Easter is Coming

Some Christian-based thoughts on the world and its meaning to those who share this faith.

Friday Funny, American Edition: "Ron Burgundy - The Jim "J.C." Caviezel Interview"

The legendary Southern California anchorman interviews the star of "The Passion of the Christ"....and other stuff.

Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science
Author:	Stephen Jay Gould

Professor Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) , a prolific author, Harvard Professor, leading proponent of evolution and the importance of natural selection and fossil records and the like, wrote a compelling book in 1999 that tried to help toward a truce in the rather (for me) tiresome debate between science and religion, one that has plagued many parts of the world since the dawn of the modern scientific age.

Here is an introduction I found to how he dealt with the arguments back and forth and how they led to his conclusion: (As you can tell, Gould is both a lively and engaging prose stylist.)

********************

"In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

"At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

"A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief."


************************************


Starting mainly with the controversy following the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species in 1859, and the acceptance and heated debate that ensued, Gould in this book reviews the old arguments and points out that there is in fact a third way to look at the controversy of God and faith versus scientific inquiry. It begins with the concept of separating these two important aspects of human thought into two distinct spheres. The non-interfering spheres are part of the Non-Overlapping Magisterium Arena, or NOMA. He also reminds us that many of Darwin's early followers were men and women of faith, the most prominent being Asa Grey, the leading American botanist of his day, friend of Darwin, and a Christian


Gould states to paraphrase that science is powerless to furnish ethical rules or proofs of God, but it's not capable of ruling out the possibility of a deity or the existence of moral imperatives based on a common human nature.

This is all the more important because, Gould states, Darwin's theories were based on the unethical "free market" doctrines of his time and also gave rise later to a "social Darwinist" movement that effectively reduces people to economic wigits for the use of the "better advanced" plutocrats at the top of the industrial food chain.

Hence the need for either a strong but un-dogmatic religious community in a nation, or at least ethical philosophers to keep the economics of greed and the feral "state of nature" advocates from taking over and disrupting a moral-based society.

Darwin did not use evolution to promote atheism--although he had severe doubts in God caused by the death of a young daughter. He famously discouraged hope in a God from seeing the struggle for existence in nature in all of its dire effects. But he remained an agnostic, as did his leading champion Thomas H. Huxley.

He also points out that Pope Pius in the 1950s and John Paul II in the 1990's declared themselves unopposed to evolution or scientific research. Indeed, the whole notion of "creation science" seems a peculiar fundementalist Protestant American affliction.

Gould maintained that no concept of God could ever be squared with the structure of nature. But he also counters that the magisterium of science cannot resolve nor even specify the existence or a God. The ultimate meanings of life--such as why we exist in the first place and what we are to do with said existence---are the proper foundations of morality, and that falls into the different magisterium of religion.

I found this book very engaging. I also realize that many on both sides of the question will not be satisfied by the late professor's conclusions. Gould in subsequent lectures certainly was suspect of anyone trying to find faith in scientific theory, but he also avoids the frankly dogma-style cant of a militant atheist like Richard Dawkins. I had the opportunity the other day to ask Professor Dawkins about Gould's book and his theory of NOMA. (Via a Southern Oregon Public Radio call-in program.) Dr. Dawkins dismissed it flat-out as "rank propaganda" and implied that Gould was making some sort of craven political accommodation with the faith community.

I would have loved to hear the late professor's response to Doc Dawkins in 2011. He might have said somethibng like this, as he already did in his NOMA writings from 1999.

"NOMA permits—indeed enjoins—the prospect of respectful discourse, of constant input from both magisteria toward the common goal of wisdom. If human beings are anything special, we are the creatures that must ponder and talk. Pope John Paul II would surely point out to me that his magisterium has always recognized this distinction, for "in principio, erat verbum"—"In the beginning was the Word." '

C.S. Lewis: The "Mere Christian", Soldier, Scholar, Communicator, and "Narnian"

He was a teacher who said he hated teaching.  A dedicated Shavian atheist at adolescence and a young adult  who came at age 31 to accept that "God was God" and became in his words, "the most reluctant convert in all England" one night in 1929 while kneeling all alone on a quiet night in his rooms at his college.   And an cloistered intellectual and homebody who disliked traveling abroad, yet graced the cover of "Time Magazine" and continues long after his passing to reach millions all over the world. 

