Recent posts by RNA members

For the second Wednesday running in his "Great Saints" series of catecheses, B16 turned at today's General Audience to the figure of Hildegard of Bingen, the visionary 12th century mystic, musician and theologian.

Here, via AsiaNews, a sum-up of today's talk:
An authentic renewal of the Church "is not achieved by change in structures rather from a sincere spirit of penance and active path of conversion". This lesson of St. Hildegard of Bingen "is a message that we should never forget," said Benedict XVI, as he dedicated a second week of general audience reflections to the twelfth-century mystic nun. Again during his Wednesday meeting with pilgrims he expressed the hope that "the Holy Spirit will inspire in the Church holy and courageous women like Hildegard, who give their valuable contribution to the spiritual growth of the Church of our time."

Hildegard, whom the Pope described as a “founder of monasteries, preacher, and counsellor to the personalities of her time, a naturalist, musician and painter", is also an example of how" even theology can receive content peculiar to women, because they are able to speak of God and faith with their special sensitivity".

Hildegard, a Benedictine nun who "distinguished herself for her spiritual wisdom and holy life" in her writings that describe her mystical visions "interpreted the Holy Scriptures in the light of God, applying them to the various circumstances of life." "Rich in theological content, her writings refer to the main events of salvation history" and "those who heard her felt bound to live a Christian life."

In her work, "with the characteristic traits of feminine sensibility, she develops the theme of mystical marriage between God and humanity, consummated on the cross". Furthermore, in her "vision of God who animates the cosmos, she highlights the deep relationship between man and God and reminds us that the whole creation of which man is the summit, receives life from the Trinity."

Hildegard illustrates the "cultural vitality of the female monasteries of the Middle Ages, contrary to the prejudices that are still present regarding that era". Her popularity pushed many people to write, there are numerous letters addressed to the monastic community from men and women, bishops and abbots. They contain considerations that are still valid today, such as for example " spiritual life must be nurtured and cared for with great dedication: at the beginning it is a bitter fatigue" because it forces us to sacrifice, but one must be open to the search for holiness, to find true happiness in God.Over recent weeks, the Pope's "Great Saints" thread of Wednesday talks has focused on Pius X, Duns Scotus, and St Joseph Cafasso, a relatively obscure 19th century Turinese whose depth of faith was expressed both in contagious devotion and concrete action... and whose ministry birthed the mission of the famous "friend of youth," St John Bosco.

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After years of buzz listing him for seemingly every vacancy to arise on these shores, Friday saw Bishop Blase Cupich installed in Spokane as the new head of eastern Washington State's 90,000-member church.

Sure, the highly-regarded prelate's new posting might lack the prominence of some of the spots for which his name's popped up in recent years -- Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, nearby Seattle and his native Omaha, to name just four. Yet in the end, one of the most competent and effective (and, indeed, tech-savvy) members of the Stateside bench was called to trade in the Black Hills of South Dakota for one of the moment's most challenging assignments for an American bishop... a tall order which, it could be said, only he bears the skill-set to tackle to its best possible result.

Long a leading "conference man" and currently the US bishops' lead hand on handling the fallout of the sex-abuse scandals, Cupich inherits a local church intensely affected by the crisis' wake. In 2004, the Spokane church filed for bankruptcy under the weight of some 180 claims filed against it. While the diocese agreed to a $48 million settlement in 2007, fresh lawsuits have continued to pile up, and the week of the installation saw the sting of Chapter 11 return to the fore as reports indicated that $1 million fund set aside for the newer filings had been depleted -- a development which, if the diocese fails to find another way of raising the added funds, could see the forced sale of as many as ten churches selected as further collateral, including the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes. (The sale call would be made by the bankruptcy's court-appointed trustee.)

Given the Indian name wakiya ska -- "White Thunder" -- by the Lakota people of the Rapid City church, it bears noting that Cupich's inaugural messages against the rough backdrop packed a considerable pop... so much so that the rousing, sustained ovation given his Vespers talk last Thursday night was loud enough to make its way back to these offices (along with the Native American drumming that kicked off the festivities).

Described by one op as an "impressive and hopeful" talk -- and another as "a hit out of the ballpark" -- here's the key portion of the Thursday homily (emphases original).

* * *We gather for Vespers. It is a pause at the end of a day to give thanks for blessings received, and to pray that God will see us through the darkness as night falls upon us. This Vespers Service also serves as a vigil, in anticipation of the new chapter the Catholic community in eastern Washington begins tomorrow. And so, let us be attentive and vigilant to what the living God has to say to us this night.
He speaks to us through the words of Paul, originally addressed to the Colossians as they faced severe trials, persecution and internal division. Those words now reach across the ages and have something to say to us: We have heard of your faith and love… and from that day we have not ceased praying for you that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding to live in a manner worthy of the Lord.We need to hear Paul’s encouraging voice tonight, for there are other voices, sometimes even within ourselves, which reduce our mission and identity to the very public challenges and criticisms we face: the menacing financial and legal strains that continue to beset us, the loss of trust with those we serve, and the public shame inflicted on us all by the irresponsible behavior of a few who betrayed their calling and harmed children. But God tells us through Paul that we are more than a diocese that has suffered bankruptcy, we are more than the failures of nearly 30 years ago, and we surely are more than the sins of the very few.

