Saturday, June 30, 2007

All of a Sudden, Celibacy is Sexy Again...

The Author mentioned in an earlier Wonderpost that showbusiness is such a fickle creature. It would seem that the unpredictability of the Beautiful people has been demonstrated yet again this week.

The National Catholic Reporter this week ran an article on Hollywood screenwriter Karen Hall. People may not know the name, but they may be familiar with some of her work, which include the scripts of M*A*S*H and more recently, Judging Amy. After the success of Amy, Ms. Hall has returned with a script for a new series due out in the fall - about priests. Before the discerning Catholic rolls one's eyes in an expression of "Not Again", it is noteworthy that there is one slight twist.

According to the Reporter, the TV series market is out for something wierd, exotic and completely way out, and apparently with Vows, Ms. Hall has delivered the most audacious overarching plot known to contemporary showbusiness: these priests actually love the Church and are faithful to its teachings.

It would seem that deviant priests in all their various flavours do not tickle the showbiz palette like they once did. The relatively disappointing reviews given to the recent Da Vinci Code movie is but one demonstration of that. And whilst the American clerical sex scandals have been a great source of embarrassment for Catholics everywhere, they also have yielded a strange dividend: public scrutiny and curiosity about the priesthood is becoming a showbiz phenomenon.

Said Hall, a devout Catholic, about the acceptance of Vows:

"The orthodox priest-protagonist is a novelty...Everything else has been done: the cool liberal priest, the gay priest, the drug-addicted pastor, priests who are pedophiles or who have lost faith. Networks are interested now in what is real, which seems weird enough to them to be compelling”.

While chic may not be the best reason to celebrate expressions of one's orthodoxy, this episode really demonstrates the importance of demonstrating Christianity to be not merely a set of beliefs (any religion can do that), but also as a true Counter-Culture that defies all forms of Modernity. Calls for a dumbing down of the faith to make it more "in touch", or to make it less "controlling", produces the kind of Modern dribble that people in postmodern culture are finding so bland. Indeed, according to James KA Smith, so long as Christianity seeks to bow before the altar of autonomy, it replicates rather than overcomes Modernity. To be truly postmodern, says Smith, is actually to boldly express the entirety of the Christian narrative. And what is more, it would appear people actually want it that way, not so much for entertainment, but because it strikes a deep longing repressed by several centuries of Modernity.

For now, let us content ourselves with the fact that for Hollywood, the cloth is now the new black.


Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Interesting View from the Catholic Register

When Catholics think of the state of their faith, too often they think doom and gloom, which provides a less than optimal outward sign when it comes to spreading the faith. Below is an excerpt from the Canandian Catholic Register's Joseph Sinasac that does not sidestep the seriousness of the state of the Faith, but at the same provides an interesting angle on these "signs of the times"...
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Signs of consolation
By Joseph Sinasac 6/19/2007
The Catholic Register (http://www.catholicregister.org/)

We are often urged to read the “signs of the times” to discern what God is calling us to do in our lives and in our church. How we read those signs will determine not only our outlook on the future, but also influence our sense of energy and purpose.

The Ignatian method of prayer calls for us to consider both the signs of “consolation” and “desolation.” Too often, we focus on the latter; the news media in particular are predisposed to dwell on the bad news to the detriment of all those signs of hope in the world.

In fact, in recent weeks it has been all too easy to wallow in the bad news involving religion. We hear of Pope Benedict XVI under attack, of violence done in the name of religion, of priest shortages and discord within our religious house. Adding insult to injury, a spate of new books have been aggressively painting religion as the source of all evil in the world. British writer Richard Dawkins, in his bestseller, The God Delusion, argues that parents who teach their children religion are guilty of child abuse. His crusade is joined by others such as Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation). All display a dogmatic zeal that is easily the atheist equivalent of the most zealous Bible-punching fundamentalists.

Yet the very passion of the attacks smacks of a desperation born in a dawning realization that the religious world is not so dark after all. These writers see that religion is being taken seriously by far more than the fringes and that it continues to make a major impact on public life in the world, for both good and ill. It is not for nothing that the pronouncements of Pope Benedict continue to receive such critical scrutiny. That fact is, they matter.

In Canada, a new spate of episcopal appointments brings to office a set of capable, energetic and talented men to office in several dioceses in Canada. Archbishop Thomas Collins is capably filling the large shoes left by Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic in Toronto, Archbishop Richard Smith in Edmonton has made a first good impression and, now, three other archdioceses – Ottawa, Vancouver and Kingston – are receiving younger shepherds who have considerable pastoral and administrative experience and are proven disciples of our Lord. Vancouver, with Archbishop Michael Miller, Ottawa with Archbishop Terrence Prendergast and Kingston with Archbishop Brendan O’Brien are filling key leadership positions in the Canadian church. We pray their replacements in their former dioceses will be of an equally high caliber.

