2016 - Opus Publicum

May 23, 2016 Politics

A Passing Comment on “Think Tanks”

Last Friday’s decision by the Left-leaning think tank Demos to cut ties with blogger Matt Bruenig over his behavior on Twitter caused a minor firestorm among online leftists who see the move as an attack on Bernie Sanders supporters by Hillary Clinton supporters. You can read the dirty details over at Politico here. Regardless of what you think about Bruenig’s politics, his social-media antics — and the antics of his supporters — fall a wee bit short of good decorum, but so it goes. There are plenty of, umm, “online personalities” who have made a name for themselves wedding above-average writing with below-average manners, though very few of them work for mainline think tanks which, for better or worse, prefer to maintain an image of intellectual credibility despite operating as ideological black boxes. And so it makes sense that Demos would not want to be associated with an individual who can’t seem to help himself when it comes to taking a 140-character jab at fellow leftists who don’t subscribe to his personal brand of socialistic politics. As I have stated elsewhere, if you take the king’s shilling, you follow the king’s rules, or else. There’s no conspiracy at work here; it’s just the way it goes. Think tanks are not designed to be free forums for open-ended discourse where both the norms of civility and toeing the party line are checked at the door.

Now, some will claim that Bruenig’s Twitter account is his own and that he was not representing Demos when he decided to call a Clinton ally a “scumbag.” That’s a silly defense. Think-tank affiliation, no less than academic affiliation, can’t be flipped on and off like a light switch; it becomes part of your professional (and, to a large extent, personal) identity the second you sign-on. And even if you want to hold that there ought to be some separation between a person’s professional life and personal opinions at a general level, most employers — particularly those in the public eye — do not want persons working for them who are going to undermine their credibility and appeal with unbecoming off-the-job behavior. In my near-decade as an attorney, I have known more than a fair share of lawyers who have lost their posts at various law firms and companies because of comments made on social media and other public fora. Moreover, I have known aspiring, non-tenured academics who have lost their positions because of similar behavior, including questioning certain popular orthodoxies promoted by their coworkers. You can decry that as “unfair” or “not right” if you wish, but everyone who plays the professional game (and it is a game) knows the rules going in, particularly when the environment they choose to inhabit comes packaged with an overt ideological bent.

None of this is to say the think-tank enterprise is good. In fact, very little think-tank behavior is defensible since the last thing that goes on in their walls is actual thinking. Surely Bruenig knew this going in, and so while his lack of employment is unfortunate (as all unemployment is), it’s neither surprising nor tragic. If you desire to be an independent, principled voice for this-or-that cause or political orientation, then a think-tank is the last place on earth you ought to be. Heck, at this stage in the game, being anywhere but a survivalist shack in Idaho is probably unwise if you have anything credible to say at all.

May 17, 2016 Eastern Orthodox Church, Politics, World

Don’t Get Too Excited

Rorate Caeli sent out a tweet today congratulating the (Orthodox) Church of Greece for the low rate of out-of-wedlock births in Greece as compared to other members of the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD). (You can view the numbers here.) As Life Site News reported last year, abortions have been skyrocketing in Greece since the economic crisis, with people increasingly relying on them as a form of birth control. In fact, many historic Orthodox countries, including Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus, and Russia, have some of the highest abortion rates in the world — a depressing truth made all the more depressing by the Orthodox Church’s ostensible resurgence since the fall of communism in the East. Sad times these be.

May 16, 2016 Church, Politics

The Clickbait Option Continues

I am deeply wounded that Peter Wolfgang, author of last week’s misguided critique of the so-called “Benedict Option,” bypasses my own critical remarks on his article in his latest piece (ok, not really). It matters not, for the same problems present in his original article are alive and kicking in this one, specifically not knowing what the “Benedict Option” is and, more critically, offering neither empirical evidence nor even a plausible research model which could in some way, shape, or form show that the “Benedict Option” caused Donald Trump. Where I do find myself agreeing with Wolfgang is with respect to his assertion that the “Benedict Option” can have real-world effects. The problem is that it’s far from clear that it has had any effect thus far — a problem Wolfgang chooses to ignore.

As for the rest of Wolfgang’s article, it’s a meandering mess of anecdotes blended with confusing claims about elementary terminology. So I am left wondering why Wolfgang is still going on about this topic. Could it be that the “Benedict Option,” despite its limited circulation in the winder world, is still a “hot property” among religious writers and thus an easy draw for clicks? That was the hunch which closed-out my initial post on this matter, and Wolfgang’s latest provides me with no reason to revise it.

To close on a positive note, let me say this. Wolfgang is right to decry retreatism even if he does it in the context of an ill-fitting critique of an idea he doesn’t seem to grasp in full. If the “Benedict Option” is nothing more than a bald call for retreat, then it seems patently obvious to this Christian that it is impossible to support it. It seems, however, that there is a bit more to the “Benedict Option” than this, but it will probably take some time before Rod Dreher (and others who support it) fully articulates what the term means in full.

May 13, 2016 Church, Eastern Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church

Cons and Trads

Fr. Chad Ripperger (formerly) of the Fraternity of St. Peter has an excellent article up over at Faithful Answers discussing the differences between traditional and conservative (or what he calls “neoconservative”) Catholics. Here’s an excerpt:

Furthermore, neoconservatives’ very love for the Church and strong emotional attachment to the Magisterium cause them to find it unimaginable that the Church could ever falter, even with regard to matters of discipline. Like the father who loves his daughter and therefore has a hard time imagining her doing anything wrong, neoconservatives have a hard time conceiving that the Holy Ghost does not guarantee infallibility in matters of discipline or non-infallible ordinary magisterial teaching. Traditionalists, confronted by a Church in crisis, know that something has gone wrong somewhere. As a result, they are, I believe, more sober in assessing whether or not the Church exercises infallibility in a given case. That, allied to their looking at the present through the eyes of the past, helps traditionalists to see that the onus is on the present, not the past, to justify itself.

The only quibble I have with Fr. Ripperger’s piece — and it is a minor one — is that it doesn’t account for the experiences of Eastern Catholics, most of whom do not fit neatly into either the traditionalist or conservative category. While there is what I would call a “natural conservatism” among the Eastern churches, centuries of living in a de facto ecclesiastical ghetto coupled with various influxes of “Latinization” have compelled contemporary Easterners to recover their respective traditions. This is all fine and good, but as most Latins know by now, the process of “recovery” is often fraught with difficulties and subject to being hijacked by renovationists.

May 12, 2016 Wrestling

My Sixth Shameless Professional Wrestling Blog Post in Years: WWE Talent Rankings

For those (few) who care, I present my wholly subjective, arguably ill-informed and poorly reasoned ranked list male workers (i.e., “insider”-speak for in-ring talent) currently employed by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and active on the main roster. First, however, a few qualifiers . . .

I have excluded “special attraction” performers such as The Undertaker, HHH, and Shane McMahon even though they are all under WWE contract.
I have included part-time talent such as Brock Lesnar and Chris Jericho.
I have included injured talent who are set to return shortly and have wrestled for at least four months since last year’s WrestleMania.
My assessments are based primarily on a performer’s body of work in the ring, though I have also tried to account for how poor booking or limited use may mask a wrestler’s potential.

Enjoy.

May 12, 2016 Church, Politics

A Little More on Trump and the Benedict Option

After yesterday’s minor scuffle over Peter Wolfgang’s dubious suggestion that the so-called “Benedict Option” dumped Donald Trump on our doorsteps, Andrew Haines — editor of Ethika Politika — is stepping into the mix with “The Benediction Option is No Match for Trump, And That’s the Point.” It’s not my business to defend the “Benedict Option”; that gig belongs primarily to Rod Dreher. As indicated in yesterday’s post, I have been critical of the “Benedict Option” in the past, though I believe Dreher’s instincts are in the right place when it comes to the gravity of our present situation and the need for Christians to have some meaningful response to it. As for Haines’s brief defense of the “Benedict Option,” which rests largely on the idea that it represents an intellectual, moral, and spiritual turn rather than a social movement with measurable effects, I am not entirely convinced. Yes, Haines is right to highlight that the “Benedict Option” is in no way, shape, or form intended to stop the political ascendancy of someone as noxious as Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for that matter), but if the thinking behind the “Benedict Option” is ever internalized by a sizable portion of American Christians, it most certainly will produce what Haines calls “real-world effects.” But will those effects be salutary? How one answers that question no doubt depends on how one understands being in the world but not of it (or, as is increasingly commonplace among contemporary Christians, being both in and of the world).

May 12, 2016 Eastern Orthodox Church

If You Want to Argue About Baptism…

. . . then venture over to the Byzantine Texas web-log where folks of various ecclesiastical stripes are discussing Orthodox fundamentalist theologian Fr. Peter Alban Heers’s views on “heterodox” baptisms. (I briefly discussed Fr. Heers’s views on Opus Publicum here.) As several people have noted, the combox discussion surrounding the article is surprisingly civil. However, those who have a low tolerance for “unbroken Orthodox tradition” rhetoric and canons-speak may wish to steer clear.

May 10, 2016 Church

Tuesday Tumblings

Without pretending to give the topic the full treatment it is due, permit me to make the off-the-cuff observation that “aesthetic Catholicism,” a semi-intellectual posture predicated upon making the Faith a lifestyle choice, is now in full swing among certain circles of young(ish) Christians who think posting selfies which look like they were lifted from a Terrence Malick film and quoting Chesterton sets them apart. Granted, this “brand” of contemporary Catholic posturing is exponentially less noxious than the “bourgeois Catholicism” which is normative in most parts of the Western Catholic world today. If there an ideological glue binding both camps together it is papalotry, or a certain type of papalotry where the “Pope is the Faith; the Faith is the Pope.” Make any mention that Christ had 12 Apostles rather than one and all of these well-intentioned, well-meaning Catholics will start murmuring about your “crypto-Protestantism” and “lack of obedience” to the Holy Father. (And what of God the Father? He’s secondary.) What splits these two camps is how they internalize the magisterium, or a certain reading of the magisterium. The “bourgeois Catholic” believes that the Church provides a pathway to being both in the world and of it with nary a second thought. Liberalism can and will save us. The “aesthetic Catholic” thinks salvation comes from Bernie Sanders and microbreweries.

All of these nonsense abides above and beyond classic distinctions between conservative and traditional Catholics. As mind-boggling as it may be, many a “bourgeois Catholic” positively embraces the Tridentine Mass and may have even read an article or two from the Summa one time. The “aesthetic Catholic” likes the Tridentine Mass, too, because it is (superficially) counter-cultural, “beautiful,” and all that jazz. What both groups seem to be missing is an eschatological horizon, a sense that Christ came to lead all souls to Heaven not make the historical conditions ripe for alt-country music or golf courses. On a lower level, one might suspect there is a general lack of seriousness among both camps — the same lack of seriousness one finds among all liberals. (And do not get me wrong, dear reader: “aesthetic” and “bourgeois Catholics” are both thoroughly liberal in orientation.)

May 9, 2016 Meta

Thank You

Thank you to all of you who tossed a couple of nickels into the hat for Opus Publicum. The WordPress costs have been covered with money to spare for my parish. Your generosity is much appreciated.