Matthew Sitman

A Different Kind Of Halo

by Matt Sitman

Amit Majmudar doubts people’s desire for a typical religious afterlife, citing video games in defense of his thesis:

[H]eaven must get pretty boring. This has to do with its stasis; its unvarying bliss, devoid of any contrasting emotions by whose paradoxical grace we might treasure or even perceive bliss; its perfectly certain future, which is eternal continuance; and above all its absence of conflict. Still worse, you are denied the company of flawed people, who are, let’s face it, a vast and interesting tribe.

This is why the human race, over the past 30 years—roughly my life span—has aggressively developed simulated realities that have very little in common with the concept of heaven as described in traditional religion. The place to look for the truest, deepest human fantasies about the afterlife is gaming. There’s no spiritually correct nonsense there, just pure choice. Game designers are free to design an environment; game players are free to elect or not to elect to enter it. Inevitably, when analyzing video games, your conclusions will be skewed toward young males, but it’s still worth studying the kinds of worlds in which gamers elect to spend their time.

The Danger Of Political Dogma

by Matt Sitman

The British philosopher Roger Scruton sees accepting the legitimacy of your opponents as necessary for politics – and always threatened by the intrusions of religion:

In our own system the opposition is a legitimate part of the legislative process. Laws are seldom steam-rollered through Parliament without regard for disagreement, and the general assumption is that the final result will be a compromise, an attempt to reconcile the many conflicting interests. This idea of legislation as a compromise is an unusual one. The natural order is that described in the Old Testament, in which kings rule by decree, taking advice perhaps, but not allowing a voice to interests other than their own.

There are aspects of human life in which compromise is either suspect or forbidden. In battle you don’t compromise with the enemy. In religion you don’t compromise with the devil. And it is when religion intrudes into politics that the political process is most at risk. This is the reason why, in the history of modern Egypt, successive presidents have tried to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. The Brotherhood believes that law and politics are not about compromise but about obedience to the will of God.

He looks to the teachings of Jesus for one way of handling these tensions, seeing in his teachings the sources of the West’s distinctive approach to the matter – “religion, in our society, has become a private affair, which makes no demands of the public as a whole.”

The Indispensable Saint

by Matt Sitman

In a review of Miles Hollingworth’s recent book, Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, Joseph Bottum sizes up the Christian thinker’s place in the history of the West:

To read The City of God is to realize Augustine was a great philosopher, of course. Maybe not quite in the absolute “A” class of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, or Hegel, but not down at the next level, either—with the “B” class (but still great) likes of Marcus Aurelius, Francisco Suárez, and Friedrich Schiller. Call it the “A-minus” set of world-historical thinkers: Plotinus, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Hume, Wittgenstein, Augustine. But to read De Doctrina Christiana would convince anyone that Augustine belongs in the first gathering of theologians, the greatest of the many fine theological minds among the church fathers in Latin Christendom. There’s a reason, after all, that Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther alike engage Augustine in a way they do no other theological thinker. Then, too, as the Confessions show, Augustine was among the last great classical stylists, trained in a rhetorical tradition that would cease to exist all too soon.

What’s more, he stood at the moment of the failure of Rome—dying as the Vandals besieged Hippo, his Roman city in North Africa—and he had the most significant historical event of 1,000 years to explain and translate into a lasting understanding of the human condition. But it’s somehow the combination of all this that makes Saint Augustine so central: What he wrote, joined with how he wrote, joined with when he wrote.

There is no Western civilization without him. He shapes our intellectual tradition in the way others who are so good they force themselves into our minds do.

(“The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico, via Wikimedia Commons)

“Think What We Might Do”

by Matt Sitman

Brian Doyle, a Catholic writer, charmingly describes when, as a child, he first encountered a Protestant – at his uncle’s wedding reception, of all places. This exchange between Doyle’s father and the man he simply calls “the Protestant” stands out:

[M]y dad strode back into view and claimed me for family photographs, but before we left he put both hands on the Protestant’s shoulders and said, “I am deeply touched that you are here, that you made the effort and came all this way. It means a great deal to me. It’s the human moments like this that will bring us all back together as a common force for witness and justice, perhaps. It is only history that divides us, and that’s all in the past. Think what we might do if we all walk together again.”

