Lesbian Ants and Seafaring, Makeup-Wearing Cavemen

It's been a big week in science, and we at the Egg are happy to note a few highlights.

First off, we know that our header has you asking, "How does he even know about my dad's sister Gertrude? Nobody in the family ever talked about it, except that one New Year's when Uncle Charlie had too much egg nog."  

But, sadly, the header is just a tease -- one more pathetic bid to attract more traffic off the search engines.  In fact, the ants in question, called Mycocephorus smithii, are exclusively female, but their reproduction is asexual.  This is less titillating, to be sure, but still fascinating.  Think about it:  a species without any males at all.  We think immediately, as you do to, of some justly overlooked 50s movies.  But then we get serious, and, remembering the dubious claims of mid-70s feminism, await word on whether these ants engage in warfare like the other breeds, or live a pacifist existence on their organic farm in Vermont.

As to the cavemen, we're talking first about Homo erectus, who apparently, after leaving Africa, became a long-distance sailor.  This, at least, is the conclusion drawn by some scientists who have discovered hand-axes on the island of Crete.  The tools date to roughly 130,000 years ago and are made (from local materials) in the style associated with H. erectus.  

It's a big story.  Homo erectus is know primarily from digs in Asia, and previous speculation had centered on the use of rafts in Indonesia.  As to Crete, H. sapiens apparently arrived there about 7000 BC.  So this find may well re-write the history of human (or anyway, hominid) development.

In other cavemen-related news, it seems that (as scientists had first suspected in 1985), H. neanderthalensis -- Neantherthal man --  wore body paint as well as jewelry made from carefully selected and decorated seashells.  According to the team that made these discoveries at a dig in Spain, the evidence dates to about 50,000 years ago, or 10,000 years before our own species arrived in Europe.  (And, obviously, a long, long time after the Homo erectus bunch had vacationed on Crete.)

This news doesn't solve the riddle of the Neanderthals' ultimate fate.  Three answers are usually offered, all of which serve to make H. sapiens seem awfully macho:  we killed 'em, we outcompeted 'em, or we -- ahem -- mated with 'em.  Recent budget cuts have eliminated the Egg's Anthropological Opinion department, so we have no idea which, if any, proposition is correct.  

But we are fascinated by the emerging image of an archaic world, including archaic Europe, in which modern human beings were not a revolutionary presence, with big brains, more culture, and better tools.  Instead, we were one of at least three large-bodied, intelligent, tool-using and culture-bearing species, all existing in more or less the same places and more or less the same times.

Grumpy Old Man

While we're on the same subject -- the proposed Anglican Covenant -- we submit for your approval an essay, linked above, by the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, a well-known Episcopal writer who teaches theology at what Wikpedia calls a "low-church and evangelical" Anglican seminary in Toronto.  (And a tip o' the biretta to Our Beloved Godfather for pointing us toward the piece).

Like much of Radner's writing, it is engaging and clear, and often provoked the Egg review committee to murmurs of assent.  Radner says that he is "is "and remains" a member of the Episcopal Church, which is significant.  We have considerable respect for critics of the (D&FMS of the) PECUSA, or any other church, when they remain in communion despite disagreements on matters of moral theology.  Those we respect least, of course, are the ones who attempt to steal their parishes and property while leaving.  You know who you are, you dirtbags.

This essay certainly is critical.  According to Radner, the Episcopal Church is a decadent relic of its former glory:

[It] is simply no longer the church filled with even the strength of purpose we saw only 10 years ago ....  [E]ven then, it was church that was growing in outreach and faith.  That church, shimmering still with some of the vibrancy of love spent for the Gospel seen 140 years before, even 90 years before, is now gone.  And [it] will not survive in any real continuity with this past and its gifts.

His case goes like this:    (1) The Episcopal Church has lost members, and therefore money, since 2000, endangering (inter alia) its seminaries; (2) it has experienced a "moral unravelling" represented by unpleasant name-calling and expensive lawsuits, and connects to the "rapidly-accelerating habits of despising tradition" and "the notorious matter of sexuality;" and that therefore (3) the Episcopal Church, despite its relative wealth, can no longer offer spiritually credible mission support to the poorer churches of the "developing" world (much of which, as Radner rightly observes, isn't really developing at all).

As we said, murmurs of assent here.  It all sounds so intuitively right, doesn't it?  

The problem is that, upon more sober reflection, the essay itself started to sound suspicious.  It contains signs -- too many signs -- of a rarely-diagnosed condition which the Egg's ecclesiastical maladies board calls "Matthau's Disease."  Named after our second-favorite movie star of all time, the disease afflicts bright, brash, idiosyncratic persons, world-beaters in their youth (think of Matthau in Fail-Safe) by turning them into grumpy old men (think of Matthau in Bad News Bears and everything afterward).  As it progresses, the disease affects the organs of memory and judgment, bathing the recollected past in an artificial glow, and making the present appear comparatively wan.  Most at risk are those who once nourished unrealistically high expectations for themselves and for their world.

In its preterminal phase, Matthau's Disease provokes the patient -- so enraged by the imagined wretchedness of the present -- to lash out rhetorically, especially at younger colleagues.  This typically takes the form of unsubstantiated ad hominen attacks upon an individual or, more easily, an entire class of individuals.  (Readers may recall the sad case of Robert Benne, who shortly before losing the use of his faculties entirely, declared that all "elite ELCA ethical theologians" were guilty of shallowness and captivity to culture, without offering a single instance to substantiate, or even illustrate, his case.)

In Radner's essay, the symptoms are readily apparent.  To begin with, does anybody seriously accept his claim that, as recently as 2000, the PECUSA was "filled with strength of purpose," and "growing in outreach and faith," and that it has declined so rapidly from that position?  Lutherans remember, with considerable embarrassment, the 1991 remark by Walter "Skip" Sundberg, that going to bed with Episcopalians was the ecclesiastical equivalent of necrophilia.  It was rude and foolish, but it is remembered, in part, because it reflected such a widespread perception.

Of course Radner is correct about the loss of membership and money, although that is not remotely unique to the Episcopalians.  The entire mainline, including such supposedly protected conservative elements as the LCMS, is suffering.  Radner mentions the defection of some parishes to AMiA over the past decade, but doesn't consider the possibility that comparative membership and money totals ought properly to include former these former Episcopalians.  

For the sake of perspective, let's remember that the number of parishes in the PECUSA actually peaked in 1915, and the number of communicants in 1970.  So any complaints about numerical decline must properly be directed to the Department of Slowly Dying Protestantism, rather than to the Bureau of Recent Infighting.  (Even adjusted for inflation, receipts are at an all-time high, a seemingly "good" sign which, as Radner suggests, makes the thoughtful wary of disaster to come.)

