As Someone Important was (not) Saying....



I've been ruminating on this topic for a long time now. The NYT op-ed page brings it to mind again:



But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.
There are other examples which have nothing to do with self-regard, such as Mark Twain's statement that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco (he didn't say that), or the line often (now) attributed to Einstein: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result." This is not a peculiar affliction of our age. These acts of misattribution are actually quite old in human culture, and they produce of a great deal of confusion and trouble.



Take the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, for example. According to Martin Luther's German translation (one of the first into a common European tongue after Jerome's Vulgate), the titles of the books are "The ------ Book of Moses." Each book gets a ordinal ("First," "Second," etc.), to keep the order clear. They weren't, of course, written by Moses at all. Modern (well, since at least the early 19th century) Biblical scholarship has identified 5 different authors for these five books, some of the "authors" almost certainly being groups of scholars and scribes, not individuals; many hands over many centuries revising and rewriting what was passed on to them. Then there is the book of Isaiah, probably the work of 4 different authors; and Baruch, secretary to Jeremiah, probably wrote some of that prophet's book.



Except to really hard-core fundamentalist Christians, this is a pretty acceptable state of affairs in scriptural studies. Even conservative Christians are comfortable with some critical distancing from the Hebrew Scriptures; but when it comes to the New Testament, there is a different response altogether.



Paul's letters, for example, outrage many Christians and non-Christians, because he advises such anachronistic ideas as women being submissive to their husbands, and covering their heads in worship, etc. And yet if you point out Paul didn't write those words, that evidence is used to prove people in the first century were gullible, and people in the present century are equally credulous. We don't do that anymore, you see. We keep careful track of our authorities, and certainly after the Enlightenment we don't even speak of The Philosopher anymore (as Aquinas did, referring to Aristotle, in distinction to the previous ruling philosopher, Aristotle's teacher Plato), because we don't regard authority as authoritative just because it is, well...authority.



But we still like to ascribe pithy ideas to famous people, either because they sound wiser that way, or because it makes us feel better about what we want to think anyway. If you are old enough, you remember "Desiderata," which was purportedly "Found in Old St. Paul's Church in 1692", a sign of the soundness of its timeless wisdom. If you can't ascribe the words to someone famous, "Anonymous" is always second best. And "anonymous" is even better if the words are supposed to be old, because then they have the patina of wisdom from "the elders" on them. The problem is, "Desiderata" was written by Max Ehrmann in 1927.



Go placidly, and pay attention to who you're listening to.



So, was Paul, for example, such a chauvinist pig? No, according to Dom Crossan and some pretty sound archaeological as well as textual evidence. The historical Paul was actually quite radical; too radical for his contemporaries, some of whom took on his authority while softening the edges of what he said. Is it really credible that the man who said "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus," would turn around and berate women for being women?* It is more likely someone wrote in his name, assumed his authority to assert their own opinions, opinions more widely acceptable in the culture at the time. Why, rather like the examples Brian Morton comes up with.



The more things change....



There is a great deal of scriptural study along this line. I was re-reading the Jesus Seminar's work on the parables of Jesus. They categorized some versions that we have as "original," some as modified, some as the inventions of the gospel writers or other, later hands. Basically, the more conventional they were, the less likely they were the original work of Jesus of Nazareth. But, of course, there is tremendous power in giving the imprimatur of the Anointed One to the "common sense" wisdom of the day. The challenge to us, 2000 years later, is to discern the true wisdom from the merely comforting aphorism.



Maybe the recent adage should be revised: "If it feels good, it's probably not worth knowing."







*Similar examples have been found in the Hebrew Scriptures. In the Book of Exodus, after the Red Sea has closed over Pharoah's army, Moses offers a spontaneous song of praise to God for Israel's deliverance. Immediately after his song his sister Miriam also offers a doxology; but only one verse of it still exists. Scholars surmise the rest, rather like the fingers on the hand of Thecla in the fresco Crossan describes, were expunged by later scribes to reduce the importance of women in the culture. There is a rich scholarship pointing out how many women's stories persist in the Hebrew scriptures (some of the first Judges were women) despite clear efforts to redact and revise the historical record. There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.


Oxford Movement (or not?)

The No Anglican Covenant Coalition has posted a concise negative review of the equally concise analysis of the Proposed Anglican Covenant prepared for the Diocese of Oxford. The NACC point to the irony of claiming the document will, at one level, "make no difference at all" (5.1) but then go on to claim (5.2) that the PAC may help the churches of the Communion


  • To articulate and explain the Anglican traditions and faith they have inherited 

  • Express their solidarity with each other, when any is the subject of misunderstanding or persecution 

  • To reinforce interdependence, mutual responsibility, and awareness of each others’ differing cultures


These assertions do not appear to me to stand up very well to close examination. I am not alone in noting the extent to which the PAC


  • introduces a significantly "different" manner of working and governance for the Communion

  • departs from several basic elements of "Anglican tradition"

  • may well formalize forms of misunderstanding and at least marginalization if not outright persecution, and

  • may impede interdependence by promoting dependency and submission, cultivate irresponsibility in enforcing change on provinces without adequate awareness of the consequences, and attempt to suppress or subsume the differences in cultures that have led to the disagreements in the first place


So, all in all, not a very good analysis from Oxford.



Tobias Stanislas Haller

see my topic tag link to Anglican Covenant for more on the problems with the PAC and its ancestors; you will note that I have waffled a bit on the extent to which the PAC is pernicious or useless, but I have never thought it was a Good Idea, particularly at this time. I never counsel marriage when a couple are having difficulties in their relationship.

Lord, when did we see you, and we were not disappointed?



Lifted shamelessly from the Mad Priest (who has better music than me), because sometimes you just have to pass it on.



God for President?



H/T MadPriest and all his minions.



Judge Orders Removal of Good Shepherd's Rector, Two Vestry Members

In a final order entered on August 25, 2011, Judge Stanley Ott of the Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County (Orphan's Court Division), Pennsylvania, has ordered that the Rt. Rev. David L. Moyer and two members of the vestry of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, a suburb of Philadelphia in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, be removed from their offices. The order carefully sorts through the claims made on both sides of this tangled affair, which began in 2002 with a doctrinal dispute between Father Moyer and his then bishop, the Rt. Rev. Charles E. Bennison, Jr. Eventually, Bishop Bennison resorted to the ill-advised use of the Abandonment Canon for Clergy to "depose" Father Moyer from office without the necessity of a presentment or trial.


Father Moyer sued Bishop Bennison in civil court for fraud in removing him without due process under the canons, and surprisingly, the civil court allowed the case to go forward. But it resulted in a jury finding that Bennison had not committed any fraud, and the case was dismissed. Then Father Moyer turned on his trial attorneys and sued them for "malpractice." That suit, too, was eventually dismissed, and Father Moyer and his second attorneys ended up on the receiving end of a malicious prosecution complaint.


Meanwhile, over at the Diocese of Pennsylvania, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori inhibited Bishop Bennison after charges were filed against him for protecting his younger brother, a former Episcopal priest who had briefly worked under him, from claims of sexual predation by failing to act on them, or to report them to any superior. His inhibition prevented Bishop Bennison from heading up the lawsuit filed against Good Shepherd in the current case before Judge Ott, which was brought instead by the Standing Committee, acting in its role as the Ecclesiastical Authority while Bishop Bennison remained under inhibition.


One curious fact about Judge Ott's decision is that while it describes the lawsuit between Father Moyer and Bishop Bennison, and refers to its outcome, it makes no reference at all to the subsequent proceedings against Bishop Bennison, which disqualified him from bringing suit in the name of the Diocese. As is well known, the Court of Review for the Trial of a Bishop finally dismissed, on pure statute of limitations grounds, the charges against Bishop Bennison in August of last year, and vacated his sentence of deposition. Although this had the effect of reinstating him as the diocesan of Pennsylvania, there was no move made to substitute him into the lawsuit -- perhaps because relations between the Bishop and his Standing Committee, to say nothing of his Diocese itself, remain very strained.


