Why I Like Jason Peters

You can actually hear the federal coffers expanding with all that increased revenue from the tax-cut extensions. Everywhere you look altruistic rich people (but I repeat myself!) are floating their wealth, creating scads of well-paying domestic jobs, and making it possible for moms to stay at home to promote such family values as greed, which leads to wealth, which begets charity.

There's no better way to start off the new year than with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Read more, here, from Jason Peters at Front Porch Republic.

2011 Georgian Monastery Tour

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Luarsab and John have posted details of their 2011 Monastery Tour of Georgia. Read about it, here.

Engaging the Church

One of the few magazines to which I still subscribe is The American Conservative--and conservative in the sense of writers like Daniel Larison, Patrick Deneen, Bill Kauffman, Andrew Bacevich and Pat Buchanan. I'm afraid our celebrity "conservatives" wouldn't know what to make of this publication. I particularly enjoy the magazine's book reviews. In the February 2011 issue (not yet online,) Richard Gamble, a professor at Hillsdale College, reviews To Change the World: the Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by sociologist James Davison Hunter.

According to Gamble, Hunter "takes up the question of what Christian faithfulness ought to look like in 21st-century America...[and] offers nothing less than 'a new paradigm of being the church in the late modern world.'"

Ho-boy. Whenever you hear the phrase "new paradigm" in regard to the Christian faith, you know what is coming. Christianity American-style never seems to tire of "new paradigms." Not that Hunter doesn't make some good points. He "challenges the American church's assumption that it can redeem the culture from the ground up, one person at a time, with the power of ideas wedded to political activism....this 'hearts and minds' approach...misunderstands the way sustainable change happens in society and will never achieve its noble purposes."

And Gamble notes:

"Hunter is at his best in cutting across superficial distinctions among the evangelical right and left and the neo-Anabaptists, uncovering the bad habits they have in common. American Protestants as a group, and even Catholics, have adopted, among other dubious propositions, a naive transformationalism, a mythic civil religion that commonly fails to distinguish between Israel and America, a negative posture toward the world that emphasizes what Christianity opposes rather than the gift of grace it offers, and a politicized and power-driven strategy to defeat the enemy....He rightly criticizes Christians for cultivating a 'proprietarian' attitude toward the American narrative and culture, as if the nation personally belonged to any branch of Christianity or even to Christians in general."

But Gamble finds that many "will have a hard time wrapping ...[their] mind around just what kind of church Hunter longs to see. At times, he seems merely to dress up an old-fashioned social gospel and anemic ecumenism in trendy language. It is hard to grasp what his recommendations would amount to if he explained them in ordinary words." And while Hunter "insists more than once that the goal of Christian activism ought not to be to transform the word," Gamble detects an "unmistakable desire for the church to be busy in worldly affairs, to move beyond Word and Sacrament for the sake of Word and Deed."

For Gamble, the author "forgets what we might call the 'dark side' of the gospel"--that of not bringing peace but a sword, of setting brother against brother, husband against wife, etc. Gamble rightly observes that "a robust 'theology of the cross'--to borrow the vocabulary of Lutherans, who, along with other confessional, creedal Christians are nearly absent from this book--knows that the gospel reconciles God to man but that it doesn't necessarily reconcile man to man." Indeed, "rather than solving the world's problems, the faithful church might appear to make things worse from a human perspective."

Gamble takes Hunter to task for claiming that it is especially harder for contemporary Christians to bear witness to the faith.

Perhaps generic "faith" has become harder to arrive at in modern America--perhaps--but the Christian gospel has never expected to find "resonance" with the world. It did not resonate with the culture of 1st century Rome. Christianity exploded into the world as something hardly "plausible' or "persuasive" to human eyes. Yet pagans converted by the thousands and the Church flourished. Just why contemporary "social conditions...make faithfulness difficult and faithlessness almost natural" is not obvious, nor is it clear why Christians today should find that challenge more daunting than the 1st-century martyrs did.

