Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Why I Believe

If someone were to ask me why I am a believer—which, by the way, no one ever has, since most people seem to have their own presumptions about why someone might be—I would give three reasons.

The first is that I was born and raised among Christians who believed the scriptures, pointed me to Christ, and lived as Christians ought. The lack of any of these would have nullified the virtues of my upbringing. Had my father and mother (my father in particular) been Sunday Christians, or believed only as much scripture as suited them, commended religion to me for practical or sanitary reasons, or demanded allegiance to the God invented by their sect, any advantages of my upbringing for faith would have died with the awakening of my critical faculties. 

The second is that I cannot believe the world came into existence by unintelligent causes. That the order and beauty here, and the existence of minds to perceive it, could have been brought into being by anything less than a divine mind seems madness to me, a kind of madness I have never been able to pretend was sane, or imagine that I could believe myself except by means of the same kind of  sacrificium intellectus that allows a man to think cows can fly. This does not, of course, settle the question of whether this mind is benevolent, infinite, or any number of other things--but it must be a Mind, and it is reasonable to call that Mind God. School-evolutionism of the sort that simply will not consider the existence of God points to a perverse resolve of the will that goes far—to be precise, infinitely--beyond science.  We have need of this hypothesis. 

The third is that I find in myself a longing that Lewis called Sweet Desire.  It cannot be fulfilled upon this earth; indeed, it is constantly disappointed here, and finally thwarted by death. (Being-toward-death cannot be authentic if death is dissolution, for dissolute existence has no meaning, the concepts of meaninglessness and authenticity having no commonality except in the  absurdity where one can no longer speak at all, so must remain silent.)  It is the answer to Pascal’s wager, and what Puddleglum spoke of in the witch’s subterranean chamber. It is what we must break through to, and if there is a God it most certainly has to do with him, and must involve life beyond death. This is reason to "diligently seek” the face and favor of God.

These are the principal reasons why the Gospel is good news to me, answering as it does to my understanding and desires, for it tells me like no other story does that there is a God, he is our beginning and our end, that he has through his divine Son by whom he created the worlds, and all of us with them, overcame the death that is the ruin of our hopes, so that partaking of his resurrected life, whatever irritations and incentives to unbelief "religion" might cast up in my path, is what I desire. That I have been given ears to hear—that I was not born, or allowed to become, blind or deaf (Lord, have mercy!)--is beyond any reason I can give. Omnia exeunt in mysterium, which is to say, vita nostra absconditum est cum Christo in Deo.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Religion

Well, that doesn't describe People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA.
David Martosko has been reading "Mere Comments" and finally has "something to contribute":

A new report from the Center for Consumer Freedom (it's called "Holy Cows") outlines the ways the animal-rights group PETA is attacking Christians and other religious believers as a part of its twisted strategy.

This year during Holy Week PETA staged a tasteless mock-crucifixion of an activist wearing a pig mask. PETA uses billboards to taunt Christians with the claim that livestock--not Jesus--"died for your sins." Last year PETA paraded a statue of a cow dressed as the Pope in front of Catholic churches. The "cow pope" statue even held a Papal staff, topped with a crucified cow!

PETA holds protests outside houses of worship, and sued a Kentucky church this year when it tried to protect its congregation from Sunday-morning harassment. Worse, PETA's "faith-based campaigners" work under the direction of a man who has publicly advocated "blowing stuff up and smashing windows" as a legitimate protest tactic.

As our secular culture continues to take cheap shots at Christians, I think it's important for believers to know that PETA is embracing a style of in-your-face advocacy calculated to offend, provoke, and otherwise show contempt for us.

You can find a summary of the report here. You can download a full PDF from the site here. I did, and I have to say it's every bit as bad as Mr. Martosko's description above, which is why I am posting it, FYI.

Defining Pregnancy Down

A reader sent me a copy of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's periodical, Advanced Studies in Medicine, Vol. 5, No. 6, June 2005. As a family physician he reads such journals, he says, and points out in that this issue is on "Women's Health."

