An ongoing review of politics and culture

A Hermeneutic Of Pontiffs

I remember that one day I produced a theological musing on Twitter. One of my tweeps responded with something like “If you take that to an extreme, that’s [Heresy X].” I thought about that for a second and my response was “Well, don’t do that, then.”

I often think about that moment because whenever we write about theology there is a great room for interpreting anything anybody says, because the terms we use are so imperfect, and perhaps because Christian theology contains so many carefully (un?)balanced paradoxes.

It seems to me that this should lead to a general principle of, well, charity in interpreting what people say in this arena. If I am an orthodox Catholic, and I say “X” and some version of “X” is heretical, then you should probably assume that that’s not what I meant.

I say this, of course, because whenever Pope Francis says something, some Catholics have what seems best referred to as a hissy fit. And these hissy fits, invariably, seem to be based not on what the Pope actually said but what he seems to have said.

So for example, when the Pope says “Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them”, that could be interpreted as a brief for moral relativism. Of course, the only problem with that interpretation would be that it would be arrant nonsense. Because, you know, he’s the Pope, and also an orthodox Catholic, as he has demonstrated on countless occasions.

What’s striking is that the same people who always wish to interpret the Pope in an unorthodox fashion are always so prompt in explaining why, say, the media are interpreting a Pope’s comments wrong.

The problem here, as always, is pride. We think like politicians. We parse words for whether they help the Republican Party of the Church or the Democratic Party of the Church, whereas we should be humbly receiving the teachings of the Vicar of Christ. When those teachings seem shocking to us, common sense alone dictates that, instead of rending our garments, we should, with humility and charity, check ourselves to see what we can learn.

So, for example, in his most recent interview, when the Pope criticizes proselytizing, is he criticizing evangelization? That’s what some people on Twitter seemed to think. It also doesn’t make sense, because the Pope later praises the Jesuits’ missionary work and, you know, more generally, he’s a Catholic bishop. It seems to make more sense if we understand his criticism as applying to pointless, antagonizing grandstanding (which is so often the form “evangelization” takes), and as calling us to an ethic of love in addressing unbelievers.

The wrong interpretation is particularly sad in this case, and missing the forest for the trees, since in this case the interview itself is an inspiring example of evangelization, with the Pope inviting (with striking humility!) a secular atheist journalist to a candid conversation. You think the Pope doesn’t care about evangelization? He is showing you how to do it! Note that his interlocutor leaves, while not converted, absolutely in awe, which is a pretty good first step. Note how the Pope speaks to his interlocutor in terms he can relate to—terms which might irk you, if you are a “conservative Catholic”, but terms which might bring people to the flock.

We really have to learn from the Pope.

Pope Francis Spits On Benedict And John Paul II's Corpse Again

Will you get a load of this?

We should not allow our faith to be drained by too many discussions of multiple, minor details, but rather, should always keep our eyes in the first place on the greatness of Christianity. I remember […] I was asked to give interviews and I always knew the questions in advance. They concerned the ordination of women, contraception, abortion and other such constantly recurring problems. If we let ourselves be drawn into these discussions, the Church is then identified with certain commandments or prohibitions; we give the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears. I therefore consider it essential always to highlight the greatness of our faith – a commitment from which we must not allow such situations to divert us.

This is really too much. Poor Pope Emeritus Benedict is in seclusion and can’t say anything about this stuff, but I’m sure he must be fuming! The era of John Paul II and Benedict XVI is well and truly over, and now we’re just 5 seconds away from womenpriests, balloon masses, and worshipping the Great One Togetherness. Francis is very clearly trying to undermine and reject the conservatives in the Church with these words. They may be nice, but they’re just going to get misinterpreted and we can’t have that.

Wait, what’s the full quote?

We should not allow our faith to be drained by too many discussions of multiple, minor details, but rather, should always keep our eyes in the first place on the greatness of Christianity. I remember, when I used go to Germany in the 1980s and ’90s, that I was asked to give interviews and I always knew the questions in advance. They concerned the ordination of women, contraception, abortion and other such constantly recurring problems. If we let ourselves be drawn into these discussions, the Church is then identified with certain commandments or prohibitions; we give the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears. I therefore consider it essential always to highlight the greatness of our faith – a commitment from which we must not allow such situations to divert us.

Wait, Germany?

Oh! It’s a quote from Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.

Nevermind then.

h/t Why I Am Catholic

Just In Case You Thought There Are Catholics Who Are Better Than Other Catholics...

After Pope Francis’ interview, the “group” Catholics United put out a press release titled “Pope to Right-Wingers: I’m Not One Of You.”

Here’s Paul:

You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task.

Don't shut the doors of heaven in people's faces

The working title of this post was “Are you frickin’ kidding me?”

The greatest sin is the sin of pride, because it is the first sin and it is the one that leads to all the others. Pride is what turns us away from God, and all the rest flows from it.

Meanwhile, the demonic mind is a mind of perversion which always seeks to lead us to perversion. The Devil likes when we do evil, but he likes nothing so much as when we do evil in the name of the good. Fallenness is the work of Man, but perversion is the work of the Devil.

