I’ve never been a big fan of comic book movies, or the fantasy genre in general. There is enough drama and suspense in the banal evil and heroic good of regular humans not to need my stories super-sized. But it is true what they say: The Dark Knight is no ordinary comic book flick. This is not, however, because Batman and the Joker have been downgraded to mere mortals. They still remain quite inaccessible as they fight a transcendent battle between an ambiguous good and an indefinable evil. What is compelling about the film, though, is that these prophets of light and dark now have much more complex priests to do their work in the world. Thus, the most interesting pair is not Batman/Joker, but rather, the more minor juxtaposition of Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon. [Warning: This post is replete with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie, you may want to skip this for now.]

First, a few words about the headliners: Heath Ledger’s Joker, while well played, is not the best villain since Hannibal Lecter. The most frightening evil is that with which we find ourselves sympathizing as reflecting the darker parts of our own nature. Joker’s brand of mayhem makes him easily dismissible. He just needs to be put in a padded cell. His miscalculation at the end of the movie in which he assumes that regular citizens will blow up a ship full of prisoners in order to save themselves shows the degree to which he is alienated from his own humanity. He does not know us because he is not one of us.

If the Ledger’s Joker is not the most compelling villain, Christian Bale’s Batman remains similarly inaccessible. While Nolan has gone to lengths to humanize the Caped Crusader by highlighting the toll that crime-fighting takes on Bruce Wayne, there is only so much he can do with his source material. Batman cannot be like the rest of us. Batman must live away from society for the sake of society. He must wrestle with demons in exchange for gaining prophetic insight into a measure of justice that, like Kierkegaard’s “Knight of Faith,” he remains unable to fully explain. The “one rule” separating his order from the Joker’s chaos remains perilously ungrounded given the radical evil he must combat and the degree to which his mission requires the suspension of any universalizable ethical order. Bale’s Batman realizes that he, as a kind of prophet, cannot alone redeem Gotham. Real salvation can only come with internal reform. His dark and mysterious goodness needs a priest. The hope that such a “ministry” is possible comes in district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

Read the rest of this entry »

I always enjoyed Paul Gigot when he was Mark Shields’ opposite number on the Friday Lehrer News Hour.

Gigot left the Show when he became editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal.

In today’s Journal he launches a rather stinging indictment of Fanny and Freddie and assorted accomplices, and all their works and pomps. Here’s the beginning:

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal’s editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels.

Mr. Mozilo loudly declared that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t understand accounting or the mortgage markets, and that I was in the pocket of Fannie’s competitors, among other insults. Mr. Raines, always smoother than Mr. Mozilo, politely intervened to avoid an extended argument, and Countrywide’s bantam rooster strutted off.

It just gets juicier.

For those who missed it, here’s Thomas Frank’s pointed analysis of Phil Gramm’s Marie Antoinette moment. “This, historians will someday say, was the snarling end of an era in which our leaders believed that markets represented the very will of the people; that to serve one was to serve the other.” Snarling, yes. But the end? Frank may be too optimistic. As he notes later in this column, one of the leading champions of ”market populism” has been Kevin Hassett, coauthor of Dow 36,000, and now one of Senator McCain’s chief economic advisors.

Vatican types often display a knack for language that can rankle friends as much as foes, with the latest example a speech by Rome’s ranking guest at the Anglican Lambeth Conference, Cardinal Ivan Dias of the Congregation for the Evangeliz(s)ation of Peoples. In his intervention yesterday, Cardinal Dias warned the Anglicans–who as we all likely know are struggling with internal divisions over homosexual bishops and women bishops, among other things–that they may be suffering from the ecclesial equivalent of Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons:

For example, when we live myopically in the fleeting present, oblivious of our past heritage and apostolic traditions, we could well be suffering from spiritual Alzheimer’s.  And when we behave in a disorderly manner, going whimsically our own way without any co-ordination with the head or the other members of our community, it could be ecclesial Parkinson’s.

Many, no surprise, are not happy with the cardinal’s talk. (A friend sent it to me this morning, but I found it so soporific–the nature of such speeches, I guess–that I never got to the juicy bit near the end.) The Guardian has coverage, and The Times (of London)’s Ruth Gledhill leads with protests from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s charities. Over at Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher rather likes the cardinal’s phrasing, but notes that “this same accusation is more or less what traditionalist Catholics say about the Second Vatican Council, and is also more or less the traditional Orthodox criticism of Roman actions leading up to the Great Schism.”

No doubt there will be cheers and jeers, depending on one’s point of view. But leaving aside the propriety of Dias’ analogy–the late pope himself suffered from a form of Parkinson’s that the Vatican would not even acknowledge–what of the point Dreher makes? One could argue, as reformers have throughout history, and as biblical exegetes can today, that Rome is a captive of a particular era, or several eras. Is that too not a form of presentism, or paralysis or forgetfulness? Historical consciousness is a tricky cudgel to wield. Then again, Dias is also invoking–I presume–heritage and tradition in the context of the Roman rather than the Reformation understanding. But reform is an inherent part of the Anglican heritage and tradition, so perhaps they are talking past each other.

What did you miss at the Museum of the City of New York last night? Sewell Chan reports at his Times blog, City Room:

Like the exhibition, the 90-minute discussion — moderated by Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal magazine, a Catholic biweekly opinion journal — was heavy on history, but the speakers also raised questions of contemporary significance.Mr. Baumann noted the role that Catholics have played in fundamental debates in American public life — in immigration, education, nationalism, the family, sexual morality and freedom of conscience.

snip

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus — a leading conservative intellectual, a former Lutheran pastor and the editor of the leading Catholic journal First Things — offered a surprising view on the question.

“To be a Catholic is not to be refused positions of influence in our society,” he said. “Indeed, one of the most acceptable things is to be a bad Catholic, and in the view of many people, the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic.”

