We Like Palaeo-Cons

... a dickens of a lot more than we will ever like neo-cons.

Today's reminder came in the form of two essays, both reflections on Obama's speech in Tucson. The first is by David Brooks, whom we have accused earlier of twerpiness, and suspect strongly of wearing bow-ties. The second is by Patrick Buchanan, whom his opponents routinely treat as though he were a fascist, when he really just loves the master race. (Really, he does.)

Brooks starts out writing what appeared to be a very fine Times op-edder, forwarded to us by Fr. William of the Beach.

It was a "wonderful" speech, Brooks says. But be warned:

Of course, even a great speech won’t usher in a period of civility. Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened.

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

That this is true, few Christians -- and no Lutheran -- will deny. We are in bondage to sin, and so forth. Brooks goes deeper yet, though, when he writes that

Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure. ... [E]ven if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure. The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.

Good stuff, and humbling. He began to lose us a moment later, though, when he proposed that other voices, correcting and amending your ideas, "move things gradually forward." This is both true and false, depending on how you read it.

In fact, of course, the market of ideas is as wise as any other market -- wiser, since it is more transparent. In that sense, many voices do result in better policies, laws, and so forth. But on the other hand, the idea of "moving it forward" smacks of the old (and we hope deeply discredited) notion of inevitable progress in human affairs. A guy who quotes the currently-fashionable Reinhold Niebuhr in his closing graf should know better.

Where Brooks goes completely off the rails is the second half of his piece, in which he tries to hark back to a lost golden age of humble heroes. He seems to believe that this age includes all of American history, from 1776 until "the past 40 years or so." Since then, says Brooks,

... we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. ... They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.

Well, maybe a little. But they also admired Napoleon because of the way he conquered Europe; in fact, several of our founders fought -- literally, with guns, in the case of Burr and Hamilton -- for the chance to become "the American Bonaparte." Hamilton seriously considered breaking the Northeast away from the Union to form a new nation on what, by the standards of Enlightenment-era revolutionaries, were "Christian conservative" principles. Burr explored the possibility of conquering Mexico to create Republic of Burr.

Continuing this ahistorical reverie, Brooks says that

... over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. ... Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second.

Seriously, David? Let me introduce you to Huey Long. Or anybody else in the long history of pandering and patronage that make up most of politics, in America or anywhere else.

Then he goes for the sports image, usually a mistake for anyone at the Times:

Joe DiMaggio didn’t ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.

Please. Has the man never heard of Ty Cobb? Of Babe Ruth's called shot? Of Muhammad Ali? The guy is just recycling Christopher Lasch from a thirty years ago, and not very well. Anyway, a potentially fine essay self-destructs in a blaze of cheesy fake-nostalgia, sort of like Kevin Costner's career.

And then there's Buchanan.

On his website, Pat agrees that this was "one of the finer speeches of [Obama's] career," precisely because it avoids throwing blame hither and yon. Although it seems to us that blame was being thrown pretty equally by both sides, Buchanan interprets this as the president standing up to the far left of his own party. Maybe so. He goes further, and suggests that Obama is "leaving the Left behind," as witnessed by his deal-making with the republicans:

The Republicans got the Bush tax cuts. But Obama got a Social Security payroll tax cut for every worker, an estate tax raised back to 35 percent and another full year of unemployment compensation.

Obama had entered negotiations with a weak hand. But he had emerged with so impressive a deal from his own party’s standpoint that Republican deficit hawks wanted their party to walk away from it, even if it meant all the Bush tax cuts expired on Jan. 1.

After cutting that deal and breaking the logjam, Obama got votes and victories on allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military and on providing billions for the first responders of 9/11. He came close to getting a limited amnesty for illegal aliens.

In short, by shouldering Pelosi and Reid aside and taking charge of negotiations with the Republicans himself, Obama not only won a string of victories, he proved bipartisan government could work.

Buchanan concludes that "[Obama] is no true believer. This is a survivor. This is a fellow with an almost Nixonian capacity for maneuver." Maybe that's damning with faint praise, but we suspect that Pat -- a Nixon speechwriter -- is saying all this with real, if grudging, admiration.

In any case, note the difference in tone. Both men are praising the speech using the language of conciliation and cooperation. But Buchanan, who has seen partisan politics at its ugliest, actually seems to believe that compromise and bipartisan government are possible. Brooks, on the other hand, falls back on theology that he barely understands to argue that they are illusions, forever outside the reach of fallen humanity. And adds that the fall occurred about 1970.

Gee -- a practical-minded combat Marine versus and airy theoretician who gets his facts wrong. Here, in a nutshell, are the two dominant strands in American conservatism. Why on earth would anybody listen to the second one?

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Tibi Laus Est Mirabilis

If you like Latin hymnody -- and who doesn't? -- Father Anonymous has a treat for you.

In the course of assembling our Latin/English prayerbook (coming this summer!), we stumbled across a little gem called Pange Lingua: Breviary Hymns of Old Uses, edited and translated by Alan G. McDougall. It was published in 1916, and old copies are hard to come by, but it is easily downloaded from the Internet or purchased print-on-demand from Lulu.

