August 2009 Archives

Yesterday the Dallas Morning News ran the first part of an absolutely heartbreaking story about a North Texas couple and their terminally ill unborn child. Deidrea and T.K. Laux discovered that their son had a catastrophic genetic defect, one that little Thomas would likely survive only a few hours, if he survived the birth at all. With the help and support of prenatal hospice nurses (!) and their church community, decided to continue with the pregnancy. Excerpt:

Deidrea and T.K. stared out at the cavernous, packed sanctuary of Bent Tree Bible Fellowship.

Pastor Pete Briscoe told the congregation that the Lauxes were newlyweds, married 10 months earlier.

On this first Sunday in May, they wanted to dedicate their unborn son to God.

In a shaky voice, Deidrea described the bleak February day that she and T.K. learned of Thomas' condition. Feeling her son's movements in the long night that followed, she knew that God was with them and they wouldn't be alone.

When she explained Thomas' diagnosis to her fifth-grade Bible study group, the girls asked if it was OK to pray for a miracle.

"The miracles have been happening every day," Deidrea told the congregation, "when we feel our son moving and he's growing."

The Lauxes understood that their sadness and joy were inseparable, and they could choose to celebrate every moment they had with their son.

Every morning, T.K. brought his wife breakfast in bed and nestled near her belly for father-son talks. He imagined aloud that Thomas was scuba diving, four-wheeling, playing soccer. Thomas kicked and spun at the sound of T.K.'s voice, clearly alive - here and now.

"We're so grateful that God chose us to be his parents, because he is such a special little boy," Deidrea told the congregation as T.K. nodded beside her. "We're telling God, 'Thank you - thank you for this gift.' "

Here is a video presentation of the story, which I strongly urge you to watch. But prepare yourself -- the emotions are powerful here. Indeed, I couldn't get through the whole thing, it was that intense. The courage of the Lauxs is breathtaking, and their love for their little boy -- whose birth you see in this film -- is so strong you almost want to turn away from it.

There is nothing quite like watching an expectant mother and father shopping for their baby's casket. At the end of the video, Deidrea says, "We didn't terminate because ... there was going to be some sort of a medical miracle. We didn't terminate because he's our son."

There are no words to describe the moral heroism of these people.

UPDATE: I finally brought myself to watch the entire Choosing Thomas video. It is excruciating. It is also one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Please watch it, and share it with your friends. I was moved to change the title of this blog post. This family lived a crucifixion, chose a crucifixion -- and because of that sorrow, knew a finer joy.

Sharon Astyk has been ruminating over the school textbooks her New England ancestors used, and what lessons they have for us today. Excerpt:

Except, that it didn't get them nothing - the benefits were not remunerative, but communal. They were competent citizens. Quoting Virgil may have been of no actual use to a farmwife in rural Maine except this - that she knew she could, that she could teach Latin to her children were she to go west, far from schools, that she would have in her head forever the story of the founding of Rome, alongside Emerson on "Compensation," "Barbara Freitchie" and the history of the rulers of England. We can quibble with what she knew - suggest that the history she learned might have better included different stories, that there are better poems. She would live her life in a community that had, if it had nothing else, a library, able to read fluently and enjoy when she had a few minutes alone. What we cannot argue with, I think is the value that communities found in education in these times was that education had value for its own sake, in creating educated citizens.

Despite the fact that that education cost people something, they went on providing it, because it was right, because farmwives who read poetry and fishermen who knew algebra made farmwives who wrote letters to the editor and gathered for literary gatherings and community theatricals, and fishermen who recited poetry to themselves as they drew in their lines, recited them to their children at bedtime, and stood for town council at the end of the day. We should not over-romanticize the role of education in ordinary, work-filled daily lives. Nor, however, should we understate how remarkable it was.

More:

At the lower levels, the emphasis is still on the economic value of education - but we are assured at every step that free public education has no value - you *must* go on to community college, to college, to graduate school, often at stunning cost (and the not-stunning costs are rising, as states cut subsidies to education). You must do these things because a free education cannot get you a job - simply having a high school degree is nothing. And we are so caught up in the economic value of education - and in the necessity of training students for higher education or blue-collar slavery, that we've entirely forgotten the value of education outside the economy - of education as a way of making people.

This old-fashioned value, as arcane as my great-grandfather's school books, however, will be back. Because if we have to live locally again, live mostly with the people around us, education for citizenship, for self-improvement, so you have some poems and stories and ideas in your head, so you can talk to others, argue, write a letter, stand for council or congress, or even simply build a barn, this is what school should teach us - and why it will persist.

