Author: Matthew Sitman

by Matt Sitman

Ted Olson surveys the fraught history of beards in the Christian church:

You’re more likely to see a beard in the pulpit today than at any time since the 1800s. But beards—especially among clergy—were once serious, symbolic matters. They separated East from West during the Great Schism, priests from laity during the Middle Ages, and Protestants from Catholics during the Reformation. Some church leaders required them; others banned them. To medieval theologians, they represented both holiness and sin. But historian Giles Constable says that rules on beards sound more forceful than they really were. Clergy (especially powerful ones) were likely to follow fashion in their day, too.

One episode from the many he highlights, from the early 1000s:

Full beards come briefly back into style, but fall out of style by mid-century. This leads some older mid-century church leaders, nostalgic for beards, to associate shaving with immodesty. As one abbot wrote in 1043, the empire in Germany was besieged by “the shameful custom of the vulgar French … in the cutting of beards, in the shortening and deforming of clothing, execrable to modest eyes, and many other novelties.” Half a century later, writers associated immodesty with beards, not shaving. One English Benedictine monk wrote, “Now almost all our fellow countrymen are crazy and wear little beards, openly proclaiming by such a token that they revel in filthy lusts like stinking goats.”

(Portrait of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a key figure in the Protestant Reformation whose beard symbolized his break with the clean-shaven Roman Catholic clergy, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Matt Sitman

Responding to the popularity of the bestselling book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife, Amit Majmudar grapples the question, “Why do ‘spiritual’ people like it so much when the man of science testifies?”:

[T]he natural conclusion we might draw from this—and I myself jumped to it—is that the sciences, enjoying the highest prestige in their long history, have become the true authority. Religions are desperate to corroborate their findings with the true Authority. The man in the saffron shawl, the man in the black cassock all look to the man in the white coat. This is why they appropriate the jargon and discoveries of science, drawing analogies whenever they can: As they once cited scripture, now they cite scientific studies.

He goes on to note the seemingly endless capacity of religions to repurpose powerful symbols and disciplines:

[R]eligions have always been syncretic, incorporating whatever they find authoritative and attractive; this is why Krishna dies of an arrow to the heel, like Achilles, and slays snakes in his cradle, like Hercules; why the story of Christ mirrored that of several killed-and-resurrected fertility gods both in the Near East and Europe, and why “Christmas” falls on the birthday of Mithras; why Mohammed, the Arab, inserted himself into a line of Jewish prophets as (note this well) the last and most authoritative one.

by Matt Sitman

William Deresiewicz laments that we can’t seem to leave behind our “messianic impulse”:

There is always some one, or some thing, that is just about to save us from ourselves. Of late the leading candidate has been the Web. It’s going to unleash a flood of innovation. It’s going to usher in a golden age of creativity. It’s going to transform our politics. WikiLeaks; the cult of Aaron Swartz; the collected works of Thomas Friedman; the belief that a legion of Joyces and Dylans, freed from the shackles of the culture industry, is about to spring forth—all these are signs of technological messianism in its latest form.

Blaming this tendency on “the little child in each of us” who still expects our parents to “swoop down and lift us up from our troubles and fears,” he connects it to our inaction in the face of climate change:

It isn’t God who’s going to end the world; it’s us. And we’re not going to end the world; we’re ending it. I grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. Then, at least, we were properly panicked. We had seen what the warheads could do, and a sudden stroke of annihilation was all too easy to conceive. But this—a slow extinction that’s already underway—we don’t seem psychologically equipped to come to terms with. The feeling has to linger, even among the most rational, that somehow, something is going to rescue us. That’s the only explanation I can think of for the lethargy, the apathy, the stunned catatonia of our response, the fact that we aren’t all running shrieking, every hour, in the streets.

Related Dish coverage of religion and climate change here and here.

by Matt Sitman

William Giraldi hails Herman Melville as “one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books”:

In the general rare books collection at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville’s tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville’s marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and Xs reveal the passages in Paradise Lost and other poems that would have such a determining effect on Melville’s own work.

His broader argument about the connection between deep reading and great writing:

Would Cervantes and Shakespeare have made their masterworks if they hadn’t been devoted readers? Perhaps. But I hope it goes without saying that the rest of us aren’t Cervantes and Shakespeare. Try to imagine a teenager who never read an important book and yet produced a novel as permanent as Middlemarch. It cannot be done. Literature isn’t music or painting; there are no idiot savants in literature. Of course quality reading never assures success on your own pages. Judging from his latest insult to trees, Dan Brown has apparently tried to read Dante, and yet his sentences are still stacked like so many corpses. Still, quality reading is the only chance born writers have of succeeding in the creation of art.

by Matt Sitman

After his coming out in favor of same-sex marriage drew the theocons’ scorn, Joseph Bottum clarifies his position, arguing that he was “not dissenting from Church doctrine…in any way”:

While wanting to make clear that “there’s no doubt” he accepts that marriage as being between two persons of the opposite sex, Bottum said merely wanted to write the piece about his thinking having come to the position that, in the U.S., “the Church just needs to get out of the civil marriage business, because the culture is just too bizarre to hear” her teaching about marriage.

“In the short-run anyway,” Bottom said, Catholics should tolerate the civil recognition of same-sex unions. “I also think we need to re-evangelize the culture, but, in the short run … I think we have to accept that the facts on the ground is, it’s here, and it’s going to be here for some time.”

“I was always very careful to, any time I said something affirming of same-sex marriage, I was very careful to put in the word ‘civil’, ‘state recognition of’, some kind of qualifying phrase like that.”

