Some Books (4)--The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other by Walker Percy

The novelist Walker Percy remains a continuing interest of me. Several years back, I posted on his Love in the Ruins, and am slowly reading through his body of work. This collection of essays, written between 1954 and 1975, address his "recurring interest...[in] the nature of human communication and, in particular, the consequences of man's unique discovery of the symbol." Many of the chapters are a bit esoteric for my taste, but two in particular grabbed my attention: "The Loss of the Creature," and "Notes for a Novel about the End of the World."

Percy explains "the loss of the creature" by way of the modern practice of tourism. This idea was of particular interest to me. Many of my postings here have been of travel and traveling, and one day I may even pull it together into something a little more substantial.

Using the Grand Canyon as an starting point, he imagines the experience of the first Spanish explorer who stumbled upon it. And he follows that "to no one else is it ever as beautiful--except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered." In this case, he notes that the canyon, "the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind....Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex....The highest point, the term of the sight seer's satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex....Seeing the canyon is made even more difficult by what the sightseer does when the moment arrives, when sovereign knower confronts the thing to be known. Instead of looking at it, he photographs it...He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years. For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen."

Percy acknowledges that there are ways in which "the thing," can be recovered. One can leave the beaten path by avoiding all of the facilities provided for seeing the thing (though even this quickly becomes institutionalized and programmed, i.e. Lonely Planet, etc.) One can engage in a dialectical recovery of the thing, "which brings one back to the beaten tract but a a level above it." Finally, a "breakdown of the symbolic machinery by which the experts present the experience to the consumer," or even a national disaster may present opportunities for the real recovery of the thing.

Percy observes the tendency (particularly among American travelers,) to feel let-down in they do not capture the "it" of wherever they are going. An example of this would be the American tourist couple traveling in Mexico, becoming hopelessly lost and stumbling onto a remote Indian village where they remain several days and witness a religious festival complete with corn dance. They both know that "this is it," the authentic, defining experience. According to Percy, "their hope has something to do with their own role as tourists in a foreign country and the way in which they conceive this role." The author puts his finger on something I have long felt, but was unable to really articulate. In my travel posts of past years, I include photographs of places, but rarely did I include pictures of people, unless it happened to be those with whom I was traveling. In Georgia, on a number of occasions, I passed on opportunities to photograph farm workers, harvesting crops much as they had done for millennia--by hand, with horses and wagons. I instinctively knew that what they were doing was of far more significance than what I was engaged in. To objectify them, to treat them as quaint curiosities that would entertain my friends at the coffee shop--or look good on a blog post, was demeaning to them, as well as being a cheapening of the moment for me. Percy would describe this as a loss of sovereignty over the experience. I carry the image in my mind, and that is sufficient.

Percy ends the chapter, as follows:

The loss has come about as a consequence of the seduction of the layman by science. The layman will be seduced as long as he regards beings as consumer items to be experience rather than prizes to be won, and as long as he waives his sovereign rights as a person and accepts his role of consumer as the highest estate to which the layman can aspire....the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners think he is.

In the other chapter noted above, Percy writes of those novelists who write about the End of the World. By this, he does not mean anything in the latest end-times fantasy or science fiction, but rather those writers who have "an explicit and ultimate concern with he nature of man and the nature of reality where man finds himself. Instead of constructing a plot and creating a cast of characters from a world familiar to everybody, he is more apt to set forth with a stranger in a strange land where the signposts are enigmatic but which he sets out to explore nevertheless." These authors betray "a passionate conviction about man's nature, the world, and man's obligation in the world."

Percy makes some interesting, and astute, generalizations about authors. "The nineteenth-century Russian novelists were haunted by God: many of the French existentialists are haunted by his absence. The English novelist is not much interested one way or the other....American novels tend to be about everything. Moreover, at the end, everything is disposed of, God, man, and the world." To Percy, these authors know that "something is wrong here," exhibiting a "single strain...a profound disquiet." He asks, "Is it too much to say that the novelist, unlike the new theologian, is one of the few remaining witnesses to the doctrine of original sin, the imminence of catastrophe in paradise?"

The subject of the postmodern novel is a man who has very nearly come to the end of the line. How very odd it is, when one comes to think of it, that the very moment he arrives at the threshold of his new city, with all its hard-won relief from the sufferings of the past, happens to be the same moment that he runs out of meaning!

Which will be more relevant of the "lost" man of tomorrow who knows he is lost: the new theology of politics or the renewed old theology of the Good News? What is most noticeable about the new theology, despite the somber strains of the funeral march, is the triviality of the post-mortem proposals. After the polemics, when the old structures are flattened and the debris cleared away, what is served up is small potatoes indeed.

Walker Percy, who died in 1990, knew a thing or two about what was coming.

Let's Sit This One Out

The "Arab Spring" seems to be lengthening out into a long, hot summer. The simmering unrest in Syria has attracted some attention in this country, with calls for sanctions and intervention to some degree. To this I say, Please, No.

Make no mistake, Bashar al-Assad is a nasty piece of work. Gangly, weak-chinned and sporting a cheesy moustache, he looks every bit the mild-mannered ophthalmologist he once was. Due to the death of his older brother, Bashar fell heir to the family dictatorship at his father's death in 2000. Hopes of him harboring reformist tendencies have born precious little fruit, and the government's response to the recent street demonstrations have shown that Bashar al-Assad has no intention of giving up the family business.

That said, Syria is not Egypt and neither is it Libya. Yes, the educated Syrian populace is frustrated with their lack of economic opportunity, as well as corruption (though it hardly rises to Egyptian standards.) But there is no widespread opposition and hatred of the Assad regime, heavy-handed as it can be. And the myriad minority groups (of which Assad himself is a member) are fearful of the Sunni majority gaining the upper hand. And Assad is a known quantity in the region, a fact that even his arch-enemies, the Israelis, can appreciate.

One of our parish families spent 3 weeks in Aleppo in April. At that time, at least, nothing was happening there. Another parish member, along with her two young daughters, is in Damascus now visiting family. She reports life is normal, with no disruptions. Of course, both of these examples are from Syrian Christians, who have more to fear from Assad's fall than anyone else. But then I recently heard from my Muslim friend in Aleppo. His words, in broken but clearly understandable English were: "as lately you had maybe in American news about Syria and what is going on but it is all wrong ."

But with demonstrations in the street against autocracy, surely we, the original Revolutionaries, have to do something, don't we? Actually, no. Charles Glass, in an excellent article, here, agrees with the old French saying that there is an "urgent need to do nothing."

Syria is a complex and diverse society in which outside do-gooders risk destroying all they claim to support. The first victims of a war in Syria will be the religious minorities. These include the Alawites and the Christians, who comprise about ten percent of the population and have prospered under the Assad regime. The government, despite the Ottoman-era practice of defining citizens by religious sect, is explicitly secular.

As in Iraq, chaos would mean the mass emigration of the Christian communities who have lived there for two millennia. Syria, following the American invasion of Iraq with its concomitant anarchy and sectarian conflict, took in over a million Iraqi refugees, including more than 300,000 Christians. Where would they and Syria’s indigenous Christians find refuge? Do Washington’s holy warriors want them to leave and for Syria to be as purely Sunni as its favorite Mideast statelet, Saudi Arabia?

Here is what Marco Rubio, the telegenic new senator from Florida and 2012's inevitable GOP vice-presidential nominee has to say about our response to Syria:

Here is the reality. We either believe the founding principles of this nation or we do not. The founding principles of the United States are simple, and that is that our rights don’t come from our laws or from our government. They come from our creator, and that these rights extend to all men. And any government who denies these rights is an illegitimate government.

Anywhere in the world where that is challenged, the United States has to speak out against it. Otherwise, the very essence of our founding, our purpose for existing as a nation and our founding, is gone. This is an important issue. ~Marco Rubio

The dependable Daniel Larison takes this nonsense to task, here, finding this "the most egregious sort of meaningless moral posturing with some flourishes of American nationalism."

And in the combox is this perceptive observation:

For one thing, the fall of Assad would very likely lead to great pressure on the ancient Christian communities of Syria. Are the Christians of the Levant endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, or are those rights confined to landholding American Deists?

In another post, Larison continues:

[The President] is the chief magistrate of a federal republic. He is not a cheerleader or motivational speaker for the world’s dissidents. Giving protesters encouragement without any intention of lending them real support is a good way to keep getting protesters killed.