Father Neuhaus dismissed the notion that anti-immigrant sentiment was related to anti-Catholicism, since many Latino immigrants to the United States are Catholic. (But he did note that the church, which has been strongly pro-immigrant, could be seen as having a vested interest in the immigration debate, since immigrants are a major source of members.)

He added that anti-Catholicism was as likely to come from the left — sometimes from commentators who believe that a “threatening theological insurgency is engineered and directed by Catholics,” with evangelical Protestants merely as the movement’s “foot soldiers.”

Read the rest right here.

Not being much of a movie-goer, I rely on others to steer me towards or away.

My former colleague at Boston College, Tom Hibbs, now Dean of the Honors College at Baylor, has a reflection on “The Dark Knight” that certainly impels me to see the film (if it’s ever released in Boston).

Dark quests for redemption, whether religious or secular, abound in contemporary culture. As Nolan’s films indicate, these quest films owe a great debt to classic film noir. Classic noir takes aim at some of the treasured assumptions and promises of modernity. In noir, the modern world, embodied in an urban setting, is hardly the world of light, happiness, and peace that utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment foretold. Modernity is about human beings exercising control over nature and thus taking control of their destinies; in our modern technological project, knowledge and power are one. The postmodern turn in noir is about the loss of control, the absence of intelligibility, and the threat of powerlessness. But the quest has something pre-modern about it—a sense of human limitations, of the dependence of human beings on one another and on events not in their control. In this world, the outcome of the quest is tenuous and uncertain.

The title of the Nolan’s latest Batman film calls to mind medieval chivalry in a postmodern key. The dark knight embraces extraordinary tasks and fights against enormous odds; his quest is to restore what has been corrupted and to recover what has been lost. In so doing, he takes upon himself a suffering and loneliness that isolate him from his fellow citizens and inevitably court their misunderstanding and scorn. He is a dark knight, in part, because the world he inhabits is nearly void of hope and virtue, and, in part, because some of the darkness resides within him, in his internal conflicts between the good he aspires to restore and the means he deploys to fend off evil. Of the many filmmakers designing dark tales of quests for redemption, Christopher Nolan is currently making a serious claim to being the master craftsman.

The rest of Hibbs’ review is here.

Have any lucky New Yorkers seen the film?

Jim Romenesko’s media news Web site has long since turned into a cascade of bad news about the newspaper business - contributing to low morale in many a newsroom. So it’s almost newsworthy that the site has linked to an article that says newspaper circulation is up.

Globally, that is. Sacramento Bee public editor Armando Acuña writes:

“Last month, the World Association of Newspapers, which represents 18,000 papers across the globe, released its little-noticed annual report at its meeting in Goteborg, Sweden.

Its conclusion, which sounds like heresy around these parts, is that `newspapers are a growth business,’ with worldwide circulation growing by almost 3 percent last year, while at the same time significantly expanding their online audience.

And, as important, advertising revenue at paid dailies was up too, at 1 percent from a year earlier and 13 percent over the last five years.

And so it is good to read in the association’s study that newspaper circulation is rising or stable in three-quarters of the world’s countries. What the report doesn’t answer is whether we are ahead of the curve in the U.S. (and parts of western Europe) because of technological advantage - or if this is another example of how we are falling behind. Or perhaps both.

Here’s an interesting abstract from the UK journal PLoS Medicine, finding that participation in IMF loan programs increases mortality from tuberculosis due to decreased government spending on public health:

We performed multivariate regression of two decades of tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality data against variables potentially influencing tuberculosis program outcomes in 21 post-communist countries for which comparative data are available. After correcting for confounding variables, as well as potential detection, selection, and ecological biases, we observed that participating in an IMF program was associated with increased tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates by 13.9%, 13.2%, and 16.6%, respectively. Each additional year of participation in an IMF program was associated with increased tuberculosis mortality rates by 4.1%, and each 1% increase in IMF lending was associated with increased tuberculosis mortality rates by 0.9%. On the other hand, we estimated a decrease in tuberculosis mortality rates of 30.7% (95% confidence interval, 18.3% to 49.5%) associated with exiting the IMF programs. IMF lending did not appear to be a response to worsened health outcomes; rather, it appeared to be a precipitant of such outcomes (Granger- and Sims-causality tests), even after controlling for potential political, socioeconomic, demographic, and health-related confounders. In contrast, non-IMF lending programs were connected with decreased tuberculosis mortality rates (−7.6%, 95% confidence interval, −1.0% to −14.1%). The associations observed between tuberculosis mortality and IMF programs were similar to those observed when evaluating the impact of IMF programs on tuberculosis incidence and prevalence. While IMF programs were connected with large reductions in generalized government expenditures, tuberculosis program coverage, and the number of physicians per capita, non-IMF lending programs were not significantly associated with these variables.

Find out tomorrow night tonight at the Museum of the City of New York:

Tuesday • July 22 • 6:30 PM

Is Anti-Catholicism Dead?

Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal, will moderate a discussion about the history of anti-Catholicism and its resonance today. From the virulent nativist movements of the 19th century to contemporary examples of anti-Catholic rhetoric, a distinguished panel will discuss how the Catholic community has confronted discrimination and whether criticism of Catholicism can exist without fueling prejudice. Mr. Baumann will be joined by George Marlin, author, activist, and former Executive Director and CEO of Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; James McCartin, Professor of History, Seton Hall University; Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of First Things, and Sister Mary C. Boys, Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Theology, Union Theological Seminary; and Peter Steinfels, “Beliefs” columnist, The New York Times, and co-director of the Fordham University Center for Religion and Culture. Presented in conjunction with Catholics in New York, 1808-1946

And on July 29 be sure to check out David Gonzales of the New York Times, Sr. Veronica Mendez of RENEW, Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, and others at the museum for “Latinos and the Future of Catholicism“:

Tuesday • July 29 • 6:30 PM

Latinos and the Future of Catholicism

The face of Catholic New York is being rapidly transformed by Spanish-speaking immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean, but many Latino Catholics are also turning away from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism. Rafael Pi Roman, the host and senior editor of WNET/Thirteen’s Emmy award-winning program “New York Voices,” will lead a distinguished panel in a discussion of the history and future of Latinos in Catholic New York. He will be joined by Reverend Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, former President of the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico; Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Professor Emeritus, Brooklyn College; Barbara Gonzalez, Chair, Centro Altagracia de Fe y Justicia; David Gonzalez, columnist, The New York Times; and Sister Veronica Mendez, RCD, Member of RENEW International Service Team.  Presented in conjunction with Catholics in New York, 1808-1946

For the rest of the museum’s public programs, click here.