Instead, the decision by Judge Ott describes matters as they stood when the current lawsuit was amended in early 2010: without any diocesan bishop to act on behalf of the Diocese, the Standing Committee had granted to the Rt. Rev. Rodney R. Michel, assisting bishop, the authority to act for the time being as a Diocesan. For Judge Ott, however, the only relevant history of which he can take cognizance is the earlier deposition of Father Moyer:
Turning to the motion for summary judgment, we perceive the pivotal fact to be the deposition of respondent Moyer which the respondents acknowledge to have taken place. (Response to Motion for Summary Judgment, par. 2.) Under the rule of deference, by which civil courts do not adjudicate controversies involving the internal governance or administration of religious organizations, this Court clearly can not inquire into the propriety of this action. Another matter on which this Court will not rule is whether one ordained by a branch of the Anglican Church can be deemed to be an Episcopal priest. . . .
At initial oral argument on the motion for summary judgment, Father Moyer's attorney tried a delaying tactic, by arguing (contrary to interest, it would seem!) that the "national Church" had a "trust interest" in the Church of Good Rosemont property (i.e., under the Dennis Canon), and that it should be afforded an opportunity to intervene in the proceedings to protect that interest. (I fail to see how that point resulted in anything but a few months' delay. It surely did not advance the interests of Good Shepherd itself.) But after being consulted, ECUSA notified the Court through the Diocese's attorneys that it did not need to intervene, and so Judge Ott proceeded to his decision.


Given Fr. Moyer's admitted "deposition", no matter how illegal under the canons, the only conclusion Judge Ott could reach under these facts was that Good Shepherd cannot both remain a parish of the Diocese of Pennsylvania and employ him as their rector:
On the sole question of whether or not the Diocese can ask this Court to force the respondents out of Good Shepherd, the answer is clear. Their eviction, literally and figuratively, is the will of the petitioning Standing Committee and Assisting Bishop. Their decision is the result of the parties' divergent views on ecclesiastical questions and this Court can not get entangled in those controversies. The resolution of the Standing Committee dated November 6, 2002, authorized the Bishop "to take all steps reasonably necessary to secure the property of Good Shepherd for the use of the Episcopal Church." (Exh. H. to amended petition for declaratory judgment.) The respondents argue strenuously that the present action was filed prematurely because the petitioners did not follow the resolution's directive that the Bishop "endeavor to seek an amicable resolution to the disputes with The Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, in order to restore the Parish and the Diocese to that unity which is ours in Christ" before moving against the respondents. Clearly, the members of the Standing Committee, as they are petitioners herein, have determined this "condition" to be impossible of fulfillment, a conclusion that would seem inevitable in light of, inter alia, the aforementioned civil case tried in 2008 between respondent Moyer and the then-Bishop.
In Judge Ott's eyes, Bishop Michel is the bishop who is asking for the removal of Father Moyer (and his supporting vestry members) from their offices. Nevertheless, there is a paradox here. The key resolution of the Standing Committee expressed the condition that, before seeking the officials' removal, the bishop "endeavor to seek an amicable resolution" of the disputes. The Court takes note of the fact that any rapprochement was probably incapable of being reached between Father Moyer and Bishop Bennison, in light of the lawsuit between them, but what about between Father Moyer and Bishop Michel? Was there any proof of the fact that he tried first to resolve the dispute, before seeking judgment? If there was, the court does not mention it.


And the two vestry members appear to have been swept out of their offices by the tide that removed Father Moyer. There is no analysis by Judge Ott of any separate authority of the Bishop of Pennsylvania to remove vestry members, or of any determination by either Bishop Bennison or Bishop Michel that the two members were unfit to serve. Instead, the Standing Committee's Petition simply alleged, in conclusory fashion, that as a result of their support and employment of Father Moyer, the vestry members "have 'rendered themselves ineligible to be members of the congregation, to vote on matters relating to the parish, or to hold office or exercise any authority on behalf of Good Shepherd.'" (This is another example of the "ejectment seat" theory of vestry malfeasance, which has very dangerous implications for the people who now are employing it throughout the Church with such success.)


Judge Ott concludes his decision with this Order:
Accordingly, the Court determines that respondent Moyer and respondents John Heidengren and Timothy Tammany no longer have any right or authority to serve as rector and vestry members of The Church of The Good Shepherd, Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and they are hereby removed from those positions.
As of the time of writing, there has not come to light any official or public response to the decision by Father Moyer, his attorneys, or his congregation.


[UPDATE 08/30/2011: Seven parishioners of Good Shepherd, who describe themselves as "traditional orthodox Anglicans", circulated the following statement about the situation on Sunday, August 28:
A Declaration of the Friends of the Church Good Shepherd, Rosemont


August 28, 2011



We the undersigned believe that in the course of recent events, the leadership of the Church of the Good Shepherd-Rosemont has shifted from, and attempted to move the parish away from, its historic and stated mission of being a pillar of traditional Anglicanism. Given the present situation in the Episcopal Church, we find this understandable, but we also feel that it is lamentable.



The current leadership has stated its objective as being the establishment of an alternate house of worship under the promised Roman Catholic Ordinariate. We are well aware of why they have done this.



We are concerned, however, that insufficient attention is being paid to the needs of the parishioners who, for reasons of conscience, cannot join them. If the process of division is to be successful and amicable, marked by mutual respect, then we believe that now is the time to start thinking about it.



Therefore, we the undersigned, have formed an ad hoc committee to be known as the Friends of Good Shepherd. We hope and pray that we may be able to assist in the orderly and peaceable process of transition from the status quo in order to preserve and maintain the Church of the Good Shepherd as a viable witness to, and embodiment of the Anglo-Catholic expression of the Christian Faith in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Several recent events have led us to take this step:



Inasmuch as:



1. Father Moyer has stated publicly that he intends to leave Good Shepherd in the near, but indefinite future to join the Roman Catholic Ordinariate Members of the Vestry have been actively engaged in projects directed toward, and specific to a time when they will have left Good Shepherd to join the Roman Catholic Ordinate.



The Vestry has operated in a less than transparent manner in matters regarding operational, financial and legal information, but especially by using the parliamentary category of Executive Session to keep certain information beyond the reach of the congregation.



In Parliamentary procedure, an Executive Session is that portion of a meeting, specially called, during which minutes of the meeting cease to be kept, and the proceedings are secret. The only attendees are members of the committee and invited guests. Deliberations during an Executive Session are to remain secret and all attendees are honor-bound to maintain confidentiality. This tool is chiefly used when dealing with controversial issues which a committee does not wish to make public, or when members have been encouraged to speak openly without concern for their words being repeated outside the meeting.



2. The Rector and Vestry have turned down a formally presented proposal to work together toward a peaceable transition, and we believe that the formation of an independent committee is desirable and necessary in order to preserve and insure the continued witness and mission of the Church of the Good Shepherd as a parish in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, and the world-wide Anglican Communion;



To this end, we the undersigned members of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, have formed and constituted ourselves as what is to be known as the Friends of Good Shepherd,whose purpose is to insure and coordinate the means whereby the aforementioned ends may be achieved. In so doing, we believe it is important that we state what this ad hoc committee is, and what it is not:



We Are Not:



Legal or elected representatives of the Church of the Good Shepherd Rosemont Parish



We Are Not:



Presuming to represent the entire congregation of the Church of the Good Shepherd but to speak for ourselves, and we hope for others, who wish to remain as members of the Parish.



We Are:



Members of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd Rosemont, Pennsylvania as well as traditional orthodox Anglicans.