“Speaking out” in support of protesters is a phony pledge of solidarity that America is with them, when they know full well that America is not with them....Lending false hope to opposition movements in Syria and elsewhere is not admirable or principled. It is much more like a cruel trick.

It hasn’t even been two months since the Libyan war started, and already we have people agitating for starting the same process all over again. When it seemed that Obama had no intention of ordering military attacks on Libya, critics argued that he had to back up his demand that Gaddafi “must go” with action. Soon enough, Obama opted for intervention, and continues to insist that Gaddafi “must go.” If Obama addresses the Syrian crackdown in his speech on Thursday, will he refrain from making grandiose statements about the regime’s legitimacy, or will he issue another demand for an end to the current regime? All signs currently point to the administration’s unwillingness to make that demand, which is why it may be better if Obama says nothing or as little as possible about Syria.

Denunciations change nothing, so soon enough there will be agitation for “actions, not words,” and then there will be calls for “more decisive action” until people begin promoting the unthinkable and ridiculous option of launching attacks on government forces. As pressure builds, the government eventually adopts increasingly aggressive and confrontational policies. What everyone acknowledged to be “madness” yesterday soon becomes an unavoidable matter of preserving our “credibility.”

And finally, Justin Raimondo has some good thoughts here:

When you're hungry, and out of a job, familiar humiliations become intolerable. Israel's propagandists are telling us the Syrian government is behind the protests at the formerly quiet border between Syria and the Golan Heights: the Syrians are supposedly trying to divert attention from the Ba'athists' domestic atrocities. On the other hand, Damascus sounds a similar note, ascribing anti-government protests in its own streets to the work of the Mossad. These two may fight it out on the field of public diplomacy, and denounce each other as evil incarnate, yet both Tel Aviv and Damascus are basically on the same side – fighting against a human tide that threatens their carefully-constructed prison societies, once thought to be escape-proof and now revealed as rather rickety.

It could end in a new Arab Enlightenment, the restoration of a high civilization that fell into Ottomanized decay and eventual ruin, or it could climax in a orgy of self-immolation and a regional war that will plunge the Middle East back into the darkness. Yet it is possible to draw at least one conclusion from the current chaos, and it is this: the US must get out of the way.

Some Books (3)—The Pllar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters by Pavel Florensky

This is a monumental work, written when Florensky was merely 26. A Russian polymath executed by the Soviets in 1937, he is known as "Russia's DaVinci." And while I heartily recommend this book, I find it impossible to summarize. It is much like reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The author goes off on tangents that may be delightful to some, but incomprehensible to others, such as myself. But the work is well worth the effort, with hidden gems of incredibly lucid insight scattered throughout. The endnotes and comments alone run 160 pages, and make fascinating reading in and of themselves. Florensky has much to say about (and against) western notions of rationality in the context of faith. He also speaks at length about friendship, perhaps in ways that may be uncomfortable to some. I also found intriguing his explication of antinomies. Beyond that, I won’t attempt to say. A few selections follow:

Catholicism and Protestantism…in both cases, life is truncated by a concept….If in Catholicism one can perceive the fanaticism of canonicity, then in Protestantism one can perceive the equally great fanaticism of scientism. The indefinability of Orthodox ecclesiality…is the best proof of its vitality….The Orthodox taste, the Orthodox temper, is felt but it is not subject to arithmetical calculation. Orthodoxy is shown, not proved. That is what there is only one way to understand Orthodoxy: through direct Orthodox experience….one can become a Catholic or a Protestant without experiencing life at all—by reading books in one’s study. But to become Orthodox, it is necessary to immerse oneself all at once in the very element of Orthodoxy, to begin living in an Orthodox way. There is no other way. (pp. 8-9.)

The faith by which we are saved is the beginning and the end of the cross and of co-crucifixion with Christ. But so-called “rational” faith, faith with rational proofs, faith according to Tolstoy’s formula…such faith is a harsh, cruel stony growth in the heart, which keeps the heart from God. Such faith is a slander against God, a monstrous product of human egotism, which desires to subordinate even God to itself. There are many kinds of atheism, but the worst is the so-called rational faith. It is the worst, for, besides the rejection of the object of faith…it is hypocritical, accepts God but rejects His very essence, His “invisibility,” i.e., His suprarationality. (p. 48)

Something is lacking. My soul—wishing to be liberated and to be with Christ—longs for something. And something will come: “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” (1 John 3:2). And the more acutely one feels what is being prepared, the closer and more intimate will the connection with the Mother Church become, and the easier and simpler it will be to endure out of love for Her the dirt that is cast upon Her. What will be will be in Her and through Her, not otherwise. (p. 95)

But precisely because sin is rationality par excellence, it makes God’s entire creation and God Himself absurd, depriving Him of the perspective depth of grounding and tearing Him from the Soil of the absolute. It places everything in a single plane, making everything flat and vulgar.(p. 133)

Holiness is a preliminary self-perception of one’s own freedom, and sin is preliminary slavery to oneself. (p. 160)

The philosopher leaves behind his cloak, all the learned nonsense that clutters up his soul, his ignorance, arrogance, empty words, lies, and sly questions together with his muddled intellectualizing. In other words, he leaves behind the vanity, insanity, and pettiness that consist of gold coins, shamelessness, life without restraint and idleness, deceit, airs of importance, a belief in one’s own superiority, and finally, his beard, frowns, flattery, and so on. Face to face with eternity, everyone must take off everything corruptible and become naked. This makes the emptiness of a soul that has lost most of its content understandable. (p. 173)

What does salvation consist in? It consists in being a stone in the tower that is being built; it consists in real unity with the Church. (p. 248)

To arrive at the Truth, it is necessary to free onself from one’s self-hood, to go out of oneself. But, for us, this is impossible, for we are flesh. But, I repeat, how precisely, in this case, can one grasp hold of the Pillar of the Truth? We do not know and cannot know. We know only that, through the yawning cracks of human rationality, the azure of Eternity is visible. This is unfathomable, but it is so. And we know that “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and scholars," comes to us, comes to our place of nocturnal rest, takes us by the hand, and leads us in a way we could not have conceived of. (p. 348)

Quick Trip to Arkansas

I am now down to two aunts--one by marriage in Fort Worth, whom I visit every January, and one by blood in Arkansas, whom I visit every May. I enjoy my annual overnight jaunt into the Ozarks and back. My aunt, now almost 88, remembers her happy central Texas childhood in great detail. I hear many of the old stories every visit, but there are always a few new ones thrown in for good measure. I had never heard her tell of the wheat harvesting in the community, or her experience in the Church of Christ Tabernacle with the preacher (and kinsman) who reminded her of Ichabod Crane, or of the time one of my uncle's caused the evacuation of the Copperas Cove High School (as well as ending his school career) by opening a bottle of skunk essence. She enjoys talking of old times--and of the Jehovah's Witness faith she has clung to these last 40 years. Obviously, I try to keep the conversation directed towards family matters (sigh.)



I will have to admit that I have even warmed-up to Arkansas. I have always harbored a Texan's instinctive disdain for our neighboring states. Our view of the westward migration is that anybody with any gumption did not linger in Louisiana or Arkansas, but came on to Texas, as any right-thinking person would do. But it is true, Arkansas is one beautiful state. The key for my changing attitude has come about by 1) avoiding the south-central portion of the state, and 2) staying completely off the Arkansas interstate highway system. My favorite regions are the Delta, from Memphis south, and the western third of the state, from Texas to Missouri.

Staying on the back roads as I do, I spend about 7-8 hours winding my way up to my aunt's. If you are looking for stereotypical hillbillyiana, well there is plenty of that, to be sure. But this sells the region short, for there is more beautiful, productive farmland than you might think. This trip, I kept my eyes opened for any interesting churches I passed along the way. For a few, I stopped to snap a picture.

The white church at the top is the old Boxley church, school and community center, a few miles down the road from my aunt's. Newton County is perhaps the most mountainous in Arkansas, and Boxley Valley is the only area where any real farming can be realistically accomplished. The narrow river valley is a protected area, spotted with white two-storey farmhouses with even larger barns, and all the accouterments of an on-going agricultural culture. This landmark is one of my favorites, but far from the only one of this nature in the area.

Crossing the Arkansas River, I came across this rather substantial red-bricked church out in the middle of nowhere. I was surprised to find a Catholic church out here in the middle of nowhere. The Church of Sts. Peter and Paul was constructed in 1917. A few miles down the road, I understood a little better. The Subiaco Abbey and School, a Benedictine institution, crowned an Arkansas hilltop. This neighborhood is obviously a Catholic enclave. Next trip, I plan to stop and look around a bit more.

