If you are near Notre Dame next week, please consider stopping by one or both lectures by Dr. Kathleen McChesney, which will be given as part of the Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Women’s Lecturer Series.  Her first talk, on January 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the McKenna Hall Auditorium, is on “Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: Where are We Now?” Her second talk, on January 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the Law School’s McCartan Courtroom, is on “The Privilege to Serve: Leadership the FBI Way.”

Dr. McChesney is eminently qualified to address both topics: Here’s her brief bio:

Kathleen McChesney, Ph.D. has held unique leadership positions as a Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, heading field offices in Chicago, Illinois and Portland, Oregon. In 2001 she was appointed to the FBI’s third highest position ‑ Executive Assistant Director for Law Enforcement. Following her thirty‑two year law enforcement career she became the first Executive Director of the Office of Child Protection for the US Catholic Bishops Conference and later joined the Walt Disney Company as Vice President for Global Security. She currently provides consulting services for businesses and faith‑based institutions and serves on several non‑profit boards. Kathleen has received several prestigious awards including the U.S. President’s Meritorious Achievement Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award for Women in Policing and the Hildegard Van Bingen Woman for the World Award.

Dr. McChesney has two recent books out:’

Kathleen McChesney and William Gavin, Pick up Your Own Brass: Leadership the FBI Way (Potomac Books, 2011) and

Kathleen McChesney and Thomas G. Plante, Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis, 2002-2012.

Please come to one or both talks!

Patrick Jordan’s lovely remembrance of Dorothy Day in the latest issue of Commonweal includes these remarks:

It was very much as a realist that she had entered the church in 1927; and in 1933, when she and Maurin started the Catholic Worker, she had not sought approval for the venture from church officials. Instead, as she recounted some years later, she relied on the advice of three priests (all editors), who told her “to launch out, but not to ask permission. It would not be given, it was implied.”

In 1968, when the Catholic sociologist and peace activist Gordon Zahn (who had brought the story of Franz Jägerstätter to the attention of the English-speaking world) was having a serious crisis of faith over the institutional church, Dorothy reassured him that “as a convert, I never expected much of the bishops. In all history, popes and bishops and father abbots seem to have been blind and power-loving and greedy. I never expected leadership from them. It is the saints who keep appearing throughout history who keep things going.” However, she told Zahn, “What I do expect is the bread of life and down through the ages there is that continuity”—the sacraments and tradition. “The gospel is hard,” she continued. “Loving your enemies, and the worst are of your own household, is hard.” Still, as she was to instruct another coworker thinking of leaving the church, “No matter how corrupt the church may become, it carries with it the seeds of its own regeneration. To read the lives of the saints has always helped me,” she counseled.

The paragraph reminded me of the view that Jean Gerson maintained in the midst of the dark days of the Great Western Schism when first two and later three rivals claimed the papal throne, “dogs quarreling over a bone,” Wyclif called them. Gerson’s view has been summarized by Louis Pascoe:

…the church has within itself the resources for its own reformation. Gerson maintains that the church is endowed with a semen vivificum et reformativum which has both a conservative and a reformative role in its life. At times he calls the semen a vis insita spiritualis or an ars quaedam vivifica. This semen permeates the entire body of the church and guarantees the continued existence of its hierarchical order through successive generations. The reformative activity of the semen is manifested in the fact that it is capable of restoring proper order to the church whenever deformities occur in its hierarchical structure. Under its influence the church is restored to the unity that characterized the early days of its institution. He argues that this is the unity to which St. Paul refers in Eph 4:4-6, 15-16 when he speaks of one Lord, one faith, one baptism and one body under one head (Louis B. Pascoe, Jean Gerson: Principles of Church Reform, p. 45).

I notice the same metaphor: “the seeds of its own regeneration” (Day), “a life-giving and reformative seed” (Gerson). As Gerson thought that this seed “permeates the entire body of the church,” Day points to the lives of the saints, who are the ones who “keep things going” and who are the ones who best experience that “the Gospel is hard.” Which reminds me of the distinction made by several twentieth-century Catholics between a hierarchy of authority and a hierarchy of holiness in the Church, with the two seldom coinciding.

I’m reminded too of the emphasis that, Enzo Bianchi, the founder and prior of the ecumenical Monastery of Bose, places on the conversion of individuals and small groups as the seeds of the reform and renewal of the Church.

James Wood, the eminent book reviewer of The New Yorker, has in the current issue (subscribers only) a memoir about how we grow to resemble our parents: “Becoming Them.” The reflections are elegant, bemused, poignant, and by the end, grieving.

He muses:

Sometimes I catch myself and think, self-consciously, you are now listening to a Beethoven string quartet, just as your father did. And, at that moment, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and rebellion. Rebellion, for all the obvious reasons. Satisfaction, because it is natural to resemble one’s parents, and there is a resigned pleasure to be had from the realization. I like that my voice is exactly the same pitch as my father’s and can be mistaken for it. But then I hear myself speaking to my children just as he spoke to me, in exactly the same tone and with the same fatherly melody, and I am dismayed by the plagiarism of inheritance.

But the reflection moves beyond bemusement to poignancy:

I could hardly imagine my parents’ life without thinking of him sitting in an armchair, while Haydn or Beethoven or Schubert played. But, of course, this idea of him is an old memory of mine, and thus a picture of a younger man’s habits — he is the middle-aged father of my childhood, not the rather different old man whom I don’t see often enough because I live three thousand miles away, a man who doesn’t care too much whether he listens to music or not. So even as I become him, he becomes someone else.

And, by the end, the music becomes G-minor mourning:

“How shall I mourn them?” How indeed? For it sounds like the title of a beautiful song, a German lament, something my father might have listened to on a Sunday afternoon, when he still did.

I continue my response to Michael Sean Winters’s column responding to my column.  Part 1 of the response can be found here.

2.  The Accommodation

So where are we now? We’ve moved beyond the original narrow exemption, at least in spe. Last year, the Obama administration sketched a possible accommodation for the objections of Catholic hospitals and universities. I outlined that accommodation in the column. Before going into more detail about the accommodation, I’d like to say few words about how religiously infused moral judgments do and do not enter into the American political process—and how the church’s view about contraception matters to the process of lawmaking.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that official Roman Catholic teaching holds that the moral act described as “contracepting” is always wrong because it separates the unitive and procreative goods (fides prolesque) meant to be joined together in a sexual act. The church teaches that contraception is wrong as a matter of natural law—which means that it is wrong for all human beings to do, no matter whether they are Catholic or not. What if they don’t agree? Well, the church teaches that they’re wrong. The church also teaches that she herself is an “expert in humanity,” and is in a privileged position to interpret the natural law.

