A Sound of Sheer Silence

Back in 2006, political pundit Matt Yglesias coined what he called the "Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics," as a way to criticize certain segments of the U.S. conservative foreign policy establishment.  Over time, this meme has expanded to include other kinds of political discussion, so for example we have the "Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency" (usually deployed as a counter to the critiques of President Obama). In the comics, Green Lantern is a superhero from Earth that is part of what is basically an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps.  The Green Lantern Corps's basic tool is a power ring which basically has the ability to project green energy and shape that energy into force fields, weapons of force, etc.  The trick is that the power and utility of the ring is dependent on the will and imagination of the user.  In principle, the ring can do anything, but only insofar as the user has the force of will to channel into the r...

In the last few posts, we have discussed the idea that we don't know how to talk in Catholicism anymore, and out failure to talk makes many of our problems difficult, contentious, and insoluble.   So, what language should we use?  How can we talk to each other? We can start by paying attention to how we talk about this thing that we are all involved in together--the Church.  An almost endless series of metaphors for the Church have been employed throughout the centuries.  I tried my hand at the plow with the "train to the Land of Hope and Dreams" (borrowing from the Boss).  Alison has a similar, if perhaps more festive, suggestion: I’d like to say that for me being Catholic is being at a huge and very spacious party at which there are an awful lot of people, most of whom are not at all like me and with whom I don’t have much in common. Furthermore this is a party to which I have been invited not because I’m special, or any of the other people are special, b...

1.  Many years ago, I read a book by Karen Armstrong entitled The Battle for God .  In the book, Armstrong tries to define and explore the concept of "fundamentalism."  Technically, fundamentalism refers to a specific movement in Protestant Christianity, stemming from the Niagara Bible Conference in the 1880s and 1890s that defined what it believed to be the "five fundamentals" of Christian faith.  However, the term "fundamentalism" has expanded to other religious contexts, so we talk about Islamic Fundamentalism, Jewish Fundamentalism, etc.  In fact, in her book, Armstrong discusses the history of Jewish, Islamic and (Protestant) Christian fundamentalisms in parallel. But what is fundamentalism?  Armstrong argues that it has three basic components--a substantive component, a political or social component, and a rhetorical component.  The substantive component is a whole-cloth rejection of the values of the broader society in which it finds itself--i...