"Refuse to Be Terrorized"

That, in a nutshell, is the way to defeat terrorism, at least according to Spencer Ackerman at Wired. He argues that Al Qaeda was never as potent a threat as we imagined, and is by now reduced to the comparatively small-scale menace of car-bomb plots. From this, it follows that their lasting victory, so far as they have one, is the massive security state that the US has built up over the past decade. Setting aside the cost of the wars and the new bureaucracy and the spying and what-all else, consider (and this is us, not Ackerman) how much income is lost by the airlines, given the massive disincentives to travel now imposed at every airport.

Here, in short, is his diagnosis:

In case you haven’t noticed, hysteria is what the terrorists want. In fact, it’s the only win a decapitated, weakened al-Qaida can get these days. The only hope that these eschatological conspiracy theorists possess for success lies in compelling the U.S. to spend its way into oblivion and pursue ill-conceived wars. That’s how Osama bin Laden transforms from a cave-dwelling psycho into a world-historical figure — not because of what he was, but because of how we reacted to him.

So why don't we just quit ... reacting? Stop spending trillions and trillions of dollars to fight an enemy whose best remaining weapon is a car full of fertilizer? Here's why:

Former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has an answer. “There’s going to be a terrorist strike some day,” Clarke told Frontline for its “Top Secret America” documentary this week. “And when there is, if you’ve reduced the terrorism budget, the other party, whoever the other party is at the time, is going to say that you were responsible for the terrorist strike because you cut back the budget. And so it’s a very, very risky thing to do.”

The risk, in other words, is a political risk.

That's why it is, as Ackerman says, "a bipartisan race to the bottom."

There's a lot more to it. Ackerman makes an exception for nuclear terrorism, a means by which the bad guys can create truly massive casualties. This is the one area in which he says we have "shamefully underreacted." In other words, we can stop being afraid ... of most things.

We're not sure we agree with all of this, mind you. We at the Egg have always supported the war in Afghanistan, and frankly cheered on President Obama's liberal use of Predator drones, Hellfire missiles, and all the other scary weapons that we have and the enemy hasn't. The whole point to asymmetrical warfare is that it's asymmetric: one side has a lot more stuff to work with, and doesn't need to be devilishly creative when it can vaporize your leaders with robot planes from the stratosphere.

But still, we think Ackerman is onto something. America overreacted from the very beginning, and the overreaction has been costly. The bizarre, immoral, expensive and unnecessary invasion of Iraq is the most obvious instance, followed closely by the TSA lines and their ever-changing list of absurd restrictions. Add those to the rest of it -- the decay of our democratic institutions, the day-to-day anxiety promoted by politicians and the media -- and you've got a seriously high-ticket freakout.

So maybe ten years on is a suitable time to take a deep breath and control our panic. Get a grip on the loose nukes, not to mention the bacteria, but let some of the rest of it go. Agree that we won't blame each other for the one or two times that the bad guys score against us, in exchange for a chance to take back our country and our way of life.

Watch Your Language -- Part 2

Is Superman taking the Lord's name in vain?

It seems unlikely. While some level of cussing has become acceptable in comics over the past few years, there are certain characters for whom it just seems ... out of character. Of these, the most extreme are Superman (whose typical expostulation has historically been "Great guns!"/"Suns of Krypton!"/"By Rao!") and Captain Marvel (who says "Holey Moley" a lot, no doubt in reference to the little-known Coptic hieromonk, Abba Moley of Dendera).

Still, DC is rebooting its entire universe, and strange things may happen. A guy who runs a comics shop in North Carolina thinks that Mrs. Kent's little boy has taken a sudden turn for the profane. Apparently, when being zapped by some sort of ray gun, he doesn't recapitulate his classic observation that it tickles, but instead says, and we quote, "GD." (It's upper case, but comics lettering is almost always upper case).

Based on this, the shop owner has preached a Crusade, and sworn to boycott Action Comics until writer Grant Morrison steps down, or Jerusalem is taken back from the infidel.

Reached for comment by every possible comics-related news outlet, Morrison responded, "it's a grunt."

Which, actually, sounds about right. You get hit by a death ray, you're gonna grunt.

Watch Your Language!

Surely you remember the old joke: "What's the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist? You can negotiate with a terrorist." The joke was funnier in the 1970s, when people still thought it might be true.

We attended a fascinating assembly of the local ministerium today, which included two presentations on the liturgy. Both were in Hungarian, and although our translator did yeoman's labor, he was also pushed close to his limit; afterward, he said, "Now I go outside and smoke ten cigarettes." Ah, Eastern Europe!

One presentation, by the professor of practical theology at the nearby seminary, was restricted to the pending reforms of the Lutheran liturgy in Romania. Since the work hasn't gone very far yet, she didn't have much to share: a little background, and some inconclusive survey results from Germany. Just a thought: We're not sure that survey results are the wisest basis for liturgical reforms.

The other presentation was by Jakabffy Tamás, the leader of a very fine schola cantorum here in town. He and the professor collaborate on a regular Gregorian-chant Vespers service at our church. (Well worth a visit, if you happen to be in central Transylvania on the first Monday of the month). Because of the language barrier, we've never had a chance to pick the fellow's brain, but we don't think he worries much about survey results. Our distinct impression is that one doesn't really negotiate with him. If you see what we mean.

Still, his presentation, on liturgical language, was fascinating. He made the same basic point that, say, the New Liturgical Movement people often do: After Greek and Aramaic, Latin is the next language of Christianity; it is the first language of the Latin church, and enjoys pride of place over other languages, even when those are permitted. Likewise, Gregorian chant is the church's proper song, and enjoys pride of place even when other kinds of music are permitted. If, frankly, they must be permitted. Which, ahem, they shouldn't be.

Underneath this rather forcefully-stated legalism lay the same sort of theoretical basis that most of us were educated with: that the liturgy is both a public service and a divine service, both the "people's work" and the opus Dei; that in it, the presence of Christ is communicated [in the literal sense, close to "mediated"] to the People of God; that the liturgy is itself a language, with a grammar like any other, and that like any other language it may change slowly over time, but resists sudden or inorganic change, especially by determined individuals.

Basic enough, but worth remembering once in a while.

Afterward, there was only one question, from, double-ahem, a foreign visitor: Given the reform-of-the-reform under Benedict, and the effort to re-evaluate Vatican II documents (such as Sacrosanctum Concilium) by taking literally their frank embrace of liturgical Latin, does he see a renewed place for Latin in the regular public worship of his church?

We figured this was a softball. He'd say yes, and then we'd drop a broad hint that the monthly ecumenical Vespers would be a lot more fun for some people if it were in a language other than Hungarian. Everybody would boo and hiss, but we'd have done our bit to support "full and active participation."

Instead, we got this sad and strange surprise. It seems that, eight years ago, a local group petitioned Rome for the privilege of a monthly Latin Mass. They never heard back. So the cathedral took it upon itself to offer one; a visitor from Rome was dispatched, who -- if we understood correctly -- didn't so much forbid the proceedings as criticize them out of existence. (We have no idea whether this was an EF or OF Mass, or even whether we understood the story correctly).

