Who Would Jesus Vomit Because Of?

Or WWJVBO.  It's on the bracelets they give out at Luther League keggers.

Okay, it's going to take us a while to explain that remark.  Let's begin by saying that Father  Anonymous is tone-deaf.  Technically, it's more like tone-mute:  he hears the notes just fine.  They just come out wrong.  Horribly, horribly wrong.  This has been a blight on his life since childhood, and it has only grown blightier since he was ordained.  Turns out there's a lot of music in church services, something nobody had really explained before he sent in his box-tops.

But there's another pastor out there who is far more tone-deaf.  Not so much in the musical sense as in the metaphorical, "this-guy-can't-read-the-signs-of-the-times" sense.

The Rev. Ken Pagano, of New Bethel Church (Assemblies of God) in Louisville, Kentucky, has organized an "Open Carry Church Service" for later this month.  The things to be carried are firearms.  In church.

At the event, Pr. Pagano is  "encouraging people to wear unloaded guns in their holsters, enter a raffle to win a free handgun, hear patriotic music and listen to talks by operators of gun stores and firing ranges."

So let's get this straight.  A few weeks after a man is shot dead while handing out worship bulletins in church, the people of New Bethel decide to mark this tragedy by hosting a "bring your gun to church" day?  

You see our point about tone-deafness.  It's as if a church had begun Advent of 1963 by hosting a "Cromwell Kills the Catholics" commemoration.  (You know, after JFK).   Or Easter of 1968 with a mock-lynching.  (You know, after MLK).

There's a little more to the story, as reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal.  First off, the  the presentations by gun salesmen seem to smack of moneychangers in the temple.  More to the point, though, the event was publicized by a poster using red letters that looked for all the world like spattered and dripping blood.  Tone-deafness, anybody?  (Pagano's explanation is that the lettering was "just a font somebody developed."  Um, yes.  Rather the point, isn't it?  Somebody developed a font that looked like blood spatter.)

Now, Pagano doesn't seem crazy or wicked.  He's an ex-Marine, and chaplain to the police department, so we assume that he's personally pretty comfortable with guns; he serves a parish in the Red States, so it doesn't surprise us that he's got a few members who are likewise.  No harm in that.  Still, the various quotations in the story are all about the Bill of Rights, and not about Jesus.  This concerns us, since the message of the Gospel isn't really one of vigorous and lethal self-defense.  Those who live by the sword, and all that.  When the Lord said "blessed are the peacemakers," we're virtually certain he didn't mean the Colt Single-Action Army revolver.   

The story quotes a number of religious leaders who object to the planned event, and they're always good for a chuckle too.  Our favorite is the Rev. Nancy Jo Kemper, who says that it "would nauseate Jesus."  We aren't entirely sure of her evidence there -- few scholars of our acquaintance have ventured to speculate upon the gastrointestinal reactivity of the Incarnate God -- but we do take her point.  

Still, we can't get the thought out of her head:  Would Jesus truly be nauseated by this?  And if he were, would he just throw up in a corner, politely?  Or would he make a big scene, tossing his cookies on the front steps of the church?  

This, we think, is a great conversation starter for your parish youth group:  WWJVBO?  Try it this week, and tell us how it goes.

Better Man Than I Am, Gunga Din

A man in a ski mask and swinging a baseball bat tried to rob a convenience store near us this week.  But the owner had a rifle, and was prepared to stop him.

The robber collapsed into tears, and said he was turning to crime in order to feed his family.  So the owner put down his rifle and gave the guy $40.  Then he talked to the robber about his religion, effected an on-the-spot conversion, and sent him on his way.

This being the 21st century, the owner was a Muslim, who came here from Pakistan 20 years ago.  The robber -- who has now formally professed Islam -- cannot be identified, because of his mask.

It's a touching story, and a reminder of how converts are supposed to be made. 

Newsflash: Cheney Takes Complete Responsibility for His Crimes

Gotcha.  Actually, he takes no responsibility.  And blames everybody else.

The former Veep's current media blitz seems to be less about national security than about a defense -- naturally, a pre-emptive defense -- against the legal proceedings he must believe are coming down the road.  After all, he has said upfront, albeit belatedly, that "I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence, that [Saddam Hussein] was involved in 9/11."  After years of claiming otherwise, this pretty much cedes any claim he might have to actual security expertise, not to mention sound judgment or basic humanity. 

So if he doesn't have any secret insider dope to help protect our country, what's Cheney blathering on about all the time?

