Your first take on my take on Frank Bruni. For some strange reason, you’re all pro-Bush so far. Bush critics and skeptics, time to weigh in.
PLAY: I hope some of you read Gerry Marzorati’s marvelous profile in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine of the pop musician Moby. It’s a very deft and evocative piece and reminds me why Moby is one of my favorite current musical artists. The beauty and energy of his sound, the way in which he has mastered technology to create an entirely derivative and yet entirely new music keeps me listening to him again and again. This afternoon, I plugged my iPod in and played my favorite collection of Moby songs, while I grabbed a beach bike-cruiser and coasted around the contours of Miami’s South Beach, where I’m staying for a few days with the boyfriend. Bliss. I’m not surprised Moby has a blog. In some ways, blogging – with its referential riffs, innovative forms, mix of genres, technological edge – is the journalistic equivalent of Moby’s music. Except, of course, not as beautiful.
LETTERS: “You are absolutely correct in your assertion that the Church’s “basic institutional integrity has vanished”. But there can be no doubt this disintegration is a direct result of the Second Vatican Council. This is painful for me to admit as I still believe most of the reforms are worthy, but the fact remains the Church was growing and vibrant before Vatican II and began this downward spiral immediately afterward. This and many other contributions to the debate on the Catholic crisis on the Letters Page.
MATT ON THE BEACH: Dinner with Drudge last night. He drew up in his gleaming white corvette, paid for, as he boasts, by the Internet. Huge fun at Pacific Time on Lincoln Road. I hope he survives the Oscars. If ‘A Beautiful Mind’ loses, all hell could break loose. As usual, Matt seems both awed and exhilarated by the prospect of being blamed. And, of course, he’s going. I wonder if, without his fedora, anyone will recognize him.
FAITH AGAIN: Rod Dreher seems to think my reflections yesterday were emanations from the ‘incoherent Catholic left’. You know something? Human beings and their faith lives are never as tidy as some clerics and theologians would like them to be. If Rod wants to call being human incoherent, then I think God may be more forgiving of incoherence than some members of his church. Thinking about this again today, and reading many of your perceptive emails, it became even clearer to me that sex is the problem – sex with minors, sex with members of the same gender, sex with members of the opposite gender, relations with the opposite gender. And the striking thing is how, when you read the Gospels, you hear so little about this subject. Jesus seems utterly uninterested in it. So why is the Church so obsessed with it? You could infer, I suppose, two things. You could infer that those of us who object to the Church’s attitudes to women, treatment of gays, extra-marital sex, and so on are overly preoccupied with the matter and should simply get in line. But it seems to me that what the current crisis clearly shows is that the Church’s teachings on sex have contributed critically to its current crisis, and that our dissent would help the church rather than hurt it. The collapse of credibility after the ban on all contraception, the dwindling of the needlessly celibate priesthood to gays and the sexually conflicted, the alienation of women, the isolation of lay homosexuals – all these are problems caused by this agenda. Why cannot the Church be as neutral as Jesus was about this issue? Why can we not leave the dark and difficult realm of eros out of fundamental moral teaching?
PUTTING SEX IN ITS PLACE: More specifically: Why can we not hold up marriage and committed loving relationships as the goal but not punish and stigmatize the non-conformists or those whose erotic needs and desires are more complex than the crude opposition to all non-marital and non-procreative sex allows. My mother’s only instruction to her children about failing to adhere to the church’s sexual strictures was a good one, I think. She told us that non-marital non-procreative sex was a sin, but it was not the worst sin by any means. And it was only a sin because it distracted from God – not because it was somehow terribly evil in itself. No more sinful than wealth or pride or cruelty or insensitivity or dishonesty – and often much less so. She demystified it for me, robbed it of some of its obsessive power. And it’s the obsessive power of sexual repression that has so warped our current Church. Let it go. And let’s focus on what really matters: love of neighbor, prayer, compassion, service, honesty, justice.
The Dish 