But he concluded by looking a little stricken and saying "We are a Latin church without the Latin language."

The Next Archbishop of Canterbury

Our home synod is struggling over the question of how, precisely, to choose its next bishop. No hurry; we've got years to decide.

MadPriest has an interesting suggestion: pick the prettiest one. He even proposes a candidate to succeed the beleaguered Dr. Williams, and we heartily approve of his choice.

Forgiveness: Upstate and by the Numbers

In New York City, it is customary to refer to most places outside the city limits as "upstate." Father A. once served a parish in the Bronx, and invited his members to an event at the Wartburg Home for Decrepit Lutherans, in Mt Vernon. It would have taken about fifteen minutes of travel in the church van, but they declined saying, "Oh, pastor, we really don't like to go ... upstate."

By this reckoning, Fr. A. now lives way, way, way "upstate." But New York, where he has spent most of his life, remains his customary point of reference, his home, even if he never lives there again. That's just how these things work.

All of which makes this coming Sunday's sermon a bit of a challenge. It will mark a nice round decade since some lap-dance-loving Saudis flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, killing one of Fr. A.s parishioners and traumatizing dozens more. And, of course, initiating a chain of events which has cost many thousands of lives all over the world.

And here is Jesus again, talking about forgiveness. Rassum-frassum Jesus.

Now, there are plenty of ways around this, and they aren't strictly legalistic. It's not as though the 9/11 conspirators, or any other suicide bombers we know of, actually apologized, or asked for forgiveness. They certainly haven't fallen down weeping before us, like the slave in the Gospel or Joseph's brothers in the first lesson (if you're using the thematic lectionary series). On the contrary, they appear to believe that their evil deeds are in fact good -- the delusion that Luther called "the White Devil." You could argue that, where there is no repentance, there is no forgiveness.

For that matter, St. Paul is clearly talking about the forgiveness and mutual toleration that [should] prevail among members of the same religious community. You could argue, if you really wanted, that all of these lessons depend for their teaching upon a mutual relationship -- the church in Romans, the social hierarchy in St. Matthew, the family in Genesis. You could argue that, where no such relationship exists, "seventy times seven" does not apply.

Sadly, however, we aren't convinced. Of course there is a shared relationship between terrorists and their victims; we are all human beings -- no man is an island, every man's death diminishes me. All homicide is fratricide. And even if my brother is a monster -- even if he never asks for my forgiveness, or any other kind of help; even if he is guilty of such terrible crimes that I myself am required to capture him, prosecute him, convict him and imprison him -- he is still my brother. That's just how it works.

Is the acknowledgment of this ontological relationship the same as forgiveness, in the sense that Jesus talks about it? Probably not. It doesn't get my brother out of jail. But it does forbid me to hate him, to desire his destruction, or to surrender the hope that he will repent. His crime does not give me permission to pretend we are less than brothers.

Anyway, here's a mathematical formula for forgiveness, courtesy of Karl Jacobsen at WorkingPreacher.org:

The king in our parable is owed 10,000 talents, or about 150,000 years worth of income ...

The slave in our parable is owed 100 denarii. ..

One talent is equal to 5,475 denarii. In the backwards thinking of the king the equation looks like this: T x 10⁴< FS; where FS is the life of the forgiven slave, and T is the talent, the wages of sin. In the kingdom of heaven forgiveness is exponentially powerful. Even 10,000 talents worth of guilt and debt are counted as nothing compared to the new life of the forgiven sinner.

In the backwards thinking of the unforgiving servant the equation is reversed when it is applied to someone else: US < d x 10²; where US is the life of the unforgiven slave, and d is the denarius, the debt the first slave clings to as his right. To put the comparative equation simply, in the eyes of the sinner 100 coins are more precious than the life of another human being; in the eyes of God 54,750,000 coins (the equivalent value of 10,000 talents in denarii) are nothing to be considered next to the fate of the sinner. Forgiveness, as laid out in this parable, is extravagant in the extreme, and more precious by far than the wages of sin.

Wow. We were always bad at math. We can barely manage 70 x 7.

Superman and the Hermeneutics of Continuity

Latin hymnody is nice enough, but what really get Father Anonymous going in the morning are comic books. And not your arty Daniel Clowes-Marjane Satrapi stuff, either. (Well, not only). Here at the Egg, we follow the same Golden and Silver Age superheroes who thrilled us in childhood, and whose lore we are passing on to our offspring. This includes some fairly obscure stuff -- Preschooler A. spent the morning demanding more adventures of Earth 3's Crime Syndicate. But at the heart of the mythology are characters known all over the world: Batman. Captain America. And above all, Superman.

So imagine our concern when DC Comics, one of the two major superhero publishers, announced plans to reboot its entire "universe," the shared imaginary world in which its characters interact. Oh, we understand the need: when you have been telling stories about the same characters for 70 years and counting, there is an inevitable need to freshen things up, not to mention sort out the conflicting versions of a single storyline. This may or may not be an artistic necessity, but it is certainly a commercial one, if new readers are ever going to understand what is going on. And the reconstruction of a universe is by no means the end of the world. DC did another major reboot in the late 1980s, for example, with decent results.

Fans, however, are generally uncomfortable with reboots. We have spent years following the characters, and mastering the obscure details of their imaginary existence. (Yes, it's just like soap operas. But with more robots.) We love these stories -- most of them, anyway -- and the thought of seeing them revised, often revised out of existence, fills us with a sense of loss. Anticipation, sure -- we all want new and better stories, and for that matter we want the ailing comics industry to survive -- but also loss.

The reboot begins today, with the release of a new Justice League of America series. It will reveal, among many other things, Superman's new costume (similar to the one featured in the forthcoming movie). The fanboy internet is in an uproar. For our part, we only wish that the nearest comics shop weren't ... well, soooo far away.

But all this has us thinking about theology, and most especially about Pope Benedict XVI. He is not, despite the red boots, Superman. But he has addressed, in language surprisingly clear for the Vatican, one of the critical challenges faced by any religious community, not least the Roman church: how to reconcile the needs for continuity and reform.

Since the late 1970s, theologians have often talked about an "hermeneutic of suspicion." The term is adapted from Paul Ricoeur, who used it to describe a post-Hegelian philosophical condition, in which all theories of meaning must be confronted with the biases of the theorist. It was borrowed by, for example, feminist Biblical scholars to describe a particular method of reading Scripture (and other Christian documents) with a lively awareness of the male-dominated culture in which they were written. We have since seen the method, or at least the term, applied to other studies as well, including that of Hinduism. And why not? As any historian knows, documents often say as much about their authors (and mises-en-scene) as about their subjects.