Answer:  Why the mess he made is everybody else's fault.  First, he started by blaming the Obama Administration, which is just weird.  The new president didn't order the war, the torture, or the renditions.  He's trying to clean up the mess he was left with, and everybody knows that.  Cheney went on to blame then-CIA head George Tenet.   Now he's also blaming Richard Clarke.  And Heaven knows there's plenty of blame to go around the former administration, but here're the problems:   

(a) Tenet and the CIA have been pretty clear that their intelligence was always murky. Spooks always are, because it always is. House of mirrors, and all that. Could they have been more discriminating, and tried to make sure that a dimwitted president read it with all the usual espionage caveats?  Probably.  But they weren't the ones who decided to launch a war based on it, nor to present it to the public (and the UN) as if it were all more solid than it ever was.  

And (b) Clarke seems to have been the only one in the administration who was actually worried about al Quaeda before 9/11, and the only one who actually resisted the facile link of 9/11 to Iraq.  Could he have been more vocal about his concerns?  Sure.  He could have grabbed the president by the lapels and shouted "Listen to me, you idiot mama's boy," with spittle flying every which way.  That would have been 0.03 seconds before the Secret Service shot him dead.

No, those guys did their jobs.  The spies gathered intel, the antiterrorism advisor gave advice.  The only person who didn't do his job -- who exceeded it in every conceivable way -- was Cheney.  Because, after all, what is a vice-president's job?  To wake up every morning, read the paper, and check on the president's health.  Ask if there are any tie votes in the Senate.  Then go back to sleep. Imagine how much better the last eight years would have been had the vice-president actually stuck to the job description provided for him by the Constitution.  (Or, come to think of it, shown any other interest in the Constitution.)

So it's pretty clear that Cheney is breaching the customary protocol (of keeping your mouth shut while a new administration gets to work) not in any effort to enhance our security, but in an effort to distance himself from blame.  Within a few months -- or weeks, at this rate -- we fully expect him to say, in public, "Don't blame me; it was the President who commanded the troops."  And again, he'll be half-right.  That's how it would have worked in a well-ordered government.

Sacrilege in Wichita

Nobody likes abortion.  Even the most passionate advocates of a woman's right to make her own decision on the matter don't like it.  They just like other things less.  And polls have consistently shown that, the closer to term an abortion is contemplated, the more people dislike it.  Many people who consider first-trimester procedures to be ethically acceptable believe those in the third trimester to be murderous.  And then other people don't.

But here's the thing:  Walking into a church on Sunday morning and blowing a guy's heart out of his chest is universally recognized to be murder.  It is also an especially vicious, pointedly sacrilegious, form of murder.  The killer was was seeking to desecrate a sacred place, by purposefully committing a terrible sin in the midst of a community gathered to celebrate forgiveness.  

Most readers will already have prayed for the soul of Dr. George Tiller, and perhaps for the soul of his murderer as well.  Please remember in your prayers as well the pastors and people of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas.  Pray that in the face of this monstrous evil they do not lose faith, or hope, or love.

Good Novelist, Questionable Critic

Apart from sharing the widespread conviction that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel, at least prior to The Watchmen, we rarely think much about George Eliot.  Truth be told, the intellectual depth and social breadth of Middlemarch intimidate us a bit.  We read it back in seminary, and are still haunted by the Roman honeymoon, and feel some of our own academic work to be rightly damned by the Key to All Mythologies.  We have never read any of her other novels, for fear of drowning in them.

Still, we are interested in the topic of Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book on Daniel Deronda, which attempts to explain how Eliot could have developed "her profound imaginative sympathy for the Jews."  It is reviewed, with great admiration, in the Weekly Standard, linked above.

Of even more interest, to us at least, is the first half of the review, which proposes that Bloomsbury's contemptuous dismissal of the Victorians has finally come under a much-deserved review, and that the Victorians are winning.  Lytton Strachey 

... mocked Victorian earnestness, debased Victorian energy, and lacerated what he took to be the essential hypocrisy of the Victorians and their pretense to an elevated spirit leading on to good works  and with his his co-conspirators made  making the Victorians seem little more than a roster of prudish neurotics dedicated to nothing grander than sexual repression.  

But these days, at least according to Joseph Epstein, 

... the Victorians have regained their rightful stature, and this owing in great part to the work of the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb [who has] reminded us how genuinely eminent the Victorians were. Darwin, Macaulay, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, the Brontës, Matthew Arnold, Thackeray, Ruskin, Newman, Trollope, Acton, Tennyson, Browning, Bagehot, Disraeli, Gladstone, the cavalcade of Victorian genius is greater than that of any other period in any other nation in the history of the world. 

