Rod Dreher's Blog, page 497

Knots And Reparations

Yesterday I posted a notice about an upcoming UCLA academic conference that is going to focus on how to start talking about “reparations” for historical wrongs against gays, women, and other “marginalized subjectivities”. You know how that goes. A reader writes:

Regarding your post today on the “gender reparations” conference, I have to wonder how Ta-Nehisi Coates would feel about this. In June 2014, Coates wrote his Atlantic piece “The Case for Reparations”, which regardless of your political viewpoint or your attitude toward Coates, deserves discussion on the intellectual merits. I believe that he does indeed make a compelling argument regarding the role of the federal government in forced segregation and exploitation of African Americans, more recently by redlining policies in housing, but older policies as well, going all the way back to slavery. He makes a case that, as the federal government doled out reparations to the Japanese who were interned during WWII under the auspices of Washington, African Americans ought to be entitled to reparations from the government for exploitative federal policies. An important thing to note about his argument is that he focuses on tangible, specific wrongs – policies adopted by the federal government impacting individuals, though at a nationwide scale. Thus he makes the case for federal reparations, as opposed to an “individual reparations account.”

I don’t think you have to agree with Coates to realize that, given this history of slavery and segregation in our country, discussing reparations for the African American community is at least a legitimate political discussion. But what about reparations for transgendered people? As you laugh at this upcoming conference, I can’t help but think that this sort of thing is in danger of making a mockery of the whole notion of reparations. I mean, I can understand a federal commission for distributing reparations to the descendents of slaves and African Americans who have been negatively affected by a host of federal policies. Can you imagine how reparations for transgendered people would be carried out? Every April the number of transgendered people in the country would spike as everyone checks off the “transgendered reparations credit” box on their tax returns. And how to audit them or tell them that they weren’t “feeling trans” on tax day?

Now, granted, I have no idea what these people are talking about or proposing at their conference, but given the “fluidity” of gender identity as opposed to something fixed like ancestry, it seems to me that dragging gender into the reparations discussion, rather than make people take gender seriously, will turn reparations into a meaningless farce. Which is really too bad, since I do think that the history of slavery and Jim Crow and federal housing policies warrants a serious discussion of reparations.

I appreciate the letter. I did read Coates’s long piece last year, and while I was not convinced that reparations would be feasible (politically or otherwise), or even just at this point in American history, there can be no doubt that what people of African descent in this country suffered individually and collectively as a result of slavery, as well as subsequent racist laws and practices, cannot be compared to anything suffered by any other group in this country, with the possible exception of Native Americans. The reader is right: this conference renders the whole notion of reparations comical beyond redemption. Trans on tax day! Hilarious.

In all candor, the reparations discussion on race alone is never going to be taken seriously by the general public, though. What I’m more concerned about is the increasing impossibility of talking across racial and political lines about race, period. Take a look at this NPR commentary  from earlier this week, written by a black man named Gene Demby. The headline: “A Discomfiting Question: Was The Chicago Torture Case Racism?” Excerpts:

Whatever the reasons for the kidnapping, his captors cursed his whiteness. The legal specifics of the charges probably matter less than the message they send: Weren’t these kidnappers clearly racist? Didn’t they deserve the vilification that came with that description?

In conversations about this case with friends and colleagues of color, I noticed that folks were straining mightily to avoid using the word racism, as if saying it might be an admission of something. I was squirming right along with them, and it took me awhile to figure out why.

In some ways, this case being called a “hate crime,” while a legal designation, might give people a rhetorical reprieve, as it allows us to talk about bias and violence without having to fight over the definition of racism.

It reminded me of something Phillip Atiba Goff, who runs the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College, told me a few weeks ago. “One of the most important achievements of the Civil Rights Movement was to take the authority over moral character away from white men,” Goff told me. “There’s no credential that [restores it] — having a black friend or relative is not sufficient.”

Before then, white people were the only ones who could define what was righteous and correct — often at the expense of the rights and safety of black Americans. Goff said that the casting of racism as an evil worthy of condemnation made all the ways white people expressed their bigotry taboo. Those taboos are, in part, what people are referring to when they rail against political correctness. And while those new constraints certainly didn’t end racism, they suppressed behaviors that created space for people of color to live more fully in America.

And that, to me, seems a big part of what we’re really discussing in stories like the one in Chicago, and what makes these conversations (and writing this) so discomfiting. In calling the kidnapping and assault racism, we’re staking claim to moral language — and uniquely powerful moral language — to which white people can’t easily lay claim, even in cases like the one in Chicago, which seems to qualify for the most vehement reproach available.

More:

And it’s why, I suspect, the folks of color I talked to seemed so visibly uncomfortable. Calling what happened in Chicago racism seems to cede at least some of that moral authority to the many people who we suspect are engaging in conversations about race and racism in bad faith; people who want to push the conversation in the direction of a false, ahistorical equanimity.

Is racism as expressed by centuries of white torture and discrimination the same as the racism of the four black people in Chicago? It’s a distasteful comparison. It’s as if you’re downplaying the misery of the young man in the video by reducing this conversation to semantics.

But consider what’s already happening with folks from the right-wing Internet, where people are holding up the Chicago case as the handiwork of black activist groups like Black Lives Matter (despite the complete lack of evidence that anyone involved in the kidnapping has ties to the organization). It seems that the people who have embraced this ridiculous claim — the hashtag #BLMkidnapping was used hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter — want to prove some kind of symmetry in American racism. One way to argue that the evil of racism is not uniquely wedded to whiteness is to argue that it is a moral failing that lives equally in blackness.

One way to argue that the evil of racism is not uniquely wedded to whiteness is to argue that it is a moral failing that lives equally in blackness.

It’s a notion that seems to be gaining traction even outside the fever swamps. Last year, two professors wrote in the Washington Post about their research showing that white Americans think anti-white bias has been on the rise in recent decades, and that it now constitutes a bigger problem in the country than anti-black bias.

Read the whole thing.  I do find this as fascinating as I do frustrating: the idea that someone can watch that torture video, with its constant anti-white racial slurs, and struggle to call it racism? Really? Gene Demby loses me completely here. What it says to me is that he and those he talks to are willing to employ a double standard based on race, giving. I think that Demby, intentionally or not, puts his finger on why so many whites believe that engaging in a cross-racial dialogue about racism is largely pointless: because some black people are so wedded to the idea that they are somehow protected from the sin of racism. As if admitting that basic human truth — that every single one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and that there are no sinful behaviors that any of us are prevented by virtue of our race, our gender, our religion, or anything else, from falling captive to — would be in some sense to hand white racists a victory.

If Demby and his black friends can look at that Chicago video and struggle to call it “racism,” then that inability compromises any dialogue on racism they might have with whites. I don’t blame them for worrying that whites who don’t actually want to confront the realities of history and anti-black racism in this country would look at the Chicago video and say, “See, black people can be racist too, therefore we’re even.” The “therefore” in that sentence is where the lie is, and Demby is right to be vigilant against any attempt to rewrite history.

On the other hand, the idea that racism is not a moral failing that black people have too, like white people and every other people on the planet, is not true. Black people can be racist because they are fully human, and like all humans, can be guilty of every sin imaginable. It is true that racism in the heart of a person or class of persons who hold power is more dangerous socially than in the hearts of the powerless, but to deny that it is toxic, period, is to deny the truth. When those who have been oppressed come to power, they face the very same temptation to mistreat those who are weaker and more vulnerable. It’s human nature. Over the years, I’ve had conversations with white teachers who teach in public schools that are predominantly (even 100 percent) minority, and whose administrations are 100 percent black. They report casual racism as part of their daily experience there. In one case, a teacher told me that the principal brought in a motivational speaker who stood in the school gym and told the gathered student body (100 percent black) that white teachers should not be trusted. The teacher told me that the white teachers on faculty looked at each other as if to say, “What are we supposed to do now?”

It happens. Again, it happens because the human heart is corrupt. Every one of us has to fight all the time to refuse to hate the Other, especially when the Other deserves it. What is the alternative?

I go back to Dante’s Purgatorio, to the terrace of Wrath, where, the poet tells us, those who struggled with anger go to have that knot undone. Dante depicts sin, and the tendency to sin, as knots that bind us and keep us from proceeding to full union with God, who is all-holy, and all-pure. The terrace of Wrath is a place filled with blinding smoke; this is meant to highlight how anger impairs our vision. There, the pilgrim Dante meets a sinner named Marco the Lombard, who is there to have his weakness for anger unknotted so he can keep moving towards God.

The smoke is so blinding that they cannot lay eyes on each other, even though they are standing face to face. Marco says to Dante:

“I’ll follow you as far as I’m allowed,”

he answered, “and if smoke won’t let us see,

hearing will serve instead to keep us linked.”

 

In the Inferno, the damned are absolute prisoners of their sin, for all eternity. One consequence of this is that there is no possibility for human contact or solidarity in any form. In Purgatorio, though, everyone has been saved by the grace of God, because at some point before death, they repented of their sins and begged for God’s mercy. They are not being punished in Purgatorio for their sins, which have been forgiven, but rather being purified so they can be strong enough to bear the glory of God. (If you’ve read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, you know how this works.)

Anyway, one thing you notice about the pilgrim Dante’s journey through Purgatorio is that at every turn, the penitents are helping each other bear their mutual burden. Community, which has been compromised by sin, is being restored through humble repentance. Notice in Marco’s lines above, he concedes the reality that because of sin, they cannot look into each other’s eyes, but at least they can listen to each other.

Dante says to Marco:

The world indeed has been stripped utterly

of every virtue; as you said to me,

it cloaks — and is cloaked by — perversity.

Some place the cause in heaven, some, below;

but I beseech you to define the cause,

that, seeing it, I may show it to others.”

Some background: the pilgrim Dante has come from a world — Tuscany — that has become more or less a war of all against all. Faction fights faction, family fights family, families fight within themselves, the Church is caught up in these petty wars, and so on. This really happened. The poet Dante was exiled from his city, Florence, because of this fighting, and told that if he returned, they would kill him. He wrote the Commedia in part to answer the question, “What happened to me? What happened to us? Why did it happen? How can things be made right again?”

So what the pilgrim Dante (meaning the character in the poet Dante’s verse) is asking Marco is this: “The world I come from is a mess. We’re all at each other’s throats. Some say that our fate is written in the stars, and we can’t help ourselves. Others say that this is our own fault. Tell us what’s really happening, so I can go back and tell the others.”

(Note especially that Dante asks Marco to speak words to him that will allow him to see the truth. Interesting how hearing can bring insight capable of dispelling the smoke of wrath.)

Marco responds:

A sigh, from which his sorrow formed an “Oh,”

was his beginning; then he answered: “Brother,

the world is blind, and you come from the world.

You living ones continue to assign

to heaven every cause, as if it were

the necessary source of every motion.

If this were so, then your free will would be

destroyed, and there would be no equity

in joy for doing good, in grief for evil.

The heavens set your appetites in motion –

not all your appetites, but even if

that were the case, you have received both light

on good and evil, and free will, which though

it struggle in its first wars with the heavens,

then conquers all, if it has been well nurtured.

On greater power and a better nature

you, who are free, depend; that Force engenders

the mind in you, outside the heavens’ sway.

Thus, if the present world has gone astray,

in you is the cause, in you it’s to be sought…

Marco is speaking specifically to the medieval belief in astrology, which said that the motions of the stars directed human affairs. It’s not true, says Marco. “The heavens set your appetites in motion,” he says, which, in a modern interpretation, could be said to mean, “Your passions are natural, and you have come into a world that conditions you to use them in certain ways.”

But, he goes on, being human, you have the God-given gift of free will, and you also have the God-given gift of knowing right from wrong. We are not animals, slaves to our instincts. True, your free will struggles against the forces of nature, including the passions, but if you feed your soul with the grace of God, and refuse to be conquered by those passions, God will untie the knot that binds you to them, and you will be free.

“In you is the cause” of all the world’s brokenness, says Marco, who goes on to say that the problems of the world come from “misrule” — that is, people choosing evil over good, and disorder over right order.

What’s especially interesting to me about Marco’s words to Dante is his use of “you” and “your”. Marco is speaking of humanity in general, but he is also speaking to Dante, man to man. The lesson I take from this episode is the one the Fathers of the Church teach: if you want to dispel evil and injustice, and work for true peace and true justice, start with your own heart, because “in you is the cause.”

At the beginning of Dante’s pilgrimage up the holy mountain, he learns that he can make no progress in the spiritual life without humility, symbolized by a reed. That is to say, he must recognize that without God’s grace, he is powerless before his sins. In the Inferno he learned that pride is the root of all sin; therefore its antidote, humility, is the basis for its eradication. In the divine economy of this poem (and of the Catholic Church), the only thing a poor sinner can do is to ask God for mercy, and to labor ascetically in prayer, fasting, and repentance, so that the purifying grace of God can enter in to heal and restore the soul.

What does any of this have to do with race and racism in America? This, I believe.

We are all of us Americans — black, white, and all the rest — thrown into a situation none of us chose. We inherited the good and the bad, all consequences of an infinite number of choices made before we were born — choices made by sinners, just like us. The consequences of these choices are knots tying us to the fallen world we did not make. They are knots tying some of us to the arrogance of unearned privilege, and to indifference to the pain of others. They are knots tying others to anger at injustice, or what they perceive is injustice. They are knots tying still others to resentment that they are blamed for things they did not do, and would even have seen undone, could they go back in time. And on and on and on, in a chain of causality stretching back to the Garden of Eden.

Do we want to be set free? Do we want to be healed? We cannot reverse history, but we can free ourselves from the knots that hold us bound — or, to be precise, we can allow the Holy Spirit to do that for us. Forgiveness is the only way. As I wrote in my book How Dante Can Save Your Life, I struggled greatly with my own anger at the unjust way my father treated me. Forgive me for getting preachy here, but through reading Dante, God unmasked how I had unwittingly allowed that traumatic relationship from childhood to define my entire world, even warping my relationship with God the Father. Repenting of that was only the start of healing within me. I still had to fight against the deep anger I had inside over that injustice, which had put an enormous burden on me, including chronic physical illness.

And I was doing this in real time. My dad was still alive then, and in his pride, completely unwilling to consider that he had done anything wrong. He preferred to think of himself as blameless, no matter what — and this only deepened my anger. And not only anger: when I was especially sick, I would be flattened on my bed with weakness, and allow my heart to fill with envy at my dad and the others in my family who rejected me. How can they live in peace, thinking that they have done no wrong, when I suffer from the unjust way they treat me? I thought.

That is envy, and it is a sin. I envied all of them their untroubled hearts. And my anger fed on my envy, all of which fed on an actual injustice. I would talk to my dad about this — my father, who could see that I was sick, and who knew (because the doctor had said so) that the physical illness came from unresolved stress between us — but my dad would not hear me. It was tearing me up.

Here, from my book, is what Dante made me see:

… that people do not confront when they make themselves manifest. Later, I went to confession with my priest, Father Matthew (who, as is customary with Orthodox priests, addressed me by my confirmation name, Benedict). I confessed my own envy and anger to him. He asked me, “What do you want?” And I said:

Which is what Dante taught me I had to do if I wanted to be free of this curse. Reading Gene Demby talking about how he and his friends couldn’t call what was plainly racism “racism” because they feared it would give white people a sense of being free from judgment — well, I heard myself standing in the confessional, raging against the unjust indifference of my family to my own pain and rejection. It wasn’t just about me; this  rejection that, in truth, was tearing our entire family apart, though they couldn’t see it.

I didn’t have it within me to overcome this anger. Only the Holy Spirit could do it within me. By refusing any expectation of justice, and by choosing love over justice, I could be free from this knot that kept me bound to wrath and envy. There was no other way. And, truth to tell, I was not a complete innocent at all. I knew the hurt I had caused them in the past. I didn’t mean to do it, but I had done it. Besides, Father Matthew had sternly reminded me that Jesus Christ forgave me though there was no way I could possibly undo the sins I had committed. He forgave because He loved me more than He loved justice. This is the meaning of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. As a Christian, I benefited from the loving forgiveness of God; I had no right to withhold it to others.

It just about killed me to humble myself enough to let that injustice go. And the force of my own victimhood — which, again, was based in an actual injustice — was immense:

Here’s what you don’t see in the Dante book, because the narrative in the text ended before my father died. Later in the spring — on Good Friday 2015, in fact — my dad apologized to me for the way he had treated me. It was a moment of intense power and grace, and reconciliation. That did not make everything perfect between us, but it unknotted me inside, such that I was able to spend the last week of his life with him, in home hospice care, living by his side, caring for him, giving him his medication, reading to him, rubbing his feet with lotion, and, when the moment came, holding his hand as he slipped into eternity.

We won. I didn’t win; we won. My dad was the way he was in part because he carried with him the burden of injustice wrought against him by others in his family, and by the world. Methodists don’t have a rite of confession, but he nevertheless called for a pastor days before he died, and made a private confession. He allowed the Holy Spirit to untie that knot.

That’s the best any of us can hope for in this life. So, to return to the original topic, the reader is correct that to bring in ridiculous talk of reparations for injustices, real or alleged, against women, transgenders, and the like, devalues talk of reparations for African-Americans. But it is also true that focusing on monetary reparations is to be in thrall to a false idol. No amount of money in the world can make up for the crime of slavery. No amount of money in the world can make up for the thousand million smaller crimes and sins committed by fallen men and women, because of racism. No amount of money in the world can cleanse those sins away, or remove their effects from the descendants of those sinned against.

And no crimes, no matter how terrible, makes any one of us innocent of sin before God, or incapable of sinning against others as we ourselves were sinned against.

That is the human condition. We will only loose the knots that bind us to our history of cruelty and the cycle of injustice through love. What that means practically, I don’t know. But I believe the church, and only the church, can be the agency of true racial reconciliation and peace. Talk about “reparations” that excludes what the Bible tells us about sin and justice is in vain.

At Home In Scrutopia

Reader Dave sends this idyllic 45-minute Belgian TV documentary in which a journalist visits Roger Scruton at his English country farm. The reader says:

At age 72, Scruton reflects on the sacred nature of his land and its inhabitants, and the fragility of its ecosystem, also discussing man’s inherent aestheticism – that arranging and rearranging of things we do to find the inner purpose and beauty of said things. With his own mortality in view, Scruton, whether feeding the fish in his pond or playing the organ in the small local church, exudes a meditative relationship to his surroundings, one expressed in quietude and with a profound thankfulness.

Dave is right. This documentary is meditative. I didn’t want it to end. You may not have the opportunity to watch it during the workday, but do make a point of seeing it tonight, if you can. Roger Scruton has created my idea of paradise, or as close as we can get to it in this world.

And by the way, if you don’t have summer plans, please do consider this:

Scrutopia Summer School 30 July – 8 August

The study group would provide a ten day immersion experience in the philosophy and outlook of Sir Roger Scruton, the British writer and philosopher who has inspired many searching people to believe in Western civilisation and its legacy. Sir Roger will lead the course of study, which will take place in and around his house near historic Malmesbury in the Cotswolds.

Residents would be housed in the Royal Agricultural University in nearby Cirencester, a charming Victorian Gothic college that provides comfortable accommodation and excellent food. Provisional accommodation has been secured from Sunday 30th July through until Tuesday 8th August.

There will be visits to nearby historical sites, including the Avebury Stone Circle, the Bath Museums and the Chedworth Roman Villa, which will provide an experience of the historical depth of this unique part of England.

The aim is to assemble a group of not more than 20 committed people, with a shared interest in culture and in all that is involved in passing it on. Each day will begin with a talk from Sir Roger followed by a discussion. Reading and discussion in the afternoon will lead to a formal presentation, either by Sir Roger or a distinguished visiting speaker, and the evenings will involve concerts, readings, or further discussion over wine. Aspiring writers, composers and artists will be invited to submit samples of their work for criticism, and discussions will be organised around a curriculum of readings chosen to illustrate some of the major intellectual issues of our day.

Provisional topics include the nature of philosophy, why beauty matters, the art of writing, figurative painting, the Western inheritance, the meaning of conservatism, musical order, real environmentalism, understanding wine and the life of friendship. We will also provide a piano trio for an evening of Schubert and Brahms.

Some appreciation of the environment can be gleaned from the film presented by Alicja Gecinska for Belgian television, a short clip from which can be viewed on YouTube. Opportunities to walk, ride and ponder in the beautiful local countryside will be many, and events will take place at the Scruton residence as well as at Cirencester.

The fee for the course will be in the region of £2,500 or $3,000 to cover board and lodging and all other costs, apart from travel to and from the event, which will be the responsibility of each participant. We will close the list of participants when we have twenty firm commitments, who have paid the deposit of £250 necessary to secure a place on the course.

If I didn’t already have travel plans for the summer, I would book this in a heartbeat. I cannot imagine a more pleasurable way to spend a week in the summertime. May it please God to preserve Roger for another year, so I can attend the 2018 session.

Secular Scholastic Shakedown Scheming

The secular Scholastics of the 21st century will soon meet at the Sorbonne of southern California to discuss vital issues of the day at Thinking Gender, Imagining Reparations: 27th Annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference. It’s free and open to the public. Here’s what’s on:

This year’s conference theme, Imagining Reparations, engages contemporary social, scholarly, and literary movements that push to reimagine and retheorize what freedom, justice, health, and care can look like. Historically, reparations have taken financial form with governments recognizing victims of perceived injustice by awarding them money. Such practices have depended on and have defined the law and dominant ideas of justice within states and empires. By contrast, marginalized groups today are reframing reparations as capable of addressing historical and ongoing abuses, evident in law itself and manifest in biological, environmental, educational, technological, institutionalized, political, and diplomatic violence. The daring to imagine new forms of reparative justice emerges from raced, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities, which inform movements that devastate the binary between theory and practice in their struggle to be whole. A broad and intersectional investment in reparations challenges the assigning of rights and privileges in the past, and it is an important tool in recasting the structures that impact our daily lives.

Thinking Gender 2017, Imagining Reparations, takes a cue from movements that conceive of violence and reparative justice intersectionally with consequences that shape and are shaped by gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, etc. We invite presentations of work from across disciplines that embodies this intersectional ethos and, in particular, envision reparations through the lens of gender and sexuality. Conference sessions will include ample time for discussion of work, emphasizing dialogue discussion, writing as important modes of conference participation, and exploring their potential as feminist, decolonial tools for learning and action. Imagining Reparations aims to create cohesion among a broad range of disciplinary engagements, theoretical stances, and practical applications by providing space for thinking together about the role of the academy in theorizing tools for collective liberation from gendered and racialized violence.

Intersection! Now we’re cookin’ with gas.

But seriously, can you imagine giving your life over to this cult? Could there be any greater example of the mocking line directed against the medieval Scholastics: that their arguments come down to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The idea being that these are intelligent people arguing about abstract nonsense. These scholars can sit around UCLA all day long and “imagine new forms of reparative justice emerg[ing] from raced, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities,” but Donald Trump is in the White House, and the caravan moves on.

It’s easy to laugh at this stuff, and it’s impossible for sentient people not to. Nevertheless, I am mindful of conservative thinker Richard Weaver’s warning on this front, in the first chapter of his 1948 classic Ideas Have Consequences (which, if you are any kind of conservative, you must read):

It must be apparent that logic depends upon the dream, and not the dream upon it. We must admit this when we realize that logical processes rest ultimately on classification, that classification is by identification, and that identification is intuitive. It follows then that a waning of the dream results in confusion of counsel, such as we behold on all sides in our time. Whether we describe this as decay of religion or loss of interest in metaphysics, the result is the same; for both are centers with power to integrate, and, if they give way, there begins a dispersion which never ends until the culture lies in fragments. There can be no doubt that the enormous exertions made by the Middle Ages to preserve a common world view exertions which took forms incomprehensible to modern man because he does not understand what is always at stake under such circumstances – signified a greater awareness of realities than our leaders exhibit today. The Schoolmen understood that the question, universalia ante rem or universalia post rem, or the question of how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, so often cited as examples of Scholastic futility, had incalculable ramifications, so that, unless there was agreement upon these questions, unity in practical matters was impossible. For the answer supplied that with which they bound up their world; the ground of this answer was the fount of understanding and of evaluation; it gave the heuristic principle by which societies and arts could be approved and regulated. It made one’s sentiment toward the world rational, with the result that it could be applied to situations without plunging man into sentimentality on the one hand or brutality on the other.

As I see it, following Weaver, what’s important about this conference at UCLA is not whether or not they come up with a plan to achieve reparations that harmonizes doctrinally with their arcane categories. What matters is that they all come to the conference sharing a viewpoint that says that sex, race, and gender are primary categories of human identity, and that justice is defined by how power and resources are allocated to people within those categories. The point of the conference is to collaborate on an action plan to confront the world and bend its practices to the theory. As Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Thought question: What would you think of this conference if it were a gathering of scholars and graduate students in a given field to discuss ways to use their scholarship to help elect more Republicans (“for collective liberation from the liberal nanny state”), or to convert more people to Evangelical Christianity (“for collective liberation from the mental slavery of unbelief”)? Would you think that to be a perversion of scholarship via weaponizing it for political or cultural combat? If so, why is it appropriate for gender scholars to gather for the sake of collaborating on a common goal of political and legal change? Just asking.

Again, you and I might laugh at these pinhead progressives theorizing how to shake down guilty white liberals for subsidies to wheelchair-bound Latinx genderqueers, but attention really must be paid. The theory is the same one that legitimizes the mainstreaming of transgenderism. For example, the people at the top of the Obama administration who decided that all public schools must allow transgendered kids to use toilets and locker rooms of their preferred gender, or face government lawsuit, may never have shown up at a conference like the one at UCLA, but they have assimilated through academia its basic worldview — and tried to put it into action.

The prominent Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book To Change The World examines why the standard Christian narrative of how social change happens is wrong. Here’s a quote from a page that gives abstracts for each chapter of the book:

Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the ways they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols.

This is not the place to discuss Hunter’s overall work in the book. I do want to emphasize, though, that ideas have consequences when they take over the minds of elites within elite institutions. The fragmentation and scattering of authority now upon us all may challenge this view, but I think it’s generally true. The real power of media elites, for example, is not that they tell people what to think, but rather that they define the borders of what it is permissible to think about. The minds of future leaders throughout the institutions of American life are formed at universities. If gender ideology maintains institutional hegemony there, then its precepts will come to be seen as normative, even by many future conservative leaders (of which a relative few will work for culture-forming institutions like media, television, filmmaking, and the like).

Point is, it really does matter how many disabled Latinx genderqueers can dance their wheelchairs on the head of a pin.

Deep State Vs. Trump

Glenn Greenwald, the progressive journalist who helped Edward Snowden release his information, posits that the Deep State — the CIA et al. — is plotting against Donald Trump, which explains the dossier release this week:

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.

Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?

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There are solutions to Trump. They involve reasoned strategizing and patient focus on issues people actually care about. Whatever those solutions are, venerating the intelligence community, begging for its intervention, and equating their dark and dirty assertions as Truth are most certainly not among them. Doing that cannot possibly achieve any good, and is already doing much harm.

Read the whole thing.  It really is true about Trump: whatever doesn’t destroy him only makes him stronger.

‘Faith And Values Correspondent’ Wanted

littleny/Shutterstock

The New York Times is adding a position:

Faith and values correspondent

We’re seeking a skilled reporter and writer to tap into the beliefs and moral questions that guide Americans and affect how they live their lives, whom they vote for and how they reflect on the state of the country. You won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine. The position is based outside of New York, and you will work alongside Laurie Goodstein and a team of other journalists who are digging deep into the nation.

Two cheers for them! I’m glad they’re adding this position, and I’m really glad they’re not basing this reporter in New York (I hope they don’t base him or her in any coastal city, or in Chicago, but rather someplace like Dallas or Atlanta). Why not three cheers? That line about how “you won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine” bothers me. If they were advertising for a sports reporter, would they advise that one didn’t need to be expert in the rules of various games they would be covering? Or if they wanted to hire an economics correspondent, would they feel compelled to say that the reporter wouldn’t need to be expert in finance?

I don’t want to read too much into this, and to unfairly knock a good-faith (so to speak) effort. Certainly a general-news “faith and values” correspondent doesn’t need to be able to give a detailed explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, or parse the finer points of sharia according to the Hanafi school. But the reporter certainly should be able to understand why doctrine matters to religious thought and belief. My concern here is that the Times is inadvertently minimizing the importance of religious knowledge, along the lines of, “You don’t really have to understand how religion works in order to report on it in the lives of ordinary Americans.”

I doubt very much that that’s what the Times editors mean to convey with that line. But what do they mean to convey? Anyway, get your CV in if you’re game for the job. Any of you have suggestions for who ought to apply for this position? I say The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway, who would also bring some much needed diversity of thought to the newspaper’s pages.

More On Night Visitors

That photo was taken recently at The Myrtles Plantation in my hometown, St. Francisville. It’s been going around Facebook; I’m not sure who the photographer is. The Myrtles is said to be haunted. Look on the staircase, just above halfway up. I once interviewed a local woman who had spent time there as a child, when the house was in her family. She told me that once she was upstairs, and she could hear sounds downstairs — voices, the tinkling of silverware against glass, that sort of thing — as if a party was going on in the dining room. But not a soul was there. I don’t know if the house is haunted or not, but I wouldn’t stay there. You can, though; it’s now a bed and breakfast.

Following up on the demonic visitation story in my Hilary Mantel post from earlier today, I want to tell a creepy one, but not (to me) nearly as scary.

It was the late fall or early winter of 1993. I was living in a friend’s antebellum plantation house far out in the country. There was no Internet back then. I was there alone most of the time. There were four bedrooms upstairs; my friend told me I could have my pick.

Shortly after I moved in, I became aware of a presence in that room, watching me as I slept. I chalked it up to me being slightly spooked by the idea of living in an old country house. Still, it persisted. By then I had become a practicing Catholic, and I began to sleep with a crucifix on the pillow next to me, angry and embarrassed that I could not shake the feeling of being watched.

It went on, and got so bad that I could not bring myself to turn off the lamp in the room at night. This went on for a couple of weeks. Finally, when my friend and her husband were visiting from the city one weekend, I told her that I was going to have to move out and go live with my mom and dad. I told her why, and that it humiliated me to be a grown man who couldn’t sleep in the dark.

She rolled her eyes. She’s a devout atheist who doesn’t believe in ghosts. But her husband, also secular-minded, but more open to mystery, said, “You know, in all the years I’ve been coming to this house, I have never been able to get a good night’s sleep in that bedroom, for the same reason.”

At that point, my friend told me that back in the 19th century, a family member — a doctor — hanged himself in the attic.

“Was the bedroom I’ve been sleeping in his?” I asked. She didn’t know.

“Why don’t you try another bedroom and see if you sleep any better?” her husband suggested.

I did — and slept like a baby. I lived there for a couple more months, before moving back to Washington.

Was the ghost of the doctor lingering in that bedroom? Was it a demonic presence? I have no idea. Something was there, though, and I wasn’t the only one who experienced it. When I returned to DC, I had dinner with a Catholic priest of deep learning and wide travels. I told him the story, and asked him what he thought of it theologically. He said he had never been able to figure this stuff out, but that he had no doubt that these things happened. He had experienced them himself. He told a story about an unquiet night he spent in a Scottish castle.

A reader sends in a story of a saint appearing in the dream of a Serbian abortionist — a dream that was so powerful it helped convince the man to repent. More:

In describing his conversion to La Razon, Adasevic “dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from four to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat.

One night Stojan asked the man in black and white in his frightening dream as to his identity.

“My name is Thomas Aquinas,” he responded. Stojan, educated in communist schools that pushed atheism instead of real learning, didn’t recognize the Dominican saint’s name.

Stojan asked the nightly visitor, “Who are these children?”

“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,” St. Thomas told him bluntly and without preamble.

Stojan awoke in shock and fear. He decided he would refuse to participate in any more abortions.

There is a much more detailed version of that story here. Interestingly, the doctor says he had never heard of Thomas Aquinas. He comes from the Orthodox tradition, which doesn’t recognize Aquinas as a saint as the Angelic Doctor lived after the Great Schism. But the doctor, who repented and returned to the Orthodoxy of his youth, maintains a devotion to Aquinas.

Any of you ever had dreams in which someone who no longer lives appeared, and gave you a message you took as meaningful? I’m interested to know about it if so.

Trump, Trust, And The Next Four Years

Where do we even start with this latest round of Trump trash? It would be delicious if Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen ended up owning BuzzFeed after it’s all over. Thing is, Trump is such a corrupt character that there is next to nothing that might be said about him that is not at least plausible, if far-fetched. A friend texted early this morning, “He’s not even President yet, and it already feels like the wheels are off.” Yep. This is the new normal.

I had to have a talk with my 12-year-old son this morning about this. I simply told him that there was a big controversy in the news about whether or not Russian spies had secret information on Donald Trump acting like a dirtbag when he was in Russia. I told him there’s a lot of dirty talk going around, but nobody can prove anything, and it’s best not to believe things that haven’t been proven true. The Internet is full of lies, and just because it’s in the news media doesn’t mean it’s believable. You ought to be skeptical of the news media, I told him.

But I also told him that the incoming president is a crude, vulgar, dishonest man who has cannot be trusted to keep his promises. Look at Trump for an example of the kind of man you do not want to be, I said. How sad that we’re at the point in American public life when the President of the United States exists as a negative example of character to kids. We ended up talking about the difference between power and authority, and trust.

I’m really glad that we got to the orthodontist’s office at that point, and the conversation ended. If he had asked me to explain how to know when a leader is trustworthy, I would have been stumped, genuinely stumped. I don’t know the answer myself. It’s too easy (and incorrect, and unjust) to say that “they’re all crooks,” but it’s also not possible, except for patsies, to believe that just because someone official or otherwise speaking as the voice of an institution says it, it’s therefore true. How do you raise children to be neither credulous nor cynical in a culture like ours?

Trump is not the cause of anything, but rather a symptom. Alastair Roberts has an excellent essay about the “ecology of untruth” that characterizes the public square today.  Excerpts:

People like Trump thrive in an ecology of untruth. However, although they contribute to, take advantage of, and exacerbate the problems of such an ecology of untruth, the blame for it can seldom be placed primarily at their door. It takes the participation of many different groups and the coming together of many different factors to establish the conditions within which someone like Trump succeeds.

Some of the factors that have given rise to our current situation are related to the current form of our media. The unrelenting and over-dramatized urgency of the media cycle, especially as that has been accelerated on social media, heightens our anxiety and reactivity. It foregrounds political threats and changes and makes it difficult to keep a cool head. When our lives are dominated by exposure to and reaction to ‘news’ we can easily lose our grip upon those more stable and enduring realities that keep us grounded and level-headed. Both sides of the current American election have been engaging in extreme catastrophization and sensationalism for some time. This has made various sides increasingly less credible to those who do not share their prior political convictions and has made us all more fearful of and antagonistic towards each other. It has also created an appetite for radical, unmeasured, and partisan action.

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The sort of people who would vote for Trump are often at the receiving end of the shrill outrage of the conspiracy theorists that certain university departments now churn out. As the university has been overrun by certain left wing sacred cows, we all have to live with an officially sanctioned excess of protected ‘bullshit’. The transformation of certain universities into propagators of a left wing authoritarian social justice ideology is one of the crucial factors behind the rise of Trumpism as a sort of anti-‘social justice’ movement. That so many non-college educated white males rally behind Trump has a lot to do with the fact that they are treated as scapegoats for so much that is wrong with America by economically and socially privileged people in colleges. The old organs and guarantors of truth and truth-driven discourse are no longer regarded as trustworthy.

The current atmosphere of distrust in experts, authorities, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories is one that arises in large measure from a deeply felt alienation, stigma, and betrayal. It also results from the disorientation caused by an excess of information and a growing number of competing voices claiming the authority to make sense of the world. In such situations, there will be fundamental shifts in people’s circles of trust and in the ways that they come to their opinions. As circles of trust change, people’s beliefs can shift in surprisingly rapid ways, ways that wouldn’t be predictable to those who aren’t attending to the social dimensions and processes of belief and knowledge.

Roberts, an Evangelical, turns towards his own religious tradition to examine how it is handling — or failing to handle — this question of the crisis of trust.

To this point, I have been focusing upon Trump supporters. However, the social dynamics of trust in our determination of truth are no less important in understanding current shifts in evangelicalism.

Once again, what we determine to be true is in large measure a function of whom we trust. As in the case of vaccine science, most in depth theological debate is beyond the level of understanding of the average person in the pew. The average person in the street can be given a basic understanding of why it is important to get their kids vaccinated, more than enough for them to act on that belief. The same is true of biblical truth: any good pastor should be able to instruct a congregation in sound and orthodox theology in a manner that equips them to live out the truth in their lives.

However, the limits of such an understanding can easily be exposed when subjected to cross-examination. While the average person in the pew could articulate the fundamental truth of the Trinity and worship God faithfully as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, most wouldn’t be able to master the philosophically and exegetically dense theological arguments that have been presented on various sides of historic and continuing Trinitarian debates. Nor should they be expected to: such theological arguments were produced for and by the most brilliant thinkers in the Church, not primarily for the person in the pew. While many could rightly direct you to passages of Scripture that teach particular doctrines, hardly any could make the sort of rigorous exegetical and lexical cases that their readings of those texts are founded upon. Ultimately, they largely have to take scholars’ word for it.

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When such a person claims to have ‘researched’ an issue, it is important to bear in mind that their ‘research’ is chiefly second hand: a matter of picking and choosing which supposed first-hand researchers to trust, with rather limited understanding of what constitutes good and bad front line research. This is much the same as in the case of people who claim to have ‘researched’ the connection between vaccines and autism online. They may regurgitate the research of first-hand scholars, but will often struggle truly to digest, process, and theoretically metabolize it. Once again, this is less of a failure on their part than a significant limitation.

In the past, theologians and pastors typically heavily mediated theological thought to their congregations. The edification of church members was crucial, but theologically trained pastors were expected to pre-digest Scripture and theology for the sake of their congregations and feed them with it to the point that they could process ever more solid food.

The rise of the Internet, however, has posed serious problems for this model. Increasingly, the person in the pew is receiving their theological and biblical understanding independent of pastoral oversight and guidance, often through a sort of personal ‘research’ akin to that of the Googling anti-vaxxer.

Church leaders are increasingly facing a situation where members of their congregations have an ever-growing and diversifying interface with a dizzying array of different figures. Congregants are following people on Twitter and Facebook, reading various blogs, listening to podcasts, watching Christian videos on Youtube, participating in online forums and communities, reading a far wider range of books than they probably would have done in the past, watching Christian TV shows, listening to Christian radio stations, etc., etc., all within the comfort of their own houses. The sheer range of sources that the members of a congregation will be exposed to nowadays is entirely unprecedented. Although some may expect pastors to keep on top of all of this, I really don’t see how they realistically can.

Unsurprisingly, the hierarchy of trust has broken down at the level of the local church. One thing Roberts does not mention is that seminaries can produce graduates whose theology is rightly distrusted by their congregations. Whatever the reasons for the breakdown of trust — good ones or bad ones — the phenomenon is real. Roberts talks about real-life cases in which people stop trusting those in authority (again, for good reasons, bad reasons, or both) and instead start trusting those with whom they feel comfortable. In that case, training and expertise go out the window. When somebody on the Internet’s opinion matters as much as your own pastor’s (or your own doctor’s, or a professional journalist’s), the social impact is profound. Roberts — who, I should underscore, is theologically orthodox — says:

To understand the future of evangelicalism, there are few things more important than attending to currently shifting networks of trust. If people are confident that evangelicalism will generally be opposed to same-sex marriage in twenty-five years’ time, for instance, I wonder whether they have been paying close attention to the movements that have been taking place. The most prominent voices that have opposed same-sex marriage are now regarded with deep distrust from many quarters, especially by the younger generations, not least on account of their politics and the abuse scandals that have tarnished their reputation. People no longer trust them as leaders, so their position on same-sex marriage is now thrown into greater question. Although they may officially have authority, practically they have little authority over the younger generations. Most of us have LGBT persons in our families and friendship groups and many of us have a much closer bond with them than with an older generation of Christian leaders. Many people’s trust in Scripture’s power to speak to issues of gender and sexuality has also been damaged through the influence of purity culture and the often hateful extremism and callousness that they associate with traditional evangelicals’ opposition to homosexual practice and same-sex marriage.

Again, younger generations have grown up and live in a context of overwhelming information and competing gatekeepers. As a result, they have learned to function more as independent theological and religious consumers, assembling their own faith through picking and choosing among authorities. As much biblical and theological reasoning lies beyond the power of their independent understanding, yet they must now determine what positions to hold based on their own research, they are increasingly inclined to treat theological positions whose truth lies beyond their power to determine as adiaphora [i.e., outside the moral law]. Alternatively, they introduce different criteria for assessing truthfulness, criteria more amenable to minds without rigorous theological education, privileging impressions or their sense of what is most ‘loving’. In such a context, a heavily contested view such as the legitimacy of same-sex marriage is likely to come to be regarded as optional by many.

Please read the whole thing, whatever your religious tradition. If you think your own church or religious tradition is immune to this dynamic, you’re dreaming. Roberts’s essay is tremendously important.

The election of Trump is the first manifestation in our national politics of this breakdown in institutional and elite authority. It will not be the last. The next four years are going to be tumultuous and ugly, in ways we can scarcely imagine at this point. This is just the beginning of our troubles.

Hilary Mantel’s Cursed Childhood

I’ve not read English novelist Hillary Mantel’s historical fiction, but quite a number of people have. Writer Patricia Snow is one of them, and in a chilling (really) First Things essay, Snow analyzes the characters in Mantel’s two novels set in Tudor England, and draws out the connections between them and Mantel’s traumatic childhood. The essay begins like this:

By now, everyone who reads contemporary fiction will have heard of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, the powerful advisor to Henry VIII who all but single-handedly disestablished the Catholic Church in England. Anathema to many Catholics on account of their sympathetic portrayal of Cromwell, the books have been runaway bestsellers, were awarded the Booker Prize (twice), and have been successfully adapted for both stage and screen. Psychologically persuasive and prodigiously self-assured, they are examples of what can happen when an artist, who has been honing her craft in the meantime, finds or invents material that turns out to be the perfect vehicle for her powers. In Mantel’s case, when she began writing about Cromwell, by her own account she was “filled with glee and a sense of power,” a conviction that everything in her life had prepared her for this.

The Catholic childhood Mantel lived in the north of England was a nightmare. Snow draws extensively on Mantel’s own published memoir to discuss how its characters and themes shaped Mantel’s fiction. You don’t need to know Mantel’s work — again, I don’t — to appreciate the insight in Snow’s speculative analysis, in particular why Mantel may have made Thomas Cromwell the dark, dark hero of her novels.

What knocks the reader for a loop is this passage in the essay, which quotes from Mantel’s 2004 memoir, Giving Up The Ghost. Jack is the lover her mother takes, and moves into the family home, exiling Mantel’s father down the hall in his own home:

In Mantel’s memoir, after Jack moves in with her mother, their house slowly fills with unseen, malevolent presences. It is not only the child who is aware of this, but the adults and adult visitors as well. Objects disappear; gusts of wind roar through the rooms; doors slam and their dogs cry with fear in the night. On weekends, the sallow, perspiration-soaked Jack hacks at the undergrowth in the overgrown garden, opening a view to the fields and the moors beyond.

Mantel is seven, going on eight. A pious, scrupulous child, she fears more than other sins blasphemy and inflicting brain damage, which would happen, she explains, if you were to drop a baby before the soft bones of his skull had closed. You might think, she confides elsewhere, that she would have asked God to show himself and put an end to the events in her home. But in her words, she was spiritually ambitious and had her own understanding of grace. (“By not asking for it, you get it.”) Rejecting the prayer of petition, and the risks that accompany it (“Because if it didn’t work . . .”), she simply waits. For a year, she carries around inside herself an empty, waiting space for God, a space that sounds ominously like what Malachi Martin calls an “aspiring vacuum” in his book about demonic possession.

It is the morning of an ordinary day. Mantel is playing by herself in the backyard when something causes her to look up, some trick of the light. Her eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, in the garden that Jack has been clearing.



[The spot] is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. . . . It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking. . . . I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.

Mantel’s first thought is that she has seen the devil, who did not intend to reveal himself. She knows from experience that if you witness other people’s mistakes, and they know it, they will make you pay. Terrified, she flees to the house as “grace runs away from [her] . . . like liquid from a corpse.” In the days and years afterwards, she is always more or less afraid and ashamed. After her encounter in the garden with what she calls elsewhere a “slow-moving sinister aggregation of cells . . . like a cancer looking for a host,” wherever she goes and whatever she does, what she has seen accompanies her: “a body inside my body . . . budding and malign.”

In that moment, she was possessed. And that “budding and malign” spiritual cancer has never left her. Demons don’t generally depart of their own accord. Snow writes:

If a testimony, traditionally understood, is the story of a life-changing encounter with God, Giving Up the Ghost is an anti-testimony, the centerpiece of which is a life-changing encounter with a demon. Yet it never seems to occur to Mantel to discuss her situation with a priest.

In fact, Mantel remains to this day bitterly anti-Catholic. Trust me, you’ll want to read Snow’s entire essay. 

Three years ago, writing in The Telegraph, Charles Moore penned these lines in an appreciative column about Mantel:

So why has she caught on? Why has such genuine merit and uncuddly, almost cold dedication to her art been recognised in a culture obsessed with celebrity?

I am not sure of the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with her sense of the nearness of anarchy and darkness. She seems to fear those things and to be attracted to them. As a Catholic, she has a strong sense of the reality of evil, but as a non-believing one, she cannot find the redemption. This is a good position from which to convey horror.

One of her early novels is called Vacant Possession. It is about a deranged woman who pretends to be a cleaner in order to take revenge on the occupants of her former home. The book’s title obviously refers to the familiar legal term, but it is also Mantel’s nod to Milton who, in Paradise Lost, says that “the fiend” may “invade vacant possession” and “some new trouble raise”.

The fiend is often present in her work, the troubling something at the corner of one’s vision. In her as yet unfinished trilogy, Thomas Cromwell carries some shadow in his life which cannot be spoken of.

English literature excels at these experiences on the borders of consciousness, at madness or anarchy imagined with the clarity of a sane mind. Now that she has turned one of the darkest passages in our history into a great work of fiction, Hilary Mantel can be said to have captured the national imagination.

“Vacant Possession.” Hmm.

By the grace of God I have never had an experience like Mantel’s, though I did go through a difficult period in the summer of 1990 or ’91 in which I became aware of a presence in my apartment as I slept. It got so bad that even though I wasn’t much of a Christian, I took to sleeping with a crucifix in my hand, as if I were a child with a teddy bear. I think back on it now and shake my head over how crazy that was. I am certain that there was a presence there, and that it was a malign presence. It would show up in my dreams sometimes, and communicate that it wanted me. Unlike most nightmares, these felt as if they were messages, invitations.

What’s crazy to me now is how hard I worked to assure myself that everything was normal,  that I was just going through a rough patch, and that there was nothing out of the ordinary for a man in his mid-twenties to have to sleep at night with a crucifix in his hand to ward off the night terrors.

The only thing that made it stop was my leaving that apartment. What made me leave? Mostly, it was the night I sat straight up in bed out of a deep sleep because I sensed the presence of someone in the room, watching me. I would not have been surprised to have seen a burglar standing over my bed. What I saw was a creature. I can see it in my mind now as clearly as if I had looked at the thing last night. It chills me today to think of it, and I won’t describe the thing to you. I was furious at it, and leapt out of bed at it. I saw it run, then disappear.

You had a nightmare, I tried to tell myself. But this was no nightmare. Something had happened.

Here’s the thing: I had been dabbling with the thought of becoming a Catholic at that time, but refused to commit to the path of conversion — chiefly because I knew that it would disrupt the casually hedonistic life I had been living. That experience in the apartment — not just seeing the entity, but the whole matter of the creeping awareness that something wicked shared that space with me — drove me towards the Church, even against my will. It helped convince me that there was another dimension to our life, one that remains hidden to us in the everyday, but that may manifest at times beyond our control. I suppose you might say that even in my most agnostic period, I always supposed that if there was a God, then he was like the kindly owner of an estate, the Duke you never saw, but in whose authority you trusted to order the grounds on which you lived. To put it another way, my late-20th century, Moralistic Therapeutic Deist cosmology had no room in it for demons.

But now I had seen one. It had been invading my dream life for months, communicating to me that it wanted to enter into me. God, I had a chill writing that sentence just now, thinking about how stupid I was back then, wondering what would have happened had I not awakened suddenly and seen the entity made manifest at the foot of my bed. After that night, I could not deny that something was very wrong, and that it wasn’t simply in my head.

I couldn’t live in that apartment anymore, not with that thing. I moved. That ended the night visits. And before much longer, I began to take instruction in the Catholic faith. On my first meeting with the priest who began my catechesis, I told him about the events in my apartment in those months. He was an old man, and Irishman who was part of a religious order. He took me seriously, and told of being sent to Africa as a newly ordained priest. The things that missionary priests in Africa encounter on a nearly daily basis, he explained, are entirely alien to the Western experience in modernity. But they are real. You cannot spend any time in Africa doing missionary work and not come hard up against the reality of the demonic, he explained.

The old priest did not believe that malign spirits only dwelled in Africa, of course. We have them here too, but we have educated ourselves out of knowing what we’re dealing with when we see it. And in turn, we fail to turn to the Church for help when we are besieged.

Reading Patricia Snow’s essay and Charles Moore’s column made me reflect on how events in my own life have affected my stance towards the world as a writer. Mantel is an artist and I am not, but I share with her a sense of the nearness of anarchy and darkness. I, of course, do find hope, shelter, and redemption in the Christian faith, as she does not. Yet I see recurrent themes in my writing emerging from my most formative experiences.

The world is not what we think it is. What is unseen is as real as what’s seen.
People are not who we think they are; they are not even who they think they are.
People will go to extraordinary lengths — including telling themselves outlandish lies, accepting what ought to be unacceptable and making their own lives and the lives of others miserable — to avoid facing truths that would compromise the worldview upon which they’ve settled.
The battle lines between good and evil, and between order and chaos, are not drawn where we would like them to be. The front is everywhere, most particularly within our own hearts.
Be wary of the treachery of the good man who believes in his own goodness. 
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:12)

This painting below, “Carnival Evening” by Henri Rousseau, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A print of it also hangs on my wall. From the moment I saw it, I was mesmerized by it. This is as close as I’ve ever seen to my view of the human condition (absent the reality of God and Jesus Christ) captured in a single painting. As I wrote in this space on the day I saw it:

This scene symbolizes the way I move through life: as a partygoer who finds himself … feeling very much out of place, on the way home, in the deep wintry woods under a full moon, with all the beauty and the danger and the mystery therein. Interesting to think about how art doesn’t explain, but reveals.

I like to think that unlike the man and woman in the painting, I am aware of the Watcher in the Dark, which is why I clutch the crucifix in my heart, and do my best to stand against the darkness, clothed in carnival clothes, but never forgetting that beyond the carnival is the dark wood. On the other hand, after closer examination, I believe Rousseau has captured the couple at the moment they have become aware that they are being watched. Look at them closely: they are not walking — his arms indicate forward motion, but his feet are planted firmly — nor are they looking behind themselves. They are frozen in place. After reading Patricia Snow’s essay on Hilary Mantel, I wonder if she was a frightened child staggering through the dark wood, saw the Watcher, and yielded to his malign designs on her.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

View From Your Table

Chattanooga, Tennessee

The reader writes:

Breakfast this morning at the Bluegrass Grill in Chattanooga, TN.

Father Jonas and his family have started restaurants in each town he

had a pastoral assignment. The restaurant logo features the Orthodox

cross and the walls have many icons.

Here’s a newspaper story about the grill and its chef-owner.

View From Your Table

Bologna, Italy

Our intrepid food traveler James C. is back in Italy after a holiday visit to the US. And look at him, tormenting low-carb me with that lovely photo of tagliatelle.

By the way, the low-carb diet is going well for me, notwithstanding looking at pornographic photographs of buttery noodles ooching all over each other. I feel great, and have tons more energy. Unfortunately, I still have significant back pain from the early December car accident, and can’t start exercising again. Nevertheless, I seem to be losing a bit of weight. I made it through the detox period, and am having no trouble staying away from bread, pasta, and sugar. But then, I don’t live in France or Italy.