Rod Dreher's Blog, page 652
November 2, 2015
US Blasts Open Trans Locker Room Doors
Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions.
Education officials said the decision was the first of its kind on the rights of transgender students, which are emerging as a new cultural battleground in public schools across the country. In previous cases, federal officials had been able to reach settlements giving access to transgender students in similar situations. But in this instance, the school district in Palatine, Ill., has not yet come to an agreement, prompting the federal government to threaten sanctions. The district, northwest of Chicago, has indicated a willingness to fight for its policy in court.
More:
In a letter sent Monday, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education told the Palatine district that requiring a transgender student to use private changing and showering facilities was a violation of that student’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that bans sex discrimination. The student, who identifies as female but was born male, should be given unfettered access to girls’ facilities, the letter said.
“All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities — this is a basic civil right,” Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Township High School District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room.”
The “female” in question has a penis. More:
Officials in the Palatine district, which serves more than 12,000 students, have framed their position as a middle ground. The transgender student in question plays on a girls’ sports team, is called “she” by school staff and is referred to by a female name. But the district, citing privacy concerns, had required her to change clothes and shower separately.
The district said she was allowed to change inside the girls’ locker room, but only behind a curtain. The student, who has not been publicly identified, has said she would probably use that curtain to change. But she and the federal government have insisted that she be allowed to make that decision voluntarily, and not because of requirements by the district.
“What our client wants is not hard to understand: She wants to be accepted for who she is and to be treated with dignity and respect — like any other student,” said John Knight, the director of the L.G.B.T. and H.I.V. Project of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, who is representing the student. “The district’s insistence on separating my client from other students is blatant discrimination. Rather than approaching this issue with sensitivity and dignity, the district has attempted to justify its conduct by challenging my client’s identity as a girl.”
Because your client has a penis! Read the whole thing, and understand that the US Government is now committed to using its power to force open the doors to public school locker rooms for people of the opposite sex. There is no such thing as compromise, according to the Obama administration. Separation is inherently unequal, it says.
This is radical. Yet this is a priority to the elites of the Democratic Party — and all public schools are subject to their radicalism. The federal government believes that gender is whatever an individual claims it is, and that all society must accept that claim. Ten years ago, if you had said that the federal government was soon going to force public schools to let biological males undress in girls’ locker room, and biological females undress in locker rooms filled with teenage boys, you would have been called some sort of right-wing paranoid.
And now, this.
The thing is, most people with kids in public schools cannot afford to take them out to homeschool or put them in private school. They are all at the mercy of the federal government. People who can afford to do otherwise will increasingly feel compelled to. Good job, Democrats.
I was talking not long ago with the head of a private Christian high school. He told me that he was receiving advice from some on the institution’s board that the school needed to adopt a firm policy keeping out students who have gay parents. That seemed to him really uncharitable, and denied the school a chance to minister to such kids and to their families. I told the principal that I agreed with him, but that the militancy of LGBT activists and the federal government was pushing Christian schools like his to take harder lines than they want to do. Lawyers have told me that if Christian institutions do not establish firm, clear doctrinal lines, and enforce them, they are going to be in a very weak position if someone takes them to court. Which someone will, eventually. It’s a form of Zero Tolerance that the left is forcing on Christian institutions that want to maintain a Christian identity, as they understand it.
Democrat Far Ahead in LA Governor’s Race
Bad news for Sen. David Vitter, the GOP candidate for Louisiana governor:
Democrat John Bel Edwards has a 20% lead over Senator David Vitter in the Louisiana Gubernatorial runoff, according to a survey released today by WVLA and JMC Analytics.
The brand new, statewide poll results confirm something that hasn’t happened in 7 years: A Democratic Governor could take office in Louisiana.
Today, WVLA released a survey of 600 likely voters, conducted by JMC analytics. When asked who they’d vote for if the election were held today, 52% of people chose State Representative John Bel Edwards. 32% chose Senator David Vitter, and 16% were undecided.
