Alan Jacobs

Reno was no drama queen, but she participated in a number of dramas: the Waco siege of the Branch Davidians, the Oklahoma City bombing, the impeachment of the president who appointed her and the return of Elian Gonzalez to his Cuban father. She always did what she believed right, even when it was unpopular, and she always took responsibility for mistakes.

— Judith Hicks Stiehm. One thing missing from the list of “the rules that guided Janet Reno’s life”: killing religious weirdos and their children. I guess ordering the deaths of the Branch Davidians is merely “participating in a drama.” And as for “taking responsibility for mistakes”: when asked, when leaving office, whether she had made a mistake in sending in troops to attack the Davidians, she said, “We’ll never know."

(Reno is the beneficiary of the same logic that excuses President Obama for killing people with drones: liberals believe only Republicans are killers. Let us turn aside decorously from deaths ordered by Democrats.)

Here in Waco, there are still plenty of people whose children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews were killed in the siege that Reno ordered. If you have any decency, you’ll pause for a moment in your praise for the wonderfulness of Janet Reno and remember the people who on her orders were burned to death.

I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall this axe sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In the wreckage of this land

[caption id=“attachment_29406” align=“aligncenter” width=“908”] here[/caption]

I view my Anglican confession of justification by faith as, in this sense, a gift to the Church Catholic. I want, precisely as an Anglican, to continue to hold it before Rome and the East and to commend it as the clearest way I know of articulating the singularity and finality of Christ’s person and work. I want it to affect future ecumenical discussion, and I want it to be included, in whatever transformed way, into the confessional bedrock of a future reunited church.... I’d want to write my tale of modern Canterbury pilgrimage in such a way that my distance from Rome could be seen — precisely so that I might speak a Reformational word that I hope can benefit the cause of a future visible union with Rome. Talking about what makes Anglicanism distinctive, such as I understand it, can be an ecumenical gift rather than an impediment, if done in a spirit of charity and of hope.

— Here. I think this is beautiful and correct, and it's an encouragement to me. Over the years, I have written a good deal about Christian unity (click the "ecumenism" tag at the bottom of this post for a sample), and have worked within local communities to try to build cooperation,  but I have to admit that I have become completely discouraged and don't plan to pursue such matters any further.

This discouragement is probably a sin, and I expect that some day I will need to repent of it, but it feels like simple exhaustion (compounded by the exhaustion that arises from a decade of dealing with serious health issues in my family). I have never been able even to encourage rival factions in Anglicanism to be more charitable towards one another, much less get Catholics interested in the idea that Anglicans might have something to contribute to Christ's Church.

It is quite possible, indeed likely, that my failure to make any progress in these ecumenical endeavors is a result of character flaws that I cannot now see but that will be revealed to me on the Last Day. Perhaps more winsome and charitable people like Wesley Hill will be able to make the difference I hoped but failed to make. This is my prayer!

Ross Douthat is trying this morning to bring some perspective to American liberals:

Liberal analysis of right needs to recognize ways in which a liberal society, while procedurally "open," can be experienced as a *regime.*

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 7, 2016

But the “open society” isn’t merely “experienced as” a regime; nor is it genuinely open. It is open to some ideas and some people that its predecessors were closed to, but newly closed to others. (In precisely the same way, people who talk about the value of “inclusion” are always including some formerly excluded groups while simultaneously excluding some formerly included groups. When you move the Overton window, the left and right sides of the frame shift together.)

Stanley Fish explained this long ago, in an essay I recommend to liberals willing to dispense with some of their illusions. The essay focuses on public education but is equally relevant to all public institutions. Read and heed:

The idea, then, is that the right kind of education, faithful to the First Amendment, gives you practice in making up your own mind about values and agendas, while the wrong kind of education captures your mind and binds it to values and agendas that go unexamined. The problem with this idea is that it is itself an agenda informed by values that are themselves unexamined and insulated from challenge. The name of the agenda is "free and open inquiry"; and despite that honorific self-description, it is neither free nor open because it is closed to any line of thinking that would shut inquiry down or route it in a particular direction. It is closed, for example, to most forms of religious thought (which it will stigmatize as dogmatic) or to any form of thought that rules some point of view — for instance, that the Holocaust did not occur — beyond the pale and out of court. To put it in a way that may seem paradoxical: openness is an ideology, in that, like any other ideology, it is slanted in some directions and blind (if not downright hostile) to others.

Now, to say that openness is an ideology is not necessarily to criticize it, much less reject it, but merely to deprive it of one of its claims. Openness (or free inquiry) may still be the ideology we choose, but if my analysis is right, we cannot choose it as an alternative to ideology. What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows serious discussion of that same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1074”] via Beware the Bibliophilia[/caption]

… (I wonder as I read this) First Things would ever run an interview with a former Catholic who had become an Episcopalian? Actually, I don’t wonder.

When I wrote regularly for First Things it was a genuinely ecumenical journal, but for some years now it has been a Catholic magazine that occasionally allows other voices, in precisely the same way that the New York Times is a liberal newspaper that occasionally allows other voices. The problem with both periodicals is not that they are what they are, but that they so regularly pretend to be something else.

It’s interesting — and, to me, encouraging — to note how much overlap there is between the critiques of the existing order embodied in the platform of the American Solidarity Party (who are basically a bunch of conservative Catholic subsidiarists) and in this op-ed by Cornel West (who is, you know, Cornel West). Put these two documents together and you basically have my politics. If all the people who share these concerns were to find one another, America could be in for a pretty cool shake-up.

I think I’ll be voting Solidarity this election.

If you decline to pass your religious beliefs on to your children because you think such beliefs could hurt them socially then there is no meaningful sense in which you actually hold any religious beliefs. No one who actually believes that Jesus is Lord, or that there is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet, would decline to explain that to their children for fear that the children would be made fun of. What such parents are actually saying is that they were raised within certain social practices, some of which happened to be religious, that they see no advantage in their children continuing.