To the hermeneutic of suspicion, some writers have proposed radical alternatives: hermeneutics of generosity, of faith, and -- especially in the last few years -- of continuity. These, they propose, are safer ways for Christians to read the Bible, as well as other documents constitutive of our tradition. Rather than assume the authors are somehow deceiving us, they say, let us assume that they are telling us the truth, not between the lines but in the plain sense of them, and as that sense has generally been understood by the Church. And, again, why not? It was Luther himself who argued against speculative interpretations when common-sense grammatical ones were ready to hand. Occam's Razor, yadda-yadda.

Of these Ricuoerian spinoffs, the hermeneutic most adverted on the internet, at least among conservative Roman Catholics, appears to be that of continuity. (Examples here, here, here.) Indeed, one popular blog has adopted this as a title. As a quick Google search reveals, the phrase is commonly associated with Pope Benedict. And -- yet again -- why not? Benedict has continued the task undertaken by his predecessor: to establish a definitive interpretation of the Second Vatican Council which reads the Council as an expression, rather than a disruption, of the Catholic tradition. Of course, the council itself made just this claim. But its most enthusiastic interpreters, in the early years, seem to have seen Vatican II as a license to rewrite history and redefine tradition. (So do its most bitter detractors, which means that the SSPX looks dimly upon the effort to "save" Vatican II for traditionalism.)

It is worth noting that Benedict himself, in his now-famous Christmas 2005 address to the Curia, did not talk about "suspicion" versus "continuity." At least according to the official transcript, he spoke rather of "disruption" versus "reform." The difference is not vast, but stil noteworthy.

Here is Benedict's analysis of the difficulty his church has faced in implementing -- and even understanding -- its most recent council:

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.

The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts.

In contrast, Benedict argues for a literal and minimalistic reading of the conciliar documents. This is what pleases many of his readers, since such a reading presumes a continued celebration of the Latin Mass in its older form, not mention (among many other things) the Daily Office said in Latin, at least by those competent to do so. He wants to assure the faithful that "the Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time ...."

We're all for the general approach. But we are intrigued by the idea that it is a matter of reform, rather than -- mere -- continuity. In that word, there is the explicit admission that the old thing, the ecclesia quo ante, was deformed, in need of judicious reconstruction in order to express its original intention accurately. In a very general way, of course, this has also been the approach taken by some of the Reformation churches, or at least some members within them. From Melanchthon to the Petris to Charles Porterfield Krauth, there have been those who attempted to develop Protestant theology as an expression of Catholic tradition. (Of course, there have also been those -- from Flacius to Schmucker and so many, many more -- who have treated Protestant theology as a replacement for Catholic theology, and indeed of the supposed "Protestant Church" as a replacement for the Catholic one.)

The same impulses which Benedict sees in the appropriation of Vatican II can be seen, by anybody willing to look, in the far longer and more complex effort of Protestants to understand their own Reformation. All of which means that Evangelical Catholics, and Anglo-Catholics, and any remaining adherents of the Mercersburg theology, or even Methodists in the Order of St. Luke, ought to pay close attention to the intellectual leadership that benedict offers to his own community. We suspect strongly that Benedict has learned something from his observation of Anglicans, at the very least, and probably of Lutherans as well. Even if we disagree about the details -- the precise content of the tradition -- we can learn from his approach to it. He is, in this sense, our brother.

All of which brings us back to DC Comics and the big Justice League reboot. We will be curious to see, over the next few months, how these new versions of old stories are accepted by readers, and then modified by the editors and writers. The new Superman -- with his short sleeves, his high collar, and his lack of underpants on the outside -- certainly looks different from the one we have been used to since Granpda was in seminary. But will he be all that different? Is the "new universe" a radically Protestant one? A Bugnini-style liturgical one? Or will it be, after all, something more readily identifiable to the initiates -- one that exists in continuity, however tortured, with the world we have known and loved?

If You're Preaching Sunday ...

... well, we'd still go with Moses the Black. But it might also be helpful to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. … we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death —- we give over our lives to death. …

When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. ... because only the man who is dead to his own will can follow Christ. In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die…

The call to discipleship… means both death and life… [It] sets the Christian in the middle of the daily arena against sin and the devil. Every day he encounters new temptations, and every day he must suffer anew for Jesus Christ’s sake. The wounds and scars he receives in the fray are living tokens of this participation in the cross of his Lord.

The Cost of Discipleship, quoted here.

Best Saint's Life Ever

Come Sunday, we remember two African saints. Egg readers are surely familiar with Augustine of Hippo: a pear orchard; a stewpot of unholy loves; the Manichaeans and Neo-Platonists; Monica's patience; Ambrose's reading skills. Above all, we enjoy his decades-long battle against Pelagianism, both semi- and otherwise. From there, straight on to the Reformation.

But Moses the Black is not quite such a household name. To refresh our memory, we googled him today, and came across what must surely be the most snappily-written vita of a saint we have ever encountered. (It comes from a site called Badass of the Week, which advertises "an unnecessarily copious amount of profanity." Just so's ya know.) Here's the lede:

When most people think, "Orthodox Christian Saint", the first phrase that pops into their heads generally isn't "skull-crushing badass". Saints are supposed to be skinny bearded dudes in ratty burlap robes who sit around in caves surrounded by lepers. These poor hermits generally earn the right to carry the mantle of Sainthood for accomplishing some crazy abstract nonsense like philosophizing about the nature of the Trinity, writing a bunch of incomprehensible dogmatic theses about God-knows-what, and/or generally just talking about how awesome the Church is. That's just the nature of Christianity; you don't get served Holy Bacon Strips at Jesus' breakfast table when you spend your life face-punching jerks unconscious, setting farmhouses on fire, and threatening people with knives. That is, unless you're Saint Moses the Black.

And:

Well I guess adopting the holy orders and devoting your life to God is great and all, but when you've spent your entire natural life chokeslamming dillholes spine-first onto the Great Pyramid of Cheops, some times old habits are a little hard to break. Not long after Moses joined the monastic community, a group of four cutthroat thieves broke into the church and started looting holy artifacts and stealing money from the collection plate. Well, as we have noted previously, Moses fully dedicated himself to whatever it was he was doing all of the goddamned time. He may have become a monk to escape prosecution, but he was devoted to his calling - and a dude like Moses sure as shit wasn't going to sit around and let some punk hoodlums disrespect his new home. He stood up, cracked his knucles, spit, and took two steps towards the assembled, dagger-wielding cabal of robbers and murderers.

So how did it turn out? Click the link, for pete's sake.

Against the Potato

Our great-grandfather, a missionary in Mexico, once preached a long sermon in which he meant to criticize the Roman church and its leadership. He couldn't figure out why the people in the room were smiling, snickering, and finally laughing. After the service, somebody took him aside and explained, we hope gently, that El Papa is the Pope. Great-grandpa, unfortunately, had preached a blistering sermon against La Papa, which means the Potato.

Which brings us to Madrid's World Youth Day, and the people who took to the street in protest. Is it possible that they, like an old-timey Protestant missionary, didn't really know what they were talking about?

Out of the gate, let us say that the protests have an ugly anti-Catholic tone to them, and that while in theory they may be directed against the Pope, in practice they are directed against young Christians. Here's a first-hand account.

