Whatever you think about the Obama administration’s handling of the Libya situation so far, I propose we can all take some comfort in the knowledge that decisions made by a McCain administration would likely be much worse. John McCain was gung-ho to bomb Libya, but that’s no surprise. It’s his reasoning that’s raising eyebrows, as noted by Salon’s Justin Elliott:

Speaking on CBS’ “The Early Show” today, McCain twice cited the fact that Moammar Gadhafi has “American blood on his hands” as a reason the U.S. should try to oust the dictator. McCain specifically referred to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which was indeed carried out by a Libyan agent.

That’s a very valid reason to be opposed to Gadhafi’s remaining in power. But it didn’t always seem that way to John McCain. As Elliott notes, under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, U.S. relations with Gadhafi had been improving.

Who else was involved in the effort to forge better ties with Gadhafi? John McCain. In August 2009 he led a delegation of senators, including fellow hawks Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, on a trip to visit the Libyan leader in Tripoli. Discussed during the visit was delivery of — get this — American military equipment to Gadhafi (a man with American blood on his hands no less).

Elliott followed up in another post with more details about McCain’s formerly cooperative stance toward Gadhafi. Some of the details are courtesy of WikiLeaks. But it’s not as though McCain was keeping the mission a secret at the time: Read the rest of this entry »

Garry Wills has a witty demolition of a new book, All Things Shining, attempting to sketch a philosophy of life in the current New York Review of Books. I’ve not read the book. But as described by Wills it seems silly. (The conclusion apparently includes a meditation on the deeper meaning of making one’s own coffee.) And yet it has blurbs from figures I greatly admire, and whose work I know reasonably well (Charles Taylor) and also big names in American higher education (Vartan Gregorian).

I wonder: is Wills too harsh or do these big names endorse books they don’t even read?

Update:

See Sean Kelly’s thoughtful (and admirably undefensive) response to Wills here. I take this to mean that Kelly (and Taylor and his other admirers) have something important to say, and that I need to actually read the book.

Is God so ignorant of things, does he know so little about the human heart, that he can find what a man is only by testing him? Of course not, the testing is so that the man can find himself….

You should recognize that God does not need to test in order to learn something he did not know before; it’s so that by his testing, by his investigating, what is hidden in someone might come out. A person is not as well known to himself as he is to his Creator, an ill person doesn’t know himself as well as his doctor. Someone becomes ill, and he’s the one suffering, not the doctor, but it’s from the one not suffering that the sufferer expects to hear what’s wrong. The Psalmist cries out: “Cleanse me, Lord, from my hidden things” (Ps 18:13). In any person there are things hidden to the very one in whom they exist. They don’t come out, aren’t laid open, aren’t discovered, except by his being tested. If God ceases to test, the teacher ceases to teach…. Why do I say this? Because a person is ignorant of himself until he learns who he is by being tested. But once he has learned who he is, let him not be careless about himself. If he was careless when he lay hidden from himself, let him not be careless now that he knows himself. (Augustine, Sermon 2, 2-3; PL 38-28-29)

A couple of Fridays ago, we finally got a break from the rain.  After I finished what I had to do for work, I went for a bike ride.  I took one of my favorite routes that has just enough in the way of hills to be a workout but that only takes about 90 minutes.  It was a great ride and I felt very “pumped” as I pulled back into my driveway.

It occurred to me along the way that it might be an odd way to spend a Friday afternoon during Lent.  It doesn’t seem very penitential, does it?

It’s easy to think that Lent is about self-denial.  But I don’t think that’s quite it.  In the same way that trimming back the excess branches of a tree reveals its true shape and beauty, the disciplines of Lent help peel away the layers of our false self.

For a good part of my life, I never gave much thought to my body.  I was naturally slender, which meant I didn’t have to worry about what I ate.  I didn’t think twice about working late or heading out to a bar after that.  Like many people, I began to notice my body more as I aged.  It was after my waist size had gone up two inches in two years that I took up cycling.

I think this sense of disconnection from our bodies has gotten worse in our culture.  Our kids spend more time playing video games than playing outside.  Many of us work in jobs that don’t require much more exertion than it takes to walk down the hall to the laser printer.  The development of new technologies like web conferencing, social networking, virtual world, MMORPGs and the like means that we live more and more of our lives in a quasi-disembodied state. 

For me, cycling is a way of reconnecting with my body.  It is a joy to train and see that my body can pedal faster and longer.  But my body also has limits.  It tires, it gets injured, and it requires rest and care.  To climb a long steep hill on a bike—to say nothing of the subsequent descent!—is to be reminded with every labored breath that you have a body and that you do not have life apart from it.

