"The Quest for Community in the Age of Obama: Nisbet’s Prescience"

Ross Douthat discusses Robert Nizbet's The Quest for Community, a conservative sociologist's critique of the ongoing conflict of individualism v. collectivism and how it remains prescient in 2012. Conservatives must be more than those who yell "Stop!" We must be more than patriotic people who do not hesitate to rally around the flag. We must be creative builders of community as modern forces, both individualist and collectivist, operate to separate humans from any structure, protection, or sense of community, better put, communities. An excerpt:

'The post-9/11 period showcased modern conservatism’s statist side—its willingness to out-liberal liberalism when it comes to building new bureaucracies, empowering central authorities, and invoking the mystical bonds of the national community, so long as national security is deemed to be at stake. The financial crisis of 2008 represented the failure of both conservative approaches to community-building: a deregulated marketplace proved incapable of generating the moral capital necessary to police itself, while the attempt to build an “ownership society” through policies that encouraged home buying ended in disaster. Meanwhile, the cultish enthusiasm associated with the rise of Barack Obama revealed that Americans remain immensely vulnerable to a Rousseauian romance of centralized authority, in which national politics is the highest form of community, and perhaps the only kind of community worth pursuing.

'Worse still, since Obama’s elevation to the presidency, America seems once more divided between “the party of the state” and “the party of the individual.” Conservatives are cracking open Atlas Shrugged and shouting about socialism, but they seem to have lost the appetite for thinking through the problem of community in an individualistic age—which is, of course, precisely the problem that make socialism so appealing in the first place.

'One hopes that this is temporary; one hopes that, eventually, the American Right will return to the problem of community, however vexing it has proven itself to be. Indeed, it is precisely because the problem will never admit of an obvious or permanent solution that it provides an appropriate organizing principle for a conservative politics—since conservatives, after all, are bound to disbelieve in permanent solutions as firmly as they disbelieve in the perfectibility of man.'

What Nizbet defended were intermediary institutions wielding diffused and less coercive power such as clubs, churches, charities, colleges, civic groups, voluntary associations, local governments, and school boards as well as the federal separation and divisions of jurisdiction. These things are our best defensese against consolidated federal bureaucracies, corporate collectivism, messianic government, and modern conformity.

(Hat tip to Instapundit.)

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012, Requiescat in pace.

Here is an excerpt from the Polish poet's Nobel lecture in 1996:

'At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they "know." They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force. And any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

'This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

'Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvre" ....'

Szymborska's bio.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse for her post, "When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine."

Does a conservative have to be a reactionary?

Corey Robin essentially says so. It is a complex question. In a modern world in which each generation seems to believe it can reinvent humanity as a better species yet delivers "total war," the reactionary might be the healthier person. The healthiest person is one who can take the long view, fight for what is worth preserving, and discard what is truly obsolete or never a good idea in the first place. The conservative is someone who wants to be connected to things better and more enduring than himself; the conservative is an anathema to anyone who believes that human nature itself can be transformed by revolution (or evolution in fathomable time).

In response to Prof. Robin's essay (which is critical of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk), here are Russell Kirk's "Ten Conservative Principles."

What Prof. Robin misses is the creative imagination of conservatives to draw wisdom from the past in order to solve modern problems, which are often caused when rulers divorce humanity from the way they rule (through both corporate collectivism and government fiat). Unfortunately, the worst dehumanizing forces are wielded by those who claim to liberate us.

The conservative knows that the plot of Animal Farm recurs often, and is most likely to recur when those who claim to represent the oppressed gain power, not that they are necessarily evil, but the act of obtaining power corrupts all but the most virtuous. We are generally better off under the diffused power of incompetents than under the concentrated power of the supposedly enlightened.

The past cannot be recreated, but it instructs us that the new is not always better than the old. Memory, that great weapon against tyranny, undermines the claims of those in power and those seeking power.

"Obama is Right: The Cost of Higher Education is Unsustainable"

More from Laurie Essig's blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

'It’s time to return to the basics of educating young minds as best we can with the money we have. I say let the higher ups go find jobs in the for-profit world that they have tried to impose on academe. Let the student-life folks go work in social services outside the university. Let the weeds grow and the paint peel. And let’s make higher ed about educating young minds with the money we have and not the money they borrow.'

The universities are incapable of reforming without an ugly implosion. University presidents have become like bank presidents, and their 2007-like meltdown is on the horizon. Some will go out of business as many prep schools did during the 1970s. Others will merge. But something has to happen because middle-class families no longer believe that borrowing $50,000 or more to obtain a bachelor's degree makes sense.

Cynthia Nixon's minefield

In a post called "Was Cynthia Nixon Right? Are We Made, Not Born, That Way?" Laurie Essig in The Chronicle of Higher Education rejects the currently trendy genetic theory of homosexuality in favor of a sociological theory:

'My point is, sexuality is hardly a known quantity, but what we do know is that these questions are decided by cultures, economies, and histories. The hardline taken by many gay rights activists that sexuality must be genetic because that is how gays will gain legal protection is not only factually suspicious, but probably not the best way to ensure rights in the first place.'