One article, "A New Era of Contraception," and an Op-Ed, "Emergency Contraception: Out of Sight, Out of Mind?" together argue for more access for "Emergency Contraception" [EC] (among other types), which would reduce unwanted pregnancies by 50%, in theory. EC, which includes three methods, generally has "multiple mechanisms of action," which include, among other things such as inhibition of ovulation) "interference with fertilization, early cell division, or transport of the embryo; and distruption of the uterine lining to prevent implantation. None of these mechanisms disrupt pregnancy once implantation has occurred." (The authors want certain EC pills to be available without a doctor's prescription, by the way.)

The tricky bit here is what is meant by "pregnancy"? My correspondent notes that the American College of Obstretrics and Gynecology states that a pregnancy begins at implantation, and that this decision was made several years ago. The FDA apparently agrees, but "others believe it starts with fetilization," to  quote the op-ed.

Still, life begins at conception, but a woman somehow may still "contracept" even after fertilization and conception has taken place. As long as the little guy doesn't implant, she isn't pregnant, and the contraceptive is effectively reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. Well, abortion does that, too, in a manner of speaking.

In Christian theology Christ became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made man whenever it was that the "embryo" was formed' Mary "conceived" in her womb, which is, I assume, not about implantation, the formation of the human embryo.

So according to the Johns Hopkins article, a woman can still  prevent conception after she has conceived. I suppose that's now an article of faith for the pro-abortion medical establishment, something you might call the Unconceived Conception?

Sometimes the Wrong Day

If you notice some items appearing on the wrong day, before you grumble about the writer's inability to read a calendar, remember that the date may be the result of Typepad's inscrutable decision to move some items from one day to the preceding day.

Early this morning, well after midnight, I posted two items for today, both in some way dated (e.g., "From the Inbox 26 August 2005"). When I checked after posting them, they did indeed appear today. A few minutes ago, I looked again at Mere Comments and found that Typepad had bumped them to yesterday. Why, I have no idea. I mention this to avoid "Can't you read?" letters.

NCC Dallies for Dollars

Touchstone correspondent Mark Tooley reports in The Weekly Standard about the Antiochian withdrawal from the NCC first reported here on Mere Comments. His article is "Three Cheers for the Syrians -- We're talking about the ones who just left the National Council of Churches."

One item in Mark's report particularly struck me--I don't think I had read this elsewhere:

Although the NCC's income had fallen from over $10 million to $6 million, [General Secretary Bob] Edgar erased the deficit-spending that was choking the NCC.

Aware that the denominations would provide no more financial rescues, Edgar changed the NCC's system of financial support. Instead of depending on the churches, the NCC is increasingly funded by left-wing philanthropies, like the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and political advocacy groups, like the Sierra Club and MoveOn.org.

So that's how you fund a national council of churches? The Orthodox churches provide almost no funding, and the denominational support from the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians is unstable--those churches continue to shrink. I guess if your churches won't fund it, you just move on to another source.

I really do hope the rest of my Orthodox brethren--in the Orthodox Church of America, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese to name two--will join us Syrians in pulling out, soon.

The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis

A new anthology is available, on CD or cassette, from the folks over at Mars Hill Audio:

In this MARS HILL AUDIO Anthology, The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis, Ken Myers talks with Clyde Kilby about Lewis’s view of the imagination; with Michael Aeschliman about Lewis’s reasonable distrust of trusting reason too much; with James Como about the rhetorical genius in Lewis’s writing; with Thomas Howard about the deep meaning of Till We Have Faces; and with Gilbert Meilaender about the surprising approach of Lewis’s apologetics. The program concludes with Alan Jacobs’s reading of his 1998 essay, "Lewis at 100."

All this, for only $7  (plus shipping & handling). Use this link to order, (it's the second item down) or you may call in your order to 1-800-331-6407.