Christians do not believe in the “immortality of the soul.”  We believe in the “resurrection of the dead,” persons who are body and soul and who are saved by God from death for no other reason than that He loves them.  A prudential care for our bodies is a form of stewardship over the part of God’s creation that we know most intimately.

So perhaps it’s not a bad idea to add a little exercise to our Lenten observance!

I seem to be weighed down by questions recently. Must be Lent. Today another puzzlement: Does anyone know what secular Calvinism is? What does the phrase mean? From whence does it come?

Then he said: “All my desire is before you” (Ps 38:9). He doesn’t say, “before men”–they can’t see hearts; he says, “Before you is all my desire.” Let your desire be before him, and the Father who sees what is hidden will reward you (Mtn 6:6) For your desire is your prayer, and if your desire is continuous, your prayer will be continuous. That’s why the Apostle said, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Th 5:17). We’re not always on our knees, are we, or prostrating ourselves, or lifting our hands, in order to do what Paul says, “Pray without ceasing”? If that’s the way we say we pray, I don’t think we can do it without ceasing. But there is another, an inner praying without ceasing, and that is desire. Whatever else you do, if you desire that sabbath, you do not cease to pray. If you don’t want to cease praying, don’t cease desiring. Your continuous desire is your continuous voice. You grow silent if you stop loving. Which people grew silent? The ones of whom it was said: “Because wickedness abounded, the charity of the many grew cold” (Mt 26:12). When charity is cold, the heart is silent. When charity is burning hot, the heart is shouting. If charity always remains, you are always shouting; if you are always shouting, you are always desiring; if you desire, you are remembering that sabbath rest. (Augustine, Enar. in Ps 37, 14; PL 36, 44)

[The two references to the sabbath appear because the Psalm-title in Augustine's version read: "A psalm for David: for a remembrance  of the sabbath," and he had already explained that this Psalm of lament was inspired in part by painful love and desire for a sabbath still to come.]

It was a divine revelation that got Bill Henrickson into trouble in the first place, revealing to  this prosperous Mormon family man the importance of the principle of plural marriage. So it stands to reason that after losing almost everything in defending that principle, it would be a divine revelation that gets him out of trouble–showing him the ultimate compatibility of women’s equality and polygamy.  Just before he dies unexpectedly of a gunshot wound, he asks his first wife Barb, who was chafing all season under the principle’s sexism, for a blessing–and thereby gives her his blessing to serve as the priesthood holder in the church he founded. He dies not only peacefully, but joyfully, certain that he will eventually be reunited on the other side of the veil with all his beloved family members.

One would be tempted to see this second revelation, just minutes before the series concludes, as, well, a deus ex machina ending. In the context of this narrative, however, it is not, at least in the pejorative sense  In fact, it simply is a variation on Mormon history. Joseph Smith claimed to receive a revelation legitimating the practice of polygamy on July 17, 1831.  Over the next several decades both the Mormon Church and the practice of polygamy became stronger in Utah and surrounding areas. In the early 1960′s, however, the U.S. Congress began to pass stringent anti-bigamy legislation, the enforcement of which became more and more unyielding and brutal. Faced with the dissolution of his society and his church, on September 24, 1890, Mormon President Woodruff published his manifesto, generally treated as a revelation by the community, revoking permission for Mormons to practice polygamy.

So I was basically right.  And if you run into me at the Catholic Theological Society of America meeting this June. I’d be happy to read your palm–ten cents.

Albany has provided New Yorkers with no shortage of embarrassing tales lately, but the story of State Senator Carl Kruger, as written up this weekend in the Times, is surely one of the most entertaining. Kruger was charged earlier this month with “accepting bribes in exchange for official acts” (the complaint, a .pdf, is here), and the investigation revealed plenty of intriguing facts and rumors about his personal life. The NYT story is headlined “A Senator’s Shadow Family,” referring to Kruger’s unusually close and at times suspicious relationship with the Turano family of Brooklyn. (One of the Turano brothers is charged with laundering money for Kruger.)

The NYT‘s account tastefully declines to insinuate much about what, if any, romantic ties Sen. Kruger may have had with the members of said family. But there are plenty of other you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up details to keep you reading:

The house [where Sen. Kruger apparently lives, and which he helped renovate] is owned by two never-married middle-aged brothers, Drs. Michael S. and Gerard I. Turano, gynecologists whose 39-foot yacht, Special Delivery, is often docked out back.

