Our Kind of Atheist

We've always had a soft spot for atheism. Many of our friends are atheists, our dearest college chum vociferously so. We ourselves are no strangers to the varieties of doubt and the inclination to disbelieve. To be frank, we consider agnosticism a thoroughly respectable position, and rather miss the days when we could hold to it.

Lately, of course, there has arisen a particularly noxious variety of person, inclined to use "atheism" as an opportunity to work out his or her (but mostly his) own Daddy issues, using anybody who believes in God (but mostly Christians) as a convenient stand-in for the real object of simmering Freudian rage. All over the web -- including, until a recent editorial decision, our own comments section -- one can see this sort of enraged tooth-gnashing. It normally takes the form of recycled Dawkins and lame efforts to imitate Hitchens. Given our passionate admiration for Hitchens, we'd be happy to put up with the latter, if it even approached the erudition, wit or flair of the original. It doesn't.

Still, just as (according to America's second-most-famous Mormons) one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch girl, nor does one generation of child-molesting priests quite spoil the whole Roman project, so we do not believe that one efflorescence of unpleasant internet trolls entirely discredits all of atheism. In the words of well-known atheist Jean-Paul Sartre, au contraire. (We assume he must have said that at one time or another; the Frogs always do.)

All this brings us to a review of Alain de Botton's new book. De Botton is a popularizer of philosophy, and an atheist. But his new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, sounds like a pleasant change from the recent rounds of believer-bashing. According to John Gray in the New Statesman:

It is only the illiteracy of the current generation of atheists that leads them to think religious practitioners must be stupid or thoughtless. Were Augustine, Maimonides and al-Ghazali - to mention only religious thinkers in monotheist traditions - lacking in intellectual vitality? The question is absurd but the fact it can be asked at all might be thought to pose a difficulty for de Botton. His spirited and refreshingly humane book aims to show that religion serves needs that an entirely secular life cannot satisfy. He will not persuade those for whom atheism is a militant creed. Such people are best left with their certainties, however childish.

Well. That's more like it, eh? In the words of Rodney King, can't we all just get along?

Seriously, though, there is no reason for the sort of Kirchnkampf stuff we've been seeing lately. Yes, sure, the fundies started it, but they're -- by definition -- a freakish reaction against modernity. To turn yourself into their mirror-image is to abandon the basics of modernity, which include the ability to tolerate diversity in civil society. Much of the "skeptical" world would find itself able to work together with much of the believing world, achieving great things for the common good (not least marginalizing the fanatics), if only it were willing to try. Instead, it often resolves to fight fire with fire, and devolves into a fanaticism of its own. Paging Robespierre!

We're also delighted to see this warm review of de Botton in the New Statesman, a newsmagazine of the British Left. The hard copy we picked up in London a few months ago was absolutely chockablock with sneering, unreflective antireligiosity. It's nice to know that the editors haven;t quite given up on the modern world, and can still tolerate some diversity.

Facts and Opinions

No reader is likely to be surprised by the assertion that Wikipedia is not -- to put it mildly -- a reliable source of facts. Oh, you can start there, of course; but if you are even a little bit serious, you move on quickly.

Here's why. Timothy Messner-Kruse, an historian at Bowling Green, is the author of two books and several articles on the Haymarket Riot. But when he tried to correct some errors in the Wikipedia article on his subject, he found his changes reversed, not because they were wrong but because they didn't reflect the consensus of opinion. And the opinion solicited here is represented by secondary sources, since Wikipedia (albeit for understandable reasons) discourages the use of primary sources.

The problem is, or course, that facts don't depend on a consensus of opinion. They depend on sources, which in the case of historical writing are original documents that can be examined and cited -- things Messner-Kruse had done, in some cases making him one of the first researchers to do so. But until his findings are more widely disseminated, they won't count so far as Wikipedia is concerned.

Honestly, we can't get too upset with Wikipedia. If they didn't have some policy like this one, they would be flooded with obsessive-compulsive cranks, swamping their servers with "evidence" for alien abductions and Fortean phenomena. But that doesn't mean we actually trust their second-hand facts, either, and neither should you.

Pink Gun Saga Continues

When last we left the charitable souls at Discount Gun Sales, they had just stopped offering their modified Walther P-22 "Hope Special" for sale, and the embattled folks at Susan G. Komen for the Cure were loudly proclaiming that they had nothing to do with any guns, what are you talking about?

Since then, there has been a funny little dance between DGS and Komen. (Nice description at HuffPo). basically, Komen says that they never authorized the Hope Special, and never received any donation from DGS. Meanwhile, the people at DGS say -- anonymously -- "Yeah, we cut them a check," but decline to provide specifics.

Where does the truth lie? We have no idea. At the moment, though, it looks as though either (a) DGS is just lying, which would not surprise those of us who don't trust the firearms industry, or else (b) Komen's Seattle chapter has lousy record-keeping skills and donor follow-up, which would not surprise those of us in the non-profit world. Of course, it could also be that (c) Komen is lying, or even (e) the whole story was concocted as a publicity stunt, to drum up business for DGS and/or distract attention from Komen's other recent PR mishap.

Best of all, it appears that the Hope Special will go back into production, although its proceeds -- if any -- will go to some other cancer-related charity.

We'll say this for the Hope Special: it's a great weapon if you ever have to perform a covert assassination inside a cotton-candy factory.

Davos Update: Nobody Knows

Foreign Policy's Clyde Prestowitz should take his shirt off. He is clearly of one mind with those lovely Ukrainian protesters at Davos. He begins,

As it always does this time of year, my inbox is filling up with messages of a certain kind. They all begin with: "I'm here in Davos" and then, in an intellectual form of name dropping, proceed to mention key words and phrases such as Geopolitical Risk, G-Zero World, and Rise of Regions. This, of course, sounds really heavyweight and important. But I am not fooled. Nobody knows what those words mean.