We Are:



Attempting to exercise our legal rights, as delineated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and to work in concert with all those who strive for a peaceable transition. It is also appropriate that we say something about what this ad hoc committee will attempt to achieve:


We Will:


As is our right under the Law, review the accounting records to gain a better understanding of our current financial position and share such information with the members of the Good Shepherd congregation.



We Will:



Examine current legal liabilities from standing litigation which could have an impact on the parish in the future, and share such information with the members of the Good Shepherd congregation.



We Will:



Review past and current parish membership files with the intent of identifying individuals and families who wish to remain members of Good Shepherd, as well as those who have left the parish or may be lapsed, and might wish to return to this parish as it moves forward in its continuing role as an orthodox Anglican parish.



We Will:



Develop a "healing" strategy, to be enacted immediately, in order to help ameliorate the hurt, separation, anger, conflict and other spiritual damage experienced by congregants over the last few years.



We Will:



Endeavor to create a dialogue with the Diocese of Pennsylvania with the goal of returning Good Shepherd Rosemont to its historic mission of being a pillar of traditional Anglicanism.



To these ends We Hope and Pray For: A close collaboration with our Rector, the Rt. Rev. David L. Moyer and the current members of the Vestry.



We Hope and Pray For:



The cooperation of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania in assisting the healing and return of the Church of the Good Shepherd Rosemont to its historic role as a pillar of orthodox Anglicanism in the Diocese of Pennsylvania.



Barbara K. Clement

Charles F. Clement 3rd

George A. Anderson 3rd

Dr. Charles Zeiders

Maria Demopoulos

The Rev. Vernon Austin

Dr. Arthur Waldron
There should be more to report about this situation after this coming weekend.]


[UPDATE 08/31/2011: The Vestry of Good Shepherd has now circulated the following message:


August 31, 2011

ALL PARISH MESSAGE FROM THE VESTRY

As a follow up to yesterday’s communication to the parish, the Vestry has issued the following statement for parishioners:

Today the Vestry conducted an unscheduled emergency meeting to discuss actions related to Judge Stanley Ott’s decree issued on August 25th. The Vestry met by teleconference at 11 a.m. EST and a quorum was present to conduct business. Brian Dickerson, outside legal counsel for the Vestry also participated.

First, the Vestry apologizes for any confusion on the timing of the Judge’s order in yesterday’s communication. The Court issued the order on August 25th, but it was not communicated to the Vestry until August 29th.

Second, the Vestry is fully complying with the order and spirit of Judge Ott’s Decree and the following actions were taken:

1. CHURCH OPERATIONS AND STAFFING – The elected Vestry of Good Shepherd is responsible for the general welfare of the parish, to respond to the needs and desires of the parish, and for the management of its assets and resources.

It has been confirmed that the Vestry remains the authorized corporation to conduct church business as empowered by the charter, by-laws and standing rules of the church and Diocese. The Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont continues to be part of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Diocese of Pennsylvania.

The Rector - The Rt. Rev. Dr. David Moyer no longer officiates or serves in any religious leading capacity at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont.

The Vestry was thankful and grateful for Bishop Moyer’s more than 20 years of service to the parish, congregation, and spiritual leadership as our “Good Shepherd.” His leadership and convictions to our parish’s orthodoxy, apostolic beliefs, and Anglo-Catholic traditions will forever be remembered and cherished. The Vestry will work with the Moyers to ensure a reasonable and fair amount of time is given to vacate the Rectory and Rector’s office after so many years of valued service and residence.

2. VESTRY CHANGES

Resignations - The Vestry accepted the resignations of John Ewing as Rector’s Warden and Tim Tammany as Recording Secretary and Vestryman. Their years of service was gratefully appreciated.

Appointments - The Vestry named David Rawson to serve as Senior Warden with financial authority to review and approve regular operating expenses of the parish, in consultation with the Vestry.

3. VESTRY VACANCIES - Recognizing that a number of vacancies exist, the Vestry desires to fill vacancies with eligible members from the parish that would like to help lead.

Over the past years, members of the parish have cited risk of legal liability in considering Vestry service – or have resigned from Vestry service. With all litigation now concluded, counsel has confirmed that legal liability should no longer be a concern moving forward. The Vestry must and will continue to work for the good of all members of the congregation.

The Vestry invites eligible parish members interested in helping lead Good Shepherd to attend the next regularly scheduled Vestry meeting on Wednesday September 7, at 7:30 pm in the Church Library.

4. DIOCESAN COMMUNICATION - The Vestry is contacting the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania to assure full cooperation with Judge Ott’s Decree. The Vestry is actively identifying supply priests for future worship and the undertaking of a search for a new Rector.

The Rt. Rev. Rodney Michel, Assisting Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, is expected to officiate on Sunday, September 4th. *

With the approaching end of summer and a new liturgical year, we are all saddened by the toll the filing of this lawsuit has had on our parish and Rector. We pray the diocesan leadership will accommodate and support orthodox parishes like Good Shepherd and embrace our ideological and religious differences inclusively. As Christians, we are called to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” We commit ourselves to this, and humbly ask you to join us in doing the same.

In Christ,

The Vestry

The Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont

Wednesday of the Twenty-second week in Ordinary Time

* PS: There will be both an 8:00 am and a 10:00 am Mass on Sunday, Sept. 4.

-- End of message; End of Update]


Still the view from Manhattan





My favorite line from the play "Greater Tuna" comes when the two radio announcers for the town are reading the national news, and note a nuclear power plant has leaked radiation (if I recall the situation correctly) that is affecting several surrounding states. They pause for a moment, then slap the page to the desk with finality and announce: "Texas NOT included!"



It's a great laugh line, especially among Texans. Sometimes I think New Yorkers, at least those with access to TV cameras, are not so self-aware:



Post-Tropical Cyclone Irene has killed 40 people in the US, and authorities warn that flooding could continue for up to three days in northern US states.



More than five million people remain without power, while Vermont is reeling from its worst floods in many decades.



Insurance claims could top $7bn (£4.3bn), the Consumer Federation of America estimated.
I've heard every city in the state of Connecticut suffered damages, from mild to severe. It may be weeks before Vermont can begin to recover. However:



It was raining in Manhattan on Sunday morning, and the dogged correspondents in their brightly colored windbreakers were getting wet.



But the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm.
And:



“Florence Nightingale said, ‘Whatever you say about hospitals, they shouldn’t make their patients sicker,” [George Will] said. “And whatever else you want to say about journalism, it shouldn’t subtract from the nation’s understanding, and it certainly shouldn’t contribute to the manufactured, synthetic hysteria that is so much a part of modern life. And I think we may have done so with regard to this ‘tropical storm,’ as it now seems to be.”
Even The Washington Post thought Howard Kurtz scored a hit with this point:



The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids. Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?
And I'll be honest, I sort of thought the same thing myself, briefly. Living on the Gulf Coast, which I've often described as America's sewer outfall, I get used to hurricanes and yet I don't really think they ever get over-hyped, even when they don't threaten major metropolitan areas or major media centers. Because despite Gulf Coast bravado, you never get used to hurricanes.



I mean, if you want hysterical reactions to hurricanes, this was true hysteria:







Fear of Rita right after the disaster of Katrina led to a mass exodus of the Texas Gulf coast just below Houston, and to a flight of people from Houston that created a traffic jam from Houston to Dallas (a distance of over 200 miles). That traffic jam led directly to the deaths of several elderly people when the bus they were evacuating in caught fire because it had idled too long in the Texas heat. And that hysteria was prompted because of government ineptitude which created the horror of New Orleans after Katrina. There was a certain sense of hype and media/government sponsored hysteria (the Mayor of Houston made matters worse by telling everyone in Houston to evacuate in the face of Rita) in the wake of that storm, but Rita still did serious damage to Beaumont and east to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Like I say, you never get used to hurricanes.