The Protestant said he too was touched to be invited, and honored, and added, “You can count on me as a partner in the long work, Jim, and maybe the time will come, when Brian is our age, that the walls have crumbled among the Christian traditions, and we are joined in the work we were asked to do by the Founder—and him a Jewish man at that.”

My dad laughed and the Protestant laughed and we parted, but all these years later I remember the way my dad put his hands on that man’s shoulders, and the way they spoke to each other with real affection and respect and camaraderie.

I am older now than they were then and the walls among the Christian traditions have still not crumbled, for any number of silly reasons—mostly having to do with lethargy and money and paranoia—and no sensible man would have the slightest expectation that they will in my lifetime. But sometimes I still wonder what it would be like if they did crumble suddenly somehow, and the two billion Christians on earth stood hand in hand, for the first time ever, insisting on mercy and justice and humility and generosity as the real way of the world. You would think that two billion people insisting on something might actually make that thing happen, wouldn’t you?

A Well-Aged Voice

by Matt Sitman

Stephen H. Webb takes on Bob Dylan’s detractors – and finds a broader lesson about beauty in the aging rock star’s singing:

Complaining about Dylan’s voice is like complaining that your scotch tastes too peaty. If you want something sweet, get a colorless spirit that easily surrenders to the overwhelming invasion of fruit juice. Otherwise, let his voice burn your ears just as it sounds like it is blistering his throat when he sings.

Since it is little more than decayed vegetation, peat is actually not a bad metaphor for Dylan’s voice, which has never sounded fresh and youthful. It was old when he was young, and now that he is old, it sounds ancient. Just as barley dried on a mossy fire adds flavor to whisky, creaky and rusty vocal folds (or so I imagine what a laryngoscopy would find) add timbre to Dylan’s singing. Would anyone really want a doctor to smooth the fibrous tissue or remove the bumpy nodules on his vocal cords in order to make his voice sound “better”?

What I have said about Dylan can be said about beauty generally, but that does not make it less true. Both scotch and Dylan are reminders that beauty emerges out of and redeems, rather than opposes and destroys, the ugly. A little bitterness makes the scotch taste sweeter, and wavering off key makes the difference between a good singer and a great performer.

Recent Dish on Dylan here.

The Latest Conservative Defector On Same-Sex Marriage

by Matt Sitman

In a moving, personal essay, Joseph Bottum, the conservative Catholic and former editor of First Things, comes out in favor of same-sex marriage – only five years after declaring its proponents were attacking “biblical ethics.” Part of his argument? Its the wrong battle at the wrong time:

[T]here are much better ways than opposing same-sex marriage for teaching the essential God-hauntedness, the enchantment, of the world—including massive investments in charity, the further evangelizing of Asia, a willingness to face martyrdom by preaching in countries where Christians are killed simply because they are Christians, and a church-wide effort to reinvigorate the beauty and the solemnity of the liturgy. Some Catholic intellectual figures will continue to explore the deep political-theory meanings manifest in the old forms of Christendom, and more power to them, but the rest of us should turn instead to more effective witness in the culture as it actually exists.

How he connects same-sex marriage to his own conservative instincts:

[S]ame-sex marriage might prove a small advance in chastity in a culture that has lost much sense of chastity. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in love in a civilization that no longer seems to know what love is for. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in the coherence of family life in a society in which the family is dissolving.

I don’t know that it will, of course, and some of the most persuasive statements of conservatism insist that we should not undertake projects the consequences of which we cannot foresee. But same-sex marriage is already here; it’s not as though we can halt it. And other profound statements of conservatism remind us that we must take people as we find them—must instruct the nation where the nation is.

Mark Oppenheimer, interviewing Bottum, unpacks (NYT) the theological assumptions behind his change of heart:

Natural law, Mr. Bottum writes, depends for its force on a sense of the mystery of creation, the enchantment of everyday objects, the sacredness of sex. In the West, that climate of belief has been upended: by science, modernism, a Protestant turn away from mysticism, and, most recently, the sexual revolution. The strictures of natural law were meant to structure an enchanted world — but if the enchantment is gone, the law becomes a pointless artifact of a defunct Christian culture.

“And if,” Mr. Bottum writes, “heterosexual monogamy so lacks the old, enchanted metaphysical foundation that it can end in quick and painless divorce, then what principle allows a refusal of marriage to gays on the grounds of a metaphysical notion like the difference between men and women?”