Pat Lang wants to know why Bill Kristol was invited to a private meeting at Ft. Hood with Gen. Odierno, who is about to take over for Gen. Petraeus in Iraq:

Why was Kristol invited by the Defense department to Ft. Hood, Texas to talk to Odierno?  Who were the other member of the “small group” who were invited?  Why does Odierno want to talk to such a group privately?  Is Odierno involved in information operations in the United States?

I am surprised that Secretary Gates would countenance such shenanigans.

More right here.

A remarkable personal narrative in today’s Sunday Times Magazine by David Carr (the Times’ Media columnist). The mix of honesty and self-deception, freedom and addiction, waste and grace is stunning. Here’s a small sample:

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

Here is what I remember about how That Guy became This Guy: not much. But my version of events is worth knowing, if for no other reason than I was there.

Virginia Heffernan on the perils of quoting sources on the Interwebs:

I am stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs.

Take a passage signed by zipthwung, an astute online commenter: “pornography if for the ruling classes and their violent vulgar all consuming appetites. Or their slaves.”

Interesting. But so as not to distract you with the typos, should I have repunctuated it, adding commas and plunking a hyphen into “all-consuming”? Should I have turned that “if” to “is”?

Zipthwung — I can testify, as a longtime fan — is a poet and a mystic. Maybe he means “if.” Dude thinks that way. Oh, but there’s more. Before quoting him, should I have determined his real name? Gender? Profession? Home address?

Week after week, these questions dog me. Sometimes I opt to copy words and paste them into the text of a column — to quote verbatim. I treat message-board words as if they had been written in books, articles, brochures or press releases. Is that what zipthwung wants? Should I care?

snip

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way — shape-shifting at a rapid pace — than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web’s lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take “hey guys, i’m stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth.” Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as “she admitted her mistake on a message board”?) I can’t tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there.

Read the rest right here.

I and others have spoken often of Pope Benedict as a superb homilist and preacher. To my mind one of the marks of this is his raising of questions in the course of his presentation.

So, in the homily at the closing Eucharist in Sydney he asks: “But what is the ‘power’ of the Holy Spirit?” In developing his response, he says:

Yet this power, the grace of the Spirit, is not something we can merit or achieve, but only receive as pure gift. God’s love can only unleash its power when it is allowed to change us from within. We have to let it break through the hard crust of our indifference, our spiritual weariness, our blind conformity to the spirit of this age. Only then can we let it ignite our imagination and shape our deepest desires. That is why prayer is so important: daily prayer, private prayer in the quiet of our hearts and before the Blessed Sacrament, and liturgical prayer in the heart of the Church. Prayer is pure receptivity to God’s grace, love in action, communion with the Spirit who dwells within us, leading us, through Jesus, in the Church, to our heavenly Father. In the power of his Spirit, Jesus is always present in our hearts, quietly waiting for us to be still with him, to hear his voice, to abide in his love, and to receive “power from on high”, enabling us to be salt and light for our world.

On a related note: in the translation from Romans in today’s Eucharist it says: “we do not know how to pray as we ought.” Joseph Fitzmyer (and others) think that the more accurate translation is: “we do not know for what we should pray.”

I find the second alternative more suggestive and challenging.

At Saturday’s Vigil celebration in Sydney, Pope Benedict offered the young people another wonderful wedding of the personal, the pastoral, and the theological:

The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity.  A clear understanding of the Spirit almost seems beyond our reach.  Yet, when I was a small boy, my parents, like yours, taught me the Sign of the Cross. So, I soon came to realize that there is one God in three Persons, and that the Trinity is the centre of our Christian faith and life.  While I grew up to have some understanding of God the Father and the Son – the names already conveyed much – my understanding of the third person of the Trinity remained incomplete.  So, as a young priest teaching theology, I decided to study the outstanding witnesses to the Spirit in the Church’s history.  It was on this journey that I found myself reading, among others, the great Saint Augustine.

Augustine’s understanding of the Holy Spirit evolved gradually; it was a struggle.  As a young man he had followed Manichaeism - one of those attempts I mentioned earlier, to create a spiritual utopia by radically separating the things of the spirit from the things of the flesh.  Hence he was at first suspicious of the Christian teaching that God had become man.  Yet his experience of the love of God present in the Church led him to investigate its source in the life of the Triune God.  This led him to three particular insights about the Holy Spirit as the bond of unity within the Blessed Trinity: unity as communion, unity as abiding love, and unity as giving and gift.  These three insights are not just theoretical.  They help explain how the Spirit works.  In a world where both individuals and communities often suffer from an absence of unity or cohesion, these insights help us remain attuned to the Spirit and to extend and clarify the scope of our witness.

The entire homily makes a fine preparation for Sunday’s reading from Romans 8.

At tomorrow’s climatic Eucharist the Pope will confirm twenty-four young people. One awaits the homily with anticipation.

Rocco Palmo provides extensive coverage of World Youth Day events, including links to yesterday’s remarkable re-enactment of the Way of the Cross in the public places of the secular metropolis.