But at the level of theory, so far as we can tell, the protests have had two distinct hypotheses: (1) that Pope Benedict XVI is personally evil (a Nazi, a pederast, that sort of thing), and (2) that, in the midst of an economic crisis, the government had shelled out a vast amount of money to pay for his presence. Neither contention is especially original; one recalls that angry Britons said almost the same thing a few months ago.

As for the first point, we can only throw up our hands in despair. Yes, he's an elderly German, and from the age of 14 was pressured into association with the Bad Guys. On the other hand, he refused to attend Hitler Youth rallies, and when they drafted him into the Army, he deserted. For that matter, one of his cousins -- with Down Syndrome -- was murdered by the Nazis in the name of their eugenics program.

As for pederasty, or rather making life easy on sexually abusive priests, well -- it has certainly been a problem throughout the Roman Catholic Church, and we don't doubt that as a diocesan bishop Ratzinger may have been been part of the problem. But he is also the one who convinced John Paul II to put the CDF in charge of discipline, rather than leaving it to the whim of individual bishops, and the one who went after some of the seemingly untouchable malefactors, like Legionaries founder Marcial Maciel Degollado.

Yes, we wish that he had spent as much of his life fighting criminal priests as heterodox ones. But he has put more energy into discipline and justice for victims than most Vatican figures, and certainly more than his predecessor. On balance, Benedict looks pretty good here.

So what about the second point? Is economically-challenged Spain wasting money on the visit of a foreign religious leader that might better have been spent caring for poor people? It's not impossible -- Spain is still among the most faithfully Catholic nations in the world, and a politician might do worse than offering circuses to people who have no bread. On the other hand, PM Zapatero is a Socialist and prominent supporter of gay marriage. His education reforms have offended religious groups, notably the Roman Catholic Church. And Spain is a far more secular today than it was a generation ago. So if this is pandering, it seems neither characteristic nor likely to succeed.

The Christian Science Monitor provides some interesting ideas:

The pope's visit will cost an estimated 50 million euros ($72 million), according to organizers, and involves closing off much of downtown Madrid. Private companies will contribute a large portion of the money for the event, but Spain will also have to cover many of the expenses. An exact breakdown of the overall economic effect is still unknown. ...

Officials in Madrid say the pope's visit, which was planned long before the current economic crisis, could generate as much as 150 million euros ($215 million) in revenues from tourists.

Ah! So it is pandering, but of a different sort -- pandering to the business community. This is the same sort of logic that drives cities to bankrupt themselves pursuing the Olympic Games, or to spend public money on a stadium in which wealthy owners can pay wealthy athletes to chase balls like school children.

Mind you, we have grave doubts about this strategy. Why? Because it doesn't work:

Owners of teams in the "big four" sports leagues — the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL — have reaped nearly $20 billion in taxpayer subsidies for new homes since 1990. And for just as long, fans, urban planners and economists have argued that building facilities for private sports teams is a massive waste of public money. As University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson memorably put it, "If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark."

Of particular interest to Madrilenos may be this part:

In one study of six Super Bowls, University of South Florida economist Phil Porter found "no measurable impact on spending," which he attributed to the "crowding out" effect of nonfootball tourists steering clear of town during game week.

Perhaps they shouldn't have invited him during tourist season.

On the other hand, WYD is reported to have drawn something like 1.5 million people, most of whom must have stayed in hotels, eaten in restaurants, shopped in stores. That is vastly more than the number of people who attend most sporting events. So maybe, this once, the theory will work.

In any case, it isn't the Pope's fault if it doesn't. He is just doing his job, and it is a job which we are ever-more convinced he does quite well. Despite our confessional position that the claims of the papacy to ius divino are inherently opposed to the Gospel -- ahem, the Pope is Antichrist -- we have to say that the protesters are giving the poor guy a an unnecessarily hard time. Worse, they are giving a hard time to the million-plus young people who turned out to sing, pray and look for meaning in their lives.

L'Affaire DSK Se Conclut

The New York DA's office has moved to drop criminal charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, because it does not believe that it could win the case in court. Very few people are likely to see this as a victory for justice: DSK's defenders will no doubt claim that he has been personally humiliated and politically destroyed, in a case that proves to have no merit; those who side with the hotel maid will claim that evidence of a grave crime is being set aside, as the victim, having already been abused in private, is now abused further in the court of public opinion. Meanwhile, other legal matters -- a civil case in New York, and a separate rape case in France -- are still pending.

As we've said before, we don't think that the DA's office has behaved badly here. They had allegations of a serious crime, supported by forensic evidence. The man accused of committing the crime was a wealthy foreigner sitting on an airplane; they moved quickly to arrest him. Everything else followed as one would expect. And when, upon further investigation, the DA concluded that the witness making the allegations was unreliable, they abandoned the case. What else should they have done?

Please don't turn DSK into some sort of innocent martyr. As the AP reminds us:

Strauss-Kahn's semen was found on her uniform dress, his DNA was identified on pantyhose and underwear she was wearing, and a gynecological exam found an area of "redness," according to prosecutors. But they said none of that was incontrovertible proof of a sexual assault. ... Strauss-Kahn's lawyers have said anything that happened wasn't forced.

There was some sort of sexual encounter in that hotel room. Whether it was assault -- or, for that matter, whether it was even with the maid -- we will probably never know. It could have been seduction, or prostitution, or some other form of adulterous liaison. Beyond that, your personal convictions depend very largely on whether you are the sort of person who reflexively trusts rich white men or poor black women. In other words, absent any proof, we are left with our prejudices.

And then there is the money.

Seems that somebody dropped $60,000 into the maid's bank account. She claims it was her jailed boyfriend, and such things are certainly not impossible. On the other hand, we have always held open -- and still do -- the possibility that somewhere in this case there is a French secret agent holding a suitcase full of cash. It's a long shot, for certain. But stranger things have surely happened.

Our Must-Have New Bible is Very Old

As readers surely know, 2011 is the quatercentenary of the Bible translation variously known as King James or Authorized. We have been quite worked up about this, and continue to be. The KJV, as an English teacher assured us many years ago, is not merely one of the masterpieces of the English language, it is one of the two sources of modern English, giving us not only words and cadences, but figures of speech which we use each day without even thinking of them. (Our teacher identified the other source as Shakespeare, and she was right; upon mature reflection, we would add the Book of Common Prayer).

So, how does one celebrate this auspicious anniversary? Were our parish made up largely of native speakers, we might have arranged to read the book in public, as a sort of festival. But since, to be frank, many of the people with whom we work have to mull over each word of the CEV, we did not see how a public event might work. Instead, our observance has been largely private, and has consisted of spending money.

Publishers, you see, are not fools. They know that there is milk yet to be had from this most productive of all cows -- and this despite the KJV's surely disturbing lack of copyright. Our own purchases have included two Bibles so far, and may well extend to a third.