We quite like this, and would agree entirely if it were not the Weekly Standard talking about Gertrude Himmelfarb.  The review is smarmily uncritical, which comes as a small surprise until you remember that Himmelfarb's son, William Kristol, is the Standard's editor.  The fact that Kristol is also a prize ass, and among the most despicable of the era's neocon talking heads, is no reflection upon Himmlefarb's scholarship, whatever it may say about her parenting skills.  Nonethless, her scholarship -- and, specifically, the matter of whether it is skewed by her political convictions -- is open to question.

The danger with Himmelfarb is that, like any other neocon, her view of the world is shaped by despair over the supposed libertinism of the 1960s leftists.  In her case, this becomes a a somewhat uncritical admiration for the supposedly higher morality of the Victorian social and religious reformers.

There is a lot to be said for this idea, although we are not at all sure George Eliot -- a bit scandalous in her time -- is the best subject with which to make the point.  We are more concerned about Lord Acton, a subject of Himmelfarb's previous work and these days an icon of the right for his apparent championship both of free markets and of an independent-minded Catholicism that dared to say "no" to Vatican I.  And yet this Acton, as Marilynne Robinson contends in her fine Death of Adam, deliberately misrepresented Calvinism (and by extension, all of Protestantism) in an effort to claim, in essence, "that while Protestants did not in fact engage in oppression at nearly the same rate Catholics did, their theology required it, while Catholic theology did not, [and therefore] Protestantism is peculiarly the theology of persecution."

Okay, okay.  It's still guilt by association.  We don't exactly mean to suggest that since Acton lied about his ideological rivals, Himmelfarb does as well.  That would be both scurrilous and improbable.  But we will point out that smart writers with strong ideological perspectives often wind up deceiving first themselves, and then their readers.

Time permitting, we'd be happy to read Daniel Deronda first, and then whatever Himmelfarb has to say about it.  But we would read both with suspicion, because as Epstein finally mentions, George Eliot barely knew any Jews -- and because Himmelfarb is part of a political movement with a tenuous grasp on reality.

And, as to the larger point, we have this to say:  we are stunned by the vigor and, yes, the moral imperative behind much of Victorian culture. It was an era of giants.  But it was also an era of hypocrisy and moral turpitude, often dressed up as arts and letters.  The repressed and thwarted sexuality of the Anglo-Catholics, from Newman to Christina Rossetti, is part of their charm -- but the charm is lost when one tries to transfer all that into present-day politics and culture.  Nor, by any means, was all Victorian sexuality repressed.  Swinburne, anybody?

Upon sober consideration, we have to suggest that hero-worship (ideological or otherwise) is not the best approach either to history-writing or to literary studies.  It is on balance more dangerous even than its opposite, the iconoclastic school of scholarship which seeks to destroy all heroes by trampling on their feet of clay.  The latter is mean-spirited and unpleasant to read; but the former leads to a Weems-like confabulation which is, in its way, even more destructive to truth. 

Whitsunday, Anyone?

Should any of our clerical readers be casting about for something to say in a Pentecost sermon, we propose re-reading some favorite poems.  

Auden's "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten," which is apparently not available online because of copyright protection, contains the unforgettable tag, "if there when Grace dances, I should dance." 

Dana Gioa's "Pentecost," subtitled "after the death of our son," is as difficult to read as a short poem written in straightforward English can be.  It would take a preacher made of sterner stuff than we to use this homiletically without growing maudlin.  But think of it as a background reading, a reminder of why God's presence in the world matters.

Derek Walcott has a poem -- same title -- that we take to be a meditation upon the sense of foreignness one feels, sometimes, in a land different from one's own.  (Auden covers this more theologically).  Worth a look, especially for the thought that "nor can these tongues of snow / speak for the Holy Ghost."

There are many others, but the one that grabbed our attention (and which will feature in our own Sunday sermon) is George Herbert's "Whitsunday."  It is a plea directed toward the Spirit, to be present in the world now -- and a complaint that God's presence is not now as evident as in the age of miracles:  "Where is that fire which once descended / On thy Apostles?  thou didst then / keep open house ...."

The stanza that really grabbed us this time around, however, is one of three that Herbert wrote and then cut from his final version:

Show yt thy brests can not be dry,

But yt from them joyes purle for ever

Melt into blessings all the sky,

So wee may cease to suck: to praise thee, never.

