I remain ambivalent about marriage as the centerpiece of the struggle for LGBT rights, not in the least because, for all the reasons I mention above, it remains a restrictive and selective civil institution. Why, for example, shouldn’t a single person be able to sponsor the legal immigration of his best friend or an adult caring for an elderly person in her home receive the same tax benefits as a married couple?
Lost on Scalia the high judge and legal philosopher, it seems, is the whole of the natural law tradition, a tradition that holds law to be, among other things, an ordinance of reason—and not simply a matter of the will, legislative or otherwise. Right reason should lead one to conclude that the human institution we call “marriage” is only one thing, the permanent union of a man and woman. Scalia expressly rejects this conclusion. But also lost on Scalia the active and educated Catholic, it seems, is the Church’s unbroken teaching that marriage can only exist between a man and woman, and that to hold otherwise is to be in plain contradiction of infallible Church teaching (Canon 750 § 2). Indeed, if, as seems all but sure, Church teaching that ‘marriage is the permanent union of a man and a woman’ is not just a truth knowable by natural reason but is revealed by God then Scalia’s assertion that we can call “marriage” any sexual combination of people (or things?) we wish (provided only that we do so through a legislature) would be objectively heretical (Canon 750 § 1)! No matter how one reads him, then, whether as a judge charged to reason or as a Catholic charged to believe, Scalia has made an astoundingly wrong and harmful assertion in a hugely public way.
The degree of disdain directed to Christian faith and worship by the intelligentsia and the commentariat, especially in the Northeast where I’ve lived for 45 years, has been growing and swelling for decades. I am still disconcerted by it; having known so many highly educated, socially adept Christians in my life, it seems extraordinary that we should be regarded as marginal. In the secular circles where I operate part of the time, my Christian faith is tolerated along a spectrum from indifference to mild amusement to patronizing sufferance to something more like contempt. Only the African-American church seems at least partially immune from this syndrome, and I don’t think that’s entirely because the bien-pensant contingent wants to give them a pass – though obviously that’s part of it. I think it’s also because the sincerity, humor, and charm of their faith, and its rock-solid breadth and depth throughout all trials commands respect. Their Christian communities have endured so much for so long that the mockery of outsiders means nothing to them. They take no account of belittling from others.I have seen this up close and in depth in my frequent visits to my native South, but it is also true in New York. The Christian gospel is close to the surface of these churchgoers’ lives, and wells up from a deep spring. It doesn’t just get brought out on Sunday morning.Therefore the response of Mother Emanuel to the racist horror in their beloved church building was not coaxed out of them by the pastors. It was there all along. My sister heard someone say, that the AME nine were not ready, but they were prepared. Their families and their fellow members in the congregation were not ready, but they were prepared. They had that extra oil with them when, in the darkness of hatred and violence, they were prepared to light their lamps of love and peace. We will see no greater witness to the conquering righteousness of God in our time. May we rise to honor it, and to carry it forward.
[gallery] houghtonlib:
The binding of a Gradual, or choir book, Northern France, ca. 1525. Designed to be visible from a distance, this book is a bit over two feet tall, and the cover is protected by brass bosses and cornerpieces.Houghton Library, Harvard University
He likes doing this; that’s the point. Being on tour, being competitive, being celebrated: This stuff feels more satisfying to him than the lonely relishing of some legacy in which he had a better head-to-head record against Djokovic. So why not keep it going as long as he can? And not to get too dogmatic about what’s basically the story of a person liking his job, but isn’t that the model of grown-up maturity that we should want from an elite athlete? So often, great players in their late careers wind up eclipsed by their own narratives, their choices constrained by a whole complex of considerations involving memorialization and pride and morning-sports-zoo yell. Think about, say, the question of Kobe’s retirement — how free does that decision feel? There’s an entrapped feeling around Kobe that Federer seems to have sidestepped. And fine, maybe he wouldn’t have sidestepped that so gracefully if his decline hadn’t been so gradual, but then, that’s also part of the point. He’s living the life he actually has, not some portable-across-platforms version of the athlete’s journey.
