St. Paul: Papist!

GetReligion chides the AP for referring to the erstwhile Saul of Tarsus as a "a Roman Catholic saint."

While not untrue, so far as it goes, it doesn't go very far. Pretty much everybody in the Christian world regards Paul as a saint. No matter what they think about saints, and no matter who else they may argue is or isn't a saint, there's no real argument about St. Paul. (Come on -- the guy wrote most of the New Testament. And "Amazing Grace" is, basically, the story of his life. )

What's just as interesting to us is the story in which this little goof occurred. Apparently, they have dug up Paul's bones. At St. Paul's Outside the Walls, in Rome. The Pope said so at Vespers the other night, so it must be true. Or at any rate, they have dug up the bones of some other guy who lived during the first two Christian centuries -- which, it seems to us, is a reasonably wide margin of error.

The Naked Civil Servant

(Tip o' the biretta to Quentin Crisp.)

Mark Musselwhite, former mayor of Gainseville, Georgia, was arrested for public nudity this week. He is alleged to have been walking down the road drunk and naked, and was picked up by rangers at a campsite, where he was drunk, naked, and with a young lady in similar condition.

He claims he wasn't the guy on the road. And who knows? Maybe everybody in Georgia walks around naked.

But okay, ha-ha, let's all make fun of the politician caught with his pants down, or in this case off. Now let's move on to the more important subject: Why is it a crime to be naked?

Seriously. Public drunkenness bothers us a great deal, and often poses a genuine safety hazard near streets and parking lots. But nakedness? We just don't see the problem. Or rather, we see a few problems, but they are problematic primarily for the unclothed person. Musselwhite, for example, is 43; he looks healthy enough in his headshot, but we'll bet he's got a bit of a paunch, and his biceps aren't what they used to be. The next time he faces the voters, one bad picture could lead to endless ribald hilarity, especially given his name. But isn't that his problem?

And sure, as an aesthetic matter, we don't want to see most people naked. But we don't want to smell their cigarette smoke, either. There are some people we don't want to see, period, even dressed in a Brioni blazer. Our desire, however, doesn't make their puffing on the public sidewalk, or their unfortunate facial configuration wherever, illegal. It doesn't give society just cause to keep them locked at home until they stub it out or wear a mask.

Yes, Adam and Eve were ashamed, post lapsus. (Who knew that one piece of fruit would put on thirty pounds?) But it seems like a jump to go from that to the blanket conclusion that nudity is shameful, and a bigger jump still to impose a clearly religious definition of decency upon a secular state. Could we restrict the religious practice of, say, sky-clad Jains, if they were to set up a community here?

In the case of Mayor Musselwhite, the fellow was at a campsite. Granted, he wasn't alone in the roaring wilderness; this was the sort of campsite where there are people around. But if they can't avert their eyes, or get over their shock at a middle-aged man with no clothes, is that his problem or theirs?

Three Cheers for Ecological Apocalypse

Sharks are racing toward extinction. Is there a single animal we will miss less?

Okay, okay. We understand that all of nature is connected, and that the loss of even a single species is a serious blow to the delicate balance. And we realize that sharks are beautiful, ancient creatures, among whom very few are the man-eating monsters of lore. Beyond that, we are appalled by the irresponsibility and outright cruelty of fishermen who hunt them only to hack off a fin and release the mutilated, doomed beasts back into the sea.

So, intellectually, we are distraught over the coming shark extinction. But still, there is a small, shameful, and atavistic part of our brain that feels ... victorious.

When We First Learned We Were Conservative

It was high school. Just a glimmer in those days, really.

Oh, we already had a clear commitment to what often pass for "liberal" causes -- for example, our hometown attempted to pass a gay-rights ordinance, which would have prevented housing discrimination and so forth, and we were there for the debate, even if we had little to say. (So was our boyhood pastor, who had more to say, and who was then as now a profound influence upon us). We read a lot of Shaw in those days, and were pretty much sold on socialism and Wagner, and very nearly on atheism. We frequently spent our lunch hours arguing matters of politics and morality with a devout Mormon, who would later join the Air Force and commit adultery, thus in one heady post-collegiate weekend teaching us everything we have ever needed to know about the the religious right.