The general idea of God as a nursing mother was not rare in Herbert's time (nor was it the least bit new).  But this particular image -- the fear of being weaned -- touches us deeply just now.  Perhaps because Baby Anonymous still takes such delight in nursing.

Your Correspondent Is A Bit Concerned

Years ago, fresh out of seminary, Father Anonymous served a congregation with a proud history, a gorgeous Gothic building, a fine worship tradition, a little money tucked away -- and a long trail of bitter conflict.

Things didn't go well.  Fr. A was not the the font of pastoral wisdom he has since become.  He spoke his mind, he tried to fix things -- and, truth be told, he probably made them worse.  The level of conflict in the parish was tragicomically high.  We still remember the week that a communicant attempted to stab an usher during Holy Communion.  yes, that's right  stab with a knife.  In the guts.   We remember even more sadly the response of the Congregation Council, which was not to condemn both men for their gross misbehavior, nor to invite them into a process of public repentance and reconciliation, but rather to choose sides.  Half the Council sided with the stabber, half with the stabbee.

Father Anonymous left soon afterward, despairing of his ability to preach the Gospel in such a way that those who heard him bore good fruit.

The best thing he did, during this unhappy period, was to invite a team of outside consultants to come and work with the congregation, attempting to interpret its history through the lens of Murray Bowen's theory concerning how families (and other groups) operate systemically.  The congregation may not have been ready to learn this stuff, but Fr. A was, and it became the focus of his attention for several years thereafter.

Oh, and he did one other thing of which he is still proud.  On his way out the door, he made it clear, both to his bishop and to the bishop's assistant tasked with filling vacant pulpits, that this congregation was deeply troubled.  "It requires," he said, "an experienced interim pastor, acquainted with parish conflict.  And under no circumstances should a pastor fresh from seminary be sent here.  Under no circumstances."

Within a few months, the bishop's office offered a new pastor to this parish.  She was intelligent, mature, well-trained -- and fresh from seminary.  Three years later, having suffered terrible personal costs, not least the breakup of her marriage, she left.  (She has done very well since then, because she's a damn good pastor.  That's not the point.)  Shortly afterward, the congregation entered the final stages of its long downward spiral, and it now essentially dissolved.  Cost our synod a fortune in legal bills, too.  

They didn't listen, and Fr. A has not forgotten.

In the years since, Fr. A has often remarked that he was working to become the pastor that congregation had originally needed.  He has served several parishes in interim positions, starting with one which had experienced minor conflict, moving to one which had experienced significant long-term conflict, and most recently requesting one from which four consecutive pastors had left amid turmoil.  

This last has been the best of the bunch.  It has the most engaging membership and the best location.  It has -- we may as well say it -- a proud history, a gorgeous Gothic building, a fine worship tradition, a little money tucked away.  And a long trail of bitter conflict.

Naturally, Fr. A believes that this is not a good place for a newly ordained pastor.  Great people, great neighborhood, plenty of reason to expect good things.  But the administrative load is very heavy, complicated by the urgent need to raise about $3.5 million over ten years, and to execute a massive restoration of three buildings.  And although the level of conflict has been very low, even still water has sharks swimming beneath it.  Four consecutive pastors.

Fr. A has made all this clear, in as much detail as he can muster, to the people who make the decisions.  He has given his advice:  Don't send a seminarian.  Beyond that, Fr. A is honor-bound not to interfere with the process.  Now there is nothing left to do but wait and pray.

So now we wait, and see if they are listening yet.

Episcopalians Lower Their Standards ... Again.

Father Alberto Cutie, "Padre Oprah," has been received into the Episcopal Church, and is taking steps toward the priesthood.  This comes after the well-known South Florida radio personality was revealed to be violating his vow of celibacy.

The Roman Catholic archdiocese is understandably ticked off.  It released a statement which said, in part,

Father Cutie's actions have caused grave scandal within the Catholic Church, harmed the Archdiocese of Miami -- especially our priests -- and led to division within the ecumenical community and the community at large.  Today's announcement only deepens those wounds.

There was also a suggestion that ecumenical cooperation would be harmed (although we doubt the truth of this, beyond a few symbolic events which may be canceled).