Upon reflection, he's not really of one mind with the ladies from Femen. They are protesting because they believe that the global elites gathered at the World Economic Forum do in fact control the world, and have brought it to the present crisis. Prestowitz, on the other hand, protests that they do not; for him, the whole thing is a self-deluding sham. He points out how these supposedly agenda-setting financial wizards failed to perceive the 1997 Asian crisis, the 2008 American crisis, or the 2010 European crisis.

His funniest bit of derision is this:

You have to hand it to Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the Forum. He's the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum. Short, bald, and unimposing, he is what you envision when someone says "gnome of Zurich." Yet, despite his anti-charisma, Schwab has managed to persuade a large number of the world's top CEOs, politicians, academics, media stars, and bureaucrats that they have to be in a cramped, second rate hotel in a cold Swiss village with mediocre skiing and food every year during the bridge weekend between January and February. Indeed, he has not only convinced these people that they have to be there, he has them begging him for invitations and prime spots on the program.

More to the point, Prestowitz argues that the WEF is founded upon a delusion, and that in fact Davos-style globalization "doesn't work under today's circumstances," pretends to be a win-win propostion but isn't, and may not even be "sustainable." he concludes with this blanket condemnation:

Anyone interested in knowing what's really happening or in changing the way things are doesn't go to Davos.

Fine, Clyde. But why is your shirt still on?

Latin News. In Latin.

Zuhlsdorf posted this today. Even if your Latin is as shaky as ours, it's worth a look. Not to mention the German subtitles!

For those who prefer their Latin news on the page, we remind you of those sturdy souls at Ephemeris.

Havel's New God

Fifteen years ago, in a Prague castle, a former theatre critic for the Village Voice sat across the table from a former playwright, well-regarded in downtown circles. They spoke of Joe Biden, NATO, real estate and God.

Paul Berman had gone on to write for the Times, and Vaclav Havel, of course, to lead the Velvet Revolution and become the first president of the post-communist Czech Republic. In a New Republic essay, Berman reflects on their interview. It's a magnificent read for many reasons: the portrait of Havel; the snapshot of Biden undiplomatic bluster; Berman's voice, as he describes his beer-soaked realization that Biden may have done some genuine good. But the essay's principal value is that it lays out and tries to make sense of Havel's ides about the role of God -- or a god, some god, a transcendent reality -- in the modern world.

Havel borrowed from Heidegger, whose disciples, as Berman notes, tend to veer off toward the extreme right to the extreme left. Yet at first, Havel sounds almost Tea-Party-friendly:

He granted that, in modern times, it has become unfashionable to speak about democracy in connection to anything above us or beyond our understanding. ... He stood in a grand tradition, though. He invoked the American Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers spoke about a Creator. Why, after all, does man have a right to freedom and a right to dignity? Who has bestowed these rights? They do not come from treaties. They are not human inventions. They are gifts of the Creator. The rights also imply a duty to the Creator. Havel cited the Declaration of Independence—all of which seemed to me rather stirring, given that, unlike a lot of people who natter on about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, Havel meant what he was saying, and the Czech Republic was there to prove it. He was Thomas Jefferson. Without slaves!

But of course there is more to it:

His proposed new god, for instance, did not have an Enlightenment look. Havel paused to reflect on the god. A new god, he told me, would most likely be abstract and multicultural —- a god who brought together Allah, Buddha, Christ, and so on.

Berman rightly catches the Romantic heritage behind this idea. He also sees why this sort of speculation, useful enough for an artist, might not have been helpful to a statesman:

... Of course I could see why he was in no rush to be quoted. One of his closest advisers had confessed to me that even his inner team rolled their eyes over Havel’s screwy ideas. A multicultural god -— “multicultural” was his word -— might upset the various mono-cultural churches. There was no reason to start up pointless controversies over theological musings of a kind that might, in fact, have been enhanced by beer.

Havel was not entirely clear about any of these ideas, so interpretation is needed; Berman does a fine job, one we expect that PhD candidates will spend debating. The whole article is well worth a read.

It is especially interesting because, although Berman does not go into this, the Czech Republic is often pointed to by apologists for atheism. It is, to judge from poll numbers, the least theistic nation in the world; roughly 30% of its residents say that they believe in no god, spirit or transcendent "life force." And yet its citizens are decent, law-abiding folk, possessed of ethical standards comparable or superior to those of their neighbors (except perhaps in the realm of human trafficking, in which the Czech Republic plays a role disproportionate to its size).

In this connection, we may consider Berman's observation that:

Havel was frightened by atheism. In his eyes, communism was atheism’s apotheosis. Communism led everyone to focus on material circumstances and to dream of improving the circumstances, and to dream of nothing else. For why should anyone dream of anything more than material improvements? More does not exist. Such was atheism’s message. To pine for a new automobile made sense, but there was no point in contemplating the state of your soul.

In the same way, Havel wrote about the danger of Western materialism. Berman quotes a 1994 lecture in which Havel explained that people in many parts of the world admired Western values -- democracy, human rights, open markets -- but at the same time feared

... what many cultural societies see as the inevitable product or by-product of these values: moral relativism, materialism, the denial of any kind of spirituality, a proud disdain for everything suprapersonal, a profound crisis of authority and the resulting general decay of order, a frenzied consumerism, a lack of solidarity, a selfish cult of material success, the absence of faith in a higher order of things or simply in eternity, an expansionist mentality that holds in contempt everything that in any way resists the dreary standardization and rationalism of technical civilization.

Havel sounds not entirely unlike another Eastern European dissident, John Paul II, who in his visit to Cuba warned against the materialisms of both the East and West.

Was Havel's tentative religiosity merely a reaction against Communism and a fear of what might replace it? Or did it spring from a genuine appreciation of the role that faith can play in the life of a nation and, especially, the life of an individual? It's hard to be sure, although Berman suggests in his conclusion that the latter is true:

If you think there is something more, a Being or transcendental something-or-other that goes beyond your own material existence, your own life is bound to end up seeming, by way of comparison, humbler, therefore easier to put at risk. Havel seems to have understood pretty clearly that his own life was not the greatest of all possible values. ... He was one of the greatest and most heroic figures of modern times, or maybe of all time, but he was a great and heroic figure because his own thinking gave him the courage to risk not being anything at all.