The short book collects almost thirty hymns, providing them both in their original Latin and in graceful English translations. Now, a collection of Latin hymns is not, by itself, all that remarkable. The hymns of the Daily Office are all easily available in both languages. What makes Pange Lingua interesting is that it collects hymns which do not appear in the modern Office, and which in most cases will be unknown except to specialists. Most are from "other" breviaries -- Mozarabic, Anglo-Saxon, and many others -- and were never accepted into the canon of Roman office hymns.

Here's a nice Gallo-German song for Easter:

Vita sanctorum, decus angelorum,

Vita cunctorum pariter piorum

Christe, qui mortis moriens ministrum

Exsuperasti,

Tu tuo laetos famulos tropaeo

Nunc in his serva placidis diebus

In quibus sacrum celebratur omnem

Pascha per orbem.

McDougall renders it as

Life of thy saints and glory of thine angels,

Christ, who art life of all who strive to love thee,

Who by thy dying on the cross didst vanquish

Death's ministration

Save in these holy days of peace thy servants,

Guard and sustain by pledges of thy triumph,

For now thy Paschal feast throughout the world

Joy they in keeping.

No, we don't like "ministrations" either, nor "joy" as a verb, but we are quite pleased by how well he kept the meter. The thing can be sung to Christe Sanctorum, which is the tune of LBW's Father, We Praise You.

Pange Lingua also includes an elegantly-written essay by the well-known Adrian Fortescue, outlining the development of Latin hymnody. It is a bit out-of-date, and isn't the deepest thing you will ever read, but it is more than good enough to introduce the subject, and perfect to share with an Advanced-Placement parish study group. We are especially pleased by the coals which Fortescue heaps upon the head of Urban VIII's "reform" of hymnody:

Urban appointed four Jesuits to reform the hymns, so that they would no longer offend Renaissance ears .... These four, in that faithful obedience to the Holy See which is the glory of their Society, with a patient care that one cannot help admiring, set to work to destroy every hymn in the office.

Pange Lingua is brief, beautiful and, considering its subject, remarkably accessible. It earns the Egg's Seal of Approval.

Red States

... are not, so far as we know, red with blood. At least not much more so than blue states. (Here's the proof). So perhaps not every murder spree is properly subject to amateur political analysis.

We should begin by saying that the Tucson massacre is especially emotional for us. Much of Fr. A.'s family -- parents, siblings, an in-law and a dog -- live in Tucson, right near the UofA. For all we know, Giffords is their congressional representative, and they shop at the Safeway. This fact has prevented us from thinking too deeply about the event, and even from following the news too closely. But still.

After the shooting, there was a rush to assign blame. The liberal end of the media chose Sarah Palin, if only because her name seems to drive up click-through rates. The conservative end of the media observed that liberals also use inflammatory language, and offered a few choice objects of blame. Other likely objects -- perhaps they have already been blamed somewhere -- include Arizona's gun laws (which gave Loughner a weapon), Arizona's school system (which denied Loughner a psychiatric intervention) and Loughner's own parents (for obvious reasons). And we imagine that Antonin Scalia is blaming all the people who attended the constituents' meeting, on the grounds that, had they been exercising their rights under the Second Amendment, they could have shot first.

We ourselves indulged in the same unsavory behavior, in ways that are entirely characteristic. Our first impulse was to blame Ronald Reagan, on whose watch so many public mental hospitals were shuttered, and so many crazy people put back onto the street. Our second was to blame the AELC, because that's just the way we roll.

This is all nonsense, of course.

The Tucson massacre does not, pending further information, appear to be the product of a vast right-wing conspiracy, nor even of the deeply debased condition of American political discourse. While it might possibly have been averted by stricter gun laws and a better public mental-health system, it is equally possible that neither would have done the trick in this particular case. We can't know such things.

And yet we at the Egg cannot shake the sense that there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of nation. In one kind, violent crimes are comparatively rare, and mass murders are vanishingly so. These include most European countries and Canada. In the other, violent crimes are common enough, and mass murders are, if not a daily occurrence, at least a frequent one. These include much of Africa and Asia -- and, notably, the United States.

Oh, it's not quite so simple. First, some of the most atrocious mass murders by governments have taken place in Europe (especially if one includes the USSR). And much of the American rationale for gun ownership is predicated, openly or not, on the right of the individuals to protect themselves from government coercion. So somebody might argue that our occasional massacres and killing sprees are the signature of a free society. (By "somebody," of course, we mean Scalia.)

Second (and less laughably) the numbers are not entirely clear. We'd be very interested in a breakdown of mass violence per capita, so that population (and density thereof) could be reflected. And although the US is the far-away leader in school killings, its competitors do appear to be European countries and China. (More schools, we imagine).

Still, hesitations duly noted, here is the bottom line: America is a violent nation. It is noticeably more violent than the European (and Anglo-Saxon) nations with which we customarily assume a cultural compatibility, and bears a discomfiting resemblance to the nations that many Americans privately dismiss as "uncivilized."

This disturbs us, and we hope it disturbs you. We hope it disturbs all Americans, enough to encourage some deep thinking about our private and public conduct, our ideas of freedom and responsibility, our care for people with mental illness and, yes, our laws.

Merry Christmas from the Deathstar

Christmas Day 2010 was kinda weird.

We've already mentioned the woman in Texas whose house was robbed by her parish pastor. But have you heard about the neighborhood in Colorado that was robbed by Imperial Stormtroopers?