Now, let's be clear.  We at the Egg don't believe that clerical celibacy is an especially good thing.  Frankly, it sets the bar unnecessarily high, and increases the likelihood of scandals just like this one (or worse).  Marriage exists among Christians, in part, because God does not want us to burn with lust -- it is a means of creating accountability and fidelity while defending against the temptation of promiscuity.   Historically, clerical celibacy was an idea promoted by the West and, repeatedly, opposed by the East.  Even in the West, there was only a fairly short period -- from the eleventh century to the sixteenth -- when the rule was universally accepted.

So Fr. Cutie has broken a rule for which we don't really care.  On the other hand, he has broken the rule  -- violated his vow and, considerably worse, he did not himself take action to deal with it, either by breaking off the relationship or by requesting a return to lay status.  Instead, he waited until he was caught, and created a scandal.

Is this the sort of priest the Episcopal Church wants in its ranks?  We would have thought that they already had enough trouble with disobedient and self-righteous clergy.

We are reminded of another Roman Catholic with a high public profile, who some years ago revealed to the world that he was, in his own self-dramatizing phrase, "a gay American."  He didn't do this immediately after a strangely delayed sexual awakening; he did it when faced with legal threats of sexual harassment from a former paramour -- and after having deceived, for years, his second wife.  Not a first youthful mistake, mind you -- his second wife.

Ex-governor Jim McGreevey was also received into the PECUSA, and is also reported to be taking steps toward ordination.  (There are rumors, for the truth of which we cannot vouch, that his path so far has cleared a bit in comparison to that of other seminary students.  Not made more difficult, as one might expect -- but made easier.)

The fact that both men were guilty of sexual misconduct is relevant here, if only from a legal perspective.  Churches these days are under tremendous scrutiny (ask our insurance broker), and sadly this is a well-deserved scrutiny.  Whether they are prone to diddle the altar boys or the pretty young maidens is beside the point; people who have demonstrated difficulty in maintaining appropriate sexual boundaries expose their churches to an elevated level of risk.  (Not to mention the risk they may pose to the faith of church members).

But beyond that, there are the fundamental questions of character.  Mistakes, once made and confessed, can and must be forgiven.  But it is also fair for a church body to ask whether it wants as clergy people who have demonstrated difficulty in following the most basic rules, and keeping their most fundamental promises.

And it is fair to ask why the Episcopal Church seems to untroubled by these characters. 

New Swedish Bishop --And She Likes Girls

The Rev. Eva Brunne was elected yesterday to be the new Bishop of Stockholm.  We congratulate her!

Bishop-elect Brunne will face more than the usual challenges, and more than the usual scrutiny.  Her church is in the process of deciding what position to take on the matter of same-sex marriage, which is already recognized by the civil authority.  The bishop herself lives with another woman, the Rev. Gunilla Linden.  They have a three-year-old son.  According to the French news report linked above, their union "has been blessed by the Church."

There will be questions beyond the strict confines of the Swedish church.  Brunne is the first lesbian known to hold a position of such authority in any church body.  It is hard to know what impact her election will have on her church's ecumenical partners -- or, of particular concern to us, on the Lutheran World Federation.

Pro Multis? Really?

Roman Catholic traditionalists are crowing because the new standards for translation require the Words of Institution to say that the blood of Christ is poured out "for many," rather than -- as has become customary in recent years -- "for all."  The latest news (linked above) is that this becomes mandatory in Hungary this coming Sunday.  According to NLM, linked above, priests have actually been sent little adhesive labels to stick over the "current erroneous translation" in their present missals.

The matter is worth considering.  We ourselves grew up with "the New Testament in my blood, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins."  You know how it is with ritual incantations:  the first learned are deepest rooted, and nothing else will ever sound quite right.  (Which is why, for example, "debts" will never outpace "trespasses.")  So let us confess up front that we are not without bias.

Nonetheless, there are problems with this translation.  Some are easy -- the SBH put initial capitals on "New Testament."  This can't possibly be right; the New Testament is a book, which when Jesus spoke had not yet been compiled.  What the Lord offered in his blood was, rather, a new testament, comparable (albeit vastly superior) to the testaments (or covenants) with Noah and Abraham. The two are connected -- one describes the other -- but they are not identical.  (The counter-argument is that we often capitalize "Word of God" when intending either the Scriptures or the Lord.  That's another mistake, but a harder one to correct).

As for the words "for many," they are indeed an accurate literal translation of "pro multis" in the Editio Typica, and (more significantly) of "hyper pollon" in Mark 14:24.  So it is easy to see why the traditionalists at NLM reveal so much indignation about the "erroneous" translation.

