Author: Andrew Sullivan

On a day that Americans typically celebrate with patriotism, Clarence Lusane calls attention to “a largely hidden and silenced black history of the U.S. presidency“:

George Washington’s stated antislavery convictions misaligned with his actual political behavior. While professing to abhor slavery and hope for its eventual demise, as president Washington took no real steps in that direction and in fact did everything he could to ensure that not one of the more than 300 people he owned could secure their freedom. During the 10 years of construction of the White House, George Washington spent time in Philadelphia where a law called the Gradual Abolition Act passed in 1780. It stated that any slaves brought into the state were eligible to apply for their freedom if they were there for longer than six months. To get around the law, Washington rotated the people working for him in bondage so that they were there for less than six months each. …

In textbooks and popular history, the White House is figuratively constructed as a repository of democratic aspirations, high principles, and ethical values. For many Americans, it is subversive to criticize the nation’s founders, the founding documents, the presidency, the president’s house, and other institutions that have come to symbolize the official story of the United States. It may be uncomfortable to give up long-held and even meaningful beliefs that in many ways build both collective and personal identities. However, erasing enslaved African Americans from the White House and the presidency presents a false portrait of our country’s history. If young people—and all the rest of us—are to understand a fuller, people’s history of the United States, they need to recognize that every aspect of early America was built on slavery.

Robert Crews surveys Russia’s policies toward its 20 million Muslim citizens:

Moscow deals with all religious groups in Russia … in a similar way: by attempting to co-opt them. It takes only one state-backed voice to make an alleged deviation from religious orthodoxy a crime, whether that authority is from the Orthodox priesthood or a Muslim cleric loyal to and cultivated by the Kremlin. The state’s support of one interpretation of a religion may prompt the persecution of those who adhere to another interpretation.

But the government’s selective promotion of Islam corresponds with Putin’s foreign policy goals. Putin’s affirmation of Islam’s historical ties to Russia, together with then President Dmitry Medvedev’s 2009 declaration in Cairo (which Putin repeated in Ufa) that Russia was an “organic part” of the Muslim world, has framed Moscow’s quest to restore its great-power status in Asia and the Middle East. Such pronouncements also represent an answer, however muted, to the growing domestic chorus of xenophobic and racist invective that populist politicians and right-wing organizations direct against Russia’s immigrants.

Timothy George argues that Lincoln was “the most spiritually minded president in American history”:

So why did he never join a church himself? Two reasons. First, he was offended by the religious rivalry and braggadocio of the frontier preachers of his day. None of them made a compelling case to his lawyerly mind that only one denomination was right and all the others wrong. Further, Lincoln was reticent, “the most shut-mouthed man I know,” as his law partner William Herndon said. He did not want to cross the thin line between sincerity and self-righteousness. There was nothing smug about Lincoln’s faith.

Lincoln’s great achievement was to see the terrible times through which he lived in the context of God’s providential purposes. He referred to America as the almost-chosen nation and came to see himself as a “chosen instrument in the hands of the Almighty.” His firm belief that God is concerned for history and reveals his will in it drew on the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets, the teachings of the New Testament refracted through the tradition of St. Augustine, and the Calvinistic Baptists among whom he grew up. Though he read Voltaire as a young man, he had no interest in a deist God who dumbly peers down on human struggles. The God of Lincoln meets us in judgment and mercy and in the crucible of suffering that shapes the destiny of us all.

[Re-posted from yesterday]

Here’s the latest data, as of this morning, for Dish revenue since our independence over a year ago:

You’ll remember that we managed to beat January 2013’s total last month. And we’re at the very brink of equaling all of February 2103’s by the end of today. The total last February was $105,500. As of this writing, we’re at $104,800 on February 15. Can we beat last February in almost half the time? Help us get there. Subscribe here.

By the way, the total number of auto-renewing subscribers is now 26,070. There’s no other online-only journalism site with that kind of subscriber base. We really are building the future of the web – without pageview whoring, sponsored content, auto-playing videos, pop-ups, slide-shows and corporate propaganda. If you value all that white space, and a time each weekend for less frenzied cultural and intellectual coverage each weekend, then help us make this model truly lead the way for others.

Subscribe here. Under $2 a month or more if you love us. Update from a new subscriber:

Sorry it took so long. I just checked my email archives and the first email I sent you was on 9/7/06 (to your AOL account?!). I’ve been reading steadily since then, so really I should have been one of the first people to sign up. Keep up all the great work. Your blog is the only site I read on a regular basis now.