Writing in The New Republic, Michael Sean Winters argues that Senator Barack Obama can close his “Catholic gap” by drawing more explicitly on themes from Catholic Social Teaching, such as the common good and the dignity of the human person:

How are we doing on the human development front here at home? Not too well it seems:

The American Human Development Index has applied to the US an aid agency approach to measuring well-being – more familiar to observers of the Third World – with shocking results. The US finds itself ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in survival of infants to age. Suicide and murder are among the top 15 causes of death and although the US is home to just 5 per cent of the global population it accounts for 24 per cent of the world’s prisoners. Despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities.

“The report shows that although America is one of the richest nations in the world, it is woefully behind when it comes to providing opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life,” the authors said. Some of its more shocking findings reveal that, in parts of Texas, the percentage of adults who pass through high school has not improved since the 1970s.

Asian-American males have the best quality of life and black Americans the lowest, with a staggering 50-year life expectancy gap between the two groups. Despite the fact that the US spends roughly $5.2bn (£2.6bn) every day on health care, more per capita than any other nation in the world, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of every western European and Nordic country, bar Denmark.

UPDATE: Robust discussion in the comments. As a point of information, the reference to a 50-point gap between black Americans and Asian Americans should be to the human development index, not life expectancy, which makes a great deal more sense. (To put that in perspective, if the authors are using HDI in the standard way — which they seem to be — a 50 point difference is like the difference between living in Norway and living in Ghana.) The actual gap between the life expectancy of poor black Americans and Asian Americans is closer to 15 years.

The First Letter of Peter counsels, in a well-known verse, “Always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you” (3:15). And that hope is new life through Jesus Christ — now and in eternity.

Pope Benedict’s Australian pilgrimage continues in unusually balmy weather. In season and out of season, the Pope proclaims the good news of Jesus Christ, the source and foundation of Christian hope.

In his meeting with leaders of Christian communities he said:

Every element of the Church’s structure is important, yet all of them would falter and crumble without the cornerstone who is Christ. As “fellow citizens” of the “household of God”, Christians must work together to ensure that the edifice stands strong so that others will be attracted to enter and discover the abundant treasures of grace within. As we promote Christian values, we must not neglect to proclaim their source by giving a common witness to Jesus Christ the Lord. It is he who commissioned the apostles, he whom the prophets preached, and he whom we offer to the world.

Dear friends, your presence fills me with the ardent hope that as we pursue together the path to full unity, we will have the courage to give common witness to Christ. Paul speaks of the importance of the prophets in the early Church; we too have received a prophetic calling through our baptism. I am confident that the Spirit will open our eyes to see the gifts of others, our hearts to receive his power, and our minds to perceive the light of Christ’s truth. I express heartfelt thanks to all of you for the time, scholarship and talent which you have invested for the sake of the “one body and one spirit” (Eph 4:4; cf. 1 Cor 12:13) which the Lord willed for his people and for which he gave his very life. All glory and power be to him for ever and ever. Amen!

And to representatives of other religious traditions he reflected upon both commonalities and distinctiveness:

The world’s religions draw constant attention to the wonder of human existence. Who can help but marvel at the power of the mind to grasp the secrets of nature through scientific discovery? Who is not stirred by the possibility of forming a vision for the future? Who is not impressed by the power of the human spirit to set goals and to develop ways of achieving them? Men and women are endowed with the ability not only to imagine how things might be better, but to invest their energies to make them better. We are conscious of our unique relationship to the natural realm. If, then, we believe that we are not subject to the laws of the material universe in the same way as the rest of creation, should we not make goodness, compassion, freedom, solidarity, and respect for every individual an essential part of our vision for a more humane future?

Yet religion, by reminding us of human finitude and weakness, also enjoins us not to place our ultimate hope in this passing world. Man is “like a breath, his days are like a passing shadow” (Ps 144:4). All of us have experienced the disappointment of falling short of the good we wish to accomplish and the difficulty of making the right choice in complex situations.

The Church shares these observations with other religions. Motivated by charity, she approaches dialogue believing that the true source of freedom is found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians believe it is he who fully discloses the human potential for virtue and goodness, and he who liberates us from sin and darkness. The universality of human experience, which transcends all geographical boundaries and cultural limitations, makes it possible for followers of religions to engage in dialogue so as to grapple with the mystery of life’s joys and sufferings. In this regard, the Church eagerly seeks opportunities to listen to the spiritual experience of other religions. We could say that all religions aim to penetrate the profound meaning of human existence by linking it to an origin or principle outside itself. Religions offer an attempt to understand the cosmos as coming from and returning to this origin or principle. Christians believe that God has revealed this origin and principle in Jesus, whom the Bible refers to as the “Alpha and Omega” (cf. Rev 1:8; 22:1).

 

As a couple of my posts may have indicated, I’ve become fascinated with Perry Miller’s writings on New England Puritanism over the past six months or so. They are not so much social history as intellectual history–an examination of the evolution of the ideas that brought New England Puritans from an essentially medieval intellectual outlook to a modern one within the span of a hundred years.

Miller’s magnum opus: The New England Mind, is a commitment. It comprises two volumes, each with big pages, small print, and each encompassing about five hundred pages of text (without notes). For anyone who wants to understand the relationship of religion, public morality, and religious liberty in the US, it’s completely worth it.

In addition, Miller is a treat to read. Entirely worth it. Wonderful control of the concepts, and, in my view at least, a beautiful stylist. Humane, wistful, and sharp when sharpness is required. Especially sharp with the Mathers–Increase and Cotton.

The last two paragraphs of the whole thing–in a chapter entitled Vale Atque
Ave.

