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Guest Bloggers
Charlotte Hays is on leave until December 1. Beliefnet has asked some of the most respected and popular conservative Catholic bloggers and writers to fill in during her absence. Please check back every day for the next two weeks to read a new guest blogger.
Amy Welborn is the author of many books, including "
De-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of the Da Vinci Code
" and "
The Words We Pray: Discovering the Richness of Traditional Catholic Prayer
." She is also general editor of the forthcoming "Loyola Classics" series of reprint editions of great Catholic literary and popular fiction, beginning with "Mr. Blue" by Myles Connolly in February 2005, from Loyola Press. She has blogged since 2001, presently at
Open Book
.
Advent Food for Thought
This past Sunday, Christians pulled out their purple and pink candles and commenced four weeks of singing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel."
Yes, it's Advent.
Like anything else, Advent resources and reflections abound on the Internet, but I stumbled upon one this morning that gave me more than the usual food for thought, and not just because I birthed my own baby 11 days ago, assisted by a midwife. It's from the blog of Alicia, a
Catholic midwife from parts up north
, I believe, who says, among other interesting things today:
Being a midwife means spending a lot of time seemingly doing nothing, simply waiting on the baby and helping the mom cope. If I have done my job well, I will seem to be unnecessary. If I have helped a mom to stay healthy during her months as a lady-in-waiting, her hours of labor will be more manageable. I think that God has given us the equivalent of midwives to help us prepare for the coming of our Messiah - He has given us the sacraments and the priests to minister them to us. We are cleansed by Penance, fed by Eucharist, healed through both these sacraments and also through the Anointing of the sick.
Something to Be Thankful For
Thanksgiving may be past, but the time for giving thanks isn't--and never should be.
The National Catholic Reporter's Washington correspondent, Joe Feuerherd, gives thanks for his
late parents in this moving tribute
, evoking the strength of a good marriage to endure through changes, pain and sorrow. And to teach a few lessons as well:
Twenty-two Thanksgivings ago, their 19-year-old son, a marginally-performing college sophomore with few visible prospects, informed Vic and Lil that he planned to marry the young lady with whom he was in love. Their response, amazingly in retrospect, was unconditional support (a reaction the now 41-year-old father of three teenagers and his wife of 21 years wonder if they could replicate). They understood the desire to build a life together.
Something to offer thanks for, to be sure.
Stemming Cells
One of the more puzzling election results was, in my mind, the enthusiastic passage of California's Proposition 71, providing billions of state money for embryo-destructive stem cell research.
The moral dimension of destroying human embryos is one thing, but not, I admit, something that I expected the public to care much about. (Especially given the lopsided disparity in spending by both sides: proponents of the measures spent 25 millions in advertising, while opponents shelled out about $400,000.) What surprised me was the passage of this bill in a state that's in perpetual financial crisis. I don't get it.
Anyway, a couple of recent articles look a bit more closely at the potential ramifications of Prop 71:
A November 26 New York Times article raises questions
:
Leaving aside the continuing controversy over the morality of this research, matters of business and governmental ethics remain.The syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, supports some types of stem cell research but says the California initiative goes too far.
"This is an unbelievable rip-off by people with an interest in the business of stem cells," said Mr. Krauthammer, who suffered a crippling spinal cord injury when he was young. "This is a huge grant from the people of California to a very specific biotech business, and it's only because of stem cells' notoriety that it's this and not something else. If taxpayers were to spend $3 billion, the logical thing would be to devote the money to the most promising areas of research, but that was never discussed because of the sexiness of stem cells. The oversight provisions are abysmal and it's basically a slush fund."
Not that the NYTimes would have seen fit to run any critical articles
before
the vote. Nah.
And then, in today's Spectator Online,
Tom Bethell takes some shots at what he calls "Mengele Medicine."
Steve Milloy of the Cato Institute believes that stem cell hype began with researchers and investors who were counting on taxpayer funding to increase the value of their stakes in biotech companies. They could then "cash out at a hefty profit, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag of fruitless research." When Bush failed to cooperate they "were enraged and began a campaign to pressure the President into opening the taxpayer spigots...on the basis of a wild-eyed hope that cures are near at hand."It's an interesting theory, and one would like to see more of this skepticism from the mainstream media. There may be some truth to it, too, although I would like to see more in the way of specifics. Who was behind California's Proposition 71, for example?
What a rip-off, taken from the realm of outrage to tragedy because of the human lives involved and the corruption of our moral sensibilities, as we let imagined utility, rather than simple respect, define our attitude towards a whole category of human beings.
Today's Flannery O'Connors
In this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review,
James Wood reviews Marilynne Robinson's latest
--and second in twenty years--novel, "Gilead."
I never read "Housekeeping," Robinson's first, acclaimed novel, and although "Gilead" sounds like the kind of serious, thoughtful work (the letter of a dying Iowa Calvinist minister to his young son in this case.) I generally, much to my shame, avoid (so I like to laugh. Is that a crime?), I have to say...if James Wood can vouch for it, perhaps I need to pick it up.
Wood is a critic who fascinates me, among other reasons, because he takes spiritual and theological issues quite seriously, grapples with them, appreciates it when others do the same:
Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction--what Ames means when he refers to "grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials." There are plenty of such essentialists in American fiction (writers like Kent Haruf and Cormac McCarthy), and Robinson is sometimes compared to them, but their essentials are generally not religious.In ordinary, secular fiction, a writer who "takes things down to essentials'' is reducing language to increase the amount of secular meaning (or sometimes, alas, to decrease it). When Robinson reduces her language, it's because secular meaning has exhausted itself and is being renovated by religious meaning. Robinson, who loves Melville and Emerson, cannot rid herself of the religious habit of using metaphor as a form of revelation. Ames spends much time musing on the question of what heaven will be like. Surely, he thinks, it will be a changed place, yet one in which we can still remember our life on earth: ''In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets." There sings a true Melvillean note.
And Wood himself is an atheist, which makes his critical perspective all the more compelling.
As a person with a keen personal and professional interest in fiction, and as a person who also spends a lot of time excoriating religiously-themed schlock like "The Da Vinci Code," "Joshua," and "Left Behind" and most other "Christian fiction," I'm often asked for recommendations of contemporary novels with a spiritual resonance. Okay, we know what we don't want to waste our time on, I'm asked. We get it. But where, people always want to know, are the modern Graham Greenes, Flannery O'Connors and Evelyn Waughs? What's worth reading?
Well, there don't seem to be any peers of that particular trinity operating today (although I'm always eager to be corrected on that score), but really, there is no dearth of fiction out there for the reader interested in this sort of thing, either. You just have to keep your eyes peeled.
Ironically enough, one of the more bracing fictional theological novels of the past couple of years came from the pen of James Wood himself--"The Book Against God," in which an atheist son spends much of his life doing spiritual and intellectual battle with his Anglican cleric father. "Lying Awake" by Mark Salzman is a lovely book about a contemporary cloistered nun, a mystic who is diagnosed with a brain disorder. The questions her diagnosis raises about her mystical experiences are sensitively raised and intriguingly resolved.
"Unveiled" by Susanna Wolfe, like my bete noire, "The Da Vinci Code," also deals with secrets and art--in this case an altarpiece in the process of restoration--but in a completely different way: in a spirit of authentic spirituality, honesty and wisdom. And by a real writer, to boot.
Probably my favorite book in this group that I've read over the past 18 months is also the oddest: "Hungry Ghost" by Keith Kachtick. Not for everyone, to be sure, it's the story of a Buddhist photojournalist from New York who falls for a very traditional young Roman Catholic woman from Texas. It's told in a rather quirky style--second person--that has the potential to annoy until you get it--"Oh, Buddhism, detachment from self...so yeah, the Buddhist narrator might tell the story in second person"--but I really was charmed by the book and thought that Kachtick did a fabulous job of exploring these contrasting worldviews.
Plus, it was funny.