Bad Science Kills Babies

When Pre-Schooler Anonymous was born, nearly four years ago, we at the Egg spent a lot of time talking to other newish parents. One of the hot subjects, in our baby-mad neighborhood, was the choice of a pediatrician. This was treated with the level of intensity that in our experience rarely accompanies the choice of a college or a spouse. Both in person and on the interwebs, parents would grill each other on Dr. So-and-So's perceived style and competence. "Which hospitals is she connected to? Does she have separate waiting rooms for healthy children and sick ones? Does she listen when you talk?" That sort of thing.

These are all reasonable questions. But then, very quietly, there was the other question: How does she feel about ... vaccinations?

It turned out that quite a number of our friends -- including some exceptionally smart, loving and otherwise responsible parents -- were dead set against providing their children with the usual gantlet of shots in the bottom. Since these shots are required by the school system, this meant finding doctors who would follow the old proposal to "let's not, and say we did." In other words, they needed doctors who would fake the paperwork.

We didn't choose one of those doctors. Quite the contrary. When we delicately broached the subject with out pediatrician, he gave us a long and very unhappy speech on why Phil Donahue was killing babies. (As older parents, we had some idea who Phil Donahue had been, but we wondered whether he shouldn't update his speech to include Jenny McCarthy or Robert Kennedy Jr). The key thing was that he also mentioned something we had come across ourselves, a massive study in Denmark which disproved the supposed link between MMR vaccines and autism.

As we looked into the question, two important points came through to us: (1) that the anti-vaccine crowd was passionate, but seemed to have more anecdotal than statistical evidence; and (2) that, as in most matters of public health, it is important that everybody take part in the preventive measures. To really keep a neighborhood safe from measles, mumps or rubella, it isn't enough to just give your own kid the (partial) protection of a vaccine; everybody else has to do likewise. Which means that the anti-vaccine types, and the doctors who enable their fraud, are not just putting their own kids at risk, but everybody else's, too.

Comes now this series of articles in the British Medical Journal, which for some irritating reason prefers to call itself merely BMJ. It's disturbing stuff.

One of the main scientific supports of the anti-vaccine movement was a 1998 Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield and numerous other authors. It claimed to find strong evidence of a correlation between vaccines and developmental disabilities, and "triggered a decade-long public health scare." It was based on a small group -- 12 patients, versus the half-million in the Danish study. But still, it was science. And in the Lancet.

It was also completely bogus. Fake, phony, fraudulent.

Reporter Brian Deer describes his investigation into the paper, which resulted in its retraction by the Lancet and disavowal by 1o of the 12 authors. To make a long story short, he found that the evidence was reported selectively and inaccurately. As the BMJ editors describe it:

Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification. He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.

Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, ... [an investigating] panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.

Prince of a guy, right? And yet he keeps going: "... although now disgraced and stripped of his clinical and academic credentials, he continues to push his views." And some people still listen. We imagine it's analogous to the occasional clergyman who, caught in some massive indiscretion, simply denies any guilt and counts on the irrational confidence placed in him by his well-conditioned followers.

Here's why it matters:

Although vaccination rates in the United Kingdom have recovered slightly from their 80% low in 2003-4, they are still below the 95% level recommended by the World Health Organization to ensure herd immunity. In 2008, for the first time in 14 years, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales. Hundreds of thousands of children in the UK are currently unprotected as a result of the scare, and the battle to restore parents’ trust in the vaccine is ongoing.

The situation in the US may be different, but experience makes us wonder how different. And when the coverage isn't adequate, kids get sick. Measles, mumps and rubella are all serious. They can lead to pneumonia, brain damage, birth defects, even death. The CDC reports hundreds of preventable deaths and thousands of preventable illnesses every year because parents have been frightened by bad science.

A Device to Root Out Evil

That's the name of this sculpture, by New York artist Dennis Oppenheim. It is in Vancouver. We got this from Gawker, which got it from the aptly-titled Unusual Architecture.

Okay, we'll be honest: our taste in sculpture usually runs toward naked ladies, preferably Attic but Roman in a pinch and French 19th century if one simply must. We don't much cotton to abstraction or symbolism. But still.

Apparently, the sculpture (originally called "Church") had a hard time finding a home, because various municipal authorities were afraid of insulting somebody. And sure enough, we can just imagine the outcry from Bill O'Reilly and -- far worse -- William Donoghue: "Oh, those rassum-frassum liberal New York artists, attacking Christianity again, yadda-yadda-freaking-yadda."

But as most of her faithful servants know perfectly well, the Church could do with a bit of upside-downing. Always. Semper reformanda and all that. In fact, think what a smash hit this image could be with the ultratraddies. After all, it shows a very Protestant-looking edifice, turned upside down and with its roof blown off. That's what they think is left after Bugnini, right? So call it, in Ratzinger's phrase, Reform of the Reform. Then watch their eyes light up.

Prayer Request

Please pray for an unnamed pastor and his family. They are dealing -- God alone knows how -- with devastating pain. It is not our business to say any more on the subject. But please pray for them.

Know Before You Go

So you are new in town, and looking for a church. Maybe you're a Lutheran, or maybe not, but the parishes on your short list include a couple of Lutheran joints. One of them is St. Birgitta's, with a leaky roof and the letters "ELCA" on its sign. The other is Sweet Savior, with a crisp new roof, a blank spot on its sign where the letters were painted over, and a brand-new affiliation with the LCMC.

