Alan Jacobs

In a passage that’s already getting a lot of attention, Pope Francis writes,

Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.

And then in a footnote to that passage:

In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [24 November 2013], 44: AAS 105 [2013], 1038). I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” (ibid., 47: 1039).

This is a point on which, as I have suggested before, here and here, I tend to disagree with my theologically conservative friends. A couple of years ago, in an email exchange with some priestly friends, I wrote:

My understanding of the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, which I take to be a standard (if not the only standard) Anglican understanding, is that they are not just signs but means of grace: “spiritual food and drink,” as is said in the prayer book. It is by and through the sacraments that we are enlightened and empowered to be the body of Christ in and for the world. And of course it is only through the sacrament of Baptism, in which we die along with Christ, paying the due penalty for our sin, and are raised to new life in Him, that we are so reconciled with Him that we may participate in the sacrament of Holy Communion. And as John Wesley wrote, “The chief of these means [of God’s grace to us] are prayer, whether in secret or with the great congregation; searching the Scriptures; (which implies reading, hearing, and meditating thereon;) and receiving the Lord's Supper, eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of Him: And these we believe to be ordained of God, as the ordinary channels of conveying his grace to the souls of men.”

Therefore to deny people the sacraments is to deny them one of the primary means by which they can receive the enlightening and empowering grace by which they can come to know God and follow Him. For the Anglican with a high sacramental theology, it is to deprive them of the “spiritual food and drink” that should be our regular diet. This strikes me as a massively dangerous thing to do. How can we expect people to think as they should and act as they should if we are denying them access to this empowering grace? And if we could think and act as mature Christians without regular access to the sacraments, then what need do we have for those sacraments?

Pope Francis’s argument seems to rely on a very similar logic. He declines to think of the Eucharist as either a potential carrot (admission to it as a reward for virtuousness) or a potential stick (exclusion from it as a punishment for sin) but as “a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak,” which sinful Christians need in order to grow in grace.

Yesterday as I was driving home from work my local NPR station informed me that I was about to hear an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I thought: Hmmm. I used to read everything Coates wrote and wanted more, but over the last couple of years I came to think that he was too certain about everything, too quick to dismiss everyone who didn’t see things precisely as he sees them, too ready to caricature people he doesn’t know anything about.

And then I listened to the interview, and thought: What an awesome guy. How incredibly honest, and humble, and gracious, and smart, and fascinating. I wish I could buy him drinks and listen to him as long as he is willing to talk.

So I am now officially all over his take on T’Challa.

As I was drafting this morning’s post on the issues surrounding transgenderism, a good many related ideas were floating around in my head. For instance, I was also thinking about the genderfluid child that Rod Dreher wrote about yesterday. I wondered what all this is like for the classmates of Abby/Adam Scott. What happens to them if they say “Abby” at a point when “Adam” is the preferred nomenclature? Do they get a timeout? Are they scheduled for a counseling session?

And it occurred to me that kids will probably deal with this simply by calling her by her last name, Scott. I mean, who has the time to keep up with someone whose gender identification changes several times a day? The essential human demand for simplification will kick in, and Abby/Adam will be given a name that stays put.

Now, it may be that her Abby/Adam’s teachers won’t like this, and it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it. Most of us went through some period of childhood being called something we didn’t want to be called, so I wonder if there will be an attempt to prevent that — at least for one child in America….

Notice, by the way, that above I have used “Abby/Adam” in a couple of places where one might have expected me to use a pronoun. The problem is, I don’t know what Abby/Adam’s preferred pronoun is. Should I have used “ze” and “zir”? Maybe Abby/Adam doesn’t like those options, or has never heard of them. And since Abby/Adam’s gender identification changes regularly, if I choose one of the existing pronouns I have a 50% chance of being wrong. So I just avoid them in this case.

This is of course what happened when people started getting nervous about using the masculine pronoun for God. “God is at work reconciling the world to Godself in Christ.”  “For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s only begotten offspring…” But this was sufficiently awkward that people just ended up constructing sentences that didn’t require the use of pronominal forms.

So this is the world we appear to be headed for: no first names, no pronouns, and unisex restrooms. Great.

[caption id=“attachment_15903” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”] here[/caption]

Not darkness but twilight in which even the best of minds must make its way now. And slowly the questions occur, vague but formidable for all that. We pass our hands over their surface like blind men, feeling for the mechanism that will swing them aside. They yield, but only to re-form as new problems; and one does not even do that but towers immovable before us.