Prof. Essig's theory is a form of determinism due to nurture not nature. I'd rather not shove either aside in any theory of human behavior.

"Should the Church Have to Dispense Birth Control?"

Megan McArdle, an Obama voter in 2008, weighs in on this weighty issue:

'I'm fairly certain that if I wanted to stage a confrontation with Catholic charities, it would not be over something as trivial as forcing them to provide birth control coverage to their employees. Preventing pregnancy is not a low-frequency, high cost event, and thus it is not really insurable. It's just a backdoor transfer from wages to birth control consumption.'

"First they came for the Catholics..."

Regarding the Obama Administration's order that religious hospitals and insurers pay for contraception, abortions, and sterilizations:

'White House press secretary Jay Carney blithely denied on Tuesday that "there are any constitutional rights issues" involved in the brewing battle. Yet, the Shut Up and Hand Out Abortion Pills order undermines a unanimous Supreme Court ruling issued just last week upholding a religious employer's right to determine whom to hire and fire. And two private colleges have filed federal suits against the government to overturn the unconstitutional abortion coverage decree.

'Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the nonprofit law firm The Becket Fund, which is representing the schools, boiled it down for Bloomberg News: "This is not really about access to contraception. The mandate is about forcing these religious groups to pay for it against their beliefs."'

Gay by choice?

I almost never comment on gay issues on this blog. Gay civil rights have become a "third rail" in American politics, and I am not able to write anything that would not disappoint if not anger someone I love.

I do find it remarkable that in the gay community those who believe that homosexuality might have elements of nurture as well as nature are treated as pariahs, e.g., Cynthia Nixon, who had a relationship for fifteen years with a man that produced two children and now is engaged to a woman. She refuses to renounce free will regarding her sexuality and has thus poked the eyes of many gay activists (but not all), who believe any talk of "choice" gives comfort to foes of gay civil rights.

Yes, it does. But no scientific study is going to solve or reveal the complexities of human sexuality. Any theory of human sexuality that locks out nurture and locks in nature will not stand for long. We are born with genes. We live our lives in and through our physical persons, and the experiences we have, good and bad, profoundly affect the choices we make, the choices we have, and the choices we defer. DNA matters, and in some cases it might be close to destiny, but DNA is not destiny.

Determinism of any sort is a harsh and false master. I reject them all.

UPDATE: Ms. Nixon "clarified" her statement by making it more ambiguous. In America today, we tolerate everything but a position directly contrary to our own.

"No Need to Panic About Global Warming"

Follow the money. For two decades, all the incentives in physics, bio-chemistry, and meteorology have been to join the bandwagon. To dissent was to assure you and your grad students received no grants; that's a death sentence in academia. To go along was to bring cheers, grants, publications, speeches, and promotions.

Anyone out there reading Thomas Kuhn?

I love science, but scientists live and work within their various cultures and cannot detach themselves as well as they think. See Structures of Scientific Revolutions.

Buried my uncle this week...

He was a great man. He excelled at everything he wanted to excel in: medicine, science, painting, wine-making, fly-fishing, training dogs, and bird-hunting. He loved his wife and family. He never articulated a theological thought to me and seldom attended any kind of church, but he served God's children as a physician with a commitment rarely found in anyone's vocation I have known.

He despised phonies and liked strong and tough people, and unfortunately, most religious people he knew were weak if not phony and foolish. One of his ancestors was a Catholic who participated in some revolutionary activity in Germany. Seeking refuge in a Catholic church, he was kicked out. He moved to Switzerland and became a very reformed Protestant. My uncle was a rationalist and pragmatist who loved nature and considered medicine in the hospital and hunting in the woods to be more holy and sacramental than attending church services. He considered his impiety more sincere than the supposed piety of most religious people, and he probably was right. He lived his convictions better than I live mine.

People such as my uncle are the reason Purgatory makes sense. Purgatory is not as much a punishment as a moment of truth when one feels the light (and heat) of God's presence yet through God's love is perfected and saved. Heat, like water, will either save you or kill you. As one of my favorite Irish priests says, a man who will admit having much to reconcile unto God, "I don't just believe in Purgatory. I'm counting on it!"

I spoke yesterday to a Protestant friend who said there is no reason to mourn a death when the deceased is a Christian. I disagree. We don't know the condition of anyone's soul at death, though with some folks we know very well, we are more confident, if not very confident. I have lost four relatives in ten months: my mother, my nephew, my first cousin, and my uncle. Under the formula generally accepted by Protestant evangelicals for becoming a Christian (accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior for forgiveness of sins through Him alone and the Bible as His revelation), only one, my mother, would be considered a Christian. Does that mean we know the others are without hope of salvation? No. The state of every soul is known to God alone.