By 1985, Mr. Kruger had won a coveted post as chairman of Community Board 18 in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, making him much sought after for people trying to do business in the area. He had also already been indicted on state corruption charges, in 1980, but he was acquitted at trial, represented then as now by Mr. Brafman.

Mr. Bascombe [who purchased a house from the Turanos] had signed an agreement, which he said he had not fully understood, that allowed the Turanos — and their forever guest, Senator Kruger — to remain as renters. Livid, Mr. Bascombe eventually took to staging loud protests on the sidewalk, calling the Turanos “liars” and demanding that they vacate the property.

And I didn’t even get to the mob history of the Turanos’ current house, or its decor (which includes samurai statues and an “ice cream room”). Or the details of how Kruger avoided depositions in previous cases. Seriously, you should read this story.

Tonight marks the series finale of Big Love, a series about Mormon polygamy centering on Bill Henrickson and his three wives, who are attempting to be the modern, humane face of polygamy against the long, dark shadow fundamentalist shadow cast by Juniper Creek, the polygamous compound where Bill grew up.

Sometimes annoying, sometimes over-the-top, the show nonetheless kept my interest during its five seasons, in part because of the superb acting. I have no sympathy for polygamy.  But in spite of myself, I ended up having sympathy for these fictional polygamists. In addition, it is one of the few shows on television that takes seriously the attempt of people to live their faith, with hope and courage.

I’ll say more about it after I’ve seen the finale. But first I want to go on record with a prediction (and no, I don’t have any inside information.) I predict that Bill will receive a vision from God or one of God’s Mormon prophets, telling him that feminism and polygamy are compatible, and that he and Barb (his first wife) must together found a new church that integrates the two. Priesthood holders do not have to be men; Barb and he will be priesthood holders together.

The writers want to go out with a bang.  A brand-new divine revelation, well, that’s a bang.

Am I right?  I’ll let you know tomorrow.  Or watch yourself, on HBO at 9 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time).

What has been said about the symbolism of holy Church should now be briefly repeated for its moral sense. For it is appropriate that through the things said to blessed Job we learn to be called back to our hearts, because the mind more surely understands the words of God when it seeks itself in them (Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Part VI, ch. 8; PL 76, 459).

“They spoke of his exodus, which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem” (Lk 9:31)

Though I had anticipated, because of the reviews, the scene in “Of Gods and Men” of the last supper with the fine wine and enchanting music, nothing had prepared me for the transfigured faces that made the scene so extraordinary. If you haven’t and you can, do see this remarkable, iconic film.

Any CWLer know what this signifies? “The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate sold most of its leasing rights to large swaths of Jerusalem to a group of Jewish investors last week. The NIS 80 million agreement puts an end to the long draw-out land affair – at least for the next 140 years.”
Here at Ha’aretz

I was driving in the car today when the news came on that the United States and a coalition of European nations had initiated attacks against Libyan armed forces.  I felt rush of varied emotions so quickly that it was difficult to keep my mind on the road in front of me.

 Most Americans probably could not locate Libya on a map.  We know very little about the tangled tribal politics that have kept Qaddafi in power for the last forty years.  Once an international pariah because of his support for terrorist organizations and complicity in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, Qaddafi has worked to improve his image in the West.  President Bush lifted sanctions on Libya in 2004 after Qaddafi promised to abandon the nation’s nuclear program.  It was only 12 months ago that Libya welcomed the first American trade delegation in 37 years.  Among the participants were some of the U.S.’s largest companies, including Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and Motorola.  European companies, particularly oil companies, set up shop in Libya long ago.

While the legal basis for the attacks is the protection of civilians, it is difficult to imagine that it will end there.  President Obama and other Western leaders have clearly said that they want Qaddafi to step down.  Air power alone has never been successful in producing such a result.  Such an outcome will require, as the saying goes, “boots on the ground.”  Who will provide those boots?  What if the rebels renew their push to take the western half of the country?  Will we stand by and let them?  Will we support them?  And if we don’t, what will prevent the better trained and equipped Libyan army forces loyal to Qaddafi from defeating the rebels again?  Is the most likely outcome a partition of the country?  Who will enforce the new borders?  Will we train and supply a new army in the east the way we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Make no mistake; this is not a humanitarian intervention.  We are taking sides in a civil war.

President Bush was justly criticized for his rush to war in Iraq and for not having a clear plan for what to do after we defeated Iraq’s armed forces.  Bush’s pace, however, looks positively dilatory compared to the speed with which President Obama, with very little consultation with Congress or the American people, has committed the United States to yet another war to establish a government in a foreign country that is more to our liking.