But it is in the margins of his argument that Radner truly betrays Matthau's Disease.  His most shocking claim is this one:

Episcopalian ministers and scholars generally have received some of the best-resourced educations within the Christian churches;  in their ranks are some of the most lively minds and engaging personalities. ... But they remain among the most intellectually lazy Christians I know, most of whom stopped reading rigorously years ago, prefer arguments based on prejudice, and have contributed virtually nothing to the Anglican and larger Christian theological forum for decades now. 

Really?  For decades?  Pardon us for a sudden case of Sundberg Syndrome, but a quick poll of the Egg's historical theology department suggests that "centuries" might be more appropriate.  Or, since Radner is limiting himself to the American province, "ever."  It sounds harsh to say this, and we beg the forbearance of our many Episcopalian friends.  But the truth, more gently worded, is that the rest of us have never really looked to you for your distinctively intellectual contributions.

On the contrary, we have admired your custodianship of the ecumenical church's history and traditions, specifically as those are embodied in your marvelous liturgical formularies.  We have envied your good taste, both in architecture and in vesture.  We -- and especially we Lutherans -- have marveled at your ability to keep under one roof people with such sharply different convictions.  But for philosophy and theology, we usually look somewhere else.  From the death of Richard Hooker, and certainly from the beginning of the Enlightenment, the burden of theology for its own sake has been carried by the intellectually disciplined and theory-obsessed writers of northern Europe, whence it is now spreading elsewhere.  (Whether and to what degree this is a good thing is another question; perhaps we are just lazy ourselves, but we sometimes wonder whether the Church as a whole is actually improved by Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Troeltsch, Barth, Rahner, Moltmann et al., or whether they are just decorations on the cake).

Still, assuming that we are wrong in this estimation of Anglican theology through history, it seems to us that Radner has an obligation to spell things out.  If in fact his colleagues are now intellectual lazyboneses, he should be able to point to a time when they clearly were not, and describe the failures by which they came to be.  Absent such a narrative, this simply sounds like "things were better in my day, when men were men and Bishop Pike was an embarrassment."

There's more evidence.  Early on, he tells a delicious anecdote:  

I know a young person who sneered at the faith of an Episcopalian – a more conservative person – who chose to leave TEC for another set of ecclesial structures.  “You would do such a thing”, this young person said to him:  “yours is the generation, after all, who invented no-fault divorce”. 

This is a note-perfect instance of why we cannot take the generation of mildly-conservative Protestant clergymen now in their late 50s to mid-60s all that seriously when they complain about the present condition of the church.  Like any other good Boomers, they want what they themselves asked for:  a church which marries priests, ordains women, worships in modern English, engages with the political realm and speaks frankly about sex.  What they can't bear is that the generations which grew up with these freedoms might regard them differently or consider them stations rather than destinations. 

So unable is Radner to hear this criticism that he dismisses it in an almost unitelligible wave of the hand:   

In fact, in this case, the complaint was less directed at a purported hypocrite, than at what he perceived to be the witness of an impotent God, unable to garner the sacrificial steadiness of His adherents.  

Later, Radner practically shouts the name of his illness in one grammatically troublesome paragraph:

And it is hard for me to say all this – after almost 30 years of ministry, once high hopes, and actual experience for some brief but glorious times, if mixed with struggle, of witness in all of its giving, forgiving, and abundantly receptive modes, bound to persons whose lives once shared are now the fodder of division without quarter.   There are days we weep.

So enchanted is he by his memory of those "high hopes" and "brief but glorious times" that he loses sight of a central (albeit subsidiary) truth of Christian history:  the days are always right for weeping.  After Eden, there has been no Golden Age, but only an endless march of folly (hey, good title for a book!), punctuated now and then by brief victories of justice and decency, and made bearable by the presence of Christ among us, promising an end to life as we know it.  Sunt rerum lacrimae and so forth,.

For all this grumpiness, though, the essay manages to end on a note of hopeful expectation.  Whether his hope -- in a working group and its new covenant -- is reasonably placed, only time will tell.  God has used stranger instruments.

The Anglican Covenant

In a desperate struggle to reconcile their puritanical and latitudinarian wings (both terms used metaphorically, with lower-case initials), the churches of the Anglican Communion are contemplating adoption of a document which would tighten up the terms of their interrelationship.

The main point of the covenant, at least in many eyes, is that is establishes a standing committee to mull over disputes among churches -- and by "disputes," we mean disputes about sex.  And lest this sound like a just another toothless exercise in church bureaucracy, beware these savage fangs:

The Standing Committee may request a Church to defer a controversial action. If a Church declines to defer such action, the Standing Committee may recommend to any Instrument of Communion relational consequences which may specify a provisional limitation of participation in, or suspension from, that Instrument until the completion of the process set out below.

That's right, baby.  Mess with the Standing Committee, and they just may not let you come to meetings.   

You can read the text, linked above, and decide for yourself whether it is a good thing or a bad one.  We have no opinion; the document strikes as sufficiently mundane, not to mention internal, that offering an opinion from outside would be like commenting on somebody else's choice of socks.  

UPDATE: 2.4 Million

That's how much master showman Rick Warren brought in with his recent appeal.

And here's a neat bit of megachurch trivia. He announced the good news during a sernon, by parading onstage 24 volunteers, each holding a giant check for one hundred thousand dollars.

When we close our eyes, they are all showgirls in sparkly bathing suits. You think?

If You Are Preaching Today

Or if you have transferred the Name of Jesus to the following Sunday, consider this from an interesting but garbled essay on names by David Mamet:

Not only are there no atheists in foxholes, there are, I believe, no atheists anywhere. We just call our gods by different names. Indeed, psychotherapy may be nothing more than the attempt to find those names, and so challenge their power.

Obviously, Luther got there first in the Large Catechism.  But the observation is still worthwhile.

Rick Warren Needs YOUR Cash!

And it's urgent.  The guy needs $900,000, and fast.  According to his "News & Views" blog on the Saddleback Church website, he needed it by today -- January 1 -- to keep his church out of the red.  We at the Egg have thought this through, and we think we, along with our readers, should give it to him.

Let's unpack this one a little bit, shall we?  First off, Father Anonymous doesn't want to hear the trashier sort of trash-talk, like the GLBT site that crowed "Warren's fund for hypocrisy is a million dollars short this year."  We are actually touched by how hard Warren has worked to avoid becoming part of the religious right, despite the many temptations that face a man in his position.  He knows that turning the church into a political action committee is a betrayal of the Gospel, and he has tried to live accordingly.  And, despite what some commentary has already suggested, Warren can't just bail the church out from his personal fortune.  According to an interview some years back, he has repaid the Saddleback every cent it ever gave him in salary, and donates 90% of his outside income, living on the remainder.

