"AGAINST THE AMERICAN JESUS": My review of Ross Douthat's Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Also, I will be blogging at TAC's group blog, State of the Union, mostly talking about arts-and-culture. Look for more on Damsels in Distress later today/tonight.

And come see me tonight in Denver!

But it's striking that the things that therapeutic, God Within religion doesn't seem to have delivered to Americans are the very things that it claims to be best suited to provide--contentment, happiness, well-being, and, above all, the ability to forge successful relationships with fellow human beings. ...Therapeutic religion promises contentment, but in many cases it seems to deliver a sort of isolation that's at once comfortable and terrible--leaving us alone with the universe, alone with the God Within.
--Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

MY AMCONMAG ARTICLE ABOUT THE CULTURE OF FEAR OF DIVORCE is online! Like I said, I'm basically happy with how this turned out.

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we’ve now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early ’80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged, and young Americans typically express both fear and a moral horror at divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety, even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it’s for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we’ve ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

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We may well wonder whether the general disparagement of wanting to be loved may not be a typically modern phenomenon, still another form of modern man's claim to equality with God.
--Josef Pieper, About Love; quoted in Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics

Some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one....

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

--GK Chesterton, Heretics. Also via RB. Merry Christmas!

By definition, the language of liberalism fails to engage on common terms with the communion of saints and the lordship of Christ.
--Christopher C. Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

One thing I found heartening at Oriented to Love was how many of us--from quite varying religious, philosophical, and political perspectives--made strong critiques of the liberal rights-framework as applied to homosexuality, without backing away from our commitment to seeking justice for LGBT people. A bit more on that, probably, in the write-up I'm doing for PRISM magazine.

THIS COUNTRY IS A GUN AND YOU ARE THE SILENCERS:

...As throughout the review, Gray is being a little unfair to Pinker here. (The book isn’t quite so blithe about mass incarceration as Gray makes it sound.) But his example gets at an important point about what you might call the hiddenness of contemporary violence, and the extent to which modern people can afford to recoil at various forms of cruelty not because they’ve completely gone away, but because they take place offstage, behind society’s scenes, in forms that most people don’t experience directly and therefore don’t need to reconcile themselves to.

So we regard public executions as an anachronistic barbarity, to say nothing of flogging, the stocks, and other pre-modern forms of punishment. But we’re kept safe from crime by a penal system that locks lawbreakers away in a self-enclosed world pervaded by hidden cruelties and unacknowledged forms of torture. We have a growing distaste for cruelty to animals, manifest in polls, pop culture, foxhunting bans, you name it. But the vegetarian minority notwithstanding, our daily meals come from factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses where animals are treated in ways that would make our gorges rise if we ever actually confronted them. And more provocatively, of course, there’s the case of infanticide: Common in premodern societies, abhorred in our more civilized age … unless, of course, you count the million-plus abortions in America every year, perhaps the most common and the most concealed form of violence that our society accepts.

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I GOT MYSELF A GUN/AND I CAN SHOOT DOWN EVERYONE/THINKING I JUST INVENTED SOME RELIGION:

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence.

more (via A&LDaily)

THE FORGOTTEN LOVE: Chuck Colson on Bert and Ernie:

...And blogger Alyssa Rosenberg summed up the biggest objection. “I think it’s actively unhelpful,” she wrote, “to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple . . . Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way.”

Strange indeed. It teaches the ridiculous and deeply destructive idea that same-sex friendships are necessarily sexual. And that’s the last thing we want to teach our children, because it will spell the end of friendship, particularly friendships between young men.

Yet that is precisely the message that’s communicated over and over. It’s the reason gay apologists want to eroticize Bert and Ernie, David and Jonathan, Jesus and the apostle John, and Achilles and Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad.

Some in our culture are apparently incapable of understanding close friendship without sex. And that flies right in the face of a Christian understanding of friendship.

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Celibacy is a sign that intercourse between men and women is not compulsory--that sex is a gift, not a law or a right.
--Christopher Roberts, here; more on this in a moment

THE NEW YORK TIMES ON A PARADE OF RARE ARTWORKS. Snerk.

"OBJECTS OF ART AND RITUAL OBJECTS." Hey, somebody's writing about the thing I wrote about in this InsideCatholic column! (Also, the National Gallery of Art's "Sacred Made Real" exhibit--sorry for subscribers-only link--included many "working" artworks which returned home to grace monasteries and get paraded through the streets on feast days.)

Stone Owl link via WAWIV.