Good St. Louis

Today is the feast day of St. Louis of France, and a good chance to share with you something good on the saintly king from G. K. Chesterton's marvelous book on St. Thomas, The Dumb Ox. In chapter 4, he noted that

It is a real case against conventional hagiography that it sometimes tends to make all saints seem to be the same. Whereas in fact no men are more different than saints; not even murderers. And there could hardly be a more complete contrast, given the essentials of holiness, than between St. Thomas and St. Louis. St. Louis was born a knight and a king; but he was one of those men in whom a certain simplicity, combined with courage and activity, makes it natural, and in a sense easy, to fulfil directly and promptly any duty or office, however official. He was a man in whom holiness and healthiness had no quarrel; and their issue was in action.

He did not go in for thinking much, in the sense of theorising much. But, even in theory, he had that sort of presence of mind, which belongs to the rare and really practical man when he has to think. He never said the wrong thing; and he was orthodox by instinct.

In the old pagan proverb about kings being philosophers or philosophers kings, there was a certain miscalculation, connected with a mystery that only Christianity could reveal. For while it is possible for a king to wish much to be a saint, it is not possible for a saint to wish very much to be a king. A good man will hardly be always dreaming of being a great monarch; but, such is the liberality of the Church, that she cannot forbid even a great monarch to dream of being a good man.

The chapter, which is titled "A Meditation on the Manichees," goes on to deal with this heresy and the Christian answer. It is a book I highly recommend.

From the Inbox 26 August 2005

Some interesting and useful articles from my recent reading.

First, two from the webzine Boundless, published by Focus on the Family: an excerpt from Danielle Crittenden's 1999 book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, The Cost of Delaying Marriage. She notes near the end:

What we rarely hear – or perhaps are too fearful to admit – is how liberating marriage can actually be. As nerve-wracking as making the decision can be, it is also an enormous relief once it is made.

The moment we say, "I do," we have answered one of the great crucial questions of our lives: We now know with whom we’ll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children, who will be our family. That our marriages may not work, that we will have to accommodate ourselves to the habits and personality of someone else–these are, and always have been, the risks of commitment, of love itself.

What is important is that our lives have been thrust forward. The negative – that we are no longer able to live entirely for ourselves – is also the positive: We no longer have to live entirely for ourselves! We may go on to do any number of interesting things, but we are free of the growing wonder of with whom we will do them. We have ceased to look down the tunnel, waiting for a train.

And A Role I Want to Fill by a recent college graduate, Grace Dyck, about the trials of favoring the traditional distinction of the sexes in academia and society in general (she tells of some fool who responded to her mother's proud explanation that she was carrying her fourth child said "Some people never learn").

Here are a few things from The Daily Telegraph. First, an article on the animal rights "nutters," How can anyone put guinea pigs before people?. It's a little light on argument and evidence, but makes what seems to me the right point:

Animal rights activists saddle animals with a warped version of the feelings they cannot express towards humans, and their overactive conscience on behalf of animals' rights is often no more than a needy over-compensation for their basic lack of humanitarian values.

He tells a story at the end of the article of something I've seen as well. I don't think he's exaggerating, judging from my own experience.

Alice Thomson writes on the English obsession with shopping in 'Bra wars' are doing us all a good turn (the headline writer knows how to attract readers). I have too many books around me to shake my head too vigorously at the careless, pointless greed he describes, but I must admit to feeling a little baffled, and more than a little disgusted, when I listen to people who just keep buying stuff.

The last article from the DT is an obituary of the Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling, whose Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England is an important book of its sort.

The liberalish English Catholic weekly The Tablet offers two articles on Pope Benedict, first an editorial titled The real Benedict steps forward, which announces that his words at World Youth Day in Germany "belie many of the fears that were expressed at the time of his election." That passive voice "were expressed" avoids the fact that such fears were expressed by The Tablet.

But more to the point, such fears were always quite foolish, and expressed nothing about the new pope or his writings, but about the need of liberal Catholics to demonize those who stand firmly for the Catholic tradition.

