∞
[gallery]
∞
Even if there were borders to my empathy, those borders would most certainly extend into South Carolina. Several of my African ancestors entered this continent through the slave market in Charleston. Their unpaid toil brought wealth to America via Carolina plantations. I am descended from those who survived racial oppression as they built this nation: My 4th great grandfather, who stood on an auction block in South Carolina refusing to be sold without his wife and newborn baby; that newborn baby, my 3rd great grandmother, enslaved for 27 years on a plantation in Rembert, SC where she prayed daily for her children to see freedom; her husband, my 3rd great grandfather, an enslaved plowboy on the same plantation who founded a church on the eve of the Civil War that stands to this day; their son, my great-great grandfather, the one they called “Free Baby” because he was their first child born free, all in South Carolina.You see, I know my history and my heritage. The Confederacy is neither the only legacy of the south nor an admirable one. The southern heritage I embrace is the legacy of a people unbowed by racial oppression. It includes towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement like Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Ella Baker. It includes the many people who rarely make the history books but without whom there is no movement. It includes pillars of the community like Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Emmanuel AME Church.
Bree Newsome, who was arrested for taking down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse.
∞
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?
Jacob Bacharach. I have asked just this question many, many times. I cannot see, nor have I ever been able to see, why, in cases where children are not involved, the state should have such a compelling interest in whether (for instance) a couple living together have a sexual relationship as opposed to a Platonic friendship.
∞
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.
In the Light of the Law. This seems not just wrong but bizarrely wrong to me. Scalia is writing, in his dissent, as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. His task in that office is to interpret the law of the United States, not the natural law as understood by Catholicism. Does Peters really expect Scalia to say, “I don’t care what the Constitution says, I shall be guided in my decisions by infallible Church teaching”? Were Scalia to do that, he would be openly and explicitly departing from the vows he made when he assumed his office. This is just plain nuts.
∞
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.
Brian Phillips on Federer. This brilliantly captures the very unusual, maybe even unique, grace with which Federer has pursued his career these past few years.
∞
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.
Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West be Converted?” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 1985