Voice of reason

Thanks to the Anchoress for tipping me to this timely essay by Elizabeth Lev:

The salacious reporting on clerical sex abuse (as if it were limited to only Roman Catholic clergy) has been given a prominence greater than the massacres of Christians happening right now in India and Iraq. Moreover, the term "clerical sex abuse" is often misleadingly equated with "pedophilia" to whip up even more public outrage. It doesn't take the political acumen of an Edmund Burke to wonder why the Catholic Church has been singled out for this treatment.

While no one denies the wrongdoing and the harm caused by a small minority of priests, their misconduct has been used to undermine the reputations of the overwhelming majority of clergy who live holy quiet lives in their parishes, tending to their flocks. These good men have been smeared with the same poisonous ink.

The brutal reality is that there are an estimated 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse in the United States today. Of these, between 40 and 60 percent were abused by a family member (for the most part uncles, cousins, stepfathers and live-in boyfriends). Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan have produced a study showing that 5 percent were molested by school teachers, while the New York Times published a survey showing that fewer than 2% of the offenders were Catholic priests. But to read the papers, it would seem that Catholic clergy hold a monopoly in child molestation.

See also: George Neumayr on "The Pope and His Pharasaical Attackers," Dr. Helen Smith on the Left's pathological lack of empathy (made more obvious daily), and Peter Sean Bradley's darkly ironic "If Only [fill in the blank] Could Marry" series.

Hawk and handler

Jennifer from Virginia holds a red-tailed hawk for her admiring public in a scene from a recent family trip to Busch Gardens (Europe), which is actually next to Williamsburg, VA.

Our two-day visit was a study in contrasts: pouring rain one day, and cold spring sunshine the next.

We're keen to keep Jane from experiencing any further head trauma, so she was only able to ride the tamest of the rides in the theme park. She loved the Clydesdales and the wolves, though.

Cathleen used a motorized scooter to relieve the pressure on her broken foot, but had great fun driving that around.

Meanwhile, Thomas talked me into going with him on the "Loch Ness Monster," the "Alpengeist," and "Apollo's Chariot." The Alpengeist has too many corkscrew turns for my comfort, but the Loch Ness Monster and Apollo's Chariot lived up to their respective billings (Nessie dates back to the early Seventies, but is still going strong).

Apollo's Chariot was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating (as one roller coaster reviewer noted, "A single, unobtrusive T lap bar ratchets passengers into place and contributes to their sense of vulnerability.")

Frankly, I was more scared on Apollo's Chariot than I was while rolling off the wing strut on a Cessna and into a tandem sky dive from 10,000 feet. Open sky with a parachute strapped to your back feels safer than the "face-melting 210-foot drop" into a ravine that Apollo's Chariot opens with (the phrase comes from the aforementioned ride reviewer, one Arthur Levine, who has a gift for describing this sort of thing).

After riding the Chariot, I decided to pass on "The Griffon," which is almost as imposing, albeit with a smaller steel footprint.

We all enjoyed the Irish dancing in the "Celtic Fyre" show, although acoustics in the theater were such that Jane complained about the volume of the music after we left. She still suffers frequently from post-concussive headaches.

A parting note: The German sampler plate sold in the "Festhaus" has tasty sausages, but you should probably avoid that dish if you're gluten-intolerant. No telling what's in those things!

Mini review: Tear Down This Wall

Did Romesh Ratnesar really go and write a 200-page book about a speech that was not the Gettysburg Address? Why yes, he did. And a darn fine job he did of it, too.

The subject here is Berlin, and the genesis and impact of what former president Ronald Reagan said at that city's Brandenburg Gate in 1987 to hasten the demise of the Communist-built wall that divided eastern and western portions of that city for several generations.

A big wet kiss to President Obama in a four-page epilogue suggests that Ratnesar has conventionally progressive sensibilities, but to his credit, Ratnesar tells the story of Reagan's famous challenge to Soviet leader Gorbachev with a keen eye for what happened and why. This is not Howard Zinn-style rewriting of history to suit ideology; it's a well-written look at a famous speech and the people with whom it resonated most.

Reagan wanted the wall down from the moment it went up, and Ratnesar shows that --thanks to his friendship with Reagan-- Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev looked the other way when it counted. Both leaders were more peaceful than either is often given credit for.

That's not to say that everyone wanted the wall to come down. Ratnesar does an impressive job of tracing the objections of U.S. State Department staffers to draft language that they thought might be seen as bellicose, or detrimental to the delicate position of free Germans who were trying not to antagonize the Communist government that then enslaved so many of their relatives. Ratnesar also traces the shared paternity of the famous challenge (made at the Wall for dramtic effect). He and his researchers talked with Peter Robinson, the primary speechwriter for "Some Thoughts on East-West Relations at the Brandenburg Gate."

Ratnesar also does a nice job of summarizing the postwar history of Berlin, and of sifting through related nuggets only recently made available. In one such nugget, Ratnesar describes a fateful German dinner party to which young Peter Robinson was invited while looking desperately for a hook as he drafted the speech. In another nugget, Ratnesar observes that Vladimir Putin was then a KGB agent stationed in Dresden. When it became clear that the Berlin Wall would not stand much longer, Putin and his KGB colleagues burned so many secret documents in their offices that the furnace they were using for that purpose quit working. Putin called for reinforcements from troops he did not get, and felt humiliated by what he regarded as the ineffectual Soviet response to capitalist provocation.

I recommend this book to any student of rhetoric or recent history. It's great stuff.

Mini review: Big Man

This engaging memoir by the jovial saxophone player for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band blends fact and fiction seamlessly, and while it misses greatness by a country mile, it held my attention throughout. Barbara King has a perceptive review of Big Man posted on her site. I won't rehash her points except to say that she is right to like the book, and right also to be irritated by what she calls "the steady drumbeat of throwaway lines about women." Don't misunderstand: weapons-grade misogyny is not at issue here. Clemons seems a decent fellow, better at getting married than staying married, as one of his friends quips. Unfortunately, he and co-writer Don Reo lard this memoir with surprisingly juvenile jokes, most of which are collected in one otherwise-pointless chapter.

Reo, a television producer, once wrote jokes for a living, so I blame him for that indulgence, as well as the starstruck name-dropping that afflicts other parts of the narrative (Not all name-dropping is created equal: When Clemons says that Jimmy Buffet told him to stick with the sax because he couldn't write a book, it's par for the course; Clemons moves in those circles. But when Chris Rock, Redd Foxx, and some guy I never heard of are all acclaimed as comic geniuses, I can't help but think that Reo is a little too impressed with the company he keeps while hanging around with Clemons).

The warm relationship that Clemons has with Bruce Springsteen is no surprise ("Without Scooter, there is no Big Man," he says), but I would like to have read more about some of his other friendships, especially with Reo himself. How the two hit it off is never explained. Another conspicuously-missed opportunity involves late great E Street bandmate Danny Federici, who is lovingly remembered without ever having been properly introduced.

I don't begrudge Clemons his co-writer. Nevertheless, Reo would have done well to take a page from another larger-than-life celebrity, George Foreman, whose co-writer in Knockout Entrepreneur had the sense to stay out of the way while Foreman told stories.

Where Big Man shines is when Clemons writes about music (love that river metaphor), or imagines conversations with literary mentors like Norman Mailer and Kinky Friedman. Clemons enjoys doing that, which is good. It's just not enough for me to call Big Man a "must-read" for every musician or music fan, the way some superfan who blurbed the book for a back-cover quote does.

Scripture Slam?

There was a Scripture Slam, writes Webster Bull, and it was orders of magnitude more significant than the "Know Your Bible" table that you sometimes see at Farmers' Markets and street fairs, usually staffed by the youth pastor from the local megachurch. In fact, the one Bull has in mind trumps even John Henry Newman's masterful "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," because it's the original.

Bonus points to Bull for wondering whether Akira Kurosawa thought about this (we already know that Shusako "Silence" Endo did):

...Then you come to Matthew 4, and the three temptations of Christ. Jesus and "the tempter" have what amounts to a Scripture Slam, fending each other off with passages from what we now know as the Old Testament. The second temptation is the kicker. The devil uses Scripture (the 91st Psalm in this case) to tempt Jesus. And what does Jesus do? Contradicts the devil with Scripture (Deuteronomy 6:16)!

After the legislative wave

Mere Comments is all over the aftermath of the passing of supersize health care reform legislation, quoting Archbishop Chaput and the site's own James Kushiner, who notes:

"...in order to provide for "Health" you must first of all know what a human being is.This Administration pretends not to to know what a human being is, and therefore cannot possibly even know what a human being is for, which means that "health care" will come to mean many things, depending on who comes to power and decides each and every detail. Does "health care," for example, mean that teenagers must have access to condoms, or that every man has a right to free viagra? Will mothers-to-be have a right to medical coverage for a Down Syndrome child if they choose not to have an abortion? In 2020? Do infertile couples have a right to in vitro fertilization? Do lesbian couples have a right to bear children? And does health care mean paying for the process to make that happen?"

Cassandra has more (along the lines of "Deficit neutral? It is to laugh!"). Ace is recording second thoughts about the new law, and also the first of what are likely to be many anecdotes about businesses taking it on the chin.

Similarly, the feckless attempt at stealth for an executive order amending the legislative monstrosity just a tad cannot bode well, as Kathleen Parker (!) had suggested it would not:

The executive order promising that no federal funds will be used for abortion is utterly useless, and everybody knows it.

First, the president can revoke it as quickly as he signs it.

Second, an order cannot confer jurisdiction in the courts or establish any grounds for suing anybody in court, according to a former White House counsel. The order is therefore judicially unenforceable.

Finally, an executive order cannot trump or change a federal statute.

Fortune Cookie wisdom

"To love and win is best. To love and lose is next best."

(So said the slip of paper in my fortune cookie the other day. I agree.)

Bonus quote -- something I heard on the radio Sunday. I didn't get the speaker's name:

"Those so-called 'lost' years of Jesus, between the ages of 12 and 30? They weren't lost. They happened. They just aren't essential to the gospel narrative."

(The photo above was taken near the front entrance of the Governor Morehead School for the Blind, where Thomas recently helped his friend J.D. complete an Eagle Scout service project)

See also: This refreshing reminder about the role of government from Rep. Paul Ryan (thanks, Anne!)

And not a fear-monger among them

We live in interesting times. Back before special weekend sessions, when presidents power-napped through Cabinet meetings and Congress kept bankers’ hours, March Madness was confined to college basketball. But now that we’re saddled with a self-consciously progressive young chief executive and a Speaker of the House who thinks of herself as “capo di tutti capi,” bipartisanship is a shadow of its former self, and one-sixth of the economy teeters on the brink of an extreme makeover. As a result, tea parties have outgrown the American Girl set, radio hosts warn about dangers to the republic, and the global village seethes with indignation from allies who have been told to acquaint themselves with the seats in the back of the bus. Democratic operatives, many of them avowed secularists with an impoverished understanding of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, daily give the rest of us more than a few reasons to pray harder.

Meanwhile, the friends and enemies of Obamacare talk past each other. The current scene reminds me of a joke about a grasshopper that springs into a bar. “What’ll you have?” asks the bartender, who is quick on his feet. “We don’t get a lot of your kind in here, but we actually have a drink named after you.” Then the grasshopper says, “Really? You have a drink named ‘Bob’?”

A similar disconnect bedevils arguments with my friend “Boris.” He knows the arcana of health care better than I do, so his Facebook notes on that subject are tinged with polite exasperation. I hold my own in our occasional arguments by exploiting his weaknesses as a debater, the most glaring of which is his fondness for hyperbole. On March 15, for example, Boris informed all who would listen that “Every single poll that digs into what people actually want confirms that people want all the things that health care reform is going to begin to deliver to them. And the Republicans know that.” Consequently, he added, “Fear-mongering, demonization, and outright lies are the only tools [Republicans] have in their arsenal to fight health care reform; and they’re totally fine with using those tools.”

In other words, the 212 representatives who voted against Obamacare last night -- more than 30 of them Democrats -- are dupes or worse (a charge that cuts both ways, incidentally). And Boris reserves special ire for people like minority leader John Boehner, who had the temerity to invoke the name of Thomas Jefferson in a speech last night, and for his troubles got a dismissive note from Boris asking "what planet is he on?"

The best response to that might have been a shrug and the kind of “ho ho ho” that sounds like it came from Inspector Clouseau. Instead, I bookmarked the tirade. I did not expect Boris to explain why early versions of the legislation over which he pants got nowhere until Democrats resorted to bribery and parliamentary sleight-of-hand. I’m sure he would say that the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback” were just the price of doing business with obstructionists. But if anyone ever asks me what a defensive crouch looks like, and whether it can be transposed from the sparring floor of a dojo to the paragraphs in an essay, I’ll know exactly what to show them.

Note the line of attack Boris used. He’s certain that anyone who has strong reservations about Obamacare is “fear-mongering.”

Had Boris shouted that from a park bench in Chicago, I’d be more inclined to overlook it, because there are certain precincts in the Windy City where people still think of President Obama as a favorite son rather than an eloquent-but-unhinged nephew. Yet overlooking those insults might be uncharitable, because Boris is flirting with something that sounds very much like libel.

May I extend the grasshopper gag for educational purposes? Suppose a doctor, a politician, an economist, a writer, and an archbishop walk into a bar. The doctor is cousin to President Obama, and the politician is a ranking member of the budget committee in the House of Representatives. None of these people supports Obamacare, and none of them is hypothetical.

Can they all be fear-mongers? They’re not even all Republicans. Dr. Milton Wolf, Congressman Paul Ryan, Mr. Thomas Sowell, Ms. Megan McArdle, and Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, I’m looking at you (I have to do the looking, because friend Boris is holding his hands over his eyes).

Someone off his or her meds might be thinking that the archbishop would “demonize” people with whom he disagrees, on the theory that broad-brush rhetoric tempts men of the cloth. But Chaput seems an amiable chap, and anyone who answers to a rabbi famous for saying “Be not afraid” makes an exceedingly poor excuse for a fear-monger. Worse for Boris, it’s not like everyone else opposed to President Obama built a career on lying, either. Democrats are not the only ones with access to figures from the Congressional Budget Office. Representative Ryan, for example, was widely praised for his impressive command of subject matter at the president’s Potemkin “health care summit.”

As for the idea that Republicans criticize initiatives from the Democrats but do not propose serious alternatives of their own, the fact that even a professional provocateur like Ann Coulter has a health care reform plan ought to give pause, if “Democratic math” (that is, not counting when possible, and double-counting when necessary) had not already.

All this is anecdotal evidence, to be sure, and yet the people I’ve cited are routinely ignored by progressives because listening to them would interfere with progressive ability to make sweeping pronouncements. This weakness in logic does not confine itself to Boris, or to arguments over healthcare reform. Nearly every progressive outlet seems rife with attempts to pass insults off as arguments.

Earlier this month, for example, the free weekly tabloid serving my town published a cover story saying “Wake County Goes to Hell.” Sure enough, the editor who smelled sulphur found something diabolical about a “right-wing school board” whose new majority threatened to “eliminate diversity as a factor in student assignments” and “adopt a strictly neighborhood (or ‘community’) schools approach.” Imagine the horror. Imagine the non sequiter. Who knew that busing low-income students miles from their homes was so wonderful? Would a real champion of diversity have decided that hell is other people?

This is no different than the perennial game of gotcha that Andrew Sullivan plays with the church, or his screeching about Sarah Palin as somehow the embodiment of everything wrong with the world.

Angst about alleged conservative heartlessness runs deep in the progressive worldview, and of course the conservative counterpart to that angst is worry over progressive brainlessness (see, for example, Rich Lowry in the New York Post, writing today: "If [Pelosi and company] had stacked the bill so the major benefits came first, underpromised so it would exceed expectations once enacted and designed it to be fiscally sustainable, it'd rest on a solid foundation. Instead, desperate to sell the unpopular reform in a center-right country, they've done the opposite on all counts."). Monster legislation throws opposing camps into high relief. But this weekend’s trillion-dollar question was and still is for Democrats who sided with the president: Do you see anything even a little implausible about “saving” money by extending mandatory health insurance and a retinue of new regulations to at least 32 million more people?

The predictable left and its epithets

Today is Sunday, and Nancy Pelosi has summoned the Democratic party faithful to the church of "What Can Uncle Sugar Do For Me If My Fellow Citizens Surrender the Contents of Their Wallets to Him?"

In other words, there's a big vote in the offing. Regardless of how it turns out, I have some thoughts along the lines of "What we have here is a failure to communicate," so here's some of the rhetorical analysis in an essay that I hope will be published soon:

Friends and enemies of Obamacare talk past each other. The current scene reminds me of a joke about a grasshopper that springs into a bar. “What’ll you have?” asks the bartender, who is quick on his feet. “We don’t get a lot of your kind in here, but we actually have a drink named after you.” Then the grasshopper says, “Really? You have a drink named ‘Bob’?”


A similar disconnect bedevils arguments with my friend “Boris.” He knows the arcana of health care better than I do, so his Facebook notes on that subject are tinged with polite exasperation. I hold my own in our occasional arguments by exploiting his weaknesses as a debater, the most glaring of which is his fondness for hyperbole. On March 15, for example, Boris informed all who would listen that “Every single poll that digs into what people actually want confirms that people want all the things that health care reform is going to begin to deliver to them. And the Republicans know that.” Consequently, he added, “Fear-mongering, demonization, and outright lies are the only tools [Republicans] have in their arsenal to fight health care reform; and they’re totally fine with using those tools.”


The best response to that might have been a shrug and the kind of “ho ho ho” that sounds like it came from Inspector Clouseau. Instead, I bookmarked the tirade. I did not expect Boris to explain why early versions of the legislation over which he pants got nowhere until Democrats resorted to bribery and parliamentary sleight-of-hand. I’m sure he would say that the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback” were just the price of doing business with obstructionists. But if anyone ever asks me what a defensive crouch looks like, and whether it can be transposed from the sparring floor of a dojo to the paragraphs in an essay, I’ll know exactly what to show them.


Note the line of attack Boris used. He’s certain that anyone who has strong reservations about Obamacare is “fear-mongering.”


Had Boris shouted that from a park bench in Chicago, I’d be more inclined to overlook it, because there are certain precincts in the Windy City where people still think of President Obama as a favorite son rather than an eloquent-but-unhinged nephew. Yet overlooking those insults might be uncharitable, because Boris is flirting with something that sounds very much like libel.


May I extend the grasshopper gag for educational purposes? Suppose a doctor, a politician, an economist, a writer, and an archbishop walk into a bar. The doctor is cousin to President Obama, and the politician is a ranking member of the budget committee in the House of Representatives. None of these people supports Obamacare, and none of them is hypothetical.


Can they all be fear-mongers? They’re not even all Republicans.

Still spreading the gospel

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Almost anything I'd want to say about my third-century namesake has already been said by other people, except for the underreported similarities between the real Patrick and the fictional farmboy Westley in The Princess Bride: Both were kidnapped by pirates while they were still teenagers, both consorted with odd characters, and both were motivated to great deeds by true love. The difference is that in Patrick's case, his true love was not the Princess Buttercup, but the adventure of spreading the gospel to the then-pagan Irish people.

Patrick's influence can still be felt, as the conversion story of Patty Patrick Bonds makes clear:

"One day I came across the writings of St. Patrick of Ireland. I was looking for historical evidence of his existence, but never dreamed I would discover God’s will for my life. What I found in the writings of St. Patrick was evidence of deep devotion to Christ and a spiritual intimacy with Christ that I knew right away was true Christianity. He was my brother. Yet he was also a Catholic Bishop. This birthed in me a desire to understand Church history and when and where the Catholic Church had gone wrong (since my assumption from childhood was that the Catholic Church was apostate)."

Patty's acceptance into full communion with the Catholic church was especially notable because her brother is the anti-Catholic evangelist James White, whose idea of ecumenical dialog involves deploying every Baptist and Calvinist canard he can lay his hands on against what he insists are the errors of Rome.

There are wonderful Baptists whose friendship I cherish, but James White isn't one of them. And it was a third-century bishop who gave his sister the courage to look past that environment.

Spring Break with Jack Bauer and 24?

My wife and I were late to discovering the TV show "24," and over the last few days we've been winding down by watching back episodes on DVD. This recap of the first episode on the Web by one Matthew Ehrlich at "TelevisionWithoutPity" cracked me up:

Now this place that Kiefer works for, it's an agency, right? More like an ad agency. I have never seen a government bureau housed in a loft-like space complete with exposed wooden beams, aluminum wall dividers, Hold Everything desk accessories, and, yes, glass walls veiled with cream-colored diaphanous floor-length curtains. Since when do Philippe Starck or Andre Putman apply for government contracts? I guess it's important, when fighting the war on terrorism, to let Osama bin Laden know that the U.S.A.'s top intelligence agents read Italian interior design magazines. 'Cause if we just furnish our offices with stuff from Office Depot, they've won, okay?

Unconventional wisdom

Peter Sean Bradley tipped me to this nugget in defense of the Roman Inquisition from Vox Day:

"The most ridiculous thing about the attempt to cite the Galileo incident as proof that the Christianity is anti-science is that geocentrism was a pagan concept while heliocentrism was developed by a Christian canon who took Church orders and may have been a full priest."

Shannon Love puts alternative energy into a perspective it does not often get:

"There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.

Yet many want to make this group of functionally useless technologies the primary energy sources for our entire civilization.

Most discussions of alternative energy talk only about the cost and reliability of the electricity when it leaves the grounds of the alternative-energy installation. This is called the Point of Generation (POG). However, energy is useless unless you have it where you need it, when you need it. It does no good to have plenty of power in Arizona when your work and home are in Michigan. It does no good to have a roaring fire in July when you’re freezing in January. Therefore, the only real factors that count are the cost and reliability at the Point of Consumption (POC).

All current and forecast alternative energy sources fail miserably at POC."

Back at the debate over health care reform, Ace is his usual contrary self while Mona Charen cuts through the "fog of controversy." Meanwhile, Tim Cavanaugh dissects lies about the economy, and (in matters historical having to do with World War Two in the Pacific theater) Victor Davis Hanson gives the estimable Tom Hanks a failing grade on his own ill-considered attempt to cut through some fog.

"A little rough around the edges"

Rest in peace, Merlin Olsen.

I was too young to follow Olsen's storied career in pro football, but I remember his recurring role as "Mr. Edwards" in the original TV version of Little House on the Prairie. That show's been off the air for years (I wonder what became of Karen "Ma Ingalls" Grassle?), but it always made me smile when Mr. Ingalls (Michael Landon) would describe Mr. Edwards to his daughters as a good man who was "a little rough around the edges."

I guess by that he meant that Edwards was a large bearded fellow who sometimes got drunk and sang "Old Dan Tucker" while in his cups. That would have qualified as "rough around the edges," back in the day.

The role of Mr. Edwards probably wasn't much of a stretch for Merlin Olsen, but he did have acting chops, and he always seemed a decent guy.

UPDATE: Thanks to Teresa in the comments for pointing out that Merlin Olson did not play Mr. Edwards--I'd misremembered that. Olsen was in the TV series as Mr. Garvey. Despite my confusing Merlin Olsen with Victor French, the actor who actually played "Mr. Edwards," the points about the culture of yore and Olsen's character still resonate.

More film notes

I very much liked The Blind Side and The Hurt Locker. Also, as Mark Humphreys notes in his compelling review, Crazy Heart deserves the accolades it is getting.

Meeeow

James Rocchi is one seriously unimpressed film critic:

(The Jefferson Airplane wrung more cultural pulp and spooky imaginative power out of the "Alice" story in 1967's "White Rabbit" with two-and-a-half minutes and a little reverb than Burton does in 2010 with 108 minutes and millions of dollars.)

Being a sworn enemy of despair

In case you missed this life-affirming prayer from the living world that Doctor Zero (John Hayward) first graced us with on February 26-- it's wonderful.

Better late than never: Correcting JFK

Archbishop Charles Chaput lowers the boom on John F. Kennedy's famous attempt to privatize religion in 1960 (reinforced four years later at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, MA) by calling the 1960 speech "sincere, compelling, articulate, and wrong."

Father John Zuhlsdorf is one of the first to applaud Chaput's confident use of St. Augustine and clear moral reasoning. Orrin Judd has more, and the Archdiocese of Denver has the full text of Chaput's speech at Houston Baptist University, which is worth reading. Here's a taste:


Real Christian faith is always personal, but it’s never private. And we need to think about that simple fact in light of an anniversary.

Fifty years ago this fall, in September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He had one purpose. He needed to convince 300 uneasy Protestant ministers, and the country at large, that a Catholic like himself could serve loyally as our nation’s chief executive. Kennedy convinced the country, if not the ministers, and went on to be elected. And his speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong. Not wrong about the patriotism of Catholics, but wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation’s life. And he wasn’t merely “wrong.” His Houston remarks profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage.

[...]

For his audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy’s stress on personal conscience may have sounded familiar and reassuring. But what Kennedy actually did, according to Jesuit scholar Mark Massa, was something quite alien and new. He “‘secularize[d]’ the American presidency in order to win it.” In other words, “[P]recisely because Kennedy was not an adherent of that mainstream Protestant religiosity that had created and buttressed the ‘plausibility structures’ of [American] political culture at least since Lincoln, he had to ‘privatize’ presidential religious belief –- including and especially his own -– in order to win that office.”

I was also struck by this historical vignette that Chaput offered:

I believe abortion is the foundational human rights issue of our lifetime. We need to do everything we can to support women in their pregnancies and to end the legal killing of unborn children. We may want to remember that the Romans had a visceral hatred for Carthage not because Carthage was a commercial rival, or because its people had a different language and customs. The Romans hated Carthage above all because its people sacrificed their infants to Ba’al. For the Romans, who themselves were a hard people, that was a unique kind of wickedness and barbarism. As a nation, we might profitably ask ourselves whom and what we’ve really been worshipping in our 40 million “legal” abortions since 1973.

Book review: The Fallen Man

Tony Hillerman died in the autumn of 2008 with more than a score of acclaimed mystery novels to his credit, yet the crimes (and, to a lesser extent, the plots) in his Navajo Tribal Police books are incidental to the cultural knowledge that his fictional characters bring to bear on their investigations.

Nobody wrote about the Four Corners and the "Big Rez" on the Colorado Plateau with as much affection as the Albuquerque-based Hillerman did.

Hillerman's love for wide-open spaces and the hardy people in them gave him a literary edge over contemporaries like the iconoclastic Edward Abbey and the introspective Sherman Alexie.

In The Fallen Man (1996), newly-retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is reunited with his tribal police protégé Jim Chee when climbers ascending Ship Rock with rarely-given permission from the Navajo near that sacred "rock with wings" discover a skeleton wearing climbing gear. The bones seem to be the remains of a white man who went missing 11 years before, right around the time he was to inherit a ranch whose most attractive feature was an abundance of the mineral molybdenum in its soil. Nobody knows whether the man fell to his death or was pushed.

What looks like a messy but coherent resolution to a cold missing persons case wins reconsideration from the tribal police (past and present) when sniper fire on the other side of the Big Rez wounds the Indian who had been a climbing guide for the missing man back in the day.

Apart from the main mystery, the problematic relationship between Jim Chee and his Stanford-educated fiancée lets Hillerman round out his characters in believable ways, while a secondary plot involving cattle thievery bears witness to the depth of his research.

As in the novel Coyote Waits, which I reviewed more than a decade ago, Hillerman brings a strong sense of place to The Fallen Man. If my maternal grandfather Clemente ("Papacito") had written fiction, this is the kind of story he would have told.

By the end of the book, you might be wondering who the fallen man of the title is, because you could make the argument that Hillerman is actually writing about several fallen men.

Pacing in this story could be a problem for readers who prefer more caffeinated narratives, and one aspect of the novel's denouement (a bait-and-switch) seemed less plausible to me than everything else, but Hillerman's evocative prose and his expert handling of cultural issues make for a quietly exhilarating read that transcends the mystery genre.

Here's an example of what I mean: Janet Peete (a lawyer raised off-reservation) wishes that Jim Chee (her fiancée) were more ambitious. Chee does not care for the promotion he accepted while trying to impress her, because he's always been more of a beat cop than an administrator.

No other novelist could distill the Navajo point of view into a half-page of utterly believable dialog between a traditionalist and a modernist, as Hillerman does in a passage that gently debunks racist myths about "lazy Indians" without getting at all polemical or reducing established characters to archetypes.

This is Chee, frustrated with Peete and saying more than he usually does:

"I grew up knowing it's wrong to have more than you need. It means you're not taking care of your people. Win three races in a row, you better slow down a little. Let somebody else win. Or somebody gets drunk and runs into your car and tears you all up, you don't sue him, you want to have a sing for him to cure him of alcoholism."

"That doesn't get you admitted into law school," Janet said. "Or pull you out of poverty."

"Depends on how you define poverty."

"It's defined in the law books," Janet said. "A family of x members with an annual income of under y."

"I met a middle-aged man at a Yeibichai sing a few years ago. He ran an accounting firm in Flagstaff and came out to Burnt Water because his mother had a stroke and they were doing the cure for her. I said something about it looking like he was doing very well. And he said, 'No, I will be a poor man all my life.' And I asked him what he meant, and he said 'Nobody ever taught me any songs.' "

Want to read the novel now? If your reading tastes are like mine, that's an easy question to answer.

(The gorgeous photo of Ship Rock illustrating this review was taken by Alexander MacLean)

Tracking the books of 2010

Here's my list, together with thumbnail assessments for each book. Nonfiction titles are listed in red:

January
-- Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, by Allen Barra (fascinating but riddled with proofreading errors)
-- Saint Damien of Molokai: Apostle of the Exiled, by Matthew Bunson and Maggie Bunson (highly recommended)
-- Knockout Entrepreneur, by George Foreman with Ken Abraham (recommended)

February
-- Wild Fire, by Nelson DeMille (burdened by the constant wisecracking of its protagonist)
-- The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, by Michael Lewis (highly recommended)

March
-- The Fallen Man, by Tony Hillerman (recommended)

Abzorba the Greek?

Mark Steyn does the math and draws the requisite conclusions, entertainingly:

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

[...]

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?