm of human trafficking, in which the Czech Republic plays a role disproportionate to its size).

In this connection, we may consider Berman's observation that:

Havel was frightened by atheism. In his eyes, communism was atheism’s apotheosis. Communism led everyone to focus on material circumstances and to dream of improving the circumstances, and to dream of nothing else. For why should anyone dream of anything more than material improvements? More does not exist. Such was atheism’s message. To pine for a new automobile made sense, but there was no point in contemplating the state of your soul.

In the same way, Havel wrote about the danger of Western materialism. Berman quotes a 1994 lecture in which Havel explained that people in many parts of the world admired Western values -- democracy, human rights, open markets -- but at the same time feared

... what many cultural societies see as the inevitable product or by-product of these values: moral relativism, materialism, the denial of any kind of spirituality, a proud disdain for everything suprapersonal, a profound crisis of authority and the resulting general decay of order, a frenzied consumerism, a lack of solidarity, a selfish cult of material success, the absence of faith in a higher order of things or simply in eternity, an expansionist mentality that holds in contempt everything that in any way resists the dreary standardization and rationalism of technical civilization.

Havel sounds not entirely unlike another Eastern European dissident, John Paul II, who in his visit to Cuba warned against the materialisms of both the East and West.

Was Havel's tentative religiosity merely a reaction against Communism and a fear of what might replace it? Or did it spring from a genuine appreciation of the role that faith can play in the life of a nation and, especially, the life of an individual? It's hard to be sure, although Berman suggests in his conclusion that the latter is true:

If you think there is something more, a Being or transcendental something-or-other that goes beyond your own material existence, your own life is bound to end up seeming, by way of comparison, humbler, therefore easier to put at risk. Havel seems to have understood pretty clearly that his own life was not the greatest of all possible values. ... He was one of the greatest and most heroic figures of modern times, or maybe of all time, but he was a great and heroic figure because his own thinking gave him the courage to risk not being anything at all.

Update: Glass Houses

2012-01-29T06:53:00.002-05:00

Per the Times, an Arizona judge has ruled against Alejandrina Cabrera, forcing her removal from the ballot.

Judge John Nelson of the Yuma County Superior Court rendered the decision based on an examination "by a Brigham Young University linguist" -- does that sound suspicious to anybody else? -- name William Eggington, who found that Ms Cabrera's command was not up to the task of conducting city business.

Eggington may be right, for all we know. We are certainly not thrilled by the idea of city officials who can't wade through the vast amounts of dreary technical reading -- laws, regulations, tax codes, construction documents -- that are part of the job.

But the case makes us uneasy. Where does proficiency begin, we ask; and is this license of a cascade of partisan purges? Surely, somebody will ask about San Luis' mayor next, since he was frank about his own limitations even while criticizing Cabrera's. Where will it end?

Judge Nelson "acknowledged that there's no precedent for him to follow," according to one of Cabrera's attorneys. This does not surprise us; we hope the case does not serve as precedent for many others.

Sin a Little

2012-01-27T16:26:00.010-05:00

Pastor Joelle recently drew our attention to this passage from Martin Luther's 1530 letter to Jerome Weller. It has been making the internet rounds since it was broadcast on The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor (the Lutheran world's favorite Episcopalian). We offer it here both to get a properly sourced text online, and because it's cool.

Weller was a young pastor who seems to have suffered from what we might call depression, but which in the old days was surely thought of differently. Luther counselled him:

Whenever this temptation comes to you beware not to dispute with the devil nor allow yourself to dwell on these lethal thoughts, for so doing is nothing less than giving place to the devil and so falling. Try as hard as you can to despise these thoughts sent by Satan. In this sort of temptation and battle contempt is the easiest road to victory ; laugh your enemy to scorn and ask to whom you are talking. By all means flee solitude, for he lies in wait most for those alone. This devil is conquered by despising and mocking him, not by resisting and arguing.

Therefore, Jerome, joke and play games with my wife and others, in which way you will drive out your diabolic thoughts and take courage....

Be strong and cheerful and cast out those monstrous thoughts. Whenever the devil harasses you thus, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing.

Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, aye, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles.

We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you : "Do not drink," answer him : " I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.' One must always do what Satan forbids. What other cause do you think that I have for drinking so much strong drink, talking so freely and making merry so often, except that I wish to mock and harass the devil who is wont to mock and harass me.

Would that I could contrive some great sin to spite the devil, that he might understand that I would not even then acknowledge it and that I was conscious of no sin whatever. We, whom the devil thus seeks to annoy, should remove the whole decalogue from our hearts and minds.

- Letter to Jerome Weller, summer 1530; from Preserved Smith, "The Life and Letters of Martin Luther," (NY & Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1911), p.324. [Paragraph breaks are my own insertion].

See? Cool.

Needless to say, the memorable part of this letter is "sin a little to spite the devil." But latter-day Lutherans, taught as we sometimes have been to separate Law from Gospel with a paring knife, may find that Uncle Marty does it with a rhetorical chainsaw. "Remove the whole decalogue?" From the guy who wrote the Catechisms? One thinks not.

What's more interesting, to us at the Egg, is the expression of a dynamic fundamental to Lutheran thinking, and often confusing to our dialogue partners. The idea is that we are free in most things -- to eat food sacrificed to idols, or not to eat; to fast in Fridays, or not to fast, and so forth. But the moment somebody forbids us, or requires us, the freedom disappears. This is the tricky way that adiaphora can inadvertently provoke a status confessionis.

Mind you, the peculiar quirk is often more of a sectarian reflex than a sound theological judgment. Strictly speaking, it only applies when the prohibition or requirement is made a matter of salvation. So, for example, when some Lutherans got all uppity about the historic episcopate as a condition for full communion with the (D&FMS of the) PECUSA, they were missing the point; mutual recognition of each other as true churches possessing true sacraments and true preaching had been achieved many years earlier. Except among a few -- largely ignorant and bigoted -- Anglo-Catholic extremists, there was no question concerning salvation, only good order. So no status confessionis was called for.

On the other hand, were we to negotiate with Lutherans, we would be very careful to make requests (which can be acceded to out of love) rather than to assert requirements (which must sometimes be rejected out of evangelical freedom). It just moves things along faster.

Annals of Hypocrisy: Spanglish Edition

2012-01-27T09:26:00.003-05:00

Arizona, surely the state sinking most rapidly into crpyto-fascism, has been in the news this week for more than Gov. Brewer's tarmac finger-wag. Namely, the Attack of the Pedants.

Per the Times, Arizona (like other states -- news to us) has a law requiring office-holders to be "proficient" in English, without quite spelling out what constitutes proficiency. One woman, running for a seat on the governing board of a small city called San Luis, has found her place on the ballot challenged by political opponents.

Indeed, it sounds as though Alejandrina Cabrera does speak English poorly -- "hesitant and heavily accented," the story describes it. We can certainly imagine circumstances under which this might be an impediment to effective governing; on the other hand, especially in a border town, so can a poor command of Spanish.

What astonishes us is that the challenge to Cabrera comes from one of her high school classmates, San Luis mayor Juan Carlos Escamilla. And hear is how Mayor Escamilla describes Cabrera's candidacy:

I do feel this opening a box of Pandora ...

Wait a second. "A box of Pandora?" Yup. That's right: Escamilla doesn't speak English all that well himself, and has said so on TV:

I feel I don’t dominate 100 percent, but I can still get by,” said Mr. Escamilla .... “I can write, read and understand it very well.”

Um, dude: glass houses?

Look, we ourselves live in a country whose predominant language we speak less than fluently. "Hesitant and heavily accented" is a goal we hope someday to achieve; we're still closer to "like a mentally deficient toddler." And we have a fellow expat here whose language skills are far superior to our own, as he lets us know whenever the opportunity arises, in a way which has probably limited the number of invitations he finds in his inbox. He's a smart guy, and seems like a very decent one, but ... we prefer to take our grammar advice from natives.

In the same way, we are inclined to think that (a) Mayor Escamilla is a jerk of the first class, and that (b) his grammatically-challenged remarks about Ms. Cabrera reveal the truth about the political right's passion for English. It's not a matter of not racism or nativism, so much as straightforward gerrymandering. They don't really care about how well a candidate speaks the language, so long as the candidate is from their own party. The "English Only" movement is just another way to weed out people who might vote Democrat.

Should have been obvious that these guys never cared about English proficiency. After all, they elected Bush.

We're Voting for Newt!

2012-01-27T08:04:00.006-05:00

Even typing those words sent a little shiver of guilt-cum-nausea through our body. (Or maybe that was the fish we ate last night. Mmmm -- perch with hazelnuts. But we digress.)

Anyway, Gingrich has promised that, if elected, he would create a permanent inhabited base on the moon. At first glance, and in the present economic climate, that seems shockingly unlikely. On second glance, it looks like a prime target for cries of "Big government run amok," especially within Newt's own party. And on third glance, it looks like just another campaign promise, easily made and easily broken. (Like Gingrich's wedding vows, areweright?)

(And, incidentally, the WaPo description of this discussion sounds like a cleaned-up version of the "presidents on the Titanic" joke: Gingrich claims 1930s science fiction is a Big Idea; Romney says that if an employee brought him this plan, he'd fire him; Paul says the people he'd send to the moon are politicians. Seriously, these guys should do vaudeville.)

Sure, it sounds a little ridiculous. But ... but ... darn it, we want a moonbase.

When we were little tykes, they told us that by The Year 2000, we would have personal jetpacks, commuter flights to Moonbase Alpha, and a pony. (Yeah -- a cloned robot pony.) Needless to say, we waited patiently but expectantly, and needless to say the past eleven years have been a grave disappointment.

Still, we soldier on into the future, only a trembling upper lip revealing the wounded little boy inside us. The Internet and big-budget superhero movies are nice, but they're no jetpacks. And nothing, nothing, can replace a colony on the moon.

So Gingrich says we should have one. That makes him, by a cruel twist of fate, our preferred candidate for the Presidency of these United States. Nor are we alone; the bastion of corporate geekery, i09, has a list of 181 reasons Newt is right ... about the moon. Needless to say, the man is wrong about every other subject on which he has ever offered an opinion, including the time of day and which direction is up.

Mind you, if Newtie No Beauty manages to win the nomination, and then the general election, and yet there is no moonbase within some reasonable period of time -- six weeks should be adequate; we've had 32 years to get ready -- there will be grave repercussions. Like we'll call him even worse names than we already do. How do you like that, Newt in a Suit? Er ... we'll come up with better ones by then -- promise.

Cage-Fighting and Christianity

2012-01-26T04:07:00.002-05:00

"Jesus Didn't Tap" -- meaning surrender -- is apparently a tattoo worn by some Christians who participate in the sport called mixed martial arts, a.k.a cage-fighting. One hastens to add that the Lord didn't cage-fight, either. Or wear tattoos.

Christianity Today has an interesting little set of ethical reflections on the martial arts. To summarize:

Marine Corps veteran and Christian Coalition editor Joe Carter argues that while the truly martial arts -- those that prepare a warrior to fight in a just war -- are entirely ethical, turning them into games and entertainment is not.
Ted Kluck -- who has been at various times missionary, author boxer and football coach -- says it's all good, and argues that violent sports teach Christian values. We are not remotely convinced.
Duke divinity student -- and former cage-fighter -- Matt Morin suggests rephrasing the question. He considers "should a Christian do it" to be divisive, and prefers to ask "why would a Christian do it." Hairsplitting, if you ask us. Either way, his answer is blunt: Cage-fighting is the new pornography.

We at the Egg have a passing acquaintance with two "martial arts." In youth, Fr. A. did a little boxing and a lot of fencing, both sports with obvious antecedents in warfare. He enjoyed both, although it was apparent that boxing was dangerous to the intellectual capacities. (The best fighter in our little college club explained that he had to suspend boxing as he wrote his senior thesis, because after a morning of blows to the head, he couldn't think straight for the rest of the day.)

We continued to enjoy watching the fights on TV for many years, at least until the reign of Tyson stripped away any pretense of art, and revealed the professional sport, especially among heavyweights, for the unmitigated thuggery it is. Today, we think of boxing the way a recovering alcoholic probably does about his last beer: with a strange mixture of shame, fear and longing.

To be brief, we think Carter is right, Morin is bombastic but also right, and Kluck is missing the logic of his own arguments. That's a shame, because he says something well worth hearing:

I think if we evangelicals are going to get indignant and legalistic about cage fighting, we have to do the same thing about professional and college football ....

If we're going to start playing the moral superiority card, we will have to unpack the various ethical dilemmas that distinguish other sports at a high level. These include academic fraud and the performance-enhancing drugs that make the NFL players you watch religiously (pardon the pun) look like comic book heroes.

That's right, Ted. Except that instead of following this through to its conclusion, you assume that nobody is willing to look at the ethics of, say, the NFL or even the NCAA. We should look at all of those thing, hard -- harder than you seem willing to actually look.

This is not about "legalism" or "moral superiority," any more than the abolition and civil rights movements were or religious doubts about capital punishment and abortion are. It's about ethical reflection as a community, upon the meaning of humanity and the right use of our bodies.

Die or Be Slain?

2012-01-23T14:54:00.004-05:00

If you're preaching Sunday, you may want to consider the passage from Deuteronomy. Or you may not; it doesn't jump out and scream "preach me." One verse, in particular, has attracted our attention today.

Here's the original:

אַ֣ךְ הַנָּבִ֡יא אֲשֶׁ֣ר יָזִיד֩ לְדַבֵּ֨ר דָּבָ֜ר בִּשְׁמִ֗י אֵ֣ת אֲשֶׁ֤ר לֹֽא־צִוִּיתִיו֙ לְדַבֵּ֔ר וַאֲשֶׁ֣ר יְדַבֵּ֔ר בְּשֵׁ֖ם אֱלֹהִ֣ים אֲחֵרִ֑ים וּמֵ֖ת הַנָּבִ֥יא הַהֽוּא

The verse is usually translated along these lines:

KJV: But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.
NASB: But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’

But the final clause is sometimes rendered this way:

CEV: ... and you must also kill any prophet who claims to have a message from another god.
NIV: ... a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death.”

Ruh-roh. There is a significant difference between the these two ideas -- the prophet shall die, or the prophet shall be put to death. It is, least, significant to the prophet in question. One allows passivity -- natural causes, old age -- where the other demands agency, either God's or, in the bloodthirsty case of the CEV, the community's.

Unfortunately, our once-respectable Hebrew skills have declined, and we are an ocean away from our trusted research tools. (So far that we don't even have our own BHS, and have trouble making out the points in online texts). Our first thought was that the problem is the binyan of the verb to die -- is it maybe a huqtal, with a passive/causative effect? Then we were reminded that the future can have an imperative sense. (This guy defends the idea that it is the community's job to kill presumptuous prophets, but he doesn't seem like a great source).

But the bottom line is that we're a bit muddled here. Die or be slain? This verse is unlikely to figure largely in our eventual sermon, but ... gosh, we're curious. Can a kind hearted Hebrew scholar (or sharp seminarian) give us some insight?

That's Why They Call It "Dope"

2012-01-22T16:10:00.003-05:00

These things just make us want to cry. The East Greenwich (Rhode Island) Patch reports:

... a plow operator clearing the parking lot of the Washington County Veterinary Hospital on Tower Hill Road notified [police] that a car with a flat tire almost struck him.

When police arrived, they found a white Volvo with ... the driver's side front tire missing from its rim.

The driver was identified as [State Representative] Robert Watson [D-30]. According to Buckley, police saw a pipe of the type often used to smoke marijuana on the floor of the front driver's side. In addition, police found a clear sandwich bag containing what turned out to be marijuana near the driver's seat.

The Patch further informs us that Watson was picked up in nearby Connecticut last year for DWI and marijuana possession. He claims to indulge in the interests of pain management, but does not possess a medical marijuana user's card.

And, we may add, it is our understanding that causing car crashes is more likely to cause pain than to cure it.

What Do They Want?

2012-01-21T17:36:00.002-05:00

If there is an experience in life that will teach you the meaning of original sin, [church] finance chairman is that role.

That's what Terry Mattingly, religion reporter and chief honcho of GetReligion, says in a 2006 speech reprinted here. Based on his own tenure as the finance chair at a Baptist congregation many years ago, he continues:

What I discovered through that experience is that there is no connection whatsoever between how much a family gives to the church and how much money that family makes. Instead, I found that the key connection is faithfulness in worship. If you attend the Sunday night service at a typical Baptist church and look around at the 40 people there in comparison to the 200 or 300 in attendance on Sunday morning, you will find that about 80 percent of the church's giving is accounted for in that group.

This is great stuff, but the speech gets better. Mattingly, a Baptist PK who has converted to Orthodoxy, is speaking to other Orthodox believers on the question of "What Do the Converts Want?" He observes that the small group of passionate, faithful believers is something familiar to Orthodox parishes as well. This proves to be the center of his proposal, which is that what converts to Orthodoxy want is "a winsome, living faith," which he characterizes this way:

The converts also want good preaching .... Emotions are OK. Movement is OK. Beauty is OK. Humility before God is OK. And more than anything else, participation in worship is more than OK -- it is essential.

Which is not to say that they want the sort of sideshow offered them by much of Protestantism, particularly of the Jumbotron variety. Mattingly claims that most of the converts to Orthodoxy come from the world of "evangelicalism," as that word is customarily used in America.

He's surely correct, although the convert we know best came from Romanism via Lutheranism; the many hundreds of Orthodox believers we know these days are, of course, cradle Orthodox -- a somewhat different crowd, although not as different as you might think. Frankly, the people we know here who are tired of the Orthodoxy they have grown up with are generally looking for the same things Mattingly mentions: faith, preaching, participation. So are almost all the converts we have ever met, from anything and too anything.

The speech is great reading for anybody with an interest in how churches grow. It may be especially interesting to Lutherans, many of whom are only a couple of generations removed from the immigrant experience. Many of the things Mattingly talks about -- assimilation, in various senses; why children stray from their ancestral faith -- are questions that Lutheran pastors talked about intensively a century ago, and even more recently than that.

Mattingly's prescription also provides some useful perspective on the past half-century of liturgical thought among Western churches. He is surely describing "full, active participation" in the sense that Vatican II intended it. But he is manifestly not describing the vision of ritual that emerged from the 1960s and 70s; the converts of whom Mattingly spoke have deliberately and despite considerable difficulty chosen a church in which that vision has no place.

This is especially important to liturgically-oriented Protestants. In recent years, Rome has taken a number of steps back from the abyss -- most notably the new English translation of the missal. It has recognized that participation does not mean dumbing down or require pandering. But Lutheran and (even) Anglican liturgiology seem to be continuing in the post-1965 direction, seeking ever more "accessible" forms of worship -- and creating a profusion of language and rituals which echo tradition without embodying it. More on this some other time, perhaps.

Mattingly sums the liturgical case up nicely:

The American converts are not looking for some kind of post-Vatican II, carved-down liturgical experience. They have that all around them. They are not trying to cut the service down another 15 to 20 minutes so that more young people will hang around -- as if that would work. Speaking as a journalist, I can tell you that the lively, growing Roman parishes are not the ones that have cut the Mass down to 45 minutes.
You see, the people who want to worship, want to worship.
One of the trends in American journalism is to try to create newspapers for people who don’t read. This seems to me to be somewhat contradictory. Similarly, there are many churches that are creating worship services for people who do not want to go to worship services. The Orthodox converts are not interested in those churches.

And why, indeed, would anybody be interested in those churches?

Dirty Old Ultra-Orthodox Men

2012-01-21T06:49:00.004-05:00

Writing about the strange new rhetoric of "religious liberty," we mentioned in passing the ever-more-strident calls of Israel's ultra-Orthodox minority to be granted a "liberty" which imposes harshly upon that of their fellow citizens.

They work little to be free for "study," enjoy tax benefits and substantial welfare checks, and are excused from military service even though it is their intransigence which adds so much to Israel's precarious security situation. And, lately, their very presence in a room is sometimes seen to require that other Israelis comply with their sectarian requirements that women be seated separately, dressed modestly, and kept silent.

To call this an imposition upon the freedom of their fellow-citizens is an understatement. In fact, it runs counter to the sexually egalitarian character long typical of Israeli society. One wonders what Golda Meir would make of it.

