Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Taking Christ Out of Christkindlmarket

Last Friday, now known as Black Friday, we took our granddaughter downtown to see the new Macy's window displays (Mary Poppins theme this year) as part of her birthday celebration. She got to pick out some nice blouses, too.

Since moving last summer, we now take the Blue Line downtown--instead of the Red Line which would take us right in front (at the lower level) of Macy's (aka Marshall Fields prior to 2006). Exiting the Blue Line brings us a block west of Macy's now and up into Daley Plaza, so there for the first time I discovered the (now 11th annual) Christkindlmarket festival, an Old Time German marketplace of shops with goodies and Christmas ornaments, carved wooden nutcrackers, nativity sets, advent calendars and wreaths, and much more.

So I was quite surprised this morning to find out from Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO  (my thanks to Judy Warner) that the new Nativity Story film, due out from New Line Cinema this Friday, was a corporate sponsor of the festival. But the City of Chicago threatened the festival somehow, Lopez reports, so the festival returned the $12,000 to New Line Cinema. This seems legit as a story, as she quotes New Line's response:

We were stunned that our paid sponsorship of Christkindlmarket Chicago – the largest Christmas celebration in Chicago – was rescinded based on the "religious" content of our film The Nativity Story

We had committed to a $12,000 sponsorship for the market, which was to include a display area in the Festival tent, logo signage in all print ads, direct mailings, brochures, flyers and on the website.

We don’t understand why our sponsorship would be rejected for religious reasons, particularly considering the fact that our film details the story that inspired the holiday season that the Christkindlmarket was created to celebrate.

They're stunned. I'm surprised. I bought some ornaments at the festival. The clerk wished me a Merry Christmas. I walked by the Baby Jesus countless times in the shops. I saw on the news later that night a workman carrying the Baby Jesus to his creche in Daley Plaza. Something just doesn't add up. Did someone suggest to city officials that Mel Gibson produced The Nativity Story? (He didn't.)

Neutralizing the Abortion Issue

The Washington Post magazine profiled yesterday a man they dubbed the "Jerry Falwell of the religious left," Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. Of as much interest as the biographical material on Wallis is the analysis of the political left's attempt to navigate around the key moral issue of the age, abortion, without alienating Christian voters.

The Post observes:

For Democrats to continue bringing in more religious Christians, experts agree, a key component will be to find a way to "neutralize the abortion issue" by "advocating for the drastic reduction of abortion," as Wallis puts it. To lessen the weight of the abortion issue, one option currently discussed in Democratic circles is the "90-10" push to reduce the abortion rate 90 percent in 10 years. "We went too far on the abortion issue," [former President Jimmy] Carter says of Democrats. "We became branded with abortion."

"It's more than just saying, 'Okay, we are going to reduce it,'" [Massachusetts Senator John] Kerry says. "I think some of our rhetoric -- I plead guilty for the Democratic Party -- I think some of our rhetoric -- mine included -- has been insensitive at times to that moral dilemma."

Did Wallis really mean to speak to the Washington Post about abortion as an "issue" to be "neutralized"? If so, will talk about "reducing" abortions "neutralize" the issue for the benefit of pro-abortion-rights politicians?

Probably about as much as Plessy v. Ferguson "neutralized" the civil rights issue for white supremacist politicians of another era.

The so-called "peace and justice" evangelicals really shouldn't have this much difficulty understanding what convictional pro-life Christians seek for the unborn. It is, well, peace and justice.

Confessions of a Pastor's Wife

Newsweek magazine, on the stands today, allows an evangelical pastor's wife to have her turn on the weekly's "My Turn" page. Eileen Button of Davison, Michigan, writes:

There are those who jokingly suggest my husband has an easy life 'since he only works a few hours on Sunday morning.' They have no idea what it takes to lead a church, write weekly sermons, counsel those battling addictions or inspire people to make eternal choices. They cannot imagine the burdens that keep him awake night after night.

It's a responsibility that I share with him now, but I'm still the same person I was before my husband became a man of God.

Some might find my ideas, opinions and loud way of laughing (and snorting) a little incongruous for a pastor's wife. But if you take the time to get to know me, you'll discover a person working through the same faith and life issues as everyone else.

Just don't forget to ask me my first name.

More on The Public Interest

Those of you interested in the James Madison Program's conference, The Public Interest and the Making of American Public Policy: 1965-2005, the schedule of which appears here, will also want to have the link to the Program's conference page. It provides a description of the conference, the schedule, and biographies of the speakers. It looks very good.

Burning Bibles in Uzbekistan

I am waiting to see the mainstream media erupt with coverage of this officially-snactioned descration of sacred texts. Who doesn't know about the [false] story about a Koran being flushed away last year? It was all over the news. This story is from Forum 18 (based in Oslo), with a summary:

Following a 27 August raid on a Baptist church in the southern town of Karshi, two visiting Baptists were given massive fines on 25 October of 438 US Dollars each for participating in unregistered religious worship, while four local church members were given smaller fines, Protestant sources told Forum 18 News Service. The court ordered Bibles and hymnbooks confiscated during the raid to be burnt, a regular practice with literature confiscated during raids despite official denials. The judge refused to discuss the case with Forum 18. After 30 police officers raided a Pentecostal church in the capital Tashkent on 13 November, one church member has so far been fined. The Karshi Baptists called for Uzbekistan's harsh religion law to be brought into line with the religious freedom guarantees in the country's Constitution and international human rights standards.