The second article on the new pope is From the Tiber to the Rhine, offers the same sense of surprise, and ends with "The days in Cologne also showed that there is another Joseph Ratzinger. Or perhaps just one we have never really known . . .". The latter, certainly, but only because you apparently never read him closely or listened to those who knew him. There is nothing to be suprised at in anything they report. This is now becoming the standard liberal Catholic line, but it will only last until Benedict does something "hard" or "dogmatic."

The magazine also offers what I thought a very interesting report, Poland’s lost dream of Solidarity.

And finally, from yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Naomi Schaeffer Riley reports on the entertainment culture at colleges in Tales Out of School. It begins:

College freshmen typically spend about 12 hours a week in class and, according to the 2004 National Survey of Student Engagement, an additional 13 hours a week studying. Assuming naively that these numbers are accurate (students have been known to cut classes and exaggerate their studiousness), such demands on student time still leave 143 hours unaccounted for--87 if we figure in eight hours of sleep a night. That learning makes up a small part of college life today is widely acknowledged. The question remains: What is going on the rest of the time?

She closes with a shrewd suggestion for improving college education.

Orthodox Hierarchical Woes

For those interested in such things, and in the Orthodox church in general, the following 2 stories are the sorts that all too often bedevil the Orthodox world, it seems, of late.

From Ecumenical News International:

The Greek Orthodox Church in the Holy Land has elected a new patriarch to replace its deposed spiritual leader patriarch Irineos who was dismissed over a land scandal that angered the church's local parishioners and embarrassed its leadership.

The church's Holy Synod on 22 August voted 14 to 0 to elect Metropolitan Theofilos, a Greek-born cleric, as the new patriarch. The election throws into fresh doubt the fate of Irineos, who has refused to accept a decision earlier this year by his bishops and the leader's of the world's Orthodox churches to dismiss him over controversial property deals in Jerusalem's Old City.   

Irineos, who was elected in 2001, has denied any involvement in the long-term leasing of church property in the Christian Quarter to Jewish investors believed to represent ultranationalist Jewish groups attempting to stake a claim to the Holy City.

And then this, also from ENI:

Christian leaders in Europe and the United States have called for the release from prison of an archbishop jailed under laws on religion in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The jailing of Archbishop Jovan by Macedonian authorities using only his secular names of Zoran Vraniskovski is among a series of incidents provoking tensions between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Macedonian Orthodox Church. The Macedonian church broke from the Serbian church in 1967, and is not recognised by most Orthodox [churches]. 

On 26 July, Jovan was jailed for two and a half years for "breeding race, national and religious hatred". The charges were based on his having conducted religious services for those in Macedonia who remain loyal to the Serbian Orthodox Church, and who want the Macedonian church to reunite with it. 

And in a statement released from their New York headquarters on 11 August, the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops declared their "outrage" at the jailing of Jovan. 

"That a recognised, canonical Orthodox Christian hierarch can be sentenced to a prison term for fulfilling his religious responsibilities is simply beyond our comprehension," said the statement, signed by nine hierarchs from various Orthodox denominations represented in the Americas. The hierarchs said that they backed the Serbian Orthodox Church in calling for Jovan to be freed immediately. 

There are obvious ethnic tensions behind this, between Serbs and Macedonians. When Yugoslavia broke up, the whole region suffered violence and fragmentation among the Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Kosovar Albanians, and so on.

I am not enough of an historian (none at all) to even guess how typical this is throughout the world or the long history of the church. Changing political realities today exacerbate the situation.

Even in Ukraine, the political reality of independence has spawned new disgreements between Eastern Rite Catholics and Orthodox, and even between Eastern Rite Catholics and the Vatican over the relocation of the Ukrainian Catholic headquarters, which is exacerbated by Vatican concerns to not offend the Orthodox.