(That said, we confess that we do have certain reservations about Warren, whom we suspect of what among Lutherans is sometimes politely called "synergism," and among Calvinists "Arminianism."  Most of the world calls it semi-Pelagianism, and it is another betrayal of the Gospel.  However, it is s subtle and debatable one.  Given that the ELCA is now in full communion with the principal Methodist church, perhaps the Gospel has even changed a bit.  We'll look into this some other time.  We also think the Hawaiian shirts are a cliche, but he seems to have retired those.)

What was that?  Right -- back to the 900 large.  Per Warren, his church is pretty well managed, and despite an ugly recession, had managed to stay close to meeting its budget all year.  Of course, every church and charitable institution has been struggling this year.  He says that about 10% of his church members are unemployed, which of course is a fraction of a point below the national average.  So while we're impressed by the management claim, we aren't thrilled by it.

Christmas, unfortunately, hit Saddleback hard.  The holiday services were well-attended, on the order of 10,000 people.  The problem (as readers may recall) is that the following Sunday came two days later, and attendance was about half what it had been on the previous year.  Now, this is not exactly an act of God, at least not one comparable to an earthquake or a flood.  Here in Europe, the first few days of Christmas are still important churchgoing events, but that has not been true in America since the days of Bishop Moore.  (And we mean Clement, not Paul).  Presumably, the top-notch management team at Saddleback owns a calendar, and could see how close the holiday came to a Sunday.  (If not, they have have a terrifying surprise coming in about 11.75 months).

Look, we aren't trying to mock Warren or his church.  Church finances are notoriously tight, and the end of the year is tough on many parishes.  Back in the Bronx, we once made photocopies of our unpaid bills, and posted them on a bulletin board for adoption by members.  (By the way, we got many complaints, but very few adoptions.  We sincerely hope that Warren's middle-class suburbanites fork over the cash more quickly than our desperately poor slum-dwellers did).

So this all sounds reasonable enough, and in fact unremarkable.  Except for a couple of things.

Thing #1:  Waitasecond.  Were they really expecting to rake in a million dollars in one weekend?  Or even -- since they had been sweating a bit already -- half that much?  Because if they were, the rest of us may as well just throw in the towel.  There's no way we can compete with that. Semi-pelagianism and Hawaiian shirts it is, now and forever.

Thing #2:  Nobody seems to know what they were expecting, because -- according to all the news coverage, at least -- Saddleback doesn't make its finances public.  It's a church, not a public trust, so it's under no obligation.  But we would like to point out that every Lutheran church in America, as well, we expect, as every church organized on even remotely comparable lines, has an annual meeting, at which its financial statements are circulated to every member who stuck around long enough to get a copy.  A few copies are usually left in the narthex afterward, slowly wilting as they wait for

Thing #3:  But that's okay, because we can figure it out.  Assuming that Saddleback really did expect something north of half-a-mil last weekend, we can multiply by 52 weekends and guesstimate an annual member giving in the range of $26 million.  Of course that's a bit unrealistic; let's assume they have a summer slump like everybody else, and cut offerings in half for the months of June, July and August.  So that's a piddling $23 million. Even assuming the church has no other sources of income -- real estate, endowment funds, a modest synod mission-support stipend -- they're still doing pretty well.

All of which brings us to Thing #4:  For these people, $900 grand in the red is a 2% deficit.  And even during the boom years, most of the churches Father Anonymous saw up close ran much larger deficits than that.  He himself served as assistant pastor at a parish where the deficit was almost exactly equal to -- you guessed it -- the salary of the assistant pastor.  Nor is this an isolated case; Mother A. had the same experience.  In both cases, we are describing double-digit deficits.

From a Saddleback perspective, this money is chicken-feed.  So here's our proposal:  just give it to them.  The Egg's editorial team and readership, personally, should just did into our pockets and get it done.  They probably won't send a thank-you note, and of course our children will starve and our altars go breadless.  But what the heck.  We'll have helped a colleague in distress, and probably stemmed the tide of public mockery coming his way.

And at least he asked politely.

From Our Crypt to Your Crib

Well, this isn't good for the supposed anonymity of our blog, but -- let's be honest -- that has always been more of a headscarf than a genuine veil. So merry Christmas from the Egg!

The not-so-Anonymi are pictured here at the improvided altar where they have presided these past two Sundays, in the art gallery below the Lutheran church in Cluj. (When you have 8-10 people in worship, the nave of even a modest cathedral is simply overwhelming).

We'll post a bit more concerning Christmas in the near future (here's a preview: thanks a million to Fr. Griffin of Punta Verde).

And by the way -- a bunch of new pictures have been posted to our un-anonymous website, Pietati. Please check them out!

Holiday Book Review #2: "The River of Doubt"

After an interview with Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain wrote that "the President is clearly insane, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories."

This opinion was widely shared during TR's lifetime.  Although it not taken seriously now -- remember how both  Republicans and Democrats stumbled over themselves in the last campaign to claim his mantle -- one cannot walk away from reading anything at all about his life without understanding why his opponents might have doubted his sanity, and even wondering whether they were right.

Now, a personal aside.  We ourselves feel a certain deep affection, even kinship, for the Rough Rider.  The Dutch ancestors of his family and ours owned farms only a mile or two distant in Manhattan.  We have lived near to both his birthplace and his Long Island estate.  We are longtime members of the American Museum of Natural History, outside of which is a massive equestrian bronze of TR.  Our chosen vacation spot is in the midst of the Adirondack State Park, which Roosevelt helped create.  For that matter, Baby Anonymous shares a first name with the president.

All that said, we still have our own doubts about his sanity.  Roosevelt was brilliant, his personality virtually a force of nature, as elemental as gravity or magnetism.  But he genuinely did seem to love war, not just the idea but his own limited practice of it.   We have always been troubled by the idea of a wealthy dilettante organizing his own semi-private military unit and leading it into combat, then using his exploits as a springboard into public life.  Never mind that this "combat" was in a war of pure aggression, made palatable to the public only by spurious "evidence" of evil intent on the other side.  (Sound familiar?) 

At the very least, TR seems to us to have suffered from what Gary Wills called, speaking of the Kennedy brothers, as "the imprisonment of toughness."  By this we mean a constant need to demonstrate his own courage and fortitude, both in arduous physical tests and in the tough-guy school of politics.  This is not necessarily a sign of mental impairment, but it does hint at some scary demons below the surface.

