A couple of months ago, in one of my “Weekly Reading” posts, I linked to a piece by Rod Dreher where he describes a First Things (FT) conference “discuss[ing] the future of religion in the public square[.]” The three conference papers have now been published. They are as follows:
Friends, acquaintances, and movie critics told me I needed to see Richard Linklater’s ambitious film Boyhood. Shot over a 12-year period, Boyhood attempts to show the physical, mental, and emotional development of a six-year-old boy named Mason in an unprecedentedly realistic manner while chronicling the ups-and-downs of his (divorced) parents’ lives. The mother, played by Patricia Arquette, has a rough go of it as a single mother who enters into two disastrous relationships with alcoholics before pulling herself out of dependency with a college education. The father, portrayed by the often insufferable Ethan Hawke, is the quintessential deadbeat dad: obsessively cool, self-justifying, and locked in adolescence for 80% of the film, he manages to finally “figure it all out” with his second stab at marriage and children. No negative consequences flow from his actions (or, rather, inaction and inattentiveness). Not even Mason appears noticeably harmed by his father’s absence; he even remains immune from harm by the aforementioned alcoholics, which is distressingly convenient. What would the audience think about Mason’s actual father had his son took a beating or suffered emotional harm at the hands of other men? But then that might raise more troubling questions about the social acceptability of absconding fathers.
On his blog yesterday, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf called attention to a Reporters Without Borders initiative to compel religious leaders to acknowledge that blasphemy is a right—one which is higher than (the liberal conception of) religious liberty. Today, in the course of his visit to Asia, Pope Francis had some other thoughts on the matter. Here are some excerpts taken from the translation up at Rorate Caeli.
Several days ago I mentioned that Pater Edmund Waldstein’s 2014 talk, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” has been on my mind. Among the many excellent points Waldstein makes in the lecture, the most interesting to me is his refusal to submit to what one might call “nostalgia shaming” or the belief that a position is unreasonable, specious, or invalid because it is nostalgic. Waldstein, whose commitment to Catholic monarchism and integralism is well known, differs markedly from his fellow intellectual travelers insofar as he is neither a hopeless romantic nor a defeatist. Having a deep and intellectually serious attachment to the past, or principles which were still upheld int he past, is not the same as being indifferent to present realities. One of the most often heard — and ultimately unpersuasive — critiques of monarchism, integralism, and the restoration of Christendom is that they belong to the past. That they were all part of the past is a point no one disputes; that they must remain there forever is a bridge too far. People assume that, of course. But then again, people assume a lot of things are permanent which are not. That poor Egyptian, dialoguing millennia ago with his ba, likely didn’t see all that much on the human horizon given what his people had already accomplished.
I write to report that on the 12th day of January, in the year of our Lord 2015, Modestinus, the worst kept secret identity in blogdom, cyber-reposed after a long battle with irrelevancy. Having outlived his usefulness, Modestinus has decided to hand the reins of Opus Publicum over to one Gabriel Sanchez, occasional contributor to various publications and self-proclaimed know-it-all on aviation law. A traditional Viking funeral will be held in Modestinus’s honor on the banks of the Grand River in due course.
After more than a year of experimenting with a new theme for Opus Publicum‘s layout, I have decided to return to the one I used when I launched the first version this blog in 2011. While I am not insensitive to some of the “Manifest” theme’s drawbacks, I am not particularly fond of the old theme hiding the “About” and “Writings” pages under a tab which few first-time visitors notice or click on. Further, by hiding the “Categories” for each post, the previous theme was not conducive to visitors searching the archives for additional commentary. A casual comparison of my stats under the previous two themes as opposed to this one reveals a substantial drop in “clicking around.” As usual, if you have any feedback or suggestions to offer, I am all eyes.
Addendum, 1/13/15: After soliciting feedback from various quarters, I have settled on a new design altogether. Basically what it came down to is that the previous template was not mobile friendly; and as one faithful reader put it to me, “Everyone reads your blog on the Blue Line in Chicago.” If only that were true.
There is so much commentary on the Charlie Hebdo (CH) killings and related violence that it’s impossible to digest it all. As best as I can tell, much of it isn’t worth reading anyway. Right now much of the mainstream media’s attention is focused on two things: (A) Who perpetrated the attacks, how, and why; and (B) What the Right, as represented by France’s Front National party, will do to “exploit” this tragedy. Anything which appears critical of CH itself or “the cause” for which 17 people lost their lives is, of course, anathema. The last thing anyone wants to do right now is reflect on what the violence in Paris says about liberal ideology and its attendant pieties, and yet that is exactly what thoughtful persons ought to do at a time like this. Granted, it isn’t easy, as I found out last week when several blogging sites, particularly Patheos’s The Friendly Atheist and the Free Thought Blogs’ Dispatches From the Culture Wars, held my initial reflections on the CH attack up for scorn because I suggested—consistent with traditional Catholic thought and saner periods in Western jurisprudence—that neither blasphemous speech against God and His Church (not Allah and Islam) nor inflammatory speech lacking artistic and intellectual merit deserves legal protection. No, that does not mean CH “got what it deserved.” We might still wonder, however, if the attacks would have occurred at all had French society had not turned a blind eye to barbarism long ago.
Some months ago, on the old Opus Publicum, I called attention to Pater Edmund Waldstein’s lecture April 2014 lecture “Exhausted Democracy.” The talk is also available on Pater Edmund’s web-log, Sancrucensis, under the title “The Politics of Nostalgia”here, or in PDF here. I have been giving the contents of this talk/paper a great deal of thought lately, and I think you should as well. Perhaps liberalism isn’t the only ideology in play at the moment, but it is so dominant that it has made us effectively forget about all of the rest.
Note: One of the “additions” I plan on making to Opus Publicum in the new year are brief book reviews. Hopefully they will prove to be of some value.
Archimandrite [Archbishop] Job Getcha, The Typikon Decoded (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2012), 313pgs.
Given the ongoing clamor over the Charlie Hebdo tragedy and its aftermath, everything below addresses those topics.
