On-line Religion Discursus

You shouldn't post when you are annoyed

2011-05-25T23:19:00.002-04:00

... but that rule would kill off about 92% of the crap posted on religious blogs, so let's blow that off.

I never quite understood what John Beeler saw in Owen White's old blog, and I missed his sign-off message from that where I gather he had some rude things to say about his sojourn in Orthodoxy. So now he has decided to join Arturo Vasquez in the ranks of old cranky Catholic Marxists. Now I found a certain charm in Vasquez's messages about folk religion (calling it "Catholicism" is a stretch). Or perhaps I should say revelation. We intellectualized Anglicans just don't do that kind of thing. But then there's the running Marxist denunciad, helped along by White and a few hangers on. I am continually stupid enough to think that when people make these declarations and leave the comments open, that they are also open to a bit of pushback. When it comes to religion and economics, it seems, this is never the case; the followers of von Mises and of Marx indeed seem to far more fervent in their economic than their religious faith.

So I suppose in retrospect it was really a waste of time to engage either of them. I'm emphatically not an Austrian when it comes to economics; laissez-faire isn't ever going to be tried anyway so that's something of a moot point. Their refusal to acknowledge how economic power translates into political power is obtuse. That said, the Marxists have never manage to convince me either. Partly it's because I think the Marxist theory of classes is defective. Anyone can see, looking at a modern corporation, that ownership is not power; and by and large, the kind of people who can write articulately about Marxist thought are by that very capability rendered unrepresentative of the classes they write to defend. White dismissed this with the insistence that I read some Marxist theorist, which I suppose I eventually will. Around that time was when Vasquez started deleting responses.

We then moved on to a typically overheated denunciation of von Hayek. I've not read him, and I don't care to defend him. But eventually the hyperbole got to me. I don't know when von Hayek started having people shot to "introduce his policies" but people are having trouble counting how high the numbers various communist regimes had executed or starved or worked to death. The slaughter should give anyone pause, especially anyone educated. So when I expressed this, um, reluctance to embrace the revolution, Vasquez sneered:

You’re an Episcopalian, so you really don’t believe in anything, so I think you’re safe when the Revolution comes. Besides, isn’t most of your church Marxist anyway? I don’t see why you are on my blog *** about it. Get your own *** sandbox. Or better yet, get a real religion.

Well, the Anglican way is to sneer back, so let me just say that he passed up the opportunity to proclaim how the members of my bourgeois church would be shot first, I suppose because his Roman snobbery got a hold on the keyboard first. It's amazing how many Catholics are under this delusion that the Episcopalians have some sort of validity envy of the Roman church, when the truth is that we are more likely to hold it in contempt as boorish, irreverent, pagan, backward, crude, tasteless, heretical, and arrogant to boot.

About Mr. White I have less to say. I didn't follow his old blog as to me it read as something akin to performance art, not to mention that I didn't need him to tell me that I didn't want to join an Orthodox church. I found it repellent to agree with him. So now he's started over as an already jaded cultural Catholic, Marxism intact. And while there are a variety of reasons why I don't put up a picture of myself on my blog, Number Two of which is that I do not photograph flatteringly, it gives me pause to go to his front page and be confronted with the sort of visage that, seen in person, would give one the sinking feeling that one was about to be made a participant in a bar fight or some other such recreational violence. It makes me wonder that I, sometimes nicknamed Eeyore as a child, a perpetual pessimist, am made to feel quite chipper about the future of things when I read the two of them.

There's Objective, and then there's Catholic

2010-09-01T16:28:00.002-04:00

It has been a long time since I put up a new post here, partly because I have found it more, um, worthwhile (if not profitable) to talk primarily about theology and the Anglican Continuing Crisis, and partly because I hadn't really found much novel to comment on concerning general religious discussion on line. However here we have an amazing tendentious assertion from Hilary White:

But what is much more infrequently (ie. never) mentioned is the reason the Church teaches the things she does. And the reason she remains "intransigent" on things like women's ordination and same-sex marriage. Here's a little secret that we would like journalists to understand better: When a Catholic, from the pope on down to the parish tea-lady, says "the Church teaches..." they mean "it is objectively true that..." In other words, neither the Pope, nor the parish tea lady has any more power to change it than they have the power to change the rate at which gravity makes things fall down.

What is rarely understood is that the Church approaches these things like a scientist approaches an observable phenomenon. The scientist, when looking at something through a telescope or microscope, asks himself "What is this? What does it do? What is it made of?" He wants to know what is the actual, objective truth is about the phenomenon. He observes its characteristics and writes them down. He tests his observations by setting up experiments and repeating the experiments to see if the observations are always the same. He asks a set of questions about it based on axioms, things that are self-evidently true and are impossible to doubt. In the Laws of Rational Thought, an axiom is what you have to start with, to base your investigations on, if you want to understand anything.

[...]

The Church, similarly, when presented with a new thing, cloning and embryonic stem cell research for example, starts by examining it and asking a set of questions based on what we already know. Both the Natural Law and Revelation give us a set of moral axioms to build with.

Well, except not. First of all, most big scientific advances happen when some set of "axioms", which is to say, self-evident and undoubted principles, fail to account for observed phenomena. Looking for truly axiomatic principles in moral teaching is essentially hopeless; we have Nietzsche to thank for that revelation. What we have in Christianity are a basic set of principles which are in arguable, and in that sense are like unto axioms. But the set of the truly inarguable propositions is exceedingly small, perhaps consisting of a single sentence.

And beyond that, there are the metaprinciples upon which official Catholicism relies quite heavily. The chief of these is the assertion that it is possible to work out a systematic morality which gives definite answers. That is not necessarily a proposition that could be defended from scripture. But there are others that quite definitely cannot be derived from scripture, nor from any axiomatic basis which enjoys acceptance as such. Chief among these is the Thomistic reliance on Aristotle, whose approach to natural science has, to be blunt, failed miserably in the face of the Baconian methods we now use.

Catholic moral theology claims to be universal, and one can, I think, argue that scripture does not provide authority for more than a really limited relativism. But White's claims towards objectivity are belied by the reliance upon infallibility. Objective reasoning works when anyone does it, and the one thing that is abundantly clear is that Catholic moral reasoning only works in a Catholic framework, a philosophical structure which is widely criticized even within Christianity. Worse, the infallibility claims imply that it only works when the Roman magisterium uses it. That is the very antithesis of objectivity.

Also, it's manifestly obvious that they do have the "power" to change their teachings, inasmuch as one understands "power" to mean the raw capability to do so. We are given free will after all. And the analogy with science, otherwise flawed, shows in this light exactly where the fault lies. If one is to hold moral principles to have an objective existence in the same manner that scientific laws do, then the process of moral theology would appear to consist of the discovery of these principles in the same manner that we work out the laws of physics or whatever. But the history of science is, after all, the history of older, imperfect formulations being replaced by new and in some sense more accurate formulations. The reality is that we do change the laws of physics, when we find that the ones we have aren't good enough; thus Newtonian mechanics have been modified with the addition of relativistic effects, and on top of that we now have to deal with quantum mechanical rules of behavior. That picture is utterly unlike the Catholic picture of moral reasoning, and indeed the mainstream of Protestant moral theology would say that we do find errors in Catholic formulations that have to be corrected, or that new technologies present us with novel moral situations which may require modification of old rules. The point is that the analogy doesn't bring us to infallibility either; indeed, it leads in the opposite direction.

These issues are why the media pay no attention to these claims and continue to qualify their reports by saying that "the Catholic Church teaches". In the scope in which objectivity has to be established, Catholic moral reasoning is just one of a set of competing explanations, and as their reasoning enjoys no wide consensus, and indeed relies upon loyalty to the organization for its ultimate authority, no objective report would ever identify it as anything but Church teaching.

The M Man Was High

2008-03-06T08:42:00.002-05:00

As sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, Time and U.S. News will have something reasonably reverential for Easter, and Newsweek will encourage us to apostasy. Well, this year they've been beaten to the punch: a professor of cognitive psychology at Hebrew U is suggesting that Moses was tripping when he saw the burning bush. Personally, I think James Lileks has the inside track on this one:

I called to say I didn’t believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn’t have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they’re freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish.

Actually, I think this is the sort of theory you come up with you are high, and a believer in one's own profundity.

It's utter rot, of course, and anyone who thought about it for five seconds-- or, like Mr. Lileks, was in college about the time I was, and therefore has seen stoned people in action-- can see that it's rot. It's more plausible to figure that somebody in the Jahwist tradition just made the whole thing up. And also of course, it is bouncing all over the news media; I got well over a hundred hits through Google News. Either the critical faculties of the media are completely shot (possibly through excessive use of the same drugs in journalism school), or they're just engaged in agitating to sell papers/pop-up ads. It remains to be seen whether this will settle into the vast mire of anti-religious claptrap which circulates sluggishly on the net. I suspect it is too stupid to make the cut, but then, it's hard to exaggerate how stupid an idea can remain in circulation.

I Learned All I Need to Know About Modern Sexuality at UMCP

2008-01-16T11:48:00.000-05:00

Overt at Newsweek they have a column titled "My Turn", and for the January 14th issue it is occupied by an article by one Bonnie Eslinger: Yes To Love, No To Marriage. The subtitle: "I am committed to Jeff for life. I just don't need a piece of paper and a pretty white dress to prove it."

Not surprisingly, this has drawn a lot of dismayed (if not depressed) commentary, as well as some quite cogent observations on the seeming immaturity of the sentiments she expresses. Ironically, from a typical Anglican theology of marriage, she is but one step from marriage in writing the article; all she needs is for her "husband" to make the same commitments publicly.

There is little that one can add to the volume of words already written. She refuses to formalize her relationship, and therefore isn't committed enough. And she sees herself as having no obligation to society at large, for her "rejection" of marriage is in essence a refusal to guarantee to the rest of the world that she will make good on the commitments she says she has made. It is irresistibly tempting to predict the collapse of her commitments (and especially those of her husband, who after all offered to do the right thing) in the face of the difficulties marriages (or arrangements) inevitably face.

But let us go back to 1979, or thereabouts. Because of the vagaries of college scheduling, I ended up taking a session of summer school. It being a transient affair, we who chose to live in the dorms were cast together willy-nilly, and I ended up with this guy who every night brought in his girlfriend for coupling. I suppose it is a symptom of the impersonality of the whole affair that I haven't the slightest recollection of his name, and I'm not entirely sure I ever remembered it. But at any rate, we had something of a standing arrangement wherein I simply didn't come to the room in the evening before a certain hour. Nonetheless I did walk in on them a couple of times when their tryst-- well, "tryst" is way too civilized a word for it: when their copulation was not consummated sufficiently early.

This went on for several weeks, and then one day he announced to me that he planned to have his girlfriend in for the weekend, and that I needed to find somewhere else to sleep while they did this. This struck me as an unreasonable imposition, and when "no" wasn't sufficient, I was surprised to find that the Resident Director didn't share my opinion. I eventually bowed my head to the Spirit of the Age and found someone else who grudgingly let me move in with the for the week or so left in the session.

Thirty years on, it still epitomizes to me the surrealism of the weird mutation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with sexual urges placed on its own level below all else. Beds are for sex, not sleeping; walls and roofs are to keep staring eyes out, not the cold and rain. I wonder whether this fellow ever married his sex partner, and if they did wed, whether they are still married.

In that light, one sentence of Miss Eslinger's proclamation stands out. She is especially dismissive of the symbols of marriage, but then says all too tellingly, "If it's not a wedding, if there's no priest or piece of paper from the state, some people just don't give any weight to your commitment—despite high divorce rates that remind us that such formalities offer no guarantee the relationship will endure." Well, obviously they have even less obligation to play by Miss Eslinger's rules than she has to play by those that society sets forth; they could reasonably hold that Miss Eslinger is really obligated to play by society's rules, and that she will just have to live with the consequences of her defiance. But they could also say, "your love for your partner is limited, because you are unwilling to sacrifice your distaste for marriage as an institution in order to fulfill the commitment you claim to make." It's not paper or the priest or any of the trappings of a wedding that make the wedding, but the vows made before God and man to live in marriage. If one is not willing to make those vows, then others may assume that one's commitment isn't so permanent and so extensive. They will understand that one's commitment to the commitment isn't, well, committed.

Indeed, it is the fact that marriage is so sacred that it is written into societal structure. Society says, "put up, or shut up; make the vows and record them legally, or we will not take you seriously." And society is utterly correct. One's love, if perfected, consents to such bonds; their rejection is evidence of love's imperfection.

If You Can't Beat 'em, Crash 'em

2008-01-14T10:29:00.000-05:00

Those who try to follow the Anglican mess probably know that the CaNN servers, which used to support T19 and a (ahem) host of other more conservative sites, started having big problems, and finally failed utterly. Most of the sites they supported have since migrated either to StandFirm or Wordpress, but recovery of the old material was attempted.

Well, it now comes out that this wasn't an accident. They were hacked. Twice, on top of what appears to have been a long term effort to knock them down. And the first attack, they claim, traces back to "an Anglican office".

Further comment seems superfluous.

Our Druidic Past

2007-12-18T10:31:00.000-05:00

Remember the Melnyks? Well, for some reason, the matter is back. I'm not sure why bringing up a two year old book is timely, but perhaps it is to get in the following paragraph:

Melnyk’s problems within the Episcopal Church began when he was ‘exposed’ by a conservative Christian website seeking more ammunition for attacking the Episcopal Church’s consecration of a gay priest as Bishop. They accused Melnyk of taking part in rituals celebrating the Divine Feminine. Although he never practised anything but orthodox rites in his church, steadfastly maintained that he was not “in conflict with the Baptismal Covenant and the historical Creeds of the Church,” and had the support of the majority of his parishioners, he felt he had no option but to resign his ministry. ”I was told I could stay if I agreed to sever ties with my friends and never again write about Druidry,” Melnyk said. “But I knew The Apple and the Thorn was on the way, and I would not agree to being silenced.”

Not top put too fine a point on it, but this a misrepresentation to the point of being an outright lie. To recap:

Melnyk was not initially implicated; nor for that matter was his wife. The incident began when Christianity Today wrote up an anonymous rite on the pages of the Episcopal Church Office of Womens Ministry. The story may have started at IRD< but it was the CT version that got things rolling. In any case, no names were given.

The Melnyks entered the picture when the rite was traced back to another on-line copy with Ms. Rev. Melnyk's name on it. William Melnyk wasn't immediately implicated by this.

Mr. Melnyk was found out when various people poking around on the web found a lot of material identifying him as a Druidic priest doing business as "Oakwyse".

What is particularly offensive about the, well, lies about the history of the incident is that it's pathetically easy, even with the failure of the blog archives on the CANN website, to track down the truth about this. Try this GetReligion search, for starters. With the proliferation of blogs and other independent records, it is not almost impossible to make such a controversy permanently fade into the past. Anyone with Google can pull it back readily, even in the face of the many deletions and bad links. It's yet another example of a web post which in effect counts on people not exercising the research power which the net itself makes so readily available.

The Globalization of Dissent

2007-08-27T16:05:00.000-04:00

One risk of trying to follow church disputes from blogs is the posturing, but the other risk is not seeing the long view. I offer up Episcopal Dissidents, African Allies: The Anglican Communion and the Globalization of Dissent, a dissertation by Miranda K. Hassett, as something of a corrective. It's quite long, but as a totally secular and scholarly perspective on how this is playing out in the larger communion, it's quite valuable.

Conjugation of Church Nouns

2007-06-16T08:34:00.000-04:00

From Huw Raphael's lectionary blog, +Z'ev:

In common usage, eisogesis is one of those irregular nouns. It’s only used in the second person negative:

My book is exegesis.
Your sermon is eisogesis.
Their blog is filled with bloody heresies.

and

These models might come into direct conflict if we see Church as another one of those irregular nouns:

We have church.
You have something, but we’re not sure what.
They have nothing at all.

Paul Zahl on Blogging Ethics

2006-06-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

I think Zahl has it all wrong. It's not the lack of real names that creates the ethical problems. Sure, it might be nice to be able to know who to sue (though I wouldn't be adverse to appearing as 'Friskiness T. Gunrunning' if it came to that). But the bigger problems have more to do with the form than they have to do with obvious anonymity.

It's all Rush Limbaugh's fault.