I particularly like the following from Gamble:

Christians who have a higher allegiance to the church than to American society will not take encouragement from Hunter's recommendations for "faithful presence." Social benefits from such a reconfigured orientation to the world may be real, but Christians ought to have their eyes open to the costs involved. A church that trades less effective techniques for more might lose its integrity, the very essence of what defines it as an institution unlike any other, and the unique message it brings to the world. Anyone who spends much time with young Christians these days knows that a generation has been raised by spiritually nomadic church-hopping parents--or even by radically de-institutionalized "home church" families--who have not bothered to initiate their sons and daughters into the life of the church. They have sent their children to the right schools and to worldview boot camp, but they have left them unbaptized, uncatechized, unaccountable, and unhabituated to regular public worship. This trend is becoming increasingly noticeable even among the offspring of conservative homes. A higher and more urgent calling than engaging the world might just be engaging the church.

The Garima Gospels

This is a bit of old news, but I am fascinated by it all. The results of the radiocarbon dating of the Gospels from the Abuna Garima Monastery in Ethiopia were released earlier this year. As previously thought, no surviving Ethiopian manuscripts predated the 12th-century. Secular scholars had been skeptical of the Church's claim that the Garima Gospels were from the hand of Abba Garima himself, who arrived in Ethiopia from Constantinople in the year 494. Their scientific assumptions are now being revised, given that one volume has been dated between 330 to 540 and the other between 430 to 650.

The British press were all over the story, with articles in The Telegraph, here, The Independent, here, and in the Guardian, here. Apparently, such stories do not sell newspapers on this side of the Atlantic. Work of the Ethiopian Heritage Fund can be found here. But for the best and most extensive coverage, by all means, see the site here.

Against Cremation

I have spent a fair amount of my life poking around cemeteries. I find them endlessly fascinating, whether they have any connection to my family or not. Cemeteries have stories to tell, if you know how to listen to them. It took a while for my wife to get used to all this. When we would travel, she was prone to quickly drifting off to sleep while riding. She would invariably awake to find herself not at our destination, but parked at some remote cemetery, whether it be Mississippi or Connecticut.

And I'm a bit of purist when it comes to graveyards. I am disturbed by modern cemeteries, with their twisting roads like subdivisions, and graves facing any which way. Don't they know the graves should all be facing East, towards the Resurrection? Last summer, the wife, her best friend and I visited Nottoway, the most over-the-top plantation home along the Mississippi. In a recent "restoration" the corporation that owns the enterprise, retrieved the family remains and monuments from a ill-kempt little Catholic cemetery a few miles away, and re-interred them on a corner of the mansion grounds--to complete the tableaux, you might say. While it was otherwise well-done, the graves were facing the house--south rather than east. I found it ironic that the highly paid consultants they engaged for this restoration did not even have the cultural insight to know how these graves would have surely been laid-out. Or perhaps they did, and just calculated (rightly) that the modern visitors herded through the site would not be any the wiser.

Along these lines, I have always been repulsed by cremation, finding the practice incomprehensible, at least for those who make any claims to being Christian. This has nothing to do with my being Orthodox, for I have held this opinion all my adult life. Orthodoxy just confirmed and validated that which I innately knew to be wrong. Burial makes a statement about the person--the life they lived and the place in which they lived it and the love they shared and most importantly, of the Life to come. Cremation says nothing at all, or at least nothing good.

About 15 years ago, a cousin died under tragic circumstances. The Fort Worth police found my name and phone number in his wallet and contacted me. I managed to locate one of his sisters and pass the information on to her. I expected to hear back from about the funeral and about which of the vacant spaces in the family plot they wanted to use. I never heard a word from them. Only this summer, in visiting with his son, did I learn that they had cremated his body, and his ashes had been scattered in the woods behind a sisters' house. Hearing this, it just compounded the sadness of it all.

Last year, out of the blue, my wife informed me that she wanted to be cremated. In a somewhat animated discussion, I explained why I would not consider doing it, and why our son (also Orthodox) would not or could not do it, and more importantly, why it was wrong for her to consider it. She grew up among extended family, many of whom viewed funeral home visitations as something of an entertainment venue. One great aunt in particular, on the rare occasions when she could not make the viewing herself, would inquire of family members who did--"did they lay a good corpse?" My wife is a very private person and I think that she just wanted to be no part of any such gawking--even from the other side! I understand that. But this is another case where her cure is worse than the disease. Cremation is no solution. Anyway, I have heard of no such foolishness since.

