29Sep

Playboy Founder Dies

Hugh Hefner was a man who unabashedly dredged sexuality out of the private corners of life and into mainstream thought. One person I spoke to today noted, “He won; He remade us into a culture in which the libertarian approach is dominant.” I think there are a lot of others who could share the credit for this, but Hef’s impact is not a small one.

Though Hef didn’t invent hedonism, he has been one of its most famous recent proponents. Hedonism is a philosophy and way of life that is rather at odds with certain aspects of Christian faith, and this is not new–This has been the case since antiquity. But let’s be clear that Christianity also isn’t inherently ascetic. The sensual pleasures are properly seen by the faithful as a gift from God to be enjoyed, as a garden of delights (just go read the “Song of Solomon”, some of the raciest prose ever written, and it’s purely from the Bible). However, it is inside of a covenant relationship, a complete and full giving of two people to each other–not just bodies, but minds and hearts–that sexual pleasure is a garden. Those who pursue sensuality as an end in itself, often find that the fullness of the experience is diminished and twisted. The garden is instead a mire and bog, infested with dark and lonely things. The waiting rooms of psychologists and divorce attorneys are full of the human wreckage of unrestrained sexual appetites. Jail cells are full of perpetrators whose lusts reached into the bathroom windows of strangers, or even the underpants of school children.

Christian publications, such as Christianity Today point out the dark legacy of an explosion of addictive pornography left in the wake of Mr. Hefner’s revolution. They cite surveys such as Barna, which show the destructive impact of porn on Christian life:

…most pastors struggle with porn—57% of pastors and 64% of youth pastors. These numbers equal the national average of 64% of men who admit to viewing porn at least monthly, according to a survey done by Proven Men…And it’s impacting all of us. According to a 2011 Lifeway Research survey, when presented with the statement, “Pornography has adversely affected the lives of our church members,” 69 percent of pastors surveyed agree. And an additional 14 percent did not know or preferred not to answer.

Even some of those who would be his natural allies on the left, have been critical. A CNN article which praised Mr. Hefner for bringing sexuality into the open, and for hiring blacks when others wouldn’t, still faulted his objectification of women, treating them as second class citizens whose main role is to sexually satisfy men:

His legacy is full of evidence of the exploitation of women for professional gain. In creating Playboy, and maintaining its brand over six decades, Hef championed a world in which women serve to delight and entertain men, where their bodies are objects, where modification to appeal to male senses often took precedence over comfort (because who really wants DDDs?).

Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, asserts that “Hugh Hefner Did Not Live The Good Life”:

We can’t, though, with his obituaries, call his life “success” or “a dream.” Hefner did not create, but marketed ingeniously the idea that a man’s life consists in the abundance of his possessions and of his orgasms. To women, he marketed frenetically the idea that a woman’s value consists in her sexual availability and attractiveness to men.

Only God knows the ultimate state of his soul, of course.

15Sep

The Holy Cross

September 14 marks an interesting and ancient feast in the Church, “The Exaltation of the Holy Cross” or “Holy Cross Day.” The day is observed in some fashion by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans. Red vestments are traditionally worn on Holy Cross Day.

The history behind this is fascinating, as it marks a time when Christianity was becoming ascendant within the Roman Empire. The story displays also something of the shift toward what we might identify as a medieval mindset within the faith. After all, this is a tale of magic, of a questing empress, and the veneration of relics that are thought to provide divine protection.

The empress in question is Helena (also known as Saint Helena in some circles), a woman of obscure birth who became the wife of Constantius, one of the co-emperors of the Roman Empire; Though he divorced her, their only son was Constantine I, destined to become the supreme ruler in the year 306. She never remarried, but remained close with her son. She was a devout Christian, and did much to promote Christianity within a Roman Empire that had previously tried to squash it.

