Jewish Gospel Dynamics

Jewish rabbi and New Testament specialist Michael Cook offers an intriguing example of modern Jewish apologetics on the claims of Christianity:

"The New Testament has been the greatest single external determinant of Jewish history, and a deleterious one to say the least. It has caused Jews grievous problems and even innumerable deaths, not to mention generating antisemitism and anti-Jewish stereotyping. Today, it remains the cause of societal pressures during Christian holy day seasons and a source of confusion for Jews targeted by Christian missionaries and millennialists.

"Engaging the New Testament, therefore, can be both therapeutic and empowering for Jews. At the same time, a willingness by Jews to tackle Christian texts may help enlighten Christians about the role the New Testament has played in violating some of their own values. Jews who are able to articulate to Christians the Gospels’ evolution from a Jewish perspective may be in a better position to curb the reckless abandon with which New Testament texts are often so cavalierly cited, bandied about and misconstrued in modern society."

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(Nod to Religion & Society for the link.)

I have posted this article not because I intend to interact with it on an apologetics level — that exercise would require far more space than the blogging medium allows
— but because I want to highlight a renaissance in modern Jewish apologetics, which I think can only be positive for Christian/Jewish interreligious dialogue. If such dialogue is to be more than self-affirming chitchat, then both partners in the discussion need to engage in apologetics, which is to say that they need to offer each other with mutual charity and respect the reasons for their hope (1 Pet. 3:15).

For another recent example of Jewish apologetics, see David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus.

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A Blogger’s Parable

The blogmistress of Once Upon a Time… (aka my sister) offers an instructive parable for bloggers with a sobering moral:

"If a person starts a blog and begins revealing intimate and private details of his life, he will attract attention. No one asked him to put himself out there, but he did. Eventually, the attention and the demands of the public leave him feeling that he has nothing private left to himself. He is conflicted because he enjoyed the audience that would read his posts gratefully. Over time, there are certain readers who demand more and more, or who may judge him for the way he lives his life and write him to say so. The man doesn’t want to lose his audience, but he sees that the price he paid for giving away his privacy is that the public feels that what he has given away is no longer just his. They are entitled to it also. Eventually, he stops blogging altogether…"

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Channeling Thomas Howard

No. Not really.

The truth is: Thomas Howard is my hero, in more ways than one.

First, as an explainer of Catholic sensibilities to the Evangelical Protestant mindset in which I was raised, he is without peer. Just as to deconstruct non-Catholic misunderstandings on justification, the papacy, the canon of scripture, and practically anything else you can think of, go to Jimmy Akin every time (Jimmy is my hero too), likewise to awaken appreciation in the most trenchant Fundamentalist heart of ritual and ceremony, of worship in liturgy and sacrament, of sacred art and architecture, of the whole sacramental and incarnational worldview, Tom Howard is your man.

As a young Evangelical yearning for something more, I discovered Howard’s Evangelical Is Not Enough at just the right moment in my life. It was like water in the desert to me. Chance or the Dance? also is wonderful, though I got even more out of Hallowed Be This House (which I see is now published under the title Splendor in the Ordinary: Your Home as a Holy Place).

Secondly, Howard is a magnificent writer, a stylist of extraordinary grace, wit, and power. He makes wonderful use of words like "precincts" and "hugger-mugger" and "surfeit," and puts sentences and paragraphs together with such elegance and music that form and function become one, and you start to absorb something of what he is trying to tell you just from the sound of the words. He is almost more a poet than an essayist; he writes with the moving energy and joy of a man who loves deeply what he is writing about, who feels it down to the marrow in his bones.

Robert Bolt said that in A Man for All Seasons that he strove to create "a bold and beautiful verbal architecture." Howard’s writing is like that, and reading it, one feels, rather than thinks: If verbal architecture can be like this, with nothing dry or functional or utilitarian about it, why not church architecture also?

Anyway, recently at Arts & Faith, a discussion board I visit more or less regularly, there was some discussion around the disconnect between, on the one hand, Catholic and Orthodox veneration of relics and icons, and Protestant discomfort with such practices on the other.

This subject triggered my Thomas Howard Response Mechanism, which sets me off and running quoting Evangelical Is Not Enough, Hallowed Be This House and whatever else comes to hand (in a pinch I’ve even been known to reach for Once Upon a Time, God…).

So, I began working on a contribution to the thread, but what with one thing leading to another, as I secretly knew from the beginning it would, I got completely carried away and ended up writing a sprawling essay touching on some of the general themes regarding which Howard had been among my earliest and most influential guides.

And, as is often the case when one tries to do the same sort of thing that one’s hero does, I did what little I could to honor Howard’s style as well as his ideas.