This means we must always guard ourselves against pride, and we must particularly guard ourselves against perversion, in the true etymological sense of turning something good to evil ends.

Nowhere is this perversion more evident than in the never-ceasing perversion of the Church. The Devil attacks the Church relentlessly, because nothing pleases him so much as the flaying of the Body of Christ, particularly when it is self-inflicted. The Devil likes Nero but his masterpiece is the Grand Inquisitor.

We see this pride leading to perversion whenever children of the Church seek to make the Church into something which it is not. A political party. A club. A prison. An elite. An NGO. A commune.

Because doing this to the Church and to us is the Devil’s main obsession, we see it arising always, in ourselves and in the world, and we must keep ever-vigilant about it.

All of which brings me to the trepidation du jour among some Catholics, which is the latest Pope Francis interview.

The mainstream media reaction was as sad as it was predictable, and the less said about it the better.

What was striking was the reaction of some “conservative” Catholics (why do you need a modifier before “Catholic”?) to, well, a message of love. The same people who are faulting the New York Times for focusing only on the culture war issues in this deep, wide-ranging interview are focusing on the culture war issues in this deep, wide-ranging interview.

This interview is just wonderful, so full of depth and love and humility and wisdom.

The Pope says two things about issues like homosexuality and abortion: he says Catholics should show their love first before catechizing, and he says that the teachings of the Church should be remembered in their broader context of love. This is precisely correct.

We have to love sinners before we teach them. We have to welcome sinners into the Church. We first have to show them that Jesus saves them before we can teach them. This is true not just because it works better. It’s true because it is God’s Way. God led his people out of Egypt and then gave them His law. God does not say “Follow these rules, and maybe I will save you.” God says: “I save you—follow these rules if you want to love me back.” The entire dynamic of the Bible and the Gospel is about receiving God’s love first, and His Law second.

Everything the Pope said about “social issues” in his interview was the stark, naked, Catholic truth. He preached an ecclesiology of love, and charity in movement.

And yet some people are saying: Now, Mr Bergoglio, I don’t know just who you think you are, but this will not do.

This is what happens when pride leads us to perversion.

It was written: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.”

Oh but no no no, we are told, the Pope didn’t say anything wrong, exactly (how generous of you to grant!). It’s not that we shouldn’t love sinners, it’s just that the Pope just shouldn’t have said it.

Well okay then. That’s much better.

Here’s Rod Dreher, whom I love as a brother and a friend albeit in a terribly imperfect way, and who I don’t want to single out. I single out this post only as an avatar of the many comments I’ve seen on Twitter and elsewhere, and not Rod personally. I’m certainly no better than Rod in any way. But this is what Rod writes:

I know what the Pope means here, and he’s right: there is so very much more to Christianity than its teachings on sexuality and abortion. But this is where I think he goes badly wrong: his remarks will be received as the Pope saying that this stuff doesn’t matter all that much.

Well yeah, they’ll be received that way. If you let them.

Can’t risk being misinterpreted! Why, if Jesus’ contemporaries had misinterpreted His message, they might have turned on Him.

This is the perversion of the Church. This is the pride that leads us to destroy the good in the name of the good. We have to find a reason to fault the Pope for saying we must love the sinner, when by our own admission everything he says is right.

You understand, the Roman Catholic Party can’t have one of its spokesmen undercutting message discipline! We can’t have him make us look bad! Yeah, yeah, sure, that love the sinner stuff, it’s in the platform, but this week is Abortion Week. And all the other weeks.

Catholicism is not an identity. It is not a party platform. It is not a clique. It is not a political objective. It is not an ideology.

Writes a priest of Rod’s acquaintance:

Words fail. If this keeps up, everything is going to be much harder. I can’t say it surprises me; the man gave an eighty minute press conference to the assembled press corps on an airplane. But it’s terribly naive, in a time when people graduate from Catholic elementary and high schools, college, and don’t know the most fundamental things about the Faith, not to realize how selectively people will pounce on this kind of thing.

I’m really sorry that the Pope expounding on the verities of the faith will make your job harder. I hadn’t realized that you had signed up for an easy job.

People “don’t know the most fundamental things about the Faith”? It’s pretty good, then, that the Pope is teaching the most fundamental things about the Faith.

People will “selectively pounce on this kind of thing”? Yes! As they always have, and as they always will! Your job is hard! It involves carrying a Cross! And dying!

But hey, look on the bright side. Catholic institutions of education have been failing at their mission for decades, but now we can blame the Pope who was elected two seconds ago.

“The man” (that’s “His Holiness” to you, Father) is “naive.” He just doesn’t know how to do his job right.

“Words fail”? Father, if this quote reflects what’s in your mind, then you need to go to confession and say penance.

This accusation of naïveté, it’s quite something.

Writes Rod:

I love his style — seriously, I do — but I am sure the liberal Pope has been very, very naive in his words here.

First of all—“the liberal Pope”? Really? When, exactly, did he become a liberal? Was it when he called same-sex marriage a plot by the Devil as bishop of Buenos Aires? Was he a liberal when he denounced abortion literally today?