Traditional-marriage activists would counter that we can at least begin a Christian renaissance by upholding marriage’s last connections to its Christian past. But Mr. Bottum says that’s the wrong starting point.

Autism As Artistic Device

by Matt Sitman

Tom Cutterham asks what Christopher and Oskar, the autistic narrators of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, respectively, can teach us about contemporary subjectivity:

The kind of knowledge Christopher and Oskar lack isn’t information — they both have plenty of that. It’s technique. And imagining that lack means we imagine its negative image as well: the subject-supposed-to-know, the person without autism, who can read minds through his or her far more complete grasp of the social world. In other words, we readers see things the narrator can’t, even though he is the one doing the description. It’s precisely this dramatic irony that drives the affect of the novels. The disparity in knowledge doesn’t just create distance between reader and narrator, it creates a kind of closeness, too.

Such relationships with characters makes us feel a little bit like parents. That is, they makes us feel the kind of care that comes with knowledge and power. We know what kind of chaos and hurt will ensue when Christopher turns up unexpectedly to live with his estranged mother and her lover, and just because he doesn’t, we hope it’ll turn out all right anyway. And at the same time that we root for Christopher and Oskar not to get hurt, we excuse the pain they cause to other people. They don’t know what they’re doing, so it’s not their fault.

Recent Dish on autism here and here.

“Ye Are All One In Christ Jesus”

by Matt Sitman

Recently Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, offered these thoughts on how conservative Christians should respond to the “transgender question”:

As conservative Christians, we do not see transgendered persons as “freaks” to be despised or ridiculed. We acknowledge that there are some persons who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women. Of course that would be the case in a fallen universe in which all of us are alienated, in some way, from how God created us to be.

But we don’t believe this alienation can be solved by pretending as though we have Pharaoh-like dominion over our maleness or femaleness. These categories we believe (along with every civilization before us) are about more than just self-construction, and they can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife, much less by an arbitrary announcement in the high school gym.

The transgender question means that conservative Christian congregations such as mine must teach what’s been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation.

I suppose the caveat Moore includes about transgender people not being freaks is welcome, but what he gives with one hand he immediately takes away with the other, rigidly adhering to the binary categories he supposedly finds in “creation.” So, transgender people aren’t “freaks,” just particularly stubborn examples of the sinfulness of this fallen world. Its truly bizarre to characterize the struggles and, often, suffering of the transgendered as a “revolt” against God, as if their experiences merely were a form of arrogant defiance, something chosen and pursued out of a prideful rejection of God’s plan. Even more importantly, its far from clear to me that “creation” is so simple. Jonathan Merritt, responding to Moore, points out the complexity of the matter:

According to research conducted by Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, one in 100 children are born with “bodies that differ from standard male or female” biology. This includes those children born with both a penis and a vagina, as well as those with vaginal agenesis, ovatestes, or genetic disorders such as Klinefelter syndrome. Apparently, God sometimes creates humans both male and female or neither fully male nor fully female.

Intersex persons offer a critique of those who believe that gender is a static binary assigned from birth and divinely ordained. For example, what about a person who is a sexually “mosaic,” which means they have mixed gonadal dysgenesis such as the development of both ovaries and testes? It’s hard to say because Christian commentators almost never acknowledge the existence of these individuals…

[T]he situation seems to grow even more complex when one considers the internal workings of transgender people. According to research conducted by the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain, transgendered people show significant differences in brain patterns. MRI scans of female-to-male transgender people, for example, resembled male brain function even though they were born biologically female.

Christians believe that God not only creates our bodies, but also our minds. Are one’s external created realities more revealing about God’s intentions than one’s internal created realities?

Merritt asked Moore about these matters, which he waved away by replying that these facts are “a question of epistemology, not of ontology,” meaning they merely obscure what sex a person “really” is. Which is another way of saying: everyone is either male or female, they just don’t know it yet. Sound familiar? Its similar to many right-wing Christians’ rhetoric about homosexuality – everyone really is straight, they just haven’t realized it, or refuse to act in accordance with that “deeper” reality.