How should this moral teaching about contraception be translated into the law in an American pluralistic democracy? Well, the church has always acknowledged that morality and law don’t coincide entirely. So, John Courtney Murray and others argued long ago that contraception should not be illegal. But they also thought it probably shouldn’t be encouraged either. From the bishops’ perspective, the problem with the contraceptive mandate is that it is encouraging contraception: It’s one thing to fail to prohibit contraception; it’s another thing entirely to require it to be included in a basic benefit package. From the perspective of official Catholic teaching, there are two problems with the mandate: 1) it wrongly teaches that contraception is morally acceptable; and 2) it makes it widely available.

So the first thing to note is that the bishops oppose the mandate, tout court, because they think it encourages a practice that will harm individuals and the common good. This opposition is a perfectly legitimate use of political freedom in the United States. Like other citizens, the bishops are free to make their case about the immorality of contraception in the public square, and to argue against any form of mandate based on that argument. And they did just that.

But they lost that case: most people in the United States do not think that contraception is intrinsically immoral. In fact, they think it can be a useful way to fulfill their moral responsibilities to their children and themselves. Some might even say for themselves that it is morally required. Moreover, unlike the bishops, they think the widespread availability of contraception contributes to the common good. So we have a mandate. And the mandate is on the books as valid law.

This is important: the bishops can and did argue that the mandate is unacceptable because it goes against the common good. What it seems to me they can’t plausibly argue is that the mandate as a whole is unacceptable because it violates their religious freedom. Read the rest of this entry »

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait on Republican rhetoric about debt:

They’re not arguing that low taxes take precedent over lower spending. They just keep falsely insisting over and over that Obama refuses to accept spending cuts. If they think it makes sense to refuse the spending cuts Obama is offering because they can’t accept the revenue increases he insists have to go along with it, why don’t they just say that? Is the position so unpopular they can’t even acknowledge it publicly? Are they just unable to conceive of a policy change that comes about as a result of compromise rather than hostage-taking? It’s genuinely weird.

At Books & Culture, Alvin Plantinga on free will:

[Jonathan] Edwards endorsed determinism, for the most part, out of concern for divine sovereignty. His idea, ultimately, is that God’s sovereignty requires that God himself be the only real cause of whatever happens. In the final analysis, God is the only agent, the only being capable of action, and the only cause of whatever events occur.

Edwards’ endorsement is weighty; and divine sovereignty is indeed important; but there are enormously high costs associated with his view. This is not the place for a full-dress discussion, but, just to indicate where the discussion could go, I note two problems for Edwards’ view. First, if God is the real cause of everything, then he is also the real cause of sin; he is the real cause of every sinful action. But Christians have for the most part strenuously avoided the conclusion that God is the author of sin. God permits sin, certainly; but does he cause it? Does he cause the wickedness and the atrocities that our sad world displays? Does God cause genocide in Africa? Did he cause the Holocaust? Does he cause all the less conspicuous but nonetheless appalling sins committed by humankind? That seems impossible to square with God’s perfect goodness.

David Gelernter worries about the effect of “internet drivel” on the written word (at Edge, scroll down):

The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word’s value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society’s ability to communicate in writing decays. And this threat to our capacity to read and write is a slow-motion body-blow to science, scholarship, the arts—to nearly everything, in fact, that is distinctively human, that muskrats and dolphins can’t do just as well or better.

The internet’s insatiable demand for words creates global deflation in the value of words. The internet’s capacity to distribute words near-instantly means that, with no lag-time between writing and publication, publication and worldwide availability, pressure builds on the writer to produce more. Global deflation in the value of words creates pressure, in turn, to downplay or eliminate editing and self-editing. When I tell my students not to turn in first-drafts, I sometimes have to explain, nowadays, what a first draft is.

Many thanks to Michael Sean Winters for continuing the conversation about the HHS regulations and religious liberty.  I appreciate his comments very much. And I want to address his questions, which are very important  Since he raises a number of issues, however, rather than doing one super-long blog post, I am going to be doing a few smaller blog posts over the next few days, trying to take the issues he raises one at a time. Even these posts will be longer than they should be, since I don’t have time to write something shorter!

1. Defining Exemptions does not equal Defining Religion

The point of my column was to distinguish between two sets of concerns that the bishops seem to have about the mandate. First and most obviously, they are worried that it will make Catholic institutions cover contraception. That’s where most of the ink has been spilled in the discussion of this controversy. And I think Winters is focusing on this aspect of the dispute.

But I really want to point out that this wasn’t my main focus in the column. I wanted to address the second and deeper worry expressed by the bishops. They worry about what the mandate says about what the Catholic Church is. The original mandate exempts a narrow class of religious institutions (such as parishes and dioceses), but doesn’t exempt Catholic universities and hospitals. So the bishops—and many other Catholics—felt insulted and misunderstood. They sensed that the government was “defining religion” in too narrow a way way, and not appreciating the key fact that Catholic universities and hospitals are also imbued with a religious mission—the very same Catholic mission as parishes and dioceses.

But here’s the thing: In a nutshell, the government wasn’t defining religion. It was defining an exemption to a particular law that applies to some but not all religious institutions. This is a crucial point. Only very rarely does the government say that you’re religious or not religious. (When it does happen, it’s a clear case of someone scamming for something—a group of prisoners who feel called to start a Church of Beer, Pizza, and Football, for example.) In the vast majority of cases, it accepts an institution’s word that it is religious, in part because it doesn’t want to get into the business of certifying religion thanks to Establishment Clause concerns. The government accepts an institution’s religiosity, and then goes on to apply the other criteria at issue in addition to religiosity in order to say whether the institution is exempt from a particular law.  Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama has announced twenty-three executive actions he’ll take to reduce gun violence:

1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.

4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.

6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.

7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.

8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).

9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.

11. Nominate an ATF director.

12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper training for active shooter situations.

13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.

14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.

15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.

16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.

17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.

18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.

19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.

20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.

21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.

22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.

23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.

