Seek Ye First...

William Miller writes the following of Dorothy Day in the 1940s:

It was in the course of the retreats that [Dorothy Day] came to see Christ not primarily as social reformer but as the exemplar of all-sufficient love. In the January, 1944, issue of the Worker, she pondered certain questions about Christ. “When St. John [the Baptist] was put in prison by Herod, did our Lord protest? Did He form a defense committee? Did He collect funds, stir up public opinion? Did He try to get him out?” No, she said. He had done none of these things. His mission was not primarily concerned with the world and its forms but with the Kingdom of God. (p. 190)

Jesus was not a social worker and he was not a community organizer. Now, there are those called to follow Christ who are also called to be social workers, and called to be community organizers, just as some are also called to be soldiers and some others to govern. But these things in and of themselves -- especially social work, reform, community organizing, making and enforcing the law -- these things are not the Kingdom of God. They may, tangentially, touch the kingdom, they may obliquely reflect that Kingdom, but they are not the kingdom.

The Irony of "The Law"

I have recently finished Dutch academic Benjamin Kaplan's Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, and it gives me a way to introduce a subject I've wanted to write about since sometime in late March.

In describing how tolerance as an ideal evolved in Europe, Kaplan writes a length about how Christian Europeans, particularly in Germany (where the Reformation hit first, though not quite hardest), lived, both before and after the events of the first half of the 16th century. Something essential to Christian European life was the mixing of polity and confessional community:

The uses of church bells [to mark civic events] reveal something else of prime importance too, the lack of separation between the secular and sacred. In towns and villages across Europe, “the body social, the body politic, and the body of Christ were so closely intertwined as to be inseparable.” A heritage of the Middle Ages, the equation of civic and sacral community survived the Protestant and Catholic Reformations as an ideal, even where it was no longer a reality. (p. 50)

While the church and the state were, mostly, separate entities, the congregation and the polity were not. Church and civil community, even before the Protestant Reformation, were contiguous; membership in one assumed membership in another. This is important because as Christians struggled with what it meant to live godly lives, they expressed those lives not just individually, but communally as well.

For Europeans, every town and village had a spiritual dimension: more than a convenient, worldly arrangement for human cohabitation, it was a religious body—a “corpus Christianum.” Viewed through the prism of Christian piety, its unity was an expression of Christian love, its peace godly, and its provision of mutual aid an exercise in charity. The communal welfare it existed to promote was spiritual as well as material. Indeed, the word welfare and its cognates, like the Latin salus and German heil, meant both, for no one dreamed the spiritual and material could be kept separate. God rewarded those who deserved it, and the blessings he bestowed included peace and prosperity in life as well as salvation after death. The fate of entire communities, not just individuals, depend on divine favor. Gaining it was therefore a collective responsibility. Protestants and Catholics did not differ on this point, except where Protestants focused their prayers and hopes on the divine will, Catholics directed their supplication also to the Virgin and saints. (p. 60)

Sanctification, a word important to Calvinists, Lutherans and Catholics, became the aim of community life. With the Law of God, as given in the Torah and most manifest in the Ten Commandments, as the guide for sanctified behavior (both individually and communally), laws were written, imposed and enforced. Violence was done. To this day, many Christians (many American Christians) assume that these laws should be the laws of the community, and that the failure of the community to uphold these laws is the cause of misfortune (such as hurricanes and terror attacks).

But is that the way to read the law -- the Torah תורה, literally "the teaching?" Because I don't think so.

Let's consider the marriage laws of Leviticus 18, which specify who may not marry whom, so that Israel "shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I [the Lord] am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws." (Lev. 18:3, JPS Tanakh) In verse 12, יהוה tell Moses the following:

Do not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister; she is your father's flesh.