“It [New England in 1730] was a parched land, crying for deliverance from the hold of ideas that had served their purpose and died. It had more than the rudiments of new conceptions, an abundance of abilities demanding expression. It was part of Protestant civilization, and, as everywhere in that kingdom, the weight of the past had become stifling. For the revivification of great principles, religious or civil, an awakening was necessary. It was a problem not only for thought but even more for language. The covenant had accurately described reality for John Winthrop, and Richard Mather had framed enduring counsel within its confines; but now reality–all the complex, jostling reality of this anxious society–demanded new descriptions. Ideas relative to these facts had to be propounded and in words that could make the relation overwhelmingly felt.

“By the end of 1730 it was evident that everybody had spoken from whom ideas or
words were apt to come, had indicated what he might or might not contribute to
the solution. Or rather, all except one. The next spring it was known that Jonathan Edwards would come to the Harvard Commencement, and he was pressed to give the Thursday lecture. Solomon Stoddard’s successor announed that he would speak on GOD GLORIFIED IN THE WORK OF REDEMPTION, BY THE GREATNESS OF MEN’S DEPENDENCE UPON HIM, IN THE WHOLE OF IT. That man must depend upon God in thework of the covenant was always a basic axiom of New England. That he should depend upon God in reforming the sins he committed in his independence was the premise of all jeremiads. Yet somehow, in a century of American experience,the greatness of man’s dependency had unaccountably become a euphemism for the greatness of man. Possibly that was because this greatness had not yet been thoroughly considered in the whole of it.”

I have been loath to write about The Hold Steady,  even though I think they are one of the most significant bands working today, mostly because I fear that often more is concealed than is revealed when mixing criticism with art. I also wouldn’t want to force a religious, and more specifically, Catholic paradigm on a band that is much too smart to be hijacked by such treatment. Third, most theological analysis of popular culture ends up drowning all its delicious irony in a sea of overwrought earnest moralizing and gratuitous name-dropping, and with that in mind, I have not wanted to suck the life out of The Hold Steady by chaining them to any particular academic agenda, as Sean Dempsey did for America. Yet, as most academics and journalists are parasites by nature, feeding off the living blood of real creativity, I found the sanguinary odor of their new album, Stay Positive, released this week, too potent to resist.

The Christian narrative has found its way into many of lead singer/songwriter and Boston College graduate Craig Finn’s lyrics, but his images of crucifixion and resurrection juxtaposed with stories of heavy drug use and young lust do not suggest any easy celebration of the saving power of the Gospel leading to moral perfection. Most of Finn’s characters find themselves simultaneously “high as hell and born again.” This is to say that choosing sin and choosing grace is not an either/or proposition in the theological world of The Hold Steady, but rather, Finn’s protagonists usually find themselves simultaneously justified and sinful such that the rock and roll resurrections recounted in his lyrics usually feel more like crucifixions making the memory of Saturday night’s decent into debauchery always much sweeter than Sunday morning’s Eucharist. This theme is most palpably present on The Hold Steady’s second album, Separation Sunday. It ends with the honest and anthemic “How A Resurrection Really Feels,” which tells the story of Holly, who finds her way back to the church after the “lovely” party scene turns “druggy and ugly and bloody.” Finn narrates her return singing, “The priest just kinda laughed. / The deacon caught a draft. / She crashed into the Easter mass / with her hair done up in broken glass. / She was limping left on broken heels. / When she said father can I tell your congregation / how a resurrection really feels?”

One might be tempted to read this scene as the “rock bottom” experience preceding Holly’s resurrection to wholeness, but this would be to miss the promise of the song’s title to present human resurrections as they really are–disheveled, desperate, and stumbling attempts to stand in the face of a scene gone bad. The truth of the matter is that Holly wouldn’t have come back if the scene had remained “lovely,” which is why the refrain at the end of the song repeats, “Don’t turn me on again, / I’ll probably just go and get myself all gone again.” The message is that resurrection is tough stuff, and you don’t do it unless you have to. This is the paradoxical tension that makes The Hold Steady, and Finn’s song writing, so compelling. Sunday morning does not feel better than Saturday night, but once Saturday night is over Sunday morning is all you have.

The Hold Steady’s new disc has been hailed as a more mature effort, which finds Finn and company trying to “stay positive” as they get older. The songs on Stay Positive have as much to do with nostalgia for the bliss of youth as with aging gracefully. The opening song, “Constructive Summer,” celebrates the promise of a “lovely” party scene as Finn shouts, “We’re going to build something this summer!” The hope for communal transcendence through chemically re-created “love and trust” has never been more joyously proclaimed or more quickly eclipsed by the real consequences of the mob chorus’s stated intentions to “get hammered,” as Finn sings, “all my friends are dying or are already dead.” With that, Saturday night begins its descent through run-ins with the law (”Sequestered in Memphis”), self-destructive behavior (”One for the Cutters”), gratuitous sex and violence (”Navy Sheets,” “Yeah Sapphire”). This last song ends with Finn admitting, “I need someone to come and pick me up,” and repeating, “I was a skeptic at first, but these miracles work.”

The center-piece of the album comes on the heels of this turn to the “miraculous.” In “Both Crosses,” Finn again returns to church by narrating the experience of a girl who has seen enough. He sings, “She’s known a couple boys that died / and two of them were crucified / and the last one had enlightened eyes / but the first guy he was Jesus Christ. / Hey Judas, I know you made a grave mistake. / Hey Peter, you’ve been pretty sweet since Easter break.” Maintaining the tension of the story, Finn suggests that his protagonist is equal parts betraying Judas and faithful Peter, and Finn remains conflicted as to which is the more compelling personality, as he ends the song meditatively repeating, “I’ve been thinking about both crosses.” In true form, Finn remains unresolved when it comes to the promise of salvation via religion. He’s not a skeptic but believing in miracles does not necessarily make him a Christian. In the end, the miracle is not Christ, for Finn, but it’s the fact that in spite of all the crumbling idols of sex, drugs, and religion, rock and roll has made it possible for him to “stay positive.”