Update: Glass Houses

Per the Times, an Arizona judge has ruled against Alejandrina Cabrera, forcing her removal from the ballot.

Judge John Nelson of the Yuma County Superior Court rendered the decision based on an examination "by a Brigham Young University linguist" -- does that sound suspicious to anybody else? -- name William Eggington, who found that Ms Cabrera's command was not up to the task of conducting city business.

Eggington may be right, for all we know. We are certainly not thrilled by the idea of city officials who can't wade through the vast amounts of dreary technical reading -- laws, regulations, tax codes, construction documents -- that are part of the job.

But the case makes us uneasy. Where does proficiency begin, we ask; and is this license of a cascade of partisan purges? Surely, somebody will ask about San Luis' mayor next, since he was frank about his own limitations even while criticizing Cabrera's. Where will it end?

Judge Nelson "acknowledged that there's no precedent for him to follow," according to one of Cabrera's attorneys. This does not surprise us; we hope the case does not serve as precedent for many others.

Annals of Hypocrisy: Spanglish Edition

Arizona, surely the state sinking most rapidly into crpyto-fascism, has been in the news this week for more than Gov. Brewer's tarmac finger-wag. Namely, the Attack of the Pedants.

Per the Times, Arizona (like other states -- news to us) has a law requiring office-holders to be "proficient" in English, without quite spelling out what constitutes proficiency. One woman, running for a seat on the governing board of a small city called San Luis, has found her place on the ballot challenged by political opponents.

Indeed, it sounds as though Alejandrina Cabrera does speak English poorly -- "hesitant and heavily accented," the story describes it. We can certainly imagine circumstances under which this might be an impediment to effective governing; on the other hand, especially in a border town, so can a poor command of Spanish.

What astonishes us is that the challenge to Cabrera comes from one of her high school classmates, San Luis mayor Juan Carlos Escamilla. And hear is how Mayor Escamilla describes Cabrera's candidacy:

I do feel this opening a box of Pandora ...

Wait a second. "A box of Pandora?" Yup. That's right: Escamilla doesn't speak English all that well himself, and has said so on TV:

I feel I don’t dominate 100 percent, but I can still get by,” said Mr. Escamilla .... “I can write, read and understand it very well.”

Um, dude: glass houses?

Look, we ourselves live in a country whose predominant language we speak less than fluently. "Hesitant and heavily accented" is a goal we hope someday to achieve; we're still closer to "like a mentally deficient toddler." And we have a fellow expat here whose language skills are far superior to our own, as he lets us know whenever the opportunity arises, in a way which has probably limited the number of invitations he finds in his inbox. He's a smart guy, and seems like a very decent one, but ... we prefer to take our grammar advice from natives.

In the same way, we are inclined to think that (a) Mayor Escamilla is a jerk of the first class, and that (b) his grammatically-challenged remarks about Ms. Cabrera reveal the truth about the political right's passion for English. It's not a matter of not racism or nativism, so much as straightforward gerrymandering. They don't really care about how well a candidate speaks the language, so long as the candidate is from their own party. The "English Only" movement is just another way to weed out people who might vote Democrat.

Should have been obvious that these guys never cared about English proficiency. After all, they elected Bush.

Cage-Fighting and Christianity

"Jesus Didn't Tap" -- meaning surrender -- is apparently a tattoo worn by some Christians who participate in the sport called mixed martial arts, a.k.a cage-fighting. One hastens to add that the Lord didn't cage-fight, either. Or wear tattoos.

Christianity Today has an interesting little set of ethical reflections on the martial arts. To summarize:

• Marine Corps veteran and Christian Coalition editor Joe Carter argues that while the truly martial arts -- those that prepare a warrior to fight in a just war -- are entirely ethical, turning them into games and entertainment is not.
• Ted Kluck -- who has been at various times missionary, author boxer and football coach -- says it's all good, and argues that violent sports teach Christian values. We are not remotely convinced.
• Duke divinity student -- and former cage-fighter -- Matt Morin suggests rephrasing the question. He considers "should a Christian do it" to be divisive, and prefers to ask "why would a Christian do it." Hairsplitting, if you ask us. Either way, his answer is blunt: Cage-fighting is the new pornography.

We at the Egg have a passing acquaintance with two "martial arts." In youth, Fr. A. did a little boxing and a lot of fencing, both sports with obvious antecedents in warfare. He enjoyed both, although it was apparent that boxing was dangerous to the intellectual capacities. (The best fighter in our little college club explained that he had to suspend boxing as he wrote his senior thesis, because after a morning of blows to the head, he couldn't think straight for the rest of the day.)

We continued to enjoy watching the fights on TV for many years, at least until the reign of Tyson stripped away any pretense of art, and revealed the professional sport, especially among heavyweights, for the unmitigated thuggery it is. Today, we think of boxing the way a recovering alcoholic probably does about his last beer: with a strange mixture of shame, fear and longing.

To be brief, we think Carter is right, Morin is bombastic but also right, and Kluck is missing the logic of his own arguments. That's a shame, because he says something well worth hearing:

I think if we evangelicals are going to get indignant and legalistic about cage fighting, we have to do the same thing about professional and college football ....

If we're going to start playing the moral superiority card, we will have to unpack the various ethical dilemmas that distinguish other sports at a high level. These include academic fraud and the performance-enhancing drugs that make the NFL players you watch religiously (pardon the pun) look like comic book heroes.

That's right, Ted. Except that instead of following this through to its conclusion, you assume that nobody is willing to look at the ethics of, say, the NFL or even the NCAA. We should look at all of those thing, hard -- harder than you seem willing to actually look.

This is not about "legalism" or "moral superiority," any more than the abolition and civil rights movements were or religious doubts about capital punishment and abortion are. It's about ethical reflection as a community, upon the meaning of humanity and the right use of our bodies.

Dirty Old Ultra-Orthodox Men

Writing about the strange new rhetoric of "religious liberty," we mentioned in passing the ever-more-strident calls of Israel's ultra-Orthodox minority to be granted a "liberty" which imposes harshly upon that of their fellow citizens.

