All aboard the Failure Express . (Politico) — President Obama used a campaign-sounding Labor Day speech to demand that Republicans support the jobs plan he will unveil in a speech on Thursday. Speaking to workers in Detroit, Obama wouldn’t give specifics about his proposal (he said he “didn’t want to give everything away right here, because I want you all to tune in on Thursday”). But he said that “more than one million unemployed construction workers” could be put to work with his plan. “We just need Congress to get on board,” Obama said to cheers. “Let’s get America back to work.” The crowd then began chanting “four more years.”
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Obama Demands Republicans “Get On Board” His Plan For More Stimulus Spending…
Time recently published a cover story, “Is Hell Dead?” about a “rogue pastor” called Rob Bell in Michigan. We don’t know for sure that anyone is in hell, he argues. Maybe, but fantasizing free heaven passes for all doesn’t make much sense, especially for a pastor. If Bell’s message is that his parishioners are all going to enjoy an eternity of bliss whether they go to church or not, it’s only a matter of time before they stop going. “The doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism,” Ross Douthat wrote. Rob Bell represents “the tragedy of non-judgmental mainline liberalism,” said R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I agree with that. Meanwhile I keep thinking of C. S. Lewis’s reminder: “All the most terrifying passages in the New Testament come from the mouth of Our Lord.” It should be clear by now that the theological liberalism that has dominated our age undermines religious faith, much as secular liberalism, intended to improve society, will end up bankrupting it. Consider the Church of England, where every progressive cause is embraced. Gay bishops? Who, in our current climate, would dare to disapprove? Out of 60 million people in the United Kingdom, only 1.1 million, or about 2 percent, go to church every week. Once it was 10 times that. Even its leaders seem to have stopped believing in it. Declining congregations and growing costs make the C. of E. an unsustainable venture without the recovery of faith. The trends in America are similar, although less advanced. The number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled (from 8 percent to 15 percent) since 1990. In the same period self-identified Christians fell by 10 percentage points (from 86 to 76 percent). The Catholic Church has likewise declined, and the sex abuse scandal is only partly to blame. One in 10 Americans now identify themselves as ex-Catholics, and one of three raised as Catholic have defected. The Jesuits, by far the most liberal order, have fallen from 8,400 members in 1965 to 2,650 in 2010. Social justice, which really means income redistribution, is their foremost article of faith. All the most liberal orders of nuns — the ones who threw away their habits in the 1960s and adopted a vaguely feminist mission of peace and social justice — are withering away. Urgent fund-raising appeals are needed to preserve their elderly remnant. On the other hand, the orders that have restored the habit and insist on a strict interpretation of their respective rules are thriving. The trend is unmistakable. But the senior archbishops in the U.S. remain cowed-intimidated by the zeitgeist. (The younger bishops tend to be much better, however.) The underlying problem can be put this way. The top archbishops are incapable of instilling the fear of hellfire in their most famous parishioners, who without rebuke openly support abortion and other activities irreconcilable with Catholicism. These bishops have been trained to believe that all problems must be addressed by diplomacy, and their faith has turned into a watery thing. But our declining faith is caused by something more pervasive than non-judgmental liberalism. Rising prosperity makes its own contribution. We have seen this all over the Western world. People will avoid thinking about an afterlife, whether heaven or hell, as long as years of plenty stretch out ahead of them — a new vacation, a new toy, a new mistress. And capitalism does bring prosperity. Not that I oppose it on the ground that it promotes worldly comfort. Nonetheless, if capitalism endures — and we are seeing it spread to China and India — then we may expect a further decline in faith. What did Jesus say? First of all, he warned that riches put our souls in danger. He didn’t mention the hazards of poverty. Repeatedly, throughout the Gospels, he insists on the need for faith. He also predicted a general decline in faith. He did miracles right in front of people’s eyes but some of them still didn’t believe. Tyre and Sidon would have repented in sackcloth and ashes if they had seen such things, he said. And at the Second Coming, “when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” (The evangelists would hardly have invented a savior who foresees that his message will become less and less popular.) Islam has flourished even as Christianity has languished. And notice that Islamic countries seem incapable of creating wealth on their own. When it gushes out of the Arabian sands in the form of oil, the basis of the wealth had already been created in the West (in the form of automobiles). THE OTHER DAY, the pastor at our local Catholic church in Washington, D.C., wondered about the book-writing atheists in our midst. What goes through their minds in the middle of the night? I don’t think they contemplate either heaven or hell. They assume that at death they enter the void. Christopher Hitchens, who has written for this magazine, tells me in an e-mail that “annihilation is, to my knowledge, the post-death assumption of most if not all atheists.” I think this also applies to many liberal intellectuals who do not explicitly identify themselves as atheists. As to heaven and hell, Hitchens added, both have “the insuperable problem of compulsory eternity.” But the “invention of purgatory” has its attractions, he finds, because it does entail “the possibility of some kind of appeal, or change of circumstances.” Richard Dawkins, the prominent preacher of atheist polemics, finds the doctrine of purgatory ridiculous. He calls it a “sort of divine Ellis Island.” But he seems unbothered by the prospect of an eternal nothing. “Being dead will be no different from being unborn — I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs.” I have been reading two of Dawkins’s books, The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth . He tells us that in his earlier books he forgot to disclose the scientific evidence that evolution is true. He will fill that gap (in The Greatest Show ). But he has little to offer, because there isn’t much evidence for evolution. Anti-religious polemics are his true forté . He’s a true believer in the idea that life arose by chance and only seems to be designed. That is his cause — the (bleak) faith that he lives for. His vituperative condemnations of religion are hard to reconcile with the claim (first made by Freud) that religious faith is “wishful thinking.” When we get up in years — and I qualify — we do think about the Last Things — normally defined as death, judgment, heaven and hell. But so do young people, now that I look back. Maybe we do so even more when we are young. But we don’t often hear about these things from the elderly, who are so fixated on aches and pains, hip replacements and the mundane details of health care (so tiresome to read about). The one certainty, that we are all going to die, and some of us fairly soon, we mostly contrive to keep out of our minds. Probably the old are better at that kind of repression than the young. Often, the practical faith of the elderly intelligentsia is a form of Roman stoicism. I sometimes meet people who tell me that they wish they had religious faith. I would only say this. Don’t think of it as a switch that is either in the “on” or “off” position. It is more like a muscle that has to
Have any of you folks been watching The Confession , on Hulu? I saw the first three chapters and found the confession scenes just riveting: When a cold-blooded hitman bursts into a hotel room to execute someone, the intended victim does something unexpected: he asks the hitman for a moment to make his peace with God. The hitman lowers his gun as the victim takes a chain with a crucifix from around his neck, holds it tightly in his hands, kneels down with eyes closed, and begins moving his lips in silent prayer. Now peaceful and resigned to his fate, the victim opens his eyes, looks at the hitman, and says, “I forgive you.” The hitman hesitates, looking confused and even regretfully at a peace he’s never seen before, but then pulls the trigger anyway. That’s the incident that propels the story in the new online web series on Hulu.com called The Confession. Shot partially in the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York City, the series stars Kiefer Sutherland as the hitman, and John Hurt as the priest to whom he contentiously goes to gain an understanding of what he witnessed. Sutherland’s character is definitely complex. He enters the confessional and speaks words from a bygone era of his childhood: “Bless me Father for I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed. I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father. It’s been thirty-five years since my last confession.” When the priest asks if he’s sorry for his sins, he says, “No,” and goes on to explain he killed a man last night. The hitman isn’t there for forgiveness, but rather to understand the peace he witnessed come over his victim the night before. Tony Rossi has more , here . Interesting to watch how TV is evolving, isn’t it? Even as we’re buying big screens for the walls, television programming is moving away from appointment-viewing, and our computers are becoming the broadcast medium for original shows. Speaking of which, Mary’s Aggies takes a look at the agendas behind some of those shows Moving on, the investigation into accusations made against Fr. John Corapi apparently hasn’t even begun yet, and the story hasn’t moved an inch, but for anyone interested, the National Catholic Register speaks with a representative from the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity . As I say, it doesn’t move the story at all, but it provides a little clarification on the society, itself, about which there was some confusion. The Register also takes a look at the “knowns and unknowns of the case. Also, Mark Shea , whose sentiments I pretty much share, thinks piping down is a good thing In surprising news: Next year religion will be studied in all Russian schools ! Amazing. On a related note, Heather King muses on the Russian religious spirit : . . . I may not know what’s going on now, but I totally knew [Russians] were in big, big trouble before. In fact, a few years ago I read a whole slew of amazing books by people who’d been in the prison camps: The Arctic Death Camps by Robert Conquest, Richard Würmbrand’s Christ in the Communist Prisons , The Accused by Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski, Kolyma, and perhaps my favorite: The Woman Who Could Not Die by Julia de Beausobre. Upon learning that her husband Nicolay, imprisoned in another camp, had been shot, Beausobre wrote: Look down right into the depths