When I was an Episcopalian, most Anglican priests preached universalism, that is, God loves us so much that no one is damned. Such a teaching, while emphasizing the truth that God would have died for any one of us, ignores the many Old and New Testament scriptures about eternal judgment and damnation. The parable of the sheep and the goats is not, I believe, just a story to scare us into being good, but an eternal truth. The Catholic teaching on Purgatory, however, makes universal salvation logical, though at a price not just of Christ on the Cross, but of the prayers and sufferings of the entire communion of saints. Those of us living join in prayer with those who are raised to eternal life, united in the Son of God, to form the bridge of love by which those who are dead might be perfected and come face to face with God Almighty.

But there are other reasons to mourn. I grieve the loss of a caring person who taught me many things my parents could not. I grieve the loss of his stories and memories of growing up in central Pennsylvania, attending Princeton and Johns Hopkins, hunting, fishing, rearing children, arguing with his in-laws (my mother's family), and treating cancers, infertility, etc. He was, I realize, my closest uncle. I entrust his soul to a loving God. The humility he demonstrated in his life will not likely desert him in death. I miss him. Requiescat in pace.

Three years ago today...

Barack Obama was inaugurated. I still believe that one president, even if supported by two houses of fools, cannot unravel this republic in one term, but one thing I underestimated is how much damage a president can do through executive orders and the fiat of administrative agencies.

"Can you come to Jesus without Church?"

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald discusses Jefferson Bethke's viral video on YouTube, "Love Jesus-Hate Religion." I have to add that the young man's problems are not just theological but aesthetic. He chooses an aggressive and abrasive medium- the hip-hop sound- to attack something pastoral and magnificent. He is really attacking not just the Church, but anything with human hands that is tied to faith. He is trying to love the Incarnation by hating everything people do with their own hands in response to the Incarnation. Ultimately, he is headed towards Gnosticism, spiritual anarchism, and Manicheism. Whether he is there yet is not my call. Jacques Maritain and Allen Tate would have much to say. I think Flannery O'Connor already introduced us to his sort of religion in Wise Blood.

"Around the world, anti-Semitism is now mainstream."

I am afraid Caroline Glick is right. When I was growing up, Holocaust deniers were mostly ex-Nazis in South America. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, I never heard an anti-Israeli comment in my elementary school. We respected Jews in our community. Though some people resented their success and their tribal ways, I rarely heard someone claim that the world's problems were caused by a conspiracy of Jews except in sourpuss kill-joy right-wing circles.

Today, however, Glick can report:

'[W]hereas they may reject the daily calls to destroy the Jews, Westerners have increasingly internalized the basic claim that Jews deserve to be hated. Take for instance a Washington Post story last week on Egypt's decision to bar Jewish worshippers from making their annual visit to the grave of Torah sage Rabbi Yaakov Abu Hatzera. The story claimed that the Egyptians oppose Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians and because the Egyptian cross-border terror attack on Israel last August, "led to the killing of at least five Egyptian border guards as Israeli troops pursued alleged militants." 'That is, according to the Washington Post, just as the pan-Arab media claims, Israel is entirely responsible for Arab hatred of Jews.'

To dehumanize the children of Abraham is to dehumanize humanity.

"The Law School Bubble: How Long Will It Last If Law Grads Can’t Pay Bills?"

I have been critical of the American Bar Association, namely its propensity to promote the federal and international jurisdictions at the expense of local communities. Here, however, the ABA is saying about our law schools: "Houston, we have a problem."

Just as the Catholic Church's crises are precipitated by problems in the priesthood, problems in the profession of law inevitably infect much of American culture. Overspecialized, indebted, atomistic, utilitarian analysts having no grounding in natural law are not a strong force to protect the weak from oppressors, prosecutors, debt collectors, government regulators, or litigious individuals. Without young independent lawyers, i.e., lawyers free of anchor-chain debt now common, it is much harder to protect citizens from stupid and corrupted legislation, untempered agencies, grasping executives, and capricious courts.

We would do better to have a year of law school followed by one-year apprenticeships in public agencies, courts, and private practice and completed by one semester of advanced academic studies and a final semester of mentored lawyering with a specific purpose. Of course, to do these things would benefit the students and public at the expense of the tenured law faculties and the behemoth universities. Billions of dollars have been invested under the assumption that increasing enrollments of law students borrowing more than $100,000 each would pay the bills. As the article says, what cannot go on- won't.

"Memo to Irving Babbitt" by John Abbot Clark

Babbitt, for those uninitiated, was one of the great culture and literary critics before and after the Great War. His criticisms of American universities, schools, arts, music, and spending priorities have not diminished in wisdom since he died almost eighty years ago.

An excerpt from Clark's Memo:

'You staunchly opposed, with calm, critical incisiveness, the fallacies of so-called Progressive Education. Today, it has become quite fashionable to go around muttering that our elementary and secondary schools are prepared to do just about anything for our children except provide them with a basic education—a solid grounding in English, mathematics, history, science, and foreign languages. You courageously fought Dr. Eliot’s elective system, and chided college presidents—many of whom even in your day were quite obviously afflicted with edifice complexes—for being far more interested in making their institutions bigger rather than better, and in raising money rather than standards. We, at long last and in large numbers, have begun to worry about our huge state-supported universities, which are fast becoming educational bazaars by day and country clubs by night.'