In Paris, AR, I slowed down to take a picture of the impressively solid and fortress-like First Christian Church. After reading When Church Became Theatre (3 posts previous), I understand the context of this particular take on church architecture.

Further along, outside of Driggs, I encountered a sign for the Clark Chapel Church of God of the Abrahamic Faith. I had no idea what a Church of God of the Abrahamic Faith would look like, exactly, so I turned down this dirt road to check it out. Four miles on, I still had not reached the chapel, and realizing that I really needed to be heading in a southerly direction, I turned back. Again, a project for a future trip. I couldn't help chuckling a bit though, and thinking of my friend Milton's alter ego, the Rev. Buford T. Smeets, Pastor of the Gum Springs Tabernacle Greater Apostolic Church of the Final Thunder.

Fortified by a real hamburger at Mena's Skyline Cafe (since 1922,) I pushed on. South of Mena, one encounters a patch of what you might describe as stereotypical Arkansas. I made a u-turn after a caught a glimpse of this metal yard. The owner had constructed elaborate biblical quotes and spiritual admonitions out of heavy iron chains. The one pictured is only the main one at the scrap yard entrance--the other iron-clad makeshift billboards lined the entire front of the property. In her day, Flannery O'Connor could have made good use of this. I was kind of impressed myself.

DeQueen is the next town of any size south of Mena. With the dearth of any signs downtown en ingles, I think they probably should just go ahead and rename it de Reina. I turned off here, and headed west. A few miles before the Oklahoma border, I turned up Brooks Road, and stopped at All Saints of America Orthodox Mission, a sight even rarer in these parts than the rural Catholic church above.

This is a ROCOR church located on a beautiful country homestead. Fr. George walked across from his woodshop and greeted me. The farmhouse was his grandmother's and he retired here a number of years ago. The present church started out as a family oratory. While small, it held 45 for Pascha, with some driving from as far away as Little Rock. The walls are covered with icons, and the small dome is a real one, not a tacked-on affair. A nice hall, guesthouse and bells round out the picture. Fr. George invited me to visit sometime and stay in the guesthouse. I may take him up on that. We had a nice talk about current events in American Orthodoxy before I left.

It was now past 4:00 in the afternoon, and I was still a long way from home. I pushed on home and arrived with some daylight left to check on my garden and chickens. A satisfying outing, all the way around, I would say.

My One-And-Only Post on the Late Unpleasantness in the Orthodox Church in America (A Mild Rant)

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Back when I was working on my graduate degree, I remember an anecdote from one of my history professors. In mock seriousness, he asked us if we knew why infighting within academic departments was so vicious. We were all a little intimidated of him, so no one answered. After a long pause, he replied because the stakes are so small. That's kind of how I feel about the latest sideshow within my particular Orthodox jurisdiction, the OCA. I do not mean to imply that one's salvation is small stakes, but as one commentator wryly noted, there are more model train enthusiasts in America than there are members of the OCA.

I have heretofore refrained from addressing the situation. Mine is not an "Orthodox blog," so to speak, but one where I may occasionally express my own Orthodox slant on contemporary happenings. I avoid publicly addressing "issues" within the Orthodox community. Also, I know I have visitors to this site who are outside Orthodoxy, to whom recent events would seem nigh incomprehensible. Well, hell--it should be equally incomprehensible to any right-thinking Orthodox. But with so much going on, it seems perversely head-in-the-sandish not to acknowledge the situation.

Let's just say there has been a little something for everybody in this year's imbroglio: attempted coups and counter-coups, plots within plots, machinations within machinations, leaked e-mails and stolen emails, dueling blogs, pettiness, jealousy, more plotting, occasional appearances by our royal family trying to keep everyone in line, de facto governance by blog post, sordid sexual allegation upon sordid sexual allegation complete with hierarchical condo hide-a-ways, formerly respected priests throwing their reputations away in vicious attacks, demonization on all sides, etc.

The world of the OCA is a small one. Basically, we all know each other. So it is not unusual that I would have some familiarity with a few of the parties involved, and why I find objectionable the cheap allegations and demonization against those I love and respect. I have been taken aback, as well, by the glee some take in all these troubles. But the Synod has met and decreed. Entrenched mediocrity has been confirmed, and the status quo ante affirmed. On our diocesan level, things are still roiling down here as perhaps the OCA's most vibrant parish, just for good measure it would seem, has been thrown on its back. I am convinced more than ever that the OCA's days are numbered, its vaunted autocephaly an increasingly impolite fiction--whether there is a Great Council or not. But God is still on His throne, and Orthodoxy, thankfully, is far larger than our little OCA. Back in my Protestant days, I saw "church problems" destroy the faith of some. And I have seen it in previous scandals within Orthodoxy. In a strange way, this has done nothing to weaken my faith. Any reality-based reading of Church history clearly shows the faithful plodding on, while bishops may plot and scheme. Simply put, if the Church were not what she claimed to be, such behavior would have sunk it centuries ago. This is all the more reason to keep my head down and tend my own garden here on the parish level. But in doing so, I am reminded of the line from Fiddler on the Roof, which has some applicability to our present situation:

May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!

Some Books (2)--Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse

George Orwell believed that there were "some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." Roger Kimball takes this line of reasoning and has some fun with it in his Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, published back in 2002. The dust-jacket promises "a delicious study of genius and pseudo-genius," a study which asks "When does a love of ideas become a dangerous infatuation?" or "What antidotes are there for the silliness of unanchored intellect?"

Frankly, I have never read much in the way of intellectual history. I can aspire to becoming a scholar, and I may have a certain knack for piecing together tidbits of history into a coherent picture. Intellectualism, however, is beyond me. My mind just does not work that way. If given a choice, I have always chosen to keep my head buried in the likes of Herodotus, or Carlyle, or Parkman, or Thucydides, or Prescott, or Macaulay, or Gibbon, or Comnena, or Runciman, or Lukacs and the like. I never gave any attention to intellectual historians and their theories--the ideas of Descartes, or Hegel, or Schopenhauer, or Marx, or Kierkegaard, etc.

That is why Kimball's book was such a satisfying read. For example, I now have some vague idea of the meaning of the term "Hegelian" without having to (God forbid) actually read Hegel. (Were this term removed from the vocabulary of intellectuals, I firmly believe most would be rendered mute.) On the whole, Kimball's essays cover an interesting lot, and both he and his subjects are eminently quotable. A selection:

Kimball on Aron: Busyness-that curiously modern bane that mistakes movement for progress.

Aron: Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word.

Kimbell on Aron on Hegel: His was a sober and penetrating intelligence, sufficiently curious to take on Heel, sufficiently robust to escape uncorrupted by the encounter.

Bagehot: Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

Scruton on Hegel: His work is like a beautiful oasis around a treacherous pool of nonsense, and nowhere beneath the foliage is the ground really firm.

Kierkegaard: The curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others.

Kimball on boredom: The dark side of a life devoted to amusement, pleasure, diversion. What happens when amusement palls and pleasure fails to please? Boredom yawns before one, a paralyzing abyss.

Kierkegaard: A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics--it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.

Bertram Russell on sex to first fiancee: As to frequency, I am sure it ought not to be great.

David Stove: Not to understand religion is ...not to understand nine-tenths of human history.

Stove on Darwin: Darwinism says many things, especially about our species, which are too obviously false to be believed by any educated person, or at least by an educated person who retains any capacity at all for critical thought.

Wodehouse by way of Jeeves to Bertie after a close brush with matrimony: It was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not like Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

Peguy: Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

Kimball is good at this sort of thing. I remember his work back when I used to read the New Criterion. And yet, I group him with Theodore Dalrymple, another writer I admire. Both are excellent at chronicling our slow descent. None are better in the Decline-of-the-West genre. And yet, both pull back in the end, watching and tabulating as the vines of our age pry loose the bricks of our edifice, one by one. Neither will acknowledge the true nature of the Crisis before us, or its remedy.

Some Books (1)--When Church Became Theatre

I have been making good progress in winnowing-down my book stack. I am anxious to finish with them so I can begin on the next pile, which already awaits my attention. In the next week or so, I hope to report on a few of the books enjoyed over the last few months.