Still, the notable connection between George Will and Howard Kurtz and the other critics of the "hype" of Irene is that they live in Manhattan, and since NYC wasn't appreciably affected by the storm, what was all the worry about? You have to especially appreciate the way Kurtz closes his column:



As the storm weakened, a tone of reality crept into the live reports. After heading to Battery Park, on the low-lying southern tip of Manhattan, CNN’s Anderson Cooper said: “There has been some flooding—not a huge amount of flooding, and some of the water is already starting to recede … It’s actually not bad at all.”



But there is always the prospect that something bad might happen soon. “Is Wall Street going to open tomorrow?” business correspondent Bob Pisani asked on MSNBC, the towers of the financial district behind him.



Hurricanes are unpredictable, and it’s a great relief that the prophets of doom were wrong about Hurricane Irene. But don’t expect the cable networks to downgrade their coverage the next time a tropical storm gathers strength.
No flooding in NYC equated to no flooding anywhere. But it was only a "tropical storm" that left Vermont in this condition:



Vermont Emergency Management officials say they'll use helicopters to airlift food, water and supplies to towns cut off by flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Irene.



Emergency Management spokesman Mark Bosma said Tuesday that Vermont National Guard helicopters will head Tuesday to about a dozen towns where roads and bridges washed out lifelines
And as for the forty people dead and the millions still without power, well...that's why they should live in NYC, I guess.



A minor update:



Hurricane Irene will most likely prove to be one of the 10 costliest catastrophes in the nation’s history, and analysts said that much of the damage might not be covered by insurance because it was caused not by winds but by flooding, which is excluded from many standard policies.
I suppose at this point I'm just piling on, especially to point out "an unusually wide area of the East Coast" barely includes New York City:



Industry estimates put the cost of the storm at $7 billion to $10 billion, largely because the hurricane pummeled an unusually wide area of the East Coast. Beyond deadly flooding that caused havoc in upstate New York and Vermont, the hurricane flooded cotton and tobacco crops in North Carolina, temporarily halted shellfish harvesting in Chesapeake Bay, sapped power and kept commuters from their jobs in the New York metropolitan area and pushed tourists off Atlantic beaches in the peak of summer.
This description makes it clear the least damage occurred in the New York City area. I'm happy for them, but for the rest of the East Coast, they have my sympathy and my prayers.

Here, too, is the church....





Sherri said...



I keep seeing that study headlined 'Less-educated & poor abandon religion.' Seems like to me it should be 'Religion abandons less-educated & poor.'
I am NOT picking on Sherri to repeat her comment here; but I just heard about this, and while I'm probably no fan of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's theology, this sounds like a very good thing to me:



Forty Texas prison inmates make up the state's first class of seminarians studying to become ministers under a new program operating totally behind prison walls.



The inmates all are serving lengthy sentences at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Darrington Unit in Brazoria County south of Houston. They're beginning Monday four years of training leading to a bachelor's degree in Biblical studies and eventual assignment to other Texas prisons where they'll minister to the spiritual needs of fellow inmates.



The nondenominational program is modeled after a similar project in Louisiana that's credited with reducing inmate violence by 70 percent since beginning in 1995.
Certainly better than abandoning the uneducated and poor, eh?

Ptochoi





There are better and worse responses to the poor (not to "poverty." That is an abstraction, a concept, an idea. "The poor" are human beings.). Walter Russell Mead has one, Dean French another. I still think most people are afraid of the poor, and our response to them now is more evidence of that.



I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us."



I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."
Dorothy Day, from The Dorothy Day Book, p. 11.



If we are foreigners to the poor, we have to treat them with respect. That, or denounce them as inferior, because they don't do things in their country the way we do "at home." And the only way to respect them is, as Dorothy Day said, to renounce all compensations. Which gets is perilously close to Derrida's concept of the gift, and of the circle, and of "economy."



Now the gift, if there is any, would no doubt be related to economy. One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating this relation to economy, even to the money economy. But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return? If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation, of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics the gift must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness. It is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible.



Not impossible but the impossible. The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be thought as the impossible. It is proposed that we begin by this.



Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7. Sorry, but you had to see that to understand what I'm saying. The only way to truly be with the poor, to give them the gift of your attention and your compassion, is to step out of the economy of exchange that we all participate in and that we all, by definition, as much as possible exclude the poor from. But Dorothy Day's response requires a goodness beyond all calculation. And the problem of a Dorothy Day is this:



On what condition does goodness exist beyond all calculation? On the condition that goodness forget itself, that the movement be a movement of the gift that renounces itself, hence a movement of infinite love. Only infinite love can renounce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other. This gift of infinite love comes from someone and is addressed to someone; responsibility demands irreplaceable singularity.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 50-51.



And this:



These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your own cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it, so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. Adulterers! Do you now know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, "God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
James 4:1-6



Which, if it isn't the task of the Church, is certainly the task of believers.

Vulture Theology



Sherri said...



I keep seeing that study headlined 'Less-educated & poor abandon religion.' Seems like to me it should be 'Religion abandons less-educated & poor.'


I actually meant to start this discussion here:



The study also shows that Americans who make more money attend religious services more frequently, and that Americans who have been unemployed at any point in the past 10 years attend services less frequently. The study found that people who are married, who do not approve of premarital sex and those who lost their virginity later than their peers also attend services more often.



“While we recognize that not everyone wishes to worship, and that religious diversity can be valuable, we also think that the existence of a large group of less educated Americans that is increasingly disconnected from religious institutions is troubling for our society,” says Andrew Cherlin, co-author of the study and a professor of sociology and public policy at the Johns Hopkins University. “This development reinforces the social marginalization of less educated Americans who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work.”
And then Dean French and Walter Russell Meade intervened in ways comical and grossly ignorant. Events changed, too, so where I meant to start is no longer the place I would start from. But I can't toss that aside either, because it is prologue to what I have to say now. So let's begin with prologue and see where we end up.



Probably this problem is a matter of economics, not just individual finances: in a 24/7 economy, Sunday has been squeezed out as the "day of rest" (whether it ever should have been a day the stores were closed is another matter, but it ain't that day anymore!). And if you are working a minimum wage job, especially (which I assume is the best you can do these days, with just a high school diploma), you're probably working more than one job just to pay for the gasoline to get you to work. Doesn't leave much time for Sunday morning services, which is still the preferred hour of worship for most Protestant Christians.



And why is that? There's a curious cultural vestigial practice right there. Why must church be open for worship between the hours of 9 and noon on Sundays? Frankly, Sunday morning is the only morning I can even THINK about sleeping in (past 6 a.m.) or having time to make breakfast something other than what comes out of a box ready to eat (more and more I think of the foods of my convenience foods childhood as MRE's). My sympathies lie with people who would rather be elsewhere on Sunday morning. Of course, my sympathies lie more strongly with people who understand worship as a discipline, not just a social duty. But those sympathies are more befitting of the monastery than the modern world, so I'm left wondering why Protestantism is so determined to "market" itself, and yet also so determined to cling to practices that are long outworn.



Or maybe they aren't so outworn; I prefer the calm silence of Sunday morning for worship, to the dull quiet of Saturday evening in church, when everyone else in the world is heading out for Saturday night. I can see where that kind of discipline for worship is as hard as the discipline of the monastics. But that's a memory from childhood, when the world was calm on Sunday morning. Today it is still calmer than the rest of the week, especially in the city; but it isn't exactly calm. But there is a discipline involved in worship, a "Du muss gehen!"* that has to be maintained, since worship has stopped involving families in their homes sometime shortly after Paul died. Instilling that discipline, or overcoming that inertia, has been a problem plaguing pastors since at least the incoming tide of the post-war church boom began receding.



