A Sound of Sheer Silence

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...

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a hardcore devotee of the ideas of Rene Girard.  I've tried before to set out, in a big picture way , why I think his ideas are so important and so fruitful--not just in terms of Christianity or religion, but in general.  But those things I mentioned are big-picture concepts, and can be seen as somewhat abstract.  If you want some specific idea of Girard's, one that is directly relevant to our current political and cultural situation, I think his most trenchant idea is his discussion of the Cult of Victimhood. In Girard's analysis, the Cult of Victimhood is, though unacknowledged by its practicioners, literally a Christian heresy (or more accurately, a Judeo-Christian heresy, if one can say that).  For Girard, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveals to the world the mechanism of scapegoating-- a victim is selected from among the people and sacrificed in order to discharge our rivalrous, imitative desires, an...

"Don't do it," I hear you telling me.  "You don't want to be That Guy," you wisely suggest.  " Everyone  has praised the Pope's new encyclical.  The only people who have a problem with Laudato Si' are Republican Presidential candidates and Rorate-Caeli  readers .  Do you want to be lumped in with that lot?" You're right, you're right.  I shouldn't do it. But. . . I have ambivalent feelings about  Laudato Si'.   I'm not sure if this encyclical will, in the long run, be a good thing for the Catholic Church.  In fact, I think the encyclical is, in some dimensions, a step backward.  There, I said it. Let's talk first about the substance of the encyclical, and then move to my bigger concern, which is the philosophical and ecclesiastical vision that informs the way the encyclical approaches and presents that substance. On the substance, everyone is focusing on climate change part, where he says that human activity ...

I stumbled upon this video the other night by accident, looking for something else (like all good things).  My initial attraction to the video was the presence of Jim Martin, S.J., whose work I've looked at here .  Martin was fine, but really the highlights were Dr. Natalia Imperatori-Lee and, especially, Andrew Sullivan.  It's long (90 minutes), but worth your time. Here were some highlights for me: 1.  Dr. Imperatori-Lee made a simple, but profound point about the distinction between "style" and "substance."  One is tempted to dismiss changes in "style" as being "only style," and not substantive.  But, in a Church that takes seriously the idea of sacraments and the Incarnation, the externals (i.e. the "style") are substance.  The style/substance distinction is, and must be, a false one in Catholic thinking.  Again, a subtle point, but a good one. 2.  I don't agree with Andrew Sullivan about everything.  He got vis...

So, Ross Douthat, predictably, expressed his views on the Synod on the Family in the pages of the New York Times Sunday editorial page yesterday .  I like Douthat, even though I don't agree with many, many of the things he says, and this piece was a good example of what I like about him.  In this piece, Douthat says what has been apparent for a while, but no one has been willing to actually admit/threaten---the conservative/traditional wing of Catholicism (i.e. Cardinal Burke, EWTN, Douthat, etc.) are not going to stand for a return to status quo pre-John Paul II, and they are prepared to walk, or at least consider walking, if that looks like Pope Francis (or whomever) is actually going to push things in that direction. To understand the Douthat piece, it's important to understand the theology of history used by conservative, EWTN-style Catholics to understand the last 50 years of Catholicism.  It goes something like this.  In the beginning, there was the pre-Vat...