Bottum blames Mark Oppenheimer’s NYT piece for the way the essay’s been interpreted:

“Much as I was grateful for the publicity” of the Times article, he said, “I think one of the problems with that was our conservative Catholic friends read the New York Times essay first, and then read the Commonweal piece, and it’s effect was, ‘Catholic deserter comes to our side.’”

“They look at it through the lens of ‘Catholic deserter’, and the first blog posts about it really blocked me into a position.”

Similarly, he said, that the left’s first reaction, “based on the New York Times profile” was “’hooray, hooray, we’ve got a defector’; and then they actually read the essay, and now they’re all out after me.”

I certainly understand Bottum’s frustrations over how conservatives greeted his essay. His basic point, which barely seems to have been grappled with at all, was this: why, in a culture and political order as secularized as ours, should Roman Catholics (and religious conservatives more broadly) insist that our laws correspond with the way churches conceive of the sacrament of marriage? Why should one religion’s particular understanding of marriage dictate our civil laws?

I’m not sure it was taken seriously enough that Bottum wrote his essay primarily as a Christian, as a religious person considering his faith’s waning power over our culture and imaginations. Bottum is asking what kind of culture we’d have to have, what the preconditions must be, for the Christian understanding of marriage to have broad purchase in our society – and therefore be able to garner the kind of consensus necessary to be a part of our legal order. Here’s a key passage from his essay:

The campaign for traditional marriage really isn’t a defense of natural law. It revealed itself, in the end, as a defense of one of the last little remaining bits of Christendom—an entanglement or, at least, an accommodation of church and state. The logic of the Enlightenment took a couple of hundred years to get around to eliminating that particular portion of Christendom, but the deed is done now.

For the traditional, sacramental meaning of marriage to make sense, it must be embedded in a decisively Christian culture – this is what Bottum means by Christendom, or, as he says repeatedly in his essay, an “enchanted” world, a world in which earthly acts are assumed to reflect a deeper spiritual reality.  The Church only looks like a moralizing bully when it insists on having its way legally and politically apart from such a context. Never once does Bottum suggest the Church should change its own definition of marriage; he merely says that in our current context, it makes no sense for the Church to fight this battle by means of the coercive power of the state. It’s like shouting at someone in a language they don’t understand – you gain nothing by growing louder and more exasperated. Instead of pouring money and energy into fighting rear-guard actions on behalf of traditional marriage, he tells Catholics to do the harder, perhaps Quixotic, work of evangelizing and rebuilding a Christian culture that would allow their arguments about marriage actually to be heard and understood. To borrow a phrase, to focus on first things. To do otherwise only distracts an already skeptical age from the core message of Jesus.

I’m an Episcopalian, not a Roman Catholic, and don’t agree with Bottum on the substance of the Church’s teachings on homosexuality and same-sex marriage – I hope, and actually believe, these teachings eventually will change. But at least he’s bringing a message of political sanity to this debate, and trying to create a space, apart from the heat of the culture wars, for considering the deeper theological and spiritual issues raised by gay people, so that, in a pregnant phrase, the Church can “decide where same-sex marriage belongs in a metaphysically rich, spiritually alive moral order.”

Ross Douthat’s response (NYT) to Bottum’s essay adds some important context to all this. It seems to me right on the mark as to why the essay’s been misunderstood, reading it as the product of a “literary Catholic, a poet and critic and essayist with a sideline in history and philosophy,” rather than a culture warrior:

[T]he more aesthetically and culturally-minded that Catholic, the more ridiculously frustrating it seems that their faith of all faiths (the faith of Italy! of France!) should be cast as the enemy of bodily pleasure — that their church, with its wild diversity of weirdo, “dappled” saints, should be seen as a purely conformist and repressive enterprise — and that the religion of Wilde and Waugh and Manley Hopkins and so many others would be dismissed as simply and straightforwardly homophobic.

That’s how I read Bottum’s essay, at least in part: As a literary Catholic’s attempt to wrench the true complexity of his faith back out of the complexity-destroying context of contemporary political debates. He’s writing as someone who loves his church, and wants everyone else to love it as he does — and I don’t blame him for imagining that perhaps, just perhaps, ceasing to offer public resistance on the specific question of gay marriage would liberate the Church from some the caricatures that the culture war has imposed upon it, and enable the world to see its richness with fresh eyes.

The entire post is worth reading in-full, and I think Douthat goes a long way toward explaining why Bottum approaches this issue the way he does and why he’s faced such difficulties in finding sympathetic readers.

by Matt Sitman

That’s the catchphrase Judith Shulevitz nominates as the most pernicious cliché of our time, tracing it back to Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. She argues that its constant invocation reveals what “George Orwell pointed out, which is that stale phrases mechanically repeated have dangerous political effects”:

You can’t blame Christensen and his co-writers for all the dumb things said and done in the name of disruption. But you can spot some unsavory habits of mind in their prescriptions. For one thing, they possess an almost utopian faith in technology: online or “blended” learning; massive open online courses, or MOOCs; cool health apps; and so on. Their convictions seem sincere, but they also coincide nicely with the interests of the Silicon Valley venture-capital crowd. If you use technology to disrupt the delivery of public services, you open up new markets; you also replace human labor with the virtual kind, a happy thought for an investor, since labor is the most expensive line item in all service-industry budgets.

Second, Christensen and his acolytes make the free-market-fundamentalist assumption that all public or nonprofit institutions are sclerotic and unable to cope with change. This leads to an urge to disrupt, preemptively, from above, rather than deal with disruption when it starts bubbling up below. Third, they don’t like participatory democracy much. “The sobering conclusion,” write Christensen and co-authors in their book about K–12 education, “is that democracy … is an effective tool of government only in” less contentious communities than those that surround schools. “Political and school leaders who seek fundamental school reform need to become much more comfortable amassing and wielding power because other tools of governance will yield begrudging cooperation at best.”