To get to the bottom you have to go through the Soviet repression of Ukrainian Catholics, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Polish period of rule and the 1596 treaty, when many Ukrainians embraced Roman Catholicism under an Eastern Rite provision. But you can't stop there. If you really get to the bottom of most such things, you'll find yourself close to hell down there at the bottom, the source of ambitions, pride, hatred, bearing false witness, and so it goes.

But still, after all is said and done, among most of the faithful the tensions at the top are usually some distance away. It is enough for many to struggle for their daily bread and attend worship services, regardless of how the successors of the Apostles might be fighting among themselves or vying for a piece of the action. Jesus told James and John, in a sense, if you want some of the action, ok, you'll get it, but it might not be what you think.

Join Us on Sept. 12: Luminous Art

Touchstone is co-sponsoring the following event and will have a marketing table and editorial presence.  Please join us.

Visions of Salvation

by iconographer Solrunn Nes

A presentation of the the four most common motif groups in Byzantine iconography; depictions of Christ, The Mother of God, Saints and Festival icons.

Monday, Sept. 12, 7:30 PM

Marmion Academy -- Koch Theater
1000 Butterfield Rd.
Aurora, IL 60504-9742
Phone: 630-897-6936

Directions:  Take I-88 toward Aurora --  Take the North Farnsworth Ave exit -- go north 1.2 mi -- Turn left on Butterfield Rd. IL-56 -- go 0.7 mi. to 1000 Butterfield Rd.

SOLRUNN NES has represented the authentic tradition of Christian sacred art for two decades in the west.  Her work will be on exhibit from Sept. 12 - 24.

Solrunn Nes, herself a western European and convert to Roman Catholicism, possesses a profound knowledge and love of Eastern Christianity, and can be recognized as a true representative of the tradition expressed preeminently at Nicaea II.  She studied icon painting in Finland with Father Robert de Caluwé (1983), and in Athens, at the Academy of Fine Arts under the supervision of Professor Konstantin Xinopoulos (1985), and has traveled extensively in Greece, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Russia and Egypt. Highly regarded as an iconographer of considerable skill in western Europe, and especially in her native Norway, where she for several years lectured at the University of Bergen, she now works as a freelance iconographer, writer, and occasional lecturer.

All her icons are striking and luminous, recognizably her own, and yet fully in accord with the objective canonical tradition. Her work -- which she classifies as New Byzantinism -- reveals how one committed prayerfully to the latter can nonetheless produce art of obvious creativity.  Her icons are bright, spare, free of busy-ness and visual noise", and immediate to the beholder. The icon is an expression of her faith.  The tradition in which she paints is not concerned with the subjective perception of what is true, beautiful, and good.  On the contrary, the faith of the Church is expressed through certain formal norms and with clarity of objective definition of the good and the true: it comes from God and leads to God.  The highest compliment that can be paid her work is that it inspires one to pray and to conceive a desire for the True Beauty reflected there.

She has produced two books of interest to the art historian, theologian, and layman seeking a deeper understanding of iconography.  Her lavishly illusatrated The Mystical Language of Icons (reviewed in Touchstone by Addison Hart) is an introduction that describes in admirable detail, yet with clarity and simplicity, the technique of draughting holy images.  She shows how Eastern Christian icons are not simply religious art, as has predominated in the west since the Renaissance (that is to say, they are not merely "pictures" of religious scenes or biblical stories), but function as liturgical, dogmatic, venerable, and prayerful objects of sacred character.  Every page of The Mystical Language of Icons is itself a work of her own iconic art, and she takes us through page after page of iconographic motifs with enlightening explanations of each.

Her other book, The Uncreated Light, is a fascinating blend of theological insight and art history.  In it she traces the depiction of the Gospels' accounts of the Transfiguration of Christ, revealing the various and rich iconographic emphases that theological currents and controversies spanning roughly a thousand years drew out of the event.  Pages of relevant biblical and patristic quotations round out the work, showing a deft intertwining of theological knowledge, spiritual insight, art history, and a trained detective's mind that picks up the subtle clues for interpretation of each work of art under her scrutiny.

Books will be available for purchase at the lecture.