But at the same time, we were making a discovery: we liked John Keats more than Dylan Thomas. Both were doomed prodigies, both had enormous (and, in retrospect, somewhat inflated) reputations among the teachers who influenced us. But we liked Keats more. No big deal by itself, except so far as it revealed a pattern. Aristophanes cracked us up, and Sophocles made us really think about the world, while Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett left us cold and unhappy. The Renaissance paintings reproduced in our old Time-Life "Museums of the World" volumes were brilliant and witty and inspiring; occasional glimpses of, say, Jackson Pollock were (and remain) intensely annoying. As for the world of what passed for "music" after Richard Strauss -- seriously, do people listen to Schonberg? On purpose?

So here was out discovery, made somewhere between the ages of 15 and 17: We liked old stuff better than new stuff. And, as we discovered somewhat more slowly, we found the people who liked old stuff a little easier to get on with than the people who liked new stuff. Not that they were more fun to be with -- they generally weren't -- but rather that they seemed a little less likely to be talking nonsense, at least about art. The people who liked old stuff -- aesthetic conservatives -- seemed to have a clearer sense of what was good or bad, and why. In other words, they had values.

This all became much clearer in college. We studied English during the rise of Deconstructionism, and it wasn't pretty. Our English department resisted the worst of it, but still. The idea of the author, much less an historical context, much less a meaning, was in serious danger. (And yes, we fell for all of this; the truth is that we are still a bit edgy about authorial identity). And you might as well forget beauty. So what breath of air could have ben fresher than Charles Pierce (pronounced "Purse"), who ended one class by saying, "I have assigned you two poems on a single subject, written only decades apart -- Goldsmith's Deserted Village, and Tintern Abbey. One of them is a good poem, and the other is not. Go home, read them, and then please explain in writing which one is good, and -- especially -- why."

Now, the sort of conservatism that Mr. Pierce represented -- as did the classmate who spent years analyzing Ingres' oil technique and who has remained our closest college friend -- should not be mistaken for political conservatism. It certainly hasn't worked out that way in practice, although we will argue, given a chance, that this is essentially a problem of semantics, and that our politics are conservative, even traditionalist, in a way that those of the economic neoliberals and foreign policy neoimperialists are not. But it did manifest, especially in our early adulthood, in a certain (if -- ahem -- relative) seriousness about matters of morality and personal accountability. There was a connection of some sort between our aesthetic values and our moral ones.

And we believe, although this is hard to work out in detail, that this same connection extends to our liturgical and ecclesiological vision, what in Lutheran terms is quaintly called "evangelical catholicism" (as though there were any other kind). One doesn't want to overstate the case; Pietism takes its morality seriously as a rule, despite the numerous exceptions which we bite our tongue charitably rather than describe. It is certainly not true, or not entirely true, that good art makes people good, nor that good people make good art. One wishes it were, but it isn't. Nor is "good art" necessarily backward-looking, whatever one's own preference. Nor, again, is good worship -- define it as you like, but we side with "traditional" -- a necessary indicator of good morals, or of spiritual health in a community. And yet these things are not unrelated.

All of which is why, despite our usual misgivings about City Journal, which never seems quite as serious as it means to be, we can't help but nod along with Roger Scruton's essay, linked above. The first half, at least, as he reminds us of why Clement Greenberg was an agent of Satan. In the second half, as he warms to his theme -- "art since 1750 seeks to desecrate the sacred, and target life rather than celebrate it" -- his brush strokes grow far too wide. In particular, he fails to take seriously the attempt of Anglo-European writers to grapple seriously with the Enlightenment as a challenge to traditional values, and to find at least some of those values in nature, and in the nature of human society, even if they had trouble finding them in God. Matthew Arnold, anybody?

Mark Sanford: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Turns out, the soon-to-be-ex-governor charged an earlier Argentinean booty call to the voters of South Carolina.

Pretty good, sir, pretty good. But to really excel at this game, you'll need to shoot a guy in the face.

Michael Jackson is Dead

Hm. He was a big star in our late teens and early 20s, and just a few years older than we ourselves. We suppose people are going to compare this to the deaths of John Lennon or Elvis Presley, as one of those you'll-always-remember-where-you-were-when you-heard-it events.. Some guy quoted by the AP went right to the top, and compared it to JFK.

So here's Father Anonymous, checking his internal cultural-event-o-meter. And you know what?

We're just not feeling it.

