Category: The Dish

Yes, This Is A Pastoral Revolution

This picture taken 21 March 2007 shows a

Well: we can now see the seeds of growth being planted by Pope Francis. Plenty of analyses have already been written insisting that nothing much has changed in the first week of the Synod on Family Life; that established doctrine – even on matters such as the re-married being allowed back to the Lord’s table at Mass – remains unaltered; that this is window dressing, and not the window itself. The only way to answer this critique is to watch the Synod – see this extraordinary moment from last week – and read its first Relatio and to find oneself – certainly as a gay Catholic – in a certain amount of shock. The drama certainly continues; a huge plurality of the bishops appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI will be pushing back hard against what Francis has already done; in fact, they already were, which may have been why Francis appointed six new over-seers of the Relatio at the last minute.

The result – though this will never be admitted or conceded – is a thorough repudiation of the last two papacies. They were both dedicated to upholding a very traditional and uncompromising view of family life and marriage, describing those outside of that model as problems to be guarded against, and even talking of some human beings as “intrinsically disordered” because of their seeming inability to live up to the uncompromising standards the church upheld. This created a fortress church, of the holy, in which those who fell short often felt excluded, even demonized, by the language and rhetoric coming from Rome.

Now compare that with the way Francis talks about family life in the very opening part of the Relatio:

Evening falls on our assembly. It is the hour at which one willingly returns home to meet at the same table, in the depth of affection, of the good that has been done and received, of the encounters which warm the heart and make it grow, good wine which hastens the unending feast in the days of man. It is also the weightiest hour for one who finds himself face to face with his own loneliness, in the bitter twilight of shattered dreams and broken plans; how many people trudge through the day in the blind alley of resignation, of abandonment, even resentment: in how many homes the wine of joy has been less plentiful, and therefore, also the zest — the very wisdom — for life.

This is looking outside the church to the family dinner – with wine of course! But it also sees not some pristine vision, but also the crooked reality of so many – the countless who dine alone, or whose exhaustion after work strains family life still further, or whose career has crashed, or whose job has just been lost, or the grown children unemployed who live in the basement. The single mother; the abused wife; the frustrated father; the traumatized children. This seems to me where Jesus is – not among the perfect, but among the wounded; and not in austere and brutal judgment, but beside them, listening, caring, loving.

This is where the church should really start:

It is necessary to accept people in their concrete being, to know how to support their search, to encourage the wish for God and the will to feel fully part of the Church, also on the part of those who have experienced failure or find themselves in the most diverse situations. This requires that the doctrine of the faith, the basic content of which should be made increasingly better known, be proposed alongside with mercy.

The abstract certitudes of the Bavarian theologian cede to the pragmatic pastor from Buenos Aires. And what we are seeing here is similar to what we saw at the Second Vatican Council. Just as that Council for the first time recognized that other faiths can have insight into the divine, so this Synod is also recognizing the goods and positive aspects in families and relationships outside the pristine model.

Following the expansive gaze of Christ, whose light illuminates every man, the Church turns respectfully to those who participate in her life in an incomplete and imperfect way, appreciating the positive values they contain rather than their limitations and shortcomings … Imitating Jesus’ merciful gaze, the Church must accompany her most fragile sons and daughters, marked by wounded and lost love, with attention and care, restoring trust and hope to them like the light of a beacon in a port, or a torch carried among the people to light the way for those who are lost or find themselves in the midst of the storm. 

Which is when we stumble across the nub of all of it:

The truth is incarnated in human fragility not to condemn it, but to cure it.

So let me address one of the more controversial and revolutionary aspects of this document, and one which obviously affects me deeply: the section the document actually titles:

Welcoming homosexual persons

Yes, you read that right. Instead of being seen as intrinsically disordered human beings naturally driven toward evil – and thereby a contaminating influence to be purged when we become visible (see the recent acts of cruelty and rigidity toward gay parishioners around the country), the church is now dedicated to welcoming gay people. You can write a long disquisition on how this changes no doctrine, but it seems to me you are missing something more profound – a total re-orientation of the church toward its gay sons and daughters. I have managed to find churches that do indeed welcome gay people; but even they rarely publicly declare that they welcome us with open arms – as we are, “her most fragile sons and daughters, marked by wounded and lost love.”

