Alan Jacobs

Three brief points in response to PEG, with thanks for his continued efforts to converse in good faith:

First, insofar as I have failed to pay sufficiently close attention to the ways PEG uses non-Catholic authors in developing his own thought, I am sorry and will earnestly try to do better.

Second, his comparison between his ongoing New Distributism project and my biography of the prayer book is not really germane, because the latter is a history and every history is necessarily particular. Moreover, someone who is not an Anglican could have written that book, and maybe done it better than I did. By contrast, the attempt to articulate a New Distributism is a work of constructive public theology, which can only be done from within a religious tradition, and, further, necessarily raises the question of how broadly one defines that tradition. So: apples and cucumbers. But that leads me to the third and most important point:

PEG writes, “A ”distinctively [Mere-]Christian theology of economics” sounds like a lovely, useful and important thing. That is simply not what I’m interested in doing.” That’s an excellent and perfectly fair answer. I just wish — and this is really the only and entire point I was making in my post that kicked all this off — I just wish that so many of my Catholic friends, and other Catholic thinkers I respect, didn’t have exactly this point of view. I keep saying, “Hey, if we serious Christians work and think together we may be able to make great progress on this intellectual issue or this practical political problem,” and almost always they say to me in return, though perhaps not quite as straightforwardly as PEG says it here, “That is simply not what I’m interested in doing.”

[gallery] houghtonlib:

Wenceslaus Hollar, “Cia or Te Herbe” from Nieuhof, Johannes, 1618-1672.
An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperour of China, 1669.

*EC65.Og454.669e

Houghton Library, Harvard University

One of the earliest Western depictions of tea. There is an 18th century tea caddy at the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge decorated with this image.

As the Yoderites and Hauerwasites have been telling us for some time, Christendom is dead. The religious right was its last, long susperation. Though there are millions of Christians in the U.S. and Europe, Christian faith no longer provides the moral compass, the sacred symbolism, or the telos for Western institutions. America’s Protestant establishment has collapsed. Neither evangelical Protestants nor Catholics nor a coalition of the two are poised to replace it. Christian America was real, but, whatever its great virtues and great flaws, it is gone, and the slightly frantic experiments have failed to revive the corpse. It’s past time to issue a death certificate.

That’s a sobering conclusion, and it’s tempting for Christians to slink back to our churches. For innovative, visionary pastors and civic leaders, though, there are hundreds of realistic, locally based, ecumenically charged opportunities to foster experiments in Christian social and political renewal.

Christendom is dead! Long live the micro-Christendoms!

PEG responds graciously to my post from yesterday, but he misunderstands me, and in so doing partly confirms the point I make. He thinks I am asking him to be “wary of taking [his] faith seriously,” to stop thinking about Catholic social doctrine “as a Catholic,” and therefore to commit “a kind of intellectual self-mutilation.” Those would be pretty ridiculous things for me to ask, which is why I didn’t ask them.

Nobody builds straw men like PEG builds straw men, as I have learned to my pain over the years. But I didn’t go into detail in that post, which makes misunderstandings more likely. So let me clarify and specify a bit, using PEG’s response to help me do so. I think a telling moment there comes when he writes, “if a non-Catholic government in a non-Catholic country explicitly built its reforming program on Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus, I’m pretty sure Pope Francis wouldn’t cry copyright infringement.” Well, I would hope not! But note the assumption: that Catholics are the ones with the ideas, and other people are free to use them. This made me smile because it manifests the approach to ecumenism that I’ve seen in many of my Catholic friends over the years: “You can be as much like us as you want to be! We don’t mind!”

But what I was suggesting in my post was that I’d like to see more Catholic thinkers turn that around: that is, to acknowledge that Catholics don’t own all the good ideas, that other small-o orthodox (and perhaps even some rather heterodox) Christian traditions have something to contribute to the attempt to renew our political world, and that Catholic thinkers might benefit from seeking out some of those ideas — or at least to show themselves open to such ideas by describing their projects as, maybe, “a distinctively Christian theology of economics.” Because Catholics are Christians, are they not? Surely it’s not “intellectual self-mutilation” for a Catholic to call himself a Christian. And even that slight shift in emphasis can be both welcoming to others and a reminder that Christians from different traditions can learn from one another in substantive ways. It’s worth remembering that Chesterton made contributions to Distributist thought when he was still an Anglican.

I might quote here from the great Catechism of the Catholic Church:

818 “However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers …. All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.”

819 “Furthermore, many elements of sanctification and of truth” are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church: “the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope, and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as visible elements.” Christ’s Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him, and are in themselves calls to “Catholic unity.”

I have no doubt that PEG, like all my other Catholic friends, sees me and people like me as “brothers in the Lord.” But what I think is often missing — and this was the concern I raised in my post — is the translation of that acceptance into both intellectual and practical terms. Ecumenism, in the strongest sense of that term, is always going to be hard when Catholics are involved, because their ecclesiology makes it difficult for them to come to the discussion table with an openness to admitting error. (Balancing this with the need to be “open to conversion” was something that Cardinal Avery Dulles struggled with powerfully.) All the more reason, then, for us to focus on those areas — again, intellectual and practical — where we can find common cause and common achievement.

Let us not be any more divided from one another than we have to be. As John Paul II wrote in Ut Unum Sint, echoing Lumen Gentium, “Dialogue is not simply an exchange of ideas. In some way it is always an ‘exchange of gifts.’”