Two years later he took a memorable walk with his friends and came closer than ever to accepting  the  Christian faith.  Little could he have known that night along "Addison's Walk" in Oxford that he would become world famous in his own lifetime as an "apostle to the skeptics" and his life the subject of many books, documentaries, film dramatizations and articles. While Lewis scholarship in the field of literature is significant--he wrote an entire volume of the Oxford Dictionary of English Literature for the 16th Century (sans poetry) over a twenty-year period and taught at Oxford and Cambridge for most of his life, his greatest gift to the world was in reaching out to believers and want-to be believers through stories, critical essays, books for all ages and endless articles and personal  correspondence with people he mostly never met who had been touched in some way by at least one of his works.   

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle."--Lewis, from his Collection of essays" "God in the Dock"  

C.S. "Jack" Lewis (1898-1963), born in Belfast to a Ulster Protestant family,   is best known today for his seven part  'Narnia' series, written when he was in his fifties and already established not only as an Oxford University don at Madgelan College, but also as a writer of Christian apologetics in works such as "Miracles", "The Problem of Pain" and the most famous of his mature works, "Mere Christianity".  The latter work was drawn from a series of radio lectures Lewis was asked to give on the BBC early in World War II by the Director of Religious Broadcasting.  A brief overview of Lewis central thesis in the talks concerned that a proof of the existence of God came from what he called "The Tao" (The Way) , a set of ethics known in common to all religions and even the non-religious also as The Moral Law. It is a law that stands above nature and gives humans an innate sense of right and wrong and how they wish to be treated.  And, just as humankind might yearn for food and water or other desires, and there is food and water to fulfill this need, so must there be a God to which the embodiment of this yearning exists to fulfill our inner selves. 

In the forties Lewis debated atheists and believers in the evenings once a week at The  Socratic Club.  He was a formidable debater, but  not a smug one. He once warned a group of Welsh clergyman in a speech: 

'No doctrine of the Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one I have just successfully  defended in a public debate. .. it has seemed to rest on itself; as a result, when you go away from that  debate it seems no stronger than its weakest pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands , and can be saved  only from by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments from Christian apologetics  into Christ Himself."  

Lewis himself was a man  on guard against the trapping of ego.  Despite his vast learning and reputation, he sought to remind himself and others that faith is more or less a longing, a yearning for a better place and how its effects are replicated in our conduct of "the shadowlands" of this life.  

   The Narnia stories are  books for children that brought in elements of Christian allegory with other more ancient views of supernatural powers of good and evil as well as the nature-gods of various pagan religions of the past.  A good friend of Professor Lewis for much of his life was J. R.R. Tolkein, creator of the Middle Earth novels of which "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is most famous. Tolkein, a strict Catholic, didn't like the way Lewis mixed all types of pagan and popular imagery together in these stories, but for Lewis I suspect it  was  all to the good to bring as much of his fertile imagination and love of fantasy together to create a world that held all enduring myths in some mode of sacred power.  

  

Both these men met at Oxford University in the 1920's with Lewis as a tutor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Tolkein as a young professor of Old English.  Both men had served on the Western Front during what was then called the Great War and seen many of their friends lost in its terrible wake of blood, explosions, muddy trenches and flying steel. These meetings with one another grew as friends and fellow writers gathered to hear first drafts of their works in a group that came to be called "The Inklings" in the 1930's.   It was on these Thursday evenings and in other gatherings at the "Eagle and Child" pub in Oxford that Lewis felt most at home, sitting with other writers and keen thinkers discussing a myriad of topics around a fire, relaxed and in good company.  Little wonder that he once described to his American publisher that "he was most happy hearing the could of male laughter". 

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. 
C. S. Lewis 

    

 Another irony of Lewis life was that he was a long-time  bachelor, living with his older brother Warren "Warnie" Lewis, a retired army officer and an older woman named Mrs. Moore, the mother of a close friend  who he had pledged to look after to a friend who did not return from the trenches of 1918.  After Mrs. Moore died, he came to marry an American woman named Joy Davidman who had come to England in part to meet him.  She too was a former atheist and writer.   When she came down with cancer in the mid-fifties Lewis married her so she would not have to worry about overstaying her visa.   After a seeming miracle recovery from the cancer, Lewis and Davidman and her two male children moved in together at "The Kilns", the small house he and his brother shared on a few acres near Oxford. (By this time Lewis was spending his weekdays at Cambridge, where he had been granted a full professorship.)