Here is the key section:

     50.        Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

     51.        The question of homosexuality leads to a serious reflection on how to elaborate realistic paths of affective growth and human and evangelical maturity integrating the sexual dimension: it appears therefore as an important educative challenge. The Church furthermore affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman. Nor is it acceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.

     52.        Without denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions it has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.

I never thought I would live to read these words in a Vatican document. Gone are the cruel and wounding words of Benedict XVI to stigmatize us; instead we have the authentic witness of someone following Christ who came to minister to the broken and the hurt, the Synod On the Themes of Family Is Held At Vaticanfragile and the strong, the people who had long been excluded from the feast – but now invited to join it as brothers and sisters – “a fraternal space” in the church. Notice too that the church is now emphasizing a pastoral “accepting and valuing” of homosexual orientation, yes, “valuing” the divine gift of our nature and our loves. Yes, the doctrine does not change. The sacrament of matrimony is intrinsically heterosexual – a position, by the way, I have long held as well. But it is possible to affirm the unique and wondrous thing of heterosexual, life-giving union without thereby assuming that gay people are somehow intrinsically driven to evil, as Benedict insisted. It is not either/or. It has always been both/and.

And look too at the positive aspects of a gay relationship: “mutual aid to the point of sacrifice.” Instead of defining us as living in sexual sin, the church is suddenly seeing all aspects of our relationships – the care for one another, the sacrifices of daily life, the mutual responsibilities for children, the love of our families, the dignity of our work, and all that makes up a commitment to one another. We are actually being seen as fully human, instead of uniquely crippled humans directed always and everywhere toward sin. And, yes, there is concern for our children as well – and their need for care and love and support.

Of course I cannot write these words without something breaking inside of me. It is like a long, dark night suddenly seeing a crack of daylight. Or rather it is like the final breaking of bread within me, a sacrament of love being released within, of a faith made more whole, of a home finally found.

Know hope. Know joy.

(Photos: A grey-beam coming through a stained-glass window, on every spring and autumn equinox, at the Strasbourg cathedral, eastern France. By Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty; Pope Francis leaves the Synod Hall at the end of a session of the Synod on the themes of family on October 13, 2014 in Vatican City, Vatican.By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)

The Most Defensive Campaign Of The Midterms

It belongs to Alison Grimes, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Kentucky. She has repeatedly refused to disclose whether or not she voted for Obama. Mitch McConnell is taking full advantage of the situation:

Ed Morrissey rolls his eyes in her direction:

Alison Grimes isn’t running for the position of Private Citizen. She’s running for the US Senate in a cycle where Barack Obama’s agenda is very much on the table — just as Obama himself insisted earlier this month. She wants Kentucky voters to replace McConnell with her, but won’t say whether she’ll vote for Obama’s agenda, instead offering wishy-washy language about independence while taking no stands on Obama policies like ObamaCare and coal restrictions. Now she wants to pretend that, even though Grimes served as a delegate to both of the Democratic National Conventions, in 2008 and 2012, that nominated Obama for President, her support of Obama in the election is somehow a mystery — and that it’s none of the business of Kentucky voters because of the principle of the secret ballot. 

Sam Youngman weighs in:

The problem with Grimes’s answer is that she had no problem telling Austin Ryan, who interviewed Grimes as part of a documentary for KET and the University of Kentucky, that she voted for Hillary Clinton in Kentucky’s 2008 Democratic primary.

Ultimately, who Grimes voted for in the last two presidential elections isn’t going to be what decides this race. What has hurt Grimes throughout is who won the presidency and how Kentucky views him. The president’s approval ratings hover around 30 percent in Kentucky, and McConnell has all but physically sewn Obama to Grimes.

Drum compares Grimes’ failed political dodge to those of Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst and Colorado Senate candidate Cory Gardner:

The difference is that Grimes was clumsy over her handling of a process issue: her support for a president of her own party. Reporters feel free to go after that. Ernst, by contrast, was crafty over her handling of policy issues: in this case, environmental policy and health care policy. Likewise, Gardner is being crafty about his handling of abortion and contraceptive policy. That sort of craftiness generally invites little censure because political reporters don’t want to be seen taking sides on an issue of policy—or even rendering judgment about whether a candidate’s policy positions have changed.

