Alan Jacobs

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

If Brendan Eich’s support for California’s Proposition 8 makes him unsuitable to be the CEO of Mozilla …

Would you allow him to hold a VP position there?

How about a managerial position?

Would you boycott a local coffee shop if he owned or managed it?

What about a bank?

In general, what positions should proponents of Proposition 8 be debarred from, and in what industries?

If you agree with the position taken by the leadership of OKCupid — who wrote on their website, in reference to Eich and to anyone else who opposes gay marriage, “Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure” — what degree of failure would be appropriate? Would unemployment be sufficient? Or does justice demand a more severe retribution?

What other widely held views — Proposition 8 passed, which means that by definition Eich’s stance is neither marginal nor extremist — disqualify a person from leading an organization? For example:

If it had become known that Brendan Eich believed that abortion should be illegal and had given money to pro-life organizations, would that have been grounds for dismissing him? If not, why not?

If Brendan Eich had said that he did not think insurance companies should have to cover sex reassignment surgery, would that have been grounds for dismissing him? If not, why not?

And finally, how far into a person’s past do you think it appropriate to look for evidence of heterodox opinions? Eich gave money to support Proposition 8 six years ago, but what if he had given money to a similar cause twelve years ago — would you still demand that he be fired or at least issue a formal apology for holding wrong views? In short, is there a statute of limitations on accountability for error?

It is the easiest thing in the world to work all the time, compared to the incredible difficulty of spending one hour or one day of rest in a proper way.

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erikkwakkel:

Medieval John Lennon

This familiar-looking face features in a Latin grammar book from the 15th century. The schoolbook includes entertaining scenes that encourage students in the challenging task of learning Latin. I like this image - and not just for its early depiction of a pair of glasses. It appeals to me because I imagine looking at a medieval portrait of John Lennon. It is not often that an image from a distant past connects so vividly to a modern - familiar - face. I wonder what the medieval student who used this book thought of this portrait. I fear that without the positive connection of Lennon this is merely a squinty-eyed, somewhat sour-looking person. Or worse: the student’s Latin teacher.

Pic: Uppsala, University Library, C 678. Image taken from this blog on the book, which provides additional images.

“Any reasonable ordering of the books must have The Last Battle as the final story, and must place Prince Caspian before The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader,’ since the latter is very straightforwardly a sequel to the former. Also, The Silver Chair cannot come before either of those books, since one of its main characters, Eustace, appears in Dawn Treader as a younger and very different sort of person from the one he is in The Silver Chair. Moreover, readers of the series will probably agree that The Horse and His Boy, being a largely self-contained story with minimal connections to the others - it is mentioned briefly in The Silver Chair, and the Pevensies appear in it briefly as rulers of Narnia - could be stuck into the sequence anywhere except the beginning and end. So the dispute really concerns only one question: should the sequence begin with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Magician’s Nephew?

The argument for The Magician’s Nephew is simple: since it describes Aslan’s making of Narnia, placing it at the beginning yields a biblical, Creation-to-Apocalypse arc for the series. The case for The Lion is more complex and much stronger. First of all, though Lewis spoke of altering the order of the books, he also spoke of needing to revise the books in order to remove inconsistencies - and if Nephew is read first, there will be many such inconsistencies. For one thing, we are told quite explicitly at the end of The Lion that its narrative is ‘the beginning of the adventures of Narnia’. For another, Lewis tells his readers that the children in The Lion do not know who Aslan is ‘any more than you do’; but of course the readers would know Aslan if they had already read Nephew. Moreover, much of the suspense in the early chapters of The Lion derives from our inability to understand what is happening in the magical wardrobe - but if we have read Nephew we will know all about the wardrobe, and that part of the story will become, effectively, pointless. Similarly, one of the delights of The Lion is the inexplicable presence of a lamp-post in the midst of a forest - a very familiar object from our world standing curiously in the midst of an utterly different world - and one of the delights of Nephew is the unexpected discovery of how that lamp-post got there. Anyone who begins with Nephew will lose that small but intense pleasure, the frisson of one of Lewis’s richest images.

If Lewis really and truly thought that the series was best begun with The Magician’s Nephew, he was simply mistaken. The original order of publication is the best for any reader wishing to enter Narnia.”

[gallery] Another contest entry, an abandoned Presbyterian church in Detroit.

[gallery] WHOA