Rod Dreher's Blog, page 650

You Want Civil War? Bring It

Ross Douthat politely but definitively unloads on the liberal Catholic theologians who griped about his opining in The New York Times, critical of Pope Francis and his allies in attempting to liberalize Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, and communion. Excerpt:

At which point we come to the third argument, which makes an appearance in your letter: You don’t understand, you’re not a theologian. As indeed I am not. But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts. And the impression left by this moving target, I’m afraid, is that some reformers are downplaying their real position in the hopes of bringing conservatives gradually along.

What is that real position? That almost anything Catholic can change when the times require it, and “developing” doctrine just means keeping up with capital-H History, no matter how much of the New Testament is left behind.

As I noted earlier, the columnist’s task is to be provocative. So I must tell you, openly and not subtly, that this view sounds like heresy by any reasonable definition of the term.

Now it may be that today’s heretics are prophets, the church will indeed be revolutionized, and my objections will be ground under with the rest of conservative Catholicism. But if that happens, it will take hard grinding, not just soft words and academic rank-pulling. It will require a bitter civil war.

And so, my dear professors: Welcome to the battlefield.

Read the whole thing. It is marvelous. That is a Catholic layman who has stones. That is a Catholic layman who is prepared to fight for what he believes to be true. I hope that the courage of his very public witness gives orthodox Catholic priests, theologians, laymen and all others what they need to find their own voice.

Ben Op in Colorado Springs

Greetings from Colorado Springs. I had a great time last night talking about Dante to a big group of folks at an event sponsored by the Anselm Society, a very cool organization based in Holy Trinity Anglican Church and dedicated to the Christian imagination. Throughout the day on Friday, I met and talked with people connected to the Anselm Society, and involved in local churches. I was surprised and gratified to discover that people here have already been talking about the Benedict Option, and want to know more about it. (There’s a Saturday afternoon Ben Op meeting set for downtown COS; I think it’s sold out, but in case not, more info is here).

Everybody I’ve talked to so far in COS is Evangelical. Interestingly, I’ve had far more interest in the Benedict Option from Evangelicals than from Catholics. Anyway, what I’m hearing is serious concern from these Evangelicals that their churches are failing the younger generation by

not grounding them seriously enough in the Bible
making worship all about entertainment, thereby cultivating in them the idea that church is all about avoiding boredom
failing at discipleship

At a group discussion around a long table in a pub earlier last evening, I confessed to the others (all Evangelicals) that I don’t know the Evangelical world well, but I had always admired Evangelicals from a distance for doing a good job teaching the Bible. At that, lots of heads around the table shook, saying, No. Several people said that young Evangelicals today know very little about the Bible. An academic theologian at the table visiting from out of town said that at the Evangelical seminary where she teaches, they’re starting to see students show up for M.Divs who have no religious faith at all. They are searching for God, and hoping to find him in graduate school.

I asked her if she had seen the NYT story about secular people entering divinity school. She had, and said it was on target. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

Two factors are driving this surge. First, the proportion of nones in the United States has grown to about a third of all millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. Second, divinity school offers even atheists and spiritual seekers a language of moral discourse and training in congregational leadership. The traits appeal to nones who aspire to careers in activism, social work, chaplaincy or community organizing rather than taking to a pulpit.

“Nones are not entirely opposed to religious traditions, though they don’t attach to a specific one,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, who has seen the trend while visiting campuses. “No small part of them are attracted to the search for social justice and for spiritual meaning. And they recognize those things as the fruits of religious tradition. So it makes sense to go to a place where you can study religious tradition.”

Within higher education, divinity programs often stand apart from the cult of relativism in the liberal arts and the utilitarian emphasis in professional schools focusing on business and law, for example.

“If you were simply looking for the skills, you might go to the Kennedy School of Government,” said the Rev. Dudley C. Rose, the associate dean for ministry studies at Harvard. “And philosophy and liberal-arts fields have given up on the project of finding a moral language, an articulation of values. That language isn’t found in many places. And when you find it, it’s not easy to abstract it. You have to connect it to a tradition.”

When I first read that piece, my first response was to think of it as silly. People wanting to get the fruits of religious belief without actually believing? Not going to work, friend. But after listening to the group yesterday, I rethought my response. I still believe it’s not going to work, and it’s silly to go to divinity school if you don’t believe in a divinity, but the conversation about the mess Evangelical young people have to deal with made me more sympathetic to the students in the NYT story.

Why? One of the folks at the table said, “The young are searching for ritual, for something more stable and deep than what we’ve given them.” Thinking about that point later, in light of the Times piece, I wondered how many young Evangelicals might be drifting away from the church because they think that there’s nothing to Christianity but a pep rally. I was reminded of my colleague Gracie Olmstead’s article two years ago in TAC in which she interviewed several of her fellow Millennials about why they had left Evangelicalism for a more liturgical church, one rooted more deeply in Christian tradition. Excerpt:

Nelson believes a sacramental hunger lies at the heart of what many millennials feel. “We are highly wired to be experiential,” he says. In the midst of our consumer culture, young people “ache for sacramentality.”

“If you ask me why kids are going high church, I’d say it’s because the single greatest threat to our generation and to young people nowadays is the deprivation of meaning in our lives,” Cone says. “In the liturgical space, everything becomes meaningful. In the offering up of the bread and wine, we see the offering up of the wheat and grain and fruits of the earth, and God gives them back in a sanctified form. … We’re so thirsty for meaning that goes deeper, that can speak to our entire lives, hearts, and wallets, that we’re really thirsty to be attached to the earth and to each other and to God. The liturgy is a historical way in which that happens.”

The millennial generation is seeking a holistic, honest, yet mysterious truth that their current churches cannot provide. Where they search will have large implications for the future of Christianity. Protestant churches that want to preserve their youth membership may have to develop a greater openness toward the treasures of the past. One thing seems certain: this “sacramental yearning” will not go away.

Hey, Evangelical readers, do you feel that way? One person I met today, a cradle Evangelical who now worships in an Anglican church (but one in the Evangelical tradition), told me that he was furious at Evangelicalism for years because he felt cheated by his childhood.

“I felt like the adults were supposed to teach me Christianity, this ancient faith that inspired so much in Western civilization, but they gave me only about five percent of what Christianity is about — and it wasn’t the best five percent,” he said.

Colorado Springs has a huge Evangelical population, and some pretty serious megachurches. A couple of people told me today that there’s fear among some megachurch leaders that the megachurch moment has passed, and congregations may drift away in search of something else.

But what else? In conversation later in the evening after the Dante talk, an Evangelical man told me that the standard Evangelical model of understanding religion was not holding the young anymore.

“Did you notice in your Dante talk ,” said the man, “when you said that the moment of accepting Jesus wasn’t the end of the journey, but only the beginning, that somebody in the audience said, ‘Preach it’? You find among Evangelicals these days frustration with the way we have typically approached the Christian life. For a lot of us, church is about going to a place to get information that you can go out and spread to other people, who will accept that information and make a mental decision based on it. It’s all about what happens in your head. People are finding that’s just not enough.”

In particular, I sensed a real loss of confidence in the concept of “children’s church.” That’s something I keep hearing from Evangelicals elsewhere too. The feeling seems to be that kids ought to be in church with the entire body of Christ, and besides, children’s church teaches them to think that church is something done to keep them entertained.

I had a couple of different conversations about suffering, and about how the church, like American culture, doesn’t know how to talk about suffering except as something to be avoided. The people I talked to seemed to want something much deeper and serious from the church on how to suffer as Christians.

Another man, a pastor, told me that he loves historian Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, and has his copy all dog-eared and marked up. “Yes!” I told him. I read that book earlier this year, and it quickly became one of my favorites. I added that it was such a revelation to me to read that book and to realize that the early church Christianity I discovered in Wilken’s marvelous history was the same thing we got every week at our tiny Russian Orthodox mission in Starhill. 

Back in the hotel room, trying to think through all I had learned today from the new friends I’d made, I found myself suddenly feeling very, very grateful to God for what he had given me in Orthodoxy, and especially in our mission parish. We are small, we are poor, and we are struggling, but a lot of these things dissatisfied Evangelicals long for, we have. If you’ve read the Dante book of mine, you have an idea about what a strong, faithful priest Father Matthew Harrington is. On my recent trip to DC and Charlottesville, I ended up spending more of my Ben Op talks citing different Orthodox practices to illustrate the way practices deepen faith and build community bonds. Some of the things people I meet tell me they want and hope for in the Ben Op, we pretty much have in our parish as a normal part of the Orthodox Christian life. Who knows? The Benedict Option might turn out to be a lot more Orthodox than I have thought. I have been careful about prescribing more liturgical practices when talking to Evangelical audiences, because I don’t know how they feel about that. All these conversations with Evangelicals yesterday made me wonder if I should re-think that. They might be a lot more open than I give them credit for.

Please go back and read this entry I did about sociologist Paul Connerton and his book How Societies Remember. Re-reading it just now in light of what I’m hearing from Evangelical folks in COS is enlightening. Connerton, writing from a secular academic perspective, tells us that the societies that are most able to remember, collectively, their stories in an age of mass forgetting are those who embody them in sacred ritual, in particular rituals that involve the body. If that’s the case, I wonder if this hunger among Millennials for a ritual that embodies meaning is an instinctive reaction against the constant de-ritualization of daily life in modernity. Are they searching for a sense of meaning that cannot be accessed by a book or a sermon?