In 1982 Fr. Paolo Dall’Oglio, a Jesuit priest, hiked into the Syrian countryside to seek a solitary spot for a retreat. After injuring his leg in a serious fall, he stayed for a week in the abandoned monastery he had found on the side of a mountain. Years later, he would re-found it as Deir Mar Musa Al-Habashi, the monastery of St. Moses the Ethiopian (or Abyssinian).

The site was of interest to art historians, since its eleventh-century frescoes represent “the only full program of medieval church decoration to have survived in greater Syria.” Its artistic program, published in full by Erica C. Dodd, offers a rare glimpse into a Syrian artistic tradition from before the Crusades, after which artistic traditions from the Christian East and West were exchanged more readily. More importantly, over time the re-established sixth-century monastery became a place of refuge for Christians and Muslims who sought to understand one another. (A short video introduction to the monastery is available here.)

Viewed from afar, Mar Musa has offered for many Christians a beacon of hope for the best kind of interreligious dialogue: it combines commitment, openness to growth, and hospitality.

That beacon’s light has been snuffed out — only for a short time, I pray. Since last summer, Fr. Paolo has been in exile.

When the protests broke out in 2011, he supported the youth who demonstrated peacefully. But the act that catalyzed his exile followed the death of a young activist and photographer, Bassel Shahade, who was killed by a sniper in Homs. The St. Cyril’s Church in Damascus refused to hold his funeral. Fr. Paolo intervened and had the service at his monastery, where Christians, Sunnis, and Alawites together commemorated his death. In one sense, he was doing no more than basic human decency demands: to offer a proper burial. But in another sense, he was publicly honoring a well-known member of the opposition. He now lives in exile in a monastery in Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

When I had the chance to meet Fr. Paolo in New York (Feb 2011), I was impressed by his rare combination of virtues. Rarely is someone so faithful and practical, idealistic and realistic, expressing levitas and gravitas, hope for the future and mourning for what has been lost. If anyone has a moral sense of the right thing to do in Syria, I would think it is Fr. Paolo.

The fact that even he is uncertain of the best course of action thus reveals the fogginess of justice amid a civil war. In an interview with Time magazine, Fr. Paolo said he preached “tolerance and hope” as the uprising began.

“The revolution is there. I have seen the revolution. I have seen the boys of the revolution, the young people, incredible courage,” Dall’Oglio says, but even he can see that the situation has passed a point of no return. “I am a Catholic priest so I have had all kind of anguish about the use of violence during this revolution. I always encourage those who behave with non-violent actions,” he says. Dall’Oglio had wished for some sort of U.N. peacekeeping force to stabilize the situation before it blew up into what now appears to be a full-scale civil war. “Today, that is not realistic anymore. The disaster already happened,” Dall’Oglio says.

Regarding the prospect of a military intervention by the United States, he responds:

The U.S. is “paralyzed by the complexity of the issue” … and therefore unable to provide real assistance. Too often, Dall’Oglio adds, individual countries’ agendas trump any real motive to help Syria, which, as many observers note, is becoming the staging ground of a proxy war between Iran and its regional arch-rival Saudi Arabia.

And yet, the most recent quotation from Fr. Paolo on the issue of humanitarian intervention takes a different tack. In response to what he perceives as a lack of exhortation by Pope Benedict XVI, Fr. Paolo offers this rebuttal (via John Allen):

If the Vatican doesn’t believe foreign troops have a role to play in keeping the peace, … what are the Swiss Guards doing in St. Peter’s Square?

Are the length of the civil war and its uncertain future beginning to wear down the commitment to nonviolent resistance? When the country’s main university is lethally targeted during exams, what response can there be?

In an interview with the New York Times, Fr. Paolo pondered whether he ought to have stayed and, perhaps, died with the protesters.

“I am a monk,” he said. “My real country is heaven, the kingdom of God. My real country is a moral belonging, it is not a place.”

During a civil war, what’s a monk to do?

The President is unveiling his gun control agenda this morning, but Politico reports on this ad that the NRA released to get the PR jump on the crafty Prez. This should work well:

Actually, it may well work. I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the NRA and the public’s fascination with possessing heavy duty weaponry.

From the ad:

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” a narrator asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools? Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.”

Those caught up in the debt ceiling shouting match may have missed some of the recent news on the U.S./Israel glaring match.

From Jeffrey Goldberg, presumably delivering a message to PM Netanyahu from President Obama: “When informed about the Israeli decision [about building on E1], Obama…didn’t even bother getting angry. He told several people that this sort of behavior on Netanyahu’s part is what he has come to expect, and he suggested that he has become inured to what he sees as self-defeating policies of his Israeli counterpart. In the weeks after the UN vote, Obama said privately and repeatedly, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.” With each new settlement announcement, in Obama’s view, Netanyahu is moving his country down a path toward near-total isolation.”

And here is Senator Chuck Schumer (D.-NY) in support of Hagel’s confirmation sending a message to President Obama: “I know some will question whether Senator Hagel’s assurances are merely attempts to quiet critics as he seeks confirmation to this critical post,” Schumer said. “But I don’t think so. Senator Hagel realizes the situation in the Middle East has changed, with Israel in a dramatically more endangered position than it was even five years ago. His views are genuine, and reflect this new reality.”

So among Obama, Hagel, and Schumer, three views of the great question, without even getting Netanyahu into this quadratic equation. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Collateral damage? “The news that Sen. Chuck Schumer will support the Hagel nomination means that Hagel will almost certainly be confirmed as Secretary of Defense.  It does not mean that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not opposing the appointment. It means that, at long last, it has been defeated.”  MJ Rosenberg.

January 16: An assessment of Hagel’s stance vis a vis the prevailing views in Washington: The Forward

And an ABC-Washington Post poll: Democrats favor him over Republicans; one-third of all respondents have no opinion. Drill down for various demographic breakdowns.

The new issue is now live, featuring a remembrance of Dorothy Day by Patrick Jordan, and a look at the life of “Catholic Muslim” Louis Massignon. Plus E.J. Dionne Jr. on the myth of American decline, and Jack Calhoun on lessons learned from picketing a gun show.

Because the mere mention of his name reminds them—and everyone else—that they were wrong about the invasion of Iraq, something most of them still deny and the rest try to forget. The few who admit they were mistaken usually claim that no blame attaches to their error because it was universal: everyone of any importance was wrong, so no one was wrong to be wrong. Conversely, if someone was right, that just proves that he wasn’t someone of importance: why else would his objections at the time have been so easily ignored? Or it proves he secretly wanted Bush’s foreign policy to fail. Hence the distasteful Schadenfreude when things fell apart.