He knows of your faith and love… and so do I. From the brief visits I have already made in eastern Washington State, I have seen and heard of your faith and love at the St. Vincent de Paul store in Dayton; at the houses for battered women and the homeless sponsored by Catholic Charities; in the sacrifices you make to educate children in our schools; in the refreshing and generous faith of our young seminarians; in the tireless dedication of our priests, religious and lay parish leaders, whose presence lets parishioners know that God’s love is everlasting; and in the care of the sick and dying by the Sisters of Providence.

I too have seen your faith and love in people I have met: a family as they care with devotion and joy for a severely impaired adult daughter; parents, though grieving a child lost in a tragedy, who have become even more generous; and a young man, confined to a wheelchair, who prepared a beautiful wood carving just to make me feel at home here.

I am convinced that just as our commitment to healing of the past must be resolute, ongoing and firm, so too must be our sense of mission for the future, a mission, as Paul puts it, “to share in the inheritance of the holy ones, by bearing fruit in every good work and by growing in the knowledge of God.” In the long run, it will be our commitment to the mission of Christ that will sustain us as we continue the work of healing the past.

That is why we need to be attentive and ever vigilant to God’s words of encouragement whenever they come. They will keep our focus and mission fresh. They will balance and steady us in otherwise uncertain times and unchartered waters. And, above all, they will keep us from falling into that most diabolical of temptations, discouraging self-pity.

I learned this one early morning in the dark winter days of 2002. I was scheduled to make a one-day round-trip from Rapid City to St. Paul for a seminary board meeting. As I stood in the long line waiting to go through the security check, a TV monitor overhead was broadcasting a morning talk show. The host and his sidekick were recounting the interview they had the day before with Father Andrew Greeley of Chicago. “He was an okay guy,” the host said, “not like all the other Catholic priests who abuse and harm kids.” My heart sank. My head bowed in shame. I could only imagine the stares of everyone fixed on me at that moment, as though a bulls-eye had been painted on my back. That made for a heavy day, a painful day. As others have said, I did not sign up for this.

Sitting on the plane for the return trip that evening, a flight attendant, an African American woman, approached me and asked: “Are you a Catholic priest?”

Oh, I thought, she must have seen that bulls-eye on my back. “Yes,” I responded, “I am.”

“Well,” she continued, “I am not a Catholic, but my brothers and I grew up in New Orleans and the priests and the sisters were so good to us. If we couldn’t pay, we were still welcome. If we didn’t have the proper clothes, they gave them to us. If we didn’t have lunch, they fed us. So we all decided a long time ago that whenever we come across a sister or a priest, we would say thanks. So thanks, Father, for what you do.”

You could have knocked me over with a shaft of Washington winter wheat!

Surely she was testifying to the enormous reservoir of good will and social capital which our priests and religious have built up over the years. But even more so, her message was the same as St. Paul’s: We have heard of your faith and love … and from that day we have not ceased praying for you to bear fruit in every good work and grow in the knowledge of God. On this vigil night, we should attend to this Word of God and let it encourage us.

It is a Word that calls us to be attentive to the many ways God is gracing us in this time to bring healing to the past and to steady us to take up again the mission of Christ. You can count on me joining you in doing just that. For you see, I share Bishop Skylstad’s excitement and now know, it is a blessing to be your bishop....and here, in full, the following day's Installation preach:

...and, for those who'd like to see it, the Mass in full -- held at the athletic center of the Jesuits' local hub, Gonzaga University...


PHOTOS: Deacon Eric Meisfjord/Inland Register

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First, let me say that I think Pastor Terry Jones’s plans to burn Korans Saturday are odious. Yes, he has the First Amendment right to do so. But it’s hate speech of the darkest kind.

And from that darkness has sprung light.

His hatred and intolerance have not met with the public approval he sought. The news is not of other churches planning to follow his lead and burn the book he has called a

A new day dawns. NASA photo, November 1969.

work of evil.

Instead, news reports show people of faith  banding together to declare that every religion has a right to be respected in the United States. A group of Christians, Jews and Muslims met Tuesday in Washington, D.C. to voice opposition to anti-Islamic intolerance of all kinds, the Koran burning in particular.  The Vatican is now on record…

Some interesting Islam-related notes:

1. The Islamic Center of Peekskill will hold a public celebration tomorrow or Friday of Eid ul-Fitr, one of the two great Muslim festivals.

It will be at Pugsley Park (at Main Street and Bank Street) from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. We don’t have a date yet because the Eid won’t be set until a sighting of the new moon.

