Praise, patriotism, partisanship, and pop

The NYT this weekend includes a glowing memoir on the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, on the occasion of Sister Mary Jean Ryan's retirement as chief executive of one of of one of America’s largest networks of Catholic hospitals. The discussion includes their clear-eyed planning for the day (soon to arrive) when the order no longer exists. A friend and I were discussing this sort of thing recently: the difference in organisation and sensibility that allows Catholic groups to be distinctively themselves, while allowing for other ways of being faithfully Christian — something that contemporary Evangelical groups struggle with. There is still a lively tradition of openness in the pews, even in these identity-mongering times, but within the leadership?

A fan of the US military writes in criticism of “support our troops” pieties:

The irony is that our soldiers are the last people who are likely to call themselves heroes and are apparently very uncomfortable with this kind of talk. The military understands itself as a group endeavor. As the West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet recently noted, service members feel uneasy when strangers approach them to — as the well-meaning but oddly impersonal ritual goes — thank them for their service, thereby turning them into paradoxically anonymous celebrities. It was wrong to demonize our service members in Vietnam; to canonize them now is wrong as well. Both distortions make us forget that what they are are human beings...

The change of tone in the coverage and discussion of Anzac Day, noticeable to anyone over a certain age, springs to mind as an Australian analogue, although the causes may be somewhat different.

An American radio host and author compares contemporary political debate to an auto-immune disease.

And my current nostalgia trip: Glycerine, the greatest hit of the band Bush. I have recently returned to an apartment complex where I was staying in late 1995, through 1996, and this song has been on my mind. Like many pop songs, it would not withstand too close an enquiry into the literal meaning of its lyrics, but as the distillation of a particular mood — masculine yearning, chastened by regret — it is superb. And in contrast to the posturing, braggarty tone of the songs in a male voice that followed it, it is unashamedly pretty. A female cover brings that out, although I do miss the surface roughness of the original:

I could have been easier on you,
I couldn't change though I wanted to.

Someone old, nothing new, someone French, someone blue; someone radiant, some history, and a good point

Some things I noticed recently:

One gets a much more measured treatment of the ongoing disaster in Haiti from the NYT than one does from the TV news in Sydney: even the ABC. That's not unusual, but it's still disappointing.

A biologist's love-letter to Avatar. The film itself: wow. The praise is all true, and some of the criticism is true too. This old Alien fan certainly enjoyed the fact that Sigourney Weaver was having the time of her life, both as her character, the splendidly named Dr Grace Augustine, and as that character's alter-ego, a cheeky twentyish eleven-foot tall blue chick with a yen for basketball. (Another nice nod to the Alien films, there.) And amidst all of the reactions to the film, it was very instructive to read a discussion with the Osservatore Romano reviewer whose previous remarks have been taken, as they say, out of context.

The remarkable American strongman Joe Rollino has has died at 104

The director Eric Rohmer also died recently: the NYT has both an obituary and an appreciation by A.O. Scott. I have only seen a few of his films but would happily see the rest, just on that basis. If it were 10 or 15 years ago, I'd expect SBS to put on a retrospective. But now?

In other cinema news, there is a good NYT article on the wonderful Laura Linney: longstanding theatre and film actress, a superb talent with a sharp mind and a professional's attitude, always a little under-the-radar and a little under-rated on the street. And wasn't she superb as Abigail Adams?

The NYT has put out an interactive timeline on the Science and Politics of Climate Change, with links to various historical stories, for example from 1956 and from 1979: the latter of these being the rough period that I would have become aware of the issue. I find this interesting because, as a science brat with all sorts of age-innapropriate concerns and sources of knowledge (and values, and prejudices, and ...) it isn't always obvious to me what other people had access to, when, and on what terms. This article appears to have been from a supplementary section of the paper: a good paper, admittedly, but a regular daily nonetheless.

xkcd on the truth lying between two extremes

On Eve Tushnet and The Gathering Storm

The unclassifiable Eve Tushnet has a couple of posts on the notorious Gathering Storm advertisement on her blog.^[1] I'd heard about the ad being objectionable --- and indeed, it is --- so I was surprised to learn that Ms Tushnet actually does some work for NOM, the organisation that produced it. On the one hand I couldn't see how that could work out; on the other, I was fascinated, given my own situation.^[2]

Here she is speaking, from a position opposed to gay marriage, about criticisms of that position:

The best counterargument is the same as the best counterargument on all gay-marriage topics: “This isn’t just about gay marriage but about a whole panoply of prior changes, most of which have obvious good qualities as well, so you’re not seeking status quo so much as rollback.” ...

I see the force of that argument, and of course I acknowledge that there’s no way we would be having this conversation without the prior cultural changes which led to e.g. laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For that matter, every single day I take advantage of the cultural changes which have made it possible for me to be an out lesbian while facing very limited explicit hostility.

But I still disagree that gay marriage is only a trivial turn of the ratchet (do ratchets turn?? I’m really not the home-improvement kind of dykey!), a mere formality, or something you can only worry about if you also reject all of the prior cultural moves which brought us here. I think prudence can allow you to draw a line, and frankly, gay marriage is a really obvious place for that line. Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!--it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.

Her other comments ad loc are incisive, quite wide-ranging, and well-taken; and some of the links are fascinating. At the end of the day, though, I'm still confused about how she can reconcile herself to a group running an ad that she herself describes as fearmongering, and as “really, really cheesy”.

Because belonging to a lobby group or a movement is not the same as belonging to a church. I've elsewhere posted in admiration of Ms Tushnet's Catholicism and the resources it gives her, and the home it provides her; and for another example, the USCCB's Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children, also cited by Tushnet, is a good advertisement for the Catholic Church: one could disagree with the position, and still respect the practical advice; one could disagree with the advice, and still admire the humanity and maturity of its conception. I understand how one could disapprove of the church in other ways, but value the tradition that makes this sort of thing possible: I understand that because it's pretty much my own position. A propos of this, a friend pointed out that a church is not meant to be admired from a safe distance ... which is a good point, so let me put it this way: I can see how, being a Catholic, one might choose to stay one; I can see how, having become a Catholic, one might judge it to have been a good choice, any drawbacks apart.

But a lobby group or a movement is not like that. Achieving an effect, pushing a point of view or policy, effecting a particular change in society, is the point of the endeavour. That's what a lobby is about: there is no other “there” there. So when a lobby comes up with a cheesy, fearmongering advertisement, it is reasonable to view it as essentially discrediting, in a way that it's not when a person does something wrong, or a country does something objectionable, or a church says something silly. If a lobby is in the business of saying silly things, or saying things in an objectionable way, isn't it Just Bad?

Which brings me back to my own local concerns. One of my criticisms of the evangelical church, at least in this town, is related: I think it's confused about whether it's a movement or a church --- even worse, whether it's an insurgent movement or The Church, simpliciter. This has all sorts of implications for how one views membership, duty, loyalty, and the ethical position of both individuals and officials: I take a rather different view, for example, of a minister on the one hand, and a cadre of a movement on the other; if they are the same person, there is potentially a serious problem. But that is really a matter for its own post, on another occasion.

^[1] I can't seem to link to individual posts there. The ones I mean are from April 2009: scroll down to Wednesday, April 15, and look for "POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE" and “'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'".

^[2] Short version: I am a conservative Christian, in the Anglican tradition (and happy to be so), I live in Sydney, and while it would be misleading to call me an evangelical I'm probably more like that than anything else; and I was taught and trained by evangelicals, and I have friends in that ministry. And yet I find the public stance of the Sydney Diocese, in particular its official media presence, absolutely unbearable.

The love that dare not speak its name

There is a fascinating exchange on homosexuality and Christian (specifically Catholic) doctrine here, in a recent Commonweal magazine.

The correspondents are, if you can believe it, a straight male theology professor (Luke Timothy Johnson) who advocates acceptance of homosexual relationships, and a lesbian freelance journalist (Eve Tushnet), a recent convert to Catholicism, who stands for the traditional position of the church.

Despite what I initially thought, both of them seem to be on the level. And despite what you might think, both of them are worth reading.

Professor Johnson's responsibly liberal position involves a certain amount of --- let us be frank --- special pleading and tendentious argument. (The references to slavery, for example, are depressingly rote and tone-deaf. If that's not already clear to you, I suggest reading The Letter of Paul to Philemon and then trying to square it against Johnson's statement on the apostle's views.) But Johnson is an unlucky man. He indulges in much less special pleading or tendentious argument than you might expect, and he is clearly trying to be straightforward and plain-speaking. His concern for being faithful to Christian revelation, and faithful to the phenomena, is manifest. And he has put all of his cards on the table, including those which count against his own argument: a refreshing thing, that, in these polemical times. In isolation I would have called his contribution to the discussion a good one, for these and other reasons, but he has had the misfortune to be up against someone who completely outclasses him.

Ms Tushnet is altogether extraordinary. She is rigorous. She is open. She is clear on what is secure in her own understanding, and what is provisional. Honest and critical about her own experience, and speaking with what anyone in our culture would recognise as a kind of authority, she finds that she needs to listen to what Christian (and specifically Catholic) tradition has to say. Reading her words, I am reminded --- quite outside my own experience --- of why I take the Scripture seriously. Of why I take Christian doctrine seriously. This does not happen often.

Her position is a classic example of faith seeking understanding, the great model of Christian thought. Prof. Johnson by contrast is trying to achieve a final position --- to get in all the data --- and one feels the strain. In fairness to him, he will probably think the same thing in five years' time. Ms Tushnet may well think something quite different in five months' time, and as a scientist I can't help feeling that that is an indulgence. But I will still listen willingly to whatever she has to say.

-----

Stepping back from the detail of Prof. Johnson's and Ms Tushnet's positions, there is something deeply Catholic about their whole discussion. I mean that in a good way. It respects reason (and reasonableness), tradition, experience, insight, and beauty, in a way that many Protestant discussions do not. It takes difficulty and obscurity for granted. It is recognisably about a world that real people live in.

As an Anglican, I have the privilege admiring the (Roman) Catholic church from a safe distance. This is something worth doing, and something that my fellow evangelical Christians are depressingly reluctant to do. The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, is an honourable exception in this matter, and I note that it is a brave man who would accuse him of being insufficiently Protestant. So what, exactly, is everyone else's problem?

[Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Ben Myers, and his estimable blog Faith and Theology, for a pointer to the Commonweal article.]