No, seriously. Blogs have a lot in common with Rush's old "rant and take calls" format than they do with online fora or newsgroups. It was his program that established the "dittohead" phenomenon, where Rush postificated and his groupies called in to give "what he said" responses. Blogs are prone to the same sort of behavior, except amplified in the usual way the computers allow.

Successful blogs develop a following, and that following is rather often of like-minded people. And especially if the blogger comes on strong in expressing his positions, it's pretty likely that contrary responses get jumped on by the crowd. The result can be a kind of gang attack. But surprisingly the ethical problems appear when the blogger tries to rein this in, since his forms of control all involve some sort of censorship. Some people are just disruptive, and there's not much that can be done about them except ban them. But almost anyone with a contrary position can be taken as disruptive, because the most harmonious state is where never a constrasting view is heard. And that's where the really pernicious problems lie, because the temptation will be to falsify the history of the discussion by deleting or altering posts. And in religious discussion, there is the further temptation of interpreting contrary views as being immoral not just in their content, but simply in their stating. The expression of dissent is then transformed into bad manners-- and therefore it can be suppressed.

Thus tendency is to turn a blog into a little pool of the like-minded, openly hostile to dissent. And the world of bloggers turns into a bunch of little armed villages.

Bad manners? I don't think ending anonymity is really enough of a protection against that. After all, Dr. Zahl himself has been pilloried at length for "uncharitable" and excessive acts and statements he has made in public under his own name, as for instance when he refers to "the steamroller of what we now call 'revisionism'". It was an absurd statement, but putting his name to it didn't seem to curb his tongue. And conversely, as computers amplify anything else they offer the opportunity for the anonymous to abuse an e-mail address by bombarding it with abuse too.

The Internet Theologian Tells All

2006-05-30T13:19:00.000-04:00

Although he isn't Terry Mattingly, the Internet Theologian is very funny-- not to mention full of insights:

The Internet Theologian Explains The Da Vinci Code

"The time has come for some kind of crib sheet for the confused and frightened, a handy, easy-to-use reference guide for identifying some of the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity.This, however, is not that guide."

From Touchstone: "No More Hims of Praise"

2006-05-09T12:38:00.000-04:00

(Tip to Wyclif)

According to Anthony Esolen, writing in Touchstone magazine, comments on the hymnal version of the latest trend in liturgy emasculation. It's bad enough in The Hymnal 1982 that there's hardly a male pronoun in the whole thing other than those referring to God. The resulting Bowdlerization is often painfully unpoetic (or at least jarring, to those of us who remember the real words), but at least they aren't heretical.

Well, apparently that wasn't enough. So here we have a familiar hymn as further corrected by some RC hymnodist:

Praise the Lord for grace and favor
To all people in distress,
Praise God, still the same as ever,
Slow to chide and swift to bless.
Alleluia, alleluia! Glorious now God’s faithfulness.

Does that not fill you with holy fervor? No? So what if the grammar is a little, um, tenuous. So what if the awkward chisel marks of political correctness mar the finish. After all, we can do without beauty in liturgy, can't we?

Frankly, I had hoped this disease could be confined to the pages of Enriching Our Worship or other follies of Anglican liturgical revisionism. And kept there, and never approved for permanent use. Or better still, suppressed. What is most striking about the ongoing revision of ECUSA liturgy is the utter denial of the past. I don't buy Peter Toon's attacks on the 1979 BCP for a minute, but the differences between it and subsequent trial liturgies puts 1979 in the bizarre position of arch-conservatism. Structurally 1928 and 1979 are very different; theologically (except for some questionable changes in the ordinal) they are different points on a continuum of emphasis. These new works are emphatically not, to the point where I must reject them.

If we can't say the ancient names of God, we have cut ourselves off from the Church. For the church must be able to tell us something about God, and surely His names would count as a pretty crucial "something". So what we are getting is a reversion to ante-Nicene Christianity-- the bad part, what with Gnostics and various anti-trinitarian heresies. In the Pagels/Ehrmann fantasy world of a Jesus perverted by the church this might make sense, but that world isn't the real world. In this world, when the church is set up as teaching that everything it had to say for the last 1600 years, both morally and theologically, is dubious if not outright in error, there's every reason to turn away from that church, or at least from those who present it that way.

If Jesus calls God "father", and commands us to do the same, who are we to improve upon his morals and his theology? Let Confessing Reader's daughter have the last word: “That’s just stupid.”

Weeds

2006-04-29T08:42:00.000-04:00

Discussion of the Diocese of Washington expose in Father Jake's blog has escalated from the original point to commendations of Bishop Chane's supposed courage and a long sermon that begins:

Building is slow, sometimes painful. It requires continued daily effort over time. Ages, centuries.

Destruction is quick. It’s done in no time. It doesn’t cost anything (apart from what’s destroyed).

Courage; yes this is rare in deed. And Bishop Chane is courageous. And no one have stood up to defend and support him.

I don't think what Chane is doing requires any courage, but that's not the point. To do justice to the author's work would require quoting almost all of it, but by the time we get to the end of it, we learn that bullies are destructive, it only takes one, it's all about fear, "political Calvinism" means that "the organization is to serve the Body of Christ", that St. Paul is relevant (but presumably not those passages in 1 Corinthians), that tradition is spent bullying one's neighbors, that we are called to love our brothers and sisters....

Obviously most of this is of the same ilk as a congressman or senator's speech yielding to no one in his defense of motherhood, apple pie, truth, justice, and the American way. It's empty rhetorical calories, or worse, self-congratulation. And just about the only content in this speech is a rather dubious condemnation of Cantuar for not attacking Akinola in his Easter sermon instead of addressing an issue (The Da Vinci Code) which is of more relevance to his own diocese and in my opinion more germane to an Easter sermon anyway.

But let's turn to all this talk of bullying and destruction. As a gardener, I can testify that planting takes minutes and weeding takes forever. The weeds have a different perspective on this, for it takes a weed a while (but not long enough for me!) to grow to seeds, and a second for me to pull it up. And when I turn from my flowers to the moral teachings of the church, it's surely a matter of perspective. It's reasonable to attribute it ALL to destruction. But then, from every life some weeds must be pulled.

Punted by Ponty

2006-04-05T10:50:00.000-04:00

Al Kimel of Pontifications fame has asked me to stop commenting in his blog, and it appears he is determined to enforce this, since he has deleted a comment I made in response to someone else's query explaining that I had been asked not to continue.

Back in the ancient days of usenet news, taking back what we said became quickly impossible as the backbone refused to transmit message deletions. Soon enough after that, dejanews and the caching of old news items mean that our words remained available essentially forever, at least for anyone who knows how to search the archives. Therefore, plenty of what I said twenty years ago can be anyone with the wits and desire to find it.

I haven't looked at usenet religion discussion in years, and it seems to me that the real action has moved to blogs and to a lesser extent to fora. Thus, as discussion has moved away from publicly archived sites, erasure of the past has become a problem. It is less so in a forum, because as a rule the maintainers do want to archive traffic and find, as with usenet, that allowing people to erase their posts is an opening for abuses. But blogs are different: they can be erased and edited at will, and therefore they offer all sorts of temptations for erasing the past. I've seen this happen quite a bit: the history of the Russian Orthodox Automomous Church in the USA involves a number of deleted blogs and websites. Much of the pagan rites flap of October 2004 was carried out as the various offenders scurried about deleting their various webpages and blogs, though not fast enough for us "persecutors" to ferret them out.

My last response in Al's blog was deleted. Before that I saw my comments entering a sort of moderation. And in looking back at at the predecessor topic I see that Al also appears to have deleted the somewhat intemperate message with which he closed it. On one level, I'm annoyed, with cause, that I am not being allowed to close out my presence in his blog. It is perhaps not deliberate, but he has created the false impression that I withdrew into my hole, presumably failing to answer the questions which were put to me. But then, websites and blogs are always, in a way, false fronts. We write out our thoughts to the world, and then we take them back, thus editing our countenance for those to come.

The New Tractarians?

2006-01-11T15:40:00.000-05:00

(Tip to Serge)

Over on A View From the Sacristy has a post which suggests:

And in that wondering, I can’t help but think on the world of blogging as a new witness and perhaps a new, “Tracts for Our Times.” And within this I don’t speak to Anglicanism at all. I speak to the wonderful web of folks, mainly traditional ‘Anglo-Catholics’ or Anglicans, feisty traditional Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox folks (in no particular order) who have banded together to form an appeal to Holy Tradition and a witness to something ancient and in our modern day, something new that does speak to people’s lives….or least those willing to listen.

I would love to believe this, but alas I think it isn't so and won't really happen. Blogging about controversy seems to create communities of those who reckon agreement unto righteousness, where posturing is more important than taking opposition seriously. Well, perhaps the original tractarians shared the same fault.

But there's also the The Law of the Stupidest Argument and the priciples of Jerks For Jesus, Bullhorns For Everyone, and The Standard Arguments. It's extremely hard to sustain worthwhile discussion in a medium that rewards people who make biting, conventional, and simplistic comebacks over those who make longer, calmer, and more considered responses. Time and again I find myself refraining from commenting because I've spent enough time thinking about something to ensure that the post has rolled off the page and that nobody is going to read what I wrote. Time and again I don't respond because a wave of standard argument quick comebacks have swamped the comments of a post. Time and again I cut my responses off because it's clear that the person on the other end doesn't read what I wrote, but only what one of the stereotypical participants would have said. The same lack of psychological presence that allows flaming also allows the more subtle fault of reducing opponents to cardboard-thin stock characters rather than real, changeable people who hold their own, changeable opinions.

What tends to happen, as a result, is that forums and blogs tend to get locked into a circle of like-minded people who tend to reinforce their common prejudices and opinions, but who are cut off from other communities with dissenting opinions. I think that's one of the biggest differences I see between blogs and the tractarians. The Tracts were written to convince the rest of the church; blog articles tend to be written to reinforce membership in the blogger's subculture. Traditionalists write to other traditionalists; liberals write to other liberals. The communities are disjoint and often as not contemptuous to each other. Therefore I tend to find the writing on both sides disappointing, because it never risks the one thing that would make it a real, living argument: refutation.

What They Have Written, They Have Written

2005-12-23T09:58:00.000-05:00

There's a general folk belief among skeptics in the unreliability of biblical texts, reinforced by the spatter of footnotes at the bottom of modern translations, and excised from the KJV versions that older people grew up with. Now in the OT there's more basis for this. There are areas where there is obvious damage to the Hebrew text. But these are not extensive, and they tend to be concentrated in certain passages and books. In the NT the issues are much smaller.

Of late there has been a lot of fuss about Misquoting Jesus, a book by Bart Ehrman that claims that the New Testament has been redacted (accidentally and on purpose) in the direction of supporting Orthodox doctrine against the competition. I haven't read this book, and I'm not sure how well I could really evaluate it, not being a scriptural scholar nor having ready access to the texts which would need to be cited in order to defend such a thesis.

I have managed to find this discussion of textual reliability in general, with some specific discussion of Ehrman's work (based primarily on a previous book, however). The impression I get from the article is that Ehrman's work is based on comparison of texts of different age; thus his conclusions are generally sound, but also largely irrelevant to readers of modern translations. The reason for this is that the translators, in working from the same text, tend to translate from the older (and presumably unchanged) version. Here and there in the crank-odox world one finds those who are fanatical adherents to the "Byzantine" text rather than the Nestle-Aland older versions favored by most modern translations, and this text (as well as the western Textus Receptus) are presumably subject to the errors/changes Ehrman discusses. As the article I cite comments, most of the small amendations pale against the larger surface message of the text, and anyone reading a modern, non-sectarian translation won't even see most of them. The media seem to be making far more out of this book than is justified.

Rick Laribee cites a dissertation which analyzes the variation in a single passage in detail. It should surprise nobody to learn that the analysis shows that almost all the variation involves easily correctable typos and other obvious errors. Indo-European languages such as Greek allow extensive error correction; the distance between meaningful variations of a text is typically quite large, and therefore requires substantial modification to get from one to the other.

There's really no getting past that the scriptural texts do intend to tell the same story which their authors intended to tell.

Kirk Hadaway & Co. on Church Statistics

2005-12-14T09:21:00.000-05:00

Read this interview.

My Bible! Mine!

2005-11-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

One of the standard arguments one sees used in Orthodox arguments against Protestants is some variation or another of the following:

As if the Bible would or could exist without the Church's authority behind it.

This comes from the blog of Huw Raphael, who is an ex-Anglican-- not that I'm surprised at that. Indeed, one thing that strikes me is how often Anglican converts to Orthodoxy resort to arguing against a theory of scriptural authority which Anglicanism rejects.

See, the bible exists because people wrote it down. In the case of any part of the OT it is laughable to suggest that it was done at the behest of a church which did not yet exist-- at least not in the form of a visible organization. In the NT, the question is at least not utterly rediculous, but it's abundantly clear that the texts were written first and then recognized for their authority, and not the other way around. The New Testament texts were written within the church, but they were not written by the church.

Furthermore, the NT is shot through, from end to end, with the assertion that the church-- by which I mean, anyone or group claiming to speak for Christ-- can be held accountable to scripture. The best one can maintain is that the True Church always passes this test.

The real issue is the naive, hyper-Protestant view that one can interpret scripture outside of any tradition (and thus free of a church). The thing is, Anglicans since Hooker have agreed that this is impossible, so for ex-Anglicans to hang this albatross around their rejected church's neck is disingenious. Spong's error isn't total rejection of tradition. It is his acceptance of the tradition of modernism, and his theses don't hold together at all if that tradition is rejected.

In the bigger picture, anyone who is choosing churches on the basis of correct theology is in fact acting as their own authority. And conversely, Protestantism in the large is precisely the recognition that the Catholic Church departed along the way from the faith-- historic or not-- in ways important enough to justify separation. (And since some of those errors are also held to by Orthodox, similar separation is justified.)

All of this ties into lame ecclesiological disputation anyway. If utter theological obedience to one's church were demanded in Anglican churches, then this conversion would be illegitimate too. The irony, of course, is that Spong was made possible because Anglican churches do just the opposite.

I'm curious as to whether there is a patristic version of the argument, by the way. SO far I've only gotten this as a lay explanation, almost always from converts.

The Punk Strunk

2005-09-06T10:04:00.000-04:00

The other week I was in Borders, picking up a copy of Beowulf for my wife (ever stopped to consider that there's a connection between Grendel and Norman Bates?), and I came across a little white book on the new release tables.

Why business people speak like idiots

Within a minute, I knew I had to take this book home with me. It's all about the nonsense that is the usual language of business these days, where people have to say "leverage" instead of, say "use". And speaking of using, on Page 45 there is a neat little chart showing that the readability (using the Flesch score) of CEO letters to shareholders correlates quite nicely with how much trouble the company is in. That's news you can use.

It's interesting that, though they take a passing swipe and grammar and usage pedants, part of their message can be traced right back to Strunk & White. Here's what they say:

The third motive for obscurity is business idiots' relentless attempt to romanticize whatever it is that they do for a living. All of this romanticizing keeps the business world from talking about work and instead allows business idiots to pretend to be secret agents and quarterbacks.

And here's what White wrote:

[He] is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight.

Obviously the standard of adventure has changed with the years. And maybe there's more hope for the message when delivered by Deloitte than by your English teacher.

At any rate, besides recommending this book for the office, I'm looking towards its theological application. Theology is laden with jargon, much of it of highly questionable significance. There's definitely something wrong with saying that God is incomprehensible and then burying this statement in a mound of polysyllabic dogma.

The 2 1/2 Foot Shelf at Notre Dame

2005-08-28T20:39:00.000-04:00

Someone was quoting from some anti-Christian nutecase, and my wife happened across this:

Anti-Catholic Printed Material Collection (ANT)
University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA)
Notre Dame, IN 46556

Contents: Anti-Catholic printed material and printed material concerning anti-Catholicism: books, pamphlets, leaflets, periodicals, offprints and printed ephemera.

In the Nature of a Wrench

2005-08-22T12:49:00.000-04:00

James Kushiner blogs, over in Mere Comments:

Man in the West does not seem at peace with his biological nature and in many ways seeks to transcend it or frustrate it. He does not seem at peace with, say, the natural fertility of the sexual act.