I’m really looking forward to the meeting this afternoon, and learning from the church leaders who will gather and share their views, their hopes, and their concerns. When I tell you that the Benedict Option is something we’re going to have to work out together, I mean it. You’d better believe I will be listening this afternoon, and taking notes for the book. I’ll update this post later, after the meeting, and tell you what I found out. With any luck, I’ll be updating it from Agia Sophia Coffee Shop, an Orthodox-run coffee shop and bookstore in Colorado Springs. The ancient faith, with its ancient rituals and living conversation with the Fathers of the Church and the early Christian tradition, is not only here in COS, but it has a coffee shop and bookstore too!

UPDATE.2: “Schmendrick,” who identifies himself/herself, as a None who is in divinity school, but who doesn’t believe in Christianity or Christian metaphysics, says:

If you want to re-sanctify the culture, the biggest hurdle is squaring the idea that the human spirit is fundamentally not of this world with the history of the past two hundred years, which rather decisively show that the human spirit is actually fantastically good at relating to and mastering this world.

To which I say:

And:

Mikael Damkier/Shutterstock

UPDATE.3: The Benedictine prior Father Peter Funk has some very wise words about the pitfalls of people from non-liturgical traditions moving into them unawares. You can’t just walk into a tradition and mimic its rituals and think you’ve got it. He writes in the comment thread:

Rod, I’ve been meaning to mention this to you for a while: I humbly recommend that you read some of the work of Mary Douglas as you think about what is required of a Benedict Option community. The mention of Evangelicals and Olmstead’s article reminded me of this. Much as there is a hunger more a greater ‘liturgical’ even ‘mystical’ experience of faith and worship, there is a danger that it is all so much woo if there is no clear, underpinning social organization to the group making use of ritual symbol. Millman brought this up in his critique several months ago, but my concern is deeper, that for symbols to communicate, they must be reinforced by real disciplines and–most importantly–certain types of social structures. To me, this is the biggest hurdle to clear in founding genuine BenOp communities.

This became an urgent matter because we have had several men enter our monastery who are converts from various points on the Evangelical spectrum. I watched as they wanted badly to make sense of the very dense liturgy that one finds in a traditional monastery, but until they were able to connect the symbolic language to specific behaviors and clear lines of authority (and clear articulation of the common good), they found themselves frustrated. Douglas’s *Natural Symbols* is the text we use the most to address this problem, but she has many books that are helpful in this regard, including very challenging commentaries on Leviticus and Numbers.

One of the factors that led her to specific ideas in Natural Symbols was the widespread abandonment of ritual by her fellow Catholics in the late 60’s. She recognized that her fellow academics poured scorn on ritual, and she noted that this is not because they were more advanced intellectually than others, but because of the social structure of academic life and its pressures (another theme of your recent posts). So she set out to vindicate ritual and symbol, and from her training in anthropology, she was able to demonstrate how certain social arrangements (such as, I believe, American democracy) render inhabits deaf and blind toward symbols.

And he writes on his blog:

In a Catholic monastery, we say that we believe in the Mystery of the Incarnation. This implies that Christ is incarnate in the men with whom we live, and therefore regulate the ways in which brothers relate to one another. As the Prior, I am understood to hold the place of Christ (properly speaking) in the community. This means that brothers don’t refer to me as “Pete,” or sit in my place at table, in choir, or in chapter. Brothers act out, in their own bodies, symbols of the Incarnation. Thus we all genuflect when we enter the church, recognizing Christ’s Real Presence in the tabernacle. We bow to one another to acknowledge Christ in each brother. We discipline our bodies in accord with the social demands that communicate a system of belief.

But what if we happen to enter the monastery as part of an unlucky group that is “less sensitive” or even “deaf or blind,” to symbolic expressions like places of honor, genuflections, pectoral crosses, bows….even habits, tonsures, icons, candles, holy water, etc? I could go on and on. The point is that monastic life as suchis as life that is based upon a belief system that is strongly tied to an intricately detailed set of symbolic observances. What if we enter such a life lacking the faculty to see and interpret the symbols?

… In my experience, young men entering a traditional monastic life such as our is reputed to be are looking for the structure that ritual and discipline provide. But I have also observed that for many of these same men, the real meaning of these rituals can be easily misunderstood. I will attempt to explain what I think is actually going on in a later post. Here, since I must wrap up, let me just point out that an effort to put her ideas into effect in our monastery has had surprising consequences (good ones, so far). And Professor Douglas’s concerns turn out to have a lot in common with the diagnoses of Alasdair MacIntyre, Rene Girard, Fr. Henri de Lubac, George Steiner, Pope Benedict XVI, and others writing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Those who are interested in the so-called “Benedict Option” would do well to pay close attention to Mary Douglas, if they really wish to avoid becoming sectarian pariahs. More than that, Douglas helps to explain why MacIntyre and de Lubac seem to be often misunderstood even by their own strongest supporters. Changing my belief requires me to change my social experience and to change the way I use and experience my body. Without social structure and asceticism (the disciplining of the body), philosophical and theological ideas will, in our world, tend to float free and remain largely inconsequential beyond the tempest-in-teapot-blog-combox skirmishes. I hope to show why this is the case in the coming weeks.

UPDATE.4: Just returned from a fantastic breakfast discussion with four Christian women — one a Catholic revert, one an Orthodox convert, two Anglicans who worship in an Evangelical tradition — who are highly engaged in the Christian public life here in COS (well, the Orthodox was visiting from Fort Collins). To be engaged in Christian life in COS means to be immersed in some way with Evangelicalism. I wish I had been taking notes; they were so full of rich insights and questions about the Ben Op. I’ll blog on it here, from memory. Please feel free to contest anything I write below (or anywhere on this thread); I’m simply reporting what I learned in the conversation.

The main thing I took away from the conversation is that there is a massive hunger among Millennial Evangelicals for the kind of things the Ben Op calls for: depth, liturgy/ritual, community, a more profound sense of prayer, and stability (that is in part a sense that this is not all going to go away when the next big thing comes along).

Some of the women said that they see among the Millennial men a craving for fatherhood. I repeated a funny line that a female friend of mine, an ex-Evangelical, said to me once: that she generally cannot stand young Evangelical men, because they come across as so simpering and “nice”. There was agreement around the table. One woman said that Evangelical culture trains men to be middle-class “nice”. This, said another woman, is why that Wild At Heart stuff was so popular years ago. The problem, I said, is that you don’t combat that by embracing an artificial Christian He-Man sense. They agreed, and one woman said that she can see by observing her husband that there is a natural drive in men to go and do things. It occurred to me that this a drive that at its best gets channeled into good works (soup kitchens, service work, etc.), but in church gets frustrated because the experience of worship is so cerebral, is so tied to making sure you are thinking the right thoughts.

One of the things that I find so compelling about Orthodox Christianity, I told the women, is that it’s so masculine. What I mean by that is that it doesn’t seem feminized and soft, and therapeutic in the “let’s make this comfortable for you” sense. Orthodoxy is demanding. It demands that you struggle with yourself. It demands that you do things like fast regularly, which is hard, but which involves integrating your spirituality with physicality. It demands that you pray in such a way (I’m thinking about the Jesus Prayer and the prayer rope) that gets you out of your head (though maybe that is not a specifically masculine thing).

The Orthodox woman at the table said, “I’ve heard people say that Orthodoxy is the Marine Corps of Christianity.” Yes, I said, I can see that. Orthodoxy is not trying to help you be you. It tells you, Life in Christ is joyful, but it is a struggle. It is nothing less than the Cross. If you want theosis, if you want to lose yourself and find yourself in Christ, here is the path that Christians have been following since virtually the beginning. To me, as a man, this really was liberating after hearing years of greeting-card Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic sermons challenging me to do little more than be nice to others, as my Best Friend Jesus wants me to do.

One woman, who serves as a spiritual director, said that beyond the fatherhood issue, she sees a deep hunger for spiritual mothers and fathers. I asked her what she meant by that. What is the difference between a spiritual mother and father, versus a spiritual life coach? I wish I had written down her precise answer, because it was very good. As I recall, no doubt incompletely, she said it had to do with a more organic relationship, with the idea that mothers and fathers are invested in the spiritual growth of their children. Young Christians need to understand that the Church is not simply a place to go to get good advice on how to live, but is rather more like a family, where people relate to each other in that way. The older members of the community take a fatherly, motherly role in the lives of the younger ones. Put that way, the experience of church is not transactional (= I go to church to get something out of it in exchange for my presence), but communal.

We talked about how difficult it is to find stability in a culture like America’s, where we think of everything instrumentally — that is, in terms of how we can use it. As Paul Connerton writes in How Societies Fail, this is what it means to live in modernity — and capitalism is a core expression of modernity. It depends for its success on creating desires, and in training us to see things that we have used up as objects, or practices, to be discarded in favor of the new thing. Fr. Peter Funk, in talking about Mary Douglas’s book, writes:

Before Vatican II, the Church in general was governed by massive amounts of rule-bound behaviors that were intended to communicate a certain theology. Strong social disciplines regulated what bishops, priests, religious, and laity could and could not do. When the reforms of the Council began to take hold, huge percentages of Western Catholics quickly gave up all kinds of symbolic behaviors and social disciplines without any apparent grief (for others, obviously, these changes were devastating; Mary Douglas is very sensitive to their suffering, and in some ways this book is an anthropologist’s effort to help redress the wrongs that were just unfolding in 1970 when Natural Symbols was published). This suggests that there were large portions of the Catholic Church for whom, in 1960, the symbols and disciplines already were more or less meaningless, that their importance had been forgotten, despite the fact that everyone continued to engage in them.