And if the principle that governments cannot slaughter their citizens with impunity is to be the principle underlying our foreign policy, where are we off to next?  Yemen, where army snipers killed 46 people yesterday?  There is no shortage of tyrannies in the world.  How much of our blood and treasure are we willing to expend to remake the world in our own image?

Christians who witness against war do so for many reasons.  First and foremost is the example of Christ himself, who admonished us to love our enemies and peacefully submitted to violence against his person.  There is the tragic waste of human lives that always accompanies war, lives created by God and precious in his sight.

Along with this, though, is an understanding that war—particularly modern war—represents the height of human pride and arrogance, an arrogance that forgets that God is God and we are not.  Rather than being fought over territory or to settle rival dynastic claims, modern wars are increasing fought to shape the course of History itself and to usher in some form of utopia, whether communist, fascist, or liberal-democratic.  They are a form of eschatology masquerading as politics.

Come consider the works of the Lord, the redoubtable deeds he has done on the earth.

He puts an end to wars over all the earth; the bow he breaks, the spear he snaps, He burns the shields with fire.

“Be still and know that I am God, supreme among the nations, supreme on the earth!” (Ps 46 9-11)

Over at Whispers in the Loggia, Rocco has posted excerpts from a recent talk by the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin.   I found it moving and wanted to share some passages that particularly touched me:

Christian faith is not just a faith about doctrines or about rules and regulations or about ethical standards against which we have to measure our own moral behaviour.   It is not just about reforming structures. It is about the ability to preach and witness to the message of Jesus.  The leader in the Church is not a manager, but a witness and a prophet. Reform in the Church is not in the first place about the redistribution of power, but about the redefinition of power in terms of the way in which Jesus revealed who God is.

The message of the Church is the message of God who loves us before any merit on our part. It is a God who reveals; who speaks to us, engages with us and allows us to understand something of the inner life of God, which is a life of communication and of love.  It is a faith which is about truth, but truth which is to be discovered in the life of a person, Jesus Christ, who revealed himself through total-self giving.  It is about a God who is generous and whose followers should witness in their lives to the fact that being truly human has much more to do with giving and sharing and loving than with possession and power and dominance.  

The God of love is revealed in the life and the works of Jesus Christ.  I have often mentioned how in my own religious education in the sixties we were taught that Jesus proved that he was God by his power to work miracles. I do not deny that miracles prove that Jesus was God. What was not stressed was that miracles of Jesus prove to us above all what God is like, that he is a God who reveals his power as one who cares and has mercy, who heals and wants to free people from the burdens and addictions and obsessions that bind them, so that they can be taken up into the inner life of love of God and experience salvation and freedom.

Amen.

I am very interested in Augustine’s understanding of episcopal and presbyteral ministry and of the biblical images he prefers when he speaks about it. Thus, for example, rather than seeing the bishop or presbyter as himself a bridegroom, or as acting “in the person of Christ the Bridegroom,” he speaks of the Baptist, of St. Paul, and, at least by implication, of himself as “the friend of the bridegroom” (Jn 3:29). On another tack, he reveals something of what he considers his role as a preacher in two places where he recalls the scene in which friends of a paralytic remove the roof of the house in which Jesus is and let him down in front of him. It also gives Augustine an opportunity to speak of two kinds of paralysis. Here are the two texts:

“What was weak,” he says, “you did not strengthen” (Ez 34:4). He says this to bad shepherds , to false shepherds, to shepherds who seek their own things, and not the things of Jesus Christ, comfortably enjoying the milk and the wool, but not caring at all about the sheep, not assisting the ill. Read the rest of this entry »

Fordham University, Fairfield University, Yale Divinity School, and the Union Theological Seminary will be hosting a series of one-day events in September and October exploring Catholic views on sexuality.  Here is a link to the website with the schedule.   So far, the organizers have lined up some top people for these discussions.  It should be interesting.

Just as an unclean love inflames the soul and incites it to desire earthly things and leads that perishable soul to pursue perishable things, and casts it down into the depths, so a holy love raises the soul to things above and inflames it toward eternal things and excites it toward things that do not pass away and do not die, and lifts it from the depths of hell to heaven. Every love has its own power, and love can never be idle in the soul of a lover; it has to lead. If you want to know what kind of love it is, see where it is leading. We are not urging you, then, to love nothing, but that you not love the world so that you may be free to love the one who made the world. A soul that is bound by some earthly love has, as it were, pitch on its wings; it can’t fly. But when it is cleansed of the world’s filthy affections, it’s as if it has spread its feathers and, now entirely free, it flies on its two wings, the two commandments of love of God and love of neighbor. And to what is it flying if not to God, ascending by loving? Before it can do that, if it has at least the desire to fly, it groans on the earth: “Who will give me wings like those of the dove, and I will fly, and I will rest” (Ps 54:7). (Augustine, In Ps 121, 1; PL 37, 1618-1619)