Anyway, this (hold your nose) liberal is just naive. (How often do you hear a Jesuit described as “naive”?) If he’d been a Provincial, and Primate of a big country, he might have some worldly wisdom. But he’s just a holy fool. And holy fools aren’t bad, exactly, you understand, but they just shouldn’t mess with grown-up stuff. They just don’t know any better.

There are many words that can apply to Jorge Mario Bergoglio. I really, really don’t think “naive” is one of them.

The world wants to be told, “It’s okay, do what you like.”

No, actually, the world wants to be saved by a King of Glory.

For liberals and Moralistic Therapeutic Deists within Catholicism, it’s springtime. For traditionalists and conservatives in the Catholic Church, it’s going to be a long winter.

This is it. This, right here. This is the problem. This is the perversion. This is the defiling of what is holy.

The Pope is measured by whether what he says helps politically the “Republican Party of the Catholic Church” or the “Democratic Party of the Catholic Church.” This is the disease. This is the cancer. We have our cliques, we have our parties, and the question is who is going to win. Who cares!

Is it going to be a long winter? Why? Because you don’t love enough? Good!

Is it going to be a long winter because you’re going to look bad? Tough! You shouldn’t have looked good in the first place. A Christian who looks good is headed in the wrong direction.

What does it mean to have a long winter? The Pope isn’t going to give you brownie points? He won’t hang out with you at recess anymore? The Pope’s job isn’t to take care of the feelie-feelies of self-described Modifier-Catholics.

Anybody who thinks the Pope is promoting Moral Therapeutistic Deism or cafeteria Catholicism or anything like that is just out of their mind. Anyone who is challenged by the Pope saying that we must first love the sinner ought to be challenged, and is not challenged by the Pope but by Christ, who is speaking through His Vicar is the Pope.

When will it get through our thick skulls? (Mine is certainly very thick.)

The Gospel of Life is the Glengarry Glenn Ross speech, except with love instead of selling real estate. “Nice guy? Good father? I don’t give a shit.” LOVE. Take up your Cross and follow Him.

It is written: “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

It’s not a figure of speech!

It is also written: “Dreadful it is to fall in the hands of the living God.”

Dreadful! Christianity is not a cake party! The Spirit burns like a flame!

Now, I am not saying you cannot ever criticize the Pope. I have questions about his comments about the Latin Mass, and his comments about Papal Infallibility, although they seem to be well-within the bounds of Catholic doctrine and to be taking it in an interesting direction. These are not things that I would criticize, because I just do not know enough about what the Pope is saying, but I certainly understand why there are questions.

But to treat an interview where the Pope urges us to treat sinners with love first with alarm is, for a Christian, demonic. It is a perversion of the good in the name of the good. It is yielding to temptation.

Do you know how many people feel excluded from the Church because they have had abortions, or are gay, or are divorced? “Oh, but they’re not excluded.” You have quite the way of showing it, by freaking out when the Pope says they shouldn’t be excluded. Love! The way the Catholic Church treats homosexual persons is very often a damned disgrace (I am in no way referring to the Church’s doctrine) and it is a blessing that we have a Pope with pastoral experience who realizes it.

The Pope is calling on you to love.

I am cutting out here because I have hated writing this post, which is almost certainly an unhinged rant which is not treating people faithfully and is all wrong.

On Recommending Books

Friend of The Scene Rod Dreher has a bleg: 3 good “Intro to Christianity for the interested irreligious reader” book recommendations.

I think that’s a great idea and I’m curious what people’s recommendations are.

But what was striking was Scene Alum Alan Jacobs’s response that, essentially, you can’t do that. It’s impossible to recommend books to people you don’t know, because nobody knows how a book will affect someone, and it might have the opposite effect. (Alan noted that he knows people who were turned away from Christianity by reading C.S. Lewis, even though he is (Anglo) Christians’ go-to apologist.)

After being snarky on Twitter, I sort of want to explore this.

There’s a sense in which this is obviously true, right? We’re all different, books are universes, and so on.

But there’s also a sense in which it’s a bit absurd. If we take it to its logical conclusion, then no one could ever make any recommendation—of anything. Gone is any sort of Great Books curriculum, or any list of books whatsoever. It looks particularly absurd when you go into non-fiction. “What are the 5 best books on the fall of the Roman Empire?” “Well, who can say? It’s a mystery.” That will not do. And this is true despite the fact that many of the books on such a fraught topic have viewpoints, editorial choices, and so on that might rub readers the wrong way. But it’s still useful for me to be able to know “Hey, here’s what So-And-So, woman I respect/whose credentials tell me her opinion is worth something/whatever, thinks are the X best books on Y.” It’s easy to make fun of “Top 20” lists and suchlike, but they actually serve a purpose in human affairs, at least in the aggregate (one Top 20 list is probably going to be useless, but a bunch of Top 20 lists together paint a picture).

I would want to make some remarks about this:

There is at least ONE Book that recommends itself to everyone. Right?

It’s possible to hate a Great Book and still get value from reading it. For example, I hated Madame Bovary. I hated the melodrama, hated the story, hated the characters. And yet, I couldn’t help but note the mastery of Flaubert’s prose, and I was still glad to be immersed in it.