Anyone who looks at the contemporary side-show of American mega-churchdom and wonders how Christianity came to such a pass will gain valuable insight from When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America by Dr. Jeanne Halgren Kilde. As the title indicates, this is not simply an architectural study, but an overview of evolving patterns of Protestant worship during the 1800s, and specifically how this was shaped and transformed by purposeful innovations in the traditional worship space. She "explores the complex relationships between space and worship, architecture and meaning, religion and society." This is a masterful work, and essential reading for an understanding of 19th-century American religiosity. As Kilde demonstrates, the calculated "revisioning of Protestant worship space," as well as the "reinvention" of a Christian past gave shape to a number of dynamic trends within Protestantism that are in evidence even today.

Briefly put, since the early 1800s, popular American church architecture has gone through four phases: the Gothic Revival, the neomedieval auditorium, the Late Gothic Revival, and finally, today's auditorium church. On the Gothic Revival:

"The hegemony of the Gothic as the generic Christian style was overwhelming at midcentury despite the fact that it seemed to contradict evangelical history and ideology in several ways....With its nave, chancel, choir and transepts, [the Gothic church] was ideal for establishing and maintaining the mystery of the Mass and the power of the clergy in the Eucharistic sacrament. It was inimical, however, to Protestant worship that focused on the sermon."

But as Kilde notes, "in their search for Christian coherence, evangelical Protestants separated the architecture from its liturgical function and imagined (emphasis mine) a generic Christian origin....Gothic design...was hailed as the only truly Christian building style precisely because it embodied Christian (i.e., generic Christian) principles...that these were pre-Reformation Christians did not greatly trouble [them.]" These churches "looked to a newly reconstructed past for their legitimacy, which a historicized Christian architectural style, the Gothic, provided," and "the appropriation and reinterpretation of the past for the purpose of reshaping and reformulating the Protestant church to respond to contemporary situations."

As one Christian writer noted in 1858: "The tendency of the structure must be continually upwards...leading the mind to the infinite above, which conveys the idea of the presence of God...Its interior must ...elevate the mid above all earthly thoughts; its forms must be filled with a spirit which in its development leads the mind toward the high undefinable ideas of that All-seeing and unseen God..."

To the Orthodox mind, this is strange and abstract language. I am not qualified to speak authoritatively about the significant of Orthodox architecture, but I do know enough to contrast it with the view above. There is no sense of pulling our thoughts upward, to some "infinite above," for the Triune God is there with us. The dome symbolizes the heavens, to be sure, but Christ Pantocrator is there, looking down on us. And with the iconography of the church, one has a sense of being literally enveloped into the mystical worship and adoration before the Throne.

I am reminded of Father Stephen Freeman's series of lessons (and now, book) on the "Two-Storey Universe" where, according to Protestant thought, God is imagined as "up there somewhere," on the second storey.

By mid-century, Gothic Revival had been largely abandoned in favor of the neomedieval auditorium churches which abandoned downtown for suburban locals, where they "strove to preserve and maintain the goodwill of wealthy members." Concern for the poor and needy often gave way to programs for "the family, " as they "adapted more fully to the growing consumer-oriented industrial culture." Kilde noted a process that "transformed audiences into voyeurs."

By late century, the pendulum had swung again, away from the neomedieval to the Late Gothic Revival. At this point, Kilde asks an important question:

"One must ask whether evangelical religion was simply colonized by capitalism during the peak of the U. S. industrial revolution. Were these churches merely the gilded totems of a capitalist age? Were they artifacts that furthered the ideology of wealth and consumption, bathing it in a glow of sanctified virtuosity and thus justifying it and the materialistic lifestyle it encouraged as sacred?"

Saint Tamar

Commemorated on May 1

In 1166 a daughter, Tamar, was born to King George III (1155–1184) and Queen Burdukhan of Georgia. The king proclaimed that he would share the throne with his daughter from the day she turned twelve years of age.

The royal court unanimously vowed its allegiance and service to Tamar, and father and daughter ruled the country together for five years. After King George’s death in 1184, the nobility recognized the young Tamar as the sole ruler of all Georgia. Queen Tamar was enthroned as ruler of all Georgia at the age of eighteen. She is called “King” in the Georgian language because her father had no male heir and so she ruled as a monarch and not as a consort.

At the beginning of her reign, Tamar convened a Church council and addressed the clergy with wisdom and humility: “Judge according to righteousness, affirming good and condemning evil,” she advised. “Begin with me--if I sin I should be censured, for the royal crown is sent down from above as a sign of divine service. Allow neither the wealth of the nobles nor the poverty of the masses to hinder your work. You by word and I by deed, you by preaching and I by the law, you by upbringing and I by education will care for those souls whom God has entrusted to us, and together we will abide by the law of God, in order to escape eternal condemnation…. You as priests and I as ruler, you as stewards of good and I as the watchman of that good.”

The Church and the royal court chose a suitor for Tamar: Yuri, the son of Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal (in Georgia Yuri was known as “George the Russian”). The handsome George Rusi was a valiant soldier, and under his command the Georgians returned victorious from many battles. His marriage to Tamar, however, exposed many of the coarser sides of his character. He was often drunk and inclined toward immoral deeds. In the end, Tamar’s court sent him away from Georgia to Constantinople, armed with a generous recompense. Many Middle Eastern rulers were drawn to Queen Tamar’s beauty and desired to marry her, but she rejected them all. Finally at the insistence of her court, she agreed to wed a second time to ensure the preservation of the dynasty. This time, however, she asked her aunt and nurse Rusudan (the sister of King George III) to find her a suitor. The man she chose, Davit-Soslan Bagrationi, was the son of the Ossetian ruler and a descendant of King George I (1014-1027).

In 1195 a joint Muslim military campaign against Georgia was planned under the leadership of Atabeg (a military commander) Abu Bakr of Persian Azerbaijan. At Queen Tamar’s command, a call to arms was issued. The faithful were instructed by Metropolitan Anton of Chqondidi to celebrate All-night Vigils and Liturgies and to generously distribute alms so that the poor could rest from their labors in order to pray. In ten days the army was prepared, and Queen Tamar addressed the Georgian soldiers for the last time before the battle began. “My brothers! Do not allow your hearts to tremble before the multitude of enemies, for God is with us…. Trust God alone, turn your hearts to Him in righteousness, and place your every hope in the Cross of Christ and in the Most Holy Theotokos!” she exhorted them.

Having taken off her shoes, Queen Tamar climbed the hill to the Metekhi Church of the Theotokos (in Tbilisi) and knelt before the icon of the Most Holy Theotokos. She prayed without ceasing until the good news arrived: the battle near Shamkori had ended in the unquestionable victory of the Orthodox Georgian army.

After this initial victory the Georgian army launched into a series of triumphs over the Turks, and neighboring countries began to regard Georgia as the protector of the entire Transcaucasus. By the beginning the 13th century, Georgia was commanding a political authority recognized by both the Christian West and the Muslim East.

Georgia’s military successes alarmed the Islamic world. Sultan Rukn al-Din was certain that a united Muslim force could definitively decide the issue of power in the region, and he marched on Georgia around the year 1203, commanding an enormous army.

Having encamped near Basiani, Rukn al-Din sent a messenger to Queen Tamar with an audacious demand: to surrender without a fight. In reward for her obedience, the sultan promised to marry her on the condition that she embrace Islam; if Tamar were to cleave to Christianity, he would number her among the other unfortunate concubines in his harem. When the messenger relayed the sultan’s demand, a certain nobleman, Zakaria Mkhargrdzelidze, was so outraged that he slapped him on the face, knocking him unconscious.

At Queen Tamar’s command, the court generously bestowed gifts upon the ambassador and sent him away with a Georgian envoy and a letter of reply. “Your proposal takes into consideration your wealth and the vastness of your armies, but fails to account for divine judgment,” Tamar wrote, “while I place my trust not in any army or worldly thing but in the right hand of the Almighty God and the infinite aid of the Cross, which you curse. The will of God--and not your own--shall be fulfilled, and the judgment of God--and not your judgment--shall reign!”

The Georgian soldiers were summoned without delay. Queen Tamar prayed for victory before the Vardzia Icon of the Theotokos, then, barefoot, led her army to the gates of the city.

Hoping in the Lord and the fervent prayers of Queen Tamar, the Georgian army marched toward Basiani. The enemy was routed. The victory at Basiani was an enormous event not only for Georgia, but for the entire Christian world.

The military victories increased Queen Tamar’s faith. In the daytime she shone in all her royal finery and wisely administered the affairs of the government; during the night, on bended knees, she beseeched the Lord tearfully to strengthen the Georgian Church. She busied herself with needlework and distributed her embroidery to the poor.