After just a few years together the cancer returned in  1960, and Joy soon died.  The blow from this loss hit Lewis like a thunderbolt.  Amazingly, and in the true fashion of a writer, he recorded his mental torments and anger with God in perhaps his most harrowing  book, "A Grief Observed".     

Lewis faith in God was shaken but recovered in his later works and he continued to write more essays and letters in his brief retirement right up to the last few days of his life. He died on November 22, 1963, the same day as the death of Aldous Huxley and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Here is a clip from "The Question of  God: Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis" a PBS documentary. Much of Lewis' words in this documentary are taken from the  spiritual memoir of his early life,  "Surprised By Joy".

The Wordy Shipmates

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Sarah Vowell

"I'm always disappointed when I see the word "Puritan" tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring stupid, judgemental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgemental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell".--Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates"

Ms. Vowell's latest book is about the Puritan settlements of the 1630's in modern-day Massachusetts, USA. Back then the place was called the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their leader for nearly twenty years was Governor John Winthrop, a Cambridge educated theologian whose word was pretty much the law. They had left England, these couple hundred souls, mainly because they wanted to practice the Christian life their own way, and the squeeze was on back home. King Charles I had disbanded the Parliament in 1629 because the Puritans in the place were the main culprits preventing him from raising money for a ceaseless war with Spain and were ticked off that he was doing things--like arresting MPs--that were in contradiction to the tradition of the Magna Carta. Since a revolution seemed a long way off, around 20,000 people, who were not keen on Charles and the pomp and heavy-handedness of High Anglican officialdom, left England in the time before and during the English Civil War.

The book focuses on Wintrop's achievements--such as the founding of Harvard University--originally a theological institution, in 1635, and the grim things--such as leading the settlers against Native-Americans in lob-sided military affairs that come close to genocide.

This 2008 book is not a formal history, but is rather a tour de force of biting humor, measured with some respect for the better actions of men like Winthrop, who besides being an authoritarian in the Calvinist mode, was also an idealist who believed that God sent him to America to help build a "city on a hill" for the world to admire, a New Jerusalem for a new Chosen People no les. These small bands of English from East Anglia (mainly) helped shape modern American politics in ways we can still see nearly four centuries after they set up shop.
In between dealing ruthlessly with political/religious dissidents, and killing Native-Americans who resented their intrusion into a place already heavily ravaged by European diseases like smallpox, Winthrop and his fellow colonials lay the groundwork for the dicey relationship between Church and State in America. Unlike many of today's modern lay Christian Protestants of the fundamentalist variety, they were well-read and believed that they could fail and God would not give them a break (or a tax cut) if they did fail. American Presidents, especially Ronald Reagan, have used "the city on a hill" motif in their campaigns. Reagan called America "a shining city on a hill" over and over again, adding the word "shiny" to Winthrop's initial remarks (from a 1631 sermon called "A Model of Christian Charity") as a bit of razzmattazz worthy of a former General Electric pitchman. In Vowell's entertaining book, the early colonial past and the modern American colossus of McDonald's, Theme Parks, Native-American casinos and CIA prison camps for alleged terrorists are all woven in to the narrative in a way that might be a bit jarring but never seems too forced or off-the-subject.

"Ave mundi spes Maria"/ from "Chant" (1994) /Bendictine Monks of Santo Domingo De Solis

from the spiritsite website on the Gregorian Chant featured here:
www.spiritsite.com

"The Monks of St. Domingo De Silos sprung onto the music scene with some very, very old tunes in 1994. By 1995, their album Chant had sold over 5 million copies.

"The album, and its follow-ups, are unadulterated Gregorian chant -- simple religious compositions dating back to the 11th century.

"As Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "The no-frills recording of Spanish monks captures with perfect clarity the intensity and intimacy of this form of prayer. Modest, unison singing--no tricks, no virtuosity--the chanting comes from the heart, unself-conscious and nakedly direct..."

"The monks of St. Domingo De Silos, apparently overwhelmed by the unexpected success of their music, requested that journalists leave them alone. Alas, this was a difficult proposal. The monks eventually acquiesced to the will of the people and released several popular follow-up albums."