As the meditative “Both Crosses” fades, the halleluiah chorus of the title track kicks up and Finn delivers the real gospel message of Stay Positive. He sings, “There’s gonna come a time when the scene’ll seem less sunny. / It’ll probably get druggy and the kids’ll seem too skinny. / There’s gonna come a time when she’s gonna have to go / with whoever’s gonna get her the highest. / There’s gonna come a time when the true scene leaders / forget where they differ and get big picture / cause the kids at their shows, they’ll have kids of their own / the sing-a-long songs’ll be our scriptures / we gotta stay positive.” For The Hold Steady, the trick is to remain cheerful amidst the daily tragedy of failures to make good on our desire to transcend our own humanity. For Finn, this cheerfulness comes in the visceral music of the Dionysian festival that is rock and roll, which hangs on that miraculous edge between skepticism and belief. The Hold Steady is not a Christian band, but it is a band concerned with crucifixions and resurrections. Craig Finn is no Gospel preacher, but he is “high as hell and born again.” The band doesn’t claim to offer salvation, but, as Finn shouted from the stage at a concert I attended in Brooklyn last summer, “There is so much joy in what [they] do!” And that is more than many of the most earnest believers can say.

That’s the latest word from The Associated Press in Rome, where the City Council has ordered a 50-euro fine for the offense of snacking near the Eternal City’s monuments. So forget about wandering over to the Trevi Fountain with that drippy cup of gelato. That pleasure is now outside the law.
Thumbs down, I say.

From Pope Benedict’s address to the articipants at World Youth Day today in Sydney:

My dear friends, God’s creation is one and it is good. The concerns for non-violence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity. They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death: a dignity conferred by God himself and thus inviolable. Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises. Our hearts and minds are yearning for a vision of life where love endures, where gifts are shared, where unity is built, where freedom finds meaning in truth, and where identity is found in respectful communion. This is the work of the Holy Spirit! This is the hope held out by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is to bear witness to this reality that you were created anew at Baptism and strengthened through the gifts of the Spirit at Confirmation. Let this be the message that you bring from Sydney to the world!

In May, the New Republic published a piece titled “The Stupidity of Dignity”by Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Commonweal commented on it here. Now Paul J. Griffiths responds to Pinker in the August/September issue of First Things. (The article is available online only to subscribers.) Pinker argues that the concept of dignity is useless and often dangerous in discussions about bioethics. He recommends that such discussions instead be governed by the concept of autonomy, which he considers adequate, straightforward, and safely secular. Griffiths points out that autonomy is really no more straightforward than dignity. As for its adequacy, well, that depends on what kind of answers one is looking for. Griffiths writes:

The deep question here is not that of transparency or religion or democracy or freedom. It begins, rather, with a need to find out what autonomy-talk and dignity-talk dispose us to think and advocate. The short answer is that autonomy-talkers such as Pinker are likely to think of worth principally in terms of capacity and thus to draw small the circle of those understood to be human and thereby in principle exempt from deliberate killing or damage. Dignity-talkers, Catholic or not, are likely to think of worth principally in terms of gift and thus to draw that same circle large. The quantity of blood shed differs significantly

From there, we need to consider a question of truth. Are we humans better characterized as autonomous or as dignified? An equally short answer to this is that autonomy-talk scants, sometimes to the point of ignoring, our dependence on others: All that each of us has — every capacity, every skill, the fact that we are and continue to be — is due to the generosity of others. Autonomy-talk, to the extent that it denies this, says something false. Dignity-talk, to the extent that it affirms this, says something true. 

…to legitimate torture. Read Andrew Bacevich’s review of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

Our editorial “War Crimes?” just went live on the main site.

I thought I’d open a thread on the new cover article.

Here’s the controversial New Yorker cover. 

http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=CQK93C8DTDVA8LV722PPL53Q27HD7N4C&sitetype=1&sid=125383&did=4 

Do you think those it satirizes will recognize it as satire? What will its impact on the campaign be?

We just updated the Web site with the July 8 issue. Be sure to read dotCommonweal regular Gene Palumbo’s moving remembrance of Bill Ford, long-time friend of the magazine. Here’s how it starts:

When William P. Ford died last month at the age of seventy-two, after a battle with esophageal cancer, the New York Times called him a “rights advocate.” That he was, having waged a decades-long legal struggle to achieve a measure of justice for victims of El Salvador’s civil war. It was the same war that had claimed the life of his sister, Sr. Ita Ford of Maryknoll, in December 1980.

When Bill’s son eulogized him at St. Cassian Church in Montclair, New Jersey, he described his father as a man of faithfulness and integrity. He was also a generous benefactor. Among other things, he and Mary Anne, his remarkable wife of forty-seven years, provided gift subscriptions to Commonweal for generations of Fordham students.

I was one of those students, and it’s a great regret of mine that, despite all that I had read and heard of him, I was never able to thank Bill in person.

Gene Palumbo made the excellent suggestion of posting the fine eulogy delivered by Bill Ford Jr. Here it is in full:

(Reflection Given at Mass of Christian Burial for William P. Ford, 4/28/1936 – 6/1/2008)

Dad

June 4, 2008

You have been told, O Man, what is good,

And what the Lord requires of you:

Only to act justly and to love tenderly,

And to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6, v 8

 

I for my part am being poured out like a libation.

The time of my dissolution is near.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

From now on a merited crown awaits me;

on that day, the Lord, just judge that he is, will award it to me—

and not only to me, but to all who have looked for his appearing with eager longing.

2 Timothy 4, vv 6-8

 

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

Have faith in God and faith in me.

In my father’s house there are many dwelling places…

I am indeed going to prepare a place for you,…

That where I am you also may be…

I am the way, the truth and the life;

No one comes to the father but through me.