Is there no way other than thought of answering its challenge? There is an anticipation of it to the point of dying. There have been times when, after long on my knees in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled from my mind, and I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body.

Ashe Schow argues that university administrators shouldn’t give in to protesters who want to rename campus buildings because that will just encourage the protestors to demand more, and more extreme, concessions. And maybe that’s true, and maybe that’s a good reason to turn aside such demands; but I think the genuinely substantive questions at stake here are actually pretty difficult.

When we see that a building — or any other public edifice, for instance a park or garden — has been named for a person whom we find in some way immoral, an appropriate first response is simple curiosity. Did the people who honored this guy by plastering his name on something public know of his evil actions and offensive beliefs? Did they share those beliefs? Did they approve of those actions? Did they, perhaps, not really approve but also not really care all that much?

Also: What positive reasons were there for choosing that name? Sometimes it’s obvious, as when donors want their own names plastered on the buildings they paid for. Sometimes we don’t have ready access to records that would let us know. Why, when Edward Harkness gave Yale a pile of money to build residential colleges, did they decide to name one of them after John C. Calhoun, a passionate defender of slavery? Possibly the thinking went no further than this: that Calhoun was a Yale graduate who went on to become a famously powerful and influential Senator and a Vice-President of the United States. There could have been few better-known graduates of the university.

And Calhoun, when Calhoun College opened in 1933 and for decades afterwards, was widely believed to be a great American. Indeed, in 1957 a committee overseen by a young senator named John F. Kennedy named Calhoun one of the five greatest Senators. So even after Brown vs. Board of Education and at the outset of the Civil Rights era, few people of influence in American government thought Calhoun’s pro-slavery commitments were sufficiently troublesome to prevent him from being honored as one of the greatest of Senators. Perhaps they thought, Ah well, people didn’t really know better in those days.

But here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view. The general forgiveness of society has been extended to millions of members of the Soviet Communist Party, and the Nazi Party, but the places once named for Adolf Hitler have had their names changed, as have Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Similarly, I have argued against those who would excuse Margaret Sanger as merely a creature of her time: “Sanger did not just ‘hold eugenicist ideas’; she was one of our nation’s most passionate and widely-respected advocates for those ideas…. It was this ceaseless, tireless, and very successful advocacy for some very nasty beliefs and practices that sets Sanger apart from others who happened to ‘hold eugenicist ideas.’”

If I were to apply this same logic to John C. Calhoun, I don’t think he would come off very well. Calhoun did not merely accept slavery, he was the single most passionate and influential advocate for slavery in his era. He believed that slavery is a “positive good”, railed against “the fell spirit of abolition,” and called those who believe that slavery is sinful “this fanatical portion of society” who wish to perform their insidious “operations” on “the ignorant, the weak, the young, and the thoughtless.”

I would be appalled at the naming of a college for Margaret Sanger. I don’t see how I can hold that view and accept the naming of one after John C. Calhoun. And if I were to agree that it’s just fine to have a college named after Calhoun, I’m not sure what I would say to a Russian who once more wanted a city named for Lenin. How bad does a social system have to be before its chief celebrants are deemed unworthy to have buildings named for them?

On Monday morning I’ll be sending an email to my students reminding them that then need to bring both Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos to class. It’s gonna be a great week of teaching.

I remember about eight years ago spending an afternoon at MoMA and then heading down to Soho for evening drinks at the loft of a friend of a friend. The loft was very well appointed, the space could have fit a productive sweatshop, and the guy who owned it worked at a hedge fund. He served us a bottle of expensive wine and remarked at length about its origins and qualities. I had no appreciation for fine wine because I eschewed discriminating tastes in things I couldn’t afford, and went on to say that I thought the intellectual apparatus that had grown up around the appreciation of food and drink, conflating chefs and vintners with artists and writers, was a sham — ultimately a way for people like him to pat themselves on the back for the way they spend their money and to compensate for the soulless and morally dubious way they made it. He told me I was “the enemy of good things.” We revealed ourselves to each other. Which one of us was the asshole?

— In Defense of Pretentiousness | Christian Lorentzen. Do I have to choose just one?

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“530”] via the 50 Watts Tumblr[/caption]