1) Our first purchase was Oxford's Quatercentenary Edition. This is a strange book, but one we quite like. It reproduces the text of the first printing, including errors, but keeping the spelling, pagination and even line numbering. It is not, mind you, a facsimile; the thing has been entirely re-typeset, in a Roman font. This is a good thing.

Why? Because the first printings of the KJV were marked by some typographical oddities: errors, naturally; but also the deliberate decision to print in black-letter type (think of the New York Times banner, but far more condensed). Black-letter fonts were meant to emulate the tight scribal hand in which late-medieval religious books were commonly written, but they were challenging to the eye even in their own time, and today have become slow going even for those of us who use them often.

Oxford's QE is a large book, although not nearly as large as the original. Despite being a modern artifact, it has been made to look old -- the type may be Roman, but it is still dowdy. It is bound in some nasty artificial material, which keeps the price down, and comes in a cloth-covered slipcase to keep it from slouching on the shelf. There is a useful essay by Gordon Campbell, whose book-length treatment of the KJV we would also like to read. The whole package is useful for scholars, attractive to look at, and fun without breaking the bank.

2) Our second purchase was from the Trinitarian Bible Society. We were alerted to the existence of these people by J. Mark Bertrand's brilliant Bible Design Blogg. Since 1831, the TBS has devoted its energy to printing and distributing the KJV, sans Apocrypha, as well as to defending and even publishing the so-called Textus Receptus. From a scholarly perspective, we think they're a bit cracked; the TR is an okay text, but we don't for a moment doubt that the KJV translation team, were they alive today, would avail themselves of the greater manuscript variety now available. And don't get us started on why the Apocrypha matter.

So the TBS is a bit ... quixotic. We still admire the seriousness with which they approach their work. A few years back, J. Mark raved about one particular TBS publication: the Windsor Text KJV. After lusting in our hearts for a while, we got on the phone and called a nice lady in England, who sent us one. It arrived soon after, and immediately became our everyday, sit-on-the-desk-by-the computer Bible.

Here's why: it's easy to read. The font is clear enough, and the paper white enough, for even Fr. A.'s aging eyes to read unaided. It is a bright, modern look, with nothing antiquarian about it -- not attractive, by any means, but easy to read. It is enclosed in a trim package, bound in leather, which slips easily into a bag and opens flat on the table.

Furthermore, the page is not cluttered by the things that annoy us in so many Bibles: pronunciation helps, cross-references, footnotes. Technically, a few references and notes -- along with chapter summaries -- might arguably be considered integral parts of the KJV text. (Thanks, QE, for making that point!) They're certainly useful, at least sometimes and to some people. But that doesn't keep them from slowing the reader down, every bit as much as archaic spelling.

On top of all this, our Windsor Edition has another feature which has already given us hours of delight: the Metrical Psalms, as authorized by the Kirk of Scotland in 1650. We knew they existed -- Old Hundredth, after all! -- but we had never really come across them before, all in one place. We had imagined that they would be tacky, sing-song schlock -- and some are. But not many.

3) So much for the Year of King James, right? Wrong. The other day, J. Mark's blog alerted us to something even more exciting: Cambridge's Clarion edition. It hasn't been published yet, but Bertrand has seen an advance copy, and is suitably impressed. This is something he (and we, and apparently many other people) have long hankered for: a single-column KJV, laid out like ordinary prose and poetry. (He also goes on and on about the binding, which is good, but as he says: I'd buy the thing if it were bound in cardboard.) Notes and references are on the outer margin.

There have been a few of these over the years. We even owned one, once, and bitterly regret giving it away. But they're hard to come by. And this one, as J. Mark sees it, is a new frontier in readability.

The double-column layout used in most Bibles is a practical way to save space, made necessary by the small type size a publisher needs to use if a Bible is to fit into one manageable volume. Most eyes just can't read five inches of 6-point type, over and over, without getting lost and tired.

But the fact is that double-column layouts are the domain of reference books. The books we read for pleasure are almost always laid out in a single column. What does it say about the way Christians think of the Bible that it is typically treated like a reference book instead of pleasure reading? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way.

You can't buy the Clarion edition yet, although Amazon is taking pre-orders. Costs an arm and a leg, and then another arm, but we fully intend to own one, sooner or later. We may even squeeze it in during the last days of the anniversary year. After all, Christmas is coming.

The Mystery of the Missing Mysteries

Like many Nordic Americans, especially of the high-church persuasion, we have an abiding affection for Nicolai F.S. Grundtvig. While by no means our ideal churchman or theologian, his story speaks to our heart, certainly more than that of his overrated and inscrutable compatriot, Soren Kierkegaard.

So we were quite pleased when Mother A. chose Grundtvig's Built on a Rock as the hymn for Sunday next. Its chilling opening verses -- crumbled have spires in ev'ry land -- never fail to stun us with their prescience. Grundtvig was thinking, no doubt, of the depredations of Rationalism up through the late 18th century; he had no idea what further depredations were yet in store.

But while performing our due diligence, we were surprised to discover that the LBW translation, credited to the prolific Carl Doving, is incomplete. It is missing two stanzas, one of them about the central rites of the Christian church.

Some details: Grundtvig wrote the hymn in 1837 and revised it in 1854. Cyberhymnal offers one Danish version here, and an English translation here. The translation is credited to the prolific American translator Carl Doving, with emendations by Fred C.M. Hansen (could the initials really stand for Common Meter?). The text printed in the Service Book and Hymnal, Lutheran Book of Worship and Evangelical Lutheran Worship is very close to the Cyberymnal version, but somewhat improved as poetry. The SBH credits Doving and Hansen, although the others omit Hansen. The JPEG above, which you can enlarge by clicking, compares the two Cyberhymnal versions and the [copyrighted] version from the ELW (not, as it says, the LBW).

There are quite a few minor variations among the English texts. The SBH, for example, changed "rest everlasting" to "life everlasting." Playing its usual games with gendered language, the ELW changed

We are God's house of living stones

Built for his own habitation

to

Christ builds a house of living stones

We are his own habitation.

Both of these changes distort Grundtvig's intent, but so slightly that we can't really get excited about them. The stanza about earthly temples is more serious, as the praise of God's glory is exchanged for a confession of faith. Still, we're Lutheran enough to see the two things as basically similar.

What bugs us is the decision, made at least as early as the SBH and continued ever since, to omit stanzas 4 and 6.

The first omission is easier to forgive. The English translation of stanza 6 isn't very good. So far as we can tell, the original starts out closer to this:

Now we can gather with our Lord

Even in the lowliest hut

And say with Peter: This place is good!

This ties the hymn back to its opening verse, making explicit the idea that the "rock" upon which the Church is built is the faith of St. Peter. This only makes sense, since the hymn spins off of Biblical incidents in which Peter plays a key role (get it?), as well as images from the Petrine epistles. Our best guess is that Doving weakened these references a little, hoping to head off any Romanizing interpretations. The result, though, is that omitting Peter's name, along with his exclamation on the mountaintop, is a needless bit of anti-Catholicism which weakens the narrative and deprives pastors of what might be a useful hymn for the Transfiguration.