Ave mundi spes Maria - English

Hail, hope of the world, Mary, hail, meek one, hail, loving one, hail, full of grace
Hail O singular virgin, who wast chosen to not suffer flames through brambles
Hail, beautiful rose, hail, staff of Jesse:
Whose fruit loosened the chains of our weeping
Hail whose womb bore a son against the law of death
Hail, O one lacking comparison, still tearfully renewing joy for the world
Hail, lamp of virgins, through whom the heavenly light shone on these whom shadow holds.
Hail, O virgin from whom a thing of heaven wished to be born, and from whose milk feed.
Hail, gem of the lamps of heaven
Hail, sanctuary of the Holy Ghost
O, how wonderful, and how praiseworthy is this virginity!
In whom, made through the spirit, the paraclete, shone fruitfulness.
O how holy, how serene, how kind, how pleasant the virgin is believed to be!
Through whom slavery is finished, a place of heaven is opened, and liberty is returned.
O, lily of chastity, pray to thy son, who is the salvation of the humble:
Lest we through our fault, in the tearful judgment suffer punishment.
But may she, by her holy prayer, purifying from the dregs of sin, place us in a home of light
Amen let every man say.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Health Care Fight and The "Immoral Society"

"...a 'laissez-faire' economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant belief that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political constraints upon economic activity.   The history of the last hundred years is a refutation of this theory...It's survival is due to the ignorance of those who suffer  injustice from the application of this theory to modern industrial life but fail to attribute their difficulties to the social anarchy and political irresponsibility that the theory sanctions."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "Moral Man and Immoral Society, A Study in Ethics and Politics" (1932).  

Reinhold Niebuhr (1891-1971), pictured on the left in a TIME magazine cover from the early 1950's, was considered the one of the foremost American Protestant theologians of pre and post World War II America. He wrote many books and articles about politics and ethics and was the Professor of Christian Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary in New York State from 1928 to 1960.  Prior to that he served as a pastor for thirteen years at a church in Detroit, Michigan.   Another important work of his is the book "The Irony of American History", a book that explores the conflicts between "the hopes of the founding fathers and the reality of the present situation" (i.e, America in the dawn of The Cold War.)  He has been cited as one of Barack Obama's favorite philosophers. 

After World War II, he co-founded the leftist but non-Marxist group "Americans For Democratic Action", which is still an active and leading independent progressive organization which, among other activities, watchdogs the voting records of Congressional members in both the House of Representatives and The Senate. 

Professor Niebuhr's book on morality in public life by groups and individuals seems relevant to me today not only because both Barack Obama and John Mccain cited him favorably during last year's Presidential Election, but because of the health care debate in the USA which is raging at the moment.    The current struggle can be summed up  in two competing philosophies. The first is the traditional view that nothing the government does in the domestic sphere can be of benefit to the average person.  Change from Washington or the State Houses is simply incompetence at best and a collectivist power grab at worst.  These views are all over the editorial pages of the "liberal media" newspapers, and there is a plethora of examples.  I will spare you the cacophony of those who feel the status quo in having 40-50 million uninsured Americans is only worthy of modest reform and cite just one advocate, Michael Tanner of the conservative Cato Institute, writing recently in The Los Angeles Times:

"Everyone agrees that far too many Americans lack health insurance. But covering the uninsured comes about as a byproduct of getting other things right. The real danger is that our national obsession with universal coverage will lead us to neglect reforms -- such as enacting a standard health insurance deduction, expanding health savings accounts and deregulating insurance markets -- that could truly expand coverage, improve quality and make care more affordable."

  

Herein is the usual argument: to Mr. Tanner, health care is a commodity like an automobile, dog food or a latte coffee creation for someone's morning caffeine fix.  Just let the "free market" take care of all this, add a tax cut to sweeten to pie, and all will be well.  

Such thinking did not serve the America that Professor Niebuhr's wrote about during The Great Depression.  Unregulated markets and speculation run wild had crashed the economy.  And now we face a similar era of recovery from the sins of ignorance. 

Health is most decidedly NOT simply a commodity. By it's nature it is often too expensive to purchase for those without the social protection of  decent job.  And the dangers of underinsured Americans means that 40-45 million Americans are not entitled to any primary care at all, unless it is under-borne by small-scale clinics which are underfunded.  In addition those who fail to get primary care have to resort to the emergency room to get treatment, often for conditions that are long neglected.  The result makes for sicker patients and higher bills. Today, more Americans file bankruptcy and lose their homes because of medical bills they can't pay than for any other reason.  

One of the things Niebuhr wrote about in "Moral Man..." was the need to go beyond appealing to moral principles to create a change.  Entrenched interests like the health care lobby will always try to show that their position of power is in the best interests of the country.  They will protect that.  Change can only come if enough people demand it, demand something that is so "radical" that all nations in Europe and Canada that elect governments already have some form of it--a public health care system with regulated costs and open access.  Otherwise, we will be left with the status quo, which traps people in jobs, and makes a mockery of a "free" society :

     

"Equivocation": Shakespeare Has A Story To Tell....Or Else!

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Bill Cain

"Why me?"

These are the first words of Bill Cain's new play, "Equivocation".


The speaker is none other than William Shakespeare, chief playwright of "The King's Men", the leading "theatrical cooperative" in London. It's early in the year 1606, and the middle-aged artist is at the top of his game, having written histories,comedies and tragedies for over a decade to much acclaim. But the man who has summoned him, Robert Cecil, Secretary of State for the Kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales under James I, does not want Will to write another play about long-dead nobility from The War of the Roses, or a farce about twins separated at birth or some play about an ancient Worthy like Julius Caesar.

That stuff won't cut it this time.

Shakespeare or "Shag" (played by Anthony Heald, a very good actor who you might have seen in films of playing a judge on the series "Boston Legal) is literally made an offer he can't refuse. His majesty elevated the company of players after he came down from Scotland to rule both kingdoms in 1603, right after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the lady who put his mother, Mary of Scotland, to death fifteen years earlier.

Lord Cecil, who is akin to a Prime Minister to James, is putting the heat on "Shag"--he and His Majesty want him to put off writing the next Globe Theater production ("King Lear') and write a new play about "The Gunpowder Plot." Here is a little background courtesy of a BBC documentary, featuring the fame historian and novelist Lady Antonia Fraser :




Cecil and the King want a play about this Catholic Plot to blow up the kings and his lords. But "Shag" doesn't want to write such a play. It was normally forbidden in Tudor/Stuart England to write about current events. He wants to play it safe, let someone other writer-- Henry Beaumont, John Fletcher, Robert Middleton, et al--write this little propaganda piece that the King has already outlined.

But there are plenty of empty cells in the Tower of London for reluctant playwrights who refuse a royal demand. Thomas Kyd--who wrote the famous "Spanish Tragedy"--had been tortured by 1593 in the Tower when he ran afoul of the authorities a few years earlier. So, rather than a stretch on the rack and a cold cell, Will takes Cecil's money and goes back to the company--headed by his friend and partner, Richard Burbage--and thus commences to write and later rehearse the "official story" of the "guilty" men who stand in the Tower for treason.

As Shakespeare goes about trying to work out the King's outline of the play, he starts finding inconsistencies and implausibilities. Cecil won't supply him with reasonable answers on how the act of terrorism was supposed to be carried out. Such as "all the traitors were gentlemen--what do they know about building a tunnel big enough to carry 36 barrels of gunpowder in the first place? And all this tunnelling would take place right under Cecil's own office? Who might really gain from the discovery of such a dastardly plot. And why would James be in such haa hurry to break precedent and makes this "news event"" a popular entertainment?

For the sake of dramatic tension, Shakespeare becomes an investigator, convincing Cecil to let him talk to some of the conspirators who await execution in the Tower. He begins to see there maybe a counter-narrative to the official story--perhaps the heretical conspirators were set in motion by a "Fifth Columnist" or "False Flag" operation engineered in the highest levels of Whitehall itself. (Similar in some ways to the Babington Plot of 1587 that conned Mary, Queen of Scots, into believing she was in communication with King Philip of Spain while a prisoner of her cousin, Elizabeth. That bit of spymaster dirty-dealing cost James' mother her head. )

"Equivocation" is a play that anyone interested in Jacobean history and power politics would love. And its very relevant giving the issues of torture by "good" governments and questions about terrorism in our own times. A good deal of the subplot is provided by Mr. Cain introducing Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith, as a character--a sort of female servant working with her dad and keeping things tidy around the Globe "tiring house" backstage.

Judith is as sharp as a whip, and adds a lot of much needed humor in the play by her witty soliloquies, but her very presence haunts her father at times: she is the twin of his only son, Hamnet, who died before he was ten. The loss of his son has, at least in this play, made Shakespeare a different man than the young poet who was happy to make Richard III a monster if it suited the Tudor Establishment. He is more willing to reach out to those who are in pain--such as a young man who was caught by Cecil's men and is being tortured to tell all of what--apparently little--he really knows.

Cain also does a good job incorporating conjectures about Shakespeare's possible Catholic sympathies--his father, John, may have entertained priests at one time in Stratford and some historians believe Will was a tutor in a Catholic recusant estate in Lancashire before he came to London. He also has a heart-to-heart meeting in the Tower with Henry Garnet, a Jesuit Priest and spy. Here's a bit of his Wikipedia bio:

"Garnet supervised the Jesuit mission for eighteen years with conspicuous success. His life was one of constant danger, concealment and disguises. A price was put on his head; but he was brave and indefatigable in carrying on his evangelization and in ministering to the scattered Catholics, even personally going into their prisons. The result was that he gained many converts, while the number of Jesuits in England increased during his tenure of office from three to forty. It is, however, in connection with the Gunpowder Plot that he is best remembered."

Garnet's emotional and intellectual resources make him similar to Sir Thomas Moore in Robert Bolt's "Man For All Seasons"--you have to respect him highly, even if you might not have agreed with most of what he believed were he brought back to life. But was he really part of any plot? Most historians seem to think so, but others disagree. It is for those who favor the latter group who will find the conclusions drawn by this work the most satisfying.

This play has won The Edgerton Foundation 2008 New American Plays Award and will have more stagings in Seattle and San Francisco apparently next year. I hope many people who love a good intriguing bit of off-beat history will get a chance to see this superb multi-level work.

And now a bit of background from the writer himself:

The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988, by Martin Scorsese

Here's the surprisingly intimate scene between Pontius Pilate (David Bowie) and Jesus Christ(Willem DeFoe) from the film based on the 1961 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Both book and later film stirred up a storm of controversy. Scorsese's work was protested vehemently by some Catholic groups and a number of evangelical Christian organizations ,such as James Dodson's far-far right "Focus on the Family". The protests and the anonymous threats against those involved with the film put a decided chill on Hollywood making anything in a the way of a challenging religious film for some time.

You will notice Jesus remarks, which are consistent with the gospel accounts, make no political claim whatsoever. Pilate gets Jesus' worldview wrong--sees him as a politician, a dubious designation then and now-- and then the Roman realizes how truly revolutionary this little colonial trouble-maker really is.
They are two men are at complete odds in values from one another.

Traditionally after this encounter, Jesus will be whipped, then mocked by occupying Roman soldiers as "King of the Jews". The Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Catholic Gary Wills in his book "What Jesus Meant" (2006) points out something ironic and telling about the brutal and shameless mock-coronation that the gospel accounts report Jesus was given by the soldiers and future events :

"the clothing of Jesus in spurious emblems of temporal authority, has been repeated down through the centuries by people claiming to be Christ's followers... Christian emperors did it,both in the East and the West. The Popes did it. The divine -right kings. Now some evangelical Christians do it. All have dressed Jesus in borrowed political robes. They will not listen to the gospels, where Jesus clearly says that his reign is not in the present order of things. The political power they claim to exercise in his name is a parody...like the mock robe and crown put on him by the Roman soldiers. These purported worshipers of Jesus are doing the work of Pontius Pilate. Jesus, born on the run from power, is still hunted by it."

Charter for Compassion--Bridging the World Religions and Practicing The Golden Rule

This video features an organization devoted to an alternative to fundamentalist violence and intolerance in the Middle East, Africa, North America and other parts of the globe.

The short film leads off with someone I think is one of the foremost popular spiritual writers of today, Dr. Karen Armstrong, author of "A History of God", "The Spiral Staircase" and, most recently "Buddha".

http://charterforcompassion.com/

The Problem of Pain

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	C.S. Lewis 1940, Reprinted 2001

Seeing the human follies of war, greed and over exploitation of finite global resources, one book has been on my mind lately. I ask your indulgence to revise a review I wrote for "The Problem of Pain" last year on "Yahoo 360" now that its contents--edited a bit--seem more relevant. Lewis, better known as the creator of "The Narnia Chronicles", was a superb and concise prose writer, and a true "apostle to the skeptics" and this is one of his best works.

Critics of Christianity have had their field days going off on how a loving Deity could create a world where such things as pain and suffering exist. " The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike," Jesus pointed out, but what of the people who suffer from pain for no good reason such as genetic illness or being in the pathway of an evil person who wanted to rob or hurt someone?

There is also the question of hell. (Or Hell, don't know if I should capitalize the first letter of that place or not.) Some leaders in the church don't accept the idea that there is a place like hell. Given the popular conceptions of "everlasting fire" and what Dante's first volume of "The Divine Comedy " did for fleshing out the images he associated with the Underworld, and the graphic torments his enemies suffered, I can hardly blame any cleric for not playing that up at the Sunday Morning sermon.

Other Christians fully embrace the concept of Hell, but feel the place will be reserved for folks whose political and social mores do not match their own. Some are so certain about it they put bumper stickers on their vehicles saying "Eternal Life: Smoking or Non-Smoking" or "Those Who Live Like There's No Hell Better Be Right". That seems too smug to me--are such people casually condemning others to the "outer darkness" just because they are riding their car's bumper? The smuggest bumper sticker I've seen is the one that says "In Case of The Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unoccupied". Hmmm. Are these people talking to the Angels or do they think their presumed high status within a particular church congregation will give them a "All-Access" ticket if the world comes to an end?

To me, it's one thing to have faith, "the substance of the thing hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). It's quite another to figure you got a pass, or , even if you are somehow certain of it, that you should brag about it. Christianity has its many critics and some of them are so because we forget that pride of place is something Jesus refused to give even to his own disciples, as the special request of the brothers James and John to Jesus illustrates (Mark 10:35-40).

One of the best and most direct discussions of why injustice and pain exists in the world came from the great lay Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, in the book "The Problem of Pain" (1940, reprinted 2001 by Harper Collins Books). It is only one of many books about Faith that Professor Lewis wrote about, and it is to me the most challenging.




"On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. On the other hand, if God's moral judgment differs from ours so that our `black' may be His `white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good".

--C S Lewis, from "The Problem of Pain"

Christianity presumes a loving Creator-God. To Lewis, such a God must be willing to grant humans free will. This is fraught with the potential for great love and great abuse. Lewis takes Augustine's notion of the Fall of Man seriously, but he puts it in a context that includes an Evolutionary path. (Lewis is no fundamentalist, although many of that ilk might like to pretend so because of his popularity from The Narnia Chronicles.)

Our "primitive" ancestors may have been less "brutish" than we imagine. Some of them might have been nobler than most of the people walking around today, Lewis surmises. But at some point thousands of years back a few humans--perhaps in an early town-dwelling period--began to set aside honoring God and preferred instead to have their own personal stash of good things that belonged not to a Creator but to themselves. This is The Fall to Lewis, and whether it involved a piece of fruit from a Tree of Knowledge or just something that rightfully belonged to another person or tribe of people is of no matter. Mankind had fallen. The endless repetition of this thievery on through today, for ill-gotten gain large and small, is just a reenactment of what some Christians see as Original Sin.

Not all pain comes from our neighbors. Pain also exists because of nature. The victims of myriad natural disasters for instance. If God intervened and provide miracle upon miracle to avert any human pain, it might be more pleasant but it would not be Life as we know it. He could also intervene constantly to stop the mistakes and follies of humankind that also result in mass pain. But would that be Life either? And is the hand of God in the present and the past staying disasters from nature or human judgement that we do not realize through our senses? This is the core matter of "theodicy" ("Why God allows evil.") It is the dark glass St. Paul said we are forced for now to see through.

Lewis goes on here to explain that the "good" most mortals understand is not so much completely different from that of Our Creator; we understand good, but our actions are often simply not "good" enough. We override our consciences to get what we want, even if the action is plain selfish and we rationalize the wrong somehow.

What we might accept as simply an expedient act, "getting some of our own back" from someone, is plain bad. That people will often look back and regret an action that hurt others shows that our concept of "good" is within us.

Our understanding can be insufficient in the way, the author points out, that a child's first attempts to draw a circle or a wheel on a piece of paper is not very close at all to a wheel as adults could fashion.

It's that humans often only want "kindness" from God, not love. ("Many want a grandfather in Heaven, not a Father" he writes. "Someone who doesn't care what is happening on Earth as long as 'a good time is being had by all'." ) There are consequences for our bad choices.

In this world, or course, a loving parent cannot always be "kind" to a child, for instance. There has to be times of discipline with the fun and indulgence. It's not because the parent doesn't love the child but because the parent is not indifferent to the future development of said child. There is no hint in his writing that restraint and discipline should take the form of corporal punishment, either. That presumably is left to the parent.