Hating religion... Good luck!

The video on Elizabeth Esther's link is all over Facebook. Her post refutes the worst of the video, and another post at Patheos also addresses much of the video's substance. The rapper in the video says he loves Jesus and hates religion. He actually hates what he thinks religion is, that is, empty ritual devoid of a relationship with our Holy Trinitarian God, creator of the universe.

God seeks man because the nature of God himself is to be man. Man seeks God through acts of piety, gratitude, charity, and obedience because man's very nature is to seek God his creator and brother. Jesus said, "If you love me, you will obey my commandments."

Is our love for God and striving to obey his commandments something to be hated? Jesus himself fasted for forty days and told the apostles that some evil spirits can only be cast out through prayer and fasting. Is it vanity to fast as Jesus did and taught?

Jesus said, "This is my body." Is it superfluous to go to Mass to receive the Body of Christ? Jesus forgave the sins of the paralytic and restored Peter in John 21 after Peter had denied Him. Is it vanity to confess our sins to priests ordained under the apostolic succession of St. Peter?

Jesus said, "When you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me." Is it vanity to lose sleep and give up treasures on earth to feed the poor? Jesus gave us impossible tasks, yet we are called to obey and rest in His love, not succeed and rest in our success. Catholics know this truth as well as Protestants, and in many cases, they know it much better, yet somehow, when we put our hands to charity we are accused of trying to work our way to heaven without a bit of trust in God's grace.

You cannot hate true religion because the very nature of man as God's child and brother is to strive, fast, pray, give, and sacrifice to identify with Christ- not because we believe that we can obtain His love and holiness by our striving, but because we cannot imagine a living relationship with Jesus our savior in which He does all the giving and sacrifice. We do not pretend we can "even" the balance sheet with God Almighty. I buy my earthly father gifts not to even the ledger but to enrich a love that keeps multiplying. The same is true with our heavenly Father. As Mother Teresa said, we need to be "something beautiful for God."


Finally, I have heard people my whole life claim that the Church and its parishes and monasteries should sell off their treasures to feed the poor, but it is seldom the poor who say this. The first person to say this was Judas, who did not, to say the least, understand the big picture and was stealing from the collection plate. His challenge to Christ was not a Christian precedent. Others who say this are secularists who cannot see the Church in its mystical glory but only in its material functions. A third group are rich people who have beautiful things and care little about the beautiful treasures in the Church because they belong to others, including the poor, the saints, God, and others they do not know or understand. And yes, there are some well-meaning people who say this, but they never polled the poor and asked them what they thought about this lousy idea.

The poor, especially the poor in spirit, love the beautiful things in God's house. The poor do not own many beautiful things and appreciate how collectively, and with their ancestors in the communion of saints, they can enjoy beautiful things in God's house as they worship the One who redeems them. They understand that those who would sell those treasures care nothing about the patrimony of the Church which allows the poorest of the poor to worship God in splendor, glory, and beauty and to be Christ. It is the rich who say, "Sell it," but it is the poor that say no.

Another link here re the poor and Church beauty.

2012 is good so far...

Alabama 21, Louisiana State 0. When it comes to college football, I'm less of a Kirkian. Russell Kirk detested all corruptions in the universities, and as a young professor at Michigan State he had watched the football tail wag the dog in the 1950s. As for me, college football will always have a romance to it, despite the fact that it turns universities upside down. It you think that's stupid, think of all those people finding a quasi-religious experience at a political convention next summer. My fever generally lasts a few hours, and I know the world seldom changes over any sporting event- except for the daily fact that young people who are striving in athletic endeavors have less time to be anarchists.

Happy New Year! Make it a year of romance...

Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

'What I mean by the romance of religion is not the sentimental meaning of romance--all chocolates and candles and heaving bosoms--instead I use the word 'romance' to refer to the great romances--those stories of heroes and quests and slaying of dragons and rescuing of fair damsels. To embark on this sort of romance is to step out of boat and walk on the waves. It is to take the step of faith, the leap into the unknown. It is to "cast all your care upon Him." and walk once again by faith and not by sight.'

Read the whole thing.

A year of slow blogging...

I do not blog as much as I used to. I have prayed about it in recent weeks, wondering whether I needed to carve out more time for it. The answer, at least for now, appears to be no.

When I lived out of state, this blog was a way for me to share with my father what I was reading and thinking. I never thought of my father as a "target audience," but we talked about the blog often. He also logged on to this blog in order to link on to his favorite bloggers, Fr. Dwight Longenecker at Standing on My Head, Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary, and Pentimento. Now that Dad and I live only a few miles apart, I seldom read a piece on the web, mark it, and write it up on the blog the same day.

The Spirit is moving. Please pray for my vocation as writer, father, husband, son, brother, uncle, guardian, lawyer, teacher, and Catholic layman. Love God. Love your neighbor. To paraphrase St. Francis Assisi, "if necessary, blog."

