War Between the Orthodoxies

 

This tanky website

Zelensky's war on Orthodoxy continues, as a priest is apprehended during a service in Chernivtsi, far West Ukraine.

Are these "Western values"? pic.twitter.com/GSbVWQnJs1

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) March 24, 2023

(where by "tanky", I mean "person who sees Putin as the heir to Stalin and thinks that's a good thing" for the world proletarian revolution, even if thinking so involves trying to think that a good Marxist is obliged to give deference to the Russian Orthodox church because "Western values") is engaging in some especially vicious propaganda, obviously not as bad as the continuing claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis, but in the same family. I think I've touched on this before, but I need to go through it in some detail, because it's just too wrong to be borne.

Abortion Science II

Guest of honor at a Singapore Full Moon party, via. 

 

Shorter David F. Brooks, "Abortion: The Voice of the Ambivalent Majority":

No, I don't mean abortion is the voice of the ambivalent majority. I mean I am the voice of the ambivalent majority, and I think the solution to the problem is obviously to be of two minds, which is what all but the extremists want, so I support overturning Roe and Casey without overturning Roe and Casey. This is the only appropriately moderate position.

That is: Brooks believes the Court should uphold the Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, in defiance of the finding of Roe v. Wade (1973) that the state's interest in protecting the fetus applies to a fetus that is 28 or more weeks old, and the revision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) changing that to the standard of "viability", a fetus that is capable of living outside the womb (28 weeks in the received medical opinion of 1973 but by now 23 or 24 weeks, sometimes set as low as 22); or in other words should allow Mississippi to introduce an entirely random standard whose only possible purpose is to reduce the number of abortions overall  (not that much—95% of abortions in the US are before 15 weeks) and then claim they hadn't overturned Roe and Casey even though they obviously had:

"Mississippi's ban on abortion, two months before viability, is flatly unconstitutional under decades of precedent," Center for Reproductive Rights Senior Director Julie Rikelman said during oral arguments. "Two generations have now relied on this right, and 1 out of every 4 women makes a decision to end a pregnancy."

Or, in Brooks's own words,

Abortion Science

 

Image via Ms. Magazine.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Case Against Abortion":

In the bad old days, we were dependent on philosophers, theologians, and lawyers to decide moral issues, which obviously led to a lot of disputes, for example on the question of abortion, but now we have science, which proves unequivocally that abortion is objectively evil.

No, seriously:

There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing. At a less advanced stage of scientific understanding, it was possible to believe that the embryo or fetus was somehow inert or vegetative until so-called quickening, months into pregnancy. But we now know the embryo is not merely a cell with potential, like a sperm or ovum, or a constituent part of human tissue, like a skin cell. Rather, a distinct human organism comes into existence at conception, and every stage of your biological life, from infancy and childhood to middle age and beyond, is part of a single continuous process that began when you were just a zygote.

We know from embryology, in other words, not Scripture or philosophy, that abortion kills a unique member of the species Homo sapiens, an act that in almost every other context is forbidden by the law.

Social Justice Noncombatant

 

Song sheet, 1915, via ww1online.

It's world famous moral philosopher David F. Brooks, in his just-the-tip wokeness phase, looking for a morally more satisfying alternative to being a Social Justice Warrior, which just ends up hurting people's feelings ("A Christian Vision of Social Justice"):

Like a lot of people, I’ve tried to envision a way to promote social change that doesn’t involve destroying people’s careers over a bad tweet, that doesn’t reduce people to simplistic labels, that is more about a positive agenda to redistribute power to the marginalized than it is about simply blotting out the unworthy. I’m groping for a social justice movement, in other words, that would be anti-oppression and without the dehumanizing cruelty we’ve seen of late.

Some kind of political equivalent of Modern Monetary Theory that claims you could issue significant quantities of power to one group of people without making anybody else feel their power is threatened.

And he's actually found something interesting, in the work of a New Testament theology professor from evangelical Wheaton College and occasional Times contributor, Esau McCaulley (who is also African American, as Brooks characteristically doesn't say but shows us by including a picture, uncaptioned, that you can identify as him by comparing it with the portrait on his Times page), but of course he doesn't get it right.

Honest to God

Parable of the Mote and the Beam, print by Jan Collaert after Ambrosius Francken, 1585,  British Museum.

Here's National Review writer and conservative Catholic Ramesh Ponnuru criticizing Pete Buttigieg (not that I'm that crazy about Buttigieg, as yet) for bringing religion into his presidential campaign:

Buttigieg's argument about the progressive implications of Christianity is heartfelt. It is also partisan nonsense. @bopinion https://t.co/sNuNCItfDe

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) April 16, 2019

It struck me as kind of upside down. After all, most people get their religious indoctrination starting pretty early in life, and start thinking about politics later; wouldn't the former inform the latter rather than the other way around? If Buttigieg was brought up a liberal Episcopalian, wouldn't that idea of Christianity lead him to think Christianity favors liberal political principles? Indeed, Ponnuru writes,

It Was Good For the Hebrew Children

Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace, from Robin's Great Coloring Pages.