Recommendations really are useful, or can be. I bought Benedict XVI’s Introduction to Christianity after reading Rod’s comments.

Recommendations are a good intellectual exercise. I’ve read a few books about Christianity, and yet Rod’s question stumped me for a while. Making a recommendation actually forces you to settle down and think about the books you’ve read, what they’ve brought to you, how someone might receive them, what they’re like, why, exactly, you’ve found them so valuable (or not so valuable), and so on.

People are grown-ups. If someone recommends a book to me, and I read it, and I don’t like it—that’s fine. Or I might not even read it because I’ll take the recommendation into account, compare it with other recommendations, and decide I want to read something else instead. To recommend a book is not to foist it upon someone. If you recommend a book on Christianity to me and I hate it, I might think “Well Jeez, this Christianity stuff really is ridiculous”, or I might think “Huh. That was really bad. Maybe there’s something else out there” or “I hated this, but So-and-So is smart and recommended it anyway, and so I’m going to try to think about why, even though overall this was bad.”

A recommendation should not just be a title and a name. I think this is the point that we should keep in mind. This is the thing that makes Alan’s point important, and the thing that might reconcile his point with recommendations. “The best book on X is Y” does not have much value. “If you’re the kind of reader who cares about A, who feels a certain way when B, and who is particularly interested in C, then the best book on X is Y. Y gives you the story of α, β and γ in such and such a way” that’s actually very useful. And remembering that People Are Grown-Ups, it both improves the odds they’re going to read a book that’s good for them and takes into account their agency.

What do y’all think?

With that in mind, here are some tentatives answers to Rod.

1. The Gospel of John and the First Epistle to the Corinthians (yes, I’m counting them as one book, if only because if I were to write “The New Testament” that would also count as one book and be bigger). Why? First of all, I don’t think it’s possible to have a good intro to Christianity without reading the actual Scripture. For many reasons. First of all, obviously, because it’s the Word of God. Second of all, because everything else in Christianity is based on it. Third of all, because Christianity starts with a (true) story about a man who lived and died in 1st century Palestine, and so the place to start is by actually reading that story. But fourth, most of all, because Christianity is not merely a doctrine, it is an experience, and to understand Christianity you have to do what Christians do, which is read Scripture.

So why John and 1 Corinthians? John because it is the most explicitly theological Gospel. It makes explicit what the others make implicit. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. This is what Christians believe. And 1 Corinthians, frankly, because it includes the soliloquy “Without love, I am nothing”, which is the other core of Christianity.

2. Tentatively, Unapologetic by Francis Spufford. I say tentatively, because the inquiry of Rod’s questioner came in a sort of culture-war-ish context, and Spufford actually rejects some bits of traditional Christian orthodoxy, e.g. on homosexuality. So if you want a book that will tell you, e.g. “Why orthodox Christians believe homosexual acts are sinful”, this is not the book (though Spufford is pretty fair in his treatment of the traditional view). But the reason why I want to recommend Unapologetic anyway is because his topic is Christian faith first, and Christian doctrine second, which is how Christians experience it, and how they live it, and is how Christianity is properly understood, because Christians believe that Truth is a Person, not a body of knowledge. This is the great value of Spufford’s book, in that even though he covers the “philosophical bits” of Christianity, such as theodicy and soteriology and Trinitarianism and the rest, he does so in the practical, real, human way which is not only the way Christians experience it, but the way it ought to be experienced.

3. This is a cop-out, but Joie de croire, joie de vivre (Joy of Believing, Joy of Living) by François Varillon. It’s a cop-out because, tragically, this book has apparently never been translated into English, and so it probably won’t be of much help to Rod’s questioner, but it is simply the best, most accessible treatment of orthodox Christian theology I’ve ever read. François Varillon was a Jesuit priest who actually (I believe) never wrote a book but spent most of his life giving lectures (so sort of like Jesus), and Joie de croire is a set of edited lecture transcripts on all the most salient topics of the faith. He is just great and perfect and scintillating, and the “spoken word” style of the lecture helps make the text alive, and helps sometimes complex ideas go down easier. Another disclaimer is that because Varillon was a Catholic priest, some of his stuff, especially on Purgatory and the role of works in salvation, would not be endorsed by most Protestants (though they would certainly endorse 98% of the book).

I would also add some left-field choices:

The Brothers Karamazov First of all because it’s a great book. Second of all, because it contains some great Christian theology. In Karamazov, theodicy and salvation are not given neat explanations thereof. Instead, one must acknowledge one’s sin and give oneself up to Christ. In that spirit, let me also add Kristin Lavransdatter and The Power and the Glory.

The Messiah The story of Christ, set to some of the most beautiful music ever.

The Story of a Soul by Therese of Lisieux. Again, experience matters as much as theology in understanding Christianity, and Therese had all of them in spades.

Finally, I would critique some of the popular choices among Rod’s commenters:

I would not recommend the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I am a Catholic and I believe it is a great document, but it is a statement of what the Church believes, not why it believes it (or only incidentally). It is also a fairly legalistic document, which again is fine, but makes reading it cover-to-cover a daunting thing, and is unlikely to teach much to a non-Christian, except that Christianity is just a bunch of rules.