Well, Candice Millard's The River of Doubt will do nothing to resolve the question of Roosevelt's sanity, although that question surely lurks beneath the surface of of the story.  But setting aside the question, which Millard touches upon only once, and gently, the story itself is a ripping yarn if ever we have read one.

It goes like this:  Having lost his 1912 third-party presidential bid (during which he was shot in the chest, and proceeded to give a speech wearing his bloody shirt and with a bullet buried five inches in his flesh), Roosevelt fell into one of his periodic slumps.  His customary remedy for these bouts of depression was a physical challenge, and so -- encouraged by some friends -- he signs on for an Amazonian expedition, to run a previously unmapped river in the heart of Brazil.

But, some friends!  Among the key organizers of the expedition is a priest on the faculty at Notre Dame, whose previous experience in South America was very slight indeed.  The priest hires as his quartermaster, responsible for outfitting the expedition, an explorer whose reputation had been ruined by the utter failure of his own single expedition -- to the Arctic. 

The Roosevelt expedition is poorly conceived and wrongly equipped.  It has the wrong food, the wrong boats, the wrong people.  But it also has a few of the right people -- the tough-as-nails explorer Candido Rondon, who has charted more of the Amazon forest than any man alive, losing hundreds of soldiers in the process; George Cherrie, a smart, solid naturalist who wants nothing more than to get home to Vermont.  A bunch of camaradas, essentially enlisted men in the Brazilian army, who at every turn demonstrate unbelievable strength and courage.  (All but one .... )

At the center of it are Roosevelt and his son Kermit.  Kermit is the most introverted of Roosevelt's children, but also the most reckless in his pursuit of danger and glory.  Recently engaged, Kermit doesn't want to be there at all; but he has come along to protect his father.  Does does his father need protection?  This is Teddy Roosevelt, the Colonel, the Bull Moose.  What kind of protection does a man like that need?

Quite a bit, because Roosevelt is hiding an old injury, which threatens his life under the best of circumstances.  And these are the worst of circumstances:  a group of men, fighting their way down savage rapids in unreliable boats, fighting infection and disease, watched by Indians with poison-tipped arrows, racing time as their provisions run out and they are in danger of starvation.  And there is a murderer in their midst.

Yeah, this is a great story, and Millard tells it well.  She has pulled out a ton of information, from archival material to interviews not only with modern-day experts on Amazonian ecology but also with some of the Cinta Larga Indians, who have passed on their own ancestral memories of the expedition.  

Honestly, friends.  We at the Egg read a lot of thrillers and tales of derring-do, but few of them actually thrill us.  This one did, as few books have since we were ten years old.   Poor Mother Anonymous is actually tired of hearing us shriek in horror or delight at the best scenes.  (She threatened to take the book away if we woke her up again).  So if you are feeling a little cooped up underneath the winter snow, or if the daily grind has ground you down, consider this for your midwinter escapist vacation.

And as you read, ask yourself:  Was he brilliant?  Or was he insane?

Holiday Book Review # 1: "DIssolution"

Yes, we know.  These are parlous times; the climate is changing fast, the international economy is in the tank, churches are losing ground in society (and resorting to ever-more-desperate strategies in an effort to cope).  The Episcopalians elected a lesbian bishop and all heck is breaking loose over that way, and we're fairly sure there's a new child-molestation scandal about to pop up in the Roman church.  (We have no evidence; it's just statistically likely).  Time and Newsweek have probably already prepared their usual holiday cover, with Bart Ehrmann asking if there really was a Jesus. Not to mention that both Europe and the East Coast are really, really cold right now.  

And we know that's what Egg readers come here looking to read about.  But what do we have to offer instead of sober analysis and smart-alecky remarks?  Book reviews.  A short series of 'em.  Because this is the time of year that church people need to catch up on their reading.

Never fear; we won't subject our friends and readers to a tedious list of everything we've read lately. Nobody needs an amateur review of Jane Eyre, and if you do, there's always Amazon.  But there area couple of books that might otherwise escape notice, and but may interest regular readers.

So.  Submitted for your approval:  Dissolution, by C.J. Sansom.

Ooooh, one thinks.  Murder mystery, set in a Renaissance monastery, written by an actual historian.  Could it be the next Name of the Rose?  The short answer is No.  This is a straight-up genre piece, with the functional but unadorned prose and workmanlike characterizations that are the norms of the craft.  Published in 2003, it is the first in a series featuring the same detective.  (And yes, it's pretty easy to guess the killer.)

So why mention it?  Here's why:  the history.  The protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, is a lawyer, working for Sir Thomas Cromwell -- the fellow Henry VIII put in charge of dismantling the monasteries and other ecclesiastical institutions, and transferring their massive wealth to the Crown.  The impact of this transfer cannot be overstated; it so enriched the British royals that their nation went, quite suddenly, from a remote backwater to a critical power player in European politics.  Bulgaria to Germany, inside a generation.

What was it like, then, to be a part of this epochal change? What was it like to be a monk, or an abbot, and to see the institutions which had given you power -- but also hope and security -- crumbling?  What was it like to be a zealous young reformer, and to see the way genuine high ideals, including theological ones, can often have a crushing effect upon the lives of people living in a less than ideal world?  Those are the questions that really interest Sansom, far more than who killed whom.  Do we need to mention that such questions are of perennial interest, and especially in these aforementioned parlous times?  He sets out to answer them, and does well, within the limits of his genre and his talent. 

Sansom is a lawyer with a Ph.D. in history, and is surely aware that one recent school of English historians has presented a notably dim view of the Reformation.  Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars and Voices of Morebath, has documented the resistance of local parishes and their clergy to the successive waves of "reform" and "restoration," as they attempted to simply continue living, and worshiping, as they always had. He has argued that, far from the tyrannical and soul-killing spiritual wasteland described by Protestant triumphalists, the Church in late-medieval England was in fact a strong, vibrant institution serving the needs of the people across a range of social strata.

Dissolution doesn't offer a partisan evaluation of the Reformation.  On the contrary, it lays out cases in every direction:  some monks are in fact hypocrites and tyrants; others are truly trying to live Godly lives.  There is a genuine need for reform -- and yet that need is also exploited by the high and mighty.  (The book's title is a pun.  It refers both to the "dissolution" of the monasteries and to Shardrake's "disillusion" with his patron, Lord Cromwell).

So.  As a mystery, it's workable -- good for the train or the beach, with eye-comforting large print.  But where Dissolution really comes through is as a painless encouragement to reflection upon the Reformation in particular, and upon the conflict between intentions and results that is part of life in a broken world.

Whew! What a Relief!