So, in review, the only way to have been right about Iraq was either (1) to have been a no-one, beneath notice, or (2) to have been right for the wrong reasons (e.g. because of insufficient indignation at “Islamofascism” or latent anti-Semitism or cynical Realpolitik). It being impossible to deny that Senator Hagel was someone of importance when he opposed the war in Iraq, only one kind of explanation is left. The discredited must try to make him look dishonorable. This also explains why the Washington Post, a guardian of conventional wisdom (and in this case one of its parents), is desperately casting about for reasons to oppose Hagel’s nomination.

Two pieces side by side in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

1. A pit bull who mauled a police horse in an unprovoked attack was spared euthanasia. More than 113,000 people signed an on-line petition to spare the dog, and raised an “undisclosed sum” of cash for his defense. The dog, unleashed and uncollared at the time of the attack, also caused the officer riding the horse to be thrown and injured.

2. A shorter piece, about 6 shooting deaths in Oakland this week, 4 of them within six hours on Friday. Friday’s victims were 17, 22, 30, and 20 years old, and were all members of “identified groups.” Last year, Oakland saw 131 homicides–clearly 2013 is starting out with a bang.

So–before the pit bull community speaks up, let me say this. I love pit bulls, always have. And I know dogs. The fault with this case lies with the dog’s owner, sure, but tell that to the mauled horse and the injured rider.

But what struck me was the juxtaposition of these two stories. Where are the 113,000 people with cash in hand to begin to work–or even donate–against the rampant gun violence in the city? The Oakland Tribune reports ” Police on Saturday vowed to intensify efforts to curb violence in the city,” but it’s also worth noting that the police force has shrunk 20% since 2009. The police here are stretched so far that in 2010 the chief released a list of crimes the police would not respond to in person if planned layoffs went through. The layoffs went through. Among the “freebie” crimes in Oakland are burglary, theft, grand theft, extortion and vandalism. Another headline read: “Oakland police investigating four homicides within hours.” It says a lot that police acting promptly after a murder is newsworthy.

Because of the horror of the Newtown School shootings, effective gun control is finally a matter of public attention. School shootings and the rampant gun violence in the cities are different phenomena in many ways, and a multifaceted approach will be needed to address the two issues. One thing they have in common, though, is easy access to guns.

So the next time someone says “we’ve got to curb access to assault weapons and large-capacity magazines,” say, “sure, great idea,” and ask back “what about the weapon of choice in the inner city–semi-automatic and automatic (legal or not) hand guns?” Not only the cheap ones, either–a successful gang banger very often has the cash in hand to buy a nice gun via straw purchase at a gun show or elsewhere.

Right now the assault-style weapons are getting a lot of attention, but it’s the small guns that kill most often in the streets. So let’s care as much about the deaths of the young in the streets as we do about the potential euthanasia of a pit bull.

As its annual nod to religion, the NY Times Book Review gave space to Commonweal-contributor Paul Elie to discuss fiction and faith. Early paragrphs set out the theme developed and discussed: 

This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground. 

So are works of fiction about the quandaries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in the United States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new occupants. 

It’s a strange development. Strange because the current upheavals in American Christianity — involving sex, politics, money and diversity — cry out for -dramatic treatment. Strange because upheavals in Christianity across the Atlantic gave rise to great fiction from “The Brothers Karamazov” to “Brideshead Revisited.” Strange because novelists are depicting the changing lives of American Jews and Muslims with great success.

Tomorrow’s Book Review publishes several articles in response to the essay, most of them suggesting other places to look for evidence of religious interest in contemporary fiction, two of them expressing a certain glee at its absence. I myself would second the letter-writer who praises the work of James Lee Burke, largely overlooked because considered “genre-writing.” Are there other examples? Or do you agree with Paul Elie’s thesis?

from Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, volume one: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration:

Luke tells us that Jesus was praying while he received baptism (cf. Lk 3:21). Looking at the events in light of the Cross and Resurrection, the Christian people realized what happened: Jesus loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon his shoulders; he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan. He inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners. His inaugural gesture is an anticipation of the Cross. He is, at it were, the true Jonah who said to the crew of the ship, “Take me and throw me into the sea” (Jon 1:12). The whole significance of Jesus’ Baptism, the fact that he bears “all righteousness,” first comes to light on the Cross. The Baptism is an acceptance of death for the sins of humanity, and the voice that calls out, “This is my beloved Son,” over the baptismal waters is an anticipatory reference to the Resurrection. This also explains why, in his own discourse, Jesus uses the word baptism to refer to his death (cf. Mk 10:38; Lk 12:50). (p. 18)

Luke does not place his genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel, but connects it with the story of Jesus’ Baptism, to which it forms a conclusion….In contrast to Matthew, Luke uses his genealogy to journey from Jesus back into past history. Abraham and David make their appearance, but without any particular emphasis. The family tree goes back to Adam, and so to creation, for once Luke comes to the name Adam, he adds: “of God.” This is a way of underscoring the universal scope of Jesus’ mission. He is the son of Adam — the son of man. Because he is man, all of us belong to him and he to us; in him humanity starts anew and reaches its destiny. (p.10)

Giovanni Bellini’s great altarpiece of the Baptism of Jesus:

Following the decision by Archbishop Nichols of Westminster to end the so-called Soho Mass for gay Catholics so that Anglican-Catholics could use the church for their boutique rites it was believed that the ministry for gay Catholics would continue at a London Jesuit parish. Apparently that’s not the case, as The Tablet reports:

No ‘gay Mass’ at Farm Street, Jesuits say
11 January 2013

The Parish Priest at the newly designated church for gay Catholics has said that no specific provision will be made for the group when they attend Mass.

Last week the Archbishop of Westminster announced an end to the Soho Masses at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, central London. But following the announcement those who attended the bimonthly Masses expressed a hope that their liturgical celebration could be transferred to the Sunday evening Mass at the Jesuit-run church in Farm Street, Mayfair.

However Fr Andrew Cameron-Mowat, the parish priest at Farm Street, told The Tablet that the community would not be able to continue some of its traditions under the new arrangement. Asked if the group could write its own bidding prayers, use rainbow-coloured items or invite priests to say Mass he said: “We will be happy to welcome newcomers to our regular parish Masses but cannot make provision for guest presiders or other features specific to any single group. This would be against the wishes of the archbishop.”