I would also not recommend Chesterton. Chesterton was chiefly an apologist and a polemicist. Which is great. But if you’re trying to understand Christianity from a detached perspective, being hit over the head with it might not be the best thing.

That’s my contribution. What are other people’s choices?

The nicest resort in France

The era of faster transport swiftly led to the era of the vacation. When, in its industrializing drive, France began covering itself with train tracks, well-to-do Parisians quickly saw the opportunity for quiet weekends away from the bustle.

Given 19th century steam trains, the only place where it was practical to spend a weekend at the beach from Paris was the North Sea. Thus enterprising entrepreneurs bought tracts of land alongside a desolate beach, albeit one with the finest sand in Europe, christened it Le Touquet, and built France’s first beach resort.

Since Le Touquet is pretty much France’s northernmost point, a swim away from England (a difficult swim sometimes, as many French monarchs found out), their Entente-era business plan called for attracting posh English tourists as well as French. So they built one of the best golf courses of the time and a city with the architectural look of an English seaside town, a grand hotel called the Westminster Hotel and street names like Avenue Reine Victoria.

This history explains the unique charm of Le Touquet. In reality, its buildings are as “fake” as those of any resort, but since they’ve been fake for more than a hundred years they’ve acquired the patina of reality. Since it was designed as French people’s idea of what an English town looks like, it doesn’t really look like anywhere else. Houses here are not called houses but villas (however small), and they all must have a name like ships, often poetic or amusing ones like Found Time, A Thousand Pleasures, Jalna) or Fifteen Minutes. Here, the sports of choice are golf, rugby, polo, tennis… (Don’t know about cricket, but I wouldn’t be surprised.) Le Touquet feels like it should be its own microstate, a sort of Monaco or Gibraltar on the North Sea.

And speaking of the sea… Those who can appreciate northern seas know this awe-inspiring beauty. I’ve already mentioned the sand, the finest that I’ve ever had the pleasure of resting my feet on, an angelic cushion. And the sea… Those tones of pale copper and steel blue, streaked with impatient foam, a carpet of diamonds glittering in reflection of the pale sun, arrayed against a sky of ever-changing colors and cloud patterns. The powerful wind, alive with salt and embers. This is a real sea, not the tepid lake of the Mediterranean.

Everyone should learn to swim in cold, living seawater. Once you realize in your bones that the cold resides in your mind and in its instinctive fear, once you learn to enjoy and even relish the cold sea’s reinvigorating properties, there are many more adventures you are ready for.

Le Touquet is its own tiny magic kingdom, a well-kept secret—and here we get to the most awkward reason why I love it so much. The city was born thanks to transport technology, and it changed, or rather didn’t, because of it. Lucky for me, the North Sea is not for everyone. As transport got faster, well-off Parisians quickly diverted their attentions to the warmer climes of, first, Normandy, and later, the Côte d’azur. Deauville and Saint Tropez have eclipsed tiny Le Touquet. Because of this change in fashion, the kind of people who come to Le Touquet aren’t just any rich people—they’re rich people whose families have been rich since the 19th century at least, and whose grandparents came to summer here. The friends who are letting us borrow their beach cabin have had it for 60 years, and other houses for longer (“Why go to the city museum? To see black and white photos of German officers living in our villa?”). My mother learned to swim here, and my uncle won tournaments at the Tennis Club. Here, people who go to the beach to get roasted by the sun like a steak don’t come. This affects not just the kinds of people you meet, but the character of the shops, of the restaurants, with the luxury understated and the focus on what’s on the plate. The best restaurant, Pérard, which makes the best fish soup in the Universe (the Universe, I tell you!) is decorated with cartoons that are only funny if you’re well versed in French and English history and literature. Le Touquet isn’t about bling. It’s Hermès, not Vuitton. BMW, not Ferrari. God, I know this is all so horribly elitist, but so be it. I would die if I had to spend my entire life in a gilded ghetto of “my people”, but for a week’s vacation at the beach, I refuse to begrudge myself.

Like every place in France, Le Touquet draws upon the rich treasures of a deep terroir. Here you can eat rattes, the tiny potatoes, grown in the sand, with their wonderful nutty flavor, made world-famous by Joël Robuchon. Maroilles and the other pungent cheeses of the North. And, of course, the wonders of the sea—mussles with fries, amazing seafood aplenty, and have I mentioned Pérard’s fish soup?

In short—the beach, the scenery, both natural and man-made, the food, the ambiance, the memories… Perhaps you’ll understand, then, why I think Le Touquet is the nicest resort in France, by far.

Bloggin' Kristin 3: Et Nos Dimittimus Debitoribus Nostris

What a book, what a book.

Read the full article

Watch Reza Aslan Make An Ass Out Of Himself

A scholar named Reza Aslan wrote about about the historical Jesus. From what I’ve seen, the book reprises one of the familiar narratives about the historical Jesus, which is that Jesus was not a religious preacher but a political rebel against Roman rule. Apparently Aslan was once a Christian and is now a Muslim.