Per the Concordia Journal:

We do not sell seminary graduates ....

If nobody else will stand up and take a position, we at the Egg surely will:  Courageously said, gentlemen!  And fie on those yellow cowards at other sems -- they shall remain nameless for so many reasons -- who have taken to selling their graduates, often at a discount or even a loss.  Sadly, white slavers and the like don't pay what one might hope for newly-minted M.Div.s these days.  (Nor do parishes).

Joking aside, the line is from -- and the link points to -- an interesting article in the CJ, called "Stress Test."  (You'll have to scroll a bit to find it).   The main point to the article is no surprise, to be sure.  After a few years in the black, Concordia, St. Louis expects to run a $3 million deficit this year.  Honestly, all one can do is shrug one's shoulders and say "Welcome to the club."  So far as we can tell, every single American institution, right down to the candy shop on the corner, will be a six to twelve zeroes in the red come Christmas.

Still, we admit to a modest surprise here.  We had somehow imagined that conservative schools were insulated from the decline.  Honestly, it seems crazy, but we had just assumed that Richard Mellon Scaife or the LCMS's own Schwan Fund would ride in to the rescue.  (Liberal foundations, of course, don't fund theological education, because they don't see why theologians matter to their various other causes.  Which is another story).  We were apparently, um, wow-we-hate-to-say-it, wrong.

In fact, the article strikes a note sadly familiar to most of the old mainline, by ending the sentence quoted above "... and even if we did, tight placements in recent years show that our declining church is a tight market."

What makes the article interesting is its analysis of how things got bad, at least at this one school.  We won't try to summarize it here, except for the critical point:  Seminary funding patterns have changed dramatically over the years, and the people in the pews rarely know how much.

And of course the LCMS has two seminaries. The ELCA is larger, but not so much larger that it is likely to need eight.  We have already expressed our concern for the school in Chicago, when and if McCormick does pull out.  But how are the others doing?  Does anybody know?

Sarah Palin is a Philosopher

Because who else routinely makes such razor-sharp distinctions between speech and meaning, langue and parole?

Recently, she went on a radio program and declared that the "birther" movement, which claims President Obama's birth certificate is somehow invalid, is "rightfully making {Obama's citizenship] an issue."

However, Palin afterward went onto Facebook "to say that, while she may have said she supports others questioning the president about his citizenship, she herself has not raised such questions."

So.  Let's get this right.  She'll use the mass media to say that the crazy people have a good point, but she isn't actually trying to make that point herself.  Or, to put it another way, she thinks that her voter base should be mollycoddled and pandered to whenever possible, but isn't personally pandering.  Derrida couldn't have sliced it thinner.  Although perhaps Heidegger, the thinking man's Nazi, is a more apt comparison.

Chuck Colson Supports Sharia

A group of religious leaders has released a statement making clear its distaste for gay marriage, abortion and so forth. You can click up top to read it. But let's be clear: This is, to put it mildly, not big news. After all, a group like this releases a statement like this every couple of years. And it wasn't as though we thought Bishop Dolan was going to rush out and start performing same-sex weddings.

There are some things worth mentioning about this particular document, though. In ascending order of significance, there are these:

First, it is called "the Manhattan Declaration." Not that they were trying to provoke anybody by naming their statement after the gayest place in America. It's just that the Gomorrah Marriott was booked that weekend.

Second, the people who signed it form a large group, and many of them are perfectly respectable representatives of major church bodies, especially the Romish and Baptist. But quite a number are oddballs or worse: consider Bob Duncan and Martyn Minns, the Anglican schismatics; Peter Akinola, the Nigerian bishop whose hatred of gay people is such that he has moved to deny them such basic civil rights as freedom of speech and assembly; Jerry Falwell's kid; Dinesh D'Souza (man! Remember that guy? Who knew he was still around?); Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson and Iraq war promoter Michael Novak. (Also, a seminary classmate of Father A.'s, whom we always suspected of being a bit dopey.)

Oh, and another thing about the signatories. Not a single one is identified as a Lutheran. Were we on the board of ALPB, LCMC, CORE or Lutherans for Life -- not to mention a member of the Missouri Synod -- we might be a little offended.

Third, the statement itself is comically long at 4,800 words. (That's about 20 pages, if it were typed and double-spaced). Heavens, people! How self-important are you, to imagine that we have enough time in our lives to actually read something like that? You could have released a document that said, "We don't like gays or want them to have civil rights, we don't like abortion and don't want it to be available" and we could all have said, "Quelle surprise," and it would have had the same impact.

Fourth, it makes a specious claim to a place in the civil rights movement, invoking the name of Martin Luther King and laying out a platform of civil disobedience. This final paragraph is worth mocking in detail:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted

suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

Where to begin with this piece of intellectually dishonest drivel?

First off, it seems that the signatories have forgotten where they live. They imagine a nation in which basic human freedoms, such as religion and free speech, are not guaranteed by law -- Akinola's Nigeria, perhaps. In the United States, there is a significant body of legal discourse devoted to keeping the claims of God separate from those of Caesar. It is, frankly, impossible to imagine any situation in which a member of the clergy (much less Dinesh D'Souza) was "forced" to bless anybody's marriage. The authors surely know this; they are simply resorting to the sort of scare tactics best left to the anonymous emails debunked on Snopes.

What very well may happen, of course, is that certain religious institutions -- hospitals, for example -- may be required to forgo government funding if they don't want to follow the government's rules. Heck, no subjunctive is required; this already happens, left and right. And guess what? Nobody really cares, except for the researchers who don't have access to stem cells and the women who need a different hospital. And maybe hospital administrators, desperate to make their balance sheets add up. This is a serious commitment, a kind of institutional asceticism -- but it ain't exactly Birmingham Jail.

In fact, their claim regarding civil rights depends upon a twisted vision of how rights, including he rights of religious communities, actually work in a secular society. Here's a sample:

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. [Blogger's note: Insert here technical query regarding common-law marriages. They are by definition non-covenantal, and yet recognized by law.] If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow.

First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized.

Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as “marriages” sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral.

Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends.

You do see the idea here, don't you? The argument boils down to this: (1) marriage is not defined by a legal covenant, but by a divine ordinance which the law is obliged to respect; (2) religious communities have a right to have their convictions incorporated not only into civil law but also into other public institutions, such as schools; (3) the good of society depends -- even absent empirical evidence, which may exist but which they do not present here because they aren't making an empirical argument -- upon the acceptance of their particular religious views.

The implicit assumption of this document is that civil laws must be shaped by divine laws, a traditional position, but one difficult to maintain in a society without an established religion.

