Seeing Stephen Colbert take over the Late Show as a new Christian was great, since losing his Colbert Report "character" allowed him the opportunity to be very open about his Catholic faith. This GQ profile is is worth reading all the way through, just to get the full build-up to the really beautiful end: "'That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.'
I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.
I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. 'Tolkien says, in a letter back: "What punishments of God are not gifts?"' Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?' he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. 'So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.'" The Late, Great Stephen Colbert
Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry writes that certain controversies are blown way out of proportion: Against Students' Stories "Only by making a bad copy of a copy—only by subtly shifting crucial details just enough so that a non-story comes to seem like a story—can this non-event come to seem worth reporting by CNN, etc. Only by exaggerating what happens can it become the occasion for moralistic indignation. [...]
We understand why this happens. It’s the collective hunger of the online, for-profit media for tasty content that creates a situation where we find apparently reputable news outlets copying a student’s work, and doing it so badly—and so strategically badly—that a story is created where none would otherwise exist. The collective news consciousness is vaguely aware that college students are Anti-Speech Social Justice Warriors Who Also Generally the Worst, because we keep seeing op-eds declaring that it’s a real problem. It’s an easy story, especially when there’s a Man-Bites-Dog twist, such as the students in question being Christians. For hungry journalists who’d rather not do their homework, a whole set of confirmation biases and moralisms swings into action the moment they sniff anything of the sort."
More from Steve Colbert: his interview on the Catholic TV show Witness with Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB: Father Rosica: “And we’re all fools for Christ, huh?”
Colbert: “Yeah, yeah - willing to be wrong in society, or wrong according to our time, but right according to our conscience, which is guided by the Holy Spirit... Are you writing this down, by the way? I should have this in Latin.”
I can't remember the first thing I read from Alan Jacobs (perhaps Fantasy & the Buffered Self?), but like Jamie Smith above, he's been a huge influence in my intellectual development over the past few years. He is particularly good – likely due to his voracious love for reading, both light and heavy – at writing about esoteric fiction I've never heard of (and of course, some that I have) and tying it into something incredibly relevant. This American Conservative essay on Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories is lovely; here's the important part: "All of this is of course merely a dream of refuge dreamed by someone (me) who is one of the safest people in the world. As I write these words, refugees from the Middle East are pouring into Europe, and someone posted on Instagram images of notices that the city of Vienna has put up in all the transportation centers. The one in English (I saw Arabic ones too) begin with the word 'WELCOME,' and go on to explain the various services the city provides for refugees, and to instruct visitors how to find help. Then, at the end, there is a single three-word paragraph:
-You are safe.-
'You are safe.' Could there be more powerful, more important, more consoling words? I have never needed to hear them in the way those thousands of refugees need to; and yet they answer to the deepest of all needs. For even water and food can wait for a while." Safe Spaces
I [virtually] met Rebecca Florence Miller through the Christ & Pop Culture members group, and have appreciated her writing on her Patheos blog as someone consistently seeking a messy middle ground on so many issues. This piece is on the necessity of recognizing our own sin (specifically looking at racism): "'What if you’re not a good person?' There is no path forward but to admit it, to accept it, to sink down deep into the knowing of this truth: I am not a good person. There are some good things I do, there are signs of the imago Dei too, but there is also a badness deep inside me that is self-centered and perverse, that considers my own needs before my neighbor’s, that clings to prejudices, that is 'in bondage to sin and unable to free myself' (as the old prayer of confession in the Lutheran church says). I am hopelessly entangled in the web of my own sin and the sins of society. How can I even begin the process of change if I cannot sit down in an honest moment and admit to myself my own badness, my own complicity in society’s badness?
The starting place of any twelve-step program is confession and acceptance that one indeed has a problem. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is said this way: 'We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.' Those in twelve-step programs know that one must not just admit this once in their lives but must rather admit it daily. There must be daily confession of one’s problem. One never 'arrives' at complete recovery; rather, one is in recovery.
This cuts against the grain of American triumphalism, which whitewashes history, turns the focus of blame on others, and congratulates oneself on being a patriot instead of a pinhead. It also cuts against the grain of American liberalism, which desperately runs the hamster wheel trying to get to 'the right side of history' and desperately seeks assurance from neighbors that one is good, after all. It’s a painful admission, but the start of any recovery is always painful. In fact, it is painful and humbling each and every day." Patriots (Not Pinheads) and the Right Side of History: Racism and Self-Justification
Aldo Leopold was pretty awesome (from Wildlife in American Culture):
"Somehow they used mechanical aids, in moderation, without being used by them. I do not claim to know what is moderation, or where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets. It seems clear, though, that the origin of gadgets has much to do with their cultural effects."
"To the amateur [researcher] are allotted only make-believe voyages of discovery, to verify what professional authority already knows. What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas."
It's been present peripherally in a few of the previous links, but the 2016 Primary season was beginning around this time. Emily Uecker at McSweeney's gives the most succinct summary in Shakespearean stanzas for each of the Republican candidates. "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" "Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here": A Shakespearean Guide to the 2016 Republican Primary
In a Political Ideologies class this fall, I read lots of great stuff, but probably nothing greater than this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: “I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves.”
