More Books to Buy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Wine

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book for Sale

It's finally here!

Odd Hours, our collection of prayers in Latin and English, is now available. Click here to buy a copy, or visit the page linked on the sidebar.

Our own copy came in the mail the other day, and we're quite pleased. It's a sturdy little book, pleasing to look at and easy to use. We'll post some pictures when we can.

There are some flaws, to be sure. No shortage of typos, for one thing, and our choice of the original-spelling Coverdale Psalms may not have been as inspired as it seemed. (They're a little hard to make sense of, especially at first).

On the other hand, the selection of Latin hymns alone is a treat. Gathering them together has been an education. A few sermons by St. Augustine have slipped in to fill blank pages. And there are other little goodies tucked away, here and there, that may help to keep the heart and mind attentive. At least that's what we hope.

On Neo-Protestantism

Years ago, studying the Romantic renewal of ecclesiology and liturgy, we noticed that there were in the nineteenth century two working definitions of the term "Neo-Lutheran," and that they were directly opposite each other.* One referred to the revival of confessionalism and a style that looked selectively backward to the Middle Ages; another referred to the movement to broaden (and vitiate) the interpretation given to the confessions, and attempted to define a self-consciously modern movement.

One use was preferred in Europe, one in America, but the term was so rare and the historiographic problem so minor that we have now forgotten which was which. However, a similar problem arises in many of our conversations these days, and it is one which scholars ought to get busy building into their glossaries.

Here in Europe -- specifically, here in Romania -- the term Neo-Protestant is used, both by scholars and by other educated people, as a catchall for those religious communities which emerged after the Reformation, but from within the ideological world created by Protestantism. So, for example, the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican churches are Protestant, while Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists are Neo-Protestant. (Meanwhile, coeval movements within the Orthodox and Roman Catholic realms, such as the emergence of the Byzantine-rite churches or the Lord's Army, are classified differently).

This is an extremely useful distinction, at least on par with the one between the "magisterial" and "radical" Reformations. It may require some clarification, particularly with regard to Anabaptists and Methodists, but it is useful.

(In particular, this distinction -- were it to become common in Anglo-American circles -- could put paid to the anomalous refusal of some Anglicans and Lutherans to identify themselves as Protestant. Since the time of that very Romantic revival mentioned above, many of us have pointed in dismay to, say, Baptists, Quakers and Adventists, saying in effect, "Neither our theology nor our worship is as much like theirs as it is like the Pope's; so if they are Protestants, then we must be ... something else." Obviously, we at the Egg participate in this little charade, but we do so more from necessity than from joy. And if they are Neo-Protestants, then we can reclaim our proper Reformation identity without much fuss.)

There is, however, a problem. In Anglo-American scholarship, the term Neo-Protestant already has two senses. It is used both to describe (1) the modernizing, "liberal" movement which followed after Schliermacher (so, for example, the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought), and also (2) the eventual reconsideration of "classical" liberalism in the works of Barth & Co.

This latter usage is fairly rare; the preferred term is Neo-Orthodox, which from our current perspective is fraught with confusion of its own. (Oy, vey.) Still, it is common enough. Two minutes on Google turn up numerous examples, including some from notable theologians and sociologists. Part of the confusion is that a theological position opposed to "modernism" in any form makes no real distinction between Tillich and Barth. (So, for instance, Carl Henry, in this 1969 essay.)

Still, neither of the two conventional Anglo-American uses of "Neo-Protestant" is particularly widespread, nor does either one define a semantic boundary in such urgent need of definition as the Central European use. Historians, social scientists and pastors all have a pressing need for some easy way to distinguish the churches which emerged during the Reformation proper from those which in subsequent generations built upon, or strayed from, its legacy.

So let's hear it for neo-Protestantism! Hooray!**

_______________________________________________________________

* And, by the way, don't bother consulting Wikipedia on this. The relevant articles don't acknowledge the double-sense, and in any case are full of Missourian disinformation.

**This cheer is directed only to the technical term, and not to the movement identified thereby. Lest you think we were changing horses in midstream.

"Très Mediocre"

That is how some French historian described the hymn Sol hodie nobis apparuit. But what do the Frogs know about art, culture or religion, especially in the Middle Ages?

The song is by Hildebert of Tours -- oops! He was French! -- but John Mason Neale, whose translation we offer below (and also, ahem, in our almost-ready-to-sell Latin/English breviary), does not seem to have been in love with the song either. In his Mediaeval Hymns, he gives the whole thing in a footnote.

But then he adds something to the effect of, "The reader cannot help but be reminded of Dr. Donne." And you know what that means, readers: Behold our new favorite Christmas hymn!

Two Suns appear to man to-day: one made,

One Maker: one eternal, one to fade.

One the stars' King; the King of their King, one:

This makes,―that bids him make,―the hours to run.

The Sun shines with the True Sun, ray with ray,

Light with light, Day with Him That makes the day.

Day without night, without seed bears she fruit,

Unwedded Mother, Flower without a root.

She than all greater: He the greatest still:

She filled by Him Whose glories all things fill.

That night is almost day, and yields to none.

Wherein God flesh, wherein flesh God, put on.

The undone is done again; attuned the jar:

Sun precedes day: the Morn, the morning star.

True Sun, and Very Light, and Very Day:

God was that Sun, and God its Light and ray.

How bare the Virgin, ask'st thou, God and man?

I know not: but I know God all things can.