[gallery] heat map of New Yorkers’ complaints

Auden was harsh on what he considered attention-seeking. Once when a friend referred to a public occasion when Robert Frost had forgotten his lines, Auden was satirical: Frost hadn’t forgotten his lines — he was just trying to steal the scene. Auden said to me, ‘If you’ve only just written a poem, you don’t forget the lines.’

A voice of his own. The occasion was JFK’s inaugural, where Frost did not exactly forget his lines but seemed to have trouble reading what he had written (though if he needed to read them then he had indeed forgotten a poem he had just composed). He proceeded to recite, instead of his inaugural poem, “The Gift Outright.”

I’m inclined to think that Auden was right, though. Maybe Frost disliked the new poem and preferred the old one. Maybe he liked playing the visually compromised old poet. In any case, the moment provoked a wonderful poem by Richard Wilbur which I’ll post here if I can find it.

Today I finished reading Jody Bottum’s An Anxious Age, and it’s a lovely book: smart and beautifully written. But it describes an America that I’m not especially familiar with: an America divided between a theologically-renewed JPII-style Catholicism and a “post-Protestantism” (Jody’s phrase) that’s the gaseous residue of an evaporated mainline Protestantism. The Christian world I know best as (a) a native-and-recently-returned Southerner and (b) a longtime resident in the evangelical mecca of Wheaton, Illinois simply plays no role in Jody’s story. I don’t know whether my puzzlement at that is a result of my limited perspective or Jody’s or both. But in any event the book left me feeling like an anthropologist from Mars, to almost coin a phrase, looking at an America that’s not any America I’ve directly known. I can’t help thinking that if Jody had seriously reckoned with, for example, Mark Noll (whom he cites once), George Marsden (whom he does not cite), or Eugene Genovese (ditto), he’d have produced a more complex book. Maybe not better; but I think more faithful to the richness of America-and-Christianity, an amalgamation that has a different feel when you’re resident in the Southern or evangelical provinces. Still, that could be my provincialism speaking.

Let me announce an interest here: I have spent much of the last quarter-century looking for ways to connect evangelical urgency and Catholic tradition. My Anglicanism is just this, an attempt to be fully catholic and fully reformed — something I tried to express when I contributed to this page for All Souls Anglican, the church I helped to start in Wheaton — see the answer I wrote to the last question on that page. As I commented earlier today on Twitter, in the last twenty years I’ve seen theologically-serious Protestants become more and more respectful of and interested in Catholicism — but I have simultaneously seen many serious Catholics withdraw completely into a purely Catholic world, with little interest in other Christian traditions except to critique them — as, for instance, in Brad Gregory’s much-celebrated but (in my view) absurdly tendentious The Unintended Reformation, which blames almost everything bad in modern society on this vast and amorphous (but somehow unified) thing called “the Reformation.”

(And I love you, Jody, but you use “Protestant” in a similar way in your book.)

Or let me take two different, and differing, examples. My internet friend Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has been writing a series of posts on what he calls the New Distributism — a topic in which I have expressed some interest — but he frames it as a “distinctive Catholic theology of economics,” and I’m not Catholic, at least not of the Roman variety, so I guess I’m not invited to this party.

Or consider this: a manifesto on immigration reform that I, as someone appalled by anti-immigrant hysteria in America, might well sign on to — except that the Catholic authors of the manifesto emphasize that hostility to immigrants is not grounded in (for example) race but in “something deeply protestant and anti-Catholic” in the American mind, and that the corruption of the original American experiment is wholly Protestant: “The United States was founded by anarchic British Protestant immigrants, who oppressed and in many cases killed the local people, with a native claim to this land.” This is followed by an appeal that simply rules out non-Catholics: “May we, as Catholics, guided by the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, stand and pray and even act in a way that gives voice to those who suffer in fear and pointless despair.”

But do we really want to see immigration reform — or economic reform (hearkening back to PEG’s posts) — as distinctively Catholic issues? It seems to me that these are issues on which all Christians might benefit from thinking together. But not if Catholics persist in seeing soi-disant “Protestants” as their chief adversaries. Late in his book Jody writes that by the 2012 election “the ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ project had failed.” No kidding.

Why Liberalism Needs Pluralism

My own instincts on the gay rights question have always been classically liberal/small-c conservative/libertarian. I think hate is an eternal part of the human condition, and that ridding oneself of it is a personal, moral duty not a collective, political imperative. I never want to live in a society in which homophobes feel obliged to shut up. I believe their freedom is indivisible from ours. Their hate only says something about them, not me. I oppose hate crime laws for those reasons. And my attachment to open debate means constantly allowing even the foulest sentiments to be expressed – the better to confront them, expose them and also truly persuade people of the wrongness of their views – rather than pressuring them into submission or silence. Others have a different vision: that such bigotry needs extra punishment by the state (hence hate-crime laws), that bigots need to be constantly shamed, and that because of the profound evil of such thoughts, social pressure should be brought to bear to silence them. More to the point, past sins have to be recanted and repented before such bigots are allowed back into the conversation.

The Quality Of Mercy « Andrew Sullivan. I’ve said it before, but maybe it’s worth repeating: no one ever holds the second position Andrew describes here without being very, very confident that none of their cherished views will fall afoul of the law. This goes for liberals and conservatives, the religious and the anti-religious, all parties on all issues. Those who are aware of the ebbs and flows of history will be reluctant to employ a weapon that could eventually be turned against them; those who believe in the permanent dominance of Our Side will move ahead boldly with their prohibitions.

[gallery] smithsonianmag:

Photo of the Day: Surfing with Dolphins

Photography by Matt Hutton (Wickham, Australia); Kalbarri, Australia