The emperor Constantine appointed his mother Helena as “Augusta Imperatrix” and authorized her to go on a quest to the Holy Land to investigate Christian sites. She tore down pagan shrines which had been deliberately placed at Christian sites by an earlier emperor, and she began the building of magnificent churches at the sites of Jesus’ birth and at the Mount of Olives.

While in Jerusalem, she is said to have found the “true cross” upon which Jesus was executed. According to legend the cross of Jesus had been buried in a cistern, along with crosses of the other two prisoners executed with him. She supposedly also recovered the nails and a part of the sign that had hung above his head (a wooden plaque inscribed with Jesus Nazaranus Rex Iudaeorum). The “true Cross” was identified among the three based on observation of its healing powers.

The subsequent tale of the cross could fill a large book. Much of it was carried to Constantinople, and part of it went to Rome, where it is kept to this day at the Basilica Santa Croce. The portion left in Jerusalem was stolen in 614 by the Persian emperor Khosrau II, and returned after his defeat by Byzantine emperor Heraclitus. In the 12th century, when the Crusaders reconquered Jerusalem, it came into the possession of Arnulf Malecorne, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, who carried it aloft during battles. It was later captured by Saladin and lost to history.

Tiny fragments of the “true cross” were prized among the faithful; they became popular as amulets for kings and nobles to wear as a sign of faith and for personal protection, and for churches to keep as relics. The proliferation of relics accelerated at sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1124. Bits of the “true cross” can be found across the globe, from Greece’s Mount Athos to Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, to Shaftesbury, England to Galveston, Texas. By the 16th century, Protestant reformer John Calvin remarked, “…if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.”

Saint Ambrose, in his funeral oration for Theodosius, recounted the legend surrounding the discovery of the true cross, and said this of Helena: “she worshiped not the wood, but the King, him who hung upon the cross.”

May we do the same.

For more information:
As of the time of this writing, Wikipedia has a long and interesting article about the True Cross. More details about these stories are also available online at Catholic Education Resource Center, and at New Advent.

10Sep

Prayers for Those Affected by Hurricane Irma

In the wake of Harvey’s devastation comes the even more powerful Irma. Our hopes and prayers go out to those affected by this monster of a storm, and those who are yet in its path.

A prayer for protection against storms and floods (Roman Catholic):

Graciously hear us, O Lord, when we call upon You,
and grant unto our supplications a calm atmosphere,
that we, who are justly afflicted for our sins,
may, by Your protecting mercy, experience pardon.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Prayer in time of storm (Anglican):

O MOST glorious and gracious Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, but beholdest all things below: Look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws of this death, which is ready now to swallow us up: Save, Lord, or else we perish. The living, the living shall praise thee. O send thy word of command to rebuke the raging winds, and the roaring sea; that we, being delivered from this distress, may live to serve thee, and to glorify thy Name all the days of our life. Hear, Lord, and save us, for the infinite merits of our blessed Saviour, thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

04Sep

Ora Labora Improvisation by Gerre Hancock

In consideration of Labor Day, I am reminded of the old hymn “Come Labor On” (Ora Labora). The hymn tune was composed by T. Tertius Noble (1867 – 1953). Below is a recording of the late Gerre Hancock (1934-2012) giving a farewell improvisation on this hymn in 2004, as he was retiring from his post as organist and choirmaster at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City. The performance was recorded by Dr. Alan van Poznak, and posted to YouTube by a YouTube community member named “contratromba858”. The words to the hymn are below.

Come, labor on.
Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain,
while all around us waves the golden grain?
And to each servant does the Master say,
“Go work today.”

Come, labor on.
The enemy is watching night and day,
to sow the tares, to snatch the seed away;
while we in sleep our duty have forgot,
he slumbered not.

Come, labor on.
Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear!
No arm so weak but may do service here:
by feeblest agents may our God fulfill
his righteous will.

Come, labor on.
Claim the high calling angels cannot share–
to young and old the Gospel gladness bear;
redeem the time; its hours too swiftly fly.
The night draws nigh.