Jason Zengerle calls “Grimes’s refusal to say who she voted for is emblematic of her entire campaign, which, for the last 15 months, has been waged in a defensive crouch—evading and obfuscating at every turn.”:

Grimes’s candidacy is showing just how absurd—and ultimately self-defeating the modern political campaign has become. So preoccupied with not making mistakes, and demonizing the opponent, the modern political campaign often forgets what would seemingly be its most important task: to make an affirmative case for its candidate. If Grimes and Terri Lynn Land—the Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan who’s run a similarly bunkered race—both go down to defeat, perhaps it’ll serve as something of a wake-up call to strategists on both sides of the aisle.

Intelligent Design

Oliver Morton pens a touching tribute to modern science, inspired by a visit to a biotech company that mass-produces designer proteins “that recognise and help the body regulate various sorts of target, notably cancers”:

If cells could choose their environment, these pampered tanks would be top of their list. Tens of thousands of hours of meticulous engineering design, years of research by acute minds, billions of dollars in capital expenditure, all devoted to letting one biological process unfold with less hindrance than has ever been possible before. The ability to design environments that so suit their inhabitants may be second only to the ability to design those inhabitants themselves when it comes to the human revolutionising of biology.

And the relation of this fierce focus to diversity is not an either/or. These antibodies are designed for a purpose. I have friends whose cancers have responded to treatments of which these antibodies are a part. Those friends have lives as unique as all human lives, as unique as any sport of creation and far more precious. And mass-produced molecules, copied in numbers that dwarf those of the stars in the sky, have intervened in the machinery that supports that life and helped to prolong it.

Books On Bikes

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Adele Peters flags a cool educational experiment:

While some elementary schools no longer have recess, and people like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie argue that school days should be even longer, a few schools are already moving in a different direction. Some are testing out standing desks, and realizing that a little bit of activity can actually improve attention spans. Others, like Ward Elementary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are starting to fill classrooms with exercise bikes, so students can work out while they learn.

The Read and Ride program at Ward began five years ago. One classroom is equipped with enough exercise bikes for a full class of students, and teachers bring students throughout the day to use them. As they ride, they read. The combination burns calories, but it turns out that it also helps students learn better. As the elementary school analyzed testing data at the end of school year, they found that students who had spent the most time in the program achieved an 83% proficiency in reading, while those who spent the least time in the program had failing scores–only 41% proficiency.

(Photo via Read and Ride)

How The Literary Make A Living

While pondering the eternal question of how full-time artists can fund their work, Alan Jacobs looks back to a 1945 essay by the poet and critic R.P. Blackmur, “The Economy of the American Writer”:

From our vantage point, perhaps the most interesting point here is Blackmur’s uncertainty about the most likely source of support for artists: will they find their place in the world of the university, or in the world of the non-profit foundation? Well, we know how it turned out: while foundations do still support artists of various kinds, universities have turned out to be the chief patrons of American artists — especially writers.

Blackmur sees that even at his moment support for writers and artists is drifting towards the university; he’s just not altogether happy about that. He’s not happy because he has seen that “the universities are themselves increasingly becoming social and technical service stations — are increasingly attracted into the orbit of the market system.” A prophetic word if there ever was one.

The universities have in the intervening seventy years become generous patrons of the arts; but what is virtually impossible for us to see, because we can’t re-run history, is the extent to which the arts have been limited and confined by being absorbed into an institution that has utterly lost its independence from “the market system” — that has simply and fully become what the Marxist critic Louis Althusser called an “ideological state apparatus,” an institution that does not overtly belong to the massive nation-state but exists largely to support and when possible fulfill the nation-state’s purposes.

On a related note, author Jess Row recently spoke out against the idea of writing for exposure rather than pay:

My feeling is that if we’re talking about a large publicly traded media company, then the contributors ought to be paid something, even if it’s very little. The question of journalism being degraded so that it’s basically being treated as something that you just do for exposure or visibility or self-branding—perhaps it’s not a conspiracy per se, but it is by all accounts a corporate strategy.

I have a lot of problems with the idea that we should be paid less for book reviews that appear online than those that appear in print. I understand that because of the internet the question of how any of these properties make money is very much up in the air, but somebody’s making money, and some people are making a great deal of money, and the people who aren’t making any money are the people who care the most about what they’re doing—the writers and the contributors and the journalists, the people on the ground. I think that’s an unacceptable position, and I think that’s an unacceptable model. It’s a good business model, but an unacceptable artistic or cultural model.