These numbers are surprising because they show that Edwards, a Democrat, will pick up more votes from former Republican candidates Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne than Vitter, a fellow Republican.
Doesn’t surprise me. So many of the Edwards voters are Anybody But Vitter people. Edwards, a pro-life, pro-gun, retired Army Ranger who has served for some time in the Louisiana legislature, is a plausible conservative Democrat. The state sheriffs have endorsed Edwards, and have dismissed a Vitter ad saying that Edwards is going to release hordes of inmates onto the streets of Louisiana.
I predict that Vitter will release an ad of some sort attempting to force Edwards to take a position on efforts by Mitch Landrieu, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Circle, and to rename it. This has nothing to do with running the state, but Vitter knows that this is a potential emotional flashpoint with many Louisiana voters, both white and black. The kind of voters, both black and white, who approve of Landrieu’s actions aren’t going to vote Vitter anyway, and compelling Edwards to take a stand one way or the other may suppress Edwards’s vote — unless the Edwards campaign can successfully rebut the claim. Watch. It’s a long way from now till the November 21 runoff vote.
Mind you, if voters in the October 24 open primary had chosen either Angelle or Dardenne (who together got more far more votes than Vitter), there wouldn’t be much of a contest now; Louisiana would be well on its way to another Republican governor. Angelle and Dardenne split the anti-Vitter Republican vote, though.
Mets Lose, Gays Win
Slate‘s resident gay hysteric Mark Joseph Stern, who could find the homo-hate in a box of Raisinets, is glad the Mets lost the world series, because, yep, Ha-a-a-a-a-te!. The Mets’ Daniel Murphy is a Christian who does not morally approve of homosexuality, and once said so in a fairly modest, irenic way, quoted here by Stern:
I disagree with his lifestyle. I do disagree with the fact that Billy is a homosexual. That doesn’t mean I can’t still invest in him and get to know him. I don’t think the fact that someone is a homosexual should completely shut the door on investing in them in a relational aspect. Getting to know him. That, I would say, you can still accept them but I do disagree with the lifestyle, 100 percent.
… Maybe, as a Christian, that we haven’t been as articulate enough in describing what our actual stance is on homosexuality. We love the people. We disagree the lifestyle. That’s the way I would describe it for me. It’s the same way that there are aspects of my life that I’m trying to surrender to Christ in my own life. There’s a great deal of many things, like my pride.
Plainly, the Mets home run king is Babe Hitler.
Seriously, though, here is a Christian who has a moral objection to homosexuality, but who says nobody, least of all himself, is perfect, and he is willing to reach out and befriend gays. That’s not good enough for Stern, who demands that Murphy be punished. Why? Because he’s a killer. Stern remarks:
Every year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gay and bisexual kids kill themselves precisely because they are pummeled with homophobic ideas like these. Some overdose on their parents’ pills; some slit their wrists; some hang themselves or put bullets in their brain. LGB kids are between two and four times more likely to try to kill themselves than straight kids. Every episode of LGB victimization, including verbal harassment, increases the likelihood of self-harm 2.5 times on average, according to the CDC.
When gay kids read comments like Murphy’s—and then see that the MLB deemed them acceptable—they’re liable to conclude that they really are twisted and aberrant, that society really won’t accept them for who they are. These toxic feelings could only be exacerbated by a cult of Murphy, a growing fan base that lauds him as the Mets’ savior. To see an anti-gay player be not just tolerated, but celebrated—even by those who would otherwise rebuke his prejudice—would be profoundly dispiriting. Even I, a fairly thick-skinned gay adult, was stunned by the celerity with which otherwise tolerant baseball fans forgave his anti-gay disparagements once he started hammering homers.