Come, labor on.
No time for rest, till glows the western sky,
till the long shadows o’er our pathway lie,
and a glad sound comes with the setting sun.
“Servants, well done.”

14Aug

When God Calls, Say Yes

In honor of the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin:

Saint Mary in stained glass, at St Mary’s Church, County Cork, Ireland; by A F Borcher, 2012; used in accordance with Creative Commons 3.0 license.

13Aug

Evil: A Quote by the Late M. Scott Peck

When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life — particularly human life — such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head.

Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a “biophilic” person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a “necrophilic character type,” whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.

Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”
― (M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil).

12Aug

Why I Avoid Revealing My Full Identity

I am not alone in feeling leery about revealing too much about myself. When researching information about 15th century scholar Lorenzo Valla, I ran into the blog by Roger Pearse, at Tertullian.org. He speaks from experience:

About Roger Pearse

This page was written in 1999, when this website was new. It contained my photograph, my email address, and various personal, educational and professional details and so forth.

Little by little, it has grown shorter. The internet is not so small a place as it was in those days. A troll was merely a nuisance, not a brutal thug determined to use the compulsive element in social media to drive a vulnerable teenager to suicide, and to jeer at them afterwards on their memorial Facebook page. A spammer was merely an advertiser, not an internet criminal determined to steal your every shekel, and your identity with it. Privacy was taken for granted. None of this is true today.

My email address was the first to go. That change was forced upon me by the torrent of spam. I created a form — which the spammers soon learned to attack — but this stemmed much of the trouble.

Next to go was my photograph, once I found that the nastier people online sought out personal information in order to use it to inflict pain on their victims. Professional details went next, for the same reason.

Today I have decided to remove the rest. It is a wrench, it is true. But I see no alternative. If I were to join the internet today, I suspect that I would not use my own name at all, but a pen-name. Anything else puts you at risk from the criminal element online.

I myself feel uncomfortable writing online under any name but my own. Occasionally some forum software prevents me from using my own name; but it is a weird feeling. But I think it would be absurd for me to attempt to use a pseudonym at this time of day.

All the same, I cannot sensibly allow personal details to remain on the web when I can prevent this. Nor should you.

Mr. Pearse’s advice is taken to heart. I am sure that over time, the clues I will have offered here and there might allow for someone to guess who I am in “real life”, but I don’t plan to make it easy.

03Aug

Boomers and the Church

I came across an interesting essay regarding the powerful impact that a single generation has had on Christian life in the U.S. The author of “The Six Commandments of the Boomers” is Reverend Todd Wilken, a blogger, speaker, and pastor within the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.

Wilken, himself a member of the “Baby Boom” generation (those with birth dates between 1946 and 1964), begins his piece with a sweeping critique of his cohorts as being generally narcissistic and self absorbed. They are now 28 percent of the U.S. population, and all of our societal institutions and power centers are firmly in their control.

Their influence on the churches of our land has been no less sweeping than it has been on other aspects of life.

Boomers seek to recreate the institution in their own Boomer image. The Boomers have brought this imperative of the individual to bear upon the Church. The Church is here to provide whatever the Boomers want or think they need… The Church has undertaken more innovations in the last generation than in all the previous generations combined, mostly at the insistence of the Boomers.

One area has been music:

And in the Church of the Boomers music is THE issue. Music was the Boomers’ voice. In large part, their music was what defined them as “hip.” Suckled at the breast of what began as tinpan alley and quickly became the music industry, the Boomers can’t wean themselves. Their kind of music is hip and that imperative of hip extends even to the Church. Again, Veith observes:

“Certainly Baby Boomers often do demand their kind of music in church. This is another of their traits —to be demanding and self-absorbed and intolerant of other styles. The World War II generation never demanded worship styles with Big Band music.”