But man seems to be at peace with the mechanization of himself. Perhaps it is because these changes have generally happened incrementally over time that he has gotten used to them. Many men think they must be good changes and believe that, just like evolution, these steps must be in the direction of evitable progress, a gradual improvement of the species.

Now, comments such as these set off my "liberal arts" detector. Those of us over on the technology end of the academy also talk about "appropriate technology" and the like; what we don't do is make noises of amazement that people seek out and use technology. Maybe it's because, as people who exert what mastery we have over the world, it is hard for us to imagine there is anything remarkable about what we've done ever since we were old enough to pick up tools.

But there's also that nagging matter of scripture. Technology as the fruit of mankind is prophesied at length in the first three chapters of Genesis; the ability to attempt to manage the world about us is one of the fundamental traits of humanity. On that both scripture and the world agree. And a mathematician such as myself sees the will to do nothing as simply a specific case of that management; it is yet an exercise of the will.

That is, in particular, why I find discussions of fertility and its control almost inevitably crippled by incomplete consideration. It is not just with steroids and rubber and the knife that we control fertility; in the larger picture, it is with vaccines and antibiotics and sanitation that we have made the biggest impact. I think that nobody would willing go back to a 17th or 15th century control of fertility through disease and war and famine.

The truth is that, yes, there are plenty of engineers out there who are completely blind to the implications of the devices they design. And unfortunately, there are as many lawmakers, and manufacturers, and writers and counselors who are blind. And there are many whose particular hammer is the universal tool-- engineers who can fix everything with technology, and writers who can fix everything with words.

But there are also plenty of people, all around, who do consider the implications of what they build or advocate. But they sin, and therefore do not think things through well; and the rest of humanity is so very cunning in their ability to pervert whatever the thoughtful people come up with. Thus it seems to me that one's "thoughtful" consideration is easily itself perverted into a sinful self-ratification. Nothing is more ironic than talk of the perils of technology, broadcast worldwide on the internet.

Obviously We're Looking For DIfferent Things

2005-08-12T09:39:00.000-04:00

OK, so I have some competition in the how to do church websites department, with Tony Morgan's 10 Easy Ways to Keep Me from Visiting Your Church Because I Visited Your Website" (which I got to from titusonenine. And I notice his advice varies from mine in several significant aspects.

As I remarked earlier, people looking at parish websites do so with a variety of different intents. So, here I might be, heading off to Grainger, IN, and what would I (personally) do? Well, nothing that finds "Grainger Community Church"-- in fact, the very name indicates to me that (besides not being Episcopal) it's not going to do worship as I know it.

Which leads us to some of the points he drags out. A lot of them are common sense web design things, and while I hadn't thought about the "pink and doves" thing, he does have a point with that one. But then we come upon this:

Put a picture of your building on the main page. After all, ministry is all about the buildings. Ah, but buildings are about ministry, and the form of the building says volumes about what's going to happen inside. Everything about GCC's website-- but especially the few pictures of the building-- says "there will be no liturgy inside."

Which brings me to a point. There are three kinds of church visitors: people like me and (I must presume) Mr. Morgan, who are in town already knowing what kind of church they're looking for; people paying their respects (wedding, funeral, etc.) who most of all just need to be able to find the place; and raw seekers who maybe have no idea what they want. I'm not sure exactly what websites are supposed to do for the latter, partly because I haven't been one in any part of my adult life, but partly because it has always seemed to me that different people have sought along different roads.

Looking at websites like that of GCC or (another he mentions in a different post) Crossroads Community Church gives me a message, all right: there's no place for me, because I'm too old to go to rock concerts. And even when I was young enough, I would have used the internet (not available at the time) to exclude "community churches". And why not? Because

-- and this is the kicker --

by then I already knew enough to read all the theological decisions hidden in what people said about church. Ignoring the surface details of whether auditorium music will survive better than congregational hymnody (though I'll bet on the latter), there is theology hidden in the difference between what GCC says it does about church and what St. Paul's Random Episcopal says it does about church. And the funny thing is that protestant websites tend to be about hiding that difference to the degree that only the ecclesiological cognoscenti can discern what a parish is about. I happen to know that "community church" normally means "standard American evangelical theology", but what about the unchurched seeker?

With All Due Respect to Toads

2005-07-22T14:17:00.000-04:00

See Joel Achenbach's observation on Judge Roberts and the toads.

Uncle Ed and Jack Spong

2005-07-19T12:39:00.000-04:00

So, for some reason over at U.S. News and World Report they feel the need to interview John Spong again. Remarking upon this in titusonenine, one "Ted" says:

Every time I read an interview of Bp. Spong I can’t help but think of my crazy old uncle Ed. Ed was the guy who would sit in the corner at family parties, weddings etc. and talk nonsense - rant and rave etc. He was a bit of curiousity, people would look at old Ed and wonder if he was still sane. But Ed was old and so allowances were made. So it goes with Bp. Spong. Crazy old man that he is, and frankly at this point a bit of a circus-side-show like curiousity. Just ignore him and don’t let him get your dander up. Life is lonely in the “where are they now” file.

Well, I wish. Why can't the media get over this guy? Because he's an easy interview? Because they wish in their heart-of-hearts that he speaks for ECUSA? (He doesn't.)

Well before his elevation, the present Archbishop of Canterbury dissected Spong's idiotic theses. If Cantuar isn't good enough, who is?

Please, Jack Spong: spare us!

The Emerald City: Home of Satan?

2005-07-13T12:17:00.000-04:00

If it wasn't enough that Harry Potter was teaching kids to seek out black magic, now we have Amy Welborn ragging on The Wizard of Oz. Here, I think we definitely have run into a problem.

Fictional books and movies which seek to teach about religious belief are uncommon; those that intend to do so for children are quite rare. Much more commonly, it is the virtues that are the subject. So it is, clearly, with this movie. And in the scene with the wizard (which, by the way, is patently supposed to be preposterous) the message about the virtues is simple: you are what you do. Such a simple message, in fact, that Jesus teaches it in the parable of the sheep and the goats. Oh, and about self-reliance.

Ah, there's the rub. The difficulty is in the translation: "Oz the Great and Powerful" is a symbol for God; therefore the movie teaches that God is a humbug. Well, maybe. And maybe not. The symbol is more complex than that, for one thing. After all, their "prayers" to Oz-the-Powerful are answered-- just not in the way that they expected. How God-like! And further along in the movie-- well, once the balloon appears, God-symbolism is completely out the window.

The bigger issue seems to be this: in a secular movie, it's easy enough to teach against virtue, by accident or on purpose. It's easy to teach virtue on purpose. But it's exceedingly hard to teach specifically Christian principles, and next to impossible to direct people to interpret what they are seeing along specifically Christian lines.

With respect to Harry Potter, you have to be pretty thick not to notice that explicitly Christian symbols appear all over the place.

Space Aliens Seize NY Times

2005-06-23T12:07:00.000-04:00

Over in her blog Barbara Nicolosi recounts a strange set of interviews by a reporter from the New York Times You can read her account of the interviews here and a follow-up exchange here.

The back-and-forth between the reporter's clueless paranoia and Ms. Nicolosi's sarcastic comebacks is amusing, but also depressing. Earth to NYT: everything is not about political power-- or for that matter, lifestyles of the upper-middle-class Manhattanite.

Another From Waiter Rant

2005-06-23T10:51:00.000-04:00

See this entry: Nuc Dimittis

Intrepid Scholar Discovers Forum Hell

2005-06-07T08:47:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of titusonenine we have a posting from "Alan Mendelsohn" concerning Academic Flame Wars. Now, anyone who has a sufficient thick hide and has spent enough time on a religious forum or, for that matter, any on-line group where people take the topic Very Seriously has encountered the kind of behavior in his narrative.

Now, it seems to me that the employment discussion veered off the rails most obviously, falling straight into the pit of tolerance forsaken. A "reactionary candidate"? Suck it up! Learn to live with someone with radically different views! And a "Clarence Thomas"? In a literature department? The university in question is unnamed, but frankly English departments, on the average, impress me as a climate where W.E.B.deBois would come off as maybe something of a rightist. (Just my unenlightened prejudices at work.)

It's well-known that on-line interaction appears to lower the stakes for heated responses. There's a subtle twist in both incidents where things fall apart because people are told that they have to take sides. It shows up most clearly in the strike discussion because that's the issue that sets off the flaming-- I think somewhat accidentally. One has to trust, of course, in the narrative as recounted, but I think John's post contains a mistake which is found all over religious discussion.

The problem is that the potential strikers didn't have two choices; they had three. Perhaps he meant to say that the choices of non-involvement and denunciation of the other strike would be conflated by outsiders into denunciation. If he meant this, he was probably right. But it jeopardized the argument by placing allegiance ahead of discourse, and it's inevitable in any group of people who pride themselves on their rationality to react to such a maneuver with a flood of emotion.

Which is why religious arguments break down even more readily. In the midst of bunch of sinners, the transformation of opinion into sin is itself going to set off a whole lot more sinning. It is impossible to keep a religious discussion going if the participants cannot restrain themselves to talking about theology as ideas instead of moral justifications/transgressions.

The Figurative Illusion

2005-06-06T08:47:00.000-04:00

Thomas Bushnell and (I think) Suzette Haden Elgin are having a sort of long-distance discussion about "literalism" in religious language, though I think neither of them really means that, um, literally.

English is a language which combines at least two different heritages of figures of speech. From its teutonic roots, we get a love of kennings, from its latinate roots, a love of rhetorical devices. Together they give us a tongue in which "figurative" speech is part and parcel of nearly everything we say. (I count at least 3 figures in the last sentence alone.) I'd count this sort of "figurative" speech as actually "literal" in the sense that it requires no especial decoding to comprehend.

When we talk about biblical language, it is common to talk as if it were figurative in the general sense of requiring this analysis. This is an exaggeration. Given the evolution of English in a Christian environment, it is only natural that biblical figures of speech become ordinary idioms. These become literal in the sense I used above.

Now, Genesis 1, if it is figurative, is so in a bigger sense this. I'm not too happy about the word "myth" as a term, but it does express what is going on here: instruction about the fundamental nature of the universe. If it is a literal recounting, it is so in addition to this teaching sense.

In the New Testament the problem becomes more serious. A Christianity in which Jesus' physical body remains dead and decaying in some grave is a different Christianity from ancient tradition in which that body is once again alive (albeit transformed radically). The second is "literal" and the first is not. There are, however, two complications.

First, there are the parables. As with Genesis 1, the most important point isn't the narrative itself, but what it is trying to say about God. There are those who deduce their way through their notion of Jesus' perfection to endorse the narrative truth too, but I am not impressed. The one place where it might have some real impact is in the attempt to work out what the next life is like from the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

The second complication, and the one that 20th century theologians tended to play with, is that in talking about the passion narrative the evangelists use a lot figurative language in the sense of a sort of theological idiom. Perhaps the biggest bugaboo is the word "rise". There's a real theological dispute behind all the argument about the word, but it's confounded by several factors. First, when people start talking about a "three story universe", the image in their heads is really from The Divine Comedy-- an unabashedly poetic and figurative work. Prior tradition doesn't consistently present such a picture, as for instance in the medieval iconography of Christ the Geometer (again, a poetic work). I think it can at least be argued that scriptural use of rising and falling is more or less idiomatic.

The other problem is that the words that people talk about using instead also are figurative idioms. Take, for instance, Tillich's use of the word "ground". (OK, the translation of Tillich.) It has a dozen primary meanings in the dictionary, never mind its appearance in countless idiomatic phrases. Their derivation from the literal meaning of the surface and substance of the earth suggest connotations of fundamental support-- good-- and unchanging stability-- bad.

That leads me to the suggestion that what most people would call a "literal" reading, I would call perhaps a "naive" reading. That is, they readily sort out the idioms and poetry and the parabolic language quite naturally, and while they may not be able to verbalize it they have a pretty good-- and consistent, with a certain limit-- notion of which is which.

The limit within they are consistent is of course their interpretational tradition. The literalist tradition is that which is confrontational about various issues against another viewpoint which is not naive. To keep this post from turning into a book, I'll cut off here with the observation that being knowing can, unfortunately, lie in knowing what isn't so.

No Adults Need Apply

2005-05-24T16:35:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of titusonenine we have this report from the Telegraph about a church in England which is tearing apart because of the rector's replacement of the standard BCP service with what is being called "happy-clappy" liturgy. Anglicans and Catholics everywhere are familiar with this sort of story-- heck, Catholics in the USA have had to suffer through this for decades.

What's most interesting about this story, to me, is the emphasis placed on how the normal service is passing away, to be replaced forever by this new way of doing things. For instance, in the first sentence the vicar is attempting to "modernize" his services. Pews are contrasted with "flexible seating" (i.e., stacking or folding chairs). Then there's the statement from the diocesan spokesman: "Sometimes a church may believe it right to move in a particular direction, which may involve taking risks and perhaps unsettling or upsetting some."

That statement is, of course, vacuous nonsense, justifying anything at all. It matters entirely why people are unsettled or upset; chances are, some of them may have good reason for their reactions!

A glance at the parish's excessively well-concealed website does not give an age for the rector, but unless he is the victim of early balding and grey hair, I'd guess he's at least in his middle forties. (His curate looks older still.) Maybe England is behind us in the USA, but unless one wants to use "modern" in condescending contrast to "post-modern", there's nothing really very modern about this style of service. It's squarely in the evangelical (in the American sense) tradition.

"Condescending" is important here because the whole premise is that younger people want this sort of service style. It's an overgeneralization, of course, but there's that other problem: young people grow up. The happy-happy, "always Easter and never Lent" style is (a) a bit dated already (it can be traced straight back to evangelical/RC circles of thirty years ago) and (b) rather patronizing, as though young people aren't ready for any of the serious part of religion. What young people really want is to be treated as the adults that they think they are. Meanwhile, the people who are old enough to be their parents, which is to say, those running the parish, are tempted into indulging themselves in the fantasy that they are young again (no), with it (definitely not), and oh so sensitive to their childrens' needs (not too likely).

And while I'm at it, there's another juvenile problem here: this service style definitely doesn't "play well with others". I don't know what English hymnals look like these days, but the 1982 ECUSA hymnal has a huge range of material from practically every musical tradition on earth. Spirituals, plainsong, psalter tunes, sacred harp, Lutheran chorales, Russian hymns and English folksongs sit side by side in the pages and on the service sheet. The organ or the piano steps up and accomodates them all. But for some reason, "contemporary" music won't fit in.

Unfortunately the very beautiful African choral music wasn't well known enough in the 1970s to make it into the hymnal. This is indisputably contemporary stuff. But to fit into the "contemporary" service, it has to be dumbed down. The problem? It's a capella, and it's sung in parts. This is apparently too grown up, so the tyrannous guitar has to take over the song leading, and everyone has to sing the melody, like school children.

It's time for contemporary music to grow up. Have the courage to sing what generations of men and women sang for centuries before.

Richard Kew on the Mess We're In

2005-05-24T16:13:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it seems impossible to find a blog where the positions are not dittohead dogmatic and extreme. Anglicans in particular seem to have to choose, all too often, between "when's the next bus to Rome?" Anglo-Catholics and "Robinson! Robinson! Rah, rah, rah!" liberals.

Thus, it's a pleasure to come upon Richard Kew's The Kew Continuum, and particularly this entry:

The Reclaiming of the Church

A Sense of Betrayal

2005-05-19T09:59:00.000-04:00

Word has come to me that Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. is leaving the the Episcopal Church and intends to seek ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. You can read his announcement of this here.

As a few of you may be aware, Al was my parish priest for something like a decade. He married us, and he baptized my eldest son, not to mention giving me communion nearly every Sunday for those ten-odd years. I've been watching his "progress" on his blog with increasing annoyance, to the point of exchanging a couple of e-mails when he started telling everyone to bail out of ECUSA.

I suppose I should have expected his abandonment of his church; everything in his blog pointed to this. But dammit, it still hurts; the more I think about it, the angrier I get. What are you going to tell me you were doing, Al, when you celebrated the eucharist, Sunday after Sunday?

Talking About Some Other Generation

2005-05-10T12:20:00.000-04:00

Well, our rector is about to go off on a sabbatical to explore the emerging church. This has become the current hot thing, as attested to by Christianity Today; its proponents love a certain style of cultural-commentary jargon, and say "postmodern" a lot.