At the grassroots Catholics are taking seriously their own call to be “leaven in the dough” in the world. Whether it be the growth of new youth movements or the growing popularity of Catholic media efforts involving youth, such as Salt+Light TV and The Catholic Register Youth Speak News program, Catholics are refusing to let the world’s secular opinion makers set their agendas.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Faith, Fiction and the Need for Both

The Author very recently took out Stranger than Fiction from the local video store. Having been told by friends that it ranked among the cleverest comedies ever made, the Author developed a curiosity that could only be satisfied by expending the necessary funds to hire the movie out. He was not disappointed...

Stranger than Fiction follows the story of Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell), an IRS agent who very consciously orders his life around numbers (For instance, Harold must always brush his teeth 72 times, he must always tie his tie in a single windsor knot to save 48 seconds, he must count the number of steps he makes to catch the bus). Life for Harold is one of precision, but at the same time, it is also a very repetitious life...and a seemingly meaningless one. Harold hates his job, and apart from only one friend, Harold spends almost every minute of his existence alone.

This mundane existence gets interrupted when Harold, brushing his teeth, begins to hear a woman's voice narrating his every move. The only problem is that he is the only one that can hear this voice. Through a series of consultations, Harold discovers that he is a character of a novel being written by a famous reclusive author, Karen Eiffel (played by Emma Thompson). More ominously, in a highly humourous scene at his usual bus stop to catch the bus home, Harold hears Karen mention his imending death. The only thing that is keeping Harold alive, however, is the fact that Karen is suffering from a bout of writer's block and does not know exactly how to "kill" Harold, a condition that her assistant Penny (played by Queen Latifah) tries to undo. Eventually, Karen finds a way to "kill Harold off" in the novel, and the race for Harold to save himself begins.

Harold successfully locates Karen, and he tries to persuade Karen not to kill him. While genuinely distraught by the discovery of her being in such control of Harold's destiny, Karen protests that she would be unable to complete what is her most brilliant work without Harold's dying. She gives a copy of the manuscript to Harold, who in turn passes it onto a literature professor Jules Hibbert (played by Dustin Hoffman), whom Harold consults throughout the film. Prof. Hibbert reads the manuscript and declares it to be so masterfully written that he tells Harold that he has to die. He then hands the manuscript to Harold, who takes a long bus trip around the city so that he could read the story from start to finish. Harold too is captivated by the story, so much so that he accepts his impending death.

The acceptance of his death transforms his life, he stops counting, breaks his routine, engages in acts of altruism (which includes fulfilling his friend's childhood desire to go to Space Camp) and also deepens his awkward relationship with a baker, Ana Pascal (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal). On the day he is destined to die, Harold goes through his day calmly and purposefully. When he arrives at his bus stop (3 minutes early, rather than on the dot), Harold sees a boy ride his bike into the path of his bus. He pushes the boy away and is hit by said bus.

However, just when we all think that at this point Harold dies (there is a scene where, almost immediately after Harold is hit by the bus, the viewer is taken to Karen Eiffel's office, where she weeps after having typed the sentence "Harold Crick was de--"), we find him waking up in a hospital bed. The viewer soon finds out that Karen had, at the last moment, changed her script entirely, so that, for the first time in her writing career, she writes a story where the protagonist does not die. The result however, is professional suicide, as she ends up writing what amounts to a mediocre tale. She is happy to live with that, however, rather than with the responsibility of sending a man to his death.

Stranger than Fiction may not be funniest comedy ever written, but it is more than made up for by its originality and intelligence, and comes highly recommended. While a great source of entertainment, Stranger than Fiction is also a great cultural resource. The movie should also bring to mind the importance of narrative to meaningfully locate the events of one's life, and indeed find meaning and purpose to life itself. Part of the widespread dissatisfaction with Modern life stems from this complete antipathy to narrative, the emptiness of which as Catherine Pickstock hints at in Liturgy, Art and Politics, can only be filled by mindless, and purposeless, mechanistic repetition. The only antidote to such mindlessness and purposelessness, would be the insertion of the events of one's life into a template of a story. More importantly, it has to be a story whose ending is known. This is an element that current manifestations of postmodern culture are loathe to concede, lest they admit into their congnitive maps the spectre of the Totalising Project, which are argued to be nothing more than instruments of cynical power projection and domination.