Nonetheless, Doving renders stanza 6 quite beautifully. The original may be more admirably blunt: The font reminds us of our baptism / the altar of Eucharistic grace.) And Doving omits the idea of God's mystery -- Guds kærligheds gåde. But we'd still be happy to sing it. And that's what confuses us about the hymnals.

Frankly, it is difficult to imagine why -- in a hymn about church buildings -- the steeple and bells should be retained, when the font and altar are omitted. (Not to mention the pulpit, which is present by implication). It is all the more shocking since this hymn, in its mutilated version, was sung through the long and difficult effort to restore a proper respect for and use of the sacraments among Lutherans in America. It is as though pastors committed to liturgical renewal were purposefully deprived of a useful tool for their work.

Here is the missing stanza, in an easily cut-and-pasted form. We believe that it is free of copyright, and encourage our readers to add it to bulletins from time to time:

Here stands the font before our eyes
Telling how God did receive us;

The altar recalls Christ’s sacrifice

And what His table doth give us;

Here sounds the Word that doth proclaim
Christ yesterday, today, the same,

Yea, and for aye our Redeemer.

Hardest Working Muscle

Scientists have now grown a working anal sphincter in a petri dish. (Thanks, i09!). This is big medical news. And -- strangely enough -- it reminds us of a story.

One of our colleagues is a retired Army chaplain, with the aggressive style and blunt manners that you might expect from a soldier-priest. He also has a mouth so filthy that it even makes Father Anonymous blush from time to time. Another pastor once sat at a table during a clergy Bible study and quietly made a hash-mark each time Fr. Falmouth dropped the F-bomb. He eventually lost count, but assures us that the number was very high. At a Bible study.

Anyway, Fr. F. himself likes to tell a story about his years on active duty. His superior officer, in the course of chewing him out, called him -- well, that thing that just got grown in a petri dish, but using the more conventional Army term. So Chaplain F. pulled himself up to attention and said, "Thank you sir. I consider that a great compliment."

"A ... compliment?"

"Yessir. The anal sphincter is the hardest-working muscle in the body."

The story has been told and retold around many a clerical campfire in our synod. By now, its punchline has a life of its own. And so, in honor both of our friend Fr. Falmouth and of the crack research team at Wake Forest, Emory and U. Mich., we are introducing a new hash tag for the blog: the Hardest Working Muscle.

We have needed a term like this for some time. After all, many of the people about whom we find ourselves writing -- ministers who steal Christmas presents, biologists who mock women as severely as they mock religion, members of Congress and terrorists (if indeed the two can still be classified separately) deserve to be called ... well, that thing. And so they are, in our private conversation. But a few readers have suggested that more decorum is called for in public, and they are surely right -- so we shall euphemize.

Still, we think this expression will get a lot of use.

St. Elmo's Fire

An ugly scene from New Welcome Baptist Church in St. Elmo, Alabama: the minister fired the director of music. The director of music asked for his back pay. A deacon attacked the director of music (and the director of music's mother, and some other people) with a knife. The director of music attacked the pastor with a taser.

Just -- sigh -- another day in the life of God's people.

The news reports are sketchy, and it may well be that the tasing began before the stabbing. We don't know and we don't care. Here's the best writeup we've seen so far, if you want details.

Sadly, all this takes Father Anonymous back to his own first call, at a profoundly disordered church in the South Bronx. Meetings, even of the most innocuous committee, were laced with rage. Several members -- "deacons," appointed for life by a previous pastor whose strategy seems to have been "keep your enemies closer" -- were prone to screaming fits. On one memorable occasion, an usher managed to so offend a communicant that they left the nave, and went down to the kitchen where the communicant pulled a knife and attempted to stab the usher. Bad enough on its own, but when poor foolish Fr. A. brought the subject up with his church council, their collective response was not to propose loving discipline or thoughtful care, but to take sides. As if either of those guys could have been, in any meaningful way, "right."

And yet there are some people who do not believe that human nature is utterly depraved. We're looking at you, Jacobus Arminius!

As a St. Emo sheriff's office spokeswoman says, "I'm sure, now, there are all hopefully looking back on it, saying, 'Hmm… We could have done something a little different there.' " We only wish we could be so sure.

"Atheists Say the Nastiest Things"

This is the contention of one Gary Hardaway, author of a book by that title. In this self-advertisement, he wrings his hands a little over the question of why a Christian would write such a book, and thereby "alienate atheists instead of showing love and kindness." He tries to explain, but I think he misses two simple points which could serve as his defense: (a) true skeptics, if there are any, surely want to know when their arguments fall short; and (b) good manners can be a useful tool to reasoned conversation. So few feelings are likely to be hurt by a book which, as Hardaway claims his does, tries to show up some bad logic and some coarse manners.

On the other hand, we aren't sure that much good is likely to come from marshaling a list of things that the other team -- defined however you please -- had said or done to hurt you. Atheists, needless to say, have their own list of things that Christians oughtn't have said but did; so do Muslims. And don't get the Jews started. These lists are long and often humiliatingly on-target. In controversy, it is often more useful simply to be your own best self, and hope that your antagonists will be theirs.

Hardaway mentions the nasty tone in which, say, Sigmund Freud and Christopher Hitchens write of religious believers, and he is quite correct. Both men sometimes seem less interested in defending their own position than in disparaging those who disagree. But he follows with this misleading example:

British Mathematician and philospher Alfred North Whitehead writes, "As for the Christian theology, can you imagine anything more appallingly idiotic than the Christian idea of heaven? What kind of deity . . . would be capable of creating angels and men to sing his praises day and night to all eternity? [What] inane and barbaric vanity."

Well, no, it is certainly not polite. Whitehead is clearly bashing those crusty old Biblical conservatives, like us at the Egg, who prefer to imagine a Heaven as filled with trumpet-blowing angels and crown-casting-down saints as any Counter-Reformation altar painting. Our feelings would be hurt, except that they're not. This is clearly just a little rhetorical name-calling among friends.

And Whitehead is, notably, a friend to the world of Christian belief. Although himself ultimately an agnostic, he came from a family of Anglican clergymen, and well into his thirties flirted with Roman Catholicism. His affection for Christianity was reciprocated by Christians; Whitehead's later work is the intellectual starting place of "process theology," a curious invention still dear to a handful of pastors. He is the secular philosopher most beloved of many mid-century clergymen, including our own grandfather.

So Hardaway is barking up the wrong tree here, and readers ought to beware. He has mistaken an agnostic for an atheist, and friendly joshing for genuine disdain.

Not, mind you, that we are put off by atheists who occasionally, if paradoxically, offer their opinions on what God would do if only God were more like themselves. On the contrary, we have long cherished the idea expressed by George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to Tolstoy. We forget the precise words, but he says something to the effect that "if I were God, I would strive to create a being greater than myself." Obviously, no sentence beginning "if I were God" can be taken seriously, and Shaw's idea of the evolving Superman combines the lamest bits of Nietzsche, Mormonism and, yes, process theology. We think that Tolstoy said something to that effect. Still, however wrong Shaw's effort, we love it that he bothered to play.