Another subscriber:

I just got a friend a year of the Dish for her birthday tomorrow. I had to search the “gift the dish” page though. That shit should be a “keeper” on the right side of the page, no?

It’s actually right there in the sidebar, in cartoon form between our Keeper Archive and our Recent Threads (unless you aren’t signed in). The gifting link is here for quick access. One more update:

Sorry it took me so long to renew, but life has gotten in the way recently with a death in the family andit’s been hard to make time for the little things. I chipped in forty bucks this go ’round, an arbitrary number that I could probably explain by saying that I’ve paid that much before for dead-tree magazine subscriptions, ones that don’t give me a full magazine’s worth of reading EVERY GODDAMN DAY.

Regardless of what’s going on in life, and in fact often specifically because of what is going on in life, I always, always make time for The Dish. There are few things that I consistently derive as much pleasure and interest from as this blog. Y’all have a good thing going here and you managed to cycle through your first year as a free agent without screwing it up. If anything y’all keep getting better.

On Saturdays I eagerly await my Window View contest and on Tuesdays I look forward to the reveal. On any given day my wife and I cull a topic for discussion. The running threads are wonderful and well-curated. Through the years you’ve posted some of my emails (and thankfully ignored some of the shitty ones), and I feel this is a truly unique community with the best moderated dialogue on these here Internets. And there’s an ever-creeping dose of sports now! Last week you even posted my wife’s VFYW pic. In a word, neato.

Thanks again for all you and your team do. I’m happy to stay onboard and love knowing that on any given day I get to help steer this fucker.

Now do make some t-shirts.

Stay tuned.

Morgan Meis marvels at the ability of Johannes Vermeer to portray people in “various states of attention, of self-awareness and of the immediate moments just before or just after becoming self-aware,” instances he terms “threshold moments.” He goes on to explore the painter’s interest in the sacred:

Even in the Vermeer pictures that do not expressly take up religious themes or imagery, the quality of the sacramental is unmistakable once you know how to look for it. It is there in the gentle, attentive, worshipful manner in which the maid pours out the milk from the jug. It is there in the incredible presence of the woman who puts on a pearl necklace. As the writer Siri Hustvedt once noted of this painting, “Vermeer brought the miraculous into a room just like the rooms he knew, and he endowed the features of an ordinary woman with spiritual greatness. “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” is a painting that makes no distinction between the physical and the spiritual world.” It is that lack of distinction between the physical and spiritual world that creates the sense of mystery. You know you are looking at something more than what you seem to be looking at. Threshold moments are, in Vermeers, hidden and obvious simultaneously. It is not Vermeer’s intention to pull away the veil, to reveal the hidden structure of these daily sacraments. It is his purpose to show them to us as hidden and as right there, eternally holy in their sacramental character.

Update from a reader:

Here is another, less serious look at Flemish portraits; the artist has done magical things with items at hand while on an airplane.

Previous Dish on Vermeer and his methods here, here, and here.

(Image of The Milkmaid by Vermeer, c. 1660, via Wikimedia Commons)

Brad Leithauser considers the power of sparse verbiage in literature. He takes Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as an example:

His hero, the aged fisherman Santiago, was once a figure of legendary prowess and strength up and down the coast of Cuba. … Santiago is also, explicitly, a Christ figure, and the sea he journeys on is saline as well as, potentially, salvational; he sails the waterways of the human soul. Of course, Hemingway understood that linking Santiago and Jesus would irk readers. Some critics lambasted him for heavy-handedness, or even for blasphemy. Still, Hemingway, showing his typical belligerence toward critics, wrote the following sentence to describe the moment when Santiago makes a sound—“Ay”—as marauding sharks arrive to feast on the fish that Santiago has so painfully, miraculously secured: “There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.” You can almost hear the author declaring “And screw you …” to his critics as he set the words down.

And you can hear something else, far nobler. For this is the moment of the book’s greatest daring. It’s what might be called the incarnational instant, the one in which Santiago enters the body of Christ, or Christ the body of Santiago, and the divine flesh gasps, as it did on the Cross, at the agony and the betrayal of earthly existence. I first read the sentence in my teens, and still recall self-defensively closing my hands as the words struck home.