Mark Joseph Stern is “fairly thick skinned” like Saran Wrap is the walls of the Kremlin. He goes on to say that he’s glad the Mets lost, to punish this thought criminal, and Stern hopes for Murphy’s career to implode:
But I’m delighted to see Murphy’s star come crashing down so publicly. Now a free agent, Murphy’s stock just plummeted, and his name will be whispered in disappointment rather than trumpeted with glee. Murphy’s horrifying performance, his downfall on the field, likely had nothing to do with his noxious personal prejudice. And yet, in some small way, it felt like justice.
Because justice. That’s how Social Justice Warriors roll.
See, this is why I keep telling Millennial Evangelicals that all the winsomeness in the world won’t make them love you. There is no way in the eyes of many LGBT folks and their allies to hold dissenting views in good faith. You may believe that it is wrong to reduce gay people to their sexual desires, and thus to dehumanize them, but many of them believe it is “justice” to reduce orthodox Christians and other moral traditionalists to their beliefs about homosexuality, and to judge them accordingly.
Thus do we pathologize dissent, on the road to criminalizing it. The reader who sent this item in writes:
So. To tolerate the traditional view of homosexuality, which prevailed until two minutes ago, is a violent offense. You cannot just sit there and listen to it. You MUST “reprimand” him. Not doing so is to render his violent claims reasonable and harmless. While we all know that they are unreasonable and harmful.
What if a Christian wrote that he was glad to see a sports team lose a national championship because the team includes an openly gay star athlete, and we cannot have people cheering for a homosexual? Would we not think that person was a petulant narcissist, and quite possibly a crackpot bigot? Could that person even hope to get a column like that published in a respectable publication?
Of course not. But there is Mark Joseph Stern, in Slate, where I bet there’s not a single person in the newsroom who has the slightest idea how unbelievably offensive that opinion is, and how nasty and repellent it would be if things were flipped, and a Christian said it about a homosexual sports figure.
I don’t know whether I find it more troubling to contemplate the backlash to this aggression, or to contemplate the likelihood that there will be no backlash, but that society will come to agree that Christians like Daniel Murphy are thought criminals who do not deserve to have careers in athletics.
UPDATE:
Q for @roddreher: if a player said he disagreed with the “Christian lifestyle,” would you say that’s totally OK? https://t.co/WmWsXeQbYc
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) November 2, 2015
@mjs_DC Of course. Who cares?
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 3, 2015
I don’t even care if a ballplayer says he doesn’t care for Christians. I might think, “What a jerk,” but the more important question is, “Can he hit?” People are more than the sum of their opinions. If his opinion was, “Hitler and Stalin were a couple of swell guys,” well, okay, that’s a big problem. But this is not that, and neither, by a thousand million miles, is what Daniel Murphy said.
It Really is ‘Camp of the Saints’
There are more displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history — 60 million in all — and they are on the march in numbers not seen since World War II. They are coming not just from Syria, but from an array of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Haiti, as well as any of a dozen or so nations in sub-Saharan and North Africa. They are unofficial ambassadors of failed states, unending wars, intractable conflicts.
The most striking thing about the current migration crisis, however, is how much bigger it could still get.
More:
“Throughout Europe, xenophobia and open racism are running rampant, and nationalist, even far-right parties are gaining ground,” Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, wrote recently in an article that appeared on Project Syndicate, an online news service.
“At the same time, this is only the beginning of the crisis, because the conditions inciting people to flee their homelands will only worsen. And the E.U., many of whose members have the world’s largest and best-equipped welfare systems, appears to be overwhelmed by it — politically, morally and administratively.”
Those stresses pose a challenge for the future, experts say, because the flow is unlikely to ebb anytime soon.
“I don’t think this wave can stop,” said Sonja Licht of the International Center for Democratic Transition. “It can maybe from time to time be somewhat less intensive, we simply have to prepare. The global north must be prepared that the global south is on the move, the entire global south. This is not just a problem for Europe but for the whole world.”
The German village of Sumte (pop. 102) has been told it has to receive 750 asylum seekers. This will, of course, obliterate the village for all intents and purposes. But who cares about them, right?