Once, exhausted from her prayers and needlework, Tamar dozed off and saw a vision. Entering a luxuriously furnished home, she saw a gold throne studded with jewels, and she turned to approach it, but was suddenly stopped by an old man crowned with a halo. “Who is more worthy than I to receive such a glorious throne?” Queen Tamar asked him.

He answered her, saying, “This throne is intended for your maidservant, who sewed vestments for twelve priests with her own hands. You are already the possessor of great treasure in this world.” And he pointed her in a different direction.

Having awakened, Holy Queen Tamar immediately took to her work and with her own hands sewed vestments for twelve priests.

History has preserved another poignant episode from Queen Tamar’s life: Once she was preparing to attend a festal Liturgy in Gelati, and she fastened precious rubies to the belt around her waist. Soon after she was told that a beggar outside the monastery tower was asking for alms, and she ordered her entourage to wait. Having finished dressing, she went out to the tower but found no one there. Terribly distressed, she reproached herself for having denied the poor and thus denying Christ Himself. Immediately she removed her belt, the cause of her temptation, and presented it as an offering to the Gelati Icon of the Theotokos.

During Queen Tamar’s reign a veritable monastic city was carved in the rocks of Vardzia, and the God-fearing Georgian ruler would labor there during the Great Fast. The churches of Pitareti, Kvabtakhevi, Betania, and many others were also built at that time. Holy Queen Tamar generously endowed the churches and monasteries not only on Georgian territory but also outside her borders: in Palestine, Cyprus, Mt. Sinai, the Black Mountains, Greece, Mt. Athos, Petritsoni (Bulgaria), Macedonia, Thrace, Romania, Isauria and Constantinople. The divinely guided Queen Tamar abolished the death penalty and all forms of bodily torture.

A regular, secret observance of a strict ascetic regime--fasting, a stone bed, and litanies chanted in bare feet--finally took its toll on Queen Tamar’s health. For a long time she refrained from speaking to anyone about her condition, but when the pain became unbearable she finally sought help. The best physicians of the time were unable to diagnose her illness, and all of Georgia was seized with fear of disaster. Everyone from the small to the great prayed fervently for Georgia’s ruler and defender. The people were prepared to offer not only their own lives, but even the lives of their children, for the sake of their beloved ruler.

God sent Tamar a sign when He was ready to receive her into His Kingdom. Then the pious ruler bade farewell to her court and turned in prayer to an icon of Christ and the Life-giving Cross: “Lord Jesus Christ! Omnipotent Master of heaven and earth! To Thee I deliver the nation and people that were entrusted to my care and purchased by Thy Precious Blood, the children whom Thou didst bestow upon me, and to Thee I surrender my soul, O Lord!”

The burial place of Queen Tamar has remained a mystery to this day. Some sources claim that her tomb is in Gelati, in a branch of burial vaults belonging to the Bagrationi dynasty, while others argue that her holy relics are preserved in a vault at the Holy Cross Monastery in Jerusalem.

St. Tamara is commemorated on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women in addition to her regular commemoration on May 1.

An American Pascha Basket

Christ is Risen!


Living my life within a liturgical year is still fresh and new to me, this my 6th Orthodox Pascha. And I suppose I enjoy the feast in the hall afterwards as much as anyone. I find that after 4 years of doing this, our mission is falling into its own rhythm, with small traditions taking shape.


American convert Orthodox remain a self-conscious and self-absorbed bunch--at least we of the online variety, where we often fret about many things, become angst-ridden, and issue dire prognostications about the impossibility of American converts ever really becoming Orthodox (it's all hopeless play-acting, don't you know, etc. etc. etc.) And I'll be the first to admit, we have a ways to go. We will know we will have arrived once we stop thinking and talking about it so dang much.


With the ethnic Orthodox, the preparation of a Pascha basket was no haphazard accumulation of meat, cheese and egg dishes. Every item was prepared in a way to symbolize, in some manner, a truth of the Resurrection. Well, we American converts are not there yet. From my study of Church history, it seems apparent that Orthodoxy takes a long time to gel with a particular culture. Before discounting where we are now, I would suggest checking back in 200 years, to see if we've made any progress or not. That is not a particularly long span in Orthodox time.


The preparation of my own Pascha basket was not carefully planned-out, to be sure. And yet, I found the contents interesting--containing something of a nod to the older traditions, but incorporating foods of my native South, as well. The contents (following) may say as much as anything about the adaptability of an Orthodox ethos in this strange clime.


1. Georgian wine, specifically Khvanchkara. The Georgians claim they invented wine--and I won't argue the point with them. I am not a wine connoisseur, but simply enjoy a smooth, modestly-priced red wine that goes down well with a meal. Khavanchkara is a winner on all three counts, and each year I make new disciples. Having the Khvanchkara at our post-Pascha feast has now become a tradition at our mission. In the weeks leading up, different ones will inquire whether I have ordered the Georgian wine yet. There's a liquor store in D.C. that has the American distributorship, I suppose. I send them an email, and in a few days time, a case of this wonderful stuff arrives at my door.


2. Tsoureki. This is Greek Pascha bread. The recipe, attached to an email I received from an Orthodox friend, stated that it dated back to "Byzantine times." Truth be told, I am something of a Byzantine nut. Attach the word to most anything, and I'm a buyer. If Detroit came out with a new sports car called the "Byzantine," I would somehow convince myself that I needed one. This love of Byzantine history is separate and apart from my being Orthodox--in fact, it came first. Perhaps someday I may tell of my humiliating episode with the "Byzantine" coins at the archaeological site in Syria. Maybe. But back to the bread--once the recipe mentioned the B-word, I knew I had to give it a try. The theological symbolism is not hard to figure out in this bread, with the yeast "rising again," the eggs, and each loaf consisting of 3 intertwined braids. But I also see why it is generally baked only once a year. The process takes the better part of a day, as well as taking-over the entire kitchen. The two loaves could have fed a small Byzantine city through an extended siege. To add another Orthodox element, I stirred the mixture with the hand-carved wooden spoon I picked up at a stall right outside the Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria. But I chose not to put the decorative dyed eggs atop the bread. My Protestant wife kept walking through--not a little skeptical of the whole thing and a bit alarmed at the usurpation of her kitchen--with barbed questions as to why I was doing this or that, and why didn't I do it this other way, etc. I figured putting the eggs atop the bread would have exceeded her level of allowable foolishness. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the Greek gentleman sitting next to me at the feast said that I got the taste just right.

3. Salami and cheese. Our city has a new frou-frou grocery store determined to out-do Whole Foods at that game. The establishment is certainly impressive, but perhaps not the place for everyday shopping and everyday budgets. But I did spring for a bit of higher-grade salami. The butcher with the fake Italian accent tried to sell me on the really expensive stuff, assuring me that it would "melt in my mouth." I did not say it, but I didn't want it to melt in my mouth. I wanted to chew it up. Anyway, I settled for salami I could afford. I chose a Gouda cheese to go with, but one that was made in Granbury, Texas.

4. Natchitoches meat pies. I think every agrarian culture develops some variation of a meat pie. In this part of the South, the meat pies became identified with this old French town on the Cane River. Meat pies and hash browns are my favorite Saturday breakfast, so I always include some to break the fast after Pascha.

5. Buttermilk pie. This is a Southern staple that tastes oh so much better than it sounds. I make the pie and the crust from scratch, and it is one of the easiest pies to throw together. My buttermilk pies have come to be expected at these gatherings.

6. Red-dyed eggs. I was the logical one to supply the dyed eggs this year, as my chickens and guinea hens are now laying big-time. This turned into more trouble than I thought, as I discovered at this late date that I really do not know how to boil an egg properly. At age 56, I can't recall ever having done it before. But by the last batch, I about had it down. For the egg-cracking game, those in the know would reach for the smaller guinea eggs, whose shells are much harder than the chicken eggs.