Jeremy Lott is the foreign press critic for
GetReligion.org
. His feature story on the Christian culture industry, "
Jesus Sells
," was collected in The Best Christian Writing 2004. Lott has worked for several magazines--most recently the American Spectator--and written for publications ranging from Christianity Today to the Washington Post to Seattle's alt-weekly The Stranger. He was still getting settled back in to his old place in Fairfax, Virginia, when he bumped into Gary Bauer at an IHOP.
Bad Purveyors of Pernicious Popcult
The videogame
JFK Reloaded
has all the usual suspects up in arms but a few unexpected voices have joined the fray. My former boss Nick Gillespie, normally a
titan of ambiguity
, wrote on Reason's
blog
that while he doesn't "get outraged" at this sort of thing, he had a message for the purveyors of pernicious popcult: "If you're going to traffic in something like this, at least have the guts not to wrap it up in a pedagogical package."
The package that he refers to includes claims by the game's marketers that by allowing a generation of gamers to take shots at JFK, they will come to believe that a) there was only one gunman necessary to take out Kennedy and b) that the gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald. It might be bit of a stretch but--how should I put this?--so what?
Creators of various entertainments have felt it necessary over the years to wrap cheap thrills in some larger, ostensibly noble public purpose. It was, among other things, a chance to beat the censors ("But this movie condemns drugs and violence! How can you keep such a message from America's youth? It would be un-American."). Nowadays, it might be fun to throw off such hypocrisies but some content codes still apply. As we've seen with crackdowns on television, the federal government is pushing the envelope right back, and videogames are still subject to the hysterical legislative overreactions.
Also, in this case the admen might not be entirely off the mark. Assume that videogames help shape the thinking of kids these days. How will it hurt for gamers to spend hundreds of thousands of man hours learning that, yup, Oswald could have done it all by his lonesome, no second gunman or magic bullet required?
Your Reality
This
article in Tech Central Station
has a subhed that's worthy of comment: "Enemies of the reality-based community manage to change reality for the better." My least favorite smug liberal anti-Bushism during the campaign was this "reality-based community" tag. If I was forced to find a phrase to encapsulate all the reasons to vote against JFK II, there she was.
The reality-based label came from a long, not terribly coherent
New York Times Magazine cover story
. The quote, attributed to an anonymous source in the Bush administration, contrasted the "reality-based community" with a newly-formed consensus in favor of a Holy American Empire. The author then wretched the epithet out of context and reapplied it to paint all Bush opponents as members of the reality-based community, and used the contrast to show Bush supporters to be a bunch of hicks and religious know-nothings who looked to the president as their political messiah.
This was so far off the mark as to elicit laughter among some Bush-supporting acquaintances (for the record, I voted
Libertarian
for president), but for a lot of left-of-center writers it became part of the anti-Bush gales. Supporters of the president were said to be deluded, and, it was often added, they would face a rude awakening on election night.
That didn't work out so well and the phrase has largely vanished from the liberal lexicon. Now, conservatives have picked it up and are using it to taunt their adversaries a second time. I had almost forgotten that the spoils of victory extend even to the English language.
Talk about Hitting a Brick Wall
The other day I hiked about five miles into the heart of my suburban wasteland in search of a mattress store, failed to find said store, and was thoroughly annoyed with myself as I dragged these young, tired bones back to the old townhouse. Along the way I got a bright idea. My portable CD player held the Crash Test Dummies' first album, "
The Ghosts that Haunt Me
," so I inserted the earpieces and hit play.
The rest of the trip flew by and the internal griping evaporated. In "Ghosts," and "
God Shuffled His Feet
," the band had a sound and a voice that is, in my experience, unparalleled. They aren't naïve or sunny but their first two CDs are pure audio joy. There's tragedy in the world but there's also wonder, and laughter, and both records have failed to grow old from usage.
And then it all went sideways. Released in 1996, "
A Worm's Life
" would be about half a good album for a run-of-the-mill band but, coming from the Dummies, it's rubbish. "
Give Yourself a Hand
," their senior effort, is a bear to listen to even once. I thought "
I Don't Care That You Don't Mind
" would be the low point--I mean, at least the
Christmas album
gave us some songs with Ellen Reid on lead vocals--but it looks like I was hopelessly optimistic.
I ordered the Dummies' latest, "
Songs of the Unforgiven
," before I took the opportunity to listen to the samples on the band's
official website
. Not so smart. The press release begins "The newest Crash Test Dummies CD...is an unabashedly melancholy collection that listeners may compare favorably with the work of a Nick Cave or a Tom Waits." Or they may prefer to compare it unfavorably to be a steaming pile of marshmallows.
Here are the
lyrics
. Any reader who can get through all of that and still smile is either an idiot or a saint. I am by no means a don't-reinvent-yourselves purist but Brad Roberts has been tossing out everything that worked in favor of that which guarantees failure. The sense of joy and wonder has been sucked out of the Dummies' music, and the band is worse for it.
Religion of Peace
"[T]his pope is currently all but leading a rebellion against the legal recognition of the post-Christian reality that is the European Union." So says my
GetReligion colleague Terry Mattingly
in summary of an article in the London Telegraph.
The piece notes that a mass of petitioners--over one million by the end of last week--wants the right for the member states of the EU to add their own preambles to what will be the new EU Constitution. These preambles that take note of the importance of Christianity in the history of Europe, to serve as counter-ballast to the otherwise secular document.
The move, according to the Telegraph story, is "keenly backed" by John Paul II and is gaining a lot of support from, of all people, the Dutch. Obviously, the Netherlands is reacting to the November 2 brutal murder/mutilation of Theo van Gogh. Christopher Caldwell in the Weekly Standard
fills in some of the gruesome gaps
for readers who haven't paid close attention to the recent goings-on there:
The past 10 days have seen almost continuous protest. At least a dozen mosques and Muslim schools were set on fire. The subsequent firebombing of several churches fanned the fury. There were raids across the country on Moroccan, Kurdish, and Pakistani terrorist cells. At one pre-dawn arrest of two suspects in the Hague, police were met with a grenade attack, and a siege that lasted 15 hours, while the cornered suspects hollered, "We will behead you!"
The note pinned to the corpse of van Gogh threatened further violence against two of the country's controversial elected officials, who have since gone into hiding. The nation's people and its elected officials, says Caldwell, are now "inclined to move from Live and Let Live to its opposite, and are calling for laws that make the Patriot Act look like Kumbayah."
The Dutch are interested in rehabilitating their country's nominal Christian identity as a way to combat militant Islam's growing influence. Most of the arrests have been of Muslim immigrants, but a few home-grown John Walker Lindh types have been caught in the net as well.
Barbara Nicolosi is the founding Director of Act One: Writing for Hollywood, a screenwriting training program that keynotes artistry, professionalism, ethics and Christian spirituality. A screenwriter herself, Nicolosi has completed full-length feature and television scripts, and has consulted on numerous film, television and video productions that deal with Christian history and spirituality. Her screenplay, Select Society, on the life of the poet Emily Dickinson is currently in development with a Los Angeles production company. She blogs at
Church of the Masses
.
Familial Dysfunction Film Fest
For the last four years, I have been a judge for the Angelus Awards Student Film Festival. Sponsored by the Catholic organization
Family Theater Productions
in Hollywood, the Film Festival gives the largest cash prizes available to student films. The "catch"--and it's a fine once, by me--is that an Angelus Award winner has to combine mastery of craft with thematic content that illuminates some truth about human experience. That is, the projects have to offer some good to the audience, beyond just the good of technical harmony. This years Awards wrapped October 23 with a gala awards and screenings of the winners at the DGA in Hollywood.
Watching the finalists roll by on the screen, I was struck--once again this year--by how seven of the top ten winners revolved around the same theme: dysfunctional parent-child relationships. This current generation-- Gen.com/Gen Next/Gen Y/Whatever ya call the kids Younger than Me and My Friends--seems to have one overarching theme on their collective creative brains: "Why Weren't My Mom and Dad There for Me?" "How Is It Possible to Love and Hate Your Parents?" "What Does it Look Like When An 8-Year-Old Has to Be the Parent of a 45-Year-Old?" "How Does a Parent Lose Their Child?" "Can People Love People Who Were Too Busy To Love Them?"
Without exception, the films don't come across as bitter. They are just very sad.
This year's crop also included an Honorable Mention Award for budding filmmaker, Alexandra Kerry, daughter of the recent losing candidate. Naturally, thanks surely to family financing, Kerry's project had laudable production values. It was a well-put together piece and she deserves credit for her skills as a young director. But even hers was thematically in line with the rest of her generation's most talented up and coming directors. Kerry's project told the story of the little daughter of an emotionally withdrawn Vietnam vet. Her father has repressed his war experiences to such an extent that he can not be vulnerable with his child. And the child, who picks up on the idea that this is not a normal way to be raised, is sad.
It was just kind of interesting.
The Academy vs. Mel
A
front-page article in USA Today
profiles the directors who must be considered in top contention for the next Academy Award.
Profiled filmmakers include Oliver Stone for his three-hour-long "Alexander," which one major critic has already labeled "worse than mediocre." Next is Mike Leigh, for this year's "important" film, "Vera Drake," about the courageous and compassionate British matron who kindly, you know, purges fetuses from young women in the 1950s. Again, another critic gulped that the film might prove "hard to watch" for holiday audiences. Then there is Mike Nichols, who arguably should get the Oscar for wrangling Julia Roberts and the sexiest man alive in "Closer." A friend who saw the film assured me that, although gorgeous Natalie Portman is frequently shown in striptease posture in the film, it isn't "totally" exploitive. Phew.
Of course, USA Today reckons that Martin Scorcese has to be considered the lead contender
if
his "Aviator" manages to coax the man out of Leo DeCaprio. Holding the long-shots are Clint Eastwood for his upcoming "Million Dollar Baby"--can the film be quite so good as to overcome
that
unfortunate title?--and James L. Brooks for "Spanglish"--you know, the highly-anticipated Adam Sandler vehicle, which a cynical person might snort is probably only in this list as a trade-off for a big ad buy in the pages of USA Today when it opens.
Now, I ask you, if you asked any moviegoer on the planet, wouldn't they come up with perhaps one more director who deserves to be on this list?
You'd think the leading contender would be the director who looked all the Hollywood studios in the eye and spit when they told him how he needed to change his vision for his particular project. He believed in his artistic vision so much, in fact, that he bankrolled his beloved project to the tune of $30 million of his own funds.
This was the same guy who decided to make a film that would hearken back to the universal language of the early silent cinema, and be so lavish, frame by frame, that people in any language could follow its story. Using everything the cinematic palette has to offer, this director finely crafted his piece using lyrical imagery and stunning juxtapositions in a way that filmgoers are rarely treated to.
Wouldn't you want to give an Oscar to a fellow who created the biggest box-office surprise of--well, the last century--by breaking every industry convention about whether American audiences would pay for a non-English movie?
And then, this same director broke another rock-solid industry dogma and made a blockbuster of a film without using a star in any lead roles! Finally, this filmmaker demolished the last defining Hollywood convention, and made a movie that was not targeted to any demographic. And then, it worked with pretty much all of them.
Heck, if you were a director, voting for Best Director, wouldn't you want to give that guy your vote? Wouldn't you think he at least deserves to get an honorable mention alongside Oliver Stone--who threw some homoeroticism into his deadly dull film seemingly so there would be something to say about it in the press junkets?
But no, Mel Gibson is disappearing off all the industry lists for being in contention for "The Passion of the Christ." And it really comes down to plain old anti-religious bigotry. The film won't get an Oscar nom, because then, people in Hollywood would have to see the film. And they really, really don't want to. There wasn't even going to be a screening of the film at the Writers Guild of America (the screenwriters' union) until a group of Christian writers I know got together and demanded it. One of them told me that she went to the screening, and only about ten other people were there, and, she said, "They jeered and laughed throughout the movie."
I bet if Bush had lost, "The Passion of the Christ" would have had a fairer shake at the Oscar. But now, ignoring it is a kind of pathetic shaking of an impotent fist at those god-fearing blue-state people. "We'll show you!" The only question is, how low will the Academy have to go to find something else to worship?