The problem is that translation is a complex art.  Anyone who has ever tried to translate a few simple passages from Scripture has had to choose between literal and idiomatic renderings -- what are sometimes called "formal equivalency" and "dynamic equivalency."  (Using formal equivalence, we would say in French that Dick Cheney is a batarde; but that would really be an aspersion upon his parentage which we are unprepared to support.  What we mean to say is that he is a salaud.)

Kittel, our preferred guide to the complexities of Biblical Greek, argues at some length that polloi in the New Testament is generally used inclusively, and always so with reference to the saving work of Jesus.  For example, in Mark 1:34, Jesus is said to heal "some" of the sick people around him; but both synoptic parallels amend this to read "all" of them, suggesting that this is how the developing tradition understood the Greek word.  The argument proffered by Joachim Jeremias hinges on the connection of the key verses to Isaiah 53:12 (NRSV:  "and he bore the sin of many"), and on the fact that Hebrew, lacking a precise verbal equivalent for "all" (in the sense of each individual; qol works for the totality of a thing), sometimes uses "many" to say "all."

Both translations, it seems to us, have a legitimate case.  Beyond both, of course, lies the fundamental question of for whom, precisely, we be believe that Jesus shed his blood.  All people?  Most people?  A chosen few?  144,000?  This is a difficult place where one wants to shape doctrine according to the text, and yet finds oneself with little choice but to do the reverse.  That said, and despite our nostalgic preference, we have to suggest that the blood of Christ was in fact shed for all people -- even those who reject it, and those (if any) who may not in the event derive any benefit from it.

Dept. of No Surprise: Scientologist is Crazy, Tells Lies

Since 2006, Congress has been considering (and re-considering) something called by various names, including "the Mother's Act," to provide money for screening, diagnosis and treatment of post-partum depression.  This is a sensible public-health policy initiative.  And a high-profile  religious fanatic is opposing it with a combination of lies and dogma.

Good news:  she's not one of ours.

Kirstie Alley may not be Tom Cruise, but she is a well-known performer (Cheers and Fat Actress) and a well-known follower of mediocre science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard's mediocre effort at creating a new religion, the perversely named Scientology.

Glenn Thrush at Politico reprints a series of tweets that Alley has sent out, which claim that the bill in question would require mothers to accept psychoactive medications, and give them to their children, if a doctor prescribed them.  This appears to be false.  It also includes some loony stuff about "squirting Prozac into the eyes of newborns."  This appears to be nuts.

The real issue, obviously, is that Scientology does not accept the use of psychiatric medications.  This is their right, we suppose, just as Christian Science doesn't care for medication at all, nor Jehovah's Witnessism for blood transfusions.  (Insert crack about Roman Catholicism/"Evangelicalism"and abortion/stem cells/cloning here).  Unlike the Christian Science or Jehovah people, Scientology has a well-worked out strategy of using prominent entertainers to publicize its preferences.

Their legal right, yes indeed.  But isn't there some legal device for holding people accountable for outright lies?  Like, say, laws about libel?

"The Death of Kings"

That's the title of a fascinating, if impressionistic, New Yorker piece on the financial meltdown, by Nick Paumgarten.  Sadly, it's available only to subscribers.  Still, it's full of great stuff, including many thumbnail sketches of people whose lives are so different from our own that we would otherwise  find them unimaginable.

And this.  Regarding collateralized debt obligations, the overpriced assets once widely marketed as securities, Paumgarten recalls a blunt critique:  "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit."  And then, reflecting on the fact that government "regulation" depended upon the rating of such securities by rating agencies that were funded by the banks themselves, he says:

It is true:  the peddlers of of the chicken shit paid to have it magically pronounced chicken salad, a conflict of interest that most investors ignored.

Okay, Harold Ross is squirming uncomfortably in his grave.  But it does make the point.

Petraeus Backs Gitmo Closure

Gen. David Petraeus, anointed by the former Republican Congress as Allied Supreme Commander of Everything and Lord of All Our Future Political Aspirations, is personally committed to interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Conventions, and with closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Colin Powell is already on record as saying similar things.  So has Wesley Clark.  So did John McCain, before his recent (and typically dishonorable) flip-flop.

Do you see a pattern here?  Actual military officers -- the experts on effective conduct of war -- say torture is bad strategy and Gitmo has long since become counterproductive.  Meanwhile, chickenhawk draft-dodgers like Dick Cheney strut around saying the opposite, with (in Cheney's case) an ever-increasing air of desperation.