LOSING IN FRONT OF YOUR HOME CROWD: I have watched neither Friday Night Lights nor Glee, but I have not been able to get this column comparing the two out of my head. FNL comes across as both better and more countercultural, which does not surprise me. (I do think it's bizarre that the author reads "everyone moves away from Dillon because it's a dead-end small town" as a rejection of solipsism--I'm pretty sure she means that since the characters we like get switched out for new characters, the audience's focus remains on the town as a whole, a community, but she makes this process sound a lot less tragic than the "meager chance of improvement earned at the price of leaving your hometown" storyline really is. Why shouldn't people "loom[] around Dillon forever"--why is staying home presented so negatively, given the author's other premises? Anyway that's just a bobble in an otherwise terrific piece.)

Link via Wesley Hill.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN MODERN LOVE: I have a review in the current Weekly Standard of the Neue Galerie's "Vienna 1900" exhibit. It's a great show; go see it! It'll run until at June 27. The review is subscribers-only for now, but I'll let you know if that changes.

I WOULD NEVER SAY "I TOLD YOU SO," OH, BUT TONY... I TOLD YOU SO: Some aphorisms of Don Colacho, as I discover a blog. (...For the theological ones, I feel duty-bound to note that Christianity complicates everybody's aphoristic wisdom a.k.a. self-image, so if you want to argue with an aphorism it might be better to sit and let it steep in you and figure out the ways in which it might be true. Or to put it another way, I don't think "Don Colacho's" point is actually that he's right about Jesus.)

#2,966: Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.

#2,964: A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

#2,956: The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.

Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.

#2,953: Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.

Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.

#2,952: If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.

#2,949: Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.

#2,942: The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.

#2,938: Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.

#2,937: An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.

#2,936: The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.

#2,932: After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.

#2,931: Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.

[I'm stopping after one page, but this is fantastic stuff. Even the punchlines with which I actively disagree are fierce.]

The so highly acclaimed “dominion of man over nature” turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

I can't believe I have evaded this author for so long. Huge thanks to Sublimity Now for the link.

"MARY, IN THE GLASS COFFIN OF THE MUSEUM." My column at Inside Catholic.

HOME IS ANYWHERE YOU HANG YOUR HEAD:

For instance, nineteen-year-old Christina says, “Oh, yeah, my dad had failed as a father, but he was my father. He loved me, and it’s been very hard for me to try to build a relationship with him. I want to have a relationship with him, because you only get one dad. Even if your mom remarries, to a certain extent you only get one dad.”

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(I don't think even adults really experience marriage as a "pure," free choice--nor should they. But even so, the difference between their choices and the terrified, dependent, sorry choices of the children are pretty notable.)

Meaning exists in between mind and body, reason and desire. The structure of meaning is captured in the great Western metaphor of the "idea become flesh." The source of the idea become flesh is love: "God so loved the world" that the divine took on human form. Love is the source of meaning, and all meaning is miraculous. This is a world beyond the conceptual capacities of liberalism. Yet it is our world. The feverish turning from private to public, and public to private--the mixing and elision of the categories--characteristic of the self-reflection within the liberal state expresses just this disjunction between the experience of meaning and the categories of liberal thought. Because meaning is neither public nor private, neither mind nor body, liberalism ends in a hopeless confusion of categories as it tries to account for the experience of the political.
--Putting Liberalism in Its Place

I'm not sure how intelligible this paragraph is out of context, but I hope it will at least whet your appetite for Kahn's book, since it encapsulates some of his strengths (introducing love and meaning to a political discourse in which these terms are either taboo, or reduced to interest and reason respectively) and weaknesses (so far, he's contented to describe a sacralized politics without criticizing it, noting that it shares a side with fascism, or offering a possible hierarchy of authorities).

ONE GOD, THREE OPINIONS: OK, unsurprisingly it looks like I can't get the more reviewy version of my take on The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza published for money before the play's run ends. But my wallet's loss is your wallet's... also loss, since I cannot let you guys go without telling you why you have to see this terrific play!!!

It's showing at the DC Jewish Community Center until July 25 and seriously, people, I can't tell you. If you like this blog and you live in the area, eat some ramen so you can afford this play.

Here you can find my somewhat more personal and somewhat less reviewy take on the play. I just loved it. Y'all, if you see it, link me to your thoughts and reviews!

(As always, Blogger is adding an extra "tail" to my posts, so be sure to use this link and not whatever happens if you just go to my main secondary site.)