I've been neglecting David Brooks since he came back from his recent book-generating aestivation (an aestivation or estivation is like a hibernation only in summer), for reasons akin to those cited by blogfriend Andrew Johnston; he's really not giving me enough material that I haven't already dealt with (Drew shows convincingly that you could write a really thorough review of the new book before it's even published, so that it's impossible to see why you'd want to even look at it, let alone slaving over an analysis of the text).

There's a moderately funny bit in today's column, though, a pre-election whine about Democrats failing to make a serious attempt to get his vote by offering a spiritual program ("The Materialist Party"), instead of talking about health care, health care, health care, or

“The top three issues this year are health care, health care and health care,” J.B. Poersch, of the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, told CNN....

Brooklets Babbling

Rafaello Sanzio, "The Disputà over the Blessed Sacrament" (so called after the scholars around the center altar, debating the mystery of Transubstantiation), west wall of the Stanza della Signatura, Vatican, via Wikipedia.

Oh, Brooksie (The Fourth Great Awakening)!

There are certain melodies that waft through history.

It's Bad Poetry Day?

by Norris Clarion Sprigg, 1907.

I didn't bring my cymbols, though, or cymbals, or symbols. Just kidding, I've always got a symbol or two at hand. What else you got?

There are certain melodies that waft through history. One is the cultural contrast between Athens and Jerusalem. This contrast has many meanings, but the most germane one for our day is the contrast between the competitive virtues and the compassionate virtues.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is the cultural contrast between Athens and Jerusalem a melody that wafts through history?

Yule be sorry

Photo by jag9889 at Flickr.

For my whole life, Macy's Herald Square, the World's Largest Store, recycled an increasingly dingy-looking window display every Christmas consecrated to the store's own peak presence in popular culture, the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, starring Natalie Wood as the little girl raised not to believe in fairy tales and Edmund Gwenn as Mr. Kris Kringle, the man who believes he is Santa Claus and who ends up not only convincing the little girl that he exists but in bringing about a Christmas truce between the warring titans of capitalism, Macy's and Gimbel's.

But a couple of years ago they finally abandoned it in favor of something new, referring to the story of Virginia O'Hanlon, the eight-year-old who asked the New York Sun, in 1897, to confirm for her the same saint's existence, to which the editor Francis Pharcellus Church notoriously replied, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," in language attempting to double-speak the audience between parents who'd see the line as a metaphor and children who wouldn't:

Why does David Brooks like prosperity gospel cult churches best?

New York Post, which seems to think on Brooksian lines, says the sexiest congregation in New York is the 7 PM Mass at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. Photo by Stephen Yang.

Because they have the cutest congregations! I'm not even kidding:

the polls now suggest Millennials are becoming disaffected from religion, and I get that. But as I go around, especially to cities, I see just an exploding religion that, believe me, is deeply religious but the opposite of Trumpism.

Say, pick New York City. There is a burgeoning supply of these churches, these Trinity Grace churches that are all around the city. There’s C3 churches, which I went to one in Williamsburg in Brooklyn a few months ago, and every beautiful hipster in New York seemed to be at that church. If you wanted to be where the cool crowd was, that church was it. And the Redeemer plants that are spreading.

Old Devil Brooks

Spiritual Conception totebag, now only $14.95 from Cafe Press.

I don't generally watch when David Brooks is on television, which is easy for me, but on Sunday morning he invaded my radio space—because for all my nastiness I'm really a soft old Birkenstocker at heart and a sucker for the totebag spirituality of the Krista Tippett show, which I listen to, for my sins (literally!), as the old helpmeet sleeps in until the weekend Puzzle wakes her up, at least to the extent I can stay awake, which varies with the quality of the guest, and Brooks was on it—I knew this would happen sooner or later—for a public-broadcasting spiritual lovefest-duet, with Dionne, chatting about the spiritual state of our union.

He's very comfortable in the role, joking easily, recalling the beloved camp counselor he used to be when he was 19:

DR. BROOKS: ...I didn’t know E.J. went through a youthful liberal Republican phase. It’s pathetic in your 50s. In your 20s, it’s just tragic.

[laughter]

DR. DIONNE: That’s the second-worst thing David ever said about me. The worst thing David ever said about me is that I was the only person he ever met whose eyes light up at the words “panel discussion.”

[laughter]

Wait, Dr. Brooks? Doctor of what for fuck's sake?

Personally, I don't think you have a clue

From Gaston Velle's Voyage autour d'une Étoile (1906), via somebody's Pinterest.