This is to Easter what Mortis, Portis, Fractis, Fortis is to Easter -- monks at play, but pious play. (And, yes, French monks. it was a joke, okay?)

Neale is right; this does remind us of Big Jack. For that very reason, Neale's translation seems a little ... different. Better, in our opinion, than his work on many more run-of-the-mill hymns -- and a reminder of just how skilled Neale was at translation. He routinely matched meter and rhyme scheme to the original texts; but he also made a point of matching the poet's style -- elevated, robust, literary, or -- in this case -- almost too clever. Almost.

"Who Partakes Thy Woe"

Pastor Joelle writes that a friend was hissed and booed recently for writing that the Blessed Virgin was "far from perfect." Joelle takes up her friend's cause admirably, and we scarcely need to say more on the subject.

But when has that ever stopped us?

By a freakish coincidence, it happens that this very afternoon, we were tutoring a young Hungarian seminarian in the finer points of theological English. He's a bright feller, so in the past few weeks we have exposed him to the grammatical and lexical intricacies of Robert Jenson, Marilynne Robinson and George Herbert. But today we hauled out the big guns -- which means, as regular readers can surely guess, John Donne.

Dipping into the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, our friend saw some choice examples of the subjunctive, neologism, and the run-on sentence. (To the last of these, he gasped "Just like Hebrew," which was really quite intuitive -- a master of Latin, Donne was nonetheless shaky on Greek, but a notably more capable Hebraist.)

Then, to relax a bit and enjoy the Christmas spirit, we read through one of our very favorite poems on the Nativity, this sonnet from La Corona:

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,

Now leaves his welbelov'd imprisonment,

There he hath made himself to his intent

Weak enough, now into our world to come;

But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th'Inne no roome?

Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,

Stars, and wisemen will travel to prevent

Th'effect of Herod's jealous general doom;

Seest thou, my Soul, with thy faith's eyes, how he

Which fills all place, yet none holds him, doth lie?

Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,

That would have need to be pitied by thee?

Kiss him, and with him into Egypt goe,

With his kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

Yes, it's clever, and touching, and metaphysical in both the Jonsonian and Aristotelian senses. But we knew all that. What we had never really noticed until we read it aloud in the winter darkness with our young friend is that Donne (raised Papist, and the sort of Anglican who would declare himself "catholic" in one breath and "puritan" in another, so long as you let him define the terms his own way) stakes out a position on the delicate question of the BVM.

Speaking to his soul, he says, "into Egypt go, with [Christ's] kind mother, who partakes thy woe." That is to say, travel a while with Mary, whose soul shares in your own condition: sinful until redeemed by the immensity she once enclosed.

This doesn't really address the complex matter of the Immaculate Conception, although one of Donne's favorite medieval writers was Bernard of Clairvaux, who argued against the idea. It most certainly has nothing to do with the matter of Mary's virginity, which we would be shocked to discover Donne had ever doubted for a moment, any more than Luther did.

What this does address, however, is the occasional tendency toward misdirected piety. So captivated are we by Mary's heroic faith, that -- just as the passiones of martyrs are sometimes rewritten to make the saint's life more nearly mirror Christ's -- so we attribute to the Mother qualities properly pertaining only to the Son. Such, for example, as sinlessness.

And it is on that count that Donne gently sets us straight here, as well as in the next sonnet (which begins with the last line of this one). Yes, she is holy, heroic, highly-favored; but those things -- and especially the heroism -- derive precisely from her humanity. She is godly, but never God; whatever her sins may have been, they were sins like ours, and they rendered her as imperfect as we are. The perfection she enjoys now is the same perfection for which we long, and dare to hope, and may receive only as a gift of God.

Of course, in one sense, Mary wasn't far from perfect -- she carried Perfection in her body. Donne would have liked that idea. But in the ordinary, moral, spiritual sense, she was just as far as any of us -- and just as close.

Midnight Special

"He himself was not the light." But all of Israel had been waiting for the Light, and of course the Church continues to wait -- joyfully and prayerfully, as tomorrow's Epistle says.

If you're preaching tomorrow, and racing to find a hook, you might consider the American folk blues Midnight Special, about a man in prison watching the train come down the tracks, hoping that it may bring a pardon from the governor, and set him free.

Shine your ever-loving light on me. It's not a bad prayer for Advent.

Like so many folk songs, it has a complicated textual history, and the lyrics are a bit hard to pin down. (Wikipedia background here; lyrics as recorded by the Band and CCR here; Leadbelly version here). And fair warning: Carl Sandburg thought that the song wasn't about waiting for a train to freedom, but about wishing to be hit by the train rather than remain a prisoner. (Still, a chance to talk about the sin of despair).

Ethical (and Other) Conundrums

What do you say when the op-ed writer you like least on Earth gets in a great line? Do you quote her, thus leading people to believe that she's anything but a crazy old bat still nursing her unrequited jones for Ronald Reagan? Do you quote her without attribution, thus stealing intellectual property?

Or do you assassinate her character, and then quote her?

Ahem. Behold the transient genius of Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, on why Republicans who know Newt Gingrich best are frightened by his rise in the polls:

What they fear is that he will show just enough discipline over the next few months, just enough focus, to win the nomination. And then, in the fall of 2012, once party leaders have come around and the GOP is fully behind him, he will begin baying at the moon. He will start saying wild things and promising that he may bomb Iran but he may send a special SEAL team in at night to secretly dig Iran up, and fly it to Detroit, where we can keep it under guard, and Detroiters can all get jobs as guards, "solving two problems at once." They're afraid he'll start saying, "John Paul was great, but most of that happened after I explained the Gospels to him" ....