Dov Linzer, himself an Orthodox rabbi and educator, has a tart little op-ed piece in the Times about this business. He argues that the strictures to which these sectarians appeal are misunderstandngs -- indeed, reversals -- of the Torah and especially the Talmud:

The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men. [...]

Put more plainly, the Talmud says: It’s your problem, sir; not hers.

Like equally rigid Muslim extremists, Israel's ultra-Orthodox claim, at least implicitly, that their rules protect women from the prurient gaze of men. But as Linzer writes:

In fact, though, their actions objectify and hyper-sexualize women. Think about it: By saying that all women must hide their bodies, they are saying that every woman is an object who can stir a man’s sexual thoughts. Thus, every woman who passes their field of vision is sized up on the basis of how much of her body is covered. She is not seen as a complete person, only as a potential inducement to sin.
Of course, once you judge a female human being only through a man’s sexualized imagination, you can turn even a modest 8-year-old girl into a seductress and a prostitute.
At heart, we are talking about a blame-the-victim mentality. It shifts the responsibility of managing a man’s sexual urges from himself to every woman he may or may not encounter. It is a cousin to the mentality behind the claim, “She was asking for it.”

Yup.

Newt Should Switch Parties

2012-01-20T14:26:00.004-05:00

Newt Gingrich should become a Democrat. Here's why:

Near the start of the last Republican debate, newt Gingrich was asked the sort of question that might have embarrassed a human being capable of that quaint emotion.

"Sir," said the moderator. "Does it trouble you that your ex-wife went on national television last night to claim that you are an amoral dirtbag? That, after she helped you break up your first marriage, you then cheated on her for six years straight? That you engaged in the nasty with your little adulteress in her very marriage bed? That when you were out of town, you would call your then wife to say good night, while the two-dollar tart you later married sat there listening in? Do you, sir, think that a man of your evident moral turpitude can possibly be qualified to lead our nation?"

We may have paraphrased a bit there, but it was something along those lines.

To which Newtie the Cutie, a man who has left shame so far behind that he can't even see it in his rear-view mirror, responded thusly (transcript here):

I think -- I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.

Really, Newt? You object to the destructive nature of the news media? How about the destructive nature of the Congress you led, with your unpopular and unsuccessful attempt to unseat the last president who actually provided peace and prosperity? But he went on:

Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.

Really, Newt? You can't imagine anything closer to despicable than that? How about serial adultery? How about being the first Speaker of the House in history to be penalized (by a Republican Congress) for ethics violations, to the tune of $300,00 -- and, incidentally, lying to the committee assigned to investigate you? Because if asking a guy's ex why she wouldn't vote for him is despicable, we really do think that cheating your country and lying to Congress are a little more so.

Now, Newt did deny the claims made by the second Mrs. Gingrich:

The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren't interested, because they would like to attack any Republican.

Which part of the story his ex told on ABC was false? We have no idea, and the context is fuzzy. Surely the parts "he cheated on me with Callista" were true. Maybe the parts about calling her up to tell her he loved her were false. More likely, though, Newt meant to say that the part about asking his wife for an open marriage were false. Only he, she and God know who is telling the truth on that one. (We can't imagine, by the way, how any of his "personal friends" could vouch for claims like this. Did the Gingriches really share their bedroom talk with the tennis club?)

We suppose that in Newt's world, it is considered good tactics to respond to accusations in a self-righteous huff, whether or not they are true. To turn the rhetorical tables, and accuse your accuser of being -- get this! -- shameless simply for bringing it up. And NPR quoted some twangy halfwit as saying that Newt's counter-attack actually impressed him, on the grounds that "when the country gets into a fight, we want a pit bull on our side us, not a poodle." So maybe, in Newt's world, that display was a good tactic.

In Newt's world, which these days is the religiously-supercharged realm of Republican primary voters, it certainly makes sense to talk -- as he and the other candidates were quick to -- about "forgiveness" and even "redemption." Although God lurks in the language, the real question being posed is whether the voters can forgive Newt for his career of sleaziness.

But that's the wrong question.

First, let's dismiss the righteous bluster about his personal life being personal. In fact, the presidency is one of those jobs for which a person's sex life has always been taken into consideration. From the broadsheets that first broke the (truthful) story of Jefferson's liaison with Sally Hemmings, to the (possibly truthful) slogan "Maw, Maw, Where's My Paw," right up to the (truthful) Gennifer Flowers accusations leveled at Bill Clinton during his own primary campaign, sexual misconduct has often been put on the table by a candidate's opposition. Newt knows this as well as anyone, and better than most.

Second, let's go back to that question of forgiveness. It's the wrong question, because the reason people ask questions about your past ethical lapses (sexual or legal) when you run for president is not that they want to condemn you to hell as a sinner. It is, rather, that they want some clue about your character, about who you are as a human being -- and what they can expect from you in the future. And yes, the evidence suggests that we can expect some indiscretions from Newt Gingrich in the future.

That doesn't have to be the end of his campaign. Consider Clinton. Frankly, the nation elected him already having every reason to believe that he was a serial adulterer -- as indeed he was, and continued to be while in office. And although the Lewinsky scandal was a distasteful thing (and we wouldn't let our sister within ten miles of that silver-haired devil), Clinton's approval ratings stayed remarkably high for a guy who was impeached. The country did not elect him because it wanted a saint; it elected him because it wanted an executive. He offered peace and prosperity; he delivered peace and prosperity; he was and remains a popular figure.

So, were we Newt, we might drop the phoney outrage and try something like this: "Yup. Thanks for asking that question right up front, John. The fact is that I have done some truly heinous things, in my public life and especially in my private life. I try to do better, but the odds are that I'm going to fail. I'm not offering this country a model of moral perfection. I'm offering it a model of intellectual leadership that ...." Well, you can fill in the rest.

Of course, we think Gingrich is a dope, and we'll happily tear into his inconsistent and impractical slew of bad ideas. As soon as he stops trying to stop deflecting legitimate questions about his leadership ability.

The funny part is that while Democratic primary voters might actually go for that line -- they virtually did with Clinton -- Republicans won't. The old ones would have, and our kind of Republicans still might. But not the new breed; they want saintliness more than they want statesmanship, and nothing could make that more clear than the re-election of George w. Bush. For them, Gingrich has to sing Amazing Grace, over and over. And he can't offer them intellectual leadership, because it has the word "intellectual" in it.

But if he just made a(nother) deal with the Devil, Gingrich might change his fortunes. Democratic primary voters, after all, don't care so much about a candidate's sexual conduct, and they positively relish their smarty-pants policy wonks.

So whaddaya say, Newton? Ready to come over to the Dark Side?

My Neighbor's Chains

2012-01-19T04:06:00.004-05:00

"I cannot be free while my neighbor is wearing chains." These are the words of novelist Walter Mosely, but they echo a familiar refrain of the Civil Rights movement. They are rousing words, and seem, intuitively, to be true. A society in which black people (or serfs, immigrants, women, clones) are not free is by definition one in which white people (or nobles, natives, men, the customarily conceived) are not free either.

What if this idea is a nonsensical libertarian fairy tale? What if, in fact, freedom cannot be shared equally throughout a society, because some freedoms are mutually incompatible? Let's not reduce this to absurdity, either; obviously, certain people -- criminals, lynch mobs, Nazis -- cannot be "free" to harm others. Let us speak only of people whose values and goals fall within the boundaries of civil society. They do not seek to inflict positive harm upon anybody else, but only to live their lives as they see fit. Is it possible that they can do no such thing, because to live their lives inevitably means harming somebody else?

Think of the Amish. For reasons that the rest of us have a difficult time grasping, they chose long ago to freeze the material development of their society at a certain point in time. The decision to drive horses in the age of the automobile, however removed from any particular teaching of Jesus, is for them an exercise of religious freedom. And yet the complete and unfettered exercise of this freedom -- say, driving black buggies down public highways at night, without any lights or reflectors -- would impose upon the freedom of other citizens to drive fast modern cars on those same highways. (At least without killing anybody). And so the Amish are required to use reflectors.

Amish communities have also been involved in conflicts with the government over education law, photo-IDs and sewage. Here's a little more. Resolving these conflicts has been comparatively easy; the Amish are a very small group, generally well-liked by other Americans, who regard them the way one does an eccentric uncle.

But what if instead of funny German-Americans and their horse-drawn buggies, this were about Pakistani immigrants and their veils? The tone of the debate would change quickly. On the matter of photo ID, Pennsylvania caved, and allowed the Amish to carry cards without pictures. Some Muslim women in other states have asked for the same privilege, and the public outcry has been significant.

The recent Republican rabble-rousing against Shariah strikes us as absurd. Jokes about HaileyBarbour aside, we have a hard time imagining the circumstances under which America's courts or legislators would countenance the use of religious codes (Muslim, Roman Catholic or anybody else's) as a replacement or even a supplement to the civil and criminal codes established by the state. But of course there are countries, such as Nigeria, where it is done this way -- and part of the argument for the practice is that it respects religious freedom.

Even Israel, our supposedly modern democratic friend in the Middle East, makes legal exceptions for its ultra-Orthodox communities. So, for example, men and women were required to sit separately at a recent government ceremony -- because the civil liberty of a one man to sit beside his wife interfered with the religious liberty of another man to keep the sexes separate.

Over the past few years, and especially the year just past, some religious communities in the United States have registered their concern that the spread of same-sex marriage will restrict their religious liberty. In its early, crude, and misleading form, the argument was made that churches would be punished under civil-rights laws for refusing to conduct such marriages; this flies in the face of centuries of jurisprudence.

The newer form is less ridiculous. While the government has little incentive to shape religious ceremonies, it has long been a partner to churches involved in health-care, adoption, and similar work. Just as some Christian hospitals have struggled with laws which treat abortion as a matter of right, so many adoption agencies will struggle with laws which require them to treat same-sex couples just as they treat different-sex couples. It is easy to imagine

The case is made is a simple manner by a document called "Marriage and Religious Freedom: Fundamental Goods Which Stand or Fall Together." It is signed by the usual suspects: Richard Land, Timothy Dolan, and -- making their first appearances in the world of church leaders who sign meaningless collaborative documents, the new leaders of the LC-MS and NALC. It's not a great document, and we are suspicious of its more extreme interpretations. But this passage seems to describe a realistic possibility:

So, for example, religious adoption services that place children exclusively with married couples would be required by law to place children with persons of the same sex who are civilly “married.” Religious marriage counselors would be denied their professional accreditation for refusing to provide counseling in support of same-sex “married” relationships. Religious employers who provide special health benefits to married employees would be required by law to extend those benefits to same-sex “spouses.”

Such things might happen (although the recent SCOTUS decision suggests otherwise). One question is whether they are bad things, and if so how bad. But the pressing question, philosophically and legally, is whether the respective freedoms -- of the states to determine which marriages are legal; of the churches to determine which marriages are holy; of couples to adopt, counselors to choose their clients -- can be made compatible, or whether somebody will always have to lose.

It's all very tricky, though, because many of the possibilities do not involve actual legal punishment of recalcitrant churches, so much as the withdrawal of the government and its money from their activities. While sad, and extremely difficult in practice, this may not be the worst thing for a cash-strapped democracy. Saying that "we won't help your adoption agency" is somewhat different from saying "your agency must shut down." although in practice the effects are likely to be similar.

The problems of adoption and employment strike us as being murkier than, but parallel to, the argument made by Muslims in many parts of the world. In addition to the mobs which express outrage when a newspaper prints a cartoon purporting to represent Mohammad, there are sober intellectual voices which propose that this exercise of free expression is, at the same time, a limitation of somebody else's religious freedom.

In both cases, adoption or cartoons -- not to mention seating at award ceremonies -- it seems to us that the emerging rhetoric of religious conservatism claims that the free exercise of religion means the freedom of religious people to do whatever they like, without criticism and with the complete support of the state and its laws.

Obviously, they are asking for too much. But what, if anything, can they ask for? What respect can a secular democracy pay to the different convictions of particular religious communities, without favoring one above another, or limiting the liberty of those with no religion at all? Or, to put it another way: What chains can we be asked to wear in support of our neighbor's freedom?

We have no ready answers. But we expect to see the question posed ever more sharply in the years to come.

If PIPA Passes

2012-01-18T12:34:00.005-05:00

That's a literary (and geographical) allusion, but good luck finding out to what. After all, Wikipedia is shut down for the day. In English, that is; the Latin and Finnish sites are still working, for what that's worth to the morally-challenged students at third-tier universities all over America.

The bigger concerns are the laws to which this blackout has drawn fresh attention. We're not entirely up to speed on this, so we won't say much. Here's a quick rundown from Gizmodo, and a better one from Wired. Here's a very watchable 13-minute rant by TED's Clay Shirky.

We will say this: America's intellectual property laws are already strict enough to stifle innovation. Copyright and patent laws have been strengthened and, in particular, their terms have been lengthened. Rather than benefiting the actual scientists or artists who make new things, the laws now provide a startling benefit to corporations -- and almost in perpetuity.

These laws do stimulate one kind of innovation, but it's a bad one. They have created the entire industry of patent warehousing, in which big companies buy up patents for things they didn't invent and have never produced, for the sole purpose of suing some other companies that eventually invent and build something similar. Suing them, and then essentially stealing their profits. The website paidContent.org describes it as "a protection racket in which an entire industry has to decide whether or not to pay a licensing fee up front or fight off litigation in court."

Add to this the unnecessarily high cost of pharmaceuticals, which contributes (a little) to the outrageous surge in health-care costs, and you begin to see the creepy moral questions which hunker around the margins of IP law.

But back up. So far as we can tell, the laws presently before Congress have nothing to do with patents, and therefore with drugs. They are designed to protect two industries: recording and film.

Protecting these industries is like declaring dinosaurs an endangered species. Except that the dinosaurs were bloodthirsty killers, not cocaine-addled moral degenerates. It took a planet-sized meteor to kill the dinosaurs; the recording industry has been kept alive by Congressional favoritism since the 1990s.

Recording, in particular, was a perverse blip, which for the first time in history allowed musicians to become wealthy for something besides writing and performing music; it made the sleazy middlemen even wealthier, and they built that wealth up by deceiving and defrauding the actual artists. Record producers were parasites, living off people with actual talent and depending completely upon the existence of the copy-proof vinyl LP. Protecting these guys is an idea so bad it makes bailing out Detroit look like probity personified. Their industry is dying; it deserves to die; let it die.

The irony here is that, although we at the Egg lack even the minimal tech savvy required to file-share or otherwise download protected content, we live in a country where it is rampant. Where the customary fashion accessory for Eastern Europeans was once an anarchist newspaper tucked under one's overcoat, it is now a terrabyte external drive containing ten movies, a season or two of HBO, and more music than J.S. Bach listened to in his entire lifetime.

This sounds like an argument for stronger laws, right? After all, these people are pirates. But do you know why they are pirates? Because nobody will sell the stuff to them. Try to use Netflix, Hulu, any of the legitimate vendors, and they send you a polite note saying "We are sorry, but we are unable to distribute content to your country." PBS Kids won't let Preschooler A. watch clips from his favorite programs about talking teddy bears.

Now, not everybody we know would pay for the stuff, even if they got the chance. But some of us would, and the media companies would make a few bucks they aren't making now. And they wouldn't lose a cent.

Or, to paraphrase our friends at the NRA: When it becomes a crime to download content, only criminals will download content.

Hailey Barbour Supports Honor Killing

2012-01-17T06:59:00.002-05:00

Pastor Joelle says it all, bluntly and concisely.

While honor killings are not, as we understand it, part of Shariah per se, where one leads, the other seems likely to follow. In this case, that means Mississippi, where outgoing Governor Barbour chose to pardon a cluster of men who killed their wives -- crimes passionel, which is to say honor killings.

Meanwhile, he leaves in prison a pair of sisters whose crime was being in the car when some other people stole $11. At least he didn't cut off their hands.

Barbour claims to have done this in the name of "our religion," and no doubt his supporters think he means Christianity. But be warned, reader: the guy is clearly a sleeper agent for the Taliban.

On t'a bercé trop près du mur?*

2012-01-14T05:06:00.004-05:00

Ah, the self-destructive antics of Newt Gingrich. They are legend, and they never seem to stop.

By now, you've heard about the Newter's most recent anti-Romney attack ad, in which he accuses the Republican front-runner of two unspeakable crimes: coming from Massachusetts and speaking French. If you haven't seen for yourself, take a look:

To be honest, this could have been a pretty funny ad. Do you hear the Parisian cafe music playing in the background? Somebody was trying. If they'd kept the focus on France, they could have won us over. You know: Photoshop a moustache and beret onto Romney, show some file footage of the guy eating cheese or talking about Derrida. That would have been funny.

Sadly, though, the ad stopped short of anything really clever, not to mention incriminating. "Je m'appelle Mitt Romney," with a bad accent? That's not really a Gauloise-smoking gun.

It is worth mentioning, though, that Romney does speak French. As a young man, he spent two years spreading the wisdom of the Angel Moroni through the streets of Paris. We don't gather that he speaks it as well as John Kerry, who is said to be nearly fluent, but he does speak it. For us, that's a very good thing; we like the idea of a national leader who has seen the world, and who can make chit-chat in one of the great diplomatic languages of the West.

We ourselves speak something that sounds, for a moment, like French, and although it doesn't do us much good with actual French people (who have standards), it can be very helpful in a train car full of Africans or Middle Easterners.

In the mind of a certain Republican primary voter, though, French is the Devil's language, spoken by cheese-eating surrender monkeys, the sort of people who like labor unions and garlic, and who didn't support our heroic invasion of Iraq. So to accuse a candidate of speaking French is almost as bad as saying that he masticates every day, or once tried to interest a 13-year-old girl in philately.

One of the ironies here, of course, is that Newt Gingrich also speaks French. As a matter of fact, he went to high school there, in Orleans, and at one point his family lived in a chateau in the Loire Valley. (Not that Newt is an elitist or nuthin'.) His doctoral dissertation (from Tulane, in New Orleans, where French is still spoken on occasion) was on Belgian policies in the Congo, so he either reads French pretty well or is an utter academic fraud. (Or both).

Newt's little adventure into Republican loyalist frogophobia is an embarrassment, and not to Mitt Romney. It is an embarrassment to the cowardly custard advertising director who didn't put in the moustache and the word balloon with a witty remark by Simone de Beauvoir. And it is an embarrassment to Gingrich, who makes a great show of his supposed intellectual prowess, and then attacks a colleague for possessing what, a generation ago, was the bare minimum attainment of a civilized person.

_____________________________________________________

* Did they rock your cradle too close to the wall? It's a very mild insult.

Trouble Ahead

2012-01-13T07:39:00.003-05:00

If you are preaching Sunday, disregard this post. It is devoted to bad ideas that won't offer you any help, and may actually do you some harm.

The lessons for 2 Epiphany B center on vocation and discipleship -- the call of Samuel, the call of Nathaniel, and Paul's encouragement of the Corinthians to refrain from sexual sin, on the grounds that their bodies are now also the Body of Christ. Good stuff.

Preachers in the United States may naturally be inclined to work Martin Luther King Jr. into this mix, and well they might. He is a great hero in one of the defining struggles of our nation's history. Because he was a clergyman, and because his civil rights mission sprang so evidently from his religious ministry -- and because he was killed for it, and is now safely deceased -- King is a ready example of vocation and discipleship. Were we stateside, he'd find a place in our sermon as well.

But we're not. Here in central Europe, the collective memory is different. There have been, and still are, people struggling for equality under the law; but for a foreigner to talk about them (or to them, or to the people with whom they are struggling) is tricky business. We could use King as a stalking horse, if we were determined, a way to introduce the idea safely. But it would involve filling in a lot of background, and take us away from the theme of discipleship as such.

Instead, we may talk about Michael Moller. He was a Lutheran pastor in East Germany, and was moved by conscience to help organize the resistance movement which eventually brought down the Berlin Wall. In the subsequent chaos, Moller -- still a very young man -- was drafted by the new government, and became (if memory serves) the last East German ambassador to the US. As unification approached, he had to choose between service to church and state, and he chose the church. In 1990, he was appointed to teach systematic theology at LTSP. In 1996, during a summer trip to Thailand, he was killed in a car accident.

Other religious leaders were involved in the resistance movement, including some prominent Protestants here where we live. But it is easier to talk about Moller: he is foreign, meaning that he has no part in the painful local ethno-religious politics, and he is dead -- meaning that he never had to make the compromises that long-term political leaders do, and his memory is suitably unstained.