They work little to be free for "study," enjoy tax benefits and substantial welfare checks, and are excused from military service even though it is their intransigence which adds so much to Israel's precarious security situation. And, lately, their very presence in a room is sometimes seen to require that other Israelis comply with their sectarian requirements that women be seated separately, dressed modestly, and kept silent.

To call this an imposition upon the freedom of their fellow-citizens is an understatement. In fact, it runs counter to the sexually egalitarian character long typical of Israeli society. One wonders what Golda Meir would make of it.

Dov Linzer, himself an Orthodox rabbi and educator, has a tart little op-ed piece in the Times about this business. He argues that the strictures to which these sectarians appeal are misunderstandngs -- indeed, reversals -- of the Torah and especially the Talmud:

The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men. [...]

Put more plainly, the Talmud says: It’s your problem, sir; not hers.

Like equally rigid Muslim extremists, Israel's ultra-Orthodox claim, at least implicitly, that their rules protect women from the prurient gaze of men. But as Linzer writes:

In fact, though, their actions objectify and hyper-sexualize women. Think about it: By saying that all women must hide their bodies, they are saying that every woman is an object who can stir a man’s sexual thoughts. Thus, every woman who passes their field of vision is sized up on the basis of how much of her body is covered. She is not seen as a complete person, only as a potential inducement to sin.

Of course, once you judge a female human being only through a man’s sexualized imagination, you can turn even a modest 8-year-old girl into a seductress and a prostitute.

At heart, we are talking about a blame-the-victim mentality. It shifts the responsibility of managing a man’s sexual urges from himself to every woman he may or may not encounter. It is a cousin to the mentality behind the claim, “She was asking for it.”

Yup.

If PIPA Passes

That's a literary (and geographical) allusion, but good luck finding out to what. After all, Wikipedia is shut down for the day. In English, that is; the Latin and Finnish sites are still working, for what that's worth to the morally-challenged students at third-tier universities all over America.

The bigger concerns are the laws to which this blackout has drawn fresh attention. We're not entirely up to speed on this, so we won't say much. Here's a quick rundown from Gizmodo, and a better one from Wired. Here's a very watchable 13-minute rant by TED's Clay Shirky.

We will say this: America's intellectual property laws are already strict enough to stifle innovation. Copyright and patent laws have been strengthened and, in particular, their terms have been lengthened. Rather than benefiting the actual scientists or artists who make new things, the laws now provide a startling benefit to corporations -- and almost in perpetuity.

These laws do stimulate one kind of innovation, but it's a bad one. They have created the entire industry of patent warehousing, in which big companies buy up patents for things they didn't invent and have never produced, for the sole purpose of suing some other companies that eventually invent and build something similar. Suing them, and then essentially stealing their profits. The website paidContent.org describes it as "a protection racket in which an entire industry has to decide whether or not to pay a licensing fee up front or fight off litigation in court."

Add to this the unnecessarily high cost of pharmaceuticals, which contributes (a little) to the outrageous surge in health-care costs, and you begin to see the creepy moral questions which hunker around the margins of IP law.

But back up. So far as we can tell, the laws presently before Congress have nothing to do with patents, and therefore with drugs. They are designed to protect two industries: recording and film.

Protecting these industries is like declaring dinosaurs an endangered species. Except that the dinosaurs were bloodthirsty killers, not cocaine-addled moral degenerates. It took a planet-sized meteor to kill the dinosaurs; the recording industry has been kept alive by Congressional favoritism since the 1990s.

Recording, in particular, was a perverse blip, which for the first time in history allowed musicians to become wealthy for something besides writing and performing music; it made the sleazy middlemen even wealthier, and they built that wealth up by deceiving and defrauding the actual artists. Record producers were parasites, living off people with actual talent and depending completely upon the existence of the copy-proof vinyl LP. Protecting these guys is an idea so bad it makes bailing out Detroit look like probity personified. Their industry is dying; it deserves to die; let it die.

The irony here is that, although we at the Egg lack even the minimal tech savvy required to file-share or otherwise download protected content, we live in a country where it is rampant. Where the customary fashion accessory for Eastern Europeans was once an anarchist newspaper tucked under one's overcoat, it is now a terrabyte external drive containing ten movies, a season or two of HBO, and more music than J.S. Bach listened to in his entire lifetime.

This sounds like an argument for stronger laws, right? After all, these people are pirates. But do you know why they are pirates? Because nobody will sell the stuff to them. Try to use Netflix, Hulu, any of the legitimate vendors, and they send you a polite note saying "We are sorry, but we are unable to distribute content to your country." PBS Kids won't let Preschooler A. watch clips from his favorite programs about talking teddy bears.

Now, not everybody we know would pay for the stuff, even if they got the chance. But some of us would, and the media companies would make a few bucks they aren't making now. And they wouldn't lose a cent.

Or, to paraphrase our friends at the NRA: When it becomes a crime to download content, only criminals will download content.

Underrated Writers

The list of writers who deserve more attention than they get is very long indeed. Alexander Theroux! John Clare! Caritas Pirckheimer! (And for every one, there seems to be another fine writer who may get just a little more attention than is strictly deserved: Paul Theroux; William Wordsworth; Hildegard of Bingen). There isn't much rhyme or reason to fame, and that just doesn't seem fair.

For no particular reason, we just thought of two literary affections we want to share:

(1) Bradford Angier. In 1947, this Boston advertising man dragged his wife to the wilds of British Columbia, where they traded their comfy urban existence for an abandoned prospector's cabin and the life of hunter-gatherers. Obviously the guy had read too much Thoreau, which was the theme of his first book; but after that, he settled down to writing about the rugged life in a way that was less philosophical and more practical. The titles tell most of the story: Free for the Eating: 100 Wild Plants, 300 Ways to Use Them; Wilderness Gear You Can Make Yourself. And so forth

The guy wrote dozens of books (one, we regret to say, seems to have been plagiarized), and we have read only a couple. But, during our days at summer camp, we stumbled upon a battered copy of How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and it fascinated us. We spent the summer reading it and re-reading it. In later years, a copy kept us company during a snowbound month in the Adirondacks, and on a shelf in our New York parsonage from which it was pulled down whenever we tired of city life.