I can't possibly do justice to her essay by quoting or summarizing it here, so please read the whole thing. Earlier today, I was having a gloomy conversation with a journalist colleague -- and all our conversations are gloomy these days -- about the future of our vocation, and he said it has occurred to him recently what a luxury it is that he's been able to build a career on what is essentially a life of the mind, lived out not in academia, but in the world of newspapers. And now that is disappearing, and all the moaning in the world won't bring it back. Yet his words made me think about what a difference the daily newspaper made to me growing up in the rural Deep South, in bringing me a perspective on the world outside of our country road. I think of sitting on the red leather couch next to my Aunt Lois, in her cabin, reading with her a headline with the exotic words "Kissinger" and "Moscow" in newsprint. Tell me what's happening, I'd ask, and she would. That news was of absolutely no practical use to anybody in Starhill, Louisiana. But it was so important all the same. When Aunt Hilda and Aunt Lois told stories about how they'd served as Red Cross nurses near the front in the Great War, I understood, even as a small boy, how the world's sorrows and travails could touch us, too. So the newspaper, and the education it provided through the men and women who worked for it, proved critical for the making of its careful readers' perspectives.

And now what? Well, we'll see. Anyway, on the education front, Tony Esolen comes at the problem of contemporary education from a different angle than Sharon, but arrives at a similar conclusion, though I'm sure Sharon would greatly disagree with what Tony is after here. In this post, Tony more or less answers a Christian friend who believes the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but has his kids in the local public school, not because he has much confidence in it, but because he believes homeschooling isn't tenable; besides, he believes that as long as he keeps his kids away from the Bad Stuff, all will be well. Tony begs to differ:

But that is just the negative side of the question -- protecting your children from mayhem. What I did not have time to say to my millenarian (but I hope soon to have the opportunity) is that we Christians are trading a great birthright for a mess of rather lousy soup. For the students are not getting much of an education, even of a non-Christian or anti-Christian variety. They miss the vast literary, philosophical, and artistic achievements of the Christian civilization that was; they (except for, in some places, the very few smartest of the students) will not read Milton, they will not listen to Bach, they will not study the paintings of Caravaggio, they will not pore over the battle plans of George Washington (not that Washington was a great tactician; he was a great leader of men). They will, to boot, miss the great achievements of the Greek and Roman cultures that, in some ways anyhow, were a preamble to the faith that took the west by storm. They are not reading Sophocles, they are not discussing the dialogues of Plato, they are not reciting the invectives of Cicero.

Look, it is one thing to put a clothespin on your nose and stride into the school, knowing that you will find much filth, but also knowing that eventually you will be able to scan a line of Shakespeare, find the area under a polynomial curve, tell who Catiline was, and explain why Oedipus at Colonus is a great play. But your children will, in all likelihood, be able to do none of those things, nor even diagram a sentence like the one you are reading. The schools (with some exceptions) aren't giving students an antichristian education. They are giving them antichristian pablum, and no education to speak of at all.

So, do we need that engraved dismissal? If even a third of Christian parents pulled their students out of the schools, imagine the effects of that, after a single generation.

From yesterday's Fox News Channel interview with Dick Cheney:

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you've heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.

It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

Think about that. The man who was vice president of the United States is saying that he is untroubled by lawbreaking -- even beyond the permissive rules on harsh interrogation his own administration laid down -- because the lawbreaking was, in his judgment, effective.

The ends, in other words, justify the means. Where do you suppose it would stop with Cheney? What if instead of threatening to rape a detainee's mother, our agents had actually done so in front of him. Would that have been okay with Cheney? Would that have been okay with Bush?

If the United States is governed by men with contempt for the rule of law, and who do not feel bound by the rule of law, we are well on the road to tyranny, and in an important sense are already there. We know about Cheney's view of the powerful executive. It would be interesting to know what he would be prepared to support in terms of the president violating the law with respect to anti-terror operations on US soil.