Is Amazon A Monopoly? Ctd

Many readers join the debate:

I can’t figure out whether Yglesias was being naïve when he says that “suffice it to say that ‘low and often non-existent profits’ and ‘monopoly’ are not really concepts that go together.” That’s exactly what monopolies do. They have enough capital to take a loss for long enough to wipe out the competition, then they take of advantage of being a monopoly.

Another elaborates by making a key distinction:

Amazon is not a retail monopoly.  However, it is quickly becoming a wholesale monopsony (a market form in which there is only one buyer for goods) with respect to books, e-books, and likely other product categories.

By driving down prices and operating at a loss for decades, Amazon is driving out all other potential buyers and resellers of these goods. This may sound good on the surface for consumers (low prices, yay!), but the concern is if Amazon becomes the only viable buyer (and therefore the only viable reseller), there will be no one left to step up as an alternative when Bezos decides he is ready to turn a profit and jacks up prices. Not to mention what happens to the suppliers (publishers and authors) when Amazon (as the sole buyer) drives prices down to unsustainable levels, which in turn will result in less choice for consumers. Many have written on this subject, including the NYT.

Another has a favorable view of the mega-company:

Amazon, as a monopsony, is not something the government should be stomping on, as long as it continues to provide good value to consumers. Amazon is losing money in these efforts and that can’t go on forever. Other businesses may struggle, but that’s generally to the benefit of consumers. Tough for business owners, sure, but business ain’t beanbag.

As far as beating up Hachette goes, Amazon is fighting to be able to discount e-books. Hachette wants to keep prices high, and keep paying authors an absurdly low royalty for e-books. Amazon certainly has its flaws (treatment of warehouse employees among them), but in the book market – which I know about as a publisher, author, and reader – Amazon has been a massive force for good. There are thousands of authors now making good money from Amazon who would never have had a chance under the old publishing system.

But another isn’t a fan:

The issue with Amazon (and Walmart) is not that they are monopolies.  Depending on the market in question, these two may or may not possess majority marketshare (in small towns, WalMart and Amazon may be your only choices for many things).  On the other hand, neither of them are (per the law) predatory monopolies – companies that drive competitors out of business and then raise prices once the competition is extinguished and collect monopoly rents.  Instead, Amazon and Walmart keep prices low and generally provide good service, which largely immunizes them from much antitrust scrutiny in the US. The behavior that gets companies in trouble with antitrust authorities in this country is any form of price-fixing or other scheme to charge customers more than they would be charged in a competitive marketplace.  Complaints that WalMart harms consumers by “reducing choice” (not carrying a wider range of products that might be carried were the retail market less concentrated) have been generally laughed out of court by federal judges.

Instead, the issue with both companies is that they are ruthless monopsonies that viciously exploit their vendors and their workforce.  Both companies demand (and get) price concessions from manufacturers that are arguably responsible for lots of outsourcing and such; both companies are also well-known for mistreating their employees.  US antitrust law, which focuses on harm to consumers (in their capacity as consumers) is not well-situated to focus on predatory monopsony behavior (after all, it was Apple and the publishers who were prosecuted for anti-trust behavior in the recent Amazon fight, even though they were aligning themselves against the 800lb gorilla in the retail book market).  US antitrust law doesn’t generally give a rip about mom-and-pop stores being run out of business.  (European authorities are more able to deal with predatory monospony behavior; whether this is good or bad policy is an interesting question).  And labor relations are, with a few exceptions, outside the scope of anti-trust law – unless business cartels attempt to fix wages in the absence of collective bargaining, anti-trust law simply doesn’t apply.

Another, more neutral observer details the company’s vast services:

I’ve been following the discussion about Amazon as a monopoly and it seems that some people miss the power of Amazon as a company that wants to be your only source for everything. The company is not only your first place to look for anything you may like to purchase from electronics, to house items, to even clothing. Amazon seems to have a hand on every slice of the consumer experience. With Amazon you have prime to get anything in two days without worrying about shipping, but in addition you get a service “prime instant video” that is a competitor of Netflix, Hulu, and regular TV. You also can get your Amazon phone (competing against Apple, Samsung, Google) and your Kindle fire (Nexus, Samsung and iPad tablet rival). Your Kindle also serves as your ebook reader (vs B&N Nook, now a Samsung tablet). On top of that Amazon has also its own app store (vs Google play and iTunes), and now I understand you can also have your music stored in the cloud by Amazon.