Which one do you choose?

There are a lot of factors to consider. Maybe you have a psychological aversion to leaky roofs, and one rainy day at St. B's would push you over the edge. Or maybe you simply can't worship God in the absence of a drum kit and some laser lights, which Sweet Savior offers at every service. Hallelujah! The decision is made.

But failing some straightforward sign from on high, you might want to consider the pastor. Can she preach? Does she preach the Gospel? Does she live the same Gospel that she preaches? And how can you know?

Jumping out of that last question, you also might want to consider the standards to which the two churches hold their pastors. These, as it turns out, are somewhat different.

The ELCA is organized more or less like most Protestant denominations in the US. This means that it tends to be a bit top-heavy, and loaded with legalistic rules and procedures. Many of these -- based on the model constitution for congregations, we would even venture to say most -- concern the preparation, conduct and discipline of the clergy.

Father Anonymous, for example, is an ELCA pastor. He holds a B.A,. an M.Div. and an S.T.M., all awarded with the customary honors. He has completed a basic unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, a year of full-time parish internship, and six years of structured continuing education. Through his synod, he has taken any number of workshops, on subjects ranging from evangelism to ethical boundaries. He has also has continued his education independently, participating actively in various scholarly conferences and publishing a series of articles on liturgical history and theology. He goes on retreat once or twice each year, to do little but pray in community with colleagues.

These are fairly standard credentials. Many of our colleagues hold more impressive ones -- doctorates are hardly thin on the ground; a surprising number of pastors are also accomplished musicians and artists. Many have developed great expertise in psychological counseling, social work, and community development. Nearly all are reasonably accomplished preachers and worship leaders.

Perhaps this is the most important thing to know about Fr. A., or any other ELCA pastor: In the years leading up to ordination, he was under the constant scrutiny both of his seminary faculty and of his synod's Candidacy Committee. He was given a day-long psychological examination, the results of which were reported to his bishop and committee. Since ordination, he has served under the supervision of his bishop. Although this supervision is often nominal, that situation is subject to rapid change. Both the pastor and the bishop are subject to an elaborate disciplinary procedure, which can be initiated easily and ended only with some difficulty -- and which is widely perceived to favor those making a complaint, rather than those being complained about. The existence of such procedures cannot be guaranteed to prevent indiscretions, either personal or theological. But it does tend to keep one's worst impulses in check.

So how about the LCMC?

At the moment, most LCMC pastors are recent refugees from the ELCA. This means, naturally, that they have come through the same processes of formation, education and credentialing that ELCA pastors have. They are accustomed to the same level of scrutiny, and indeed in many cases the reason they have left the ELCA is that they consider its ethical standards to be insufficiently strict.

Pretty much the same deal, right? Maybe for now. But not, we suspect, for very long -- and here's why.

The LCMC considers itself to be "a post-denominational association." Their website does a funny semantic dance, both affirming and denying its identity as a "denomination." It's easy to understand why, since a large part of the LCMC's publicity has focused on the idea that those "typical protestant denominations" we mentioned are clunky old dinosaurs. But what does it mean to be a "post-denominational association"? Specifically, what does it mean in terms of clerical formation, rostering and discipline?

According to its website, the LCMC recognizes two kinds of congregational call, "certified" and "contract." A candidate with a certified call must have college and seminary degrees "or the equivalent," and may have gone through psychological examination, CPE, and internship. Maybe, but with absolutely no guarantee.

As for continuing education, supervision and disciplinary procedures -- well, maybe these will evolve in time. Or maybe they are signs of a top-heavy denominational dinosaur.

The standards for a contract call, meanwhile, are nearly non-existent. Basically, the candidate must subscribe to the statement of faith. Period. No education is required, nor is any other test of intellectual, psychological or spiritual fitness. (Except, of course, for not being gay.)

In theory, of course, congregations might well be the best judge of what constitutes fitness for leadership in their own ministry. In practice, however, it has been our experience that congregations just aren't accustomed to thinking about things that happen outside their immediate environs -- things, in other words, like education, formation and supervision. They are easily swayed by a smooth talker, and lack the capacity to dig much deeper.

Consider this helpful note from the LCMC: "Criminal, employment, and reference checks are the responsibility of the congregation as the employer and LCMC does not conduct such investigations." That's true in the ELCA, too, we expect. (Or we expected, until a commenter told us otherwise; seminarians, at least, are now subject to such checks.) By the time a candidate gets to an ELCA congregation, he or she will typically have been subjected to so much scrutiny that a background check is superfluous. The LCMC lacks the internal resources, or even the desire, to pre-screen candidates for their congregations.

Here's how the subject was recently presented in the newsletter of an LCMC congregation:

A pastor is someone who is called or hired by a congregation for the specific purpose of serving in a pastoral capacity. It is not dependent upon the education of the person being called; it is dependent upon the decision of the congregation to call that person...

Although pastors in the Lutheran church have traditionally been seminary graduates, there is no biblical requirement that this be so. Many other denominations routinely call persons to serve as pastor who have no formal training. Even Lutheran churches often hire associate pastors or youth pastors who ahve little or no formal training. These pastors are commonly addressed by the title pastor [Blogger's note: Really? Not in our experience.]