At best, we put the death of Michael Jackson somewhere between those of Robert McNamara and Ted Williams. (Wait -- you mean to tell us McNamara is still alive? Talk about your cosmic injustice.)

And this isn't because we're immune to celebrity-worship. On the day that Muhammad Ali dies, we plan to weep like babies. (Ali is the man. Period.) And of course we have our own personal celebrities: we still wince when we recall the death of Walter B. Gibson, the guy who wrote 283 pulp novels about the Shadow, many of them in two weeks each. (You know, we spoke to him once, by telephone. It was a local call, so we rang him up. Delightful guy.)

And it's certainly not because the -- oh must we? Okay then -- "self-styled 'King of Pop,' " as every single obituary is sure to say, wasn't colossally famous in his time. On the contrary.

We spent months in the 1980s traveling through obscure Andean villages, and a familiar scenario repeated itself often. We would find ourselves pausing for a moment, perhaps to drink a little mate de coca in a town with one dirt road while we waited for the weekly truck that constituted the sole means of transportation. And during this pause, we would make a few minutes (or, sometimes, hours) of idle chitchat with a local. Sometimes, a young boy; others, a toothless old man or a woman wearing a bowler hat and many, many skirts. (Usually, they were speakers of Quechua or Aymara, and spoke Spanish as poorly as we ourselves. This made for a slow, confusing conversation, but you have all the time in the world when the truck runs weekly.)

At a certain point, they would ask where we were from, and we would answer New York. They would ask us how much money we earned, and we would answer that we were unemployed. And then they would ask our name, which was -- surely you know that "Anonymous" is a nom religieux -- Michael. And every single time, whether boy or viejo or senora -- our collocutor would widen their eyes, nod sagely and say, "Ahhhh -- like Michael Jackson."

Yeah, he was huge.

But here's the thing. He was nuts. He wasn't just Elvis-gets-fat-and-offers-to-narc-for-Nixon nuts. He wasn't loveable-eccentric nuts, or even overindulged-star nuts. He was creepy scary nuts, the kind of nuts that makes you wonder about the mental stability of anybody who voluntarily came near him, including especially the parents of those boys who used to sleep over at his Peter Pan-themed "ranch." Just watching him on television, even for a moment, gave us a sick feeling in the pit of our stomach. Oh, we knew he had been royally screwed up by his family and early stardom and all that; and we truly did feel bad for him. But it takes a little more than the death of a pathetic guy who'd been given a raw deal by life and whom you pitied to make an historical moment, or else we'd all remember where we were when Scott McClellan died. (Wait -- you mean Chubby is still alive too? We didn't realize.)

Anyway, that said, it's still sad. He was a human being, and a fragile one. We wish his life had been better.

"Get Out, You Homosexual Demon!"

Apparently, the Connecticut's Manifested Glory ministry doesn't mind straight demons. Watch the exorcism video, if you dare:

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Justice Thomas Wants to Search Schoolgirl's Undies.

Or he wants a middle-school principal to do it. At least if there's any chance she might be carrying Advil.

This imbecile should never have been named to the Supreme Court. Thomas, like several other current justices (we're thinking of you, Little Johnnie Roberts) makes a point of throwing his support to anybody with any degree of power, no matter how slight. In his mind, society has two choices: we can let middle school principals humiliate their students, or loose mere anarchy upon the world.

Good news: nobody -- not even Scalia -- sided with him on this one.

Mark Sanford IS Don Draper!

Really, this explains everything.

For those who miss the reference, Don Draper is an exec at the Sterling, Cooper ad agency, on AMC's brilliant Mad Men, which is set in the early 1960s. He is rich, talented, and good-looking; he has a picture-book family (ex-model wife, one boy, one girl). He also lies, cheats, and -- most notably -- sleeps around. And in the second season, he took a business trip, in the middle of which he simply disappeared for a few weeks. Didn't call the office, didn't call home; just disappeared, and then re-appeared one day, expecting that nothing would have changed. (And why? Because of his secret other life, obviously).

We at the Egg have watch both seasons of Mad Men with an almost morbid fascination. While Draper is the most extreme case, almost all the other Sterling, Cooper execs are ethical catastrophes. They drink and smoke to perverse excess, cheat on their wives with barely a nod. The one obviously gay character has squeezed himself into an especially tight closet: he both deprives himself of sexual satisfaction and deprives his wife of any emotional connection. The two women are ... well, they're at least as messed up as the men. Hell, we don't even trust the priest.