You probably already know these things already, and the reason you probably knew them is because Twitter has been aflame with links to an interview Aslan has given about his book to Fox News. The Buzzfeed post about the interview has over 3 million pageviews and a “12X social lift” (whatever that means). Meanwhile the Slate post is cited among its “Most Viral”. Both call it “embarrassing”, and usually with superlatives.

Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. But mostly for Aslan.

Let’s back up here for a second. There is a problem for “historical Jesus” research, which is that source material is so scarce. You have a few fragments in Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. You have the non-canonical gospels which are of very late and dubious origins. And you have the canonical gospels, which make supernatural claims about Jesus and therefore automatically (and justly) invite skepticism. This gives a wide latitude for historians and other scholars to paint pictures of the “historical Jesus” as basically whatever they want. That’s not an indictment of Jesus scholarship. That’s just the way it is.

Meanwhile, there is a great popular interest in “historical Jesus” scholarship, if only because there is a great popular interest in “What You Don’t Know About This Familiar Story”. Many “historical Jesus” books have gone on to become publishing sensations. And often, they’ve gone on to become publishing sensations in the wake of generating controversy for proclaiming that the traditional Christian account of Jesus’ life is a-historical. (Even though it’s not possible to prove it, only to hypothesize it.) Controversy generates book sales. Particularly religious controversy. Such is the world.

In this context takes place the Aslan interview.

And it’s impossible to watch the video and not feel that Aslan has come into the studio picking for a fight. Trying to generate a viral moment.

Oh sure, the Fox News interviewer also has an agenda. But watch how the interview proceeds.

Interviewer: “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

Aslan: “Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with [enunciating] four degrees including one in New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the history of Christianity for [enunciating again] two decades.”

And boom, we’re off to the races!

Aslan won’t answer the question, and so the interviewer presses on (as Interviewing 101 demands), and we all go downhill from here. Aslan never stops treating the interviewer with contempt, and never stops taking offense at any relation between his faith and his book.

Those bigots at Fox News with their anti-Muslim views. Oh, how dare they say that a Muslim can’t write a book about Jesus! And their buck-toothed anti-intellectualism. This is a SCHOLAR. Don’t you understand? A scholar!

Except that there is nothing whatsoever offensive or out of the ordinary about the interviewer’s question.

“Why did you write this book?” is literally the most common interview question asked of authors! It is so common, it is such a cliché, that it is a joke in literary and media circles! This is also true of the variation “[Tidbit of author’s personal history], so why did you write this book?”

I’m a Frenchman who has never lived in the US for long, and who often writes about American politics. As a result, I am often asked why I, as a Frenchman, decide to devote so much time and attention to US politics. This is normal. And to be honest, I sometimes tire of answering that question. But I’m never offended by it.

And I’m also a practicing Roman Catholic, and if I wrote a book about Luther or Muhammad or the Buddha, it would be normal and completely innocuous to ask me why I chose to write about this particular subject given my faith tradition.

But I could take offense. I could treat the person like a child and say something like “I have a master’s degree from HEC School of Management which was ranked number one in Europe for many years running by the Financial Times — a small newspaper out of London, maybe you’ve heard of it — where I was ranked among the top twenty matriculants.” You know what that answer would make me? It would make me a complete ass and a buffoon.

Scholarship is scholarship and should be judged on its merits. But there is absolutely nothing weird or out of the ordinary for an interviewer to ask an author how his background affected his decision to write a book. It’s amazing to me that this has to be pointed out. I would even add especially if a believer in one religion writes about another religion.

Aslan, talking to his interviewer “as if she were a child”, Slate notes, says “it would be like asking a Christian why they would write a book about, you know, Islam.” Indeed, old chap! That’s exactly what it would be like!

To take an example, one of the TAS Alums is Alan Jacobs, a professor and scholar of literature. His latest book is a biography of The Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer (I now know, thanks to Alan) is one of the great works of the Anglican Church. And I know Alan is an Anglican. So it seems obvious to me why Alan wrote this book. Alan is a man who cares deeply about books and their history and about his own religious tradition so it makes complete sense to me why he would write this book. If Alan’s next project was a Biography of the Ramayana, I would be indeed curious to note why he decided to write it.

The interview goes on in this vein. The interviewer quotes Aslan a bit of criticism of his book. Instead of responding, Aslan talks about how his book has a hundred pages of endnotes and is therefore a serious book. First of all, that’s silly. I mean, really. But second of all, answer the damn question. Aslan speaks as if the fact that he has a PhD somehow means that he is beyond criticism, at least from non-PhDs, and certainly from journalists.

Then why go on the interview?

I mean, think about it for a second. There’s about as much chance of Fox News’ audience buying Aslan’s book as there is of it buying Yeezus. So why do the interview?

Well, for this, of course. The interview didn’t ever degenerate—it never “generated” to begin with. Oh sure, Fox News had its own agenda. But Aslan could have played it cool, or presumed good faith at least on the first question. That’s if he hadn’t been coming on the interview just for this. To assume bigotry on the part of Fox News, to talk about his academic bona fides, and therefore to generate a viral moment and juice his book sales.