Speaking of stained memories, there is a way to work King into one's sermon which has some theological value, although it is a homiletical dead end of stupefying stature. One might draw together both the call of the prophet Samuel (who was more a prophet than King?) and Paul's warning against sexual misconduct (because, as his old friend Ralph Abernathy has testified sadly, King was a frequent adulterer). This is a way to make the important point that Christian heroes are not sinless plaster saints, but real people struggling daily with sin, death and hell -- simul iustus, as we say for short. But we can only imagine it would be received poorly in most assemblies, and uncharitably in the rest.

Slow it Down!

2012-01-12T04:30:00.003-05:00

Where does your Communion bread come from?

Thanks to the Chez Panisse, the Slow Food Movement and Michael Pollan, Americans are more likely now than a generation ago to ask where their food comes from. This is a useful and healthy question, and how frightening is it that we so rarely know the answer? But, honestly, we at the Egg had never spent much time asking it of our most important meal.

Oh, we've served parishes where the answer was pretty clear. We've used a lot of bread baked by parishioners, and in our first call were lucky enough to have an old guy who made wine in his basement, and brought it over in gallon jugs. Provided that you have no theological objection to leavened bread (and we don't), this is probably the most spiritually and liturgically satisfying way to get things done.

Mind you, it's not perfect. The homemade wine was too sweet, not strong enough, and so heavily sedimented that that on the last Sunday before a new delivery, one consecrated sludge. Leavened bread, by its nature, crumbles -- and crumbs at the altar are something to be strenuously avoided. So despite the many charms of DIY Eucharistic elements, we confess that we are just a bit more comfortable with a chalice full of tawny port and a paten loaded with little wafers.

Given the obsessions of the oenologically inclined, it is easy to fine out where your wine comes from; most vineyards will happily cite you their average rainfall and the pH of their soil. Our sentimental preference: Brotherhood Winery, America's oldest and for most of our lives a local house. ("Local," at one point, meant amost within the parish boundaries).

Wafers are more of a challenge. We usually buy them mail-order, from any of three or four suppliers. Over the years, we have tried most the varieties: tiny, giant, "priest's host," whole wheat, gluten-free, stamped with a cross or a lamb or sometimes a crown, wrapped in cellophane or packaged in a jar. While we certainly have our preferences (small and ultra-thin, thank you, so we don't have to masticate our Savior), the truth is that one supplier's product has always struck us as as being pretty much the same as another's.

And now we now why: they're all made in the same factory. According to this fascinating and slightly disturbing article by Rowan Moore Geraty posted at Killing the Buddha, 70% of the communion wafers sold in the US are produced by one company, Cavanagh. Founded in the 1940s, they created the first machinery for mass-producing the wafers, and today (it seems) a great many church supply houses sell Cavanagh products.

According to Geraty, Cavanagh's innovations have had a double effect. One, not really examined in the article, is to centralize production -- bread is no longer a locally-made product, but one shipped long distances from a factory. The other, which occupies much of the article, is that the product has been secularized. What was once largely the work of nuns, and constituted for them both a ministry and a means of sustenance, is now the work of a commercial industry.

Indeed, a lot of the article is drawn from two sources: Cavanagh, and the Benedictine sisters of Clyde, Missouri, who are the largest remaining monastic manufacturer. Geraty makes it pretty clear that the nuns resent Cavanagh's dominance in their industry, but the sisters in Clyde seem to run a pretty big shop themselves. We can't help wondering whether the article would have been improved by interviews with a couple of micro-suppliers as well.

The article has flaws. Its description of pre-Cavanagh wafer production can't be quite correct. Geraty talks about nuns with cookie trays, but we have seen medieval wafer presses in museums -- they look a little like those long-handled sandwich presses that some people use with an open fire. The emphasis falls heavily upon Roman Catholic institutions and practices, to the extent that Protestantism is misrepresented (the move toward weekly Communion among Lutherans and Episcopalians, for example, has a history that long predates Vatican II). But this is small stuff.

For us, the most bluntly disturbing part of the article is not the beginning, in which Geraty's roommate eats unconsecrated wafers as a snack food, but the end, when Geraty describes in passing something called the Chasid Cup:

The online promotions for the Chasid Cup show the hermetically sealed container with a shot of grape juice and an individually wrapped Communion wafer against a purple background with slick font and a tantalizing picture of grapes reminiscent of juice advertisements.

We've heard of this monstrosity, but assumed it was something used by Baptists or community churches or ... well, somebody like that. But the following sentence reduced us to tears, and then prayer, and then tears again:

The product is billed as a sanitary and convenient alternative to conventional methods of serving communion, with sales growing, according to one church goods importer, primarily in the Lutheran market.

Oh, please, no. Please, please, please no.

Underrated Writers

2012-01-09T12:52:00.007-05:00

The list of writers who deserve more attention than they get is very long indeed. Alexander Theroux! John Clare! Caritas Pirckheimer! (And for every one, there seems to be another fine writer who may get just a little more attention than is strictly deserved: Paul Theroux; William Wordsworth; Hildegard of Bingen). There isn't much rhyme or reason to fame, and that just doesn't seem fair.

For no particular reason, we just thought of two literary affections we want to share:

(1) Bradford Angier. In 1947, this Boston advertising man dragged his wife to the wilds of British Columbia, where they traded their comfy urban existence for an abandoned prospector's cabin and the life of hunter-gatherers. Obviously the guy had read too much Thoreau, which was the theme of his first book; but after that, he settled down to writing about the rugged life in a way that was less philosophical and more practical. The titles tell most of the story: Free for the Eating: 100 Wild Plants, 300 Ways to Use Them; Wilderness Gear You Can Make Yourself. And so forth

The guy wrote dozens of books (one, we regret to say, seems to have been plagiarized), and we have read only a couple. But, during our days at summer camp, we stumbled upon a battered copy of How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and it fascinated us. We spent the summer reading it and re-reading it. In later years, a copy kept us company during a snowbound month in the Adirondacks, and on a shelf in our New York parsonage from which it was pulled down whenever we tired of city life.

Angier isn't an especially grand stylist, but apart from the mere information conveyed, his writing has a certain winsomeness. His best bits strike a note that is one part Commander McBrag and one part Boy's Life: "To make pemmican, you start with jerky and shred it by pounding, suggests Colonel Townsend Whelen." Well, naturally, but then the Colonel would say that. Or consider this chapter opening:

One day, you may be boating down the Peace River near the start of its more than 2000 mile journey inland to the Great Slave Lake and thence as the Mackenzie to the Arctic Ocean. Soon after the headwaters of this wilderness highway mingle in the Continental Trough, the river turns abruptly eastward to flow with surprising tranquility through the entire range of the Rocky Mountains. if you watch the left shore after chuting through the minor turbulence known as Finlay Rapids, your eyes will likely as not catch the platinum gleam of Lost Cabin Creek.

What follows is a grim anecdote about campers who hadn't read a book like his, and didn't, ah, survive. But the real point is the promise that you, too, may someday be paddling down the Peace River, because sooner or later everybody does; and when that happens, here is a little stream to watch out for, with a kind of sad story attached.

There are many fine outdoors writers, and Angier isn't by any means the best of them. (Paging John McPhee). But he is a fine writer, and his books are full of handy tips for outdoors living. You could do worse, if you were ever to be stranded on Lost Cabin Creek.

(2) Montague Summers. Oh, Father Summers! You are the craziest of all crazed literary men men, the one who makes Baron Corvo look like John Updike and Ezra Pound like Wallace Stevens. (And that is high praise from somebody who cares as much as we for Corvo and Uncle Ez.)

Anglican deacon and (perhaps) Catholic priest; expert on Restoration drama and Gothic novels; tried and somehow acquitted of pederasty -- Summers (1880-1948) could conceivably be famous for any number of things. But as it is, his reputation rests almost entirely upon his writing about witches, vampires and werewolves.

We stumbled across Montague Summers decades ago, when young College Boy Anonymous first studied Renaissance History. Our prof, an expert on Italian intellectual history, had recently made the jump to Mitteleuropean social history, and was dipping his toes into witchcraft studies. By dipping his toes, we mean that he had provided expert Latin assistance to the first translation of Johann Weyer's classic De praestigiis daemonum. (What, you haven't read it?) After a morning's trot through the library stacks, we mentioned to the said prof that we had stumbled across something by this Summers fellow, and his eyes blazed like hot coals, as he arched his back and spat out the damning words, "Montague Summers believes in witches!"

True dat. Summers did indeed believe in witches, and we expect any manner of other things that go bump in the night. Even in his own time, and certainly in this post-Trevor-Roperian age of scientific study, such a belief put one beyond the pale among serious historians. But that's fine, because Summers wasn't a serious historian. He didn't teach at a university, hold a doctorate, or attend conferences of his colleagues. He was instead an old-school man of letters, the sort who wrote for a living, and wrote about whatever interested him -- sex, religion and the supernatural, ideally all at once.

You can, of course, read Summers looking for facts. But why would you, when the prose is so much more exciting? Once described as "more Churchillian than Churchill," his writing a strange mixture of languages, allusions, and examples piled upon examples. The naughty bits are in French, the holy bits in Greek or Latin; the references to secular poetry are shoveled in among those to canon law, folklore, or the records of the Inquisition. We confess that, in college, we found it incomprehensible.

And yet it can be irresistible. Try this:

The vampire has a body, and it is his own body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality; the androgyne in the phantom world; a pariah among the fiends.
Even the Pagan poet taught his hearers and his readers that death was a sweet guerdon of repose, a blessed oblivion after the toil and struggle of life. There are few things more beautiful and there are few things more sad than the songs of our modern Pagans who console their aching hearts with the wistful vision of eternal sleep. Although perhaps they themselves know it not, their delicate but despairing melancholy is an heritage from the weary yet tuneful singers of the last days of Hellas, souls for whom there was no dawn of hope in the sky. But we have a certain knowledge and a fairer surety for "now Christ is risen from the dead, the first-fruits of them that sleep."

He follows this up, immediately, with completely superfluous references to Gray, Swinburne and Bronte. Sheer genius!

Of course, there may be another reason we fell hard for Summers. According to this guy, Summers was

... described by acquaintances as kind, courteous, generous and outrageously witty; but those who knew him well sensed an underlying discomfort and mystery. In appearance he was plump, round cheeked and generally smiling. His dress resembled that of an eighteenth century cleric, with a few added flourishes such as a silver-topped cane depicting Leda being ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan. He wore sweeping black capes crowned by a curious hairstyle of his own devising which led many to assume he wore a wig. His voice was high pitched, comical and often in complete contrast to the macabre tales he was in the habit of spouting. Throughout his life he astonished people with his knowledge of esoteric and unsettling occult lore.

Geeze, Louise. The guy's our doppelganger.

Cranky Old Age

2012-01-09T10:24:00.010-05:00

Ah, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.

When Father Anonymous was a mere slip of a thing -- Vicar Anonymous, they called him then -- there were some cranky old men hanging around the synod. The ones he knew best were super-high-church types, ordained in the 1960s or earliest 70s. They had been eccentrics then, although often quite vocal and even influential ones. Over time, several had become extremists; but, having lost any real influence, they kept their extremism largely to themselves.

It is hard to generalize, because these guys did not think with one mind any more than do we, ahem, modern people. But in general they had all at one time or another taken a vocal public stand against something on this list:

Ordained women
Altar girls
Feminist theology, liberation theology, and so forth
The Lutheran Book of Worship, especially (a) the loss of the Introit, (b) the addition of the canticle "This is the Feast," and (c) the Swedish eucharistic formula beginning "Blessed are you."

(With these antipathies, for the record, we agree about the Introit, and straddle the fence regarding the canticle. Otherwise, we're in utter disagreement.)

The first three objections, obviously, came from what today is easily dismissed as sexism tout court, although that isn't quite fair. Several of these guys were very sharp, and several had done remarkable -- and arduous -- ministry among the desperately poor and brutally oppressed. And it is worth noting that they weren't, and those who remain aren't, part of the Anita-Bryant-era anti-gay revolution. On the contrary, while they may not care much for the current regularization of same-sex romance in the Church, this was probably the single community with the longest record of shrugging their shoulders at gay colleagues, extending the charitable if specious assumption of celibacy, and moving on.

Naturally, by the time we came across them, these old codgers had already lost the argument on every item to which they objected, at least so far as the course of the church's common life was concerned. In some cases (altar girls, notably) parish pastors had even been instructed by a bishop to toe the line in their own parish. Those who know our polity will be able understand what a rare thing this is.

But they lost, consistently. In the face of the Commission on a New Lutheran Church, and the regime which followed it, none of their concerns had any real chance of survival. Frankly, better minds and better ideas were marginalized with an efficiency that was one side or the other of ruthless. (Bill Rusch, anybody?)

So what did they do after they lost? A few of them switched churches, generally heaving-ho in the direction of Rome. A few others flamed out, caught in one or another sort of public scandal. But most just settled down to spend those last few years in their own parish, hanging out with like minds and complaining (often acidly) about the evil times they had lived to see.

We have been thinking about these guys lately, mostly because of the Facebook group for ELCA pastors. It's a sort of nationwide cocktail party, in which we talk about the sort of things pastors talk about: problem parishioners, management software, the old three-way volunteer-vs-paid sexton-vs.-cleaning service debate. Occasionally, the talk turns to truly important things (mission; evangelism; staying out of court); often, it dwells on the sort of thing that could only interest a cleric, if even that (vestments, the pension plan, funny stories about incense). Whenever it gets too caught up in trivia, some well-meaning soul can always be counted upon to bleat, in effect, "What about the children?!"

And this group is turning us into one of those cranky old men. Fast.

Don't get us wrong. We like our colleagues, and always have. Lutheran pastors are a smart, decent bunch, with comparatively few stinkers among 'em. We like our colleagues, but have to confess that we don't really care for some of their ideas. Okay, a lot of their ideas. which means, in turn, that we don't really care for the direction that the church has taken over the years. Reading these posts, we come away with a sense that the "other" Lutheranism -- the mildly pietistic, aggressively modernistic, liturgy-bashing, bad-"contemporary"-service-organizing, Marty Haugen addicted, grape-juice-in-little cups-distributing Lutheranism we have heard about but rarely encountered -- is really much bigger than we had ever imagined. And that thought terrifies us.

What terrifies us even more is the likelihood that our own inevitable encounter with it may be coming fast. We can't stay holed up in Europe forever, and there is only so much of our home synod to go around. We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that our future may very well involve fewer thuribles and more little cups.

What does this mean? Frankly, it means a little blood in our mouth, as we accept the things we cannot change. And it means occasionally sitting at a table with colleagues, drinking bad coffee out of plastic cups, and complaining. Some will join us in our complaints, others will fight with us, and a decent few will sit by quietly, disagreeing but amused. We will, in short, have become one of the Cranky Old Men.

To repeat: we didn't agree with these sadsack old coots.. We didn't even like most of them; they were often pompous, and prone to smoking cigars. Apart from a general predisposition in favor of incense and chasubles, we had very little in common. But one of the things Fr. A. enjoys most about parish ministry is the chance to sit around church basements listening to old men talk (also old women, of whom there are many more), and while he prefers WWII veterans, these guys would do in a pinch.

So we hope that someday, when we have become embittered and cigar-prone, some young punk of a seminarian will be willing to sit around the undercroft with us, listening to our tales of the good old days, when there were no robot pastors and people still had their doubts about polyamorous wedding services.

Scratch That!

2012-01-06T07:36:00.005-05:00

Wow. Just as we were hitting "publish" on that last post, the pope was naming his new cardinals. Twenty-two of them, from all over the world. Eighteen are under 80, and may therefore vote in a conclave. Reuters says that Benedict has now named more than half of the college. [UPDATE: Reuters is wrong. See the comments.]

The National Catholic Reporter has a complete list here, and summarizes the demographics thusly:

Once again, Benedict’s choices are top-heavy with Italians (seven of the 18 voting cardinals), Vatican officials (ten) and Europeans (twelve). Three also come from North America, including Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto along with Dolan and O’Brien.
Only three of the new cardinals come from outside the West: João Bráz de Aviz, a Brazilian who heads the Vatican office for religious life; John Tong Hon, bishop of Hong Kong; and George Alencherry, archbishop of the Syro-Malabar church in India.

So there you have it.

F.Y.I.: Countdown to the Inevitable Dept.

2012-01-05T17:42:00.005-05:00

Rumors are out that Pope Benedict XVI is soon to name a group of new cardinals, some perhaps even today. It will be interesting to see who they are, and where they come from.

Cardinals, who elect the pope, lose their status as electors on their 80th birthday. This means that 14 of the 113 current electors will lose the right to vote during 2012. The canonical total is 120, so it is possible that Benedict will name as many as 19 cardinals in the coming year. Of the 14, two are Americans, one is English, and only one is Italian. (No, we don't keep tabs on this ourselves. But this guy does, and we've just bookmarked his page.)

Historically, Italians made up the great bulk of the College; that has ceased to be true in modern times, although they are still well-represented. La Stampa's "Vatican Insider" column predicts that more Italians will enter the college than leave it, perhaps six of them. It even gives names, and explains some of the canonical questions in play. On the other hand, Zuhlsdorf simply grunts a prayer that few of the new cardinals will be Italian.

Although such things as language and nationality ought not to matter, they do, at least a little. People sometimes speak of "voting blocs," and while we doubt that there is anything so crass among the cardinals, it would be shocking if there were not strong opinions about the right or wrong direction for their church. Likewise, it would be surprising if the fundamental convictions which shaped those opinions were not themselves shaped by education and culture. So, while it is certainly not true that all Italians (or English speakers, or Africans) think alike, it seems reasonable to suppose that the members of each group may hold out similar hopes for a future pope.

What are those hopes? It is hard for an outsider to know. We gather that the Italians lean a bit more toward John XXIII that some of their colleagues, but we really aren't expert in this sort of thing. Given the vast number of cardinals appointed by John Paul II during his long reign, not to mention the orientation of his successor, it seems unlikely that these old-time hippies will see their dreams come true, at least this side of Paradise.

Mind you, we hope that the cardinals need cast no vote in conclave anytime soon. Benedict, at 84, appears to be in good health -- some heart problems, a minor stroke or two, but nothing surprising for a man of his age. His powerful intellect seems unimpaired; we are eager to read his Jesus books. But life is unpredictable, and becomes more so as it grows longer. Surely Benedict (who predicted a short reign for himself) is thinking about the choice of a successor, and giving great care to the selection of those who will make that choice.

The Destroyer

2012-01-03T15:10:00.013-05:00

Father Anonymous has read nearly every word that Ernest Hemingway ever published. (Well, at least in his own lifetime and between hard covers.) Heck, he still cherishes youthful memories of skimming Por quien doblan las campanas in a Madrid bookshop, and lying on the rocky beach at Nice reading Les neiges du Kilimandjaro.

That doesn't make him a fan. Far from it.

In fact, our relationship with EH has been a strange on-and-off affair. Like most Americans born near midcentury, we had a high school English teacher who was besotted with Hemingway, and tried to pass her besottment (besottage? Soteur? Whatever.) down to a new generation. So she assigned his stories to children, which is a good way to make sure that nobody takes a writer very seriously. (Consider poor Mark Twain.)

We dutifully read most of the stories, and a couple of novels, but with the mixture of curiosity and contempt that children routinely bring to assigned authors. And naturally, we regarded Hemingway as kid's stuff. Once we were all grown up and off to college, we certainly weren't going to bother with him anymore -- or, to be honest, with anybody else born after about 1700. It was only in young adulthood that we tried again, on the grounds that Religio Medici, for all its charms, is tough reading for the subway.

It didn't take long to get a sense of how Hemingway's artistic career had played out: a few exceptionally fine stories, one striking novel, and then a fairly quick decline into self-parody. Unless we are mistaken, this seems to the general consensus of the critics, so far as there is one.

Death in the Afternoon, written nineteen years after The Sun Also Rises, and 21 years before the suicide, is a convenient half-way point. It lacks the intellectual honesty of Sun, the willingness to question concepts like masculinity and honor. It is indeed a piece of remarkably good sports writing; but is it really better than anything A.J. Liebling ever wrote about boxing? (For that matter, we're not sure that Hemingway's writing about war was any better than Liebling's, either. And Liebling gave himself the luxury of adverbs.) By the time he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, ten years after that, Hemingway was a national institution -- but his ironies and intimations had been replaced by the stuff of pulp fiction. The best part of that book, by a fur piece, is the epigraph.