Okay, fine. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

(via Gawker)

The Vegetarian Option is Steak

She's out of the running, if indeed she was ever in it, so there's no reason for us to crack wise about ex-Lutheran Michelle Bachmann. But still:

Jane Schmidt, a high school student in Waverly, Iowa, recently asked Michele Bachmann, "Why can't same-sex couples get married?"

"They can get married," Bachmann responded, "but they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they're a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they're a man."

(In Iowa, same-sex marriage is the law, at least for now, but never mind that.)

She expanded on this in a response to another student: "Every American citizen has the right to avail themselves to marriage, but they have to follow what the laws are. And the laws are you marry a person of the opposite sex."

Cue the sound of a thousand heads hitting a thousand desks.

The WaPo's Alexandra Petri has a field day with this:

"Why can't Rosa Parks sit at the front of the bus?"

"She can sit," Bachmann would say. "She can sit at the back of the bus."

... "Is there a vegetarian option?"

"The vegetarian option is steak,"

And so forth.

Evensong

Father Anonymous is just off the plane from a quick family trip to London. It wasn't especially grand -- this was a very quick trip, staying with friends in the 'burbs and hauling a belligerent preschooler everywhere we went. Fr. A. himself was suffering from a tummy bug -- which is getting worse even as he types -- and was far more belligerent than the said preschooler. (Sorry, Honey.) Comparatively few sights were seen, and many grumpy remarks were made.

Still, the trip had its charms. In a less belligerent mode, Little Anonymous put his boots out on Monday night, and St. Nicholas managed to find them. Books in our native language were purchased, a decent Tex-Mex restaurant meal was eaten, and we gather that the Buckingham Palace guards were duly changed, although by then we were on a nearby lawn swinging Little A. in circles to make him dizzy. The friends were wonderful and hospitable, and we would much rather have visited them in their old home in Surrey than their new one in Kosovo.

Among the items not checked off on Fr. A.'s personal to-do list was what he calls the John Donne Heritage Tour. At a minimum, it would have included a trip to the chapel at Lincoln's Inn (which was constructed while Donne was, essentially, a law school chaplain); a tour of St Paul's Cathedral, where Donne was dean -- albeit in the former building -- and a chance to shudder at the ghastly statue; a pop into St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, where Donne held the benefice and which, coincidentally enough, is now used by the Romanian Orthodox community. We might have ferreted out his birthplace and a few other handy landmarks as well. They're all close to each other, and, alone, could have been visited in a long afternoon. We were not, however, alone.

Still, thanks to the utterly unmerited grace of Mother A., not to mention an episode of remarkably good behavior on the part of Little A., we were able to snake past the Occupy St. Paul's tent camp and take part in choral Evensong. Anglophiles get weepy-eyed about this, and more than a little pretentious. It isn't all that much, when you come down to it: just Vespers, out of the BCP, albeit sung very nicely indeed and in a strikingly beautiful church. (If one likes Baroque.)

But here's the thing: when you're still groggy from the wee-hours flight, when your intestines have been in full revolt and your mood is foul; when you have been rushing around in the cold, arguing with your loved ones; when the world seems like a nasty place, where the rich get richer and the poor get to sleep out in the rain -- when, in short, you are face to face with the brokenness of all humanity, especially your own -- then there is nothing much better than Vespers. There is nothing much better than to hear the words of hope, and to sing the songs of Zion; nothing much better than to sit with those you love and pray Cranmer's Collect for Peace, asking for precisely that peace which the world cannot give.

The Noise of a Fly

John Donne was raised since infancy in a world of intense religiosity. He came from a family of saints and martyrs, and himself wound up the dean of London's cathedral and among the best-known preachers of his age. His Meditations alone stand among history's most thought-provoking considerations of life, death and prayer. Even during his supposedly rakish youth -- the rakishness of which is often wildly overstated -- Donne was a serious lay student of theology, at one point penning a mock-legal brief on the moral questions around suicide.

We may take it for granted that he prayed often and fervently (and, anyone acquainted with his prose may well suspect, in Latin as often as English).

Yet it seems that Donne, like most of the rest of us, found prayer difficult and demanding. He once preached:

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

Can I get an Amen?

That's from Donne's sermon at the funeral of Sir William Cockayne, in 1626. We still remember the moment we first read it, and the shock of recognizing our own distractable nature in the prayer-life of ... well, of our hero. And that was when we realized that it wasn't so much our own distractable nature as human nature.

Odd Hours

After years of eye-straining work, today Father A. hit the "print" key on his Latin-English prayer book. Here's what the dust-jacket will look like.

For some readers, this will strike a sentimental note. It harks back to the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal -- and specifically to the nice leather-bound edition that Grandpa Anonymous used to use. (Except, of course, that his didn't have any Latin. An oversight on the part of Luther D. Reed, no doubt.)

There is a lot of SBH genetic material in this book, most of it inherited from the Common Service Book. The Matins and Vespers services use the CSB/SBH structure. The difference is that, in the old hymnals, you had to flip pages to find the seasonal propers. Here, each season's office is printed along with with its versicles, responsories, psalm antiphons and suggested hymns.