עֶרְוַת אֲחֹות־אָבִיךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה שְׁאֵר אָבִיךָ הִֽוא׃

Okay, so who'd want to marry their aunt anyway? Yet, in Exodus 6, as the genealogy of Moses is outlined, we read:

Amram [a grandson of Levi] took to wife his father's sister Jochabed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. (Ex. 6:20, JPS Tanakh)

Moses' father married his aunt (who was probably younger than he was).

Getting back Leviticus, a few verses later, יהוה tells Moses:

Do not marry a woman as a rival to her sister and uncover her nakedness in the other's lifetime.

וְאִשָּׁה אֶל־אֲחֹתָהּ לֹא תִקָּח לִצְרֹר לְגַלֹּות עֶרְוָתָהּ עָלֶיהָ בְּחַיֶּֽיהָ׃

To find an example of this, we need to go back to Genesis 29, where we find Jacob sojourning in "the land of the Easterners" (v. 1). He meets Rachel at the well, is clearly smitten with her (she is the daughter of his mother's brother Laban), and agrees to work for Laban for seven years in order to marry Rachel. On the night the marriage is consummated, Laban gives Jacob the older sister Leah instead, claiming "[i]t is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older. Wait until the bridal week of this one is over and we will give you that one too, provided you serve me another seven years" (v. 26-27). Eventually, Jacob gets both sisters as wives, and they become the mothers of the 12 sons who will give their names to the tribes of Israel.

Okay, a point can be made here -- these relationships were made before יהוה gives the teaching to Israel in the wilderness, and thus they were not really against the law. I suppose that argument will work -- I don't buy it, and I will explain later why I don't -- but then consider David and Bathsheba.

The commandment has been given and written -- twice, in Exodus and Deuteronomy -- "You shall not covet your neighbor's house: you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's" along with "you shall not commit adultery." In 2 Samuel 16, we read the story of Kind David, spying a beautiful woman taking a bath. He "sent messengers to fetch her; she came to him and he lay with her," (v. 4) which sounds like a rape to me. She becomes pregnant, and David then tries to trick her husband, the loyal soldier Uriah, into sleeping with her so that everyone would think the child is his. No dice, it doesn't work. So David then orders to put Uriah in the front of the formation and during the battle to withdraw so that Uriah can get killed. This happens, and Bathsheba comes to live in the palace with David. Rumors must have flown, because Nathan the prophet condemns David for what he did:

David said to Nathan, "I stand guilty before the Lord!" And Nathan replied to David, "The Lord has remitted your sin; you shall not die. However, since you have spurned the enemies of the Lord by this deed, even the child about to be born shall die." (v. 13-14)

A harsh consequence, the innocent paying the price. David later "consoled his wife Bathsheba; he went into her and lay with her. She bore a son and she named him Solomon." (v. 24)

David should have known the law. And yet the eventual result of his coveting and adultery is Solomon, the greatest and wisest king Israel would know, the one who built the temple and extended its frontiers out as far as they would go.

Yes, a case can be made that the characters in the story, especially Jacob and Moses' father, did not know the law, because it had not yet been revealed in the narrative, but the readers would know the law. Hearing that Jacob married sisters, that Moses and aaron were the fruits of a Levitically forbidden marriage, that David coveted and arranged to have killed and from that came Solomon, this says something about the relationship God's people Israel have with God's teaching. They would have been taught the law, reminded of who could not be married, but also reminded in the stories that the best of us violated that teaching. Or were the results of the violation. Without Jacob marrying Leah and Rachel, there would have been no tribes of Israel. Without Amram taking his aunt as wife, Moses and Aaron could not have responded to God's call to lead Israel out of Egypt. Without David spying (and likely raping) Bathsheba, and getting her husband killed, there would have been no Solomon, and no temple in Jerusalem.

Israel owes its very existence, its covenant with God, to the violation of the teaching.