Angier isn't an especially grand stylist, but apart from the mere information conveyed, his writing has a certain winsomeness. His best bits strike a note that is one part Commander McBrag and one part Boy's Life: "To make pemmican, you start with jerky and shred it by pounding, suggests Colonel Townsend Whelen." Well, naturally, but then the Colonel would say that. Or consider this chapter opening:

One day, you may be boating down the Peace River near the start of its more than 2000 mile journey inland to the Great Slave Lake and thence as the Mackenzie to the Arctic Ocean. Soon after the headwaters of this wilderness highway mingle in the Continental Trough, the river turns abruptly eastward to flow with surprising tranquility through the entire range of the Rocky Mountains. if you watch the left shore after chuting through the minor turbulence known as Finlay Rapids, your eyes will likely as not catch the platinum gleam of Lost Cabin Creek.

What follows is a grim anecdote about campers who hadn't read a book like his, and didn't, ah, survive. But the real point is the promise that you, too, may someday be paddling down the Peace River, because sooner or later everybody does; and when that happens, here is a little stream to watch out for, with a kind of sad story attached.

There are many fine outdoors writers, and Angier isn't by any means the best of them. (Paging John McPhee). But he is a fine writer, and his books are full of handy tips for outdoors living. You could do worse, if you were ever to be stranded on Lost Cabin Creek.

(2) Montague Summers. Oh, Father Summers! You are the craziest of all crazed literary men men, the one who makes Baron Corvo look like John Updike and Ezra Pound like Wallace Stevens. (And that is high praise from somebody who cares as much as we for Corvo and Uncle Ez.)

Anglican deacon and (perhaps) Catholic priest; expert on Restoration drama and Gothic novels; tried and somehow acquitted of pederasty -- Summers (1880-1948) could conceivably be famous for any number of things. But as it is, his reputation rests almost entirely upon his writing about witches, vampires and werewolves.

We stumbled across Montague Summers decades ago, when young College Boy Anonymous first studied Renaissance History. Our prof, an expert on Italian intellectual history, had recently made the jump to Mitteleuropean social history, and was dipping his toes into witchcraft studies. By dipping his toes, we mean that he had provided expert Latin assistance to the first translation of Johann Weyer's classic De praestigiis daemonum. (What, you haven't read it?) After a morning's trot through the library stacks, we mentioned to the said prof that we had stumbled across something by this Summers fellow, and his eyes blazed like hot coals, as he arched his back and spat out the damning words, "Montague Summers believes in witches!"

True dat. Summers did indeed believe in witches, and we expect any manner of other things that go bump in the night. Even in his own time, and certainly in this post-Trevor-Roperian age of scientific study, such a belief put one beyond the pale among serious historians. But that's fine, because Summers wasn't a serious historian. He didn't teach at a university, hold a doctorate, or attend conferences of his colleagues. He was instead an old-school man of letters, the sort who wrote for a living, and wrote about whatever interested him -- sex, religion and the supernatural, ideally all at once.

You can, of course, read Summers looking for facts. But why would you, when the prose is so much more exciting? Once described as "more Churchillian than Churchill," his writing a strange mixture of languages, allusions, and examples piled upon examples. The naughty bits are in French, the holy bits in Greek or Latin; the references to secular poetry are shoveled in among those to canon law, folklore, or the records of the Inquisition. We confess that, in college, we found it incomprehensible.

And yet it can be irresistible. Try this:

The vampire has a body, and it is his own body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality; the androgyne in the phantom world; a pariah among the fiends.

Even the Pagan poet taught his hearers and his readers that death was a sweet guerdon of repose, a blessed oblivion after the toil and struggle of life. There are few things more beautiful and there are few things more sad than the songs of our modern Pagans who console their aching hearts with the wistful vision of eternal sleep. Although perhaps they themselves know it not, their delicate but despairing melancholy is an heritage from the weary yet tuneful singers of the last days of Hellas, souls for whom there was no dawn of hope in the sky. But we have a certain knowledge and a fairer surety for "now Christ is risen from the dead, the first-fruits of them that sleep."

He follows this up, immediately, with completely superfluous references to Gray, Swinburne and Bronte. Sheer genius!

Of course, there may be another reason we fell hard for Summers. According to this guy, Summers was

... described by acquaintances as kind, courteous, generous and outrageously witty; but those who knew him well sensed an underlying discomfort and mystery. In appearance he was plump, round cheeked and generally smiling. His dress resembled that of an eighteenth century cleric, with a few added flourishes such as a silver-topped cane depicting Leda being ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan. He wore sweeping black capes crowned by a curious hairstyle of his own devising which led many to assume he wore a wig. His voice was high pitched, comical and often in complete contrast to the macabre tales he was in the habit of spouting. Throughout his life he astonished people with his knowledge of esoteric and unsettling occult lore.

Geeze, Louise. The guy's our doppelganger.

The Destroyer

Father Anonymous has read nearly every word that Ernest Hemingway ever published. (Well, at least in his own lifetime and between hard covers.) Heck, he still cherishes youthful memories of skimming Por quien doblan las campanas in a Madrid bookshop, and lying on the rocky beach at Nice reading Les neiges du Kilimandjaro.

That doesn't make him a fan. Far from it.

In fact, our relationship with EH has been a strange on-and-off affair. Like most Americans born near midcentury, we had a high school English teacher who was besotted with Hemingway, and tried to pass her besottment (besottage? Soteur? Whatever.) down to a new generation. So she assigned his stories to children, which is a good way to make sure that nobody takes a writer very seriously. (Consider poor Mark Twain.)

We dutifully read most of the stories, and a couple of novels, but with the mixture of curiosity and contempt that children routinely bring to assigned authors. And naturally, we regarded Hemingway as kid's stuff. Once we were all grown up and off to college, we certainly weren't going to bother with him anymore -- or, to be honest, with anybody else born after about 1700. It was only in young adulthood that we tried again, on the grounds that Religio Medici, for all its charms, is tough reading for the subway.

