I’ll be out of the reality-based loop (or will I?) due to the two-day observance of the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, the celebration of the Revelation that made the Jews the “chosen nation,” starting Sunday night through Tuesday night. See ya.
Archive for the ‘Faith and Works’ Category
Too little, too late
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 29, 2008
An Anglican bishop laments the collapse of the English church:
The collapse of Christianity has wrecked British society, a leading Church of England bishop declared yesterday.
It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.
In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of ‘endless self-indulgence’ that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.
In a blow to Gordon Brown, he mocked the ‘scramblings and scratchings’ of politicians who try to cast new British values such as respect and tolerance.
The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the ‘social and sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.
(Via Glenn.) Good luck with that one. The fact is, the empty churches of Britain are a culmination of over a century of failure by the Anglican Church to find a way to keep the English in the pews. Founded on reasons of state and lust by Henry VIII, the Church of England ripped the Catholic soul out of British Christianity and mainly flourished to the extent it did at all in the succeeding centuries as a flavoring for confident Jingoism.
With the collapse of the Empire, the COE’s main activity has been keeping up with the Joneses in terms of out-Vatican-II’ing Vatican II in a race to the left. It has lacked either the reactionary equilibration or the charisma — much less the interest and courage on behalf of freedom — of a John Paul II. And it has, in an effort to please leftist elites, tied the United Nations in the contest for foremost legitimatizer of antisemitism in the West.
Can Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali turn the ship of spirituality in England around? Almost certainly not. But if he really wants to try, let him catch up with Vatican II in one way the COE has completely punted: By publicly condemning the entrenched antisemitism, couched cynically as anti-Zionism, of the Anglican Church and English society in general. The Jews or their treatment may not matter so much in England’s big picture, but it is a simple fact that you can weigh the moral merit of any society, and any institution, in no small measure by how it deals with the social and cultural cancer of antisemitism. In the case of the COE, it has historically, and in contemporary times, done a despicable job. There’s no better way to show the world of what he is made, and to demonstrate that there just may just be a good reason to root for Anglican Christianity to survive, than for the Right Reverend Nazir-Ali to address that challenge head on.
Posted in Euroids, Faith and Works, Oppression | 6 Comments »
Strong to save
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 26, 2008
Staten Island pier, Fleet Week
Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman
Two verses I sang, as a high school men’s choir tenor:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease,
And give, for wild confusion, peace;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
These men and women did and do place themselves in mortal peril all around the world so the likes of us can write self-indulgent blogs without fearing even for a second the peril that our ancestors, in whatever place they were, lived with at every moment in their own homes — the perils of tyranny, of arbitrary violence and of comprehensive destruction of their entire worlds.
This Memorial Day we are morally obliged to thank them, to remember them, and to thankno less the God Who has given so much victory and might to their hands and to ours; and we are obliged as well to live our lives to and demand of our civilization a standard of moral and civic quality that merits the bestowing of such grace today and tomorrow.
Posted in Americana, Faith and Works | 2 Comments »
“Holy or Sacred Tradition”
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 17, 2008
Dean Esmay is trying slowly, carefully to explain basic stuff about Catholicism that a lot of people who talk about the subject really don’t know.
Posted in Faith and Works | 1 Comment »
Guidance requested
Posted by pennywit on May 9, 2008
For some reason, I’ve taken an interest in some of the more accessible books about evangelical Christian culture. I just finished Hannah Rosin’s God’s Harvard, and I’m almost done with Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready. I’d like to read a book that looks at contemporary Christian evangelical culture from the inside, but does so with at least a moderately critical eye. Any suggestions?
Posted in Faith and Works | 6 Comments »
Wearing the pants
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 1, 2008
An article from two weeks ago about a men’s haggadah and the general lack of male participation in Reform communities (Jewish Week). This week, my old friend Dr. Judith Rosenbaum replies in a letter and states that the claim that Judaism has been feminized “has been heard in every generation since the 19th century” (Jewish Week).
What an odd response. The decline of Jewish religious practice, continuity and community, by and large, across the mass of worldwide Jewry since the 19th century is hardly controversial. What’s the point of asking, “Oh, they’ve been complaining about a precipitous decline ever since the precipitous decline”?
Answer: Dr. Rosenbaum not only has no problem with the fact of feminization of any culture, much less Judaism’s traditionally (and to some extent notionally) patriarchical culture, she’s way in favor of it, and not too concerned about the implications for continuity of such a culture in anything like a traditional form.
She more or less comes out and says that, but then the point about “oh, that old saw” is not only irrelevant, it’s misleading. Or “ms.” leading, you could say.
AMERICAN JUDAISM FACES A SHORTAGE OF MEN: “Contemporary liberal American Judaism, although supposedly egalitarian, is visibly and substantially feminized.”
Posted in Faith and Works, Past is prologue | 1 Comment »
Constantine’s Sword
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 30, 2008
My annoying friend David Kelsey has got a great-guns discussion going about the movie version of Constantine’s Sword, a book I read and enjoyed a few years ago, with certain reservations — mainly that author James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, comes out by the end sounding so politically correct and essentially anti-Catholic that his “new” views seem to color what would otherwise have been very illuminating analysis of a critical turning point in the history of the Church, especially, yes, as it relates to Jews. I’m also a little suspicious of his little Freudian motif he weaves throughout.
This is always a hot-button topic. There is something in me that won’t let me join the chorus of otherwise nearly universal Jewish condemnation of the history of the Church, right up through more or less present times. And I am not quite sure what that something is.
Cross-posted on Dean’s World.
Posted in Faith and Works, Past is prologue | 5 Comments »
Roosting season
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 28, 2008
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks (“God damn America”) and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
(Via Insty.) You’re still all missing the point. Yesterday Rev. Wright received a standing ovation for essentially the same speech. Not from some fringe group, but from the NAACP.
This is mainstream thinking among the black elite in this country, it seems, and certainly in the black churches — and Obama Barack, at best, believes he can at best inch away from it in order to corral votes from the rest of us.
And I told you this months ago, before the story was Rev. Wright himself.
And only now are those chickens, if you will, coming home to roost.
Posted in Americana, Faith and Works, Oppression, Politics and Poker | 19 Comments »
Interview with a “Prude”
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 25, 2008
John Hawkins at Right-Wing News talks with with Carol Platt Liebau about her book, Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!):
A lot of people think the only downside for premarital sex is STDs and pregnancy and if you avoid those problems … then you might as well enjoy yourself. Let’s say a person isn’t religious and they don’t get STDs or get pregnant; why shouldn’t they have sex before marriage?
That’s the key question that I was trying to strike at the heart of Prude.
You know what? You may avoid an STD, you may never confront an unwedded pregnancy, but even so, giving too much, too soon, to too many people is still a terrible idea. It’s terrible idea because there are many, many, emotional and psychological consequences that often these little girls are never told about.
Like what?
They include regret, anxiety, shame, the inability to trust men, and trouble forming permanent committed relationships later. You know, John, it all makes sense. If you’re the kind of young woman who doesn’t understand why it’s important not just to have sex with any guy that wants you to, you’re probably going to be prone to seeing some of the less attractive sides of male behavior. If you see that over and over again…it’s going to be difficult to learn how to trust men because you’ve never gotten to see the finer or noble side of men. Of course, it’s going to be difficult to forge long term relationships later, because if you don’t trust men, then on what basis are you building when you finally find a man you’d like to spend your life with?
This is, of course, territory covered recently, and successfully, by Dawn Eden in her book, The Thrill of the Chaste. I would be interested in knowing how the books differ. If anyone has read reviews comparing and contrasting — I couldn’t find one — or otherwise has a clue (such as by reading them, perhaps?), I would be interested in knowing.
Posted in Faith and Works, Homo sapiens, O Mores! | 2 Comments »
The word and the thought
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 22, 2008
[Steven Pinker] cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways.
That is actually something of a dissenting opinion, or seems to be, among researchers commenting on the linked article, in which experiments seemed to suggest a very different conclusion. But this is a fascinating topic, and one I was discussing with a very bright lawyer friend this weekend who, like me (actually, better than I) knows both English and Hebrew. I was telling him how, as my Hebrew skills improved, I was increasingly struck by the beauty and power of biblical passages. In particular I was thinking of the parts of the Torah that recount the Exodus, which of course was of recent interest.
“Hebrew is powerful,” he agreed, “but it lacks the precision of English. And that,” he said, “is why Middle Eastern peoples kill each other so readily: Their imprecise language, and their thinking, result in black and white approaches to life that don’t leave much room for tolerance or doubt.”
Maybe. But a lot of things in a culture can provide nurture violence. And as this Times article says, while there can be no mistake about the connection between language and conceptual development, it is probably a mistake to overestimate the effect of language on a people.
And after all, Hebrew itself is the language that, along with its cognate Aramaic, gave birth to the analytical depth and infinite shades of grey realized in the Talmud — a level of analysis, it is true, that is required in order to flesh out the flat-footed, “plain” meaning of arguably very vague, imprecise biblical texts. It is this process that is the premise of traditional rabbinic Judaism.
But focusing either on language or other social constructs also throws a sort of amoral mechanist blanket over moral teaching, at the societal level, and moral decision-making, at the individual letter, that is begets warranty. Ultimately people are, and should be treated as, moral decision-makers. Even if they are affected and shaped by their cultures, souls know the truth, no matter how much we foul up the ability of members of a society to make the inquiry and seek it.
Posted in Faith and Works, Homo sapiens, Scientificus | 3 Comments »
