The Dish

"We have to see that behind much of the furor is fear and these fears are comprehensible. There is a fear among straight priests of becoming a member of a small minority in what is perceived as a "gay’ vocation." There is a fear among some homosexual priests of being found out, a feeling of guilt and so on. We have to reassure people so that the issue can be faced calmly. If there is a fevered anxiety about all this, then it does not help people mature and face their own complexity. It is not the case that there are just these two groups, homosexuals and heterosexuals. People are complex, and have contrary motions in their hearts. Straight people may be tempted to strangle the little bit of them that responds to people of the same sex and fear gay people. But that is a disguised form of fearing themselves. And gay seminarians may be tempted to deny who they are, adopt an anti-gay rhetoric, and all that is highly unhealthy and deforming.

It is important also that someone’s sexual orientation is not the most important thing about them, as if everyone was a sexual maniac, endlessly wanting to get other people into bed. The most important thing about anyone, regardless of whether they are gay or straight, is that they be able to love, and that they are helped to love well, deeply, honestly, transparently," – Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former master general of the Dominicans.

"I heartily believe that we were living better under the old regime. No one could threaten the Christians then," – Abu Noor, 59, a Christian in Baghdad, missing Saddam.

Clinton strikes again. She compares Bush’s 2000 speeches and lack of specifics to Obama’s speeches and alleged lack of specifics this time around. But Obama’s website is packed with specifics – some of which I don’t find congenial. But at least I’m not pretending they don’t exist. Meanwhile, another Clinton gaffe/fib/lie/misspeak/mishear. Memo to Senator Clinton: get more than three hours’ sleep a night.

Gluttons for punishment, I guess. But if they’re journalists, they should disclose their prior financial contributions to the Clintons.

There was something depressingly familiar about the late Friday news release, but credit where it’s due: the Clintons have disclosed their multi-million dollar fortune since leaving the White House. It’s good to know that the net worth of the allegedly "beer-track" candidate is infinitely higher than her opponent; and it’s also good to know that Bill Clinton’s enmeshment with tabloid mogul Ron Burkle extends into the tens of millions. Few raise the question of whether the Clintons’ cooptation of the National Enquirer empire has any degree of self-interest in it, but perhaps these things are best left to Mickey.

Yes, the Democrats are tearing themselves apart. Yes, he just gave an excellent speech on foreign policy. He’s still got a mountain to climb this fall. My column in the Sunday Times here. Iraq is his main but not only problem:

It’s hard to see how the US surge of troops in Iraq helps him in November, whatever happens. If troops cannot be withdrawn for fear of all-out civil war, if violence is back up after a lull, the surge may appear as digging a deeper ditch for America to get out of. McCain will seem like Bush, the Sequel. If, on the other hand, Iraq has calmed, the risk of a young, inexperienced bridge-builder such as Obama may seem less serious.

It’s lose-lose for McCain. If another serious attack hits the mainland, or if a miracle happens in Iraq, he may still have a chance. But he is a war candidate; that’s his brand. And war is currently deeply unpopular.

The polls, moreover, show the economy emerging as the major issue of the campaign. Even McCain admits he is uninterested in economics. He admirably rejects the easy impulse to use taxpayers’ money to bail out the reckless lenders and borrowers of the real-estate bubble. But this is not exactly popular in the distressed heartland. And Obama has been slowly learning how to address these issues.

On two critical narratives, an Obama-McCain match-up is tough for McCain. One voted against an unpopular war; the other supported both the invasion and the surge. One will be 72; the other will be 47. The narrative will not be age as such; it will be the future versus the past. Americans are future-oriented people – and this election so far has disproved the usual truth that the next generation does not vote. If Obama is the nominee, there will be a tsunami of a youth and black vote, the likes of which America has not seen since the 1960s.

Recorded earlier this week: Hitch and I debate the good, the bad, and the ugly about Jeremiah Wright:

The first part of the show is after the jump.

Gollum was unavailable.

Crowley on the news:

Questions: Was he pushed or did he jump? (Is it possible Penn decided Hillary’s chances are too slim to keep sacrificing his corporate work?) What does this mean for the campaign’s strategy? (Penn was always a proponent of leadership and experience themes, Wolfson has historically been more keen to humanize her.)

Ambers:

That Mark Penn would one day step aside from the Clinton campaign has been, as they say in sociology, overdetermined for a while.

I finally read Hitch’s book on God a little while before my breather. I’m relieved to say I liked it much more than I was expecting to. A huge amount of his criticism of organized religion over the centuries is surely valid. I feel no hesitation in agreeing. And for all the amusing contempt Hitch pours on people of faith, there is in the book a truth-seeking gene that all genuinely religious people should welcome. Sam Harris is even more compelling an atheist to me, because of his obvious fascination with meditation, consciousness and truth. I’m not the only one to notice Sam’s spiritual side – he is, in fact, one of the more self-evidently spiritual people I’ve ever met. Here’s Stafford Betty in the Jesuit magazine, America:

Harris has kept company with contemplatives, men and women who know how to stop the whir of their own thoughts and tiptoe into an awareness that completely transcends their own puny egos. Paul Tillich called this the ground of being, and contemporary Buddhist writers, with whom Harris is in particular sympathy, use that phrase too. What does this ground of being feel like? Catholic mystics like Father Keating and Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., conceive of it as a joyous, compassionate, loving, powerful, boundless, light-filled reality that can be known intimately in the private sanctuary of their own mind. Leading American Buddhist teachers like Surya Das and Thubten Chodron would not disagree. Would Harris object to such a conception?

Given his openness to the life of the deep mind (shall we call it the spirit?), I do not see why he should. It avoids the following pitfalls. It does not define God in a way that invites logical problems when we try to square God’s existence with evil, and it does not place God on the outskirts of Uranus far removed from the human heart. It does not insist on God’s being a person like us, a kind of overgrown superego, but it does not make God into some sort of impersonal energy either. However one defines God in the last analysis, the God we are looking at grows directly out of deep meditative experience. It reserves the first chair for the experiencer, not the system-builder. Harris, I believe, would approve.

More than he might readily admit.