The trajectory of Hemingway's writing is roughly parallel to the trajectory of his personal life, but the personal life began in a less attractive place and ended in a vastly more awful one. We don't blame him for his depression or condemn him for his suicide. But the fact is that he was a bit of a pig from the very beginning, and he only got worse. We are reminded of how bad it was by this review of a new biography and a volume of Hemingway's letters. The most damning indictments come from his second son, Gregory, who wrote:

When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centred shit, the stories or the people? ....

God have mercy on your soul for the misery you have caused. If I ever meet you again and you start piling the ruthless, illogical and destructive shit on me, I will beat your head into the ground and mix it with cement to make outhouses.

Err, yes, well. A-hem.

Gregory also called him a "gin-soaked, abusive monster," which certainly seems to fit the facts. And fair warning: It's easy to blame the old, crazy drunk. But even the brilliant young writer of the 1920s was as unfaithful to his first wife as the vicious old celebrity would be to her successors. Not to mention a blowhard, bully and braggart, given to lying about his adventures in war. The gently mocking portrayal in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is funny and true, but still too loving by half.

"Too loving," we say, because Hemingway does not deserve our love. Not, at least, the sort of idolatrous, excuse-making hero-worship that he was given by the reading public of his own time. After 1940, he really wasn't a very good writer, and at no stage of the journey was he much of a human being. He deserves our pity, even compassion if we can muster it, but not -- certainly -- the time it takes to read his last works.

And yet, even so, we here at the Egg have dipped our toes into those last few books, the ones brought out by editors in the hero's name. A Moveable Feast is pretty good, although it has done an unconscionable disservice to the church calendar. But it is The Garden of Eden that fascinates us.

Don't get us wrong, here. As published, the book is a disaster. Reading it was almost physically painful. The editors faced the unenviable task of squeezing 200,000 words of chaotic manuscript into 70,000 words of fiction, and have been roundly brutalized for their failures; but, without examining the documents, it is hard to blame them. One shudders to imagine scrawled notebooks and half-typed pages, illegible and illogical.

Yet the result does exercise a perverse fascination. The main characters are a young writer and his bride, living in France, as their sex life veers toward androgynous role-playing. Hemingway has clearly based some of this -- but how much? -- on his second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer. But he was writing years afterward, beginning the thing in 1946. The thought of Ernest Hemingway as a cross-dresser is, all at once, risible, repulsive, and intriguing. Of course it's subtler than that. David, the young writer, doesn't run around provincial France in party dresses; he dyes his hair to match his wife's. But still.

In Eden, a Hemingway well past his artistic prime is trying to dig past the hairy-chested tales of fighting and killing that have become his bread and butter, and to revisit the themes of The Sun Also Rises. If Jake's missing you-know-what was one way to question the nature of masculinity, David's dye job is another -- and, read in context, a more dramatic one. It is, you should pardon the expression, a ballsy move.

It helps to remember that Hemingway's son Gregory, the happy child quoted above, was a transvestite and ultimately transsexual. (He was also deeply troubled in the classic Hemingway fashion: bipolar, alcoholic, and so forth). He would have been 15 when his father started The Garden of Eden. All of which means that, as the book progressed by fits and starts, the father was struggling to understand a strange and apparently painful part of his own sexual history, and the son was doubling up on the strangeness and the pain. A grim evening of theatre lies waiting for some playwright.

And however broken their relationship, they did know each other -- in the same letter, Gregory calls his father "Ernestine." It's the sort of slashing insult that, in those days, few people apart from an estranged son would have thought to administer to the Great Macho Figurehead.

None of this changes our estimation of Hemingway as a man or a writer; quite the contrary. But it does make us think of reading the biography or, when time allows, the new edition of the letters. As entertainment, Hemingway's letters are in a class by themselves. An older selection offered some great moments, such as a description of the competition among writers through history in the language of a boxing match (Cervantes was a tough old bird, and hard to beat, but "I'd thumb Henry james where he had no balls") and a drunken rant in which he invites Senator McCarthy to visit him in Cuba for a showdown.

But mostly, it makes us want to read books by and about nicer people.

A Rose By Any Other Et Cetera

2012-01-02T10:59:00.004-05:00

A few days ago, we blustered about corporate re-branding. Apparently, the people of the Somme region in northern France overheard, and thought this was a wonderful idea. Historically lumped in with some neighbors under the general category of Picards, they decided that they deserved their own name. So they held a contest. Per the Beeb, some 23,ooo locals offered suggestions. Not all were entirely serious:

Some of the more outlandish suggestions included the Simpsommes, Sommosapiens, Sommeilleurs (sleepy ones) or Sommites (luminaries).

The winner was less inventive: Samariens, from a Latin word for long, lazy river. Okay, we guess, but no Sommoosapiens.

All this raises a question for us. Regional pride is all well and good, but -- from a purely economic perspective -- do they truly think it serves their purpose to adopt a name that will remind English-speakers, at least, of a brutal Great War bloodbath, when they previously enjoyed one that reminded us of our favorite starship captain?

Jokes aside, the name given to a particular group of people can be awfully serious. Yesterday, we were serenaded by a cluster of Gypsies, celebrating the New Year (and looking for donations of cash, booze or tobacco). But of course one doesn't call them Gypsies anymore, at least in theory, as in French one doesn't call them Tsigane (or Gitans, or Manouches, or whatever).

Easily the most calumniated people in modern Europe, they have asked to be known as the Romany or, more often, merely the Roma. And so they are, at least in the European press and the literature of well-meaning NGOs.

But this name is immensely annoying to those who can claim to have prior dibs. Citizens of the Italian capital city, for one. For another, the 22 million or so [other] citizens of Romania, whose name for themselves is Romani (masculine plural) and means little more nor less than "Romans." Rightly or wrongly, they're quite protective of the name, and of the history they believe it reveals.

The European Union has chosen to call ... those other people ... "Rrom," a name that manages to neither please anybody nor solve the problem.

It is not our place to tell anybody what they should call themselves or ask to be called. People in our own country are generally called Americans, which is a little tough on the hundreds of millions of other people who live in the Americas.

Still, the confusion is annoying to everybody. Somebody needs a new name. And we hear that Sommosapiens is up for grabs.

It All Started With Lucent

2011-12-31T06:07:00.007-05:00

Look, we actually like faux-Latin. We think it's funny, and -- frankly, our own command of the actual language being what it is -- we often find ourselves mumbling the faux variety when we didn't mean to. (Hey, it's not not like we're offending the natives, right?)

But when Bell Labs changed its name to Lucent in 1997, it was like Pandora opening her box. What followed was a deluge of macaronic neologisms: Altria, Vocera, and on and on. And why? "Bell Labs" was easily the most respected name in privately sponsored research. They invented everything you've ever heard of, and their original name carried so much weight that, as the company's fortunes declined, Lucent eventually re-rebranded itself as Bell Labs again, in a futile effort to stave off its corporate decline and retreat from basic science.

Despite this, other companies jumped right onto the bandwagon. Latin was appealing because the rebranders could easily find familiar-sounding words that nobody had yet used. Lucent itself, of course, is a form of luceo: they shine. But its successors got wilder and wilder. Novartis, for example, might conceivably be a dative or ablative plural of the feminine noun "novarta," meaning new art -- if such a word existed, which it doesn't. It's just gobbledygook, and transparently fake gobbledygook at that.

But the dogs piled on. James Archer has a list of them here, several of which he counts among "the biggest jokes in corporate naming." And you know what's on the list, right?

Thrivent. Of course.

The names of Lutheran Brotherhood and the Aid Association for Lutherans may not have been quite as prestigious as Bell Labs, but they sent a message of solidity and community. Thrivent, a Latinate verb ending stuck onto an Old Norse root, sends just the opposite message. It cries out phoniness, fakery, Potemkin-villagery. And, for the record, we at the Egg like Thrivent, a lot, and have trusted it with much of our financial well-being. We're just worried about the name, which stinks of desperation and lack of corporate confidence.

So comes now the most ominous name-change yet. The ELCA Board of Pensions is changing its name to Portico. The word itself is not fake; it is a real English word, with obvious Latin roots (porticus and of course porta). And that's the nicest thing we can say about it.

In an astonishing bit of double-speak, the BOP website claims that "We're changing our name to be clear about who we are and what we do." This is nonsense of the arrant variety. "ELCA Board of Pensions" was nice and clear. Sure, they've had some bad publicity lately, as the value of their investments (and therefore ours) has plummeted. But at least you knew what the organization was there for.

As for the new name, well, it doesn't say much of anything. The publicity makes a big deal about how a portico is a covered area where people gather, and well as the entrance into "something larger" -- they mention Solomon's Temple, although not a church, but let's assume that's what they meant. There's no real sense to this; they aren't a social organization, and they although they serve the church's mission, they certainly aren't leaders in evangelism per se.

Color us mystified, and annoyed. And a little scared: it took twenty years from the moment of its rebranding for Bell Labs to get out of basic science. How long will it take the Board of Pensions to get out of ... pensions?

On the other hand, you can't fight progress, or city hall, or the tide. Maybe this is a good and God-pleasing development, soon to be followed not merely by church-related organizations, but by churches themselves. After all, none of us likes the alphabet soup that makes churches sound like New Deal agencies, so maybe it's time for some ecclesiastical rebranding. Here are some suggestions; yours are welcome:

The Presbyterian Church USA becomes ... Kirkitas.
The RCA becomes ... Extra-Calvinisticum.
The United Methodist Church becomes ... 1000Tongues.org
The Roman Catholic Church ... well, they already think they have trademark protection on "The Church," so they're not going anywhere.*
The United Church of Christ becomes ... Occupy Wall Street.

As for our own tribe:

The LC-MS has often been ... Virulent.
The ELCA, if not careful, may wind up ... Silent.

______________________________________________________________

* The Domestic & Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA is in court right now, fighting the RCC's trademark claim.

Honey in the Mouth

2011-12-29T09:46:00.002-05:00

If you are preaching come Sunday, we certainly hope it is upon the Name of Jesus. This feast (which is historically connected to that of the Circumcision) is sufficiently important to Lutherans that it is, along with the Comites Christi, among the only Lesser Festivals granted precedence over a Sunday for which the color is white.

For those averse to rubrics, that means, um, "Hulk like Jesus Day."

Devotion to the Name of Jesus has a long and complicated history, well beyond the scope of a little blog post. But it is especially prominent in two very different settings: Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, and modern African-American churches.

With regard to the latter, a member of our Bronx parish often reflected upon her experience when visiting friends' congregations. She was an uneducated woman from the deep South, and we will not try to reproduce her distinctive grammar, but as she described it,

They just sit there during the sermon, as if they were barely listening. But then the preacher says 'Jesus' and they all begin to moan. Then he says 'JE-sus,' and the moaning turns to clapping. Then he says 'JEEE-SUS,' and they are all shouting and stomping their feet.

Please note that this woman was not herself entirely comfortable with the devotions she described to us. On the contrary, although raised in Bapticostal churches, she had been Lutheranized deeply enough to find the practice a bit suspicious. The name, she said, is not an idol to be worshiped; she came to church in order to hear the good news of sin and redemption, rather than to bark like one of Pavlov's dogs. (That may not be quite how she said it.)

In fairness, however, it is hard to imagine that, in most African-American churches, the Name of Jesus can ever be separated from the content of the Gospel. On the contrary, it serves as an epitome of the Gospel narrative, the proverbial nutshell containing the Iliad.

As for the first setting, we don't know very much about it. The old Catholic Encyclopedia has a short article, which makes special mention of Bernardino of Siena (1380-144). Blogger Terry Prest has a very nice piece on St. Bernardino, about whom we knew nothing previously. He posts a sermon by Bernardino from the Vatican website, which includes this stirring bit:

The name of Jesus is the glory of preachers, because the shining splendour of that name causes his word to be proclaimed and heard. And how do you think such an immense, sudden and dazzling light of faith came into the world, if not because Jesus was preached?

This is well worth quoting, or adapting, for a Lutheran sermon.

Bernardino's more famous namesake (and we imagine eponym) is of course Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), about whom there is no shortage of information on the web, or in any respectable church history. Bernard, sometimes called "the last of the Fathers" and "the honey-tongued doctor," was a Cistercian reformer, and -- perhaps apart from his enthusiasm for the Crusades -- one of the most admired churchmen of his own or any other time. (John Donne quotes him more frequently than any other medieval writer.) Bernard's passion for the Name of Jesus comes through in much of his writing, and samples can be found with a quick web search.

But here is a thoughtful meditation on Bernard and the Holy Name, offered by Pope Benedict XVI at a 2009 audience in St. Peter's Square. We'll highlight the best bits:

[Bernard's] solicitude for the intimate and vital participation of the Christian in the love of God in Jesus Christ does not offer new guidelines in the scientific status of theology. But, in a more than decisive way, the abbot of Clairvaux configures the theologian to the contemplative and the mystic.
Only Jesus -- insists Bernard in face of the complex dialectical reasoning of his time -- only Jesus is "honey to the mouth, song to the ear, joy to the heart (mel in ore, in aure melos, in corde iubilum)." From here stems, in fact, the title attributed to him by tradition of Doctor Mellifluus: his praise of Jesus Christ, in fact, "runs like honey."

In the extenuating battles between nominalists and realists -- two philosophical currents of the age -- the abbot of Clairvaux does not tire of repeating that only one name counts, that of Jesus the Nazarene. "Arid is all food of the soul," he confesses, "if it is not sprinkled with this oil; insipid, if it is not seasoned with this salt. What is written has no flavor for me, if I have not read Jesus." And he concludes: "When you discuss or speak, nothing has flavor for me, if I have not heard resound the name of Jesus" (Sermones in Cantica Canticorum XV, 6: PL 183,847).

For Bernard, in fact, true knowledge of God consists in a personal, profound experience of Jesus Christ and of his love. And this, dear brothers and sisters, is true for every Christian: Faith is above all a personal, intimate encounter with Jesus, and to experience his closeness, his friendship, his love; only in this way does one learn to know him ever more, and to love and follow him ever more. May this happen to each one of us."

"Honey to the mouth, song to the ear, joy to the heart." While Lutheran pastors are generally not encouraged to steal their sermons from the Pope, it seems to us that these paragraphs, at least, could be borrowed (with attribution!) to good effect.

Bethlehem Broomstick Brawl

2011-12-28T11:51:00.007-05:00

Ah, yes: ecumenism at work.

Per the Wall Street Journal:

Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox clergymen screamed at each other and beat each other with broomsticks during Wednesday's cleanup inside the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Merry Christmas to everybody!

By the way, the same guys did this last year, too. So now it's a tradition. Which, since they're Orthodox, means it will be repeated without fail forever, using the identical curse-words and, ideally, gold-sheathed brooms copied directly from the originals.

We mentioned in our last post that the behavior of one's fellow Christians often makes other religions, or no religion at all, seem suddenly appealing. Then we recall that Stalin was an atheist and Pol Pot a Buddhist, and the point seems moot. It is human nature, not any particular expression of it, which is the problem.

But here's our favorite bit: Palestinian security forces broke up the melee, and no serious injuries were reported. How bad do tribal relations have to be for the Palestinian Authority to play peacemaker?

Noonan's "Faith" Turns People Atheist

2011-12-27T14:41:00.004-05:00

A reader accused us of treating Peggy Noonan uncharitably the other day, and perhaps we did.

Still, we don't much care for the Pegster. She annoys us. And apparently not us alone; C.T. May is especially annoyed by her writing on religious themes, which May finds "short of common sense and scruples," "dumb about logic [but] clever about manipulation," and ultimately "vile."

Now that's uncharitable.

May's little screed is itself short on charm; the best attempted bon mot is this: "I’m agnostic and proud, but when I read Peggy Noonan on faith I become an atheist until the effect wears off." It doesn't quite work. Trying too hard, maybe?

Nevertheless, we do recognize the sentiment -- there is plenty of writing by Christians, not to mention the faithful of other religions, which urges upon us a certain momentary suspension of allegiance to the Church in particular and theism in general. In any club, there are a few members who make one cast a longing eye upon the neighboring establishment.

Good News, Bad News: Islamofascist Division

2011-12-27T09:51:00.005-05:00

Good news: The Iranian judges who convicted a woman of adultery and sentenced her to death by stoning have had a change of heart.

Bad news: They're going to hang her instead.

Jezebel has a synopsis of the story so far. Basically, though, it's just what it looks like; she shtupped a guy who wasn't her husband, and they're going to kill her for it. The only legal wrinkle, beyond that, is that she was later convicted of killing her husband -- apparently while she was in prison. Any number of countries, Texas not least among them, execute you for murder. In this case, though, there seems to be some judicial uneasiness about the murder conviction; it incurred only a 10-year sentence, which was later reduced to five for mere "complicity." So they're going to kill her for adultery.

Now, there are all sorts of things wrong with the story. You don't have to oppose the death penalty full-stop to think it is misapplied here. You don't have to be part of the Republican Party's anti-Shariah wing to think that this speaks badly for jurisprudence in the Islamic Republic. You needn't support free love to think that this is wrong, nor need you consider Iran's international reputation salvageable to hope that the judges here will try to salvage it.

All you really need is to remember that Lady Justice has a pair of scales, and that they're supposed to balance. Adultery is a bad thing -- God's Top Ten, after all -- but, Leviticus 20:10 notwithstanding, a punishment like this would have been over the top even under the bloodthirsty Christianism of Europe's religious wars. (Witches and heretics were fair game; adulteresses -- except in royal cases like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard -- much less so.) To modern eyes, there is no way that judicial murder balances adultery.

Of course, no sensible person accuses Iran of having modern eyes. Or justice. On the other hand, they do have one of our drones, and (maybe) the makings of a an atomic bomb.

Churches to Close On Sunday

2011-12-23T08:29:00.004-05:00

Nearly 10% of Protestant churches in the US will be closed this Sunday. And why? Because it is Christmas.

Heavens. What are these churches going to do when Easter falls on a Sunday?

The logic here is baffling to us. Christmas is a good reason to go to church; Sunday is a good reason to go to church. How is it that the combination of the two somehow becomes a reason to stay home? And what sort of pastors accept this reason?

Apparently, Lutheran ones. Over the last few weeks, we've observed a couple of online discussions of this phenomenon, including one among our Lutheran colleagues. At least a few of them it seems, will be among the nearly 10%. We find this profoundly shocking.

At the WSJ, David Gibson offers a mildly outraged op-ed piece on the subject, which tries to locate the problem in a conflict between beloved domestic traditions (stockings hung by the mantle with care) and public ones (going to Mass). That's certainly the gist of it; pastors are deciding to cancel worship because they don't expect large crowds.

This, to us, is the core of the problem -- and make no mistake, we do consider it a problem. Parish churches are not, generally speaking, summer chapels. By this we mean that the implicit contract made by churches (and their pastors) both wit members and with society at large is that they will hold services, at the very least on Sundays and holy days. The service in question need not be especially grand; read some lessons, preach a sermon, confect a sacrament and off we go.

Okay, yes, we confess that over the years we have ourselves polled the parish and opted to transfer a few holy days, including big ones. The Epiphany and the Ascension are especially vulnerable. But Christmas is different; it is the second great feast of the church year, and for many Christians secretly the greater of the two. For some people, it possesses an emotional power which can bring them to the heights of exaltation, or provoke a profound depression. There may not be many people in worship on Christmas Day, but those who show up do so for a reason, and it seems cruel to abandon them.

As for the Lord's Day, which is in fact a feast more central -- more essential, in that it touches directly upon the churchs' esse, its being -- than either Easter or Christmas, the idea of simply shutting the church down when it could be open seems to fall somewhere between bad judgment and sacrilege. Are we so entirely governed by the logic of the marketplace that we will abandon our most fundamental duty simply because we don't expect a crowd?

Beyond the one point, Gibson's thinking is a bit muddled -- none of this has much to do with either the Puritans or St. Augustine; he seems to elide the distinction between holding a service that is shortened or goofy ("the Jingle Bell Mass") and holding none at all -- but he does make one point that every pastor ought to hear clearly:

Perhaps it's a bit puritanical to insist that believers dump their cherished family traditions to march off to church on Christmas morning. But it's also self-defeating to complain about keeping Christmas holy when churches close on Dec. 25.

There's the real point, right there: if you close the church, you lose the right to complain that nobody comes.