But there's more inside than just the SBH, or for that matter just Lutheranism. For one thing, there is a Compline service, which shares elements of the Lutheran Book of Worship and the modern Roman Catholic rite, although rendered in old-fashioned language. For another, very few Lutheran prayer books contain the Angelus or the Marian antiphons. Most of the hymns were translated by Anglican poets, and in general it is likely that Anglican readers will feel very ... very ... comfortable with this book.

It appears that the book, a hymnal-sized hardcover with a decent cloth binding, is going to sell for $38.95 from Amazon. (And, even at that, we make about a buck on each copy). It will come in closer to $28 if you buy direct from Lulu.

"Ugly Ritual is Bad Religion"

That's the title of a good piece by Rod Dreher, at Real Clear Religion. The name is self-explanatory; what we especially like is that, after the customary nods to liturgical Latin and orthodox otherwordliness, he then makes his case most strongly with a heartfelt story about small-town Methodism.

Because -- and this is important -- every community has its rituals. And those rituals matter.

Dreher is not, by any means, our favorite opinionator of the day. But this essay is worth reading and thinking about.

Safeway's War On Families Continues ...

... in Everett, Washington, where a security guard detained a 4-year-old girl for eating some dried fruit from a bag, and then putting it back on the shelf. (We know: Ick, right? But the kid's dad didn't notice.)

The guard "told the father that the girl could face criminal charges" -- she's four, mind you -- then took her to a room and made her sign a piece of paper"acknowledging she wasn't allowed to enter any Safeway stores." We're impressed that she could sign her own name, because -- did we mention this? -- she's four years old.

All this follows the Honolulu incident, in which parents were arrested and temporarily lost custody of their preschooler after the same sort of innocent mistake.

The Safeway chain announced that it had fired the guard in Everett, saying it was "appalled" by his behavior, and was going to re-examine its policies. Pretty much what they said after the Honolulu incident, which gives it a less-than-convincing sound.

The supermarket industry is reasonably competitive; unless you're in a very small town, there are almost always other stores to patronize. If there were a Safeway within a thousand miles of us right now, we would have already abandoned it in favor of KrogersShop-RitePriceChopperA&P or whatever. The funny thing is that what the stores are competing for, by and large, is business from families with children. So if Safeway wants to delay its inevitable swirling around the drain, it really needs to start thinking about ways to attract the parents of small children. Here's a hint: more "How can we help you," and less over-the-top bullying.

Stay Awake!

So says Jesus in the lesson for Sunday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Octopi Wall Street!

That was one i09 reader's comment on this astonishing piece of video:

Yes, that's right: a walking octopus. An octopus that hauls its gelatinous body out of the water, crawls across the land, drops a crab off with some onlookers (at 2:08), and then flops back into the drink.

We knew they were clever creatures, easily the smartest of the invertebrates -- apart from an occasional bishop -- but we had no idea they could walk. Frankly, we find the idea disturbing.

A couple of other i09 readers made Cthulhu jokes, which were inevitable, but another told an absolutely freaky story about a science teacher who thought kids were stealing fish from his tanks. So he set up a camera, which filmed the nocturnal shenanigans of an octopus. This monster of the deep was able to squeeze itself through a quarter-sized hole, crawl along a counter, climb into another tank, eat a resident, and then escape back the way it had come -- covering its tracks.

We at the Egg, for one, welcome our cephalopod overlords.

Beware the Apple Tree!

This time of year -- when we call upon God to rend the heavens, and so forth -- preachers may be tempted to talk about Martin Luther and the apple tree. Our suggestion: don't. Or do so only in the most guarded terms.

You have all heard, over and over, the remark attributed to Uncle Marty: If I knew that the world would end tomorrow, I should still plant my apple tree. Or variations thereof.

There are two questions for a preacher tempted by this remark: (1) is it genuine; and (2) does it reflect Luther's own eschatology?

The first answer appears to be no. Such is the conclusion of Martin Schloemann, in Luthers Apfelbaumchen? Ein kapital deutscher Mentalitats-geschichte seit dem zweiten Welt-krieg (1975; repr. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994). We gather that Scholoemann can trace the remark only back to 1944.

The second answer is probably fodder for a graduate seminar, rather than a Sunday sermon. Frederick Gaiser, in a 2005 Word & World editorial (here, if you have ATLA access) says that Schloemann's own answer is no, if the remark is to argue for a life focused on the present reality without concern for the last days, and yes -- or at least maybe -- if it is used to talk about "creaturely service [to] neighbor and world" grounded in an eschatological context. (Gaiser doesn't mention it, but the appropriation of the remark to support environmental initiatives is opportunistic and arbitrary -- and by the way, Luther did have some truly interesting things to say about the degradation of German farmland.)

But be warned: Schloemann found the misattribution of the remark suspicious, not merely because it doesn't necessarily reflect Luther's thought, but also because it reflects "the slippery malleability of the 'Luther'" whose imprimatur people seek to stick on the cause of the moment. If there are any two words that fail to describe Luther, they are slippery and malleable.

In a somewhat confusing essay on tracing suspect quotations, Yoel Natan suggests that this one may have evolved from a Jewish source:

[Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai] used to say: ‘If there were a plant in your hand and they should say to you, ‘Look, the Messiah is here!’ Go and plant your plant, and after that go forth to receive him’ (‘Abot R. Nat. B 31; quoted from John T. Carroll et al. The Return of Jesus in Early Christianity. Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 2000, pp. 180-181)

So if, having considered questions (1) and (2), a preacher goes on to ask (3), "What if this remark reflects my own eschatological ideas, which I want to share in a convenient form with the faithful?" it seems to us that there are two good answers. Either attribute it to Yochanan ben Zakkai, or just say it yourself.