I would affirm the need for a radical break with that form of Christianity which is called the denomination. Sociologists have rightly pointed out that the denomination (essentially a product of North American religious experience in the past two hundred years) is simply the institutional form of a privatized religion. The denomination is the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture. Neither separately nor together can the denominations become the base for a genuinely missionary encounter with our culture.
Business critics say Twitter is falling because the suits don’t know what do to with the service. In reality, it’s failing because our social mobs know just what to do with it. Twitter is getting worse because it helps us argue — and believe — that everyone else is getting worse.The debasement of Twitter indicates that many of us are ready to slip into verbal brutality to show that just one worldview — ours, of course — can annihilate the competition. Twitter used to be a place to escape from the uniformity and hyperventilation of the “mainstream media,” where the ideological id has long run rampant. Now, Twitter is a megaphone for the worldview wars. It fosters constant competition among our claims that everyone should care and act as we do.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18033”]
I do not know where I came across this image of St. Basil the Great giving alms to the poor and wounded — if anyone can turn up its source, please let me know — but I love it because it captures something of the man who, for me, is the greatest model of Christian leadership the Church has ever produced. The man who was in his time and place the chief defender of orthodoxy against the Arians was also the person who essentially invented the hospital and was relentless in his advocacy for the poor.
In one of his greatest sermons, he said to the wealthy of Cappadocia,
Think, you who call yourselves ‘Benefactor’! Be mindful of yourself, who you are, of what things have been placed in your charge, from Whom you received them, and why you were favored above others. You have been made a servant of the good God; an administrator for your fellow servant…. For a little while these things will give you pleasure; then flowing away from you they disappear, and then you must with exactness render an account of them. But you try to lock them up and keep them hidden using bolts and bars and under seals. You watch them anxiously and think, ‘What will I do?’As some of us contemplate a Benedict Option, let us remember Basil and the other Cappadocians. They are the greatest models that our Christian history offers us.‘What will I do?’ Offhand, I would say, ‘I shall fill the souls of the hungry. I shall open my barns and I shall send for all who are in want. I shall be like Joseph in proclaiming the love of my fellow human being.’
Greif is relentlessly sober and earnest about writers who eschewed sobriety and earnestness. He acknowledges “mockery” and “irony,” but I don’t know whether he ever acknowledges the importance of this fact about most of his chosen fiction writers: that they think “man” is, all things considered, a pretty ludicrous figure. For instance, he acknowledges that in Pynchon’s V Benny Profane is a schlemihl because he “cannot get along with objects. Objects are always slipping from his hands, hitting him in the face, failing to work. Alarm clocks won’t ring on time, spades will turn, electronics won’t run.” This is all true, but it’s important to note that this affliction puts Benny in the same general class as … Sideshow Bob when he steps on the rakes. One of Pynchon’s constant themes is that technology makes schlemiels of us all, even as we try to convince ourselves that we are becoming more and more masterful because of all the clever machines we can make and buy.
In O'Connor’s work, and in Bellow's—and even Ellison’s, in a bitterer vein—comedy constitutes a chief form of critique of the hubris of man. Auden once commented that “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws"—the laws that govern rakes, and alarm clocks, and my neighbor, whose bondage to those laws I laugh at until I am forced by events to acknowledge that the same laws also afflict me. As Auden puts it, "No one … can claim immunity from the comic exposure"—this is a point relentlessly emphasized in the stories of O'Connor (where people usually respond to such exposure with rage), in the novels of Bellow (where the response is usually exasperation), and in the novels of Pynchon (where it is usually befuddlement). We seem never to learn what we need to learn from this exposure, from this relentless evidence that we are not the captains of our fate or masters of our destiny, but subject to the same dreary old physical forces that dogs and plants and stones must contend with. The nature of man, these writers tell us, is to be comically unable to accept constraints upon Being, comically insistent that we can somehow take charge of our lives and our worlds. There is of course a tragic side to this insistence as well.