There are very few examples of human beings deliberately and purposefully punishing other human beings for violations of the teaching. In Exodus 32, after the episode with the golden calf, Moses commissions some Levites to take up their swords and "go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor, and kin." (v. 27) In Numbers 25, God commands Moses to "publicly impale" (v. 4) Israelites cavorting with Moabite women (and worshiping their god). Phinehas the priest follows the command with vigor, stabbing an Israelite man and a Moabite woman in the belly after following them into their tent.

But the example that comes to mind is Numbers 15:32-36 (Numbers is something of a gruesome, no-holds barred book, almost as violent as Judges). Israelite come upon a man gathering wood in the wilderness on the sabbath.

Those who found him as he was gathering wood brought him before Moses, Aaron and the whole community. He was placed in custody, for it had not been specified what should be done with him. Then the Lord said to Moses, "The man shall be put to death: the whole community shall pelt him with stones outside the camp." So the whole community took him outside the camp and stoned him to death--as the Lord had commanded Moses. (v. 33-36)

What strikes me about this passage, and the punishment it mandates for violating the sabbath, is that Jesus spends a lot of time deliberately breaking the sabbath. He violates the law, as it is understood, and tempts readers and listeners who might know that the punishment for sabbath breaking is death to appreciate the situation.

(Jesus doesn't cavort with non-Israelite women, but he does encounter them, and he is present for them as he is for Israelites.)

This is why I find the law ironic. It is a guide to sanctified behavior, promising salvation if followed and exile, slavery and death if not. But God doesn't abandon God's people merely because they have abandoned God and God's teaching (though God does come close in Judges 10). God continues to reach out, to forgive, to redeem, to make real God's promises as God's people struggle with the teaching we cannot follow and the law we cannot obey. It must be remembered that the history of God's people is salvation in the midst of exile, slavery and death, God present with us in our suffering and amidst the consequences of our inability to follow God's teaching. In the end, it isn't the law that saves us, not our keeping ourselves sanctified as individuals or a community, but rather God's unremitting faithfulness to us.

The Common Good

I've now listened to two of the four lectures in the BBC World Service series of Reith Lectures this year, given by U.S. political philosopher Michael Sandel. He spoke at length on his call for a "new politics" geared toward the "common good."

I'm not a fan of the notion "common good," and Sandel's lectures clearly outline some of my major problems with the concept. But first, I'll try to do some justice to Sandel's views. First, his single biggest problem with the last 20-30 years of politics in the West -- especially in Anglo-America -- was a surrender of morality to the cost-benefit analysis of the market. And that governments, especially the Blair-Clinton governments (following in the wake of the Thatcher-Reagan regimes) were too willing to let markets "work" or to have governments pretend to be markets as ways of attempting to provide state services for all (or as many as need) without actually making the hard political -- and moral -- choices to provide those services. In this, politicians have handed over actual policy making to technocratic elites, who have too much say in means and ends.

In the end, there are some goods markets (and economists) cannot price, and so some things cannot simply be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. Politics is all about moral choices -- will all citizens of an allegedly democratic polity have access to health care is a moral, not an economic choice. Sandel apparently believes that electorates would -- no, better, should -- choose the social democratic welfare state if given the chance.

Missing entirely from Sandel's calculus on the subject is the reality of force -- violence -- as a tool of government. (Any question of government policy or law must always begin with "who are willing to shoot in order to get your way?" It is the only question to ask.) Who is he willing to shoot in order to get his idea of the "common good" enacted? Assuming that an electorate has the "conversation" he wants, the reality of electoral politics is that 50%+1 win the vote. That means that minorities, say people who don't believe that access to health care is a moral issue or a civic and social right, can be compelled to participate, to support, policies and programs that they otherwise do not wish to support. Sandel assumes consensus, but how does that consensus come about, aside from propaganda -- ahem, excuse me, education -- coercion and all that goes with it? There is little room for dissent, and that's the problem with assuming the moral validity of the nation-state as "communities" in this instance. Can there be consensus on anything in a polity of 300 million people and more than 100 million voters? And what happens if that consensus happens to be something other than Sandel's happy liberal democratic social welfare state? Do we have to discuss and vote -- like certain European electorates in dealing with the EU constitution -- until we get it "right?" Is that what consensus is? Then why bother with the voting? Why not just send in the soldiers first and create "consensus" at gunpoint? Because it all amounts to the same thing.