Theotokos

We attended Mass this morning with my father at St. Peter's. Fr. Thomas Kelly said that we cannot fathom the holiness of the Mother of God, who was one with Christ and touched him every day. Nor can we fathom the faith of Mary, who loved her Son and embraced Him fully even when His actions and destiny were not apparent.

"Mother of God" is the free translation of theotokos. The literal translation is more like "the one who gives birth to the one who is God."

"Are We Alone in the Universe?"

Charles Krauthammer discusses the discovery of more "Goldilocks" planets relatively closeby. They need to be not too warm, not too cold, not too big, and not too small in order to have any chance to have life similar to the life on ours.

"The Death of Pretty"

Not a pretty trend in my lifetime. From Natalie Wood to Kim Kardashian.

"Spiritual Lullaby"

Pentimento says Merry Christmas and more.

May you have many "Oh wow!" days...

Peggy Noonan writes:

'I thought of a story told by a friend, whose grown son had died, at home, in a hospice. The family was ringed around his bed. As Robert breathed his last an infant in the room let out a great baby laugh as if he saw something joyous, wonderful, and gestured toward the area above Robert's head. The infant's mother, startled, moved to shush him but my friend, her mother, said no, maybe he's just reacting to . . . something only babies see.'

What did the baby see? We don't know. But we do know that babies are amazing. The Feast of the Incarnation is upon us.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Isaiah 60:2-3.

Isaiah got to see things rarely revealed and to write them down for us. G.F. Handel was given the gift of putting Isaiah and other biblical writers to music in his Sacred Oratorio. I once sang in a community chorus that performed The Messiah every year. This performance reminds me of those good days of volunteer musicians and singers working overtime during the holidays to make something beautiful for God.

Jesus, like His saints, comes to us when we have almost come to the conclusion that He does not exist or does not care. This year I celebrate the Feast of the Nativity without the woman who gave me my own. She is not here to sing, so here is Kathleen Battle and Christopher Parkening singing the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria."

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Why was Freddie Mac assigned my new mortgage?

This year, to say the least, has been difficult, and during September I learned that in order to obtain a home loan I would have to prove that I didn't need the money. I paid off most of my debts. I liquidated assets in order in order to make a 30% down payment. The loan originator was Superior Bank. Superior Bank, after questioning every jot and tittle of my financial statements, assigned my mortgage to Wells Fargo, a total foreigner in these parts which bought out Wachovia in 2007, which had bought out SouthTrust earlier in the decade. I just received notice that Wells Fargo assigned my mortgage to Freddie Mac, which will retain Wells Fargo as its servicing agent. My payments go to Wells Fargo, but Freddie Mac owns the payments.

What is going on here? A bank recently seized by the FDIC originated my loan. Its people are aggressively trying to build business in Alabama. Superior Bank sells the mortage to a conglomerate which bought what was once an aggressive bank. Wells Fargo sells a perfectly good mortgage to a private corporation which pretends to be a government agency that regulates and enhances the mortgage industry. In reality, Freddie Mac was a very profitable corporation enjoying vast financial guarantees from its many friends in Washington, most notably, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Newt Gingrich.

Why should you taxpayers be perhaps on the hook for my mortgage? Why should my mortgage be serviced by a conglomerate which gladly assigned it to Freddie Mac? Why would Freddie Mac want my mortgage except to appeal to Congress that its portfolio contains at least a few loans in which the borrower has more than a reasonable chance of paying it back? What does Wells Fargo get out of it? What does Freddie Mac get out of it?

I myself would like to think I am not enabling crony capitalists, but it seems that the mortgage industry has been taken over by the biggest players. I say: (1) abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; (2) prohibit the FDIC from insuring the deposits of any bank which has more than $100 billion in assets. "Too big to fail" means "to big not to be a nest of crony capitalists."

More on Mr. Gingrich and his $1.6 million in compensation from Freddie Mac here. I hope that Mr. Gingrich and Mitt Romney beat each other to a pulp in the next thirty days in order to make room for a candidate that is truly conservative, not a flip-flopper, and can control the right without being controlled by the right. I pray that the Republicans nominate a candidate who has the respect of conservatives yet can impress independents as a viable alternative to the Chicago way.

Christopher Hitchens is dying...

I have always loved Hitchens for his candor and wit. Because he has been a very outspoken atheist, I have long suspected that he both feared and hoped God might actually care about this vale of tears. Interesting thoughts by Mark Judge:

'Ironically, there is a kind of symmetry between Hitchens and his declared enemy, Mother Teresa, whom Hitchens wrote a nasty book about and called a fanatic and a fraud (yawn). In her 2009 book Come Be My Light, published posthumously... Mother Teresa writes of long periods, indeed years, of “darkness” and suffering, during which she felt that God wasn’t there. After the book was published, Hitchens went on TV to gloat. Even Mother Teresa didn’t believe it! In fact, Mother Teresa was going through what many saints do, a dark night of the soul. Such things can make us doubt God, and that is anything but an unholy thing. As Chesterton noted, Christianity is the only religion that allows God to be an atheist (“Why have you forsaken me?”).'