Mark P. Shea is Senior Content Editor for
www.CatholicExchange.com
and blogs at
Catholic and Enjoying It!
. He lives in Washington state with his wife, Janet, and their four sons.
Snap Judgments
Noticing a number of snap judgments in the comments field.
Turns out I'm "rich" cuz I made fun of Greeley. No doubt it will also soon turn out I'm a zealous supporter of the war because I revere our troops and the courage they display.
Just for clarity's sake,
I think the war failed to meet just war criteria
.
I also think that, now that we're there, we owe it to the Iraqis to help them get on their feet, which means getting them to the place where they can police and govern themselves and the Foaming Bronze Age Thugs in their midst. As one Vatican type put it: however the baby was conceived, it's been born now and needs care.
Then I think we should get out as fast as we can.
Email from a Marine
God help us be worthy of
such courageous men and their sacrifices
.
If You Had Only Reuters to Go On...
...you'd kinda get the impression
that it has never occurred to anybody in the English-speaking world to translate the Old Testament directly from Hebrew to English till Robert Alter had this bold new idea. You'd also get the impression that those darn religious believers are, 'ow you say?, "manning the barricades" against this unheard of newfangled idea. Is it possible for mainstream media (MSM) journalists to conceive of religious believers as something besides fearful, censorious, ignorant obscurantists?
If I were king for a day, I would sentence every member of the MSM to spend at least a year reading
Get Religion
every single day.
And in the Far-Flung Land of Australia...
...an Anglican pastor draws
spiritual insights
about the state of the Anglican communion from a film critic in New Jersey writing about the Polar Express.
The Internet makes such interesting cross-fertilization possible.
Ascendant No More?
Catholic Exchange chronicles lefties going through the
five stages of dying
.
There's more schadenfreude in this piece than I care for, but I have to confess that the histrionics of the Left after the election have been so over the top in their narcissism (I mean, come on: "Post Election Selection Trauma"? A whole psych disorder just for losing an election? Get a grip!) that it's hard not to laugh.
My hope is that the Left pulls itself together, gets a clue, and helps to provide a moderating influence on the creepy Ledeen tendencies of the Right (see below).
I'm a Film Fan
... and some of the most literate commentary on film (both cinematically and theologically) can be found at
DecentFilms.com
. Check it out!
Not That Religious Conservatives Can't Figure Out Ingenious Ways to Trim Out Inconvenient Truths When It Suits the Cause, Too
Exhibit A:
Michael Ledeen and his numerous Faithful Conservative Catholic Defenders in the comment boxes on my blog
. Ledeen argues for the glories of Machiavelli and says, "those called upon to make ... tough decisions have to be willing to 'enter into evil.' Sometimes ...doing that...means doing things we know to be morally wrong." In short, Ledeen makes the plea "Let us do evil that good may come". It is a plea that is
directly
contradicted by inspired Scripture in Romans 3:8 where Paul specifically declares that those who say such things are "justly condemned".
Yes, I know Ledeen's Jewish and you can't expect him to care what Paul thinks. I don't. But I do expect alleged Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM] to care. But if you have the time, do scroll down the blog and read the astounding amount of hemming, hawing, excuse-making, fog, equivocation, insults and general avoidance behavior displayed by readers eager to make excuses for the glorification of Machiavelli when a Big Noise in the Conservative community does it.
If allegedly serious Catholic are this willing to make excuses for this when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry? I pray the salt does not lose its savor.
Andrew Greeley's "World Class" Losers
What a refeshing blast of elitism!
Fr. Andrew Greeley trashes that tiresome bit about God being no respecter of persons, not to mention "Woe to you who are rich" and "Blessed are the anawim". Nosirree! People who live in "world class cities" (you know: Babylon, Nineveh, Hitler's Berlin, Nero's Rome, Andrew Greeley's Chicago) have it all over those red state yokels from Green Acres and Nazareth.
Remember when Greeley's Democratic Party had respect for the Little Guy?
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