I read with interest the discussion below on John Meier, since I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time yesterday evening.   Meier was the invited speaker at the Graduate Theological Union’s 19^th Annual “Reading of the Sacred Texts” lecture.  The event was held at the GTU library, which was fitting since Meier spent so much time there while writing the fourth volume of his series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 

Alliteratively subtitled “Law and Love,” the book focuses on Jesus’ attitude toward the Mosaic Law.   Examining several issues, including Jesus’ teaching on divorce, oaths, the Sabbath, purity rules, and the love commandments, Meier’s conclusion is that the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus.  Far from seeking to abolish the Law, Jesus was deeply involved in Jewish debates over its interpretation and application.

One of the issues raised in the comment box discussion below was how Meier sees his project.  In brief, Meier wants to know what can be known about Jesus through modern techniques of historical research.  The aim is a portrait of Jesus that even non-Christians could theoretically accept.  The scope is narrower than it appears, because there are many things about Jesus that, given the sources we have, simply cannot be known in this way.  As Meier observed last night, “what we don’t know, we don’t know.”  The resulting portrait of Jesus is, he readily concedes, a fragmentary and unstable reconstruction that cannot serve as the basis for a faith commitment.  The “historical Jesus” is not the same as the “real Jesus.”

It is this methodological humility that separates Meier from many other contemporary writers on the historical Jesus.  Unlike many members of the Jesus Seminar, who tend to fill in the gaps in our historical knowledge with highly speculative musings, Meier generally stops where the data stops.  It also separates Meier from theologians who would like to use the historical Jesus as a control on the dogmatic claims of the broader tradition.

After Meier’s lecture, he took a question from a young theology student who was clearly a bit shaken by Meier’s assertion that Jesus may not have said some of the things attributed to him in the Gospels.  The young man asked a somewhat complicated question which boiled down to whether we can then continue to preach the Gospel as true with integrity.

Meier responded that the Church’s belief that scripture is divinely inspired does not depend on their historical accuracy in all details.  The Book of Genesis is just as divinely inspired as the Gospels, yet no one would claim that the creation accounts in Genesis are a historical record.  The truths revealed by scripture are not primarily historical truths, but rather the truths that—as the Vatican II document Dei Verbum puts it—“God wanted put into sacred scripture for the sake of salvation.”  Our four Gospels became canonical because the early Christian community recognized that, despite significant differences in style and detail, these writings echoed what they believed about Jesus.  All in all, it was a good answer, albeit one likely to be more comforting to Catholics than Protestants.

As both Bob Imbelli and Joe Komonchak observed below, Meier has had his critics who question whether all this effort is producing something of value to the Church. While I don’t necessarily agree with every assertion he’s made over the course of his 3,000+ page journey (who could?), I generally count myself as a fan for a number of reasons.

First of all, as N.T. Wright has observed, the absence of high quality research on the historical Jesus does not mean there will be no research on the historical Jesus.  It just means that it will be done badly and primarily by people with ideological axes to grind.  While Meier is probably never going to get as much press as the people who make more exciting claims (“the body was stolen!”), his work acts as an important control on the more outlandish claims of some scholars.

Secondly, Meier’s review of the sources is extremely thorough, which is something of an understatement.  Those of us who don’t have time to read the thousands of relevant documents in this area should be grateful that Meier has and that he presents the evidence as objectively as he can.  If you want to draw different conclusions than Meier, at least you will have the relevant evidence at your disposal.

Finally, I think Meier has done us a particular service by treating the subject of the current volume.  The Law/Gospel antithesis that is a legacy of the Reformation continues to be enormously influential in preaching and catechesis.  There is a conservative Protestant version of this that seems to hold that the point of the Incarnation was to establish the doctrine of Justification by Faith.  There is also, however, a liberal version that holds that Jesus was an opponent of institutional religion and its burdensome rules. Neither does justice to the complexity of the Jesus who emerges from the scriptures. While these issues have been thoroughly explored by a number of Protestant scholars, such as E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright, I’m not aware of a similarly thorough treatment from a Catholic perspective other than Meier’s.