Now, I think talking about "generations" is a bunch of hooey. I'm looking at some of the websites of these places-- and they are "cutting-edge" in the annoying way of not using a normal name for anything and using a lot of Flash animations-- and I'm noticing a consistent pattern about the leaders of these places: they're all about my age or a little older. I'm guessing that their kids are all middle-to-high school age because, like me, they waited until they were almost thirty to have them. And I'll bet their kids don't think their parents are cool, because there is nothing less "cool" than parents who try to be their children.

Me? When I came home from high school, I called up the local Episcopal parish to find out what time services were. (I went to the 11:15 service-- the only time fit for old ladies and college students.) By the time the founders of Cedar Ridge Community Church were getting organized, I was singing in the choir. Not too long after, I was going to a different parish which was shortly packed with young families. Cool? No! It was a by-the-book Rite II BCP sung eucharist sort of place, with standard hymns which we sang in parts.

One thing one sees around the net is that everyone has a program for saving The Church by changing how we do church. There are plenty of arch-traditionalists out there, for example, who want to pick some ideal liturgical praxis and stay there. This can work in a limited fashion but it inevitably runs up against the problem that, being reactionary, it is too much dictated by what it believes the current culture to be.

It's the progressive movements, though, that age worse. The leaders of the emerging churches are going to grow old, and they are going to lose touch with the "current". Another ten years, and their churches are going to be the churches of the old fuddy-duddies. Indeed, I'm looking at the emerging church materials and seeing merely the latest reinvention of the American evangelical style-- a style that is based in amnesis, not anamnesis, and which to me seems of the world, not in it.

Stipites Mundi

2005-05-04T16:35:00.000-04:00

Bishop Bennison, Episcopal ordinary of Pennsylvania (i.e., Philadelphia), has put forth another rather perverse discourse, as recorded in titusonenine. This piece has been analyzed all over the traditionalist Anglican world, but I particularly like the epithet from RatherNot blog: stipites mundi, the "blockheads of the world".

His entry is rather long, but worth reading in full. My reaction to Bennison's tornado-strength spin of "Catholic" is to roll my eyes, but it's nice to know that someone else out there sees how stupid this stuff is.

Mind you, there are traditionalist blockheads out there too-- perhaps later I will point out some. But the Latinate phrase was too good to pass by.

The Scent of Religious Discussion

2005-05-03T12:05:00.000-04:00

We're not making this up:

Try the new scent: Polemic

Note that the bottle is apple-shaped; I think it signifies Eris, goddess of discord.

Oolon Coluphid and the Anglicans

2005-04-28T14:57:00.000-04:00

Richard John Neuhaus has another Oolon Coluphid moment in his latest Rome Diary entry. Now, he's been declaring Anglicanism dead for years, a practice he admits irritates some of us:

"But the immediate question here is whether, as correspondents allege, I am habitually scornful of the Anglican communion."

Well, he has been not only scornful; he has tended to assume a tone which I can only describe as smart-aleck. Yes, it's entertaining to harp on the latest "epatez les orthodoxes" escapades of John Shelby Spong, but after a while the sheer irrelevance of his "faith" to the average Episcopalian is grating.

Also grating are Neuhaus's references to Newman, whose example he followed after a fashion (in Neuhaus's case, the conversion was from being a Lutheran Pastor). Newman left; Keble did not. And indeed, if the threatened disintegration of ECUSA takes place (and with the public statements of the various parties, this seems assured) the supply of Anglican converts may dry up, as traditionalists may no longer have anyone to flee.

But in any case, we are obviously in media res. The story of Anglicanism is not only not over, it is approaching a crisis which, one way or the other, will change its character forever. Neuhaus doesn't know the end of the story, nor does anyone else on earth.

And while I'm at it: the comments on the princely wedding were tacky. I can only imagine that the issues of Prince Charles' sins would be, for Rowan Cantuar, a matter for the confessional, and not properly the subject of public discussion.

(a tip of the tippet to titusonenine for bringing this to my attention)

Blogs in the Sacred Grove of Dead Trees

2005-04-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

The story of the Revs. Melnyk has gotten a bit hard on the brain of late, as Rev. William Melnyk, having repented of his Druidism, has more recently recanted his repentance, and even more recently repented of his recantation of his repentance. Confused? So am I.

What's interesting about this is how this whole saga has largely been played out as an internet affair, with the MSM serving largely as a footnote. So now the Philadelphia Inquirer has weighed in with the latest change of heart, and as the GetReligion guys have pointed out, they've got the basic story utterly wrong.

What I find curious is the emphasis on the "conservative watchdog groups". Frankly, I think that Christianity Today practically qualifies as MSM, but the fact is that us bloggers quite gleefully chased all this down because it was fun and because the Forces Of Evil were so flagrantly incompetent in covering their tracks. Everything one needed to know was out there, if one were only to look for it. Somehow a pretty straight recounting of what we found (and I was one of the researchers, I'll confess to that) has gotten turned into a fairly vague and inaccurate expression of conservative opinion. It seems that it's OK for the Inquirer to pretty much ignore a story in its own backyard (its first article on the issue wasn't published until November 5th, eleven days after the story hit the web) but not OK for the rest of us to pursue the story on our own.

Will the Inquirer print a correction? Stay tuned....

The Excluded Middle

2005-04-20T12:19:00.000-04:00

Thomas Bushnell has a blog entry about the unhappy fate of moderate positions on a certain class of social issues. To some degree I agree with what he says, but I think the subject needs deeper consideration.

Beneath his argument is a certain moral analogy: that issues of race, gender, and sexuality are, with regards to equity, essentially similar. I'd call this a conservative viewpoint in the sense that the primary contending positions have given answers in each of these three issues that assume this similarity. Bad guys said they were similar in that each issue was determined by essential differences in race/gender/sexuality; good guys said they were the same in being determined by essential equality.

For race, the equality position won. But this position has continued to be dogged by actual inequality in outcome, leading to more social problems to be fixed. This in turn has led to more radical solutions. So now the conservative position is that the law does enough now and there is nothing more to be done, the radical liberal positions vary but include such notions as reparations, and there is a quite assorted middle which thinks that the current structure of rights and laws is mostly OK but which considers a wide variety of activity or leeser modifications. (The old conservative position is now reactionary, and in practice isn't expressible in public anymore.)

The situation for gender is more extreme. The "bad" inequity positions have never been quashed, and since physical differences are more than skin deep, it has been harder to get people to agree that they don't matter. In the mass of different views it's a bit arbitrary to pick out a middle, but on one end might cite certain religiously derived views limiting women to the household, and on the other radical feminists who like to entertain the notion of parthenogenesis. There is a lot of room between these positions, and perhaps the center is to be found in the acceptance of the larger principle that employment should derive from actual ability and nothing else; that net differences between men and women should be accepted; and that the basic physical differences between the sexes prevent utter equality and that therefore some other standard of equity has to be proposed.

What strikes me about the difference between these "moderates" and those in Bushnell's examples is that the field of their "moderation" is different. Bushnell's "moderates" are compromisers; these moderates need not be.

That presents a problem with regards to same-sex marriage because there are really two questions involved. One is the metaphysical discussion of marriage, and this does indeed tend to bar a middle ground. The other, however, is the relationship between marriage and the state, and this is very much contested and allows plenty of room for a range of opinion. To help confuse matters further, in the USA this relationship requires compromise. One cannot keep "covenant" away from "law", not unless one is willing to completely bar the law from recognizing any kind of legal obligation arising out of a marriage. That would be an extremely radical position, of interest only to domineering, wife-dumping men. Thus, whatever position eventually prevails will be, on some level, a compromise.

Culture From APLM

2005-04-19T14:19:00.000-04:00

That's the Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission, a sixty year old group associated with ECUSA which started out as a body for liturgical renewal. Well, they seem to have branched out.

It's not up on their website yet, but in The Witness there is a statement from their April 2005 meeting in Estes Park CO. It's all about homosexuality, and while some of it makes cogent comments, some of it walks right into Christ and Culture problematic theology.

Consider this passage:

It is no coincidence that most of the bishops and provinces of the Anglican Communion who oppose the ordination of homosexual persons, or the blessing of their faithful relationships, are opponents of the ordination of women and the welcoming of infants at the eucharistic table as soon as they are baptized. All of these practices upset the hegemony of men in the church, and are painful for those who cling to privilege and power. No one likes to relinquish power, and it is never easy.

That curious word: hegemony. To someone of my age, someone who paid any attention to this stuff in college, it sets off an alarm. It's the language of the politicized radical chic of a quarter-century ago. Now, GC and the people who formulate positions for it-- people like the members of APLM, as it happens-- are in the hegemony business, if anyone in the church is. It also seems to me that I hear an certain frustration that they can't extend their hegemony over, say, Anglican churches in Nigeria.

But more of an issue is this language in its totally secular usage. It was, after all, the preferred language of radical feminism. In that context, it was never accurate. Individual men do not gain hegemony simply by being male; individual women are not utterly barred from power over men simply by being female. This language was always subject to the criticism that it legitimized institutional elitism, because it was indifferent to the actual differences in power among actual men and women.

In being imported into theological language, this business about giving up power was added to it. This added a note of hypocrisy to the whole endeavor, because the acts of those who espoused this line of thinking, when it came to General Convention, was not only very much to wield power, but also to spread alarm about the danger of the opposition getting power back!

Likewise, the various struggles over parishes which have hit the papers over the years have largely been about demonstrations of episcopal hegemony as exercised by liberal bishops. In the Diocese of Washington, for example, the issue was Jane Dixon's instance on a show of her power in forcing visitations upon parishes. She even said as much.

Now, I don't like the Donatist edge to this either. For better or worse, Vickie Gene Robinson is a bishop. He may be a bad bishop, and a scandal, but for me he's not on the same level of scandal as Spong. Nevertheless the conclusion of the statement borders on the disengenuous. The problem is that the theological innovators are determined to use the power structures of ECUSA to advance their positions, whether or not the rest of the communion objects. Being cut off from the rest of the communion is the natural result of this. (I think their invocation of the Donatists is overstated, BTW: I see no sign that the communion is broken any worse than it is broken between ECUSA and the Catholic church.)

"Liberal" and "Conservative" Considered Problematic

2005-04-17T06:48:00.000-04:00

Fairly early on in this series of exchanges, Thomas Bushnell clarified an entry on his blog with the following response:

"They claim to be conserving church over and against culture, when actually they are trying to conserve older culture against change."

Well, I don't think so. The word "conserve" here is the problem.

For one thing, we're a bit out of date with the terminology. Within the last year the one party has taken to calling themselves "reasserters" and has labelled the other side "revisionists". This is still not really acceptable because they've stuck the opposition with a pejorative, but at least they've put some distance between the current conflict and the French Revolution. And these labels do get at what the one side perceives as the fundamental issue.

At this very late date there's almost nothing to "conserve" about conservative culture. I'm just barely old enough to remember-- somewhat-- how the late '60s changed everything. What I do remember, and what I see looking back at materials of the time, is that there was most definitely a liberal establishment (see "the Johnson administration") and that for the most part both it and whatever there was of a conservative establishment were remade to the point of destruction in the turmoil of 1968 and subsequent years.

As far as cultural conservatism is concerned, there is plainly a nostalgia for an image of, oh, a certain vague picture of late '40s-mid '50s society. But race doesn't figure actively in this picture-- for that they jump directly to 1968, and at that point they become the radicals and the "liberals" become the cultural conservatives.

What we call political conservatives today are a creation of the middle '70s. By that point the dogma of liberal progress was firmly in place, and it remains the centerpiece of that party. "Liberal" and "conservative" simply remain in place as position labels from, oh, about 1933, but it would be idiotic to ascribe the liberal or conservative positions of the former era to present-day "liberals" and "conservatives".

All camps want to "conserve" their own values. The label is not a substitute for the actual positions.

The G Word

2005-04-15T08:33:00.000-04:00

I'm suprised find I've never made an entry here about the issue of church names, because it's one of the basic issues of dealing with, um, Catholic/Orthodox (or Roman/Eastern) ecclesiology. The marketing strategy of these names is obvious and when these names are taken at face value one has to be fanatically careful about maintaining a distinction between "Catholic" and "catholic", and then beating everyone else about the head and ears to maintain it as well. The alternative-- finding other names for the bodies-- just never worked out, and at least one can fall back on the position that the legal names for the bodies in question have a certain standing.

With regards to sexual orientation the problem is much, much worse. Even the phrase "sexual orientation" has problem presuppositions built into it.

Historically the self-terminology for what these days I think I'm supposed to call blacks has been heavily driven by the co-option of these terms into racial epithets. As a result one can date black institutions by their names. With words like "gay" the situation is more complex. Bushnell is wrong if he thinks that the word is neutral; kids around here use it as a pejorative. I'm also a bit surprised that the semiotics of seizing the epithets of persecutors and claiming them as one's own are being ignored. It's an interesting technique, and whether it will succeed in the long run will be interesting to see. In the meantime, it puts a curious color on the way "queer" keeps popping up in his discourse, and on the threat to label me a "breeder".

This last term is an unabashed pejorative. "Straight" people don't use it as a self-description-- at least, nobody I know does. "Queer"? I don't use that word either-- at all. As with "gay", the word is so contaminated with the subtext of sexual deviancy, flaunted or decried, that its denotation is useless. What's odd is this objection to the phrase "homosexual men". It's hard for me to understand the assertion that this is a pejorative, when I specifically chose it in an effort to escape connotation. The message I read from this is that I am not to be allowed that escape.

Well, maybe. At any rate, whether or not this is being a distraction, I'm tired of fighting it. As long as you're willing to sign off that I mean no pejoration by it, you can be "gay" if you want.

Suspicious

2005-04-14T10:34:00.000-04:00

Thomas Bushnell has made another blog entry concerning the "Christ and Culture" discussion. Now, much of the tone of what he writes invites objection, notably the phrase "the queers are taking over". If want to say it for yourself, do so; don't even vaguely imply that I said anything like it.

As far as Louie Crews' seat on the Executive Council, the entry borders on disingenuity. You can check his church resume for yourself, but the picture I read from it-- and I first encountered him almost twenty years ago-- is that of a prominent and influential member of the church establishment. When I see Todd Wetzel or James Staunton or Jack Iker on the executive council, I'll be much more impressed by its balance. As it is, prominent liberals are represented, and prominent conservatives are not. It's hard for me to believe that anyone who pays any attention to ECUSA politics can deny the significance of seating one of Integrity's founders on the EC.

And that suspicion brings me to the main point. Theology as rationalization is all over the place; if one's opponents are doing it (and they often enough are) then onesself (or at least one's allies) are probably doing it too. Talking about motivations is always a dangerous opening for rationalization.

I'm not utterly convinced that the conservatives are that reactionary; I personally don't feel any moral nostalgia for a 1956 in which my parents had been married for one year. I can understand the longing for a "return" to a public culture was more directly informed by a "Christian" perspective, whether or not the image of that culture is historically accurate. Conversely, the language of enlightenment humanism is constantly on the lips of the liberals, but the Christianity of this language is at least debatable.

And "cultural"? Well, of course; one of the things that people use to draw lines around cultures and subcultures is shared values. And one of the chief of these is differentiation from those outside the subculture. My experience of theological discussion in general is that issues of inclusion and differentiation contaminate such discussion very heavily. I'm either supposed to see the liberal side as controlled by their unwillingness to accept traditionalist theological principles, or I'm supposed to see the conservative side as controlled by their theological principles. As far as I think I am applying theological principles, I don't get either side, so I personally have to believe this way of differentiating the sides is just not where the discussion is coming from.

The Standard Arguments

2005-04-14T08:59:00.000-04:00

In the on-going "blog vs. blog" discussion I'm having with Thomas Bushnell, he's done one of the standard things one sees on "liberal" side: replace "homosexual" with "negro". Personally, I think it would have been a lot more apt to replace it with "Latino" or "Mexican"; after all, I live in the middle of the negro/Afro-American/black problem, and my father is from North Carolina. Somehow I have to doubt that New Mexico and California offer quite the same perspective.

Be that as it may, this is an old mode of argument. SO-- d'ya think someone might have formulated an answer by now? Of course they have! But Has anyone ever convinced anyone else? It hardly seems so.

The obvious answer is that race is a very poor analogue for homosexuality. Even leaving aside the important issue of nature vs. behavior, the reality of class structure is utterly different. Washington DC (and for that matter the area as a whole) has a very visible black underclass; but it also has a black upper class. The black underclass is extremely segregated, but then, so are latinos and for that matter poor whites. Do male homosexuals mostly live in a similar underclass? If they do, it's not very visible.

Even running the clock back forty years, it's hard for me to see the parallel-- and I should point out that forty years ago I was in Montessori school. I've never attended a segregated school in my life.

Surely I'm not the first person to make these observations. It bugs me that discussion of these issues all too often takes the form of trading ritual arguments. The similarity of race and sexuality is a corollary, not a lemma, but it seems that we never get to confronting this.

That "Christ and Culture" Thing

2005-04-13T11:13:00.000-04:00

Thomas Bushnell is none too happy with Richard Kew's thesis on denial. He specifically focuses on the issue of "culture" in his condemnation.

I see in this an error of reification. There's a sociological tendency to talk about Culture as a coherent organism, but this image is false, and the way that people talk about it indicates the falsehood.

At the moment it's easier to talk about this by looking at the liberal side, using everyone's favorite test case: homosexual men. What does the culture say about this? Well, obviously it's going to depend on who you ask. Once the Leviticus-quoters on the one hand and the homosexual lobby on the other are removed from the picture, I suspect that there remains a very large party which has a gut aversion, and a somewhat smaller but still large party which may or may not disapprove but has a "live and let live" attitude.

Looking at the Episcopal Church, it's hard not to miss the connection between the homosexual lobby and the church administration. (For instance, Louie Crew holds an Executive Council seat.) Widening out a bit further, it's pretty clear that they travel within a subculture in which subscription to the righteousness of homosexuality is a unquestioned and indeed unquestionable presupposition. Does this drive theology? In my opinion, it does.

Bushnell's implicit identification of church theological conservatives with American political conservatives is very much more problematic. Within the Episcopal Church itself that identification is mostly false. They simply don't travel within the same subculture. Indeed, one of the most obvious elements of the condemnation of fundamentalists is the streak of sheer snobbery that runs through it, a snobbery that accurately reflects class differences between the two subcultures. All of this shows up all over the internet. Good upper middle class people "affirm" male homosexuality; bad middle-middles (including especially social-climbing businesspeople who dare to think that their money means something) are "homophobes" (and there's clearly a condescending class difference manifest in that faux clinicalism).

When I look at Louie Crew, I see a person of some privilege, and I see someone who presumes to direct the course of the "culture". (As a matter of record: he taught at the same private boarding school that I attended.) What I'm hearing, very loudly, is the complaint that the "culture" refuses to follow where they lead. Its very much the complaint of an establishment that is in denial about its right to lead.

Does the Olive in the Martini Break the Lenten Fast?

2005-04-13T09:48:00.000-04:00

What with all the inane posturing about theology out there it's nice to come upon some actual application. You should read Waiter Rant anyway, but particularly this story about Hamburgers and God.

Richard Kew on Denial

2005-04-12T13:18:00.000-04:00

YOu can see this at titusonenine, or at the Kew Continuum.

I can only add that so much of the theological discussion on the net falls right into this. People spend endless hours, for instance, arguing for the ecclessiastical sovreignty of this or that church or bishop, as though any such talk was going to influence the actual, very real divisions. Creationists waste disk space thinking that they can show that evolution is unscientific. And to crown it all, infallibility seems to be omnipresent.

Trackback.... Must have trackback....

2005-04-06T13:05:00.000-04:00

I've switched over to Haloscan in order to get trackback for this blog. Unfortunately it means that, for now, the older comments aren't visible. I'm going to see if I can overcome this problem.

Update: OK, the old comments seem to be there after all. Hmmmm. Now if I can make sure the trackback is working right....

Church Websites Revisited

2005-03-29T12:46:00.000-05:00

I was looking at some parish websites using the parish locator from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington website last night. I have some other comments to add about designing these.

When setting up a website it's important to remember that the whole world can see it. Therefore, a lot of the people who look at it will not view it from the perspective of a parishioner or even a neighbor. For example, last night I became interested in the histories of the various parishes. Guess what? Lots of parishes had a section on their history, but there were plenty that didn't. This is something that people from great distances will be interested to read (provided it is kept to the point).

Then there's the bandwidth issue. I have DSL at home, and still I find that lots of these websites are slow to load. There are still plenty of people out there on dial-up (and likely to remain so). It's annoying to have to wait for heavyweight images and objects which don't provide content, especially

big stock photos (or for that matter, any big images on the home page)

Java applets which do ordinary functions (e.g. buttons)

Stick to standard names for things. They are "service times", not "when we gather". And please, get someone who isn't color-blind to look at your website. I ran across one last night that had blue letters on a red background, and my eyes shimmied for several minutes after I closed the page.

The Average Age Urban Legend

2005-01-13T15:21:00.001-05:00

If you're an Episcopalian, you may have been told that the "average age" of Episcopalians is 57.9 (and "rising rapidly"). Where does this number come from?

Well, it doesn't appear to come from anywhere, at least not from some actual study. It's also (in the mouths of other denominations) the average age of Methodists and of Presbyterians. And its pairing with an average age of US residents (a number given anywhere from 35 to 40) is utter nonsense.

The Canadian Census people do in fact collect pretty detailed info about religious affiliation and age. Their reports give an average age of about 50. There is a group called US COngregations which also does some study work along these lines. They report an average age for all US worshippers of about 50. A report they prepared specifically for the Methodists gives similar numbers.

These last two, by the way, show why the comparison with the average age in the USA is nonsense: they do not count children under age 15 at all.

I took the liberty of exchanging a few messages with C. Kirk Hadaway, Director of Research at The Episcopal Church Center. He wrote back:

"I have been unable to find the source of this number. I suspect that it is actually an estimate of adult Episcopalians from a national survey. Obviously, including children would lower the average age. I have tried to develop an estimate using known percentages of members 60 and over and demographic age distributions of the population. This is somewhat speculative, but I am sure that the actual average age is around 47 or 48 rather than 58."

and later:

"By combining Faith Communities Today data for the Episcopal Church with a census population pyramid I get an estimated average age of 49 in 2000. That is an estimate, of course, but any figure in the high 50s is highly suspect."

As for "rising rapidly", even if not a single Episcopal baby were born nor a single person converted, the average age could not rise by a year every year. The aging of the population is counterbalanced, to a degree, by the dying off of older members.

So why do people repeat these numbers? It's because they want to alarm people with the notion that their church is dying out. The reality is that large denominations tend to have population distributions that reflect that of the nation as a whole: a fairly uniform distribution of members across age groups. There is of course a dip in teen to 20s attendance, but its effect is not so dramatic as this.

Maybe I'm a Reasserter

2004-12-25T23:04:00.000-05:00

But then again, maybe I'm not. Well, anyway, Salty Vicar has a list of Questions for Reasserters, and I feel some sort of response is called for. I think, however, that a different sort of response is called for than an a mere list of specific replies.

Perhaps the most common failing of theologians is to look upon scriptural material as being their especial province. That is, they like to believe that everyone needs theologians in order to have a hope of getting anything out of scripture. Now, considering the condition of the writing of the NT texts, this is an utterly preposterous conceit.

And as Ponty is wont to point out, the attitude of Salty's questions tends towards the condescending. Take this one:

Augustine one said that "all truth is one." Harmonize, if you can, insights from Adam Smith, Einstein, Freud, Chomsky, and Galileo with Biblical cosmology. Explain why it makes no difference in your interpretation of scripture.

I'm with Ponty in wondering what Chomsky is doing in there; surely he political fatuosity puts paid on his cosmological imprint. One wonders whether a Rev. Salty of twenty years ago would have included Karl Marx. The hidden assumption in this is that these people have something to say about cosmology in a way that has anything to do with NT religion. It's a highly questionable assumption, especially considering the range of people cited. Let's start with Galileo (a "poster boy" choice at that): must we assume that the Evangelists or Apostles would have been shocked to learn that the earth travels in an elliptical path around the sun? I think not. It is not a given that people are so heavily invested in the commonplaces of their day, and indeed, it seems that most people accept such changes to common knowledge with aplomb.

But there's a deeper assumption: that the skepticisms of the modernists have to be taken as given. By right, claims of science do not merit this. Newton and Einstein have earned their places of honor in formulating models that withstand the assaults of years of use. Adam Smith? Well, economics is still controversial, is it not? And so is psychology-- indeed, Kinsey's "foundational" studies have attracted increasing criticism as it becomes more apparent that they are heavilty contaminated by the sin of self-justification.

Thus, it isn't proper that the modernists expect to get a pass on their presumptions. What's unreasonable about reading scripture in a, well, normal manner? Like, um, some of it is literal and some isn't and some is both?

Omnis Mundus Jocudetur Nato Salvatore

2004-12-25T22:43:00.000-05:00

The sun has set on Christmas Day, and rather than going to bed and catching up on sleep as I should, I'm sitting here blogging.

As far as on-line talk is concerned, I think what distresses me the most for the year is the bitterness and the contempt. I pray that this bitterness be put behind us.

Merry Christmas to all who read these words.

Learn When to Quit

2004-12-21T16:51:00.000-05:00

From Midwest Conservative Journal:

Sometimes it pays to quit will you're not too far behind.

Jerks For Jesus

2004-12-14T11:20:00.000-05:00

Surely one of the most abiding principles of internet discourse is "Venom in the defense of my moral principles is no vice!" Here, courtesy of Fr. Jake, is a particularly mean-spirited "sermon". Well, actually, it's a church politics speech. "Poorly educated, theologically unsophisticated, [and] socially regressive" translates to "doesn't agree to the latest teachings of the liberal secular establishment", when it comes to that; the complaints about Rowan Williams are all about Cantuar failing to enact the (liberal) party line.

Now, all the tendentious teaching about what Jesus didn't say is beside the point. It's theologically unsophisticated and socially regressive (for American society, anyway), and doesn't say anything I haven't heard before and haven't rejected as bad exegesis. Heck, I feel the need for a bit of a sermon myself here:

For Christians, there is no choice between personal purity and social action. If you think that what you do in the bedroom is private and doesn't affect everyone around you: that's self-indulgent wishful thinking. If you think that leading a pure life is enough: purity also lies in how you treat others, even though whom you cannot see. Ridicule purity, ridicule charity, ridicule those who advocate either, and you're writing your own ticket to hell, along with anyone foolish enough to follow you.

But beside that, the point is in how the opponents are treated. To be blunt: a long list of cheap shots, liberally showered in contempt, shouldn't be anyone's model of an acceptable sermon. As an Anglican Christian, I'd like to think that we can actually treat our enemies with genuine human respect, and hear what they say. If what they say is wrong, let its error fall on its own lack of merit. The tantrums of the saints are not for emulation.

Reverse Triumphalism

2004-12-09T08:46:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has followed much about this years' ECUSA crisis has surely seen a lot blog entries and comments proclaiming the death of ECUSA or Anglicanism in general. Personally, I would like to discount these. It's not because they may or may not be right, but mainly because it's been done so many times before. We get a wave of these with every new outrage or attempt to deal with the issues. Sometimes get them just because someone posts something-- anything-- about ECUSA.

In case anyone hasn't noticed: Churches don't fall quickly. It's not entirely unreasonable to date the current debacle back to 1976, with the approvals of owmen as priests and the current BCP. So check your calendars, people, because that was over twenty-eight years ago. The Windsor Report has been out less than two months; it's unreasonable to expect drastic action in so short a time.

And yet we have all the reverse triumphalist proclamations, people who I suppose fancy themselves like the dead collector in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The church isn't dead yet, so they have to hit it over the head a few times.

The fellows over at Balaam's Ass have been on this one too.

The Six Foot Shelf

2004-12-07T07:42:00.000-05:00

The Vatican has (allegedly) its secret library; I have the Six Foot Shelf of Bad Religion. It features such gems as

The Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price
New World Translation of the Scriptures (by the JWs)
The Lost Years of Jesus by Elizabeth Clare Prophet
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Arthur Waite
The Desire of Ages by Ellen G. White
The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow by Constance Cumbey
Gyn/Ecology and The Wickedary by Mary Daly

...and many others. Why do I have these things? Well, partly because my wife absorbs books. But it's also because primary sources are important. If you're going to denounce something, it's more effective if you can refute it accurately. Inaccurate refutations are often enough tantamont to endorsement.

Yet Another Function of Infallibility

2004-12-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

At some point one is certainly entitled not to rehash old arguments. I do not personally get involved in discussions of the trinity as a doctrine; there's almost no chance that anyone will present me with an argument I haven't seen before.

I count this, however, as a personal prerogative, not some doctrinal statement about my authority.

So over in Ponty's blog we get into this long thread about Mariology, and in comment #30 he says:

"#23: Your presupposition is “If the popes and Eastern patriarchs have endorsed it, it is correct.” But of course, Protestantism is practically defined by its rejection of some sort of generative infallibility among a certain class of people.

"Exactly! And that is precisely why Protestantism is incapable of holding on to the fullness of the faith in its confrontation with modernity."

Well, in a sense Catholicism has been incapable of holding on to it too, for Catholicism spawned Protestantism. Claiming infallibility is fairly effective in cutting off interminable debate of basic principles, at least internally. It does nothing at all about cutting them off externally. And in fact, it presents a tradeoff. The ultimate defense of arguments is being tested against refutation; hence, anything that curtails those tests reduces confidence in those arguments.

In practice, cutting off debate is a temptation to sin by ignoring the refutation of poor arguments. In the world at large, debate cannot be cut off, but it can be crippled by poor communication. Hence bad RC and EO doctrinal claims are refuted every day; it's just that RC and EO authorities ignore these refutations. And I mean "refuted" in a very specific and objective sense: they are found to be not valid by individuals.

As soon as one has to talk about infallibility, one is admitting that human reasoning is not all that it could be-- and not because of the limitations of reason, but because sin contaminates reasoning. It's obvious that claims to infallibility occaisions of near (if not actual) sin, due to the temptation to dress one's assertions up in supernal authority. But such assertions should not be refutable even in ordinary reasoning.

Which brings me back to the original quote. Even if the "infallible" churches are less tempted to dump basic items of faith, I do not think they are protected from obscuring these truths in a thicket of errors or extraneous claims and practices. Mariology stands as an object case: one need not look far to see places in the RC church where devotion to Mary is elevated practically to worship, and Jesus becomes an appendage.

Also, infallibility must stand on its own feet. If it is needed to justify dogmatizing certain principles, the more fundamental solution is to dogmatize them directly. The more controversial propositions infallibility is stretched to cover, the more people are encouraged to doubt the fundamentals. In that wise, Protestantism is nothing more than the acknowledgement of the real state of human judgement.

Possibly the Most Laughable Thing Spong Ever Wrote

2004-12-04T11:01:00.000-05:00

Over in Ponty's blog the question of Spong's intellectual achievements. For my contribution, I offer a passage from Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism which is so profoundly stupid that it has brought laughter to those to whom I have read it.

Not surprisingly, Spong invests heavily in the "three-story universe" theory. Naturally, he equates this "prescientific" theory with ignorance and, well, stupidity. He doesn't say "stupid", but ultimately the ultimate cause of not being able to understand must be insufficient intelligence.

So we come to chapter 3: "The Pre-Scientific Assumptions of the Bible", and we have this choice passage on the top of p. 31:

Luke did not comprehend the vastness of space. No one in his day did. He could not have imagined space travel. Under the popularizing influence of astrophysicist Carl Sagan, we can now put the ascension into a new physiological context that reveals the inadequacy of biblical literalism. If Jesus ascended physically into the sky, and if he rose as rapidly as the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) he would not yet hav ereached the edges of our own galaxy. (emphasis mine)

Now, it isn't true that people in the period didn't understand the vastness of space. Ptolemaic astronomy, the standard theory of the time, held the earth to be essentually point-like with respect to the universe as a whole. But we do not need to lay upon apostles and evangelists the study of astronomy. Likewise, it's presumptuous to theorize about their ability to understand space travel, at least to the extent that the average viewer of Star Wars understands it. But besides the rediculous picture of Jesus jetting across the cosmos, there's the problem that Spong has the scriptural text wrong! Here's what Acts 1:9 actually says (RSV):

And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

Jesus didn't appear to rise out of sight indefinitely; he only had to get as far as a passing cloud-- maybe 30,000 feet up. Even at a much more leisurely rate than an ICBM, that's not hard to achieve.

The Keyboards of the Kingdom

2004-12-03T08:55:00.000-05:00

Jason in New Hampshire has been looking at internet argument about religion for a while too, and he's not pleased with what he's seeing.

I live out at the Anglican/Catholic/Orthodox end of internet discussion, so the specifics of the disagreements have a different flavor. But the point about the "keyboards of the kingdom" is even more valid for us. Technically, only bishops can speak to Anglican or Catholic or Orthodox doctrine. When the rest of us do theology, it may be right, it may be wrong, but it isn't the church speaking. Therefore, it is always high time for us to get out of the cathedra and speak as if we were the ordinary mortals that, in fact, we are.

A Clerihew

2004-12-03T08:49:00.000-05:00

Inspired by discussion of Spong's denuciad of John Stott, I have been moved to the challenge of writing a clerihew:

John Shelby Spong
Said that his church had it wrong
Whereas John Stott
Said that it had not.

In the "Orwell Was Right" Department

2004-11-21T01:12:00.000-05:00

Word comes from Ecumenical Insanity that Planned Parenthood doesn't like the Third Order Franciscans offering an abortion/contraception-free health plan to federal workers in Illinois. Now, as it turns out, according to OMB there are twelve other plans available in Illinois (not counting the nationwide plans such as Mail Carriers)so I don't think "choice" is really an issue.

This isn't PP's first foray into doublespeak-- I suspect most people have lost count by now. A quick glance at their website reveals these gems:

'Choose Life' Plates Unconstitutional: Planned Parenthood and ACLU Claim Victory for the First Amendment (preventing people from expressing their anti-abortion opinions is really a triumph for free speech and free exercise of religion)

FDA Corrupts Science with Ideology, Denies Women Essential Access to Plan B® Emergency Contraception (essential, at any rate, to embedding the practice of abortion in the culture)

Planned Parenthood Announces Return of Annual “Choice on Earth” Holiday Card (a striking act of tastelessness concerning a holiday about a birth)

and we mustn't forget statements like

Nation's Leading Reproductive Health Organization Criticizes Politically-Motivated Legislation Targeting The FDA and Early Medical Abortion Option (well, actually they are the nation's leading abortion provider)

I don't agree with the RC Church position on contraception. But I am man enough to tolerate RC men and women following the moral dictates of their church. Planned Parenthood likes to talk about extremism, but their "eye" fails when it meets a mirror.

Do Protestants Exist?

2004-11-20T18:26:00.000-05:00

From time to time one sees statements, most typically from Eastern Orthodox respondents, as to what "Protestantism" holds. Now theoretically, I'm a Protestant, being an Episcopalian and all that. Well, you can find Anglicans who say that Anglicans aren't Protestant, and you can find others who'll claim that some Anglicans aren't Protestant. But at any rate, what's the "-ism" in "Protestantism"?

It's easy enough to find a common historical origin to protestant churches: their separation from the Roman Catholic Church. This implies but two "doctrines": that the claims of the RC church to infallible teaching are false, and that there is grace outside of the RC church. Other doctrines? Well, there is hardly any topic which does not elicit radical disagreement somewhere among some "protestants".

It's not hard to see the deeper meaning of statements as to what Protestants believe. These statements are about differentiation. Converts are particularly susceptible to making them because converts need differentiation badly; conversion, after all, involves ceasing to be of one's former group. But the urge to differentiate is at best dubious, because it tempts one to exaggerated generalizations, to the point of absurdity. There is no system in "Protestantism, not when one tries to put the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in the same bin with Wheaton College, Bob Jones University, and Episcopal Divinity School.

The Law of the Stupidest Argument

2004-11-18T13:00:00.000-05:00

Most internet discussion areas are subject, more or less, to The Law of the Stupidest Argument:

"In a discussion among strangers, the least thoughtful controversial position stated will dominate the argument."

This doesn't mean it will prevail, but subsequent discussion will tend to revolve around this position. And the actual merit of the "stupid" position is irrelevant; be it simple or simplistic, it will drive subtler and more complex positions out of the discussion.

We Kant Go On Like This

2004-11-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

In this exchange about the epicopagans, Fr. Jake says:

"Where we differ is your assumption that you believe that 'absolute truth' can be perceived by a human being. It is your perception of the truth, as any first year philosophy student would tell you."

I'm going to object to this claim, because I think it is a rationalization of the real difference.

In looking at the differences and trying to prune away enough jargon to be able to explain it to my 11-year-old, I quickly come upon an obvious result: two straightforward statements about what the numinous is like-- and I don't need the word "numinous" to explain either of them. One side says that God has a specific nature which is adequately spelled out in the Bible, and that other deities aren't if fact really God, and that discriptions of God which disagree with the Bible are, well, wrong. To get the fundamentalist boogeyman out of here, I need to add that disclaimers about accuracy for transmission apply. I'm saying the bible is essentially accurate, not absolutely accurate.

The other side says that most religions, if not all, do describe the same divinity, but all are basically flawed because God doesn't really intervene directly in the world, is not really incarnate in a specific historic person, doesn't specify acts of worship, and doesn't have any specific name. And one can pretty much focus it all down to one question: Is the doctrine of the Virgin Birth true?

On the crucial level, there's no religious language at all. "Mary gave birth to a male child even though she had never had sex with anyone." In the ordinary sense that we judge statements of ordinary fact, this is such a statement. And it gets an ordinary answer from either side. Traditionalists say yes, pretty much everyone else says no. (Some people try to claim "it doesn't matter", but I've never found a case where this isn't either an excessively qualified "yes" or a baldly gutless "no".) From "yes", it's a short trip to "If Christ were not arisen, our faith would be in vain"; but the dissent is working from "Since Christ is not arisen,...." And furthermore, for the most part they will provide a baldly ordinary assertion that Mary was made pregnant by some ordinary human male.

In other words, I don't buy the assertion that the supposed change in paradigm is the cause of this. I think that it is the conclusion of it, because it is the resolution of the dissonance between skepticism about Catholic factual claims and commitment to a belief in the numinous.

And what's more, there's nothing novel here. One gets tired of talking about the Gnostics, but the parallels are obvious. The neo-whatever way of talking about sacred story, far from being more modern, is actually one of the oldest ways of talking about myth. Indeed, in the Graeco-Roman world it could be argued that everything we know about mythology is colored by this attitude towards it; it accounts for the decided comic-book quality of Greek myth as we have it.

And beyond that, the picture of traditionalists as unsophisticates is dubious to the point of misrepresentation. C.S.Lewis, for one, is someone whom I would count reasonably learned on the subject of reading mythological texts. And when I read Til We Have Faces I see many, many passages which address these issues.

The bottom line: "it's all perception anyway" is taking the same place in theological rationalization as "it's all relative" did for an earlier generation's capitulation to moral indifference. The first owes no more to Kant than the second does to Einstein.

Conservative Persecutors Need Weekends Too

2004-10-31T07:27:00.000-05:00

There hasn't been anything new actually new in the Anglo-Druid story, but I suppose that this has been a blessing to the anti-conservatives, who were having a little trouble getting their RPMs up up on this at first.

But they are reporting in now about how vicious and (don't forget this part) backward we "conservatives" are. Now it's probably just me, but I don't see "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" as being a particularly conservative principle. But I guess I'm out of touch.

I'll start with the Salty Vicar. It worries me a bit when people start identifying themselves with biblical condiments, because most of the popular ones-- salt, mustard-- can render your food inedible if not downright toxic in large quantities. Anyway, it seems my inner Pharisee has been outed:

Conservatives should be careful. If they get hijacked by the intemperate, they will be revealed to be... sadly human in their mob mentality, more passionate about perversion, than enthusiastic in evangelising. I submit to you, if they had the fire of the gospel, they would seek to convert those wayward druids, rather than burn and ruin them.

I'm actually on record in a few places about this one. I'm not at all happy about the injury that seemingly must be inflicted on this couple in the course of this. But I also do not see how it can be avoided. It's not an unreasonable conclusion that the Church cannot have these two representing it as its clergy.

More to the point, Rev. Salty, what are you doing about converting them? What-- nothing at all? Come on, Rev; Mr. Rev. Melnyk has offered to communicate by e-mail.

And "mob mentality"? How about the sheer delight in ferreting out the trail which our druids have so thoroughly failed to cover up?

THen we have this from Father Jake:

Answer me honestly; if the rites these two priests developed were originally a Jewish rite, or even a Muslim or Buddhist rite, would everyone be so upset? I don't think so. Christians have a built in bias against anything Pagan. And that is what this latest flap is really all about.

Well, um, the obvious difficulty with this analogy is that what was posted on the national church website was, as Ted Olsen so helpfully pointed out, a carefully crafted Anti-Jewish rite. It almost sounds like a seminary assignment:

"Write a liturgy contravening at least the first commandment. Use ritual acts denounced by at least two OT prophets."

One can at least do something with Buddhism that isn't so determinedly perverse, and one can at least pretend that Allah and YHWH are different names for the same thing. What set people off so about this "liturgy" was how an office of the national church could have the gall/stupidity to put up instructions for comitting sins that I at least thought we got out of our systems during the Babylonian Captivity.

So I have to ask you clerics: do you have a problem with you, personally, with conducting or participating in such a rite? (Not you, Al-- I know you'ld be a "happy druid".)

Texts From Rev. Rose

2004-10-30T21:32:00.000-04:00

For the benefit of the assembled masses, I've collected a few links with statements from Rev. Rose that may (or may not-- your decision) bear upon the current matter. I have avoided statements from hostile sites (e.g. David Virtue).

As a prelude, here is the ENS announcement of Rev. Rose's appointment as head of Women's Ministries.

The following came from ECUSA Women's Ministries:

Letter to Prophetic Church Women: "Our own work is to seek to tell the truth, to find sacred space, both for worship and for our own sacred circles."

A Litany of Women's Power: Adapted by Rev. Margaret Rose for the Opening Liturgy for the Anglican Delegation to the UN/CSW; February 27, 2004

The following is from Every Voice Network:

in article Mothers of invention: Women, power, and the church see the following: After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Rose started doing what feminist education has long advocated: monitor power-sharing at the highest levels by counting the number of women and minorities on the front pages of newspapers, noticing whether this number is equal to that of white men. "I can tell you that since then, the increase in the number of white men has been astronomical," she says. "There's a kind of power exercised in a way that's just despicable, and lying."

The following is from Covering Religion:

in article Gene Robinson’s Consecration Recalls the Debate on Women’s Ordination see the following: "Scripture has been used a lot to oppress people," said Rev. Margaret Rose, director of the Episcopal Women’s Ministries,which brings together leaders of women’s ministries from churches across the country. "Groups of people who hold that scripture is inherent and literal, take it and use it as a weapon."

The "Episcopagan" Flap

2004-10-30T07:20:00.000-04:00

For the past few days the Anglican blogosphere (with some help from Christianity Today) has been clanging loudly over an explicitly pagan ritual posted at the main Episcopal Church website by the Women's Ministry office. The getreligion.org survey article has links to most of the places you would need to go to pick out the details of this, so I am going to skip that part and begin with a very quick analysis of the blog-forces involved.

Naturally, there have been plenty of people willing to take this as an excuse for their next rite of posturing about the Apostacy of ECUSA. They've fortunately been basically drowned out by other matters. The initial outrage over the 815 involvement in the episode was drowned out by the deliciously tabloid revelation that the origin of the offending material was a couple of Episcopal priests who had been quite indiscrete about how they mixed, um, their day and night jobs, and by the bloggish glee in thwarting their panicky attempts to cover their tracks. I'm guessing that this aspect is going to burn itself out soon because there doesn't seem to be much left to uncover. Their fate is in the hands of their bishop, where it must rest for now.

The other, more important line has been overshadowed by the gush of detail about neo-druids (and the inevitable need to keep correcting misunderstanding about the Gorsedd of Bards). Ted Olsen at CT has however been relentless in keeping the heat on the galling appearance of the offending rite under the ECUSA trademark, which is the keystone to the arch of this story. The whole thing would have blown over if the offending webpage had appeared on some other website, even with Ruppe-Melnyk's name on it.

And now that the blog-watchers at getreligion.org have pushed the whole thing to the surface, the liberal blogs are starting to join in. More on that in the next message.

The Cassandra Prophecy Award Goes To

2004-10-25T13:34:00.000-04:00

David Virtue, in his opening comments for the week following Gene Robinson's consecration:

"The Archbishop is hoping that a commission on homosexuality, Eames II, will resolve the problem. It won't. Eames II like Eames I on Women's Ordination proved singularly elusive. It is loaded with liberals and will satisfy no one except Western Liberal bishops and their acolytes. Those of us who know Archbishop Eames, know only too well the outcome of these commissions before they even meet. It will be Anglican fudge from first to last."

Virtuosity is one of the standard spots for reportage and linkage in Anglican-Land. Like many web types, however, David Virtue's analysis is heavily spun by his own perspective, which is radically conservative and more than a bit confrontational. The report is thoroughly Anglican, to be sure-- and Virtue ought to sit back a second and consider how much his preconceived distaste for the report derives from his personal deviance from the Anglican character. I also think that Virtue underestimates the subtlety of Rowan Williams' actions. What has become important about the report isn't anyone's opinion of it, but that fact that the radical liberals are refusing to do more than pay lip service to it-- and moreover, lip service which is quite transparently a rejection of the report.

Internet discussion of the report follows much the same pattern. A lot of conservatives are unhappy that the report didn't recommend a summary execution for Robinson and exile for the bishops who consecrated him. From outside the communion, I see additional commentary proclaiming the report as the deathknell of Anglicanism. Nothing could be further from the truth. One week later, it's becoming clear that the report has in fact laid out the battlefield so that the conservatives have been given a great victory. The radical liberals have put themselves outside the limits of the communion in their responses to the report, and question now before the communion is how much of the rest of ECUSA and the other questionable jurisdictions we stay with the vast conservative majority.

The Best (serious) Analysis of the Windsor Report

2004-10-22T13:18:00.000-04:00

By Leander Harding in titusonenine:

"You (the Episcopal Church, USA and the Anglican Church of Canada) have been acting as though you can do anything you want without consulting the rest of the Anglican family and still consider yourselves part of the family. You cannot."

"[to the AMiA sponsors:] "Back off. You are not helping and are making a chaotic situation more chaotic."

Like the Report or loathe it, this summary of the report gives, in my opinion, the best picture of the possibilities of the months ahead. As of now, the ECUSA troublemakers are refusing to repent (or even give more than a lame "sorry you got mad" apology); Akinola seems prepared to lead the Africans away from ECUSA. Cantuar? Holding his cards close.

This summary also illustrates what's wrong with all the demands for anathemas: they aren't necessary. Sure, denuciations are a great feel-good boost to one's own sense of righteousness, but do they have any effect on the issue? Even without resort to them, the current situation is untenable and hopeless. It appears that the communion [i]will[/i] decide the sexuality issue, and it will do so in division.

I'm Not Sure Why

2004-10-20T14:55:00.000-04:00

I don't know why anyone in the Southern Baptist Convention thinks we care what they think of the Windsor Report.

I note especially the following: "Torn apart by divisions over an issue as volatile as homosexuality, the Lambeth Commission has released a report more concerned with polity than principle, and more concerned with hurt feelings than heretical teachings." Well, um, yeah, but since you SBC guys don't even believe in polity, what's your point? And let's not get started on how baptist polity allowed the SBC to be captured by the Fundamentalists. 'Fess up: the SBC has enough trouble over theological battles to where it doesn't ahve room to gloat over those slacker Anglicans.

The Windsor Spin

2004-10-20T11:09:00.000-04:00

OK, so the Windsor Report on saving the Anglican communion is out, and the spin is on.

John Shelby Spong (Newark Ret.) has, of course, to weigh in, heedless of the total lack of regard anyone in the Anglican Communion has for his views anymore. Earth to The Times: perhaps next time you could ask someone with a clue-- say, Lord Carey?

Conservatives outside the communion naturally denounced the report; for instance, there's this denuciad from the Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion. To this sort of response, I can only reply, "well, um, yeah, you've already bailed out, so you've already taken the advice of the report." Or in the immortal words of Kevin Henkes, "Thank you for sharing, Victoria. Now put your head down."

The person whose opinion matters the most, Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, has issued an essentially dismissive response. He and the other African bishops will be meeting next week; I can only imagine that their joint response will similarly negative. American conservative bishops and organizations also expressed disappointment with the (in their opinion) mild recommendations of the report. Various of the more moderate liberals are calling for that most modern of Anglican solutions, More Process. (Sorry, fellas: stalling isn't going to help.) Our friends at EDS have come up with this helpful guide for helping you to avoid reading the report and noticing that it's written in reasonably plain English.

And the people who caused all the trouble in the first place? They are unrepentant.

I'd like to think that the Most Rev. Frank Griswold, in issuing his statement, is simply clueless about the fact that he doesn't speak for his church anymore. Alas, I must believe that the presiding bishop is nothing more than a tool of the radical liberals. What the report asks is mostly a small thing, yet Griswold, Chane, and various other bishops and dioceses who pushed Robinson to the fore can't bring themselves to do anything that the report asks them to do.

A lot of conservatives have said that the report doesn't have any teeth (or have made cracks about dentures). I think this is incorrect. The last paragraph essentially says, "If these things can't be done, there's no hope for the communion as it stands." Therefore, Eames & Co. have in essence prepared the groundwork for the division of the communion. The important question now, as I see it, is where the divisions fall.

Jeff Walker Explains the Windsor Report

2004-10-19T18:21:00.000-04:00

The Windsor Report Explained with extremely high-tech graphics

The One True Issue

2004-10-19T14:34:00.000-04:00

The RC Archbishop of Denver, Charles J. Chaput, has been portrayed in a New York Times interview as insisting that Catholics may not vote for a candidate who does not oppose abortion. The accuracy of this piece has been disputed; however, a transcript of the full interview has been provided by the archdiocese, and at least by my reading, this characterization of at least some of what Archbishop Chaput said is reasonable.

The point of deciding this election on the basis of abortion policy is, to me, bizarre. In the first place, the confidence that Bush will eventually be able to appoint justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade is misplaced. Barring a major upheaval in the Senate-- which won't happen-- justice candidates who will step up to overturning that precedent will never get confirmed. To that degree, such a vote is merely symbolic.

Four years ago, such a single issue command would have been more plausible. In the current election, there are other issues. I have a hard time with the church that invented casuistry pointing to one issue as an absolute priority.

"I Will Have to Sing Show Tunes!"

2004-09-22T13:58:00.000-04:00

In what is probably the most linked-to blog entry in history, a woman in NYC describes her successful method of dispersing subway preachers.

Image Takes a Hit

2004-09-02T14:46:00.000-04:00

Some time back we found out that Keith Richards is a regular C-of-E guy, and now we have this suggestion from get religion.org:

"And what about all of those Contemporary Christian Music stars at the Republican National Convention? The Democrats have real music stars and the Republicans have niche-market stars. Something tells me that this is not a fair fight, in terms of star power. But a born-again Alice Cooper gig sponsored by the Family Research Council would be cool. Don't you think?"

Seize the Terms

2004-07-29T18:19:00.000-04:00

It's a way of life for the combatants on obligatorily controversial topics to try and take the language away from the other side. I've already talked about that word "denomination", and soon enough I'll have to deal with "faith" and (yes) "truth".

But it's gotten worse. Or at least, funnier. It appears that some newspapers have put macros in their editing software to automatically substitute approved terms when certain no-no self-descriptive phrases turn up. Otherwise, how do you explain this choice morsel from the GetReligion.org guys where an opera celbrating life turned into an opera opposing abortion?

The Most. Rev. Boilerplate

2004-07-29T17:41:00.000-04:00

It was no news to me that the Most. Rev. Frank Griswold, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA, tends to send out missives that are repetitious and platitudinous. Also, obscure. Well, our good friends at GetReligion.org have been kind enough to supply us with this Presiding Bishop Letter Generator. Use with care; the head you befuddle may be your own.

More On the Calendar

2004-07-29T10:30:00.000-04:00

A problem with all church calendars is that, by implication, they are trying to calculate when Passover ought to be. They think that Passover should begin on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, but it doesn't work quite that way.

All of these calendars rely on the convenient fact that the lunar and solar cycles fall into sync every nineteen years (modulo some fudging about leap years). The Christian and Jewish calendars, however, focus this synchronization on different parts of the year; Judaism concerns itself with the date of Rosh Hoshanah, while Christianity, of course, is concerned with Easter. Therefore the Jewish calendar uses a system of added months, plus some other adjustments, as explained here; but the Christian calendars use a cycle of full moon dates.

Besides this basic difference in emphasis, there are three other sources of inaccuracy. The first and more obvious is the Julian offset, now at thirteen days and growing by a day three out of every four centuries. But the full moon dates aren't accurate either. Some degree of error is inevitable, but as it happens the old paschalion just gives flat-out wrong dates at times. Finally, as it happens the Gregorian calendar is a little off, so that sometimes the equinox actually falls on the 20th instead of the 21st of March.

In an attempt to get all of Christendom on the same calendar, a group met in Aleppo, Syria in 1997 and came up with a new formula. In spite of much Orthodox participation in the conference, this proposal sank like a stone.

Read This Blog

2004-07-29T10:17:00.000-04:00

Doug LeBlanc and Terry Mattingly, two of the best religion reporters out there, have a blog together: GetReligion. It's agood starting place for discussion of the kind of religion reporting that gets done (and rather often, done badly).

The Calendar Argument

2004-07-16T15:43:00.000-04:00

Give any Eastern Orthodox group a month or so and someone is bound to bring up the church calendar. Now, the calendar has two components: fixed feast/fast days which are tied to some civil calendar, and movable dates in the spring which are tied to the date of Easter. The date of Easter is determined by a Paschalion, a formula which is in turn tied to the coresponding civil calendar.

Back in the bad old days BC, Julius Caesar suppressed a lot of calendar abuse by forcing the Roman civil calendar into a fixed pattern of months and leap years, in order to keep the vernal equinox on March 21st. This Julian civil calendar was inherited by the early church. One of the issues decided at the Council of Nicea was that the church should observe a fixed paschalion as determined by the church of Alexandria. Contrary to much popular opinion, the current calculation was not dictated. That formula was devised a bit later by Dionysius Exiguus (who is also responsible for our current BC/AD dates) because the church in Rome needed a mechanical calculation.

Here I need to digress a bit. Everyone "knows" that Easter falls on "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox". The reason for this is that "the first full moon after the vernal equinox" should be the date of Passover, and Nicea decreed that Easter cannot fall on Passover. What the paschalion produces is a date for this first full moon.

The real moon isn't quite so cooperative. Both the Dionysian paschalion and the current Jewish formula follow a 19 year cycle of dates; but they don't use the same pattern and as a result there are years where there is actually another full moon between the equinox and Passover. The bigger problem with the Dionysian paschalion, of course, is that it is coupled to the Julian civil calendar. The Gregorian civil calendar was introduced to fix the drift of the calculated vernal equinox away from the real equinox; Easter as calculated in the Dionysian paschalion is in some years a month "late".

Now the Gregorian civil calendar could be accused of being a little inaccurate in that sometimes the equinox falls on the 20th instead of the 21st. Well, not exactly. See, it matters where you are. If the equinox occurs when it is noon in Japan, it is still the previous day in California.

You might think that the Dionysian and Gregorian paschalions should produce Easter dates that are either identical or are a month part, but they don't. The pattern of full moon dates isn't the same (accounting for the civil calendar difference).

A lot of people think it is a scandal that Christians can't agree on the dates of holidays, but resolving the issue has proven intractable. Catholics and Protestants have inherited the Gregorian calendar and paschalion; the Orthodox will not abandon the Dionysian paschalion unless there is uniform agreement to do so. Some Orthodox churches follow what is called the "revised Julian" calendar, which combines the Gregorian civil calendar with the Dionysian paschalion; they celebrate Christmas on December 25th (Gregorian) but celebrate Easter with the rest of Orthodoxy. This isn't really satisfactory, both politically and because the paschal season (Easter to Pentecost) falls too late in the year and thus runs into some other holidays and fast periods.

So is there hope? Tune in next time!

Urban Legends

2004-07-15T16:13:00.000-04:00

My contempt level goes up when people post the religious versions of urban legends. I'm willing to give a lot of leeway for stuff in the distant past. Modern tales get short shrift.

A few popular ones:

"They've seen the ark on Mt. Ararat in aerial photographs!" Well, no, they haven't. A quick Google will show that further investigation revealed all these sightings to be of various lava formations.

"Space scientists had to account for the missing day in Joshua!" Well, no, they didn't. Snopes has an entry on this one.

"When the Greek patriarch in Jerusalem observed Easter by the New Calendar, the Holy Fire didn't come down!" This one I did a bit of research on. Inevitably the reference is to the same account, and this account follows classic urban legend form of putting the supposed witness somewhere out of reach. Since hundreds of people would have seen this, nobody should have to rely on the word of an obscure monk at an unreachable monastery.

"Easter is pagan!" Well, no, it isn't. This can be traced back to a source: Bede says (or speculates) that the word "Easter" comes from the name of the goddess "Eostre". Well, modern researchers (e.g. Ronald Hutton) tend to doubt that there was any such goddess, and point out the obvious common component: the word "East". At any rate, the name for Easter in most languages is derived from "Passover" or "Pesach" (to use the Hebrew).

It's not hard to research tales like this anymore, especially if you're posting from a computer on the internet! While you're at it, you can check on the illustrations in the sermon on Sunday morning.

Has Anyone Ever Convinced Anyone Else?

2004-07-14T10:03:00.000-04:00

I can't stand most talk radio. Besides the fact that everyone is always shouting, it hardly seems that anyone ever really hears anything anyone else says. P.J. O'Rourke wrote a column for the Atlantic about this.

On-line religious discussion tends in the same direction, plus the side channel of out-and-out sermons. Well, I suppose there are enough disfunctional people involved who simply don't realize that there's someone at another keyboard to whom they are talking. But all too often I see messages arguing against imaginary opponents. What's the point of arguing with someone if you aren't going to argue with them?

I suspect, sadly, that a lot of the argument is actually about self-righteousness. The point seems to be not to convince anyone else, but just to have stated the Right Dogma, thereby identifying onesself as one of the Elect/Saved/whatever. I say, "Why bother?" God already knows what you believe, after all.

Battle of the Bishops - Round Two

2004-07-06T15:18:00.000-04:00

Well, curious things have happened since my last post, and Bp. Gregory has been suspended if not removed from his office. Apparently supervision from Suzdal across a language barrier wasn't close enough.

Now the question is going to be whether fealty to Valentine through the proxy of Fr. Shishkoff will be enough. A quick look at the clergy shows the problem: it is largely a convert creation, and very many of the clerics have little history of Otrthodox experience and are relatively newly ordained. Are they any better clerics with a new bishop?

That's a major reason why Ilhoff, as Episcopal Bishop of Maryland, is not as bad a problem as would first appear. There's a great bulk of Episcopal history and tradition in the diocese, spread out among the laity and clergy; here the control issues work in favor of tradition instead of against it. The naive method of choosing on the basis of a suitable parish tends to work better here.

Meanwhile, the online participants are doing a lot of damage control. Gregory appears to have fled the scene of the crime, as it were, taking with him one of "his" clerics in a classic vagante act. Others about him have seen what side their bread is buttered on and changed their allegiance (or kept it there, depending on how you look at it). Those at a greater distance, and who are not yet really members anyway, have tended to defend Gregory. And in some respects they are bound to him because they have no way to participate in ROAC/AROC except through the agency of Gregory's long-distance recruitment.

Infallibility Considered Uninteresting

2004-06-18T11:45:00.000-04:00

Infallibility arguments are mostly a waste of time. Oh, I suppose it's useful from a political perspective of suppressing endless battles within a denomination (do we need to hash out Arianism again? I didn't think so) but since the internet isn't an organization, infallibility on-line inevitably degenerates into a political battle over who "owns" the church (a subject I'll get to later).

When there's agreement, nobody cares about infallibility; it only matters if there is expression of doubt or outright disagreement. But in those cases it is ineffective as a defense of a line of argument. For the dissenter, the defects in the argument made are ipso facto evidence that the claim to infallibility is spurious. Thus, the recent attempts by some in the Vatican to claim that all papal bulls are ex cathedra infallible accomplish nothing except emphasize to outsiders how precarious some of them are. Most bulls which advance theological points do so through argument, and therefore are subject to the ordinary rules of rhetoric; the Vatican cannot really protect them from criticism, but can only refuse to listen.

The other point about infallibility on-line is that none of the usual respondents can actually claim it. I see no popes here, nor members of any magisterium. What we do is interpret what the (ostensible) infallible authorities say. These interpretations are not protected by infallibility by any standard.

Why I Bother

2004-06-18T10:28:00.000-04:00

I think there are reasons to discuss religion on-line besides those I listed earlier. First, I think there is no point to an argument where one cannot be convinced that one is wrong. By this I don't mean that you cannot be convinced that you are right; but you have to take the argument seriously, and risk refutation.

Sometimes argument is called for when someone makes an argument that is utter nonsense. That's a point when I'm willing to cross denominational lines. When I'm doing that I try to stay within the confines of the denominational context in which the argument appeared. This is a hard stunt to pull off, I admit, and I do slip; some people have tried to argue that it's intrisically impossible and that I always argue as an Episcopalian. That's too strong a claim. When it comes to matters of historical fact, for instance, denomination doesn't matter.

Likewise, when people makes erroneous assertions about Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church, I feel no qualms about correcting them. Here I must qualify the notion of "error"; I don't mean disagreements between theologies, but caims about what Episcopalians are supposed to believe and the like.

I have no problems with these because getting your facts straight is intrinsically beneficial. Entering the subjective arena of theological disputation requires a different rationale. Here, I think the only reasonable purpose is to refine the quality of your own arguments by putting them to the test of argument. If you don't think they are subject to discussion (and possible refutation), then why bother? When you make inarguable arguments, you aren't really listening; listening requires understanding, and understanding risks agreement.

What's Going On

2004-06-18T09:07:00.000-04:00

What's with the internet religious discussion anyway?

After all, religion is a Forbidden Topic in polite company. By this we can conclude that the internet is not polite company; then again, anyone who has seen all the flaming already knew that. So, is it academic discourse? No. Hardly anyone involved in such discussions is a scholar, and the discussion largely lacks scholarly apparatus.

Why are people doing it? Well, some people are clearly preaching, or relaying the preaching of others. Presumably this is supposed to gain converts, but since sermons are (mostly) boring, this tends to be largely about the poster gratifying himself that he's satisfied his evangelistic obligations, and they tend to have no interest in real conversation or discusssion.

Conversely, a lot of the atheists are plainly in it for the sheer bloody-minded entertainment value of it. It's rather like bear-baiting, and there are lots of Christian hardheads available to play the part of the bear.

Then there are all the people who want to continue the 30 Years War, or the Battle of Kosovo, or the Iconoclast Controversy, or choose-your-favorite-fight. These people do want to argue, and they are going to defeat you.

So who's left? More to come....

The D Word

2004-06-13T08:12:00.000-04:00

A lot of people get bent out of shape when I use the word "denomination" in reference to Eastern Orthodox churches or the Roman Catholic Church. They like to claim that they don't have denominations and that "denominations" are a Protestant thing.

Taking the dictionary definition straight up, they don't have an argument. PECUSA is a denomination, and OCA is a denomination, and ROAC is a denomination, and the Catholic Church is a surpassingly large denomination. The word denotes organizational units, and connotes a difference in "flavor". Objectively, it is almost trivial to draw lines between these groups.

So why do people protest? Because they want to slant the playing field in the direction of claiming that their (generally Eastern Orthodox or Catholic) church is a totally different kind of fish from a Protestant body. I'm not the least convinced-- not because I'm presuming that they are all parts of The One True Church, but because on an earthly level they obviously are different species of fish-- but all are fish.

In other contexts the constant battle over the word gets to be a waste of time and I fish for other words to describe the likeness of ROAC and ECUSA. Here I'm more interested in how the argument is carried forth, so I'll stick with "denomination", thank you.

BATTLE OF THE BISHOPS!

2004-06-10T10:27:00.000-04:00

In the left corner we have The Right Reverend Robert Wilkes Ilhoff, Episcopal Bishop of Maryland. Definitely a liberal, and a bishop in a Protestant church at that; but at least he doesn't persecute his conservative parishes. He presides over one of the densest territories of the Episcopal Church, and has it's most conservative convent under his wing (though he is not of course their episcopal visitor).

And in the right corner we have His Eminence, Archbishop Gregory of Denver and Colorado. And, as it turns out, all the rest of North America too, at least in the schismatic sect to which he belongs. He is now on his fourth or fifth denomination-- I lost count. He has a history of e-mail/letter recruitment of more-or-less unattached young men, so that as it happens, of all the laymen who I know to have affiliation with his diocese, at most one of them was a member before I knew of them. Several are still not members and do not apparently have a way of attending liturgy weekly.

So, which of these men should you follow?

Wrong question!

If you believe in bishops in the first place, then the first thing you ought to know is that you don't follow a single bishop. And any group, Western or Eastern, Anglican or Russian, which is separated from its parent brings up questions of historical continuity. Reaching back to the Pedalion isn't really different from reaching back to Richard Hooker (short range) or scripture itself (long range)-- except that in a dispute between scripture and the Pedalion, I'm going to pick scripture every time.

One should not be choosing between Gregory's or Ilhoff's imperfections. And one shouldn't be defending the irrelevance of one's own bishop's imperfections, Nick. That's just rationalization.

Moving on to the denominations: of course, if you're a "one-true-church" member, then every other group has to have a fatal theological flaw. Obviously this is another avenue for rationalization, especially when one of the groups that has to be so defeated is your group's parent body. This presents an interesting puzzle: here I must be convinced strictly by the merits of the argument and not through authority, for that authority rests upon convincing me of the merits! Also, in the case of ROAC, the sins of which it accuses ROCOR happened long enough ago to where it is unclear that there is any untainted ROCOR for ROAC to descend from.

There's another choice available.....

The Seeing Eye Dog Controversy: Conclusion

2004-06-09T07:17:00.000-04:00

A notable feature of the seeing eye dog controversy is the repeated statement that "dogs are unclean animals." Naturally, nobody can give me a clear citation to this effect, certainly not from the NT. (In this age of on-line bibles, there's no excuse for an inaccurate citation; if you use The Unbound Bible you can get it in a variety of versions, translations, and even different versions of the original text.)

There's something Levitical about this pronouncement, and indeed in other places I see Eastern Orthodox (generally men) reinventing menstrual purity laws, in direct contradiction to the council in Acts 15. And there's a rabbinical exactitude to limiting Peter's vision in Acts 10 to the purity of food. Unfortunately, taking that tack completely guts the point of the vision in the first place; after all, Peter wasn't going to eat Cornelius! The vision must be given an expansive interpretation for it to have the necessary meaning; it doesn't just mean that we can now eat pork chops.

Which brings up another point about theological "argument": maybe even most of the time, it's nothing better than rationalization. Most of the content of the seeing eye dog argument was about justifying a rule that everyone already "knew" but nobody could really cite. The message everyone should have gotten was, "maybe I don't really know this rule after all."

Sermons Are (Mostly) Boring

2004-06-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

Most sermons don't make the transition to the internet gracefully. Never mind that sermons are, shall we say, largely disposable. And they are made to be heard, not read, even when they are delivered by being read aloud. Sermons that rely on eccentric delivery-- or often, simple oratory-- don't tend to read well in any medium.

On the web, Sermons tend to run long. Web pages aren't a good medium for long documents, especially long documents that resist being broken up in the way that HTML was made to support. Also, to be frank, a lot of sermons tend to be not worth reading (a common problem with internet information). Given the way that sermons are originally delivered to a mostly captive audience, there isn't a lot of impetus to tip one's hand and get to the point quickly. It's pretty typical to come across sermons on the web whose first screenful gives no indication of whether they are worth reading at all. I do not give them the benefit of the doubt.

But they reach their nadir in forums and newsgroups. I never read them there, especially when the poster has a history of sermon posting. These venues are about interaction, and sermons do not, in general, invite interaction. Those who repeated post sermons are unlikely to respond to replies. I suppose the principle at work here is that they post sermons because they have nothing of their own to say.

Pawning the Purple

2004-06-07T23:15:00.000-04:00

or, "A Bishop Reconsiders Profitability"

Nobody is is interested in a fully apostate bishop, which is to say, one who leaves his office. 'Bishop Denies Faith, Resigns" is a dog-bits-man story.

BUT "Episcopal Bishop Causes Outrage"- THAT sells books. So as long as John Shelby Spong could put "A Bishop Reconsiders" in his subtitles, he sold books; now that he's retired, nobody cares.

The Arrow of Theology

2004-06-07T07:30:00.000-04:00

It's not like Time's arrow.

Infallibility is a dogma that nobody should need. If the arguments are good enough, they stand on their own. If they aren't then infalliblity won't help. Well, maybe it helps claims that are insufficiently justified (e.g., the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary). For claims that have counterarguments, infallibility is useless; the counterargument itself serves as proof that infallibility is falsely claimed.

Which leads to a further conclusion. It is necessary to consider the bad theology (a.k.a. heresy) as well as the good; otherwise, you can't understand the good properly, because it forms in relationship to the bad. Nicene orthodoxy makes much less sense if you don't understand Arianism and the other errors to which it is the answer. Hence, theology consists in large part of seeing the pathway through all these arguments. And it seems to me that the orthodox tradition-- not necessarily the Eastern version thereof-- demonstrates itself to be essentially correct. Most ancient heresies, when espoused by moderns, are invented anew, particularly Arianism, which the Jehovah's Witnesses reinvented.

When you look at the details, however, the picture of inevitable progress gets severely muddled. At this late hour I see a lot of "doctrine" that has severe problems when held up against the words of Jesus. It is not too much to ask that the two be consistent. To get back to the dog: Jesus never says that dogs are unclean. But he does lift up the first great commandment. Now Nick; if you used a guide dog, would you want someone to take it from you on such a pretext?

Donning the Cassock

2004-06-05T18:00:00.000-04:00

Just so everyone else knows: I'm not a cleric, nor a professional theologian or religious academic. I do theology the way any layman does it: reading the texts, listening to the advice of others, and thinking. By the grace of God, the voice of the Spirit is heard. Or not.

And if you believe Richard Hooker, that's the way the clerics are doing it too.

So who gets to speak for a church? Well, in episcopal polity, certainly not laymen. You have to ask a bishop, or repeat what a bishop says-- word for word. And if what the bishop says isn't firmly grounded in tradition--

Well, how do you tell that it is so grounded? Well, um, you do theology. After all, even if one bishop is just repeating something another bishop said, the predecessor has to fulfill the same test, and so forth.

So: is it actually true that in Orthodox tradition dogs are unclean animals? Well, I don't know for sure: Nick, you aren't good enough authority on your own. And even then the same problem applies to whichever bishop you end up citing. Is what he says an integral part of the tradition, or is it just a presumption or prejudice riding the genuine merit of other canons and positions?

Who Is Tom Harpur, and Why Should We Care?

2004-06-04T11:49:00.000-04:00

It's time to pick on the liberals.

Tom Harpur, as it turns out, is a religion reporter in Canada (and sometime Anglican priest; I don't know whether he is now or not) who has apostacized into a religiosity unbounded by any actual reality. This is a guy who regards the gospels, from end to end, as fiction. Nevertheless, he holds that there is some "truth" in there somewhere.

Scholarly apparatus makes for a book that looks more legitimate, especially for a Rhodes scholar who has been taught to do it right. (There's a lot of woo-woo "scholarship" out there which betrays itself by earnestly doing it wrong.) It is also perversely comforting to those outside the scholarly compound, who then get to pat themselves on the back for avoiding the "folly to the Greeks". Underneath all the apparatus, however, these texts solve "problems" that have a totally different character from how they are presented. The issue that they solve is this: the author becomes an unbeliever in the exegesis he knew, and invests in the ridicule that is heaped upon that exegesis. So how does he keep his religion? Well, the solution, if you are into the academic world, is to bury the whole thing in a different exegesis. The unasked question, then, is "Why do you no longer believe?"

More to come...

The Seeing Eye Dog Controversy, Continued

2004-06-03T07:03:00.000-04:00

The newsgroups were not the only forum to have a go at the Seeing Eye Dog. The notorious "Indiana List", a famously contentious listserv discussing Eastern Orthodoxy, had its chance to try the issue out. Again, there was much the same pattern.

In Eastern Orthodox forums, the issue almost immediately divides the participants into two groups: those who focus on the charity of allowing the person the use of their dog, and those who focus on the supposed rule. Elsewhere in Christianity, it isn't even an issue: Protestants and Roman Catholics can scarcely understand why the question would even be raised.

To me, the most striking part is how the supposed rule gets rationalized by those who insist on it. Now, the canon itself doesn't address dogs, but rather refers to cattle. Nonetheless, one of the arguments that always arose was that there was something intrinsically polluting about dogs per se, though the canon doesn't address that point. Then there's the starry-eyed theory about how much more loving it is to substitute congregants for the dog. Now, I know a blind man who uses a dog, and another woman who is confined to a motorized wheelchair and who has a dog for picking up dropped items and the like. I also know a blind boy who prefers to use a cane. They use these contrivances precisely because (a) relying on the inconstant grace of strangers is both degrading and unreliable, and (b) because those that do want to help often don't know how to.

The most disturbing argument I encountered was one that said that the dog "represented the lie that the blind person could see." I could go on at length about how wrong-headed this is, but I'll limit myself to the observation that this is a rationalization that is pretty far afield of the "no dogs" issue, and one which attacks the notion of guide dogs in general. In essence, to defend a specific taboo, the arguer creates a totally wrongheaded moral obligation forbidding the use of guide dogs.

More to come.....

The Seeing Eye Dog Controversy

2004-06-01T21:48:00.000-04:00

Back in 1999, there was a post in alt.religion.christian.east-orthodox about how a Toronto priest was fined for turning away a woman who used a guide dog, claiming that the dog was not allowed in church. This sparked a huge furor which ran to something over 200 messages.

In between the clueless assertions about how the ushers (or parishioners) could substitute for the dog, and the vague assertions about how tehre was something false about using a dog at all, there was a running argument about how the canons barred animals from church, and another which asserted that dogs in particular defiled the church by their presence. I demanded at length that someone produce the canon, but no citation was made until a post was made which cited the council at Trullo as follows:

Canon LXXXVIII (ancient):

"Cattle shall not be led into the holy halls, unless the greatest necessity compels it."

Canon LXXXVIII:

"No one may drive any beast into a church except perhance a traveller, urged thereto by the greatest necessity, in default of a shed or resting place, may have turned aside into said church. For unless the beast had been taken inside, it would have perished, and he, by the loss of his beast of burden, and thus without means of continuing his journey, would be in peril of death. And we are taught that the Sabbath was made for man; wherefore also the safety and comfort of man are by all means to be placed first. But should anyone be detected without any necessity such as we have just mentioned, leading his beast into a church, if he be a cleric let him be deposed, and if a layman let
him be cut off."

The Law of Rule

2004-06-01T21:15:00.000-04:00

Western religions have rules. And Western religions, as a rule, have two levels of rules.

One level is scripture. If you aren't a liberal, this level always was inarguable. But in general, scripture itself doesn't give enough; it is necessary to add at least one layer of interpretation. Here I'm not so much interested in doctrine, but in praxis.

In Judaism, you get midrash and other things argued out by rabbis. In Christianity, if you're in an episcopal-polity church, you get canons and other forms of tradition.

Church canons bring out the Junior Lawyer in people, particularly the kind of people who spend a lot of time on-line. They particularly get the "church tradition is immutable!" people going, because they offer a great opportunity for Defending The Faith in a really hard-nosed and impersonal manner. Best of all, in Orthodoxy (and often in Catholicism) you don't even really have to know them all that well, because the volume of them and the obscurity of many means that it's hard for people to check up on you.

That brings us to the Seeing Eye Dog Controversy....

Don't Touch It, Mommy: It's Evil

2004-05-30T23:32:00.000-04:00

Vagante Christian sites are one thing. Here and there you come upon unmitigated cults.

Some time back a group of us had a run-in with the minions of one "Michael Travesser", known at birth as Wayne Bent. He had a plethora of websites, all of which now claim to be closed. In earlier months they had the words of the "master" with appropriately doting (but content-free) responses from his followers. He also had a bad habit of stealing copyrighted photos from other sites.

ROAC at least makes some pretense at normality. These cultish sites are obviously nuts. Don't go there.

A Bad Example

2004-05-30T23:15:00.000-04:00

The ROAC America website is a nice, small example of a bad denominational website. It doesn't work in Lynx; and it has a ton of stuff on it that doesn't do a thing for anyone who actually is looking for information, but which together take quite a while to download over a phone line.

When one starts looking at the options, one can see right away that this is a vagante sect, in schism from a more respectable body. We're in crypto-Orthodoxy here, so, naturally there is a list of succession given; there's also a long, crankish rant against their immediate progenitors and nearly every other substantial Orthodox body. After that, a look at their parish listing shows that their real presence is negligible.

The old version of the website was at least obvious in its pretentions. Now you have to go a level deeper.

Denomination Websites

2004-05-24T09:18:00.000-04:00

OK, again, this shouldn't be so difficult. There are a few things which should be linked to right from the front page:

A parish locator

A directory of church organizations

A history

An indication of how this denomination is different from the others

A nice, easy-to-figure-out set of theological statements isn't bad either.

But then you get to idiocies like The Episcopal Church website. OK: first of all, the entrance wastes a huge chunk of bandwidth being totally obscure. Then when you get in, it's hard to tell what any link is. The whole thing makes it hard to find any particular information there.

Church Websites

2004-05-24T08:59:00.000-04:00

Parishes and congregations should have websites. (Since I'm Episcopalian, I'm going to use parish for the rest of this.) But it seems to me that a lot of the sites don't understand what they are doing.

A big issue about websites in general is that they are different from advertising, and this is especially true of parish websites. As a rule, people who come looking for a church website are already aware that the parish exists. Typically they are looking for information about the parish. Therefore the crucial information should be on the front: address, phone number, service schedule, affiliation, names of principal clergy. Nobody should have to click through for any of this.

If there are going to be pictures, one should be a good shot of the exterior, and another should be a good shot of the interior. And they should be easy for the outsider to find. I see too many websites where all the pictures are of crowds of people shot at church picnics where even parishioners would have a hard time figuring out who is who.

And the sales pitch: look, if you say that you are a "community of caring people", I'm going to figure out that somebody in a position of power at the parish is more interested in appearance than reality. Nobody can tell whether you are caring over the internet, and most of them aren't in a position to find out, either. I expect all parishes to be caring, and I'm disappointed when I find one that isn't. But that's not what a church's first job is. Its first job is to do the communal worship on Sunday morning, and if I visit a parish on a trip, what I expect out of it is good worship by reasonably friendly people. Well, and a jump start if I have a dead battery in the parking lot, but that's not a high standard to meet.

Religion and the Public Life

2004-05-21T08:56:00.000-04:00

(with apologies to Richard John Neuhaus)

Way too much of the political talk on the internet is stupid. It's stupid in that it represents nothing more than the speaker's alignment with some political camp. Too many liberal democrats refuse to admit that Bill Clinton was less than an exemplar; too many conservative Republicans can't admit that George Bush the younger has presided over a war of dubious legitimacy and scurrilous tactics.

If it's stupid when it's just politics, it's stupid squared when it comes to religion. I have no use for the secularist theory that religion can't enter into politics. I'm going to vote my religion, thank you. But you have to be a complete idiot to think that the political parties aren't using their religious hangers-on.

Instead, we see conservative groups in most bodies whose online discussions sound like a bunch of College Republicans. Come on, guys: show some independent thought! Question the president-- before his minions question you! Gee, don't you think there might be something unChristian (not to mention politically foolish) about establishing a policy of torturing captives?

Not that the liberals are an improvement. alt.religion.christian.episcopal, when it isn't being overrun by crossposts, is largely an outpost of Integrity. It's yet another example of the way that mainline churches find their morality dictated to them by the world, rather than the other way around.