A Sound of Sheer Silence

So, as basically everyone knows, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States tomorrow.  Like all inaugurations, there is a great deal of pageantry involved.  And, as has been the case numerous times before going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, there will be a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C .  The National Cathedral is the cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, as well as serving (as the name implies) in an informal way as the closest thing we have to house of prayer for the entire country in a place as religiously diverse as the United States.  In addition, it appears that the choir of the National Cathedral will be singing in some capacity at the inauguration itself. I have made my views  clear  on the idea of the presidency of Donald Trump , and nothing that has happened since Election Day has changed my position one iota.  I do not and will not celebrate Donald Trump becoming t...

Yesterday was the the First Sunday of Advent, the season of waiting and watching for the coming of Jesus at Christmas.  As was so well said by in the sermon I heard this weekend, there are really three different sorts of "coming of Jesus at Christmas" that Advent looks forward to--the one in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, the one that we believe will come at the end of time, and the one that comes to each one of us in an individual way, in that "sound of sheer silence" as the title of this blog says.  Those three ways are different, of course, but they are also the same in important ways, I think.  The more you carefully look at one of them, the more they resemble the other two. In that light, I was thinking over the course of this weekend about the how the people in the 1st Century were waiting and watching, and how that might relate to our waiting and watching.  What might we learn from them?  How are their struggles like our struggles, their fears like our fears...

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said,"As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." They asked him, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" And he said, "Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and, 'The time is near!' Do not go after them. When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately." Then he said to them, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. "But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; the...

The idea of the "Big Lie" is usually associated with Adolf Hitler and is usually discussed in connection with Nazi propaganda.  It turns out the term was coined by Hitler in Mein Kampf , but it was used to refer to his claim that the Jews (of course) blamed Germany's defeat in World War I on poor military leadership, as opposed to laying the blame where it should go, which is on themselves (in Hitler's mind--this is of course nonsense).  In any event, the notion here is to make a simple statement that is repeated often, and eventually people will begin to believe the statement to be true.  Or, said in a pithy way "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it." In the case of Nazi version of the Big Lie, the statement they chose was, well, a complete lie--the idea that conspiratorial Jews were behind everything.  Tragically, their version of the Big Lie worked, leading to the horrible consequences we all know.  But ...

After tomorrow, it will be over.  We will have to deal with the aftermath, and that aftermath could be catastrophic, but the immediate phase will be over.  It has been, and I say this without hyperbole, a horror show from beginning to end.  I will tell you that I sit here, with one day more to go, profoundly depressed about the state of the country that I was born in and love still. There is a significant chance (if, I think, substantially less than 50%) that Donald Trump will become the President of the United States.  If that were to come to pass, I believe that the United States will never be the same.  Here, I am with Andrew Sullivan in his apocalyptic piece  from last week--I believe a President Trump means the institution of fascism in the United States, much along the lines of the model provided by Trump's buddy Vladimir Putin of Russia.  If Trump were to win tomorrow, I believe the 2020 election will be much more like the 2012 Russian Pres...

On September 17, 1862, outside of the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, the United States Army faced off against the army of the Confederate States of America in what has become known to history as the Battle of Antietam.  In the summer and early fall of 1862, the U.S. Army had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the break-away Southern states, and was on the verge of losing the war.  Now, the armies of the South had invaded Union territory, and were threatening to march on Washington, D.C. On that day, confusion and poor leadership left the center of the Union line vulnerable.  To stave off disaster, and acting on his own initiative, Brigadier General Thomas Francis Meagher led his Irish Brigade (including the soon-to-be-legendary 69th New York Infantry Regiment, "The Fighting 69th") in a desperate charge against the Confederate center, at a place that has now become known as "The Sunken Road," or "Bloody Lane."  The charge failed to br...

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." --Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, 1947. We hear, endlessly, that "the Church is not a democracy."  It is said by conservative folks with great glee and enthusiasm, and by more progressive folks with a kind of resigned sigh.  And, as a purely factual matter, it is 100% true.  Roman Catholicism is not a democracy in any meaningful way.  But I don't think people have really thought through what that means, and what the consequences of that reality truly are. Some small glimpse of that awareness has broken through in the form of the brouhaha over some emails exchanged four years ago between Hillary Clinton's campaign head John Podesta and various aides and subordinates.  The topic of these emails (or, at least, one of those topics), is Catholi...

I'm working on some posts reviewing the rest of the chapters of the book, and I will be getting those out in the next week or so, but I wanted to pause for a second and go on a bit of a tangent.  This last week and half or so has been a bit of a perfect storm--I've been reading and thinking about Rev. McCleneghan's book, I have been talking to friends of mine about the book and about their own situations, and of course I have . . . experienced? endured? . . . the latest from Donald Trump and his campaign and the reaction thereof, alongside the rest of the U.S. population. At the intersection of all of this has been a bit of a Eureka moment for me.   As I mentioned in a previous post , I've always known I existed in a bit of the in-between space between the broader, secular culture and the more conservative Christian (in my case Catholic) culture. And, while there is no question that I have been moving in many ways away from that more traditionalist thinking, I still ...

The law school I attended had (as still has) a professor of criminal law named Paul Robinson.  I didn't have him for first year criminal law, but a number of my close friends did.  One of his big areas of research in criminal law involved the idea of moral intuitions.  Criminal law, and other areas of law for that matter, have often taken on a rationalistic and technical character, in which you attempted to come to the "correct" legal regime through the application of pure reason.  Professor Robinson believed that this approach tends to de-emphasize and de-legitimize our basic moral sense of what is just--a basic intuition that is often a more reliable vehicle to achieving justice than our hyper-rational structures, especially when that intuition is "crowd sourced" and incorporates our collective wisdom. I was thinking about Professor Robinson's ideas while reading this essay by Rachel Held Evans .  Evans writes about the dilemma that pro-life Christians f...

1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbatio...

The first Presidential election I remember even a little bit was 1984.  In 1984, Republican President Ronald Reagan was running for re-election against Democratic former Vice President Walter Mondale, and Reagan crushed him in one of the most lop-sided contests in American history.  I was six, so I don't really remember lots of the details (for '88 I remember watching the debates and following the primaries), but when you don't remember facts you tend to retain feelings--almost like ghosts of the things that you can't quite recall. What I remember about the Mondale campaign was a certain dour, pessimistic tone--things are bad, we are heading into a ditch, and only by kicking Reagan out of the Oval Office can be get this thing back on track.  By contrast, the Reagan campaign was positive.  Sure, there are problems and challenges, but we are working on them, and if we keep working on them we can fix them.  America is the greatest country on earth, filled with go...

Your Excellencies and Graces, As you know, we are in the midst of an election season here in the United States; on November 8, 2016, we will elect a new President.  With all due respect to former Governor Johnson of the Libertarian Party, the two primary choices we are presented with are Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  It is my view, and I am not alone in this opinion, that this choice represents a monumental turning point in the history of the United States, one that will have profound consequences for not just our country, but for the world. It is with this in mind that I write this open letter to us, as a Catholic and a US citizen deeply concerned with the fate of my Church, my country, and my world.  My aims are modest.  I am not asking you to directly weigh in on the election, as that would be unwise of you, even improper.  Nor am I asking you to speak out against the overt racism exhibited by Donald Trump and his supporters...

I don't usually write about politics here.  In large part, this is a function of the fact that my time writing this blog coincides with the low ebb of my interest in politics.  Well, that low ebb is coming to an end here in 2016, mostly as a result of the fact that the country of my birth appears to be in danger of spiraling completely out of control and into a very scary place.  I will say up front that I don't have any solutions to provide or profound insight to offer.  This is going to be scatter shot and disorganized--some observations and thoughts that may not make much sense. 1.   Legacy.   It's really hard to talk about politics outside of your own circumstances, which is in large measure determined by where you come from.  So, here's where I come from.  My father comes from Northeastern Pennsylvania, in a town half-way between the small cities of Scranton (which became famous as the setting for the comedy show The Office ) and Wilkes-...