The Topmost Apple

St Bridget of Kildare

2012-02-01T17:22:00.002-05:00

An interesting post from catholicity and covenant. I like the last para especially:

There was no such thing as a Celtic Church; the concept is unhelpful, if not positively harmful.

On the feast of St Brigid of Kildare it is good to be reminded of Wendy Davies iconoclastic 1992 paper The Myth of the Celtic Church. What is striking about Davies' paper is the implicit conclusion that, while the churches in Celtic lands were not 'un-Roman', their geographical existence on the periphery of Europe did shape their existence. This was particularly evident by the late 11th century when the churches in Celtic lands remained untouched by the various reform initiatives and movements that had defined the early medieval church elsewhere in Latin Europe.

What Davies does not touch on, however, is the very fact that churches flourished in the Celtic lands - lands which had been outside the Roman imperium (Ireland and Scotland) or on its very margins (northern England and Wales). In so doing, they witnessed to the fact that the community called into being by the Crucified and Risen One could take root and transform social relations where the mighty imperium itself, despite its armies and its wealth, was unable to do so.

Which brings us to Bridget of Kildare, at the edge of the known world, doing that which was beyond the power of the military and economic superpower of late antiquity. Here, perhaps, is the particular relevance of Bridget and her follow saints of the churches in the Celtic lands. We too live in an age of turmoil - of post-Christendom, of declining empires, of falling markets, of terror and anxiety, of cultural and social uncertainity. But in this uncertain landscape, a landscape without the certainities of imperium, today's Church, like Bridget's Church, can - by forming communities of hope, orientated towards the Kingdom, not the imperium - take root and shape cultures.

"The Great Divorce"

2012-01-31T09:22:00.000-05:00

From David Brooks' column today:

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.

More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class.

Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

The upper tribe is now segregated from the lower tribe. In 1963, rich people who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan lived close to members of the middle class. Most adult Manhattanites who lived south of 96th Street back then hadn’t even completed high school. Today, almost all of Manhattan south of 96th Street is an upper-tribe enclave.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

"The New Theories of Moral Sentiments"

2012-01-31T09:03:00.001-05:00

From the Wall Street Journal online:

Deirdre McCloskey certainly leaves an impression. With her robust frame, hoarse voice interspersed with an occasional stammer, and extraordinary charisma, she is anything but your typical economic historian.

On a recent trip to England, she gave a talk at Hartwell House in the heart of Buckinghamshire that felt like a good stand-up comedy show, on par with the better performances of Eddie Izzard or George Carlin. But humor and witticisms aside, the talk revealed her conviction that economists should not shy away from the subjects of love, friendship or virtue.

Ms. McCloskey sees a problem in the way that economic models are dominated by a strange, sociopathic character—"Max U" as she calls him, referring to the standard economic problem of maximizing utility subject to various constraints. Her own scholarly work has become increasingly focused on bringing love, hope, faith, courage and other virtues back into economics.

Ms. McCloskey enjoyed a stellar career in economic history before her apostasy, being among the earliest pioneers of cliometrics—the quantitative study of economic history. In her career as an economic historian, with appointments at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, she built and used historical data sets to answer seemingly arcane questions about the British steel industry during the 19th century and medieval agriculture.

But then Ms. McCloskey started crossing boundaries. She became interested in the way economists formulate their arguments and use persuasion in public discourse. Her research, questioning some of the fundamental tenets of neoclassical orthodoxy, was not always met warmly by her colleagues. In the context of her scholarly transformation, she is fond of quoting Mae West: "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."

In the mid-1990s, Ms. McCloskey went through another radical transformation, changing her gender and ditching her given first name, Donald, to become Deirdre. Although many of her colleagues in academia were supportive of her crossing, that period was difficult for her and her family. Her children have cut ties with her, and she has never met her 13-year old grandson. "People throw away love too easily," she told me as we drove to Hartwell House.

If her talk of ethics sounds fluffy, recall that in 1759 Adam Smith earned his reputation by publishing "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," in which he accounted for the emergence of sympathy and moral judgments. It was only in the 20th century that ethics disappeared from economics, partly as a result of the increased mathematization of the discipline. Ms. McCloskey says it was a fundamental error for economists to start making their arguments in terms of "Max U" alone. "In fact, 'Max U' would be a much more sensible person if he had gender change and became 'Maxine U,'" she chuckles.

In 2006, Ms. McCloskey published a 600-page book, "Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce." In a meticulously documented volume, drawing from a range of philosophical traditions, she asks whether one can participate fully in the modern capitalist economy and still be a moral person. Ms. McCloskey is a free marketeer and used to be a close personal friend of Milton Friedman, as she eagerly points out. Her answer is therefore an emphatic yes. It would be ill-advised, she thinks, to claim that profit-seeking makes one inherently corrupt, especially if it is balanced by other virtues.

Four years later, she completed a 600-page sequel, "Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World." "I've forgotten how to write short books," she says apologetically, adding that she would like both to be part of a four-volume series on the bourgeois era.

Unlike "Bourgeois Virtues," "Bourgeois Dignity" makes a historical argument. Modern economic growth, she claims, is a result of an ideological and rhetorical transformation. In the Elizabethan period, business was sneered upon. In Shakespeare's plays, the only major bourgeois character, Antonio, is a fool because of his affection for Bassanio. There is no need to dwell on how the other bourgeois character in "The Merchant of Venice," Shylock, is characterized.

She contrasts this with attitudes 200 years later. When James Watt died in 1819, a statue of him was erected in Westminster Abbey and later moved to St. Paul's cathedral. This would have been unthinkable two centuries earlier. In Ms. McCloskey's view, this shift in perceptions was central to the economic take-off of the West. "A bourgeois deal was agreed upon," she says. "You let me engage in innovation and creative destruction, and I will make you rich." A commercial class that was not ostracized or sneered at was thus able to activate the engine of modern economic growth.

Ms. McCloskey insists that alternative explanations for the Industrial Revolution fail, for a variety of reasons. Property rights, she says, could not have been the principal cause because England and many other societies had stable and secure property rights for a long time. Similarly, Atlantic trade and plundering of the colonies were too insignificant in revenue to have made the real difference. There had long been much more trade in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic, moreover, and China or India had never experienced an industrial revolution.

By elimination, Ms. McCloskey concludes that culture and rhetoric are the only factors that can account for economic change of the magnitude we have seen in the developed world in past 250 years.

The danger of our era is that the bourgeois deal is slowly crumbling away. It is under attack from the political left and also from economists whose work revolves around one sole virtue—prudence—thus eroding the public understanding of markets and economic life. Looking at the West's current economic woes, it is easy to share Ms. McCloskey's concern that unless we revive a sense of dignity and approbation for entrepreneurship and innovation, we might easily kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of our prosperity.

A solis ortus cardine, the hymn for Lauds in Christmastide

2012-01-30T15:13:00.002-05:00

Here's a really lovely version of A solis ortus cardine, the Lauds hymn for Christmastide. The hymn has 7 verses, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet (in sequence).

The text comes from a 23-verse alphabetic poem, Paean Alphabeticus de Christo, written by Caelius Sedulius (died c. 450); the poem is the story of Christ's life, birth to resurrection. The first seven verses - the ones in this video - make up the Christmastide Lauds hymn; verses 8, 9, 11 and 13 of the poem are used for Hostis Herodes impie, the Epiphany Vespers hymn.

Here's the Latin text of the entire A solis ortus cardine. Below is the section used for this hymn, with an English translation by John Ellerton below the Latin.

A solis ortus cardine
Adusque terre limitem
Christum canamus principem
Natum Maria virgine.

Beatus auctor seculi
Servile corpus induit,
Ut carne carnem liberans
Non perderet, quos condidit.

Caste parentis viscera
Celestis intrat gratia,
Venter puelle baiulat
Secreta, que non noverat.

Domus pudici pectoris
Templum repente fit Dei,
Intacta nesciens virum
Verbo creavit filium

Enixa est puerpera,
Quem Gabriel predixerat ,
Quem matris alvo gestiens
Clausus Johannes senserat.

Feno iacere pertulit,
Presepe non abhorruit
Parvoque lacte pastus est,
Per quem nec ales esurit.

Gaudet chorus celestium,
Et angeli canunt Deum,
Palamque fit pastoribus
Pastor creator omnium.

From east to west, from shore to shore,
let every heart awake and sing
the holy child whom Mary bore,
the Christ, the everlasting King.

Behold, the world's Creator wears
the form and fashion of a slave;
our very flesh our Maker shares,
his fallen creature, man, to save.

For this how wondrously he wrought!
A maiden, in her lowly place,
became, in ways beyond all thought,
the chosen vessel of his grace.

She bowed her to the angel's word
declaring what the Father willed,
and suddenly the promised Lord
that pure and hallowed temple filled.

He shrank not from the oxen's stall,
he lay within the manger-bed,
and he, whose bounty feedeth all,
at Mary's breast himself was fed.

And while the angels in the sky
sang praise above the silent field,
to shepherds poor the Lord Most High,
the one great Shepherd, was revealed.

All glory for this blessed morn
to God the Father ever be;
all praise to thee, O Virgin-born,
all praise, O Holy Ghost, to thee.

From the YouTube page, describing the video:

EN: Schola Gregoriana Monostorinensis performing in the Calvary Church from Cluj (RO)
HU: a Schola Gregoriana Monostorinensis előadásában, a kolozsmonostori Nagyboldogasszony (Kálvária) templomban
www.hhrf.org/schola

Here's Guillaume Dufay's 15th-century version of the hymn; he uses chant and polyphony in an alternatim style:

"Religion Can Aid in Self-Control"

2012-01-27T11:51:00.000-05:00

From Psych Central News. Not, again, news to people involved - but I suppose it's to the good to have one's lived experience confirmed experimentally:

Thinking about religion gives people more self-control, according to a new study from Queen’s University.

“After unscrambling sentences containing religiously oriented words, participants in our studies exercised significantly more self-control,” said Kevin Rounding, a psychology graduate student and lead researcher on the study.

Study participants were given a sentence with five words to unscramble. Some contained religious themes and others did not. After unscrambling the sentences, participants were asked to complete a number of tasks that required self-control, such as enduring discomfort, delaying gratification, exerting patience, and refraining from impulsive responses.

Participants who had unscrambled sentences containing religious themes had more self-control in completing their tasks, the researchers said.

“Our most interesting finding was that religious concepts were able to refuel self-control after it had been depleted by another unrelated task,” said Rounding. “In other words, even when we would predict people to be unable to exert self-control, after completing the religiously themed task they defied logic and were able to muster self-control.”

“Until now, I believed religion was a matter of faith; people had little ‘practical’ use for religion,” he continued. “This research actually suggests that religion can serve a very useful function in society. People can turn to religion not just for transcendence and fears regarding death and an afterlife, but also for practical purposes.”

The study was published in Psychological Science.

Source: Queen’s University

Kings College Choir: "Evening Hymn"

2012-01-26T17:42:00.001-05:00

This is Balfour Gardiner's version of the Compline hymn Te Lucis Ante Terminum. It's irresistible to me: all that Victorian drama! And very fun to sing. Latin and English words below.

Te lucis ante terminum,
rerum Creator, poscimus,
ut solita clementia,
sis praesul ad custodiam.

Procul recedant somnia,
et noctium phantasmata:
hostemque nostrum comprime,
ne polluantur corpora.

Praesta, Pater omnipotens,
per Iesum Christum Dominum,
qui tecum in perpetuum
regnat cum Sancto Spiritu.

Amen.

To thee before the close of day,
Creator of the world, we pray
That, with thy wonted favour, thou
Wouldst be our guard and keeper now.

From all ill dreams defend our sight,
From fears and terrors of the night;
Withhold from us our ghostly foe,
That spot of sin we may not know.

O Father, that we ask be done,
Through Jesus Christ, thine only Son,
Who, with the Holy Ghost and thee,
Doth live and reign eternally.

Amen.

"Free-Market Socialism"

2012-01-24T19:17:00.003-05:00

That's the title of David Brooks' column today. Here's the whole thing:

I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Josh Haner/The New York Times

Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.

She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.

Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”

A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.

Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.

Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.

Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.

Over the past 40 years, women’s wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It’s not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It’s the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.

The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.

Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.

If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.

Freud's "heroic refusal to flatter humankind "

2012-01-22T13:13:00.010-05:00

Interesting article from Prospect Magazine here: Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker. I don't agree that this is the only reason Freud is out of fashion - but this is probably quite a big part of it. Freud, ironically, has this in common with Christianity: both affirm "Original Sin." Each system recognizes the deep, "ineradicable" flaws in human nature, and each recognizes the need for outside intervention to mitigate these flaws.

Some excerpts from the article; I've bolded some of the most interesting passages. I love this sentence in particular: "The incessant ranting uplift and adamant certainty of latter-day partisans of Enlightenment are symptoms of a loss of nerve."! That's called "whistling past the graveyard," I do believe:

Sigmund Freud contemplates a bust of himself, sculpted for his 75th birthday by Oscar Nemon

Writing to Albert Einstein in the early 1930s, Sigmund Freud suggested that “man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction.” Freud went on to contrast this “instinct to destroy and kill” with one he called erotic—an instinct “to conserve and unify,” an instinct for love.

Without speculating too much, Freud continued, one might suppose that these instincts function in every living being, with what he called “the death instinct”—thanatos—acting “to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter.” The death instinct provided “the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities [to war] which we are now combating.”

To be sure, Freud concluded, all this talk of eros and thanatos might give Einstein the impression that psychoanalytic theory amounted to a “species of mythology, and a gloomy one at that.” But if so, Freud was unabashed, asking Einstein: “Does not every natural science lead ultimately to this—a sort of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical sciences?”

Today the idea that psychoanalysis is not a science is commonplace, but no part of Freud’s inheritance is more suspect than the theory of the death instinct. The very idea of instinct is viewed with suspicion. Talk of human instincts, or indeed of human nature, is dismissed as a form of intellectual atavism: human behaviour is seen as far more complex and at the same time more amenable to rational control than Freud believed or implied. Theories of human instinct only serve to block those impulses to progress and rationality that (for all the scorn that is directed against the very idea of human nature) are considered to be quintessentially human.

Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud’s thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker.

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1856 and dying in London in 1939, Freud is commonly known as the originator of the idea of the unconscious mind. However, the idea can be found in a number of earlier thinkers, notably the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It would be more accurate to describe Freud as aiming to make the unconscious mind an object of scientific investigation—a prototypically Enlightenment project of extending the scientific method into previously unexplored regions. Many other 20th century thinkers aimed to examine and influence human life through science and reason, the common pursuit of the quarrelling family of intellectual movements, appearing from the 17th century onwards, that formed the Enlightenment. But by applying the Enlightenment project to forbidden regions of the human mind Freud, more than anyone else, revealed the project’s limits.

Starting with research into hysteria, where he concluded that hysterical symptoms often reflected the persisting influence of repressed memories, Freud developed psychoanalysis—a body of thought in which the idea that much of our mental life is repressed and inaccessible to conscious awareness was central.

The practice of psychotherapy that Freud began—the so-called “talking cure”—had the effect of promoting the idea that psychological conflict can be overcome by the sufferer gaining insight into the early experiences from which it may have originated. Later thinkers would attack Freud’s emphasis on early experience and the claims attributed to him regarding the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis. Yet several generations of intellectuals were in no doubt that he was a thinker of major importance. It is only recently that his ideas have been widely disparaged and dismissed. Initially rejected because of the central importance they gave to sexuality in the formation of personality, Freud’s ideas are rejected today because they imply that the human animal is ineradicably flawed. It is not Freud’s insistence on sexuality that is the source of scandal, but the claim that humans are afflicted by a destructive impulse.

....

Schopenhauer posed a major challenge to the prevailing Enlightenment worldview. In much of the western tradition, consciousness and thought were treated as being virtually one and the same; the possibility that thought might be unconscious was excluded almost by definition. But for Schopenhauer the conscious part of the human mind was only the visible surface of inner life, which obeyed the non-rational imperatives of bodily desire rather than conscious deliberation. It was Schopenhauer who, in a celebrated chapter on “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” in The World as Will and Idea, affirmed the primary importance of sexuality in human life, suggesting that the sexual impulse operates independently of the choices and intentions of individuals, without regard for—and often at the expense of—their freedom and well-being. Schopenhauer also examined the meaning of dreams and the role of slips of the tongue in revealing repressed thoughts and emotions, ideas that Freud would make his own. Though Freud rarely mentions him, there can be little doubt that he read the philosopher closely. So most likely did Spielrein, whose account of sexuality as a threat to individual autonomy resembles Schopenhauer’s more even than does Freud’s.

From one point of view, Freud’s work was an attempt to transplant the idea of the unconscious mind posited in Schopenhauer’s philosophy into the domain of science. When Freud originated psychoanalysis, he wanted it to be a science. One reason was because achieving scientific standing for his ideas would enable them to overcome the opposition of moralising critics who objected to the central place of sexuality in psychoanalysis. Another was that, for most of his life, Freud never doubted that science was the only true repository of human knowledge. Here he revealed the influence of Ernst Mach (1838-1916), an Austrian physicist and philosopher whose ideas were pervasive in Freud’s Vienna. For Mach, science was not a mirror of nature but a method for ordering human sensations, continuing and refining the picture of the world that has been evolved in the human organism. If we perceived things as they are we would see chaos, since much of the order we perceive in the world is projected into it by the human mind.

....

It is a paradoxical position, as the development of Freud’s thought illustrates. If science is a system of human constructions, useful for practical purposes but not a literal account of reality, what makes it superior to other modes of thinking? If science is also a sort of mythology—as Freud suggested in his correspondence with Einstein—what becomes of the Enlightenment project of dispelling myth through scientific inquiry? These were questions that Freud faced, and in some measure resolved, in the account of religion he developed towards the end of his life. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), he had interpreted religion largely in the standard Enlightenment fashion that has been revived in recent years, and is now so wearisomely familiar: religion was an error born of ignorance, which was bound to retreat as knowledge advanced. Never placing too much trust in reason, Freud did not expect religion to vanish; but at this point he seemed convinced that the diminishing role of religion in human life would be an altogether good thing.

The account of religion he presented ten years later in Moses and Monotheism (1937) was more complex. In the earlier book he had recognised that, answering to enduring human needs—particularly the need for consolation—religious beliefs were not scientific theories; but neither were they necessarily false. While religions might be illusions, illusions were not just errors—they could contain truth. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud went further, arguing that religion had played an essential role in the development of human inquiry. The Jewish belief in an unseen God was not a relic of ignorance without any positive value. By affirming a hidden reality, the idea of an invisible deity had encouraged inquiry into what lay behind the world that is disclosed to the senses. More, the belief in an unseen god had allowed a new kind of self-examination to develop—one that aimed to explore the inner world by looking beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Freud’s attempt to gain insight into the invisible workings of the mind may have been an extension of scientific method into new areas; but this advance was possible, Freud came to think, only because religion had prepared the ground. Without ever surrendering his uncompromising atheism, Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis owed its existence to faith.

...

In some respects Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis has more in common with the ancient Stoic art of life than with any modern way of thinking. As Philip Rieff argued in Freud: the Mind of the Moralist (1959), which remains the most penetrating study of the subject, there are good reasons for thinking Freud was formulating a new version of Stoic ethics. The goal of the Stoics was self-mastery through the acceptance of a personal fate, a condition that was supposed to go with tranquillity of mind. In looking back to infancy and childhood, Freud was pointing to the fact that the choosing self—one of the central fictions of liberal humanism—is itself unchosen, formed in a state of helplessness and bearing the traces of that experience forever after. It was this beleaguered self that Freud aimed to fortify: by gaining insight into the early experiences that shape our habits of feeling, he believed, we can in some measure reorder our response to the world. This is the respect in which Freud was proposing a version of Stoic ethics. But his Stoicism differed from the ancients in at least two important ways.

In the Meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, self-mastery is achieved by identifying the self with the cosmos, a semi-divine order of things that is intrinsically rational. At bottom an uncompromisingly modern thinker, Freud had no such mystical faith in logic as the essence of the universe. The self-mastery he advocated—and practised—was not premised on the redemptive power of reason. Instead, it required accepting chaos as an ultimate fact. Here a second difference with ancient Stoicism appears: Freud never held out the hope of tranquillity. Rather, he aimed to reconcile those who entered psychoanalysis to a state of perpetual unrest. As has been argued by Adam Phillips, Freud’s most creative contemporary interpreter, psychoanalysis does not so much promise inner peace as open up a possibility of release from the fantasy that inner conflict will end. In this Freud also differed fundamentally from Schopenhauer, who never ceased to cling to a tormenting dream of salvation.

It may now be clearer, perhaps, why Freud’s thought is once again an object of scandal. His assault on the innocent verities of rationalism does not come from an avowed enemy of the Enlightenment—like that of Joseph de Maistre, say, whose attacks on reason were done in the service of revealed truth—but from one of its most resolute protagonists. An intrepid partisan of reason, Freud devoted his life to exploring reason’s limits. He was ready to accept that psychoanalysis could never be the science he had once wanted it to be. At the same time he came to accept that science might be superior to other modes of thinking only in limited ways. The myth-making impulse, which functions as the bogeyman of infantile rationalism, could not be eradicated from the human mind or from science.

Freud’s thought is a vital corrective to the scientific triumphalism that is making so much noise at the present time. But more than any other feature of his thinking, it is his acceptance of the flawed nature of human beings that is offensive today. Freud’s unforgivable sin was in locating the source of human disorder within human beings themselves. The painful conflicts in which humans have been entangled throughout their history and pre-history do not come only from oppression, poverty, inequality or lack of education. They originate in permanent flaws of the human animal. Of course Freud was not the first Enlightenment thinker to accept this fact. So did Thomas Hobbes. Like Hobbes, Freud belongs in a tradition of Enlightenment thinking that aims to understand rather than to edify. Both aimed to reduce needless conflict; but neither of them imagined that the sources of such conflict could be eliminated by any increase in human knowledge. Even more than Hobbes, Freud was clear that destructive conflict goes with being human. This, in the final analysis, is why Freud is so unpopular today.

In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. Enlightenment fundamentalism—the insistence by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that our salvation lies in affirming a highly selective set of “Enlightenment values”—serves this emotional need for meaning rather than any imperative of understanding. Like the religions they disparage, but with less profundity and little evident effect, the varieties of Enlightenment thinking on offer today are balm for the uneasy soul. The scientific-sounding formulae with which they appease their anxiety—the end of history, the flat world, the inexorable but forever delayed process of secularisation—are more fantastical than anything in Freud’s “gloomy mythology.”

The incessant ranting uplift and adamant certainty of latter-day partisans of Enlightenment are symptoms of a loss of nerve. Baffled and rattled by the unfolding scene, requiring incessant reassurance if they are not to fall into mawkish despair, these evangelists of reason are engaged—no doubt unconsciously—in a kind of collective therapy. Inevitably, they find Freud an intensely discomforting figure. Among many of his followers, the practice of self-inquiry that Freud invented has been turned into a technique of psychological adjustment—the opposite, in many ways, of what he intended. In this respect, at least, contemporary hostility to Freud expresses a sound intuition. What Freud offers is a way of thinking in which the experience of being human can be seen to be more intractably difficult, and at the same time more interesting and worthwhile, than anything imagined in the cheap little gospels of progress and self-improvement that are being hawked today.

If Freud has been misunderstood, neglected or repudiated, he would have expected nothing else. He is rejected now for the same reason that he was rejected in fin-de-siècle Vienna: his heroic refusal to flatter humankind. As his correspondence with Einstein confirms, he did not share the hope that reason could deliver humankind from the “active instinct for hatred and destruction,” which was clearly at work in Europe at the time. When he left Nazi-occupied Austria to spend the last year of his life in Britain, he knew that the destruction that lay ahead could not by then be prevented. But fate could still be mocked, and so defied. When leaving Austria, Freud was required to sign a document testifying that he had been well and fairly treated. He did so, adding in his own hand: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.”

"Bring Order to the Commonwealth by Ordering the Soul"

2012-01-21T11:38:00.006-05:00

From "The Imaginative Conservative," another of the blogs I've subscribed to of late:

The illustrious ancients, when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such investigation of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and in seeing them as they really were. When things were thus investigated, knowledge became complete. When knowledge was complete, their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls became perfect. When their souls were perfect, their own selves became cultivated. When their selves were cultivated, their families became regulated. When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into proper order. When their states were in proper order, then the whole world became peaceful and happy.

--Confucius

"Who we are and what we are for"

2012-01-20T11:26:00.000-05:00

Somehow in my wanderings around the web recently I came across a blog called "Front Porch Republic." I think it was via Rod Dreher's blog on "American Conservative." Dreher is, I think, a friend of Andrew Sullivan's and was mentioned recently in one of David Brooks' columns. (And this whole circuit is a clear demonstration of the power of hyperlinks!) Dreher has recently moved back to his hometown in Louisiana from - I would imagine - some Eastern city; there seems to be some sort of somewhat under-the-radar back-to-the-small-town movement among conservative intellectuals. What's interesting about this, of course, is that anybody living in a small town these days can have the best of both worlds: a far slower (and probably mentally healthier) pace of life - AND a cosmopolitan-style intellectual life via the exchange and exposition of ideas on the web. It's really quite great.

I'm liking reading conservative writers these days, apparently. Partly because I don't want to get stuck in some ghetto of thought in my own little arena - but also, clearly, because they really know how to discuss ideas - and in any case I'm noticing some interesting convergences anyway, with was were once held to be "liberal" thought. The old boundaries are collapsing, too.

Anyway, here's a good recent article called Tradition and Critique: On Wanting to Know; I'm quoting the whole article because it's a bit tough to pick out the ideas I wanted to point to, if they're quoted out of the context of the whole. I love the Walker Percy quote - and while I'm not really THAT interested in the whole captain-abandons-ship aspect, it is interesting, too. The most interesting thing to me is in the notion of "the fraying and collapse of social and personal identity." And I very much like the notion that "Traditionalists....need to accept the modern problematic and the modern questions....so as to avoid irrational traditionalism." (This kind of thing is exactly what I mean, in fact, about some of the old boundaries blurring these days!)

I'm most interested, in other words, in the questions posed in the piece and used as the title of this post.....

I think Walker Percy uses the following to illustrate contemporary life, although I don’t remember where. But it goes something like this: When his grandfather walked down the street, everyone knew who he was, and he knew who he was; when his father walked down the street, everyone knew who he was, but he did not know who he was; when Percy walks down the street, no one, including him, knows who he is.

This might be idealized, but it’s a helpful image of the fraying and collapse of social and personal identity. And as Percy articulates so well, some of that fraying occurs because of the enervating effects of science and philosophy. Examining a thing is often its undoing; older certitudes are exposed, uncertainty results.

Reading some recent commentary in the Guardian on the Costa Concordia reminded me of the Percy reference. As you likely know, the captain abandoned ship, apparently “tripping” into a lifeboat in his attempt to help others escape. Later ordered to return to ship by the coastguard, he refused.

Bruce Hood asks if any of us know what we would do in similar circumstances, asking for at least some empathy for the captain. This is understandable. Of course we all like to think we would be courageous, would be noble, would fall on the grenade or go down with the ship, and we do not know what we would do.

All that’s fair, if not somewhat self-evident. But Hood presses on, and his commentary is a clear example of how science and philosophy can enervate moral certitude. He begins with science:
Self-preservation is an instinct, much in the same way that your instincts tell you to put your hands out for protection when you let yourself fall backwards. In the face of impending danger, our brains can swing into reflexive defence mode, operating much faster and more automatically than when they recourse to calm, rational reasoning. Respond first and ask questions later, is the message, rather than place yourself in harm’s way.

OK, that’s true. Self-preservation is an instinct, hormones do flood the body, and so on. And courage is when moral agents act responsibly and well, and cowardice is when they do not, allowing instinct to overpower reason. I might not know whether I’d be a coward or a hero, but there is still a difference, although that moral claim might be a weak one if actions are less about agency and more about natural processes beyond my control.

Hood continues with some philosophy:
That “self” is a narrative that we hold about who we are. When we consider our self, we hold beliefs about what we would do in certain situations. However, the story we generate and the action we end up taking do not always match.

Much has been made in the commentary about the myth of the Victorian captain going down with the ship, whether maritime law demanded it or not (or whether many captains actually did this.) But as the old saying goes, “Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton”— the self may be a narrative, but in an older system the story was about piety, honor, obedience, and somehow the hormones were expected to obey the demands of duty. But if identity is a narrative told by a self in flux within a naturalistic system, it might be a little harder, as Percy thought, to know who you are, and no one else could know who you are or what to expect from you.

We struggle to know who we are or what we are for now that the old stories are disrobed. So much so that columnists for the Guardian find it necessary to deconstruct all this talk of cowardice, for the duty of a captain to take care of others is just a social construction, and not one in keeping with our nature anyway!

Charles Taylor suggests that one of the salient facts of modern identity is our self-conscious realization that our frameworks are not certain or necessary, and that lots of other people make sense of their lives in ways quite distinct from our own. Consequently, we’re often looking over our shoulders, not as clear-eyed and confident that our own way is right, wondering if their way is better. We’ve examined everything, and now we’re not sure who we ought to be.

It’s very tempting to fall into nostalgia or sentimentality in these situations. Very easy to long for a world which no longer exists, to attempt to revive ancient virtues now out of place, very easy to be suspicious of those self-examinations about the contingency and variability of our moral frameworks. That sort of traditionalism, however, verges on the irrational, and sometimes the reprehensible in its nostalgic defense of what can no longer be.

Traditionalists, and I’m in that camp at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays, really do need to accept the modern problematic and the modern questions — the looking over the shoulder — so as to avoid irrational traditionalism. Failing to do so renders tradition an arbitrary whim (a whimsical aesthetic, a lifestyle choice, as certain commentators criticize, and not without reason), rather than a reasonable choice. And yet, it is that very act of self-awareness which so often threatens the tradition, exposing it as less certain than was thought, and thus, maybe, optional. That kind of self-examination is not what the tradition is wont to do.

But reasonable traditions examine themselves anyway.

"Why Last Saturday's Political Conclave of Evangelical Leaders Was Dangerous"

2012-01-20T11:24:00.002-05:00

From the conservative Evangelical Christianity Today.

The 150 evangelical leaders who met behind closed doors on January 14 to anoint a Republican candidate for President were wise not to have invited me.

I believe that Christians have an urgent duty to engage the social, economic, and moral threats to a healthy society. That requires a wide variety of political action. However, one thing it doesn't call for is playing kingmaker and powerbroker.

By conspiring to throw their weight behind a single evangelical-friendly candidate, they fed the widespread perception that evangelicalism's main identifying feature is right-wing political activism focused on abortion and homosexuality. In truth, it is hard to imagine the Religious Left in 2008 doing something similar: holding a conclave to decide whether they would throw their collective weight behind either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, unwilling to leave the Democratic primary results to the voters.

I am jealous for the reputation of evangelical Christians. And so are a host of other Christian thought leaders. In 2008, Presbyterian pastor (and Christianity Today board chair) John Huffman gathered a broad-based group to affirm and lend support to a defining document, entitled "An Evangelical Manifesto." The broad coalition included key seminary presidents, leaders of Hispanic evangelicalism, tall-steeple pastors, and leaders of key parachurch ministries. There were even denominational leaders: the national commander of the Salvation Army was among the first to sign up after the charter signatories.

he Manifesto explained that evangelicalism is defined by its beliefs, its piety, its compassion, and its mission activity. The Manifesto was largely positive, but when it finally turned negative, it strongly repudiated attempts to politicize the faith, either from the Right or from the Left.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Wheaton College literature professor Alan Jacobs suggested what the Manifesto writers should have put up front (full disclosure: I was one of the document's editors). He said what some of us thought without being bold enough to blurt it out: "We're fed up with being the Republicans' lapdogs, but don't think we're joining the Democratic kennel."

When evangelicals are confined to a partisan kennel, it is easy to think we are exercising real power. In fact we are, to use the old Soviet phrase, serving as "useful idiots." Christianity Today founder Billy Graham discovered this had happened to him. Out of an abundance of enthusiasm and good will, he tried to aid Richard Nixon in his campaign. Later, when Watergate transcripts revealed the true Nixon, Graham realized he had been used.

We are tempted to think we can be kingmakers and powerbrokers, that we can deliver or withhold the support of a voting bloc. But if there is any lesson in the story of this year's primary elections, it is this: evangelicals have not voted as a bloc and many are not following their leaders. (Ironically, in December several news pieces described the lack of consensus on a candidate among Iowa evangelicals--and then referred to them as a voting "bloc." How could they be a "bloc" if they couldn't agree which they hated more: Mitt's Mormonism or Newt's infidelities?)

Rather than trying to demonstrate power through the promise or threat of votes, evangelicals should use influence. Influence is a matter of education and persuasion—informing and convincing constituents and lawmakers alike. In the past four decades, the number of evangelical advocacy groups operating in Washington, DC, has grown thirteenfold, from three to thirty-nine. These groups focus on a variety of issues, both domestic and international: human rights, global poverty, religious freedom, bioethics, family life, and immigration, among them. They advocate for legislation that will address these problems, but because they need everyone's support, they have learned to work both sides of the aisle.

"Religion Is Divisive and Conservative -- and a Very Good Thing"

2012-01-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

By Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, in the Huffington Post - of all places! - today.

I am a person of liberal convictions, and I spend most of my time with other liberals. Many of my friends share my liberal political views but recoil from my liberal religious beliefs. The reason that they give most frequently is that "religion is divisive and conservative."

My answer is always the same: "You are absolutely right."

Religion, I tell them, is divisive because it deals with important matters -- above all, the search for holiness and God and the struggle to determine the ultimate values that guide our lives. As human beings contend with these questions, they will offer multiple answers; this has been so since the time of Babel. Indeed, I am always amused that my liberal friends who are so insistent on pluralism in the political realm are so surprised and put off by pluralism in the religious realm. But a diversity of views on religious question is inevitable and desirable. Matters of right, wrong, and the character of the sacred are never simple. Theology, precisely because it deals with weighty and difficult subjects, is a discipline of hard edges.

You are stuck, I go on, in a childish, simplistic mindset that sees religion as a gentle, "let's all get along" affair. But no one needs religion for that. And any religion that, from time to time, is not intellectually ferocious in asserting its idea of the good -- as opposed to someone else's idea of the good -- is not a religion to be taken seriously.

At this point in the argument, my friends look at me with a smirk. You have made my case, they say. Aware of what they are thinking, I acknowledge the underside of religion. Ferocious intellectual arguments about what is moral and what God expects of us can take an extremist turn. They can become an instrument to separate those with our beliefs from the despised "other" who thinks differently. They can become a rationale to hate and even to kill.

But in most instances, I point out, exactly the opposite is true. We humans are essentially communal beings, and in our search for meaning, we build communities with others who share our values. And despite our very significant differences and our claims of superiority, it is fascinating that all major religious traditions end up asserting two basic truths. The first is the fundamental dignity of every human being -- a dignity that can only come from without and not from within; and the second is our capacity for a deep and sincere compassion that enables us to go beyond ourselves and to feel the pain of others.

True, religious people often begin by feeling this compassion for those in their own narrow community, embracing and comforting only those who attend their church or synagogue or mosque, who share their rituals, and who define morality in their terms. But what we see, from the American experience above all, is that once we have learned to relate to our own community with dignity and compassion, we rather quickly acquire the capacity to relate to others in the same way.

Yes, strong views can be dangerous, but, I insist to my friends, once we accept religion's divisiveness we can get something back from it. And that something is that religion ultimately leads to healing far more often than it leads to hate. And that is why religious Americans, as Robert Putnam has demonstrated, are, as a general rule, more charitable, more caring, and better citizens than other Americans.

Regarding the conservative nature of religion, I argue that religion is conservative because it resists the tyranny of the new and the culture of now. It asserts that when we decide on the matters of greatest consequence, we must give a hearing to the sages of old and to the sacred texts that record their voices. The religious world, it should be said, does not agree on how much attention should be paid to these voices. For fundamentalists, it is their holy writings that matter most; for religious liberals such as myself, ancient teachings must be interpreted in light of reason and modern realities. Yet both camps defer, in some significant measure, to the wisdom of those who came before.

But such deference can only be welcome. Religion rejects the arrogance of those who assume that by virtue of the fact that they are here now, living and breathing at this moment, they possess greater insight into the human condition than revered teachers of old. Religion gives the dead a vote. It says that when we want to repair the spirit and learn about kindness and compassion, the teachings of our ancestors are indispensable.

My conclusion: religion is indeed divisive and conservative -- and it is also a very good thing.

What is the question to which Christ is the answer?

2012-01-18T14:01:00.011-05:00

Many websites are "going dark" for one day today - shutting down their sites completely in protest of bills soon to be voted on in Congress. Good thought; it's a means to imagine the world another way.

And I think it's related to some of the things we've been talking about lately, too. So: what if the church went dark? I'm thinking this is the most important question we can ask ourselves when thinking about "evangelism" these days: "What is the question to which Christ is the answer?" I don't think anybody thinks very much about this, because it's all taken so much granted. The church exists; it's what the reality is - but what if it weren't like this? (This is related to my original question, "What is the the purpose of the church?" of course; it's just more totalizing and more direct.)

We can't talk to other people about this unless we think about it ourselves for awhile, I don't think. What would the world be like if the church went dark? More to the point: what if Christ had never appeared in the world? What would be different? What would be lost? (Imagine Jesus, I guess, as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life.")

What is the question to which Christ is the answer? We can even ask it this way, if it makes more sense: What is the question to which religion is the answer? What does it offer people that they won't have otherwise? What is missing in our lives as human beings without it? What is the reason - there certainly is a reason, even from a completely secular point of view - that people have turned to religion for so large a part of our history? What question have people been asking all these thousands of years? What's missing in the world that religion supplies? And, if you like: how has it shaped the world? How would the world be different without it (if it's even possible to imagine this)?

I personally can only ask this question using the "Christ" formula, because Christianity is the only religion I know well at all. And of course, I do think Christianity is quite valuable, and offers things I haven't found elsewhere.

So: What is the question?

Wikipedia, and others, go dark today (an anti-SOPA protest)

2012-01-18T10:34:00.002-05:00

For Epiphany: O balow, balow la lay

2012-01-16T09:27:00.005-05:00

From the YouTube page:

The Choir of Wells Cathedral, Somerset, under the direction of Matthew Owens, perform Jonathan Dove's setting of Dorothy L. Sayers' poem 'The Three Kings.' Commissioned by King's College, Cambridge for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve 2000. Treble solos by Folasade-Nelleke Ladipo and Sophie Gallagher.

"Sayers portrays her three kings in the three ages of man—young, in the prime of life, and very old. With perhaps an unexpected twist and a departure from received imagery Sayers portrays the young king as doleful and bringing myrrh; the prime-of-life king is a solemn priest who brings incense, 'sad and sweet', and it is the very old king who brings the handfuls of gold which are not money but gaud, baubles and glittering toys for a baby boy."

Text:

The first king was very young, 
O balow, balow la lay,
With doleful ballads on his tongue,
O balow, balow la lay,
He came bearing a branch of myrrh 
Than which no gall is bitterer,
O balow, balow la lay,
Gifts for a baby King, O.

The second king was a man in prime,
O balow, balow la lay, 
The solemn priest of a solemn time,
O balow, balow la lay,
With eyes downcast and reverent feet
He brought his incense sad and sweet, 
O balow, balow la lay,
Gifts for a baby King, O.

The third king was very old,
O balow, balow la lay,
Both his hands were full of gold,
O balow, balow la lay,
Many a gaud and glittering toy, 
Baubles brave for a baby boy, 
O balow, balow la lay, 
Gifts for a baby King, O.

"Burning Incense Is Psychoactive: New Class Of Antidepressants Might Be Right Under Our Noses"

2012-01-09T12:23:00.003-05:00

From Science Daily (HT the Society of Catholic Priests): Burning Incense Is Psychoactive: New Class Of Antidepressants Might Be Right Under Our Noses

ScienceDaily (May 20, 2008) — Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. An international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

"In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Bosweilla had not been investigated for psychoactivity," said Raphael Mechoulam, one of the research study's co-authors. "We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning."

To determine incense's psychoactive effects, the researchers administered incensole acetate to mice. They found that the compound significantly affected areas in brain areas known to be involved in emotions as well as in nerve circuits that are affected by current anxiety and depression drugs. Specifically, incensole acetate activated a protein called TRPV3, which is present in mammalian brains and also known to play a role in the perception of warmth of the skin. When mice bred without this protein were exposed to incensole acetate, the compound had no effect on their brains.

"Perhaps Marx wasn't too wrong when he called religion the opium of the people: morphine comes from poppies, cannabinoids from marijuana, and LSD from mushrooms; each of these has been used in one or another religious ceremony." said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "Studies of how those psychoactive drugs work have helped us understand modern neurobiology. The discovery of how incensole acetate, purified from frankincense, works on specific targets in the brain should also help us understand diseases of the nervous system. This study also provides a biological explanation for millennia-old spiritual practices that have persisted across time, distance, culture, language, and religion--burning incense really does make you feel warm and tingly all over!"

According to the National Institutes of Health, major depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability in the United States for people ages 15--44, affecting approximately 14.8 million American adults. A less severe form of depression, dysthymic disorder, affects approximately 3.3 million American adults. Anxiety disorders affect 40 million American adults, and frequently co-occur with depressive disorders.

Not exactly news to us, of course....!

Anglican Chant XVII: Psalm 98, Hanforth

2012-01-07T10:13:00.001-05:00

A lovely version of Psalm 98 sung to Hanforth's chant setting.

The Schola Cantorum sings Psalm 98, "Cantate Domino," at Choral Evensong on 15 May 2011 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Highland Park, Pittsburgh, PA. Chant: Jones. Alastair Stout, organ; Peter J. Luley, choirmaster.

From the Coverdale Psalter:

Psalm 98: Cantate Domino

1. O SING unto the Lord a new song : for he hath done marvellous things.
2. With his own right hand, and with his holy arm : hath he gotten himself the victory.
3. The Lord declared his salvation : his righteousness hath he openly shewed in the sight of the heathen.
4. He hath remembered his mercy and truth toward the house of Israel : and all the ends of the world have seen the salvation of our God.
5. Shew yourselves joyful unto the Lord, all ye lands : sing, rejoice, and give thanks.
6. Praise the Lord upon the harp : sing to the harp with a psalm of thanksgiving.
7. With trumpets also and shawms : O shew yourselves joyful before the Lord the King.
8. Let the sea make a noise, and all that therein is : the round world, and they that dwell therein.
9. Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord : for he is come to judge the earth.
10. With righteousness shall he judge the world : and the people with equity.

La Demoiselle d'Orléans

2012-01-06T10:41:00.001-05:00

In addition to being the Feast of the Epiphany, today is also the birthday of Joan of Arc - and she's getting some interesting attention online.

The first image below is an oil on canvas from between 1450 and 1500, and is located now in the Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris. The second image is an oil by John Everett Millais, and was painted in the 19th Century. The third is - well, you know....

Vidimus stellam

2012-01-05T16:45:00.028-05:00

Vidimus stellam - "We have seen his star" - is the Alleluia for January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany; this version is sung by the Schola des Moines de Montserrat:

Here's the chant score, with the English translation below.

We have seen his star in the East, and we have come with our gifts, to worship the Lord.

The text comes from Matthew 2:

1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

6 “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

Here's William Byrd's polyphonic setting, sung by Ensemble 'Gloriana':

Here's a terrific painting of the Adoration of the Magi that I haven't seen before; wow! According to ibiblio.com, it's painted by Pieter Aertsen, and is the "Middle panel of a triptych, The Adoration of the Magi; c. 1560; Oil (?) on panel, 167.5 x 179 cm; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam." Gorgeous and interesting, too.

Ibiblio says this about the painting:

The baby Jesus is sitting on the lap of his mother, the Virgin Mary. He is holding his hand up in a blessing. Before him kneels a king offering a gift of gold. This is Melchior, the oldest of the three kings who came to pay homage to the infant Christ. Behind Mary, in a red gown is her husband Joseph. According to tradition, Jesus was born in a stable. The donkey, the ox and the shabby straw roof remind us of this. The scene takes place against the background of a ruined palace with marble columns and steps. This refers to King David, a distant ancestor of Jesus. The ruin is symbolic and represents the old world: Jesus represents the new, Christian world.

Pieter Aertsen painted this large, colourful panel in around 1560. It is a varied scene with many attractive details such as the rather homely basket of clothes beside Mary and the king's entourage with camels on the left of the background.

Only one of the three kings is pictured on this panel. In fact, the painting is no longer complete. It was originally the centre panel of an altarpiece. The other two kings were pictured on the side panels. The right-hand panel has been lost. The left-hand panel, depicting the Moorish King Caspar and his entourage, has been preserved. This king is offering a vase of myrrh, a fragrant resin which was employed in the ancient world in perfume. It was used in preparing myrrh balsam, for embalming corpses. According to tradition, this was what Caspar, the African king, gave to Christ. It is viewed as a reference to Christ's subsequent death.

Here's a beautiful (and copyrighted) "Adoration of the Magi" page from the St. Alban's Psalter. Wish I could post it here, but they've cut it up into about 50 pieces to protect the copyright! Go see, though - gorgeous.

Box Turtle Bulletin » Jamaica’s New PM on Gay Rights

2012-01-05T10:19:00.005-05:00

Box Turtle Bulletin » Jamaica’s New PM on Gay Rights

Homosexuality became a surprising topic in Jamaica’s elections last December in which members of Jamaica’s ruling Labor Party charged that the opposition was funded by gays. That tactic didn’t stave off their electoral loss however. Labor lost to the opposition People’s National Party in a landslide and PNP leader Portia Simpson Miller was sworn in as Prime Minister.
Here is Simpson Miller addressing the issue of gays serving in government during a December televised debate. Her remarks stood in stark contrast to the lengthy non-answers delivered by Labor leader Andrew Holness.

Bible becomes 2011 bestseller in Norway | Books | guardian.co.uk

2012-01-04T17:59:00.000-05:00

Bible becomes 2011 bestseller in Norway | Books | guardian.co.uk

The UK's 2011 bestseller lists might have been dominated by cookery, courtesy of Jamie Oliver, and romance, courtesy of David Nicholls, but Norwegian readers were plumping for another sort of book last year: the Bible.
The first Norwegian translation of the Bible for 30 years topped the country's book charts almost every week between its publication in October and the end of the year, selling almost 80,000 copies so far and hugely exceeding expectations. Its launch in the autumn saw Harry Potter-style overnight queues, with bookshops selling out on the first day as Norwegians rushed to get their hands on the new edition.
"We only printed 25,000 to start with and thought it would last six to nine months, but it was launched mid-October and by the end of the year it had sold 79,000 copies – it's just incredible," said Stine Smemo Strachan, who worked on the project for the Norwegian Bible Society. "It has only been knocked off the number one spot once, by [literary author] Karl Ove Knausgård … There were people sleeping outside the day before the launch because it was embargoed – it's a bit ironic seeing that the content has been available for quite some time now."
Thirty consultant translators, priests and academics translated the Greek and Hebrew original into Norwegian for the new edition, with a team of 12 literary authors including Knausgård and playwright Jon Fosse then smoothing out that text. "Obviously it was very important to get the right translation but they also wanted it to be readable, to make sure it was good literary language," said Smemo Strachan. "None of these authors are religious - they are all just very good literary writers who thought it would be an interesting project to be involved in."
A "literary" version of the Bible, with no chapters or verses which "reads like a novel", has also been published and has "sold incredibly well", said the publisher.
According to official data, 80% of Norway's population of 4.9m belongs to the Church of Norway, but not all the new edition's purchasers are thought to be buying it for strictly religious religions. "It certainly can't just be actively religious Christians who are buying it because it just wouldn't make these numbers," said Smemo Strachan.
This summer's murders in Utøya and Oslo are not viewed as a reason for the Bible's record-breaking sales, however. "It's hard to tell: obviously it has had a great impact on the country and people here," said Smemo Strachan. "But the success is being attributed to the fact that its publication is seen as a cultural event, and to its readability."

In the name of goodness.....

2012-01-04T17:48:00.000-05:00

Another quote from Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus:

The world's deepest problem is not badness as opposed to goodness; it is sin, the incurable human tendency to put self first, to trust number one and no one else. And that means that there is nothing - no right deed, however good, noble, lawful, thrifty, brave, clean, or reverent - that cannot be done for the wrong reason, that cannot be tainted and totally corrupted by sin. As I observed earlier, the greatest evils are, with alarming regularity, done in the name of goodness. When we finally fry this planet in a nuclear holocaust, it will not have been done by a bunch of naughty little boys and girls; it will have been done by grave, respectable types who loved their high ideals too much to lay them down for the mere preservation of life on earth. And lesser evils follow the same rule. When I crippled my children emotionally (or when my parents crippled me) it was not done out of meanness or spite, it was done out of love: genuine, deeply felt, endlessly pondered human love - flawed, alas, by a self-regard so profound that none of us ever noticed it.

Auden again

2012-01-04T10:36:00.002-05:00

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.' It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.

Poets.org.

Some further thoughts about this and that, and etc.

2012-01-03T10:11:00.026-05:00

Happy New Year!
I just came to understand what I think may be a rather central issue in the Episcopal Church: priests and their parishioners may at times be on two separate and opposed tracks. Priests spend all their time at church and many are eager to "get out there in the real world" to do service. Parishioners, by contrast, spend all our lives "out there in the real world" and most are coming to church for the sake of our spiritual life, and for renewal and refreshment. Hmmmm...
I got a Kindle Fire - a great toy! - and with it a free month of Amazon Prime. So I watched all four seasons of "The Tudors" - and had, I have to say, a great time doing it! Pure soap , lots of costume schlock and gratuitous sex - and quite wonderful in one way in particular: everybody was completely and utterly screwed up. There were no heroes or attempts to create them; every character was either deeply flawed or else bent to (sometimes quite horrific) wrongdoing by circumstances - all the while busily justifying their own actions. Interesting that soaps tend to take a more accurate snapshot of reality in some ways, I think. In any case: I've never been more grateful for freedom of speech and religion in my life.
Here's a great story, about an Episcopal priest in South Orange (NJ). Here's the part of the article that interested me:

For the Rev. Canon Dr. Sandye A. Wilson, rector of the Episcopal Church of St. Andrew & Holy Communion in South Orange, taking care of hearts is her business.

Under Wilson's leadership for nearly eight years, St. Andrew has evolved into one of the most diverse, socially conscious and creative religious communities in New Jersey. She has brought liturgical dancers (ages 8 to 80) onto the altar and children to the "Small Fry" service every Sunday. There are poetry slams, science and arts camps, peace camps and drama camp; there is a Holocaust Remembrance and hunger drives with Jewish synagogues, as well as hurricane and earthquake relief work in partnership with the Jamaican Nurses Association. She cooks formal dinners for teenage boys at the rectory so they can practice their social skills, and then takes them to a restaurant of their choice to practice those skills.

What struck me was how great that last sentence is: "cooking formal dinners for teenage boys." What a wonderful - and surprising - idea! She's an interesting character - and grew up attending both the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Church until she was in the fourth grade, when the family switched to the Episcopal Church. The article notes that 'Rev. Wilson likes to say she believes faith is "caught" more than it's "taught"' - and I do understand what she means. I do agree with Derek that "liturgy" is important, and is, in fact, formative; I've never disagreed with this. My rant last month was only about exclusive focus on "liturgy," at the expense of explanation/exposition/teaching.

But note she still knows at least some Catholic prayers by heart - and that she says that "There is something about the mystery (of religion), the incredible connectedness with a God who loved us so extravagantly — it got into my soul as a little kid." She grew up in the church, IOW - in a church, in fact, in which teaching is highly prized and emphasized. Somebody taught her about "a God who loved us so extravagantly." The Roman Catholic Church, for all its faults, teaches the faith as it understands it. Evangelicals, for all their faults, teach the faith as they understand it. It has to first be taught, before it can be caught, IMO.

But I don't mean to pick on her at all; she sounds wonderful. What I wanted to point out was the really interesting theological idea behind those dinners - and to show that that idea could be used by anybody to create similarly lovely ministries in their own parishes, with all sorts and conditions of people.

And here's the idea: what she's doing with the boys is finding a lovely, warm way to help them deal with and redeem the places where they feel themselves broken. The boys don't feel comfortable with their social skills; probably they want to meet girls and have a good chance of getting dates. That's a normal human desire, and one that can cause a lot of problems for people, messing up their lives if that normal desire goes wrong. And so here is a way to offer them something really fun - everybody loves a formal dinner when there's no worry about being judged - and some companionship with others who feel the same way. The whole process is about taking a felt weakness (which means acknowledging it to start with) and redeeming it with something fine and wonderful - and all of that happens via the church. It's actually very Catholic, no? And perhaps an "acted parable" of Grace?

Reminds me a bit of Acts 17:
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

I have a feeling that all kinds of conversations go on at that table. And so could all kinds of conversations like this go on at other, similar tables.
I realized this past Christmas that my understanding of Grace really is more based in the Incarnation than anything else. I keep thinking of that Epiphany/Baptism antiphon we discussed years ago, about the earth's waters "being made holy" as Christ stepped into the Jordan River. John Tavener uses this text:

Today is the nature of the waters sanctified,
And Jordan is cloven assunder,
And rolleth back the current of its flood,
As it beholdeth Christ baptized.

(This text is found in the "Service book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic (Greco-Russian) Church," in case you were interested!)

It's interesting that it says, not that the waters were sanctified, but that the nature of the waters was sanctified. I need to think more about this. In any case, I realize my attraction to the idea of the Incarnation is instinctual, since I've always sort of leaned this way - long before I knew anything about the various theological approaches.
Speaking of "Grace": I'm continuing to read Robert Capon's book about the Parables, and just got through the "Parables of Grace" section - which actually I liked a lot less than the "Parables of the Kingdom" part of the book. I'm not liking how he presents the material, mainly; way too much talk of "death," illustrated by some (to my way of thinking) macabre metaphors. This is a weak part of the book, IMO - although a lot of it is interesting. I'm happy, in any case, to see the parables discussed in such depth, and I'm learning a lot, even when I disagree with what he's saying. It's making my own understanding of things sharper and clearer to me, too - as in the above bullet point about Grace/Incarnation - which is always a good thing.
I'm working out an idea about the 12 Steps as an indirect approach to helping solve certain problems of the human condition. This came about because while I agree with the Lutheran idea that "we can do nothing to effect our own salvation" - in fact, I've begun to believe that "works righteousness" (whether from "right" or "left") may be the biggest problem we have in the Episcopal Church at the moment - I also think there are things we can do to help ourselves. Not for God's sake, but really for our own and for the sake of others, simply so that we can live better together.

In the church there seems to be a kind of competition to scramble to the top of the pile marked "Holy" - and "Holy" seems to take on certain characteristics, depending on the crowd you hang with. TEC's big problem is, because of its (mostly) politically liberal bent, idealism. Idealism about everything - including about the "proper" way to behave in the world. What you get, then, is people yelling at others to "get out there and love your neighbor" - as if "loving your neighbor" were the most normal and natural thing in the world! In fact, "loving your neighbor" goes against many of our most basic instincts, and almost nobody can do it. So we are eternally stuck, expecting all this impossible idealized behavior from ourselves and others. We've lost touch with the reality of the human condition, and so with reality itself.

What's so great about A.A. is that there's no "Holy" pile; everybody's "one drink away from a drunk" at any time - and A.A. only asks us to "practice these principles in all our affairs," without actually prescribing any particular way that's going to happen. No "theosis"; no "attainment of virtue." It's simply about living as a "friend among friends, a worker among workers" - as a human being, IOW, at the same place forever as all others, but each with a unique destiny in which to "find and do God's will."

I agree with the Mockingbird thought that faith is really a kind of rest - but I part company at the point that says "You can do nothing." You can do something - and in fact people sometimes need to "do something" because they can't sit still in their own pain. The 12 Steps, so my theory goes, address certain basic human functions or characteristics (haven't quite done this analysis yet!) - and help people get to a place where "faith" can actually work for them. Well, we'll see how it all works out, I guess.
I'm Open Source through and through, I've realized. I think the more people who can have input on a problem from the more and more various points of view, the better. It is vitally important, though, initially to come to agreement about the basic platform we're working on - whether that's PHP, a faith system, or reality itself.

How to Deal With Slow Walkers - YouTube

2011-12-28T11:49:00.002-05:00

For some stupid reason, I find this very funny: How to Deal With Slow Walkers - YouTube. (What can I say? I'm a cheap date....)

"Violence against women: War's overlooked victims"

2011-12-27T13:51:00.002-05:00

From The Economist: Violence against women: War's overlooked victims. Excerpts, with more at the link:

SHORTLY after the birth of her sixth child, Mathilde went with her baby into the fields to collect the harvest. She saw two men approaching, wearing what she says was the uniform of the FDLR, a Rwandan militia. Fleeing them she ran into another man, who beat her head with a metal bar. She fell to the ground with her baby and lay still. Perhaps thinking he had murdered her, the man went away. The other two came and raped her, then they left her for dead.

Mathilde’s story is all too common. Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war. Antony Beevor, a historian who has written about rape during the Soviet conquest of Germany in 1945, says that rape has occurred in war since ancient times, often perpetrated by indisciplined soldiers. But he argues that there are also examples in history of rape being used strategically, to humiliate and to terrorise, such as the Moroccan regulares in Spain’s civil war.

As the reporting of rape has improved, the scale of the crime has become more horrifyingly apparent (see table). And with the Bosnian war of the 1990s came the widespread recognition that rape has been used systematically as a weapon of war and that it must be punished as an egregious crime. In 2008 the UN Security Council officially acknowledged that rape has been used as a tool of war. With these kinds of resolutions and global campaigns against rape in war, the world has become more sensitive. At least in theory, the Geneva Conventions, governing the treatment of civilians in war, are respected by politicians and generals in most decent states. Generals from rich countries know that their treatment of civilians in the theatre of war comes under ever closer scrutiny. The laws and customs of war are clear. But in many parts of the world, in the Hobbesian anarchy of irregular war, with ill-disciplined private armies or militias, these norms carry little weight.

Take Congo; it highlights both how horribly common rape is, and how hard it is to document and measure, let alone stop. The eastern part of the country has been a seething mess since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In 2008 the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian group, estimated that 5.4m people had died in “Africa’s world war”. Despite peace deals in 2003 and 2008, the tempest of violence has yet fully to subside. As Congo’s army and myriad militias do battle, the civilians suffer most. Rape has become an ugly and defining feature of the conflict.

Plenty of figures on how many women have been raped are available but none is conclusive. In October Roger Meece, the head of the United Nations in Congo, told the UN Security Council that 15,000 women had been raped throughout the country in 2009 (men suffer too, but most victims are female). The UN Population Fund estimated 17,500 victims for the same period. The IRC says it treated 40,000 survivors in the eastern province of South Kivu alone between 2003 and 2008.

“The data only tell you so much,” says Hillary Margolis, who runs the IRC’s sexual-violence programme in North Kivu. These numbers are the bare minimum; the true figures may be much higher. Sofia Candeias, who co-ordinates the UN Development Programme’s Access to Justice project in Congo, points out that more rapes are reported in places with health services. In the areas where fighting is fiercest, women may have to walk hundreds of miles to find anyone to tell that they have been attacked. Even if they can do so, it may be months or years after the assault. Many victims are killed by their assailants. Others die of injuries. Many do not report rape because of the stigma.

Congo’s horrors are mind-boggling. A recent study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam examined rape survivors at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a town in South Kivu province. Their ages ranged from three to 80. Some were single, some married, some widows. They came from all ethnicities. They were raped in homes, fields and forests. They were raped in front of husbands and children. Almost 60% were gang-raped. Sons were forced to rape mothers, and killed if they refused.

....

Rape is a means of subduing foes and civilians without having to engage in the risky business of battle. Faced with rape, civilians flee, leaving their land and property to their attackers. In August rebel militias raped around 240 people over four days in the Walikale district of eastern Congo. The motives for the attack are unclear. The violence may have been to intimidate the population into providing the militia with gold and tin from nearby mines. Or maybe one bit of the army was colluding with the rebels to avoid being replaced by another bit and losing control of the area and its resources. In Walikale, at least, rape seems to have been a deliberate tactic, not a random one, says Ms Margolis.

At worst, rape is a tool of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as in Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda. Rape was first properly recognised as a weapon of war after the conflict in Bosnia. Though all sides were guilty, most victims were Bosnian Muslims assaulted by Serbs. Muslim women were herded into “rape camps” where they were raped repeatedly, usually by groups of men. The full horrors of these camps emerged in hearings at the war-crimes tribunal on ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague; victims gave evidence in writing or anonymously. After the war some perpetrators said that they had been ordered to rape—either to ensure that non-Serbs would flee certain areas, or to impregnate women so that they bore Serb children. In 1995, when Croatian forces over-ran Serb-held areas, there were well-attested cases of sexual violence against both women and men.

In the Sudanese region of Darfur, rape and other forms of sexual violence have also been a brutally effective way to terrorise and control civilians. Women are raped in and around the refugee camps that litter the region, mostly when they leave the camps to collect firewood, water and food. Those of the same ethnicity as the two main rebel groups have been targeted most as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing. According to Human Rights Watch, rape is chronically underreported, partially because in the mostly Muslim region sexual violence is a sensitive subject. Between October 2004 and February 2005 Médecins Sans Frontières, a French charity, treated almost 500 women and girls in South Darfur. The actual number of victims is likely to be much higher.

Chanticleer: The Huron Carol

2011-12-24T13:47:00.002-05:00

Chanticleer - Huron Carol - YouTube

Blessed Christmas to all....

O Virgo Virginum (December 23)

2011-12-23T16:45:00.002-05:00

The final Great "O" Antiphon, O Virgo Virginum ("O Virgin of Virgins") is sung tonight at Evensong

O Virgin of Virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? That which ye behold is a divine mystery.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat:

O Emmanuel (December 22)

2011-12-22T16:45:00.007-05:00

O Emmanuel is the Antiphon upon Magnificat for tonight at Vespers:

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, Desire of all nations and their Salvation: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat:

The text of the Magnificat comes from Luke 1:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

Here's a video of the wonderful Clare College Choir, singing "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," the hymn that grew out of the "O Antiphons."

They're using a different set of words than the ones I know:

O come, O come, Emmanuel! Redeem thy captive Israel That into exile drear is gone, Far from the face of God's dear Son.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, thou Branch of Jesse! draw The quarry from the lion's claw; From the dread caverns of the grave, From nether hell, thy people save.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, thou Dayspring bright! Pour on our souls thy healing light; Dispel the long night's lingering gloom, And pierce the shadows of the tomb.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Come, thou Lord of David's Key! The royal door fling wide and free; Safeguard for us the heavenward road, And bar the way to death's abode.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, Adonai, Who in thy glorious majesty From that high mountain clothed in awe, Gavest thy folk the elder Law.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

"Pigeons Can Learn Higher Math as Well as Monkeys, Study Suggests"

2011-12-22T16:19:00.002-05:00

Pigeons Can Learn Higher Math as Well as Monkeys, Study Suggests - NYTimes.com:

By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame.

Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability which until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest.
They learned to rank groups of one, two and three items in various sizes and shapes. When tested, they were able to do the task even when unfamiliar numbers of things were introduced. In other words, having learned that two was more than one and three more than two, they could also figure out that five was more than two, or eight more than six.
Damian Scarf , a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, tried the same experiment with pigeons, and he and two colleagues report in the current issue of the journal Science that the pigeons did just as well as the monkeys.
Elizabeth Brannon , a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and one of the scientists who did the original experiments with monkeys, was impressed by the new results. “Their performance looks just like the monkeys,” she said.
Score one for the birds. The pigeons had learned an abstract rule — peck images on a screen in order, lower numbers to higher. It may have taken a year of training, with different shapes, sizes and colors of items, always in groups of one, two or three, but all that work paid off when it was time for higher math.
Given groups of six and nine, they could pick, or peck, the images in the right order. This is one more bit of evidence of how smart birds really are, and it is intriguing because the pigeons’ performance was so similar to the monkeys’. “I was surprised,” Dr. Scarf said. He and his colleagues wrote that the common ability to learn rules about numbers is an example either of different groups — birds and primates, in this case — evolving these abilities separately, or of both pigeons and primates using an ability that was already present in their last common ancestor.
That would really be something, because the common ancestor of pigeons and primates would have been alive around 300 million years ago, before dinosaurs and mammals. It may be that counting was already important, but Dr. Scarf said that if he had to guess, he would lean toward the idea that the numerical ability he tested evolved separately. “I can definitely see why both monkeys and pigeons could profit from this ability,” Dr. Scarf said.
No testing has been done with numbers greater than nine, so whether a pigeon can count large numbers of bread crumbs or popcorn kernels is a question still open to investigation.

O Rex Gentium (December 21)

2011-12-21T16:45:00.009-05:00

Anglicans sing O Rex Gentium ("O King of the Nations") tonight as the Antiphon upon Magnificat. (If they're not singing an Antiphon in the honor of St. Thomas, whose feast day it is today, that is.)

O King of Nations, and their Desire; the Cornerstone, who makest both one: Come and save mankind, whom thou formedst of clay.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat itself:

The text of the Magnificat comes from Luke 1:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

The "cornerstone" referred to in this antiphon has many Scriptural sources. Likely the first, and very influential, mention is found in Psalm 118:22:

The stone which the builders rejected Has become the chief corner stone.

Isaiah 28:6 talks, too, of a "cornerstone":

Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: ‘Whoever believes will not be in haste.’

Matthew 21:42 refers back to the Psalm (as do Mark and Luke in their Gospels):

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

The same reference to the Psalm is found in Acts 4:11, as Peter and John talk to the Sanhedrin:

This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone.

And Paul harkens back to the Isaiah - but with a Pauline twist, adding in a bit of text from Isaiah 8:14! - in Romans 9:33:

As it is written, “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

Box Turtle Bulletin » McInerney sentenced; King’s adopted father conveniently blames the money source

2011-12-21T06:59:00.000-05:00

From Box Turtle Bulletin: McInerney sentenced; King’s adopted father conveniently blames the money source:

McInerney sentenced; King’s adopted father conveniently blames the money source
A Commentary
Timothy Kincaid
December 20th, 2011

As anticipated, Brandon McInerney was sentenced to 21 years in jail – with no parole opportunities – for his cold blooded murder of fellow classmate Lawrence King, a 15 year old gay boy.
I will never forget this story. But not just because Larry King was murdered.
Because as foul as King’s murder, was his character assassination. With King no longer alive to defend or explain himself, those with an interest in casting him in the role of ‘evil homosexual vampire’ faced little opposition. Instead, a chorus of defenders of the neo-Nazi sociopath – from sources that still leave me amazed – leaped at the opportunity to portray Larry as a predator who (as jurors put it) “tormented McInerney to the breaking point” by flirting. Oh, clarification: “aggressive flirting”.
To be honest, there have been times during this ordeal that I have felt like I am the only person attempting to speak on Larry’s behalf.
The first to hint that King got what he had coming was Ramin Setoodeh, a Newsweek gossip writer who went to Oxnard, spoke with the defense counsel and some homophobic teachers and then breathlessly told the world that Larry “flaunted his sexuality and wielded it like a weapon.” Why? It’s hard to tell. Maybe laziness, maybe he was gullible. But to me, Setoodeh seems to be the sort of effeminate gay man that can’t wait for the opportunity to demean some gay guy one lisp more effeminate than he is. And this was his big break so he really needed something juicy, girl!
Then came the defense counsel who went on full scale public image campaign to downplay the fact that McInerney had tormented King for years, was dabbling with neo-Nazi ideology, and had publicly threatened to kill King. He clearly broadcast his intention to conduct a full-on gay panic defense, and that is what he did, both in the press and in the courtroom. He painted a picture of tiny Larry King leering and sexually assaulting the much bigger, much stronger, much more popular athlete. And, aside from the prosecutors, no one called him on this absurdity.
The newspapers jumped in playing up King’s gender play, never omitting a reference of King showing up in school in “women’s boots” and “full make-up” while avoiding the fact that the school had a dress policy that King adhered to faithfully. In fact, they seemed to forget that King showed up in school with eye make-up only and that occasionally, and that a teacher counseled him to tone it down. Catherine Saillant, the LA Times reporter covering the story, invariably goes for titillation and context is her victim. Were King alive – or were there anyone alive to represent him – he’d have a good case for libel or at least for editorial restructuring. But like it or not, homophobic snickering – especially that which includes non-gender-typical behavior – sells newspapers and without anyone to demand honesty the pattern continues.
GLAAD, the one organization that exists for the purpose of opposing defamation, had other priorities. It was busy being very very careful that gay-supportive allies are sternly lectured about using the word “fag” and nagging pro-gay businesses about advertising on Fox News (it’s biased, you see). From my search, this is what I found that GLAAD had to say about the deceptive news coverage and the snicker snicker chuckle chuckle way in which Larry was presented as though he were Charles Busch in a classic role: ” … ” I guess it just wasn’t as important as tsk tsking Glee for using the word “tranny” (maybe they should have said “chasing the boys around the school in high heels, teetering as he ran” instead; that seems to be okay).
And much of the rest of the gay community felt sorry that a 14 year old was facing a possible life sentence. So no one wanted to fan the flames. It’s a tragedy for everyone. Poor Brandon was a “victim” too. Well… at least ’til the Hitler books and Nazi propaganda turned up and then there was mostly just silence.
But the greatest betrayal has been from King’s “family”. I put family in quotations because these people have not ever behaved in a manner that reminds me of family – not even my severely dysfunctional family. Greg and Dawn King, who adopted Larry at age three claimed he Larry never bonded with them. And in November 2007 he was removed from their home and placed in a group home after he complained that Gregory King was physically abusive.
But while a living Larry wasn’t much value to the Kings, a dead one was a good source of cash. And, indeed, the Kings happily sued everyone in sight from the school to his social workers. Their theory: Larry’s flamboyance was the reason he was killed so anyone who didn’t stifle him is to blame. From all I can tell weighing Larry’s reputation against a big check was not a difficult call for them; they were named “King” and they wanted to live like it.
Yesterday Greg King was back in court in full swing: (from the Hedda Hopperish LA Times coverage by Saillant)
The father, though, reserved his harshest words for the Hueneme Elementary School District, which operates the junior high school where his 15-year-old son was shot twice in the back of the head on Feb. 12, 2008, by McInerney in front of stunned classmates.
Educators knew that his son had a history of acting provocatively for attention, yet they did nothing to stop King after he started going to E.O. Green Junior High School in women’s high-heeled boots and makeup and began aggressively flirting with boys, the father said. The middle school student had been removed from his home for unspecified reasons and was in foster care.
Instead of protecting him from his “poor impulse control,” King’s father said, “they enabled and encouraged him to become more and more provocative,” putting him in an unsafe position.
Though he holds McInerney responsible for shooting his son, King said the school’s response since the shooting has been despicable.
District leaders have made no changes in policy or procedures, saying they are unnecessary because the school’s staff followed the law in allowing Larry to augment his school uniform with women’s accessories. To date, no formal changes have been made, although the school district paid $25,000 toward a $255,000 civil lawsuit settlement for King’s family.

I’m sorry, Larry King.
Your life sucked. Your school sucked. Your parents sucked. And now you’re dead.
I wish I could say that we have learned something or grown somehow or that it wasn’t all in vain. I can’t.
But I do care. If no one else out there says it, I will. I care that a kid was picked on and had no family to turn to. I care that he was the target of another boy whose heart was dark and who delighted in torment. I care that his solution was to fight back the only way he could, by mouthing off and challenging convention. And I care that this showed tremendous character for refusing to be the victim, for refusing to cower, for refusing to let someone else’s hate fill him with shame.
And I care that one day that kid showed up in school – wearing boys shoes and no accessories or make up, incidentally – and sat down in computer class. And I care that someone being schooled in formalized hate pulled out a gun and put two bullets into the back of that kid’s head because he dared to show no shame . And I care that after that kid, after you Larry, were executed and after your lifeless body was buried, that it wasn’t enough. That adults executed your character for their own financial gain.
I won’t forget you, little effeminate boy who somehow – when those who are supposed to care and support you failed you – found the courage to be yourself and then were attacked, killed, and then maligned for it. I won’t forget you.

O Oriens (December 20)

2011-12-20T16:45:00.026-05:00

The Great "O" Antiphon O Oriens ("O Dayspring") is sung tonight as the Antiphon upon Magnificat.

O Day-Spring, Brightness of the Light everlasting, and Sun of righteousness: Come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat itself.

The text comes from Luke 1:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

Oriens is Latin for "East" - and also refers to "the Morning Star" (either Venus, or perhaps the sun). The text most likely comes from Revelation 22:16, part of the "epilogue" of the book and one of the very last verses in the Bible:

12 “Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. 13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

14 “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. 15 Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

16 “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

17 The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

18 I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. 19 And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.

20 He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

21 The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.

More about the Great "O" Antiphons, from the website "The Hymns and Carols of Christmas":

The antiphons date back at least to the reign of Charlemagne (771-814), and the 439 lines of the English poem Christ, by Cynewulf (c. 800), are described as a loose translation and elaboration of the Antiphons. One source stated that Boethius (c. 480-524) made a slight reference to them, thereby suggesting their presence at that time. Julian reports that two 11^th century copies can be found in manuscripts in the British Museum and the Bodleian. The usage of the "O Antiphons" was so prevalent in monasteries that the phrases, "Keep your O" and "The Great O Antiphons" were common parlance.

At least two — and up to five — additional verses were later added to the original seven. However, it is clear that these seven were designed as a group, since their initial letters (ignoring the 'O' that precedes each line) spell out the reverse acrostic 'SARCORE' — 'ero cras', that is, "I shall be [with you] tomorrow."

According to some sources, by the 12th or 13^th century, but no later than the eighteenth century, five of the verses had been put together to form the verses of a single hymn, with the refrain "Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel nascetur pro te, Israel" ("Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel; Shall come to thee, O Israel") (there was no refrain in the original Latin chant). The earliest known metrical form of the "O" Antiphons was a Latin version in an Appendix of Psalteriolum Cantionum Catholicarum, (Cologne, 1710, from the Tridentine rite).

In 1851, it was translated by and published in Rev. John Mason Neale’s Medieval Hymns. The original title was "Draw nigh, draw nigh! Immanuel." It was revised and published in 1854 in Neale and Thomas Helmore’s second edition of Hymnal Noted with the more familiar "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." "Emmanuel" (or "Immanuel") is the name of the Messiah as prophesied by the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah (see Isaiah 7:14, quoted in Matthew 1:23). There have been numerous other translations, notably by Thomas Alexander Lacey and Henry Sloane Coffin.

English prose translations are by Cardinal John Henry Newman from Tracts for the Times, No. 75 (Vol.3), pp. 183, 206-207, as quoted by Alfred S. Cook, The Christ Of Cynewulf, pp. 71-72. "Alternate Prose Translations" are also provided; translator unknown.

Scriptural citations from Fr. William Saunders, "What Are the ’O Antiphons’?" (and also under the title "A Seven-Fold Announcement"), and Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf, pp. 72-114.

O Clavis David (December 19)

2011-12-19T16:45:00.011-05:00

O Clavis David ("O Key of David") gets sung tonight as the Antiphon upon Magnificat.

O Key of David, and Scepter of the house of Israel; that openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth, and no man openeth: come, and bring forth from the prisionhouse the captive, who sitteth in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat itself.

The text for this antiphon is found in two places in the Scriptures: Isaiah 22 and Revelation 3:

Isaiah 22:22: And the Key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.

Revelation 3:7: And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth....

Clearly, the Revelation passage is a direct quoting of the Isaiah; I am not yet certain of the significance of the phrase in either case, however.

O Radix Jesse (December 18)

2011-12-18T16:45:00.008-05:00

Tonight's Great "O" Antiphon sung before and after the Magnificat is O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse).

O Root of Jesse, which standest for an ensign of the people, at whom kings shall stop their mouths, whom the Gentiles shall seek: Come and deliver us, and tarry not.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat itself.

The text comes from Luke 1:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

The text for this Antiphon comes primarily from Isaiah. The "root of Jesse" is a reference to Isaiah 11 - and the wonderful "kings shall shut their mouths" comes from the haunting "Suffering Servant" passages in Isaiah 52-53:

Behold, my servant shall act wisely;
he shall be high and lifted up,
and shall be exalted.
As many were astonished at you—
his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance,
and his form beyond that of the children of mankind—
so shall he startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him;
for that which has not been told them they see,
and that which they have not heard they understand.

"'A High Degree of Cruelty': UN Report Calls for LGBT Rights Worldwide"

2011-12-18T07:50:00.001-05:00

From the Montreal Gazette: UN Report Calls for LGBT Rights Worldwide:

Landmark report: UN calls for protecting LGBT rights worldwide

Reuters

Homosexuals and transgender people in all regions face discrimination and violence, including killings, rape and torture because of their orientation, and risk the death penalty in at least five countries, the United Nations said on Thursday.

In the first official U.N. report on the issue, it called on governments to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, prosecute all serious violations and repeal discriminatory laws.

“Homophobic and transphobic violence has been recorded in all regions. Such violence may be physical (including murder, beatings, kidnappings, rape and sexual assault) or psychological (including threats, coercion and arbitrary deprivations of liberty),” said the report by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

The U.N. Human Rights Council commissioned the report in June when it recognised the equal rights of LGBT people and said there should be no discrimination or violence based on sexual orientation. Western countries called the vote historic but Islamic states firmly rejected it.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech to the 47-member forum in Geneva on December 6, said “it should never be a crime to be gay.”

“HIGH DEGREE OF CRUELTY”

In addition to spontaneous “street” violence, people perceived as being LGBT may be targets of more organised abuse, “including by religious extremists, paramilitary groups, neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists,” the U.N. report said.

Violence against LGBT people tends to be especially vicious, with “a high degree of cruelty” including mutilation and castration, it added.

They are also victims of so-called “honour killings” carried out by relatives or community members who believe shame has been brought on the family, according to the 25-page report.

Gay men have been murdered in Sweden and the Netherlands, while a homeless transgender woman was killed in Portugal, it said. Lesbian, bisexual and transgender women in El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan and South Africa have experienced gang rapes, family violence and murder.

Members of sexual minorities are disproportionately subjected to torture, often in custody, the report said.

It cited allegations that in a police station in Indonesia, a man and his male partner were severely beaten and sexually assaulted a day after having been attacked by civilians.

A lesbian couple in Brazil were allegedly beaten at a police station and forced to perform oral sex, according to the report.

Currently 76 countries have laws that are used to criminalise behaviour on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, it said, calling for their repeal.

“Such laws, including so-called ‘sodomy laws’, are often relics of colonial-era legislation … Penalties range from short-term to life imprisonment and even the death penalty,” it said.

The sodomy trial of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim ended on Thursday after nearly two years of sensational testimony with the judge saying he would deliver a verdict on January 9, ahead of a general election expected early next year in the mainly Muslim country.

“In at least five countries, the death penalty may be applied to those found guilty of offences relating to consensual, adult homosexual conduct,” the U.N. report said.

It did not identify the countries, but activists named them as Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen. Areas of Nigeria and Somalia also impose the death penalty for homosexual practices, they said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Sophie Hares)

O Adonai (December 17)

2011-12-17T16:45:00.015-05:00

Tonight, the Great "O" Antiphon sung before and after the Magnificat is O Adonai:

O Adonai and Leader of the house of Israel, who appearedst in the Bush of Moses in a flame of fire, and gavest him the law in Sinai: Come and deliver us with an outstretched arm.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat itself:

The text comes from Luke 1:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

About the word Adonai ('literally "my Lord," the plural form of Adon, that is, "Lord" or "Lordship"'), from the Jewish Encyclopedia:

This word occurs in the Masoretic text 315 times by the side of the Tetragram YHWH (310 times preceding and five times succeeding it) and 134 times without it. Originally an appellation of God, the word became a definite title, and when the Tetragram became too holy for utterance Adonai was substituted for it, so that, as a rule, the name written YHWH receives the points of Adonai and is read Adonai, except in cases where Adonai precedes or succeeds it in the text, when it is read Elohim....The translation of YHWH by the word Lord in the King James's and in other versions is due to the traditional reading of the Tetragrammaton as Adonai, and this can be traced to the oldest translation of the Bible, the Septuagint. About the pronunciation of the Shem ha-Meforash, the "distinctive name" YHWH, there is no authentic information. In the early period of the Second Temple the Name was still in common use, as may be learned from such proper names as Jehohanan, or from liturgical formulas, such as Halelu-Yah. At the beginning of the Hellenistic era, however, the use of the Name was reserved for the Temple.

....

Pronunciation of the Name by the Temple priests also gradually fell into disuse. Tosef., Soṭah, xiii. 8, quoted Menaḥot, 109b, and Yoma, 39b, relates that "from the time Simon the Just died [this is the traditional expression for the beginning of the Hellenistic period], the priests refrained from blessing the people with the Name"—in other words, they pronounced it indistinctly, or they mouthed or mumbled it. Thus says Tosef., Ber. vi. 23: Formerly they used to greet each other with the Ineffable Name; when the time of the decline of the study of the Law came, the elders mumbled the Name. Subsequently also the solemn utterance of the Name by the high priest on the Day of Atonement, that ought to have been heard by the priests and the people, according to the Mishnah Yoma, vi. 2, became inaudible or indistinct.

....the Greek translators of the Bible, even though some scribe might now and then write the Tetragrammaton in the archaic Hebrew form on the margin, Π I Π I, as found by Origen (see facsimile attached to article Aquila), took great care to render the name Π I Π I regularly Κυριός, Lord, as if they knew of no other reading but Adonai. Translations dependent upon the Septuagint have the same reading of the Name. Not from "superstitious fear" or misapplication of the third command of the Decalogue or of Lev. xxiv. 11, but from a reverential feeling that the Name ought not to be pronounced except with consecrated lips and to consecrated ears, the substitute "Lord" came into use. Yet this simple measure, introduced to guard the Name against profane use, formed one of the most powerful means of securing to the Biblical God the universal character with which He is invested as the Lord of Hosts and the Ruler of men and nations. YHWH, as the God of Israel, might still be taken as a tribal God; The Lord is no longer the God of one people; He is Lord of all the world, the Only One. Compare Name of God, Shem ha-Meforash, and Tetragrammaton.

Ponta De Areia

2011-12-17T13:07:00.002-05:00

Here's a lovely version of this wonderful Milton Nascimento tune: Ponta De Areia - Esperanza Spalding - YouTube:

Here's Nasciemento's own terrific rendition of this on Wayne Shorter's 1974 album, "Native Dancer":

Here are (maybe!) the words, in Portuguese and (a Google-translate version of) English:

Ponta de areia, ponto final
Da Bahia-Minas, estrada antural
Que ligava Minas ao porto, ao mar
Caminho de ferro mandaram arrancar
Velho maquinista com seu boné
Lembra o povo alegre que vinha cortejar
Maria-fumaca não canta mais
Pras mocas, flores, janelas e quintais
Na praca vazia, um grito, um ai
Casas equecidas, viúvas nos portais

Tip of sand, period Da Bahia-Minas, Minas road antural linking the port, the sea Railways sent Old drivers start with his hat

Remember the happy people who had been courting Mary sings no more smoke-Pras girls, flowers, gardens and windows in the empty square, a cry, a cry equecidas homes, widows in the portals

O Sapientia (December 16)

2011-12-16T16:45:00.012-05:00

The singing of the Great "O" Antiphons begins tonight in the Anglican world; for the next 8 evenings, these ancient texts will be said or sung as the antiphon upon Magnificat at Vespers. (Roman Catholics begin on December 17; they use one fewer antiphon. The last is sung, in each church, on the 23rd, "Christmas Eve Eve.") The first antiphon is O Sapientia ("O Wisdom"); the English translation - in the old language - is below the video.

O Wisdom, which camest out of the mouth of the most High, and reachest from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.

Below is a Latin version of the Magnificat itself, if you're inclined to listen to or sing it:

That text comes from Luke 1:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

The rubrics for Sapientia-tide (these next 8 days) change, according to Breviary.net; the antiphons at Lauds and Vespers are proper to this period. Pray the hours via the links at the bottom of the page.

The text of O Sapientia is drawn in great part from Sirach 24:

¹ Wisdom shall praise her own self, and shall be honoured in God, and shall glory in the midst of her people,
² And shall open her mouth in the churches of the most High, and shall glorify herself in the sight of his power,
³ And in the midst of her own people she shall be exalted, and shall be ad- mired in the holy assembly.
⁴ And in the multitude of the elect she shall have praise, and among the blessed she shall be blessed, saying:
⁵ I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn before all creatures:
⁶ I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth, and as a cloud I covered all the earth:
⁷ I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud.
⁸
I alone have compassed the circuit of heaven, and have penetrated into
the bottom of the deep, and have walked in the waves of the sea,
⁹ And have stood in all the earth: and in every people,
¹⁰ And in every nation I have had the chief rule:
¹¹
And by my power I have trodden under my feet the hearts of all the high
and low: and in all these I sought rest, and I shall abide in the
inheritance of the Lord.
¹² Then the creator of all things commanded, and said to me: and he that made me, rested in my tabernacle,
¹³ And he said to me: Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel, and take root in my elect.
¹⁴
From the beginning, and before the world, was I created, and unto the
world to come I shall not cease to be, and in the holy dwelling place I
have ministered before him.
¹⁵ And so was I established in Sion, and in the holy city likewise I rested, and my power was in Jerusalem.
¹⁶
And I took root in an honourable people, and in the portion of mg God
his inheritance, and my abode is in the full assembly of saints.
¹⁷ I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus, and as a cypress tree on mount Sion.
¹⁸ I was exalted like a palm tree in Cades, and as a rose plant in Jericho:
¹⁹ As a fair olive tree in the plains, and as a plane tree by the water in the streets, was I exalted.
²⁰ I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon. and aromatical balm: I yielded a sweet odour like the best myrrh:
²¹
And I perfumed my dwelling as storax, and galbanum, and onyx, and
aloes, and as the frankincense not cut, and my odour is as the purest
balm.
²² I have stretched out my branches as the turpentine tree, and my branches are of honour and grace.
²³ As the vine I have brought forth a pleasant odour: and my flowers are the fruit of honour and riches.
²⁴ I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.
²⁵ In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue.
²⁶ Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be filled with my fruits.
²⁷ For my spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb.
²⁸ My memory is unto everlasting generations.
²⁹ They that eat me, shall yet hunger: and they that drink me, shall yet thirst.
³⁰ He that hearkeneth to me, shall not be confounded: and they that work by me, shall not sin.
³¹ They that explain me shall have life everlasting.
³² All these things are the book of life, and the covenant of the most High, and the knowledge of truth.
³³ Moses commanded a law in the precepts of justices, and an inheritance to the house of Jacob, and the promises to Israel.
³⁴ He appointed to David his servant to raise up of him a most mighty king, and sitting on the throne of glory for ever.
³⁵ Who filleth up wisdom as the Phison, and as the Tigris in the days of the new fruits.
³⁶ Who maketh understanding to abound as the Euphrates, who multiplieth it as the Jordan in the time of harvest.
³⁷ Who sendeth knowledge as the light, and riseth up as Gehon in the time of the vintage.
³⁸ Who first hath perfect knowledge of her, and a weaker shall not search her out.
³⁹ For her thoughts are more vast than the sea, and her counsels more deep than the great ocean.
⁴⁰ I, wisdom, have poured out rivers.
⁴¹ I, like a brook out of a river of a mighty water; I, like a channel of a river. and like an aqueduct, came out of paradise.
⁴² I said: I will water my garden of plants, and I will water abundantly the fruits of my meadow.
⁴³ And behold my brook became a great river, and my river came near to a sea:
⁴⁴ For I make doctrine to shine forth to all as the morning light, and I will declare it afar off.
⁴⁵
I will penetrate to all the lower parts of the earth, and will behold
all that sleep, and will enlighten all that hope in the Lord.
⁴⁶
I will yet pour out doctrine as prophecy, and will leave it to them
that seek wisdom, and will not cease to instruct their offspring even to
the holy age.
⁴⁷ See ye that I have not laboured for myself only, but for all that seek out the truth.

"In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011"

2011-12-16T05:20:00.003-05:00

Sad. He was a wonderful writer. In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011 | Blogs | Vanity Fair

By Gasper Tringale.
Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

Te Deum in C (Stanford) - Westminster Abbey - YouTube

2011-12-13T21:12:00.002-05:00

Here's Stanford's Te Deum in C, sung by the Westminster Abbey Choir.

We praise thee, O God :
we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee :
the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud :
the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim :
continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy :
Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty :
of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world :
doth acknowledge thee;
The Father : of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true : and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory : O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man :
thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death :
thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants :
whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints : in glory everlasting.

O Lord, save thy people :
and bless thine heritage.
Govern them : and lift them up for ever.
Day by day : we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name : ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us :
as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted :
let me never be confounded.

"No Reason for the Season"

2011-12-13T07:50:00.011-05:00

In support of and building on Robb's earlier post ("True Confessions of a Recovering Advent Nag") on this topic, I'm going to quote from Torie Bosch's article in Slate. Christianity has given a lovely holiday to the world, and what in the world is wrong with that?

Bemoaning the bastardization of the Christmas season is becoming a holiday tradition. In newspaper letters to the editor and in the blogosphere, purists offer chiding reminders that Jesus is "the reason for the season" and that Christmas is supposed to be his birthday party—not a random excuse for shopping and very special sitcom episodes. Adding his voice to the choir this year is megachurch leader and inauguration invocationer Rick Warren, who pleaded in his new book, The Purpose of Christmas, "If you'll slow down for a few minutes … and pause to consider the purpose of Christmas, you can receive and enjoy the best Christmas gift you'll ever be given." For Christians, I have no doubt that that's some sound advice. But I don't want to slow down and consider the purpose of Christmas. What I love about the holidays are what Warren and his ilk surely consider distractions: the trees, the lights, Santa, and Muppet specials.

For me, Christmas has always been a secular occasion. I grew up in an unaffiliated household. My mother is Catholic, though she didn't practice for most of my childhood. My father was raised in a devoutly Jewish home, but he always adored Christmas. My grandmother tells, half-fondly and half-sadly, of when he was 6 and asked whether he could become Christian so that Santa Claus would pay him a visit. He eventually stopped practicing Judaism, but his love of Christmas never went away.

When I was a girl, my father would spend hours decorating the tree, the house, and the yard in a manner a bit like that of Christmas Vacation—lots of swearing, lots of tangled lights, and (eventually) lots of genuine pride in the accomplishment. Each year, one of my brothers or I would accompany him to pick out a new nutcracker to add to our family's collection; the jester, Drosselmeyer, and Civil War soldiers might not have been part of the Nativity story, but they meant Christmas to me. We never celebrated Hanukkah, because it never appealed to him: Christmas was the only winter holiday worth the effort, as far as he was concerned. My father passed away when I was young, but my family's holidays remained much the same. We focused on the togetherness and celebrating my father's memory on his favorite holiday. The miracle of Jesus' birth was far from our minds.

Again, I ask: what is so terrible about this? This is exactly why Christianity continue to speak to human hearts and minds; it's about the hallowing of ordinary human life as God appears in the midst of us - and Christmas, of all holidays, is supposed to be joyful, peaceful, and fun. It's Incarnational; it's lovely.

Here's the last part of the article:

The best thing we nonbelievers can do, in fact, is be honest about not celebrating the religious side of Christmas. Each Christmas and Easter, churches have to struggle to accommodate the extra crowds who show up for holiday services. While pews may be partially filled or even deserted on a Sunday over the summer, the holidays see a huge increase in attendance as the CEOs (Christmas and Easter Onlys) stop by. The problem is particularly pronounced in Catholic churches, as Christmas is a holy day of obligation. When holiday church attendance is motivated by guilt instead of a genuine state of religious worship, it creates headaches for everyone—and takes up valuable pew real estate.

Instead of sitting in church, feeling uncomfortable and vaguely dishonest, I can spend the day with my family—sleeping late, opening presents, preparing and devouring the Christmas meal, sipping a beer, watching the inevitable holiday Law & Order marathon. Could I do these things at other points of the year? Sure — Law & Order is a year-round pleasure. But only at Christmas do so many of my friends and family also have time off, and only at Christmas can I see loved ones who have scattered across the country. Whether or not you believe in God, Christmas is a time of year when you head home or host guests, a rare occasion for the kind of togetherness that can drive you crazy, fill you with love, or both.

What could be better than that, I ask? The whole point of the day is the life of joy, after all. It's simply wonderful that it actually can happen this way - that people have found in one of our holidays a simple, lovely way to feel alive and be connected with people they love.

Amen, and amen!

Tebowing

2011-12-12T03:24:00.000-05:00

Well this is just really funny.

The Advent Prose, tonight at St. Thomas

2011-12-11T19:24:00.003-05:00

You can listen to the Choir of Men & Boys sing it at Sunday Festal Evensong at this link.

They also sing some gorgeous responses by Michael Walsh, and "The Service on Plainsong Tones," (i.e., the Evening Canticles) by Arthur Wills.

Sing along, too, with the lovely Advent hymns, "Comfort, Comfort Ye, My People" and "Creator of the Stars of Night." Wonderful.

(I was very surprised to hear a woman read the Gospel this morning at St. Thom's! And she is the preacher at Evensong, too, I believe. Both firsts, as far as I know....)

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme

2011-12-11T13:40:00.003-05:00

Below is Bach's Cantata 140, from 1731, the entire cantata in a 28-minute video. Wachet auf ("Sleepers, Wake!") is based on Phillip Nicolai's wonderful Lutheran hymn from around 1598; that hymn was sung today to open St. Thomas' Festal Eucharist for Gaudete Sunday.

From the YouTube page:

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140 (1731)

I. Chorus: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Sleepers awake, the voice is calling us) [0:00]
II. Recitative: Er kommt (He comes) [7:09]
III. Aria (duet): Wann kommst du, mein Heil? (When will you come, my salvation?) [8:07]
IV. Chorale: Zion hört die Wächter singen (Zion hears the watchmen singing) [14:39]
V. Recitative: So geh herein zu mir (So come in with me) [18:38]
VI. Aria (duet): Mein Freund ist mein! (My friend is mine!) [20:15]
VII. Chorale: Gloria sei dir gesungen (May Gloria be sung to you) [26:39]

A church cantata by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), with the cantata chorale based on the Lutheran hymn "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" ("Sleepers awake, the voice is calling") by Philipp Nicolai. The text is based on the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25:1-13, the reading of which is scheduled for the 27th Sunday after Trinity in the Lutheran lectionary. This cantata was first performed in Leipzig on November 25, 1731. Bach later transcribed the fourth movement chorale for organ (BWV 645) and published it along with the Schübler Chorales.

English text:

I. (Chorus)

Wake ye maids! hard, strikes the hour,
The watchman calls high on the tower,
Awake, awake, Jerusalem.
Midnight strikes, hear, hear it sounding,
Loud cries the watch, with call resounding:
Where are ye, o wise virgins, where?
Good cheer, the Bridegroom come,
Arise and take your lamps!
Alleluja!
Ye maids beware:
The feast prepare,
So go ye forth to meet Him there.

II. Recitative:

He comes.
The Bridegroom comes!
And Zion's daughter shall rejoice,
He hastens to her dwelling claiming
The maiden of his choice.
The Bridegroom comes; as is a roebuck,
Yea, like a lusty mountain roebuck,
Fleet and fair,
His marriage feast he bids you share.
Arise and take your lamps!
In eagerness to greet him;
Come! hasten, sally forth to meet him.

III. Aria (Duet)

[Soul] Come quickly, now come.
[Jesus] Yea quickly I come.
[Soul] We wait thee with lamps all alighted!
The doors open wide,
Come claim me my bride!
[Jesus] The doors open wide,
I claim me my bride.
[Soul] Come quickly!
[Jesus] Forever in rapture united

IV. Chorale

Zion hears the watchmen calling,
The Faithful hark with joy enthralling,
They rise and haste to greet their Lord.
See, He comes, the Lord victorious,
Almighty, noble, true and glorious,
In Heav'n supreme, on earth adored.
Come now, Thou Holy One,
The Lord Jehovah's Son!
Alleluja!
We follow all
The joyful call
To join Him in the Banquet Hall!

V. Recitative

So come thou unto me,
My fair and chosen bride,
Thou whom I long to see
Forever by my side.
Within my heart of hearts
Art thou secure by ties that naught can sever,
Where I may cherish thee forever.
Forget, beloved, ev'ry care,
Away with pain and grief and sadness,
For better or for worse to share
Our lives in love and joy and gladness.

VI. Aria (Duet)

[Soul] Thy love is mine,
[Jesus] And I am thine!
[Both] True lovers ne'er are parted.
[Soul] Now I with thee, and thou with me.
[Jesus] In flow'ry field will wander,
[Both] In rapture united forever to be.

VII. Chorale

Gloria sing all our voices,
With Angels all mankind rejoices,
With harp and strings in sweetest tone.
Twelve bright Pearls adorn Thy Portals,
As Angels round Thy glorious Throne.
No ear has ever heard
The joy we know.
Our praises flow,
Eeo, eeo,
To God in dulci jubilo.

Text of the Parable of the Ten Virgins:

Matthew 25:1-13 (WEB)

'Then the Kingdom of Heaven will be like ten virgins, who took their lamps, and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. Those who were foolish, when they took their lamps, took no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. Now while the bridegroom delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, "Behold! The bridegroom is coming! Come out to meet him!" Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, "Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out." But the wise answered, saying, "What if there isn't enough for us and you? You go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves." While they went away to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins also came, saying, "Lord, Lord, open to us." But he answered, "Most certainly I tell you, I don't know you." Watch therefore, for you don't know the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.'

Here's something about the hymn itself, and about Nicolai, from the website "The Hymns and Carols of Christmas":

From July 1597 to January 1598, a terrible pestilence ravaged the town of Unna, in Westphalia. For weeks, up to 30 funerals were held in the church. The parsonage of the Lutheran pastor overlooked the graveyard. Over 1,300 fell victim to an agonizing death. Son of a Lutheran pastor, Pastor Philipp Nicolai was regarded as an outstanding and influential preacher, who gained his Doctor of Divinity degree from Wittenberg University in 1594.

During this fearful time, Pastor Nicolai’s thoughts turned to death, and then to God in Heaven, and, finally, to the Eternal Fatherland. He wrote, in the preface (dated Aug. 10, 1598) to his Frewden-Spiegel:

"There seemed to me nothing mere sweet, delightful and agreeable, than the contemplation of the noble, sublime doctrine of Eternal Life obtained through the Blood of Christ. This I allowed to dwell in my heart day and night, and searched the Scriptures as to what they revealed on this matter, read also the sweet treatise of the ancient doctor Saint Augustine [De Civitate Dei].... Then day by day I wrote out my meditations, found myself, thank God! wonderfully well, comforted In heart, joyful in spirit, and truly content; gave to my, manuscript the name and title of a Mirror of Joy, and took this so composed Frewden-Spiegel to leave behind me (if God should call me from this world) as the token of my peaceful, joyful, Christian departure, or (if God should spare use in health) to comfort other sufferers wham He should also visit with the pestilence.. . . How has the gracious, holy God most mercifully preserved me amid the dying from the dreadful pestilence, and wonderfully spared me beyond all my thoughts and hopes, so that with the Prophet David I can say to Him "O how great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee," &c.

He was especially moved by the death of his fifteen-year-old former pupil, Count Wilhelm Ernst who died at Tubingen, September 16, 1598, in the very midst of this horror. These feelings gave rise to one of Nicolai's most beautiful hymns: "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" ("Wake, Awake, For Night Is Flying" and many other translations). Described by John Julian as "one of the first rank" the hymn has a deep scriptural basis. While it comes primarily from the story of the wise and foolish maidens as recorded in Matthew 25: 1-13, it is not limited to that parable, but expands to include:

Rev. 19:6-9 and 21:21 - Marriage references in Revelation between the Lamb and the Bride:

Rev. 19:6-9 ("And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.")
Rev. 21:21 ("And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.")
I Corinthians 2:9 ("But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."). Emphasis added.
Ezekiel 3:17 ("Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me."). Emphasis added.
Isaiah 3:8 ("For Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen: because their tongue and their doings are AGAINST THE LORD, to provoke the eyes of his glory.").

According to Julian, it first appeared in the Appendix to his Frewden-Spiegel, 1599, in 3 stanzas of 10 lines, entitled "Of the Voice at Midnight, and the Wise Virgins who meet their Heavenly Bridegroom. Matt. 25.", and was widely reprinted after that.

In structure, it is a reversed acrostic, W. Z. G. for the Graf zu Waldeck, viz. Count Wilhelm Ernst. Probably the opening lines;

"Wachet anf! ruft uns die Stimme
Der Wächter sehr hoch auf der Zinne"

are borrowed from one of the Wachter-Lieder, a form of lyric popular in the Middle Ages, wrote Julian. But while, formerly, the voice of the Watchman from his turret summons the workers of darkness to flee from discovery, with Nicolai it is a summons to the children of light to awaken to their promised reward and full felicity.

The melody is also apparently by Nicolai, though portions of it, according to Julian, may have been suggested by earlier tunes. He continues, "It has been called the King of Chorales, and by its majestic simplicity and dignity it well deserves the title."

The first harmonized version of the tune appeared in the mid-16th century, in the famous Scandinavian collection Piae Cantiones of 1582, subsequently by Praetorius and then Bach. Sir John Stainer's popular 19th century harmonization is the version most familiar to us today.

Displaced while his home underwent reconstruction, J. S. Bach wrote this most famous of his cantatas, #140.

This cantata remains popular with people of all ages, according to Alan C. Collyer. He writes that the fourth movement based on the second verse "Zion hears..." appeals to many young people today with its beautiful, biting counter melody against the chorale sung by the tenors. The first movement appears as an extended chorale with the sopranos singing the melody in long notes with each other part weaving around in glorious counterpoint. The final verse with its magnificent transcendent text, combined with Bach's harmonization in E flat (a bit high for the congregation!) can be called, writes Collyer, a deeply spiritual and religious experience.

Gaudete!

2011-12-09T21:40:00.004-05:00

Rejoice!, that is. That's the name traditionally given to this Sunday, Advent 3 - named for the Introit on the day, Gaudete in Domino - "Rejoice in the Lord."

Here's the Gregorian chant version of the piece; very pretty:

Here's the Philippians 4:4-6 text it's based on:

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

And here, ladies and gents, is something really spectacular: Chanticleer, singing Henry Purcell's unbelievably gorgeous setting (also called "The Bell Anthem"). Zowie:

The English (Coverdale) words:

Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice. Let your softness be known unto all men, the Lord is e'en at hand. Be careful for nothing: but in all prayer and supplication, let your petitions be manifest unto God with giving of thanks. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesu. Amen.

International Gay Rights: "Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day"

2011-12-06T16:26:00.003-05:00

From the U.S. State Department website, and a gratifying speech by SoS Hilary Rodham Clinton. A lot has happened in only 30 years.

Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
Palais des Nations
Geneva, Switzerland
December 6, 2011

Good evening, and let me express my deep honor and pleasure at being here. I want to thank Director General Tokayev and Ms. Wyden along with other ministers, ambassadors, excellencies, and UN partners. This weekend, we will celebrate Human Rights Day, the anniversary of one of the great accomplishments of the last century.

Beginning in 1947, delegates from six continents devoted themselves to drafting a declaration that would enshrine the fundamental rights and freedoms of people everywhere. In the aftermath of World War II, many nations pressed for a statement of this kind to help ensure that we would prevent future atrocities and protect the inherent humanity and dignity of all people. And so the delegates went to work. They discussed, they wrote, they revisited, revised, rewrote, for thousands of hours. And they incorporated suggestions and revisions from governments, organizations, and individuals around the world.

At three o'clock in the morning on December 10th, 1948, after nearly two years of drafting and one last long night of debate, the president of the UN General Assembly called for a vote on the final text. Forty-eight nations voted in favor; eight abstained; none dissented. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. It proclaims a simple, powerful idea: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. And with the declaration, it was made clear that rights are not conferred by government; they are the birthright of all people. It does not matter what country we live in, who our leaders are, or even who we are. Because we are human, we therefore have rights. And because we have rights, governments are bound to protect them.

In the 63 years since the declaration was adopted, many nations have made great progress in making human rights a human reality. Step by step, barriers that once prevented people from enjoying the full measure of liberty, the full experience of dignity, and the full benefits of humanity have fallen away. In many places, racist laws have been repealed, legal and social practices that relegated women to second-class status have been abolished, the ability of religious minorities to practice their faith freely has been secured.

In most cases, this progress was not easily won. People fought and organized and campaigned in public squares and private spaces to change not only laws, but hearts and minds. And thanks to that work of generations, for millions of individuals whose lives were once narrowed by injustice, they are now able to live more freely and to participate more fully in the political, economic, and social lives of their communities.

Now, there is still, as you all know, much more to be done to secure that commitment, that reality, and progress for all people. Today, I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. They are arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.

I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity, who have a right to claim that, which is now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time. I speak about this subject knowing that my own country's record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country. Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences. So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home.

Now, raising this issue, I know, is sensitive for many people and that the obstacles standing in the way of protecting the human rights of LGBT people rest on deeply held personal, political, cultural, and religious beliefs. So I come here before you with respect, understanding, and humility. Even though progress on this front is not easy, we cannot delay acting. So in that spirit, I want to talk about the difficult and important issues we must address together to reach a global consensus that recognizes the human rights of LGBT citizens everywhere.

The first issue goes to the heart of the matter. Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. Now, of course, 60 years ago, the governments that drafted and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were not thinking about how it applied to the LGBT community. They also weren’t thinking about how it applied to indigenous people or children or people with disabilities or other marginalized groups. Yet in the past 60 years, we have come to recognize that members of these groups are entitled to the full measure of dignity and rights, because, like all people, they share a common humanity.

This recognition did not occur all at once. It evolved over time. And as it did, we understood that we were honoring rights that people always had, rather than creating new or special rights for them. Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.

It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity.

The second issue is a question of whether homosexuality arises from a particular part of the world. Some seem to believe it is a Western phenomenon, and therefore people outside the West have grounds to reject it. Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes; and whether we know it, or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors.

Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality. And protecting the human rights of all people, gay or straight, is not something that only Western governments do. South Africa’s constitution, written in the aftermath of Apartheid, protects the equality of all citizens, including gay people. In Colombia and Argentina, the rights of gays are also legally protected. In Nepal, the supreme court has ruled that equal rights apply to LGBT citizens. The Government of Mongolia has committed to pursue new legislation that will tackle anti-gay discrimination.

Now, some worry that protecting the human rights of the LGBT community is a luxury that only wealthy nations can afford. But in fact, in all countries, there are costs to not protecting these rights, in both gay and straight lives lost to disease and violence, and the silencing of voices and views that would strengthen communities, in ideas never pursued by entrepreneurs who happen to be gay. Costs are incurred whenever any group is treated as lesser or the other, whether they are women, racial, or religious minorities, or the LGBT. Former President Mogae of Botswana pointed out recently that for as long as LGBT people are kept in the shadows, there cannot be an effective public health program to tackle HIV and AIDS. Well, that holds true for other challenges as well.

The third, and perhaps most challenging, issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens. This is not unlike the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation. Some people still defend those practices as part of a cultural tradition. But violence toward women isn't cultural; it's criminal. Likewise with slavery, what was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.

In each of these cases, we came to learn that no practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us. And this holds true for inflicting violence on LGBT people, criminalizing their status or behavior, expelling them from their families and communities, or tacitly or explicitly accepting their killing.

Of course, it bears noting that rarely are cultural and religious traditions and teachings actually in conflict with the protection of human rights. Indeed, our religion and our culture are sources of compassion and inspiration toward our fellow human beings. It was not only those who’ve justified slavery who leaned on religion, it was also those who sought to abolish it. And let us keep in mind that our commitments to protect the freedom of religion and to defend the dignity of LGBT people emanate from a common source. For many of us, religious belief and practice is a vital source of meaning and identity, and fundamental to who we are as people. And likewise, for most of us, the bonds of love and family that we forge are also vital sources of meaning and identity. And caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human. It is because the human experience is universal that human rights are universal and cut across all religions and cultures.

The fourth issue is what history teaches us about how we make progress towards rights for all. Progress starts with honest discussion. Now, there are some who say and believe that all gay people are pedophiles, that homosexuality is a disease that can be caught or cured, or that gays recruit others to become gay. Well, these notions are simply not true. They are also unlikely to disappear if those who promote or accept them are dismissed out of hand rather than invited to share their fears and concerns. No one has ever abandoned a belief because he was forced to do so.

Universal human rights include freedom of expression and freedom of belief, even if our words or beliefs denigrate the humanity of others. Yet, while we are each free to believe whatever we choose, we cannot do whatever we choose, not in a world where we protect the human rights of all.

Reaching understanding of these issues takes more than speech. It does take a conversation. In fact, it takes a constellation of conversations in places big and small. And it takes a willingness to see stark differences in belief as a reason to begin the conversation, not to avoid it.

But progress comes from changes in laws. In many places, including my own country, legal protections have preceded, not followed, broader recognition of rights. Laws have a teaching effect. Laws that discriminate validate other kinds of discrimination. Laws that require equal protections reinforce the moral imperative of equality. And practically speaking, it is often the case that laws must change before fears about change dissipate.

Many in my country thought that President Truman was making a grave error when he ordered the racial desegregation of our military. They argued that it would undermine unit cohesion. And it wasn't until he went ahead and did it that we saw how it strengthened our social fabric in ways even the supporters of the policy could not foresee. Likewise, some worried in my country that the repeal of “Don't Ask, Don’t Tell” would have a negative effect on our armed forces. Now, the Marine Corps Commandant, who was one of the strongest voices against the repeal, says that his concerns were unfounded and that the Marines have embraced the change.

Finally, progress comes from being willing to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. We need to ask ourselves, "How would it feel if it were a crime to love the person I love? How would it feel to be discriminated against for something about myself that I cannot change?" This challenge applies to all of us as we reflect upon deeply held beliefs, as we work to embrace tolerance and respect for the dignity of all persons, and as we engage humbly with those with whom we disagree in the hope of creating greater understanding.

A fifth and final question is how we do our part to bring the world to embrace human rights for all people including LGBT people. Yes, LGBT people must help lead this effort, as so many of you are. Their knowledge and experiences are invaluable and their courage inspirational. We know the names of brave LGBT activists who have literally given their lives for this cause, and there are many more whose names we will never know. But often those who are denied rights are least empowered to bring about the changes they seek. Acting alone, minorities can never achieve the majorities necessary for political change.

So when any part of humanity is sidelined, the rest of us cannot sit on the sidelines. Every time a barrier to progress has fallen, it has taken a cooperative effort from those on both sides of the barrier. In the fight for women’s rights, the support of men remains crucial. The fight for racial equality has relied on contributions from people of all races. Combating Islamaphobia or anti-Semitism is a task for people of all faiths. And the same is true with this struggle for equality.

Conversely, when we see denials and abuses of human rights and fail to act, that sends the message to those deniers and abusers that they won’t suffer any consequences for their actions, and so they carry on. But when we do act, we send a powerful moral message. Right here in Geneva, the international community acted this year to strengthen a global consensus around the human rights of LGBT people. At the Human Rights Council in March, 85 countries from all regions supported a statement calling for an end to criminalization and violence against people because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.

At the following session of the Council in June, South Africa took the lead on a resolution about violence against LGBT people. The delegation from South Africa spoke eloquently about their own experience and struggle for human equality and its indivisibility. When the measure passed, it became the first-ever UN resolution recognizing the human rights of gay people worldwide. In the Organization of American States this year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights created a unit on the rights of LGBT people, a step toward what we hope will be the creation of a special rapporteur.

Now, we must go further and work here and in every region of the world to galvanize more support for the human rights of the LGBT community. To the leaders of those countries where people are jailed, beaten, or executed for being gay, I ask you to consider this: Leadership, by definition, means being out in front of your people when it is called for. It means standing up for the dignity of all your citizens and persuading your people to do the same. It also means ensuring that all citizens are treated as equals under your laws, because let me be clear – I am not saying that gay people can’t or don’t commit crimes. They can and they do, just like straight people. And when they do, they should be held accountable, but it should never be a crime to be gay.

And to people of all nations, I say supporting human rights is your responsibility too. The lives of gay people are shaped not only by laws, but by the treatment they receive every day from their families, from their neighbors. Eleanor Roosevelt, who did so much to advance human rights worldwide, said that these rights begin in the small places close to home – the streets where people live, the schools they attend, the factories, farms, and offices where they work. These places are your domain. The actions you take, the ideals that you advocate, can determine whether human rights flourish where you are.

And finally, to LGBT men and women worldwide, let me say this: Wherever you live and whatever the circumstances of your life, whether you are connected to a network of support or feel isolated and vulnerable, please know that you are not alone. People around the globe are working hard to support you and to bring an end to the injustices and dangers you face. That is certainly true for my country. And you have an ally in the United States of America and you have millions of friends among the American people.

The Obama Administration defends the human rights of LGBT people as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a priority of our foreign policy. In our embassies, our diplomats are raising concerns about specific cases and laws, and working with a range of partners to strengthen human rights protections for all. In Washington, we have created a task force at the State Department to support and coordinate this work. And in the coming months, we will provide every embassy with a toolkit to help improve their efforts. And we have created a program that offers emergency support to defenders of human rights for LGBT people.

This morning, back in Washington, President Obama put into place the first U.S. Government strategy dedicated to combating human rights abuses against LGBT persons abroad. Building on efforts already underway at the State Department and across the government, the President has directed all U.S. Government agencies engaged overseas to combat the criminalization of LGBT status and conduct, to enhance efforts to protect vulnerable LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, to ensure that our foreign assistance promotes the protection of LGBT rights, to enlist international organizations in the fight against discrimination, and to respond swiftly to abuses against LGBT persons.

I am also pleased to announce that we are launching a new Global Equality Fund that will support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world. This fund will help them record facts so they can target their advocacy, learn how to use the law as a tool, manage their budgets, train their staffs, and forge partnerships with women’s organizations and other human rights groups. We have committed more than $3 million to start this fund, and we have hope that others will join us in supporting it.

The women and men who advocate for human rights for the LGBT community in hostile places, some of whom are here today with us, are brave and dedicated, and deserve all the help we can give them. We know the road ahead will not be easy. A great deal of work lies before us. But many of us have seen firsthand how quickly change can come. In our lifetimes, attitudes toward gay people in many places have been transformed. Many people, including myself, have experienced a deepening of our own convictions on this topic over the years, as we have devoted more thought to it, engaged in dialogues and debates, and established personal and professional relationships with people who are gay.

This evolution is evident in many places. To highlight one example, the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality in India two years ago, writing, and I quote, “If there is one tenet that can be said to be an underlying theme of the Indian constitution, it is inclusiveness.” There is little doubt in my mind that support for LGBT human rights will continue to climb. Because for many young people, this is simple: All people deserve to be treated with dignity and have their human rights respected, no matter who they are or whom they love.

There is a phrase that people in the United States invoke when urging others to support human rights: “Be on the right side of history.” The story of the United States is the story of a nation that has repeatedly grappled with intolerance and inequality. We fought a brutal civil war over slavery. People from coast to coast joined in campaigns to recognize the rights of women, indigenous peoples, racial minorities, children, people with disabilities, immigrants, workers, and on and on. And the march toward equality and justice has continued. Those who advocate for expanding the circle of human rights were and are on the right side of history, and history honors them. Those who tried to constrict human rights were wrong, and history reflects that as well.

I know that the thoughts I’ve shared today involve questions on which opinions are still evolving. As it has happened so many times before, opinion will converge once again with the truth, the immutable truth, that all persons are created free and equal in dignity and rights. We are called once more to make real the words of the Universal Declaration. Let us answer that call. Let us be on the right side of history, for our people, our nations, and future generations, whose lives will be shaped by the work we do today. I come before you with great hope and confidence that no matter how long the road ahead, we will travel it successfully together. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

You don't have to be psychic....

2011-12-06T07:29:00.000-05:00

Sanctus XVII, for Sundays in Advent

2011-12-04T20:44:00.002-05:00

Sanctus XVII, for Sundays in Advent & Lent, Vocals by Matthew J Curtis on Vimeo

Here's a lovely audio/video recording of this Sanctus from Mass XVII, apparently used for Advent in the Roman Catholic Church.

Sanctus XVII, for Sundays in Advent & Lent, Vocals by Matthew J Curtis from St Antoine Daniel on Vimeo.

All of the music - both audio/video and scores - for this Mass, and in fact for all of the Mass settings, can be found here.

Vigilate (Byrd)

2011-12-03T14:27:00.000-05:00

Vigilate - The King's Singers - YouTube

The text is from this year's Gospel reading for Advent 1, Mark 13: 35-37. A beautiful rendition.

Vigilate,
nescitis enim quando dominus domus veniat,
sero, an media nocte, an gallicantu, an mane.
Vigilate ergo,
ne cum venerit repente, inveniat vos dormientes.
Quod autem dico vobis,
omnibus dico: vigilate.

Watch ye therefore
(for you know not when the lord of the house cometh,
at even, or at midnight, or at the cock crowing,
or in the morning):
Watch therefore,
lest coming on a sudden, he find you sleeping.
And what I say to you,
I say to all: Watch.

"The World at Our Fingertips: 23 Beautiful Old Texts, Available Online"

2011-12-01T10:09:00.005-05:00

Fantastic! A 10th-Century Iliad! The Magna Carta! The Dead Sea scrolls, if you can believe that! Here: The World at Our Fingertips: 23 Beautiful Old Texts, Available Online - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic.

The Internet's collection of old manuscripts is not only growing in size but improving in quality. With a few clicks of the mouse you can zoom in on some of the earliest Hebrew scrolls, the handwritten works of Leonardo da Vinci or Jane Austen, and the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. The British Library's digital editions include supplemental materials such as translations, explanatory essays, and, in the case of Mozart's notes, audio files of the songs he sketched out. Below, a gallery of some of the best examples of the original manuscripts online.

The Whale Song Project

2011-11-29T12:05:00.006-05:00

Whales | Home

Welcome to the Whale Song Project

You can help marine researchers understand what whales are saying. Listen to the large sound and find the small one that matches it best. Click 'Help' below for an interactive guide

Quite wonderful. Go here.

("And there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it!")

"Be a Jerk: The Worst Business Lesson from the Steve Jobs Biography"

2011-11-28T15:17:00.011-05:00

Be a Jerk: The Worst Business Lesson from the Steve Jobs Biography - Tom McNichol - Business - The Atlantic

I frankly couldn't stand this guy, or his products. Never owned one, or had any desire to - mainly because people who did were so insufferably superior about their ownership, referring to anybody who didn't as "living on the dark side" (and let's not forget those idiotic references to "Windoze"). I've worked in high tech for over 20 years without ever having an Apple product in my home, and have gotten along quite well, thanks. He wasn't any Edison, either; does anybody really believe that all these shiny, essentially void-of-lasting-value products were breakthroughs on the level of the light bulb, or the motion picture? Please. He broke no conceptual barriers; he pandered. And it was always All About Steve.

Why don't people just hang up photos of cash at the Jobs memorials and when they post all these worshipful eulogies for him? That's what everybody is impressed with, after all....

Apple's founder and CEO could be a cruel and nasty guy. He was also the greatest chief executive of our time. Don't go thinking those two things are related.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Steve Jobs was a visionary, a brilliant innovator who reshaped entire industries by the force of his will, a genius at giving consumers not only what they wanted, but what they didn't yet know they wanted.
He was also a world-class asshole.
Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography of Jobs offers a revealing look at what the author has called "good Steve" and "bad Steve." Good Steve was brilliant, charismatic, a champion for excellence, an alchemist who turned a moribund computer company into gold. Bad Steve was petulant, rude, spiteful, and controlling, a man who thought nothing of publicly humiliating employees, hogging the credit for work he hadn't done, throwing tantrums when he didn't get his way, or parking his Mercedes in handicapped spots. For several years, he even denied the paternity of his daughter so that the child and her mother had to live on welfare.
The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature; indeed, it's one of the things that separates humans from, say, an Apple computer. Every one of the components that makes up an iPad is essential to the work it produces. Remove one part and the machine no longer performs its job, and not even the Genius Bar can fix it. But humans are full of qualities that are in no way integral to their functioning in the world. Some aspects of personality have little or no bearing on whether a person performs well, and not a few people succeed in spite of their darker qualities. You can be a genius and an asshole, but the two aren't necessarily causally linked. In fact, there's a strong body of evidence to suggest that there are plenty of assholes who aren't geniuses at anything other than ... being assholes.
But such subtleties may be lost on CEOs, middle managers and wannabe masters of the universe who are currently devouring the Steve Jobs biography and thinking to themselves: "See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I'll be successful like Steve."
This sort of flawed thinking -- call it asshole logic -- isn't something that's necessarily endorsed by Jobs's biographer.
"(Jobs) was not the world's greatest manager," Walter Isaacson said in a recent interview with 60 Minutes. "In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."
But asshole logic, not surprisingly, tends to ignore facts that don't sanction one's own assholery. This distorted reasoning was already prevalent before Steve Jobs's death, and is only likely to spread as Isaacson's biography closes in on becoming the best-selling book of 2011. Five years ago, when Stanford professor of management science and engineering Robert Sutton was researching his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, he ran across a disconcerting number of Silicon Valley leaders who believed that Steve Jobs was living proof that being an asshole boss was integral to building a great company.
Sutton's counter-thesis was that assholes--which he defined as those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their hostility on the less powerful--poison the workplace and induce qualified employees to quit and are therefore bad for business, regardless of the asshole's individual talent or effectiveness.
When Sutton published an article in the Harvard Business Review advancing his theory, he was amazed at the reaction. He had published other articles in the Review, many of them longer and better researched, but nothing provoked the response that his asshole article did. Sutton received well over 1,000 emails, and gathered countless horror stories, including one about a worker undergoing chemotherapy whose boss told him he was "a wimp and a pussy."
What an asshole!
Sutton decided to expand the article into a book, and wound up interviewing dozens of Silicon Valley leaders and insiders. When Sutton would advance the notion that assholes are bad for business, one person after another had the same reaction: "What about Steve Jobs?"
"Even people who worked with Jobs told me that they'd seen him make people cry many times, but that 80 percent of the time he was right, " says Sutton. "It is troubling that there's this notion in our culture that if you're a winner, it's okay to be an asshole."
So many people advanced Steve Jobs as evidence that asshole CEOs build better companies that Sutton somewhat reluctantly included a chapter in his book on "The Virtues of Assholes," with Steve Jobs as Exhibit A. There is some evidence that "status displays" by aggressive bosses can motivate workers and give slackers a kick in the pants. And effective jerk bosses usually aren't assholes all the time, they're able to turn on the charm when the situation demands it, something Steve Jobs, by most accounts, was very good at doing. And it helps for companies to have skilled subordinate executives that are good at cleaning up after the Asshole-in-Chief, much like the sad-faced men carrying shovels who walk behind circus elephants.
But Sutton's book makes clear that for the most part, assholes are bad for the bottom line, to say nothing of the human toll they exact. There are plenty of very successful companies that aren't led by assholes - Google, Virgin Atlantic, Procter & Gamble and Southwest Airlines among them. Likewise, there are legions of assholes who lead companies that aren't successful, in part due to their own bad behavior.
With the death and canonization of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the Jobs biography as a kind of sacred text for managers, the ranks of bosses who see Bad Steve's nastier traits as something to imitate is liable to swell. It's unlikely the book will make despots out of thoughtful, fair-minded middle managers. It's far more probable that it will turn bosses who are already assholes into even bigger assholes, raising the temperature of the worst actors so that they become that most combustible of workplace figures, the flaming asshole.
Already, the web is full of articles that hold up Steve Jobs as the model of how to lead and succeed in life, with titles such as "Ten Leadership Lessons from the Steve Jobs School of Management" and "21 Life Lessons from Steve Jobs." Most of these works prefer to focus on Good Steve, but it may not be long until business book authors hone in on the timeless lessons to be drawn from Bad Steve's asshole ways. The titles write themselves: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes. The One-Minute Asshole. Who's The Asshole Who Moved My Cheese?
The fact is, Steve Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole. He succeeded because he was Steve Jobs. He had an uncanny sixth sense about what consumers wanted, an unmatched ability to adapt existing technology and turn it into something new, and a commitment to quality that turned ordinary Apple customers into fans for life. Being an asshole was part of the Steve package, but it wasn't essential to his success. But that's not a message most of the assholes in the corner offices want to hear.

Capon on Christian education and stories

2011-11-27T09:49:00.003-05:00

Another terrific snippet from "Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus," by Robert Farrar Capon:

Christian education is not the communication of correct views about what the various works and words of Jesus might mean; rather it is the stocking of the imagination with the icons of those works and words themselves.

It is most successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce understanding but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the walls of the mind. We do not include the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, because we understand it, nor do we omit the parable of the Unjust Steward because we can't make head or tail of it. Rather, we commit both to the Christian memory because that's the way Jesus seems to want the inside of his believers' heads decorated. Indeed, the only really mischievous thing anyone can do with the Gospel is insist on hanging only the pictures he happens to like. That's what heresy really is: picking and choosing, on the basis of my interpretations, between the icons provided to me. Orthodoxy, if it's understood correctly, is simply the constant displaying of the entire collection.

Next Stop Mars! Huge NASA Rover Launches toward Red Planet: Scientific American

2011-11-26T13:16:00.000-05:00

Next Stop Mars! Huge NASA Rover Launches toward Red Planet: Scientific American

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA has launched its next Mars rover, kicking off a long-awaited mission to investigate whether the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life.
The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket today (Nov. 26) at 10:02 a.m. EST (1502 GMT), streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The huge robot's next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take 8 1/2 months.
Joy Crisp, a deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called the liftoff "spectacular."
"This feels great," she said as she watched the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral. [Photos: Curiosity Rover Launches to Mars]
Pamela Conrad, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's mission at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said, "Every milestone feels like such a relief."
NASA expected around 13,500 people to watch the liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, with many more viewing from surrounding areas, setting a record for the number of spectators watching an unmanned launch.
"It's a beautiful day," Conrad added. "The sun's out, and all these people came out to watch."
The work Curiosity does when it finally arrives should revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet and pave the way for future efforts to hunt for potential Martian life, researchers said.
"It is absolutely a feat of engineering, and it will bring science like nobody's ever expected," Doug McCuistion, head of NASA's Mars exploration program, said of Curiosity. "I can't even imagine the discoveries that we're going to come up with."
A long road to launch
Curiosity's cruise to Mars may be less challenging than its long and bumpy trek to the launch pad, which took nearly a decade.
NASA began planning Curiosity's mission — which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) — back in 2003. The rover was originally scheduled to blast off in 2009, but it wasn't ready in time.
Launch windows for Mars-bound spacecraft are based on favorable alignments between Earth and the Red Planet, and they open up just once every two years. So the MSL team had to wait until 2011.
That two-year slip helped boost the mission's overall cost by 56 percent, to its current $2.5 billion. But today's successful launch likely chased away a lot of the bad feelings still lingering after the delay and cost overruns.
"I think you could visibly see the team morale improve — the team grinned more, the team smiled more — as the rover and the vehicle came closer, and more and more together here when we were at Kennedy [Space Center]" preparing for liftoff, MSL project manager Pete Theisinger of JPL said a few days before launch.
A rover behemoth
Curiosity is a beast of a rover. At 1 ton, it weighs five times more than each of the last two rovers NASA sent to Mars, the golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in January 2004 to search for signs of past water activity.
While Spirit and Opportunity each carried five science instruments, Curiosity sports 10, including a rock-zapping laser and equipment designed to identify organic compounds — carbon-based molecules that are the building blocks of life as we know it.

The Advent Vespers Hymn: Conditor alme siderum ("Creator of the stars of night")

2011-11-26T11:21:00.005-05:00

Here's the plainchant Latin version of this hymn for Evensong in Advent, sung by Cistercian monks (from Stift Heiligenkreuz in Vienna); it's really a lovely melody. Haven't found anything in English as good yet, but the word in Latin and English both are below.

Conditor alme siderum
aetérna lux credéntium
Christe redémptor
ómnium exáudi preces súpplicum

Qui cóndolens intéritu
mortis perire saeculum
salvásti mundum languidum
donnas reis remedium.

Vergénte mundi véspere
uti sponsus de thálamo
egréssus honestissima
Virginis matris cláusula.

Cuius forti ponténtiae
genu curvántur ómnia
caeléstia, terréstia
nutu faténtur súbdita.

Te, Sancte fide quáesumus,
venture iudex sáeculi,
consérva nos in témpore
hostis a telo perfidi.

Sit, Christe rex piissime
tibi Patríque glória
cum Spíritu Paráclito
in sempitérna sáecula.
Amen.

Creator of the stars of night,
Thy people's everlasting light,
Jesu, Redeemer, save us all,
and hear Thy servants when they call.

Thou, grieving that the ancient curse
should doom to death a universe,
hast found the medicine, full of grace,
to save and heal a ruined race.

Thou camest, the Bridegroom of the Bride,
as drew the world to evening tide,
proceeding from a virgin shrine,
the spotless Victim all divine.

At whose dread Name, majestic now,
all knees must bend, all hearts must bow;
and things celestial Thee shall own,
and things terrestrial Lord alone.

O Thou whose coming is with dread,
to judge and doom the quick and dead,
preserve us, while we dwell below,
from every insult of the foe.

To God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Spirit, Three in One,
laud, honor, might, and glory be
from age to age eternally.
Amen.

And here's something a little more out there - but still lovely, I think: Ensemble Nu:n - Conditor alme siderum - YouTube.

Ensemble Nu:n is, apparently, a German/Canadian ensemble that performs some of the chant repertoire in their own style.

They've also posted a video of the Lauds hymn for Advent, Vox clara Ecce Intonat.

It'll be interesting to see what they come up with over time.

Audite Verbum: An Advent Matins Responsory

2011-11-25T09:45:00.004-05:00

Canto ambrosiano, Avvento, Responsorio AUDITE VERBUM, Schola Gregoriana Mediolanensis, Giovanni Vianini, Milano, Italia - YouTube

That's an Ambrosian Chant version of the Advent Responsory, Audite verbum.

Here's something about this Responsory from the 1918 book, Liturgica historica: papers on the liturgy and religious life of the Western church, available in full at the Google Books link. (Psst, Derek: It looks like quite a good resource!)

At the end of each lesson for matins, i. e. the night office, is a long responsory which, in its simplest form, is thus made up: first, a biblical text (or an adaptation of one), which is the 'responsory' in a strict sense; on which follows a 'verse', also from Scripture; and after that the second half (or part) of the preceding 'responsory'.

For instance, .... the responsory at the end of the eighth lesson at matins of the first Sunday of Advent:—Responsory: 'Audite verbum Domini gentes, et annuntiate illud in finibus terrae *. Et insulis quae procul sunt dicite: Salvator noster adveniet.' Verse: 'Annuntiate, et auditum facite: loquimini et clamate.' And then comes a repetition of the second half of the 'responsory' proper: * Et insulis quae procul sunt dicite: Salvator noster adveniet.' It is obvious that, with an arrangement of this kind, to be tolerable at all the ' verse' must be such that its last words, when followed by the second half of the 'responsory', will make sense and form a continuous phrase. But the authentic and native Roman method of singing these responsories knew no need for such clever dovetailings; for according to that Roman method the ' responsory' was simply repeated in its entirety after the 'verse'.

The translation found at Divinum Offocium for this Responsory (along with the entire service of Matins - another good resource) is:

R. Hear the word of the Lord, O ye nations, and declare it in the ends of the earth * And in the isles afar off, and say Our Saviour shall come.
V. Declare it and make it known, lift up your voice and cry aloud.
R. And in the isles afar off, and say Our Saviour shall come.

The Medieval Music Database has a page on this responsory, as well, along with a page from The Poissy Antiphonal. This is a different tune, though:

Science's attitudes must reflect a world in crisis : Nature News & Comment

2011-11-24T10:16:00.002-05:00

Science's attitudes must reflect a world in crisis : Nature News & Comment

Those involved in science policy sometimes seem to me to be sleep-walking through the greatest crisis to afflict the West since the Second World War. True, from the point of view of the scientist at the bench, grants continue to flow and results continue to be published. Perhaps this is why wider discourse about science's role in society has hardly budged an inch.
For the past three years, I have grown steadily more impatient with this 'business as usual' approach. Whenever an academy president or research chief stands up to speak in public, I have been waiting for them to explain how they will do things differently. They never do.
At the World Science Forum in Budapest last week, some scientific leaders finally acknowledged the new reality. In particular, representatives of developing countries — which account for a fast-growing share of global science — talked of radical reorientation of research priorities to better match the pressing needs of their populations. And behind the scenes, analysts are mapping out fascinating, and sometimes alarming, possible scenarios for global science after the crash.
Challenged by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to face up to the implications of the economic crisis, prominent Western representatives at the forum, such as William Colglazier, science adviser to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and Chris Llewellyn Smith, former chief of Europe's particle-physics laboratory CERN, failed to do so in their plenary talks. And some speakers were clearly more comfortable discussing the planet's ecological crises than the economic ones currently alarming the general population.
Questions were soon raised, however, when Princess Sumaya bint el Hassan of Jordan's Royal Scientific Society captured the mood of the developing world. “We must ask ourselves why so much scientific research is driven by the consumer needs of a tiny elite,” she said. “We're being naive if we envisage business-as-usual for science in the new century.”
Some things remained unsaid at Budapest: no one criticized science's failure to join engineering groups in highlighting the lack of solid, productive foundations for the two-decades-long boom that ended abruptly in 2008. Nor was there criticism of failure to expose the pseudoscience that underpinned the exotic financial instruments that played such a central part in both the boom and the bust.
But the forum did reveal the beginnings of a serious response by scientific leaders to the tumult ahead. Despite much cosy rhetoric about defending research funding, one uncomfortable but realistic scenario is for it to nosedive, perhaps by one-third in the United States and the United Kingdom in real terms, over the next five years. Even though other nations will spend more money, that sort of change will wreak havoc.
One great danger is that scarce funding will consolidate around single-discipline research — even though everyone knows that the most valuable work is now multidisciplinary. An associated danger, already revealed in the US Congress, is that the social sciences will be expelled from the temple — just when, as Llewellyn Smith pointed out in Budapest, the hard sciences need to invite them in to help public engagement.
But the political outcomes of the crisis aren't yet clear enough to enable scientists to plan around them. That has led the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris, the global association of academies and scientific societies, to conduct a foresight exercise that explores how science as a whole might change shape over the next 20 years.
An ICSU task force led by physicist John Marks has been looking at all the drivers of global science and has consolidated them into two overriding forces: engagement with society and globalization (as opposed to nationalism). Plotting these two against each other, Marks told the forum, produces four distinct scenarios for the future — whatever the level of funding.
The first and most sunny, with more globalization and high engagement, would see a series of positive outcomes, including much more interdisciplinary research. The second — more globalization but low engagement — is rather like what we had before the crash, only worse. The ICSU PowerPoint slide for this showed bunches of vainglorious yuppies with mobile phones and portable computers, doubtless creating more gizmos and expensive drugs that most people in the world can't afford. The third scenario would have more nationalism, with high engagement. That might create a series of little Denmarks pulling away from each other to deal with their own problems, with their own research strategies and regulatory regimes.
Finally, and most ominously, there's more nationalism, with less engagement. This predicts old-fashioned, stick-to-your-knitting, single-discipline science, aligned with resurgent nationalism. The slide for this one had a mushroom cloud at one stage, but Marks settled for a barely more reassuring image of some darkly lurking battleships.
The ICSU exercise isn't complete yet and not everyone sees its value. But it outlines the choices that science faces. Scientists have always cultivated globalization, and can keep pushing for it. Engagement is different; a tribal disdain for the social sciences still holds sway in the laboratory, as does a haughty disregard for the views and demands of the general public. Both outlooks need to be jettisoned if science is to contribute and thrive in this new world.

An improved discussion of "human nature" for the Episcopal Church's Catechism: Step 4

2011-11-23T17:11:00.002-05:00

It just came to me today, pursuant to recent discussions, that we could vastly improve on the "Human Nature" section in the Episcopal Church's catechism by simply printing out the Step 4 Chapter in the A.A. book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. It does include some actual observations about "human nature" - and it's way more interesting besides.

So, without additions or deletions, or any further ado, here's the chapter in question:

"Step Four: "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

Creation gave us instincts for a purpose. Without them we wouldn't be complete human beings. If men and women didn't exert themselves to be secure in their persons, made no effort to harvest food or construct shelter, there would be no survival. If they didn't reproduce, the earth wouldn't be populated. If there were no social instinct, if men cared nothing for the society of one another, there would be no society. So these desires--for the sex relation, for material and emotional security, and for companionship--are perfectly necessary and right, and surely God-given.

Yet these instincts, so necessary for our existence, often far exceed their proper functions. Powerfully, blindly, many times subtly, they drive us, dominate us, and insist upon ruling our lives. Our desires for sex, for material and emotional security, and for an important place in society often tyrannize us. When thus out of joint, man's natural desires cause him great trouble, practically all the trouble there is. No human being, however good, is exempt from these troubles. Nearly every serious emotional problem can be seen as a case of misdirected instinct. When that happens, our great natural assets, the instincts, have turned into physical and mental liabilities.

Step Four is our vigorous and painstaking effort to discover what these liabilities in each of us have been, and are. We want to find exactly how, when, and where our natural desires have warped us. We wish to look squarely at the unhappiness this has caused others and ourselves. By discovering what our emotional deformities are, we can move toward their correction. Without a willing and persistent effort to do this, there can be little sobriety or contentment for us. Without a searching and fearless moral inventory, most of us have found that the faith which really works in daily living is still out of reach.

Before tackling the inventory problem in detail, let's have a closer look at what the basic problem is. Simple examples like the following take on a world of meaning when we think about them. Suppose a person places sex desire ahead of everything else. In such a case, this imperious urge can destroy his chances for material and emotional security as well as his standing in the community. Another may develop such an obsession for financial security that he wants to do nothing but hoard money. Going to the extreme, he can become a miser, or even a recluse who denies himself both family and friends.

Nor is the quest for security always expressed in terms of money. How frequently we see a frightened human being determined to depend completely upon a stronger person for guidance and protection. This weak one, failing to meet life's responsibilities with his own resources, never grows up. Disillusionment and helplessness are his lot. In time all his protectors either flee or die, and he is once more left alone and afraid.

We have also seen men and women who go power-mad, who devote themselves to attempting to rule their fellows. These people often throw to the winds every chance for legitimate security and a happy family life. Whenever a human being becomes a battleground for the instincts, there can be no peace.

But that is not all of the danger. Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness follows. If the pursuit of wealth tramples upon people who happen to be in the way, then anger, jealousy, and revenge are likely to be aroused. If sex runs riot, there is a similar uproar. Demands made upon other people for too much attention, protection, and love can only invite domination or revulsion in the protectors themselves--two emotions quite as unhealthy as the demands which evoked them. When an individual's desire for prestige becomes uncontrollable, whether in the sewing circle or at the international conference table, other people suffer and often revolt. This collision of instincts can produce anything from a cold snub to a blazing revolution. In these ways we are set in conflict not only with ourselves, but with other people who have instincts, too.

Alcoholics especially should be able to see that instinct run wild in themselves is the underlying cause of their destructive drinking. We have drunk to drown feelings of fear, frustration, and depression. We have drunk to escape the guilt of passions, and then have drunk again to make more passions possible. We have drunk for vain glory--that we might the more enjoy foolish dreams of pomp and power. This perverse soul-sickness is not pleasant to look upon. Instincts on rampage balk at investigation. The minute we make a serious attempt to probe them, we are liable to suffer severe reactions.

If temperamentally we are on the depressive side, we are apt to be swamped with guilt and self-loathing. We wallow in this messy bog, often getting a misshapen and painful pleasure out of it. As we morbidly pursue this melancholy activity, we may sink to such a point of despair that nothing but oblivion looks possible as a solution. Here, of course, we have lost all perspective, and therefore all genuine humility. For this is pride in reverse. This is not a moral inventory at all; it is the very process by which the depressive has so often been led to the bottle and extinction.

If, however, our natural disposition is inclined to self righteousness or grandiosity, our reaction will be just the opposite. We will be offended at A.A.'s suggested inventory. No doubt we shall point with pride to the good lives we thought we led before the bottle cut us down. We shall claim that our serious character defects, if we think we have any at all, have been caused chiefly by excessive drinking. This being so, we think it logically follows that sobriety-- first, last, and all the time--is the only thing we need to work for. We believe that our one-time good characters will be revived the moment we quit alcohol. If we were pretty nice people all along, except for our drinking, what need is there for a moral inventory now that we are sober?

We also clutch at another wonderful excuse for avoiding an inventory. Our present anxieties and troubles, we cry, are caused by the behavior of other people--people who really need a moral inventory. We firmly believe that if only they'd treat us better, we'd be all right. Therefore we think our indignation is justified and reasonable--that our resentments are the "right kind." We aren't the guilty ones. They are!

At this stage of the inventory proceedings, our sponsors come to the rescue. They can do this, for they are the carriers of A.A.'s tested experience with Step Four. They comfort the melancholy one by first showing him that his case is not strange or different, that his character defects are probably not more numerous or worse than those of anyone else in A.A. This the sponsor promptly proves by talking freely and easily, and without exhibitionism, about his own defects, past and present. This calm, yet realistic, stocktaking is immensely reassuring. The sponsor probably points out that the newcomer has some assets which can be noted along with his liabilities. This tends to clear away morbidity and encourage balance. As soon as he begins to be more objective, the newcomer can fearlessly, rather than fearfully, look at his own defects.

The sponsors of those who feel they need no inventory are confronted with quite another problem. This is because people who are driven by pride of self unconsciously blind themselves to their liabilities. These newcomers scarcely need comforting. The problem is to help them discover a chink in the walls their ego has built, through which the light of reason can shine.

First off, they can be told that the majority of A.A. members have suffered severely from self-justification during their drinking days. For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses; excuses, of course, for drinking, and for all kinds of crazy and damaging conduct. We had made the invention of alibis a fine art. We had to drink because times were hard or times were good. We had to drink because at home we were smothered with love or got none at all. We had to drink because at work we were great successes or dismal failures. We had to drink because our nation had won a war or lost a peace. And so it went, ad infinitum.

We thought "conditions" drove us to drink, and when we tried to correct these conditions and found that we couldn't to our entire satisfaction, our drinking went out of hand and we became alcoholics. It never occurred to us that we needed to change ourselves to meet conditions, whatever they were.

But in A.A. we slowly learned that something had to be done about our vengeful resentments, self-pity, and unwarranted pride. We had to see that every time we played the big shot, we turned people against us. We had to see that when we harbored grudges and planned revenge for such defeats, we were really beating ourselves with the club of anger we had intended to use on others. We learned that if we were seriously disturbed, our first need was to quiet that disturbance, regardless of who or what we thought caused it.

To see how erratic emotions victimized us often took a long time. We could perceive them quickly in others, but only slowly in ourselves. First of all, we had to admit that we had many of these defects, even though such disclosures were painful and humiliating. Where other people were concerned, we had to drop the word "blame" from our speech and thought. This required great willingness even to begin. But once over the first two or three high hurdles, the course ahead began to look easier. For we had started to get perspective on ourselves, which is another way of saying that we were gaining in humility.

Of course the depressive and the power-driver are personality extremes, types with which A.A. and the whole world abound. Often these personalities are just as sharply defined as the examples given. But just as often some of us will fit more or less into both classifications. Human beings are never quite alike, so each of us, when making an inventory, will need to determine what his individual character defects are. Having found the shoes that fit, he ought to step into them and walk with new confidence that he is at last on the right track.

Now let's ponder the need for a list of the more glaring personality defects all of us have in varying degrees. To those having religious training, such a list would set forth serious violations of moral principles. Some others will think of this list as defects of character. Still others will call it an index of maladjustments. Some will become quite annoyed if there is talk about immorality, let alone sin. But all who are in the least reasonable will agree upon one point: that there is plenty wrong with us alcoholics about which plenty will have to be done if we are to expect sobriety, progress, and any real ability to cope with life.

To avoid falling into confusion over the names these defects should be called, let's take a universally recognized list of major human failings--the Seven Deadly Sins of pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. It is not by accident that pride heads the procession. For pride, leading to self-justification, and always spurred by conscious or unconscious fears, is the basic breeder of most human difficulties, the chief block to true progress. Pride lures us into making demands upon ourselves or upon others which cannot be met without perverting or misusing our God-given instincts. When the satisfaction of our instincts for sex, security, and society becomes the sole object of our lives, then pride steps in to justify our excesses.

All these failings generate fear, a soul-sickness in its own right. Then fear, in turn, generates more character defects. Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied drives us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized while ours are not. We eat, drink, and grab for more of everything than we need, fearing we shall never have enough. And with genuine alarm at the prospect of work, we stay lazy. We loaf and procrastinate, or at best work grudgingly and under half steam. These fears are the termites that ceaselessly devour the foundations of whatever sort of life we try to build.

So when A.A. suggests a fearless moral inventory, it must seem to every newcomer that more is being asked of him than he can do. Both his pride and his fear beat him back every time he tries to look within himself. Pride says, "You need not pass this way," and Fear says, "You dare not look!" But the testimony of A.A.'s who have really tried a moral inventory is that pride and fear of this sort turn out to be bogeymen, nothing else. Once we have a complete willingness to take inventory, and exert ourselves to do the job thoroughly, a wonderful light falls upon this foggy scene. As we persist, a brand-new kind of confidence is born, and the sense of relief at finally facing ourselves is indescribable. These are the first fruits of Step Four.

By now the newcomer has probably arrived at the following conclusions: that his character defects, representing instincts gone astray, have been the primary cause of his drinking and his failure at life; that unless he is now willing to work hard at the elimination of the worst of these defects, both sobriety and peace of mind will still elude him; that all the faulty foundation of his life will have to be torn out and built anew on bedrock. Now willing to commence the search for his own defects, he will ask, "Just how do I go about this? how do I take inventory of myself?"

Since Step Four is but the beginning of a lifetime practice, it can be suggested that he first have a look at those personal flaws which are acutely troublesome and fairly obvious. Using his best judgment of what has been right and what has been wrong, he might make a rough survey of his conduct with respect to his primary instincts for sex, security, and society. Looking back over his life, he can readily get under way by consideration of questions such as these:

When, and how, and in just what instances did my selfish pursuit of the sex relation damage other people and me? What people were hurt, and how badly? Did I spoil my marriage and injure my children? Did I jeopardize my standing in the community? Just how did I react to these situations at the time? Did I burn with a guilt that nothing could extinguish? Or did I insist that I was the pursued and not the pursuer, and thus absolve myself? How have I reacted to frustration in sexual matters? When denied, did I become vengeful or depressed? Did I take it out on other people? If there was rejection or coldness at home, did I use this as a reason for promiscuity?

Also of importance for most alcoholics are the questions they must ask about their behavior respecting financial and emotional security. In these areas fear, greed, possessiveness, and pride have too often done their worst. Surveying his business or employment record, almost any alcoholic can ask questions like these: In addition to my drinking problem, what character defects contributed to my financial instability? Did fear and inferiority about my fitness for my job destroy my confidence and fill me with conflict? Did I try to cover up those feelings of inadequacy by bluffing, cheating, lying, or evading responsibility? Or by griping that others failed to recognize my truly exceptional abilities? Did I overvalue myself and play the big shot? Did I have such unprincipled ambition that I double-crossed and undercut my associates? Was I extravagant? Did I recklessly borrow money, caring little whether it was repaid or not? Was I a pinch penny, refusing to support my family properly? Did I cut corners financially? What about the "quick money" deals, the stock market, and the races?

Businesswomen in A.A. will naturally find that many of these questions apply to them, too. But the alcoholic housewife can also make the family financially insecure. She can juggle charge accounts, manipulate the food budget, spend her afternoons gambling, and run her husband into debt by irresponsibility, waste, and extravagance.

But all alcoholics who have drunk themselves out of jobs, family, and friends will need to cross-examine themselves ruthlessly to determine how their own personality defects have thus demolished their security.

The most common symptoms of emotional insecurity are worry, anger, self-pity, and depression. These stem from causes which sometimes seem to be within us, and at other times to come from without. To take inventory in this respect we ought to consider carefully all personal relationships which bring continuous or recurring trouble. It should be remembered that this kind of insecurity may arise in any area where instincts are threatened. Questioning directed to this end might run like this: Looking at both past and present, what sex situations have caused me anxiety, bitterness, frustration, or depression? Appraising each situation fairly, can I see where I have been at fault? Did these perplexities beset me because of selfishness or unreasonable demands? Or, if my disturbance was seemingly caused by the behavior of others, why do I lack the ability to accept conditions I cannot change? These are the sort of fundamental inquiries that can disclose the source of my discomfort and indicate whether I may be able to alter my own conduct and so adjust myself serenely to self-discipline.

Suppose that financial insecurity constantly arouses these same feelings. I can ask myself to what extent have my own mistakes fed my gnawing anxieties. And if the actions of others are part of the cause, what can I do about that? If I am unable to change the present state of affairs, am I willing to take the measures necessary to shape my life to conditions as they are? Questions like these, more of which will come to mind easily in each individual case, will help turn up the root causes.

But it is from our twisted relations with family, friends, and society at large that many of us have suffered the most. We have been especially stupid and stubborn about them. The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them far too much. If we lean too heavily on people, they will sooner or later fail us, for they are human, too, and cannot possibly meet our incessant demands. In this way our insecurity grows and festers. When we habitually try to manipulate others to our own willful desires, they revolt, and resist us heavily. Then we develop hurt feelings, a sense of persecution, and a desire to retaliate. As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant. We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any one of those about us. Of true brotherhood we had small comprehension.

Some will object to many of the questions posed, because they think their own character defects have not been so glaring. To these it can be suggested that a conscientious examination is likely to reveal the very defects the objectionable questions are concerned with. Because our surface record hasn't looked too bad, we have frequently been abashed to find that this is so simply because we have buried these self same defects deep down in us under thick layers of self-justification. Whatever the defects, they have finally ambushed us into alcoholism and misery.

Therefore, thoroughness ought to be the watchword when taking inventory. In this connection, it is wise to write out our questions and answers. It will be an aid to clear thinking and honest appraisal. It will be the first tangible evidence of our complete willingness to move forward.

The Advent Prose, 2011

2011-11-23T16:45:00.005-05:00

Advent Prose - YouTube

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour forth righteousness: let the earth be fruitful, and bring forth a Saviour.

Be not very angry, O Lord, neither remember our iniquity for ever:
thy holy cities are a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation:
our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee.

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour forth righteousness: let the earth be fruitful, and bring forth a Saviour.

We have sinned, and are as an unclean thing,
and we all do fade as a leaf:
our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away;
thou hast hid thy face from us:
and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities.

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour forth righteousness: let the earth be fruitful, and bring forth a Saviour.

Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen;
that ye may know me and believe me:
I, even I, am the Lord, and beside me there is no Saviour:
and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour forth righteousness: let the earth be fruitful, and bring forth a Saviour.

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, my salvation shall not tarry:
I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions:
fear not for I will save thee:
for I am the Lord thy god, the holy one of Israel, thy Redeemer.

From this page:

The Advent Prose is a series of texts adapted from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and said, or more usually sung, in churches during the season of Advent. In its Latin form, it is attributed to Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, who lived in the fourth century. The English translation is traditional. It is most common in high church Anglican or Roman Catholic churches, but no doubt known elsewhere as well. There are several ways of singing it, but a common one is for the Rorate section, shown here with emphasis to be sung as a chorus, and for the choir to take the verses, with the chorus alternating. Although the English text says 'Drop down, ye heavens...', the Latin verb rorare actually means 'to make or deposit dewdrops', a fact which evaded me when I first came to the piece. Similarly, justum in the second line means 'the just man', rather than 'righteousness'.

Monastic Compline - Complete, in Latin

2011-11-22T16:45:00.001-05:00

Compline (Night Prayer) Monastic (Latin with English translation) - YouTube

The blurb at YouTube says:

Pray along with~Compline (Night Prayer) Gregorian
The Order for Compline
ACCORDING TO THE HOLY RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT
AND THE BREVIARIUM MONASTICUM
1963/65/ still in use by many traditional minded catholic Benedictine monasteries today!
Produced for 'Full Screen' mode.
chant by http://www.prinknashabbey.org/ 1985

It's the full service - 21 minutes long.

HT Night Prayers.

Christ the King, continued

2011-11-20T16:01:00.010-05:00

Today's Festival Eucharist for Christ the King at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue was superb; I highly recommend listening. The music was magnificent, and a kind of compendium across the centuries of all kinds of "Christ the King"-ly music. Although in my opinion Coronation is certainly not the right tune for the opening hymn, "All hail the power of Jesus' name"; that would course be Diadem:

Sometimes the Methodists - and the Lutherans and the Mennonites - just have a better idea when it comes to hymns.

In any case, the choir sang, as the Offertory, James MacMillan's polyphonic setting of the introit/acclamation/chant Christus Vincit. Here's a video of this really gorgeous piece:

And here's a very nice video of the plainchant version, labeled "Medieval Gregorian Chant," from Corpus Christi Watershed. Below that is an image of the first page of the chant itself, from the (RCC) Parish Book of Chant (see it in this PDF starting on page 103):

This piece is, apparently, intended to be sung "In Honor of Christ the King" in the Roman Catholic Church. (I'm not sure whether that means it should be sung on the Feast Day or not - but it is, apparently, used that way at least occasionally.) Anglicans sometimes sing one of the various settings of Christus Vincit at Easter - but of course, if singing this plainchant version we'd (most of us, anyway!) excise the section of the plainchant dedicated to the Pope.

EWTN titles the "Christus Vincit" text as "Acclamations VIII Cent., Ambrosian Chant (Variant)." It seems to have been used at various coronations - both secular and religious (i.e., the crowning of the Pope) - throughout European history (see this page for more about all that). New Advent has a bit about the chant, here, in a section called "Growth of liturgical acclamations" - and introduced by this sentence: "It seems highly probable that the practices observed in the election of the Pagan emperors were the prototype of most of the liturgical acclamations now known to us."

Almost contemporary with [the above acclamations] are the acclamations found in our English Egbert Pontifical (probably compiled before 769) which with other English manuscripts has preserved to us the earliest detailed account of a coronation in the West. The text is a little uncertain, but probably should read as follows:

Then let the whole people say three times along with the bishops and the priests; 'May our King, N., live for ever' (Vivat Rex N. in sempiternum). And he shall be confirmed upon the throne of the kingdom with the blessing of all the people while the great Lords kiss him, saying: 'For ever. Amen, amen, amen.'
There is also in the Egbertine ritual a sort of litany closely resembling the imperial acclamations just referred to, and this may be compared with the elaborate set of laudes, technically so called, which belong to the time of Charlemagne and have been printed by Duchesne in his edition of the Liber Pontificalis, II, 37. In these imperial laudes the words Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat (Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands), nearly always find a place. It should be added that these acclamations or some similar feature have been retained to this day in the Eastern coronation rituals and in a few of Western origin, amongst others in that of England. Thus for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902 the official ceremonial gave the following direction:

When the Homage is ended, the drums beat and the trumpets sound, and all the people shout, crying out: 'God save King Edward!' 'Long live King Edward!' 'May the King live for ever!'

Anglicans do not, in fact, officially celebrate Christ the King in the first place; for us, it's simply the Last Sunday after Pentecost. (Stephen Gerth of St. Mary the Virgin in New York explains the historical tradition of celebrating Christ as King at Epiphany; he says that "In origin, [the feast day of] Christ the King wasn’t about Christ; it was about the pope." There's more about that at the link; the holiday initially was set, in 1925, for the last Sunday in October, and the pope's encyclical stated that it was specifically in order to fight "anti-clericalism." I agree with Fr. Gerth that the compilers of the 1979 BCP did a really good thing by ignoring the origin of the Feast and moving the celebration of the Kingship of Christ to the last day of the Church Year - and without actually celebrating it as feast day. Nicely done indeed! It's a great day, I think - and I do like that Anglicans take the focus off the earthly "rulers," and put it entirely on Christ alone.)

The current US BCP collect on this day is one that definitely focuses on the Christ the King theme:

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Hatchett's Commentary has this about the collect:

This is a somewhat free translation by Capt. Howard E. Galley of the collect of the Feast of Christ the King in the Roman Missal. Christ is portrayed as the king who frees those who are bound and unites under His gracious rule all who are divided.

Not sure at all who "Capt. Howard E. Galley" is, though! The original collect for this day - this one's from the 1549 BCP - is the "Stir up" collect now used, in amended form, on Advent 3:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people, that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.)

The St. Thomas Choir also sings a lovely setting of Dignus Est Agnus, the Introit for the day (I posted on that this past week), by Malcolm Williamson. That one's not on YouTube, so go have a listen to the service to hear it.

You'll be quite happy, I predict, with Thomas Attwood's Anglican Chant setting of Psalm 100, too; it's the same tune as this one, used for Psalm 50.

And then of course, you really can't beat "Crown him with many crowns" to end the day - some of the very best lyric anywhere. (I'm including this fascinating Vietnamese-Praise music version because it's one of the few on the Tube that leaves in the last verse: "Crown Him with many crowns, As thrones before Him fall; Crown Him, ye kings, with many crowns, For He is King of all." Sacrilege to sing the amended modern verse!):

Crown Him With Many Crowns

Crown Him with many crowns,
The Lamb upon His throne;
Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns
All music but its own!
Awake, my soul and sing
Of Him who died for thee,
And hail Him as thy matchless King
Through all eternity.

Crown Him the Lord of life,
Who triumphed o’er the grave,
And rose victorious through the strife
For those He came to save.
His glories now we sing,
Who died and rose on high,
Who died eternal life to bring
And lives that death may die.

Crown Him the Lord of Lords,
Who over all doth reign,
Who once on earth, the incarnate Word
For ransomed sinners slain
Now lives in realms of light
Where saints with angels sing
Their songs before Him day and night,
Their God, Redeemer, King.

Crown Him the Lord of heaven,
Enthroned in worlds above;
Crown Him the King to whom is given
The wondrous name of Love.
Crown Him with many crowns
As thrones before Him fall;
Crown Him, ye kings, with many crowns
For He is King of all.

I do adore the music and textual themes on this day. Yes, I do.

Magnificat from Collegium Regale ( Howells) sung by the St Alban's Choir

2011-11-18T11:18:00.002-05:00

Magnificat from Collegium Regale ( Howells) performed by St Alban's Choir - YouTube

Step Three, revisited

2011-11-17T19:33:00.003-05:00

From Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions:

"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him"

Practicing Step Three is like the opening of a door which to all appearances is still closed and locked. All we need is a key, and the decision to swing the door open. There is only one key, and it is called willingness. Once unlocked by willingness, the door opens almost of itself, and looking through it, we shall see a pathway beside which is an inscription. It reads: "This is the way to a faith that works." In the first two Steps we were engaged in reflection. We saw that we were powerless over alcohol, but we also perceived that faith of some kind, if only in A.A. itself, is possible to anyone. These conclusions did not require action; they required only acceptance.

Like all the remaining Steps, Step Three calls for affirmative action, for it is only by action that we can cut away the self-will which has always blocked the entry of God--or, if you like, a Higher Power--into our lives. Faith, to be sure, is necessary, but faith alone can avail nothing. We can have faith, yet keep God out of our lives. Therefore our problem now becomes just how and by what specific means shall we be able to let Him in? Step Three represents our first attempt to do this. In fact, the effectiveness of the whole A.A. program will rest upon how well and earnestly we have tried to come to "a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

....

Then it is explained that other Steps of the A.A. program can be practiced with success only when Step Three is given a determined and persistent trial. This statement may surprise newcomers who have experienced nothing but constant deflation and a growing conviction that human will is of no value whatever. They have become persuaded, and rightly so, that many problems besides alcohol will not yield to a headlong assault powered by the individual alone. But now it appears that there are certain things which only the individual can do. All by himself, and in the light of his own circumstances, he needs to develop the quality of willingness. When he acquires willingness, he is the only one who can make the decision to exert himself. Trying to do this is an act of his own will. All of the Twelve Steps require sustained and personal exertion to conform to their principles and so, we trust, to God's will.

It is when we try to make our will conform with God's that we begin to use it rightly. To all of us, this was a most wonderful revelation. Our whole trouble had been the misuse of willpower. We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with God's intention for us. To make this increasingly possible is the purpose of A.A.'s Twelve Steps, and Step Three opens the door.

Once we have come into agreement with these ideas, it is really easy to begin the practice of Step Three. In all times of emotional disturbance or indecision, we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done."

November 17, 1983 - with gratitude.

Novermber 20th, Christ the King: Dignus Est Agnus ("Worthy is the Lamb")

2011-11-16T17:06:00.006-05:00

Although Anglicans do not officially celebrate the Feast of Christ the King this Sunday (on our Calendar, it's "The Last Sunday After Pentecost" or "Proper 29"), some of us do observe it anyway - and the Collect for the day is a Kingly one:

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Introit for the Day, Dignus Est Agnus, comes from Revelation 5:

Below is the score from JoguesChant and also their English translation:

The Lamb who has been slain is worthy to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honour; let glory and dominion be his for ever and ever. Endow the King with your judgment, O God, and the King's son with your righteousness.

Handel set this text, too, of course, as the last movement (along with "Amen") of Messiah:

And just as in the oratorio, the Church Year ends on that note; you can just start Messiah over again next week, with Comfort ye my people.

This, though, is by far the most-known version of "Worthy is the Lamb" on YouTube:

I must say I quite like the refrain; it's powerful and the words are great. As much as I like chant - and I do - I'm very interested in songs like this that everybody can sing. The Chant Proper texts set to simple but powerful tunes for the whole congregation; that's a worthy goal, I think.

The Old Testament reading this week is from Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24:

34:11 For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.

34:12 As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.

34:13 I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land.

34:14 I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel.

34:15 I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD.

34:16 I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

34:20 Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.

34:21 Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide,

34:22 I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.

34:23 I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.

34:24 And I, the LORD, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the LORD, have spoken.

Here's a page called "Homage to the Lamb" (c. 1000) from the (German) "Bamberg Apocalypse":

And here's something by an unknown German painter or painters: "Vision of St. John Evangelist" from c. 1450:

There are actually quite a few intricately (or colorfully!) illustrated Apocalypses out there; check 'em out.

Worcester, Protestant Cathedral: "Like As The Hart"

2011-11-16T09:53:00.003-05:00

Worcester, Protestant Cathedral: "Like As The Hart" - YouTube

A wonderful Herbert Howells anthem; text from Psalm 42.

Here's the Coverdale version of the Psalm; this piece uses just the first 3 verses:

Psalm 42. Quemadmodum

LIKE as the hart desireth the water-brooks : so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
2. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God : when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
3. My tears have been my meat day and night : while they daily say unto me, Where is now thy God?
4. Now when I think thereupon, I pour out my heart by myself : for I went with the multitude, and brought them forth into the house of God;
5. In the voice of praise and thanksgiving : among such as keep holy-day.
6. Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul : and why art thou so disquieted within me?
7. Put thy trust in God : for I will yet give him thanks for the help of his countenance.
8. My God, my soul is vexed within me : therefore will I remember thee concerning the land of Jordan, and the little hill of Hermon.
9. One deep calleth another, because of the noise of the water-pipes : all thy waves and storms are gone over me.
10. The Lord hath granted his loving-kindness in the day-time : and in the night-season did I sing of him, and made my prayer unto the God of my life.
11. I will say unto the God of my strength, Why hast thou forgotten me : why go I thus heavily, while the enemy oppresseth me?
12. My bones are smitten asunder as with a sword : while mine enemies that trouble me cast me in the teeth;
13. Namely, while they say daily unto me : Where is now thy God?
14. Why art thou so vexed, O my soul : and why art thou so disquieted within me?
15. O put thy trust in God : for I will yet thank him, which is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Bishops Renew Fight on Abortion and Gay Marriage - NYTimes.com

2011-11-15T13:17:00.002-05:00

Bishops Renew Fight on Abortion and Gay Marriage - NYTimes.com

It's shocking that they are actually arguing that civil rights is a denial of freedom of religion! The Catholic Church has fallen a long, long way in the past 30 years or so.

Bishops Open ‘Religious Liberty’ Drive

Archbishop Timothy Dolan spoke at the annual Fall assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore on Monday.

BALTIMORE — The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops opened a new front in their fight against abortion and same-sex marriage on Monday, recasting their opposition as a struggle for “religious liberty” against a government and a culture that are infringing on the church’s rights.
The bishops have expressed increasing exasperation as more states have legalized same-sex marriage, and the Justice Department has refused to go to bat for the Defense of Marriage Act, legislation that established the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.

“We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the bishops conference, said in a news conference Monday at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore. He added that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were trying “to push religion back into the sacristy.”

Archbishop Dolan also came prepared to answer questions about the sexual-abuse scandal at Penn State University, which has reminded so many observers of the Catholic Church’s own abuse scandal. He said that the accusations against a former university football coach were a reminder that sexual abuse is a universal problem that affects most institutions.

“Every time that once again takes over the headlines we once again bow our heads in shame,” the archbishop said. “We know what you’re going through, and you can count on our prayers.”

The bishops are struggling to reclaim the role they played in the 1980s and into the ’90s as a nationally recognized voice on the moral dimension of public policy issues like economic inequality, workers’ rights, immigration and nuclear weapons proliferation. Since then, however, they have reordered their priorities, with abortion and homosexuality eclipsing poverty and economic injustice.

But as the sexual-abuse scandal largely overshadowed their agenda in the last decade, their pronouncements on politics and morality have been met with indifference even by many of their own flock. The bishops issue guidelines for Catholic voters every election season, a document known as “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” which is distributed in many parishes. But the bishops were informed at their meeting on Monday that a recent study commissioned by Fordham University in New York found that only 16 percent of Catholics had heard of the document, and only 3 percent had read it.

Nevertheless, the bishops remain a forceful political lobby, powerful enough to nearly derail the president’s health care overhaul two years ago over their concerns about financing for abortion. Last week, the White House, cognizant of the bishops’ increasing ire, invited Archbishop Dolan to a private meeting with President Obama, their second. Archbishop Dolan said they talked about the religious liberty issue, among others.

“I found the president of the United States to be very open to the sensitivities of the Catholic community,” Archbishop Dolan said in the news conference. “I left there feeling a bit more at peace about this issue than when I entered.”

But in an impassioned address to the prelates, Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., the chairman of the bishops’ newly established committee on religious liberty, said the church would urge priests and laypeople to take up the religious liberty cause. Bishop Lori said that in states like Illinois and Massachusetts, and in the District of Columbia, Catholic agencies that received state financing had been forced to stop offering adoption and foster care services because those states required them to help same-sex couples to adopt, just as they helped heterosexual couples.

Bishop Lori said in his speech, “The services which the Catholic Church and other denominations provide are more crucial than ever, but it is becoming more and more difficult for us to deliver these services in a manner that respects the very faith that impels us to provide them.”

The bishops have also been lobbying the Department of Health and Human Services to expand the religious exemption to the mandate in Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul that requires private insurers to pay for contraception. The exemption, as currently written, would still require Catholic hospitals and universities to cover birth control for most of their employees — which the church says is a violation of its religious freedom.

Some liberal Catholic commentators have criticized the bishops’ priorities, saying they are playing into the culture wars. John Gehring, Catholic outreach coordinator with Faith in Public Life, a liberal religious advocacy group in Washington, said, “The bishops speak in hushed tones when it comes to poverty and economic justice issues, and use a big megaphone when it comes to abortion and religious liberty issues.”

Brooks: "Let’s All Feel Superior"

2011-11-15T01:29:00.006-05:00

Let’s All Feel Superior - NYTimes.com

From David Brooks' column:

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

Some people simply can’t process the horror in front of them. Some people suffer from what the psychologists call Normalcy Bias. When they find themselves in some unsettling circumstance, they shut down and pretend everything is normal.

Some people suffer from Motivated Blindness; they don’t see what is not in their interest to see. Some people don’t look at the things that make them uncomfortable. In one experiment, people were shown pictures, some of which contained sexual imagery. Machines tracked their eye movements. The people who were uncomfortable with sex never let their eyes dart over to the uncomfortable parts of the pictures.

As Daniel Goleman wrote in his book “Vital Lies, Simple Truths,” “In order to avoid looking, some element of the mind must have known first what the picture contained, so that it knew what to avoid. The mind somehow grasps what is going on and rushes a protective filter into place, thus steering awareness away from what threatens.”

Even in cases where people consciously register some offense, they still often don’t intervene. In research done at Penn State and published in 1999, students were asked if they would make a stink if someone made a sexist remark in their presence. Half said yes. When researchers arranged for that to happen, only 16 percent protested.

In another experiment at a different school, 68 percent of students insisted they would refuse to answer if they were asked offensive questions during a job interview. But none actually objected when asked questions like, “Do you think it is appropriate for women to wear bras to work?”

So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect. The more people are around to witness the crime, the less likely they are to intervene.

Online you can find videos of savage beatings, with dozens of people watching blandly. The Kitty Genovese case from the ’60s is mostly apocryphal, but hundreds of other cases are not. A woman was recently murdered at a yoga clothing store in Maryland while employees at the Apple Store next door heard the disturbing noises but did not investigate. Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was tortured for 24 days by 20 Moroccan kidnappers, with the full knowledge of neighbors. Nobody did anything, and Halimi eventually was murdered.

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?”

The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

Experimental Theology: The Word

2011-11-13T22:09:00.000-05:00

Experimental Theology: The Word

A pretty great post at "Experimental Theology" blog (ht Episcopal Cafe):

As regular readers know, I help lead a bible study at a local prison. The prison is about twenty minutes from home and because you can't take a cell phone into the prison I'm out of contact for about two and half hours while inside. So when I get out I call Jana and we talk as I make the drive home, catching up with what has gone on with her and boys while I've been at the study. And Jana will also ask about the study and how it went that night.

Well, a couple of weeks ago we had this conversation.
"So how'd the study go?" Jana asked.

"Good. I'm noticing something interesting."

"What's that?"

"Well, for my part of the study I find myself reading the bible quite a bit. Reading aloud long passages."

"That doesn't sound so bad."

"No, it's not. But I'm doing it because I don't feel that I can add anything. The best thing that can be said is said by just reading the bible. I can't improve upon it. So I just read the text."
Outside of the prison, in the bible class I help lead at our church, I don't think people would sit still long enough to listen to a lot of the bible read aloud. And because of that I spend a lot of time adding things to the text, bringing in a lot of outside commentary, my own thoughts and observations, to make the text interesting or palatable. Outside the prison the biblical text is either too boring or too scandalous. Either way, the bible doesn't "fit."

But inside the prison I experience just the opposite. I find my attempts to "spin" or "supplement" the biblical text to be ineffective and distracting. The text seems to work all by itself. It fits.

Why is this so? I'm not sure, but my initial hypothesis is that the bible really only makes sense out on the margins, where life is desperate, where the metal meets the bone.

Consider Psalm 56 (the psalm I mentioned yesterday). Listen to these words:
Psalm 56.1-7
O God, have mercy on me,
for people are hounding me.
My foes attack me all day long.
I am constantly hounded by those who slander me,
and many are boldly attacking me.
But when I am afraid,
I will put my trust in you.
I praise God for what he has promised.
I trust in God, so why should I be afraid?
What can mere mortals do to me?

They are always twisting what I say;
they spend their days plotting to harm me.
They come together to spy on me—
watching my every step, eager to kill me.
Don’t let them get away with their wickedness;
in your anger, O God, bring them down.
My sense is that a lot of Christians will struggle with this text. We don't often feel afraid because we are hounded by enemies who are slandering and boldly attacking us. We don't feel that enemies are plotting against us, spying on us, seeking to kill us.

And because of this, we don't get, in our liberal sensitivities, the last sentiment: "in your anger, O God, bring them down."

So what we end up doing on the outside with texts like these is to feel embarrassed or worried about that last bit. We don't want intolerant Christians running around using texts like these to bash people. So we add a lot of meta-level commentary to make the text "fit" our context.

But imagine reading Psalm 56 in a prison. Nothing needs to be added. The text fits that context perfectly. All I need to do is read it. Without embarrassment or commentary. More, the text is absolutely riveting! Every line is an explosion of recognition, a word directly aimed at the lived experience of the audience. It's like looking into a crystal ball or a mirror.

And I don't do a thing. I just read Psalm 56. The Word does the rest.

I'm reminded in all this about how William Stringfellow came to be completely dominated by the biblical text, reading it almost exclusively late in his late. The categories of the bible, the way the bible described the world, took on greater and greater relevance for him, the most truthful and accurate way of describing the world. I always considered that to be a curious detail about a theologian I greatly admired and didn't give much thought about why that happened to him. But more and more, though I'm still embarrassed by the text at times, I think I'm starting to see what he saw.

More from Capon

2011-11-11T18:17:00.002-05:00

Even if we do no more than confine ourselves to chapter 13 of Matthew, its string of shortish parables of the kingdom develops mightily the mysterious themes sketched in the Sower. If we toss in the parables of grace as well, we find the mystery of the kingdom more and more closely identified with Jesus himself (the parable of the Watchful Servants in Luke 12:35-48). If we include the parables of judgement, we find him saying that the final constitution of the kingdom rests entirely on relationship with him - and on that relationship as operative in the mystery of his catholic presence in all human beings (the parable of the Great Judgement, Matt. 25:31-46). And finally, if we take in the rest of his words and deeds, we find him claiming at the Last Supper that the cup is the New Covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20). In short, we find him asserting that in himself - in his death, resurrection, and ascension - whatever is necessary for the fullness of the kingdom has been accomplished purely and simply by what he has done.

The idea of the catholicity of the kingdom - the insistence that it is at work everywhere, always, and for all, rather than in some places, at some times, and for some people - is an integral part of Jesus' teachings from start to finish....Not only does he resort, as in the parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13_33), to the occasional illustration that quite literally uses the word "whole" (the holon in Catholic); far more often, he sets up his parables in such a way that by their very terms they cover nothing less than the whole world....

Consider some instances. In the Sower, the four kinds of ground listed clearly meant to cover all sorts and conditions of human beings; there no cracks between them into which odd cases might fall, and there is no ground beyond them to which his words do not apply. In the parable of the Weeds, he simply says that "the field is the world" (Matt 13:38). In the Net (Matt 13:47), he says the kingdom catches all kinds. And in his later parables, he develops this technique of including everybody into something close to an art form. Let me give you a handful of random examples. In the parable of the Forgiving Father (Luke 15:11-32), the whole human race's relationship to grace is neatly divided between the prodigal and the elder brother. Likewise, in the story of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18_9-14) there is no one in the world who can't be comprehended under one or the other character. And in the parable of the Feast for the King's Son's Wedding (Matt.22:1-14), there is not a single kind of response to grace that is left out: the characters in the parable - whether they are graciously invited or compelled to attend, whether they accept or reject the King's party - are plainly intended as stand-ins for the great, gray-green greasy catholic mass of humanity with which God insists on doing business.

In the case of the parable of the Sower, however, there is still another, if more subtle, indication of the note of catholicity. Jesus' parables, even when there were not spoken to anyone outside the small group of the disciples, were set forth, as I have said, in a context of highly parochial ideas about God's relationship with the world. If you have any feeling for the way narrow minds work, you will realize that the Sower, as told, would immediately strike such minds as reeking of the catholicity they had spent their entire religious lives deploring....

At the end of his interpretation of the Sower, Jesus adds a few remarks (Mark 4:21-25 and parallels). All of them, it strikes me, are rather edgy. He does not sound like a cool rabbi who has delivered an unexceptionably pious lesson; instead he sounds like someone who has just said something he knows is offensive but who is bound and determined to make it stick.

The first remark - "Does anyone ever bring in a lamp and put it under the bed?" - seems to me roughly equivalent to "What am I supposed to do, hide the truth just because people don't like it?" His second - "There is nothing hid, except to be made manifest" - has to have been offensive to those who believed that God has already disclosed, to them, everything really mattered. His third, - "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" - sounds like nothing so much as "I dare you think about all these implications that are terrifying you." His fourth - "Watch how you hear; the measure out judgment will be the way it's measured out to you, and even more severely" - practically makes my case all by itself. And his final remark, in which he repeats his preface to the interpretation of the Sower - "To him who has, more will be given; and from him who not, even what he has will be taken away" - is entirely too vague about the identity of the several "whos" to be of much comfort to anybody.

But the real clincher of the case the catholicity of the Sower is the collection of parables following in Matthew 13:24-52 (and parallels) that so clearly develops the catholicity of the kingdom. The synoptic writers plainly feel that all this material is of a piece: even if one or the other of the notes I have listed is merely adumbrated in the parable of the Sower, each of them, as the succeeding parables unfold, is given its turn at a full-dress exposition.

Salvation all around

2011-11-10T10:07:00.003-05:00

Lots of interesting discussions are cropping up all over the web these days: discussions about youth and faith; discussions about CWOB; discussions about the decline of the church in general and of TEC in particular.

The most interesting, lately, to me, are the ones that center around the topic of Salvation. Lee, Christopher, Crystal, and I are continuing our conversation at Lee's place. Christopher has put up a post. And our old friend Caelius has, as per usual, made an extremely interesting point: that Paul's view of Salvation was colored by his own history as an "oppressor" of the church. Here's a quote from his first post in eight months, "The Inhumanity of Nature and Society is the Seed of the Church" - and a great one it is!

Tertullian famously said that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." That's certainly one way to read the New Testament narratives and the martyrologies of the latter eras, but it's a bit of a shortcut. I would argue that persecution was not the fuel for the growth of the Early Church. Instead, persecution strengthened the power of the evangelical message by revealing clearly and bloodily the corrupt and inhumane nature of society. Yet because those who present the early evangelical message to us were themselves oppressors (Paul's self-understanding as a persecutor of the church, for instance, shapes his soteriology in a way that would be distinct from Onesimus), the Gospel tends to be posed as the good news of salvation from one's individual contribution to collective inhumanity (one's sins) through Jesus Christ rather than salvation from the collective inhumanity of society and nature through Jesus Christ. I am afraid to say that this is the deep and nearly irremediable flaw of Patristic writing, perhaps only tempered by the indistinct lens on less elite characters seen in the accounts of the Egyptian monastics. Once an elite individual experiences conversion in a society so much at the whim of nature and so cruel to the least among them, that individual sees those communal sins reflected clearly in their own viciousness.

Therefore, the effect of the Gospel is strongest where nature is most directly afflictive to human life or where society is structured in the least egalitarian manner. The temptation that comes is to pose the Gospel as good news of magical salvation from nature (a common theme in evangelical/Pentecostal thought) or as an excuse for general social reform (the liberal tendency). Possible counter-examples lie in the death camps of Hitler and Stalin, but you may note that 20th century dictators in those presumably nominally Christian societies killed their enemies in the countryside and the wilderness, where no one could see them. The Caesars (and many later Christian rulers) felt quite comfortable erecting crosses on public highways and getting rid of religious dissenters as a form of public entertainment. Roland Barthes commented on a capital case in France in the 1950s, "When the State decides to kill a man, they deny him the power of speech." The inhumanities of the First World, at least, are most easily maintained, when they are most invisible.

I'm not so sure that the "Therefore" leading off the 2nd para actually follows from the first, though. And I'm not sure I agree that Paul and Onesimus are actually so far apart, either; a person doesn't have to be an oppressor of the church (or an elite!) in order to make the lives of other people miserable. All of us are perfectly capable of doing that, with whatever small amount of local (familial!) power we might possess with which to do it. Perhaps God chose Paul for a reason, in other words. (And then you also have to ask: why would the effect of the Gospel be strongest for people who had difficulty identifying with its chief interpreter? East and West, Paul is Theologian/Evangelist Numero Uno. As a matter of fact, the people who dislike Paul these days - at least in TEC - tend to be elites themselves!)

Still, that's some interesting thinking. Caelius' final paragraph reads this way:

Perhaps the strongest argument for the power of the Gospel with regard to nature actually comes from Stephen Jay Gould's Full House , where he argues that there is no evidence that humans represent the culmination of evolution or that the evolution of humanity (or the type of sentience we possess, since sentience is not unique to us) was the necessary outcome of evolution. The Discovery Institute's musings to the contrary, we are not privileged in the grand course of planetary or cosmic history. The intelligibility of physical law (reason) may argue for the existence of God; I'll let the philosophers continue to dither about that, but without revelation, we are a random, irrelevant species that would be better off ending our increasingly dangerous campaign of ecological and biogeochemical disturbance by jumping into the ocean. The salvation that Jesus Christ brings to me is to assert that the emergent randomness (like humans, whales, and copepods, both as individuals and species) in an otherwise neat and tidy natural order is not random, but beloved, even perfectible in Himself. He then can more easily proceed to saving me from my sins.

A typically beautiful series of ideas from a wonderful thinker and writer. I wish he'd post more often - but then when he does, it's always terrific, so I'll take it.

Anyway, all this has got me to thinking about Salvation - and Lee's question at his blog made me wonder if Salvation isn't simply defined as "whatever it has to be for each human being, given his or her particular situation"? Salvation is "being saved from destruction" - and people are destroyed (and destroy themselves) in many and various ways. Perhaps Christ was here in particular to mirror us to ourselves - his suffering and death reflects and validates our own, even in those moments when nothing else validates it and we are left to ourselves, utterly alone - and his real question to each person is exactly that: "What is Salvation, for you?" In that question, and in its answer, you find the key to healing.

God becomes incarnate on earth to come face to face with each human being. And who can save us but God?

It's true that we participate in this effort with other people - just as in A.A. How can we be saved, except through the help of other human beings?

But each person's path is unique: Whose salvation is it, if not my own?

"Robert Downey Jr, Mel Gibson, and the Idiot Forgiveness of God"

2011-11-09T09:41:00.000-05:00

Robert Downey Jr, Mel Gibson, and the Idiot Forgiveness of God | Mockingbird

No idea how I missed this when it aired a couple weeks ago, but BRAVO! We all know about Mel Gibson’s considerable trespasses of the past few years – vile stuff, to say the least – depending on who you ask, he might have even committed an unforgivable sin (or three). So Downey Jr’s speech hits like a thunderbolt, does it not? In remarkably preacher-like fashion, he steps out on a serious limb, quotes JC and references Yom Kippur, in the process highlighting the severity of the Law in its secular expression and the self-righteousness that pariahs always inspire. In one fell swoop, in other words, he silences every mouth. But it’s the courageous testimony of a forgiven man that cuts to the heart; it’s the sheer advocacy and career-sacrificing love on display (one reputation for another?) that gives the sermon its tear-jerking power:

I doubt any of the other presenters knew that Luke 7 was the reading for the day… And “hugging the cactus” has to be the best euphemism for penitence (or honest confrontation with one’s darker side) I’ve heard in ages!
In all seriousness, though, this is precisely where Christianity has such a beautiful contribution to make. The notion that forgiveness can precede repentance – that “sorry” can be a response to rather than a pre-condition for love/absolution – is not just foreign to Hollywood, it’s foreign to you and me. (And let’s face it – it’s never politically correct to desire “mercy not sacrifice”). Especially when it comes to those who’ve done us wrong, or offended us personally. Some might even say we hate it, that we go so far as to crucify it. Which is perhaps why we need to hear the silencing word of the Law and the surprising news of God’s Grace – grace which extends to bonafide repeat offenders like Gibson – proclaimed, week after week, award show or no.
One is reminded of the reply that Robert Capon gave in an interview about this very dynamic. He might go a little further than we would – the alcoholic repents because he’s run out of options, not (necessarily) because he’s experienced love – but the point remains, that any forgiveness which is predicated on an “appropriate” apology/penitence slowly transforms into something else altogether:
Floyd Brown: I think I understand philosophically what you are saying here, but it is still hard for us slow learners there in the back row. I’ve got to have a plan here. I know that if I go out and I fight and I’m the kind of guy who causes disruptive things, I’m a threat to society. I do bad things and bad things result. I know that if repent of these things, God will forgive me, but if I don’t ever repent of these things, what’s going to happen?
Robert Capon: He forgave you before you repented. That’s crucial. See, that is why it is so outrageous. The gospel is really vulgar, crass and immoral because it says God forgives the world before it repents. In the gospel, repent is always repent and believe. It means turn yourself around from not trusting the forgiveness and trust it. That’s it. It doesn’t mean that you earn it by repenting. You had it before.
If you do something to me and you are wrong and I am right, you can repent all you want but until I forgive you, it’s not going to do you a bit of good. It only helps when I have already forgiven you and you can enter into the restored relationship and turn again to me. Only I can decide to forgive you and God for His own idiot reasons decided to absolve the world. He really did. It’s outrageous. It’s immoral. It’s tough.

Salvation and A.A.

2011-11-09T08:30:00.011-05:00

I'm really enjoying talking with Lee and Christopher these days about (big theology word coming!) soteriology and things like that.

Lee's latest post is called Participatory Soteriology and the Shape of Christian Life Together. (The discussion came out of Lee's post about the latest Episcopal adventure, the vote to "rehabilitate" Pelagius in the Diocese of Atlanta. Listen: maybe Pelagius really didn't say things attributed to him by Augustine; I have no issue with "correcting the mistakes of written history" - but is this actually the most important possible project for Episcopalians at the present moment? I can't imagine that it could be.)

Anyway, I'm worrying the subject of "Grace" these days, and what role it plays - or ought to play - in Christian faith, and in particular how we can fix what I see as our huge problem with "content" and the teaching (or, rather, not) of same in the Episcopal Church..

I'm coming to think that Grace is, more than likely, the most important idea in Christianity - and of course, as I always do, I'm tending to view these things through A.A. eyes. And that is perfectly OK, since A.A. descends directly from the 1920s-era Oxford Group, whose founder was a Swiss Lutheran pastor. Sam Shoemaker, one of the group's leaders in the United States and a very early A.A. supporter (not an alcoholic himself), was the (Episcopal) rector of the parish now known as Calvary-St. George's in Manhattan.

A.A. is the example par excellence of Grace, in fact: those who recover in the program recognize, sometimes early on and sometimes much, much later, that recovery is solely on account of the utterly unmerited Grace of God. "The best efforts" of human beings - either the alcoholic or those who'd tried to help her - had no effect on the problem; it's not until people let go - till we surrender all control - that we are able to recover. It is a left-handed process entirely: great power unleashed in the midst of - and, in fact, by means of - pain and weakness.

One of the most wonderful things about the blogs, for me, is that these kinds of casual virtual discussions can all of a sudden illuminate a fact or an idea you simply hadn't seen clearly before. And that's what just happened for me in the discussion at Lee's: I realized that one of A.A.'s singular features - one of the things that make it different from religion as it's usually practiced - is that it's an open-ended process. There is no ultimate "goal"; there's no particular endline that, once having crossed it, you can say that you've definitively "arrived." There aren't any particular "metrics" - which means that there is lots of opportunity for adventure and the chance to continually learn. There is the priceless opportunity to live one's own life, as it plays out in all its reality, under the Grace of God.

I wrote at Lee's that:

....the theory is – and it does work, I can say, from personal experience! – that once made free through Grace, we become very willing to share this Good News, because …. well, because it's good.
That is the experience of many people – surely those in A.A., but also Christians. Free Grace – the gift of God – is something that wants to share itself through those it's touched. Not for any reason that presents itself as morality, but just because it feels like Salvation, and because you want others to experience it. This is A.A.'s Twelfth Step, exactly: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and practice these principles [i.e., the Twelve Steps themselves] in all our affairs." (Note the last clause!)
One of the best things about this is that no particular formula is given; it's rather understood that the "spiritual awakening" will be different for different people, according to their needs and gifts. There is no "blueprint," except for what actually happens in a person's life, and how A.A.'s principles apply to it.
In A.A., of course, the course is made easier: the Twelve Steps are life itself. Without them, the personality will once more decay and shrivel, the alcoholic will likely resume drinking, and all will be lost. So A.A. meetings – which are really just a place to talk about life and death and suffering and spiritual awakenings, and to regain perspective – are necessary. The Steps are necessary. Talking about these things is necessary. Admitting our "character defects" is necessary.
A.A. says that: "Great suffering and great love are A.A.'s disciplinarians; we need no others." And this is surely true for others, too.

I think one of the most important things about all that is contained in this idea: "There is no 'blueprint,' except for what actually happens in a person's life, and how A.A.'s principles apply to it." And, believe it or not, I think the key phrase there is "what actually happens"!

A.A. concerns itself primarily with reality. Reality - "what actually happens" - is the key to everything. What's true about the human condition as alcoholics live it out. What's true about my own character defects; what's true about the harm I've caused others. As I said over there, A.A.'s whole project is about "ego deflation at depth": the First Step is an (often very hard-won) admission of the reality of one's own personal situation. But this doesn't ordinarily (if ever) come in the form of a result of personal effort; it arrives instead as a flash of insight - as a "moment of clarity," as I've heard often in the rooms.

And that moment is the embodiment in the world of pure Grace; without it, there's no way forward at all.

More later, surely, as I think these things through further.