Month: January 2006

"It was a mistake to torture people [in the Inquisition]. However, torture was regarded as a perfectly justified, legitimate way of producing evidence and it was therefore legally justified," – the Rev Joseph Di Noia, the Under-secretary of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. I think a vacancy might be available for the good prelate at the CIA.

The story that president Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam depends on … president Bush and one of his friends. Here’s the relevant part of a 2000 piece that deals with the issue:

"’Had my unit been called up, I’d have gone … to Vietnam,’ Bush said. ‘I was prepared to go.’ But there was no chance Bush’s unit would be ordered overseas. Bush says that toward the end of his training in 1970, he tried to volunteer for overseas duty, asking a commander to put his name on the list for a ‘Palace Alert’ program, which dispatched qualified F-102 pilots in the Guard to the Europe and the Far East, occasionally to Vietnam, on three- to six-month assignments.
He was turned down on the spot. ‘I did [ask] ‚Äì and I was told, ‘You’re not going,” Bush said.
Only pilots with extensive flying time – at the outset, 1,000 hours were required – were sent overseas under the voluntary program. The Air Force, moreover, was retiring the aging F-102s and had ordered all overseas F-102 units closed down as of June 30, 1970."

There’s no paper record. But Fred wasn’t hallucinating. He’d just absorbed what the president had said and repeated it, with a benign spin. That’s a pretty good description of his book, actually.

It’s the fastest growing global version of fundamentalist Christianity. And it will be a mere 100 years’ old this year. One of the most successful American exports ever, one of its theological innovations is the "prosperity gospel" where personal wealth is actually a sign of God’s blessing rather than, as Jesus taught, an obstacle to holiness. These movements are increasingly the political ideologies of our time. We need to understand them much better than we do.

Some on the hard right would have you believe that checking the executive’s power is somehow a left-liberal project. It may be; but it’s also a project that many conservatives, worried about an unnecessarily intrusive government, should be deeply involved in. I favor aggressive attempts to hunt down our enemy; I’d be fine with NSA wiretapping with warrants; I’d be in favor of re-vamping FISA to make it compatible with modern technology. The choice is not, in other words, between doctrinaire civil libertarians and hard-ass terrorist-hunters. It’s between providing a sliver of accountability and providing none. Mercifully, plenty in the administration recognized this. Predictably, they’ve all been purged.

I have read the first encyclical closely now; and it’s clearly some of Benedict’s finest work. I’ve posted a few of extracts – his critique of Christianity’s tendency to abhor the body, his understanding of the limits of politics, his connection between eros and agape – that strike me as particularly eloquent. I’m still saddened by the absence of philia in the document, although one reader suggests that that’s a function of Benedict’s belief that true philia is impossible for Christians among non-Christians. Here’s my correspondent’s elaboration of Ratzinger’s earlier work, "The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood," in this regard:

"Now, this does not mean that one should be cruel toward non-Christians. On the contrary, Christians are obligated toward their non-Christian fellows in a three-fold manner. First, there’s ‘missionary activity.’ Second, there is agape, which has two forms: a) ‘the relations of Christians among one another should have an attractive and exemplary force,’ and b) to ‘follow the work of the Lord who performed his work of love for those who neither knew nor loved him (see Rom 5:6), directing their love to all those who need them, without asking for thanks or a response.’ And finally, the "last and highest mission of the Christian in relation to non-believers is to suffer for them and in their place as the Master did.’ (pp. 81-83)

At any rate, I suspect that Benedict’s decision not to speak of philia has to do with the fact understanding it contains a harsh truth: that there are insurmountable difference between Christians and non-Christians (and even Catholics and non-Catholics). For what seem to me altogether sensible political reasons, I think Benedict chose not to emphasize the somewhat exclusive quality of the Church."

That helps. Benedict’s aversion to Aquinas also helps explain the absence of philia from the encyclical.

At the same time, I have to say I’m struck by the references in the document. It’s pretty stunning to me that Benedict should cite Plato’s Symposium for his definition of eros. This sentence is mind-blowing:

"That love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, was called eros by the ancient Greeks."

Er, not exactly. For the Greeks, eros meant a kind of longing. Plato saw it as bound up in the search for truth, as well as for beauty. But also – critically – it describes same-sex love as well as opposite-sex love. The Symposium, the source of Benedict’s description of eros, treats same-sex love interchangeably with opposite-sex love, and the myth cited by Aristophanes even places same-sex erotic love on a higher plane than mere heterosexuality. (I’m even hoping to use the passage in my own marriage service, and began my anthology on gay marriage by citing it.) Benedict must know this. He’s a deeply learned man. Why rest his own treatment on sources that clearly embrace gay love? Beats me. He even cites Virgil’s Eclogues, a deeply homoerotic work. Part of me thinks that Benedict’s anti-gay posture is just orthodoxy, made more reactionary by the social revolution of our time. And then I wonder if he doesn’t have an esoteric meaning as well. Nothing in this encyclical couldn’t apply to same-sex eros; his bigoted Instruction has helped expose the fact that the Church is a deeply homosexual institution, and in the West, at least, there’s no real attempt (so far) to purge gay seminarians and priests. Maybe the Instruction’s unpersuasive and naked bigotry is esoterically designed to advance the argument that gay people are obviously not "objectively disordered" in such a way to render them unfit for the priesthood. Is Benedict quietly showing the validity of same-sex eros and equal dignity of same-sex eros, even while publicly denouncing it? Or have I read too much Leo Strauss? Probably the latter.

Children, chains, blood, and mullahs. Another day of Jihad.

Remember that instantly iconic photograph of the American soldier in Iraq, covered in mud and sweat, smoking a newly-lit cigarette? He’s back home now.

"In this world full of culturally charged issues I think we should make it clear that Senator McCain and I are not married," – president Bill Clinton, at Davos.