Last May, I made my yearly visit to my aunt in Arkansas. She is a real sweetheart, and at age 87, my last living link with that fast-fading world. Many years ago, she converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses. This came as something of a shock to her husband and children, who were Episcopalian. My cousin (now Catholic) said that whoever had knocked on her door that particular day would have gotten her. It just happened to be the Witnesses. She remains quite committed to all that. And while I relish my visits, it sometimes gets a little crowded with that elephant in the room. Anyway, while sitting at her kitchen table this year, drinking coffee and eating her homemade nut bread, she casually mentioned that she intended to be cremated. I found it hard to suppress my incredulity, as this is the side of my family which should know better. This should not be surprising, however, given this sect's particular heretical theories about Christ and His Ascension. I should have said something. But I said nothing.

I suppose I am to the point where I think we should be calling it out for what it is. Andrew J. Harvey, in this excellent article, agrees. He has some good things to say. A few excerpts, as follows:

Cremation is an increasingly popular option but it is neither a Christian nor an agrarian option. That more and more Christians opt to incinerate themselves does not necessarily make that option Christian. A Christian who defends cremation more than likely appeals to utility or to what the poet Scott Cairns calls “gnostic bullshit.” As if upon death we are done with our bodies. Christianity has a long tradition regarding the dead, and cremation has no part in it. Cremation is a sign of our time, and it is ultimately a sign of our culture of death—the post-Christian regress of western civilization.

We no longer kill for our suppers, know where are food comes from, tend to our elderly, or bury our kin....“this evasion of the dead and dying is manifest in the extradition of the dead to a position at the margins of the city during the Industrial era, the removal of the dying to the functional space of hospitals, in the discreet elimination of corpses, and in the domestication and beautification of death”.....

It is the ultimate mystery of our redemption that He will call us back from the grave. Burial, therefore, is the final way in which we can live into our baptism. It completes the typological imagery in our own mystical Passover. It is the culmination of our faith. By sowing this seed of a natural body into the soil we will bear fruit in fields of glory. By commending this image of God to the earth we will be raised up in heaven. This is the sacrament of death and burial.

In case I have not made my point bluntly enough: cremation in terms of the advancement of Christian truth is a step backwards. A desecration. A form of apostasy. I do not think that Christians today who are considering cremation choose it as the fiery means to release the immortal soul from the body as ancient pagans saw it. Nor on the other hand is cremation preferred in the light of any precisely Christian theology or tradition. Rather they are motivated by a heterodox view of the body or of death, a kind of latent Gnosticism that assumes the immortal soul will have no more to do this body. Such heterodoxy is more in line with our Progressive Age’s own heady mix of necrophobia, necrophilia, and the myth of an end of suffering through advancement of medical science. But the cult of this life is precisely what our Lord chastises as the path of nihilism: he who seeks his life shall lose it, and he who loses it for my sake shall find it. Rather if we are to reject this culture of death and the cult of this life, we must cultivate life, an abundant life that transcends the fear of our own mortality. One way to celebrate this proper culture of life, counter-intuitively, is to cultivate our bodies in death.

The End of Suffering

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I have recently finished reading The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain by Scott Cairns. This is my first exposure to the author, who has a lot to say in this small book.

For all our good intentions, our long-distracted crew--the ostensible followers of Christ--have squandered our diverse gifts over the centuries. We have even intermittently modified our theologies--lowering the bar of our expectations--time and time again to accommodate our failure to become what we are called to become. "No one is perfect," we repeat, smiling as we scribble our own doctor's excuse for the teacher.

And:

Those of us who struggle with habitual sins--and we know who we are--are very likely to break our hearts over the business of turning away from those chronic mark missings. Our problems with recurring sin, and the more general human problem of being enslaved by sin, is never solved simply by our rejecting that sin, no matter how many times we try, no matter how strenuously we struggle to reject it....The strongest man or woman in the world is not nearly strong enough to triumph over his or her sin simply by saying no to it. What we need is the strength-giving grace occasioned by our saying yes to something else, by our saying yes, and yes, and yes--ceaselessly--to Someone else. It is not our finally turning away from sin that frees us from sin's recurrence; rather it is our turning toward Christ--and the mystery of our continuing to turn into Him--that puts sin behind us.

And:

And so, sure, I too want very much to be saved. These days that means that I want to be saved from what passes for myself. This is because what passes for myself does not always feel quite like the self that is framed in the image of God and is thus united with those around me and is, allegedly, growing with them into His likeness. I would like to replace this recurrently hamstrung, self-defeating, and mostly isolated self with the more promising image: the person in communion with other other persons. And while I'm at it, I wouldn't mind undergoing something like a lasting re-pair of heart and mind, body, and soul.