One answer to the problem prominent among pastors when I used to hang out with them was what I came to label "vulture theology." Nobody really liked the sound of it (the idea, not my label), but they were also rather comforted by it. The idea was that children came to church as a captive audience, and parents brought them because they felt compelled to do so, so the children would learn good lessons about life (and maybe discipline. Whether any of that is true or not is another matter. Certainly they learn about power and how many people like to wield it, no matter how small the arena.). When those children reached the age of consent (which varies in Christian churches, but usually the age of confirmation) parents generally gave up forcing them to attend, and the children usually stopped. (The blessing/curse of the church. In Protestant denominations, confirmed children became voting members of the congregation. I liked it; the one place I was an adult, like my father, although I was still young in the world. But most confirmands vanish after the confirmation service, glad to be able to choose not to stay.) They would return, vulture theology theorized, when they had kids, or when the chips were down and they needed the church for comfort and support.



In other words, at a time of spiritual crisis, or spiritual (or real) death. Vulture theology. We pastors were like undertakers; all we had to do was be patient; sooner or later you'll come to us.



Funny, that isn't happening: "The study also shows that Americans who make more money attend religious services more frequently, and that Americans who have been unemployed at any point in the past 10 years attend services less frequently." I would first compare this to the theories that Islamic terrorism was bred in ghettos and poverty and powerlessness, because who else would become a suicide bomber except someone with no material prospects to look forward to? And it turned out the most likely terrorist was a child of wealthy parents. To speculate why it was them, and not the poor, whom Al Qaeda and others were more likely to recruit, one cannot ask the first question without making presumptions that exclude other possibilities. Were they, for example, driven by a lack of direction in their lives? By the emptiness of material possession? By a need for meaning that property ownership couldn't provide? Such questions presume conditions which may, or may not, exist. Such questions presume there is a spiritual dimension to human existence and frankly, I don't hear too many people talking that way anymore.



I don't hear people making those presumptions unless I read old books that already sound like they come from a pre-Enlightenment era, books like Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. No one today considers humanity in the "Old World" way Frankl does, and his language is so pre-21st century empiricism (which borders on logical positivism, another irony), it almost seems pre-Cambrian. But if there is an explanation for things like wealthy children becoming suicide bombers, and for riots across England, for the decline of the unemployed in worship in America (and the rise of the well-off, who obviously feel more comfortable in church, or have more time to take some comfort there), then perhaps the explanation is not in simple terms of a hierarchy of needs. Maybe we have needs that don't arise only at the top of that hierarchy. Maybe what keeps mankind alive isn't bestial acts alone, after all.



And maybe the vulture is not our best selection from the ancient Christian bestiary.



Before you say that the decline in worship of the poor is clearly an affirmation of Maslow's hierarchy, let me point out the church started among the poor ("Foxes have holes, and birds their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head...") and stayed there almost up until the time of Constantine. And the concern of the church is always supposed to be the poor, although the eye strays from that goal from time to time:



"My church comforts the sick and the dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do? Oh, that's right, you don't have a church!"
And certainly the church can do that without too much affliction to the comfortable (affliction which would make the feeding of the hungry and the poor almost impossible, if carried too far, so let's be reasonable), but should the church itself be so comforting a place the poor should feel uncomfortable there? That's a problem as old as Protestantism itself, and one reason new churches, like the Pentecostal movement, spring up from time to time. They begin in marginal communities and can promise dramatic changes (Harvey Cox has pointed out, over and over, that the Pentecostal movement was one of the first truly interracial churches in America). Then, of course, the institution becomes established, and has to look to its own concerns, and the pastors become personalities, and they need TV cameras to "spread the message," and soon the message is them, and then....



Well, that's one way it happens. The other is that the poor and marginalized move up the economic ladder and take their church with them, and pretty soon the church is as much an institution of society as any "mainstream" denomination. And that brings blessings and curses, too.



But the results reported in this study are interesting and sad. The church, respondents say, is a place of judgment, especially about sexual matters ("The study found that people who are married, who do not approve of premarital sex and those who lost their virginity later than their peers also attend services more often."), and it is a place associated with monied interests. That should comfort Dean French, but it is cold comfort to the rest of us who take the parable of the sheep and the goats at least somewhat seriously. Given the few mentions of the Temple in the Gospels are about the iniquitous influence of money (the cleansing of the Temple; the widow's mite; even the impermanence of the seemingly permanent structure), you'd think the institution would have gone a different route, attracted a different crowd. Then again, what would it be if it had? Would it even be, at all?



We prefer either/or answers. We prefer solutions which eliminate problems or, at worst, create new problems. We like, in other words, Hegel; but we get Derrida:



“In our ‘wars of religion’, violence has two ages. The one…appears ‘contemporary’, in sync or in step with the hypersophistication of military tele-technology—of ‘digital’ and cyberspaced culture. The other is a ‘new archaic violence’, if one can put it that way. It counters the first and everything ir represents. Revenge. Resorting, in fact, to the same sources of mediatic power, it reverts (according to the return, the resource, the repristination and the law of internal and auto-immune reactivity we are trying formalize here) as closely as possible to the body proper and to the premachinal living being. In any case, to its desire and to its phantasm. Revenge is taken against the decorporalizing and expropriating machine by resorting—reverting—to bare hands, to the sexual organs or to primitive tools, often to weapons other than firearms. What is referred to as ‘killings’ and ‘atrocities’—words never used in ‘clean’ or ‘proper’ wars, where, precisely, the dead are no longer counted (guided or ‘intelligent’ missiles directed at entire cities, for instance)—is here supplanted by tortures, beheadings, and mutilations of all sorts. What is involved is always avowed vengeance, often declared as sexual revenge: rapes, mutilated genitals or severed hands, corpses exhibited, heads paraded, as not so long ago in France, impaled on the end of stakes (phallic processions of ‘natural religions’). This is the case, for examples, but it only an example, in Algeria today, in the name of Islam, invoked by both belligerent parties, each in its own way. These are also symptoms of a reactive and negative recourse, the vengeance of the body proper against an expropriatory and delocalizing tele-technoscience, identified with the globality of the market, with military-capitalistic hegemony, with the globalatinization of the European democratic model, in its double form: secular and religious. When—another figure of double origin—the foreseeable alliance of the worst effects of fanaticism, dogmatism or irrationalist obscurantism with hypercritical acumen and incisive analysis of the hegemonies and the models of the adversary (globalatinization, religion that does not speak its name, ethnocentrism putting on, as always, a show of ‘universalism”, market-driven science and technology, democratic rhetoric, ‘humanitarian’ strategy or ‘keeping the peace’ by means of peace-keeping forces, while never counting the dead of Rwanda, for instance, in the same manner as those of the United States of America or of Europe). This archaic and ostensibly more savage radicalization of ‘religious’ violence claims, in the name of ‘religion’, to allow the living community to rediscover its roots, its place, its body and its idiom intact (unscathed, safe, pure, proper). It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body: as though thereby to eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound. Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication.
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, tr. Samuel Weber (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 52-53.



I've highlighted the bits that are of most interest to me, but to begin with Derrida identifies a double origin which struggles with its "twin" (let us say) but cannot destroy it; not without destroying itself. It can't synthesize it, either. They are too much alike, too much different, and irreconcilable without the destruction of both. There is no "third way" here. There is only the struggle.



Israel, the scholars tell us, means "struggles with God."



It is notable, of course, that this study doesn't highlight a violent response to the situation, but something more akin to a resigned shrug. Life, after all, is supposed to be hard (Puritanism, at least as remembered in modern America) and only the blessed are supposed to be rich (Calvinism, again as vaguely remembered in modern America), and if the church is so concerned with either why I should be rich (Joel Osteen) or social justice for some other group besides mine (liberal mainstream churches), then where do I go?



