Remember The Josias

Last week I mentioned a new venture, The Josias, which I will be contributing to in the near future. After getting some technical matters out of the way, including a new web address, The Josias is starting to host fresh content. For those interested in the purpose behind the site, here you go:

Here we have endeavored to collect some writings which may be useful in improving the understanding of justice and the common good. We know that what is said here may seem strange and unwelcome, disconnected from the questions disputed among the Great and the Wise of our time: but we are not writing a mirror for princes, and hope that we may observe those things the more clearly in whose outcome we are the less invested.

Here are some links to the latest posts.

The Crony Capitalism Claim

The latest issue of First Things, which isn’t even highlighted on their website yet, features an article by Acton Institute Director of Research and “Tea Party Catholic” extraordinaire Samuel Gregg entitled “Catholic Blindness.” Without getting into the details of the piece here (that’s for another time), let me note that for those who have followed the general trajectory of Acton’s apologetics for free markets and small government, the article doesn’t break any new ground. In fact, it’s more-or-less an advertisement for Actonism and perhaps part of a campaign to ramp-up interest in Acton University for 2015. Anyway, lurking behind Gregg’s pro-market apologia and, indeed, most of the ideological rhetoric that emanates from the Acton Institute is the specter of crony capitalism, an intentionally slippery concept that is mean to instill fear in the hearts of anyone who believes there is a legitimate—indeed necessary—role for government in the operation of the economy. I call the concept “slippery” because it can be, and often is, quietly expanded and retracted over the course of a single exposition in order to meet an array of critical challenges. Moreover, as I will discuss more below, it is far from clear that crony capitalism describes a new phenomenon—one which is distinct from capitalism per se or, at least, any form of capitalism which has actually existed in the real world. There’s apologetic utility in that. For if every critique of capitalism is not a critique of “real capitalism” but only “crony capitalism,” then the espousers of “real capitalism” are free to continue promoting their ideology without fear of falsification. The irony, of course, is that Actonites and other free-market apologists—including Gregg in his First Things article—perpetually point to real world examples of what they claim is “real capitalism” (not “crony capitalism”!) at work to empirically defend themselves. And this is where the expansion and contraction of the crony capitalism descriptor really comes into play.

The Josias

Since I am sure all of you, dear readers, do not have enough blogs to read, let me suggest one more: The Josias — a new collective blogging endeavor which will, on occasion, feature my posts from yours truly plus a small horde of other folks who have far more interesting things to say than I. If you are curious about the “theme” of the blog, look no further than its first posting, Abbott Dom Gerard’s 1985 Pentecost sermon which I have posted here before under the title, “Illiberal Catholic Manifesto.” Also, be sure to follow The Josias web-log on Twitter: @josias_rex

Note: The blog address has been updated to reflect its most current location.

Seven Years Later

For very understandable reasons, a number of people are today celebrating the seventh anniversary of Summorum Pontificum (SP), though the document didn’t enter into force until September 2007. I already wrote some thoughts on SP here. Contrary to certain claims, I do not believe SP is a flawless document, but my quibbles with it are minor. In fact, they are so powerfully overshadowed by the real problems of SP’s implementation and the active hostility of bishops, priests, and layfok toward the Tridentine Mass that I really see no point in discussing them. Were SP met with open arms by the hierarchs of the world and every diocese on earth committed to offering the vetus ordo regularly, I doubt very much that anyone, even nitpicking traditionalists, would care that much about SP’s marginal tensions. But that is not the case. I can’t remember a week going by since I entered the Catholic Church in 2011 where I didn’t read or hear some Catholic, conservative or otherwise, popping off about SP, the Tridentine Mass, those who attend it, or all of the above. Their criticisms, more often than not, were visceral, not intellectual. And in those rare circumstances where some degree of intelligence was applied to the alleged “problem” of the old Mass, the arguments often rested on rickety premises (“Only old people like it…”) or (potentially false) claims which utterly miss the point: “Nobody understands Latin!”; “The old Mass creates too much distance between the priest and the faithful!”; “What do you mean we can’t sing ‘On Eagle’s Wings’?”

Sexism and Critique

One of the hazards of web-logging is that it induces a fair number of needless, though not necessarily uninteresting, distractions. After posting “Irrelevancy” yesterday, a few people sent me links to various blogs discussing critic Edward Champion’s attack on blogger Emily Gould and others Champion deems “middling millennials.” One friend in particular thought I was giving Champion’s takedown too much credit and, more importantly, that I had missed the sexist (if not misogynistic) nature of the piece. That’s not entirely true, but I am not sure why it matters. The accuracy of Champion’s criticism doesn’t rise or fall with the nature of his personal prejudices. Champion could be the most sexist, petty, jealous-driven man on earth and it wouldn’t necessarily undermine his identification of certain problems found Gould’s work and attitude, not to mention the larger pathologies infecting certain segments of the contemporary “literary scene.” If one wants to knock my take on Champion’s take of Gould, knock me for being out of touch with contemporary culture and, thus, prone to let someone like Champion do my analytical lifting for me. I am not saying I would agree with such a knock wholeheartedly; I did, after all, read some of Gould’s work following the Champion piece, along with her recent interview in New York Magazine. I won’t defend Champion coming unglued in his Gould takedown, but I don’t think he is off his rocker either. (Well, maybe he is a little bit: he threatened to commit suicide on Twitter following a wave of negative feedback for attacking Gould.)