A press release promises “an opportunity to meet your Muslim neighbors and learn how we would like to continue to serve the community.”

2. Congregation Kol Ami in White Plains will hold an interfaith panel on Saturday, Sept 18. (Yom Kippur) from 3 to 4:30 p.m.: “Visions of a Tolerant America: Jewish, Muslim and Christian voices discuss an Islamic Center near Ground Zero.”

Panelists will include three parents who lost children on 9/11, Ann Schaffer of the American Jewish Committee and Rabbi Shira Milgrom of Kol Ami.

3. The pastor of a small evangelical church in Florida still plans to burn some Qurans on Sept. 11. What will the fall-out be?

He doesn’t care that Gen. David Petraeus has warned that “images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”

Numerous groups are coming out against the church, including the World Union for Progressive Judaism, which says: “We join with the sane voices from the highest offices of the American government, and religious and civic leaders around the world, to stand up against this seeming Inquisition on American soil and call for Terry Jones to call off this attack on religious freedom in a land of liberty.”

4. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is finally back on American soil and is finally speaking out about what the deal is with the proposed Islamic center.

He writes in the NY Daily News:

****

The project has been mischaracterized, so I want to explain clearly what it would be. Our planned 13-story community center is intended for Park Place between Church St. and West Broadway. It is not a mosque, although it will include a space for Muslim prayer services. It will have a swimming pool, basketball court, meeting rooms, a 500-seat auditorium, banquet facilities and many other things a community needs to be healthy. The center will offer theatrical programming, art exhibitions and cooking classes. These are amenities missing now from this part of the city.

And, yes, the center will have a public memorial to the victims of 9/11 as well as a meditation room where all will be welcome for quiet reflection. The center will support soul and body.

The center will be open to all regardless of religion. Like a YMCA, the 92nd St. Y or the Jewish Community Center uptown, it will admit everyone. It will be a center for all New Yorkers.

What grieves me most is the false reporting that leads some families of 9/11 victims to think this project somehow is designed by Muslims to gloat over the attack.

That could not be further from the truth.

This Venn diagram made the rounds last week as a great illustration of how many people we're talking about when we discuss Muslims, Muslim-Americans and al-Qaida. With the Qur'an burning Florida church in the news lately, I thought it would be useful to update it: Note that the Qu'ran burner dot is inflated to 200x its normal size just to appear on the graph. Credit to Technipol for the to-scale diagram. Nick http://www.faithinpubliclife.org

Making an unusually-pointed intervention on a local situation, this morning the Holy See joined a broad international chorus in condemning a Florida Evangelical pastor's plan to burn a stack of copies of the Koran to mark Saturday's ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Here, the unsigned statement released from the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue:
The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue received with great concern the news of the proposed "Koran Burning Day" on the occasion of the Anniversary of the September 11th tragic terrorist attacks in 2001 which resulted in the loss of many innocent lives and considerable material damage.

These deplorable acts of violence, in fact, cannot be counteracted by an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community. Each religion, with its respective sacred books, places of worship and symbols, has the right to respect and protection. We are speaking about the respect to be accorded the dignity of the person who is an adherent of that religion and his/her free choice in religious matters.

The reflection which necessarily should be fostered on the occasion of the remembrance of September 11th would be, first of all, to offer our deep sentiments of solidarity with those who were struck by these horrendous terrorist attacks. To this feeling of solidarity we join our prayers for them and their loved ones who lost their lives.

Each religious leader and believer is also called to renew the firm condemnation of all forms of violence, in particular those committed in the name of religion. Pope John Paul II affirmed: "Recourse to violence in the name of religious belief is a perversion of the very teachings of the major religions" (Address to the new Ambassador of Pakistan, 16 December 1999). His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, similarly expressed, "…violence as a response to offences can never be justified, for this type of response is incompatible with the sacred principles of religion..." (Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI, to the new Ambassador of Morocco, 6 February 2006).B16 is shown above receiving a copy of Islam's sacred text during his 2008 meeting with the interreligious community at Washington's Pope John Paul II Cultural Center.

Here, a snip from that encounter's PopeTalk:

Americans have always valued the ability to worship freely and in accordance with their conscience. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian and observer of American affairs, was fascinated with this aspect of the nation. He remarked that this is a country in which religion and freedom are “intimately linked” in contributing to a stable democracy that fosters social virtues and participation in the communal life of all its citizens. In urban areas, it is common for individuals from different cultural backgrounds and religions to engage with one another daily in commercial, social and educational settings. Today, in classrooms throughout the country, young Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and indeed children of all religions sit side-by-side, learning with one another and from one another. This diversity gives rise to new challenges that spark a deeper reflection on the core principles of a democratic society. May others take heart from your experience, realizing that a united society can indeed arise from a plurality of peoples – “E pluribus unum”: “out of many, one” – provided that all recognize religious liberty as a basic civil right (cf. Dignitatis Humanae, 2).