Sentences you'd probably never get to read if there were no David Brooks ("The Beauty of Big Books"):

Personally, I have issues with born-again paganism. 

This is not coming out of nowhere, I should say. He's been checking it out, in the form of a very big new book, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, by Anthony T. Kronman, a Yale law professor who did a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1972, before he went to law school, and has found his mind going back there in recent years, toward the elaboration of a systematic sort of pantheism.

Brooks has looked at the book, or several of its pages—you can get a good idea how many of them by listing the quotations he has culled from it:

Is Douthat a better theologian than the Pope? Spoiler: No.

"Mosque in mourning" in St-Étienne-du-Vouvray, Normandy, photo by François Mori/AP, via San Angelo Standard-Time.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, is putting out another request for some magic words; not only does President Obama have to say the words "radical Islamic terrorism" in order to win the war against radical Salafi terrorism, Pope Francis has to refer to the horrible murder of Abbé Jacques Hamel at the end of last month as a "martyrdom" ("The Meaning of a Martyrdom"):

In theory, it should be possible (for a pope, especially!) to plainly call Father Hamel’s death a martyrdom while also rejecting sweeping narratives about Islamic violence or religious war.

"In theory"! What theory is that?

As a matter of fact, I think a theoretical standpoint requires you to say that Abbé Hamel was not a martyr, however much respectful attention you might want his sacrifice and suffering to be given, because it isn't, just like Father Damien or Padre Pio, in line with the classic three-point definition:

Say the magic words

Whenever you say, "radical Islam," a duck resembling you comes down and terrorism stops. pic.twitter.com/r4WaGBTSXi

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) June 14, 2016

Shorter David Brooks, "Religion's Wicked Neighbor", New York Times, June 17 2016:

Obama is wrong not to say "Islamic terrorism". What he shouldn't say is "religious terrorism", because it isn't religious at all. It's just Islamic.

Brooks on a brief visit home from the psychophilosophical wilderness to his National Review roots, perhaps as a kind of Father's Day tribute to old Mr. Buckley, playing the traditional game of making the elaborate Jesuitical argument to justify some stupid conservative slogan, in this case the denunciation of the president for refusing to say the magic words that will—well, it's not clear what they'll do. Probably we'll never find out. Thanks, Obama!

Barack Obama is clearly wrong when he refuses to use the word “Islam” in reference to Islamist terrorism.

That's pretty cute, given that Brooks himself is using the word "Islamist" in contradistinction to "Islamic", meaning not of Islam ("submission" to God and to nothing else) but of Islamism, the idolatrous worship of the religious edifice instead of the deity. In fact he doesn't know he's doing that, of course. He just thinks it sounds elegant and chic. He may have gotten it from Hillary Clinton, who consciously used it the other day (I think)—

Douthat can't handle the truth

Clifton Webb in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), with Gene Tierney's back. Via somebody's Tumblr.

It's Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, all hopped up about Pope Francis's new exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love!), but there is no joy in Rossville. It's that danged modernity again:

MODERNITY has left nearly every religious tradition in the Western world divided.

The specific issues vary with the faith, but there is an essential sameness to what separates Reform Judaism from Orthodox Judaism, evangelical churches from mainline Protestantism, the liberal Episcopal Church from the conservative Anglican Church in North America.

The terror-caps are just an accidental feature of the Times style—because it's the first word in the piece. But it does look funny!

Actually what separates Reform Judaism (about 35% of Jews in the United States according to the 2013 Pew survey, plus 6% for Reconstructionist and other particularly liberal denominations) from Orthodox Judaism (about 10%, including the Ultra-Orthodox) is Conservative Judaism (about 18%), of which Ross appears not to have heard, together with the 30% who identify mostly as "just Jewish" (27%) or otherwise unaffiliated.

Thoughts and Prayers: A Fulmination

Annals of derp: Canon balls

Giovanni Venanzi of Pesaro, 1688: King Solomon being led into idolatry by his wives. Via Wikipedia.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, demonstrates once again that he's just not that good at theology and canon law, in his allegations of a "conspiracy" on the part of old Francesco to "rewrite" Catholic doctrine with regard to the policy of allowing divorced-and-remarried Catholics to take communion:

Francis’s purpose is simple: He favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null.

...if his purpose is clear, his path is decidedly murky. Procedurally, the pope’s powers are near-absolute: If Francis decided tomorrow to endorse communion for the remarried, there is no Catholic Supreme Court that could strike his ruling down.

I' faith, you have drunk too much

From Sergey Eyzenshteyn, The Battleship Potemkin, via.

David Brooks has read every single modern book on religious faith, enabling him to say with perfect confidence:

The best modern book on belief is “My Bright Abyss” by my Yale colleague, Christian Wiman. (paragraph 2)

Also he's so in at Yale, as Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner of Grand Strategy at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (course load of one class per year and a little team teaching), that he has colleagues in the Divinity School now.