Over the course of the evening, Meier repeatedly asserted that the fifth volume of the series will be his last (“if a Pentateuch was good enough for Moses, it’s good enough for me,” he said at one point to general laughter).  However, since he plans to treat three enormously complex issues—Jesus’ parables, the titles of Jesus, and his death—I simply cannot imagine he will fit all of it into one volume.  Whatever the result, I will certainly look forward to reading it.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore has refused to sell or lease vacant school buildings to charter schools because it has found that charter schools are siphoning students away from Catholic schools, according to the Baltimore Sun.

The decision highlights the sharply conflicting approaches that U.S. dioceses are taking to competition from charter schools, since Baltimore’s next-door neighbor, the Archdiocese of Washington, turned over seven of its former schools to be used as charters. My own diocese, Brooklyn, is very active in leasing properties to charter schools – encouraged by Mayor Bloomberg, a big supporter of charter schools.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore will no doubt take some heat for resisting the rush to charter schools, which are publicly funded. But I think it is a thoughtful stand.

Charter schools, pet projects of both powerful foundations and powerful elected officials, have produced mixed results. In many ways, they emulate Catholic schools and so are drawing away students who might otherwise go to the Catholic schools. The foundation and government officials who are pushing charter schools – the Gates Foundation, the Obama administration, and others – have an obligation to face up to the fact that they are contributing to the demise of Catholic schools.

Perhaps this decision in Baltimore will help them to realize what they are doing to the Catholic schools.

Update:  The Sun ran a statement from Archbishop Edwin O’Brien saying that the Baltimore  archdiocese is not refusing all requests to lease to charter schools. Rather, it has refused to do so in one specific case. (Thanks to Jack Barry for noting this change in the comments.)

Fr. Peter Milward, SJ, who teaches English literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, writes here about last week’s earthquake and its aftermath:

I’ve become reasonably accustomed to swaying after fifty-five years in Japan, where small earthquakes are fairly common. But this was different. It wasn’t the gentle movement I was accustomed to. It was something I had never experienced, whether here in Japan or back in England. Books and papers began falling all around me, and I remained lying there motionless, waiting for the movement to stop. But for a long time it didn’t stop. When it finally did, I got up and surveyed my room, which was a complete mess. Two bookshelves had fallen over, spilling their contents. I left my room to explore the rest of the Jesuit house where I live. Along the way, I quickly learned two facts about the earthquake. One was that here in Tokyo it had registered a magnitude of 5.5 on the Richter scale, whereas the strongest I had ever experienced in this land of earthquakes had been little over 4. The other was that at the epicenter of the quake, off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, the magnitude had been 8.8. That was indeed something, more than any of us had thought possible, even in Japan.

“WASHINGTON — The prospect of a deadly siege of the rebel stronghold in Benghazi, Libya, has produced a striking shift in tone from the Obama administration, which is now pushing for the United Nations to authorize aerial bombing of Libyan tanks and heavy artillery to try to halt the advance of forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.”  Even without a no-fly zone in place, the story mentions a “no-drive” zone.  Hmmm!  NY Times Here

And this from Libyia via Reuters.

Too little; too late?  National Journal

UPDATE: The United Nations Security Council approved a measure on Thursday authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians from harm at the hands of forces loyal to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. Here

UPDATE 3/18: From a briefing to Congressional leaders Thursday, 3/17 about Libya: “Several senators emerged from the briefing convinced that the administration was intent on beginning military action against the forces of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi within the next few days and that such action would include both a no-fly zone as well as a “no-drive zone” to prevent Qaddafi from crushing the rebel forces, especially those now concentrated in Benghazi.”

View from the UK: sober.

Don’t think that John alone is a lamp; the Apostles also are lamps. The Lord said to them, “You are the light of the world,” and so they wouldn’t think that they were the same sort of light as the one of whom it was said, “He was the true light that enlightens every man who comes into the world,” he at once teaches them the true light itself. After saying, “You are the light of the world,” he added, “No one lights a lamp and places it under a bushel.” When I said you were a light I meant that you are a lamp. If you exult in your pride, you will be blown out. I am not placing you under a bushel; you will be on a candelabrum so that you may shine. What is this lamp’s candelabrum? Be content to be lamps and you will have the candelabrum. The cross of Christ is a great candelabrum. Anyone who wants to shine should not be embarrassed because this candelabrum is made of wood. So you may understand that Christ’s cross is a candelabrum, listen: “No one lights a lamp and places it under a bushel, but on a candelabrum so that it may shine on all those who are in the house. May your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify–not the way you seek to be glorified, seek to be extinguished–so they may glorify your Father who is in heaven.” May your good works glorify your Father. You were not able to light yourselves so that you could be lamps; you could not place yourselves upon a candelabrum: give the glory to the one who gave this to you. Listen to Paul the Apostle; listen to a lamp exulting on the candelabrum: “For me,” he says (those who know what follows are shouting), “For me, however,..” (What, Paul?), “far be it to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world” (Gal 6:14)…. Glory in the candelabrum, O lamp; always keep your humble place on the candelabrum so that you may continue to shine. Keep it there, or pride will extinguish you. (Augustine, Sermon 289, 6; PL 38, 1311-1312)