The task of upholding religious freedom is never completed. New situations and challenges invite citizens and leaders to reflect on how their decisions respect this basic human right. Protecting religious freedom within the rule of law does not guarantee that peoples – particularly minorities – will be spared from unjust forms of discrimination and prejudice. This requires constant effort on the part of all members of society to ensure that citizens are afforded the opportunity to worship peaceably and to pass on their religious heritage to their children.

As previously noted, the pontiff recently chose "Religious freedom, the path to peace" as the focus for the church's 2011 observance of the World Day of Peace (1 January). The traditional papal message on the theme will appear later this fall.

On a related note, over the weekend the Vatican issued a public protest over the planned stoning of an Iranian woman on charges of adultery, offering its diplomatic service for mediation in the hope of saving the woman's life.

PHOTO: Getty

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So we stayed with friends near Boston the other night. Both he and she are clergy, though they work in different churches. The male -- I'll call him Tom (because I don't want him to get into trouble) -- and... Bill Tammeus

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis has said that recovering from years of drug abuse is her "greatest accomplishment" in life. (Well, that and motherhood.)
In an interview on NBC's Today, the actress admitted that ending her addiction is what allowed her to lead a successful life.
"My recovery is the single greatest accomplishment of my life. And without that, the rest of my life would have fallen apart," she explained.
Read the rest here.
Mainly I applaud Curtis, and others like her in the limelight, for naming their struggles with addiction. It takes the power out when you say or write things. However, the mixed-bag I have with Curtis and others is two-fold: One, that recovery work can be glorified. (We seem to hear every day about so-and-so actor going to rehab. So it becomes sort of the "in" thing.) And two, I tire easily of celebrity news. "Actress X stubbed her toe today while shopping for a bathing suit. News at 11."

When Gen. Petraeus told reporters yesterday that the "International Burn a Koran Day" planned by the Dove World Outreach Center (the most tragically ironic congregation name ever) for this weekend will endanger the lives of U.S. personnel and strengthen the Taliban, he focused attention not only on the propaganda function of this hateful display, but also highlighted its potentially deadly consequences. Further fleshing out the danger posed by the burning, Rev. Tim Ahrens (an FPL board member) filed a blog post from Egypt, where he's currently staying with American missionaries: This action will not only endanger our troops, it will endanger the fragile relationships between Muslims and American missionaries, Peace Corp Workers, Medical workers, diplomats, teachers, students, tourists and Holy Land pilgrims. ... Anglicans, Copts, Evangelical Christians and so many others all say the same thing. They KNOW the radical elements of Islam will respond to this action. The reaction will be swift, violent and I believe will bring harm to innocent men, women, and children. One Dutch Christian said, "When our papers had a caricature of Mohammed, the reaction was violent. To burn the Qur'an will bring a much greater reaction against Americans, especially Christians." The potential for violence also threatens Muslims around the world. The majority of the fatalities in the demonstrations and riots following the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper several years ago were caused by police firing into crowds in Muslim countries. All of these threats underscore the importance of putting news coverage in accurate contact, as the Council on American Islamic Relations urged the media to do last week, when they sent out a press release stating in part "Just as all Muslims should not be blamed for the actions of a few extremists, neither should all Christians or all Americans be blamed for the intentionally offensive actions of the Dove World Outreach Center. Pastor Terry Jones represents nothing but an extremist fringe." "Media professionals have a responsibility to put this publicity stunt in its proper context in their reports and commentaries." Dan

image courtesy yorkblog.com

I didn’t intend to write three posts on the emerging/emergent church movement, and I know the subject may be getting old for some readers.  But the topic isn’t dead for those of us in the church.  The general superintendents of my own denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, released a statement on the Emergent Church just last month – a well-balanced statement, I thought.  On a more local level, there are people who have expressed concern about the influence of the emergent church in our congregation.  I don’t know if they’ll read this post, but for them and for others I have a few last thoughts to share.

Listen to Dave Tomlinson’s description of the postmodern climate, taken from his book The Post-Evangelical:

The postmodern world is a world which understands itself through biological rather than mechanistic models; a world where

…

I just walked in after a long weekend and a morning assignment and one of the first things I see is a new statement about the proposed downtown Islamic center from a group of New York’s religious leaders.

It’s basically a call for civility.

I’m sure you’re getting tired of hearing about this (and so am I), but here is the statement:

*****

JOINT STATEMENT FROM NEW YORK RELIGIOUS LEADERS

New York has a long and proud history of dialogue and respect among the various faith groups that live together in this magnificent city. It is especially troubling, then, whenever religion is seen as a source of misunderstanding and disagreement. As religious people, Muslims, Jews and Christians know that at the heart of each of our faiths is the promotion of peace and understanding among all God’s children. Consequently, there can be no place for religious bias of any kind – including anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, or anti-Islam—in any of our communities.

Public discussions about the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero have recently become an unfortunate source of tension and animosity here in New York City. As leaders in our religious communities, we join together to voice our shared concern for the way in which New Yorkers have become polarized on this issue. All of us must ensure that our conversations on this matter remain civil, that our approaches to each other are marked with respect, and that our hearts stay free of bitterness.

As religious leaders, we stand ready to assist in facilitating a dialogue that will not only lead to a resolution of the current dispute, but also lay the foundation for a new and deeper understanding among us all.

Imam Shamsi Ali
Director, Jamaica Muslim Center, New York

Rev. Dr. A. R. Bernard
President, The Council of Churches of the City of New York

The Most Reverend Nicholas A. DiMarzio,
Bishop of Brooklyn
Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn

The Most Reverend Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York

Rabbi Yaakov Kermaier
President, New York Board of Rabbis

Imam Izak-EL M. Pasha
Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, New York

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik
Executive Vice President, New York Board of Rabbis

image courtesy firstthings.com

My recent post on the Emergent Church was deliberately personal in focus and did nothing to help define the movement.  I’d like to make an attempt at defining it in this post, with the understanding that I’m not an academic, not a church leader, not an “insider” in any way.  I’m just a Christian who finds that much about the Emergent Church makes sense to me.  There’s an understandable amount of confusion – and not only on the difference between Emerging and Emergent (more on that later).  Emergent is not a euphemism for liberal, not another name for Hipster Christians, the Organic Church or New Monasticism, though there is overlap between each of these categories.   Emerging is less a set of concrete practices and doctrines than it is a posture or mood, and defining a mood is no…

Good Tuesday afternoon, gang… and with Labor Day behind us, just like that, the September gust's kicked in, and the Wide World of Church springs back to life.

Welcome to Fall and the scene's traditional, action-packed 12-Week Sprint. Highlights to come -- at least, the ones we know about -- include the long-awaited release of the text of the freshly-approved, ever-controversial Roman Missal in English that'll hit every Anglophone pew worldwide over the next year; November's election of a new president and vice-president of the US Bishops; another slew of appointments (as of this writing, three Stateside Latin sees stand vacant, with another 12 led by ordinaries who've either already turned 75 or will reach the retirement age before October's end); Hatman's debut in Rome and Pharaoh's jubilee back home; the distinct possibility, if not likelihood, of a consistory to create new cardinals over Christ the King weekend; an October Synod of Bishops on the Middle East -- and two years since the 2008 Synod on the Word, B16's final text on the Scriptures (reportedly tipped for a next-month publish) -- and...

...above all, right out the box, this season's Big One: against a charged backdrop on multiple fronts, the pontiff's pilgrimage to the UK -- likely to be one of this papacy's defining road-shows -- set to begin in nine days' time with the Volo Papale's wheels-down in Edinburgh (and, for which, a locally-produced Visit Missal is already posted).

Again, that's just the top line of what we know to expect... knowing how this beat's had more than its share of surprises of late, though, you might want to buckle up for way more.

On a personal note, even if your narrator's feeling a bit rusty at the keys, it's good to be back from a very eventful, (losses aside) tremendously blessed hiatus -- and, seriously, all thanks for your patience and kindness during it.

Suffice it to say, after almost six years of tackling this work (or trying to) as the bulk of practically every day, I needed to work on my life for a change... and much like the task you see, that could only happen by devoting to it the time and energy it needed. Bottom line: behind the scenes, let's just say the reboot's off to a pretty good beginning... out here, meanwhile, once again, here goes nothin'.

Hope everything's great on your end and the rev-up's going smoothly… again, welcome back to the full-tilt circus; for all the rest, as always, stay tuned.

PHOTO: Getty

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The Florida church that plans to burn the Quran is praying over what God would have them do.

Before I start, let me get this off of my chest:

If you’re going to call your evangelical Christian church the Dove World Outreach Center, you should probably not espouse violent anti-Islam sentiment and commemorate 9/11 by burning copies of the Quran. Seriously, that’s wrong on so many levels…Christian outreach cannot be achieved through hateful rhetoric and actions designed to insight violence. And really, does it further the Christian church when its members do everything in their power to come across as ignorant bigots?

Dove World Outreach Center, Gainesville, Florida

End of rant.

And yet the Dove World Outreach Center, a self-proclaimed New Testament church in Gainesville, Florida, is selling Islam is of the Devil shirts and books and promoting September 11th as “International Burn a Koran” day. And General David Petraeus, the top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, is urging them to…

One regular but regularly unannounced feature of papal trips in recent years has been the private meeting with local Catholics who were sexually abused as youths by priests. Journalists only find out about them after they’ve taken place. Just such a meeting seems to be on the cards during Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain next week, but of course it does not appear in his official schedule. Chris Patten, the prime minister’s special representative for the papal visit,  said as much on Monday in an interview with BBC television (quote at the end of the clip):

“On several previous visits, the pope has met victims of abuse. He has never said he was going to meet them before he did and his meetings have always, for very understandable reasons, been private. I would be surprised if in this visit or any future visit he behaved in any different way.”

When our London correspondent Avril Ormsby asked about any possible meeting with victims in an interview with him last week, Archbishop Vincent Nichols said: “It will not be announced beforehand, and it will take place in private, if that is going to be the case. But precisely because of those rules, it is not clear.”

(Photo: Chris Patten, July 5, 2010/Peter Macdiarmid)

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I like the work of columnist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group. She's thoughtful, a bit unpredictable and willing to take unpopular positions -- at least positions that would be unpopular with people who consider themselves political conservatives,... Bill Tammeus

"Therefore, if you know one Dominican patient, you know exactly one Dominican patient, and not all Dominicans."

Here, a few first-year medical students at Harvard weigh in on the future of their future profession. And I like what the one guy said above, which should be a lesson to us all--whether in medicine or the arts. Generalizations, while helpful in making certain categorical judgments, miss the particular. What patient/person doesn't want to be seen and heard?

Jane Bennett’s sympathetic yet critical commentary on my essay “What is Enchantment?” (published in the volume Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age) describes the notion of disenchantment that I present as primarily addressing the theological displacements that emerged with the rise of the new science. Her own work, she says, offers a quite different focus, one of a mood or affect that “circulates between human bodies and the animal, vegetable, and mineral forces they encounter.”

I don’t doubt that this interesting focus is quite different from mine, though I think it would be wrong to represent my view as being focused on the theological. In my analysis, the theological had only a central genealogical role to play in the process of “disenchantment.” But, I had argued that the fallout of the theological—once the theological transformations were exploited in alliances forged between established religious interests, commercial interests, and the mandarin interests of organized scientific bodies (such as the Royal Society)—was impressively diverse, ranging from transformations in political economy to political governance and, further yet, to the mentalities of human culture in its relation to the natural world. So the focus, if any, on the theological was intended wholly to emphasize that, unlike purely materialist accounts, I was following more refined Marxists like Christopher Hill, who had written of the importance of the conflict of religious ideas in shaping the period of history in which I had invested my genealogical efforts.

I may have misled Bennett with the remark she quotes in her comment: “The point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” One theme in my essay was to ask the question: “When and how did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources?” But, having raised the question, I had worried that it may seem to some that my interest in raising it was a narrow, ecological one. Because I didn’t want to ghettoize the question of nature into just this narrow self-standing concern, I wanted it to relate the “natural” with larger issues of politics, history and culture, and the quoted remark was only intended to convey that broader interest. The idea was not to deny—indeed, it was to assert—that material nature was suffused with value properties that made normative and affective demands on one. It’s just that nature was not to be seen as merely the value-laden material elements among the “actants” that Bennett describes, but also the relations between the actants and human actors and a tradition and history of those relations.  The idea was never to say that the latter in some way canceled the possibility of the former.

I think if there is disagreement between us, it is not about the relevance of the material elements and their normative status but about whether the fact of this circulatory mood that she describes as central to her idea of enchantment can support her claim that there was no loss of enchantment in the modern period. She says: “There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to  ‘re-enchant’ the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work.”  But, in my view, there can be no understanding of the fact of our having become desensitized to enchantments without conceding what she doesn’t want to concede to me, which is that the world is viewed by us in ways that are properly described as disenchanted in just the way I had expounded.

Disenchantment, in my understanding of that process, was a result (a fallout, as I said above) of our having (among other things) over-intellectualized our relations to the world (including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period.

I’ve italicized “conception” and “for us” in order to make clear that disenchantment cannot be understood as a process without understanding the desensitization that Bennett opposes when she says she wants us to be more “sensitized.”  She can’t have what she wants here without also opposing “disenchantment,” as I understand the term and, therefore, equally proposing “re-enchantment,” as I understand the term.

I would diagnose this misunderstanding of “disenchantment” on her part as perhaps reflecting a rather deep philosophical disagreement between us on how to conceive of nature and matter, when we conceive of it in the non-mechanized way that we both wish to do. My stress on “conception” and “for us” are meant to convey something like the following conception of nature and matter. When one views nature and matter as not merely mechanized, as not merely something that we study in the natural sciences, i.e., with relative detachment, one views it as essentially containing properties that can’t be understood correctly unless one sees our capacity for responsiveness to them with our practical agency (that is what the “for us” was doing in my use of it above, stressing the relevance of this responsiveness) as built-into the kind of properties they are. They are not properties that are anyway there, independent of the kind of sensibility (our sensibility for practical normative engagement) that we, as agents, have. This does not mean that we mentally construct and project these properties onto the world, which in itself is brutely material (in the sense that “mechanized” is supposed to convey). It is a non-sequitur to say that, just because a certain property (value properties) in the world can only be viewed by a certain kind of sensibility (the one that subjects or creatures possessed of a certain self-conscious agency possess), the subjects who possess that sensibility must be constructing these properties and projecting them onto the world. That is what Hume and others influenced by him think to this day, and they were first systematically encouraged to do so by the transformations that I was calling “disenchantment” that began in the late seventeenth century. In my view, the properties are really properties of nature and matter, they are not constructed by us. But they are properties in some sense “for us,” since those who do not possess the kind of self-conscious agency that is moved by normative demands would see darkness in the world where we might see it as containing values making those normative demands.

If her “actants” are not conceived this way, then what she means by “actants” is not what I would have meant by them, had I used that word.  In fact, I would have thought one has not gotten past mechanization, if one didn’t think of nature and matter as containing properties of the kind I am suggesting, over and above the properties studied by natural science.

Thus, when Bennett says we should be more sensitized to the participatory role of material “actants” (that is, to what I, in my terminology, call the normative demands of the value properties in nature and matter), she is precisely saying what I, in my terminology, mean when I say that our angle on the world should be less detached and more responsive to its normative demands. But this predominance of detachment was exactly what was generated by the process of disenchantment, as I understand that process. Hence, there is no avoiding “re-enchantment” if ‘sensitization’ is what you seek.

There may also be something to sort out between us (a possible disagreement, I mean) on the subject of agency, though I rather think it may be more verbal than substantial. Bennett says: “There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective. Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants.”

I am going to put aside what I have already clarified, viz., I am not emphasizing history and tradition with a view to denying that material and non-human elements of nature can make normative demands on us.

Nor do I want to deny that there may be collective and distributed agency of various sorts. So, I don’t think that is the issue between us either, if there is one at all.

I gave an argument in my essay for saying that we wouldn’t be agents if there were not such things as “actants,” as I would use that term. In other words, we would not be agents if there were not normative demands being made on our agency by value properties in matter and nature, that is, value properties in the world that we inhabit. And when I say that these value properties and actants make demands on us, I suppose that I am asserting that they are “real participants,” to use her expression. But there are ways to be “participants” in “assemblages” (these are all her and Latour’s terms, not mine, but I am using them in a way that I find plausible, which may not be what is intended by them) without possessing the kind of self-conscious agency we possess. I would deny that value properties in nature and matter that make normative demands on us are themselves agents in this self-conscious sense. So their demands on us are not intentional demands. They do not intend to make those demands since they don’t have any intentions.

She might even grant this and say that intentional agency of a kind that implies the capacity for self-consciousness of the sort we possess, is not the only kind of agency that there is. I would have no objection to that, so long as one keeps different uses of the word agency apart and makes clear which one is in play. But, in the passage I have just cited, Bennett denies that we (human beings) have “real” agency. Well, in that case, she and I must mean different things by agency. And it is not credible to me that she is denying that we possess something that has been called “agency” for centuries by philosophers, and not just philosophers. So she must be stipulating a use of the term agency (let’s use her term for it, “real agency”) that is different from this. It is supposed to be something that has a more distributed locus than being located in either us, human actors, or in non-human “actants.” I think the interest of that stipulated use of the word agent (“real agent”) would depend on what systematic philosophical use it was put to. Bennett, in a short blog, doesn’t say enough for me to assess that. But, however that assessment may turn out, what we would be assessing can’t be something that stands in disagreement with me—if disagreement means that she says something that I deny or vice versa. I have not said that no one can find any form of agency in the world other than of the sort that I am discussing with the term agency.  And since it is not credible that she is denying that there is something of the sort I mean by the term agency, which human beings posses but pharmaceuticals or bacteria (to take just two examples of the “actants” that “participate” in her “assemblages”) don’t possess, we can resolve all these issues amicably in the word, by disambiguating the term agency in these ways. The disambiguation, it would appear, goes three ways. There is the kind of agency we possess. There is the kind of agency that “actants” possess. (If we see them, as I do with my metaphor, as “making normative demands” on us, or if we see them, as Bennett does, as “participants,” I suppose they must be allowed some “agency,” even if not ours).  And then there is the distributed agency that Bennett calls “real agency,” which is neither of the above. I look forward to reading her book, which, judging from the hints given in this blog, brings the third of these to centre-stage. But with this disambiguation in place, I cannot see that I have to withdraw anything I said on the basis of anything that is allowed in allowing this third notion of agency.

One final point of what seems like a more substantial disagreement. Bennett ends her blog with the following comment on my notion of enchantment: “But it [her idea of enchantment] seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for ‘a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands’ seems not quite right.   A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an ‘unalienated life.’”

I think this is a rather basic misunderstanding of my view. Indeed I think there is a straightforward and unnoticed double movement with which the words “harmony” and “unalienated” are used in this passage that leads directly to this misunderstanding.

There is one sense or use of the term harmony in which I was not suggesting that a world that was enchanted would induce an unalienated or harmonious life within it. Suppose we saw the world as enchanted, in my sense of the term. To do so is to see it as, not merely mechanized, but containing value properties that make normative demands on us. Let’s work with a simple example, simpler than the ones that involve her more complicated “actants,” though nothing that I will have to say is such that it can’t be extended to more complicated examples. Let’s say that there is a meteorological perturbation off the coast of Bangladesh. Now, if there is to be enchantment of the sort I have in mind, that fragment of the world (nature, matter) is to be described, not just in that detached way (“meteorological perturbation”), as natural science would, but also as a fragment of the world which contains a “threat.”  Threats are value properties in nature. They are not constructions of our vulnerability, which are then projected onto nature, as the disenchanted worldview would have it. But even though they are in nature, the natural sciences don’t study threats. Threats make normative demands on our practical agency, not demands for detached explanatory study, as meteorological perturbations do. Notice, however, that this particular value property off the coast of Bangladesh is certainly not harmony-inducing (in this first sense or use of the term, “harmony”) to the Bangladeshi fisherman living in a thatched dwelling on the coast, seeing it come in his direction. It is a threat, after all. It is, if you like, just what Bennett describes with her term “hostile.” It is a hostile part of the enchanted world. So, no harmony in one sense or use of the word “harmony,” despite enchantment.

Even so, it might be that that value property in that fragment of the world makes a normative demand, let’s say on the municipality of that Bangladeshi locality to do one or another thing to remove the threat to the fisherman and his hut. If there were a suitable agentive responsiveness on the part of those on whom the normative demand was made, that would be a small and, as I said, very simple example of human agency being in sync with the normative demands of appropriate properties of matter and nature. When there is such responsiveness to such demands, there is “harmony” in a second, quite different sense and use of the word than the sense I mentioned above. And this harmony is a harmony between human agency and non-human properties of matter and nature.

It seems apparent, then, that there need not be any disagreement between Bennett and me on any of this. I have accommodated what she means by hostility and disharmony in the relations in her “assemblages,” and I have shown how it is quite compatible with what I had in mind by talking of harmony generated by seeing the world as containing value properties (threats over and above meteorological perturbations) and our suitable agentive responses to them. All we need to do is avoid a conflation of two different uses of words like harmony and alienation.  Let there be all the hostility and disharmony she finds in these relations. It does nothing whatsoever to register disagreement with my points about a quite different notion of an unalienated life.

My notion of alienation is, if I understand her views, probably very close to a state of affairs that results from a too great “desensitization” to the elements of enchantment that she finds in the world. By this criterion of what is and is not alienated, one partly (though not wholly) overcomes alienation by even so much as recognizing (becoming “sensitized” to) the enchanted elements in the material environment, including what she describes as the “hostile” elements. To move from this partial to a more complete overcoming of alienation would require being responsive with our agency in the way I was describing above to the normative demands of the enchanted elements, including the hostile ones. The value properties in an enchanted world, as I said earlier, are defined upon our capacity to recognize them, but they are not defined upon our actually recognizing them and certainly not defined upon our being responsive to their normative demands in our practical agency. So she is very wide of the mark when she describes my view as being committed to something “pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness.” I dare say, it is no more pre-designed to do so than her notion of enchantment.

She is right, however, to point out that I do stress the moral, perhaps measurably more than she does. That is already evident in the fact that my rhetoric is the rhetoric of value-properties (some of which are bound to include normative moral demands on us) whereas her rhetoric is restricted to talk of circulating “moods and affects.”  My view derives from an Aristotelian picture of morals (if some recent interpretations of Aristotle, owing to John McDowell, are correct in their interpretations), where values in the world prompt our moral agency, rather than moral agency emanating entirely from a self-standing psychology, as in Hume and the very widespread Humean legacy of contemporary Ethics, which sees the world beyond our subjectivity as evacuated of anything that is not within the purview of natural science. It looks to me as if Bennett has no interest in seeing enchantment as, in this way, being part a wider metaphysics in which the metaphysics of morals is one embedded element. I detect only phenomena such as mood, affect, and the political implications of seeing enchantment along those lines, in what she has to say.

I can’t myself see a way to a politics that flows from questions of enchantment without also seeing morals as flowing from it. Politics, in my view, can’t be in an orbit entirely of its own, independent of considerations of moral and other values. There is nothing moralistic in claiming this. It is not as if, in saying that the politics generated by recognizing such things as “actants” must be related to the normative moral demands that those things make on us, one is identifying the “politics of things” with those normative moral demands. Still, relating them together may put some theoretical constraints on how we are to understand the “politics of things.”  I don’t know if Bennett would want to impose such constraints on the politics she would want to embed in a notion of enchantment. Her rhetoric in general and her criticism of me in particular (the criticism that, unlike her, I stress the moral) doesn’t make it obvious how she would permit such a constraint. But I say all this with some hesitation. I would need to read more of her work in detail to be able to say anything more confidently.

In this era of communication via social networking tools, I was pleased to see the recent start of a Web site and Facebook move by American Muslims to respond to all the heat and noise generated by the controversy over... Bill Tammeus