If we were an unbeliever (see what we did there?), we would hope to express our convictions with clarity and generosity, and to show as much interest in the convictions of believers as Whitehead and Shaw did. And sitting as we do on the other side of the fence, we still hope for those things.

Gingrich Is a Twit, Uses Twitter

It will come as no surprise to either of his ex-wives that Newt Gingrich is a liar-liar whose pants are habitually on fire. Nor will Egg readers be surprised by that oft-cited datum. Still, the man is so creative about his prevarication that we can't help but note the new iterations as they appear.

Consider the claim, made by several sites lately (Gawker, PeekYou, some academics, and summarized here by Cnet) that Newt may have created an army of followers on Twitter -- not recruited, mind you, but created, as in ex nihilo. PeekYou's analysis proposes that more than 90% of his followers are bogus.

Now, we're not well-informed about this social networking business. Frankly, we don't use Twitter ourselves, haven't checked in on Facebook for two weeks, and don't know what Google+ actually is. But we expect that, if Newt has indeed been cooking the numbers, he has some obvious motive -- perhaps followers are like mass, and large numbers of them create their own gravity, attracting still larger numbers. It would not surprise us if Gingrich, an egomaniac even by DC standards, hoped to end his career as a metaphorical black hole, the center of all human attention on the planet earth.

Why AOL Lost Its Market Cap

Just a guess here, but when we looked at a borrowed computer this morning, we saw the following headlines:

Top AOL News Stories:

• How Was The Joker Potty Trained? Mental Health Experts Psychoanalyze Batman Villains
• Alaska's Alleged Sea Monster Caught On Film
• WATCH: Exploding manhole Tosses Car In The Air
• 15 Most Annoying Things About Flying the Unfriendly Skies)
• Cat Stabs Man (Or So He Says)

Really? The nation hovers on the brink of an unprecedented financial disaster as Congress grandstands, and these are the top stories? Apparently, Arianna Huffington hasn't turned the place around yet. Orf worse yet, maybe she has.

Darkness Visible

To justify the ways of the movie industry would require the skills of a formidable writer. Any number have tried and failed. On the other hand, several writers have tried to justify the ways of God to man, and at least one has come awfully close (especially if one's leanings are at once Calvinist, classicist and obscurantist).

So Hollywood bought the rights.

All of which means that plans are afoot to film Paradise Lost.

Here's an informative but badly-written story. (Ande here's the poem, if you need to brush up). The guy who directed I, Robot has signed on; some star I've never heard of is in talks to play Lucifer. The script has already been worked on by a small army of writers, only one of them with much of a Tinseltown track record.

It sounds a little weird, but -- honestly -- it might work. It's got the ultimate in just war, and as much sex as you want to film. Paradise Lost is famously difficult to read, but the good news is that you don't read movies. If you cut through the density of the language and the literary allusions, a lot of it is pretty visual, and easy (okay, easy-ish) to imagine onscreen. Here is Satan, mustering his strength after the defeat of the rebellion:

Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
His mighty Stature; on each
hand the flames
Drivn backward slope thir pointing spires, and rowld
In
billows, leave i'th' midst a horrid Vale.
Then with expanded wings he stears
his flight
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
That felt unusual weight,
till on dry Land
He lights, if it were Land that ever burn'd
With solid,
as the Lake with liquid fire ...

It just cries out for CGI, dunnit?

Anyway, the Times gets the best line, noting that although the casting for Adam and Eve hasn't yet been announced, the costumes should be pretty easy.

Weird Stuff Notes

For several weeks now, we have been changing residences more frequently than Arafat did in the 1970s, and our internet access has been spotty. Likewise television, newspapers and books. So we're pretty far out of touch with the world these days. (On the other hand, we did see some longhorn cattle this afternoon).

All this out of touchness leaves us a bit confused about the headlines. So far as we can tell, presidential wannabee Michelle Bachmann has recently left her Lutheran church, after not attending for the past two years. Nothing really new there, if you're an ELCA member annoyed about The Gays. But Mrs. Bachmann is -- or rather was -- part of the WELS. Is it possible that they weren't reactionary enough for her?*

Her decision might conceivably have been prompted by some fluff about her husband's counseling service, which includes a "cure" for homsexuality. More likely, it is related to a recent Atlantic piece, reminding the world that Martin Luther thought that the Pope was Antichrist, a belief enshrined in the WELS statement of faith, and (more significantly) in the Smalcald Articles (2:4:10).** This latter, after all, is part of the common confession of all Lutheran churches. Were it otherwise, the point would be moot, since Luther said any number of things which Lutherans are free to disregard, chuckle over, or cringe at. He was particularly rough on Jews and Germans, for example. He also thought that eating meat was a consequence of the Fall, and on one occasion endorsed bigamy. All of which is why we have the Book of Concord.

Author Josh Green does something funny here: he cites a couple of theologians who tell him, as anybody familiar with the documents would, that sure, Luther said and meant the antichrist thing; but that neither Luther nor Lutherans meant anything like the things modern people seem to read into it. Then, to all intents and purposes, he ignores them. He is explicitly trying to use Bachmann's religious association against her, as Republicans used Obama's in 2008 -- a tactic that struck us as churlish then and continues to do so now.

In related faith-baiting news, we read that a Fox News host thinks Rick Perry may have an eaiser time raising funds than Mitt Romney, since Romney "is obviously not a Christian." While agree with the general idea, we are troubled by the glibness of that "obviously." As we have said before, the question of whether Mormons are Christians is purely academic, and depends upon your definition of Christian. For the record, our definition is tied up in the somewhat loose canon of Scripture, to which the Book of Mormon is by no historic standard a part, and in the faith delivered to the saints, as recorded in their writings -- including, most especially, the Canons of Nicea. But for somebody who thinks that "Christianity," degree zero, means no more than claiming the name of Jesus as a road to salvation, Mormons are indeed Christian -- along with some Hindus. Seriously.

Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty is talking up his Evangelicalism, just in case anybody missed it.

Now, we haven't been following these stories, so it is likely that we have missed some important details. But what comes out clearly is that, once again, religion and religious tests are likely to have a prominent role in the presidential campaign. This is, as always, an unneccessary and unwholesome contribution to the civic life of our secular republic.

But hey -- at least it got Lutheranism into the news.
_________________________________________________________
*Technical note: It seems that the WELS, unlike the ELCA, doesn't remove people from the roster for inactivity; they keep you on the rolls until you die or formally request removal.
**In context, Luther is arguing that, because the [Renaissance] papacy claimed that communion with Rome was necessary for salvation, the pope arrogates to himself the saving power which belongs only to God. Since modern Roman Catholicism takes a more nuanced view of this subject, and since much of this has been dealth with in the dialogues leading up to the Joint Declaration, it seems to us that Luther's claim is no longer binding. (Even at the time, Melanchthon recognized the possibility of granting the pope authority as a practical matter.)