What current manifestations of postmodernity seem to fail to grasp is that, in the absence of an ending to the story, what actually occurs is actually a replication of the Modern process of repetition that postmodernity seeks to transcend. In the same way that Harold could only find meaning and purpose to his existence by reading the entirety of his story, the meaningful location of one's life is dependent on knowing the end to the tale. Once the end is known, the fear that makes the Harolds of this world hide in mindless repetition disappears.

Christianity has an important role to play here culturally. More than a set of ideas, the recognition of Christianity as a powerful (and Kairotically complete) story of redemption, and the discovery of one's location in that story and the direction that one's story takes, imparts to the believer a powerful and liberating potential. For when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune arrive, the fear that would make us retreat into the Modern culture of accumulation and safeguards (manifested in things like commercialism, contraception) ought to disappear in the face of a confidence in a God who throughout the course of salvation history, proved his faithfulness in transforming the many tragedies of Israel. We, the Church, the spiritual descendents of Israel, are privy not just to the fulfilment of God's promises in the past, but also to the consummation of those promises in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb that awaits those who bear those trajedies trusting in God's promises (read the Book of Revelations).

Such a realisation ought to make us as Christians more than confident in, to paraphrase Thomas Merton, staring despair in the face. At the very least, the Christian need not count the number of strokes when brushing one's teeth.

Friday, June 08, 2007

When Can Catholics End Zone Dance...Now?

There is a lot that this Author would like to say about the recent furore over accusations politicians are slinging at Archbishop Barry Hickey and Cardinal George Pell, over alleged interference with the democratic process through their notifying Catholic MPs of consequences from the Church, should they decide to support an upcoming cloning bill. That will be left for another time...

This has gone under many a radar, but on 5th May 2007, Dr. Francis Beckwith, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University and more significantly for the purposes of this wonderblog, President of the Evangelical Theological Society in the US, converted to Catholicism. Dr. Beckwith hails from Baylor University and is a regular contributor to the Right Reason blog for conservative philosophers. While most of his colleagues in the ETS have been gracious and supportive of Dr. Beckwith's decision, and his subsequent move to resign as president of the ETS, much of the commentary in response to his entry concerning his conversion have met can be best described as "uncharitable".

Be that as it may, the Church's academic scene would be very much enriched by the inclusion of a brilliant mind like Dr. Beckwith, who even in Evangelical mode, is a formidable theologian and philosopher.

But do not let this Author, with his incredibly limited knowledge on good philosophical things, sway you. Let Dr. Beckwith himself tell you his story, which is found in the Right Thinking Blog and is replicated below.

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During the last week of March 2007, after much prayer, counsel and consideration, my wife and I decided to seek full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. My wife, a baptized Presbyterian, is going through the process of the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). This will culminate with her receiving the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation. For me, because I had received the sacraments of Baptism, Communion, and Confirmation all before the age of 14, I need only go to confession, request forgiveness for my sins, ask to be received back into the Church, and receive absolution.

Given my status as president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), I decided several weeks ago--after consultation with trusted friends--to not seek absolution until my term as ETS president ended in November and then to request that the ETS nominations committee not place my name on the executive committee ballot as an at-large member. I wanted to make sure that my return to the Church brought as little attention to ETS as possible. To complicate matters, I received conflicting advice from wise friends on when and how to address the ETS executive committee on this delicate matter. Some suggested that the ETS executive committee would rather not know about my reception into the Church until after the national meeting in November. These friends recommended I lay low, give a presidential address that is irenic and does not address Protestant-Catholic issues (which I had planned on doing all along), and then quietly ask not to be nominated to the executive committee for the four-year at-large term. Other friends, equally as wise, gave conflicting advice. They opined that my withholding from the executive committee my plans to return to the Church would play to prejudices that some Protestants have about “secretive Jesuit conspiracies” and the like. They were concerned that my planned move would be inadvertently disclosed by friends before the November meeting and that the news that I had withheld information concerning my return to the Church could be perceived by many as a bad witness for the Gospel.

I did not know exactly what to do. So, I prayed and asked the Lord to provide to me clear direction. I believe I received this direction on April 20. On that Friday morning, my 16-year-old nephew, Dean Beckwith, called me and asked if I would be his sponsor when he receives the sacrament of Confirmation on May 13. I could not say “no” to my dear nephew, who has credited his renewal of his faith in Christ to our conversations and correspondence. But in order for me to do this I would have to be in full communion with the Church. So, on Saturday, April 28, 2007, I received the sacrament of Confession. The next day I was publicly received back into the Catholic Church at 11 am Mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Waco, Texas. My wife, standing beside me, was accepted as a catechumen. (A Baylor student, who I do not know, was present at the Mass and provides an account of it on her blog).