"But this is a walk on the wild side."

This is Peggy Noonan's last line in her column about Newt Gingrich. Here is the paragraph tailor-made for this blog:

'Do you want evidence he's a Burkean conservative? Start with welfare reform in 1996. A sober, standard Republican? Go to the balanced budgets of the Clinton era. Is he a Tea Partier? Sure, he speaks the slashing lingo with relish. Is he moderate? Yes, that can be proved. Michele Bachmann this week called him a "frugal socialist," and there's plenty of evidence of that, too.'

The column is worth the read. I'll just say having lived in Georgia during a major part of his elected political career that I have known of only two people who exceeded Newt as political animals: George Wallace and Bill Clinton.

The City of God

Pentimento, if you read her blog, is a city girl through and through. Her writing can no more be divorced from NYC than Eudora Welty's could be extracted from Jackson, Mississippi.

When I read her many posts on NYC, I realize she has something I lack utterly: a vision of a City of God. My vision of God is pastoral, quaint, and intimate- more like Psalm 23. I admit that I can scarcely imagine God ruling over a huge urban area with justice, order, and liberty, where millions of people enjoy city amenities without poverty, homelessness, cynical bureacrats, and even more cynical political machines and crony capitalists. But the "New Jerusalem" is prophesied by the Old Testament prophets, Jesus himself, and St. John the Apostle, and it is not a village or farm; it is a city. It is my lack of faith that I could never imagine a city of God. Saint Augustine, pray for us.

The Tiber River- What's on the other side?

This week I was trying to check on the Latin spelling of St. Matthew, so I searched for a parallel Vulgate/English Bible and found this lovely site. As I read the parallel texts, I switched over to the Gospel of St. Mark because I wanted to see the Latin text of: "Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief," which is credo adiuva incredulitatem meam. What is missing in the Latin is any word for Lord such as Domini. Curious, I pasted credo adiuva incredulitatem meam into my search engine and got several hits, including this blog post at Bedlam or Parnassus. The post was so interesting I stopped at work to post a comment. I received this nice response:

Dear TQ...thank you so much for posting on my blog. I have just read your story of crossing the Tiber as well as your profile. It seems we have much in common! Anyone who can list Spinal Tap alongside Casablanca, Shawshank, the Iliad, and especially the Aeneid is my kind of guy! I think it no coincidence that our paths have crossed. In Part VII of your story, I saw the same picture of St. Augustine that the lock screen on my iPad. If you would like to chat further, drop me an email. I will list it here, but would prefer you delete this comment so it is not out there too long. You may email me at ____@_____. For a quick rundown, my wife and I celebrated 20 years of marriage this summer. We have two children, and I have been a Latin teacher at middle school, high school, community college, and undergraduate levels for 20 years. A lifelong evangelical, I have been prayerfully considering the Tiber swim for several years.
Magister Christianus

This is the extent of our correspondence so far, but it is just the type of exchange I hoped to have when we first connected to the internet in 1997. Two men who blog anonymously, who love to read and appreciate ancient books and sacramental mysteries somehow connect electronically. Please pray for my new friend Magister Christianus.

"When We Remembered Zion"

Pentimento loves New York. It is a longing for home worthy for a poet or songwriter:

'The city is itself a massive safety valve; no matter how cramped your quarters, you can leave them at any time and actually go somewhere else and still return home in ten minutes. The teeming, rushing life all around buoys the spirits; aesthetic pleasures of all kinds abound. One can have myriads of secret lives there -- I don't mean affairs or other insidious secrets, but, rather, tiny, mundane ones: favorite places, favorite trees on favorite streets, favorite cups of coffee at favorite diners. It seems to me that in small towns, or in the suburbs, one has fewer means of release, fewer tiny secrets to maintain, and one is therefore much more exposed.'

I had to post a comment about Southern suburbia. I look forward to meeting my blogging friends in NYC one day.

Retirement of Cardinal Law

Bernard Cardinal Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston several years ago and was kicked upstairs to Rome. He recently retired from his Roman post. Cardinal Law was the bishop in charge when the whole archdiocese imploded in sex scandal, but he followed a long line of bishops who seemed incapable of addressing pederasty among the clergy.

Cardinal Law was, according to people who knew him well, a decent man, not especially charismatic, but concerned for justice. Many Church leaders over five decades admitted neither the sickness among their own priests nor their own unwillingness to protect children. A frightful stubbornness kicked in. As I teach my daughter through J.R.R. Tolkien's characters, few people set out to do wicked things, but as with Gollum, sin eventually hinders us from doing the right things if we do not address it with humility and contrition. Like Gollum, we can become monsters.

As a Catholic familiar with political persecutions of bishops and priests in history, I could understand if the bishops had taken the wayward priests out of public ministry and not told the police, but they did not even do that. They refused to address repeated mortal sin in their own and allowed that mortal sin to destroy the lives of the faithful. The bishops in Boston, as in other places, were largely immigrants and children of immigrants who had "made it" in America, and their pride made it almost impossible to admit dangerous, ongoing mortal sins by the clergy on their watch. It does not surprise me that Boston, a city where the Catholics' distaste for the WASP is often palpable to this day, became the place where the Church could not own up to its own scandal. But sometimes, as in here, God can speak and work through The Boston Globe.