It didn't take long to get a sense of how Hemingway's artistic career had played out: a few exceptionally fine stories, one striking novel, and then a fairly quick decline into self-parody. Unless we are mistaken, this seems to the general consensus of the critics, so far as there is one.

Death in the Afternoon, written nineteen years after The Sun Also Rises, and 21 years before the suicide, is a convenient half-way point. It lacks the intellectual honesty of Sun, the willingness to question concepts like masculinity and honor. It is indeed a piece of remarkably good sports writing; but is it really better than anything A.J. Liebling ever wrote about boxing? (For that matter, we're not sure that Hemingway's writing about war was any better than Liebling's, either. And Liebling gave himself the luxury of adverbs.) By the time he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, ten years after that, Hemingway was a national institution -- but his ironies and intimations had been replaced by the stuff of pulp fiction. The best part of that book, by a fur piece, is the epigraph.

The trajectory of Hemingway's writing is roughly parallel to the trajectory of his personal life, but the personal life began in a less attractive place and ended in a vastly more awful one. We don't blame him for his depression or condemn him for his suicide. But the fact is that he was a bit of a pig from the very beginning, and he only got worse. We are reminded of how bad it was by this review of a new biography and a volume of Hemingway's letters. The most damning indictments come from his second son, Gregory, who wrote:

When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centred shit, the stories or the people? ....

God have mercy on your soul for the misery you have caused. If I ever meet you again and you start piling the ruthless, illogical and destructive shit on me, I will beat your head into the ground and mix it with cement to make outhouses.

Err, yes, well. A-hem.

Gregory also called him a "gin-soaked, abusive monster," which certainly seems to fit the facts. And fair warning: It's easy to blame the old, crazy drunk. But even the brilliant young writer of the 1920s was as unfaithful to his first wife as the vicious old celebrity would be to her successors. Not to mention a blowhard, bully and braggart, given to lying about his adventures in war. The gently mocking portrayal in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is funny and true, but still too loving by half.

"Too loving," we say, because Hemingway does not deserve our love. Not, at least, the sort of idolatrous, excuse-making hero-worship that he was given by the reading public of his own time. After 1940, he really wasn't a very good writer, and at no stage of the journey was he much of a human being. He deserves our pity, even compassion if we can muster it, but not -- certainly -- the time it takes to read his last works.

And yet, even so, we here at the Egg have dipped our toes into those last few books, the ones brought out by editors in the hero's name. A Moveable Feast is pretty good, although it has done an unconscionable disservice to the church calendar. But it is The Garden of Eden that fascinates us.

Don't get us wrong, here. As published, the book is a disaster. Reading it was almost physically painful. The editors faced the unenviable task of squeezing 200,000 words of chaotic manuscript into 70,000 words of fiction, and have been roundly brutalized for their failures; but, without examining the documents, it is hard to blame them. One shudders to imagine scrawled notebooks and half-typed pages, illegible and illogical.

Yet the result does exercise a perverse fascination. The main characters are a young writer and his bride, living in France, as their sex life veers toward androgynous role-playing. Hemingway has clearly based some of this -- but how much? -- on his second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer. But he was writing years afterward, beginning the thing in 1946. The thought of Ernest Hemingway as a cross-dresser is, all at once, risible, repulsive, and intriguing. Of course it's subtler than that. David, the young writer, doesn't run around provincial France in party dresses; he dyes his hair to match his wife's. But still.

In Eden, a Hemingway well past his artistic prime is trying to dig past the hairy-chested tales of fighting and killing that have become his bread and butter, and to revisit the themes of The Sun Also Rises. If Jake's missing you-know-what was one way to question the nature of masculinity, David's dye job is another -- and, read in context, a more dramatic one. It is, you should pardon the expression, a ballsy move.

It helps to remember that Hemingway's son Gregory, the happy child quoted above, was a transvestite and ultimately transsexual. (He was also deeply troubled in the classic Hemingway fashion: bipolar, alcoholic, and so forth). He would have been 15 when his father started The Garden of Eden. All of which means that, as the book progressed by fits and starts, the father was struggling to understand a strange and apparently painful part of his own sexual history, and the son was doubling up on the strangeness and the pain. A grim evening of theatre lies waiting for some playwright.

And however broken their relationship, they did know each other -- in the same letter, Gregory calls his father "Ernestine." It's the sort of slashing insult that, in those days, few people apart from an estranged son would have thought to administer to the Great Macho Figurehead.

None of this changes our estimation of Hemingway as a man or a writer; quite the contrary. But it does make us think of reading the biography or, when time allows, the new edition of the letters. As entertainment, Hemingway's letters are in a class by themselves. An older selection offered some great moments, such as a description of the competition among writers through history in the language of a boxing match (Cervantes was a tough old bird, and hard to beat, but "I'd thumb Henry james where he had no balls") and a drunken rant in which he invites Senator McCarthy to visit him in Cuba for a showdown.

But mostly, it makes us want to read books by and about nicer people.

A Rose By Any Other Et Cetera

A few days ago, we blustered about corporate re-branding. Apparently, the people of the Somme region in northern France overheard, and thought this was a wonderful idea. Historically lumped in with some neighbors under the general category of Picards, they decided that they deserved their own name. So they held a contest. Per the Beeb, some 23,ooo locals offered suggestions. Not all were entirely serious:

Some of the more outlandish suggestions included the Simpsommes, Sommosapiens, Sommeilleurs (sleepy ones) or Sommites (luminaries).

The winner was less inventive: Samariens, from a Latin word for long, lazy river. Okay, we guess, but no Sommoosapiens.

All this raises a question for us. Regional pride is all well and good, but -- from a purely economic perspective -- do they truly think it serves their purpose to adopt a name that will remind English-speakers, at least, of a brutal Great War bloodbath, when they previously enjoyed one that reminded us of our favorite starship captain?

Jokes aside, the name given to a particular group of people can be awfully serious. Yesterday, we were serenaded by a cluster of Gypsies, celebrating the New Year (and looking for donations of cash, booze or tobacco). But of course one doesn't call them Gypsies anymore, at least in theory, as in French one doesn't call them Tsigane (or Gitans, or Manouches, or whatever).