Martyrs of the Kvabtakhevi Monastery

Commemorated on April 10

In the 14th century, during the reign of King Bagrat V (1360–1394), Timur (Tamerlane) invaded Georgia seven times. His troops inflicted irreparable damage on the country, seizing centuries-old treasures and razing ancient churches and monasteries. Timur’s armies ravaged Kartli, then took the king, queen, and the entire royal court captive and sent them to Karabakh (in present-day Azerbaijan). Later Timur attempted to entice King Bagrat to renounce the Christian Faith in exchange for permission to return to the throne and for the release of the other Georgian prisoners. For some time Timur was unable to subjugate King Bagrat, but in the end, being powerless and isolated from his kinsmen, the king began to falter. He devised a sly scheme: to confess Islam before the enemy, but to remain a Christian at heart. Satisfied with King Bagrat’s decision to “convert to Islam,” Timur permitted the king to return to the throne of Kartli. At the request of King Bagrat, Timur sent twelve thousand troops with him to complete Georgia’s forcible conversion to Islam. When they were approaching the village of Khunani in southeastern Georgia, Bagrat secretly informed his son Giorgi of everything that had happened and called upon him and his army to massacre the invaders. The news of Bagrat’s betrayal and the ruin of his army infuriated Timur, and he called for immediate revenge. At their leader’s command, his followers destroyed everything in their path, set fire to cities and villages, devastated churches, and thus forced their way through to Kvabtakhevi Monastery. Monastics and laymen alike were gathered in Kvabtakhevi when the enemy came thundering in. Having forced open the gate, the attackers burst into the monastery, then plundered and seized all its treasures. They captured the young and strong, carrying them away. The old and infirm were put to the sword. As the greatest humiliation, they mocked the clergy and monastics by strapping them with sleigh bells and jumping and dancing around them. Already drunk on the blood they had shed, the barbarians posed an ultimatum to those who remained: to renounce Christ and live or to be driven into the church and burned alive. Faced with these terms, the faithful cried out: “Go ahead and burn our flesh—in the Heavenly Kingdom our souls will burn with a divine flame more radiant than the sun!” And in their exceeding humility, the martyrs requested that their martyrdom not be put on display: “We ask only that you not commit this sin before the eyes of men and angels. The Lord alone knows the sincerity of our will and comforts us in our righteous afflictions!” Having been driven like beasts into the church, the martyrs raised up a final prayer to God: “In the multitude of Thy mercy shall I go into Thy house; I shall worship toward Thy holy temple in fear of Thee. O Lord, guide me in the way of Thy righteousness; because of mine enemies, make straight my way before Thee (Ps. 5:6–7) that with a pure mind I may glorify Thee forever….” The executioners hauled in more and more wood, until the flames enveloping the church blazed as high as the heavens and the echo of crackling timber resounded through the mountains. Ensnared in a ring of fire, the blissful martyrs chanted psalms as they gave up their spirits to the Lord. The massacre at Kvabtakhevi took place in 1386. The imprints of the martyrs’ charred bodies remain on the floor of the church to this day.

Michael Scheuer on Looking Ahead to Next Year in the Middle East

The current issue of the American Conservative contains an important and cogent article by Michael Scheuer, former CIA operative now Georgetown University professor and noted author, writer and lecturer on the Middle East. I first become acquainted with his scholarship while reading Imperial Hubris back in 2005. I find Scheuer to be one of the clearest-headed analysists of our predicament in that part of the world. There is little danger that American political leaders--of either faction--will pay much attention to what Sheuer has to say. But it is important that it be said as much as possible. A few selections for the article, below:

A year from now, we will find that most Arab Muslims have neither embraced nor installed what they have long regarded as an irreligious and even pagan ideology—secular democracy. They will have instead adhered even more closely to the faith that has graced, ordered, and regulated their lives for more than 1400 years, and which helped them endure the oppressive rule of Western-supported tyrants and kleptocrats.

As new Arab regimes develop, Westerners also are likely to find that their own deep sense of superiority over devout Muslims—which is especially strong among the secular left, Christian evangelicals, and neoconservatives—is unwarranted. The nearly universal assumption in the West is that Islamic governance could not possibly satisfy the aspirations of Muslims for greater freedom and increased economic opportunity—this even though Iran has a more representative political system than that of any state in the region presided over by a Western-backed dictator. No regime run by the Muslim Brotherhood would look like Canada, but it would be significantly less oppressive than those run by the al-Sauds and Mubarak. This is not to say it would be similar to or more friendly toward the West—neither will be the case—but in terms of respecting and addressing basic human concerns they will be less monstrous.

The West’s biggest surprise a year out may well lie in being forced to learn that Westernization, secularization, and modernization are not synonyms. The postwar West’s arrogance—dare I say hubris?—has long held as an article of its increasingly pagan faith that these concepts are identical, inseparable, and the proudest achievement of superior Western culture. Well, not so. Muslims make an absolute distinction among the concepts.

At day’s end, the success of the United States and its allies in concluding their war with the Islamist movement depends on an adult assessment of the Muslim world. The basis of this analysis must be a realization that modernization, Westernization, and secularization are not interchangeable terms….We must begin to recognize that while America’s neoconservative and progressive thinkers fallaciously prattle on about the Islamists being on the verge of Islamicizing the West, it is the West’s half-century campaign to impose and then maintain secularist tyrants on Muslim states that has supplied the main motivation for the growing number of Muslims who believe themselves and their faith to be at war against the West. Continued failure to make this simple and clear semantic distinction will bring the late Professor Huntington’s concept of a clash of civilizations much closer to fruition.

The Silly Season: Fearless Political Prognostications for 2012

With a little over a year and a half before the next Presidential election, I thought I would have a little fun with the current crop of aspirants. Of course this time around, all the buzz will be on the right, which will be righter right than it has been in quite some time. And while no one has yet announced, the race is clearly underway. The lead pack--Newt, Haley, Sarah, Mike, the Donald, Michelle, Rick and Herman-- has already swarmed Iowa, where they are all busy burnishing-up their birther creds.

Newt keeps the hypocrisy meter spinning, and can say with Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others."

Haley is a GOP candidate right out of Democratic Central Casting.

Were Mike to be elected, the inauguration would have to be in Jerusalem.

And the Donald...well, as a born-again birther, he has been making the rounds, giving his testimony. I watched a clip of a recent interview he had with Bill O'Reilly. The Donald scoffed at the idea that the family would place a notice announcing little Barack's birth in the Honolulu newspaper, noting that "even the Rockefellers don't do that." Well, Donald, maybe the Rockefellers do not, and maybe your other neighbors on the Upper West Side do not, but in real world America, this practice was commonplace for many decades. The announcements were a public service, and the general practice was for the hospital to release the information to the local paper if so desired. The Donald doesn't mind being the butt of jokes when he is in on the joke, but here he appears clueless. But with 51% of GOP primary voters believing this fantasy, this may be a wise move for Iowa, where the percentage is no doubt much higher.

With these guys in the running, it has had the unintended consequence of making Michelle seem a bit saner.

None of these Dancing Demagogues could remotely win the GOP nomination, unless the Tea Party crowd totally subsumes the Establishment Republicans. What they are doing, however, is using up all the oxygen in the room and preventing any traction for the Sane and Sensible Centrists. For the life of me, I had trouble coming up with any candidates for this category--John H., I suppose; Mitch, who is probably not running anyway, and Ron P. when he is talking foreign policy.

The final category is the Establishment Electables, consisting of only Tim and Mitt. Tim would like to play with the Dancing Demagogues, but cannot yet bring himself to go the birther route. He is certainly trying to compensate, however, with his wild-eyed foreign policy proposals. But at the end of the day, he is even more boring than mild-mannered Mitt. And besides, it is Mitt's turn, a cherished GOP tradition.

So there you have it--it'll be Mitt vs. Barack. Oh yeah, and the VP nominee will be Marco Rubio, protestations to the contrary.

I am not one of these people who can take the high road and disregard it all for the foolishness it is. I am hard-wired for voting, and will do so as long as I am able. I do not think I will live long enough, however, for the GOP to ever convince me to vote their way again. But, if they were to do so, they would first have to nominate a candidate that did not insult my intelligence. So, that particular moral conundrum is at least 5 years out.

Unlikely Headlines

'

National Tea Party Leaders Endorse Obama Re-election Bid

Up: The New Down

Pope Benedict Confesses to being Closet Methodist

Mike Huckabee Exposed as Secret Hamas Agent


And then there is this:

Calvinism Declared by the Church Fathers

Such a claim can be found here. The author maintains that Calvinism, as it has come to be called, is simply a nickname for historical Christianity. But, of course. Although I do not really follow Calvinism, or neo-Calvinism, I have a vague recognition that it is enjoying something of a boomlet here in recent years. Even so, this seems like a new tact.

A writer over at Orthodox Apologetics, among others, is taking such bold-faced revisionism to task. He notes (rightly) that a bit of context and sourcing would have been nice for the carefully cherry-picked quotations assembled by the Calvinist site.

Say what you will about Calvinism, but don't blame it on the Church Fathers!