I'm sure you will read more about in Time, Newsweek, and your local paper, soon.

Horton's an Elephant No Matter How Small?

Steve Breitenbach sent me this link earlier this week from the Daily Mail of amazing pictures of several animals in utero. If it's a picture of a baby elephant in the womb, many ask, then why isn't it a homo sapiens baby in the womb as well? The development of what makes an elephant an elephant seems to be quite early in the life of the "embryo-fetus-elephant." The link is to the main article. Just a little down the page you will find a link to a "gallery" of "amazing pictures."

Family Cons v. Market Cons

Yuval Levin, senior editor of New Atlantis journal, serves up an interesting argument in this week's Weekly Standard. In his article "Putting Parents First," Levin acknowledges the very real tensions within the American conservative coalition between those committed primarily to protecting free-market economics and those committed primarily to preserving traditional structures of family and community.

Levin writes:

As the modern conservative movement took shape, conservatives were spared the full burden of mitigating these internal tensions because they confronted adversaries, at home and abroad, who opposed both of the goods conservatives aimed to advance. The left at its height viewed capitalism and traditional social institutions like the family as equally unjust and oppressive, and sought to use government power to replace or to undermine both.

This allowed conservatives to serve the cause of family and market by opposing big government. That doesn't mean the conservative coalition always held together amicably, but a common enemy can go a long way toward smoothing over differences. And opposition to government was not just a slogan. It genuinely served the interests of the family and the market in a time when both were under siege. It truly was the case, as Ronald Reagan put it in his first inaugural address in 1981, that "in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Levin argues this strategy no longer holds, or will not hold much longer (I agree.) In other words, the "Leave Us Alone" coalition increasingly is turning on itself. He sees the solution in conservatives of various stripes concentrating their policy proposals not on the "investor class" but on the "parenting class" and includes specific recommendations for public policy.

I'm not as optimistic as Levin that this coalition can be reconfigured. But his analysis is insightful, and should prompt some interesting discussions across the conservative landscape, especially perhaps among those of us who ask more and more, "What hath Jerusalem to do with Wall Street?"

Jefferts Schori Invokes the Patriarchs

According to a Religion News Service story, the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church has warned the Diocese of San Joaquin not to try to leave the Episcopal Church. Katharine Jefferts Schori told its bishop, the genial and courageous John-David Schofield,

"Our forbears did not build churches or give memorials with the intent that they be removed from the Episcopal Church. Nor did our forbears give liberally to fund endowments with the intent that they be consumed by litigation."

One would think she'd have someone at the Episcopal Church headquarters to say "Don't go there" when she starts writing like this. Strictly speaking, she is right in claiming what she does, but this is not an argument an advocate of approving sodomy and marrying homosexual people who is rather vague on the exact purpose of believing in Jesus Christ should raise.

The obvious response is: "Our forebears did not build churches or give memorials with the intent that they be run by people like Katharine Jefferts Shori and used to marry people of the same sex and employ heretics and skeptics."

Even assuming that many of the Episcopalian patriarchs to whom she appeals were cultural Episcopalians more than Christians, it does stretch one's credulity to think that they would, if someone had thought to predict such a future, side with Mrs. Jefferts Shori rather than Bishop Schofield. If she really cares what her forebears wanted, she ought to tell her lawyers to give up right now.

Celebrating The Public Interest

Our senior editor Robert George asked me to post this announcement, with the note that "everyone is welcome to attend, and there is no admission fee. We've got a great line-up of speakers." The conference is presented by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which he directs. Another senior editor, Wilfred McClay, is one of the speakers.

The Public Interest and the Making of American Public Policy: 1965-2005
November 30-December 1, 2006
Princeton University
Computer Science Building Room 104
Corner of William Street and Olden Streets

Thursday, November 30

3:30-5:00 p.m. SESSION 1:  Neoconservatism and the American Commonwealth

Speaker One:  The Constitutional Idea – James Ceaser, University of Virginia
Respondents:  William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, Adam Wolfson, former Editor, The Public Interest, Roger Scruton, Visiting Professor, Princeton University
Speaker Two:  Neoconservatives and the Courts – Ken I. Kersch, Princeton University
Moderator: Robert P. George, Princeton University

5:15-6:45 p.m. SESSION 2:  Social Policy and Urban Policy

Speaker One: Welfare Policy – Larry Mead, New York University
Speaker Two: Crime and Urban Policy – John DiIulio, University of Pennsylvania
Speaker Three: Social Policy and Old Age (Medicare/Social Security) – Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review
Moderator Adam Wolfson, former Editor, The Public Interest