This makes for some pretty good TV. But here's how it goes: Father and Mother Anonymous sit on the couch, alternately chuckling and screeching at the misbehavior of the characters, wondering if the well of depravity has a bottom. Then every once in a while, they pause the DVR and ask each other whether people ever actually lived this way.

Oh, we've all heard legends of the three-martini-lunch, and we certainly remember watching our elders chain-smoke. But even that seems like another planet. The Draper-world, a combination of money, male privilege, and utter moral bankruptcy, seems so alien that it must be an alternate dimension of time/space. We may lead sheltered lives, but it hard for us to imagine that people ever lived -- or might still live -- like Sterling, Cooper and Associates.

At least it did. Until we started to think about politicians.

Self-righteous rich kid who humiliates his wife? Is that Peter Campbell or Eliot Spitzer? Self-hating homosexual who punishes himself and everybody he meets? Could be Sal Romano, or it could be Larry Craig. (Or Mark Foley.) Troubled newcomer who sells out his team for a chance at unearned power? Well, there's Duck Philips -- and Hiram Monserrate.

You can go on like this. Roger Sterling is like a trimmer Bill Clinton -- the charismatic boss who really should keep his hands off the help. It would be unchivalrous to speculate which female politician, trying to make it in a man's world, has either slept her way to the top or abandoned her own progeny, but we expect that neither phenomenon is unknown in the corridors of power.

Yes, it seems that there really is an alternate world in which reasonably talented people with too much power live bizarre double-lives, acting the part of respectable citizens while simultaneously (and with the more-or-less tacit approval of their peers) behaving in ways that would scandalize the people who pay their salaries. That alternate world is called Politics.

All of which leads us to one inevitable question: Whose body did Mark Sanford leave lying in a trench, wearing the wrong dogtags?

Oh. It Was a Girl.

Mark Sanford was in Argentina with his lady-friend. No big deal, apart from the fact that it violates his marriage vows (and the Ten Commandments), and that it will probably destroy his chance of ever becoming president. Oh, and the fact that he has publicly humiliated his wife and children.

Still, a governor really committed to causing a scandal could have done a lot better. The commenters at Wonkette have a number of suggestions, most involving a combination of cocaine and Argentinean boys. Oh, and the bodies of his victims, that one was good, too.

Lamentably, we missed the press conference, which Pastor Joelle assures us was bizarre -- and notably missing the customary stiff-lipped spouse. But we do understand that the FoxNews onscreen text managed to mis-identify the governor as a Democrat. Because, given the number of Republican sex-scandals in the past few years, they felt it would only be fair to balance it with a Democrat. Even an imaginary one. (Apparently, Fox has already forgotten John Edwards -- which is funny, considering how much most Democrats despise him, even as his wife has become a bestselling author and folk-hero).

New Anglicans to be Purpose-Driven

Or so we gather from the fact that the new Anglican Church in North America chose Rick Warren to give a speech at its first provincial assembly.

By the way, this new Anglican church is composed of dioceses, parishes and priests who have broken away from the Protestant Episcopal Church in North America, but who hate it when they are called "breakaway" dioceses, parishes and priests. But do you know what, dear readers? We at the Egg are not afraid to take a stand here, bold and courageous: breakway, breakaway, breakaway. There, we said it.

The name -- Anglican Church in North America -- sounds more reasonable than it really is. Although the name properly lacks a definite article, one can scarcely speak of it without adding one. And the minute one does, the minute it becomes "the ACNA," an invidious implication is made, suggesting that some other body may not be the real Anglican church.

Where is the World Is Governor Sanford?

The Mark Sanford story gets weirder and weirder.

For those who missed it, the South Carolina governor disappeared for a few days last week. Off the grid, no cellphone, no email. His security detail, staff and family had no idea where he was -- or so they said. (Neither did his lieutenant governor, who has been more than happy to repeat the fact, nightly, on MSNBC. No love lost there, we imagine.)

It is strange and unsettling for the chief executive of any organization to be out of touch for an extended period. During his own summer vacations, Father Anonymous has noticed a distinct pattern of enhanced anxiety around the parish. (Imagine how crazy things would get if a bishop were to leave town for a while -- especially if he didn't have his new staff in place yet!)