And this is why I’m annoyed and I’m writing this. Yes, Fox News had an agenda, and yes, Aslan is not the first person to manufacture controversy.

What’s so annoying to me is that I haven’t seen a single media outlet—that so breathlessly posted the video, and called it “embarrassing”—point out what is actually going on here. Because there’s the Bad Guys in one camp—the camp of bigoted Christians—and there’s the Good Guys in the other camp—the camp of Scholars who, because they are Scholars, are Good.

Oh yes, the Fox News video is embarrassing. It’s a little embarrassing for Fox News. It’s a lot embarrassing for Aslan. And it’s very, very embarrassing for Buzzfeed and Slate and all the other outlets that amplified it uncritically.

Bloggin' Kristin 2: Mother

I read in great big gulps while our daughter naps on the weekend. Now halfway through. I am soon leaving for a week’s vacation without internet, so you’ll have to wait a little while for the next installment, which will probably be the last one.

This may be the single best novel I’ve ever read. (The other contender is War and Peace.)

Again I am struck by Undset’s gift at sketching characters that are utterly believable, as complex as any living being, and deep. I am struck by her gift of “showing not telling.” When I wanted to be a writer (ha) those were the two things that bedeviled me. Those who can do it I view as gods.

(Before I started Kristin I was reading Infinite Jest but for all my true admiration for DFW’s amazing wordsmithery, this is not where the charism of writers lies.)

I’m also struck by what a page-turner this is. I am intensely invested in the story. I can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen next. As I write this I’m struggling with the temptation to just spend the whole day reading the book—but of course I have a business to run here.

All right, some chaotic notes.

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Whatever You Do, Don't Pray

I take a break from your regularly scheduled 14th century Norway blogging to bring your attention to a funny piece that appeared recently in America’s Finest News Source: “Unambitious Loser With Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives In Hometown.”

You may have already seen it because it’s been around on Twitter and Tumblr several times now. I’m writing about it now because TAS Alum ayjay linked to it.

Quick question: what’s missing in this paragraph?

According to relatives who moved thousands of miles away and are currently alienated from much of the family, Husmer has never once taken a major professional or financial risk, choosing instead to “coast through life” by putting considerable time and effort into his rewarding marriage, playing an active role in his two children’s lives, and being sincerely thankful for what he has in this world.

First, let’s think about what The Onion is doing here. I’ve argued before that the internet (and perhaps its recent change of ownership) has led The Onion to change its editorial strategy from “writing funny stuff that panders to our readers” to “writing funny stuff that will make our readers want to heighten their social standing by sharing it on social networks”, a subtle but, in my view, real, difference.

If we accept the old-school newsgroup definition of “trolling” as “trying to get a reaction” as opposed of “trying to make people angry” The Onion is now very much (and a real way, moreso than in the past) in the trolling business.

And here we’ve got a great Onion piece, because it is trolling both “sides” here, is it not? It’s trolling its traditional audience of urban hipsters who are mocked by the piece and will ironically share it, but it’s also trolling the guys-who-stayed-in-their-small-town and will very unironically also share it.

Anyway…

When I read the sentence “putting considerable time and effort into his rewarding marriage, playing an active role in his…” my mind completed the sentence with “church.”

But there’s no mention of “church,” or “God,” or “faith” in this story, is there? And shouldn’t there be? I mean, this is a piece that recites clichés of Small Town vs Big City life, and one of those clichés is that Small Town people are churched.

But Michael Husmer, for all appearances, doesn’t go to church. Not that he isn’t “spiritual”, because we still need that for his picture of happiness. So instead of going to church, he has “[put] considerable time and effort into […] being sincerely thankful for what he has in this world.”

That would have been a bridge too far for The Onion. The Onion trolls its audience—while pandering. If they’d shown someone who goes to church as more fulfilled than their presumably largely secular audience, they wouldn’t have been able to build the ironic detachment to enjoy this critique of their lifestyle.

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think of this post and video brought to you by Friend of TAS Rod Dreher which highlights just how thoroughly contemporary American media ignores religion in the day-to-day life of people.

Meanwhile, we’ve replaced the language of salvation with the language of addiction.

I’m not sure I have a point here except to note that it is through the day-to-day that we build the awareness of faith that allows it to remain a potent cultural force (as well as through projects of infiltration and renewal) and that there’s something important here about making and keeping faith as a fabric of everyday life for contemporary American culture. Call it the naked cultural square.

Bloggin' Kristin 1: Youth

My first hundred pages. Below the fold because spoilers.

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Bloggin' Kristin

After the eighth horse’s head in my bed I have finally caved in to TAS Chamberlain Matt Frost’s entreaties and begun reading Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter.

Since the translation available on Kindle is reportedly not very good, I have next to me as I speak an ancient and cumbersome artifact, a codex which I will carry around with me now for some time. It has been handed to me by my wife, who is now done with Kristin (for now, at least).

The timing is apt. Summer is here, and I will be vacationing (or, “vacationing”, as entrepreneurs do…) soon.