Friday, December 1

9:15-10:45 a.m. SESSION 3:  The Character of American Capitalism

Speaker One: The Modern Corporation – Irwin Stelzer, Hudson Institute
Speaker Two: Economic Policy – Murray Weidenbaum, Washington University
Moderator: John Londregan, Princeton University

11:15 a.m.-12:45 p.m SESSION 4:  Education

Speaker One:  Primary and Secondary Schools – Joseph Viteritti, Hunter College, CUNY
Speaker Two:  The Universities – Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University
Speaker Three:  Multiculturalism and Affirmative Action – William B. Allen, Visiting Fellow, James Madison Program, Princeton University
Moderator: Eric Cohen, Ethics and Public Policy Center

2:15-3:45 p.m. SESSION 5:  Manners, Morals, and Modern America

Speaker One: Marriage, Children, and Family – Kay Hymowitz, Manhattan Institute
Speaker Two: Bioethics – Diana Schaub, Loyola College in Maryland
Speaker Three: Religion and American Politics – Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Moderator: Eric Cohen, Ethics and Public Policy Center

4:00-5:45 p.m. ROUNDTABLE ON The Public Interest
Participants:  Nathan Glazer, Harvard University; William Galston, The Brookings Institution; William Bennett
Moderator:  William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

Pilgrims and Patriots

     I’m not sure what our schoolchildren are taught about the Pilgrim fathers these days. Probably not much. They may be taught that they sailed from England to escape persecution by the state religion, and that they were generally inept folks who would all have died were it not for the assistance of a gentle Indian named Squanto, who showed them what maize was and how to fertilize the flinty New England soil with dead fish. For that, they gave the first Thanksgiving dinner, to Give Thanks, and invited the Indians, to whom they also gave thanks.

     The students surely are not taught what a pilgrim is, literally. The Latin peregrinus means “somebody who wanders across the fields,” and was adopted in the Middle Ages to refer to one who made the arduous trip overland -- and finally over the Pyrenees -- to the shrine of Saint James at Compostela, in Galicia. (A “palmer,” as you may know, is one who travels to the Holy Land, whence he might bring back palm branches, while un romeo (Italian) is one who goes to visit the major churches in Rome.)

     Now the notion of the pilgrim church is older than the Middle Ages, older even than the New Testament; in a way, it is as old as creation, when the Word went forth from the Father, not to return in vain. The Lord expelled the first sinners from the garden, when, as Milton says,

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

Enoch walked with God, and then one evening was seen no more. Noah ventured upon the billowing seas in an “ark,” a box; and, as my colleague Father Reardon has written, that rare word is the same used to describe the little wicker basket wherein the baby Moses was placed upon the waters. Abraham, without a Baedeker, by camel and on foot took his weary way from Ur of the sophisticated Chaldees to the land the Lord would show him, a land he knew nothing of. The great Passover meal is eaten as if in haste, with one’s loins girt and staff in hand, ready for a journey. The commandments are placed in another Ark, and for generations that Ark resides in a tent, moving from place to place. Jesus goes before us to Galilee, then to his Father’s house, to prepare a dwelling for us there.

     The Christian faith is a faith on the move, secure in the Kingdom of God that is already among us, but awaiting the Kingdom to come in its fullness. We know that our homes are not here; we are all like Abraham, our father in faith, strangers in a strange land. Yet it is liberating, that knowledge that no farmland however rich, no hills however green, no city however just can claim our final allegiance as our home. It frees us to forgive the stumps and stones, the abandoned machines, the burnt out tenements, the buckled roads, the commissioners on the take, the mosquitoes from the marsh, the swelter in August and the frozen mud in February. We can be stable, steadfast -- planted in one place. So were the monks who lived under Benedict’s rule. Because they were pilgrims, they knew that no one place here could satisfy the heart; so with a free conscience they took a vow of stability, and devoted their earthly attentions to one place, praying there, and clearing woods, draining swamps, tilling fields, and draping the hills with the vine. With the same spirit of longing for home, and a similar care for their less than perfect new place of sojourning in a cold and harsh land, the Pilgrim Fathers stayed close to where they built their first village. Such a pilgrim is a patriot in the most perfect sense: he loves his land, and devotes himself to it, because it is a shadow of the patria he truly loves, and towards which he is always walking. The grace of the Father calms our hearts, and spurs us on, as the Father Himself is ever in act, and ever at rest.

     What is the converse of the pilgrim? The wanderer, seeking the peace that cannot be found on earth; godless, therefore strangely landless, making an idol of every city or every earthly delight he happens upon, but turning against it when it proves to disappoint. Such wanderers are restless, yet fixed in a dreary stasis. They are always going here and there, to no end, as men lost in the windings of an inextricable labyrinth. “God help the man so wrapped in Error’s endless train,” says the poet Spenser.

     But perhaps this good old muscular hymn says it best:

Who would true valor see
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent,
To be a pilgrim.

Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.

Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend
Can daunt his spirit:
He knows, he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.
                         (John Bunyan)

Pilgrims and patriots, a Happy Thanksgiving to you all.