New Book by Fr. Alexis Trader

I am pleased to pass along news of a new book by Fr. Alexis Trader. The premise certainly sounds interesting. Fr. Alexis explains about the book on guest blogs here and here. By all means, check out what Fr. Alexis has to say.

The False Dream

I have never been one to speak of the "American Dream." I was always a bit skeptical of the concept, and thought it silly to collectively define ourselves by some "dream." The phrase is often utilized by politicians on the make and other demagogues. If someone is talking about the American Dream, you can generally expect it to be accompanied by flag-waving, cheap sentimentality and appeals to questionable historicism.

As I understand it, the "Dream" is simply the belief that each generation of Americans will enjoy a richer, more prosperous life than their parents--bigger, better, more. And that is supposed to be good thing--never mind the social, cultural, moral, financial and ecological wreckage resulting from 65 years of unrestrained consumerism. And yet, I am not convinced that this was necessarily the "dream" of our forebears. We Americans have always been money-crazy, to be sure (if you have any doubts, just brush up on your de Tocqueville.) But I think earlier generations simply wanted to make a good life for themselves. And they wanted their children to have a good life as well. The idea that each succeeding generation must be more prosperous and comfortable than the one before is very much a child of the 20th-century, I think. The hard times of the Depression years and the sacrifices during the Second World War gave way to a new era, one where, buoyed by incredible technical advances, America found itself at the top of the world. Americans seemed ready and eager to make up for lost time, hence the "Dream."

My parents fell in with most everyone else during that time. My dad and mother started off with absolutely nothing, and with no resources to fall back upon. But they knew how to work hard, and my dad knew how to put things together. In 1953, they built the big house -(for that day.) In 1963, they bought the first Cadillac--which they used to go on our first vacation. But having known poverty, they were never comfortable with any type of outward show of wealth. We always kept chickens, milked cows and had a big garden. My mother spent the summers working in the garden and canning. My dad always seemed to have a bunch of hay on the ground. Growing up, I suppose my "dream" was a summer not spent in the hayfield. About 1960 or 61, pursuit of the American Dream meant that my dad bought a Yellow Jacket ski boat for my brother who was in high school at the time. This was back in the day when such boats were still wooden, and I will have to say that it was a sharp looking outfit. Very young at the time, I vaguely remember being on the lake in the boat a couple of times at best. But one of those times stands out in my memory, for on that occasion I watched as my nearly 50-year old father tried his hand at water-skiing. Of all the images I have of my dad, this is one that clearly does not fit! Pursuit of the American Dream can put you in odd places. Looking back, I can see where I bought into it at times, myself. (I will, ahem, skip over the ridiculous places it took me.)

But at its core, the Dream is rotten. And now, in some quarters, there is a growing recognition of its basic emptiness. I recently watched an interview with Suze Orman, the colorful financial advisor on television. She is not someone I normally follow, but she was hawking her new book on MSNBC's Morning Joe, which is hands-down the best news show going, and the only television I watch with regularity. Ms. Orman had some wise things to say about how the American Dream--which she labels a false dream--has been redefined since 2008. What she describes as the "new dream" is something I could live with. I highly recommend the interview, here. (Unfortunately, the first 5 minutes of this segment are devoted to the latest idiocy out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich. Scroll forward if possible.)

The Either/Or-edness of Things

I recently engaged in some spirited correspondence with an old friend from back in my Church of Christ days. In that past, we shared a mutual frustration with our church, and often talked of what might be. Even after all these years, I find him every bit as discontented as he was 10, 15, 20 years before. And yet, he is still on the fence, you might say, contemplating which way to go. My friend talks of chucking church altogether and devoting his time to a homeless shelter, soup kitchen, or some other community service. He now chafes at their emphasis on "attendance" at church services, finding it not only unimportant, but actually distracting from what God really wants--"doing good."

I found the whole conversation a bit odd. I suppose our discussions were hampered by the fact that we no longer speak the same language. In Orthodoxy, we have a throw-away line that usually says something to the effect that it is not that Orthodoxy has different answers, but that it asks different questions. I believe this to be true, but it is awfully hard to explain without explicating 2,000 years of church history. And yet, I felt this was exactly the position I was in with my friend. His burning concerns have no real meaning to me any longer. Take for example his beef with "attendance." However one characterizes Orthodox services, the word "attendance" is not a factor. One attends a concert. One attends a class. One attends a lecture. In every case, the attendee is part of an audience. One participates in an Orthodox liturgy.

But this would have been hard to explain to my friend, and would have come across as just more know-it-all triumphalism of which we are sometimes guilty. And I am afraid it comes across that what in print, as well. But the differences are real and substantive. The thing that really frustrated me, however, was my friend's either/or approach to his dilemma--he could either "attend" church or he could "do good." I asked him why he could not do both. In truth, there is no either/or solution. The question is really one of yes/and. He, in turn, was disturbed by my insistence that his anti-communal, individualistic go-it-alone approach was a dead end.

My friend's attitude put me in mind of something Flannery O'Connor once wrote--"The good thing about Protestantism is that it always carries the seeds of its own reversal. It is open at both ends--on one end, to Catholicism, and on the other to unbelief." I sympathized with his frustrations on the limitations of the church he knew--the general churchiness that characterized his worship experience. And having once been there myself, I knew exactly that to which he was speaking. My response that worship did not have to be that way was met with a good bit of incredulity. He could not image anything outside the general context of his experience--Protestant/fundamentalist/evangelical. My concern was with what O'Connor noted--the open end he was tumbled out of was the one which led to unbelief.

And along the way, he was leaving himself wide open to anything and everything--from the fluffy nothingness of Philip Gulley to the latest hot-shot televangelist. He actually convinced me to read Gulley's If The Church Were Christian. He assured me that it would change my life. The book did, in fact, bring tears to my eyes: first because I could never regain the time I had wasted reading the book, and secondly because a small forest was sacrificed to publish that trash. After that, he wanted me to listen to the latest podcast by David Jeremiah. That is where I drew the line. Like I say, different languages.

The either/or dichotomy is not unique to just Protestantism. I came across the following on a Catholic blog:

Anyone who says, "We don't go to Mass, but we are really good people" have missed the Christian bus big time. They don't get it and so greatly don't get it that they are almost uneducable. Their misunderstanding is so profound that you couldn't even say to them what they haven't got because they don't know what they don't know. The astounding blind ness of such folks is that nine times out of then they then turn around and blame the people who do go to Mass for being hypocrites. Their lack of self awareness and spiritual awareness reveals the depth of their own hypocrisy for they think they are good, and never see that the essential prayer--the prayer at the heart of it all is the sinner's plea, "Lord Jesus Christ, Have Mercy on me a Sinner."

This prayer, so simple and so profound is the prayer that truly liberates. See how free and how child like you can be if you simply say this prayer? Within this prayer is the soul's freedom and the soul's joy. Within this prayer is the simple trust in God on which everything else depends. Therefore, "Being good or Going to Mass" is a totally false dichotomy.

As one of the students said, "You can't really go to Mass and mean it and be bad, and if you don't go to Mass you can't really be good."

And so, the false dichotomies play out in Catholic circles as well.

My friend's situation has been on my mind for some time now, but only recently did I read of a theory as to why these questions are so common in Western Christendom, whether Catholic or Protestant. Andrea Elizabeth has undertaken a series on Dr. Joseph Farrell's God, History and Dialectic. This is my introduction to this work, which, unfortunately, can be obtained only by e-book. Dr. Farrell examines the difference courses taken by what he calls the First Europe (the East) and Second Europe (the West.) The following is an excerpt from the Introduction, which is available online:

Why did the western half of Christendom split along so cleanly dialectical lines during the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation? Why, for example, is it not only convenient but possible to describe that split by a series of polar oppositions: Faith versus works, Scripture versus Tradition, “private conversion stay-at-home-and-watch-television religion” versus “public, sacramental, institutional” religion; predestination versus free will, Kernel versus Husk, Kerygma versus Dogma, Luther versus Zwingli, Calvin versus Arminius, Whitefield and Edwards versus the Wesleys, Henry VIII versus the Pope? It has its secular counterparts as well: Empiricism versus Rationalism, Materialism versus Idealism, Science versus Religion, Creation versus Evolution, hard versus soft disciplines, and so on. One could
cite an endless litany of similar oppositions. Indeed, theologians, philosophers, and
historians of the Second Europe have long written about this or that pair of these eitheror
polarities, but astonishingly, have either done so in isolation of an examination of the
paradigm of dialectical opposition itself, or they have accepted that paradigm as an
inevitability of Christian theology or of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. The
phenomenon of this acceptance is therefore deeply rooted, and must be accounted for.
These essays argue that the paradigm is itself a direct consequence of Augustine’s
formulation of trinitarian doctrine. But the movement from the specifically Augustinian
formulation of the Trinity to these cultural consequences is certainly not an easy one to
recount, and thus, many theologians — those most adequately equipped to undertake
the task — fail to do so, for they view the original dispute between the East and West
over that formulation as a dispute about words. The troublesome questions multiply:
Why did a Church and a culture, which believed absolutely in the complete union in
Christ of the utterly spiritual and the completely material, without separation and without
confusion, lose sight of the implications of that belief in the movements of the dialectical
deconstruction of its thought and institutions? Why did the same Church, which, heir to
the doctrine of the Trinity, ought to have believed in the “both-andness” of Absolute Unity
and Utter diversity find itself embroiled in life-and-death constitutional struggles between
the Empire and the Papacy, or more fundamentally, between endless contests between
One Pope and Many Bishops? (p.11)

Dr. Farrell would say that the either-or approach of my friend--as opposed to a "both-andness" view--is hardwired into the very makeup of western Christendom, manifesting itself in an endless progression of controversial counterpoints. I believe that to be true. The real question, though, is how does one move past that mentality? We have become accustomed to the rut we are in. Western Christendom steadily declines with the endless re-reforming of the Faith these last few hundred years. There may be no way out until we hit bottom first.

Mike Huckabee is a Buffoon

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MIKE HUCKABEE IS A BUFFOON, Part One:


HUCKABEE: [O]ne thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits –

MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.

HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.


LARISON:

Almost everything Huckabee said in this part of the recent interview was false, but he said it because it fits into the tiresome narrative that Obama disrespects and “snubs” allies. It appears that Huckabee was also directly channeling Glenn Beck’s view on the subject. It’s hard to imagine Huckabee saying this without the two-year drumbeat of nonsensical foreign policy criticism coming from both mainstream conservative pundits and talk radio.



MIKE HUCKABEE IS A BUFFOON, Part Deux:



Fischer: You know, I was struck by the fact that when he made his tour to Indonesia, he made a point of going to an Indonesian memorial that celebrated the victory of Indonesians over British troops – again, part of that anti-colonial thing. And so I’d like you to comment on that; you seem to think that there is some validity to the fact that there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president.

Huckabee: Well, that’s exactly the point that I make in the book....And I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.


LARISON:
Ah, yes, the heroic Indonesian fight against the British. Who can forget that one? There were just a couple small problems with this. As far as I can tell, Obama did not visit any memorial during his Indonesia trip, and Indonesia was formerly a Dutch colony. Not that it will matter to Huckabee, but Obama didn’t attend a madrassa when he was in Indonesia. Of course, there is that famous Punahou madrassa in Honolulu, but everyone knows about that one.

Update: Obama did visit the Indonesian national war cemetery, which is what one would expect during a state visit to another country.

I wrestled with the title of this article. The obvious wording--"Mike Huckabee is an Idiot"--seemed somewhat lacking in Christian charity, what with Great Lent upon us and all. And so, I opted for the softer, kinder Buffoon, meant of course, in the nicest John Hagee-ish sort of way.

Bacevich on Being Irrelevant

If the Muslim masses demanding political freedom and economic opportunity prevail, they will do so not thanks to but despite the United States. Yet by liberating themselves, they will also liberate us. Our misbegotten crusade to determine their destiny will finally end. In that case, we will owe them a great debt.

I have come to believe that just about every word Andrew Bacevich puts to paper is worth reading. This article is no exception.

There'll Be No Butter in Hell!

A favorite of mine--from Cold Comfort Farm. Flora Poste accompanies her cousin Amos Starkadder to hear him preach at the Church of the Quivering Brethren.

Met. Hilarion Speaks at Highland Park Presbyterian, Dallas TX: No One Has Ever Seen God

Met. Hilarion Speaks at Highland Park Presbyterian, Dallas TX: No One Has Ever Seen God

The Impasse

The following is an excerpt from The Impasse by Fr. Touma Bitar, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Silouan the Athonite in Douma, Lebanon. I recommend the entire article posted here, on Notes on Arab Orthodoxy (h/t to Samn!) If we believe Fr. Touma to be correct, then the question for us becomes--what do we do with this?

Man’s egoism and self-love preceded his love of money. Love of money gradually progressed into a system of consumption, and the system of consumption made man a prisoner of the logic of profit. The logic of profit transformed the earth’s resources into financial calculations and financial calculations loosened the reins of the passions of soul and body. The passions of soul and body became an uncontrollable harlot and in the absence of internal restraints within people’s souls, the ladder of values and traditional moral restraints collapsed and value and morals came to be centered on purported individual freedom and man’s worship of himself. Then individual freedom and self-worship caused people’s aspirations to become greater than his environment’s capacity to pump vital capital into them and so heaven and earth could no longer match people’s wild cravings. Their storehouses started to be depleted and their balance was thrown off. The environment became ill on account of the illness of man’s heart and the unleashing of his passions beyond any limit.

And now what remains? Souls have become addicted to consumption. Man has become an instrument of consumption! Today man’s worldly identity is in what he consumes! Wills have become feeble and souls have become weak! Man has tasted this number of varieties of selfish freedom and self-worship. He no longer desires or is capable of repentance – that is, of a change of mentality and behavior. For him repentance is identical to death. For this reason he starts to live off of his fantasies, his dreams, his self-esteem, his accomplishments, and his cravings until death. He sees that he is approaching an unstable precipice and he is unable to stop before it, and he doesn’t care! He has become addicted to himself and death has become less painful than resisting his addiction. In letting loose his passions, his will to live starts to die. Death becomes life for him, and he has no other life!

Americanism as Religion, Plainly Stated

I really should stop reading the local newspaper as it is not good for my blood pressure. I live near the most right-wing city in the nation. (If you have other contenders, let me know and we will compare statistics.) Not surprisingly, we are also the tightest notch on the Bible Belt. This makes for some interesting submissions to the "Letters to the Editor" section on the opinion page. (When I can stand it no longer, I occasionally write to the paper myself. This amuses my friends and probably drives away potential clients.) Today's paper contains a gem of letter, where the writer addresses the apocalypse he believes would surely ensue were the health care plan to take effect. Along the way, he expounds upon compassion as he sees it, and in so doing, succinctly sums-up the Americanist religion. He writes:

Let's set the facts straight regarding Jesus' compassion while on this earth. I can't recall where Jesus said that feeding the 5,000 hungry followers was the responsibility of government, nor did He see the blind, deaf, dumb and lame as the responsibility of the taxpayers. He healed them so they could go to work and provide for themselves.

Wow. So Jesus Christ healed so that people could work hard and be self-sufficient? Wonder how the Apostles and the Church Fathers missed that insight. The sad thing is that this letter is typical of what one often hears and reads around here.

John 6:60+

The Teetotaler engages in a bit of exegesis on John 6:60-63, 66. He quotes from the MSGV (More Spiritual than God Version.) A sampling, below:

John 6:60-63, 66 Therefore, many of His disciples, when they heard this, said “This is a hard saying; who can uncerstand it? When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, “Does this offend you?” What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before? Anyway, I was just jerkin’ around with you with that “eat my body, drink my blood” stuff. It’s all figurative. Y’all know, don’t ya, that Christianity will be all about angels’n'feelin’ good about yourself? … From that time, many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.

Read the full post, here. It is a good one.

Conspiratorialists of the World, Unite!

One disturbing thing I noticed when I first began to travel in Turkey was their penchant for believing the most bizarre conspiracy theories afloat. My acquaintances over there--largely intelligent, well-informed and college-educated--would nevertheless fall for any crackpot theory making the rounds. Alternative reality scenarios for 9/11 were believed almost unquestioningly. One was convinced that the Israelis were building an airbase in Kurdistan. The Armenian Genocide had become the Turkish Genocide. And I was surprised to learn that the New World was actually discovered by...the Turks. At the time, I would shake my head about this sort of thing. Well, no longer--not because they were right, but because we are just as bad. Exhibit A has to be this, the latest lesson from Glenn Beck, in which he charts the course of the coming Islamic Caliphate. That there are some Muslim extremists who dream of a restored "Caliphate" is a fact. Beck's speculations, however, are pure fantasy, perfectly attuned to a fearful audience who know little of people different from themselves.