An address by Archbishop Martin of Dublin at Mater Dei Institute on “Church State Relations” :

The Church does not have all the answers to the questions of the day: to claim that would be fundamentalism.  The Church cannot simply adopt politically correct positions: to claim that would be conformism.  The Church must always have the internal freedom to take positions that are culturally unpopular.  The message and the measure of the Gospel should challenge every form of conformism.  It is important to remember that conformism can be an expression of narrow conservatism but that there is also conformism which thinks that it is truly progressive.   We can become entrapped in positions on many sides of the overall cultural spectrum.   The Gospel however should always foster free and fresh thinking.Does Ireland have a cohort of Christians capable of bringing that fresh savour of the Gospel to the complex social, economic and political structures of the world in which they live?  Where are they getting inspiration and formation?  Are our Catholic schools and our programmes of catechetical formation, especially at second level, equipping a future generation of young Catholic Christians to be able to engage their faith in the day to day configuration of the life of society?  Is the agenda of many in the Church too Church inward-looking?   These are some of the challenges with which your new and important Institute of Ethics in society will hopefully examine in a dialogue between men and women of different backgrounds, believers and others, in the search for a renewed sense of public ethics.

The Church must live in such a way that it reflects the radical newness of the Gospel.  The Gospel is radically new with respect to every culture.  The Church cannot be forced into the measure of any political platform, just as the Church cannot be forced into the measure of every theological position.  The Church is not my Church, nor our Church, but the Church of Jesus Christ.  Renewal in the Church therefore is renewal in what is essential to the life of the Church.  The Church is not just a sociological reality which can be renewed simply by the application of sociological models of consultation and change management.

The Church is the community of the baptised, who live as true disciples of Jesus Christ, formed by the word of God and the teaching of Christian tradition, which gathers in prayer and for the Eucharist and which emerges from the celebration of the Eucharist with a characteristic life-style of charity and sharing.

The rest is here.

John Donne came to be considered a “metaphysical” poet, one of whose literary skills was the use of “conceits,” far-fetched comparisons of very dissimilar things. Donne’s sermons reveal that he knew Augustine very well, and perhaps he noticed how Augustine did not refrain from using conceits in his own sermons. Here is one of them, used at least twice by him.

In his second Enarratio on Psalm 33, Augustine summarized the lengthy interpretation of the Psalm’s title that he had given in his first sermon. The title referred to an incident recorded in 1 Sam 21: 12-14 when David feigns insanity in order to be thrown out of court. The key verse read in the old Latin version Augustine had before him: affectabat, et tympanizabat ad ostia civitatis, et ferebatur in manibus suis, et procidebat ad ostia portae [He affected madness and drummed at the gates of the city and was carried on his own hands and fell down at the threshold of the gate]. Augustine, of course, knew that David is a type of Christ, and so applied each detail to him. He writes:

What does “affected” mean? It means he was full of affection. For what is as full of affection as the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ who, seeing our weakness, in order to free us from endless death, took upon himself our temporal death with such great injury and disgrace. “And he drummed”: because a drum is made by stretching skin across a wooden frame. David’s drumming symbolized that Christ was to be crucified. “He drummed at the gates of the city”: because what are the “gates of the city” but our hearts, which we have closed against Christ, who from the drum of the cross has opened the hearts of us mortals. (Enar. In Ps 33(2), 2)

In a typological interpretation of the crossing of the Red Sea, applying it to Christian baptism, Augustine uses the same conceit in commenting on the verse: “Mary the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a drum in her hand, and all the women went forth after her with drums and dances,” joining in the Canticle of Moses (Ex 15:20-21).

