Alan Jacobs

The message powerfully communicated in this book is entirely clear: when using the term "evangelical," it is now imperative to consider the entire world. Whatever system is used for counting, more evangelicals now live in Nigeria and Brazil, when taken together, than in the US. More evangelicals are now found in each of those two countries—and also in each of China, Kenya, South Korea, India, and Indonesia—than in any of the European homelands from which evangelicalism emerged. And today the most evangelical nations in the world, when measured by proportions of national population, are not the United States, England, Scotland, or Canada—but Vanuatu, Barbados, the Bahamas, Kenya, the Solomon Islands, South Korea, and the Central African Republic.

— Mark Noll

If the police kill, lie about it and take the law into their own hands, no one can be confident in calling for help during a crisis, nor can we rely on them to testify credibly in court. This is a systemic problem and is not merely a problem of individual bad actors.

— Amy Campanelli, the Cook County public defender, quoted in this powerful NYT story 

[caption id=“attachment_15943” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”] original map here[/caption]

If the reading of adults is as inefficient as Professor Adler asserts – and I agree with him – it is because most of them are reading only in order to escape from their own thoughts or to be socially respectable. If they are to improve, the first thing to say to them is not — “You don’t read enough,” or “You read bad books,” but — “You read far too much. You haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a person you are or what you want to know, and it is no use your trying to read at all until you have, and are compelled to admit to the truth you discover is most disagreeable. To read the Iliad because Professor Adler tells you it is good is no better than reading the Saturday Evening Post because your neighbor reads it. No one can tell you how to become a civilized person. There is no ready-made answer because, to become civilized, you will have to be reborn.”

— W. H. Auden, review of Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book (1941)

For me, the Kindle seems to be all works and no looks—the Oasis is a step forward only if you regard the visual language of day planners from the 1990s as an artistic high water mark for society.

— Khoi Vinh

I don’t code, and don’t have the technical chops to be genuinely geeky, but my habit of muttering “Priori Incantatem” to myself as I’m arrowing up through previous Terminal commands — I think that’s pretty geeky.

My thanks to Ross Douthat for taking the time to respond to my thoughts on Pope Francis’s recent Apostolic Exhortation. I’m just going to add a quick thought here that I hope will serve to sum up the dispute between us. Ross thinks that I don’t fully grasp  Catholic teaching about the indissolubility of marriage. I think I do understand Catholic teaching about the indissolubility of marriage, but do not agree that specific practices of church discipline — employing the Eucharist as the chief instrument of such discipline — necessarily follow from that teaching.

That said, after reading Ross’s reply and doing some further reading have a better understanding of why the Eucharist is the focus of discipline for Catholics. (Of course, on some level I’ve understood this for decades, but I am thinking my way more deeply into the logic.)

One final comment: I continue to find it curious that Catholic conservatives today want precisely the opposite kind of governance from the Church than they want from secular states. In secular politics they want decentralization, subsidiarity, local knowledge and discretion in preference to abstract laws applied from above; in Church governance they want canon law set by the Vatican and merely enforced at the local level. Now, to be sure, there’s no contradiction here; there is no reason why one must think that secular governance and Church governance should operate according to the same principles; but I still think it curious. Of course, it could also be said that American Catholic liberals have equally curious views, but in mirror image: they tend to approve of state centralization with universally binding dictates issued from Washington, while wanting the implementation of Catholic teaching to be left up to the discretion of local communities.

Basically, Catholics are weird, is what I’m saying.

Back from the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas clergy retreat, where I was privileged to be a speaker alongside the amazing Fleming Rutledge, I have a renewed appreciation and admiration for what these people do. Parish priests have a tough job! But I also met people engaged in refugee resettlement, hospital chaplaincies, hospice care, education from K through 12 — it’s hard work, and vital work, and churches around the country are doing it with virtually zero public recognition or appreciation. Moreover, despite the Episcopal Church’s general reputation for theological vacuity, I met  person after person with a genuine zeal for the Christian Gospel. It was an honor and a pleasure to be among them.

Now, after all that human interaction, this introvert needs to hole up in a room alone for three or four days. But I had a great time!

Here’s how undiscerning and weak-willed I am: I’m off for three days to speak to and consort with the gang of publicans and sinners otherwise known as the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. So if any of my Catholic friends were to respond to my recent barrage of posts — an extremely unlikely occurrence, if history is any guide — I won’t know until I get back, because I’m going offline. Blessings to you all!

In my recent post I asked, “So why the hostility from so many conservative Catholics? I am not certain, but from what I have heard over the years, I don’t think many conservative Catholics have much trust in the average parish priest, especially here in America. But then, they don’t seem to have much trust in bishops, taken as a class, either. And from these responses to Amoris Laetitia they clearly don’t trust the Pope. So I find myself wondering in whom, or in what, they do place their trust.”

Well, here’s something of an answer from Rusty Reno: canon law. “On the matter of the divorced and remarried, Francis turns the pastor into the arbiter of who can and cannot receive communion—a decision based on a priest’s judgment of the interior spiritual condition of an individual Catholic. Francis sets aside the objective clarity of canon law, something that gives the lay Catholic a place to stand and leverage against limitless clerical discretion.”

That’s helpful, and it certainly confirms my sense that for many conservative Catholics priests are simply not to be trusted. However, I also think it raises questions about whether canon law, or any law, can be so specific and detailed as to eliminate the need for judgment — whether the legislative branch of any law-governed organization, so to speak, can supplant the judicial branch. Won’t judgment always be needed? And in these matters isn’t such judgment always and necessarily, at least to some degree, meant to discern “the interior spiritual condition of an individual Catholic”? (Think of the confessional and the sacrament of Penance, in which priests don’t just read off a card but are expected to make discerning evaluations.) And even if canon law could replace prudential judgment, would that be any less “clerical” a mode of discipline, given that canon law is written and implemented by clerics?