of your heart and tell me—Is it not right for you to be kind to [your torturers] Even to them? Particularly to them, perhaps? Is it not right that those men who have no kindness within them should get a surplus of it flowing towards them from without? Whoa. Some Catholic must-reads for the day: Lisa Mladinich on Life and Calling; Teens and Vocational Discernment – some very good advice on how to help the teens around grow in their ability to consider what they were born for, and to hear the “small still voice.” Relative to that, Get Religion on why fewer children mean fewer nuns (and priests, I’m sure.) Julie Davis: Remember how I always bug you to read In This House of Brede? Well, Julie wants you to read Story of a Soul , too! Pat Gohn goes to the Catechism and finds, believe it or not, a route away from resentment! Thoughts on Geraldine Ferraro as she is laid to rest, today Something just beautiful: Beauty, beauty, beauty More interesting stuff: Deacon Greg: Bishop to Gays; The Church is Your Home Pat McNamara: on Dorothy Day Finally – It’s OPENING DAY! Baseball, baseball — how long I have waited for baseball, and longed for it in the deep mid-winter! Here is Jason M. Morgan on Baseball and the Soul : . . .baseball will heal you. Bring a box of tangled wire, a ball of knotted twine, a heap of broken heart, a clutter of twisted misery to the baseball diamond and spend enough time listening to the thump of the ball in the glove, the sound of the wind on the dust, and looking at the blue salute of the indivisible sky, and baseball will make you whole again. Bring your defeated soul to baseball, and baseball will, by the unchangeable truth of its geometry and the eternal vectors of its freedoms, speak to you, call you by name, and—not teach—but allow you to remember who you have always been. Remembering Babe Herman And this thanks to our good Joseph Susanka – That’s Baseball ! Click here to view the embedded video. More: The Confession, Fr. Corapi, SOLT, Baseball, More!
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The Confession, Fr. Corapi, SOLT, Baseball, More!
The environmental movement in America began as a defense of nature against man. But what we call “nature” is a human construct, and when Thoreau and John Muir set out to protect the unspoiled wilderness, they were really trying to create the unspoilt human being who would walk in it. All the most vigorous environmental initiatives in America, from the national parks movement and the Sierra Club to Earth Day and the Wilderness Society, have been dedicated to the wilderness idea. The motive has seldom been to protect or improve the human habitat, but to make trails into the pristine hinterland, where the American people can breathe the pure air of Eden, and cast off the burden of original sin, which is the sin of the city. This wilderness obsession has had good results. It is good that America has large national parks, in which wildlife enjoys a measure of protection. It is good that Americans cherish their forests, rivers, lakes, and wetlands. It is good that they worry over the future of bald eagles, black bears, and bobcats. And it is only right that these concerns should be reflected in American vacations, in the romantic streak in American art and literature, and in the “lone ranger” image that recurs in American popular culture. The squads of easy-rider motorbikes that patrol the scenic highways, the troops of scouts on the mountain trails, the canoes and kayaks on the river rapids-all testify to a deeply implanted respect for the natural world, and a longing for a lost innocence. People who retain the idea of lost innocence are one degree better than those who have forgotten it and therefore believe that there is no such thing. And maybe the goodness of America depends, in the last analysis, on the cult of the wild. But there is a downside to the wilderness idea and it is an important one. The American concern for animal habitats has encouraged a vandalization of the habitats of people. Man takes his fallen condition with him into the wilderness. He may reflect on it there, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, but he cannot escape it. And by creating this illusory Eden he turns his back on his true habitat, which is the city. The city is a crowded forum of strangers, where you are face-to-face with people whose company you never chose. It depends on social cooperation, which in turn depends upon the rule of law and the institutions of commerce. But it depends also on a primordial act of dedication, to the god or saint who will protect it. All the great cities of the world began life as sacred places, in which the life among strang- ers was given a redemptive purpose by the shared submission to a higher power. Modern cities have grown away from that primordial posture of submission. But they are still marked by it. Churches, public buildings, the facades of streets and squares — all bear witness to an original act of settlement, in which a piece of earth was marked out by a community and dedicated to its gods. The classical building styles that shaped the original towns and cities of New England derive from temple architecture. Their harmony stems from the devotion of their founders: when placing brick on brick or stone on stone they were building not just a home but an altar. The same is true of the Gothic style, praised in those terms by Ruskin, and put to such striking use in the industrial architecture of Victorian England. It was Ruskin who launched the environmental movement in Britain. The greenwood had been felled to create the Royal Navy and nothing of wilderness remained. But Ruskin did not care. His concern was with the landscape