Can Advent be Saved?

2011-12-22T10:34:00.002-05:00

Here's a post from the rarely-updated parish soapbox. Basically, it contrasts the rigorous pre-Christmas penitential discipline of the Orthodox church to the ... thing that Advent has become for us in the West.

Read it, if you like, in some of the copious free time we all enjoy these next few days.

Slapping Jesus

2011-12-22T04:21:00.005-05:00

Science proves the Shroud of Turin is real! (Oh, wait, no it doesn't.)

This are the competing contentions of twinned articles in the Telegraph. Of mild interest on themselves, they are a window onto a more general nuisance, namely the routine use of Christian holy days to sell newspapers and score political points.

Every year, around Christmas and Easter, the news-magazines slap Jesus on their covers, in the form of some arresting graphic (the manger surrounded by members of Congress; the risen Christ with advertising logos where the nail- and spear-marks ought to be) and accompanied by some catchy headline which suggests that maybe some of the supposed experts (scientists, historians, even theologians) don't believe the same things that you do.

It is as predictable as clockwork, and scarcely more interesting to watch.

This strategy, of course, depends upon a particular social setting for its effectiveness. We live in an intellectual world in which many of the central claims of Christianity have been subject to about three centuries of critical examination, and yet continue to exercise a deep influence upon the collective consciousness. Were the first of these things not true, there would be no latent controversy to arouse, no sleeping dog to poke in the ribs; were not the second, nobody would care when the dog began to bark.

But as it is, the semi-annual Jesus-slapping ritual is a marvelous way to remind society at large of its divided mind, and of the particular influence of one religion upon that mind. With a single headline, the savvy editor can get blood flowing in the hearts of both the passionate believer and the militant secularist. With an article sufficiently heavy on intimation and light on straightforward reporting, it is possible to leave both parties with the sense that they are under attack, and need to defend themselves. It changes nobody's opinions, but it gives everybody something to complain about. (Much like the average parish Christmas pageant, but we digress.)

In recent years, the news-magazines have been easily outpaced by more volatile outlets. The specious idea of a "War on Christmas," for example, is the work of cable-news hosts and Republican Congressmen. (How specious is it? In our society, one might as well imagine a banker, looking out from his executive dining room at the huddle of insect-sized protesters below, complaining about a War on Capitalism.) At the same time, the secularist grinches of Santa Monica have chosen this particular time of year to place anti-religious placards on public property, to prevent those awful Christians from wishing anybody a Merry Christmas.

All of this, needless to say, is a sideshow, staged by the cynical for the entertainment of the vulgar. More sober thinkers have always recognized that the battle over symbols is, as Tom Chivers says in his anti-Shroud opinion piece, "undignified":

The intelligent faithful don't need trinkets like this to justify their belief, surely?

Of course not; nor do they need their Ten Commandments carved in marble outside a courthouse, or Nativity scenes plastered in public parks. By the same token, neither do atheists need to use municipal property to attack somebody else's religion. These may -- arguably -- be among the privileges of a free and open society, but are hardly elemental human rights on par with the actual freedom of conscience.

Worse yet, the various forms of Jesus-slapping undermine the genuine civility which lubricates, or ought to lubricate, the machinery of civil society. The truth, evident to a moment's reflection, is that the co-existence of those with different beliefs (including those who claim to have none at all) ought to be the jewel in the crown of a democratic nation. More than that, the easy and opportunistic division of those with different beliefs into warring camps is a trick worthy of the British Raj, or their successors in central Asian tyranny.

In fact, not only can communities professing different beliefs co-exist, they can cooperate, and often do so quite naturally. Even those who disagree about, say, the hypostatic union can find common ground regarding highways and tax policy. Surely, reflective Christians and reflective atheists are able to recognize that a civil-rights regime which protects one must, by definition, protect the other. And so forth forever.

Slapping Jesus in public is, no doubt, better than slapping each other. He can take it. But it would be more honorable, more dignified -- and for Christians, a more fitting acknowledgment of the Incarnation -- to give up the slapping, and embrace not just our common humanity, but the duties and responsibilities that come with our common citizenship.

Or, in the case of the news-magazine, to stop baiting us and actually report some news.

The Competition

2011-12-20T15:51:00.003-05:00

Admit it: you want to buy a copy of Odd Hours, our Latin-English prayer book. You think it sounds cool, right? We agree! After a week or two of use, we're pretty happy with the way it turned out. So move your mouse over to the sidebar, and click the link to learn more.

But ... wait! Maybe you shouldn't. Let's talk about this, shall we?

First off, let us give you some good reasons not to buy our book. The truth is that it could use some proofreading. We wanted to get the thing out by Christmas, and we may have rushed a bit. So far, we've only found minor typos, but there are a lot of them.

Second, and more seriously, the English psalter is hard to use. It's the Coverdale translation, in the original spelling, which is both very beautiful and historically important. But in early printed books, some letters were omitted, and replaced by a horizontal line, called a macron, over nearby letters. Our version lacks the macron, so words that are already spelled strangely are made to look stranger still. For example, "womb," spelled "wombe" in those days, looks like "wobe." The good news is that, since the Coverdale psalter was used in the Book of Common prayer, the odds are that you already know every word in it by heart. Without knowing that you know. Still, the spelling takes some getting used to.

Third: it's not a true breviary! There are a few brief lessons offered, to use if you're stuck somewhere without a Bible, but no lectionary (which one would we use?) and certainly no daily lessons printed out. That would have been a much bigger book.

And fourth, there may be other books that you would enjoy more. Not all that many, mind you; this is a niche market. But we have a couple of ideas:

For All the Saints. Years ago, Fred Schumacher put together a 4-volume breviary based on the Lutheran Book of Worship. It includes complete daily lectionary readings and a generous selection of devotional readings from ancient and modern writers. We used it ourselves for a long time, and can recommend it highly for somebody who just wants to say Matins and Vespers, and likes modern modern language.

What FATS lacks, compared to Odd Hours (and apart from a better acronym) is ... well, the oddity. No Latin, no "thee" and "thou" -- those are the main things. But it also lacks the selection of seasonal hymns, the Litany, the Small Catechism prayers, Suffrages and Compline. Not to mention the Angelus and Marian antiphons! This is a good choice, though; it offers much that ours lacks, and lacks some that ours offers.

In the same general vein (i.e., all English, and starting with the "official" prayer book), there are many Anglican Daily Office books, some of which look very good. Here's a one-volume Anglican Breviary, reprinted from a 1955 version. We might pick that one up ourselves. Here's an American version, in two volumes at Amazon, from 1986. As you might expect from our Anglican cousins, they look quite nice, and don't come cheap.

The Brotherhood Prayer Book, put together by the Lutheran Liturgical Prayer Brotherhood. We've never seen a copy, but it looks great on their website. Again, it lacks some of the quirky features of Odd Hours, but it more than compensates with something else: musical notation. The daily office begs to be sung, and BPB makes it a little easier. (The hardbound edition has notes, the paperback is text-only.)

Now, it's English-only, but there is a way to work around that. Benjamin Mayes has put together a Latin companion the Brotherhood Prayer Book, which is available (only? let us know) as a free downloadable PDF. We haven't really looked at it, but the idea seems simple enough. Print it, staple it, and hold it next to your BPB. On second thought, that doesn't sound simple; it sounds awkward. And we're not sure how to staple a 250-some page book. Still, just looking at the table of contents, it seems like a very impressive piece of work.

The Baronius Press Breviarium Romanum. This is going to be great, if it's ever actually published. The 1961 Roman Breviary, in Latin and English; 3 volumes, bound in leather; lots of illustrations; rubrics printed in red. They have been teasing us with this baby for years; it was supposed to come out last year, then last summer, and right now the website says maybe Christmas, which of course is six days away.

But good things are worth waiting for. Given the delays, we assume the proofreading and other quality-control matters will be nearly perfect. Frankly, if you don't object to any of the underlying theology, it might be the best thing going.

The BR is easily ten times the book that Odd Hours is. Of course, at $350, it is easily ten times the price, too. Heaven forbid that a few pages get crumpled in your bag, or that it falls into the snow when you are hurrying in to see Mrs. Olafsson at the nursing home.

Of course, none of these books offers much for people whose spiritual lives require the modern-day comforts of, for example, inclusive language. Neither does ours; that is one of the costs of using liturgical language from an earlier era. For that, you can (of course) use Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Or, for something a bit more user-friendly, there is Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, put together by Shane Claiborne and some of his "New Monasticism" pals. Phyllis Tickle's four-volume The Divine Hours is similar. Apart from their modern language and lefty leanings, these are books intended largely for the sort of people who aren't used to a traditional liturgical style, and need some hand-holding. Nothing wrong with that, and much right with it. They represent another take on structured daily prayer, and are probably just right for some sensibilities.

So, seriously, take a look at some of these, and see what you think. Meanwhile, we'll be at the prie-dieu, mispronouncing the versicles.

More Books to Buy

2011-12-19T15:08:00.002-05:00

Father Anonymous isn't the only one whose creative juices have been flowing lately. We have recently been apprised of some other self-publishing endeavors that may interest our readers.

Let us say, for the sake of the argument, that you aren't eager to own your own Latin-English prayerbook, complete with a difficult-to-use psalter. Hard to imagine, but there's no accounting for taste. Or perhaps your copy is already on order, but now you're in an indy-book-buying frenzy and must have more.

Then by all means consider Campfire Christmas Songs. Here's how the author, Our Beloved Godfather, describes it:

When my son asked me to join him for a weekend retreat during the Christmas season, I happily agreed and headed down to the local music store to buy a Christmas collection. To my dismay, the collections that I found either included obscure chords (F#mSus4), or too many chords to play at a reasonable tempo, or melody lines that seemed to be written only for high sopranos or countertenors!
The failure at the music store sent me to an online search that also turned up nothing useful. Since then I have gathered a collection that would be both playable by the campfire guitarist and in a voice range comfortable for the back-pew alto.

While we wouldn't know what F#mSus4 was if it jumped us in a back alley, we are very much afraid of contracting a case, and imagine that a book like this may provide some immunity. For five bucks, you can't go wrong.

Or perhaps you'd like to celebrate Christmas by looking at beautiful pictures of beautiful churches. Good news -- we know a guy for that, too. Only a week or two after we expressed our admiration for Mark Christianson's photos from the south German town of Bad Wimpfen, with its historic cloister, he announced their publication in book form. While it seems entirely unlikely that he got the idea from the Egg, we intend to take full credit anyway. Or not. Either way, the book looks beautiful, and we sincerely hope that Mother A. buys us a copy for our birthday.

The Future of Wine

2011-12-19T13:59:00.003-05:00

Wine is doomed! Global warming has imperiled the international wine industry. By the end of the century -- and maybe much sooner -- the fabled wines of France, Italy and Iberia will be little more than a memory.

Or, on second thought, maybe not. At the moment, high-quality wine grapes are growing in places like Britain, where they have not grown since the later Middle Ages. At the same time, there is no evidence that the flavors of the great European vintages (or Napa Valley) have been affected. In other words, there is more good wine in circulation than ever before; we are living in the golden age of viticulture.

These are the competing conclusions drawn by John McQuaid, in an article posted at Yale's environment360. In an age of sound bites and over-the-top alarmism, it may seem mealy-mouthed on McQuaid's part to resist confidently projecting a single scenario, whether of doom or of comfort. It took us a moment to remember that serious journalism, like any other sort of serious fact-based discussion, used to routinely resist following after Chicken Little. What a strange place the past is, even for those of us who have been there!

Anyway, the article is interesting for anybody who cares about wine. And why shouldn't we? After all, it is a sacrament.

Note to self: stock up on tawny port. Just in case.

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

2011-12-16T02:32:00.004-05:00

The essayist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, as he had expected that he would, from esophageal cancer.

Hitchens was a remarkable figure, a sharp and often dazzling writer, and -- although we never met him -- we are told that his conversation was sharper and yet more dazzling, even (or perhaps especially) after a few drinks. We regret that we will never have the opportunity to find out for ourselves.

Here, for the record, is a taste of Hitchens on George W. Bush:

He's unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

We wish we'd said that. And yet despite this, Hitchens was a vocal supporter of the Iraq invasion, a position which cost him some friends:

It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian", another "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay".

Surely it is unfair to call him cynical or opportunistic. Hitchens had come so see "Islamofascism" -- his coinage, if we recall correctly -- as the great challenge of the day, comparable to the struggle against Hitler and Mussolini. In this, we disagree not about the challenge but only about how best and most effectively to meet it.

We also disagreed, of course, about the matter of God. Even so, one has to admire lines like this one, from his bestseller on the subject:

I have been called arrogant in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit.

The irony, of course, is that in the end he published more on the subject of God than we ever have, and spoke with no less conviction. Make of that what you will.

Needless to say, we disagreed with Hitchens on any number of topics, but then so did everybody else. He was professionally disagreeable; that was his vocation. He was a gadfly by trade, and a nearly unswattable one.

Book for Sale

2011-12-15T18:08:00.004-05:00

It's finally here!

Odd Hours, our collection of prayers in Latin and English, is now available. Click here to buy a copy, or visit the page linked on the sidebar.

Our own copy came in the mail the other day, and we're quite pleased. It's a sturdy little book, pleasing to look at and easy to use. We'll post some pictures when we can.

There are some flaws, to be sure. No shortage of typos, for one thing, and our choice of the original-spelling Coverdale Psalms may not have been as inspired as it seemed. (They're a little hard to make sense of, especially at first).

On the other hand, the selection of Latin hymns alone is a treat. Gathering them together has been an education. A few sermons by St. Augustine have slipped in to fill blank pages. And there are other little goodies tucked away, here and there, that may help to keep the heart and mind attentive. At least that's what we hope.

On Neo-Protestantism

2011-12-15T04:20:00.005-05:00

Years ago, studying the Romantic renewal of ecclesiology and liturgy, we noticed that there were in the nineteenth century two working definitions of the term "Neo-Lutheran," and that they were directly opposite each other.* One referred to the revival of confessionalism and a style that looked selectively backward to the Middle Ages; another referred to the movement to broaden (and vitiate) the interpretation given to the confessions, and attempted to define a self-consciously modern movement.

One use was preferred in Europe, one in America, but the term was so rare and the historiographic problem so minor that we have now forgotten which was which. However, a similar problem arises in many of our conversations these days, and it is one which scholars ought to get busy building into their glossaries.

Here in Europe -- specifically, here in Romania -- the term Neo-Protestant is used, both by scholars and by other educated people, as a catchall for those religious communities which emerged after the Reformation, but from within the ideological world created by Protestantism. So, for example, the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican churches are Protestant, while Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists are Neo-Protestant. (Meanwhile, coeval movements within the Orthodox and Roman Catholic realms, such as the emergence of the Byzantine-rite churches or the Lord's Army, are classified differently).

This is an extremely useful distinction, at least on par with the one between the "magisterial" and "radical" Reformations. It may require some clarification, particularly with regard to Anabaptists and Methodists, but it is useful.

(In particular, this distinction -- were it to become common in Anglo-American circles -- could put paid to the anomalous refusal of some Anglicans and Lutherans to identify themselves as Protestant. Since the time of that very Romantic revival mentioned above, many of us have pointed in dismay to, say, Baptists, Quakers and Adventists, saying in effect, "Neither our theology nor our worship is as much like theirs as it is like the Pope's; so if they are Protestants, then we must be ... something else." Obviously, we at the Egg participate in this little charade, but we do so more from necessity than from joy. And if they are Neo-Protestants, then we can reclaim our proper Reformation identity without much fuss.)

There is, however, a problem. In Anglo-American scholarship, the term Neo-Protestant already has two senses. It is used both to describe (1) the modernizing, "liberal" movement which followed after Schliermacher (so, for example, the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought), and also (2) the eventual reconsideration of "classical" liberalism in the works of Barth & Co.

This latter usage is fairly rare; the preferred term is Neo-Orthodox, which from our current perspective is fraught with confusion of its own. (Oy, vey.) Still, it is common enough. Two minutes on Google turn up numerous examples, including some from notable theologians and sociologists. Part of the confusion is that a theological position opposed to "modernism" in any form makes no real distinction between Tillich and Barth. (So, for instance, Carl Henry, in this 1969 essay.)

Still, neither of the two conventional Anglo-American uses of "Neo-Protestant" is particularly widespread, nor does either one define a semantic boundary in such urgent need of definition as the Central European use. Historians, social scientists and pastors all have a pressing need for some easy way to distinguish the churches which emerged during the Reformation proper from those which in subsequent generations built upon, or strayed from, its legacy.

So let's hear it for neo-Protestantism! Hooray!**

_______________________________________________________________

* And, by the way, don't bother consulting Wikipedia on this. The relevant articles don't acknowledge the double-sense, and in any case are full of Missourian disinformation.

**This cheer is directed only to the technical term, and not to the movement identified thereby. Lest you think we were changing horses in midstream.

"Très Mediocre"

2011-12-14T16:25:00.007-05:00

That is how some French historian described the hymn Sol hodie nobis apparuit. But what do the Frogs know about art, culture or religion, especially in the Middle Ages?

The song is by Hildebert of Tours -- oops! He was French! -- but John Mason Neale, whose translation we offer below (and also, ahem, in our almost-ready-to-sell Latin/English breviary), does not seem to have been in love with the song either. In his Mediaeval Hymns, he gives the whole thing in a footnote.

But then he adds something to the effect of, "The reader cannot help but be reminded of Dr. Donne." And you know what that means, readers: Behold our new favorite Christmas hymn!

Two Suns appear to man to-day: one made,

One Maker: one eternal, one to fade.

One the stars' King; the King of their King, one:

This makes,―that bids him make,―the hours to run.

The Sun shines with the True Sun, ray with ray,

Light with light, Day with Him That makes the day.

Day without night, without seed bears she fruit,

Unwedded Mother, Flower without a root.

She than all greater: He the greatest still:

She filled by Him Whose glories all things fill.

That night is almost day, and yields to none.

Wherein God flesh, wherein flesh God, put on.

The undone is done again; attuned the jar:

Sun precedes day: the Morn, the morning star.

True Sun, and Very Light, and Very Day:

God was that Sun, and God its Light and ray.

How bare the Virgin, ask'st thou, God and man?

I know not: but I know God all things can.

This is to Easter what Mortis, Portis, Fractis, Fortis is to Easter -- monks at play, but pious play. (And, yes, French monks. it was a joke, okay?)

Neale is right; this does remind us of Big Jack. For that very reason, Neale's translation seems a little ... different. Better, in our opinion, than his work on many more run-of-the-mill hymns -- and a reminder of just how skilled Neale was at translation. He routinely matched meter and rhyme scheme to the original texts; but he also made a point of matching the poet's style -- elevated, robust, literary, or -- in this case -- almost too clever. Almost.

"Who Partakes Thy Woe"

2011-12-12T12:45:00.004-05:00

Pastor Joelle writes that a friend was hissed and booed recently for writing that the Blessed Virgin was "far from perfect." Joelle takes up her friend's cause admirably, and we scarcely need to say more on the subject.

But when has that ever stopped us?

By a freakish coincidence, it happens that this very afternoon, we were tutoring a young Hungarian seminarian in the finer points of theological English. He's a bright feller, so in the past few weeks we have exposed him to the grammatical and lexical intricacies of Robert Jenson, Marilynne Robinson and George Herbert. But today we hauled out the big guns -- which means, as regular readers can surely guess, John Donne.

Dipping into the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, our friend saw some choice examples of the subjunctive, neologism, and the run-on sentence. (To the last of these, he gasped "Just like Hebrew," which was really quite intuitive -- a master of Latin, Donne was nonetheless shaky on Greek, but a notably more capable Hebraist.)

Then, to relax a bit and enjoy the Christmas spirit, we read through one of our very favorite poems on the Nativity, this sonnet from La Corona:

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,

Now leaves his welbelov'd imprisonment,

There he hath made himself to his intent

Weak enough, now into our world to come;

But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th'Inne no roome?

Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,

Stars, and wisemen will travel to prevent

Th'effect of Herod's jealous general doom;

Seest thou, my Soul, with thy faith's eyes, how he

Which fills all place, yet none holds him, doth lie?

Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,

That would have need to be pitied by thee?