This is a nice throwback for me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read fiction, or a codex, or a book this long. And since I’m told this is such a masterpiece (and thirty or so pages in, I’m already inclined to agree), and since I may or may not need extra motivation to make it to the last page, and since I know Matt has a gun and so I’d better make it to the last page, I intend to blog my reading of the book here.

It would be truly glorious if we could get a bit of a book club started and have other folks (bloggers, commenters) join in, but I understand that’s a bit of a stretch.

In any case, get ready for some more Kristin bloggin’.

A Shift In How We Think About Education

Random thought I had on the way back from dropping my daughter off at the Nanny…

There’s been a remarkable shift in our public discourse about education, and what it ought to entail, over the past few centuries, more remarkable for the fact that (I think) it’s gone unnoticed.

Simply put, in the 19th and 18th centuries, the public discourse about education was about politics; over the past few decades it’s become about economics.

Here’s what I mean: if you read the great advocates of democracy in the 18th and 19th century (the Enlightenment philosophers, the American Founding Fathers, various French liberal and/or republican intellectuals (using those words in their French meanings)), to them education was a necessary precondition of democracy and its main goal was to build enlightened, free, citizens. What was foremost to them was that education be liberal, in the oldest and etymological sense of the word: an education to freedom. A free society could not long endure if its citizens were not educated enough to make responsible use of that freedom in their personal lives and in public life, and so education was not only crucial but a certain type of education was.

Flash forward to today, and the only goal is to beat the Chinamen who are coming to eat the bread off our plates. The central question about education, both sides of the aisle agree, is how to create productive worker bees workers to win the economic race against China.

This has obvious consequences. The classic curriculum of the public schools of the French Third Republic emphasized philosophy, mathematics and latin. There were also “morality” classes in elementary school. Today the United States is obsessed with producing ever more graduates in the field of experimental science and engineering.

Now, there are several possible explanations for this shift, not all of them bad:

• To some extent, the earlier focus on liberal education was related to an anxiety about whether the then-new experiment of democracy could succeed. Critics notwithstanding, the architects of democracy were well aware of how the regime could fall victim to populism leading to despotism (today we would say fascism). One might say liberal education has become less pressing a concern, because we’ve reached that goal. Advanced democracies have been around and relatively stable for a long time, and almost everyone in them agrees with the basic tenets of individual rights, representation, rule of law, etc. Of course, a critic would say that this is all dangerous complacency—we think democracy just “happens” whereas in fact it is a constant struggle.
• If you agree that the polity should encourage some form of liberal (in this sense) education, then you are postulating that there is some sort of “public morality” that everyone must subscribe to, and perhaps this is dangerous. Perhaps we’ve grown a lot more weary about “imposing morality” on anyone and this is something we prefer to leave to the private sphere. There’s an obvious sense in which any attempt to impose a worldview through (mandatory) public education is creepy; Jules Ferry, the architect of France’s public school system, once wrote that his main goal for his school was to teach citizens to be able to sit quietly for hours at a time and to obey orders. And obviously the overarching goal of public education in France was to rid the country of organized religion by combating the “brainwashing” of non-secular schools with secular brainwashing. But there are obvious retorts to this libertarian-ish view: that it amounts to a dangerous relativism; that the ideology that has replaced it, which we could dub “economism”, is itself a form of public morality; that indeed the very belief that only the private sphere should teach morality is itself a form of public morality; that really no one actually believes this, witness ever-flaring debates about e.g. evolution and sex in school curricula, or the striking resemblance between school curricula in the US’s manifold jurisdictions.

What’s striking to me here is that if we’ve gone away from “public morality” as a goal for education, it seems to me that it’s either because we all agree on what the public morality is, or because we can’t agree on what the public morality is. And I have a nagging sense that the answer is actually “both.”

There’s a sense in which there is a “public morality” in education and that it works out to some sort of “atheistic productivist moral therapeutic deism” where the goal of life (and what education should prepare you for) is to be happy and do whatever you want and find fulfillment as long as fulfillment involves earning a degree from a four-year institution of higher education in a vocational field and finding a productive 9-to-5 job (and getting married but as long as it’s not before 30 and having had many other romantic experiences before that). Or something.

Keen readers of this post will rightly guess that I side with the “politists” against the “economists” in this debate, if only because the “economist” view is so awful, but what I’m more interested in is in why we’ve actually shifted away from this view so much that to articulate it is to seem old-fashioned and out of step, and perhaps even outside the Overton window.

(PS I guess I’m thinking about this because yesterday I had a convo with libertarians on Twitter about civil liberties and terrorism. They argued that another 9/11 wouldn’t be such a huge deal because after all plenty of people die in car crashes every year. I responded that another 9/11 would be a huge deal because it would have huge social and political ramifications. Now they’re right that it doesn’t have to be this way, but they’re wrong to just wave away the stubborn fact that this is the world in which we live. I really wish it weren’t this way. As I said yesterday, I agree strongly with David Foster Wallace here. But most Americans don’t. Perhaps teaching that sacrifice is part of liberty should be part of our public goals for education. Of course, the idea of public goals for education would also horrify libertarians…)