John 14, vv 1-6

 

I speak now for all six of the Ford children.

 

What to say? He was and is still son, big brother, husband, father, law partner, one who hungers for justice, dear friend, Pop-Pop, and, for Alex, the youngest grandchild, simply Pop.

 

And then I pictured him leaning across the table with the irrepressible smile and in his gentle manner run through with steel: “Bill! Let me make a suggestion….”

 

So I knew we’d be talking about Bill Ford, teacher.

 

My father’s mother, Mildred, was hired in the early 1930’s by the NYC public schools to teach first grade in Brooklyn. Hers was among the last appointments before a hiring freeze that lasted for the rest of the Great Depression. She went on to teach for 40 years and she wanted nothing more for her son than that he, too, would become a teacher, perhaps a principal, because of the dignity of the work and also, ever practical, because of the job security.

 

Like some other sons, at first my father wasn’t so attentive to his mother’s wishes – he was a bond trader, then became a lawyer. But he became a teacher in the broadest sense.

 

He had clear principles to convey:

 

Briefer is better;

 

Use simple, declarative sentences;

 

And, as you heard my brother tell last night, alcohol and gasoline don’t mix.

 

We even had words

 

Perseverance was the watchword for the first five children;

 

John’s word, for some mysterious reason, was teamwork.

 

His severest admonition was this: you have a short memory. By which he meant, be grateful, be generous; the gift you have received, give as a gift.

 

Very Ignatian, and rightly so. My father is a proud and grateful product of Jesuit education. He graduated from Brooklyn Prep in 1953, from Fordham College in 1960 and, to his great pride and joy, was the recipient of an honorary doctoral degree from Fordham University in 1990.

 

Just a few weeks ago, Dad and his best friend Andy Coll, who he met in September, 1949, when they each had gotten lost on the IRT while on their way home from the Prep to Bay Ridge, were talking at our kitchen table about what a Jesuit education is at its essence. Almost at one and the same time they answered, “it taught us how to ask questions.”

 

And my father, in turn, taught all six of us how to think. There is no problem, he insisted, that cannot be solved if only you apply clear thinking, develop logical arguments supported by evidence, and persist in making your point. Then he went out and offered us a decades-long case study in how it’s done.

 

But mostly he taught by his actions. Our word for him is FIDELITY.

 

Together my mother and father have made and kept, with fidelity, great friendships—through Brooklyn Prep and St. Savior’s, through Fordham, with fellow parishioners of St. Cassian’s and neighbors; with co-workers at Ford, Marrin, and Lacordaire; treasuring them all, holding especially dear Uncle Tom & Aunt Mary, Sr. Maddie and Maryknoll, the Colls and the Connollys, the O’Connors and the Rudsers, the Kennys and the Sullivans (so many Sullivans!), with whom they have raised their children and shared the struggles and joys of a full life;

 

My father has shown a great fidelity to the truth. He is a man of great integrity who constantly taught the difficult virtue of honesty, that when one gives his word, he must keep his word. This became known to all who met him during his 22 year-long effort to bring those who killed Ita and Maura and Dorothy and Jean to justice. By his devotion to the truth and fidelity to his word, this effort became more than just righting a wrong done so horribly to his own sister—rather it became an impassioned campaign to end the repression being visited upon the Salvadoran people by its own military, with the support and at the direction of our government.

 

Our dear family friend Gene Palumbo emailed us last night from El Salvador to share some of his memories of my father’s many visits there, often with Mike Posner, Scott Greathead and others from The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Gene wrote, “As for me, one memory stands out. One day, during the war, Bill came with me to Sunday Mass at the Maryknoll parish in Zacamil. He was asked to say a few words at the end of the Mass. I translated for him. At one point, near the end, he said (more or less), “never fear, we won’t be walking away, we’ll never forget you because (and these next were his exact words) there is a bond of blood between our family and you.”

 

And through my father, and by the grace of working alongside Fr. Joe Parkes, our President, that is precisely the same bond I have now with the students and my dear colleagues at Cristo Rey New York High School.

 

Like every teacher, my father was human and he could be quite the irascible, stubborn Irishman. Each of my younger siblings has a similar story about being brought by my father to a street corner for a lesson, only to have some overly helpful passerby interrupt – and immediately the riposte: “I’m glad you know what color the light is; I’m trying to teach my daughter how to cross the street.”

 

Upon receiving a general message from my fourth grade teacher telling parents not to allow their children to watch an excessive amount of TV, my father promptly scribbled a reply that this was “gratuitous in our case.” Once my teacher looked up the definition of the word, I was stripped of my position as editor of the class newspaper and banished to a corner seat.

 

And throughout the 1980s, when my father went down to Washington to meetings with members of Congress and the State Department to challenge US policy in Central America and push back against their stonewalling in the Churchwomen’s case, he would often bring one of his children, so that these representatives of our government might be ashamed.

 

But the final word is Love.

 

Dad loved his family and was happiest when we were all around him, in particular, Sam, Thomas, Billy, Lina, Maggie, Anna, Mary and Alex.

 

Married 47 years to my mother, even more in love with her now than when first they met, dad was aware that in so many ways my mother had the more important and challenging part of their partnership – that would be the six of us - and did all he could to show his appreciation and lighten her load. My sisters and I have been blessed in the spouses and partners we have – Jack and Diana and Martin and Christina and Richard, as John will also be blessed – and we have been shown how to make of these commitments a life-long love.

 

Our brother John was born just a few days before Ita was killed. My father and mother had the great insight, despite the awfulness and pain of that time, to celebrate John’s birth as an unambiguous sign that life will always triumph over death. My father called John the prince (thus making of my mother a queen) and he and John made a fast friendship, a rascals’ pact, and drew him into the center of our family. Just like Dad, John has given us his own great gifts of humor and spirit and life. You, John, light up a room and bedevil Mom the minute you enter—and we love you so much for all that.