But I'm not so sure he's really read all that much, because he sounds surprised at having heard quite recently how much reading is involved:

Jesus Christ in a cardigan!

Photo by dalaimickey.

So (via Raw Story) Bryan Fischer of American Family Radio is actually a polytheist, believing in a whole rafter of gods, some evil and others good, and thinks he's entitled to call out Muslims for latching onto the wrong one:

“When Muslims pray, they are praying to a god that they refer to as Allah, who we know from the Scriptures is not the true and living God, but is a demon-god,” Fischer said in footage posted byRight Wing Watch. “Remember, not every being that occupies the unseen world, the spiritual world, is a good guy, is a good spirit.”

So I realize they probably learned about Islam from Disney's Aladdin, where everybody worships an idol (there's some of that shit in Narnia, too) and a sultan's virgin daughters go out on unchaperoned dates wearing bikini tops and below-the-navel harem (!!!) pants, but where do these Boykinists learn their own theology? (This dude has a BA in philosophy from Stanford, which makes me want to cry a little bit, I still have some illusions, you know; and some kind of theology degree from a place called Dallas Theological Seminary, which ought to be sued for malpractice if this is the quality of their work.) Fucking idolators calling themselves Protestants, I just don't know what this world is coming to.

From Race, Gender, and Empire in Disney.

A question of legitimacy

So Todd ("Hot Toddie") Akin, Republican candidate for Claire McCaskill's Missouri Senate seat, asked by KTVI television if he really meant it should be illegal for a woman impregnated by an act of rape to get an abortion, replied,

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that is really rare. If it is a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down."

To which there soon followed a monumental hue and cry of gotchaists, political correctors, rogue gynecologists, and the like, calling the representative down for this statement, with very few defenders, among them CNN's Dana Loesch, who tweeted a reaction:

Long-time readers may recall Dana as the person who insisted that no would-be abortion patient could complain about a transvaginal ultrasound exam because it was just like the activity that had gotten her pregnant in the first place. (Ms. Loesch believes that most penises are made of a smooth, luminescent ceramic material. By a curious coincidence, her husband has a chin composed of exactly the same substance!)

Chris & Dana Loesch. From Gateway Pundit.

But in fact, as Mr. Akin soon confessed, he had merely "misspoken". So what remains to us is simply to work out what he meant to say.

My guess is that he was using the word "legitimate" in an idiosyncratic way, to describe acts that it is legitimate to refer to as rape (in his opinion); because Akin and his like don't think statutory rape is bad enough to call rape, or raping a person who was just "asking for it", or somebody who is known not to be a virgin. What he was actually trying to talk about was the bad ones in this view, which it might be better to call illegitimate rapes, that is, what he and his colleague Paul Ryan were referring to not long ago as "forcible" rapes, a concept for which he was criticized a good deal last year.

As every Republican knows, women desire above all things to be whacked on the head, dragged into the bedroom, have their bodices ripped from their bodies, and so on, unless it is by the wrong man (a liberal, perhaps), or unless  they are nuns, under 16, or your sister. 

A "legitimate rape" would be what Republicans normally refer to as "good sex" or, more colloquially, "having a Dagny". The fundamental criterion for this is that when the woman involved says "no" she means "yes", as signalled, perhaps, by her being dressed provocatively, or seen drinking an alcoholic beverage, or otherwise tempting the caveman she wishes to attract to her cave.  An "illegitimate" or "forcible" rape is when these criteria are not met, when "no" actually does mean "no", for whatever reason.

Now, it is widely believed that a legitimate rape in this sense often leads to pregnancy. For example, I think it happened to Anna Magnani in the The Rose Tattoo. It's kind of the way God planned it, if you're a person of faith:

for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. So the Church, which is "on the side of life," teaches that "it is necessary that each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life." (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2366)

Whereas in the case of an illegitimate rape, obviously, such a blessing is not to be expected. So that's all poor Representative Akin meant to say--is that so terrible?

Anna Magnani. From Art Carousel by Pasolininuc.

Update:
Hahahahaha! While I was futilely trying to make so-called "satire" out of this occasion, Akin clarified: he did mean to say "forcible rape", expecting that would just calm everybody down. You can't keep up with these guys.

Wanker of many generations!

Bill Johnson, ex-politician (R-Alabama, sometime gubernatorial candidate) and current international humanitarian, discussed in a post here last December, resurfaced recently (via General Stuck in comments at Balloon Juice).

Possible recipients in the Rotorua mud baths. Picture from Fodors.

Johnson was the strange soul who went off to New Zealand to help with earthquake relief and while living in Christchurch took to the unusual hobby of sperm donation, [jump]