Kiss him, and with him into Egypt goe,

With his kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

Yes, it's clever, and touching, and metaphysical in both the Jonsonian and Aristotelian senses. But we knew all that. What we had never really noticed until we read it aloud in the winter darkness with our young friend is that Donne (raised Papist, and the sort of Anglican who would declare himself "catholic" in one breath and "puritan" in another, so long as you let him define the terms his own way) stakes out a position on the delicate question of the BVM.

Speaking to his soul, he says, "into Egypt go, with [Christ's] kind mother, who partakes thy woe." That is to say, travel a while with Mary, whose soul shares in your own condition: sinful until redeemed by the immensity she once enclosed.

This doesn't really address the complex matter of the Immaculate Conception, although one of Donne's favorite medieval writers was Bernard of Clairvaux, who argued against the idea. It most certainly has nothing to do with the matter of Mary's virginity, which we would be shocked to discover Donne had ever doubted for a moment, any more than Luther did.

What this does address, however, is the occasional tendency toward misdirected piety. So captivated are we by Mary's heroic faith, that -- just as the passiones of martyrs are sometimes rewritten to make the saint's life more nearly mirror Christ's -- so we attribute to the Mother qualities properly pertaining only to the Son. Such, for example, as sinlessness.

And it is on that count that Donne gently sets us straight here, as well as in the next sonnet (which begins with the last line of this one). Yes, she is holy, heroic, highly-favored; but those things -- and especially the heroism -- derive precisely from her humanity. She is godly, but never God; whatever her sins may have been, they were sins like ours, and they rendered her as imperfect as we are. The perfection she enjoys now is the same perfection for which we long, and dare to hope, and may receive only as a gift of God.

Of course, in one sense, Mary wasn't far from perfect -- she carried Perfection in her body. Donne would have liked that idea. But in the ordinary, moral, spiritual sense, she was just as far as any of us -- and just as close.

Midnight Special

2011-12-10T04:51:00.002-05:00

"He himself was not the light." But all of Israel had been waiting for the Light, and of course the Church continues to wait -- joyfully and prayerfully, as tomorrow's Epistle says.

If you're preaching tomorrow, and racing to find a hook, you might consider the American folk blues Midnight Special, about a man in prison watching the train come down the tracks, hoping that it may bring a pardon from the governor, and set him free.

Shine your ever-loving light on me. It's not a bad prayer for Advent.

Like so many folk songs, it has a complicated textual history, and the lyrics are a bit hard to pin down. (Wikipedia background here; lyrics as recorded by the Band and CCR here; Leadbelly version here). And fair warning: Carl Sandburg thought that the song wasn't about waiting for a train to freedom, but about wishing to be hit by the train rather than remain a prisoner. (Still, a chance to talk about the sin of despair).

Ethical (and Other) Conundrums

2011-12-09T16:27:00.003-05:00

What do you say when the op-ed writer you like least on Earth gets in a great line? Do you quote her, thus leading people to believe that she's anything but a crazy old bat still nursing her unrequited jones for Ronald Reagan? Do you quote her without attribution, thus stealing intellectual property?

Or do you assassinate her character, and then quote her?

Ahem. Behold the transient genius of Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, on why Republicans who know Newt Gingrich best are frightened by his rise in the polls:

What they fear is that he will show just enough discipline over the next few months, just enough focus, to win the nomination. And then, in the fall of 2012, once party leaders have come around and the GOP is fully behind him, he will begin baying at the moon. He will start saying wild things and promising that he may bomb Iran but he may send a special SEAL team in at night to secretly dig Iran up, and fly it to Detroit, where we can keep it under guard, and Detroiters can all get jobs as guards, "solving two problems at once." They're afraid he'll start saying, "John Paul was great, but most of that happened after I explained the Gospels to him" ....

Okay, fine. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

(via Gawker)

The Vegetarian Option is Steak

2011-12-09T15:59:00.002-05:00

She's out of the running, if indeed she was ever in it, so there's no reason for us to crack wise about ex-Lutheran Michelle Bachmann. But still:

Jane Schmidt, a high school student in Waverly, Iowa, recently asked Michele Bachmann, "Why can't same-sex couples get married?"
"They can get married," Bachmann responded, "but they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they're a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they're a man."
(In Iowa, same-sex marriage is the law, at least for now, but never mind that.)
She expanded on this in a response to another student: "Every American citizen has the right to avail themselves to marriage, but they have to follow what the laws are. And the laws are you marry a person of the opposite sex."
Cue the sound of a thousand heads hitting a thousand desks.

The WaPo's Alexandra Petri has a field day with this:

"Why can't Rosa Parks sit at the front of the bus?"
"She can sit," Bachmann would say. "She can sit at the back of the bus."
... "Is there a vegetarian option?"
"The vegetarian option is steak,"

And so forth.

Evensong

2011-12-08T12:13:00.003-05:00

Father Anonymous is just off the plane from a quick family trip to London. It wasn't especially grand -- this was a very quick trip, staying with friends in the 'burbs and hauling a belligerent preschooler everywhere we went. Fr. A. himself was suffering from a tummy bug -- which is getting worse even as he types -- and was far more belligerent than the said preschooler. (Sorry, Honey.) Comparatively few sights were seen, and many grumpy remarks were made.

Still, the trip had its charms. In a less belligerent mode, Little Anonymous put his boots out on Monday night, and St. Nicholas managed to find them. Books in our native language were purchased, a decent Tex-Mex restaurant meal was eaten, and we gather that the Buckingham Palace guards were duly changed, although by then we were on a nearby lawn swinging Little A. in circles to make him dizzy. The friends were wonderful and hospitable, and we would much rather have visited them in their old home in Surrey than their new one in Kosovo.

Among the items not checked off on Fr. A.'s personal to-do list was what he calls the John Donne Heritage Tour. At a minimum, it would have included a trip to the chapel at Lincoln's Inn (which was constructed while Donne was, essentially, a law school chaplain); a tour of St Paul's Cathedral, where Donne was dean -- albeit in the former building -- and a chance to shudder at the ghastly statue; a pop into St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, where Donne held the benefice and which, coincidentally enough, is now used by the Romanian Orthodox community. We might have ferreted out his birthplace and a few other handy landmarks as well. They're all close to each other, and, alone, could have been visited in a long afternoon. We were not, however, alone.

Still, thanks to the utterly unmerited grace of Mother A., not to mention an episode of remarkably good behavior on the part of Little A., we were able to snake past the Occupy St. Paul's tent camp and take part in choral Evensong. Anglophiles get weepy-eyed about this, and more than a little pretentious. It isn't all that much, when you come down to it: just Vespers, out of the BCP, albeit sung very nicely indeed and in a strikingly beautiful church. (If one likes Baroque.)

But here's the thing: when you're still groggy from the wee-hours flight, when your intestines have been in full revolt and your mood is foul; when you have been rushing around in the cold, arguing with your loved ones; when the world seems like a nasty place, where the rich get richer and the poor get to sleep out in the rain -- when, in short, you are face to face with the brokenness of all humanity, especially your own -- then there is nothing much better than Vespers. There is nothing much better than to hear the words of hope, and to sing the songs of Zion; nothing much better than to sit with those you love and pray Cranmer's Collect for Peace, asking for precisely that peace which the world cannot give.

The Noise of a Fly

2011-12-02T14:22:00.002-05:00

John Donne was raised since infancy in a world of intense religiosity. He came from a family of saints and martyrs, and himself wound up the dean of London's cathedral and among the best-known preachers of his age. His Meditations alone stand among history's most thought-provoking considerations of life, death and prayer. Even during his supposedly rakish youth -- the rakishness of which is often wildly overstated -- Donne was a serious lay student of theology, at one point penning a mock-legal brief on the moral questions around suicide.

We may take it for granted that he prayed often and fervently (and, anyone acquainted with his prose may well suspect, in Latin as often as English).

Yet it seems that Donne, like most of the rest of us, found prayer difficult and demanding. He once preached:

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

Can I get an Amen?

That's from Donne's sermon at the funeral of Sir William Cockayne, in 1626. We still remember the moment we first read it, and the shock of recognizing our own distractable nature in the prayer-life of ... well, of our hero. And that was when we realized that it wasn't so much our own distractable nature as human nature.

Odd Hours

2011-11-30T11:17:00.007-05:00

After years of eye-straining work, today Father A. hit the "print" key on his Latin-English prayer book. Here's what the dust-jacket will look like.

For some readers, this will strike a sentimental note. It harks back to the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal -- and specifically to the nice leather-bound edition that Grandpa Anonymous used to use. (Except, of course, that his didn't have any Latin. An oversight on the part of Luther D. Reed, no doubt.)

There is a lot of SBH genetic material in this book, most of it inherited from the Common Service Book. The Matins and Vespers services use the CSB/SBH structure. The difference is that, in the old hymnals, you had to flip pages to find the seasonal propers. Here, each season's office is printed along with with its versicles, responsories, psalm antiphons and suggested hymns.

But there's more inside than just the SBH, or for that matter just Lutheranism. For one thing, there is a Compline service, which shares elements of the Lutheran Book of Worship and the modern Roman Catholic rite, although rendered in old-fashioned language. For another, very few Lutheran prayer books contain the Angelus or the Marian antiphons. Most of the hymns were translated by Anglican poets, and in general it is likely that Anglican readers will feel very ... very ... comfortable with this book.

It appears that the book, a hymnal-sized hardcover with a decent cloth binding, is going to sell for $38.95 from Amazon. (And, even at that, we make about a buck on each copy). It will come in closer to $28 if you buy direct from Lulu.

"Ugly Ritual is Bad Religion"

2011-11-30T02:58:00.003-05:00

That's the title of a good piece by Rod Dreher, at Real Clear Religion. The name is self-explanatory; what we especially like is that, after the customary nods to liturgical Latin and orthodox otherwordliness, he then makes his case most strongly with a heartfelt story about small-town Methodism.

Because -- and this is important -- every community has its rituals. And those rituals matter.

Dreher is not, by any means, our favorite opinionator of the day. But this essay is worth reading and thinking about.

Safeway's War On Families Continues ...

2011-11-29T02:44:00.003-05:00

... in Everett, Washington, where a security guard detained a 4-year-old girl for eating some dried fruit from a bag, and then putting it back on the shelf. (We know: Ick, right? But the kid's dad didn't notice.)

The guard "told the father that the girl could face criminal charges" -- she's four, mind you -- then took her to a room and made her sign a piece of paper"acknowledging she wasn't allowed to enter any Safeway stores." We're impressed that she could sign her own name, because -- did we mention this? -- she's four years old.

All this follows the Honolulu incident, in which parents were arrested and temporarily lost custody of their preschooler after the same sort of innocent mistake.

The Safeway chain announced that it had fired the guard in Everett, saying it was "appalled" by his behavior, and was going to re-examine its policies. Pretty much what they said after the Honolulu incident, which gives it a less-than-convincing sound.

The supermarket industry is reasonably competitive; unless you're in a very small town, there are almost always other stores to patronize. If there were a Safeway within a thousand miles of us right now, we would have already abandoned it in favor of KrogersShop-RitePriceChopperA&P or whatever. The funny thing is that what the stores are competing for, by and large, is business from families with children. So if Safeway wants to delay its inevitable swirling around the drain, it really needs to start thinking about ways to attract the parents of small children. Here's a hint: more "How can we help you," and less over-the-top bullying.

Stay Awake!

2011-11-24T03:39:00.003-05:00

So says Jesus in the lesson for Sunday.

While we are tempted to drag in a sermon by St Augustine (we have a great one on staying up late, which he preached at the Easter Vigil), it occurs to us that readers may grow tired our endless harping on Augustine.

So how about Honore de Balzac? The French novelist is said to have risen from bed around midnight, and begun writing -- and to have continued writing for ten, fifteen, or many more hours. Needless to say, he had a little help.

We're talking about coffee here. Balzac drank prodigious amounts of the stuff; we remember hearing ten or fifteen cups in a day, the sort of quantities that could kill a racehorse. And in a wonderful essay called The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee, he wrote about his poison of choice. He understood (as many coffee drinkers don't) that you need to back off now and then:

Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera."

But Balzac had learned to extend coffee's effect over time, and he reveals his system:

For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.

However, writing novels -- not NanoWriMo quickies, mind you, but the sprawling epics of the nineteenth century -- takes a bit longer than this. And so Balzac says:

I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae.

The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.

From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

Mind you, a friend who tried this method took to his bed, believing himself poisoned. Balzac suggests that the poor fellow "had a stomach of papier-mache."

Perhaps, now that we think about it, this wasn't quite what the Lord had in mind. And yet, with the sermon deadline bearing down on us and that rassum-frassum breviary still not prepared for the printer, we find ourselves eyeballing the little bag of beans in the freezer, and wondering ....

Octopi Wall Street!

2011-11-23T07:18:00.006-05:00

That was one i09 reader's comment on this astonishing piece of video:

Yes, that's right: a walking octopus. An octopus that hauls its gelatinous body out of the water, crawls across the land, drops a crab off with some onlookers (at 2:08), and then flops back into the drink.

We knew they were clever creatures, easily the smartest of the invertebrates -- apart from an occasional bishop -- but we had no idea they could walk. Frankly, we find the idea disturbing.

A couple of other i09 readers made Cthulhu jokes, which were inevitable, but another told an absolutely freaky story about a science teacher who thought kids were stealing fish from his tanks. So he set up a camera, which filmed the nocturnal shenanigans of an octopus. This monster of the deep was able to squeeze itself through a quarter-sized hole, crawl along a counter, climb into another tank, eat a resident, and then escape back the way it had come -- covering its tracks.

We at the Egg, for one, welcome our cephalopod overlords.

Beware the Apple Tree!

2011-11-23T05:18:00.007-05:00

This time of year -- when we call upon God to rend the heavens, and so forth -- preachers may be tempted to talk about Martin Luther and the apple tree. Our suggestion: don't. Or do so only in the most guarded terms.

You have all heard, over and over, the remark attributed to Uncle Marty: If I knew that the world would end tomorrow, I should still plant my apple tree. Or variations thereof.

There are two questions for a preacher tempted by this remark: (1) is it genuine; and (2) does it reflect Luther's own eschatology?

The first answer appears to be no. Such is the conclusion of Martin Schloemann, in Luthers Apfelbaumchen? Ein kapital deutscher Mentalitats-geschichte seit dem zweiten Welt-krieg (1975; repr. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994). We gather that Scholoemann can trace the remark only back to 1944.

The second answer is probably fodder for a graduate seminar, rather than a Sunday sermon. Frederick Gaiser, in a 2005 Word & World editorial (here, if you have ATLA access) says that Schloemann's own answer is no, if the remark is to argue for a life focused on the present reality without concern for the last days, and yes -- or at least maybe -- if it is used to talk about "creaturely service [to] neighbor and world" grounded in an eschatological context. (Gaiser doesn't mention it, but the appropriation of the remark to support environmental initiatives is opportunistic and arbitrary -- and by the way, Luther did have some truly interesting things to say about the degradation of German farmland.)

But be warned: Schloemann found the misattribution of the remark suspicious, not merely because it doesn't necessarily reflect Luther's thought, but also because it reflects "the slippery malleability of the 'Luther'" whose imprimatur people seek to stick on the cause of the moment. If there are any two words that fail to describe Luther, they are slippery and malleable.

In a somewhat confusing essay on tracing suspect quotations, Yoel Natan suggests that this one may have evolved from a Jewish source:

[Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai] used to say: ‘If there were a plant in your hand and they should say to you, ‘Look, the Messiah is here!’ Go and plant your plant, and after that go forth to receive him’ (‘Abot R. Nat. B 31; quoted from John T. Carroll et al. The Return of Jesus in Early Christianity. Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 2000, pp. 180-181)

So if, having considered questions (1) and (2), a preacher goes on to ask (3), "What if this remark reflects my own eschatological ideas, which I want to share in a convenient form with the faithful?" it seems to us that there are two good answers. Either attribute it to Yochanan ben Zakkai, or just say it yourself.

On the Sidebar

2011-11-22T09:42:00.002-05:00

The Egg's Dept. of Scrupulous Reading has recently recommended some changes to the blogroll posted to your right. The suggestions have worked their way through the Committee on Resisting Change, and been grudgingly approved. Let us draw them to your attention:

Liturgy Geek is smart, and kind, and who can resist the name of her blog? Not us, that's for darn sure.
MadPriest, the vicar of St Laika's, snuck up on us. The more we read, the more we like. So we have started reading more. Despite an unfortunate love of capital letters, his frequently-updated blog is written with vigor and wit. Really, he had us with his utterly sexist post about an improved process for selecting bishops.
Restenergy Blog is Mark Christianson's project, and includes many of his wonderful photographs. We are dumbstruck by his recent pics from Bad Wimpfen, and hope that he will someday give the fine churches of Claudiopolis Transilvaniae the treatment they deserve.
Halden Doerge's Inhabitatio Dei is new to us. We stumbled over it, as one generally does on the internet, looking for something else. No idea what, but we liked his blog better. He doesn't post often, but his (rather serious) essays seem educated and thoughtful.

We have also, and with deep regret, dropped two blogs from the list:

Father Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes is still updated, occasionally, but for whatever reason the updates do not appear on our blogroll. Perhaps, given his difficult situation, the author has adjusted the settings to create a bit more privacy. We continue to pray for John Hunwicke, and specifically that the leaders of the church body to which he is newly attached will recognize the depth, sincerity and vitality of his priestly vocation.

And Pr. Sophie's Lutheran (True) Confessions, which once covered the world of Lutheran LGBT matters with such love and humor, was last updated in August, 2010. (Although the Twitter feed remains active.) We don't know who Sophie is, or whence came the decision to discontinue. Perhaps after CWA 2009, the battle seemed won, or perhaps -- as happens so often in the world of blogging -- life offline gained momentum. Whatever the reason, we hope that Sophie is safe and happy.

Adveniat Tempus Adventus

2011-11-22T06:03:00.003-05:00

Like the proverbial month of March, Advent arrives like a lion and leaves like a lamb. It comes with talk of a fire kindled in the brushwood, and the stars falling from heaven; it leaves with an angel announcing new life to a fearless girl. A season could do worse for itself.

Lion-like, Advent comes roaring in with its annual debates and decisions. The one we care about these days is "Blue versus Purple"; the one about which don't care much anymore is "Can We Sing Christmas Songs."

The first question, about liturgical color, is meaningless on its surface. What possible difference could it make whether the paraments and stoles and whatnot are the violet customary in the Roman rite or the indigo purportedly found in a few northern rites? The answer, of course, is none; liturgical colors are as utterly adiaphoristic as it is possible to be.

And yet ... Whether with or without precedent, dark blue has been taken up by American churches in the past few decades, and called "the color of hope." This is surely a fair assignment; hope is a virtue of which Advent speaks conspicuously, whether in its lion-weeks or its lamb-weeks. Why should it not have its own color?

On the other hand, consider the role of Advent in the church's year. Historically, it was a late development; as the Christmas-to-Epiphany cycle emerged as a mirror image of Easter -- "Pasch in winter," it is sometimes called -- so eventually Advent was invented as an invernal "St. Martin's Lent." It was, and among the Orthodox its equivalent remains, a fast. It was likewise a time of penitence, of self-scrutiny and confession. Logically, as Christmas shares its color with Easter, while retaining a distinct character, so Advent shared its color with Lent.

It seems possible that, by changing the color of Advent, churches may also change its character. The analogy to Lent is broken, or at least vitiated. The question churches need to ask themselves is whether this is a good thing or a bad one. Some may celebrate a step away from a religion of guilt and gloom -- but others may regret the lost opportunity to offer discipline and self-restraint in the season of endless office parties and shopping binges.

We have swung both ways over the years, but lately we lean toward the latter. A violet Advent seems more deeply countercultural, and therefore more deeply useful.

As for songs, well, how much rhetorical blood has been spilt over the question of whether a few Christmas carols sung in early December will be an offense to Almighty God? Pastors struggle both with parishioners and consciences; music directors seem to divide down the middle, with Dr. Purist Noseintheair snarling at the populist leniency of Ms. Suzie Pedalpumper.

It makes us want to jump up and down shouting, "Hey, guys! You know they're only songs, right?" Songs are just as adiaphoristic as colors -- or for that matter seasons -- and yet for some reason they seem to draw many times the acrimony.