Well, the good news is that Sanford turned up yesterday. That is good news, we hasten to speculate, primarily for his rivals. Here's why:

First, because during his absence, his staff had originally claimed to have spoken to him, then admitted that this wasn't true. The problem here is not that somebody in the governor's office lied, which they obviously did, so much as the distinct appearance of a confused, amateurish cover-up.

Second, because when Gov. Sanford did re-appear, his staff announced that he had spent four days hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Really? And nobody at home saw you pack your bags for a four-day solo camping trip? That seems unlikely. Moreover, it is accepted practice among solo hikers to always let somebody know where you are going. Failure to do this on the part of, say, a single twnrty-something might be a sign of youthful recklessness; on the part of a middle-aged, married man, it is much worse. And on the part of a governor, it's just crazy.

Or it would be, if the hiking story were not another amateurish lie by his staff.

Third, because today's story is that Gov. Sanford was in Buenos Aires. And he just doesn't know what the fuss is all about.

The GOP thought this man might be a 2012 presidential candidate? Seriously?

No Good Deed ...

A few days ago, we mentioned Malcolm Morgan and City Church, Belfast. We were quite pleased by their efforts to protect five "Romanian" families who had been harassed by thugs. We were less pleased by the press, which failed to provide much information about the church, or to identify the families as Roma. (It's a bit like saying that people painted "symbols" on the home of some Polish immigrants, and neglecting to mention that the immigrants were Jews and the symbols were swastikas. Or that "some" Irishmen attacked "some others" in Belfast, without mentioning that some were Protestants and some were Roman Catholics.)

Anyway, the church was vandalized this week:

"I arrived this morning to find windows smashed at the front of our church and our main doorway smashed as well," [Morgan] said.

"Stones were lying scattered on the floor inside and outside, and ... broken glass was everywhere.

"It would be easy to conclude it was carried out by someone who didn't like our response to the Romanians, but that is only guesswork."

He said the church had been "thrilled that we were able to respond to the Romanian situation ... these broken windows wouldn't have stopped us anyway".

The Guardian article, linked above, is still a bit vague on the name of the church or ethnicity of the families. That doesn't keep it from making one's blood boil.

"Once I Am Thoroughly Drunk ..."

It seems that President Obama enjoys Urdu poetry.

This is no surprise; he is a cultivated man, and there is a lot of extremely fine poetry in Urdu. We ourselves are deeply moved by the works of Fakrhuddin 'Iraqi, the brilliant 13th century poet whose Divine Flashes often use the language of wine and drunkenness to describe the believer's experience of God:

Once I am thoroughly drunk, what matter if I wind up in a church or in Mecca?

Once I've abandoned myself, what matter if I win Union -- or separation?

By the standards of Muslim orthodoxy, it's daring stuff -- as if Charles Bukowski were telling the Christmas story.

Nor are we surprised by the Politico report which, without ever quite saying so, seems to treat the president's recent claim to read this stuff, in an interview with a Pakistani newspaper, as something between an eccentricity and outright pandering. Politico, like many similar organizations, seems to be run by the kids who worked their tails off to get good grades, so that they could get good jobs. They were not the kids who, say, did well in English because they liked poetry, or in history because they liked stories, or who visited museums because they were full of beautiful objects. They are the kids grow up to run much of the world, and they run it with vigor and enthusiasm -- they were smart kinds, and unlike the poetry-lovers, they were actually hard workers. They wind up in Congress, in business, and in the media. And yes, they go to the theatre, they go to museums -- hell, they sit on museum boards, they'll remind you in a heartbeat. They've been to cocktail receptions at the Temple of Dendur.

But all these years later, they still can't quite believe that anybody likes poetry. At least not without seeking some advantage from it.

And that's why the piece, by Ben Smith, begins with this inane lede:

If you want to make high-brow small talk at one of President Barack Obama’s cocktail parties, don’t bother brushing up your Shakespeare. Try reading Urdu poetry.

See, that's what poetry is for: high-brow small talk. And you have to pick one genre, the way people pick sports teams. Smith can't -- quite -- believe that a bright, ambitious person might also be well-enough rounded to enjoy both the poetry of both Renaissance England and medieval Pakistan. Nor, despite the obvious pains he took to google "Urdu poetry" and learn that "the ghazal is the most common form" and that "One of the most popular poets was [sic] Mirza Ghalib," does Smith imagine exploring the ways that his taste for poetry, especially poetry rich with philosophy and religion, might have shaped Obama as a person or as a leader.