That's the title of a 1989 Atlantic Monthly essay by the political scientist Glenn Tinder -- a piece one of this blog's readers recommended in a combox thread below. Many thanks to the reader -- I'd forgotten about this piece, which really does have a lot to recommend it. Here's how it begins:

We are so used to thinking of spirituality as withdrawal from the world and human affairs that it is hard to think of it as political. Spirituality is personal and private, we assume, while politics is public. But such a dichotomy drastically diminishes spirituality construing it as a relationship to God without implications for one's relationship to the surrounding world. The God of Christian faith (I shall focus on Christianity although the God of the New Testament is also the God of the Old Testament) created the world and is deeply engaged in the affairs of the world. The notion that we can be related to God and not to the world--that we can practice a spirituality that is not political--is in conflict with the Christian understanding of God. And if spirituality is properly political, the converse also is true, however distant it may be from prevailing assumptions: politics is properly spiritual. The spirituality of politics was affirmed by Plato at the very beginnings of Western political philosophy and was a commonplace of medieval political thought. Only in modern times has it come to be taken for granted that politics is entirely secular. The inevitable result is the demoralization of politics. Politics loses its moral structure and purpose, and turns into an affair of group interest and personal ambition. Government comes to the aid of only the well organized and influential, and it is limited only where it is checked by countervailing forces. Politics ceases to be understood as a pre-eminently human activity and is left to those who find it profitable, pleasurable, or in some other way useful to themselves. Political action thus comes to be carried out purely for the sake of power and privilege.

It will be my purpose in this essay to try to connect the severed realms of the spiritual and the political. In view of the fervent secularism of many Americans today, some will assume this to be the opening salvo of a fundamentalist attack on "pluralism." Ironically, as I will argue, many of the undoubted virtues of pluralism--respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings, to cite just two--have strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity. The question that secularists have to answer is whether these values can survive without these particular roots. In short, can we be good without God? Can we affirm the dignity and equality of individual persons--values we ordinarily regard as secular--without giving them transcendental backing? Today these values are honored more in the breach than in the observance; Manhattan Island alone, with its extremes of sybaritic wealth on the one hand and Calcuttan poverty on the other, is testimony to how little equality really counts for in contemporary America. To renew these indispensable values, I shall argue, we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.

More:

The most adamant opposition to my argument is likely to come from protagonists of secular reason--a cause represented preeminently by the Enlightenment. Locke and Jefferson, it will be asserted, not Jesus and Paul, created our moral universe. Here I cannot be as disarming as I hope I was in the paragraph above, for underlying my argument is the conviction that Enlightenment rationalism is not nearly so constructive as is often supposed. Granted, it has sometimes played a constructive role. It has translated certain Christian values into secular terms and, in an age becoming increasingly secular, has given them political force. It is doubtful, however, that it could have created those values or that it can provide them with adequate metaphysical foundations. Hence if Christianity declines and dies in coming decades, our moral universe and also the relatively humane political universe that it supports will be in peril. But I recognize that if secular rationalism is far more dependent on Christianity than its protagonists realize, the converse also is in some sense true. The Enlightenment carried into action political ideals that Christians, in contravention of their own basic faith, often shamefully neglected or denied. Further, when I acknowledged that there are respectable grounds for disagreeing with my argument, I had secular rationalism particularly in mind. The foundations of political decency are an issue I wish to raise, not settle.

In the essay, Tinder argues at one point that Christianity shares with conservatism an appreciation for human evil, but that Christians are far more sensitive to it. And Christians, in his view, can't be real conservatives, as that term is understood, because they are suspicious of institutions and social arrangements that typically attract the admiration of conservatives, or at least aren't protested by them. He says that a Christian who is a thorough supporter of capitalism either doesn't understand capitalism, or doesn't understand Christianity. He concludes that men being what they are, though, if we don't have God, or a meaningful allegiance to a metaphysical reality transcending our own preferences, we will find it difficult to do what needs to be done politically, to right wrongs and stand up to evil, and risk giving ourselves over to a politicized heresy like fascism, or to the despair and Epicurean decadence of the consumer society.

Very good column by Ross Douthat today, comparing Eunice Kennedy Shriver's public legacy with her late brother's. The great difference between the two? Abortion. Eunice Kennedy Shriver was a pro-life liberal, and saw no difference between advocating for the poor and the weak, and the unborn. Ted used to agree, but, as they say, "grew in office" when the cultural winds shifted. Excerpt:

For abortion opponents, cruel ironies abounded in this sibling disagreement. Because of Eunice Shriver's work with the developmentally disabled, a group of Americans who had once been marginalized and hidden away -- or lobotomized, like her sister Rosemary -- was ushered closer to full participation in ordinary human life. But because of laws that her brother unstintingly supported, that same group was ushered out again: the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.

In 1992, Eunice participated in the last significant effort to push the Democratic Party away from abortion on demand, petitioning her party's convention to consider "a new understanding" of the issue, "one that does not pit mother against child," but instead seeks "policies that responsibly protect and advance the interest of mothers and their children, both before and after birth." That same summer, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court upheld a near-absolute right to terminate a pregnancy -- a decision made possible by her brother's demagogic assault on Robert Bork five years earlier, which helped doom Bork's nomination to the court.