Nichols had come under intense pressure from conservatives in the UK and Rome to reverse his support for the Soho mass, and activists kept up the pressure when it seemed he might have made some provision for allowing the liturgy to continue even after it was shut down in Soho. We couldn’t have that, of course.

H/T: Catholic World News

How else to explain that debacle of a loss to Alabama — the team from about the most Protestant state in the nation whipping the team that is the repository of all that is good and right and holy about Catholicism in America.

More bad news: Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly is reportedly interviewing for the Philadelphia Eagles vacant head coaching job. That would be a good fit: a coach who can’t win the big games in college going to a franchise that can’t win the big ones in the NFL.

There is one bit of good news, though: one of six computers used in the BCS “matrix” still ranks Notre Dame No. 1 over Alabama. A Catholic computer?

So what strikes me most, however, is that since Monday night’s whupping, all those ND fans have been almost entirely silent. Nary a peep on the interwebs, where for weeks there had been nothing but triumphalism and woofing about how Notre Dame’s imminent championship season showed the superiority of a Catholic school (crowing from many folks who just a couple years earlier were blasting ND as having sold its Catholic soul — hmmmm) and how the divine hand of a Catholic God was clearly at work in this miraculous season (brought to you by Mormon players and perhaps one sex assault suspect, but whatever). Heck, this season even taught me that the inimitable G.K. Chesterton once lent his bloviations to the cause of Our Lady’s football team.

How could they lose with such backing? But lose they did. Crushed, actually. Not that there seems to be any humility coming from ND fans — the Golden Domers who bragged of beating the Mobile Homers. Well, maybe those poor kids from the South can teach rich white suburbanite Catholics something.

But seriously, folks. After all the chest-thumping and scapular-waving, don’t Catholics have anything to say about the theodicy of football? How it is that Notre Dame could lose and thereby undermine the Catholic faith? How it is that the brilliant RGIII may have been chewed up and spit out in his rookie season with the Redskins? Why it is that we continue to to cheer for our teams (mea maxima culpa) even thought the sport can cause traumatic brain injury that leads terrific athletes and fathers and husbands like former N.F.L. linebacker Junior Seau to blow their brains out at a young age?

Actual religious faith seems to be a more nuanced discipline than the all-or-nothing world of football fundamentalism.

Then again, in the case of Notre Dame’s lost championship, maybe the answer is obvious: Notre Dame used its free 30-second spot during the highly-rated telecast to promote the fact that it is No. 1 in graduating student-athletes. That was a “cowardly decision,” suggested George Weigel, who said the university should have instead used the spot to promote the pro-life cause or the bishops’ religious freedom campaign.

Because of course carrying water for the Republican party is really what a Catholic university is all about. And it’s what wins football championships.

Just posted on the homepage: Commonweal’s editors on confronting gun violence.

The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, with more than 200 million guns in circulation. The result: a rate of violence wildly out of step with all other developed nations. There are approximately thirty thousand firearm fatalities every year in the United States (according to data compiled by the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania), and more than twice as many non-fatal firearm injuries. More than three hundred of those killed annually are under the age of fifteen(.pdf). Some forty police officers are killed by guns every year. And every seventeen minutes, someone in America commits suicide with a gun.…

The numbers represent a wide range of social problems—including mental illness and inner-city crime (a disproportionate number of gun victims are young male minorities)—that won’t be resolved by limiting access to guns. But the easy availability of firearms is the most basic reason those problems turn deadly with devastating frequency. As the Penn study points out, “Firearms, especially handguns, are effective lethal weapons with the capability to escalate often-impulsive acts of interpersonal violence or suicidal thoughts into death.”

It’s been three weeks since E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote on the need to remember Newtown, and just under a month since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the first three days of this week:

- Connecticut governor Dan Malloy in his State of the State address directly rejected the National Rifle Association’s proposal to put an armed guard in every school in America in the wake of the Newtown massacre, saying that “freedom is not a handgun on the hip of every teacher and security should not mean a guard posted outside every classroom”

- New York governor Andrew Cuomo, in advance of his State of the State address, was crafting with legislators a package of gun measures that would make New York the most restrictive state in the nation

- The Obama administration suggested it is considering executive action on guns

- Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota (who has an “A” rating from the NRA) backed off comments made Sunday in which she called White House gun violence task-force proposals “extreme,” supposedly after a series of ads run in response by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

- The NRA accepted a White House invitation to attend a series of meetings on guns and gun violence on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Tuesday was the second anniversary of the shooting of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; she and her husband Mark Kelly announced they were forming a political group to take on the NRA . Also on Tuesday, at a preliminary hearing in Colorado, emergency calls from the Aurora movie theater at which gunman John Holmes killed 12 people last summer were played; a judge is expected to decide by the end of this week whether the case will go to trial. On Monday, a collection of conservative and gun rights groups announced plans for a “gun appreciation day” to be held just before President Obama’s January 19 inauguration; it’s modeling its event on last August’s anti-gay-marriage Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day and calling on supporters to head to gun stores, gun shows, and gun ranges to protest “gun-grabbing” by the government in the wake of the Newtown shootings.

Back in the days when I worked part-time or summer  jobs such as  hot dog vendor, library clerk and shoe salesman, I remember being outraged upon learning that McDonald’s Corp. had showered President Richard Nixon with campaign donations to persuade him not to raise the minimum wage. As Bloomberg News reports in this excellent piece on two McDonald’s employees – Tyree Johnson, who works in two Chicago location, and Jim Skinner, who served as chief executive officer – not much has changed. Leslie Patton reported:

Fast-food restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the U.S. average during the recovery that began in June 2009. The jobs created by companies including Burger King Worldwide Inc. and Yum (YUM)! Brands Inc., which owns the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC brands, are among the lowest-paid in the U.S. — except in the C suite.

The pay gap separating fast-food workers from their chief executive officers is growing at each of those companies. The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s Corp. in the last 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionization efforts that erupted recently on the streets of Chicago and New York.

The story provides a portrait of Tyree Johnson, who earns $8.25 an hour, the minimum wage in Illinois. He has worked for McDonald’s for 20 years. “Johnson would need about a million hours of work — or more than a century on the clock — to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s, based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, paid then-CEO Jim Skinner last year,” Bloomberg News reported.

The story, which ran Dec. 12 (and which I later learned about when the writer received an award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation), demonstrates that the minimum wage deserves to be a much larger issue than it has been on the political landscape. Basic fairness calls for it.