This book makes a great gift, whether the recipient is Orthodox or not.

Laws and other wastes of time

My friend Milton forwarded this quote on to me. I had seen it before, but it is a good one, that bears repeating in these times.

"It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."

--- C. S. Lewis

Lying is Not Patriotic

"Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our Empire and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge."

H/T to Conservative Blog for Peace

New on the Book Table

Perhaps the most cherished and coddled of all my vices is the buying of many books. In these straitened times, however, I have had to apply some much-needed discipline to my excessive book-purchasing. The rule I try to hold is this: I keep what I am currently reading on a side table next to my favorite chair, and I do not purchase new books until the table top is emptied. I recently passed that milestone when I finally finished up with History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (skimming over the battlefield maneuverings and savoring the speeches.)

The previous reading list is now off the table and on the shelves. I found some good bargains online, and Eighth Day Books' annual 15% off sale came along at just the right time, bringing a couple of volumes within the arc of affordability. So, the books I will be reading for the foreseeable future--in no particular order--are as follows:

1. Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse by Roger Kimball

2. Early England and the Saxon English: With Some Notes on the Father Stock of the Saxon-English, the Frisians by William Barnes

3. Christianity and Culture by T. S. Eliot

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

5. Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers by Metropolitan Hierotheos

6. When Church Became Theater: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America by Jeanne Halgren Kilde

7. The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain by Scott Cairns

8. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters by Pavel Florensky

9. The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, Volume Three (January, February) by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra

10. The Lives of the Monastery Builders of Soumela: Saints Barnabas and Sophronios of Athens and Christopher of Trebizon

11. Nights of the Red Moon by Milton T. Burton

These books will keep me occupied and out of trouble in the days ahead. If I hold to my discipline, Florensky's volume alone will keep me out of the book-buying loop for quite some time to come.

Ain't That America

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Last night I left work and headed out for my night job at our local university, where I teach a class each semester. The Christmas shopping busyness is in full throttle about now, meaning that all the streets and highways are stacked up in all directions. As I inched along, I couldn't help but notice a gleaming new white SUV in the next lane. Of course, I am driving a white SUV myself--though of course mine is smaller and older (going on 5 years and just turning over my first 100,000 miles.) What especially annoyed me however, was the bumper sticker prominently displayed on back: Impeach Obama. That's Change We Can Believe In. Around here, otherwise hardcore sentiments such as this pass for political moderation. (And for all the lecturing about the Constitution, the real basis for such opposition is not hard to read, at least around here.) And I just hate such snarky, rabid partisanship...unless of course, it is snarky rabid partisanship from my side of the aisle. As I eased forward, I could see in the backseat where a overhead television was playing some Disney movie--perhaps Snow White. I have never understood televisions in cars. God forbid that these little darlings in the backseat should have to undergo an unentertained moment as they are carted from store to store to restaurant, etc. Back in the day, I made my son listen to NPR. Now that he's grown, that's probably why we avoids riding with me anymore. But still, televisions in automobiles are just wrong. A commercial came on, so I turned down the volume on Chris Mathews' Hardball on MSNBC that I was listening to on my Sirius Radio station 090. Easing up a little further, I noticed that the mother behind the wheel had a cross hanging from the rear view mirror--a big gaudy Celtic-y-looking thing that you could see from a block away. I have a cross hanging from my rear-view mirror as well. Of course, mine is a small, tasteful, silver Russian version. Having time to think, it seemed like each effort at condescension on my part was coming back to bite me in the butt. Thankfully, the light changed and I pressed onward, my uncomfortable Pogo* moment having passed.

*We have met the enemy and he is us (Walt Kelly, 1970)

Milton's New Book

A month or two back, I mentioned Milton Burton's upcoming novel, Nights of the Red Moon. The book is being released today. The novel scored a highly positive review in yesterday's Washington Post, here. Way to go, Milton.

A Pilgrim Story

I enjoy Thanksgiving, but can do without the “Thanksgiving Story.” The events of 1621 have been mythologized, tortured and twisted to suit particular political agendas for so many years that the real “Pilgrim story,” if there is one, lies buried somewhere underneath. Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” has long been a starting point for American politicians to launch off in any number of generally unhealthy directions. A recent manifestation has the Tea Party crowd staking claim to the national myth, casting it as a victory of capitalism over socialism (here.)

