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Article Excerpt
* I have mentioned before Clive James' book of mini-essays on intellectuals of the past hundred years, Cultural Amnesia. He really does not like Jean-Paul Sartre, who was lionized by so many for so long. James blames Sartre's prewar period in Berlin, and especially the influence of Heidegger. "In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas." But wait, he is just warming up. "[Sartre] might have known that he was debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men did, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive force than merely to see the world as it was." Sartre was a fervent communist to the end, denying or belittling the atrocities committed by Stalin, Mao, and their lesser imitators. As odiously, he made his peace with the Vichy regime and then, after the war, claimed to be a hero of the resistance and set himself up as a grand inquisitor, indicting intellectuals whom he thought had been less than heroic. "Heidegger and Sartre were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from facts.... Working by a sure instinct for bogus language, a nonphilosopher like George Orwell could call Sartre's political writings a heap of beans, but there were few professional thinkers anywhere who found it advisable to dismiss Sartre's air of intelligence: there was too great a risk of being called unintelligent themselves. Effectivement--to resurrect a French word that was worked to death at the time-Sartre was called profound because he sounded as if he was either that or nothing, and few cared to say that they thought him nothing." Clive James bids fait to restore the good reputation of polemics.
* Two years ago, the Archdiocese of Boston shut down its adoption services rather than comply with the state's demand that it place children with homosexual couples. While cheering the decision not to compromise on moral principle, some observers complained that the archdiocese gave up without a fight. Now the U.K. is making the same demand of the Catholic Church there, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the bishops' conference of England and Wales, says he is prepared to do battle in court in order to defend the Church's policy of placing children with "married heterosexual couples." Says Neil Addison, an attorney close to the controversy, "The Church may not win, but, if Catholic agencies are to be closed and deprived of their right to provide these services, let that be done--and be seen to be done--by the government and not by the Church." Precisely.
* The Sabbath commandment of Exodus 20 is quite explicit that, as God rested on the seventh day, so also his people, including their servants, strangers in the land, and even the cattle should have a day of rest. "This," writes Remi Brague, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, "is the social dimension of the Sabbath, which became the thin wedge whereby ancient societies were opened to the pursuit of liberty." God steps back, as it were, allowing his creatures the freedom of their nature. "To be sure, God keeps whatever exists in being, for without his continuous will to maintain them, they would disappear. But he respects the nature of the things he has created.... Human freedom expresses in a human key a property that belongs to each creature: the property of existing and acting according to a nature of its own. Interesting, the Koran, which repeatedly praises God's creative activity, does not mention the test of the seventh day. As a consequence, it does not contain any law on sabbatical rest. A verse even discreetly criticizes the idea that God could get tired (L, 38). Mainstream Islamic apologetics (Kalam) later built a whole worldview in which things, and even time, consist of indivisible units or properties that stick together because God creates them afresh, out of nothing, in every instant. Such properties don't belong together because they express the nature of a thing, but merely because God is accustomed to combining them. No created thing, not even a human being, has a nature of its own, from which it can, as it were, enter into free relations with its maker. All are forever subject to His will. To be sure, the biblical worldview agrees in putting God above any fatigue (see Isaiah 40:28). Moreover, the New Testament insists that God does not stop 'working' (John 5:17). But the world that God works to maintain is composed of things that are endowed with a stable nature and which spontaneously act in accordance with it." Brague's is a suggestive way of thinking about the difference between a religion of submission (the meaning of the word Islam) and a religion of freedom, the latter being rightly ordered according to the nature of God's creation.
* That "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" issued by the Pew Research Center last February continues to be sliced and diced by various analysts, including Robert Benne, who writes in The Cresset, a magazine published by Valparaiso University. "Continuing the list of surprises about Catholicism," Benne writes, "ten percent of all Protestants are former Catholics but eight percent of Catholics are former Protestants. That eight percent represents a considerable number, around five million. Converts to Catholicism usually are far more intense about their faith than cradle Catholics, so I suspect that this eight percent injects new vigor into the Church." He also notes that a striking number of Catholic converts are prominent intellectuals. A young man who is active in Catholic ministries at an Ivy League university speaks warmly of their cooperation with evangelical ministries such as Campus Crusade for Christ. Ecumenical cordiality, however, does not preclude an element of evangelistic rivalry. "The big difference," he says, "is that they aim at the weakest Catholics while we aim at the strongest evangelicals." The claim is that evangelicals who are more theologically versed and religiously committed are more open to Catholicism, while Catholics who become evangelicals were, for whatever reason, alienated from Christianity. Put differently, religiously serious evangelicals are more likely to become Catholic, while religiously lapsed Catholics are more likely to become evangelicals. I have heard this from chaplains and students on other campuses and suspect there might be something to it. But the dynamics of conversion are often elusive. Some while back, I spoke at an Episcopal parish in the Northeast and afterward had dinner with the members of the vestry. Ten of the fourteen members present were former Catholics, and seven of them said they would be Catholics today if it were not for their divorces that prevented them from receiving Holy Communion. The pastor of an evangelical megachurch who says more than half his members are former Catholics tells me, with a smile, "I hope you guys don't change your rules on divorce and remarriage." But back to Robert Benne on the Pew survey. The survey notes that the mainline/oldline churches--Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, ELCA Lutheran--are "homogenous, aging, and diminishing." This, Benne adds, "even after all the huffing and puffing about 'diversity' and 'inclusivity' that these churches have put forth." The survey notes that the category of the "religiously unaffiliated" is growing, but fully one third of the unaffiliated say that religion is "important" to them. Benne writes: "They are adopting the European pattern of 'believing without belonging.' And, even with the emergence of a mini-movement of militant atheism among bestselling authors, the atheist and agnostic portion of the population stands at a mere four percent. People are evidently 'reading but not believing.' ... Even with the growth of the unaffiliated (one third of whom are religious!), Christians represent 78.4 percent of the population. Other religions, including Judaism, represent another 4.7 percent, which brings America to 83.1 percent religious. Add the 'unaffiliated religious' at 5.8 percent, and the U.S. reaches nearly 89 percent religious." He then provides a cautionary note: "There were a lot of religious people in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era. So the fact that 89 percent are religious cuts little ice. Disciplined, informed, Christian faith likely would show up as a much smaller percentage." Likely to the point of certainty.
* A history of two millennia of Christianity in 312 pages, and eminently readable pages at that ? You might well think it could not be done, but Robert Bruce Mullin has done just that in A Short World History of Christianity (Westminster John Knox). Mullin is professor of history and world mission at the General Theological Seminary (Episcopal) in New York and has distilled prodigious scholarship into a succinct story of what happened from the time when people first encountered Jesus and asked "Who is this man?" up through an informed speculation about the possible futures of the worldwide Christian movement in the present century. Almost exactly fifty years ago, Martin E. Marty published...
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