This is a serious problem, the experience of ritual as empty. What’s interesting is that instead of thinking of ways to reinvigorate the Tradition, the Catholic reformers of the 1960s and 1970s, like good moderns, cast aside many of the rituals and traditions as useless, and tried to supplant them with new ones that were more “relevant”. It did not work. The thing we Christians today have to understand is that the basic idea that we have the right to change traditional ritual and practices because they don’t “work” for us is deadly poison.

This is not to say that ritual and practice can never change, but rather that we should be very, very careful about doing so. It is never sufficient to say it doesn’t work for us anymore, therefore we should quit doing it. How do you know that the problem is you? It could be that you aren’t working for it. If this tradition has been around for so long, maybe the people before you who kept it know something that you do not. You are not the End of History; the tradition was not made to please you.

In Orthodoxy, for example, nobody is going to listen to you if you start complaining that this or that part of traditional worship “doesn’t work” for you. They will tell you to stick with it, to give yourself over to it, to allow it to shape you instead of expecting it to conform to your own expectations. According to my priest, one-third of Orthodox converts fall away. I can easily imagine American converts coming to it, finding out that a tradition so symbolically dense is not easy to understand all at once, and giving up. If you stick with it, though, and submit to it, you will find over time that the practices and rituals do what they are supposed to do: form you in ways you couldn’t have imagined before. They de-center you.

The Catholic revert at the table said that she struggled for a long time with certain teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, but finally understood that her problem was that she was trying to judge the entire tradition by the standards and felt needs of a 21st century Millennial American woman. “I finally realized that I needed to submit to something greater than myself,” she said, explaining that there are still things she wrestles with in Catholicism, but that submission was the right thing to do.

“I was looking for the perfect church, and it just doesn’t exist,” she said, adding that the problem, as she saw it, was that she was not judging her own religious life in light of tradition, but presumed to put tradition under her personal judgment.

We talked about the problem of Authority, which, to my mind, is the most difficult one for the Benedict Option to grapple with. One of the women at the table had grown up fundamentalist Baptist, and was scarred by it. She said that the community was very rigorous and intolerant, and highly literalistic. Questions were not allowed. One of the results of this — and this, she said, is something she sees in working with disaffected Evangelical young people in COS — is that people get this false dualism in their heads. That is, they think that if the Bible is not literally true, then everything must be up for grabs. That is not how historic Christianity has interpreted the Bible, of course, but within fundamentalism, this is not accepted or understood. So you have young people leaving Christianity without ever having had a genuine understanding of the breadth and depth of Christian tradition.

She also said that one of the things that drove her from that faith was the way it was all in your head. It was all about holding the correct belief. They learned lots of Scripture, for which she’s grateful, but he said that it ended up being a matter of worshiping the Bible, and a literal interpretation of it.

She continued that this kind of Christianity leaves young people vulnerable to the broader culture. Even the “it’s just me and Jesus and my Bible and my cup of coffee” form of Evangelicalism does this, because it trains people to look at the Bible as a divine rule book. “When it comes to something like homosexuality,” she said, “they see a culture that celebrates it uncritically, and the only thing they see in the church that opposes it is a few verses from the Bible.”

The gist of what she was saying is that Bibliolatry is a weak stance against the force of post-Christian culture.

“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “The argument you would hear from Catholics and Orthodox against homosexual practice goes much deeper than those Bible verses, even though those verses are important. It has to do with a Christian anthropology derived from Scripture, and philosophizing in a Christian sense. You can’t proof-text your way to that.”

This led to a discussion about the absence of a historical sense of the Church among Evangelicals (and they might have said younger Catholics too, and probably many cradle Orthodox). One of the women said that it’s very, very common among Evangelicals to operate from this sense that Christian history jumps from Acts to the Reformation. They ignore 1,500 years of Christian history. Thus, their own sense of what it means to be a Christian is entirely conditioned by modernity, a historical and cultural period that was defined as a cutting-off from the past, a denial that the past has a hold on us at all — this, because only by doing so can the freedom of the individual be realized. This is not what the Reformers intended, but it’s what happened, especially after the Enlightenment.

Along these lines, the secular philosopher Matthew B. Crawford says:

According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention. My point in that passage is that liberal/libertarian agnosticism about the human good disarms the critical faculties we need even just to see certain developments in the culture and economy. Any substantive notion of what a good life requires will be contestable. But such a contest is ruled out if we dogmatically insist that even to raise questions about the good life is to identify oneself as a would-be theocrat. … Subjectivism — the idea that what makes something good is how I feel about it — was pushed most aggressively by Thomas Hobbes, as a remedy for civil and religious war: Everyone should chill the hell out. Live and let live. It made sense at the time. This required discrediting all those who claim to know what is best. But Hobbes went further, denying the very possibility of having a better or worse understanding of such things as virtue and vice. In our time, this same posture of value skepticism lays the public square bare to a culture industry that is not at all shy about sculpting souls – through manufactured experiences, engineered to appeal to our most reliable impulses. That’s how one can achieve economies of scale. The result is a massification of the individual.

Modern freedom is a kind of slavery — certainly for Christians. If you subscribe to this definition of freedom, you cannot help but be swayed by every new church trend that comes down the block. Millennials have to be given credit for one thing: they sense the ephemerality of contemporary Christianity that is geared towards “preference-satisfying behavior.” It cannot stand up to the hurricane of post-Christian culture.

It must be said too that an ahistorical Catholicism (or Orthodoxy) — that is, a Catholicism/Orthodoxy that has in its treasury all this historical experience and wisdom, but that never makes use of it by introducing the Tradition into the life of parishes here and now — is no better than trendy megachurch spirituality. In my 13 years worshiping as a Catholic in America, it was very rare that you got the sense that Christianity existed before the lifetimes of everybody now living. I mean, there was no manifest connection in the sermons or anything else with the lives of the saints, with the early church, with the experiences and teachings of medieval Christians, and so forth. You lived in the Everlasting Now. When my new Evangelical Anglican friend last night said that he was angry for a long time at his upbringing for denying him almost any awareness of and access to the Great Tradition of Christianity, you could say the same thing for contemporary American Catholicism. (I can’t say about Orthodoxy; there are so few of us, and my limited experience has been the opposite — though I have heard from Greek Orthodox Americans who fell away that this was their own experience). So, though Catholics and Orthodox have more tools for the Ben Op than Evangelicals do, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that the way most of us live today is sufficient to hold on. We need those roots, and renewal within them.

In the end, the overall impression I left the table with this morning was that Millennials, whether they meant to do this or not, have come to the end of the road with modern Christianity, and are facing the fact that there’s nothing much keeping them attached to it, as opposed to drifting into the Nones category. And this will happen, in mass numbers, over the next decade or two as pressure from the mainstream, post-Christian culture builds. You cannot fight something powerful with nothing much.

But what is the answer?

This is what the Benedict Option project is about. I will close for now, and walk down the street to the big meeting. Check back on this blog later on, maybe even tonight, and I’ll blog what I will have learned this afternoon. One thing I didn’t bring up here, but that did come up in our conversation this morning: the need to recover a sacramental understanding of the world.

UPDATE.5: This will be the last update on this super-long post. As it turns out, I don’t have a lot to add. The meeting was really great, with lots of questions and lots of excitement — but it turned out to have me talking so much that I didn’t get the chance to take many notes. The best question I got was from a teacher in a classical school, who said that in her experience in the classroom, there’s a big difference between knowing what to think and knowing how to think. She wanted to know what implications that might have for the Benedict Option.

What a great observation, and question! I had not conceived of it that way, but the teacher had a really important insight. So much Christianity in our culture — even conservative, small-o orthodox Christianity — is a quest to discover what to think. What should we think about the poor? What should we think about same-sex marriage? What should we think about ecumenism? And so forth. These are good questions.

But as the teacher’s question revealed, we Christians so rarely set out to discover how to think in an authentically Christian way. We look to the Bible, or to the Catechism, or to popular pastors or teachers for clear, unambiguous answers. Often those answers are not readily available to us. We may be given a clear teaching or principle, but learning how to apply it in our particular situation is not at all clear.

Both fundamentalism and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism relieve us of the burden to think through a problem, because they provide easy answers. It is more important, though, that we learn how to think Christianly — that is, with a mind and conscience formed by deep and continuous encounter with God through prayer, sacrament, fasting, and holy tradition. This is not something you can get from reading books alone, or from reading whatever the most popular current Christian books are. This is something that comes from formation in community, including the communion of saints (= the men and women recognized as heroes of the Christian tradition, and learning from the example of how they lived and struggled with things).

My own temptation for all of my life as a Christian has been to go to a book or books to look for answers. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it is not a sufficient thing. As I’ve learned walking the Orthodox way for the past nine years, it is a weakness to think that one can always find the truth by acquiring more information. Some things can only be learned through experience. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised a young poet, “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Along those lines, if we have lived the tradition in our daily lives, not just in what we think, but in our practices, we will be able to live our way into Christian answers to hard questions. And if we train ourselves and our children how to think as authentic Christians, we, and they, will be far better off as we face the tumultuous challenges ahead of us than if we, in our impatience, settle on the what-to-think solution.

This is not an easy thing to accept in a culture that demands clear answers right this very second. But it’s the truth, I believe. I am going to have to explore this teacher’s insight a lot more in the book (which my agent will begin shopping around to publishers next week, I think).

So, I’m leaving Colorado Springs tomorrow, so very, very grateful for having come here and met so many engaged Christians asking themselves the same questions I’m asking myself about how we can live faithfully in a post-Christian culture. Listening to them, and talking with them, is my own way of “living the questions,” and I really do believe that in this way, we will live out the answers. Thank you, Colorado Springs people. Let’s stay in touch.

SJWs Ruin NYU Fall Ball

At New York University, some insane SJW law students sent this “open letter” to the deans out to the entire student body via the campus listserv. (Yes, this blog has readers at NYU):

Dear Dean Jason Belk and Dean Trevor Morrison,

The Mental Health Law and Justice Association writes this open letter in order to express grave concern and outrage at the triggering, disrespectful, and harmful suicide imagery displayed at Fall Ball.

During last night’s Fall Ball, which was organized by NYU Law’s Office of Student Affairs, there were video projections on the windows inside of Greenberg Lounge of silhouetted people engaging in what we can only imagine were intended to be “spooky” activities. One of the images projected displayed a man dying by suicide. Because MHLJA follows the recommendations of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to not discuss suicide methods and firmly believes in publishing content that is safe for all members of our community, we will not provide any more details about the projection. However, members of our organization do have photographs of the images, should your administration need corroboration.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death on college campuses. Worldwide, someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds. For members of our community who have lost someone to suicide or who have had personal experiences, this topic is not a Halloween gimmick.

In addition to the suicide imagery, MHLJA condemns other projections displayed, which showed violence against women and interpersonal violence.

Our campus should be a safe space for all members of our community, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Violence and the difficult mental health challenges people face are not a joke, a gimmick, or a spectacle.

In addition to publicly expressing our concern, the Mental Health Law and Justice Association makes itself available to all members of our community who would like to find a safe and welcoming space to reflect on these issues. We encourage all who are interested to reach out to us by emailing vbl216@nyu.edu or skg356@nyu.edu. We also encourage all students who may have been triggered yesterday to visit NYU Counseling and Wellness, located at 726 Broadway, 4th Floor, Suite 402. Walk-in hours are available today from 10am to 6pm, Saturday from 10am to 3pm, and Monday – Thursday 10am-8:30pm. At the end of this letter, you can also find a list of off-campus resources.

To all members of our community: If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, please seek help. You are important to us and we want you to stay.

Because we believe that this unfortunate situation is the result of the stigma surrounding mental health and widespread misunderstanding of suicide, the Mental Health Law and Justice Association will be hosting an event on suicide prevention at the law school. Anyone who would like to be involved in helping us plan this event can contact vbl216@nyu.edu or skg356@nyu.edu.

Dean Belk and Dean Morrison, we urge you to issue a public apology to all members of our community who may have been triggered and ask that you make a commitment to ensuring that all future events, communications, and programs are verified to avoid harm to members of the mental health community and those whose lives have been touched by suicide. The Mental Health Law and Justice Association makes itself available to the administration to discuss how this can be achieved moving forward.

In Solidarity,

The Mental Health Law and Justice Association

http://www.law.nyu.edu/studentorganizations/mentalhealthlawjusticeassociation

Did I say these people are crazy? Because they are. Halloween is supposed to be scary and transgressive, you morons! If you don’t like it, stay home!

 

SJWs Ruin Halloween

What is it going to take to stop these idiots? A trip to Mardi Gras? Help, help, they’re being microaggressed by costumes!:

Pocahontas, Caitlyn Jenner and Pancho Villa are no-nos. Also off-limits are geisha girls and samurai warriors — even, some say, if the wearer is Japanese. Among acceptable options, innocuous ones lead the pack: a Crayola crayon, a cup of Starbucks coffee, or the striped-cap-wearing protagonist of the “Where’s Waldo?” books.

As colleges debate the lines between cultural sensitivity and free speech, they are issuing recommendations for Halloween costumes on campus, aimed at fending off even a hint of offense in students’ choice of attire. Using the fairly new yardstick of cultural appropriation — which means pretending for fun or profit to be a member of an ethnic, racial or gender group to which you do not belong — schools, student groups and fraternity associations are sending a message that can be summed up in five words: It is dangerous to pretend.

“If there’s a gray line, it’s always best to stay away from it,” said Mitchell Chen, 21, a microbiology major and director of diversity efforts at the Associated Students of the University of Washington. The university emailed to all students this week a six-minute video of what not to do for Halloween.

“If there’s a gray line, it’s always best to stay away from it.” That could be the motto for an entire generation.

Watch the video. If you go to this SJW-infested university, you should basically stay home on Halloween. Somebody, somewhere, is bound to be butthurt by anything you do.

Racist, Sexist, the Usual

JStone / Shutterstock.com

The only thing wrong with this post by Villanova theologian Katie Grimes is that it’s not longer:

Here’s my take on why Rod Dreher and his ilk are so obsessed with me: first, I am a woman who dares to do theology that does not flatter the male ego, and second, I am a WHITE female who praises, loves, and calls a “theologian” a black man like Tupac. Perhaps it is this last offense that enrages him the most. Tupac has earned a title that he has fallen short of.

More, please. I beg you.

The Fork in the Road

Gloria Steinem, 81, has a new book out called My Life on the Road. Here is what it says on the dedication page:

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO:

Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.

Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”

Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death:

I’ve done the best I could with my life.

This book is for you.

That son or daughter would be 58 years old now, and may have produced grandchildren to comfort Steinem in her old age. To bring her joy. She made her choice, and it wasn’t for life, but for self. To be 81 years old, to publish a memoir, and to dedicate it to the doctor who killed your unborn child in your womb — what a sad waste of life. Two lives. That dedication is an epitaph and an indictment.

Revolution in the School Restroom

The Obama administration says that it’s a violation of federal law for schools to deny use of their preferred bathroom to transgender students. More from the AP:

The U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice made that argument in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted late Wednesday in support of a Virginia teenager who is suing for access to the boys’ restrooms at his high school.

The government’s filing says a Gloucester County School Board policy that requires 16-year-old junior Gavin Grimm to use either the girls’ restrooms or a unisex bathroom constitutes unlawful bias under Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.

The policy denies Grimm “a benefit that every other student at this school enjoys: access to restrooms that are consistent with his or her gender identity,” lawyers for the two departments wrote. “Treating a student differently from other students because his birth-assigned sex diverges from his gender identity constitutes differential treatment on the basis of sex under Title IX.”

The administration’s position in Grimm’s case represents its clearest statement to date on a modern civil rights issue that has roiled some communities as more children identify as transgender at younger ages.

While not legally binding, it signals to school districts that may be wrestling with how to accommodate transgender students while addressing privacy concerns raised by classmates and parents which side of the debate they should take if they want to avoid a federal investigation.

Don’t think you can get out of this by taking your kids out of public schools. Title IX applies to private schools too, as long as they receive federal money. While this is much more applicable to colleges and universities (who benefit from federal financial aid assistance, research money, and so forth), some private schools receive federal money through particular programs. According to the US Education department, those programs include teacher training, assistance for poor students, aid teaching English to immigrant students, gifted and talented programs, and other things.

Want to keep that federal money teaching poor Latino immigrant kids how to speak English in your inner-city Catholic school? Better let boys use the girls restroom, or the might of the US Government will come down hard on you.

It’s coming. For some school districts, it’s already here.

This is one reason why the 2016 election is going to be massively important. Hillary Clinton will certainly keep this outrageous policy. I doubt very much a Republican president will. But I don’t know that for sure. In any case, politics remains important, but at best it will be a delaying action for matters like this. In Weimar America, trans is a cultural juggernaut.

Gnostic Nun, Cyborg Catholicism

It looks like maverick Villanova theologian Katie Grimes has some interesting company on the theology faculty at the Catholic university. Sister Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun, has been awarded an endowed chair in Christian theology there. She looks forward to transhumanism changing the Catholic Church. Excerpts from her essay:

It is interesting that a male, hierarchical church shares common ground with the male aims of science and technology. Could it be that science and religion are instilled with the same utopian ideal, the restoration of Adam to his divine perfection? Is it possible that each area is focused on the same goal and thus can respectfully keep one another at arm’s length? After all, what would be the point of the church embracing modern science and thus opening up to evolution and gender complementarity, if evolution points to an unknown future thus transcending the myth of Adam? Similarly, if science opened up to the values of religion what would motivate scientific and technological development beyond the myth of Adam? In other words, does the Adam myth constrain a new synthesis between science and religion?

To bring science and religion together into a new unity requires a new level of consciousness, a new type of person, one who is free of the Adam myth and its corresponding misogyny. This is where transhumanism can play a profound role. To guide my thoughts, I turn to the social philosopher Donna Haraway who, in 1990, wrote a cyborg manifesto in which she saw a way forward for gender equality through technology. A cyborg is a hybrid of biology and machine and can range from humans with pacemakers and prostheses to robo-humans. Haraway uses the hybridization of the cyborg as a symbol of overcoming the dualisms of Western thought, including patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism and naturalism. According to Haraway, the cyborg symbolizes a reconstruction of gender, moving away from Western patriarchal essentialism and toward “the utopian dream of the hope for a world without gender,” a world where gender is not defining of identity but transcended by lines of affinity. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no origin story such as original perfection, bliss, falleness and death and is free from the defining limits of nature. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. According to Haraway, cyborgs can now construct their own identity by choice and not fear.

Cyborgs can construct their own identity by choice. Therefore, to be fully free, we must use technology to make ourselves transhuman. More:

Transhuman technology signifies that reality is a process constituted by a drive for transcendence. Nature, in a sense, is never satisfied with itself; it always presses to be more and for novelty. When we participate in this drive for new possibilities, we participate also in God. This is the dimension of holiness in technology. When we are immersed in the drive for transcendence, we share in the ultimate depths of reality we call God. The myth of Adam has created enormous divisions in science and religion and has stifled human evolution. Transhumanist technologies, symbolized by the cyborg, provide hope for a more unified world ahead – if we develop and create technologies with this aim in mind.

Read the whole thing. You can almost hear that old familiar hiss.

Writing in First Things this month, Villanova philosopher Mark Shiffman has a very different take on transhumanism. The essay is behind the paywall. In it, Shiffman says that in the theology that leads to transhumanism, “We become

more godlike through our own efforts of self-transcendence, rather than through humble prayer and petition and self-giving love.” Excerpt:

Today, the most ambitious Cartesian dreams of life extension and enhancement set the agenda for “transhumanism.” Although it styles itself a philosophy, transhumanism is really a religious movement with a twenty-frst-century marketing campaign (under the brand “H+”). Like their prophet Descartes, transhumanists think of the human being as a consciousness hosted in a body, and of the body as a machine that the will can manipulate by means of reason. Transhumanism adds a new technological claim: Computing advances are on the verge of bringing about the “singularity,” a convergence of artificial, computer-based intelligence and human, brain-based intelligence. This convergence will allow us to transfer ourselves out of the “wetware” of the brain and into super-sophisticated hardware, thus enhancing our powers and possibly securing a kind of immortality. We are on the brink of transcending the bodily limits that have previously constrained humanity, thereby becoming transhuman.

It’s easy to write transhumanism of as a fringe phenomenon of science fantasy. But this is a mistake, for elements of it are already engulfing us.

Yeah, I’ll say — right there on that Catholic campus, holding an endowed chair in the theology department! More from this fantastic essay:

In [sociologist and transhumanism advocate Steve] Fuller’s interpretation, the Judeo-Christian doctrine that we are made in the image of God means that we have as-yet unrealized, godlike possibilities, and original sin denotes the weakness and drag of our non-godlike bodies. On this reading, Christianity mandates rebellion against our finitude through efforts to rise spiritually above the failures of the body.

This, in fact, is not Christian orthodoxy at all, but rather Gnosticism, one of the great heresies. Augustine explicitly rejected Gnosticism [Emphasis mine — RD] in the Manichean form he knew intimately. He understood original sin as the disordered will to self-exaltation. Far from being a source of sin, our embodied condition is

pronounced good in the first chapter of Genesis.

Like Marcion, a Christian heretic excommunicated in the second century, the Gnostics repudiated the depiction of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, beginning with the affirmation in Genesis 1 that the whole creation of earth and the heavens is good. According to Gnosticism, only pure spirit is good; the body and the material world are evil and the source of all evil. Gnostics wanted to purify and detach their spirits from material existence by ascetic disciplines, including abstention from sex and procreation. It was the culture of death calling itself Christianity.

The culture of death calling itself Christianity. Plus ça change. Um, I know we’re not supposed to talk about theologians being heretics, because it is “serious business that can have serious consequences for those so accused,” but I’m pretty sure there’s a Gnostic nun sitting in an endowed chair of theology at Villanova, a school that prides itself on its “Augustinian spirituality.” Does this not bother the people who hired her? I know, it’s a naive question, but still.

See, this is why the effort from the Catholic left to police the theological discourse is so harmful: it prevents us from calling things what they are. And that is serious business that can have serious consequences. This is not a game.

Why Study Academic Theology?

Catholic Bishop Robert Barron takes Ross Douthat’s letter-writing critics to task:

The letter to the Times is indicative indeed of a much wider problem in our intellectual culture, namely, the tendency to avoid real argument and to censor what makes us, for whatever reason, uncomfortable. On many of our university campuses this incarnates itself as a demand for “safe spaces,” where students won’t feel threatened by certain forms of speech or writing. For the first time in my life, I agreed with Richard Dawkins who recently declared on Twitter, “A university is not a ‘safe space’. If you need a safe space, leave, go home, [and] hug your teddy…until [you are] ready for university.”

Along those lines, I found it very weird last night when the Catholic writer Grant Gallicho (), on Twitter faulted me for writing critically about Villanova theologian Katie Grimes, a signatory of the anti-Douthat letter. He said my post was “creepy”; I asked him to explain. He tweeted:

@roddreher The way you singled out a young academic for Internet shaming. Scouring her oeuvre. Petty. Talk about the letter or don’t.

— Grant Gallicho (@gallicho) October 28, 2015

I responded:

@gallicho I didn’t “scour her oeuvre”; a reader found those things she posted on https://t.co/5bFwUWdhQA. They speak for themselves.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) October 28, 2015

To which he replied:

@roddreher A reader. You trumpeted it. You have a readership. It’s unseemly.

— Grant Gallicho (@gallicho) October 28, 2015

It went back and forth like that a few more rounds. As a sign of  — I don’t know, fatigue? desperation? — he tweeted petulantly:

@roddreher How boring. You vacated Catholicism ages ago.

— Grant Gallicho (@gallicho) October 28, 2015

Well, that’s persuasive. All this over something I wrote yesterday examining three academic papers that anti-Douthat critic and Villanova theologian Katie Grimes put into the public realm.  In the letter she signed, Grimes, who is in her twenties and works as an assistant professor of theology at Villanova, questioned the conservative Catholic Douthat’s ability to write about theology topics on the pages of the Times, as he is not a trained theologian. In a follow-up blog post, Grimes clarified that she doesn’t believe laypeople ought to keep silent; her critique, she said, is more specific:

I object not to the privileging of un-credentialed voices but to the Times’ inconsistent standard of credibility.  When it wished to employ an editorialist about the economy, it selected a Nobel Prize winning professor.  When the New York Times publishes articles about global warming, they trust the judgments of “credentialed” scientists.  One wonders why the New York Times does not extend to the discipline of theology the same respect?  In other words, while one does not need a PhD to perceive and to live God’s truth, one does need some sort of systematic training to pontificate (pun intended) about questions of church history and liturgical, moral, and systematic theology.  These can be found outside of the theological academy, but they must be found somewhere.

So perhaps rather than calling Mr. Douthat “un-credentialed,” the letter should have asked the New York Times the following question: with what criteria did they determine Mr. Douthat competent to act as an arbiter of theological truth?

 

Yesterday, in the comment thread on the Douthat affair, one of this blog’s readers posted a link to the four Grimes papers that Grimes has uploaded to Academia.edu. The reader suggested that there was something unusual about them. I went to the site and read three of the four, hence the blog post that grieved the heart of Grant Gallicho. Admittedly I was tough on Grimes, because I think her paper topics are silly, and conclusions either silly or monstrous. I linked to the full papers and published excerpts from them so readers can draw their own conclusions.

Why did I do this? Because Grimes signed a letter implicitly calling on the Times to prevent Douthat from writing about Catholic theology, because he’s a supposed ignoramus, and she elaborated that opinion journalists writing about theology ought to have “some sort of systematic training” in theology before writing about it. Well, let’s have a look at a sample of what Katie Grimes — holder of undergraduate and master’s degrees from Notre Dame, and a PhD from Boston College, and a job as an assistant professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova — has come up with as a result of her systematic training at two of the country’s top Catholic universities.

She offered in public, for the public’s consideration (which is why you upload something to Academia.edu), a paper about reading Thomas Aquinas through the lens of gender theorist Judith Butler, and concluding that the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Catholic Church) has misunderstood the medieval theologian, who actually would have considered homosexual acts to be morally licit. She posted a paper in which she lauds gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur as a “theologian.” And she posted a paper in which she contends that the Eucharist and Baptism, the two central sacraments of the Catholic faith, are fatally compromised by white supremacy, and that the Catholic Church can only find redemption if it begins lobbying the government to force white people to leave their homes. Excerpt from that paper:

The vice of white supremacy must be unmade by the transformative grace of Black Power, which places black life and freedom first. Theologians need to learn to care less about how to persuade whites to do the right thing and more on what they need to be made to do. Rather than intensifying projects of moral suasion, the church ought to begin devising strategies of white corporate coercion.

 

It is considered “unseemly” by Gallicho and those who agree with him that I harshly criticized Grimes’s work. Apparently criticism online amounts to “Internet-shaming,” and it is morally wrong for me, as a 48-year-old journalist, to criticize, even ridicule, the work of a 24-year-old theologian — the holder of a master’s degree and a doctorate in theology, mind you — because she is young.

What patronizing garbage. The truth is, I suspect, they know perfectly well that this kind of theology is hugely embarrassing to the cause of shutting down commentary from Douthat and those like him. If people know that this is the kind of thing that the professional Catholic theologians and their fellow travelers laying into Douthat write, and consider to be credible theology (versus Douthat’s newspaper columns), that the progressive Catholic cause suffers. If you are writing a letter trying to convince The New York Times that professional theologians know better than educated laymen about such matters, and this is the kind of work one of the signatories does, well, it makes you look less than persuasive.

Now, that list of signatories is long — see the letter here — and contains a number of Catholic theologians who have been at this for much longer than Grimes has. It would be unfair to single out one scholar (and a very junior one at that) to represent the whole. To be sure, it’s very easy for people outside the academy to glance at the research and work that academics produce and go, Ha ha, look at those crazy professors and their weirdo work! Academic work is often by its very nature obscure and difficult, and subjects that may seem impenetrable, even comical, to outsiders may in truth be valuable and necessary. I get that. But sometimes, it really is ideological crackpottery. Whether Grimes’s three papers I considered are groundbreaking or insane, you can decide for yourself. What is pathetic, though, is the special pleading of progressive Catholics who say it is unfair to criticize the work of an assistant professor at a major Catholic university, because she’s starting her career.

Anyway, theologian Kevin Ahern writes today to denounce my blog post as “calumnious,” and to explain why what I saw in those papers is not what’s really there. Excerpt:

Reading academic, peer-reviewed journal articles is hard work. Often in our own work, when preparing to cite a particular article at length, it is necessary to spend many days very carefully reading a single article. The reasons are fairly obvious: the article is advancing a thesis that is often complex; said thesis may cause you to re-think your own work, or lead it in a new direction; the research for the article leads the reader into an almost-endless array of theological insight (most of which the reader will be at least somewhat unfamiliar with). Grimes’s articles that Dreher cites in his post are no different from the generic peer-reviewed essay we cite above. They are meticulously researched, or else they never would have been accepted for publication. This is key in this debate, which has focused so much on orthodoxy: acceptance of these articles does not rely on whether the reviewers agree with Grimes but whether she makes a thorough argument and supports it with ample evidence. It would hardly be possible to give any one of these articles a fair reading in a short time. So, what we get from Dreher are some selected quotations without attending to Grimes’s more complex theses in these articles. Of course, such proof-texting of a text would lead to a failing mark in most introductory theology courses, so, as teachers, we can’t let it go by the wayside here.

OK, but I am confident that, as an undereducated but literate layman who somehow still has all his teeth, I would not much change my opinion on these peer-reviewed essays if I sat there steeping in them for days. The overwhelming impression I get from reading them is that they were written by someone who despises the Church and the Christian tradition. I’ll explain that later, but first, I’ve been dialoguing via e-mail with several professional theologians in the past day or two, most of them Catholic, all of them what you would call “orthodox.” I asked them if they could help me to understand how stuff like Grimes’s gets called professional theology. One of the theologians writes:

In Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s “The Nature and Mission of Theology” he talks about how the Church’s authority is not extrinsic to theology, but is the very ground of its existence, the condition which makes the nature and task of theology intelligible. The project of modern liberal thought cannot allow this. It colonizes Christian thought so thoroughly that it tempts the theologian to see him or herself the “lords of faith.”

Ratzinger provides an image for this which he finds in the magnificent Romanesque cathedral in Troia, a small town in the Apulia region of southern Italy. There he finds a relief on the pulpit dating from 1158 showing a lamb being pounced upon by a greedy lion, tearing into the lamb. This he says symbolizes the way in which the lion as a symbol of power constantly seeks to devour the the lamb which is a symbol of the Church. There is also a third animal in the relief, a small white dog throwing itself with tooth and jaw against the lion. The intentions of the courageous hound are clear. But will the small dog be consumed by the lion, or will his bite release the lamb from the lion’s bite? Ratzinger says that the small dog a symbol for the theologian who understands themselves to be the servants of the faith.

The modern liberal project requires theologians to conform themselves to a different standard, a standard extrinsic to the Church. This problem is not restricted to any one theologian. It has become the standard habit of theology to make the Church’s comprehensive understanding of faith and reason to conform itself to the new knowledge that arises from human experience. Just read the American Academy of Religion and you will see this in spades. It’s fine to single out theologians — young or old — who embody this approach to theology. But the problem is pandemic. The comprehension of the faith always seems to depend on some standard external to the Church — Judith Butler, Tupac, Base Communities, the experience of being Black, Hispanic, Male, Female, a sex addict — but when this happens to the theologian, he or she is always the lion and never the small white dog in the Troia pulpit. This theologian reads all of theology through the power box, instead of through the lens of seeking truth and understanding of the one true deposit of faith which is guarded by the apostles.

The great temptation of the theologian, Ratzinger says, is the temptation to make ourselves (our experience, our time, our culture) to be the lord of faith. But the only authentic vocation for the theologian is ecclesial. The theologian who understands him or herself as a servant of the faith is, in fact, the only one who is actually doing theology. All the rest saw off the branch upon which the whole theological task rests.

There is a whole sociology of knowledge aspect to this question which can be looked at from a purely secular point of view. The way people get formed, who they read, who they are told are most admirable, which essays and books are recommended, all build up certain standards for making intelligible judgments. The AAR or the CTSA are guilds which habituate students to a way of doing theology that is much more akin to the lion rather than the hound with a torch in his mouth.

Another theologian answers my query thus:

I have 20 answers and none. You practically have to go back 40 years to talk about how the liberal establishment took over these programs in the 70’s and has had to perpetuate itself by finding younger scholars who reject the JPII-BXVI papacies, and so have had to appeal in particular to PhD’s from Jesuit faculties (Fordham and Boston College in particular). The latter cultivate an idea of a radically adaptive Catholicism that is open to radical changes in the area of sexual ethics and (to some extent) abortion and that are solidly politically left leaning.

The left is especially worried about hemorrhaging: the loss of mainstream Catholics influenced primarily by the culture and that leave the Church because of a perception of its irrelevance and obsolescence in the modern secular world. So they reach out (desperately at times) to find ways to connect Catholic tradition with contemporary culture, to show the relevance of the former, while advancing the liberal causes they believe in. This makes for what many perceive as an internally incoherent and caricatural Catholicism that the secular left is unimpressed by and that traditional Catholics find alienating and unintelligible. It does engage secularized Catholic students, perhaps, but often only to deepen their confusion. Nor is it typically analytically rigorous, so it forfeits the respect of the philosophical disciplines insofar as it refuses to engage consistently the foundational principles of Catholic dogma.

I said, in an email exchange with this theologian, that I wonder if part of the progressive theologian outrage over the attention I paid to this young Notre Dame and BC-trained theologian has to do with the angst they have of what people outside the academy will think of theology if they see the kind of thing that actually passes for academic theology in progressive quarters. He responded:

Well, that is no doubt true. Part of the issue is also that they want to maintain the moniker of authentic Catholic identity in Catholic institutions even as they seek to modify them (or transform them rather radically albeit gradually) and this means that it is awkward to see this kind of caricatural theology that seems clearly to betray Catholic theology or even to fail at being Catholic manifest in the light for all to see.

I will add more to this long post if any of the other theologians I reached out to answer.

If I were a young person with a passion for theology and a love for the Church, and I thought I would reach the end of my studies as the sort of theologian who writes about St. Tupac and the Dumb Queer Ox, I would stay away from the formal study of theology for the sake of my own faith. And if I were any kind of believing Catholic, I would read things like this and begin to lose faith in the university institutions who produce and reward theologians who think like this. Of course this is just one graduate, but she was formed by elite Catholic theological institutions, and must be thought very good at what she does, else she wouldn’t have landed an assistant professorship at a place like Villanova straight out of her PhD program.

This fall, Grimes is teaching two introductory courses, called Faith, Reason, and Culture, plus a senior-level undergraduate course on racism and the Catholic Church (that was her doctoral thesis topic). It’s hard not to wonder what kind of introduction to the Catholic tradition these freshmen get in her class. For all I know, she handles the meat-and-potatoes intro courses like anybody else would. My guess from her writing is that she has intense passion for her work, and I bet that’s a passion she communicates to her students. The most memorable professor I had in my undergraduate years awoke in me a passion for philosophy. Though I never wanted to be an academic, I can honestly say that the passion that teacher gave me for the life of the mind, and for philosophical ideas, has guided my journalistic career. That intro course may be the first time most of those students will have encountered the study of Christianity and culture at that level. What will they come away knowing about the Catholic Church (Villanova is a Catholic university, if you don’t know) and what it has meant to Western civilization?

I know, it’s only three papers, but the impression I get from reading the work of Prof. Grimes that’s out in public is that this is someone who does not love the Church and its tradition, but is learning it to burrow inside and to “burn down the master’s house,” so to speak.

And that is the general impression one gets of the theological enterprise as seen from outside the academy. Mind you, I know good and faithful Catholic theologians who work within the academy. One of my friends used to teach theology at Villanova, and I know him to be a highly engaged, orthodox Catholic (N.B., I have deliberately not contacted him about this topic, because I don’t want to put him on the spot). Please understand, I’m not picking on Villanova here; I visited there last month, had a great time, and sat in on some wonderful humanities courses. I would send my kid to Villanova (though not to study theology). I am trying to understand why so many contemporary theologians seem so very hostile to the tradition they are supposed to serve, and why deconstructing — even destroying — that tradition appears to be a goal of theirs.

A reader of this blog who writes under the moniker WhiskeyBucks writes:

I watched in horror at what a top-flight humanities grad program did to my sister. She went in a lively, driven, extreme talent with original thoughts. I was so excited that she got into the program. Now she just sees Dead White Zombies on every street corner, feels compelled to deconstruct the oppressive subtexts of hardware stores and ice cream, and is ONLY friends with people who consider themselves revolutionary academics because they use the c-word on Tumblr as a performative rebellion against whatever social poltergeist that they proxy for their daddy-rage. Not to mention the only job she can find is bagging groceries, is more depressed than I’ve ever known her, and “can’t” bring herself to talk to her priest, because her little tribe has turned her against him.

So Katie Grimes isn’t the problem, she’s the product of the problem.

Another reader, Andrew W., who is not a theologian but is an academic, writes:

There are a number of disciplines that survive in academia because while they don’t produce a lot of graduates themselves, they’re embedded in the general curriculum as general studies requirements. Women’s studies or various minority studies come to mind. A person who decides to major in one of those disciplines is pretty much committing themselves to either trying to find a job where the degree itself doesn’t matter, or becoming an academic in that field. Religious studies has become one of those disciplines, and like most of them, the real way to get kudos in the discipline is to put on the appearance of challenging the status quo.

There are several problems with that. First of all there’s the difficulty of an academic discipline where much of the primary material involves the supernatural. Generally the academy is going to be materialist and taking these things at face value is not going to go over well. On the other hand an incoming Freshman who actually chose to come to a religious university very well may believe or even have had an experience of the supernatural. I can’t think of any other discipline where this is an issue.

Another problem is that religious studies programs are also supposed to be a starting point for the ministry, but they’re not really geared for that. Interesting as the anthropological and social background of the scriptures may be (even if they aren’t forced into a Marxist/feminist oppression narrative) religious texts are still ultimately meant to be applied.

As another person mentioned many Catholic universities in their promotional literature sell themselves as a place where the student’s faith is going to be nurtured. My Alma Mater, which was non-sectarian, also did this. What actually happens is the faith is deconstructed on the presumption that the student will develop a more mature faith in the process. Unfortunately if the follow-up to that is one story after another of virtuous victims suffering at the hands of an evil patriarchal misogynist religion if a person — and this is going to be most of the students in those required general studies courses in religion — isn’t all that interested in religion, they’ll tune out the professor, or they’ll give up the faith. If they are interested in religion they’ll either rebel, clam up, or become one more quasi-religious SJW attempting to reform the faith whether the faithful like it or not. Now that’s one heck of a bait and switch, particularly at 40 to 80k per year tuition.

That’s why I think these people went into panic mode when Ross Douthat used the word “heresy”. If word gets out that the religion departments at Catholic Universities are teaching a curriculum that is hostile to the Catholic tradition itself, and actually are encouraging the students to believe things which are recognized and condemned heresies (denial of Christ’s divinity, denial of the real presence in the Eucharist, Pelagianism) tens of thousands of parents and students are paying top dollar to send their students to Catholic schools that aren’t Catholic when they could send them to a state school at a fraction of the cost and the Newman center wouldn’t be actively trying to undermine the faith they had as children.

The humanities are having a terrible time of it in colleges today. Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, has deplored the habit humanities faculties have of holing up in their ivory towers. Excerpt:

There are many compelling explanations for the sorry plight of the humanities in 21st-century America. I have little interest in expounding upon them here, other than to observe that we, as a guild, are fanatically and fatally turned inward. We think and labor alone. We write for one another. And by “one another,” I mean the few hundred or so people who inhabit our fields—hectares and patches of scholarly specialization.

For the humanities to persevere (and for humanists to stop perennially bemoaning their miserable fate like the despondent cast of Che­khov’s Uncle Vanya) we must exorcise the demon of inwardness. We must cure ourselves of a psychological affliction that compels us to equate professionalism with specialization, erudition with footnotes, and profundity with the refusal to tackle broader questions not of interest to “one another.”

My contention is—and state legislators, boards of trustees, and belt-tightening administrations are there with me—that the humanities had better start serving people, people who are not professional humanists. Our survival as a guild is linked to our ability to overcome our people problem. If we don’t, well, then just get used to more memos from the provost announcing the “strategic migration of faculty resources” to the B School and away from your liberal-arts college.

The public redemption of the humanities that I have in mind begins in graduate school. (As for the present post-tenure generation, Dante’s warning to abandon all hope, lasciate ogni speranza, seems fitting.) The change will occur when we persuade apprentice humanists to engage their audience and then equip them with the tools to do so. Who composes that audience? In order of importance: students, scholars not in one’s field, and cultivated laypersons.

Now, ask yourself: whose interests are served by professional Catholic theologians whose research and writing focuses on queering medieval theologians, the theological wisdom of gangsta rap, and the racial malignancy of the Church? As Prof. Grimes has written, the Church is so evil and given over to white supremacy that the sacraments themselves are compromised ? She writes:

This corporately vicious operation of white supremacy within the corporate body of Christ requires theologians to change the way they conceive of liturgy, ethics, and the relation between the two. In pervading the church’s corporate body, I contend, the vice of white supremacy permeates all of its practices, no matter how sacred.

Is it true that the Catholic Church, like other churches, has been guilty of perpetuating white supremacy, either affirmatively or passively, by not standing up to it? Undoubtedly, and this is a shameful blot on the Church’s past. Even so, how can you love a Church that you believe to be virtually demon-possessed by race hatred, and that exorcising it requires you to destroy its visible body and its ancient practices? If I thought that were true, I would want nothing to do with an institution so rotten, and if I were inside it, I would work as hard as I could to destroy it. It may be theology, of a kind, but is this really what Catholic theology should be about? It’s empowering within Catholic institutions the very ideology that seeks to destroy Catholicism, or so it seems to me. 

Philip Rieff wrote, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions.

Theological faculties are normative institutions. If they fail to communicate the ideals of the Christian faith — and in Catholic theological faculties, the Catholic faith — they will die, and so will the faith. This is happening in America right now. To what extent are theological elites the problem? Or are they the solution?

And: do they care one way or another, or are they, like Berlinerblau says of many academic humanists, only focused on writing for their tiny sect of insiders?

The professional theologians I know — most, but not all, of them Catholic — are diverse thinkers, but one thing that unites them is a love for the Church and the Christian tradition. I hadn’t thought of it till now, to be honest, but the thing I notice about all of them is that they treat the tradition with reverence — not slavishly repeating what they’ve been told, but engaging it as a servant, seeking to deepen knowledge of the divine and its workings within that tradition, and to steward the tradition through the challenges of our own place and time. What I see in the attitude of many progressive theologians is a rejection of the tradition, bordering on a contempt for it — and indeed a passion for rupturing the tradition, and remaking it according to their own ideological ends.

This does not give life. In fact, it is poison. I met an Evangelical law student earlier this month who told me that at her undergraduate college, a well-known Evangelical institution, the theology faculty had torn her faith down, but they gave her nothing with which to build it back up. She said she was one of the few undergraduates she knew to make it through without losing her faith.

Again, hers was an Evangelical school, supported by Evangelicals, many of whom surely have no idea that the theology department there sees its mission as relieving undergraduates of the burden of their religious belief. Mind you, I heard a theologian from a different Evangelical school saying recently that many of his students find themselves traumatized by some of the things they learn in their theology classes, because those things don’t line up neatly with the simple lessons they learned in Sunday School. But if they stick with it, they will emerge with a deeper faith, because they will have understood the roots of Christianity much better. This scholar is orthodox, though, and so is his institution. For now, anyway. Students (and their parents) can trust this institution and its professors to challenge the students on matters of faith, but to do so in a way that helps them grow in understanding and fidelity to the tradition. Why? Because these professors are faithful to it themselves, and receive the faith as a gift to be loved, and passed on in love. I believe this is not an academic exercise. Actual souls are at stake.

If the mission of any theological faculty is to be found in St. Anselm’s phrase, “faith seeking understanding,” then it appears to this layman that more than a few professional theologians really want their students to understand that the faith is nothing more than man-made nonsense, and what man has made he can remake in his own image. So, why study academic theology? Does one do it to shore up the master’s house, and maybe to add new rooms onto it, based on the experience of living in it during a different time? Or does one study academic theology to tear the house down and build something more modern on the footprint?

And how do people outside the academy know the difference? Here again is the “Apologia for Theological Inquiry” posted on the Daily Theology blog by one or more (it’s unclear) of Grimes’s defenders. Read it and see what you think. I don’t trust it. At all. But then, I don’t have a theology degree. What am I missing?

UPDATE: Michael Peppard, who teaches theology at Fordham, writes:

At the end of Peter Steinfels’s book, A People Adrift, he suggests to folks like me (in Catholic institutions), that we “have often generally assumed the defense of innovation while leaving the task of protecting continuity to the hierarchy.” I think this is correct. But he says that in the future, “we will have to broaden our own sense of responsibility for the whole Catholic tradition.” This is a noble endeavor, and it is a great fit for the classroom. And “the future” of that comment is now.

So why doesn’t more of Catholic theology protect continuity? Why so much attempted innovation — some successful, life-giving, even true, but some not? One reason I haven’t seen discussed yet here is the entire research paradigm (in which I also participate): the rubber meets the road in the area of scholarly publication. One challenge I perceive is producing scholarly work that is faithful to tradition and also passes the originality test necessary to be worthy of a major journal or publishing house. It is paradoxical to get something published in a major venue within the wissenschaft paradigm that is conservative in the sense of preserving tradition – why would the publisher do that? Most scholarly publishers aren’t interested. And where would a tenure committee rank something like that? As long as university promotion committees say that what they value primarily is the production of new ideas, there will be up-and-coming scholars pushing boundaries. Outside of universities on the research paradigm, it’s possible things are different, but then again, even those professors were mostly socialized into the research paradigm during their top-tier graduate programs, so the ethos is quite widespread. That’s how I see it, in a descriptive, not evaluative, sense.

UPDATE.2: A theologian who will be anonymous here writes:

While I can’t speak specifically about Katie specifically (because I don’t know either her or her work), I can say that her “type” is common, especially in  theological ethics. Having looked over Katie’s CV and skimmed a few essays, I would dispute anyone who claimed she wasn’t doing interesting, or even sound academic theological ethics. Is her stuff trendy? To be sure. Is her stuff perhaps overly determined by its trendiness? Perhaps; I would have to read her far more carefully than I have before I could even begin to assess it for that. I did think her essay on Butler and Aquinas was academically feasible, even though it was seriously wrongheaded in presuppositions, interpretation, and conclusion. But, hey, people can be wrong. I don’t think that delegitimates her as a “real theological ethicist,” or even as a real Catholic ethicist. (I don’t know her personal faith, if she has one). So that’s my only qualifier to what follows.

I think academic theology in general suffers, not from a Nietzschean will-to-power, but a far more banal will-to-sophistication. You could couple this with a corresponding will-to-coolness. Theology finds itself in a terribly embattled, insecure place in the university. I think many departments are driven by an inarticulate desire to prove themselves to their peers and, by so doing, justify their place in the increasingly secular, hostile landscape of higher education.

There is a deep-seated fear that a lot of theologians have, I think, that their peers will dismiss them as fideistic, illogical, or intellectually spurious. “Divine revelation” isn’t a particularly academic concept and so the idea of doing any thinking—let alone ethics!—based on, emerging from, in working in conversation with, divine revelation simply doesn’t compute in the positivistic culture of academia. Doing theology as faith seeking understanding will be met with a cynical and dismissive eye, we theologians fear. [Aside: this goes to show the crisis of confidence theologians have in themselves and in theology as a discipline. I think you could make the argument that a great deal of theology is done today by people who view faith as an intellectual liability, rather than the source of their intellectual inquiry.] And so theologians will sometimes set out to prove their intellectual and academic merit by adopting modes of discourse that carry authority, that are sexy and popular, among their peers.

Lately, so it seems, the popular discourse that theology has adopted  has been the critical theory of folks like Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno and the Frankfurt School and so on. Such discourse has been popular in the humanities and the social sciences, so by adopting this discourse, Theology shows its relevance and its intellectual savviness. A lot of my friends and colleagues who work in the intersection of Theology and Political Science or Theology and Sociology will describe their theological projects as “Marxian” (as distinct from “Marxist,” though I remain a bit fuzzy on the difference between them).

I think a lot of contemporary Theology at least adopts the method of Marxian, critical theory in an attempt to join the intellectual “inner circle” (to use C.S. Lewis’ phrase) and so justify our continued presence at the academic table. It gives the discipline of Theology some cultural cachet; it makes Theology look hip, exciting, sophisticated, and relevant. No more of this arid Trinitarian theology! No more of this oppressive sacramentality! Away, you dry scholastic speculation! We are talking about the real world now. Take us seriously!

I also think adopting this kind of discourse is tempting—and dangerous—because it enables us to frame intellectual discourse as a kind of justice. We can congratulate ourselves for boldly “speaking the truth to power” and defending those voices that have been unfairly neglected or unjustly silenced. Theology, in this sense, is finally focusing on the “least of these”—and so now truly doing the work Jesus wanted us to do. I think a lot of universities—and Theology departments too—simply assume that Theology has long been held under the oppressive regime of normative forms of privileged discourse. These forms of discourse are often perceived as unfairly neglecting or unjustly silencing other discourses and perspectives. To counter this privilege, real or imagined, we must talk extensively about “diversity,” “privilege,” “bias,” “structural oppression” and so on. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that when it is grounded in the imitatio Christi and the desire to share in God’s healing of the world. But I think such work can easily make Christ into an extension of a pre-existing political ideology. When that happens, we are no longer doing theological ethics. We are just doing the ethics of our own presuppositions and tastes and sprinkling a little Jesus on top. The Right does this; and so does the Left. It also lets us congratulate ourselves for “doing justice” by, well, just talking about it —raising awareness! — rather than actually doing it. But I digress.

I think the other reason Theology departments are so drawn to this kind of Marxian critique is that helps academics ward against the charge of being elitist. We think—or at least I have thought—that such discourse breaks academia out of the perceived irrelevance to the “real world” that became such a concern after the Boomers.  Such discourse, we think, brings us out of the elite Ivory Tower, where academics (apparently) have always sat in privileged and comfortable distance from the messiness of real life.  Such discourse brings academic thought into the realm of the people again, man: “We do our theology in the streets (with Tupac)!”  And while there may be something profoundly Christian in that—following the kenotic descent of Christ to the form of a slave—I fear that the motivation is, again, not imitatio Christi, but something far more self-serving.

So in the end, I think part of the draw of Theology departments to trendy theology and subversive, transgressive approaches to ethical issues is, well, it makes our department look good. It shows our intellectual sophistication to our academic colleagues and our “of the people, for the people” to the world beyond that damned Ivory Tower.

Like I said, I don’t know Katie Grimes at all, so none of this is directed at her. I’m speaking more of an academic type that I’ve encountered over and over. In that type, my fear is always that theology is being done primarily as an academic, and thus career-focused discipline, rather than as a religious or spiritual vocation. As Dante saw over and over, when theology becomes the instrument to an end other than prayer and the worship of God, things are bound to go wrong. I don’t know the hearts of the people involved, of course, so I can’t speak to their motivations with any confidence. But this is my sense of academic theology’s current state.

Jeb’s Goose Is Cooked

Before the Summer of Trump, Jeb Bush seemed to be the inevitable GOP nominee. Well, if not inevitable, then at least most plausible on paper. The one thing he had to overcome was his last name, by which I mean the legacy of his brother’s failed presidency. If he could do that, it would likely be smooth sailing for him.

It hasn’t happened. His George W. Bush’s legacy hasn’t even been much of an issue to this point, but Jeb’s campaign is dead in the water, and sinking fast. This brutal assessment by Chris Cillizza, written after last night’s debate, nails it. Excerpt:

He just isn’t all that good at this. And he knows it.

There’s no other conclusion that you could draw after watching Jeb Bush flail in Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. Bush looked overmatched and lost — an image made all the worse by the fact that he was positioned on the stage in Boulder, Colo., next to Marco Rubio, his one-time political mentee but now quite clearly his superior in the race.

Bush’s attempt to attack Rubio was a metaphor not only for his debate performance but for his campaign. Knowing he needed to land a clean punch on Rubio, Bush piggybacked off a question from the moderators about Rubio’s sparse attendance record in the Senate and tried to attack. But Bush doesn’t really like attacking. And he backed into it from the start. “Could I bring something up here?” he asked, before somewhat awkwardly and, if I’m being honest, nervously, said this of Rubio: “I expected that he would do constituent service. Which means that he shows up to work.”  Then Bush, in an obviously prepared line, joked that Rubio was following a “French work week.” (Ugh. Sad trombone.)

Rubio, ready for the hit, calmly dispatched a series of facts — including that John McCain missed lots and lots of votes in 2008 and Bush still backed him — before delivering this howitzer: “The only reason you are doing it now is because we are running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

The crowd cheered. Bush folded his hands and tried to respond. It didn’t work. It was over — in more ways than one.

Read the whole thing. If you didn’t see Jeb’s feeble attempt to smack Rubio, and Rubio’s taking him to school, it’s here:

If I were a Bush donor, I would either close my checkbook or redirect my tithe to Rubio. Jeb said the other day:

If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want to have any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to just sit around and see gridlock become so dominant that people are literally in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around and be miserable, listening to people demonize me and feeling compelled to demonize me.

Hey, I agree! I don’t blame him one bit for feeling that way. It’s a perfectly sane way to feel, and I think it speaks well of Bush’s humanity that he thinks this way. But it speaks very poorly of his prospects to be president. Given his somnolent debate performances so far, it’s all too easy to see Hillary Clinton eating him alive in the campaign.

I don’t know, though, if Bush, having raised so much money (a total of $133 million, far ahead of his GOP rivals) has a graceful exit. I suspect his donors will, in effect, make the call for him after last night’s debate, by finding some better investment to make.