On the Sidebar

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

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

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

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

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

Adveniat Tempus Adventus

Like the proverbial month of March, Advent arrives like a lion and leaves like a lamb. It comes with talk of a fire kindled in the brushwood, and the stars falling from heaven; it leaves with an angel announcing new life to a fearless girl. A season could do worse for itself.

Lion-like, Advent comes roaring in with its annual debates and decisions. The one we care about these days is "Blue versus Purple"; the one about which don't care much anymore is "Can We Sing Christmas Songs."

The first question, about liturgical color, is meaningless on its surface. What possible difference could it make whether the paraments and stoles and whatnot are the violet customary in the Roman rite or the indigo purportedly found in a few northern rites? The answer, of course, is none; liturgical colors are as utterly adiaphoristic as it is possible to be.

And yet ... Whether with or without precedent, dark blue has been taken up by American churches in the past few decades, and called "the color of hope." This is surely a fair assignment; hope is a virtue of which Advent speaks conspicuously, whether in its lion-weeks or its lamb-weeks. Why should it not have its own color?

On the other hand, consider the role of Advent in the church's year. Historically, it was a late development; as the Christmas-to-Epiphany cycle emerged as a mirror image of Easter -- "Pasch in winter," it is sometimes called -- so eventually Advent was invented as an invernal "St. Martin's Lent." It was, and among the Orthodox its equivalent remains, a fast. It was likewise a time of penitence, of self-scrutiny and confession. Logically, as Christmas shares its color with Easter, while retaining a distinct character, so Advent shared its color with Lent.

It seems possible that, by changing the color of Advent, churches may also change its character. The analogy to Lent is broken, or at least vitiated. The question churches need to ask themselves is whether this is a good thing or a bad one. Some may celebrate a step away from a religion of guilt and gloom -- but others may regret the lost opportunity to offer discipline and self-restraint in the season of endless office parties and shopping binges.

We have swung both ways over the years, but lately we lean toward the latter. A violet Advent seems more deeply countercultural, and therefore more deeply useful.

As for songs, well, how much rhetorical blood has been spilt over the question of whether a few Christmas carols sung in early December will be an offense to Almighty God? Pastors struggle both with parishioners and consciences; music directors seem to divide down the middle, with Dr. Purist Noseintheair snarling at the populist leniency of Ms. Suzie Pedalpumper.

It makes us want to jump up and down shouting, "Hey, guys! You know they're only songs, right?" Songs are just as adiaphoristic as colors -- or for that matter seasons -- and yet for some reason they seem to draw many times the acrimony.

Once upon a time, in our idealistic youth, we sided with Dr. Noseintheair. No matter how the choir begged and the children cried, there would be no Christmas songs before Christmas! Father A. stood like St John the Baptist, fire in his eyes, decrying the generation of liturgical vipers. Frankly, we still prefer to hold Christmas off until Christmas; if nothing else, we like the way it builds suspense, like ketchup slowly working its way down the neck of a bottle. We compare it to such antepaschal customs as fasting, or veiling the crucifix, or omitting the Alleluia.

But here's the thing: Christmas songs are, by and large, about the Incarnation. And the Church is always celebrating the Incarnation, because (with the Resurrection) that's the center of the Church's very being -- the object of every sermon and every sacrament, the sine qua non of Christianity as a religion. To set them aside is, at least arguably, to risk setting aside the center of the faith in favor of its marginalia. We might as well spend Holy Week trying to forget the Resurrection (which, of course, some liturgical practices nearly do).

So if the question is: Can we sing Christmas songs during Advent?, we at the Egg are inclined to answer, with a heavy sigh, Yes, provided you would also sing them in Lent, or in mid-summer. Which, for many of the most beloved hymns, you would, could and maybe even should.

Historic Bibles Online

A few months ago, scrounging the net for a particular verse reading in the Coverdale Psalter -- tricky to find, if you care about spelling and punctuation -- we stumbled over something truly remarkable: a website featuring page-by-page photo-reproductions of historic Bibles.

Truly, friends, we live in astonishing times. A poor parish priest can sit in his study and flip pages through the first English New Testament, from 1390 -- as well as Erasmus' diglot, Luther's 1522 NT and his 1530 Bible, and plenty more. These are not easy books to find, even in reproduction. (And yes, the site is run by a company which does sell reproductions of historic Bibles, but even those ain't cheap. We've checked).

This is incredibly cool, at least for readers with an interest in incunabula, typography, and so forth. It's not perfect, of course. For example, the most important part of the Geneva Bible was its extensive annotation, which was sufficiently antiepiscopal and anitmonarchical to require a more C-of-E-friendly translation, duly commissioned by King James I. Well, the Geneva Bible is there, all right, but we couldn't zoom in close enough to read the notes as easily as we'd like. No problem on a bigger monitor, we expect. Also, the page includes Foxe's Book of Martyrs but not the Douay Bible. Showing bias much, guys?

Still, it's a striking site, and we'll click back often.

It's called Bibles-Online.net. The commercial site has the unhumble monicker Great-Site.com. And yet, for all our Lutheran disdain for self-promotion, we have to say that this is a pretty great site.

Shakespeare and the Albino Monks

A few nights back, Father A. slipped out to his local multiplex to see the film Anonymous. The beautiful Mother A. declined to accompany him, claiming that she would be too distracted by his growls, grimaces and muttered cursing. She is a wise woman.

