Alan Jacobs

Seeing the “collections” of Simone Capano I’m reminded of the work of Gregory Blackstock, which I once wrote about here.

UPDATE: via Roberto Greco on Twitter, see this post by Lizette Greco.

Writers and academics who fret over the fate of public intellectuals may think they are debating vital questions of the culture. But their discussions are myopically focused on the writing habits of a rapidly disappearing elite. The vast majority of potential public intellectuals do not belong to the academic 1 percent. They are not forsaking the snappy op-ed for the arcane article. They are not navigating the shoals of publish or perish. They’re grading.

— Corey Robin

I care very much about the future of religious liberty, and I don’t think, over the long run and in this country, there will be much of it. The Obama administration, and (as I understand it) American liberalism more generally, is committed to the idea that freedom to worship is sufficient, and is trying, gradually but consistently, to discourage Christians and other religious believers from acting out their religious convictions anywhere outside the walls of the church — at least, in any ways that might interfere with the power of the State to arbitrate and dispense justice and charity.

I suspect that this determination on the part of Democrats will drive many Christians more deeply into the arms of the Republican Party, but not me. I find most of the ideas of the GOP, those that reign and those on the margins, in foreign and domestic policy alike, so distasteful that I would almost prefer loss of religious liberty to seeing those people back in power. And in any case, the number of Republican politicians who genuinely care about religious liberty is small and shrinking. I have not voted for a major-party candidate in any election (except a few local ones) since 1988, and I don’t expect to do it again any time soon.

My own political preferences are largely for what I would call Modern Distributism, that is, a version of Distributism emancipated from naïve idealizing of the Western Middle Ages. Distributism, I might say, for people who think the Reformation was not merely tragic and modernity not wholly bad, but who also have a deep resistance to the corrosive effects of the so-called free market on the social order and especially on the poor and weak. (One day I’ll write about all this. It’s not as crazy as it sounds.)

I could defend and explain all of these claims, but I’m not going to do so here, because I’m just stating my basic political position as a preparation for making my chief point.

It’s possible that in the coming years there will be at least a temporary slowing in the erosion of religious liberty, but I can’t see the long-term trends altering. All Americans, including those who call themselves conservatives, are gradually growing accustomed to the elimination of the “third sector” of civil society and will find it increasingly difficult to understand why either the free markets or the State should be restrained from exerting their powers to their fullest. I expect that quite soon most Christians will cease even to ask for anything more from the State than freedom to worship.

For those of us who believe that civil society should be stronger, not weaker, and especially if our primary concern is for the health of religious institutions as the most important mediating forces in society, this change will pose a wide range of problems. For instance, the removal of tax breaks for religious institutions will surely be complete within a generation, and a range of policies will discourage charitable giving, which will make generosity harder — but not impossible for most of us. That’ll be a way for us to discover what we are made of.

But there may be stronger challenges. I suspect that within my lifetime American Christians, at least those who hold traditional theological and moral views, will be faced with a number of situations in which they will have to choose between compromising their consciences and civil disobedience. In such a situation there are multiple temptations. The most obvious is to silence the voice of conscience in order to get along. But there are also the temptations of responding in anger, in resentment, in bitterness, in vengeance. It might be a good exercise in self-examination for each of us to figure out which temptation is most likely for us.

My friend Ashley Woodiwiss used to teach a course at Wheaton College called “Gandhi, King, Havel.” It was a course about multiple strategies of nonviolent resistance to varyingly coercive regimes. I think in the coming years Christians would do well to study those thinkers and other like them, and to spend a great deal of time reading and meditating on the Beatitudes. After all, it’s not likely that there can be any political or social environment in which such reflections would be without value.

In recent years, and in several states, the Catholic church has shut down its adoption services rather than comply with state laws mandating that gay and lesbian couples be granted equal opportunity to adopt.

In its public communications the Church has consistently said that it could only be licensed by the states to handle adoptions if it complied with these laws.

Supporters of the laws have consistently said that the Church would merely have been denied state funds if it hadn’t complied.

The implication of the Church’s statements is that it could not function at all without obedience to the laws (presumably because state laws do not allow for non-licensed organizations to administer adoptions); the implication of its opponents’ statements is that the Church could have continued to offer adoptions but at a higher cost.

I have read dozens and dozens of articles and posts about this controversy, every single one of which merely asserts its position as factual without any substantiation (e.g., from the relevant legal codes). Moreover, I can’t tell whether the legal situation might be significantly different in different states.

Can anyone point me to reliable sources on these questions? (And please: do not simply make your own unsubstantiated assertions. That would be to darken counsel by words without knowledge. I need reliable sources here.) I don’t have commenting enabled here, so replies on Twitter or via email are best. I would be very grateful for any assistance.

UPDATE: Thanks to those who replied. I have lots of stuff to read now!