Via Steve Sailer, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban slams George Soros on the migration crisis:
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused billionaire investor George Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of “activists” trying to undermine European nations by supporting refugees heading to the continent from the Middle East and beyond.
“His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle,” Orban said in an interview on public radio Kossuth. “These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.”
Soros responded:
Soros said in an e-mailed statement that a six-point plan published by his foundation helps “uphold European values” while Orban’s actions “undermine those values.”
“His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle,” he said in the statement. “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”
Remarks Sailer:
In other words, Soros is agreeing with Orban.
Interesting times.
Chris Christie on Drug Treatment
HuffPo has a six-minute clip of an incredibly powerful Chris Christie talk on the campaign trail, in which he challenged the way we deal with drug abuse in this country. It’s one of the most compelling things I’ve ever heard any politician say. He starts by talking about how his mother, a smoker so addicted to nicotine that she couldn’t quit, contracted lung cancer in her 70s. Christie says nobody said, “Well, she deserved it, let’s not give her chemotherapy.” So why do so many people object to giving treatment to drug and alcohol addicts? he asks. He ties his support for drug treatment to being pro-life. And then he tells the story about a law school classmate who, as a practicing lawyer, had to take Percocet for an injury. He became addicted, and … well, watch the video. You won’t be able to take your eyes off of it.
If the next president is a Republican, I hope he or she finds something important for Chris Christie to do in the administration. I swear, I would rather do almost anything than watch a politician talk for six minutes, but this is riveting stuff.
November 1, 2015
It Ain’t Paranoia If You’re Right
“It is true — Pope Francis answered — it is a truth and for that matter the family that is the basis of any society changes continuously, as all things change around us. We must not think that the family does not exist any longer, it will always exist, because ours is a social species, and the family is the support beam of sociability, but it cannot be avoided that the current family, open as you say, contains some positive aspects, and some negative ones. … The diverse opinion of the bishops is part of this modernity of the Church and of the diverse societies in which she operated, but the goal is the same, and for that which regards the admission of the divorced to the Sacraments, [it] confirms that this principle has been accepted by the Synod. This is bottom line result, the de facto appraisals are entrusted to the confessors, but at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who ask will be admitted.” [Rorate Caeli translation, emphasis added]
So the Synod did not give Francis the result he wanted, so he’s going to push for what he wants anyway (and don’t forget, he has the power to overrule the Synod). The Trads and the conservatives were right all along.
At this point, you can’t be shocked by this. What I find more shocking is that the Pope knows full well that many, even most, of his bishops are against what he proposes, believing it to be heresy. And he telephones a newspaper editor (an atheist newspaper editor at that!) to undercut his own Synod. Loose cannons are less dangerous than this pontiff.
You see this, from one of the lead Douthat detractors?
Don't read @DouthatNYT latest provocation. It is just part of indep study course in ecclesiology/Church history a few of us are giving him
— Massimo Faggioli (@MassimoFaggioli) October 31, 2015
I’m posting this from the Houston airport, en route to home. I ran across this passage in The Brothers Karamazov, and thought of the liberal Catholic theologians who denounced Douthat, and who are scandalized by the resistance they have called forth. The speaker here is Dmitri Karamazov:
And Rakitin doesn’t like God, oof, how he doesn’t! That’s the sore spot in all of them! But they conceal it. They lie. They pretend. That’s the sort spot in all of them! ‘What, are you going to push for that in the department of criticism?’ I asked. ‘Well, they won’t let me do it openly,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But,’ I asked, ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,’ he said.
UPDATE: And so now, the Vatican is walking this back. Excerpt:
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told the Register Nov. 2: “As has already occurred in the past, Scalfari refers in quotes what the Pope supposedly told him, but many times it does not correspond to reality, since he does not record nor transcribe the exact words of the Pope, as he himself has said many times. So it is clear that what is being reported by him in the latest article about the divorced and remarried is in no way reliable and cannot be considered as the Pope’s thinking.”
Father Lombardi said he would not be issuing a statement about the matter as those who have “followed the preceding events and work in Italy know the way Scalfari writes and knows these things well.” Over the past two years, Scalfari has written several such articles following conversations with Pope Francis, each of which has drawn controversy.
This exchange appears no different, which raises the question: why does the Pope continue to speak to someone such as Scalfari, and discuss such sensitive subjects with him, when he knows he is unreliable but likely to report his words without reference to a recording or transcript?
Exactly. On the face of it, it would appear that Pope Francis is an idiot to keep calling and talking to this guy who keeps misquoting him. I don’t believe for a second that Pope Francis is an idiot. This strategy allows him to signal to liberals what he intends to do, while preserving himself plausible deniability (“That socialist geezer doesn’t even write anything down! How can you believe a thing he says?”) to Catholics inclined to give the pope the benefit of the doubt.
October 31, 2015
Another Shooting in Colorado Springs
Maybe you heard about the shootings in Colorado Springs today. Four dead, including the shooter. They happened not too far from my hotel this morning. I didn’t hear about them till later this afternoon, after the Benedict Option event. The man who told me about them had been at my talk. His name is David Works. He went on to say that he appreciated what I had to say in my talk about how the church in America has no real idea how to deal with suffering, or how to talk about it, and how we need to do a much better job of it.
“You talked about the martyrs,” he said. “My two teenage daughters were martyrs.”
“What?” I said.
David Works is the man in this story from 2007:
Even though the Colorado shooter may have killed their two daughters, devout Christians David and Marie Works said Thursday morning their faith has helped them to forgive the gunman and find peace in knowing that Stephanie and Rachel Works are in heaven.
Appearing in an exclusive interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” David Works said the family was leaving New Life Church in Colorado Springs for burgers and shakes when he heard a “pop” and saw the gunman, Matthew Murray, making his way to the parking lot armed with an assault rifle.
“I screamed at everybody to get down, that there’s a shooter out there,” recalled the teenage sisters’ father.
Upon seeing his 16-year-old daughter Rachel fall to the pavement, Works said he tried to rush to her side but was stopped short by the gunman.
“I saw him again point the gun and, uh felt my belly rip, and fell to the pavement, not having gotten to Rachel all the way,” described Works in recounting the horror of their Dec. 14 encounter.
His wife, Marie, meanwhile, was trying to help the couple’s 18-year-old daughter Stephanie.
“I saw lots of blood coming out of her nose,” said Marie. “And I thought, she’s been hit in the head, that – and then I started to look for a pulse and I couldn’t find a pulse. And I was fairly sure that she was gone.”
He showed me a scar on his abdomen from where he took a bullet that day. The gunman, Matthew Murray, hated Christians:
“You christians brought this on yourselves,” Murray writes in his 452-word harangue. “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill.
“Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”
After hearing his story, I asked David Works how on earth he found the strength to endure such suffering. He shrugged and said with a gentle smile, “I figure if a man can rise from the dead, anything is possible.”
David and Marie Works appeared on The 700 Club back in ’07 to talk about their grief as parents, and how their faith helped them bear the cross of their daughters being murdered by an anti-Christian maniac.
Heroes of the faith walk among us still. I met one this afternoon in Colorado Springs.
Universities Help SJWs Ruin Halloween
Universities are nipping politically incorrect costumes in the bud this Halloween. Some have put up sensitivity flowcharts and flyers with the phone numbers of consultants students can call to make sure their costume doesn’t offend anyone.
“Unsure if your costume is offensive? Don’t be scared to ask questions,” a State University of New York at Geneseo poster reads, with the contact information of no less than five campus officials listed below.
If that wasn’t enough, Geneseo also provided a flowchart to show them the way of inclusive Halloween partying.
Look:
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:
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.
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.
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