By now, you have read the reviews, and know that Anonymous is a picture about the supposed conspiracy to pass off the illiterate son of a rural tradesman as the author of plays and sonnets which, it is assumed, could only have been written by a person of noble breeding and top-notch education. You surely realize as well that this assumption is malarkey. Shakespeare came from the rising middle class, and attended a grammar school with a curriculum that would put some modern American colleges to shame. Some of his fellow playwrights -- Marlowe and Jonson -- made much more strenuous efforts to show off their formal education. The idea that only a nobleman could have written Shakespeare's plays is baseless snobbery; the idea that a nobleman would have is dubious in the extreme.

The whole thing is a bit Da Vinci Code-esque. One half expects the conspiracy to be revealed by a Harvard "symbologist" pursued by albino monks.

Here's a nice Smithsonian piece which gets at the basic problem: we don't a lot of documentary evidence about the life of Shakespeare. To people accustomed to having their websurfing histories and credit-card reports meticulously processed by computers and sold to marketing departments, this sounds suspicious. No data trail? The man must not have existed! In fact, as the Smithsonian says,

We know as much about Shakespeare as we know about most of his contemporaries–Ben Jonson, for instance, remains such a cipher that we can’t be sure where he was born, to whom, or even exactly when. “The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position at that time,” says David Thomas of Britain’s National Archives. “It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him.”

In the absence of evidence, people are prone to make up stories. It is sweet, but also a little annoying.

All that said, Anonymous wasn't as bad as it might have been. The CGI sets are pretty, even though they seem to have been generated in black-and-white. There are a few bits of good acting, especially Rhys Ifans (the Earl of Oxford) and the daughter-mother team of Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (both as Elizabeth I). Sadly, Richardson is party to the most comically bad instance of mock-fellatio ever filmed, but one can only blame Roland Emmerich for this. The supposed "history" presented in the film is utterly bogus, but it does at least succeed in giving a sense of the endless succession of spies, plotters and bullies that constituted the great and good of Renaissance England.

Sadly, for a film about a writer of so many sparkling lines, the dialogue is tepid. The most compelling scene in Anonymous, by far, is Henry V's "ye band of brothers," played straight -- and every line save one is by Shakespeare.

But let's get back to the bogus history. The idea that Shakespeare did not write his own works emerged in the 19th century. Candidates for the "real" Shakespeare abound; the classic is probably Sir Francis Bacon, whom we had always assumed was chosen because he is the only other Elizabethan literary figure whose name is recognized by the average non-English-major. In fact, as a moment on Google reveals, the "Bacon" hypothesis was first put forward by a writer named Delia Bacon. What a ... coincidence.

Albino monks aside, there is in fact a funny theological twist to the story of the Shakespeare conspiracy. Readers surely know that in 1835, David Strauss published his Das Leben Jesu, which marked the beginning of the interminable "quest of the historical Jesus." One of the early responses to Strauss was Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, who in 1848 published a book called Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare, Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible. He was making fun of Strauss, mind you -- Schmucker knew perfectly well that Shakespeare had written his own works, just as he knew that Jesus had been Jesus. But he inadvertently gave ammunition to the crazy people.

(Aside to fellow Lutherans: Yes, this guy was the son of that Samuel Schmucker. The one we all hiss and boo like a stage villain. It is good to remember that by the standards of his own day, Schmucker pere was a confessional conservative, and that both his sons -- the other is the great Beale Melanchthon Schmucker -- turned out okay.)

The Smithsonian blog post linked above highlights one of the wee bits of Shakespearean data exhaust that scholars have preferred to overlook. Years ago, the Canadian scholar Leslie Hotson dug up a "surety of peace" -- something like an order of protection -- in which Shakespeare was named as part of a group that had made threats against the life of one William Wayte. A very close reading places Shakespeare in the middle of the London underworld, associated with pimps and strong-arm men. A "gangster," it calls him. Yes -- and who better to have written about Caesar's Rome and Macbeth's Scotland?

Occupy Bulevardul 21 Decembrie 1989?

We haven't had much -- anything -- to say about the movement to "occupy" civic spaces around the United States. In a nutshell, here's why:

Ever since the Egg relocated its production facility overseas, it has been a little hard to keep up with life back home. We still know the obvious things -- the name of the president and six Supreme Court justices; that Breaking Dawn is in the theaters now -- but we're fuzzy on the nuances. (What's a Glee? Who played in the World Series?) The upshot is that we don't really know what's going on, either at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, in Oakland, or at the seemingly hundreds of other franchises nationwide and in Canada.

Some of our muzziness reflects the deliberate muzziness of the protesters themselves. To be sure, income inequality is at the heart of the matter -- and inequality is made even more unequal when unemployment rates are so frighteningly high. (An old friend, a paralegal with many years of experience, was just laid off from her job at a foreclosure firm. Nobody is safe!)

But a complaint is not a prescription. There's no OWS platform as simple as, say, "America out of Viet Nam" or "End Apartheid Now." One gathers that this is the point; the movement has been purposefully decentralized and multifarious, a sort of big tent enclosing many shades of disenchantment.

Fr. William of the Beach has forwarded us several fine home videos of the scene in Manhattan, the most recent of which is posted below. Both the protesters and the police seem well-enough-behaved. (This is what we love about America, by the way. Cuz it ain't that way everywhere.)