I honestly don't know how quickly the mainstream churches have turned on this dime, but my experience is they are more like aircraft carriers than small and agile boats. Reinhold Niebuhr tells a wonderful story from his days as a Detroit minister. He took the pulpit one morning to rail against the heartlessness of the automakers who were laying off workers in the Depression at a record rate. Niebuhr spoke passionately for the unemployed, and furiously about the companies who would discard them so callously. After the service, a church member approached him to say he, the member, was in management at an auto worker, and was suffering great torments calling in employees to hand them their last paychecks. Niebuhr realized then that no problem is a matter of the abstract "they," but is always about "us." And when you have to rail against "us," it's suddenly a much harder thing to do.



I have a friend who has been in ministry most of his adult life. When there were attempts to boycott Taco Bell because of the labor practices used to harvest the tomatoes the corporation used, attention fell on an employer in his town. A representative from the national church came to town to "educate" the pastors in town about the issue. When they tried to point out they had church members who worked for the company Taco Bell bought produce from, their words fell on deaf ears. The matter was one of ideas, not people, and the pastors were failing to hold up their end for the good of the goal.



Churches have a hard time avoiding such conclusions. Institutions have a hard time with nuance, and the church is, by and large, an institution. So if the churches are not tackling the problem of unemployment in a coherent or even useful manner, I won't be surprised. There is precious little they can do besides rail against the system, perhaps in the manner of Jesus cleansing the temple of merchants. But the church is not Jesus, and the free market is not the Temple; so there's that. There's also the obvious problem: wealthy people support the church, unemployed people don't. The first rule any pastor learns in a modern church is: don't bite the hand that feeds you; not if you want to eat.



I don't think those hands need to be bitten anyway, but any discussion of money from the pulpit makes people squirm; and any discussion that goes against the grain of modern understandings of poverty might well make those who aren't poor or about to be poor due to job loss, more than a bit uncomfortable. And I don't know how it would make the poor and unemployed any more comfortable, either. So we're back at the pastor's problem: what do to, and how to do it.



One problem is the language we feel compelled to use. I still remember speaking up in a meeting of clergy and interested laity on a church response to a scientific subject. When I pointed out the statement being crafted made precious little reference to God, I was berated by a lay person for "beating up" on science. I was doing no such thing, but no one in the room, laity and clergy alike, supported my position, so I learned when to shut up (basically, always) and when to speak up (basically, never) and thus got through the rest of the process without incident. We don't like talking about spiritual matters, at least not as Protestants, because we sound too much like religious know-nothings. Or we are religious know-nothings who understand science only as it makes us materially comfortable, and abandon it to pursue rather silly spiritual ideas that are really no more sound than triskadekaphobia and other superstitions, so as to keep our science and our religion comfortably separated. I've seen many examples of both. Until we can find or appropriate a language that expresses our confessions of faith without expressing our credulity about the physical universe, we'll have quite a struggle with this issue. That language is available; but we have yet to do the hard work of appropriating it to our use.



Another problem (although almost all our problems, thanks to Hume, come down to problems of language), is our problem of identity. After Freud and the Viennese school of psychology, we all assume human beings are primarily sexual creatures. After menarche and puberty, we are all driven by sexual desire, so much so that we must be identified, first and foremost, as heterosexual or homosexual, or even bisexual and transgendered. Again, the modern liberal church has nobly taken up this cause, reinforcing the idea that we are not first creatures of spirit, but creatures of our genitalia and what we want to do with them. What would happen, though, if we thought of ourselves first as spiritual beings, and secondarily as material beings? We might try to disappear into the ether, I suppose, trying to become as diaphanous and "pure" as possible. But I don't think so; I don't think we'd have to abandon the world to be spiritual beings in the world, though we might have to stop thinking Maslow's hierarchy (which I first encountered in seminary; three college degrees, and I had no use for that pyramid until I was training to be a minister of the gospel) is the baseline for human needs, and spirituality comes in fourth or fifth or sixth in line. What if we simply turned that around? What seismic shifts in human consideration might arise?



Yet another problem is the problem of the holy.



This archaic and ostensibly more savage radicalization of ‘religious’ violence claims, in the name of ‘religion’, to allow the living community to rediscover its roots, its place, its body and its idiom intact (unscathed, safe, pure, proper). It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body: as though thereby to eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound. Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication.”
Derrida is concerned with violence, but we need not follow him there to appropriate his language and understand it correctly. What about the claim, in the name of 'religion,' to rediscover the roots, the place, the body and idiom, of 'religion.' Isn't that what Dean French is doing, and to a lesser extent Walter Russell Meade? They come closer to speaking the language of violence on the subject of poverty than anyone else I'm hearing. And that is an interesting thing about the discussion of poverty: the very discussion of it usually makes us very nervous.



In Ursula LeGuin's Omelas, even a kind word to the child in the basement is enough to end the perfection of the too-true-to-be-good city. I find that whenever a kind word is spoken about the poor, almost-violent reactions often ensue. I knew a kind and good man, a church member (not of my church) who insisted that panhandlers on the streets of Houston, obviously destitute and broken people, in fact made $30,000 a year (apparently a princely sum; I think his age was showing in that calculation) by begging, which proved, PROVED!, they were not, indeed, worthy of our compassion. He meant well, but while the poor may always be with us, it seems to most people that we don't always have to care for them. Meade and French stand in a long line that I remember from my childhood, when anecdotes about color TV's in tar paper shacks proved that the poor weren't really victims of a system, but simply profligate and poor managers of their admittedly meager incomes. We seem to feel, somehow, that the poor indict us in our comfort, and any kind word delivered to them or even about them, that isn't tempered with some kind of rebuke for the group as a whole, is enough to afflict what makes us comfortable. Speaking harshly of the poor is our own way of trying to "eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound." But, of course, what we end up with is: "Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication."



We always have the poor with us because we are always committed to systems that make sure some one else is poor, that someone lives in the basement so we can enjoy the sunshine and festivals of Omelas. That is the double root we always strive to uproot and eradicate. But we uproot and eradicate ourselves, in the effort, as well. Is it any surprise that: “This development reinforces the social marginalization of less educated Americans who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work.” Disconnecting people from institutions we don't really want them to be a part of is the primary work of an institution.



So, do we abandon the institution? If we do, where do we go? And after all, is the Church really Omelas? Do we really have no alternative but to accept it, or walk away?



Who is the church, anyway? The priests, the bishops, the pastors and judicatory of whatever form and function? Or is the church the people in the pews? Is the church you? Which is not to say that you are the Body of Christ, but is the Church so apart from you that it, too, is an abstraction, a thing to which you have nothing but an unfortunate connection? If pastors are waiting like vultures for parishioners to come along in the end, in the last resort, are you waiting for the church to act like the church you imagine, in the end, in the last resort? Maybe it is time, again, to ask the passionate questions (on another subject, but again, we can disregard that) of that passionate Roman Catholic, Walker Percy:



What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness?...God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing...What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest! Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!
Maybe that's what we should do. It is clear Meade and French and their ilk are wrong, and worse, dangerous. But knowing that doesn't tell us what to do, only what not to do. So what do we do? We get up. That's right, nothing more than that. Get up! Protest! What is missing? Who is robbing us? God? A thief? Find him! Find the thief! Find God!!!!



Sorry, no answers here at the end of the book. Just more questions:



If you're looking for an answer,

If you're looking for a way,

If you're looking for directions,

Or a lesson how to pray,

Then there's nothing for you here,

You'd better go.



"Song for Maybe Christians," as best I can remember it 40 years later. Something I learned in high school. Some things stick with you longer than they should.



UPDATE: There is, by the way, a response to poverty in this country from major religious organizations. The membership of this group is really quite impressive. On the other hand, they are not the Tea Party (or Tea Parties), and they don't attract the attention of the DC media crowd. There is also the distinction between poverty (a concept) and the poor (people). But it is a response. A candle in the darkness, as it were.



*(try as I might, I can't find the German double "S" on my computer. Apologies!)