The objections are obvious. While D'Souza is a notorious opponent of church/state separation, his Baptist co-signatories are heirs to a long and distinguished history in that department. They have just thrown it out the window.

At a practical level, it is the sort of thinking on display here that gives a foothold to practices that would surely appall the signatories. We are thinking, specifically, the claim of Muslim minorities to be governed by Sharia rather than civil law, or, as those minorities grow in number, to insist that the rest of society be legally required to conform to Islamic standards.

This is neither hyperbole nor reductio ad absurdum. To the degree that religious principles are allowed to shape civil law, above and beyond the private conscience and popular consent of the governed, a society risks the freedom of each religious community from the other.

Or, to put it bluntly, the Manhattan Declaration is Step One toward the outlawing of Mohammand cartoons -- and the legal establishment of polygamy in America.

Lies, Damn Lies and Campaign Biographies

Since the presidential election, we at the Egg have done our best to lay off the team that lost. It seemed unsporting, not to mention redundant, to kick McCain and company while they were down.

The problem with our strategy is Sarah Palin. Clearly intoxicated by the bright lights of national attention, she has made little secret of her thirst for more. Yes, we thought it was weird that her first move was to quit her job -- being the governor of a state is often considered a pretty good base from which to organize politically. But of course, that only works if you are planning to run on a platform which includes actual accomplishments. If you actually believe (as Palin does, and not without reason) that the winning campaign will be composed of sound bites and airbrushing, then the tedious meat-and-potatoes of budgets, legislative deals, and re-election are all a big waste of your comparative youth. Don't get old behind a desk -- get out and attack your enemies!

So she wrote a campaign biography, which is by now one of those tedious ritualistic exercises undertaken by presidential aspirants, about the way lower-level politicos kiss babies and cut ribbons. Nobody really believes anything you write in these books, any more than they believe you love their pwecious or personally paved their road. You just do it so that you'll have something to talk about.

All this being true, a lesser literary figure than Sarah Palin might have stuck to a few heartwarming stories about gutting moose as a child and visiting wounded infantrymen when her handlers set it up in advance. Easy enough, right?

But not our Sarah. No, she has apparently resolved to settle some scores in this biography -- to launch a strike at anybody who might be a publicity problem later. Like, you know, her family.

Click up top for a HuffPo report on Palin's former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten. Her book apparently includes some claims about him, which he in turn claims are actually lies. This would just be a case of he said/she said, except that an ethics panel (consisting overwhelmingly of Republicans) has already investigated the case, and found Palin to be in the wrong. She and her family have spent years attacking this guy and trying to get him fired, for what are clearly personal reasons. But rather than let it drop, she just keeps coming back, requiring more people to shoot her down. Like this:

In Going Rogue, Palin ... cites many charges that were brought against Wooten that were subsequently dismissed. She contends that there were "ten different" citizen complaints field against Wooten--without acknowledging that all of them were filed by members of her family or close friends. ...

In an interview conducted in Alaska this past summer, John Cyr, the former Alaska Public Safety Employees Association Executive Director, confirmed Wooten's charges:

Not one complaint has ever been made about Mike Wooten's professional performance from any member of the public other than the Palin/Heath family and their closest friends. The troopers that I've talked to that have worked with Mike tell me Mike is the kind of guy they'd go through a door with. That he does his work. He's a professional. You know, just no complaints out there about Mike's work.

"It's the product of an ugly divorce and custody battle," Cyr said of the complaints against the State Trooper. "It's nothing more than that."

Perhaps we should admire her persistence, if not her ethics or judgment.

The Chicago Massacre

By now, most Egg readers are doubtless aware of the sudden and significant cuts in staff made recently at ELCA headquarters in Chicago.  Forty positions were eliminated -- on top of others, like the archivist, which had already been eliminated in recent months.  This is a significant 

We have few details to share, although the excellent blog Pretty Good Lutherans, linked above, does.  In particular, it posts a partial list of the actual positions which have been cut (although, mercifully, not the people who held them).

Now, PGL seems somewhat upset about the fact that two positions dealing with racism were cut -- one in the PB's office, one in Church and Society.  This, it is suggested, reflects a weakening of the ELCA's commitment to multiculturalism, and a willingness to remain what it is, an overwhelmingly white, English-speaking church body.

First, let's register an objection on principle.  Nobody enjoys layoffs, least of all in the more-or-less friendly environs of a church office, and we assume that the various managers who were forced to make the individual decisions did so with heavy hearts.  Until we hear otherwise, we will assume as a matter of course, and in keeping with the Eighth Commandment, that the decisions don't reflect anybody's desire to restructure the church's commitments, but rather dire necessity and a realistic assessment of what it takes to keep a denominational HQ running.

Clear?  Good.  But, all that said, the list includes six staff positions in the Global Mission unit.  Six.  That's three times as many as two.

For those who don't know, GM is bureaucratic shorthand for the part of the church office which selects, equips and coordinates the foreign missionaries, most of them in Africa but many others in the Middle East, Asia and the Americas, and a few of us -- ahem -- in Europe.  

It's not an especially large team, because, let's face it, the heyday of Anglo-American missionary work is behind us.  Earlier generations were successful in planting national churches all over the world, and those churches no longer need (although some still want) the classic malarial zealot with a Bible in one hand and a suitcase full of cash in the other.  He has been replaced by a much smaller team of experts in things like public health, water resources and accounting.  A very small number of these experts, usually committed to long-term service, is supplemented by a larger number of young, eager volunteers, deployed for comparatively short periods to do more general work.  Fairly few -- your correspondent is an exception -- do classic church-planting and pastoral care.

But that said, even the new smallish team  needs to be recruited, trained, supervised, and coordinated.  Team members need help with everything taxes and visas to medical evacuations and hostage situations.  Companion church officials need somebody to call when there is trouble -- not just the PB or his secretary, but somebody with specific expertise and a command of the details.

So if we accept the logic that the ELCA no longer cares about racism, we must also believe that it is running away, and fast, from its foreign mission work.  Here at the Egg, we don't think that's true.  But we also think that cutting six people from a single department is awfully harsh.  And we hope we don't need help with our taxes.

MIssion Accomplished: Moldovan Style

More than 1000 Moldovans have contracted A1H1, with 90 more reported each day.  In the past two weeks, 24 soldiers have fallen ill.  (We don't know what percentage of the Moldovan army this represents, but we suspect it may be surprisingly high).

But never fear, because help is on the way:

Defense Ministry chief doctor Col. Sergiu Vasislita says about 0.9 ounces (25 grams) of onions and 0.5 ounces (15 grams) of garlic will be added to each soldier's daily diet. That roughly corresponds to a small onion and a couple of garlic cloves.