The Puritans have suffered from bad press ever since Hawthorne (and no, they did not dress all in black and white, and yes, alcohol was permitted as long as it did not lead to drunkenness.) Their perceived influence over the development of our national consciousness can be overblown at times. I pulled this from The New England Mind by Perry Miller, an old text from my colonial American history class:

The posterity of American Puritanism have devised nothing that would more shock their fathers than their inquiry into the comparative force, among motives which impelled the settlement, of the economic as against the religious….it was unthinkable that children conceived and educated in Massachusetts and Connecticut would become preoccupied, not with universal Christendom, but with provincial merchandise.

Exactly. So perhaps the Puritan ethic was determinative after all, just not in the way they intended.

The Puritans are a bit hard to warm up to, you might say. Despite their much vaunted importance to the development of representative government and all that sort of thing, and despite the industriousness by which they recreated East Anglia on the rocky shores of Cape Cod, I have never found their story to be that compelling. Give me Virginia or Pennsylvania any day.

Of course, there are alternative histories of New England. I find it unfortunate that the libertine Merrymount Commune and Thomas Morton--the early thorn in the flesh of the Massachusetts Bay Colony--have not become part of our national memory. Morton greatly preferred Algonquin society to English, and had his vision carried the day, rather than that of his Puritan neighbors, New England might have developed along radically different lines, as least as it concerned the native populations. And one might also look to the stories of people like Mary Mills, who created such a ruckus in Boston, and who also happens to be my 7th great-grandmother.

My ancestry is solidly Southern—always starting in Virginia or southern Pennsylvania, and flowing in two streams of migration—either through the Gap into Kentucky and Tennessee, or following the Piedmont through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, perhaps Mississippi (but never Louisiana) and then on to Texas. The only exception is my paternal grandmother’s family. Her father was born in Texas, but both his parents were born in Indiana, from where their bloodlines go back to the earliest settlers of Massachusetts and Connecticut. They eagerly joined the westward migration—Ohio by 1815, Indiana by 1820, Missouri by 1840 and Texas by 1860. In Indiana, they threw off the last vestiges of Calvinism and put on Campbellism, which served the family well for 6 generations or so…that is, until I ditched it for the real thing.

Though I find myself descended from redoubtable Puritan women with names like Mehitable, Remember, Experience and Genevrah, the one that sticks out in my mind is aforementioned Mary Mills, who burst upon the Boston scene in the third Puritan generation. She was only in her teens at the time of her notoriety. The Quaker community in Boston met quietly in the homes of members. But such impertinence was not to be sanctioned in Puritan Boston. Officers would break up the meetings and demand that the Quakers attend public worship. One such meeting consisted of a group of women including young Mary Mills. And the women did attend public worship, but not as the authorities intended. With heads uncovered and hair disheveled, ashes on their faces and dressed in sackcloth, the women marched down the aisle of New South Meetinghouse, occasioning, as one observer noted, "the greatest uproar that I ever saw."

The women were jailed and tried, with execution a real possibility. Young Mary declared that she was ready to die for her beliefs. None of the women were executed, however, but they were “carted.” Stripped to the waist, they were tied to the back of a cart and pulled through the streets of Boston.

After the uproar had died down a bit, the Quaker community secreted Mary out of Boston, placing her with a young couple in Sandwich, a quiet village on Cape Cod. Here she stayed for several years, but in time her presence in the household began to cause problems. The wife charged that her husband’s affections had been transferred to young Mary.

Relief came in the form of an elderly, but prosperous, sea captain. Mary Mills found herself married off to William Gifford, 45 years her senior. Within 4 years, the captain was dead, leaving Mary a young widow with 2 small sons. She never remarried and remained in Sandwich, where her family prospered and became substantial citizens. The youngest, James, went to sea like his father, but kept a family at Sandwich. His granddaughter, Deborah, was the first of the line to head west. I have visited her grave, on a knoll behind a cornfield, 40 miles south of Cleveland.