On the Faults of Natural Law

This short essay is not intended as an exhaustive exploration of the subject, but is designed to express in a short space the primary difficulties I have with the concept and application of natural law. This presents a problem at the outset as there are at two very different understandings of the term “natural law.” The 1910 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the subject begins,

In English this term is frequently employed as equivalent to the laws of nature, meaning the order which governs the activities of the material universe. Among the Roman jurists natural law designated those instincts and emotions common to man and the lower animals, such as the instinct of self-preservation and love of offspring. In its strictly ethical application — the sense in which this article treats it — the natural law is the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which He has endowed us.

It is the final understanding, and its application, I am addressing at this point — as it is the one that I feel is most pernicious and ethically problematical, and open to the greatest abuse.

However, let me first raise the question of why anyone should feel the need to develop such an overarching theory of morality in the first place. It seems to me that this stems from a desire for objective standards, rather than a willingness to live in a conditional moral universe that is subjective at its heart. The evident problem with such a desire for objectivity lies in the fact that morality itself is necessarily relative — that is, it deals with the interrelations between various entities, and how they interact with each other. This necessitates an inescapable degree of subjectivity. Even behaviors of an individual in relation to some nonhuman entity — the state, the church, or even God — are by definition relational. The desire to declare a given act as moral or immoral divorced from the relation of the actor to the act and to that which is acted upon leaves precious little with which to deal.

For example, theft, which as an act-in-itself is simply the manipulation of some object (real or — in this day and age — even virtual), is only considered “theft” because of the relationship of the thief to the thing stolen, and touches on whole areas of presupposed or unexamined philosophical groundwork such as the nature of ownership itself: what makes something “belong” to one individual and not to another. There is nothing essentially rational or necessary in the concept of ownership — it depends upon other concepts that derive from cultures and their attitudes and have no objective or universal standing.

This exposes the greatest problem with natural law: that the supposedly self-evident truths to which it appeals are themselves philosophical constructs that even if widely shared still reflect the cultural prejudices of those who share them. I commend reading the whole article in the Catholic Encyclopedia (see link below) which, dating from 1910, reveals rather clearer traces of these cultural prejudices proclaimed as self-evident truths than might be risked with such bluntness today.

In short, natural law, as a system, is hopelessly guilty of begging the question. It assumes as its necessary premises answers to some of the very issues it purports to address.

Perhaps the most “question-begging” aspect of the concept lies in the essentially useless conclusion identifying the ultimate principle of natural law. As Aquinas says, (and as the CE reports),

the supreme principle [governing all of natural law], from which all the other principles and precepts are derived, is that good is to be done, and evil avoided (I-II.Q94.2).

Well, that’s settled then. Just do what is good, avoid evil, and all is taken care of. The problem, of course, is that rational people disagree as to what is even the highest good, and what subsidiary goods flow from it, and what actions and relations are in accordance with the highest or subsidiary goods.

The problems begin almost as soon as one begins to attempt to apply the basic premise. As the article in the CE goes on to say, the universality of natural law

pertains not to those abstract imperfect formulæ in which the law is commonly expressed, but to the moral standard as it applies to action in the concrete, surrounded with all its determinate conditions. We enunciate, for instance, one of the leading precepts in the words: “Thou shalt not kill”; yet the taking of human life is sometimes a lawful, and even an obligatory act. Herein exists no variation in the law; what the law forbids is not all taking of life, but all unjust taking of life.

The emphasis above is mine: the authors recognize that the concrete reality and conditions of any action have a role in determining whether that action is in fact good or not — that is, if it is in accordance with natural law. But the natural law itself cannot be used to make that determination because all it says, in essence and in its pure form, is that one should seek the good and avoid evil. In the case cited, all hinges on what is determined to be “unjust” — and of course in some contexts even the meaning of “life” — and so the whole weight of morality has to refer to that universe of conditions and circumstances rather than to any objective, immutable, or universally shared principle.

Take, as another example, the good of procreation — any rational person would say that the continuance of the human species is a good thing. But some cultures or moral systems (such as rabbinic Judaism, see mYebamoth 6.6) have held that the duty to procreate is incumbent upon all men; while others (for example, the Roman Church) have held that celibacy is not only permissible but virtuous. (Aquinas’ way around the problem of celibacy — II-II.Q152.2 — was to note that the commandment to be fruitful and multiply was addressed not to the individual human but to humanity as a species — a rather clever solution, but one that also tends to undercut the very basis of natural law as incumbent upon every human as human! And clearly the Roman Church is not willing to apply this same principle to birth control, but invokes a completely different moral touchstone: the dubious notion that the “procreative function” is not to be separated from the “unitive.” Since these functions are to some extent separate even in nature and can further be separated by human action, and there may well be quite rational causes for doing so — for example, in the case of a woman for whom it has been determined that bearing a child would be a significant danger to her life — the objectivity of this moral law comes into question.)

Additional difficulties arise the further one wades into the defense of natural law. In an effort to define its “essence” the CE continues with these two principles:

(a) The natural law is universal, that is to say, it applies to the entire human race, and is in itself the same for all. Every man, because he is a man, is bound, if he will conform to the universal order willed by the Creator, to live conformably to his own rational nature, and to be guided by reason. However, infants and insane persons, who have not the actual use of their reason and cannot therefore know the law, are not responsible for that failure to comply with its demands. (b) The natural law is immutable in itself and also extrinsically. Since it is founded in the very nature of man and his destination to his end — two bases which rest upon the immutable ground of the eternal law — it follows that, assuming the continued existence of human nature, it cannot cease to exist. The natural law commands and forbids in the same tenor everywhere and always.

Noting already the exceptional cases of those who do not have the use of reason, another problem with this asserted universality arises when particular human actions judged irrational by some are judged rational by others. Who is to set the objective standard as to what is rational? Do we not end at base with reliance upon cultural norms and prejudices, which by definition are not universal?

The usual response from natural lawyers is to say that a culture (or an individual) who fails to follow some precept which the proponents derive from natural law is either depraved or perverse: that is to say, like infants or the insane they simply have not attained or have lost the use of reason or have reasoned in error, or they know full well that what they are doing is wrong but persist in doing it out of some innate disordered desire to do what they know full well is “evil.”

This is, however, merely a cloak for cultural prejudices. Allow me to cite one more example from the CE article, which is at some pains to defend the toleration of polygamy in the Hebrew dispensation (“dispensation” itself being a somewhat uncomfortable fit with a supposedly universal and immutable law):

Under no circumstances is polyandry compatible with the moral order, while polygamy, though inconsistent with human relations in their proper moral and social development, is not absolutely incompatible with them under less civilized conditions.

This blatantly sexist (and vaguely racist) declaration is clearly at odds with right reason. If polygamy is permitted (because it advances a primary end of marital union, i.e., procreation) then surely the same is true of polyandry. The rabbinic ruling (cited above) that commands a man whose wife does not bear a child within a certain term of years to take another assumes that the problem lies in the woman. But a woman whose husband is sterile is forbidden to take another man. This stems not from any truly “natural law” but from a firm bondage to patriarchy, in which tracking the patrilineal descent is considered crucial. Obviously matriarchy and family inheritance by matrilineal descent is not only just as “natural” but arguably more secure, as the occasional doubts about paternity do not arise in the case of maternity. In fact, I recall a woman stand-up comedian some years ago deriving quite a laugh from her line, “I don’t have any kids... [proud smirk] that I know of...!” The allowance of polygamy and rejection of polyandry is not objective and rational, but mere cultural prejudice at work. (I do not, by the way, say any of this in defense of either polygamy or polyandry, but simply to point out the inconsistency and sexism inherent in culturally conditioned “natural law.”)

So, is it possible to develop some objective standard that is actually helpful in guiding moral behavior. Clearly, simply to say, “Seek the good and avoid evil,” is entirely unsatisfactory and only begs the question — perhaps giving a useful definition of morality but no actual particular guidance to what constitutes moral behavior. It is rather like telling someone who wants to learn how to spell to use the alphabet.