The minimum wage I received as a 17-year-old serving hot dogs at a beach in the Rockaways during the Nixon administration was worth 15 percent more, adjusted for inflation, than the $8.25 an hour Illinois minimum wage that Chicagoan Tyree Johnson receives for flipping burgers – and 30 percent more than the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

One of the writers I followed as I tried to imagine myself as a writer was Richard Ben Cramer, who died yesterday at 62. He had struggled with cancer, and he also struggled with writing, but wound up producing classics for all that pain.

My favorite is his profile of former Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, who was in retirement in Florida, fishing like he used to hit baseballs. (Those were the days when Esquire magazine profiles could be books in themselves.) Cramer had Williams speaking in UPPERCASE, which was completely appropriate for the piece but is one of those tricks that aspiring writers should not try at home.

I also like to cite Cramer’s lede on the funeral of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands (May 1981, for the Philadelphia Inquirer — remember newspapers?) when editors get doctrinaire about the 30-word lede. Here is Cramer at 95 words!

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — In a grimy gray drizzle, under ragged black flags that lifted and waved balefully in the fitful air to the wail of a single piper, on streets winding through charred and blasted brick spray-painted with slogans of hate, by silent tens of thousands, past fathers holding sons face-forward that they might remember the day, past mothers rocking and shielding prams that held tomorrow’s fighters, past old men who blew their rheumy red noses and remembered their own days of rage, Bobby Sands was carried yesterday to a grave of raw Ulster mud.

Crazy, yes, but wonderful. You can get away with it once a career. And Cramer was no trickster. He was all thorough reporting and interviewing and solid writing. Problem is, too many of us think that if a trick works once, it can work a hundred times. Not so.

Joe Klein remembers Cramer, whose last hurrah in a way was his tome on the 1988 presidential campaign:

“Books will break your heart” became our shared mantra, and What it Takes broke his, under-appreciated by his jealous colleagues and under-read by a public too busy and carefree to digest 1000 pages about one of the more boring political races of the past 60 years.

But what a splendid 1000 pages it was! Beautifully written, precisely observed–and with a larger point that beggared the cheap cynicism that had become, and remains, the default position for so many political journalists. Cramer actually dared to appreciate the incredible intelligence, hard work, courage and, yes, character that went into running for President…

…Cramer defiantly became friendly with his subjects, especially Biden, Bush and Dole. That may have been a bridge too far for those of who of us don’t dive in, as Richard did, and then leave the political scene. It’s hard to criticize politicians who are also friends (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan became for me). But Cramer’s appreciation of these politicians’ skill and humanity became an example I tried to follow in subsequent campaigns, a crucial antidote to the wall-to-wall ugly that corrodes the political process. (Thus, in 2012, it was  important for me to write about the incredible strength of Rich Santorum’s family, even if I disagreed with him on almost everything.)

So it goes.

John Brennan has been Obama’s national security adviser and is now nominated to head the CIA. His torture, rendition, and drone involvements have had moral murmuring but I’ve not detected major public criticisms of him. So today, I was surprised and amused to see Pat Lang, at my favorite military/intelligence/political blog,  say the following: “I would not have picked Brennan. He seems to me to be a rule obsessed product of too much Catholic education.” Can anyone have too much Catholic education? Does Lang mean too much Jesuit education? Brennan is a graduate of Fordham (political science).

UPDATE: Here is  a “Room for Debate,”  debate on Brennan at the NYTimes.

Patrick Molloy informs us that Hagel is also a Catholic (didn’t know that). See his comment below.

And Here: an interesting and provocative piece by Michael Lind at Salon on the Hagel nomination: Obama Repudiates Bushism.

There hasn’t been much comment here about the U.S. bishops’ recent document on preaching, Preaching the Mystery of Faith, approved at their November 2012 meeting. Since it represents a new direction in the bishops’ thoughts about the goal of Sunday preaching, I wonder what people think about the changes the bishops have recommended.

Preaching the Mystery of Faith is a sequel to the influential 1978 document from the bishops on preaching, Fulfilled in Your Hearing. The bishops say that “new circumstances within the Church at this historical moment call for us to build on this previous document.” What new circumstances?

It is a familiar list. First, people have become disaffected with the church — mostly, in the document’s analysis, because of our individualistic, relativistic, materialistic society, not because of what people may have come to feel about the church, its message, its leaders, the nature of authority, or their local parish. Second, both the people who have drifted away and those who are at mass every week “seem to be uninformed about the Church’s teaching.” Neither of these diagnoses are documented with details, perhaps because they are now so widely regarded (by many church leaders, anyway) as the official story of our current condition.

The bishops call upon preachers to remember that “homilies are inspirational when they touch the deepest levels of the human heart.” But the bishops also clearly feel that Fulfilled in Your Hearing neglected the homily’s catechetical function, and the driving force behind Preaching the Mystery of Faith is to restore catechesis, in the form of description and explanation of church doctrine and tradition, as a stronger and more urgent homiletic priority.

When we have the privilege of preaching the homily to a congregation at the Sunday Eucharist, we also have an invaluable opportunity to advance the Church’s catechetical ministry….Over time the homilist, while respecting the unique form and spirit of the Sunday homily, should communicate the full scope of this rich catechetical teaching to his congregation….It would also be helpful for experts and publishers to prepare pastoral aids for the clergy to help connect the proclamation of the readings with the doctrines of the Church.

In addition, the bishops say that “virtually every homily preached during the liturgy should make some connection between the Scriptures just heard and the Eucharist about to be celebrated.”

It’s a lot to accomplish in a Sunday homily, isn’t it? Retain a focus on the week’s readings and how they might illuminate the great questions and decisions of our lives, but also make their connection to the doctrines of the church explicit, and provide an explanation of those doctrines as needed. And also make sure to work in the Eucharist.

In 1978, Fulfilled in Your Hearing helped begin an era where “preaching on the readings” became the official and widespread expectation for what most preachers should be doing most Sundays. By contrast, with Preaching the Mystery of Faith, the catechetical homily only marginally related to the lectionary may make something of a comeback. In my own diocese, a schema of such homilies is running throughout the Year of Faith, with all preachers directed to devote the second Sunday of each month to an assigned catechetical topic (Scripture and Tradition, The Four Marks of the Church, etc.).

Perhaps there are people who will respond well to a refresher of Catholic Basics in their homilies. What concerns me most is the undercurrent of condescension towards those who will hear these homilies — those undercatechized, culture-saturated laity who need so much remedial teaching: “The homilist …. addresses disciples who — like their spiritual ancestors on the road to Emmaus — may be tending, in varying degrees, in the wrong direction, confused and unsure.” Thus the need to be very explicit about resolving their confusion.

By contrast, the innate respect for the assembly expressed in Fulfilled in Your Hearing asks us to wonder first about the words parish listeners are actually hoping to hear, rather than our preconceived notion of what they ought to hear.

Unless a preacher knows what a congregation needs, wants, or is able to hear, there is every possibility that the message offered in the homily will not meet the needs of the people who hear it. To say this is by no means to imply that preachers are only to preach what their congregations want to hear. Only when preachers know what their congregations want to hear will they be able to communicate what a congregation needs to hear: Homilists may indeed preach on what they understand to be the real issues, but if they are not in touch with what the people think are the real issues, they will very likely be misunderstood or not heard at all. What is communicated is not what is said, but it is what is heard, and what is heard is determined in large measure by what the hearer needs or wants to hear.

The bishops have made their own judgment about the shape of our parishes right now and what their assemblies need and want to hear in homilies. Are they right?

A powerful story in this morning’s New York Times Magazine illustrates the value of restorative justice, where the focus of the criminal justice system is put on the victims of crime and the community harmed by it. A young man killed his girlfriend of several years after an extensive dispute, and her parents chose to forgive him:

Andy Grosmaire, Ann’s father, stood beside his daughter’s bed in the intensive-care unit of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. The room was silent except for the rhythmic whoosh of the ventilator keeping her alive. Ann had some brainstem function, the doctors said, and although her parents, who are practicing Catholics, held out hope, it was clear to Andy that unless God did “wondrous things,” Ann would not survive her injuries. Ann’s mother, Kate, had gone home to try to get some sleep, so Andy was alone in the room, praying fervently over his daughter, “just listening,” he says, “for that first word that may come out.”

Ann’s face was covered in bandages, and she was intubated and unconscious, but Andy felt her say, “Forgive him.” His response was immediate. “No,” he said out loud. “No way. It’s impossible.” But Andy kept hearing his daughter’s voice: “Forgive him. Forgive him.”

…

Four days later, Ann’s condition had not improved, and her parents decided to remove her from life support. Andy says he was in the hospital room praying when he felt a connection between his daughter and Christ; like Jesus on the cross, she had wounds on her head and hand. (Ann had instinctually reached to block the gunshot, and lost fingers.) Ann’s parents strive to model their lives on those of Jesus and St. Augustine, and forgiveness is deep in their creed. “I realized it was not just Ann asking me to forgive Conor, it was Jesus Christ,” Andy recalls. “And I hadn’t said no to him before, and I wasn’t going to start then. It was just a wave of joy, and I told Ann: ‘I will. I will.’ ” Jesus or no Jesus, he says, “what father can say no to his daughter?”

When Conor was booked, he was told to give the names of five people who would be permitted to visit him in jail, and he put Ann’s mother Kate on the list. Conor says he doesn’t know why he did so — “I was in a state of shock” — but knowing she could visit put a burden on Kate. At first she didn’t want to see him at all, but that feeling turned to willingness and then to a need. “Before this happened, I loved Conor,” she says. “I knew that if I defined Conor by that one moment — as a murderer — I was defining my daughter as a murder victim. And I could not allow that to happen.”

She asked her husband if he had a message for Conor. “Tell him I love him, and I forgive him,” he answered. Kate told me: “I wanted to be able to give him the same message. Conor owed us a debt he could never repay. And releasing him from that debt would release us from expecting that anything in this world could satisfy us.”

As part of this release, the Grosmaires met with Conor and his parents and negotiated a reduced prison sentence of 20 years, plus ten years of probation — no small feat in the “tough on crime” Florida panhandle. Here is what the USCCB says in recommending restorative justice in a document published in 2000:

Restorative justice focuses first on the victim and the community harmed by the crime, rather than on the dominant state-against-the-perpetrator model. This shift in focus affirms the hurt and loss of the victim, as well as the harm and fear of the community, and insists that offenders come to grips with the consequences of their actions. These approaches are not “soft on crime” because they specifically call the offender to face victims and the communities. This experience offers victims a much greater sense of peace and accountability. Offenders who are willing to face the human consequences of their actions are more ready to accept responsibility, make reparations, and rebuild their lives.

In this case, that is exactly what happened:

… their forgiveness affected Conor, too, and not only in the obvious way of reducing his sentence. “With the Grosmaires’ forgiveness,” he told me, “I could accept the responsibility and not be condemned.” Forgiveness doesn’t make him any less guilty, and it doesn’t absolve him of what he did, but in refusing to become Conor’s enemy, the Grosmaires deprived him of a certain kind of refuge — of feeling abandoned and hated — and placed the reckoning for the crime squarely in his hands. I spoke to Conor for six hours over three days, in a prison administrator’s office at the Liberty Correctional Institution near Tallahassee. At one point he sat with his hands and fingers open in front of him, as if he were holding something. Eyes cast downward, he said, “There are moments when you realize: I am in prison. I am in prison because I killed someone. I am in prison because I killed the girl I loved.”

The Pew Forum reports on the religious make-up of the 113th Congress, including a none (doubt that it’s the first). Does the religious make-up of the Congress really make any difference? Does party affiliation trump religious affiliation?

What is with those people, messing with the Catholic Church? Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the schismatic traditionalists that Benedict XVI has been diligently courting for years, says he has been assured the pope is really on his side and we shouldn’t pay any mind to the “political”cover stories coming out of the Vatican about Rome’s problems with the SSPX.

Besides, you know who is really at fault. CNS reports:

According to an audio recording posted on YouTube Dec. 30, the bishop gave a nearly two-hour talk Dec. 28 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in New Hamburg, Ontario. He spoke about the society’s three years of discussions with the Vatican over the society’s future and explained how he interpreted behind-the-scenes communications about the talks.

Apparently speaking without a text, he also called the Jewish people “enemies of the church,” saying Jewish leaders’ support of the Second Vatican Council “shows that Vatican II is their thing, not the church’s.” (The full audio is embedded below.)

Those most opposed to the church granting canonical recognition to the traditionalist society have been “the enemies of the church: the Jews, the Masons,” he said.

Well, there’s the hermeneutic of continuity for ya.

The pope got himself in a bit of trouble in 2009 when he “rehabilitated” Fellay and three other SSPX leaders, including Bishop Richard Williamson, a Holocaust denier later thrown under the bus by Fellay, who is seen as the acceptable face of the Lefebvrists.

Benedict later said that the Vatican failed to do a Google search on Williamson to learn about his proclivities beforehand, an explanation which seemed implausible given Benedict’s longstanding ties to the SSPX and the SSPX’s longstanding history of anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish statements.

Williamson’s defenestration and the purging of a couple other priests was said to have cleared that all up. Maybe not so much.

Why is the Vatican continuing the pursuit of the SSPX? At what cost? A principal result of the reconciliation effort has been to shift the center of gravity in the church to the far right, so that right wingers who might have been on the fringe in years past are considered sensible centrists — a phenomenon we have also seen in the Republican party in recent years. In the end, it may be irrelevant whether the SSPX or some of its elements return to Rome. The larger goal has been achieved.

Don’t tell the kids, but it’s almost time for Christmas!

That is, if you live in Armenia.

One of the lesser known facts about Christian history is how little concern there was — for the first few hundred years — about determining, much less celebrating, the date on which Jesus was born. The first extant record of proposed dates for the Nativity comes from Clement of Alexandria, about the turn of the 2nd to 3rd century:

“There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the 28th year of Augustus, and in the 25th day of [the Egyptian month] Pachon [May 20 in our calendar].” (Stromateis 1.21.145)

Missing from this earliest evidence is either of the two dates that came to be celebrated later: December 25 (in the Western parts of the Roman Empire) or January 6 (in the Eastern parts). How did these dates arise? And why is Armenia the lone stalwart, still celebrating Nativity on January 6?

To these questions, professor Andrew McGowan of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne has provided a well-researched and accessibly written response: “How December 25 Became Christmas.” After laying out the basic evidence, McGowan does a great service by providing a compelling alternative to a common explanation of the origin of the Christmas date. First, the oft-repeated one:

The most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

This explanation has been anthologized by standard coursebooks on the history of Christianity — yet it has scant evidence to commend it. McGowan admits, to be sure, that many of Christmas’s modern customs and symbols (e.g., the tree) were appropriated through cultural interaction with non-Christian peoples in Europe. Such obvious borrowing of customs and symbols has led scholars to believe — probably falsely — that the date of Christmas was also borrowed from non-Christian ritual practice.

To the contrary, McGowan proposes the following: “Strange as it may seem, the key to dating Jesus’ birth may lie in the dating of Jesus’ death at Passover.”

Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation — the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

The first reference to the exact date of December 25 comes in the Philocalian calendar (354) from Rome, but no reason is given there for the dating.

In the East, too, the dates of Jesus’ conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the easterners used the 14th of the first spring month (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar — April 6 to us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6 — the eastern date for Christmas. … Thus, we have Christians in two parts of the world calculating Jesus’ birth on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and coming up with two close but different results (December 25 and January 6).

The notion that the Incarnation and Passion of Jesus ought to have occurred on the same day of the year expresses well the cyclical theological orientation of the ancient and medieval worldview. The Paschal mystery recapitulates creation.

The Armenians hold fast to the date of January 6, which was defended at length by the 7th-century Armenian mathematician, Anania of Shirak, in “A Discourse upon the Epiphany of Our Lord and Savior.” In the course of that defense, he quotes from a letter about liturgical issues written by Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, to the Armenians in the year 335. It is furthermore clear in that letter — which is the best extant evidence of Christian liturgy in Jerusalem before Cyril of Jerusalem, Egeria’s travel diary, et al. — that Macarius considered the date of the Nativity to be the same as the date of the Epiphany (Baptism).*

So while we complete our “Twelve Days of Christmas” in the West and prepare for our Epiphany to the Magi and “Three Kings’ Day” celebrations, let us not forget the Armenians, who honor a tradition of equal antiquity.

* Terian, Abraham. Macarius of Jerusalem: Letter to the Armenians (A.D. 335). Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.

Hospital workers and nurses in a Goshen, Indiana medical center are being forced to get a flu vaccine or else. One hospital fired eight, including three nurses, at least one of whom says she objected to the vaccine on religious grounds. ABC News reports:

Ethel Hoover wore all black on her last day of work as a nurse in the critical care unit at Indiana University Health Goshen Hospital. She said she was in “mourning” because she would have been at the hospital 22 years in February, and she’s only called out of work four or five times in her whole career , she said.

“This is my body. I have a right to refuse the flu vaccine,” Hoover, 61, told ABCNews.com. “For 21 years, I have religiously not taken the flu vaccine, and now you’re telling me that I believe in it.”

More than 15,100 flu cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since Sept. 30, including 16 pediatric deaths. Indiana’s flu activity level is considered high, according to the CDC, which last month announced that the flu season came a month earlier than usual.

Hoover’s lawyer, Alan Phillips, says his client had the right to refuse her flu shot under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination of employees. Hoover and some of the others are Mennonites, but Phillips said religion could include any strongly held belief, and that the belief flu shots are bad should suffice.

“If your personal beliefs are religious in nature, then they are a protected belief,” Phillips said.

From the HuffPo roundup of the story:

According to UPI, a total of 26 employees filed for an exemption from the mandatory flu vaccination. Eleven appeals were granted along religious lines, and several more employees were exempted because they faced the possibility of a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine.

The employees who were ultimately fired did not fit the criteria for religious protection as established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to the hospital.

“If it were religious beliefs as defined by the EEOC, they would not have been terminated,” explained McDonald to UPI. “Sometimes there can be a little bit of gray area, and people who have very personally-held religious beliefs will present those as religious opportunities for exemption.”

Yes, there’s no medical reason not to get the vaccine, and it is designed to protect the health of the patients these people have vowed to serve. But religious freedom trumps everything, as we have been often and loudly reminded, and yet our Nazi-Stalinist State continues to trample on the conscience of believers. Why won’t we rise up? It’s mind-boggling. Right?

I’m sure I’m the last person in the digital world to be sent this trailer, but it’s worth watching again. Or just smile benignly at my post and move on…

This week’s New Yorker cover (titled “Threshold”) captures the anxieties of many parents, grandparents, and teachers as school starts up after the holiday, and no doubt many children as well.