Once upon a time, in our idealistic youth, we sided with Dr. Noseintheair. No matter how the choir begged and the children cried, there would be no Christmas songs before Christmas! Father A. stood like St John the Baptist, fire in his eyes, decrying the generation of liturgical vipers. Frankly, we still prefer to hold Christmas off until Christmas; if nothing else, we like the way it builds suspense, like ketchup slowly working its way down the neck of a bottle. We compare it to such antepaschal customs as fasting, or veiling the crucifix, or omitting the Alleluia.

But here's the thing: Christmas songs are, by and large, about the Incarnation. And the Church is always celebrating the Incarnation, because (with the Resurrection) that's the center of the Church's very being -- the object of every sermon and every sacrament, the sine qua non of Christianity as a religion. To set them aside is, at least arguably, to risk setting aside the center of the faith in favor of its marginalia. We might as well spend Holy Week trying to forget the Resurrection (which, of course, some liturgical practices nearly do).

So if the question is: Can we sing Christmas songs during Advent?, we at the Egg are inclined to answer, with a heavy sigh, Yes, provided you would also sing them in Lent, or in mid-summer. Which, for many of the most beloved hymns, you would, could and maybe even should.

Historic Bibles Online

2011-11-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

A few months ago, scrounging the net for a particular verse reading in the Coverdale Psalter -- tricky to find, if you care about spelling and punctuation -- we stumbled over something truly remarkable: a website featuring page-by-page photo-reproductions of historic Bibles.

Truly, friends, we live in astonishing times. A poor parish priest can sit in his study and flip pages through the first English New Testament, from 1390 -- as well as Erasmus' diglot, Luther's 1522 NT and his 1530 Bible, and plenty more. These are not easy books to find, even in reproduction. (And yes, the site is run by a company which does sell reproductions of historic Bibles, but even those ain't cheap. We've checked).

This is incredibly cool, at least for readers with an interest in incunabula, typography, and so forth. It's not perfect, of course. For example, the most important part of the Geneva Bible was its extensive annotation, which was sufficiently antiepiscopal and anitmonarchical to require a more C-of-E-friendly translation, duly commissioned by King James I. Well, the Geneva Bible is there, all right, but we couldn't zoom in close enough to read the notes as easily as we'd like. No problem on a bigger monitor, we expect. Also, the page includes Foxe's Book of Martyrs but not the Douay Bible. Showing bias much, guys?

Still, it's a striking site, and we'll click back often.

It's called Bibles-Online.net. The commercial site has the unhumble monicker Great-Site.com. And yet, for all our Lutheran disdain for self-promotion, we have to say that this is a pretty great site.

Shakespeare and the Albino Monks

2011-11-21T03:35:00.005-05:00

A few nights back, Father A. slipped out to his local multiplex to see the film Anonymous. The beautiful Mother A. declined to accompany him, claiming that she would be too distracted by his growls, grimaces and muttered cursing. She is a wise woman.

By now, you have read the reviews, and know that Anonymous is a picture about the supposed conspiracy to pass off the illiterate son of a rural tradesman as the author of plays and sonnets which, it is assumed, could only have been written by a person of noble breeding and top-notch education. You surely realize as well that this assumption is malarkey. Shakespeare came from the rising middle class, and attended a grammar school with a curriculum that would put some modern American colleges to shame. Some of his fellow playwrights -- Marlowe and Jonson -- made much more strenuous efforts to show off their formal education. The idea that only a nobleman could have written Shakespeare's plays is baseless snobbery; the idea that a nobleman would have is dubious in the extreme.

The whole thing is a bit Da Vinci Code-esque. One half expects the conspiracy to be revealed by a Harvard "symbologist" pursued by albino monks.

Here's a nice Smithsonian piece which gets at the basic problem: we don't a lot of documentary evidence about the life of Shakespeare. To people accustomed to having their websurfing histories and credit-card reports meticulously processed by computers and sold to marketing departments, this sounds suspicious. No data trail? The man must not have existed! In fact, as the Smithsonian says,

We know as much about Shakespeare as we know about most of his contemporaries–Ben Jonson, for instance, remains such a cipher that we can’t be sure where he was born, to whom, or even exactly when. “The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position at that time,” says David Thomas of Britain’s National Archives. “It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him.”

In the absence of evidence, people are prone to make up stories. It is sweet, but also a little annoying.

All that said, Anonymous wasn't as bad as it might have been. The CGI sets are pretty, even though they seem to have been generated in black-and-white. There are a few bits of good acting, especially Rhys Ifans (the Earl of Oxford) and the daughter-mother team of Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (both as Elizabeth I). Sadly, Richardson is party to the most comically bad instance of mock-fellatio ever filmed, but one can only blame Roland Emmerich for this. The supposed "history" presented in the film is utterly bogus, but it does at least succeed in giving a sense of the endless succession of spies, plotters and bullies that constituted the great and good of Renaissance England.

Sadly, for a film about a writer of so many sparkling lines, the dialogue is tepid. The most compelling scene in Anonymous, by far, is Henry V's "ye band of brothers," played straight -- and every line save one is by Shakespeare.

But let's get back to the bogus history. The idea that Shakespeare did not write his own works emerged in the 19th century. Candidates for the "real" Shakespeare abound; the classic is probably Sir Francis Bacon, whom we had always assumed was chosen because he is the only other Elizabethan literary figure whose name is recognized by the average non-English-major. In fact, as a moment on Google reveals, the "Bacon" hypothesis was first put forward by a writer named Delia Bacon. What a ... coincidence.

Albino monks aside, there is in fact a funny theological twist to the story of the Shakespeare conspiracy. Readers surely know that in 1835, David Strauss published his Das Leben Jesu, which marked the beginning of the interminable "quest of the historical Jesus." One of the early responses to Strauss was Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, who in 1848 published a book called Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare, Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible. He was making fun of Strauss, mind you -- Schmucker knew perfectly well that Shakespeare had written his own works, just as he knew that Jesus had been Jesus. But he inadvertently gave ammunition to the crazy people.

(Aside to fellow Lutherans: Yes, this guy was the son of that Samuel Schmucker. The one we all hiss and boo like a stage villain. It is good to remember that by the standards of his own day, Schmucker pere was a confessional conservative, and that both his sons -- the other is the great Beale Melanchthon Schmucker -- turned out okay.)

The Smithsonian blog post linked above highlights one of the wee bits of Shakespearean data exhaust that scholars have preferred to overlook. Years ago, the Canadian scholar Leslie Hotson dug up a "surety of peace" -- something like an order of protection -- in which Shakespeare was named as part of a group that had made threats against the life of one William Wayte. A very close reading places Shakespeare in the middle of the London underworld, associated with pimps and strong-arm men. A "gangster," it calls him. Yes -- and who better to have written about Caesar's Rome and Macbeth's Scotland?

Occupy Bulevardul 21 Decembrie 1989?

2011-11-16T03:16:00.002-05:00

We haven't had much -- anything -- to say about the movement to "occupy" civic spaces around the United States. In a nutshell, here's why:

Ever since the Egg relocated its production facility overseas, it has been a little hard to keep up with life back home. We still know the obvious things -- the name of the president and six Supreme Court justices; that Breaking Dawn is in the theaters now -- but we're fuzzy on the nuances. (What's a Glee? Who played in the World Series?) The upshot is that we don't really know what's going on, either at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, in Oakland, or at the seemingly hundreds of other franchises nationwide and in Canada.

Some of our muzziness reflects the deliberate muzziness of the protesters themselves. To be sure, income inequality is at the heart of the matter -- and inequality is made even more unequal when unemployment rates are so frighteningly high. (An old friend, a paralegal with many years of experience, was just laid off from her job at a foreclosure firm. Nobody is safe!)

But a complaint is not a prescription. There's no OWS platform as simple as, say, "America out of Viet Nam" or "End Apartheid Now." One gathers that this is the point; the movement has been purposefully decentralized and multifarious, a sort of big tent enclosing many shades of disenchantment.

Fr. William of the Beach has forwarded us several fine home videos of the scene in Manhattan, the most recent of which is posted below. Both the protesters and the police seem well-enough-behaved. (This is what we love about America, by the way. Cuz it ain't that way everywhere.)

But did you see the placards? A lot of somewhat general insistence upon liberty (which makes sense, when the protesters have been required to vacate the park, thus endangering their freedoms of speech and assembly), coupled with agitation around schools, the public library, and ... hormone replacement therapy?

As we said, multifarious. Hard to pin down.

Anyway, it all has us thinking about the place where we live. Romania has the fastest internet download speeds in Europe, but only about half the population has indoor plumbing. Economic inequality here is far more extreme than in the US. Unemployment is lower than the US, at least on paper -- but many "employed" people can't collect their paychecks, which would be pathetically small even if they could. The government is widely held to be both irresponsible and incompetent; the mayor of our own city was taken to jail last week, where he is awaiting trial on corruption charges. As for civil liberties, citizens of our own age and older were effectively raised without them, during the grim, repressive days of Nicolae Ceaucescu.

In 1989, there was a revolution. It wasn't the bloodiest revolution in history -- more like Tunisia than Syria, at the moment -- but it was bloody enough. People were shot down in the street. Flushed with optimism, people imagined that their world would change overnight. The name of our main street was changed from Lenin to the date date of the uprising. The world seemed, briefly, full of hope. And, twenty-one years on, things are certainly far better than they were; yet many of the promises remain unfulfilled. Frankly, a lot of the same people still hold power, either economic or political -- and a lot of the same people are still poor and powerless.

All this suggests to us that, for all the organizational wisdom that keeps the OWS movement free-form and many-headed, it must eventually lead to something more pointed if it is to have a lasting effect. It will need to produce policies and leaders; it will need to actively transform a broken political system, rather than settling for the observation that it is broken. Such things are possible, but they are very difficult, and comparatively rare.

Christ is Coming; Say Your Prayers

2011-11-11T07:25:00.008-05:00

Readers have surely noticed that this is the week when the lectionary takes its annual turn toward the Apocalypse. Zephaniah tells us that, when God comes, "it will be a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, of wasteness and desolation, of darkness and gloom." St Paul mutters ominously about thieves in the night.

In other words, it is pre-Advent, the weeks during which the Church refreshes itself with some old-time fire and brimstone, a bracing reminder that the Day of the Lord isn't all about ponies and rainbows.

And -- watch this segue, friends, because it's going to be crass -- what better time to deepen your prayer life by buying Fr. A.'s new book?

The book in question is called Odd Hours. It's a Latin-English breviary -- or, technically, a diurnal -- with forms of Matins and Vespers for the different seasons of the church year. Compline, Suffrages and some of the Small Catechism prayers make an appearance as well. There's a complete Psalter, using (get this!) the Coverdale translation in its original spelling. Because, really, what do Protestants need more than a book of Latin prayers, translated into obsolete, archaic, and nearly unreadable English?

We'll say a lot more about Odd Hours in the next few weeks. We don't really expect to take the world by storm with this thing, but we do think there may be a few people who enjoy it. We think of the book as a work of "outsider art," which is the term dealers use these days for the "machines" and "castles" that crazy old men make in their basements out of tin cans.

Like a crazy man in the basement, Father A. didn't actually make any of the tin cans. He's been collecting them from other sources -- SBH, Vulgate, and lots of Internet Archive books -- and stacking them up in funny ways.

And like that same crazy man in the basement, Father A. has been working on this thing for many years, with a monomaniacal frenzy that has left his baby undiapered, his wife in despair, and his blog un-updated. It eventually drove him to exile in a windswept Carpathian stronghold. Having destroyed his family and his friendships, the monstrous project now in its final stages. Soon enough, you should be able to purchase a copy on Amazon (or, if that jacks up the price unreasonably, from the print-on-demand service Lulu.com). It will sell roughly for cost, but we aren't sure what that will be. We had hoped to have it available as a Christmas gift for the lunatic in your ecclesiastical attic, but it seems unlikely that we'll make the deadlines. Turns out Mother A. expects us to work between now and Christmas.

Until then, however, you can read -- and download, and pray -- Matins and Vespers for Advent, absolutely free, just by clicking here. We hope you will.

Twilight of the American Idols

2011-11-10T06:06:00.005-05:00

A couple of balloons got deflated recently:

Idol #1: Rick Perry is no longer a viable candidate for the Republican nomination. He made a fool of himself in the most recent debate, struggling to remember even his canned threat against the Department of Energy. Afterward, Perry himself remarked that "It's a good a thing I was wearing my boots, because I really stepped in it." The guy is clearly not ready for prime time.

Since Perry is sitting on a big old pot of money, it is unlikely that he will slink away in defeat. It is likely that he will stay in the race, for all the usual ego-and-2016 reasons. If you ask Herman Cain, Perry has been trying to destroy him out of sheer meanness, and such a thing is not impossible. The real question is whether Perry's schadenfreude will extend to the destruction, attempted or complete, of Mitt Romney.

Idol #2: Joe Paterno. Needless to say, this is far more important than the mere presidency of the United States -- it's football. Paterno, who is 84 and probably should have retired years ago, was fired by Penn State for failing to take sufficient action when one of his assistant coaches was discovered raping a 10-year-old boy in the locker room.

The story is appalling on every possible level. Over 15 years, assistant coach Jerry Sandusky serially molested young boys, often using the Penn State athletic facilities to do so. He was observed doing this on several occasions, and by several people.

And let's be clear, this isn't a "sex scandal" in the same way that Bill Clinton's in-office adultery or Newt Gingrich's serial infidelity are. This goes well beyond even Herman Cain's alleged groping of an employee. Sandusky is accused of at least two counts of rape, a crime of violence -- in his case, against children. And to be sure, there is an element of scapegoating here; Paterno is only one of the many links in a chain or irresponsibility. After all, he reported the allegation to the administration, thereby doing the bare minimum to salve his conscience.

But as one of our friends, himself a professional athlete, observed this morning, Paterno -- a living legend so legendary that even Fr. A. has heard of him -- was in many ways superior to the administration at Penn State. For years, he has run his program like a medieval prince. If he had wanted Sandusky gone, the guy would have been gone in a heartbeat; if he had said a word, Sandusky would have been in prison. So why didn't he?

The Paterno case begs comparison to the scandals within the Roman Catholic Church. Paterno does indeed sound like one of those bishops who took little or no action against the reported abusers on their team. Paterno is also one of those sports figures who has often pontificated on "values." If anything, though, a coach of Paterno's stature has more power than the average bishop.

The Church's War on Filthy Lucre

2011-11-05T10:21:00.005-04:00

John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, is the other highest-ranking cleric in the C of E. He is sometimes presented as a more reliable friend to theological conservatives than the brilliant but much-distracted Archbishop of Canterbury. This makes his piece in today's Yorkshire Post especially interesting, since he lashes out at the ultra-wealthy plutocrats who are so often admired by political conservatives.

Sentamu expresses his annoyance with the fact that FTSE 100 CEOs received average pay increases of nearly 50% last year, while the Western economy was in freefall. He argues that this is both illogical and socially destructive:

Top pay has been found to bear little or no relation to company performance, but even if it did, isn’t the performance of a company dependent on the work and well-being of all its staff?
Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are that they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive.

No argument, but nothing new, either. We are more interested by Sentamu's prescription for change, which is that society should, basically, stop honoring the rich. Encourage (but don't require) people to make public the amount of tax they pay; don't give the Queen's Award to Industry to CEOs so much as to whole companies, and especially don't give it to people who are already rich.

On their face, these suggestions are laughably weak tea, but they move toward an important idea. Prestige, social status, "cool" -- these are all names for the same basic commodity, and it is extremely valuable. Prestige ranks with sex and money as one of the great motivators of human activity. Now, in life as we know, it these things are often companions; people with one have easier access to the other two. But there are exceptions. At least early in the game of life, the cool kid with no money has a better shot at the pretty girl than the well-off jerk.

So what if being rich weren't cool? That's what Sentamu seems to be proposing here. What if honor were not publicly held to accrue to wealth, but rather to, say, activities that improve society? It's utopian, but it could happen. As he observes, it wasn't that long ago that "honor" among the English (and French, and Italian) aristocracy meant killing each other in duels.

Of course, honor in society isn't all about wealth. Bill Gates may be richer than Steve Jobs ever was, but until he started his Foundation, there was zero chance he could ever be as cool. But let's be serious: each of these guys enjoys a social status unimaginable even to some otherwise remarkable people -- most Nobel prizewinners, for example, or virtually any serious artist. or, and this is closer to Sentamu's point, the people who actually do the science, engineering and labor that make Microsoft and Apple what they are.

Sentamu's ideas don't seem all that well thought through, but we think he's onto something.

There is nothing new about Christianity taking the side of the poor against the rich -- you are preaching on the Beatitudes this Sunday, aren't you? Take a look at the Anglo-Catholic Socialism website linked on the sidebar for another reminder, or remember that the cause of Archbishop Romero is still working its way through the Congregation.

And yet Archbishop Sentamu's essay follows by only two weeks a statement on global finance by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace which has managed to offend many of the right people. (George Weigel dismissed it as "rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.") While we haven't had a chance to read the statement yet, we gather that it's a bit confused. Still, strong newsmaking public signs of what Christians know but other people forget -- the Church's concern for the poor -- are always welcome.

Down With Skool

2011-11-05T07:41:00.004-04:00

(With gratitude to Nigel Molesworth).

A college education in the United States may very well be a colossal waste of money and education. Evidence has been mounting for years that college is overpriced. It doesn't actually prepare most people for, you know, work. Drop-out rates are high, and whether students finish a degree or not, they are left to begin adult life with crippling debt. And don't get us started on graduate school.

There's a review essay by Anthony Grafton at the NYRB, and it's sobering stuff, albeit familiar. Grafton is critical of some recent books, especial those which go after professors, and which seem to fall short of particulars, but he signs on to the general picture. Today's students study impossibly few hours; they read little, care less, and appear to gain no long-term benefit, financial or otherwise. Universities (Rutgers is mentioned in particular) starve their academic departments to feed the unprofitable pursuit of football glory.

Grafton is especially impressed by a test called the College Learning Assessment, which seeks to measure student progress -- of which it finds little:

The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

(Grafton does not mention one factor that may deter professors from assigning as many term papers as they once did. Our own brief college teaching experience shocked us by revealing how thoroughly the Internet has abetted the age-old instinct to plagiarize, so thoroughly that students of seemingly reasonable intelligence seemed unable to distinguish between "writing" and "pasting." Surely few professors want to set up shop as full-time investigators of academic criminality.)

Notably, Grafton makes an exception -- or rather, the data make an exception -- for the liberal arts:

Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Just as we would have expected. In our day, by gum, students read books and wrote papers, mostly about Shakespeare and Wittgenstein. (Or was it von Kleist and Rembrandt? After all these years, we sort of forget).

Mind you, the CLA measures things like critical thinking, and many a liberal arts graduate has had time to think critically about, say, the meaning of the unemployment line.

Used and Abused

2011-11-03T06:17:00.006-04:00

This looks very interesting: Robert Jenson has published a little book called Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse. Steve Wright gives it a quick review at Faith & Theology.

Regular readers know that the abuse of slogans (and logia) is one of the Egg's interests, and stimulates our occasional efforts to find sources and contexts for the sort of sayings that people tend to take for granted. (Fr. A.'s first published work of scholarship was, in fact, an exploration of the the words lex orandi, lex credendi. Hint: nobody uses them -- or even quotes them -- rightly.)

Wright gives few examples of the slogans addressed in Jenson's book. He mentions sola Scriptura and the law/gospel distinction. We wonder whether, and hope sincerely that, they also include sola fide, sinning boldly, and "sacrifice," or rather the rejection thereof.

Two matters give us pause. First, Wright says that Jenson "takes almost every effort afforded him to disagree with Melanchthon." Disagreement with Melanchthon has been a common enough pastime among Lutherans from the very beginning, but we are inclined to consider it an unhealthy one -- more like smoking than playing baseball.

It seems increasingly clear to us that Melanchthon is the essential Reformation theologian, the vital and indispensable link connecting the many different ideas and approaches that were then in play. It is Melanchthon the classicist who prevents Luther's evangelical insights from coming unmoored from patristic tradition; it is Melanchthon the ecumenist who, so long as he can, keeps the Reformation of Germany in communication with those of Switzerland and England. And yes, it is Melanchthon the much-abused "pussyfooter," the "synergist," even the author of the Interims, who offered the best hope that the Reformation had of being what it always claimed, a reform movement within a united church.

And second, we note that the book is published by ALPB, as was Jenson's catechism a few years back. Nothing wrong with that, but we do wonder why one of the three or four best American theologians is publishing with such a very small house. We hope it is because he chooses to.