 

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

 

Bill Ford, teacher, gives us one more lesson about love. Early Saturday morning, after a phone call from Becca, all six of us and Mom and Christina gathered around as Fr. Paul came to anoint dad. We prayed together and each had a chance to tell our father how much we love him. Then he looked up and we leaned in to hear what he might have to say–and he put his arms around her and just drew my mother in to him.

 

Like every good teacher, he has stepped back now to allow us room to step up.

 

He left me a note – four words: Watch over them all.

 

We love you Dad. It’s your turn to rest now; we have work to do.

 

 –WPF III

Over thirty years ago, when I taught at Dunwoodie, the Seminary of the Archdiocese of New York, there was a student who had a perpetually furrowed brow. His favorite expression was: “As if we didn’t have enough trouble, now this!”

Well, the prospects facing us when moon day’s markets open is enough to furrow the brow of the most intrepid.

Here’s an excerpt from the editorial in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

[S]peaking of ugly, yesterday’s markets showed one more nasty side effect of the Fannie Mae panic: fear of rising inflation. Gold popped by $23 an ounce, and at $965 is back at the heights it reached during the March run on Bear Stearns. Oil also bounced up as the dollar fell, a sign that investors think the Fed will react to the Fannie fears by delaying any monetary tightening even longer than it already has.

If there’s any other good news in all this, it is that the scandal of Fannie and Freddie is at last coming into public focus. The Washington political class has nurtured and subsidized these financial beasts for decades in return for their campaign cash and lobbying support. Wall Street and the homebuilders also cashed in on the subsidized business, and also paid back Congress in cash and carry.

The losers have been the taxpayers, who will now have to pay the price for this collusion. Maybe the press corps will even start reporting how this vast confidence game could happen.

And the New York Times (or at least its columnists) are, for a change, on the same page. In today’s Times there’s Gretchen Morgenson:

IT’S dispiriting indeed to watch the United States financial system, supposedly the envy of the world, being taken to its knees. But that’s the show we’re watching, brought to you by somnambulant regulators, greedy bank executives and incompetent corporate directors…..

It wasn’t as if this problem came out of left field. Fears that Fannie and Freddie were getting too big have been a recurring theme in recent years. And Congress has had ample opportunity to create a new regulator that would be vigilant about ensuring the safety and soundness of both companies.

But even after both companies were found to have accounted for their results improperly, Freddie Mac in 2003 and Fannie Mae in 2004, Congress failed to act. As a result, Fannie and Freddie were allowed to become high-growth companies and stock market darlings.

“These companies would have been fine had they been forced to be the cyclical utilities they were intended to be,” said Josh Rosner, an analyst at Graham-Fisher, an independent research firm in New York. “They would be healthy and able to help the markets in this time of illiquidity.”

Instead, they are in trouble and their woes are infecting the entire stock market….

“The real outrage is that none of this had to happen,” said William A. Fleckenstein, co-author of “Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve” and president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Wash. “We did not have to ruin the financial system and ruin the financial lives of a huge chunk of the middle class in the United States.”

“It is crystal clear that the Fed not only made mistakes, they had the pompoms out, cheering for deregulation,” he adds. “Until people recognize why we are in this mess, I don’t see how we get out of this thing.”

A week ago, Bridgewater Associates, a research firm, estimated that losses from the credit crisis we’re now mired in might amount to $1.6 trillion when all is said and done.

We’ll have to wait years to see if this is accurate. But whatever the number is, it will also represent, in stunning red ink, the cost to society of financiers who are shortsighted and greedy and regulators who don’t regulate.

Of course, Fanny and Freddie meant gravy for our fearless political class, as another Times article makes clear:

The dominant role Fannie and Freddie play today is no accident. The companies, Wall Street firms, mortgage bankers, real estate agents and Washington lawmakers have built up an unusual and mutually beneficial co-dependency, helped along by robust lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.

In Washington, Fannie and Freddie’s sprawling lobbying machine hired family and friends of politicians in their efforts to quickly sideline any regulations that might slow their growth or invite greater oversight of their business practices. Indeed, their rapid expansion was, at least in part, the result of such artful lobbying over the years.

And as Fannie and Freddie grew, so did the fortunes of Wall Street, which reaped rich fees from issuing debt for the two companies, as well as the mortgage and housing industries, which banked billions of dollars as the housing market boomed.

Even after accounting scandals arose at the two companies a few years ago, attempts to push through stronger oversight were stymied because few politicians, particularly Democrats, wanted to be perceived as hindering the American dream of homeownership for the masses.

Lots of perks came with Fannie and Freddie’s charters and government backing: exemptions from state and federal taxes, relatively meager capital requirements, and an ability to borrow money at rock-bottom rates.

James A. Johnson, a longtime member of the Washington establishment who previously worked as a campaign adviser to former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, ran Fannie for most of the 1990s.

“Jim Johnson was the architect of Fannie’s lobbying strategy. He was the muscle guy, if you will. The guy who would walk the halls of Congress,” said Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Arlington, Va., and longtime critic of the companies. Freddie, Mr. Ely said, soon copied Fannie’s playbook.

Naturally, as happened at Dunwoodie after Compline, magnum silentium descends. The Times reports:

Mr. Johnson could not be reached for comment. Fannie declined to comment; Freddie did not respond to an interview request.

The Pope reiterates the moral imperative of acting to combat climate change:

There is a need to “wake up consciences [on climate change],” Benedict responded. “We have to give impulse to rediscovering our responsibility and to finding an ethical way to change our way of life.”  Benedict said that politicians and experts must be “capable of responding to the great ecological challenge and to be up to the task of this challenge.”

“We have our responsibilities toward Creation,” Benedict said, stressing, however, that he had no intention of weighing in on technical or political questions swirling around climate change.