Cardinal Law is an old man. Though many want to see him in irons, that is not likely to happen. He is more likely to retire to a religious community outside the United States and be buried in a cemetery for priests and religious. If you read Dante, there are special places in The Inferno for bad priests and bishops, but thinking about Hell and wishing it for anyone risks your soul more than that of the one you despise. This blog's theme holds true:

"How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

As Jesus said, some demons can only be cast out by prayer and fasting. Saint Anthony the Hermit, pray for us.

"Branding" is for bulls.

A "brand" in modern parlance is a person, product, or line of products whose usefulness and/or suaveness is imprinted in the minds of consumers. As I explored setting up my own law practice, I found the web to be full of marketing consultants, some very good but most underemployed, who tell me that I must create my own "brand" as a lawyer. I know what they are saying, and I do not believe they mean harm. Nonetheless, the constant promotion of style and image over substance is what is wrong with the world.

I was introduced to Benetton twenty years ago. I received two pretty sweaters as a Christmas gift. They were colorful and had the label "United Colors of Benetton." I liked to wear them and received compliments whenever I did. Their "branding" I soon learned, however, was despicable, though they always claimed to be fighting for love and its modern twin, tolerance. They caught every politically-correct wind and threw sexual controversies into clothing ads as if no children were ever watching. I never purchased another Benetton product.

Most recently, their mocking of world leaders through the photo-shopped "kissing" images of the "UNHATE" campaign shows the truly discordant and incoherent colors of Benetton. Nobody has tried to reach out to Muslims and discuss faith and religious tolerance more than Pope Benedict XVI, yet there he is pictured, kissing Sheikh Ahmed Mohamed El-Tayeb. Below the men are the words "UNHATE," as if a big smooch among men would keep young Muslims from blowing themselves up along with the Coptic Christians. Benetton's brand is "trendy shock" masquerading as moral vision. It is really politically-correct sanctimoniousness.


Penn State had a great brand until two weeks ago. The association of Penn State with "Joe Pa," excellence, "Happy Valley," and clean football is now broken with the images of Jerry Sandusky in handcuffs and his lawyer trying to explain away a scathing indictment and more reports of pederasty. Nobody protected the Penn State brand as zealously as Graham Spanier, who, until two weeks ago was considered an outstanding university president. It appears that he carried a shovel and broom wherever he went in order to bury the bones and sweep away the rumors at the school and thereby protect the "brand."


The Irish diaspora produced a unique American ethnicity, even a "brand," the Boston Irishmen. Through political machines, trade unions, the public schools, the parochial schools, and the priests and bishops, they overthrew the Brahmins and WASPs and ran the city of Boston and many of its suburbs. But the Church became more concerned with its "brand" than its mission to children, and went down in scandal. If the bishops and clergy had been willing to let a priest or two face scrutiny and moral outrage for their deeds fifty years ago, they would have saved the "little ones" in their charge, set a disciplinary example for the rest, and avoided the millstones that several of them acquired about their necks.

Branding has its costs. Brands are abstractions. They have no relationships. They do not bleed. They do not make the world a better place. They simply, for a very short time, symbolize something people want and perhaps need.

Branding is one of the costs of over-specialization. Not too many people understand the medicines, machines, and investments they depend on, much less the laws they are beholden to. We depend on people whose skills we do not have time to understand. In the great unknown, a brand sometimes must suffice for reasonable certainty, e.g., good brands such as GM, AIG, Wachovia, and Lehman Brothers.


Steve Jobs had 'a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM and Xerox, Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.'

After quoting Jobs, Peggy Noonan goes on to discuss how politics is where branding can hurt the most:

'America is in political decline in part because we’ve elevated salesmen—people good on the hustings and good in the room, facile creatures with good people skills—above people who love the product, which is sound and coherent government—”good government,” as they used to say. To make that product you need a certain depth of experience. You need to know the facts, the history, how the system works, what the people want, what the moment demands.'

Each party now is in the straight jacket of its own "brand." The partisans of the party of "no new taxes" and "no amnesty" cannot accept the fact that the tax code will need to be rewritten in the next few years to sustain growth and provide for entitlements; there will be winners and losers. (I myself prefer flatter rates, fewer deductions, and few if any tax credits for crony capitalists.) They cannot accept the fact that millions of loyal Americans are not legal citizens yet cannot be deported without a bitter new "trail of tears" and separation from their children who are U.S. citizens. The partisans of the party of "unions and entitlements forever" cannot accept the fact that confiscatory tax rates cannot guarantee entitlements, pensions, giveaways, and union hegemony for my lifetime, much less my daughter's.

We need creative people, producers, and innovators who are willing to sacrifice parts of our sprawling government in order to save it. Branding cannot be the substitute for either integrity or imagination. We need new leadership.