This is what Moses and the sons of Israel sang, what Mary the prophetess and the daughters of Israel with her sang, and this is what we, both men and women, both our spirit and our flesh, now sing. This is how we may fittingly understand the drum that Mary took up to harmonize with this canticle, for a drum is made by stretching flesh over wood, and it is from the cross that Christians learn how to sing the sweet song of grace. Baptism has made us humble by God’s gracious mercy and has destroyed the pride by which the enemy reigned over us, so that now anyone who boasts must boast in the Lord (1 Cor 1:31): “Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified: horse and rider he has thrown into the sea!” (Sermon 363, 4; PL 39, 1638)

That’s Monsignor John P. Meier, priest of the Archdiocese of New York, Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Bronx native. His four volume (and counting) work, A Marginal Jew, drew this praise from Pope Benedict: “a model of historical-critical exegesis.” This judgment, first offered in volume one of the Pope’s Jesus of Nazareth, has been reiterated in volume two. In addition, the new volume cites Meier several times.

However, in the “Glossary” of volume two — explicitly designated as “Prepared by the Publisher” (and indeed, there is no glossary in the Italian edition) — the listing under “Meier” says the following:

The premise of his critical work is that he proceeds using a critical method the results of which he maintains might produce agreement about Jesus of Nazareth’s identity and intentions among critical Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars.

Now, as I understand it, Meier’s infamous “unpapal conclave,” convened by him in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School, harbors no illusions about the possibility of reaching agreement regarding “the identity and intentions” of Jesus of Nazareth. Or have I misread the intentions of the good Monsignor?

To think that the popular image of the nuclear plant worker has been Homer Simpson. The New York Times account of a band of 50 workers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station trying to forestall disaster:

They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.

They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.

The company continued to fight problems in several reactors on Wednesday, including a fire at the plant.

The workers are being asked to make escalating — and perhaps existential — sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation exposure to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for nuclear plant workers in the United States.

The change means that workers can now remain on site longer, the ministry said.

The writers compare their approach to that of firefighters, which seems right. Echoes of 9/11, and so many instances when a band of brothers (or sisters) risks it all.

The art critic Leo Steinberg has died at age 90. Brilliant, bold, controversial, a prose stylist in a discipline not known for elegant writing, Steinberg was a larger than life figure.

Though he wrote incisively about modern art, his training was in Renaissance and Baroque art, and his most lasting achievements may be in the books he produced about those eras.

The Sexuality of Christ in the Renaissance and in Modern Oblivion is typical of Steinberg: a big, thesis-driven book that nonetheless is full of persuasive argument and evidence. His knowledge of, and sensitivity to, Christian theology, was a cut above most other art critics of the time.

I also love his late book, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, which I reviewed in First Things. Read the review here.

NYT obit here.

Rand Cooper has a brilliant review of a brilliant movie, Another Year, in this issue of CWL (March 25, 2011). All the right questions, demurs, and enthusiasms. Bravo! Here.

In preparation for becoming confessors, we seminarians were taught of a sin called delectatio morosa, a lingering delight in past sins. I wish they had given us this description of it by John Donne. He is describing a moment in the process by which we achieve purity of heart:

When the heart is emptied of infidelity and of those habits of sin that filled it, when it is come to a discontinuance and a detestation of those sins, then we can better look into every corner and endeavor to keep it clean, clean in that measure that the God of pure eyes will vouchsafe to look upon it, and the light of his countenance will perfect the work. The diligence required on our part is a serious watchfulness and consideration of our particular actions, how small soever. In the Law, whatsoever was unclean to eat made a man unclean to touch it, when it was dead. Though the body of sin have so far received a deadly wound in thee, as that thou hast discontinued some habitual sin, some long time; yet if thou touch upon the memory of that dead sin, with delight, thou begettest a new child of sin. And as Isaiah speaks of a child, and of a sinner of an hundred years old (Is 65:20), so every sin into which we relapse is born an hundred years old; it hath all the age of that sin, which we had repented and discontinued before, upon it; it is born an Adam, in full strength the first minute; born a Giant, born a Devil, and possesses us in an instant. Every man may observe that a sin of relapse is sooner upon him than the same sin was at the first attempting him; at first, he had more bashfulness, more tenderness, more colluctation against the sin than upon a relapse. And therefore in this survey of sin, thy first care must be to take heed of returning too diligently to a remembrance of those delightful sins which are past; for that will endanger new. And in many cases it is safer to do (as God himself is said to do) to tie up our sins in a bundle and cast them into the sea (Mic 7:29), so for us to present our sins in general to God and to cast them into the bottomless sea of the infinite mercies of God, in the infinite merits of Christ Jesus, than by an over-diligent enumeration of sins of some kinds, or by too busy a contemplation of those circumstances which increased our sinful delights then when we committed those sins, to commit them over again, by a fresh delight in their memory. When thou hast truly repented them, and God hath forgotten them, do thou forget them too. (Sermon 3, 193-94)

Everything you need to know about the latest O’Keefe video sting was explained during the sixth season of The Simpsons: