Rod Dreher: March 2009 Archives

The Episcopal Divinity School has chosen its new dean, the Rev. Katherine Ragsdale. From a Ragsdale sermon:

Finally, the last sign I want to identify relates to my fellow clergy. Too often even those who support us can be heard talking about abortion as a tragedy. Let's be very clear about this:

When a woman finds herself pregnant due to violence and chooses an abortion, it is the violence that is the tragedy; the abortion is a blessing.

When a woman finds that the fetus she is carrying has anomalies incompatible with life, that it will not live and that she requires an abortion - often a late-term abortion - to protect her life, her health, or her fertility, it is the shattering of her hopes and dreams for that pregnancy that is the tragedy; the abortion is a blessing.

When a woman wants a child but can't afford one because she hasn't the education necessary for a sustainable job, or access to health care, or day care, or adequate food, it is the abysmal priorities of our nation, the lack of social supports, the absence of justice that are the tragedies; the abortion is a blessing.

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion - there is not a tragedy in sight -- only blessing. The ability to enjoy God's good gift of sexuality without compromising one's education, life's work, or ability to put to use God's gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember - abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

This woman is evil. She is an evil person who preaches evil, and is a conscious agent of the culture of death. She is the enemy. We are, of course, to love our enemies, but that doesn't make her any less the enemy. Could it possibly be more stark? Lord have mercy.

Incidentally, the LGBT caucus among the Episcopalians is over the moon.

Why would any Christian wish to be under the spiritual authority of this person, or submit to the instruction of this enemy of life, this enemy of the Gospel? Seriously, it boggles my mind. She is no Christian, not in any way I recognize. I literally pray that her ministry of death comes to nothing.

God help the poor faithful Episcopalians.

Caleb Stegall, stiffening our spines in the comboxes of this thread over at Front Porch Republic:

The sooner we are collectively disabused of the notion that all we need is more book (or 'net) larnin', the sooner we'll be off our cushion and out the door. You want to farm. Great, so farm. Start small. What you lack isn't knowledge, but skill. Go talk to some locals. I recommend the feed store as a near infinite source of local knowledge and wisdom (which, by the way, is exactly where the old timers told me what I'm telling you now). Financially, stay out of debt, don't buy stuff you don't need, and learn how to work hard.

I have no patience for those who blame the world or the age we live in or the flood of Progress for their failure to have the life they supposedly want. This victim mentality is even uglier in conservative nostalgics (and I say that as one who is intimately familiar with the emotion). It needs to be ruthlessly dealt with. The worst thing that can happen to gatherings like FPR is that they have a tendency to become a place for parlor dress-up mind games for spoiled misfits each nursing their own grievances. A kind of virtual second life for conservatives who get to imagine the world they want without engaging in any of the real work, sacrifice, pain, and suffering that is required to attain the real thing. If preventing that hurts a few feelings, so be it.

You have bootstraps. So use 'em.

It's James Kalb week here on Crunchy Con, I guess. I keep running across essays by him that are terrific. Like this one. Excerpt:

The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has reached its attainable goals. While no one admits it, what we see around us is the victory of the Revolution.

Politics today is radically secularist and antiparticularist. It aims to dissolve what is left of traditional society and construct a universal form of human association that will constitute a technically rational system for the equal satisfaction of desire. Religion is to be banished from public life, ethnic and gender distinctions abolished, and a worldwide order established, based on world markets and trans-national bureaucracies, that is to override local differences in the name of human rights, international economic development, and collective security.

Contemporary liberalism expresses and supports that new order. Not all members of our ruling elites adhere to liberalism, and it draws support from outsiders as well. However, our elites determine its content, and it promotes their interests. It sets the terms of discussion, defines what is considered progress, and establishes the general principles of cooperation upon which our elites base their claim to rule.

Supporters of the new order see it as historically and morally necessary, and thus as compulsory regardless of established views and habits. Since modern governments claim to base themselves on consent, the public must be brought to accept it. Managing opinion and keeping perspectives that oppose fundamental public policies out of mainstream discussion have therefore become basic to statecraft.

Genuine opposition comes not from the left but from reactionary and restorationist groups that exclude themselves from respectable politics by rejecting liberalism and the left. Today's dissidents are particularist -- traditionalist, fundamentalist, populist, or nationalist. Beyond that, they are antisecularist and antihedonist. They reject a system of politics that bases social order on human desire, because they reject the view that lies behind it, that men make morality for their own purposes.

Today all things are justified on the grounds that they help men get what they want. Those who recognize an authority superior to human purposes are seen as dangerous bigots who want to oppress others in the name of some sect or arbitrary principle. As a consequence, fundamental political discussion no longer exists. Politics today is divided between an outlook that presents itself as rational and this-worldly, and absolutely dominates public discussion, and a variety of dissident views that speak for goods higher than human desire but are unable to make effective their substantial underlying support. The conflict is never discussed seriously since it is considered resolved; the ruling liberal view is accepted as indisputable, while dissent is considered confused or worse.

The dominant outlook believes itself peculiarly tolerant and all-inclusive. It is not. The error results from a misconception of politics and morality that is essential to liberalism. Liberalism claims to leave religious and moral issues, at least those it identifies as personal, to individual judgment. The theoretical ground for doing so is neutrality as to ultimate commitments. As the Supreme Court has put the matter, "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992, 505 U.S. 833, 851.

Read the whole thing. Interestingly, earlier today I was working on my column for this Sunday, and I cited that same Anthony Kennedy quote as the summation of contemporary liberalism. Of course, if we really lived like that, we'd have anarchy. We don't have anarchy. The system, then, manipulates that false neutrality toward liberal policy goals. Read your Kalb.

A message from the prior of Clear Creek Monastery, a Benedictine abbey in Oklahoma. Excerpt:

What does the great monastic tradition issuing from Saint Benedict have to say about this essential relationship with creation?

In fact, for men and women living in Saint Benedict's day, the question would have had little meaning. The vast majority of human beings lived in rural areas then, and for them life was intimately and necessarily connected to the rhythm of nature. The day's activities were programmed according to the hours of sunlight. The year was punctuated by the various seasons in which planting, harvesting and every important task found its appointed time. In such a world, excepting the case of a few very rich people in large cities, it was scarcely possible to become disconnected from the rhythm of creation.

Nonetheless there is much in the wisdom of Saint Benedict that speaks to our present needs in terms of returning to a wiser way of life, a life closer to the land.

One of the pillars of the Rule is evangelical poverty. There would be neither an economic crisis in the world today, nor an ecological threat, were it not for the evil done by greed. Monastic poverty means being content with the simple things that sustain human existence in its inherent goodness. This poverty allows man to live in harmony with field and forest, without feeling the need brutally to strip the earth of her resources in order to realize an immediate gain. Although the economic reality in America has become increasingly complex in our day, it is still possible to recapture this joyous sort of poverty. We are not speaking of the tragic misery of the desperately poor, but of an attitude rooted in the Christian faith. E.F. Schumacher's Small Is
Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (first published in 1973) offers insights that seem more timely than ever. Another important work, Flee To The Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, with a preface by Hilaire Belloc, charts a way forward in terms of an explicitly Catholic perspective.

Read the whole thing.

I e-mailed Jim Kalb, author of "The Tyranny of Liberalism," to ask him how traditionalist conservatives should debate gay marriage. Here is his answer:

Convinced gay-marriage proponents are likely to stay that way.
It's like trying to argue a convert out of his new religion. The best you can do is give arguments that might affect a reader who's undecided.

The question wouldn't come up at all unless people were confused about what human life is about, so the arguments have to go pretty deep.

That means we aren't likely to make converts fast. But we can raise issues and open doors, and if what we say answers to how people see life then in the long run it can transform things.

The basic point is that life isn't technological. It's not a matter of this cause and that effect that we can rejigger however we want.

It's much more a matter of ingrained and even innate patterns that make us what we are and define how we understand our connections to others.

Those patterns aren't totally fixed. Private property is a basic pattern, but it comes in different forms that vary from time to time.

Nonetheless, what it is and how it works can only be changed up to a point. If you try to do away with it altogether you'll have problems.

The question as to "gay marriage" is how all this works for patterns that have to do with sex and family life--man, woman, marriage, family, sex, chastity, and so on.

Those patterns are utterly basic, at least in their general form. That should be obvious. In all times and places myth, story, custom and law have treated the connection between man and woman as absolutely fundamental, something to be desired, fostered, shaped, honored and guarded. Sexual complementarity is so basic it's even reflected in the grammar of languages, in the form of grammatical gender.

Marriage is the relationship that gives order and form to sex and its natural procreative function. As such it's enormously important. If you can redefine it so that the sex of the parties has nothing to do with it, then you can redefine anything in human life any way you want. Man becomes the artifact of whoever is in power.

He's not, though, and we shouldn't try to make him so. We won't succeed, and we'll only disrupt the patterns that enable him to live decently.