"Why Some Women Are Burning Out of Work By 30"

I started law school in my mid-thirties; I was the third oldest person in my class. Most of my classmates came straight from college where they were "all-everything." As is normal today, bright women were well represented on the Law Review, on the Moot Court Board, on the other journals, and among the star interviewees for the best-known law firms in the nation. Many women graduated from Vandy Law and went on immediately to enviable positions in private practice, clerkships, government positions, and NGOs.

This article strikes a chord because I have seen it happen to dozens of my female classmates who have left law practice before our class' 10th anniversary, and often before they themselves hit 30.

Who was Hitler?

We used to hear: "Bush is Hitler." Now we hear: "Obama is Hitler." Meanwhile, about one billion people living between Marrakesh and Jakarta do not believe there was a Holocaust. Are we nuts? Hitler should not be compared to Saddam Hussein or Pol Pot, much less to a U.S. president.

During the 1990s I taught a fellow who wanted to minimize the evils of Adolf Hitler. He had an older relative who was somewhat of an apologist for the Fuehrer. This kid was rare in those days; those who had fought Hitler still were present in the news media and would not let such misguided sentimentalism sneak into our public discourse. Today, weak references and comparisons to Hitler occur daily in the media and on the streets, propagated by both the right and the left.

Let's set the record straight: Hitler was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Mass extermination was his policy, method, end, and pleasure. His only competition at the top tier of evil during the last hundred years was from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. There were plenty of other mass murderers and rapacious dictators, but only those three, through force of personality backed by totalitarian parties, massive armies, and invasive legions of secret police, were able to order or cause the deaths of more than twenty million people over huge territories and across multiple ethnicities. Whatever evil most of us have witnessed, theirs was exponential in comparison.

Enough is enough. Hyperbole confuses. The present hyperbole comparing 21st-century U.S. presidents to the 20th century's most murderous dictator insults everyone who gave blood to defeat National Socialism and everyone who has served the last two presidents loyally and faithfully.

UPDATE: To compare anyone with Hitler is to declare him beyond the pale and therefore less than a person and unworthy of any respect. It destroys our political discourse and our own moral reasoning to compare anyone but a handful of human beings to Hitler.

Warp drive is on its way!

Neutrinos appear to travel faster than light. I am excited now about my prospects of intergalactic travel... which must be just around the corner (or around the Andromeda galaxy).

"George's God: The Faith of the Quiet Beatle"

Andrew Ferguson writes of George Harrison's quest for faith:

'It helps that Hinduism lets a believer off the hook more easily than Christianity. Harrison became a particular devotee of the god Krishna, a blue-skinned, flute-tooting playboy who, unlike Jesus Christ, rotates his way through a harem of thousands of nubile maidens. Compared with them, Ringo’s wife must have seemed like a trifle.

'Still, his mother may have succeeded more than he knew. When he went off with Maharishi, he wrote her a letter of reassurance. His Hindu practice, he told her, wasn’t taking him “off from any devotion to the Sacred Heart in any way. It only strengthens it!” Religious devotion of the most intimate sort preoccupied him, and his oscillation between guilt and redemption had a Catholic look to it—though his insistence on the split between spirit and body could have landed him squarely with the Manicheans.'

"Consecration to Mary"

Nice post by Betty Duffy, a friend of Pentimento. An excerpt:

'If everything I do is for Jesus through Mary, my sanctity is not my problem; it's not something I can earn of my own will or by perfect performance. I'm a slave, and my intentions are now Mary's intentions, and the graces of my prayers are hers to administer. I have confidence that I also share the benefit of those graces somehow.'

"The Sheep and the Goats"

The reading today, Matthew 25:31-46, is more than challenging. To embrace Christ is not just to embrace the joys of joyful people but the sorrows of sorrowful people:

44 Then they also will answer, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?'
45 Then he will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.'

Oddly enough, towards the end of the deacon's homily this morning, a fire alarm went off in the sacristy, and the priest got up reverently and turned it off. Later he said to the assembled that the deacon's "fire and brimstone preaching set off the alarm." It was funny to all because the deacon had challenged us in a most loving and gentle way.

After eating lunch with my father, we dropped him off, and as we drove home ourselves it occurred to me that I had not visited my uncle in months. As soon as I thought it, I tried to talk myself out of it, which usually happens when one gets a godly impulse. We went to see my uncle, a widower who is about ninety and legally blind. As I sat with him, I prayed that Our Lady of the Visitation which guide me of when to talk and when to shut up. I don't know how well I listened, but I tried. My wife and I agree that we ought to go more often, not to share, but to sit. The saints were never in a hurry when with those in need.

I thought about other things today in obedience to the Gospel, namely that if I give my time to God's needy children, all those professional things a lawyer is supposed to do, such as networking, Twittering, rubbing elbows with the mighty, etc. will be covered by God and the heavenly host. Ora pro nobis.

"Crime and Communion"

Pentimento finds little graces in unlikely places, little graces that God give us vision to see, often through suffering.