But did you see the placards? A lot of somewhat general insistence upon liberty (which makes sense, when the protesters have been required to vacate the park, thus endangering their freedoms of speech and assembly), coupled with agitation around schools, the public library, and ... hormone replacement therapy?

As we said, multifarious. Hard to pin down.

Anyway, it all has us thinking about the place where we live. Romania has the fastest internet download speeds in Europe, but only about half the population has indoor plumbing. Economic inequality here is far more extreme than in the US. Unemployment is lower than the US, at least on paper -- but many "employed" people can't collect their paychecks, which would be pathetically small even if they could. The government is widely held to be both irresponsible and incompetent; the mayor of our own city was taken to jail last week, where he is awaiting trial on corruption charges. As for civil liberties, citizens of our own age and older were effectively raised without them, during the grim, repressive days of Nicolae Ceaucescu.

In 1989, there was a revolution. It wasn't the bloodiest revolution in history -- more like Tunisia than Syria, at the moment -- but it was bloody enough. People were shot down in the street. Flushed with optimism, people imagined that their world would change overnight. The name of our main street was changed from Lenin to the date date of the uprising. The world seemed, briefly, full of hope. And, twenty-one years on, things are certainly far better than they were; yet many of the promises remain unfulfilled. Frankly, a lot of the same people still hold power, either economic or political -- and a lot of the same people are still poor and powerless.

All this suggests to us that, for all the organizational wisdom that keeps the OWS movement free-form and many-headed, it must eventually lead to something more pointed if it is to have a lasting effect. It will need to produce policies and leaders; it will need to actively transform a broken political system, rather than settling for the observation that it is broken. Such things are possible, but they are very difficult, and comparatively rare.

Christ is Coming; Say Your Prayers

Readers have surely noticed that this is the week when the lectionary takes its annual turn toward the Apocalypse. Zephaniah tells us that, when God comes, "it will be a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, of wasteness and desolation, of darkness and gloom." St Paul mutters ominously about thieves in the night.

In other words, it is pre-Advent, the weeks during which the Church refreshes itself with some old-time fire and brimstone, a bracing reminder that the Day of the Lord isn't all about ponies and rainbows.

And -- watch this segue, friends, because it's going to be crass -- what better time to deepen your prayer life by buying Fr. A.'s new book?

The book in question is called Odd Hours. It's a Latin-English breviary -- or, technically, a diurnal -- with forms of Matins and Vespers for the different seasons of the church year. Compline, Suffrages and some of the Small Catechism prayers make an appearance as well. There's a complete Psalter, using (get this!) the Coverdale translation in its original spelling. Because, really, what do Protestants need more than a book of Latin prayers, translated into obsolete, archaic, and nearly unreadable English?

We'll say a lot more about Odd Hours in the next few weeks. We don't really expect to take the world by storm with this thing, but we do think there may be a few people who enjoy it. We think of the book as a work of "outsider art," which is the term dealers use these days for the "machines" and "castles" that crazy old men make in their basements out of tin cans.

Like a crazy man in the basement, Father A. didn't actually make any of the tin cans. He's been collecting them from other sources -- SBH, Vulgate, and lots of Internet Archive books -- and stacking them up in funny ways.

And like that same crazy man in the basement, Father A. has been working on this thing for many years, with a monomaniacal frenzy that has left his baby undiapered, his wife in despair, and his blog un-updated. It eventually drove him to exile in a windswept Carpathian stronghold. Having destroyed his family and his friendships, the monstrous project now in its final stages. Soon enough, you should be able to purchase a copy on Amazon (or, if that jacks up the price unreasonably, from the print-on-demand service Lulu.com). It will sell roughly for cost, but we aren't sure what that will be. We had hoped to have it available as a Christmas gift for the lunatic in your ecclesiastical attic, but it seems unlikely that we'll make the deadlines. Turns out Mother A. expects us to work between now and Christmas.

Until then, however, you can read -- and download, and pray -- Matins and Vespers for Advent, absolutely free, just by clicking here. We hope you will.

Twilight of the American Idols

A couple of balloons got deflated recently:

Idol #1: Rick Perry is no longer a viable candidate for the Republican nomination. He made a fool of himself in the most recent debate, struggling to remember even his canned threat against the Department of Energy. Afterward, Perry himself remarked that "It's a good a thing I was wearing my boots, because I really stepped in it." The guy is clearly not ready for prime time.

Since Perry is sitting on a big old pot of money, it is unlikely that he will slink away in defeat. It is likely that he will stay in the race, for all the usual ego-and-2016 reasons. If you ask Herman Cain, Perry has been trying to destroy him out of sheer meanness, and such a thing is not impossible. The real question is whether Perry's schadenfreude will extend to the destruction, attempted or complete, of Mitt Romney.

Idol #2: Joe Paterno. Needless to say, this is far more important than the mere presidency of the United States -- it's football. Paterno, who is 84 and probably should have retired years ago, was fired by Penn State for failing to take sufficient action when one of his assistant coaches was discovered raping a 10-year-old boy in the locker room.

The story is appalling on every possible level. Over 15 years, assistant coach Jerry Sandusky serially molested young boys, often using the Penn State athletic facilities to do so. He was observed doing this on several occasions, and by several people.