The Least Safe Way

2011-11-01T17:43:00.004-04:00

Old Father A. has never actually shopped at a Safeway supermarket. Now it appears he never will.

Last week, a former USAF staff sergeant and her husband moved from California to Honolulu. They went for a walk, got lost, and stopped into a supermarket to buy some food -- and eat a sandwich, planning to scan the wrapper at the checkout counter. (She's 30 weeks pregnant, so you can imagine how hungry a getting-lost-in-your-new-neighborhood walk made her). Although they bought $50 worth of groceries, they forgot to scan the wrapper, and so failed to pay for the sandwich.

So, when the security guard dragged them away, they were pretty embarrassed, and offered to pay for the sandwich. But it seems that Safeway's policy wouldn't let them do that. Do you know what Safeway's policy required the store to do?

Have the couple arrested. And put in jail. And have their 2-year old daughter taken away by Child Protective Services.

Obviously, Safeway supermarkets are going to fold all over the country, because from now on nobody in his or her right mind will ever shop at one. But the story (here, here, here) does raise another question: what sort of half-wit police officers do they hire in Honolulu? Because it is one thing for some lardass mall cop and his pimple-faced management trainee boss to follow this policy; it is another thing for the actual police to make it happen.

Oh. What? There -- Joys!

2011-11-01T03:30:00.003-04:00

Here in South-East Central Europe, people are heading to the cemeteries today, to place candles by the graves of the faithful departed. Many American Christians will never know that All Saints Day has come and gone; many others will only celebrate it next Sunday.

And don't get us started on All Souls Day, a day once reserved for the not-so-faithful departed. If you ask us, it was the more realistic of the two November holy days. The general Protestant disdain for Purgatory pretty much killed that one, although ... Tract XC, anybody?

Anyway. Your congregation will probably sing For All the Saints; almost everybody does, and well they might. Great freakin' hymn. But please do consider this gem, by Peter Abelard:

O quanta, qualia sunt illa sabbata

quae semper celebrat superna curia.

quae fessis requies, quae merces fortibus,

cum erit omnia Deus in omnibus.

quis rex, quae curia, quale palatium,

quae pax, quae requies, quod illud gaudium,

huius participes exponant gloriam,

si quantum sentiunt, possint exprimere.

vere Ierusalem est illa civitas,

cuius pax iugis est, summa iucunditas,

ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,

nec desiderio minus est praemium.

illic molestiis finitis omnibus

securi cantica Sion cantibimus,

et iuges gratias de donis gratiae

beata referet plebs tibi, Domine.

Illic ex sabbato succedet sabbatum,

perpes laetitia sabbatizantium,

nec ineffabiles cessabunt iubili,

quos decantabimus et nos et angeli.

Nostrum est interim mentem erigere

et totis patriam votis appetere,

et ad Ierusalem a Babylonia

post longa regredi tandem exilia.

Perenni Domino perpes sit gloria,

ex quo sunt, per quem sunt, in quo sunt omnia;

ex quo sunt, Pater est; per quem sunt, Filius;

in quo sunt, Patris et Filii Spiritus.

Here is John Mason Neale's translation:

O what their joy and their glory must be,

those endless Sabbaths the blessèd ones see;

crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest:

God shall be All, and in all ever blest.

What are the Monarch, his court and his throne?

What are the peace and the joy that they own?

O that the blest ones, who in it have share,

all that they feel could as fully declare!

Truly, "Jerusalem" name we that shore,

city of peace that brings joy evermore;

wish and fulfillment are not severed there,

nor do things prayed for come short of the prayer.

There, where no troubles distraction can bring,

we the sweet anthems of Zion shall sing;

while for thy grace, Lord, their voices of praise

thy blessèd people eternally raise.

Now, in the meantime, with hearts raised on high,

we for that country must yearn and must sigh,

seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,

through our long exile on Babylon's strand.

Low before him with our praises we fall,

of whom and in whom and through whom are all;

of whom, the Father; and in whom, the Son;

and through whom, the Spirit, with them ever One.

It is one of Neale's best efforts, although he apparently did not bother to translate stanza 5, illic ex sabbato, etc. (Basically, it says that there where sabbath follows sabbath forever, saints will forever celebrate the Sabbath, singing our joyful songs alongside the angels.)

One thing to observe is that "O quanta qualia" doesn't mean "joy and glory." It is a more subtle expression, something on the order of of "O, how many and of what sort." Also, the "blessed ones" are actually described as "the supernal court," matching the expression in the next stanza.

Sadly, the thing most to be noted is that Lutherans have long been deprived of so much from this hymn. The LBW includes only 4 (altered) stanzas, so the wonderful rhetorical questions of st. 2 are gone, as is the comparison of life on earth to the Babylonian exile. But all that pales before the fact that ELW doesn't include the hymn at all.

Still, here are the words, for anybody who wants them. They're worth singing today.

Living, Dying and Being Damned

2011-10-29T09:45:00.003-04:00

Many remarks by Martin Luther get tossed around, often without great care for their context. Upon closer examination, some of these prove to be spurious -- it seems he never offered to plant a tree just on the eve of the apocalypse. Others prove to be genuine, but still worth a little exploration.

Consider this:

Living, nay dying and being damned, make a theologian, rather than comprehending, reading, or speculating.

The original reads:

Vivendo, immo moriendo et damnando fit theologus, non intelligendo, legendo aut speculando.

The source in a 1520 lecture on Psalm 5:11 ("let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice," etc.), reprinted in the Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 5, p. 163, lines 29-30. The source is often cited on web pages, although we suspect strongly that many of these sites are copying from each other.

We took a moment to confirm the citation, using the astonishing Internet Archive. More than a moment, actually, since the enormous file slowed our browser to a crawl. Thanks, Uncle Marty, for your legendary logorrhea.

Writers generally use the remark as a prooftext for what may be called the existential side of Luther's theology, the sense of personal struggle against sin, death and Hell. They are surely right to do so, at least within limits. (We stumbled over an LCMS document that seems to use it as a model for seminary education. No comment.)

What we have not seen mentioned is the context. The much-quoted remark follows a passage that says, very roughly, this:

I would want to be warned that it is said, from Italy all the way to Germany, in the Commentary on the Mystical Theologians of Dionysius: that it is merely an annoying display of one's own learning, not to truly be a mystical theologian, but to read, teach and understand this, or to understand and teach what the vision was.

Okay, that's a junk translation, and we apologize. But do you see the point? Both remarks make a distinction between a true theologian and merely learned person -- a useful distinction. But it is by no means original to Luther, who is here restating for his students a remark he has himself found in the writer now generally identified as Ps-Dionysius (or maybe a commentary on Ps-Dionysius).

This matters, at least a little, because so many Protestant theologians have an abiding hatred for the rehashed neoplatonism of Ps-Dionysius, with its ladders of being which extend from heaven straight through the earth, and which were used to reinforce the rigid social and ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Middle Ages. (Indeed, Ps-D. seems to have invented the word hierarchy). We had two different professors at two different seminaries who assigned this guy, merely in order to refute him.

We do not doubt that Luther himself eventually had some harsh words for Pseudo-Dionysius. He had harsh words for everybody, to be frank. But it may be useful to remember that one of Luther's most frequently repeated remarks, and one of lasting value, was intended as a no more than a reflection of something the other guy said first. We expect there's a moral in there, about listening to people we disagree with, and not throwing out the good ideas with the bad ones.

Happy Reformation Day, everybody!

Dept. of No Surprise: Google Buzz Stops Buzzing

2011-10-25T12:40:00.000-04:00

Google is cancelling its "Buzz" service. Color us shocked. We use a lot of Google products -- Blogger, for one! Google Books! Google Translate! -- but even we only looked once at Buzz. Our response, as we recall it, was "Meh."

Still, we give them credit for efficiency. Think how long it took MySpace to get to the same decision.

Rick Perry is Unimpressive

2011-10-25T10:11:00.002-04:00

Or perhaps he is simply made to sound that way by this brief interview posted at the Times. Editors, of course, have the power to make an interview subject sound foolish simply by leaving in, unedited, his or her "ums" and "ahs." So it is technically possible that Perry has some worthwhile ideas and expresses them clearly. That is not, however, the impression he has given in the Republican debates, nor is it the impression one takes away from this interview.

On the contrary, Perry sounds desperate. He is trying to steal some of Herman Cain's thunder by flogging a flat tax -- or, if you will, a massive tax break for the wealthy. When goaded by the interviewer, he takes an obligatory swipe at Mitt Romney ("a fat cat" -- seriously, is it 1969 again already?).

But the most ludicrous exchange is certainly this one:

Q: Why did you choose to keep the birther issue alive?.

A: It’s a good issue to keep alive. You know, Donald [Trump] has got to have some fun. It’s fun to poke him a little bit and say “Hey, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.” I don’t have a clue about where the president — and what this birth certificate says. But it’s also a great distraction. I’m not distracted by it.

Um .... what? Apparently it's fun to "poke" the President rather than engage in substantive policy discussion; we understand that idea, even if we do not sympathize. But "it's a good issue" about which he claims to have no clue? It's "a distraction" by which he claims not to be distracted? What do those sentences even pretend to mean?

The answer, of course, is nothing, in the sense of grammar and logic. But, between the lines, they say something very clearly: "I, Rick Perry, am a desperate man, willing to pander to any possible constituency, no matter how intellectually and morally irresponsible. Please elect me, please please please."

A World Like New York

2011-10-22T04:20:00.007-04:00

A few times every day, Father Anonymous passes somebody wearing a Yankees cap. At first, to be honest, he didn't even notice them. He's a New Yorker, so Yankees caps, and sweatshirts and other merchandise, are a customary feature of his visual landscape, no more remarkable than billionaires or crazy people. But after a few months, Fr. A stopped in his tracks and said, "Waitasecond! I live in Eastern Europe."

A quick GPS check confirmed this insight, and the curious little cleric sat down to sip a cappuccino in the piazza and contemplate. Yes, caps with the distinctive Yankees logo are common here; likewise sweatshirts and sweatpants. A quick survey, however, revealed that other popular athletic clubs are represented less well. The raw numbers look like this:

Team	Hats	Sweats	Other
Chicago Bulls	0	0	0
Los Angeles Lakers	0	0	0
Brooklyn Dodgers	0	0	0
Texas Rangers*	0	0	0
Minnesota Vikings**	0	0	0

Even the Mets come up goose eggs.

More remarkable is the paucity of local team logos. Except, perhaps, on game day, CFR and U-Cluj jerseys are invisible; although we have seen Steaua Bucuresti merch in shops, we suspect that nobody actually buys it.

All this struck Fr. A. as curious. One expects to see one's hometown team supported in the hometown, and one is hardly surprised to find a few stray fans in Philadelphia or even Boston. (The latter a bold crew, willing to risk life and limb by wearing their pinstripes in Beantown). But ... why here?

Mother A. simply shrugs and says, "To many people, New York is America." This idea fascinates us, since to so many people, especially Americans, New York is anything but America. (Also Dutch businessmen. We sat up drinking with a few dozen of them the other night, and each time we introduced ourselves as American, Geert or Hans would ask which part of America; and then say, "Ah, so not really America." (We had this conversation so often that we began to wonder about the Dutch educational system, and considered sending a shipment of US maps to our distant cousins in Deventer.)

Comes now the news (courtesy of a sharp-eyed reader, Dr. Dan) that Mohamed el-Bibi, the Libyan freedom fighter said to have discovered the late Col. Qaddafi hiding in a sewer pipe, has been widely photographed wearing a Yankees cap. A blog at the Times meditates on this, and defers to the suggestion of Max Fischer at the Atlantic, that Mr. Bibi's hat should not be taken a sign of team loyalty: "Probably he doesn't even know what the Yankees are."

Probably. But he's still wearing the cap. And why?

Here's our answer: Because New York is America. And a particular vision of America. It's not just that "Yankee" is a catchall term for our compatriots (often followed by "go home"); an eagle or a flag or a big Thanksgiving turkey could represent America qua America better than the elaborately scripted initials NY. Rather, New York -- meaning here the city in particular -- represents the America that people all over the world admire, and dream of: a place of freedom, peace and relative prosperity; a place of almost infinite opportunity; a city that welcomes strangers, of whatever race or faith. A place where the Jewish mayor wouldn't mind a mosque at Ground Zero.

It may not be just as they imagine it, but this is what they imagine, and what they want for themselves, for their own countries, even in countries where is is the dream is almost impossibly unlikely. Perhaps especially in those countries. It isn't that people want to move to New York, so much as that they want the places in which they live to be more like the New York they have heard about.

So while the terrorists plan their next attack -- almost certainly aimed at New York -- it is helpful to remember that they are choosing this particular target because it is the envy of the people they most want to crush. And while Republican presidential candidates fall all over themselves in the effort to credit some other country -- any other country! -- for bringing down a dictator, it is helpful to remember that the guy who actually caught Qaddafi was dreaming of a world more like New York.

______________________________________________________

* Does this team still exist? We have heard a persistent rumor that Bush Jr. destroyed it, along with everything else his wretched and incompetent hand ever touched.

**Lutherans! Or so we choose to believe.

The Soul of Wit

2011-10-11T11:44:00.005-04:00

We do not know David Shayer of Palo Alto. But in a letter on p. 24 of the current Economist, he says in few words something we have struggled to say in many more:

Sir -- Why is is called "class warfare" to advocate raising taxes on the rich, but not when it comes to cutting benefits to the poor?

Just so.

Dept. of No Surprise: Mormonism is a "Cult"

2011-10-08T03:39:00.007-04:00

"Mormonism is a cult!" Or rather, "Evangelical Pastor Calls Mormonism a Cult." Or, in detail, "Rick Perry Supporter Calls Mormonism a Cult." Those are the variations on a story which is making the rounds this week, and which bears a moment's reflection.

Let's handle them in reverse order.

#3: "Rick Perry Supporter Calls Mormonism a Cult": Per the Times, a Southern Baptist minister named Robert Jeffress introduced Gov. Perry at a shindig called the Values Voter Summit, held in Washington. (The summit -- remember when that word meant Reagan meeting Gorbachev? -- was organized by groups like the Family Research Council, and we gather that its values didn't include, say, the right of labor to organize, or the occupation of Wall Street.)

So, Jeffress introduced Perry as "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ," and then -- in separate statements to the press -- used the "c" word to describe the faith of another Republican candidate. As the Times says, "injected a potentially explosive issue into the presidential campaign," and "raised immediate suspicions that the attack may have been a way for surrogates or supporters of Mr. Perry ... to gain ground by raising religious concerns."

For the record, when Perry himself was asked, he said that he does not consider Mormonism a cult. Still, since he (like Michelle Bachmann) makes much of his faith on the campaign trail, it is likely that a bit of religious furor will help him. In that sense, the papers are justified in making a fuss about this, and even is suspecting a bit of campaign opportunism. (Here's Sarah Posner's take on "anti-Mormonism" at the VVS).

But let's consider #2: Evangelical Pastor Calls Mormonism a Cult. Well, duh. This version of the story is dog-bites-man, as they say, meaning utterly unremarkable. Somewhere in America, some evangelical pastor probably does this every few minutes.

The mistake that the Times makes, and which we suspect some other news organs will as well, is to restrict the story to "Evangelicals," in the American news-media sense of that word. The fact is that no Christian community, so far as we are aware, recognizes in the Latter-Day Saints as sharing a faith compatible with its own. In other words, none of us consider them Christian. (Think about that: Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, and the Metropolitan Community Church can see in one another the same essential faith, and yet none of them can see it in the LDS).

The Mormons are understandably peeved by this. By their own lights, "followers of Jesus" is precisely what they are; they simply have access to more information about him than the rest of us.

But the Jeffress story has an added complication, since he didn't merely make a distinction between Mormons and Christians-as-conventionally-defined. This brings us to variation #1: Mormonism is a Cult! In the current cultural climate, these are fighting words. No wonder, since to be called a "cult" is to be lumped in with Jim Jones and David Koresh, with Jack Hickman and the Raelians. It is to be classified as a brain-washing, child-abusing, apocalypse-mongering collector of guns, concubines and federal warrants. And few people familiar with Mormonism would seriously mean to do that.

Of course, the word "cult" is tricky. It can be used sociologically, to describe manipulative and authoritarian patterns of leadership and behavior, but its earliest use was religious. Some modern Christian apologists use it to describe heretical movements -- not just within Christianity, but within other religions. This is the standard by which most Christians unhesitatingly identify the LDS as a cult. Like Elijah Muhammad's renegade creator scientist Yakub, Joseph Smith's visit of Jesus to the New World is a critical bit of mythological history unacceptable (and a bit comical) to more conventional believers.

But underneath even this use lies an older non-pejorative use of the word "cult": to mean a particular religious movement, especially when regarded as a system of worship. This is the sense of the Latin cultus, which at its root is about agriculture, whence nurture and reverence, whence finally worship. When Peter Brown writes (brilliantly) about "the cult of the saints" in Latin Christianity, he offers no judgment, either theological or sociological. And in that sense, we're all cultists. (Ooops.)

What, then, should we make of the Jeffress story, and of Gov. Perry's putative involvement?

On one hand, we at the Egg can affirm that Mormonism is indeed a cult, in both less and more pejorative senses of that word: it is a system of divine worship, and from any Christian perspective an heretical one. Yet we have to reject the most pejorative sense; Mormons may be odd ducks, but they are not, as a group, the brain-washed Kool-Aid drinking automata that many people associate with the word. Quite the contrary.

So when, in the midst of a heated (and in Perry's case, floundering) contest, one candidate's supporters start declaring that another candidate is a cult-member, we do indeed think it is a cheap shot, intended to stir the coals of religious bigotry. Needless to say, that sort of thing has no place in a secular democracy, not to mention no place among civilized people. Or, to put it more bluntly: Hey, Jeffress -- leave it for the ayatollahs, okay?

I Eat Because It Is Absurd

2011-10-06T07:43:00.002-04:00

Apparently, there's a Manhattan restaurant called Tertulia, reviewed here by the Times. Sounds lovely. The name is supposedly a Spanish word for a literary or intellectual gathering -- like salon, maybe.

But we know better, don't we?

Fr. A. wishes he were in the Big Apple, just so he could mosey into Tertulia, order some tapas, and then casually ask the waiter what Athens has to do with Jerusalem. Or whether the morcilla is made with actual seed-of-the-church. And then, when that romantic couple at the back table begins to indulge in some PDA, he might mutter to a friend, "See how they love one another!"

Dept. of No Surprise: Sewage is Icky

2011-10-06T06:40:00.007-04:00

Per Science Daily, scientists have found a "surprising number of viruses in sewage." More astonishing yet, some of these viruses "could relate to human health." We know -- astonishing, right?

As it happens, the climax to our very favorite movie occurs in a sewer. Orson Welles is the villain, his veneer of charm torn away to reveal the vicious, treacherous s.o.b. underneath. He is chased through the bowels of Vienna by the police and even by his childhood friend Joseph Cotton. Wounded, he tries to escape, crawling up a staircase and reaching his fingers up through the grating. He doesn't make it. It is a dramatic moment, and one which is not without theological weight. (Screenplay by Graham Greene, remember).

But here's the thing, and it's something old Fr. A. thinks about every time he watches the picture. If the bullet hadn't killed old Orson, do you think the viruses would have?

Hark! The Church Proclaims Her Honor

2011-09-29T06:14:00.005-04:00

Here's a hymn we had never seen, and quite like. It sounds like the sort of thing many of us need to hear after the council meeting gone wrong, or the synod assembly gone long.

It was written by Samuel Preiswerk, translated by Catherine Winkworth. (CyberHymnal proposes singing it to Lobe den Herrn, although we think that may be a mistake.)

Hark, the Church proclaims her honor,
And her strength is only this:
God hath laid His choice upon her,
And the work she doth is His.

He His Church hath firmly founded,
He will guard what He began;
We, by sin and foes surrounded,
Build her bulwarks as we can.

Frail and fleeting are our powers,
Short our days, our foresight dim,
And we own the choice not ours,
We are chosen first by Him.

Onward, then! For naught despairing,
Calm we follow at His word,
Thus through joy and sorrow bearing
Faithful witness to our Lord.

Tho’ we here must strive in weakness,
Though in tears we often bend,
What His might began in meekness
Shall achieve a glorious end.