I have been fond of saying that we seem to be stuck in a dichotomy: Boomer theology and traditional music (your average mainline denominational church), versus boomer music and traditional theology (a typical evangelical church). I now realize that I underappreciated even the sinister influence that the “Boomer worldview” has had on theology that is otherwise outwardly orthodox:

In the Church of the Boomers this rebellion against authority manifests itself as a skeptical approach to the Church’s doctrinal standards, pastoral authority, and polity.

However, the bigger problem is that in the Church there is an unquestioned authority: the authority of the Bible. The Church of the Boomers rejects this authority in one of two ways; they either deny the authority of the Bible outright, as in liberal Churches, or they relativize the authority of the Bible, as in much of Protestant Evangelicalism. The first kind of rebellion against Scripture’s authority is obvious. The second is much more subtle, and therefore more dangerous.

The relativizing of the Scripture allows the Boomers to affirm Scripture’s authority in theory while denying it in practice. They can say that they are Bible believing, that the Bible is inerrant and infallible, and even authoritative. The problem isn’t in what the Boomers say about the Bible, the problem is in how they use the Bible.

When studying the Bible there is a big difference between asking, “what does it mean?” and asking, “what does it mean to me?” The former seeks objective truth, the latter seeks subjective, relative truth. The former affirms Scripture’s authority, the latter denies it. Bible study in the Church of the Boomers is mostly the latter. If the meaning of the Bible is determined by each individual’s private interpretation, then the issue of the Bible’s objective authority is rendered moot.

Read it all at the link above.

01Aug

Seeing Refreshment

Summer is blazing away here, with temperatures rising perilously close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. On these kinds of days, a certain listlessness sets in. We have terms that reflect this, such as “summer doldrums”. “Doldrums” is borrowed directly from a nautical term describing a windless area in which sailing vessels flounder and languish.

In the stock market, trading volumes drop as investors heed the old adage “Sell in May and go away”. School is out, leaving just a skeleton crew of secretaries and teachers doing inventory; The vast empty parking lots are almost spooky reminders of the activities that will resume again in just a few weeks.

In many churches, a seasonal ebb is also noted. The pews are emptier. The choir is gone for the summer. The A-team of church leaders (the senior pastor / rector / bishop / head priest / etc) are often away on vacation, leaving church business and Sunday services in the hands of their assistants.

However, this is not the whole story. There is another way to view summer. Summer is also a time of refreshment. Beads of condensation slide delightfully down the smooth glassy curves of a piña colada, or of an icy lemonade. Pools and beaches are great places to cool off and splash around. Pigs grunt and artisans sell woven goods at summer fairs. Vacation trips allow us to travel the cities and markets of the world, or to marvel at the natural wonders of rivers, oceans, mountains and canyons.

There you have it: Two ways of looking at a season–one positive and one negative. This brings me to a point about the power of perception. I have in memory a title of a book I read in the 1990s. Unfortunately the title is about all I remember, because it was so awesome: The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, by Thomas Moore.

For all its otherworldliness and dedication to the things of God, Christianity is much about reenchanting this life with a new perspective.

Enjoy your summer. May it be for you a time of refreshment

23Jul

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

While flying to the Midwest recently, I read a charming and thought provoking little book, Neil Gaiman’s 2013 The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The author noted for Coraline here weaves a tale of a man who returns home to a country house to attend a funeral, and remembers the mysterious events that took place when he was a child. He recalls that he visited a neighbor girl named Lettie, whose family are really ancient and otherworldly beings in disguise. With Lettie he visits another dimension, and accidentally brings back a sinister being named Ursula. In the end, he finds he is under attack by powerful scavenger beasts that nearly kill him until Lettie intervenes.

While there are Christian themes, such as sacrifice and redemption, don’t mistake me as saying that this is a Christian story or allegory. It’s pure fantasy. However, a part of the story that leapt out for me is this lovely prose, which I would take to be a picture of Christianity’s heavenly joy:

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed-and-breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, ‘Be whole.’ and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.