Dept. of No Surprise: Lousy Hermenuetics Division

By now, Egg readers are probably aware that Donald Rumsfeld pandered to George W. Bush's religious beliefs as a way of building presidential support for the Iraq invasion, by headlining military intelligence briefings with Biblical quotations.

We are shocked by the depth of Rumsfeld's cynicism, as well as by the apparent shallowness of Bush's understanding of Christianity.  But neither of those is news.

What is news, although by no means a surprise, is that many of the Biblical quotations were taken out of context, in some cases badly enough to reverse their meaning.  The "armor of God" from Ephesians has always been prone to misunderstanding, and it was misunderstood.  And of another verse, Scott Alexander, director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, says: 

As a Christian, I am deeply troubled that a verse such as Isaiah 6:8 -- a verse about a great prophet's call to indict his own people for their infidelity . . . is being presented as a divine call for the U.S. to invade Iraq. 

Well.  This is how fanaticism works:  the dim, misled by the wicked into a corrupt understanding of their Scriptures, commit acts of unnecessary violence.  And nobody ever thinks to consult the experts -- you know, people with special training in the interpretation of difficult ancient texts.  We're embarrassed, both as Americans and as Christians; we're angry; we're bitter.  But we're not surprised.

Schaden-Friday

Okay, it's Saturday.  But we needed a catchy header.

The Rev. Don Armstrong is among the self-described "conservative" or "orthodox" priests who have left the PECUSA to form their own mini-denomination, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, in which women can be ordained as priests but not bishops and gay people may keep quiet.

He is also, according to a grand jury indictment, a thief.

Armstrong, the long-time pastor of a parish in Colorado Springs, is accused of using church money to pay the college expenses of his two children, including their rent and tuition.  In 2007, an ecclesiastical court found him guilty of financial and pastoral misconduct to the tune of $400,000, and he was "removed from the active ministry."  Coincidentally (ahem), it was also in 2007 that Armstrong joined CANA.

The current indictment accuses him of stealing $291,000 from a trust and, later, from general church funds.

It has been a bad few months for Armstrong, jurisprudentially speaking.  His schismatic congregation had hoped to obtain possession of the $17 million church property, which a judge has now ruled they must turn over to the diocese.

Look, we know it happens in the best of families, yadda-yadda.  But what we're really wondering is why CANA let this guy in.  Do they have some evidence that of the guy's innocence?  Do they simply not care about the Seventh Commandment (or Eighth, by the Prayer Book count)?  Were they perhaps swayed by the prospect of a $17 million church property?

We hate to be Father One-Note, but we are reminded of another schismatic church body, which left its parent denomination with great fanfare, over issues in which politics and theology blended uncertainly.  They too claimed, and not entirely without reason, that "we didn't leave our church; our church left us."  Subsequent experience has suggested that some of the most compelling and apparently gifted of these schismatics were not entirely well-adjusted, emotionally speaking.  We wonder what would happen if CANA's clergy were to take, say, the MMPI en masse.  (Or after Mass, if that were more convenient).

Rubrical Alert UPDATE

Lay readers are invited to skip this next bit, which falls somewhere between "inside baseball" and "liturgical trivia."

After we reminded readers to extinguish their paschal candles on Ascension Day, a rubrically alert reader commented on our "Rubrical Alert," suggesting -- well, declaring -- that in fact we ought not extinguish the candles, but rather move them to the baptismal font where they should be lit until Pentecost.

Our answer was, basically, that the rubrics vary.  The old custom was as we described it; the trend since the 1960s has been toward the practice our reader described.  The Roman rubrics definitely call for leaving it lit (we can find nothing in GIRM, but this is the consistent order of various diocesan newsletters), as do the the rubrics of the Episcopal Church (BCP).  The Lutheran rubrics (LBW) are more conservative, perhaps because they have been updated least recently.  They permit the candle either to be extinguished after the Gospel on Ascension Day or to burn through Pentecost, and then to be moved to the font. (Philip Pfatteicher, perhaps thinking wishfully, says that LBW "leans toward" the older use but "allows" the newer.  And ELW seems to give no direction.)

Any conversation like this is complicated by the different ways that rubrics are understood.  Among Roman Catholics, they have theoretically something like the force of law; among Lutherans, they have scarcely any authority at all.  (And are frequently written in such a namby-pambily permissive fashion that, even if they had any true authority, they would say little).  In the interest of ecumenical amity, we will allow our Anglican readers to tell us themselves how much weight rubrics carry these days.

But let's talk for a moment as if there were no rubrics, only thoughtful choices.  Which practice is best?