And let's be clear, this isn't a "sex scandal" in the same way that Bill Clinton's in-office adultery or Newt Gingrich's serial infidelity are. This goes well beyond even Herman Cain's alleged groping of an employee. Sandusky is accused of at least two counts of rape, a crime of violence -- in his case, against children. And to be sure, there is an element of scapegoating here; Paterno is only one of the many links in a chain or irresponsibility. After all, he reported the allegation to the administration, thereby doing the bare minimum to salve his conscience.

But as one of our friends, himself a professional athlete, observed this morning, Paterno -- a living legend so legendary that even Fr. A. has heard of him -- was in many ways superior to the administration at Penn State. For years, he has run his program like a medieval prince. If he had wanted Sandusky gone, the guy would have been gone in a heartbeat; if he had said a word, Sandusky would have been in prison. So why didn't he?

The Paterno case begs comparison to the scandals within the Roman Catholic Church. Paterno does indeed sound like one of those bishops who took little or no action against the reported abusers on their team. Paterno is also one of those sports figures who has often pontificated on "values." If anything, though, a coach of Paterno's stature has more power than the average bishop.

The Church's War on Filthy Lucre

John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, is the other highest-ranking cleric in the C of E. He is sometimes presented as a more reliable friend to theological conservatives than the brilliant but much-distracted Archbishop of Canterbury. This makes his piece in today's Yorkshire Post especially interesting, since he lashes out at the ultra-wealthy plutocrats who are so often admired by political conservatives.

Sentamu expresses his annoyance with the fact that FTSE 100 CEOs received average pay increases of nearly 50% last year, while the Western economy was in freefall. He argues that this is both illogical and socially destructive:

Top pay has been found to bear little or no relation to company performance, but even if it did, isn’t the performance of a company dependent on the work and well-being of all its staff?

Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are that they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive.

No argument, but nothing new, either. We are more interested by Sentamu's prescription for change, which is that society should, basically, stop honoring the rich. Encourage (but don't require) people to make public the amount of tax they pay; don't give the Queen's Award to Industry to CEOs so much as to whole companies, and especially don't give it to people who are already rich.

On their face, these suggestions are laughably weak tea, but they move toward an important idea. Prestige, social status, "cool" -- these are all names for the same basic commodity, and it is extremely valuable. Prestige ranks with sex and money as one of the great motivators of human activity. Now, in life as we know, it these things are often companions; people with one have easier access to the other two. But there are exceptions. At least early in the game of life, the cool kid with no money has a better shot at the pretty girl than the well-off jerk.

So what if being rich weren't cool? That's what Sentamu seems to be proposing here. What if honor were not publicly held to accrue to wealth, but rather to, say, activities that improve society? It's utopian, but it could happen. As he observes, it wasn't that long ago that "honor" among the English (and French, and Italian) aristocracy meant killing each other in duels.

Of course, honor in society isn't all about wealth. Bill Gates may be richer than Steve Jobs ever was, but until he started his Foundation, there was zero chance he could ever be as cool. But let's be serious: each of these guys enjoys a social status unimaginable even to some otherwise remarkable people -- most Nobel prizewinners, for example, or virtually any serious artist. or, and this is closer to Sentamu's point, the people who actually do the science, engineering and labor that make Microsoft and Apple what they are.

Sentamu's ideas don't seem all that well thought through, but we think he's onto something.

There is nothing new about Christianity taking the side of the poor against the rich -- you are preaching on the Beatitudes this Sunday, aren't you? Take a look at the Anglo-Catholic Socialism website linked on the sidebar for another reminder, or remember that the cause of Archbishop Romero is still working its way through the Congregation.

And yet Archbishop Sentamu's essay follows by only two weeks a statement on global finance by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace which has managed to offend many of the right people. (George Weigel dismissed it as "rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.") While we haven't had a chance to read the statement yet, we gather that it's a bit confused. Still, strong newsmaking public signs of what Christians know but other people forget -- the Church's concern for the poor -- are always welcome.

Down With Skool

(With gratitude to Nigel Molesworth).

A college education in the United States may very well be a colossal waste of money and education. Evidence has been mounting for years that college is overpriced. It doesn't actually prepare most people for, you know, work. Drop-out rates are high, and whether students finish a degree or not, they are left to begin adult life with crippling debt. And don't get us started on graduate school.

There's a review essay by Anthony Grafton at the NYRB, and it's sobering stuff, albeit familiar. Grafton is critical of some recent books, especial those which go after professors, and which seem to fall short of particulars, but he signs on to the general picture. Today's students study impossibly few hours; they read little, care less, and appear to gain no long-term benefit, financial or otherwise. Universities (Rutgers is mentioned in particular) starve their academic departments to feed the unprofitable pursuit of football glory.

Grafton is especially impressed by a test called the College Learning Assessment, which seeks to measure student progress -- of which it finds little:

The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

(Grafton does not mention one factor that may deter professors from assigning as many term papers as they once did. Our own brief college teaching experience shocked us by revealing how thoroughly the Internet has abetted the age-old instinct to plagiarize, so thoroughly that students of seemingly reasonable intelligence seemed unable to distinguish between "writing" and "pasting." Surely few professors want to set up shop as full-time investigators of academic criminality.)

Notably, Grafton makes an exception -- or rather, the data make an exception -- for the liberal arts:

Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Just as we would have expected. In our day, by gum, students read books and wrote papers, mostly about Shakespeare and Wittgenstein. (Or was it von Kleist and Rembrandt? After all these years, we sort of forget).

Mind you, the CLA measures things like critical thinking, and many a liberal arts graduate has had time to think critically about, say, the meaning of the unemployment line.