Because I can in good conscience, as a Catholic, affirm the ETS doctrinal statement, I do not intend to resign as a member of ETS. However, because I am sensitive to the fact that my status as ETS president changes the dynamic of my return to the Church, I had originally thought that it was wise for me not to step down as ETS president before my term expires in November. For, I thought that my resignation would draw needless attention to ETS. On the other hand, because I had no doubt that word of my return to the Church would disseminate quickly through private conversation and correspondence over the next six months, I suggested to the ETS executive committee that it appoint someone else on the committee to preside over the remaining meetings in both August and November. I offered to attend those meetings and contribute to them in ways to advance the good of ETS. But I also told the committee that if it did not think it was appropriate for me to attend, I would not. On the other hand, if it thought I should conduct the meetings, I would do so. Regardless, I deferred to their collective judgment on this matter. However, I also told them that I intended to remain as ETS president until my term expires in November, but not to accept a nomination for a four-year at-large appointment to the executive committee after the end of my term.

But, as many of you now realize, word of my reception into the Church was delivered, without my knowledge, to several bloggers. A tiny percentage of these bloggers have engaged in much speculation about my motives, the timing of my move, as well as my status as ETS president. Unfortunately, some of these speculations had pockets of uncharity, for they were not advanced under the assumption that I have a true love for my Evangelical brothers and that I may have had undisclosed reasons, perhaps personal and theologically delicate ones, that time and circumstance prevented me from fully conveying in one full swoop. Fortunately, the uncharitable aspects of these postings have had no impact on people of good will and devout faith, both Protestant and Catholic, who have offered their prayers, advice, and even critical comments to me in the form of private messages adorned by a love of Christ and a sincere desire to honor and respect both me and my wife. Many of these messages, especially the critical ones, have been extremely important in helping me to reassess my decision to remain as ETS president. As I have already stated, my decision was based on a cluster of goods that I thought would be best protected by my completing my tenure and then permanently moving off the executive committee. However, given the immense public attention and commentary that my reception into the Church has provoked, I no longer think that it is possible for ETS to conduct its business and its meetings in a fashion that advances the Gospel of Christ as long as I remain as its president. I now believe that my continued presence as president of ETS will serve the very harms that I had originally thought that my retention would avoid. For this reason, effective May 5, 2007, I resign as both President of the Evangelical Theological Society and a member of its executive committee.

In order to dispel any other rumors, I want to make it clear that no one on the ETS executive committee asked for me to resign. They received my letter concerning this matter during the week of April 30, and I have no doubt that they have since then discussed that epistle among themselves. As stewards of this important academic society, these men not only have the right to do this, they have the obligation. And I would have willingly and graciously resigned if they had asked me to, even if I thought that I could serve out my term with little controversy. But knowing these wonderful gentlemen, and the measured and serious way they take their responsibility, I knew they did not want to be rushed into assessing such a delicate matter. I have no doubt they have been thinking, deliberating, and praying about what to do. But given the fact that it is unlikely that I would have been elevated to the presidency of ETS by its membership if my reception into the Catholic Church had occurred prior to the time of my candidacy, I think it would have been more than reasonable for these gentlemen to ask me to step down. But they had not done so yet. Nevertheless, I am stepping down, in order to relieve them of the burden of that judgment as well as to avoid bringing scandal to either ETS or the Church.

There is a conversation in ETS that must take place, a conversation about the relationship between Evangelicalism and what is called the “Great Tradition,” a tradition from which all Christians can trace their spiritual and ecclesiastical paternity. It is a conversation that I welcome, and it is one in which I hope to be a participant. But my presence as ETS president, I have concluded, diminishes the chances of this conversation occurring. It would merely exacerbate the disunity among Christians that needs to be remedied.

The past four months have moved quickly for me and my wife. As you probably know, my work in philosophy, ethics, and theology has always been Catholic friendly, but I would have never predicted that I would return to the Church, for there seemed to me too many theological and ecclesiastical issues that appeared insurmountable. However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.

I have tremendous respect for both what ETS stands for as well as for each and every one of the members of the ETS executive committee. If not for them, their predecessors, and so many of their (and our) mentors and teachers in the Protestant Evangelical movement, my present faith would be diminished. ETS’s tenacious defense and practice of Christian orthodoxy is what has sustained and nourished so many of us who have found our way back to the Church of our youth.