Modern Doomsday Cult

Long, long ago, we mentioned Shoresh Yishai, a creepy faux-Jewish cult begun by a pair of Lutheran pastors on Long Island, years ago. They were (and their successors apparently remain) an awful bunch. Start with the child molestation and go from there. Anyone who has served a parish in Nassau County knows some of the heart-wrenching story.

We recently received a note from an anonymous correspondent, who claims to have been a member of this group for most of his or her life, and who has just recently started a blog devoted to going public on the subject. There isn't much there yet, apart from this nice bit of snark:

In the 1980’s, the cult was known as Shoresh Yishai, but the name has changed over the years. Currently they refer to themselves as the Abensaur Family or simply as the Family. As you probably know, the Family is not the most original name. The charismatic founder of the cult, Jack Hickman, also known as Abba to his followers, was not the most original cult leader. Most of the ideas and dogmas that are alive in the cult today he stole from others. This is rather fitting with his character as he did after all live a parasitic lifestyle.

The least a cult leader can do, we imagine, is show a little creativity. Give us flying saucers and mind-reading machines or stay home.

Anyway, if you are interested in Jack Hickman and his followers, stay tuned to Modern Doomsday Cult, and encourage the author to keep working.

Dawkins Defends DSK

The case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn has, as you surely know, collapsed. His accuser has proven to be an unreliable witness, and although charges remain in place, it is unlikely that the matter will ever go to trial.

Many people have accused the DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., of treating DSK improperly. The heart of the accusation seems to be that he was arrested and jailed, which are the things one hopes will be done to men accused of violent sex crimes. His bail was fairly high, which is what one hopes will happen when the men so accused are wealthy and politically connected citizens of a nation with which one has no extradition treaty.

Joe Nocera gives a straightforward and convincing defense of Vance in his Times column. Here's the meat of it:

For the life of me, though, I can’t see what Vance did wrong. Quite the contrary. The woman alleged rape, for crying out loud, which was backed up by physical (and other) evidence. She had no criminal record. Her employer vouched for her. The quick decision to indict made a lot of sense, both for legal and practical reasons. Then, as the victim’s credibility crumbled, Vance didn’t try to pretend that he still had a slam dunk, something far too many prosecutors do. He acknowledged the problems.

We happen to have seen it in the print edition, but then out of curiosity we went online to read the comments, especially by those whom Nocera did not manage to convince.

Perhaps it is our perfervid imagination, but it seems to us that, if one reads just a little bit between the lines, a picture emerges. They seem like apologists for wealth and power, the sort of people who vote with the majority on recent Supreme Court decisions. One DSK defender argues that the banker was "assumed guilty and suffered extreme social and financial punishment" even though he had not been put on trial. This is, of course, nonsense. He was treated like the suspect in a violent crime, which is not at all pretty. Social and financial consequences are not the DA's responsibility; talk to the World Bank about hiring a new boss while the old one was ... unavailable.

Now, we have hinted before and hereby hint again that we do, in the depths of our conspiratorially-minded, thriller-reading heart, nourish grave suspicion that l'affaire Strauss-Kahn may have been a political hit by Sarkozy, or even by the Greeks, seeking respectively to eliminate a rival or secure softer bailout terms. Such things do happen.

But until the chambermaid writes a tell-all with the lines "and then the man known only as Stavros handed me a condom, a cellphone and a briefcase full of cash," it seems impossible to be sure. Still, given what we do know about DSK personally, and powerful men in general, it seems entirely possible that, as Nocera writes, "something very bad happened in that hotel room."

What interests us, really, is the rush to defend him, by Bernard-Henri Levy and all the anonymous Times commenters -- not to mention the Post, which was quick to claim that the maid had worked as a prostitute (as if prostitutes never got raped). All told, it reminds us what we wrote about Richard Dawkins in our last post: that there is a phalanx driven to rage by the prospect that any man may not be able to seek out sex with any woman at any time.

In effect, the vitriol Dawkins sprayed at Skept-Chick seems to come from the same place that the outrage on behalf of DSK does. It is the howl of the old and privileged, unable to bear the thought of losing even the slightest bit of what they have so long enjoyed.

The Selfish Geneticist

One of these days, we will get around to Richard Dawkins -- promise. The bottom line is that, while we gather that he is a highly capable scientist, we aren't deeply impressed by his ever-more-strident public attacks on the straw man he chooses to call "religion." We don't imagine he would be much impressed by our thoughts on, say, the role of heterochromatin in transcriptional silencing, and probably for the same reasons. That's okay; thoughtful people can disagree, particularly when they do so courteously.

And our very slight reading about Dawkins had always suggested that he was a basically nice guy. A bit shrill sometimes, but understanably so; he must get more hate mail than Dave Benke. Newspaper profiles, though, go out of their way to portray him as an affable type, not quite courtly, but courteous except perhaps when snarled at.

We are beginning to wonder. It may very well be that Dawkins is, like so many successful men of a certain age, quite far from even the most basic understanding of common courtesy, particularly with regard to women. At any rate, that's how his own faithful seem to be calling it, as they turn on him like a pack of wild dogs.

It's a long story, summarized here by Gawker. The bottom line is that a prominent female skeptic was at a conference, where some guy hit on her in an elevator at 4am. She blogged about it later, suggested that this sort of thing creeped her out, and asked readers not to do it.

And there things would have lain, we suppose, had Dawkins -- in the comments section appended to somebody else's blog post -- not chimed in with a ham-fisted attempt at irony:

Dear Muslima[,]

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

He's in all sorts of trouble now. It will probably blow over, or maybe it won't.

What fascinates us is the fact that such a seemingly bright and affable guy would write this at all. Did somebody ask for his opinion on the subject of women getting hit on in elevators? Or did he simply think, as he seems to, that expertise in evolutionary genetics amounts to automatic authority in every other subject?

To be fair, there was a context. But even this does not make Dawkins look very good. The commenters were discussing, among other things, whether it was really so bad to ask a woman back to your room, in an elevator, in the wee hours. Many people opined that it was a natural enough thing, even when done awkwardly; others may have agreed, but pointed out that it was also intimidating, and therefore rude to the point of sexual harassment.

Dawkins seems to be taking the former position, which may be natural enough for a man of his age, but please do consider what that position amounts to, particularly when expressed with such over-the-top rhetoric. After all these years, there remains a large phalanx of men who are outraged -- literally, driven to a frenzy -- by the idea that they do not have the perfect right to proposition any woman, in any place, at any time, and to do so without ever being criticized for it. Some imagine they have rights which go well beyond this.

This sort of thinking is, in some ways, a reflection of gender and class privileges so deep and longstanding that until recently they were rarely even noticed. But by now they have been noticed long enough, and thoroughly enough -- especially in the academic world -- that there is no real excuse even for the most privileged. Ask Larry Summers. Were Dawkins an associate prof, he might be looking for work next term.

It is to the credit of the skeptical and atheist communities that so many of their number are having none of this nonsense. Now if we could only get them to come around on that, um, other thing.