Of course I could never really even approximately "channel" Howard, or hope to match either the talent or the style of his inimitable prose. The man is a true original. (The first few grafs of my piece in particular are too jargony and abstract, though I think it gets better after that, about the time I get to Genesis 1.) But I think anyone familiar with Howard may notice that I am at least trying to walk in Howard’s footsteps, even if I don’t quite have his stride.

Read SDG’s "Reflections on a sacramental/incarnational worldview" at Arts & Faith

Crow’s Ears and Karma Lite Nuns

Terry Mattingly has the story.

The Vatican is known its complex rituals, rich in ancient symbols and mysterious details. Take, for example, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, as described by the International Herald Tribune.

“The 84-year-old John Paul was laid out in Clementine Hall, dressed in white and red vestments, his head covered with a white bishop’s miter and propped up on three dark gold pillows,” wrote Ian Fisher of the New York Times. “Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow’s ear, that he had carried in public.”

Get the joke?

You see, that ornate silver shepherd’s crook is actually called a crosier (or “crozier”), not a “crow’s ear.”

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If You Build It, They Won’t Come

Charles_krauthammerCharles Krauthammer has a reputation for being one of the smartest political commentators around.

In a recent column, he argued the case that:

Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters, and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the 11 million illegals among us.

He went on to argue that the way to achieve objective (1) is to build a wall, and the grounds on which he argued it–or part of the grounds–were interesting: It’s the compassionate solution.

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There are other ways to stop illegal immigrants from coming to this country, such as making their lives in this country so difficult that they won’t want to come here anymore, or slapping American citizens who employ them with harsh penalties that actually get enforced, but these would cause human suffering needlessly.

The most human solution, to this line of thought, is to simply build a barrier. No barrier is perfect, but if you make it hard enough to get past then most people won’t try and the tidal wave of illegal aliens coming into this country now will be slowed to a trickle.

And walls don’t hurt people. They don’t cause suffering.

Certainly, if people bang their heads against walls, that’ll hurt, and if the wall is too short and they try climbing it or knocking part of it down or burrowing under it they may hurt themselves, but that is dwarfed by the suffering that would be caused by the alternative ways of diminishing the flood of illegal aliens.

Unless one is committed to the idea that America should willingly absorb an unlimited number of illegal aliens (something Catholic teaching does not require) then it looks like the most merciful way to stem the tide is to simply build a wall (or series of walls, augmented by patrols).

At least it’s the most merciful means that America has within its power to do.

An even more merciful thing would be for the Mexican government to reform itself, end its corruption, stop encouraging illegal immigration to the United States, and open up its economy so that people in Mexico will have economic opportunities at home and won’t feel the need to flee their country.

Those are things that the American government can encourage the Mexican government to do, but they’re not within the American government’s power. It takes two to tango, as they say.

What is within the American government’s power is building a wall, and that is looking like the most merciful thing that we know we will be able to do.

A while back I read a statement issued by some Mexican bishops (not sure if it was the whole conference or not) that patronizingly said America should not build such a wall because, they said, such a wall would not work.

This, of course, was completely disingenuous.

They know that a wall would work, which is why they were advocating against it being built. It wouldn’t stop every single illegal alien from coming into the country, but it doesn’t have to. It only has to hold back the tsunami we’re currently experiencing.

If someone has a better proposal–that can be realistically achieved and isn’t just a pipe dream–for how to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, I’d love to hear it, but for now a wall is looking like the most practical, most merciful thing that I can think of.

If you’d like to make a proposal to address this problem, please do so. It needs to have three qualities:

1. It is more compassionate than building a wall (including more compassionate for Americans, meaning that it doesn’t required them to bear huge costs that are far larger than the cost of building and patrolling a wall).
2. It will actually work.
3. It is something that the U.S. has in its power to do (i.e., it doesn’t depend on what Mexico does, since their government has shown itself to be a bad faith partner in solving this problem).

Please argue why your proposal fits each of these criteria.

Whatever turns out to be the best way stop illegal immigration, we’ve go to do something that is effective. Regardless of what happens to the illegal aliens already in this country–whether they’re given amnesty or not (and I’m virtually certain that they will be)–we simply cannot continue taking ineffective measures at securing our borders, for it will only encourage more illegal immigration.

Frog At The Pump

Gasprices_3   

In case you’ve just crawled out from under a rock — or in case you’ve been walking to work — gas prices have been soaring.  I just filled my tank for $3.18/gallon.  My theory for the rise in gas prices is that we’re being seeing the urban legend about cooking frogs played out at the gas pump:  If you dump a frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump right out.  But if you put him in cool water and gradually raise the heat, you’ll have frog legs for dinner.  In other words, at the gas pumps we’re being acclimated to being boiled.

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