Some of the hardest moral questions facing us in our day will not yield to a merely doctrinaire and “objective” conclusion. Acts cannot be judged good or bad in the abstract apart from the actors and what is acted upon, and the circumstances and motives underpinning and enveloping the action. Some will judge acts entirely on the basis of their consequences — and all sorts of ethical systems have evolved which attempt to judge the good or ill of those consequences (pleasure, prosperity and well-being of the greatest number, for example). Others will judge acts on the basis of positive laws and duties — surely a rational approach, but hard to put into practice divorced from motive and circumstance. Others will appeal to the social contract for interactions between human beings. Some, such as myself, will fall back upon the moral advice of Jesus in terms of love of God and neighbor.

My point is that the very existence of all of these various systems of morality seriously damage the credibility of the base assertions of natural law — and of all the systems at our disposal, it is the least likely actually to bear useful fruit, given its question-begging, cultural bondage and sterile dogmatism.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG


citations of the Catholic Encyclopedia are from the online version of the article: Fox, James. “Natural Law.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. Accessed 28 Aug. 2011 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09076a.htm. The CE received the approbation of the Roman Catholic Church as follows: Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York.

The Unique Case of our National Cathedral


As I discuss in this week's edition of Anglican Unscripted, Washington's National Cathedral is a hybrid creature: it is not owned by any parish or Diocese of the Episcopal Church (USA), but is owned by a public charitable trust, called the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation. The Foundation was established by a charter from the United States Congress, enacted in January 1893 and signed into law by the outgoing President Benjamin Harrison, to facilitate the project of raising funds for the construction of a cathedral and religious education center that would be suited to the nation's capital.

The idea for a national cathedral had first been conceived by the French planner Pierre l'Enfant, who had been commissioned by President George Washington in 1791 to lay out the design for what in 1800 became the city of Washington in the District of Columbia. Major l'Enfant set aside a site ("Lot D") in his plan for what he imagined as a non-denominational religious center (see the detailed notes and plan at the end of this article):
This church is intended for national purposes, such as public prayer, thanksgivings, funeral orations, etc., likewise a proper shelter for such monuments as were voted by the late Continental Congress for those heroes who fell in the cause of liberty and for such others as may hereafter be decreed by the voice of a grateful nation.
But nothing came of that idea, and in 1836 construction began on the Old Patent Office Building at the site, which now houses the National Portrait Gallery.

While the Episcopal Church began to re-examine its structure and governing documents following its centennial in 1889, a movement began at the same time among prominent parishes in the District of Columbia to erect a suitable cathedral for the nation's capital. This movement, led by the Church of the Epiphany, began with the chartering of the Foundation in 1893, and next the formation in 1895 of a new Diocese of Washington. The latter was created by carving out of the Diocese of Maryland the area of the District of Columbia, together with the Maryland counties of Montgomery, Prince George's, Charles, and St. Mary's. The new diocese elected as its first bishop the Right Reverend William Satterlee, who immediately took up the cause for a cathedral and became its driving force.

Under Satterlee's leadership, the Foundation first acquired 30 acres for a cathedral on Mt. St. Alban, a prominent site overlooking the city, and the location already of the existing parish of St. Alban's. Additional acreage was purchased over the years, as funds became available. (One of the chief contributors was Charles Glover, the president of the no-longer-extant Riggs Bank, but which at the time was the largest bank in Washington.) Fundraising for such a project took considerable time, however. In 1906, the Foundation hired England's leading Anglican church architect, George Frederick Bodley, to design the building; one of his followers who had come to America, Henry Vaughan, was hired as the supervising architect.

Just one year later, in 1907, the Foundation held a grand ceremony to lay the cornerstone, which an estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people attended, and at which both the Bishop of London and President Theodore Roosevelt gave an address. (Although many of his predecessors were Episcopalians, and attended services at Episcopal churches in the District, Roosevelt was the first of many Presidents to be connected with the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, to give the building its full proper name.) The cornerstone, a huge block of American granite, incorporated a stone which had been brought from a field next to the Church of the Holy Nativity, in Bethlehem, and inscribed on it were the words from John 1:14 -- "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."

Bishop Satterlee died in 1908, but his successors kept the project going. The cornerstone of the Bethlehem Chapel was laid in 1910, and the first services were held there in 1912. There was a brief hiatus in the fundraising during World War I, and by the time the War was over, both Henry Vaughan and Frederick Bodley had passed away, as well. The Foundation selected an American, Philip Hubert Frohman, as the head architect. He would work continuously on the project for the next fifty years of his life, and is considered the principal author of the Cathedral's final design. The son of the designer of New York's Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., was hired to lay out the landscaping for the Cathedral Close.

Work on the Cathedral did not finish until eighty-three years later, with the completion of the west towers in 1990, when a ceremony was held at which President George H. W. Bush delivered the dedicatory address. Both he and his son, President George W. Bush, held their inaugural prayer services there. There are many more people associated with the building's long history, including the amazing Rowan Le Compte, who at the age of sixteen designed a stained glass window for the Cathedral. He and his wife Irene subsequently went on to do many more windows and colorful mosaics for the interior, and at age 81 he was still at work on designs, as related in this informative article.

As I explained on Anglican Unscripted, the Cathedral, its schools and its grounds, as well as its bank accounts, prayer books, organ and altar cloths, are uniquely exempt from the language of the Dennis Canon, since they are all owned by a public charitable trust, whose charter dedicates it to a much broader purpose than just serving the Episcopal Church (USA). Nevertheless, the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul serves simultaneously as the see both of the Bishop of Washington and (since 1940, as adopted by a concurrent resolution of General Convention) of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church -- who by a canonical change in 1943 was for the first time required to resign from his diocese upon being elected.

There began shortly afterward, during the term of the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill which began in 1947, that slow process of "primatial creep" which transformed the Presiding Bishop's office, with its mushrooming staff, into a major institution of its own in the Church, as I described in this earlier post. And, now, despite the definitive rejection of a proposal at General Convention in 1946 to create a territorial see in Washington for the Presiding Bishop, and the defeat of a later proposal to turn the Presiding Bishop into the equivalent of a metropolitan archbishop, we have nonetheless arrived at that result via a little-noticed change made by the newly adopted disciplinary canons of Title IV, as I discussed in this post.

Thus while the Presiding Bishop has no Diocese, he/she still has a cathedra -- an episcopal chair in the National Cathedral, and all ceremonies of installation to that office take place there. In recent years, however, the Cathedral's budget has shrunk considerably, and more than half of its staff have been laid off. Its most recent Dean, the Very Rev. Dr. Samuel T. Lloyd III, is returning in September to his parish at Trinity Church in Boston's Copley Square. Nevertheless, the Cathedral has balanced its budget and begun a nationwide campaign for support through the newly re-launched National Cathedral Association.

Plans for a stable future have now been shaken, both literally and figuratively. The recent Virginia earthquake caused significant damage to the masonry of the Cathedral, as can be seen in the gallery of pictures at the Cathedral's Website. Apparently there was no insurance, due to the scarcity of earthquakes on the East Coast. Raising the millions needed for repairs will once again devolve on the shoulders of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, which has a notable Board of Trustees, and should be up to the task. Donations to the cause may be made at this page, where the photographs of the damage can be seen.

[UPDATE 09/07/2011: While I deplore the current blinkered attitude of those in charge of the Cathedral and what goes on there, I draw a distinction between the people in charge and the building which they mismanage. That building, as my post above shows, has a long and distinguished history, and embodies the love and professionalism of many dedicated and highly talented individuals. The damage to it done by the recent earthquake may be repaired on its own merits by making contributions for that sole purpose, without thereby signaling approval or ratification of the Diocese's misguided policies. The building will continue to be a national monument long after the current multicultural craziness has ceased to be a factor in its image.]