I didn’t really know Walker Percy, but one day when I was in Maple Street Book Shop I spotted Walker coming up the walk.

I said to Cutting Jahnke, who was minding the store, “Quick, sell me a copy of The Last Gentleman. I want to ask him to autograph it.”

Walker came in and said hello in his diffident manner. I asked him to autograph the book, and while he was signing, I ventured, “I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Percy, that this book changed my life.”

Walker looked down at the floor, shuffled his feet a little, and said, “Well, it didn’t do a damned thing for me.”

— The Book That Didn’t Change Walker Percy’s Life | The American Conservative.

But let me enter a suggestion as a conclusion. Liberalism should have the confidence to tolerate institutions, even large ones, that have competing and contrary missions to those of the state. The very liberality of the managerial state is guaranteed by real diversity, not just of skin color and sexual preference, but of religion and values, too.

Real pluralism preserves the possibility of critique emerging within a liberal state. The interplay of individuals and diverse institutions encourages liberality and understanding at the ground level of citizenship — the gratitude for people very different from you who are still very solicitous of your needs. Whereas the strict ideological hen-pecking of the state creates a kind of existential dread, and intensifies the panic of the culture war — the fear that a loss on principle in one case, is the loss of all power and recourse in the future. Legislators and jurists would do best to retain these two essential liberal values, by finding solutions that deftly avoid setting them against each other.

— Michael Brendan Dougherty

One might, as well, consider this Lenten period as a period of descent. For one, it can be a period of our more frequently descending with our minds into our hearts in silent prayer, into prayer as communion with Christ. It is also a descent into our partaking of His kenosis, His emptying, His self-sacrifice that occasions our healing. Lent, therefore, becomes a salutary means of our dying to mindless habits, our dying to soul-scattering distractions, our dying to life-inhibiting illusions. It becomes a season of greater deliberation, and a recovery of our sense of the invisible Love in whom we live and move and have our being, even when we don't take notice. Great Lent is the Church's way of assisting our taking notice.

We die for a season, and then we live, live with greater awareness, and live more fully. So they say, and so I gather.

— Scott Cairns

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating:  People who think I’m some crazy liberal are always so shocked about how much I love to talk about sin.   I think liberals tend to think admitting we are sinful is the same as having low self-esteem.  And then conservatives equate sin with immorality.  So one end of the church tells us that sin is an antiquated notion that only makes us feel bad about ourselves so we should avoid mentioning it at all.  While the other end of the church tells us that sin is the same as immorality and totally avoidable if you can just be a good squeaky-clean Christian. Yet when sin is boiled down to low self-esteem or immorality then it becomes something we can control or limit in some way rather than something we are simply in bondage to.  The reality is that I cannot free myself from the bondage of self. I cannot by my own understanding or effort disentangle myself from self interest – and when I think that I can …I’m basically trying to do what is only God’s to do.

So, to me, there is actually great hope in Ash Wednesday, a great hope  in admitting my mortality and my brokenness because then I finally lay aside my sin management program long enough to allow God to be God for me.  Which is all any of us really need when it comes down to it.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

[caption id=“attachment_14081” align=“alignnone” width=“768”] Dehio, G. and von Bezold, G.: “Die Kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes” (1884)[/caption]

What is particularly telling in Ms. Korn’s article is that she identifies perhaps the one conspicuous conservative professor on the Harvard campus for censure (even as she quotes him quite severely out of context). When thinking of who should be silenced at Harvard, she can only think of one person, a single conservative octogenarian. Her call for “censorship” of conservative views on campus is at this point almost wholly unnecessary, since there are nearly no conservatives to be found at Harvard, or on most college campuses today (the University of Colorado has gone so far to create a Chair in Conservative Studies, since there was no other way to locate a conservative on that campus). Her call is actually much less controversial than it appears at first glance, since it effectively describes the de facto political and social condition on most college campuses today.

And so it ever was: religious universities for much of their history were not in the business of actively limiting the academic freedom of the professoriate, because then—as now—the faculty were largely in agreement about the proper object of that academic freedom. They differed, however, in the nature of those commitments. My former Georgetown colleague, Hans Noel, has written of his gratitude for not being forced by Georgetown to conform his teachings on abortion to the views of the Pope. Indeed, it does not. But in a different time, there was no need to even express such gratitude – the faculty who taught at Georgetown were there because of a commitment to the Catholic teachings, and conformed not because they had to, but because they embraced those teachings as true. So it is today—the faculty largely accept as true most liberal mantras, including the not-so-courageous view that the Pope is wrong on abortion, support for gay marriage, and so on. They are the fruits of Mill’s transformation—the defenders of “experiments in living.” Sandra Korn has not called for a fundamental change, but described how things are.

— What’s Wrong with Academic Freedom