What was it Groucho said about military intelligence?

On the Subject of Narcissistic Hypocritical Blowhards

(See our own comments to the previous post)

Rudy Giuliani is still thinking about a run for the Senate.  Apparently, polls show that he could beat Kirsten Gillibrand (also know as "Who?") in a race for her seat, but would lose to Andrew Cuomo in a duel for the governorship.

Giuliania, for those who have forgotten, is a thrice-married serial adulterer who publicly humiliated his last wife and whose own children would not support his abortive run for the presidency.  And -- having accidentally dropped the image of abortion -- we may as well mention that he has waffled on this, as he has on various other matters of (homo)sexuality, playing liberal to the hometown crowd and conservative to the national one.

Yes, the same Giuliani who, as mayor of New York, made the brilliant decision to override recommendations from law-enforcement professionals and locate his emergency command post not in an inconspicuous Brooklyn warehouse, but in the World Trade Center -- the only building in America, up to that time, to have been successfully targeted by foreign terrorists.

He also promoted his old pal Bernie Kerik to be the Homeland Security advisor.  You know, Bernie Kerik -- who has since become the first NYC police commissioner ever sent to jail, the one who has since pled guilty on corruption charges which have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and will now send him to prison for years.

We're not saying Giuliani is an amoral unprincipled power-mad thug with incredibly poor judgment.  We're just saying -- oh, right.  We are saying those things.

More CORE Lies

Or anyway, fibs.  Or "failures to do quite what they said."

Apparently, when the CORE people elected to wait a year before deciding to forming a new denomination, they didn't really mean wait a year, to see how the ELCA's decision would play out in real life, and perhaps let tempers cool.  They meant decide now, even absent a positive vote to do so, and spend a year actually forming the new denomination.

Perhaps that's not fair.  Strictly speaking, they weren't lying at their convocation; they have simply changed their minds since then:

ELCA had asked members who opposed the change to hold off on taking action, and CORE delegates had agreed to wait a year before taking steps to split from the ELCA. But Ryan Schwarz, chairman of CORE's Vision and Planning Working Group, said congregations had grown impatient.

"When we talked about waiting a year, we never intended to sit around for a year and just contemplate," he said. "We expected to do planning. Now we're also going to be doing the legwork in terms of creating a new church body.

Note the construction:  "we expected to do X; now we're [also] doing Y."  In other words, we're not doing what we said we would; we're doing that and something else.

No big deal, really.  No sane observer could have doubted that CORE would create its own denomination sooner or later.  We point out the change in plans only as a further instance of the unreliability demonstrated by the organization and its leaders during this gestational period -- call it public service for our friends who may be inclined that way.  Caveat emptor, and so forth.

Lutheranism's OTHER Greatest Gift to Popular Culture?

(Besides Davy & Goliath, obviously.)

Diana Krall has long been our favorite living jazz vocalist.  And yes, we are well aware that some jazz aficionados (a notoriously cranky and obsessive bunch) argue that "jazz vocalist" is a contradiction in terms.  But they just haven't listened to enough Diana Krall. 

And when the Guardian asks what got her started on the path of musical excellence, she answers:

My family. My dad's mum and dad were coal-miners; they had a piano, and loved music like Fats Waller. Then on my mother's side, there were 10 kids, all Lutherans – so I had the whole Lutheran hymn influence on top of that.

She also takes her kids on tour, and washes their clothes in the sink and gets up early, even after playing a late-night show.  We were deeply in love before we read this brief interview, but now we feel the emotion more powerfully than ever.  Readers may feel fortunate that they cannot see Father Anonymous, mooning about eastern Europe like a lovesick calf, stars in his eyes and a song on his lips, irritating his reverend and dear wife.  (Mostly because of the song, which he can't sing on key to save his own life).

Well. That Explains It, Then

Per the AP, an hour ago:

TAMPA, Fla. — Florida police say a man arrested for repeatedly calling 911 looking for sex claimed it was the only number he could dial after running out of cell phone minutes. Tampa police said 29-year-old Joshua Basso made sexual comments to the 911 dispatcher and asked if he could come to her house. Investigators say she hung up, but he called back four more times.

The Fort Hood Atrocity

We at the Egg, like most other Americans, are still reeling from the horrors of the Fort Hood shooting, in which an Army psychiatrist named Nidal Malik brutally slaughtered 13 people not far from our wife's hometown.

Living abroad, we have been spared the worst of TV's so-called "news" coverage, which no doubt consists, as usual, of a momentary report of the facts, followed by a stage-managed four-minute brawl among talking heads.  We feel no abiding sense of loss.

But we did click through a series of op-ed pieces collected by Arts & Letters Daily.  A series of conservative writers -- David Brooks at the Times; Forbes' Tunku Vadajaran, Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ, and  anti-Islamic polemicist Ibn Warraq -- offer variations on the same argument.  They claim that Americans, who combine a "swaggering" pride in our ability to assimilate immigrants with a knee-jerk political correctness, were quick to point fingers at all the wrong things:  the racist abuse to which Malik had been subjected, the nature of the wars abroad to which he would be deployed, and so forth.  Come on, say the editorialists.  The guy was a radicalized Muslim who shouted "Allahu akbar" as he began firing.  Let's cut the PC nonsense and admit that the Army, like the rest of American society, has been pussyfooting around the question of who our real enemy is.  Or something like that.

Frankly, they have a case.  We have long believed, and said, that it is essential to recognize the religious element in the wars America is fighting.  This includes both the Islamist conviction of the Taliban and al Qaeda and the far-less-commented-upon rise fundamentalist Christianity in the US armed forces.  Ignoring matters of hegemony and petroleum, many combatants on all sides imagine that they are fighting a religious war.   No analysis which ignores this deserves to be taken seriously.

So it is easy to see Malik as a sort of fifth-columnist, because he has made it pretty clear that he wants to be perceived as one.  And religion clearly does play a role in this.

But what role, and how much of one?  It will probably take a while to figure it all out.  While we wait, let's toss the ball around.  The Turkish Muslim Mehmet Ali Agca shot John Paul II.  Was he the leading edge of worldwide jihad, or a just a crazy man?  Lee Harvey Oswald had lived in Russia for nearly three years -- but does that make his various crimes here acts of Soviet aggression, or just more homegrown American violence?  The juries are still out in both cases, but the smart money is on craziness.

More pointedly, what about those Americans who believe that are fighting, on behalf of Christianity, a religious war against the enemies of God?  Does their claim, simply by virtue of having been made, make itself true, and thereby vindicate the warning of the various mullahs that our troops are modern-day Crusaders?  We hope not.