Easily the most calumniated people in modern Europe, they have asked to be known as the Romany or, more often, merely the Roma. And so they are, at least in the European press and the literature of well-meaning NGOs.

But this name is immensely annoying to those who can claim to have prior dibs. Citizens of the Italian capital city, for one. For another, the 22 million or so [other] citizens of Romania, whose name for themselves is Romani (masculine plural) and means little more nor less than "Romans." Rightly or wrongly, they're quite protective of the name, and of the history they believe it reveals.

The European Union has chosen to call ... those other people ... "Rrom," a name that manages to neither please anybody nor solve the problem.

It is not our place to tell anybody what they should call themselves or ask to be called. People in our own country are generally called Americans, which is a little tough on the hundreds of millions of other people who live in the Americas.

Still, the confusion is annoying to everybody. Somebody needs a new name. And we hear that Sommosapiens is up for grabs.

Slapping Jesus

Science proves the Shroud of Turin is real! (Oh, wait, no it doesn't.)

This are the competing contentions of twinned articles in the Telegraph. Of mild interest on themselves, they are a window onto a more general nuisance, namely the routine use of Christian holy days to sell newspapers and score political points.

Every year, around Christmas and Easter, the news-magazines slap Jesus on their covers, in the form of some arresting graphic (the manger surrounded by members of Congress; the risen Christ with advertising logos where the nail- and spear-marks ought to be) and accompanied by some catchy headline which suggests that maybe some of the supposed experts (scientists, historians, even theologians) don't believe the same things that you do.

It is as predictable as clockwork, and scarcely more interesting to watch.

This strategy, of course, depends upon a particular social setting for its effectiveness. We live in an intellectual world in which many of the central claims of Christianity have been subject to about three centuries of critical examination, and yet continue to exercise a deep influence upon the collective consciousness. Were the first of these things not true, there would be no latent controversy to arouse, no sleeping dog to poke in the ribs; were not the second, nobody would care when the dog began to bark.

But as it is, the semi-annual Jesus-slapping ritual is a marvelous way to remind society at large of its divided mind, and of the particular influence of one religion upon that mind. With a single headline, the savvy editor can get blood flowing in the hearts of both the passionate believer and the militant secularist. With an article sufficiently heavy on intimation and light on straightforward reporting, it is possible to leave both parties with the sense that they are under attack, and need to defend themselves. It changes nobody's opinions, but it gives everybody something to complain about. (Much like the average parish Christmas pageant, but we digress.)

In recent years, the news-magazines have been easily outpaced by more volatile outlets. The specious idea of a "War on Christmas," for example, is the work of cable-news hosts and Republican Congressmen. (How specious is it? In our society, one might as well imagine a banker, looking out from his executive dining room at the huddle of insect-sized protesters below, complaining about a War on Capitalism.) At the same time, the secularist grinches of Santa Monica have chosen this particular time of year to place anti-religious placards on public property, to prevent those awful Christians from wishing anybody a Merry Christmas.

All of this, needless to say, is a sideshow, staged by the cynical for the entertainment of the vulgar. More sober thinkers have always recognized that the battle over symbols is, as Tom Chivers says in his anti-Shroud opinion piece, "undignified":

The intelligent faithful don't need trinkets like this to justify their belief, surely?

Of course not; nor do they need their Ten Commandments carved in marble outside a courthouse, or Nativity scenes plastered in public parks. By the same token, neither do atheists need to use municipal property to attack somebody else's religion. These may -- arguably -- be among the privileges of a free and open society, but are hardly elemental human rights on par with the actual freedom of conscience.

Worse yet, the various forms of Jesus-slapping undermine the genuine civility which lubricates, or ought to lubricate, the machinery of civil society. The truth, evident to a moment's reflection, is that the co-existence of those with different beliefs (including those who claim to have none at all) ought to be the jewel in the crown of a democratic nation. More than that, the easy and opportunistic division of those with different beliefs into warring camps is a trick worthy of the British Raj, or their successors in central Asian tyranny.

In fact, not only can communities professing different beliefs co-exist, they can cooperate, and often do so quite naturally. Even those who disagree about, say, the hypostatic union can find common ground regarding highways and tax policy. Surely, reflective Christians and reflective atheists are able to recognize that a civil-rights regime which protects one must, by definition, protect the other. And so forth forever.

Slapping Jesus in public is, no doubt, better than slapping each other. He can take it. But it would be more honorable, more dignified -- and for Christians, a more fitting acknowledgment of the Incarnation -- to give up the slapping, and embrace not just our common humanity, but the duties and responsibilities that come with our common citizenship.

Or, in the case of the news-magazine, to stop baiting us and actually report some news.

More Books to Buy

Father Anonymous isn't the only one whose creative juices have been flowing lately. We have recently been apprised of some other self-publishing endeavors that may interest our readers.

Let us say, for the sake of the argument, that you aren't eager to own your own Latin-English prayerbook, complete with a difficult-to-use psalter. Hard to imagine, but there's no accounting for taste. Or perhaps your copy is already on order, but now you're in an indy-book-buying frenzy and must have more.

Then by all means consider Campfire Christmas Songs. Here's how the author, Our Beloved Godfather, describes it:

When my son asked me to join him for a weekend retreat during the Christmas season, I happily agreed and headed down to the local music store to buy a Christmas collection. To my dismay, the collections that I found either included obscure chords (F#mSus4), or too many chords to play at a reasonable tempo, or melody lines that seemed to be written only for high sopranos or countertenors!

The failure at the music store sent me to an online search that also turned up nothing useful. Since then I have gathered a collection that would be both playable by the campfire guitarist and in a voice range comfortable for the back-pew alto.

While we wouldn't know what F#mSus4 was if it jumped us in a back alley, we are very much afraid of contracting a case, and imagine that a book like this may provide some immunity. For five bucks, you can't go wrong.

Or perhaps you'd like to celebrate Christmas by looking at beautiful pictures of beautiful churches. Good news -- we know a guy for that, too. Only a week or two after we expressed our admiration for Mark Christianson's photos from the south German town of Bad Wimpfen, with its historic cloister, he announced their publication in book form. While it seems entirely unlikely that he got the idea from the Egg, we intend to take full credit anyway. Or not. Either way, the book looks beautiful, and we sincerely hope that Mother A. buys us a copy for our birthday.

The Future of Wine

Wine is doomed! Global warming has imperiled the international wine industry. By the end of the century -- and maybe much sooner -- the fabled wines of France, Italy and Iberia will be little more than a memory.

Or, on second thought, maybe not. At the moment, high-quality wine grapes are growing in places like Britain, where they have not grown since the later Middle Ages. At the same time, there is no evidence that the flavors of the great European vintages (or Napa Valley) have been affected. In other words, there is more good wine in circulation than ever before; we are living in the golden age of viticulture.

These are the competing conclusions drawn by John McQuaid, in an article posted at Yale's environment360. In an age of sound bites and over-the-top alarmism, it may seem mealy-mouthed on McQuaid's part to resist confidently projecting a single scenario, whether of doom or of comfort. It took us a moment to remember that serious journalism, like any other sort of serious fact-based discussion, used to routinely resist following after Chicken Little. What a strange place the past is, even for those of us who have been there!

Anyway, the article is interesting for anybody who cares about wine. And why shouldn't we? After all, it is a sacrament.

Note to self: stock up on tawny port. Just in case.

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

The essayist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, as he had expected that he would, from esophageal cancer.

Hitchens was a remarkable figure, a sharp and often dazzling writer, and -- although we never met him -- we are told that his conversation was sharper and yet more dazzling, even (or perhaps especially) after a few drinks. We regret that we will never have the opportunity to find out for ourselves.

Here, for the record, is a taste of Hitchens on George W. Bush:

He's unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

We wish we'd said that. And yet despite this, Hitchens was a vocal supporter of the Iraq invasion, a position which cost him some friends:

It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian", another "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay".

Surely it is unfair to call him cynical or opportunistic. Hitchens had come so see "Islamofascism" -- his coinage, if we recall correctly -- as the great challenge of the day, comparable to the struggle against Hitler and Mussolini. In this, we disagree not about the challenge but only about how best and most effectively to meet it.

We also disagreed, of course, about the matter of God. Even so, one has to admire lines like this one, from his bestseller on the subject:

I have been called arrogant in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit.

The irony, of course, is that in the end he published more on the subject of God than we ever have, and spoke with no less conviction. Make of that what you will.

Needless to say, we disagreed with Hitchens on any number of topics, but then so did everybody else. He was professionally disagreeable; that was his vocation. He was a gadfly by trade, and a nearly unswattable one.

Stay Awake!

So says Jesus in the lesson for Sunday.

While we are tempted to drag in a sermon by St Augustine (we have a great one on staying up late, which he preached at the Easter Vigil), it occurs to us that readers may grow tired our endless harping on Augustine.

So how about Honore de Balzac? The French novelist is said to have risen from bed around midnight, and begun writing -- and to have continued writing for ten, fifteen, or many more hours. Needless to say, he had a little help.

We're talking about coffee here. Balzac drank prodigious amounts of the stuff; we remember hearing ten or fifteen cups in a day, the sort of quantities that could kill a racehorse. And in a wonderful essay called The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee, he wrote about his poison of choice. He understood (as many coffee drinkers don't) that you need to back off now and then:

Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera."

But Balzac had learned to extend coffee's effect over time, and he reveals his system:

For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.

For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.

When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.

However, writing novels -- not NanoWriMo quickies, mind you, but the sprawling epics of the nineteenth century -- takes a bit longer than this. And so Balzac says:

I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae.

The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.

From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

Mind you, a friend who tried this method took to his bed, believing himself poisoned. Balzac suggests that the poor fellow "had a stomach of papier-mache."

Perhaps, now that we think about it, this wasn't quite what the Lord had in mind. And yet, with the sermon deadline bearing down on us and that rassum-frassum breviary still not prepared for the printer, we find ourselves eyeballing the little bag of beans in the freezer, and wondering ....

On the Sidebar

The Egg's Dept. of Scrupulous Reading has recently recommended some changes to the blogroll posted to your right. The suggestions have worked their way through the Committee on Resisting Change, and been grudgingly approved. Let us draw them to your attention:

• Liturgy Geek is smart, and kind, and who can resist the name of her blog? Not us, that's for darn sure.
• MadPriest, the vicar of St Laika's, snuck up on us. The more we read, the more we like. So we have started reading more. Despite an unfortunate love of capital letters, his frequently-updated blog is written with vigor and wit. Really, he had us with his utterly sexist post about an improved process for selecting bishops.
• Restenergy Blog is Mark Christianson's project, and includes many of his wonderful photographs. We are dumbstruck by his recent pics from Bad Wimpfen, and hope that he will someday give the fine churches of Claudiopolis Transilvaniae the treatment they deserve.
• Halden Doerge's Inhabitatio Dei is new to us. We stumbled over it, as one generally does on the internet, looking for something else. No idea what, but we liked his blog better. He doesn't post often, but his (rather serious) essays seem educated and thoughtful.

We have also, and with deep regret, dropped two blogs from the list:

Father Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes is still updated, occasionally, but for whatever reason the updates do not appear on our blogroll. Perhaps, given his difficult situation, the author has adjusted the settings to create a bit more privacy. We continue to pray for John Hunwicke, and specifically that the leaders of the church body to which he is newly attached will recognize the depth, sincerity and vitality of his priestly vocation.

And Pr. Sophie's Lutheran (True) Confessions, which once covered the world of Lutheran LGBT matters with such love and humor, was last updated in August, 2010. (Although the Twitter feed remains active.) We don't know who Sophie is, or whence came the decision to discontinue. Perhaps after CWA 2009, the battle seemed won, or perhaps -- as happens so often in the world of blogging -- life offline gained momentum. Whatever the reason, we hope that Sophie is safe and happy.