made by man — the patchwork quilt of old England, seamed by hedges and dry-stone walls, and buttoned to the earth by neat little cottages of stone. For Ruskin this man-made nature was contiguous with the city, to which he dedicated, in Stones of Venice , the greatest description in English of a place made sacred by buildings. AMERICAN SPRAWL IS BOTH THE CAUSE and the effect of the wilderness urge. It comes from ceasing to care for the city as a sacred place and a common home. Throughways, junctions and flyovers, faceless tower blocks, loud fascias, adverts raised high on poles and childish logos — all such things deface the city, turning it from a home to be lived in to a tool to be used. The trashing of the American city didn’t have to happen. The idea that you can own land in a city and do what you like with it is a new and eccentric chapter in the history of human settlement. Religious edicts, building codes, and civic ordinances governed the appearance of the ancient city and ensured its continuity as a public space: this we witness not only in the surviving monuments of Athens and Rome, but also in those jewels of everyday urbanization like excavated Ephesus and the now mutilated Aleppo. The crenellations on the facades of Venice have been legislated for 500 years. The heights of buildings in Geneva and Helsinki have been limited by law since the 19th century. The city of Salzburg now bans those who trade in its center from displaying their logos or altering the architecture to suit their taste. Thanks to the legally imposed boundaries of Vienna, you can look from the center of the city to a green horizon of protected woods. And so on. European cities have been loved by their residents, and have therefore adopted an aesthetic of settlement. Hence their residents have settled and stayed. The American city began as a creditable attempt to create a public space, but nothing public exists for long in a country where only the wilderness has a lasting claim to protection. New Brunswick, laid out with classical streets and squares, pinned to the sky by the clean stone spires of churches, was trampled to dust in a few decades: now it is a wasteland of parking lots and office blocks, with the occasional classical building marking the place of a vanished street like a loyal hound at the grave of its master. This aesthetic disaster—matched elsewhere only by the results of war and conquest — is a lasting blemish on the American idea. But what can be done to rectify it? The New Urbanists advocate centripetal rather than centrifugal cities, and argue vigorously for designs that will attract residents downtown. But even if they succeed, the rooted American belief that you can do what you like with your property and stick what you like in the face of passersby, means that the cities of the New Urbanists will very soon look like the cities of the old urbanists that we know— a jumble of signs, logos, and fascias, scattered along throughways in which buildings stand not beside their neighbors but against them. It is hardly surprising that those who work in such places should flee at the first opportunity to the unspoiled wilderness. But it is their love of the wilderness that caused the disaster. It is not that Americans are unaware of the problem. Concern over the randomization of the American city was vigorously expressed by J. C. Nichols in the early years of the iron-frame skyscraper, and later by Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, from their very different points of view. The battle lines over suburbanization were formed between the wars, and hostilities have recently escalated with the writings of James Howard Kunstler, Joel Kotkin, and Robert Bruegmann. The fight against billboards, which had a success with the institution of scenic byways, continues on a small scale all over America. And here and there counties have succeeded in placing restrictions on the worst forms of light pollution and roadside sprawl. But, for good reasons as well as bad, Americans are reluctant to impose aesthetic constraints on the use of private property. THE OTHER DAY, sitting on the porch of our publisher’s mountain cabin in Virginia, I confronted the distinction between owned and unowned America in its most vivid form. Across from us was the Shenandoah National Park, a dark mass of forest, exuding its primeval silence. And below it, in the valley, was the old village of Etlan, Madison County, an unspoilt clutter of whiteboard houses along the road. But among the old farms with their rust-red barns, the new horse farms are springing up, one of them vast, rectangular, its white-light sheen dominating the landscape and eclipsing the softened colors round about. In Europe there would almost certainly be a law, telling the owner of that horse farm to blacken the roof of that barn and to paint its sides rustred—as there is a law requiring pan-tiles in Provence, slates in Brittany, Cotswold stone in Gloucestershire. But, as our publisher said, such a law would be received over here as a gross intrusion by the government and would be resisted by no one more fiercely than the good conservatives whom he has spent his life defending. And those conservatives would be right. For the American way of life is about individual sovereignty: take that away, invade the home and dictate the taste of its inhabitants, and the most sacred altar of freedom would have been surrendered to the encroaching state. Still, I cannot help blaming that ugly horse-barn on the wilderness beyond. Nor can I help wishing that Americans had not invested quite so much of their aesthetic passion in the places where they don’t live, and quite so little in the places where they do.