What we're getting at, perhaps inelegantly, is that not every madman is part of a conspiracy -- even when they want to be.  Sometimes they are pawns, sometimes they are wannabees, sometimes they are just plain crazy.

New York: It's Rough Town, Withal

The following missive was recently sent by one of our sacerdotal colleagues to another.  Names have been omitted to prevent embarrassment.  Otherwise, res ipse loquitur:

Dear Pastor X,

 A suggested beginning for your sermon Thursday -

 In the beginning was the L--- family and the L--- family was with Pastor X for parish dinners and with Pastor Y for parish dinners; and behold it came to pass the sexton of Pastor X's congregation struck with a chair upon and about the head an esteemed member of Pastor Y's congregation; and following thereupon, the mother of both the striker and strikee joined rank with those of the faithful departed; and therefore be it acknowledged by all pursuant to this notice that Pastor X will offer full and unconditional public apology before the funeral gathering to all offended parties both the quick and the dead within the hold of Pastor Y's charge for all offenses both real and imagined emanating from and pertaining to the premises of Pastor X's congregation perpetrated upon the inhabitants and incumbent members of Pastor Y's congregation.

 Or something like will do just fine.  Looking forward to our 10am Thursday joint funeral efforts.

 Best,

Pastor Y

The News from Lake Wobegon

So what's up in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan region, you may ask?  It happens that we know.  These are just some of the headlines in the current edition of the local Forum:

• Semi hits four cows on Clay County road
  
• Valley folks take on region's eating challenges
  
• Experts say mild weather to linger
  
• ND hospital makes changes after babies switched
  
• Lutherans forget divine grace
  

Well, they all look interesting, don't they?  So let's run 'em down.  Good news is that the semi driver was not injured, although the cows were killed.  The eating challenges in question have nothing (directly) to do with poverty, but rather with the ability of a human being to consume a three pound cheeseburger or a 12-egg omelette.  The babies were switched back in September, and the mistake was discovered within and hour.  Still, it's a scary thing, and the story never actually specifies which procedures have since changed.  For shame, Williston Mercy in Bismarck. The weather does look nice so far, but we're sobered by the national Weather Service fellow, who when asked about spring flooding answered, "Anything at this point is simply literally a guess."

As for the Lutherans, it seems that First and Hope, both in Fargo, have decided to hold back their benevolence from the ELCA.  Readers will surely not be surprised to learn that the reason is, in a word, gays.  No news there.

What did catch us off guard was that we learned it from an open letter to the congregation councils, linked up top, by the Rev. Arthur W. Johnson, a retired pastor and former member of First.  He's pretty unhappy, too.  Specifically, he says

What courage you have exhibited to so strongly condemn another’s behavior and commitments[!] I would like to know if you consulted the faithful members of your congregations who are GLBT and included their judgments in your resolutions and if you invited your congregations to vote.

Since you seem so clear and firm on the issue of homosexuality and your Bible’s condemnation of such, what pronouncement are each of your councils preparing for this month? The Christian Bible makes a goodly list: the rich, divorced, women, slavery, enemies, war, imprisoned, foreigners and of course children (Psalm 137:9) to name only a few topics to cut your moral teeth on.

The letter isn't exactly Ciceronian in its rhetoric.  Johnson's "goodly list" is a kind of tired trope by now, and we aren't sure there is a Bible that isn't the Christian Bible.  And when he says, further on that, that left-handed children were killed in the Middle Ages for being "born sinister," he's just wrong.  But cavils aside, we appreciate Johnson's passion, and his willingness to speak publicly about to what must be painfully divided congregations.

We are struck by the possibility, raised by Johnson, that the decision to hold back benevolence was made by the congregation councils, without a vote by the membership.  Can this possibly be the case?  If so, it seems to us a bit hubristic.  Lutheran polity clearly puts major financial decisions -- not to mention decisions about how a congregation shall be aligned with its denomination -- in the hands of the Congregational Meeting.

We don't know the facts, although First has posted an online statement of its own, um, sexual position, which begins by saying that it was adopted "by the unanimous consent of the 24-person council ... with the unanimous support of the Pastoral Staff."  It adds that "this unity has probably become as important as the statement itself."  Well, probably so, and we don't doubt the results of congregational vote.  But did one occur?  Readers in the know are encouraged to tell us.

So that's the news from you-know-where.  Oh, and Gov. Tim "Hawkeye" Pawlenty shot a buck, but was thereafter unable to find the wounded animal, leaving it to limp and bleed its way through the snowy woods and eventually succumb to predators or die a slow death from infection.  Obviously a candidate for the Dick Cheney Sportmanship Award.

Note the New Links, Left

Observant readers have probably found that the list of links on the left side of this page is rarely updated.  There's a good reason for this, and medieval moral theology gave it a simple name: sloth.

Old Father Anonymous is a lazy, lazy man.  So in four years of blogging, he has changed those links maybe twice.  Even though it's pretty easy.

But today, he has added three new links, and hopes that you'll take a look at them:

1. The English Ministry of the Lutheran Church in Romania.  Two American pastors descend on Eastern Europe; one of them is good-looking and the other has a cute kid.  
   
2. Pietati, the English Ministry's blog, which offers a less formal picture of what's happening in Transylvania;
   
3. Pastor Joelle's Skating in the Garden in High Heels Under My Alb.   And man, has she got some sharp words for CORE today. 
   

In America, This Wouldn't Have Happened

It was a grand ecumenical celebration of the Reformation, in a Transylvanian city.  We drove to the church, stepped out of the car, and saw this sign:  "Blueball Real Estate."

Father A. began to laugh.  When his bishop asked what was so funny, perhaps he should have maintained a tactful silence.  But does that sound like him? 

The bishop roared, and as we entered the vestry, made a point of sharing this new and off-color bit of English slang with the assembled clergy.

A German observed that his language had no corresponding word.  All agreed that Germans are a lucky, lucky nation.

"For the New Generation of Priests and Laypeople"

Or, alternatively, neither.  Paging PeaceBang and fast!

We happily tip our biretta to Father Rock de Starr for this one.

And although the beautiful Mother A. has declared herself unfit for this fit, she offers a nihil obstat to the Rev. Mother in Missouri.  We ourselves demur, but then fashion is -- let's be gentle, friends -- not our forte.  We give thanks daily that our cassock obviates the need to make difficult sartorial decisions.

Our New Hero

Schmeckenbeckons!

So many of you have forwarded this that posting it here is almost redundant.  But what if, somewhere in America, there is somebody who hasn't seen it?  No!  Such a condition must not stand.  So if you haven't yet, then by all means do: