I wonder what folks in the UK think about this. Alarmism, or a serious concern?
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I suppose I ought to feel more alarmed than I do, but I don’t feel much. The analogy is not very good, but people of our age have been through all kinds of ‘eco’ crises – you remember when we were facing an ice age? you remember when air pollution was supposed to be so bad by 2010 that we’d all be walking around in gas masks? I know that’s not a very good analogy, but it’s about projections of today into the future.
Another analogy about what one might have projected into the future from the early 1970s. In the early 1970s, in England, the trade union movement was too strong in proportion to the number of people who benefited from it. It became greedy. There were constant strikes. Many in the trade union leadership were actually commmunist – as they die off, now, one sees from their obituaries that many had close links with Moscow. There was serious, and well-placed, alarm in England in the early 1970s that the country would swing to the far left, or become ungovernable. What seemed obvious was that the trade unions and the left in general would continue to become more powerful. Conservativism of all forms was dead.
What actually happened, as we know, was that people became tired of this, elected Mrs. Thatcher, who took away many trade union rights (such as one union going on strike when another did – joined up strikes), and enforced the secret ballot for strikes. The old industries which had been the heart of the trades union movement became weaker and weaker. One might even say, from the perspective of Catholic social teaching that the trades unions lost too many of their rights. But, in any case, any natural projection of the way things were in 1975 to how they are in 2010 which assumed the future would be more and more like the present would have been entirely wrong.
So I don’t feel alarm. Yes, there may be a real problem there, but many in England and in Europe are increasingly tired of Islamicism, in the sense of Islamic immigrants who don’t assimilate at all. Chancellor Merkel’s remarks the other day were very striking in this respect: they would have been unspeakable 10 years ago. She said, in so many words, assimilate or go back to Turkey. Sarko in France banning the burka is another straw in the wind.
Just geussing, then, from having lived as a teenager through the seventies: when any social group achieves a degree of power which the rest of society feels is disproportionate, there’s a push back. It looks like the push back against non-integrating Muslims might be beginning. Other things may happen too, for instance, over the next half century the oil wealth of the Middle East will begin to dissipate, and that must be the financial basis of resurgent Islamicism.
In 30 years time, we won’t be back to the Status Quo Ante, any more than we went ‘back’ with Mrs Thatcher. England won’t ever again be the Anglican country of the 1950s. -
That makes a lot of sense. I think the question in the minds of a lot of people over here who follow these stories of creeping Islamization in Europe is whether the pushback will be suppressed. Will the ruling class, media, et.al. succeed in so demonizing any opposition as racism, Islamophobia, etc. that it will be cowed into non-resistance? I’ve always supposed that at least some resentment was there among the people who don’t have much of a public voice, if only because they’re typically the ones most impacted. The same sort of thing is operative here with Mexican immigration (not that the two phenomena are identical, but there are similarities). Apparently southern Arizona, for instance, is having major problems with uncontrolled immigration, associated crime, etc., but as you may know an attempt to step up local enforcement has been treated by everybody from Obama on down as bigotry, incipient fascism, blah blah blah.
I thought Merkel’s remarks on multiculturalism were pretty amazing and a definite sign that what you say may prove to be the case, i.e. that there are limits beyond which the Germans at least won’t go. If I hadn’t been so busy last week I would have written something about it. -
Mac: The same sort of thing is operative here with Mexican immigration (not that the two phenomena are identical, but there are similarities).
I don’t have much of a ‘tory populist’ in me (as we know, more inclined to whiggish toryism), but I have intermittant populist tory thoughts with respect to immigration into the UK since WWII. From that perspective, right from the 1950s, immigration always benefited the elite, because they worked for lower wages than the indigent working class. Complaints of a tory populist character (Enoch Powell) were therefore silenced, and the Labour elite itself by the 1960s became the patrons of an immigrant client class, discarding their former clients, the working class, in that respect.
The way in which your analogy doesn’t work is chronological: our immigration started in the 1950s, and was very high by the 1960s and 1970s, so we are 40 years down the line.
From this ‘tory populist’ perspective,
(which is really a quasi Marxist view – who benefits), it’s not impossible that the ‘elite’ will cease to see themselves as winning out through high Islamic immigration. For example, particularly as the immigrant class ceases to function as a client class, and seeks power in its own right, (as in the linked article), the elite class may cease to enjoy patronising it, because the benefits will be outweighed by the problems, and they will have lost their payback. So ‘multiculturalism’ will miraculously go out of fashion, and the liberal elite will remember it is a liberal elite, and it’s a bit odd for them to be supporting Islamicist theocrats.
So, I’m saying, even from a Tory populist perspective, which imagines a self-serving elite is in control of events, things could change, because that elite has no natural affinity with an unassimilated Islamicist movement which is beginning to make demands on its own terms. -
The odd sympathy of an anti-religious elite for theocrats is often discussed here. One aspect of it is summed up in a line from Stuff White People Like, the “white people” being urban liberals: something about them liking “any religion that doesn’t have Jesus in it.” Which in turn is all wrapped up with the hatred of traditional western civ.
“Tory populist”–I wonder if that’s what I am.
It’s been often remarked here that our open borders movement is a weird alliance of business and the left. Business likes the low wages; the left is at its best compassionate without exactly thinking the problem through, and at its worst just in favor of anything that seems likely to work to the disadvantage of middle-class white people and the country in general. -
Well, in my typical Whig optimistic way, I’m suggesting it’s possible that the business elite will notice that mass immigration is not benefiting them.
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At the moment it is benefiting them a lot more than it’s hurting them. It’s also benefiting the Democrats, whose identification with the welfare state & multiculti makes them more attractive, and who look for ways to allow non-citizens to vote.
For the business elites to see that it’s not benefiting them will require taking a longer view of things than is generally found in either business or politics here. John Derbyshire made an interesting point a while back on this topic: that the rich in this country identify less and less with the country at self, and thus care less about its welfare, and that many of them are not terribly disturbed by a tendency for things to go the South American route, i.e., a small number of extremely wealthy people and a huge number of very poor. I’d like to think that second point is overstating the case. -
I was thinking yesterday that actually, in history, some ‘alarming’ trends do just intensify and are not headed off, eg Prussian expansionism c. 1860-1945. One would have been a fool to think, well these things just balance out eventually.
I read about this in the paper this morning, and thought, that’s genuinely alarming. The reason is, local councils are always being taken over by extremists according to the press. It’s a standard newspaper trope. But children’s names – that strikes me as genuinely reflecting the culture.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/category/religion/ -
That does make one take pause.
AMDG -
I tend to be pretty cool-headed about predictions of imminent crisis. Partly because as you, Francesca, were saying the other day, doomsayers have been going at it for forty years or so. Partly, more specifically American, I’ve lived through quite a number of presidential administrations now where opponents screamed loudly that the republic would not survive this guy. Liberals did it with Reagan, conservatives with Clinton, liberals again with Bush, conservatives now with Obama. For that matter it was true in Carter’s and Nixon’s administration, and probably earlier. In all of those cases the oscillation was within pretty definite limits.
But yet I see a long-term trend which is bad, and not showing much sign of reversal. That’s the general collapse of culture, in several senses of the word. Everyone seems to agree that’s happened in the UK, too. And this would be evidence of that–Pakistanis not only no longer interested in becoming part of English culture (bad) but interested in replacing it with something else (worse). -
Mac: Liberals did it with Reagan, conservatives with Clinton, liberals again with Bush, conservatives now with Obama.
I was struck by something you said about Obamacare the other day, something to the effect that, it’s a bad idea, but its not the antichrist. Intelligent American friends of mine, people who are not especially political (I thought) are going out of their minds about Obamacare. I can’t understand it. People seem to be shocked, shocked, when a liberal candidate who has been elected to the presidency becomes a liberal presidence (and not only people who voted against him); and vice versa, conservatives are shocked when a liberal candidate wins and becomes a liberal president (and not only people who voted against him). Why are people so surprised when an acting president does what he said he would do when he was running?
I’m in about eight minds about Islam in Europe, all of them different. At least one of them says I’m glad I’m moving to Indiana, even though the preparations for it are extremely tiring and time consuming. -
I got that wrong. I’m so tired I can’t even repeat myself! I meant that people are shocked when a conservative candidate wins and becomes a conservative president.
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Don’t worry, I knew what you meant.
Another aspect of that phenomenon (when the liberal/conservative candidate becomes a liberal/conservative president) is that the really zealous liberals/conservatives are not happy. Because there is a lot of inertia built into the American system (and some that’s not built in but is there now) and a lot of constraint on how far any particular administration can go in either direction. Obama was on Jon Stewart’s show (!) last night, and apparently Stewart challenged his record from the left–I think I saw the word “timid” in a headline about it, though I haven’t stopped to read. Well, of course “timid” is the exact opposite of what the right is saying about O’s agenda.
This other item from the Telegraph strikes me as an equally disturbing flip side to the story about names. -
I’m reading a book by Dean Koontz which is set in 1994 and the things that the characters are saying about the economy are exactly the same things that people are saying today. I’ve thought about the cycle that Maclin describes, each party thinking that we won’t survive the presidency of the opposing president and it gives me a bit of comfort, however, Obama seems to have done things that are so sweeping (I originally typed “weeping.”) and in many ways they seem so irreversible and headed in the direction of more and more government control.
AMDG -
On Lauren Booth, I would say generally, she’s a flake. But there was a good book a few years ago by Alain Besancon, called Trois tentations dans l’eglise (Three temptations in the Church). He’s a kind of French Roger Scruton, ie the sort of writer I don’t like, and Rob G. does, and Mac does in some moods but not others. One of them was democracy, the second was anti-democracy, and the third was excessive amiability to Islam. Only that third chapter was ever translated, unsurprisingly, in Commentary. He makes an interesting point which few conservatives tackle, which is that Islam is or could be very appealing to some women. Because the European Islamic male may be no feminist [ :)], but he wants to marry a female, and to support her, and for her to have children, and divorce is frowned upon. For many European women, he said, it’s not easy to find a male like that from within the secular European post-religious culture. Some, not many, but a few, I see in burkas in Aberdeen are evidently European (I mean, because they are white), and Bescancon has made me wonder if they took that route.
There’s a mosque which has grown and grown about ten minutes walk to the left of my house. Twenty minutes walk to the right of my house there is Tilleydrone, whence, as we know, my cat Pius wandered last summer until he was eventually recovered. Tillydrone is a bad, drug-infested area. I spent a lot of time there over three weeks, posting fliers offering reward money for him (because he was spotted there early in his vacation). Walking to the right as well as to the left of my house made me reflect on Besancon’s point: if you were a youngish girl from the Tilleydrone area, might you not take a bet on one of those men outside the mosque rather than the feckless characters you encounter at ‘home’? I should say, incidentally, I encountered much decency in Tilleydrone, including the eventual return of my feline.
Besancon makes an interesting point. Conservatives here, eg in Standpoint or the Spectator, constantly criticise Islam from a liberal perspective. But a critique from the perspective of Islam’s lack of respect for individual freedom means nothing to the person in the Tilleydrone housing estate.
We’re certainly not going to rise to the Islamic challenge until (or if) we ask why it is appealing. -
Janet: yeah, I don’t mean that presidents (or rather administrations) don’t succeed in pushing things in the direction they want them to go, just that it’s incremental. That movement toward govt control has been under way a long time, and most of it does seem to be irreversible. The best opponents seem to be able to manage is a two-steps-forward one-step-back dance. A lot of Republicans are saying they will try to repeal Obamacare if they get control of Congress. We’ll see…
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Francesca–“…why it’s appealing…” There are so many aspects and possible answers to that. I feel pretty safe in guessing that for someone like Lauren Booth part of what’s operative is western cultural self-loathing or masochism. There’s a touch of that in a lot of the left-wing sympathy for Islam, often more than a touch. And among celebrities. So many westerners hate the western tradition enough that they’re willing to kowtow to anything non-Western, and of course Islam is a very vigorous and commanding sort of thing: you can see how someone who’s rather weak-minded, as this woman appears to be, and also infected with the western cultural death wish virus, would throw herself at its feet.
And then there’s the Tilleydrone syndrome. We have that, probably several times over, in poor black neighborhoods, where most men are just not present as husbands and providers. -
Don’t quite agree with you Mac that it’s just Western kowtowing. Perhaps it is in the case of Lauren Booth. But I’d say for instance that Cat Stevens’ conversion to Islam shows more moral and religious seriousness than the Beatles late interest in Swamis and Gurus. (I say that even despite my love for George Harrison’s music).
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No, not just. I only mean it’s often part of the picture. Not “kowtowing” per se, but a general dislike of one’s own culture and openness to another. Cat Stevens is also partly an example of that: his mother was a Lutheran, his father was Greek Orthodox, and he went to Catholic school. Why was he more open to Islam than to Christianity? I’m sure part of the answer to that is in the church(es), but part is in him, too.
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Maybe I’m too soft on Cat Stevens & George Harrison, but I don’t think they could see that Christianity is a way of life and a spirituality. It wasn’t being practised as such by many at the time.
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I’m sure they couldn’t. But why not? Certainly what you say about most people not living the faith is true, but there were probably, in numbers, as many serious Christians as serious Muslims or Hindus in England in the ’60s and ’70s. Well, maybe not…but still, a significant number. Why did they not even look at home? Sheer fashion and the grass-is-greener coolness factor are probably a part of it.
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I’m pretty sure Hilaire Belloc somewhere describes Islam as the most “human” (or perhaps “humanly appealing”) of religions, and expresses surprise there aren’t more converts to it from the secular West – predicting that in the future there would be. Can you corroborate that, Louise?
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I;m not sure if I can, Francesca. I do recall that he predicted its rising again to be a real -er – challenge (which it wasn’t in his day).
He did also say that if a person were going to simply make up a religion about One God, it would look very much like Islam. I think he also made the point that the Islamic creed, being far simpler than The Faith, would be appealing to many from that POV.
I am just reading a book or two about men in the Church and one of the writers suggests that the churches (he is a Protestant author) are emasculated, by and large and that the men in them are bored. The women, he reckons, are tired. If he’s right (he might not be) then that could partly account for a difficulty in making converts/reverts.
I am inclined to think that the Christ we present is a somewhat emasculated version of Our Lord and God. But now I’m off topic! -
Just a thought really – if a secularist cannot find any crusaders to bring him to Christ, maybe he will go join the mohammedons?
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Merely by way of further illustration: I was debating on one of my favourite Aussie Catholic blogs recently about the question of Islam. The blogger is a good bloke and works for his Archdiocese in interreligious matters. He said I was offensive at one point and “not nice.” Now, I do enjoy stirring the pot (a bad family trait) it’s true, but I don’t normally go out of my way to be offensive. In this case I was stating an honest opinion, for the purpose of debate and I didn’t give a fig if it was “offensive” or not. I wanted to know whether my opinion was the truth (or partly true). I have no objection to courtesy or kindness (which mean something pretty definite) etc, but the modern obsession with “niceness” is really off, imo.
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Chancellor Merkel’s remarks the other day were very striking in this respect: they would have been unspeakable 10 years ago.
I know this is “Californian Beach Talk” (as my eldest daughter used to say when she was little), but I did really think the fact of Merkel’s remark was “awesome.” I can’t comment on the actual remark since I didn’t read it at the time. I only have the gist of what she said. -
Oops! for some reason I thought I was replying to Francesca below, but it was Paul. Sorry!
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‘I’m pretty sure Hilaire Belloc somewhere describes Islam as the most “human” (or perhaps “humanly appealing”) of religions’
That could be in the chapter on Islam in The Great Heresies. I should remember, having read it within the past year or so, but I don’t. At any rate, I certainly think it’s true, as also Louise’s reference to Islam being what you would get if you invented a religion (a monotheistic religion, that is). Its great simplicity is certainly one of its selling points. I remember some American basketball star who had grown up Catholic, or at least been to Catholic schools, who had converted to Islam giving that as one of his reasons. Said he never could make any sense of that Trinity stuff. -
By the way, Francesca, when are you moving? I was thinking you had said last summer, and then when you seemed to still be in Aberdeen wondered if something had changed.
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But Mac,
1) the 60s and 70s were the time when Western Catholicism moved away from the practice of the faith as a ‘culture’ – the notion of the faith as a culture, in which everyone did the same kinds of things at the same kinds of times was derided as pre-Vatican II legalism. An obvious example would be abstaining from anything one choses to, rather than everyone giving up meat on Fridays. If everyone gives up meat on Fridays, one has a culture. If everyone choses to abstain from what they want, one has a lot of different Catholic individuals. At that point, if one is looking for a religious culture to shore up faith in a materialistic world, Islam, with everyone doing Ramadan will look much more appealing. Today, in Britain, one can literally ‘see’ the Muslims and their culture. The Christians are invisible, not because they are fewer but because they’ve lost their specifying culture.
2) In the same time period, ‘mysticism’ and ‘spirituality’ are not the focus of Catholic self-understanding. There’s more focus on social action. I just finished a three hour class on Augustine’s ‘De Trinitate’. The last three books are all about becoming the image of the Trinity by remembering, knowing and loving God. Evidently, no-one told the American football player about that! Broadly, the liturgical action of the church in the 1970s etc ceases to look very mystical or otherworldly. If one were looking for mysticism and incense in the 1960s or 1970s, it would be more obvious to look east than to look to Catholicism, because Catholicism was at the time downplaying its mystical element. Christopher Derrick says somewhere, we dropped the incense to make sense to people, and people went east, looking for mysticism.
3) At the same time, it’s only people like Don Giussani, at Communio et Liberatione, who are describing Christianity as a ‘way’. Catholicism is not propounded in those terms in recent times. Not as a way of finding union with God.
So seekers looking variously for a culture, mysticism, and a way, will look East or to Islam. -
Yeah, I agree completely with all that. I think it’s in one of his essays in CetT that Daniel makes a point along those lines really well–he talks about what a lost moment for the Church the ’60s were, about how there should have been barefoot Franciscans hitchiking the country.
But. When all that’s said, I think there’s still some blame that belongs to the people who walked away. Using myself as an example: in the late ’70s when I first returned to Christianity, I put a good deal more blame on the church and the culture (“society”!) than I do now. I give more weight now to the role of sheer pigheaded sinfulness. There’s the legitimate appeal of mysticism, yes. There’s also the not-so-legitimate appeal of mere novelty and exoticism, to say nothing of simple pleasure-seeking. The vast vast vast majority of people who dumped Christianity for something in the Eastern line didn’t do anything more than toy with the paraphernalia. Cf. recent wedding of Katy Perry and Russell Brand in India: Katy Perry is the child of Christian fundamentalists, and one can say, ok, that’s not a very appealing form of Christianity so it’s no surprise that she would try Hinduism. But she doesn’t seem to be doing that at all. She’s just another pop star who wants to put a drapery of “spirituality” on her hedonism.
I’m just saying that there are two sides of the story–it’s not all the fault of the church(es).
Also, what I think is even more interesting is to dig down another level: why weren’t the churches, or at least the Church, emphasizing a true deep spirituality? Why did the clergy actually seem to want to flee from their own tradition? I think that last is a major psychological fact all across the modern west. -
Re: Men & Church — coincidentally, a friend sent me this piece, which is from 2007, just this morning. I had not seen it before. It is by Frederica Mathewes-Green, a convert to Orthodoxy. It doesn’t strike me as triumphalistic, and perhaps you all as Catholics might find it interesting. I’ve been Orthodox coming up on 16 years now, and I can say that while some of what the respondents say might be a bit overstated, by and large I’ve found much of what they say to be true about the Orthodox Church as I’ve experienced it.
Anyways, FWIW:
http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/42390.htm -
Rob G, I look forward to reading that after lunch. Hope you noticed I went out to bat for you on Inside Catholic. Was too busy to check what happened next!
Mac, I am starting at UND on 1 Jan. I didn’t get my visa to work in the USA until 20 October. It’s a slow process. I really want to be able to drive by the time I get ther, I have been taking driving lessons since August, but my driving instructor told me I’m not nearly ready to take the test yet. I didn’t get the provisional license until July. One other reason I put it off until January was that the court case for my mugger was supposed to be at the end of August, and I feared he’d walk if the victim didn’t bother to show. Then, in late July, the mugger went AWOL, and they postponed the court hearing until March! Last night I found the police are chasing me to attend a court hearing now in March, even though I told them in August the only way I could do it was by Skype from the US, and even though I postponed moving to the US to make the original hearing date.
I would apply that logic about finding the East attractive to myself, but be cautious about applying it to others.
Certainly, one reason the church goesAWOL was sin! Hans Urs von Balthasar said there was nothing wrong with the documents of Vatican II, it was world bishops who were the problem. -
Rob, I sympathize and agree with most of that, in particular the part about the problem men have with bridal mysticism. I have a huge problem not only with that but with all the devotional apparatus that involves an intimate quasi-romantic relationship with Jesus in his humanity. I’ve had to just figure out ways to work around it in my own spiritual life. I’ve been contemplating for some time an essay (of greater than blog-post length) on the subject.
Masculine spirituality never disappeared entirely in the Catholic Church, but it’s certainly been eclipsed, first by the bridal/romantic sort of thing and more recently by therapy-ism.
(Side note: what possesses web designers to put text on a patterned background?) -
Francesca,
“I would apply that logic about finding the East attractive to myself, but be cautious about applying it to others.”
I don’t share that reservation in general, though of course I ought to be careful about applying it from a distance to any individual, e.g. Katy Perry. But it seems to me to have been in general pretty well proven by experience. I do, btw, know someone who was serious enough to go to India, where she had some experiences which left her convinced of the existence of the demonic.
I totally agree with that statement by VonB, naturally.
Sounds like you’re having quite an ordeal trying to get things squared away for your move–good luck. I find it hard to imagine what it would be like to learn to drive at your age (which of course is significantly less than my age, but somewhat past 16, when most Americans learn.) -
I don’t know, Mac, you might not agree because there’s a typo! Von Balthasar thought the VII docs were ok, but the problem was worldly bishops!
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Rob, as a female, I could relate to much of that. I just wrote a little piece on meat-fasting for (the English) Magnificat, where I connect it to John Paul II’s idea of the ‘church breathing with both lungs, east and west.’
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No, I agree with it even more–I did think “all the bishops in the world” was overstating it by at least a few bishops.
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The strangest thing about that article was the ludicrously ill-judged suggestion that spousal mysticism is anything like a sop to the emotional neediness of lonely women. Those people really need to revise their concept of “spouse”, as well as their concept of “nun”.
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“This is fine rapturous imagery for women who need a social life.” Yeah, that comment is off base and gratuitously snide, especially as it’s followed by this complaint: “Or it depicts Jesus whipped, dead on the cross.” I don’t know how the Crucifixion is handled, devotionally speaking, in Orthodoxy, but this is something for which Catholics needn’t apologize (not to say that like any other emphasis it can be an over-emphasis).
Also, there was: “a love story written by women and for women”. I didn’t care for this but I have to admit there’s some truth in it. It’s not the whole picture, by any means, but it’s there. I heard a homosexual activist make a similar point, only of course he put it as being gay men instead of women. -
I liked it down to the middle, including especially the bit about fasting. But after a point it began reminding me of that American poet who used to take groups of guys into the woods so they could play at being guys.
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Ha! Robert Bly, I think it was. I admit, the same thought crossed my mind at some point, as it has also wrt some of the commentary in Touchstone/Mere Comments about restoring masculine spirituality.
I meant to note, btw, a possibly significant fact. It does seem to me that men are either returning to or not leaving the Catholic Church as they perhaps were not/were 20 years or so ago. It’s anecdotal, but: I have a weekly hour of eucharistic adoration at a local parish, and the four people who are scheduled for that hour are all men. And the first person to show up for the next hour is a man of, I’d guess, roughly my age, who drives a big SUV with a Marine Corps sticker on the rear window along with several hunting-fishing-conservative-politics stickers. I haven’t seen any green carnations.:-) -
Robert Bly! Typical that I was the one uncharitable enough to point it out! I like guy guys myself – I lured one round to my house this afternoon with the promise of a pear baked in wine, for which he took off the old toilet seat which was there when I bought the house, and replaced it with the new one I bought. What is always remarkable to me about guy guys is how much food they can tuck away. This one was going out to dinner tonight and still managed to eat his pear with cream and consider a second one. To me, the best thing about guy guys is that they are relatively unselfish. A man in touch with his feminine side is a more selfish man (in my exp) – he gets a double dose of it, as it were, specifically male selfishness plus female self-centredness.
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Your last remark is very interesting Francesca, b/c I’ve just been reading books/articles about “Mr Nice Guys” (as opposed to “good guys”) and apparently they are not so “nice.”
Fascinating. -
Ok, I’m just here to vent on an unrelated topic. A non-Christian friend just wrote something negative about the Quiverful Movement. I was going to write something in defense of large families etc, when it later occurred to me just how much I really hate that Protestant habit of sloganising scripture. I happen to deeply love that text (in the Psalms?):
Like the arrows in a hero’s hands are the sons you father when young,
Happy the man who fills his quiver full of such arrows.
Being a mother of four sons and two daughters myself, you may imagine how that text would delight me. Can Protestants follow the text without cutesyfying it? I mean seriously – “Quiverfull Movement.” Blech.
It’s like they can’t just be widows either, they have to be “Titus 2 Women.”
Puke.
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Where’s your ecumenical spirit, Louise?!? 🙂
Think of that sort of thing as the evangelical (not particularly Protestant in general, actually) sola scriptura equivalent of Daughters of the Most Blessed Sacrament or something (I just made that up but it probably exists). -
” male selfishness plus female self-centredness.”
Now that’s a really good way of putting something I’ve struggled for a long time to pin down. I agree with C.S. Lewis that the average woman does more specifically for other people in a day than the average man in a week (I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the idea). And yet I sometimes find myself thinking that women are more selfish than men. The distinction between selfish and self-centeredness unties that knot rather well.
I don’t want to speculate about where I fall in the typology. -
Where’s your ecumenical spirit, Louise?!? 🙂
Yeah, I get the idea, but the Daughters of the Five Wounds or similar are not gaining a group name from scripture. It just seems to caricature scripture and I find it opens scripture up to irreverent attacks and that irks me. But really, it’s just my own sensibility – I don’t expect others to agree with me. -
Oh, I know what you’re talking about, but I think it’s pretty hard to avoid something of the sort, one way or another. Things like “Quiverfull” do seem kind of hokey, and they make easy targets for secular mockers. But to me it just represents the Bible-centric orientation of evangelicals (a mainstream Episcopalian wouldn’t dream of participating in something with a name like that). Here there’s been a lot of fun made of headlines in the sports section of papers in areas where there are a lot of Catholic schools: “Our Lady Stomps St. Pius” etc.
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There are several things in Rob’s article that I would like to comment on. I even copied it into Word so that I could respond to it point-by-point, but I realize that I will never have time to do that. I’ll just comment on a few things as a have a free moment.
First is this: Compared to the Orthodox hymns of Christ’s Nativity, “‘the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay’ has almost nothing to do with the Eternal Logos entering inexorably, silently yet heroically, into the fabric of created reality.”
Well, yes it does. It has everything to do with it. Jesus eschewed all the grand, glorious, pomp and circumstance to be that baby asleep on the hay, and I’m not sure why singing about it in simple, humble terms is less appropriate than doing so with a lot of grand, glorious, pomp and circumstance. Not that the GGPC isn’t wonderful, it is, but this comment brings to mind the two men who went up to the temple to pray.
And this comment combined with the remark about “Jesus whipped, dead on a cross,” make me wonder a bit.
AMDG -
I had a similar reaction to Janet’s – specifically about that line ‘the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.’ It’s partly because I love our Western Christmas (I always listen to the service with 9 readings and carols from Kings, Cambridge together with my mother), and this Christmas is fairly much overlaid with those 19th century ‘sentimental’ Christmassy images of baby Jesus. In fact, here in England, sometimes a certain kind of Catholic says they despise these 19th century Protestant hymns, and just wants to sing ye olde Englande 12th century carols. And my reaction, like Janet’s, is that Christianity has a history, and in a sense is a history, (though not necessarily a progress), so that ‘sentimental’ images of baby Jesus are now as much part of that history as the LORD Logos becoming Incarnate. We learn from the whole history of Christian reaction to the Incarnation, not just one specially dignified segment of it.
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I’d already forgotten that. But yeah, it really brought me up short. I’m in sympathy enough with the overall point that I just sailed on past that, the remark about depictions of the Crucified, and a few other things. But this one is of a piece with the objection to seeing Jesus dead (!!).
A Catholic–well, ok, this Catholic–reading such things wonders if maybe Orthodoxy is not as incarnational as Catholicism. I mean that in a broad sort of aesthetic sense, not necessarily a formal theological sense, about which I’m not qualified to comment. -
“A friend of mine told me that the first thing he does when he walks into a church is to look at the curtains. That tells him who is making the decisions in that church, and the type of Christian they want to attract.” That kind of made me laugh. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a church–even a Protestant church–that had curtains.
OK, so one respondent says, “It’s the only church where you are required to adapt to it, rather than it adapting to you.” And yet, in the paragraph immediately preceding that one Mathewes says, “Their responses, below, may spark some ideas for leaders in other churches, who are looking for ways to keep guys in the church.” So, the churches should adapt to prospective members? And much of the article sounds not so much like the men are being conformed to the church as that they are drawn to the church because it is already conformed to what the men want. And is this a reason for choosing a church? The question shouldn’t be whether we are comfortable with, or even whether we are challenged by this church. The question is “Is this the Church?”
And getting back to the original quote about adapting, what if to be in the Church that Jesus founded you have to adapt to a spirituality that you aren’t comfortable with?
I have a lot I would like to say about Bridal Mysticism, but I don’t have time at the moment. I will say that I don’t think it’s necessarily “romantic.” It certainly is not romantic in the mushy-smushy way that seems to be what’s being talked about here. Certainly “In the Garden” doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m willing to bet that C. Austin Miles never heard of Bridal Mysticism or anything like it.
AMDG
AMDG -
Yeah, I was momentarily baffled by that about the curtains, and just ignored it.
“And much of the article sounds not so much like the men are being conformed to the church as that they are drawn to the church because it is already conformed to what the men want…. The question is “Is this the Church?”
There’s a core problem there that isn’t easy to resolve. This reminds me of a long argument that I had with a Mennonite friend. He said he had picked the church that was closest to what he believed. I said I had picked the church that had the authority to tell me what to believe. He replied that I was basically doing the same thing as he was, applying my personal judgment. I replied that in submitting to the Church I was renouncing my personal judgment on certain doctrines. He replied that it was the same thing in the end. Well, I don’t think it is.
Have to go to a meeting… -
Yes, but the men in this article don’t seem to be choosing for either of these reasons. I don’t think the word “belief” is anywhere in the article. There is one paragraph at the end that touches on it briefly.
AMDG -
“Jesus whipped, dead on a cross.” I saw that and sort of blinked it with the half thought – ‘coming from somewhere above or beyond me’. Later I connected it to the Orthodox reaction to Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ’ – wholly negative, in my recollection.
Totally off topic (!) now: does anyone think the reaction to Gibson’s rows with his Russian 2nd wife is wildly out of proportion to the crime? The things he is reported as saying to her, like ‘you look like a whore’ are polite vicarage tea-party chat in comparison with family rows I’ve been a party to. It is true that, for instance, my aunt googled UND and found its football team calls itself ‘the fighting Irish’ and said, ‘you are going to the right place’, so perhaps Murphy rows are unusually violent. Even a piece I read defending Gibson, on Mercatornet, by comparing him to Carraravio were incomprehensible to me, from my experience. Carravagio is reputed to have been a murderer and a pimp, amongst other things – in my book, it doesn’t bear comparison with violent and racist observations 1) during a family row with a woman he’d evidently just discovered he made a big mistake leaving his wife for and 2) when being stopped by traffic cops. With the traffic cops, I’m afraid my reaction is, who wouldn’t want to say something like that to a traffic cop? -
Well, the Gibson stuff sounded fairly bad to me, but really, for the most part I don’t go as far as having a definite opinion about stories like that.
Having said that, I ask myself why, and I think the answer is partly that I only half-believe them. Perhaps that’s a result of many years of reading headlines on publications like the National Enquirer alleging HUGE scandals that somehow never come to pass. Those mags are always in a rack at the checkout counter in the grocery store, so you have time to see the headlines, but not to pick one up and actually read the story. Though a lot of them do (the scandals, I mean.) I figure if three or four mags at the grocery store say so-and-so are splitting up, they probably are, but if only one says it, probably not (yet).
So, you know–did Gibson say something nasty to his wife(?)? Probably. To the cop? Probably. Was he out of control raving psycho, fit to be locked up, a danger to himself and everyone else? I withhold judgment. -
Well that brings it round full circle, with a dose of my medicine! You don’t believe the reports, because there are so many that are not true!
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I’m not sure what you mean about your own medicine. But I don’t necessarily actively disbelieve them–I just sort of shrug. I was really responding to your original question, which was about reaction to the reaction to the stories. I meant to be saying that I don’t have an opinion about the reaction, because I only had a smidgen of one about the original story.
I did have a reaction to Gibson’s divorce–what a shame. (Well, also that the Russian gal is very attractive. Shame on me…). -
A Catholic–well, ok, this Catholic–reading such things wonders if maybe Orthodoxy is not as incarnational as Catholicism. I mean that in a broad sort of aesthetic sense, not necessarily a formal theological sense, about which I’m not qualified to comment.
Chesterton said he did not like Byzantine art b/c it was not as realistic as more Western style art – not as incarnational, I think he said. Now, I like Byzantine Icons myself a very great deal, but when I was learning a little about how to write one (I am in possession of a half-finished Cristo Pantocrater) our instructor, who had learnt his craft in a Russian monastery for 8 years, told us that icons are not meant to be quite as “fleshy” and were in a sense more abstract than other kinds of painting.
I, of course, am no expert. -
does anyone think the reaction to Gibson’s rows with his Russian 2nd wife is wildly out of proportion to the crime? The things he is reported as saying to her, like ‘you look like a whore’ are polite vicarage tea-party chat in comparison with family rows I’ve been a party to.
Francesca, I could kiss you! I read a great piece in Gibson’s defense, which I’ll link to if I can find it.
It would seem on that taped phone call (why was it taped???) Gibson is just coming to terms with the possibility that his new love is a piece of work. (She might or might not be).
Seems to me that people generally expect men to be Mr Nice Guy and that’s not good.
I think Gibson would look good in chainmail.
No doubt things would be better for everyone if he hadn’t committed adultery.
I could alomst wish to be a fly on the wall at a Murphy family argument, but I’d probably get swatted! -
As for “you look like a whore” – perhaps she did. In which case you could argue that it was an act of charity to tell her so (I’m serious).
Consider – I have a very sweet childhood friend, who is very fashion conscious and quite gorgeous herself, who is also a standard secularist Aussie and pretty PC. Now, even she felt moved recently to bemoan women’s “streetwalker” fashions (her words).
My other childhood friend from that same neighbourhood, who is a Radical Feminist has made observations to the same effect, using the same language.
So…
it’s not just Gibson! -
Seems to me that when it comes to the media, it’s okay to rant at and be a boor towards “conservatives” etc, but not okay to do the same towards your very attractive Russian model girlfriend.
Go figure. -
“I think Gibson would look good in chainmail.”
lol! -
I think the attention to Mel’s attack on his girlfriend was more than anything else a reflection of the fact that there is an unlimited appetite in this country for celebrity disasters. Like I said, I didn’t really follow that episode, but I think the reaction wasn’t so much “what dreadful things to say, what a bad man” as “Mel Gibson crashes and burns–isn’t it great?!?” I’ve seen many headlines over the past week or so about Charlie Sheen’s reported psycho episode. There isn’t really that much of a moral component in the reactions, it’s more just ghoulish fascination, with a fairly strong component of pleasure in seeing the mighty brought low, or at least in being proved to be no better than the rest of us, possibly worse.
There was, on the other hand, a definite moral component to the reaction when Gibson was caught railing against the Jews. -
yeah, you could be right. it seemed that over here there was more a moral angle, but I could be wrong.
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I’m still waiting for my invitation to a Murphy family stoush…
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I thought the main reason for the uproar over Gibson’s verbal attack on his girlfriend was the fact that he told her the way she dressed would set her up for rape by black males — and especially because he referred to them with the worst possible racial epithet. Or am I wrong?
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Louise, I’m talking about the way I grew up, not the way things are now. My parents are in their 80s, my brother has problems, my aunt and uncle live abroad, and we don’t do fights like we used to.
I agree Mac, that the issue was moral (rightly) when Gibson made anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, it was defences of Gibson which bothered me more, as if he’d done something really bad by being rude to his wife and a traffic cop.
Louise, I agree – no one talked about, what the heck is the Russian female doing taping their conversations if she isn’t simply a gold digger? -
Marianne, that was definitely part of it. Or at least it was heavily featured in the headlines about the story. But it would have been pretty big news anyway, at least here. People here find nothing so fascinating as an out-of-control celebrity.
If there’s been damage to his career, I think it would have been the anti-semitic rants that were most responsible, since there’s such a strong Jewish presence in the entertainment industry. -
Louise, I’m talking about the way I grew up, not the way things are now.
oh… that is a great pity…
Light On Dark Water 
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