Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, are all with us. Nor is there even lacking the possibility of a new Constantinism; letters have already begun to appear in the press, recommending religious instruction in schools as a cure for juvenile delinquency; Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the “Christian” empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.
— Auden’s review of Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture, first printed in The New Republic in 1944.
To have a chance at a Guggenheim you must of course have good references.
To be clear, then: Packer believes that forcing Catholic colleges and hospitals to buy health insurance plans that pay for sterilization and morning-after pills does not impinge upon religious liberty in any way, but allowing Catholic colleges and hospitals to decline to cover drugs and procedures that their faith considers gravely immoral is analogous to an official establishment of religion. The first belief, I presume, depends on some version of Kevin Drum’s suggestion that the state has no obligation to respect conscientious religious objections if the objectors represent a sufficiently marginal minority within American society and culture. The second seems to depends on a fear that if you give a marginal minority that you find disagreeable an inch, you’re guaranteeing that they’ll take a mile. (Today, conscience exemptions; tomorrow, the Comstock Act; the next day, the Spanish Inquisition.) Taken together, you have the following argumentative method: ”Our enemies are too marginal, extreme and out-of-step with the times to deserve to have their liberties respected, but at the same time these marginal extremists must be brought to heel because they’re an enormous threat to our liberties and freedoms.”I would submit that this is not the argumentative method of a tolerant liberalism, or the kind of premise that sustains a “vast, pluralist, heterodox, freedom-loving democracy.” It’s crudely majoritarian, explicitly anti-pluralist, and as much a form of culture war aggression as any of Rick Santorum’s positions and assertions.
This brings us back to the Black Rubric. The 1552 book had eliminated the term “Mass,” and Cranmer had changed the wording of certain passages that described (or were widely thought to describe) what exactly is happening to the elements of the Supper, but he would not acquiesce in the demand made by many reformers, including the aforementioned Bishop Hooper and the passionate Scot John Knox, to eliminate the people’s longstanding habit of kneeling while receiving Communion. For Knox this was idolatry plain and simple, the worshipping of the creature instead of the Creator; Cranmer disagreed. In Cranmer’s view enough had been done to combat the traditional popular desire to worship the consecrated elements: “Heave it higher, sir priest!” the people used to call out during the elevation of the Host, and one of the demands of the Cornish rebels was “to have the sacrament hang over the high altar and there to be worshipped as it was wont to be.” But the new Book of Homilies that Cranmer had overseen heaped scorn on these superstitions, and he went so far as to forbid the elevation of the bread (for him it was manifestly not the Host) altogether. But he would not tell the people they couldn’t kneel simply because that gesture could be “misconstrued, depraved, and interpreted in a wrong part.” Kneeling was in fact appropriate—far more appropriate than the sitting posture Knox preferred—and “well mente, for a sygnificacion of the humble and gratefull acknowledgyng of the benefites of Chryst, geven unto the woorthye receyver.” At one point in the debate, Cranmer pointed out to Knox that if he wanted this Supper to be performed New Testament-style, then all the congregants should take the sacrament reclining on one arm, since that was the ancient Palestinian custom.
More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.
After running Collusion for a few days, I wanted to see if there was an easy method to stop data collection. Naively, I went to the self-regulatory site run by the Network Advertising Initiative and completed their “Opt Out” form. I did so for the dozens of companies listed and I would say that it was a simple and nominally effective process. That said, I wasn’t sure if data would stop being collected on me or not. The site itself does not say that data collection will stop, but it’s also not clear that data collection will continue. In fact, the overview of NAI’s principles freely mixes talk about how the organization’s code “limits the types of data that member companies can use” with information about the opt-out process.After opting out, I went back to Collusion to see if companies were still tracking me. I found that many, many companies appeared to be logging data for me. According to Mozilla, the current version of Collusion does not allow me to see precisely what companies are still tracking, but Stanford researchers using Collusion found that at least some companies continue to collect data. All that I had “opted out” of was receiving targeted ads, not data collection. There is no way, through the companies’ own self-regulatory apparatus, to stop being tracked online. None.
One of Jean François Rauzier’s imaginary libraries. Click on the image for a much larger version.
Just yesterday, Slate’s Hanna Rosin, my own beloved editor, wrote: “The world today brings news that Jan Berenstain, co-author with her husband Stan, of the 45 years and running Berenstain Bears series for children, has passed on to a better world. As any right thinking mother will agree, good riddance.” She was talking about the cartoon bears, of course, and not Jan Berenstain herself, the small 88-year-old, with her bangs and glasses, photographed holding her special pens and special pad, still creating, still drawing in her ninth decade. Hanna was presumably not saying “good riddance” as in, it is good that Jan Berenstain suffered a stroke and died in her hospital bed, and the clever analysis of the ubiquitous children’s series that follows this flashy statement is entirely fair and well-reasoned. And yet one wonders, whatever strong emotions one has about the cartoon bears in a children’s book, could that bold and harsh “good riddance,” have been resisted the day Jan Berenstain’s death was announced?Just as one tries not to wear fuchsia to a funeral, it seems that one might fruitfully reserve one’s more pointed critiques for another occasion. There is, however, an increasing fashion for these negative obituaries, this sharp summing up of dead people’s achievements in which they are found falling short, these personal attacks timed as the dead person’s possessions are still being retrieved in plastic bags by their relatives from the hospital.
A few years ago, when I was beginning to work on my book about the American college, I came across a manuscript diary kept in the early 1850s by a student at a small Methodist college in southwest Virginia. One spring evening, after attending a sermon by the college president that left him troubled and apprehensive, he made the following entry: “Oh that the Lord would show me how to think and how to choose.” That sentence, poised somewhere between a wish and a plea, sounds archaic today. But even if the religious note is dissonant to some of us, it seems hard to come up with a better formulation of what a college should strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others. “Show me how to think and how to choose.”