In the LCMC,... [i]ndividuals qualify to serve as contract pastor when they and the congregation feel a call on their life. ....the only requirement that LCMC has for contract pastors is that they must subscribe to the LCMC's faith statement.....all of the pastors in LCMC, whether certified or contract, are entitled to use the title "Pastor"

That bottom-lines it nicely and honestly.

So if you choose St. Brigitta's, you may get a leaky roof, but you will also get a seminary graduate who is subject to well-established disciplinary codes. This doesn't guarantee competence, but it certainly suggests a basic level of experience and reliability. If you choose Sweet Savior and their snappy drum kit, it is possible that your "pastor" will be a college student with little or no prior experience of parish ministry or even Lutheranism, who has been screened only by a committee of well-meaning but overmatched church elders (who were probably too cheap to spring for the background check), and who is now subject to no external discipline whatsoever.

Your choice, but we hope it isn't a tough one.

A Christmas Bell

Peace among religious communities (both Christian and otherwise) is as urgent now as it was during the run-up to the Thirty Years War. We hardly needed the Alexandria massacre to tell us as much.

Transylvania, where we live these days, has an especially distinguished history of religious toleration. Toleration, mind you, is not equality or separation-of-church-and-state or anything else quite so modern. Catch us in an unguarded moment for some rueful commentary. But the tradition is long and noble nonetheless.

All of which is just a preface to this story, posted at the parish orange-crate, about a little town with a little church and a little bell. And a prayer for peace among people of faith.

The Lord has Turned Our Sunsets

... into sunrise, and through the Cross changed death to life. So says Clement of Alexandria. (Exhortation to the Heathen, Chapter 11)

Last night, Father Anonymous, with his family and a few of the faithful, joined a thousand or so of their closest friends on one of the great central piazzas here in Cluj. There was rock music blaring from the steps of the opera house, and a worship service in the Orthodox cathedral, which let out just before midnight. It was cold, but not that cold. We stamped our feet and drank champagne.

At the stroke of midnight, the fireworks began, and we began to sing a Romanian song -- the one people sing at birthdays. It was all very jolly.

But not so very far away, as the crow flies, a different group of worshipers was coming out of another church. Also Orthodox, as it happens -- Coptic, rather than Romanian. And they didn't walk out into a grand civic celebration. They walked into a bloodbath, as a bomb went off and killed at least 21 of them. Riots ensued. A mosque was attacked.

It has been a long time since Alexandria was the intellectual powerhouse of the Christian world, since Clement ran his famous school, expounding on the meaning of the Logos whose Incarnation we celebrate during Christmas. But there are still Christians in Egypt -- something like ten percent of the population, meaning eight million or so people. They aren't being brutalized the way the Christians of Iraq are -- it isn't genocide in Egypt, at least not yet. But they are being brutalized.

Please pray for the victims of this atrocity. Please pray for the perpetrators, too, and for all the people of Egypt. Let them seek reconciliation now, while they can, and before their nation descends into the sort of chaotic religious war that is too easy to imagine.

Ooops.

Sandy McGriff, who with her husband Weldon founded a church in Dallas, was arrested on the day after Christmas. She was found leaving the home of a parishioner with $10,000 worth of furs, purses, electronics and so forth.

McGriff claims that she had seen a broken window, and felt that it was her Christian duty to protect all that fine Santa-loot. (She calls it poor judgment, which nobody can deny). The police say that she kicked and scratched them during the arrest, not to mention slipping two sets of handcuffs. (Also, in our limited experience, signs of poor judgment).

McGriff's church, by the way, is called the Church of the Living God. This may confuse some googlers, since there is another CLG founded by her late brother-in-law, the late Larry McGriff.

Video here, courtesy of Conservative Babylon. (Incidentally, CB regularly features a Black Collar Crime Roundup. We'll be checking back often.)

Is It Genocide Yet?

The Times has a piece on the Christians in Iraq -- as persecuted a minority as any on earth, or nearly so. Surely you remember the massacre of 60 worshipers last October. Regular readers will also be aware of the way violence against Christians in Iraq has driven many to leave the country while they still can, reducing their numbers by nearly two thirds, at least by some accounts.

Although there have been large Christian communities in what is today called Iraq since the first century, those communities may not endure much longer. They are being driven off by their neighbors.

Today, as Christians all over the world celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christians of Iraq are afraid to visit their churches. Their fears are grounded in reality. Please pray for them.

The Holy Family is Not Cheese

By a strange quirk of the English language, the word "child" has few rhymes, and one of them is "mild."

That's what Father A. said in his sermon last Sunday. We won't bother printing the whole thing -- it wasn't that interesting -- but we do want to share this one thought:

And so our poetry and our Christmas carols are full of "mildness." The Virgin is mild, the baby is mild; mild he lays his glory by, mild this and mild that. But do you know what mild means? Inoffensive, placid, even boring. A cheese is mild when it has no flavor.

But the characters we sing about are nothing like this. Mary is bold, when she magnifies the Lord; Joseph is brave, when he defies convention and says Yes to the angel. Jesus is a hero when he goes into combat against sin and death, a savior when on the third day he emerges victorious. They are not mild; they are wild. That is the rhyme, and I wish our carols all used it. They are wild with courage, and obedience not to the letter of the Law but to the spirit of love and faith.

Five minutes later, we sang one of those "mild" hymns. Since then, we've sung a dozen or so more, and so have most Egg readers. But each time, over the past week, we've substituted "wild," and do you know what? It changes the song. One world -- one consonant -- reshapes the story, in a way that we can't help thinking is a bit more faithful to the evidence.