The need for hell, as mentioned by Jesus among others in the Gospels, of course has to be addressed. To Lewis, the netherworld is there to punish those people who have chosen to live lives devoted to self. It is not because God has ceased to Love an unrepentant criminal or a immoral person; it is because greedy and violent people must see how far they have fallen from grace. "To forgive is not the same thing as to condone," he writes.

Punishment exists both here and beyond. And shame and guilt are not always something to be expunged by a psychiatrist or a regimen of pills, but can be a chance for one being to feel the pain one has caused another and repent. It is this pain (which Lewis calls "God's megaphone") that sane people experience for past wrong actions.

Before I leave this off I want to make something clear: Mr. Lewis nowhere says that all human suffering is somehow just or delivered from God. All those who suffer from persecution in places like Darfur are, in my mind, suffering the way innocent early Christians suffered and I believe Lewis would acknowledge this. But it is POSSIBLE that some bouts of suffering can have a restorative effect on an individual.

Many people do not come to God until they feel a malady or suffer a personal reverse. When the illness lifts, however, they can be the better for having gone through a bleak period. And it is indeed a loving God who will wait patiently, as he did in my personal life, for some sadness or pain to crop up before I would deign to-- finally!-- acknowledge His gifts to me.

If you'd like to get Professor Lewis' ideas from "the horse's mouth" (and I can do little justice to his reflections here) then picking up a copy of "The Problem of Pain" is a good place to start. (All Lewis major works have been recently reissued.) I don't think one needs to be a committed Christian to gain something from this writings. You will likely come away with a clearer understanding of spiritual matters, and where that takes you might be a pleasant surprise as it was for this blogger.





See link below for more on C.S. Lewis and this book:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0032.html

Jesus: Meditations On His Stories, and His Realtionships With Women

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Andrew Greeley

This a wonderful book for cutting through the hide-bound fundamentalism and rigid homilies that have made Jesus a remote figure even to many observing Christians. The author also takes pains to divorce his Subject from the dictates of commercial fare like Dan Brown's "Di Vinci Code" which distorts the stories of Jesus' life with material from much later and non-canonical sources in order to spice up the Incarnation with tales of Mary Madelene as a wife of Jesus or a mother. Greeley points out:

"To put it in modern terms, when Jesus chose a human to announce officially his return to life, he engaged in affirmative action and selected a woman". (page 79)

Indeed it was Mary Magdalene whom Jesus first appeared to according to John's Gospel. She was the first apostle. Even St. Paul, who is taken to task by progressive elements for being sexist, made clear in a one of his Letters that men and women were equal under Jesus Christ--as were Jews and Gentiles, free people and slaves, et al.

It was the later Romanization of Christianity that lowered the status of women from the status they held in the first house-churches around the Mediterranean of the First Century AD to the demotion they faced after the long prosecuting of the faith when the Emperor Constantine and other men of state and sword institutionalized Christianity with the needs of Imperial and male Ecclesiastical power . (Roman pagan society traditionally gave all power to the patriarch of a family, even that of life and death over wife and children.)

Father Greeley, noted sociologist, prodigious novelist and priest, takes a fresh view of the parables of Jesus that are interposed throughout the Gospels. Although a Catholic, he has no agenda here to serve any one form of the faith, nor to set out to prove the "one true faith".

The book's interpretations cover not just the more famous "stories" such as "The Prodigal Son" or "The Good Samaritan" but almost all the great and some lesser-known parables such as the story of the "Wise and Cunning Servant" and "The Workers in the Vineyard". Greeley is always weaving in two strong threads through all the parables of Jesus: that they are surprising stories, sometimes even humorous in their twists and turns of events, and also that His stories are strongly weighted against notions of envy and revenge that permeate in culture.





Greeley also makes plain something that is clear to many like myself who read the Gospels later in life for the first time were very surprised to find: that Jesus Christ always treated women, his followers as well as those looking for a cure for their ailments or those that afflicted their sick children, with both respect and decency and a pure love for the feminine half of humankind, all without condensation or sentimentality.
This makes Jesus almost unique in the Ancient World as a religious leader who neither demeaned nor took women for granted--even those like the Samaritan woman at the well in John's Gospel or the harrowing story of the woman taken in adultery and thrown at his feet (John 8) to provoke him to follow the Law or renounce it in some form.

This is a good book for an overview of Jesus and the Gospel stories. Some may dispute Father Greeley's findings here and there, but they are too learned and straight forward to be dismissed casually.