Ah, College Days

Check out Veritatis Praeco, a newish blog by a group of anonymous students at an unnamed Papist university.

We can imagine them -- a team of overly-serious young men, kind of conservative and kind of pretentious, some actually wearing corduroy jackets and one guy smoking a pipe. It's like a morally-serious Harvard Lampoon. Well, not really. But there is a recent post called "Why We Drink."

It all takes us back to our own undergraduate years, or it would, if you read through the posts and substituted "poetry" for "religion," "library" for "church," and maybe "Renaissance" for "God." (Never mind what you'd substitute for "smoking a pipe.")

But the part about drinking is pretty similar.

O, Peter Steinfels ...

... you've done it again. Your columns in the Times are often the most interesting thing we read about religion all week, at least in a secular publication. You are a sharp observer of Romish events, and even if you occasionally seem a little fuzzier when dealing with other religious traditions, we still race through the front page section a bit until we hit your byline.

And last Saturday, you outdid yourself. Surely you remember -- it was your response to Jillian, who e-mailed you from Marie Claire, the fashion magazine, breathlessly promoting the current issue, which includes

... accounts by 'five modern career gals' of 'how their belief in faith helped them through the hardest of struggles.'

You quickly signaled the most problematic part of the story:

The article is titled “Cheaper Than Therapy.”

Oh, there were other problems. Several of the women don't seem all that devout -- the Jew eats pork, the Catholic claims to be "recovering," (and still seems surprised that her parish priest isn't an ogre). The whole religion-as-therapy angle is tired and misleading. And, although you didn't mention it, "belief in faith" is a strange expression. We at the Egg believe in thousand-dollar bills, but that doesn't mean we possess any, or that they do us much good.

But "cheaper than therapy." Ah, now there's a phrase we hope we never hear again. And we expect that the clergy of many religions will say "Amen."

First, the therapy: it's not what we do. Oh, a few may, perhaps -- those who are trained as psychotherapists. And, lamentably, a few others may pretend to, using expressions like "pastoral counseling" more broadly than is wise -- or ethical. (Those people should be avoided like the plague, by the way).

And second, the "cheap": it's not what we are. Or, at least, it oughtn't be. You make the obligatory reference to Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace," although it seems a bit off-point here. But then you come back, roaring, with this remark to Jillian and the team at Marie Claire:

[The word "cheap"] doesn’t appear a lot elsewhere in these pages. This is not to complain about the items surrounding your article about the effect of today’s hard economic times on our sense of hope — the $4,100 skirt or the $4,995 dress or the $1,250 clutch or the $315 diamond-dust-based body treatment at one spa or the $250 head-to-toe feng shui scrub-down and massage at another.

And perhaps you're not complaining, but we are. Because the underlying gimmick of the article (or at least its offensive title) is that the overindulged can find in religion a less costly alternative to one more of their indulgences. And that's just nonsense.

What the overindulged will find in religion -- virtually any religion, except Scientology and the Prosperity Gospel -- is a challenge to their indulgence. A regular churchgoer may very well want to own a $4,100 skirt; she may even have one in her closet somewhere. From a Christian perspective, there's nothing inherently wrong with beautiful and extravagant things, and much that is right with them. But in church, she will find herself challenged, over and over, to explain how the aesthetic beauty of that skirt is greater than the moral beauty of an equally lavish gift to the poor, or to the other ministries of the church.

She will find that there was indeed a cost to her churchgoing -- not necessarily a financial one (although hope springs eternal in the clerical breast), but certainly an emotional and intellectual cost, as she was asked to reconsider her entire system of values.

And we're saying "church," here, but believe us that there are other religious communities in which the challenge would be phrased more sharply still. Orthodox Jews don't dress that way because they have no taste; they dress that way because they have a commitment to modesty. And does Jillian even want to talk about Buddhist non-attachment? Too much of that would wreck her business model.

The Taliban's In Trouble Now

'Cuz the Finns are on their way.

Don't laugh. Finland hasn't actually fought a war in generations, but they're always ready. And the last one they fought was against a vastly larger and better-resourced opponent. Also one who was as evil as any evil dictator ever. Perhaps you've heard of Stalin? And they beat the bastard.