Try it tomorrow, if you get the chance.

Sexy Ghosts

Killing the Buddha.com features this fascinating review of a new book called Heaven's Bride, by Leigh Eric Schmidt. It's about the 19th-century sex therapist, religious historian, and political figure Ida C. Craddock. And ... wow. What a story.

Craddock was a brilliant polymath, rejected by Penn because she was a woman, and condemned to life teaching shorthand at a secretarial college. Breaking away, she became a self-proclaimed expert on both sex and religion, dishing out advice along the lines of “think and talk during the nude embrace … of good books, pictures, statuary, music, sermons, plans for benefiting other people, noble deeds, spiritual aspirations." I know: sexy, right?

She was also part of the wild and crazy world of American religiosity, mingling with all your freethinkers, free-lovers, Theosophers and so forth. She visited the Oneida Colony, and later started her own Church of Yoga. When she got into legal trouble, Clarence Darrow defended her. And she did get into trouble. A World's Fair lecture on belly-dancing ticked off Anthony Comstock, the J. Edgar Hoover of smut, and he went after her. She wound up institutionalized and, eventually, dead by her own hand.

But the really wild thing about Craddock was this: she was married to a ghost. Or so she believed, at any rate. Her supposed husband was the shade of a dead businessman, whom she called Soph, and with whom her relationship extended to such intimate details as how lumpy he made the bed at night.

After her death, a psychoanalyst went after her reputation, and published a case study which argued -- in good early Freudian style -- that religious and sexual delusions went hand in hand, as products of repressed (or "sublimated") erotic impulses. Schmidt pounces on this: "The ecstasy of revelation versus the voice of reason — that is an old and almost tiresome choice." Well, yes and no. Psychoanalysis was a pseudo-science from the get go, a religion of its own dressed up in doctor's clothing. So any "reason" here is incidental. Craddock was, pretty plainly, nuts. That doesn't make Freud any more right than Comstock. The question is, as usual among human beings, which of the strange and subjective belief systems available to us will actually create a more beautiful and liveable world.

Buy the book here. We certainly plan to.

On a Less Uplifting Note

This video shows members of one New Mexico church standing outside another, bellowing threats into their microphones. A scuffle ensues. The Body of Christ is wounded, not to mention embarrassed:

What we don't get is why. What's going on here?

The story is reported by a Roswell teevee station, but not very clearly, and we still don't get it. Oh, we get the part about these guys being jerks -- it's clear enough -- but the details elude us. Here's what we do know:

1. Old Paths Baptist Church has a snappy website, but otherwise promises, in so many words, "that old time religion." It uses the King James translation only, believing that "all other versions have Satan's fingerprints." (Take that, Hell-spawned NIV). It is "unregistered," which tells us absolutely nothing. Its pastor, Joshua De Los Santos, has been out of jail for almost five years, and will have his college diploma someday soon.

2. Church on the Move is much older, having come to Roswell in 1994. By these standards, it is practically St. Catherine's Monastery. It also has a snappy website, which offers

• a casual atmosphere
• today's music and media presentations
• a message relevant to your daily life
• an amazing children's ministry
• friendly, smiling faces who will greet you and help you find your way around

The website hints that the church may have some doctrines, but doesn't actually say what they are. For that, you either take a class or listen to the podcast. But, honestly, they seem like nice enough people, in a kind of Saddleback-y way.

So what did they do wrong? Our guess is that used the wrong Bible translation. We're thinking Eugene Peterson. Which is, basically, an express bus on the Highway to Aitch-Ee-Double-Hockey Sticks.

Or, maybe, this:

3. Who cares about the actual facts? Old Paths just won itself a whole lotta publicity, Westboro style. And we helped. Damn, they are good at this.

Another Fine Instance

To further prove our point that St. Augustine was a fine preacher -- as though such a thing needed to be proven! -- we have dug up a seasonal example.

A Christmas sermon is included in the (Romish) Office of Readings, whence it has been copied many times to the Internet. Often, lamentably, there is no indication of its source. Fortunately, we live in the Information Age; four minutes of diligent searching turned up the Latin original here, at the indispensable Augustinus.it site. (For those who don't know, Augustinus makes the complete works of its namesake available, searchable and annotated. Please don't confuse it with Augustinus.net, which is something else entirely).

The breviary version has been, appropriately enough, abbreviated. The first few sentences are missing; they're good, and introduce his theme, but the shorter version has a more dramatic opening. Here it is:

Awake, mankind! For your sake God has become man. Awake, you who sleep, rise up from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you. I tell you again: for your sake, God became man.

You would have suffered eternal death, had he not been born in time. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh. You would have suffered everlasting unhappiness, had it not been for this mercy. You would never have returned to life, had he not shared your death. You would have been lost if he had not hastened to your aid. You would have perished, had he not come.

Let us then joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festive day on which he who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our own short day of time.

He has become our justice, our sanctification, our redemption, so that, as it is written: Let him who glories glory in the Lord.

Truth, then, has arisen from the earth: Christ who said, I am the Truth, was born of the Virgin. And justice looked down from heaven: because believing in this new-born child, man is justified not by himself but by God.

Truth has arisen from the earth: because the Word was made flesh. And justice looked down from heaven: because every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.