What I find so disturbing about Moore’s approach is both its evasion of the actual, documented facts noted above and its a priori imposition of easy answers, gleaned from one rather narrow reading of Scripture, on this sensitive question. I haven’t considered all the theological implications of transgender people – its an issue, I suspect, many Christians haven’t fully considered – but I do know thinking through the question should begin with profound empathy, and a willingness not to presume to have the “right” answer from the start. Moore’s position bothers me, then, not just because of its substance, but because of the posture it exemplifies: there’s not a trace of doubt in his essay about the righteousness of his own approach. Sharon Groves wrote a follow-up article that captures this almost perfectly. She argues that Moore’s handling of the matter “is dangerous because it discourages a curiosity about the actual lived experiences of trans people” and that he’s “shutting down any deeper conversation and, in the process, dampening our understanding of how the spark of the divine exists in all of us.” She continues:

The core teachings of Christianity are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. We cannot love God fully if we don’t do the work of trying to understand who God is for each of us. When we look at the most moving and transformative religious writing – from Augustine to Thomas Merton – there is a sense of openness and curiosity to the experience of God. We can’t love God if we don’t try to glean how God works in our lives.

Similarly, we can’t really love our neighbors if we cast off all curiosity about who they are and their experience of life in the world. And finally, if we remain uninterested in ourselves – about how we come to know our gender–then we can’t really love the difference that shows up in our neighbors.

The heart of Christianity is grace, or God’s one-way love for each of us, wherever we are in our lives. Its a message of radical acceptance and affirmation, without conditions. It does not depend on our having figured everything out, or having gotten our lives together, or having settled questions about our gender or sexuality. Similarly to the way the Bible does not address the matter of homosexuality as we have come to understand it, there is no “biblical” position on the issue of transgender people – except to love them exactly as they are. Transgender people need to be shown this love, not have their own experiences dismissed as a form of alienation from God’s intentions for them. Showing them this love, if it is real and not a mere pose, necessarily includes walking along side them on their journey, not pointing them to a one-size-fits-all destination. A love that seeks to change or cure is not love at all, but only a more subtle form of power and control, the very means of relating to others Jesus consistently rejected. Like all of us, transgender people need mercy, not easy answers. Like all of us, they need to experience the church as a welcoming refuge – a place of genuine affirmation. Like all of us, they need to be reminded, not of those verses Moore rips from the book of Genesis, but of St Paul’s words from his letter to the Galatians that, in the Kingdom of God,

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

(Photo: Five-year-old Tyler, known until last fall as Kathryn, gets a haircut from his dad Stephen at their suburban Washington, D.C., home, on Monday, March 12, 2012. Tyler’s insistence on being a boy started at the early age of 2. By Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

The Past Is A Different Palate

by Matt Sitman

Librarian Judith Finnamore of London’s Westminster Archive Centre has been cooking her way through The Unknown Ladies Cookbook, “a 300-year-old British compendium of family recipes” she rediscovered. You can follow her culinary exploits via her blog, which offers detailed recipes and historical snippets from the manuscript. Handwritten by several different women between 1690 and 1830, the recipes show just how much the way we prepare our food has changed. In a profile of Finnamore’s work, Amy Guttman highlights a few of these shifts. One of them? Brits used to use a lot of eggs:

Some recipes call for as many as 30 eggs to bake a cake; others suggest whisking for an hour. But if you were to try out these recipes today, you’d need to use just two-thirds or even one-half of the eggs indicated, Gray says, because eggs have grown larger over the last century. As eggs began to be classed by quality and weight, farmers culled smaller chickens in favor of larger ones that produced bigger eggs.

Even in 1940, Gray says, egg cups were much smaller than they are today, indicating a gradual change. While whisking for an hour sounds like a workout, with servants to do the actual work, the women running a household wouldn’t have minded. Gray says she has actually whisked eggs for a full hour, and it does make a difference in texture. So if you have servants to do it, why not?

Samuel Muston notices some of the more interesting recipes Finnamore uncovered:

“Some of the recipes are ‘challenging’ for our palates – I mean the sheep’s head dish won’t be for everyone.” Other surprises include “mince pies” with calves tongue in them. There is also a vast 3lb cake, whose inclusion is puzzling given Finnamore doesn’t think this was used by a cook at some great country pile, but rather that it came from a “place like the Bennett house in Pride and Prejudice”.

Put Off By Punctuation

by Matt Sitman

Josh Jones highlights novelist Cormac McCarthy’s unusual punctuation style which, as he confirmed in an interview with Oprah, entails never using quotation marks or semi-colons:

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.