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The Wilderness Obsession
This past week, Republican South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli displayed how the GOP is the party who is actually For The Children, and not just in the talking points way. First up was Governor Mark Sanford, who signed bill H 3245 into law . The law now requires that women have a 24 hour waiting period before obtaining an abortion. Prior to this law, there was only a one hour waiting period. It also requires that abortionists offer women the ability to see their unborn child on an ultrasound before aborting the baby, but does not require that they view the ultrasound. They must merely be given the choice. Choice is important, right? Next, came Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, who concluded last week that state agencies in Virginia can legally regulate abortion clinics as medical establishments. This should just be common sense and shouldn’t raise the ire of even the most vociferously pro-abortion, right? I mean, it does not make abortion illegal, but it does make it safer – and hopefully rarer. Safe, legal and rare is the mantra, no? Apparently, by safe, legal and rare, pro-abortionists really only mean one out of the three. They actually want it to be unsafe, legal, and not rare at all. As is indicated by their fierce opposition to such simple, decent and potentially life-saving measures. Governor Sanford had this to say when he signed the new South Carolina law: “I believe life is sacred, and in the debate over when life begins, I think we as a society should always err on the side of life,” Gov. Sanford said. “Given current federal law , I think it’s imperative that a decision of this magnitude only be made with the fullest and most accurate knowledge available. It’s our hope and expectation that this new law results in a substantial decrease in the number of abortions carried out in South Carolina . How draconian, huh? I thought knowledge was power? Not so for pro-abortionists. They are infuriated over a mere 24 hour waiting period. In most states, the waiting period to simply obtain a marriage license is longer than that. Ideally, a marriage lasts a lifetime, but an abortion always does – there is no going back. Once a life is taken, it is gone. Forever. Is it too much to ensure that a woman take ONE DAY to contemplate it ? A woman who may be scared and make a rash decision due to said fear – a decision that not only takes a life, but will haunt her for the rest of hers. Taking just those 24 hours of contemplation may save both those lives. In Virginia’s case, it is clearly a measure of safety. Abortion clinics, often functioning as mills, are not regulated in Virginia as medical establishments. As such, they have no standards of safety to meet. Says a spokesman for AG Cuccinelli: “The state has long regulated outpatient surgical facilities and personnel to ensure a certain level of protection for patients. There is no reason to hold facilities providing abortion services to any lesser standard for their patients,” said Brian J. Gottstein , a spokesman for Mr. Cuccinelli . “Even pharmacies, funeral homes and veterinary clinics are regulated by the state,” he said. Right. How is it safe – at all – to have no standards for abortion clinics? According to NARAL, safety is no big whoop. What concerns them is that some clinics may not meet those standards and will have to close. Abortion-rights advocates said they are not surprised by Cuccinelli’s decision and predicted that if the Board of Health acts on his opinion, the regulations could prompt the shutdown of 17 of the state’s 21 clinics performing abortions. “We’ve been waiting for the attorney general to take on abortion providers, and it looks like this is his first pitch,” said Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia. “These so-called regulations are only an attempt to shut down abortion clinics in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” Good. That should help with both the whole safe and rare idea. Plus, maybe it’s just me, but even if you are pro-abortion wouldn’t you think that if a facility can’t meet minimal safety standards , then they should be forced to close? Excuse me, what am I thinking. That requires common sense, decency and actual concern for women, which is utterly lacking in the pro-abortion agenda. Susan B. Anthony List’s President Marjorie Dannenfelser’s debate with NARAL’s Tarina Keene about AG Cuccinelli’s decision proves it: By the way, the Democrat nominee for Governor in South Carolina, Sheheen, declined to answer any questions about South Carolina’s new law. Again – there is no such thing as a pro-life Democrat. Polling indicates that more and more Americans are identifying as Pro-Life and that changing hearts and minds is working. Now, so is changing laws. May it continue. For the children.
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SC’s Governor and VA’s Attorney General: For The Children