Brad Williams defends the humanity of immigrants, regardless of their documentation status, at Christ & Pop Culture: Illegal Immigrants: People, Not Political Capital "This political season, please try to remember that illegal immigrants are not money sponges who are looking to exploit our welfare system. They are men and women with families and dreams, and most of them are here to work and better themselves. They are image-bearers of God, and sojourners in our land: our response should be mercy, not wrath."
Ross Douthat takes on Ben Carson and the appeal of evangelical outsider candidates, writing about how "the evangelical tendency has been to look for a kind of godly hero, a Christian leader who could win the White House and undo every culture-war defeat... Such unrealistic ideas are hardly unique to the religious right. But evangelical culture, as James Davison Hunter notes in 'To Change the World,' his magisterial account of recent Christian engagement with American politics, has a particular fondness for the idea of the history-altering individual, the hope that 'one person can stand at the crossroads and change things for good.'
As Hunter’s book points out, neither political nor cultural change usually happens like this. Instead, it comes from networks, institutions, interest groups, and it requires strategy, alliance-building and steady pressure." We know how this story ends, unfortunately; evangelicals apparently weren't so much concerned with the "godly" or "Christian" parts after all, preferring instead the anti-establishment strong man to smite their perceived enemies for them. Evangelicals and the Carson Illusion (NYT)
As Hunter’s book points out, neither political nor cultural change usually happens like this. Instead, it comes from networks, institutions, interest groups, and it requires strategy, alliance-building and steady pressure." We know how this story ends, unfortunately; evangelicals apparently weren't so much concerned with the "godly" or "Christian" parts after all, preferring instead the anti-establishment strong man to smite their perceived enemies for them. Evangelicals and the Carson Illusion (NYT)
Despite evangelical fears of persecution through biased and unfair media coverage, a lot of great work on religion (albeit amongst much dreck) has come out of secular outlets since I started paying attention. The Atlantic's Emma Green is one of the sharpest and fairest religion journalists around. Here's her piece on how people reading too much political progressivism into Pope Francis's rhetoric and ideology misread his primary pastoral function: Pope Francis Is Not ‘Progressive’—He’s a Priest [Pope Francis] comes to the United States not as a politician, but as a pastor. As the country receives a pope who is known for going off script and freestyling his ministry, only one thing is truly sure to happen: Prepare for some preaching, America.
...“My hope,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, “is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: ‘Give them something to eat.’”
I should really get more in the habit of sharing good passages from books I'm reading, like this one from NT Wright's Surprised by Hope: "Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient. It reminds the politicians that there is a gap in their thinking. The world is in fact still a sad and wicked place, not a happy upward progress toward the light."
"'Don't you believe in progress?' people ask scornfully when someone objects to a new 'moral' proposal. They used to say that when people objected to cutting down ancient trees to build a new road, but we have begun to realize that progress in that sense wasn't all it was cracked up to be."
"'Don't you believe in progress?' people ask scornfully when someone objects to a new 'moral' proposal. They used to say that when people objected to cutting down ancient trees to build a new road, but we have begun to realize that progress in that sense wasn't all it was cracked up to be."
Another strange thread in these posts is the tie back to Pope Francis, and my growing comfort with the Catholic Church. While I'm still working out where I stand on some of the Roman Catholic vs. Reformed debates, and don't even know now how I feel about some of Francis's more radical stances, I'm sure glad I was reading Melinda Selmys on his critics, particularly those complaining, "Why didn't the Pope say more about [insert personal ideological priority here]?"
"One of the major things that happens to most people when they grow up is that they realize that, no, actually, there is way more about the world that I don’t know than there is that I do know. Mature thinking is characterized by a kind of humility which is willing to admit uncertainty and doubt.
This isn’t the same as lacking conviction – rather it’s a matter of having the conviction that the truth is bigger and more complicated than one’s own limited intellectual horizons. Socrates, who saw the acknowledgement of his own ignorance as the foundation of wisdom, was certainly neither an intellectual slouch, nor a wishy-washy relativist, nor a man lacking in courage or principles.
Humility-before-truth is not a matter of denying truth, but rather a matter of being willing to learn and to be taught – including a willingness to learn and be taught things that do not conform to our own pre-established beliefs." Is the Pope Catholic? (Patheos)
"One of the major things that happens to most people when they grow up is that they realize that, no, actually, there is way more about the world that I don’t know than there is that I do know. Mature thinking is characterized by a kind of humility which is willing to admit uncertainty and doubt.
This isn’t the same as lacking conviction – rather it’s a matter of having the conviction that the truth is bigger and more complicated than one’s own limited intellectual horizons. Socrates, who saw the acknowledgement of his own ignorance as the foundation of wisdom, was certainly neither an intellectual slouch, nor a wishy-washy relativist, nor a man lacking in courage or principles.
Humility-before-truth is not a matter of denying truth, but rather a matter of being willing to learn and to be taught – including a willingness to learn and be taught things that do not conform to our own pre-established beliefs." Is the Pope Catholic? (Patheos)
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