Comments (0) In an short piece in The Atlantic titles The Virtue of the Mormon Afterlife, he writes
Mormonism just rose in my estimation. I was talking to Joanna Brooks–a Mormon who writes the Ask Mormon Girl advice column and is the author of The Book of Mormon Girl– when conversation turned to the afterlife. The news she brought was good even for us non-Mormons . . .
Go to the link to hear that news.
A problem and how to address it. May I suggest a couple of good places to start?
Today on The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru writes about the move by Republicans in the House and Senate to restore religious liberties abrogated recently by the Obama Administration, which
has decided to require religious institutions that offer insurance to cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients, whether or not they object to covering them. Churches would be exempt but not, for example, Catholic universities or hospitals.
My Twitter feed has been alive with conversation about what the Administration has done, but I’ve paid scant attention. I’ll be more attentive from now on because this disturbs me. At one time, I was anti-abortion but pro-choice. No longer. Over the years, I’ve changed my views to anti-abortion, give-the-child-up-for-adoption-if-necessary. To me, if there is any doubt about whether that life begins at conception, then the doubt should favor the possibility of life. Moreover, if Jefferson’s wall separating church and state means anything, it means something here in the domain of all things sacred to religious folk and institutions.
As per my usual routine, I went into my office to shut down my computer. It was 11:00 PM, and Janet and I were going to bed before the New Year. For one, Janet followed me in to see if her print job was finished. It wasn’t, and so here I sat, waiting for it to begin, let alone finish. And because I was sitting at my computer, I began to surf. My surfing was rewarded.
First, by a link on Instapundit that led me to a post on Chicago Boyz of an excerpt of a Tennyson poem, The Passing of the King:
The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn
Amazed him, and he groaned, ‘The King is gone.’
And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,
‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’***
Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.
I had my problems with Christopher Hitchens — who didn’t? — and Barron mentions some of these issues in the video. But he puts those disagreements in a very realistic context, in what I think is an attempt to see our brother Christopher with God’s eyes. That is what we are called to do even with our outright enemies, never mind people who might say an unkind word about (or to) us now and again. Now there’s a resolution for the New Year: Try to be as charitable with people who disagree with me as Father Barron is in his comments on Hitchens. (One hell of a challenge; but then, so, of course, is Christianity. In fact, it’s the same challenge.)
The strifes and sadnesses and laughter and joy and work and play and songs and silences of another year are now sealed up and put aside and stored away in the attic of memory. And now the new year with its prospects and menaces, its and tediums and discoveries, its old friends and new ones, comes faintly into view.
2012 will be a contentious and eventful year. Be good to each other. Keep your sense of humor. Don’t personalize the political, and correct or avoid those who do. The personal is too valuable to be debased in that way. Be hopeful. Have gratitude. Fear God and dread nought.
Stephen Colbert has a little fun
with presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, and this:
He does a pretty good and fair job, though I’d stay inside when the thunder clouds gather if I were him.
So what if you were just standing around and suddenly the person standing next to you suddenly began singing. Well, it might sound something like this:
Yeah, right.
In any case, this is galling. And so New York centric as to be self-parody. No wonder this rag sold for $1.00 — that’s the entire rag, including building, desks, copiers, and kool-aid stand.
After reading many, many arguments for rejecting faith in God–including some posted today in The Washington Post’s “On Belief” section–I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m safe in my belief. That is, I’ve yet to read any such argument that even begins to touch the pillars of my belief system, the pillars of my faith. Instead, doubters and the faithless, hack away at a straw man religious faith that is always foreign to me, so foreign, in fact, that I often find myself agreeing with the critic.
The following passage from Walter Russell Mead‘s essay, Establishment Blues, has caused me to think about and appreciate my faith more than anything I’ve read outside the scriptures in many moons:
The religion gap between the elite and the rest of the country is a big part of the problem — and in more ways than one. I can’t help but notice that the abandonment of serious religion by most of the American elite has coincided with a massive collapse in both the public and private morality of the American establishment. Kids who weren’t raised in church or synagogue or mosque, who were taught that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ were simplistic categories in a complex moral world of shades of gray, who were told that their highest moral duty was to be true to their inner passions, who were the first generation in American history to be raised in a Scripture-free educational medium, turn into self-indulgent, corner-cutting, self-centered adults.
What a surprise! We raised a generation of bright kids without a foundation in religion, and they’ve grown up and gone to Wall Street. We never told them that the virtuous life was both necessary and hard, that character was something that had to be built step by step from youth, that moral weakness was both contemptible and natural: and we are shocked, shocked! when, placed in proximity to large sums of loose cash, they grab all they can.
Religion is no guarantee of righteousness; Elmer Gantry is not the only sticky-fingered preacher in the history of the world. But at least in western history when the culture and habits of mind of an entire social milieu have lost touch with their cultural foundations in ethical monotheism, trouble is usually on the way. The estrangement from religion is also an estrangement from the ideas and cultural values that bind society into a workable whole.
The French aristocrats laughed at the manners and the morals of the common people and ridiculed the faith that lit the darkness and softened the harsh conditions of ordinary lives. Enlightened and cosmopolitan, the establishment mocked the attachment of the ignorant peasants to the king. The well educated, well connected elites accepted no limits on their ability to convert their social privilege into personal wealth; they accepted no limits on the gratification of their physical desires — flaunting their romantic affairs in the same spirit in which they feasted at Versailles while the gaunt peasants starved. They used and abused to the fullest all the privileges that came with their status while mocking and rejecting any sense of duty and obligation.
It was fun while it lasted.
I’ve bolded the parts that have virtually been ringing in my ears since I first read the essay. I’m not sure why. Yes, what Mead says confirms my own beliefs, but the reason his thoughts have so impressed themselves upon mine must go beyond that. Maybe with a little more thought on my own, I can come up with the reason.
This I do know: I am thankful beyond measure for the faith of my father and mother, my grandfather and my grandmother, and–lucky me–my progenitors going as far back as my great-great grandparents on both sides. You see, my great-great grandfathers on both sides marched in the Mormon Battalion across the United States, into Mexico, and on to San Diego–well before The Beach Boys beckoned us all to Southern California. And then they walked back to Salt Lake City and, at least in the case of George Washington Taggart, walked on to Winter Quarters, Nebraska–prodded on by the faith that strengthens me daily.
I’ve been a fan of Christopher Hitchens for at least 10 years, largely because I agreed with his principled stand on Iraq. I’ve since learned that it’s possible he would take a similar stand if someone wanted to invade Utah. He doesn’t like my church, any church for that matter.
A churchman myself, I can turn the other cheek and allow him to slap away. I have this sneaky feeling that he’s a closet Christian. His brother Peter is a believer. What do I base this “feeling” on? Two things. The first was an article in The Washington Post (I think), wherein he talked about how he made sure his children read the Bible because it had such an influence on Western civilization. The second is his recent paen to the King James Bible in Vanity Faire, again for much the same reasons.
The God I believe in is great enough to forgive Christopher’s sins, once Christopher himself sees them.
If he–Hitchens, that is–has the towering intellect attributed to him, he’ll one day recognize them. In this, I disagree with his brother. It’s not the cancer that will bring Christopher to God. It’s the attendant humility.
God, after all, will have a humble people.
And with this, I almost forgot why I began this post. The reason, again in Vanity Faire, is Hitchen’s essay on losing his voice. Essays like this are one reason I respect the man. If he’d only not written that diatribe against my religion.
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