Consider the internal logic.  The candle itself, with its five grains of incense, is a reminder of Christ's wounded body -- and thence of his physical presence after the Resurrection.   The custom of extinguishing (or removing) it after the Gospel -- or sometimes after the lesson from Acts -- grows logically from this.  Why do you stand here looking for him, o (ahem) persons of Galilee?  The older practice makes good sense, although it may suffer from a bit of medieval literalism.

The idea of the new practice is to recognize that the Easter season is a full 50 days, and represents the manifestation of the triune God in the world, including the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  It dates to an era in which the meaning of the Easter season was reinterpreted, to throw less emphasis upon the drama of personal repentance than upon that of new life for the world.  (A rethinking of Lent is the most obvious expression of this same urge).  A former tendency to circumscribe the 50 Days was specifically rejected, both by renumbering the Sundays of (not "after") Easter, and by using the Paschal Candle as the symbol of of a unitary 50-day season.  This is a worthy goal, but we wonder whether the Paschal Candle is in fact the best symbol for such a thing.

Here is an article from the Prayer Book Society, recognizing that among Anglicans, the 50-day Paschal Candle has prevailed, but arguing passionately that it ought not.  Fr. Peter Toon makes a number of dubious arguments, boiling down to "tradition is good."  But he ends by making a single very good one,  that the new custom "strengthens the modern tendency to discount the importance of the Ascension and to dilute the reality of the Resurrection of its physical aspects."  That's no small thing, in the modern era.

Lutherans manage to show a remarkable lack of good liturgical sense.  Still, it seems to us (and we are biased) that this is is one that the LBW got right, albeit in the namby-pambiest way possible.  The still-newish custom of leaving the Paschal Candle lit through Pentecost strikes us, upon reflection, as a well-intentioned mistake.  And so we call for a rebellion!  If you are a Papist or an Anglican, dare to defy the rubrics on this one.  If you are Lutheran, do what comes naturally, and take a stand against change.  Aux armes, citoyens. 

So what do you think, readers?  Are you joining the revolution?  What did you do this year, and why?  What will you do next year?  

Iran Blocks Access to Facebook

The regime is doomed.

Apparently, a reform candidate was better at using Facebook than the status quo candidate.  So the government shut the whole thing down.  This is the sort of stupid thing that repressive governments do when they feel threatened by new technology.  (And, by the way, repressive regimes are always threatened by new technology, especially the kind that lets people communicate with each other).

It may work for now.  Mir Houssein Mousavi may lose the election.  Maybe he would have anyway; who knows?  But the Iranian leadership has just surrendered any plausible claim to openness in its electoral process.  Worse yet (or better, from our perspective) it has done so in a way guaranteed to piss off young people.  (And remember that fully half the Iranian population is under 24 years old, versus less than 6% over 65).

"I Love New York"

That's what's printed on the pink boxer shorts worn by US Army Specialist Zachary Boyd in the now-famous AP photo, snapped during an engagement in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley on May 11.

Boyd is from Texas, but picked the shorts up on a quick tourist visit to the Big Apple.  If he drops by for another visit, we'll happily help him pick out another pair.  Hell, ten pair.

Boyd is stationed at someplace called Firebase Restrepo, which per the AP is "on a steep mountainside where soldiers are on constant lookout for Taliban fighters, [and not] a place for formality: Uniforms have holes in them, and some men wear flea collars because of bugs in their beds ...."

Fighting broke out, and Boyd didn't have time to pull on his ragged, bug-ridden uniform pants.  Why?  Because he was busy defending his position.  Making him just the kind of soldier we want to share barracks with, if we ever need to share barracks.

Thrusters to Full ... Engage!

Or as the young folks say now, "Punch it."

Yeah, the Egg staff just played hookie (wait until our executive editor finds out!) to sit in an air-conditioned cinema watching the new Star Trek.  And whooping with delight.

Seriously.  We may have no friends and live in Mom's basement at the age of 40, but we totally lived vicariously through this picture.

"Take my Bishop": Eurotrash Edition

Some lucky Facebook users have already experienced "Take My Bishop, Please," the internet craze that's sweeping the nation.  But now, courtesy of the "Take My Bishop" European bureau, a fortunate few have been sent their own virtual Archbishop of Turku.

What -- you weren't among them?  Feeling left out?  Well, then, you'd better ask your synod assembly to memorialize Churchwide to make "Take My Bishop" an official ELCA commission.  Heaven knows we've supported others that were less entertaining.