In this regard, I do not understand Sandel's disdain for technocrats. (Maybe he's using that term solely to disparage Chicago-school economists, investment bankers and central bankers -- all well worth disparaging -- I don't know.) Ever since the American welfare state was born (more or less at the University of Wisconsin, with help from the University of Chicago), it was an elite and technocratic exercise, America's version of Britain's Fabian Socialism. It was heavily dependent on planners, on data, on the social sciences to measure, regulate and control human existence. Laws were passed, such as compulsory public education, with no popular demand and almost no popular support. Indeed, politics was not about determining the direction of government, but ratifying decisions already made. And linking the people "mystically" to those who ruled them.

Sandel's politics is an endless committee meeting in which no real choices can be made and no real dissent can be accepted. This is, of course, always how the "common good" is presented to us, which is why there is absolutely no such thing as the "common good."

* * *

As an aside, Sandel was at his best when responding to a young George Washington University Republican. Not that he answered well, but when the foolish young GOPer said that America is the only country in the world where people can live out their dream, Sandel rather bravely took on such nonsense, noting that there are plenty of countries where people can pursue dreams.

The attitude by the young Republican is, of course, not only a Republican attitude -- it is most reflected in Wilsonianism, a monstrous worldview invented and embraced by Democrats. But it is the kind of attitude that effectively says: human flourishing can only truly happen in the United States. (Sandel and his ilk are little better, since they believe that human beings can only truly flourish in the social democratic welfare state.) It is the kind of attitude that says: America must be open to all so that they may realize their dreams, and that the world must become America so that all may realize their dreams. The realizing of human dreams in the context of being American is the end (the conclusion and the purpose) of human existence. Which makes Republicanism a false religion that worships a very false god, the United States of America. Again, Democrats are no better, since they worship that same damn false god with a dollop of health care atop.

Hyperbole? Maybe? Ya Think?

A commercial attached to a short online interview with Edward James Olmos about the upcoming Battlestar Galactica film The Plan described the animated Transformers TV series from the 1980s (?) as "defining a generation." Oh, please.

But maybe that explains all the 20-somethings around me.

The Resemblance is Creepy

Fugitive Saudi al Qaeda leader Usama bin laden ...

... and French lawyer and Reformation leader John Calvin.

Again, bin Laden, who is the aspiring leader of a theocratic state (but so far has not managed to put one together outside wherever it is he is hiding)...

... and Calvin, who was the actual leader of a theocratic state, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Just interesting. That's all.

UPDATE: I'm certain if I posted a photo of bin Laden in one of those wonderful, multi-cornered Afghan hats, they'd look even more alike.

Liberalism Defined

The most compact and brilliant definition of liberalism (which includes what passes itself off as "conservatism" in the Anglo-American world) I have ever come across was written by William Miller in the first chapter of his Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. In 1973 (or sometime before), Miller wrote:

In this era the acceptable humanism of progress was located in the dogmas of liberalism. Fervor was in the faith that by keeping abreast of the sweep of time, especially in the institutional forms that order its sweep, the essential goodness of men would blood and life would be made rich. The method of liberalism was that of knowing the phenomenal world and then in a continued rearrangement of its forms keeping time’s flow harmonious. In the midst of this change and flow men, as always, required a basis for community, something to be together in. The national state became the primary source of community; never was its cohesive power stronger than when war invested it with all those marks of power in the form of military might that bore testimony to its progress.

For the age of technological enlightenment the liberal outlook was a harmonious vision. Time moved with a regular cadence, governed by a moral order. Now all of this has gone. Time has accelerated, and progress has become flight. It is not change that is anticipated but shock, and the formulas of radical adjustment devised to meet this change never fit, but before they can operate are discarded in the wake of hurtling time. -- p. 3-4

I'm not sure I agree with Miller that "all this has gone." The idea that human beings are innately good, and can must fully realize that goodness if the institutions and structures within which they live are improved, reformed, made better, more efficient, kinder, less "self-interested". In short, a society where it would be easier for people to be good, as Ellis noted of Peter Maurin in his memoir of life in a Catholic Worker community in New York. The faith that these things are achievable, doable, possible, even certain -- the most certain outcome of hard, faithful, well-intentioned work done by the hands and hearts of honest, decent, good people motivated to make the world a better place -- this idea dies hard. It is the central tenet of Enlightenment faith, it has oddly been reconciled with the Christian faith from which it sprung (but which it stands in opposition).

Liberalism requires the state, the state to measure the natural world, to measure and restrain and educate human beings. It requires the state touch, taste, smell, and manipulate all things. There can be nothing that is not subject to the state if the natural, innate goodness of human beings is to be brought out. Even at its worst, waging war, the state does so for the bettering of mankind and humanity (sacrificing individual human beings to the task, as making a world where it is "easier for people to be good" is more important than any actual individual human life), for the measuring and manipulation of nature and human beings.

I have long thought that Liberal Christianity's greatest problem (and by Liberal Christianity, I do not mean politically liberal in the American sense, though that is one annoying manifestation; I mean the desire to reconcile the claims made upon God's people -- the church -- in scripture with the Enlightenment) is its attempts to turn the Kingdom of God into a political and social project, one that can be achieved through deliberate, programmatic human effort. The Liberal Gospel seeks, as its grace-filled world, a world without sin, a world in which there is absolutely no need for God's grace.

On Exile

I have, in the past, written some on exile, particularly as our (by our, I mean "God's called people") permanent condition, or at least our indefinite condition inbetwixt Eden and the Eschaton. I like the metaphor as a way of explaining the human condition, our lost-ness in the world, our journey to wherever. I know that some Jewish thinkers following the end of the Babylonian exile decided that exile never really ended, that we as God's people remain estranged from God and the promise.

And yet the promise from God, although unrealized in a material way, is still real and still fulfilled.

Anyway, I cam across this wonderful bit on exile in Marc Ellis' memoir of his time living and working in the Catholic Worker community in Manhattan, A Year at the Catholic Worker:

In the deepest reaches of man's psyche, in the beginning of humankind's mythical history, lies exile. With exile comes the definition of what it means to be human. Exile, in the expulsion of Adam, signals the beginning of time, of division, of multiple levels of reality. Exile is the end of infinity, the inheritance of moment. It is the loss of innocence. In exile we perceive our nakedness. Exile, too, is the tasting of death, the severed connection between humankind and God, and so becomes the essence of fear. Exile is the loss of home, and security, and place. It is the beginning of the perpetual wandering.

Exile is the expulsion of Eve, the appearance of pain and of condemnation. It is the perception of otherness, of separation, and distrust. Exile, at its very roots, becomes a struggle for physical and psychic survival and thus demands a distinction between human and nature. Its hand is in the beginning of the desire to conquer and the terror of risk. Exile spells the end of illusion and omnipotence. It is the tossing out into a world of uncertainty and danger and darkness. And when even the sworded cherubim disappears, exile is the beginning of loneliness.

I won't add much to this, 'cept that it's beautiful.

Things We Don't Do In Church Anymore

Courtesy of Benjamin Kaplan, from Divided by Faith, who writes:

Churches were also practical structures. Not just places of worship, they were communal property with myriad uses.

Which, citing a study of churches in post-Reformation England, included:

In 1612 at Woburn, the curate baited a bear in church; 25 years later, also in Bedfordshire, there were cockfightings on three successive Shrove Tuesdays in Knottingly church, round the communion table. The minister and churchwardens were also present.

And for the poor pastor who needed some extra to make ends meet:

Gendulphus van Schagen, the impoverished pastor of Laar, a Flemish village, grew vegetables and raised hens, pigs, and doves in his churchyard. Parishioners complained to the archbishop only after his doves hit them with droppings during services and his hens laid eggs on the church’s altars.

Bear baiting and cockfighting! Around the altar! Now there's a project for an enterprising pastoral intern!

Tolerance Versus Toleration

Ahh, I am back to the reading of serious books and commenting on them. I can see that in order to maintain sanity wherever I end up, it will have to be within spitting distance of a proper university library. By proper, I mean humanities.

I troll the new books at the seminary library, and occasionally find some gems. Last book I reviewed for Lew Rockwell, this book I'm not going to wait so long (like I had a running commentary on the Germany book, which I never did finish...) to comment on this one, DIVIDED BY FAITH: RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE PRACTICE OF TOLERATION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE by Benjamin Kaplan, an (an?) historian at University College in London and the University of Amsterdam.

Kaplan seeks to explain the rise of "tolerance" as an ideology in Europe more organically, from lived life rather than as an idea that arose out of nothing. One of the problems of doing intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is that it's easy to focus on one or several important thinkers who created an idea out of whole cloth. For example, in dealing with what I call Revolutuionary Islam, is it easy (and necessary) to focus on Sayyed Qutb, Maulana Maududi and Abdullah Azzam as the influential creators and thinkers, but this ignores how the idea spread -- newspaper editors, preachers, discussion groups, all spending time thinking, reflecting and talking about the ideas, mashing them together, creating a synthesis from which they acted (particularly in Afghanistan, where all these strains, plus others, came and were woven together). But it's hard work trying to do that kind of social excavation, given that newspapers decay rather rapidly, and so much of this is done orally, in sermons and speeches and conversations. Kaplan is trying to do this for tolerance. Good for him. I'm 55 pages into this book and it's absolutely fascinating reading.

Today's topic -- persecution. Kaplan has this to say about the role of coercion within the church:

Protestants and Catholics were both heirs to a heritage of Christian thought that legitimized persecution. Dating back to antiquity, that heritage had been shaped by one individual more than any other, the church father Augustine of Hippo. A reluctant persecutor, for years Augustine has counseled the church against resorting to force in its struggle with the Donatists, and to the end of his days he rejected applying torture or the death penalty to heretics. In his later writings, though, he offered a justification for lesser forms of coercion that became a fixed part of Catholic dogma and was taken over by Protestants as well. For Augustine, persecution was a form of tough love. “Thou shall beat him with the rod, and shall deliver his soul from hell” (Proverbs 23:14, [JPS Tanakh: Beat him with a rod and you will save him from the grave," in reference to the training of a child]), he quoted. Like a father who chastised his son, a shepherd who drove wandering sheep back into the fold, of God who sent tribulations to his chosen people, the church persecuted the wayward for their own good. Skillful application of corrective discipline could return heretics to the church, outside which there was no salvation. Leaving heretics mired in error condemned them to damnation. The one was therefore an act of Christian love, the other of uncaring neglect. In 1582 a Calvinist synod phrased the argument thus: “Regarding Christian love, it does not consist in having to tolerate every person in his disbelief without speaking against it or punishing him … He too uses love who admonishes and instructs with soft and hard words, as the need demands … The Reformed church cannot exempt [a person] from God's law nor teach anything else … or promise anyone freedom and salvation except those to whom God has promised them. Therefore, ministers do not neglect love in tolerating and admonishing where proper, and punishing in accord with God's ordinance where it is necessary.” Augustine found support for this argument in various passages of scripture, most notably the parable of the banquet in the Gospel of Luke (14:15-24). Spurned by his invited guests, a householder welcomed the poor and maimed to his meal, and when there still remained room around the table he ordered his servants to “go out to the highways and hedges, and whomsoever ye shall find, compel them to come in.” The banquet Augustine compared to “the unity of the body of Christ,” the highways and hedges to “heresies and schisms.”

To be sure, Augustine conceded, no one could force a person to believe anything. This principle had been firmly established by earlier church fathers, among them Tertullian. Faith, the latter asserted, was an internal conviction that no coercion could generate. It was therefore “against the nature of religion to force religion.” Augustine argued that one could at least make heretics listen to the truth, ponder it, and reconsider their views. Many people remained mired in error out of custom, negligence, or obstinacy. Such persons needed to be “shaken up in a beneficial way by a law bringing upon them inconvenience in worldly things.” Persecution could serve a valid pastoral function by making people amenable to instruction. Although it could not convince of its own power, wrote Anglican theologian Jonas Proast in 1690, it could “bring men to consider those reasons and arguments which are proper and sufficient to convince them, but which, without being forced, they would not consider.”

I find it interesting that a bit of Proverbs (a book I don't like anyway) about the training and disciplining of a child is applied to wayward members of the church. The idea that adults are somehow "children" in need of violent discipline when they stray, and need to be forced to consider ideas they might not otherwise, is pernicious. There is no end of evil this can be used for, especially when the "state" becomes the great family and whoever is sovereign over the state becomes daddy, and we that daddy's children.

But what kind of love -- and I mean real, honest, compassionate concern for the well being of others -- that pretends to care so much that it will inflict pain and suffering in order to prevent an allegedly worse outcome: eternal damnation? There is a vast amount of confidence in one's righteousness there, to inflict pain and suffering -- even death -- for such a cause. This isn't love, not really. It's sentimentality, the kind of emotion that leads the humanitarian to reach for the guillotine (to borrow from Isabel Paterson) when the intended recipients of help, aid and betterment refuse. Love gives, but it does not compel. Not ever.

(Remember, other adults in a community or society are not your children.)

But there's one more thing. To inflict this kind of pain, to compel others, requires someone to do the compeling, to inflict the pain. It is all well and good for someone to ache over the misguidedness or suffering of others and propose a solution, but who will get their hands dirty? Who will turn the wheels on the rack? Who will shoulder the rifle? The liberal who aches to save Darfur will end up wanting to send some (perhaps many) soldiers to the place who have nothing but contempt -- ugly, racist contempt -- for the people they are saving (and shooting). In order for the church to compel, it must make common cause, must employ and cultivate and promote and protect, sadists, who live to be cruel, to turn the wheel, to shoulder the rifle and pull the trigger. That God uses all means possible does not mean we should. Sadists have enough job opportunities -- as school teachers, police officers, spies, soldiers and the like -- without the church also needing their skills and talents.

The Bicycle-Eating Potholes of Chicago

Of all the dangers a bicyclist faces in Chicago, potholes are probably the greatest. No part of this city is immune, and there are even streets in way upscale Hyde Park that look like they've been hit by cluster bombs and artillery submunitions. They can make motoring unpleasant. They can make cycling lethal -- try steering around some of these in heavy traffic...

Here are a few of the nastiest potholes I've come across. Most of these are on the West Side.


Fill this one with water and you could fish from it. I want to say this is on Lake Street, but I don't remember exactly where it is. It could possibly be visible from space.

This is on Lake Street, about five blocks or so west of Larramie. This has since been covered up with a steel plate which sits at a funny angle and is not quite flat, thus making a nice "clang!" every time someone drives over it. This one was a couple of feet deep, and I think the weed was actually growing in there. (There's a larger pothole on Lake in Oak Park that has swallowed a city trash can...)



I don't quite remember where this was either.


This yonical pothole was maybe a meter deep -- it might have its own mineral rights or lead to the kind of lost world Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about. This was somewhere just west of the West Loop area.