Years ago, I visited in Sandwich. The old town cemetery there is chock-full of jumbled tombstones of Tobey and Ellis and Perry and Burgess and Bassett, all my people. The old Quaker burial ground, where Mary and the Giffords repose, is another thing altogether. An ancient rock wall encloses a perfectly manicured lawn, without a single marker, stone or rock to denote a burial. For that was the way of the early Quakers. I understand the point they were making—modesty, humility, a stark recognition of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” etc. And this simplicity impresses me more than the overly ostentatious “weeping Angel” monuments of America’s wealthy elite of later generations. But the Quakers were wrong, on this as on any number of things. For there is no rock which one can stand before and cry “Memory Eternal.”

Memories of Svaneti

I recently came across this BBC production on Georgia, focusing mostly on Svanetian polyphany. This music is not for everybody, but it sure works for me--and it makes me yearn to go back one day. Once I can afford to travel again, a return to Georgia has moved to the top of my list.

Help St. Michael the Archangel Monastery

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Looking for a monastery to help?

Here's a deserving candidate--St. Michael the Archangel Monastery in Canones, NM.

This from Steve Robinson at Pithless Thoughts:

St. Michael's is under "reconstruction" by Mp. Jonah....Fr. Silouan from St. John's was sent by Mp. Jonah (who was Fr. Silouan's Abbot at St. John's for years) to be the Superior and re-establish order and rebuild the Monastery.

The monastery has basic infrastructure. There are small three cells that were built several years ago. They have no water or electricity to them and are heated by a wood burning stove by design....The original buildings on the property are over 80 years old and were built "al ojo" (by the eye). None of them are insulated and need major repairs and upgrading.

Here is the need: They have basically no money. Fr. Silouan is overwhelmed just keeping up with the day to day needs of the monastery (he was digging a trench to fix a broken drainage pipe last Sunday to try to get it done and reburied before the freeze that night).... If you can donate toward a "construction fund" for the Monastery it would go a long way to easing some of the pressures of trying to prioritize what to fix and when.

Please read Steve Robinson's post for much more information and on how to help.

(On a personal note, Fr. Ephroysnos has been a guest in my home. I am very pleased to learn he is now at St. Michael's.)

"The Left's delusion over Islam is baffling to Middle Eastern Christians"

h/t to Byzantine Texas for this.


Ed West has a great piece in The Telegraph, here, regarding the European Left's steadfast denial of the on-going extermination of Middle Eastern Christians--in Iraq today, perhaps Egypt tomorrow. He points to a recent article in The Guardian as a prime example of the attitude. A few gems from their article amply prove West's point:

One article in Foreign Policy went so far as to suggest the church attack might spell “the end of Christianity in the Middle East” altogether. Yet such generalisations play into the hands of radicals wanting to perpetuate the clash-of-civilisations myth. Though anti-Christian feeling may be rising on the extreme radical fringe of some Arab societies such as Iraq, this should not obscure the harmony that has long been a characteristic of other parts of the Arab world.

In fact, large parts of the Arab world remain tolerant and display deep inter-communal harmony. The fact that most of Iraq’s displaced Christians have fled not to the west but to other Arab states, notably Syria and Jordan, seems to illustrate this.

However, the Arab world in general remains a place where Christians and Muslims have lived side by side for centuries, and look certain to continue doing so. Perhaps we should be celebrating this fact rather than exaggerating the extent to which the whole region is suddenly becoming anti-Christian.

To this rot, West drolly observes--"Yes, cynical old British media. There we are focusing on the one unfortunate incident where dozens of people happened to be slaughtered in a church, when we could have focused on literally dozens of Iraqi churches where no one was murdered by Islamists that weekend."

West articulates a number of points that need to be said, again and again.

Christians in Jordan and Syria are protected. But despite the Left’s “myth of the myth” of the clash of civilisations, the simple fact is that almost nowhere in the Islamic world are Christians free in the same way Muslims are free in Europe.

Deniers of this essential truth usually fall back on historical arguments about Islam’s famed tolerance, but this is deceptive. During the high middle ages, the Islamic world was far more tolerant than Christendom, but it couldn’t be otherwise. North of the Alps Europe was 95-99 per cent Christian, so minorities faced persecution; the “Muslim world” had enormous Christian minorities throughout this period and in some cases majorities, and this goes for modern-day Iraq, Syria, Egypt (probably majority Christian until the 18th century), Lebanon and Palestine. That they slowly became Islamic was largely down to two facts of life which make a mockery of the tolerance myth: Muslims could not generally become Christians, and Christians had to pay a special tax, and so the class of people who subsidised the rest of the population gradually shrank over generations...

In the West...Muslims practice their religion in freedom, and maintain thousands of mosques. Moreover, they are free to spread their religion, and openly celebrate each new convert. In contrast, Christians in the Muslim world are arrested for allegedly trying to spread Christianity, and a Muslim who converts to Christianity may face the death penalty.

Even Arab Muslims do not believe the Left’s shtick about Islamic tolerance.

Despite such articles as the one in The Guardian, there are some signs that the crisis is beginning to register in the minds of British citizens. Not so in this country, we are too busy keeping up with who was eliminated from Dancing with the Stars.

And in a parallel universe, a bit closer to home, the Bush gang was gathered together again at the groundbreaking of the Bush Library in Dallas. In remarks at the ceremony, he who made possible the current bloodbath in Iraq--former Vice President Cheney--remarked that "history is beginning to come around." Lord, have mercy on us all.

Thumbing through the Eighth Day Books catalog, I came across the following quote from Walker Percy. It's a keeper, I think.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

"We are not leaving"

This dismal plight of the Middle East's ancient Christian communities is a recurring topic of this blog. I have not addressed the subject lately, perhaps somewhat out of discouragement, as the news--outside of Syria and Jordan--remains unremittingly bleak. The recent slaughter of the faithful in Baghdad's Sayidat al-Nejat Cathedral is as horrific as anything that has been reported since the American invasion of 2003.

Robert Fisk is a columnist and commentator for The Independent. He has been based in Beirut for many years, and his writing on the region is some of the most perceptive available to Western readers. I consider Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation to be essential reading. Two of his recent columns address the worsening Christian position: Exodus: The Changing Map of the Middle East and Only Justice Can Bring Peace to this Benighted Region. A few excerpts, below:

Across the Middle East, it is the same story of despairing – sometimes frightened – Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions. Almost half of Iraq's Christians have fled their country since the first Gulf War in 1991, most of them after the 2004 invasion – a weird tribute to the self-proclaimed Christian faith of the two Bush presidents who went to war with Iraq – and stand now at 550,000, scarcely 3 per cent of the population. More than half of Lebanon's Christians now live outside their country. Once a majority, the nation's one and a half million Christians, most of them Maronite Catholics, comprise perhaps 35 per cent of the Lebanese. Egypt's Coptic Christians – there are at most around eight million – now represent less than 10 per cent of the population.

Yet nowhere is the Christian fate sadder than in the territories around Jerusalem. As Monsignor Fouad Twal, the ninth Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and the second to be an Arab, put it bleakly, "the Israelis regard us as 100 per cent Palestinian Arabs and we are oppressed in the same way as the Muslims. But Muslim fundamentalists identify us with the Christian West – which is not always true – and want us to pay the price." With Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem cut off from Jerusalem by the same Israeli wall which imprisons their Muslim brothers, there is now, Twal says, "a young generation of Christians who do not know or visit the Holy Sepulchre".

The Lebanese journalist Fady Noun, a Christian, wrote a profound article from Rome last week in which he spoke of the Christian loss as "a great wound hemorrhaging blood", and bemoaned both Christian division and "egoism" for what he saw as a spiritual as well as a physical emigration. "There are those Christians who reach a kind of indifference... in Western countries who, swayed by the culture of these countries and the media, persuade eastern Christians to forget their identity," he wrote.

And while Western Christians routinely deplore the falling Christian populations of the Middle East, their visits to the region tend to concentrate on pilgrimages to Biblical sites rather than meetings with their Christian opposite numbers.

Americans, so obsessed by the myths of East-West "clashes of civilisation" since 11 September 2001, often seem to regard Christianity as a "Western" rather than an Eastern religion, neatly separating the Middle East roots of their own religion from the lands of Islam. That in itself is a loss of faith.

In fact, I'm wondering if our governments don't need this terror – to make us frightened, very frightened, to make us obey, to bring more security to our little lives. And I'm wondering whether those same governments will ever wake up to the fact that our actions in the Middle East are what is endangering our security.

The West is powerless to help those fearful Christians. The actions of "faith-based" politicians – the Christian faith, of course – has brought about a new Christian tragedy in the Middle East. (The fact that I met several Americans in California recently who thought Christianity was a "western" religion rather than an eastern one probably says more about America than Christianity.)

I'm afraid it's the same old story. Justice will bring peace – not intelligence wars against "world terror". But our leaders will still not admit this.


At Coffee Hour today, I had a pleasant, but serious conversation with a Syrian couple visiting from Aleppo. The husband, Ibrihim, is a quiet-spoken and dapper man who teaches high school mathematics. His wife, a bit more voluble, teaches music. He spoke with pride of their 5 children--a son here, another in Phoenix, and 3 daughters in Syria. Three of the children are doctors. We talked about Aleppo, the Orthodox Church there, the follies of American involvement in the region, and the general situation of Christians in Syria--the best in the Middle East. At the last, though, I noticed that his jaw clenched a bit, as he said:

"We are not leaving. We are not leaving."

Neo-Conservatism on Crack

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My voting is never driven by domestic "issues." We have an entrenched, self-perpetuating Establish- ment Party that is both Democratic and Republican. In terms of foreign policy, however, there can be real differences, and oppor- tunities to inflict damage that will last for generations. One example of what.should.not.be.done. is the advice of Sen. Lindsay Graham (Rep. SC), here, who suggests that if push comes to shove, we "neuter" Iran. As Reza Aslan observed, "this isn't Iraq, this isn't Afghanistan...some sort of fake country put together." He's right. This is Persia, with a 3,000 year-old civilization behind it.

The Great Disparager

In the current issue of The American Conservative (not yet online,) George Scialabba writes of T. S. Eliot, whom he characterizes as a "great disparager." I am not as well read in Eliot as I should be, and this article is certainly an encouragement to learn more. Scialabba writes:

He praised Baudelaire, who, in an age of "programmes, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarianism, and revolutions," of "cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness," understood that "what really matters is Sin and Redemption" and perceived that "the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform, and dress reform...that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation--of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it gives some significance to living."

And this from Eliot:

To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery; the very dark night and the desert. To me, the phrase 'to be damned for the glory of God' is sens and not paradox; I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children's game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end....And I don't know whether this is to be labeled 'Classicism' or 'Romanticism'; I only think that I have hold of the tip of the tail of something quite real, more real than morals, or than sweetness and light and culture.

Washaterias and Watchtowers

In the course of my career, I have been involved in a number of enterprises "on the side." One of the most colorful endeavors was the broom-making business that my brother-in-law talked me into about 25 years ago. The business, if you want to call it that, consisted of a broom-making machine, a wizened little alcoholic from South Louisiana who knew how to operate it, and a broken-down van to transport said brooms. My brother-in-law owned the old cotton gin in town, and he set the operation up inside. He would handle "marketing," as well as keeping our key employee sober enough to operate the machine. My job was to deliver the brooms to our wholesale customers. As could be predicted, the operation broke down on all fronts. I couldn't keep the van running, and my brother-in-law couldn't keep the broom-maker sober.

As part of a convoluted trade this summer, my family and my nephew found ourselves as the new proprietors of a washateria in a neighboring county. I feel good about it, actually (or at least it has more possibilities than making brooms.) Washaterias are simple and honest--they provide a much-needed service at a reasonable cost. Early every Monday morning, I drive over, collect the quarters and fill up the change machine. I sweep the floor and bag the trash that has accumulated since the last cleaning. Invariably, the Jehovah's Witnesses have left reading material scattered around the laundromat. Generally, I gather it all up and into the round file it goes. Yesterday, however, I stuck a Watchtower in my back pocket to read later on.

I've had a good bit of experience with the JW's, as my favorite aunt is one. Back when that happened, my cousins maintained that whoever knocked on their front door that particular day would have had her. It just happened to be the Witnesses. For many years, my aunt would send us the books and reading material, but that has dropped off in recent years. At its core, the JW sect is just straight-out Arianism dressed up for the modern age. With many of their more noted beliefs oddly peculiar to themselves, the age-old heresy at its heart is sometimes obscured. I thought their Arianism might even be nuanced somewhat in the Watchtower, just as the Mormons do not hit you with the looney stuff until much later on. Most of the issue I read was devoted to knowing God by the "right name" (an argument they seem keen to have,) and various articles about being nice and helpful. But at the end, there is an article with this sentence: "Just think: Jesus Christ, the myriads of angels in heaven, and mankind on earth all have a beginning because of being created." As heresies go, you can't state it any plainer. At least on Mondays, I will suffer no qualms about consigning such publications to the trash can.