Truth has arisen from the earth: flesh from Mary. And justice looked down from heaven: for man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven.

Justified by faith, let us be at peace with God: for justice and peace have embraced one another. Through our Lord Jesus Chris for Truth has arisen from the earth. Through whom we have access to that grace in which we stand, and our boast is in our hope of God’s glory. He does not say: “of our glory,” but of God’s glory: for justice has not come out of us but has looked down from heaven. Therefore he who glories, let him glory, not in himself, but in the Lord.

For this reason, when our Lord was born of the Virgin, the message of the angelic voices was: Glory to God in the highest, and peace to men of good will.

For how could there be peace on earth unless Truth has arisen from the earth, that is, unless Christ were born of our flesh? And he is our peace who made the two into one: that we might be men of good will, sweetly linked by the bond of unity.

Let us then rejoice in this grace, so that our glorying may bear witness to our good conscience by which we glory, not in ourselves, but in the Lord. That is why Scripture says: He is my glory, the one who lifts up my head. For what greater grace could God have made to dawn on us than to make his only Son become the son of man, so that a son of man might in his turn become son of God?

Ask if this were merited; ask for its reason, for its justification, and see whether you will find any other answer but sheer grace.

Now, what makes this such a fine sermon? Many things come to mind. Not least of all, it is very short. This would take four minutes to preach; double it, and you still have a short sermon by any standard. And it needs to be short, because it is dense, both with Biblical language (everything in italics, obviously) and dense with theology. You can't do this for long without losing your listeners.

"Dense," however, does not mean "dull." Try reading this out loud, and you can almost feel the excitement created by the language itself. This is no accident. Augustine was a master of rhetoric, and his mastery comes through at least a little bit in the translation. For example, the repetition of his principal text, "veritas de terra orta est" (Ps 84:12 in the Vulgate, 85:11 to most of us) -- this is a dramatic effect. What the translation can't capture is the rhythm. The latter half of our second paragraph reads this way in Latin:

Perpetua te possideret miseria, nisi fieret haec misericordia. Non revixisses, nisi tuae morti convenisset. Defecisses, nisi subvenisset. Perisses, nisi venisset.

Notice the way the sentences get shorter, driving us to the point.

And above all, it is the point which makes this a great sermon. Because Augustine's point, as you surely notice, is what a later generation of Augustinian thinkers would call the articulus stantis et cadentis Ecclesiae. That is to say, justification by grace. And Augustine could not possibly be more straightforward about it. The last line is worth framing: Quaere meritum, quaere causam, quaere iustitiam; et vide utrum invenias nisi gratiam. Seek the price, seek the cause, seek the reason; and you find nothing but grace.

Arguably the most Lutheran Christmas sermon ever preached, including any of Luther's.

The Soul of Wit, and Vice-Versa

Preparing to preach on Sunday's lesson -- the oneiric "annunciation to Joseph" -- we found ourselves re-reading Augustine's Sermon 263, on the Ascension.

Yes, the Ascension -- not the Annunciation. You may wonder why, and well you might. The connection isn't clear, but it is worth making. One of our favorite paintings is the "Merode Altarpiece" by Robert Campin, which hangs in the Cloisters. We have admired it for rather more than thirty years now, first for the startling clarity of its color and perspective, and later for the depth of its theological symbolism.

It is a triptych, in the venter panel of which, Mary hears the good news of her pregnancy. Among other symbols, a candle -- burning, oddly, in the daytime -- has just been snuffed out. Most likely, a reminder that in this moment the eternal Son has set aside his majesty and condescended to be made flesh. Nice, huh?

What excites us almost as much, though, is the right panel: Joseph in his workshop. For centuries, art historians puzzled over the strange little boxes that Joseph was building. In 1945, Meyer Schapiro published a now-very-famous article identifying them as mousetraps. At which point, to scholars of the later Middle Ages, the symbolism became clear, because it occurs in other places as well.

The mousetraps are a reference, at least indirectly, to Sermon 263, in which Augustine writes that "Muscipula diaboli, crux Domini; esca qua caperetur, mors Domini." Roughly put, "The devils's mousetrap is the Lord's Cross; that bait which captures him, the Lord's death." And so Joseph, with his decision to raise and guard the unexpected child, helps to bait the trap which will spring at last on Good Friday. (Feel free to mention that tomorrow, if it comes up).

Anyway, we are always forgetting the source of this image, and then finding it again with a Google search -- which means that we look over Sermon 263 each time, once or twice every year. We only have it in Latin, which we read slowly and inaccurately, but even so the sermon (like many of Augustine's) is a marvel.

It is about 500 words -- roughly half the length of our average own usual Sunday sermon, and ours are fairly brief. But into those 500 words it packs an enormous amount: the Bible, the liturgy, the history of salvation, and the meaning of the Ascension and the hope of the Second Coming. Even with less content, the package itself would be remarkable, because it is easy to forget what a stylist Augustine was. His phrases are terse, epigrammatic, and infinitely quotable -- like Tertullian, but without the heresy.

For Your Reading Pleasure

As we draw near to Christmas, most Egg readers want nothing more to curl up with a good book. Because, after all, what else have they got going on? Har-dee-har-har.

But this too shall pass, and when it does, you may once again have time to read for pleasure. Perhaps next summer, or when the kids go off to college. Or when you retire. And when that fine day comes, we earnestly hope that Ann Wroe's The Perfect Prince is still in print.