But Amazon is also your source for all the back-end computing cloud needs. You can have your files on AmazonCloud Drive, but if you are a company wanting a solution for your IT needs you can use Amazon Web Services and have everything you need from basic website setup to sophisticated data mining applications. AWS even has scientific clients as you can run sophisticated modeling software to do advanced drug search and any other complex data processing and searches. In fact Amazon is looking for academic clients for their AWS system.

If you need to search for anything you want to buy, you don’t even need Google to do the search. Unlike Facebook, Amazon doesn’t nag me to their website every day to waste my time with the latest viral news or inane discussions. They have never asked for anything too personal but they have everything they need to know about my personal interests if they just look at my purchases and regular browsing habits in their website.

They seem to have a knack to pick businesses and services that are going to be necessary as long as humans want to be consumers, and in principle you can have pretty much every need covered in their ecosystem.

(Full disclose: the Dish gets about 3 percent of its annual revenue from Amazon’s affiliate program, detailed here.)

Following In The Footsteps To Freedom

dish_JeanineMichnaBales

Photographer Jeanine Michna-Bales retraced the steps of fleeing slaves along the Underground Railroad for her project Through Darkness to Light:

Finding that there were few visual records of the secret stations along the escape route, she herself traced the steps taken by many of the 100,000 slaves between the Southern plantations of Louisiana to the border of Canada, where slavery was prohibited. Along the way, she creates an archive of historical sites both famous and obscure, discovered through academic inquiry at historical societies and oral histories passed down through generations. …

Michna-Bales shoots after dark, capturing the ambiguous nature of the shadowed land, which becomes shrouded both in terror and in hope. After examining each station during the day, she sometimes had to score the spot with a plastic bag lest she lose her way in the dark. Some safe houses had not been well documented; after reading accounts, she would work from a general area, searching and asking around for old houses. Many homeowners confirmed her hunches and led her other buildings along the railroad. Once, police showed up after her presence had been called in by neighbors, only to offer her more insight into the history of the railroad.

See more of her work here.

On “Getting” Kafka

Recently, we considered how the author’s sense of injustice makes him well-suited for the Internet era. Now, in an essay that explores the many misuses of “Kafka-esque,” Sam Jordison looks back to a David Foster Wallace essay (pdf) on what makes the writer so funny:

It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get – the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t ‘get’ Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.

A Stand-Up Gal

Linda Holmes calls Cameron Esposito’s new comedy album, Same Sex Symbol, “raunchy and sharp, insightful and very funny”:

What comes through in the record throughout is a particular point of view in which people who believe lesbian pornography represents actual lesbians, or people who believe that they’re looking for threesomes, or people who otherwise fail to understand the basics of her life, are sort of amusing and clueless weirdos she can finally see clearly because, as she explains: “I am so happy with where I am in my life. Just finally, my look sorted out, you know, my gender reflected to you accurately — my gender being ‘fighter pilot.'” And even though “fighter pilot” is a punch line, there’s no punch line to the underlying idea that she is happy. That part is true. It’s not all that common for comedy to come from a place of settled satisfaction with where you’ve ended up, and from the clash between that feeling and the constant expectation of others that you are somehow unsettled by their disapproving or just ignorant gaze.

In an interview, Esposito shares how she got comfortable incorporating more of her personal life into her routines:

When I was starting I was really just figuring how to be out as a person and how to be in the world and be gay because I came from a really conservative, Catholic background. So when I first starting doing standup, part of it was because I wanted to be onstage talking about the person I am. I couldn’t do that yet, so my jokes were more surreal, they were more superficial in some ways, and now I feel like, through standup, I’ve figured out how to talk about myself in a way that makes me more comfortable.

And now I’m just totally chill and it’s a lot easier, and sometimes people are like “Do you always talk about your sexuality onstage?” And I’m like, “No, I just always talk about myself the same way that any comic does.” So the natural evolution of that is that I’m just trying to get closer and closer to what I really am. That’s what people are interested in. The more specific you can be, the more universal it is. If you speak in broad strokes you miss everybody but if you’re like “Are you ever terrified of this thing?” even if they’re not terrified of that thing they still know terror. That’s what makes us people.