The 110 Finnish soldiers serving in Afghanistan will soon be joined by 86 more. According to the Helsingin Sanomat, the participation of Finnish "peacekeepers" in the conflict hasn't been entirely successful thus far:

The Sheberghan women’s prison, which was financed by Finland, and which proved to be a brothel where the inmates were compelled to have sex with customers, is one extreme example of how sharply Finland’s good intentions can be with everyday life in Afghanistan.

The article goes on to say that Finns, both in the street and in the corridors of power, are a little unclear about just why they're in Afghanistan these days. It's easy to get confused, since "Afghanistan" and "Iraq" are easy to say in the same breath, but we hope they can remember: because that's where the enemies of civilization are.

This Will Show Those Mozarabicists

Among the services provided by the blog New Liturgical Movement is its occasional biographical tidbits concerning famous Papist liturgiologists. They recently ran a not-so-interesting sketch of Adrian Fortescue, and today ran a more informative piece on Edmund Bishop.

Bishop (who was not one, nor a priest, nor a fully-professed monk) is the author of many interesting minor works. It is also he who coined a deathless description of the Roman Rite, saying that it is historically characterized by "soberness and sense."

If You are Preaching Tomorrow ...

It may be useful to observe that the NRSV doesn't do its best work on St. Mark 4:40-41. It has Jesus ask "Why are you afraid," and the disciples "filled with great awe."

As usual with arguments over translation, these are certainly defensible renderings. "Awe" does indeed get at one aspect of phobos, the sense of an encounter with vast force. But it misses the intense emotional content, the urge to flee.

We would be happier -- and we think the evangelist's point would be better served -- if the Lord asked, "Why are you acting like cowards," and the disciples, having witnessed a display of divine power, responded by "fearing a great fear," or, in colloquial English, being terrified.

They are terrified, it appears from a close reading of the text, less by the storm (which has already been stilled) than by the power they have seen manifested. They are terrified of Jesus.

Can You Subscribe to "The Economist" in Romania?

A week or so back, Father Anonymous was at a local newsstand, searching for something to read while he ate lunch at a diner. His principal requirements were that it would (a) open flat, and (b) not insult his intelligence.

The papers had all been sold out for the day, which left him with glossy magazines. Most of the choices failed one or both tests -- People and Us lie flat, but actually subtract a few IQ points as you read them. Marie Claire does have some interesting makeup tips, but the pages will flip over if they are not weighed down. Esquire, despite those alluring covers showing naked ladies with headlines projected on their bodies, fails miserably on both counts; after all these years, it remains the most consistently disappointing magazine in America.

Father A. had narrowed his choices down to The Ring ("What is happening in the world of prizefighting?" he often wonders), or Inked ("Although," he reflected gloomily, "none of those tattooed youngsters seems to have taken seriously the relevant passages of Leviticus 19.")

"But wait," he said aloud, startling a few of his fellow-customers. "Here's The Economist. That should get me through my BLT." And then, standing at the register, he gasped audibly, realizing that, at $6.99, the magazine would cost about twice what he planned to spend on a sandwich. Literally.

Still, he bought and began to read, and well before his lunch was served he found himself muttering, "I always forget what a good magazine this is. I really should subscribe. Wonder what it costs in lei?"

As Sinatra would have said, had he been more bookish, it was a very good read. The reporting on and analysis of US and British affairs was solid; of more use was the coverage of matters in the non-English speaking world, that quaint patch of Earth located to the south and east. And west. American news magazines rarely have much to say about, say, the purges in Kazakhstan, or the financial problems facing Morton Tsvangirai -- or even, closer to home, Canada's ailing nuclear industry. And yet these are all stories worth reading.

Turns out that Father A. isn't the only one who thinks it's worth the splurge:

Virtually alone among magazines,The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits—a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

This is from an admiring, although not uncritical, piece in The Atlantic, by Michael Hirshorn. (Another magazine we hope ships copies to Eastern Europe, come to think of it. ) Turns out that, while newspapers are dying left and right, and the news-magazine business is scrambling to reinvent itself, The Economist is doing quite nicely, thank you.

And why? Hirschorn has a number of ideas, and can;t bring himself to believe that it boils down to the simplest: "quality will out." But we think it does, if you are willing to define "quality" in terms of breadth, rather than snappy prose or even originality.