Here's the background. During the last years of the fifteenth century, England's King Henry VII was troubled by a young man who claimed to be Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York, son of Edward IV and legitimate heir to the crown. (Remembered by mystery buffs as one of the "princes in the tower" from Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time.) This young man made friends among various crowned heads of Europe, and eventually launched two different invasions of England before he was captured.

After the utter box-up of his second invasion, young "Richard" confessed that he was really a working-class boy from Cambrai. His story, which Henry publicized widely at the time, was accepted by most of his contemporaries, and is widely believed by modern historians as well. It is almost certain that "the Duke of York" was in fact Perkin Warbeck. Almost.

Yet, upon close examination, there are little flaws in the story. The confession that Perkin signed gives extraordinary detail about his supposed hometown, and his family. Yet it also gets basic facts wrong -- including the family name. There are a dozen explanations, to be sure -- a careless scribe, the difficulty of rendering foreign names, and so forth. One explanation is that the confession was false.

But who cares? There is more to the story than "yes he was" or "no he wasn't." Indeed, Ann Wroe suspends judgment on the question of true identity, in order to explore other questions that may interest modern readers far more: how is an identity constructed, and how is it destroyed? How could a boatman's son pass as a prince, fooling everybody from Emperor Maximilian to an army of illiterate Cornishmen?

Wroe starts with the basics. She describes his clothing, which mattered immensely in the age of sumptuary laws, when social status could largely be established in a tailor's shop, if the tailor had a few bolts of cloth-of-gold. Then there was his posture, the direction of his gaze, which depended upon the subject at hand and the person to whom he spoke -- these things were prescribed by custom, and when executed correctly were as clear a sign of princely status as clothing, jewelry or native-sounding French.

That's Chapter One, more or less, and the detail gets thicker from there. Wroe, who holds a doctorate in medieval history but works as an editor at the Economist, draws on a seemingly vast array of sources to create a deep sense texture. Looking at the royal account-books, she can describe the clothes that a certain lady wore at court; reading the reports of diplomats, she can divine the interest of foreign kings.

And yet the profusion of facts cannot answer the most basic questions -- and often raises some we might not otherwise have thought to ask. For just this reason, the book is profoundly speculative. Wroe leaves open the possibility that Richard was not really Perkin, and makes a point of calling him by whichever name (or cognomen, or epithet) was being used, at the time, by the people around him -- Piers, Pieris, Peter, Perkin, Richard, York, "the boy," "the feigned lad," and many others. In scattered receipts and account books, she seems to find a relationship -- a deep friendship, perhaps even a romance -- between Perkin's wife and the king who was his undoing. Because she reads her sources so closely, she is able to identify inconsistencies here and there, and to help readers share in the sort of semiotic confusion that all his contemporaries experienced. She tweezes her material, picking apart each minute piece of supposed evidence to search for things that don't add up, and reasons that they might not. By the end, we do not know anything more certainly than Perkin's contemporaries did, but we can understand intimately why they did not.

Some people, of course, do not like their historians to speculate. They want evidence to be hard, fast and conclusive. History, they say, is the study of facts. They will not care for this book. But then, such people are doomed to lives of disappointment, because the things we know, or even the things we might know, will always be outnumbered by the things we cannot ever know.

For our money, the most interesting subject in the book is not its nominal subject at all. His wife Katherine is a Scottish lady of considerable rank, whose marriage to a foreign prince is arranged by her cousin and king, James IV. After the failure of the insurrection, she is taken in at court, apparently a favorite of the king and -- even more interesting -- close to the queen. The queen, that is, who was the sister of the true Duke of York, and would surely have been able to tell him from an impostor. It is hard to argue much from silence, but Wroe observes that in the course of a long life and several marriages, Katherine never names her first husband in any surviving documents. She gives him neither the name he claimed for himself, nor the one Henry had forced upon him.

Henry VII may be even more interesting. On one hand, he was a Tudor, with most of what that implies -- an autocrat, even a tyrant, employing a small army of spies and informants; a skilled manager both of force and of perception; one of the monarchs who led England from backwater to power player on the European scene. He lacks only the religious turmoil that distinguished his son and grandchildren. On the other hand, he emerges here as a remarkably patient, tolerant, even reasonable ruler. He is particularly tolerant of Perkin, whom he works hard to capture but whom, having captured, he allows to survive, disgraced to be sure, but in remarkable comfort.

Speaking of religion: Although it is everywhere as subtext, the book contains little of explicitly religious interest, apart from a clear description of just what it mean to take legal sanctuary in a monastery. But then at the end, after the true climax, Wroe goes where few historians dare to tread: she follows her subject beyond his death, and into the afterlife. Using late-medieval religious texts, Wroe imagines -- as they would -- the soul leaving the body to meet its maker. It is a bravura display, both as an historian and as a stylist. For some readers, it will be far too much -- speculation impossibly beyond the bounds ofreason. From us, it evoked a cackle of delight.

Wroe's prose is lucid, but the detail alone makes this book slow going. It is probably best read when snowed in for days on end, alone in the cabin and with little else to do. Poor Father A., his eyes weakened by age and his intellect ruined by a lifelong diet of comic books, took months to work his way through The Perfect Prince. He considers it time well spent.